i would be eight people each inhabiting the others' dreams

I've stopped writing in tablets. I write here still but not to the exclusion of writing there. I've never not wrote there, I take days off here. Nothing written in a tablet for eight days. I was in Montgomery Mall yesterday to get my glasses straightened, just down the upper terrace from store I bought my glasses a tiny pen & ink joint, I instinctively veered in, looked for good new colors of fountain pen ink, this burnt pink is excellent, twenty-five fucking dollars, I.... haven't written in tablets for eight days, nine by the time you read this. I'm more fascinated it took me eight days to notice I hadn't written in tablet in eight days than fascinated I haven't written in tablet in eight days.

• I've always suffered reading slumps but I've never suffered one of such glut. I am 2/3rds through and stalled on twelve and counting novels. The latest, Rachel Cusk's Outline followed the same pattern as all the others: This Will Save Me! what? fuck me. The twelve include three of my bibles. Fuck them.
• Poems still work, though I can't read more than one poem by one poet at a time.
• If music ever stops working I'm doomed.
• The Last Days in Aleppo.
• The burnt pink ink looked excellent. I didn't buy it. Victories where you can find them.
• Bannon hearts Moldberg. Of course he does.
• AmRen and suits & ties.
• How Democrats made DeVos possible.
• Eraducation. DeVos sucking doesn't mean education doesn't need fixing.
• Trump and the Resistance.
• Avoid eye contact.
• On Tom Raworth, I Serendipitously posted one his poems yesterday.
• Serendipitously, Raworth died  two days before I posted his poem, which means I actually added the poem to the post on the day he died. The fuck?
• Serendipity giveth and taketh away, but always be Blessed.

YOU RUINED MY EVENING / YOU RUINED MY LIFE

Tom Raworth

i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish

only as one i contain the complications

in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant

i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels

and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts

the actors bow gently to me and i envy them

their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world

i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams

walking through corridors of glass framed pages

telling each other the final lines of letters

picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another

only as one i contain the complications

and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world

the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings
      

i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant

picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing

re-running the reels of my presence in this world

the difficulties vanish and the images are the same

eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated

inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications

only as one walking gently storing my dream

Who Decides Against Our Teams

Mary Tyler Moore's death. I've not been moping and not posting, or didn't think I'd been moping, been successful in producing unsuccessful pages on (like always) me and faith. I'm small, I need a team. I saw a tweet Mary Tyler Moore was dead. For Liberals of my age that show was gospel. I thought of the Husker Du cover of her show's theme song, I youtube it, there's the show's theme song, click the arrow, Mary throwing her hat in the air, and it slayed me, a Eucharist of Nostalgia.

• Serendipity be Blessed.
• I also have unsuccessful pages on how my brain is being deliberately rewired. I mean, more and much more sloppily than before, and by design. It's frighteningly fascinating.
• Or I'm old and my chips don't process like they used too.
• Death to the Either/Or.
• The gags of litany still salve.
• RIP Harry Mathews who I've read like a religious obligation but but never quite got, as in dug. My fault, certainly. Just received Tlooth from off-campus storage, I have slim hope it will work this time, my never quite digging it an article of faith I need overcome.
• RIP, Mannix.

  
Cool gales shall fan the glades

Harry Mathews

But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at?

Who wants to write a poem without the letter e,

Especially for Thee, where the flourished vowel lends such panache to your carnet de bal

(OK, peons: pizzazz to your dance card)? The alphabet’s such a horn

Of plenty, why cork up its treasure? It hurts to think of “you” reduced to u

In stingy text messages, as if ideally expression should be limited to formulas like x ≠ y,

Where the respectable truth of tautology leaves ambiguous beauty standing by

Waiting to take off her clothes, if, that is, her percentage of body fat

Permits it (a statement implicitly unfair, as if beauty, to remain sublime, had to keep up

Lineaments already shaped by uninhibited divinity); implying, as well, fixated onlookers, i.e.,

Men and women kidding themselves that full-front-and-back nudity is the north

Star of delight rather than imagined nakedness, shudderingly draped like a fully rigged, fully laden ship without a drop to bail,

Its hidden cargoes guessed at — perhaps Samian wine (mad-
making!) — or fresh basil

Gently crushed by its own slight weight, reviving memories of delights once stumbled on as a boy,

Delights often wreathed with necessary pain, like the stout unforgiving thorns

That tear shirt and skin as we stretch for ripe blackberries, to be gulped down fast,

Sweeter than butter and marmalade, quenching our thirst better than sucked ice,

Making us almost drunk as we shriek with false contempt at each benighted ump

Who decides against our teams. What happened to those blissful fruits, honeydew, purple plum,

White raspberry, for stealing which from Mrs. Grossman’s stand I invented ingenious alibis

That she never believed (insulting, or what?)? Where are childhood’s innocent sweetnesses, like homemade rice

Pudding and mince pie? Or the delicious resistances of various foods — bony

Lobsters, chops with their succulent tiny interstices, corn sticking to the cob, or the grilled feast

Of brook trout I caught without too much fuss after kicking a 
resentful hornets’

Nest? And when carnality replaced appetite, I was communally pronounced the horniest

Ten-year-old around; and I hadn’t even seen you. But when I did, you became the plume

In the horse’s hat of my lust. I was thirteen when we first danced together. There weren’t many afters

But I cherish my plume. There weren’t any afters, nothing, just a gentle abseil I

Could not climb back up. I still wave my plume, or my horse does, as he canters nobly

Into next year, my eighty-fifth. I hasten to add that “this coyness, lady, were no crime”

If I didn’t, in spite of all, feel so grateful to you. All manner of mercis

Fill my throat, along with immortal memories, of which I must acknowledge the thorniest

To be your disappearance, whether you tanked in river water or were scorched by Zeus’s proximity (or some such baloney);

But your firm breasts, taut nipples, and bent thighs? No thorns. All you wanted was a loosened peplum,

So I still bear your plume, and your name will not die: not to be written here or read, but my voice shall sibilate

It so shrilly that unseeded babies hear me, and every hidden woodworm wake from its dream to fall forever from the rafters.

Just Go Ahead Behead, Impale, Starve, Strappado

My Hillaryite Friend knows HRC wins barring the unforeseen, thinks the unforeseen still possible but less day minus day. One of my Hillaryite Colleagues plays a nervous wreck* but isn't, one's genuinely worried: the former's more annoying than the latter. I have more faith in the unforeseen than you do, I said to my Hillaryite Friend, though now I can't imagine anything outside a violently shocking event - terrorist bombings in the Homeland, brink of real war with Russia, assassination of either candidate - that would swing the election dramatically and, outside the assassinated candidate is HRC, I can't imagine anything would help Trump.

HF said, my parents are life-long Republicans, my mom has to say she's voting for Trump but she won't, all her friends are the same. They won't vote for Hillary, but they won't vote for Trump, will come out of booth and say they did. My mom said, I don't want my brother Bob or my asshole boss Dickhead president. I said, one of the ironies of this election is the Democratic argument that a woman CAN be a Dickhead as good or better than a man. This election is smashing the sexist meme that men are innately bigger assholes than women. Hillaryite Friend said, thank god for Wikeleaks.

• Thanks to those who chimed-in on Galeano. I'll do them now and then. Sorry for the mope.
• >> Deleted bleggalgaze << My small gift as thanks.
• As I type this sentence Friday morning Twitter has crashed. Weird.
• UPDATE! Apparently a cyber attack, a big one, not just twitter.
• As I type this sentence Friday morning I'm listening to Act One: King of the Mountain, live Kate Bush from the 2014 London shows, iTunes dropped it into my library last night! 
• Instant review: Holy fuck. 
• *Hillaryite Colleague is furious at wikileaks. Why, HC says, aren't they hacking Trump? So your issue, I said, isn't the ethical problems of hacking but who is being hacked? Fuck you, HC said.
• The future hiding in plain sight.
• This is true: on Wednesday I grabbed from stacks Henry Green's Back. I am tunneled. The digging is slow. I need sherbet, try the Green. I loved it, couldn't put it down until my eyes quit. First thing Thursday, back, the fuck? The novel didn't change over night. Fine metaphors abound.
• Beep.
• Gravity's Rainbow, page 364.
• At ten o'clock this morning I'm buying tickets for Magnetic Fields in DC in March. New album, 50 Songs, dropping in a few months. 
• UPDATE! Sweet.
• New Flaming Lips. No long follow along (not gah, meh), still listen to the first three, released 300 years ago...
• My friend Kapusta (aka Prunella) tweeted out a Thalia Zedek song last night, so....

BLOODY MARY

April Bernard

Note who's got to go
today, don't fuss
about the means,
just go ahead behead,
impale, starve, strappado,
the assortment
of choices enough
to make a crown
crow. They never
loved me enough.
It must be said: They
were a disappointment.
   
When divine mother
love wears out, I
reverse the robe
from blue to red.
I like a flat ground
to build the next town,
city, empire of disgust.
All the waste you see,
that's what I did,
none of that happened
to me. I did that.
I made that. I killed that. I.

Born One-Hundred Thirteen / Born One-Hundred Ten Years Ago Today

Mark Rothko, born 113 years ago today. I love love love his art (to Earthgirl and Planet's dismay), but more: any excuse to post Morton Feldman....






 

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