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Everyone in this room is alive. There are no dead in this room. The dead don’t travel among us. The dead don’t have a Rewards Card.
Albuquerque, I have
never been to you.
Books are a shame these days.
Armored men. Armchair men. Marmada. Sweet as marmalade. That’s very sweet of you.
But no whipped cream.
Ready to adopt my own arm, a child with a disfigurement.
I will read to you.
I will accept your mundaneity.
Stay away stay away the one that totally withdrew, the one that wouldn’t take no for an answer, this is not an unusual situation, this is not a catch-up, this is not catching up, this is not a spirit, this is not a des-spirit.
Desk.
Orthopedist’s office: comedy of errors, a rare circus, plaster melodies and hardware.
Another strong-minded woman. Another sort of reparation. Another cane or a cast.
Harder knocks than most, an -ing rhyme, a woman personalized, a custom preference, a song stuck on a balcony, yes you have a little virus.
Phenomenology of poetry.
Aversion of poetry
Resting through aversion
Resting with oily skin
Elderly talking
Loving their children
The lady next to me, stunning in wrinkles, eyes blue smoked opal coat black and white houndstooth wreathing in wrinkles, eyes blue with bruises, careful with lipstick, still on her chair, dressed to the teeth.
november 30
Optimistic with Buddhism.
The practice.
Failed head. Fuck.
Shopping for Christmas cards.
Shopping for Buddhist cards.
I believe I can get home. Go home and—work on my splotch art. Always a tentative on-the-fly effort with permanent, disfigured results.
I have to write about Crystal Bowles. There’s only one joke there, which is her name.
Dedicated to kids.
A lot of great teachers have passed through my life unnoticed.
Hey Sal.
I have nowhere to go.
I alternate. Surprise me.
My stomach is twisted.
Suddenly I am warm.
Occasionally, I feel something trickling next to my skin.
I am observation.
There is an ancient print shop on a hotel property that may have to be demolished.
Digital scrapbook. Everything is new. I am sighing with innovation. I am fried.
I am—disgusted.
I am exhausted. Easier to maintain simplicity.
Sustainability. Burn.
I am lost. Swimming.
The text.
The reserves have lost all their tigers. A tiger reserve outside New Delhi with no tigers to show for it. A man willing to shoot to kill. My nephew going into the Navy.
The penguin is in poor condition.
What about New York December 2—if I am in good condition?
I am vibrating nervously,
my nerves are twigs in wind.
Animals. Lisa has an enamour of animals.
Very smart, very sensible. The horse is an animal.
I fell in love with it. Love is a Practice. A failed practice. A failed letting go. Love is a failure of letting go.
I have a feeble-fatality.
3 countries in 3 days. Brussels, Holland, Germany.
Gallery. The word is elite.
I miss Blair.
This ebay is great.
What about another planet, another world like the Little Prince’s? Obviously, it can be simple, a planet populated by nothing more than a plant.
My hand is almost numb. I have control over muscles on the back of my hand that I can arch and press slightly into the hard surface of the splint.
Far out.
The coffee is a bit appalling, as is Sam’s insatiable desire for a phone.
I have another appointment in
ONE
WEEK
Appealed by doubt. I catalogued the EOBs, I set up a workplan. I saw the physician’s assistant. I photographed the broccoli rabe.
My arm’s whine affecting my mind, a slight nausea of thinking—or maybe that’s the holiday?
Worn floors in here, dirty linoleum, the random escaped coffee bean.
november 20
Resting, resting, arresting.
If you can load garbage into trucks, is your injury so bad?
To elevate with such care, anything anything anything that’s happening.
My hosts, my hosts, my experience of hospitality.
The failure of my lights. The utter failure of my many lamps. They wink out one by one.
The eyes of disaster.
Yet not so bad.
I read it again and again and I still have no idea what he’s talking about. Just seems sad to me, but is that my idea or his?
I am late so late so finally late.
I am late to ask the question about mountains.
I am late to coax the answer from your stony lips.
I love my in-laws. I felt so sad that I won’t see them this weekend.
Greed delusion and hatred.
Listening to dharma talks on the car radio, through my IPod. Driving into Queens, my last fling. It all feels final.
Nearly wild with my refusal to accept
something I’m not even sure of.
Nothing by mouth after midnight.
Nothing by mouth after midnight.
Nothing by mouth after midnight.
Ashbery drives the emotion into metaphoric schemes.
I don’t really want to understand it.
I don’t want the poet’s sympathy.
november 14
Wrist issue.
Wrist misery.
Rising above, like a Buddhist, with no solid self.
Emotions rise up out of the unsolid self. Should I accept that living really belongs to my son now?
If I could find my way to a simpler conception. If I could find my way to the egg on the pedestal, if I could find my way to the walking rock. No table salt. No laughing pepper. No funny farm. No moldy vegetables. Rot in a garden. Where do we see that rot, the heavy mosses, the packed earth of the path? The beaten borders, crumbling boundaries? The edge trees fallen into the river, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, in a death flirtation with the current. Where do we see that? Where do we see the planes? How far away are they? The red light blinks far away at night and there you are, another person. We forget that all of these poets are also persons, one after the other, exhibiting bodily functions. Yes you are a wizard of language. Yes you may set a bonfire. Yes you can turn and turn and turn. No you are not a clergy person. No none of this should be bandied about. No you are not for sale. No you have no memory of the mountain of marzipan you saw in Italy.
I am puzzled by the moldiness of man-made surfaces, the genial alignment of everything in the natural world.
I am very interested in your cavern in the mountains, the crevice where the sun shines one hour only.
I am tremendously interested in going into the mountains. The place where I will sit down to dinner with Arabs, my combed hair glistening. The charred fox on the platter, mistaken for dog, shot through the heart. The chorus of cousins solemnly uninvited, but still in attendance. The rugged rapscallions, the host with his lions, the pair eating onions, the service of truncheons. The bat is a velvet mask.
I wrote so much no one would want to pick up one of my notebooks and wade into that.
Writing—sort of below par—under the surface. Aimless.
Writing without the mountains.
The surface is uneven. The cutting board is warped. The gentleman was proud to show me the use of passive voice in my writing sample. Fucking shit. Well live and learn. I am still expecting to show them, every one of them, show them—what?
I am lingering.
I can’t scratch my left eye. I can’t applaud. There’s no use applauding now is there. I’ve been in two rooms where applause has been called for, and yet—unable to applaud. No applause necessary. Applaud with aplomb. The plaudits, the maldits, the well-dits. How-do-you-do-dits. This is what we have to say.
What are these women up to? And then these men, their heads white and bony, their chins with flaps like lizards, that they have to shave.
What a mess.
I find it all a hateful mess.
I have a fear of not being able to keep myself clean when I’m old, old and too proud to be seen.
My cast smells, a faint rotten odor. A faint odor of rot. What’s rotting? Dried skin.
Part of me is just super fucking suspicious about this goddawful meaningless poetry. I can’t write anything like that! I think about the hermits pushing against the bounds of possible experience.
I think of the poets pushing, pushing out of bounds the wheelbarrows full of language. Clods, clots, clothoppers. Hamemers.
The foxes coughing in the mountains. The evil fox light. Lost lore of animals lost lore of fears. Our superstitions are gone now, transformed into bombers from the air. Our strange fear of foxes or wolves following, met with turbans and robes. We do not learn much about any of this, we don’t push through it. We just take it as it lays.
“I went into the mountains to interest myself”
“in the fabulous dinners of hosts distant and demure”
“The foxes followed with endless lights.”
(J. A.)
I am going to pull out “The Instruction Manual”—”as I sit looking out of a window of the building.” I want to write “The Questionnaire.” All of these ideas are depressing and messy, like litter. Like leaves. The dead brown leaves, everywhere, curled, curled. Every year, done, down, down.
Investing. She is investing time. She struggles to define the terms and conditions. The terms of daylight and nightlight. The conditions of breakfast, tea, noise, and satisfaction. She is not sufficiently passionate. Her passion is weak (again). I can learn from the past. I can make a move out of passion. I can dedicate.
I will dedicate my room to the poetries, my living museum of cloth and pixels. The pixels are little squares in the fabric. Her technique is appalling. Going back through the catch—fishes, shells, seaweed, and garbage. Fishes fish, dishes or dish. Hollywood Hollywood Hollywood (dactylic) Perilous Perilous (dactylic) In my room (anapestic). I could go through some poems, mark them. I could observe them in their carriages.
I am going to stop for a moment and read Desnos halfway through.
I am resistant in so many ways.
I hiked into St. Lucia. I have done some hiking. I was scared on Mount Baker. Scared by Ken, I suppose, essentially. I’ve been scared on the lake. Many times. But I won’t quit.
Where am I? In Silverado, the foothills. Sloshing around in cold water, panning for cold. Defined by the late afternoon, the decline of light over the side of the mountain.
Faith. Faith. A lot of it.
I have been here before.
I am pleased by the dust and the cowboys. I am pleased by the conservatives. What makes a match? I agreed to step up to the plate.
I hear the train. I hear the surface water sound that invades this house. This is a house of strangers. I am intrigued by watercolors. I am happier here if I pretend I live in California OR Oregon. Yes, hey ho, I live in Oregon.
Do I want to pay my parking tickets? Oh no, nothing is that fortunate.
Fortune. Fortune crusting.
This is a bad habit. Repetition.
What is a good student?
Do I want to be a poetry student?
Vague desire to study philosophy. A search for meaning. Then I remember I don’t believe in meaning. I believe in nouns. I could read a philosophy sprinkled liberally with nouns. And not abstract nouns either. Concrete.
Coffee tends to cool it, to thin it out, bring edges into crisper relief. I think I understand.
I remember starting out.
The memory becomes a big junky storage bin.
november 11
Jumpy. Jumpy. Leaf blowers until I can’t hear myself think. Renegotiating everything. What about a month of fragments? What about a month of Sundays? What about doing some hard laundry? What about turn off the critical frame of mind?
Not necessary.
Unseen baby, unknowable one. You don’t invite them to be a bad mother. You don’t correspond with mother. You don’t know the alignment, the starsign, the angel of mother. You don’t ask and the mother won’t retreat. You avoid the mother. The tattoos, the breath, the side dishes. The lack of respect. You are eternally grateful.
I learned there is a different definition of project. At first,
I thought I had many projects. Now I realize I have only one.
How not to get hit by a car.
A shower would be better.
A shower would be best.
And yet yesterday
it rained all day.
The positions, the choreography of your gestures does not relate to the metrical feet, and though it should. There are metrical feet hiding in the prose, wearing veils. There are hard hearts, hard- hearted orb that rules the night. I am lost. Contemporary. The past. You can ask, you can ask to attach, you can task to attach your trash. There is nothing else to say.
My shoulders have regressed since the injury. They are back up around my ears. I am waiting for a beating, another blow to fall.
I am waiting for the pain. I like to devalue, much more than most. I do not like children. I am an ana-pest.
Can a sculptor capture such a subtle shading of emotion? No. Maybe a painter can.
I used to write.
I don’t write anymore.
Favorable to nouns. I am quite enamored of nouns. I adore their capacity for imagery, for correspondences. They shimmer with energy, living freely in the absence of verbs.
In the call and response, I am leaning toward prose. I think it would be a joke.
Now Gertrude Stein was she more focused? Did she probe her inner parts?
Using anapest anapest shakira shakira perilous perilous arduous arduous the mistakes of repetition the greetings of three-dom
three three threes
syllables in trees
Absence of relaxation today—what? pressure? the house is a pressure.
Pressure—pleasure—pressure—pleasure—someone has to have the answers
why does it seem like my goal is to stump them?
I want to post something online I am taken with the practice of blogging I am taken in a different direction It has been hard to learn Yes it is my focus that is needed Telescoping eyes Zoom out zoom in sometimes
you just don’t feel like talking
well silly me I am just trying to explore there is no tyranny here which is hard to get used to—dear Anarchist there is no tyranny here
There are no opportunities for line breaks in prose
or is there
november 9 later
When the boughs breaks—practicing writing in traditional meter like Longfellow—trace of tobacco in the air—would like to regress, remembering Indian days—would like to expel have my nails done
november 9
Still sad. Sadder than ever today. I want to throw myself on your mercy. To wander into your crowd full of people I don’t know. I set up a conflict with people around me. I don’t stake my claim.
I don’t taste my own sauce. I guess I’ll leave here now.