the most arbitrary you

awaken tangled 
surface into
bluer blue

there is no
oven for you
nothing to keep
you cool no
container for

you are 
losing
you


and then the promised wallop does not arrive


but you do





picture from: http://theartofmemory.blogspot.com/

all kinds of silences quote by beryl markham

"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo."

from "west with the night" by beryl markham

what if you built a city and no one came?

the city that never really was. 

such foolish plans do not come to 

naught but become 

sketches in the sand, some-

thing pretty for the pilots, 

bored like lovers with their lands.

revision

"Revision is the opposite of repetition & religion. In the process of stripping the language back to an unnaturally naked state, you want to see what is hidden behind each word, what intention, what fact, then cover it up with something else. Revision is suspicious of first words & assumes they exist only to signal something else, something deeper. I revise what I have written in order to strip away fraud & get to the uncontaminated first intention. By slashing the curtain of words, I might finally glimpse the words behind the words & the silence behind those."

-fanny howe

meditation on the corner

i knew her face once joyous but now she’s dyed her hair so falsely blonde that she appears strangely somber. a custard yellow car queues behind a truck not ogre but ochre. behind the custard yellow car waits a house of the same color. confronted by a wall of aquamarine, doodled faces make no sense to me, flanked as i am by a steaming dragon of silver machinery. parked up the street a decrepit powder blue ice cream truck is mocked by its own miniature wheels. it must be hard to grow old when you’re that shade of blue. dim gray muscular male bulldog waddles across the street and squats to scratch before he reaches the other side of twelfth. above me, a toy train laps the room on popsicle stick tracks, while we are negotiating he says, are we she says, and her tunes shiver behind her. outside, an enormous arm that has fallen asleep in the middle of its dramatic gesture, poses for a painting of pointing, as if it took that long to herd one’s attention to that spot or to turn toward that precise angle of insight, exactly there. eventually your life will be heavy enough to turn with the tragic majesty of a doomed ship, because it takes some force to turn around in the cold deep water you now find yourself in, because it takes some force to counter the momentum of all those accumulated choices and the current that already wields you is very strong. a plant is wilting in its pot at the intersection of wide glass, defeated perhaps by the cool overcast, drowned for sure in the moistureless light of ash. and my eyes are smeared with it. across the street there is a dirty yellow recycling bin that looks somehow lonely, sullen like a mouth, waiting for a bottle or a can on that dead tongue of chalk. there are people i know with whom i do not crack wise about death, as if it were more immediate for them, a fresher wound, just recently plated, and still warm on their table, because they have been reacquainted with how suddenly any of us could be taken, stolen from story, and that for them is not merely a plot device. and then a seriously studious young woman walks in wearing the word love, which is spelled along her black sweater’s sleeve. staring out the window, i wonder if the people who live on the corner ever feel nervous about all that's swung above them?