Salvaged Poetry #3

evaporation

jumping in an oval

shape uncurling selfhood

long, glove-like fingertips 

the hair's growing on knuckles

with blisters, hot and cool

on waning shadow beings

transparent, those and flesh

clouds aren't milky

just the thin little sun

shedding its many shells

I flee to the sky.

Salvaged Poem #2

Wrap the lye-dipped apple in a layer of caramel,

stab it on a stick, and shake ten or twenty sprinkles

over it like confetti in preparation

for some grand occasion or another.

Bringing together one's bosom companions

invitations will go out to that man of 

Whitechapel, Boston, and Chicago

(the latter dressed in his clownsuit)

We'll all gather together in the most haunted house in town

lock ourselves inside and the flashlights outside

Find rest another night in some graveyard or another

Claw at the ground and scream to be admitted

There's the chain smoking of menthols

atop the roof of that condemned building

with shoddy framework, asbestos, and lead

You stare straight at the sun for hours and hours on end

On the coldest night of the year, we will stand naked

Beneath a sky that weeps large shards of ice

and that moon, that moon, and that moon

Walk slowly to the middle of the road

Then run down its length until you reach the highway

(The road is icy and everyone has stayed at home)

We'll stand there, as long as it takes

All those flickering stars of eyes

see how we survive.

Salvaged Poem #1

Never step into the light without
surveying the darkness around you
first for signs of a river.
Land disapparates with the appearance
of suns, flourescence, and bioluminicity.

Take a breath and swallow it.
This will create a pain in your stomach
that works as a makeshift barometer.
Walk to the highest point and exhale
continuously until consciousness is lost.

Make for yourself a new name.
Write this name ten thousand times
on various parts of your body.
This will take twenty-seven years
of your life.  Tell no one.

This book of instructions composed
in accordance with the predefined
date of our last correspondence.
Do not burn after reading but hide
in the garden at noon on Sunday.

Proud Editing

I'm pretty happy with how this scene's been edited.  It is out of context.  I shall leave it as such for you.

Swallowing

Coffee.  Black.  Because that's how all the great PIs drank it in my sepia imaginary.  Like the darkness of the coffee had to meet, match the dark of the logic-bound soul.  That antipathy toward all things sweet.  Nothing in the eyes but that dark dark darkness.

"Of course, you know she didn't fall per se.”

His voice was dry and deep.  To the point where an illness was inevitable. 

Jones didn't drink coffee, but instead had ordered a large hot chocolate with many particulars.  He had whip cream on his nose.  Not literally, but in some truth, there it was.  

That’s the kind of person he was.  Or is. 

Perhaps in a place closer to our reality, he wore clothes that were quieter.  It memory, it serves us best to brighten things, spruce them up so that they can remain in our minds for longer.  Maybe his suit was dark and his shirt blue, his tie a diamond-print maroon.  But I can only remember his outfit as white slacks with a yellow t-shirt.  The suit jacket draped over the back of his chair, the tie a purple and loosened.

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.  It is so short, love, and so long, the forgetting.  Oblivion is so long.

She wouldn't fall, of course.  June, I mean. 

I thought it but did not speak a syllable, though I had intended to say it aloud and to him, leaning forward and intimate.  Instead, "oh" was all I said, more a sharp inhale than a word at all.  I may have slumped back in my chair.

"They wouldn't believe me."

"Probably, they’d have just thought I was drunk or something.  Maybe LSD."

"Which is kind of a pretty thought, because she was in the sky with diamonds, you see."

"She just stepped out and the clouds, they just took her away.  Almost as if she were made out of paper.  It was almost digital the way it happened."

"In any event, she didn't fall."

"She's still alive.  Somewhere."

Which I knew.  But still, it was so nice to hear.

kind of a freedom, there

The more I read books that really resonate with me on some subconscious level, the more confident I feel in my own writing.

Think of it-- we can do whatever we want.

I just read Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" and realized a lot of my prose was secretly poetry via the sentence.  Then I panicked at the distinction.  Then I remembered that it didn't matter.  The titles supplied by others don't change the writing at all.

As I edit, I pull some of it into broken lines.  It looks more like traditional poetry that way, though still sentence-based for the most part.

I became worried that it would all need to look this way.  Then I reminded myself that it could look however I want.  So I started leaving some in the standard prose form.

Reading Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I strongly felt the lack of real plot.  A boy has a key and wants to see what it goes to.  But it isn't so much a quest as a curiosity.  What are important are the details.  People and pretty situations-- lovers building museums to each other in their homes.  Living at the top of the Empire State Building.

Even the telling of stories within a story and purposeful run on sentences.  Sections with red marker.  Sections with missing words.  Line breaks.  Photographs.  Lines printed over other lines.  Invisibility.

There really are no rules to writing.  Isn't it lovely?

I don't make New Year's resolutions.  I've said this before.  The Earth rotates around the sun and a circle has no start.  January 1st is an obscure choice, a random end and beginning to the circular path.  My orbit has been beginning in September with the book goal.  I'm abandoning the 52 books per year goal because I far surpass it each year.  This isn't vanity, it just is.  Making goals that you know you can easily achieve is like cheating at solitaire.

But if I did make a new resolution, which can start today because it's as good a point of start as any, I'd tell myself to stop being so self-conscious with my writing.  If it is crap, it will stand out as such (i.e. "endless sky").  Otherwise, it can't be that terrible.  Everything is coming temporarily out of my scrap parts bin; all writing will be treated as salvageable for the time being.

Least importantly but still noteworthy, I will stop worrying about my comma placement.  I know I overuse commas.  The truth is, I put commas where I want you to pause.  It is a poet's mark.  Comma= short pause, period= longer pause, paragraph break= significant pause, section break= stop for a second and think before proceeding to next section!

Therefore, I will continue to overuse commas in all creative writing.  And try to love my words more.

writer's melancholy

That's the truth of it, what happens when I go about editing.

I went back to my Nano novel from last year because I've been watching Lost and kinda like to do some sci fi editing for a bit.  Even though I intended it to be steam punk, it really is just mainstream sci fi.  Anyway, looking back at it, I can't help but be extremely bored.

There's the rub.

Of course it's unexciting.  It's a rough draft.  I'd just like for once to write something that isn't completely crap in its initial stages.  You know, pump out a brilliant piece the first go around.  Just once.

And then realizing that it's not only crap but 50,000+ words of crap to wade through and turn into something worthwhile.  Well, that's just exhausting.

In any case, I don't imagine much will be coming of Clover any time soon.  Back to this year's "novel," which may secretly be a prose-based poetry piece in the long form.

Onward!

Nano Prosody Madness

I wonder if the indentations and whatnot will translate.  Anyway, here is the first section, edited!  I told you I would do it!  Hurrah for the first vignette done!

Remember-- nice words only.  This is barely edited at all :|

Winter and a soul

You don’t expect to miss the cold.  Not that

brisk breeze of a cold, the whooshing cold

that likes to pull at your hair and grab your jacket tighter.  It’s the

missing

of that real cold that won’t go away even after ten cups of coffee

and a long hot shower.

You aren’t supposed to be any

thing but happy when the sun’s come out.  Maybe that’s just from

being of a place that’s full of rain that touches bone.  You have to

take the brighter weather as a call

for optimism and breathing

in enough Vitamin D for the whole year.  But all I really

want is one frost-smitten day to don my

fuck-the-world feelings, crash through puddles, and scare children with my indiscriminately cruel-frozen mien.  

This is the justification for a rage denied.

Sometimes, you can get that emotion when you drink, really drink, all alone someplace you aren’t meant to be.  

The stacks.  In the basement, through a broken win-

dow.  Down the stairs.  

Walk to the very back where the light can't reach

when the fluorescence reeks its worst.  Dusty, musky

place of dead things and books forgotten, covers torn

off decades ago, and a thousand thinning stamp printed dates.  

A melancholic place.  A place to think, really.  A place to drink.

Leaning against Chaucer and Dante and all those

dead men.  Lushes themselves, I suppose. 

The last bus home only slightly remaining in the mind, cast

aside like the ego, and those drinks become all.

Still though, it’s not the same.  You need some

one around to throw that

rawanger

off of, or you don’t get anything out of it

but the inkling that you are slightly

losing it and may one day commit

mass murder and make a spectacle of your

self lasting many generations or not even fifteen minutes of infamy.  Wikipedia entry: Your Name (Serial Killer).  You have to spill that bad mood onto someone else, feel empowered

through the ruining of someone else’s good time.  Raw anger.  Rawanger.  You only say it through clenched

teeth, spit out without a moment’s pause between.

But all those I know to drink with, they become happy drunks.  

Drink away the philosophy and hurt and all the jazz in Paris and New Orleans and Tokyo and my old hometown.  

They play darts and miss the board entirely,

or place bets on billiards and can’t manage to touch the ball with their well-chalked sticks.  

But these small failures are nothing but amusements in the now. 

They laugh so easily at themselves. 

Me and June… anyway, we go out to the ocean with raw-

anger.  Take our wildness out to sea.  It doesn’t feel

much like Melville’s ocean, nothing to draw

you to it but boredom, sweet ennui, borrachas.  Nothing better

to do

but breathe in all that salt

water, let it seep into our pores and eyes so that sand joins with our blood streams.

It’s the same one though, our ocean.  

It doesn’t much feel like an ocean, not a real one that spits out, bubbles and debris, ignores broken bottles, plastic bags, and even our bodies thrown to its wiles.  

Not the kind that would really want to eat trash like me or

a true beauty, my Junia.  

When we get a mind to drown ourselves here, we end up back on the beach,

landlubbered sans free will.  

          And still, at night our tries dry straight

away. The footprints and the cut

remnants.

Not even the sharks would eat us, if there were any.  This shallow in the waves.  So they say.

The night’s too warm.  All they

do is sleep with their mouths

open and hope something good floats

in.  Accepting less.  Excepting less,

they prowl.  I suppose.

 “Come to bed,” she says, using that one voice she has that is kind of like the cold only

too fleeting to be real, an Indian winter in a white Summer,

“No more thoughts tonight.”

Secrets in Television

It is always a tricky thing to have a protagonist with a great secret in a television series.  Unlike in books or in films or plays, you have to wait sometimes years for even a single person to come upon this secret.

There is a dumb show coming out soon that appears to be stealing a plot from Tootsie but extending the cross dressing as woman for work into setting of the modern economic crisis.

I am not referring to this sort of secret. (Nor do I condone such terrible, terrible shows in general)

The example sitting in my head right now is BBC's Merlin in which the eponymous wizard must hide his powers.  Because people performing magicks in Camelot are put to death.  Very tricky secret, that one.  I've been watching it just shy of four seasons now and again am convinced that with the next episode (season finale) everyone (or at least one person, which we know for sure) will learn of his magick.

But they always have something tricky.  Like they'll find out and then lose memory of something.

I think the show I'm thinking of is Jake 2.0 but I don't remember him telling someone in a strange situation in which they forget (that he has tiny robots inside him that let him interface with technology via brain waves).  No, I must be thinking of Drop Dead Diva when she tells Grayson a zillion times that she's actually his dead girlfriend but it always turns out to be a dream.

Oh!  But in Lois and Clark his Superman-ness was revealed to his love interest in the first season.  But that kinda detracted from the other seasons.

Moral of story-- don't tell secret!  Only to certain people at certain points.  I.e. Lancelot is going to be sent off somewhere at end of episode, may as well let him know about Merlin's magicks not Jake telling his girlfriend and her thinking he's a jackass and dumping him (effectively leaving show).  There may be nothing worse than the telling of secrets and the not only not believing (which happened in Drop Dead Diva) but dumping.

Maybe it's just because his girlfriend was a jerk.

Anyway, I now sit on my brain in anticipation of the Merlin finale.  I am hoping at least one more person will learn of his power!

Eek!

"The sky is an endless blue" - A Preliminary Review of Labyrinth

Not the one with David Bowie.  Obviously that Labyrinth is brilliant.  Jennifer Connolly did a crap job but we were too busy looking at the bulge in Bowie's pants to notice.

Anyway, I am speaking to Kate Mosse (not Kate Moss)'s Labyrinth, the book about "three secrets. two women. one grail."

First off, you should know that I've only got the book because there's a miniseries coming out via the BBC with Katie McGrath of Merlin fame in it.  And she's lovely.  So I want to like it very much.  I'm hoping the series has better qualities than the book.

That said, I've only read seven pages.

But lor' how those pages drag.  No, that isn't fair.  The character is mildly interesting and digging for evidence of a Paleolithic settlement and seemingly finding one in the first four pages (apparently it actually started on page three as there are some starting quotes and a map).

The thing is, the language is just very boring.

Choice lines: "Above her, the sky is an endless blue" (3-4).  Alright, let's search "sky is an endless blue" in quotes via the Google.  2,790 results.  "Endless blue sky"= 2,270,000 results.  Just tweak it a bit to, say, "the sky is an infinite blue" and you get 416 results or, for "infinite blue sky," 183,000 results.

Moral of story, if words are flowing that easily, consider using a thesaurus.  The phrase "sky is an endless blue" is clichéd.  I was pretty solidly asleep by that line (and thus sleepreading, ever so coolly).

Second choice line occurs after a boulder comes rolling down the mountain at a fast speed almost killing our protagonist.  In response, we have: "Too close for comfort, she thinks."  Honestly, when is a boulder falling down a mountain far enough away to be comfortable with?  But anyway, it is such an obvious line.  Especially in the context of someone almost getting killed.  Plus now she's in the eponymous labyrinth, which is just very quick.

I am so bored with this book, I want to give it up already.  I'm mildly interested in her falling into this labyrinth-y pit but also pissed off that one of the archeologists didn't get to have the find.  She didn't want them to because she wanted to "prove herself" though a temp summer volunteer.

Plus, the back cover has a quote by the author wanting to write about the grail legend from a woman's perspective.  Because, apparently, Mists of Avalon never happened.  And she's a bit giddy about the women having sex and I really hate poorly written sex scenes and, given the crap of the first four pages, I'm guessing they'll be lousy.

In any case, I must give it at least through the first chapter.

Still, if it is a good story it will make a nice mini-series.  So long as they give up the author's terrible internal dialogue (haven't had any external yet).