Showing posts with label Nurse with Wound. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nurse with Wound. Show all posts

Friday, January 17, 2025

I See, Said the Blind Man, As He Puts Down His Hammer and Saw

My left eye




Populated with you-can-guess which assholes, genocidaires, psycho&sociopaths, shitlords, hunt and peck at your (dis)pleasure. My right eye




I can't speak to RIP David Lynch beyond noting I recognize his significance by how friends analog and digital are mourning his loss and praising his art. I don't watch things, never did much, don't at all now, I listen to music, read, make things, it's not a moral stance, I wish I could, it's a weakness not a strength, not a point of pride but a point of embarrassment. I try, I just can't, so here's Ed to speak to David Lynch
I saw Eraserhead decades ago and haven't felt compelled to ever watch again and I watched the first episode of Twin Peaks, but I'm old and going blind and can't read like when young, I'm willing to try anew, what Lynch first?
O, violence to not-human animals is a non-starter, the only Joy Williams' novel I haven't read, *Breaking and Entering,* I won't read because I saw in a review thirty years ago people saw-off live pelicans' beaks and no, fuck no. No. Never. Fucking humans, the shittiest species. I'd prefer to not see human-on-human violence but can deal with it if necessary, ditto books
REST IN PEACE, BOB UECKERI haven't watched a baseball game in thirty years, I listen to local play-by-play all season long, every season, L & C can vouch
13 SentinelsThere is not one book in this list of 2025 releases that delights me it's being published
There's a new Legendary Pink Dots album!
REM has essentially disappeared from American culture
A GUIDE TO NURSE WITH WOUND





I SEE, SAID THE BLIND MAN, AS HE PUT DOWN HIS HAMMER AND SAW

John Ashbery

There is some charm in that old music
He’d fall for when the night wind released it:
Pleasant to be away; the stones fall back;
The hill of gloom in place over the roar
Of the kitchens but with remembrance like a bright patch
Of red in a bunch of laundry. But will the car
Ever pull away and spunky at all times he’d
Got the mission between the ladder
And the slices of bread someone had squirted astrology over
Until it took the form of a man, obtuse, out of pocket
Perhaps, probably standing there.

Can’t you see how we need these far-from-restful pauses?
And in the wind neighbors and such agree
It’s a hard thing, a milestone of sorts in some way?
So that the curtains contribute what charm they can
To the spectacle: an overflowing cesspool
Among the memoirs of court life, the candy, cigarettes,
And what else. What kind is it, is there more than one
Kind, are people forever going to be at the edge
Of things, even the nice ones, and when it happens
Will we all be alone together? The armor
Of these thoughts laughs at itself
Yet the distances are always growing
With everything between, in between
The tall hedges that seem to know what life is:
An offering that stands to one side. And we dream.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

the wind is the wind is a no-vo-cain band




  • New Magnetic Fields, my favorite of the few new 50 I've heard, release in March.
  • Four theories on the unscheduled and until last Friday unnoticed cessation of scribbling in tablets, all of which suggest scribbling in tablets is precisely what I need doing:
  1. The fate of kayfabe in a world of fake leaves me ink-tied: how to write in a world without kayfabe?
  2. I still have not rid myself of my indoctrinated faith in the human capability to survive its assholes and waver between futile anger and tongue-tied humor.
  3. Like everyone else, I can't get past assigning blame in the micro for the current clusterfuck even while this clusterfuck, macro, ahead of schedule, yes, was inevitable.
  4. I am obsolete, as are pencils and paper, as are fine metaphors abounding.
  • I typed this joke HERE in the context of this post: fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man, Buck Turgidson said, in his Grammy winning role of Patton in the American classic, Stroke Me.
  • I would never have written that joke in tablet, I would have put pen down, turned to laptop, the saved to 2018 draft (I haven't fucked that up in months, I think), and typed the joke there, for you (to admire my range).











THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

Tom Raworth

1. gone to lunch back in five minutes
  
night closed in on my letter of resignation
out in the square one of my threads had broken loose
the language i used was no and no
while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills
occasionally the metabolism alters
and lines no longer come express
waiting for you what muscles work me
which hold me down below my head?
it is a long coat and a van on the horizon
a bird that vanishes    the arabic
i learn from observation is how to break the line
(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan
police band singing ‘bless this house’
as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam
                
2. walking my back home
                   
the wind
is the wind
is a no-vo-cain band
and the footstep
                          echoes
i
have conjured people
                          
3. ah, it all falls into place
  
when it was time what he had left became a tile
bodies held shaped by the pressure of air
were clipped to his attention by their gestures
my but we do have powerful muscles
each of us equal to gravity

or sunlight that forces our shadows
into the pieces of a fully interlocking puzzle
                   
4. good morning he whispered
  
the horrors of the horses are the crows
the bird flies past the outside the library
many heels have trapped the same way
he tolls, he lapsed with the light from so many trees
check the pattern swerves with the back
the tree that holds the metal spiral staircase swings
aloft the hand removes a book and checked it
for death by glasses or the angle food descends
   
5. the broadcast
   
she turns me on she turns on me
that the view from the window is a lake
and silent cars are given the noise of flies dying in the heat
of the library    the grass outside goes brown
in my head behind my glasses behind the glass in the precinct
thus, too, they whisper in museums and banks


Tuesday, March 22, 2016

A Voice Asks: Would You Like a Wooden Gag or a Steel Gag?




  • So proud of HRC when yesterday in front of AIPAC she put her arms around a five year old Palestinian girl and told the girl to let Hillary worry about the girls future.
  • Apparently Bill jumped the gun with this year's Sista Souljah moment. Was supposed to wait until nomination secured.
  • Eff this fraud.
  • Israel: the Broken Silence.
  • What is our responsibility?
  • Cassandra's processional.
  • Academic freedom.
  • Academic confession.
  • To be fair to Major League Soccer, they happily accept washed-up Americans too.
  • I do not miss my United tribalism at all.
  • The store has never reopened. It's in Comus. The building is still there. For years we'd buy beer here and then go to Sugarloaf. I was in the store three days before this happened.
  • Beckett, for those of you who do.
  • Lispector, for those of you who do. I am reading one of her short stories a day, something is unlocking the Lispector block in my head.
  • SunnO))).








EAT NOTHING

Daniel Borzutsky

It was a tube and clear and plastic and they shoved it into the nose of the stomach or the bowel

Or they place it directly into the skin and there was a bright light overhead

A card read: Pretend he has an eating disorder

Another card read: Pretend she has dementia

I don't like to put things in my mouth when you talk to me this way

But if you insist on shoving things in my nostrils

Then I will have to tell you what it is like in my esophagus

Because my smooth muscles contract, things can slide nicely through my intestines

The device in my body passes through the posterior mediastinum in my thorax and enters my abdomen through a hole in my diaphragm at the level of the tenth thoracic vertabra

A voice says, Would you like a wooden gag or steel gag?

Do you prefer brandy, milk, or cabbage?

I smile because I know how important body language is in front of a TV audience

There are forty-seven women strapped to chairs that recline when a button is pushed

There are fingers in rubber gloves

The squeeze open lips and sing a song about gastric obstructions and psychiatric disorders diagnosed against a lady's consent

When your bowels open, my love, when you think too much about the pharynx: this makes me feel so along

Vomit is one option          starvation is another

My love, says the authoritative body on the screen

I have a compelling interest in the weight of your frame

How many bureaucrats do we need to affirm this?

Look, love, often people don't really know what they want

They can see an end, but it's not the right end

This is a song about what it feels like when you touch me this way

This is a song about a certain type of fiscal strategy

If they say you can stick things in his body that he doesn't want in his body then you must not say we cannot stick things in his body because there are just too many people who love him

My love, says the authoritative body, you must realize that if I slice off your hand in an act of ungovernable aggression it doesn't mean I don't love you

It all depends on what you need me to say



Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Bleggalgaze: Viral Relics in the Genome?













THE NEW ZOMBIE

Rae Armantrout

        1

I stare at a faint
spinning disc

in the black
endlessly

ready to pounce.  

        2   

I actually say,

"I'm so sick
of zombies!"  

        3 

Viral relics 
in the genome?

Genes that switch
themselves off

and on,

unthinking
but coordinated?

        4

Zombie surfeit

Half-off zombie.

The best zombie
imitation.

Invisible zombie 
hand



Tuesday, January 13, 2015

I Don't Have a Pill for That, the Doctor Said










I DON'T HAVE A PILL FOR THAT

Deborah Landau

It scares me to watch
a woman hobble along
the sidewalk, hunched adagio

leaning on —
there’s so much fear
I could draw you a diagram

of the great reduction
all of us will soon
be way-back-when.

The wedding is over.
Summer is over.
Life please explain.

This book is nearly halfway read.
I don’t have a pill for that,
the doctor said.



Tuesday, December 3, 2013

He Will Not Remember the Names of Cousins and Uncles





Here's the SunnO))) cascade I promised. Reiteration of duh. I have moved to the next stage of my obamapostasy: I can't imagine myself neener-neenering emotionally devastated Hillarmy's (go register Hillarmy.every extension at GoDaddy, I name it and relinquish claims on trademark, yo) moral outrage over the Democracy-threatening secrecy of the Christie administration. I read Jennifer Rubin for the same reason I watch natural disaster porn, here is her sloppiest, laziest, no doubt she thinks her most brilliant trolling on wapoblog ever since the last until the next. Yes, more politics today than recently. I'm going to a wedding in Norfolk this weekend, a cousin I wouldn't recognize if introduced but a son of my favorite aunt and uncle, want to bleed any excess aargh-fluid out of the political spleen just in case Earthgirl and I decide to get shit-faced and politics, as they inevitably will among the shit-faced, come up. For I swear I am keeping my mouth shut regardless. SeatSix can vouch I succeeded or failed next Sunday or Monday.






  • The state versus JohnLast week I had the unusual experience of being cross-examined at length by the State on the content of many of my blog posts here, in the course of a post-conviction proceeding. Although this line of questioning was objected to on grounds of relevance, it was not unexpected, and the State justified its inquisition on the grounds that my “credibility” was at issue. It was gratifying to know that at least one person was still reading this blog. And it would not surprise me if in the near future other authorities take an interest as well, as a result of this prosecutor’s interest. I think I explained myself, for the record, as well as could be expected in that format and environment, and as well as Heresy is ever able to justify itself to Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, this is as good a time and opportunity as any to summarize the views I’ve expressed here over the last few years, which have evolved some but not much since the last time I posted.
  • Event Planner.
  • Obscure Sound's Best of November, with sound.
  • Bodah reads another Hejinian poem on his weekly radio show.
  • E-Literacy and the SocialIt often seems that autopoiesis and self-reference play a crucial role in the basic understanding of e-literature, which the established scholarship (e.g. e-literary criticism) considers first and foremost in terms of its new media specificity. This practice is distinctly contextualized and embedded in contemporary society and its paradigm shifts. In the present time, defined by capitalism, which does not leave anything outside of its influence, there is also no point in leaving the e-literary text outside, i.e. without any references to "the social" and to theories that deal with new social and cultural paradigms. The challenge of broader social theory application in this field is therefore the current topic of interest in this essay. To emphasize the specificity of an e-literary piece (as a performance, event, procedure, program, ride, textual instrument) directs us to its materiality, which is a very historical, changeable category. The requirements for full autonomy of this field as separated from the social (the claim of modernist aesthetics), have passed. Today we recognize that software is also a cultural and social tool (Galloway, 2012). In this essay, we are going to discuss some key theoretical notions on the issue of  "the social" at the present time and their application in the field of e-literature.
  • The most horrifying sentence you'll read today.
  • Three new Ashbery poems.
  • Flowers of Abeyance.






GRADATIONS OF BLUE

Matthea Harvey

The scent of pig is faint tonight
as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue,

looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard
with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten.

Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimed
I was still soft-fingered when I planted you.

In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds,
pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests

on the plane’s wing-tip colored pink by the sun.
Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo,

like the hawk that usually flies between or above their branches,
found skimming the ground with its catch of mouse or mole,   

or the barge that passes every day at four, its metal nose
just out of the water, while empty at eight, its sleek sides

flash signals to those on shore. Later, on the highway
a row of trucks lit like orange squares in the setting sun—

a colony of ants each with a piece of chrysanthemum
on their backs—begins to reassemble memories;

the petals become lining, the shape of the flower is lost,
so that years later, looking at an old photograph,

she will not remember the names of cousins and uncles
but the exact bend in the river behind them, the pattern of trees.



Thursday, October 24, 2013

Jack Spicer Is Music to My Ears, Everything Is Possible





Heard that song for the first time today, a song mentioning Jack Spicer, and since tomorrow is an Egoslavian Holy Day and another poet will get all the space, the song, two Spicer poems and a Nurse with Wounds cover I found plus a favorite John Fahey song I found while looking for the Vince Taylor all get play tonight. As for Spicer, any chance to post Spicer I will post Spicer. Click on tag below for more poems.


A POEM FOR DADA DAY AT THE PLACE APRIL 1, 1958

Jack Spicer

I
    
The bartender
Has eyes the color of ripe apricots
Easy to please as a cash register he
Enjoys art and good jokes.
Squish
Goes the painting
Squirt
Goes the poem
He
We
Laugh.

II
    
It is not easy to remember that other people died
          besides Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker
Died looking for beauty in the world of the
          bartender
This person, that person, this person, that person
          died looking for beauty
Even the bartender died

III 
     
Dante blew his nose
And his nose came off in his hand
Rimbaud broke his throat
Trying to cough
Dada is not funny
It is a serious assault
On art
Because art
Can be enjoyed by the bartender.

IV
     
The bartender is not the United States
Or the intellectual
Or the bartender
He is every bastard that does not cry
When he reads this poem.
   






[ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN]

Jack Spicer

Any fool can get into an ocean   
But it takes a Goddess   
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
    water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.



Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Does It Shift with the Ringer's Will?











FIELD EFFECT

Joshua Clover

For 8 months he lay in bed over the

difference between “the bell rings” & “he rings

the bell.” Did those 2 “rings” SOUND

DIFFERENT? The invisible disturbance which

is the bell’s vibration beating at the air—a

FIELD EFFECT—does it shift with the

ringer’s will? This, he thought, was the

smallest difference between things which the

human mind could hold (or almost hold, the

thought-of-it falling away from the thinking,

a penny rolling to the horizon & so to

sleep . . .). He couldn’t get up. It became clear

that he was the murderer. Everyone knows. A

man standing at a podium reads from notes.

In the audience people nod in immaculate

suits, women & men. When I am done

someone will transcribe what I say into speech.

It will not resemble my notes. He is just THE

THING between his notes & his speech. This is

only fair, that he be the air. Some of the

women wear hats with feathers in them, wild,

candescent. In the audience is a boy named B,

not the letter, not the note. Another sound,

neither letter nor note—



Sunday, July 14, 2013

Unless You Walk into It Freely, and with Open Despairing Eyes, You Can't Even See the Windows




  • Napoleon Alert System Activated. It's been since early Monday morning since any of us has seen him. 
  • UPDATE! Works every time. Deactivating Napoleon Alert System
  • Wilfully Obscure reminded me yesterday of The Nobodys.
  • The music if fine, but since I hadn't thought of them in at least two decades it reminded me that I was young once, though you may not believe it.
  • Remember when mocking Michelle Malkin was Left Blegsylvania's most satisfying gag? Someone named Melissa Harris Perry scolded Edward Snowden for being - get this - an attention slut. Regardless of what confidential information Snowden reveals, the real value of the Snowden Affair - sorry, I keep repeating myself - is in the reaction not only of Power but in Power's liberal propagandists' behavior. Melissa Harris Perry - whoever the fuck she is, I'm told she's a load - is pissed Snowden's attention sluttery is eclipsing her attention sluttery, and Melissa Harris Perry is right.
  • I say this with full admittance - my constant admittance - of my attention sluttery.
  • Q&A w/Greenwald. I must confess, the visceral hatred of Greenwald by the professional Left propagandists fascinates me on sooooooooo many levels.
  • Lesson learned: don't weaponize your sidewalk. But yes, I've not mentioned the Zimmerman trial much because what can be said about a country where a murdered black kid is put on trial for his own murder?
  • Twenty-four hour moratorium on further comment self-imposed.
  • This will be an exceptionally slow day here in smaller Stringtowns as most everyone goes to Stringtown's bleggal overlords to keep up with the story.
  • How to get away with murder.
  • You are the enemy.
  • Weapons of mass distraction.
  • The conspiracy matrix.
  • Neither a rightist or leftist be.
  • Angst of pianists.
  • Today in motherfucking blooger, anyone here I trust know the back-end of blooger as in dealing w/google or know anyone they trust. Dear blooger:










[LETTER TO GARY BUTTONE]

Jack Spicer

Dear Gary,

   Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it.

   Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry.

   I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you.

   But let's have these letters go on, whether it be days, years, or never before I see you. We can still love each other although we cannot see each other. We will be no farther apart when I'm in Berkeley than we were when I was in Minneapolis. And we can continue to love each other, by letter, from alien worlds.


   Love,
   Jack



Friday, May 24, 2013

Beginning a Phrase in the Middle or Ending It without a Comma, We Won't Read It Anyway




I've learned to try, I'm not very good at, I almost always fail, but I've learned to try to wait 48 hours before writing about political news - in this case Obama's speech - in hopes that I'll not write about it at all (at that I always fail), plus I'm busy, plus a friend sent me a long, thoughtful, and Kind letter regarding my name's unmasking here that I'd rather think about in the few moments I'm not directed elsewhere where I'd rather not be. So this: I am a book hoarder, if I see something I own and love and have two copies already but see a third on sale for $2 in a used book store I buy it, people responded positively to the Milosz I posted (and there's another below, and now that I'm re-addicted expect much more in the near future), I've two extra copies of the above, if you want one let me know, send me your address in an email.

UPDATE! One copy claimed, one remains, I've added a second poem to encourage everyone (and by everyone I mean the three of you) to move fast.

UPDATE! Second copy claimed, but fuck, if you're someone with a history of Kind toward me and this blog (or wish to start a history of Kind toward me and this blog, go ahead, I'm a rube), I'll buy you a copy if you send me your address and say please.







SECRETARIES

Czeslaw Milosz

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth
Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle
Or ending it without a comma. And how it all looks when completed
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.



PREPARATION

Czeslaw Milosz

Still one more year of preparation.
Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.
The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
Springs and autumns will unerringly return,
In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And they will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
Growing immense at the corner of  street; the ride at dusk
Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked with heavy boots; on fire and running
He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.