46% eyelids

it is 4:48 am

since nine or ten pm i have been cleaning my bedroom in my parents' house and throwing things away. i have often wondered about this, how my space would go from the way it's been-- off-limits war zone, brimming with torn diary pages, boxes upon boxes of relics-- to the way i imagined it in some grim faraway day, when i visited and paged through whatever was left on my bookshelf. i'm moving out of here for good in a few months. i will have my own year-round address in a different city, rent checks to mail, no RAs. i am finding out.

i threw away so many things i thought i'd keep forever
they all seem really stupid, like the plastic man in a bunny suit i won at a friendly's claw machine
like a banana les paix condom from our middle school montreal trip
like notes from people i'm not friends with anymore about things i can't imagine ever having cared about

one thing i found was a collection of poems, loose leaf, peculiarly flat emotionless print. "a haiku for every month i've known you, featuring: things i never told you." i don't remember writing them. tonight i find them incredibly sad.

...february 2006:
"oh, tulips!" i thought--
until, on the seventeenth,
they were roses.

...april 2006:
ocean parkway was
so different in the spring
alive, and so was i

may 2006:
please let me forget
that you once smashed a firefly
with a baseball bat.

october 2006:
honestly, sometimes
i thought if i were skinny
you would love me more...

i have been thinking so much lately about the disintegration of relationships and now i just don't want to anymore. everything is too sad and that's okay, it's okay. cusp of an entirely constructed beginning, today, but belief is everything ain't it? on the train home from manhattan the lights flickered on and off on and off even when we weren't switching tracks. i used to love that, fingersnap fleeting sanctuary. tonight i lit up, i grinned every time, my ipod died i didn't notice

the mystificator

if you've got forty minutes to kill, go read this interview with vladimir nabokov, out of a 1964 playboy. it is an ars poetica-cum-anagogy, sagely and often unintentionally hilarious.


"Nobody will ever discover," he asserts chillingly, "how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it."

nest with me, vn, i want to marry you

cherimoya

mark twain once called the cherimoya "deliciousness itself!" its ancient history is rooted along the peruvian andes, but this domestic baby cost six fat dolla billz so i guess i'll have to wait a couple years till we hike the salkantay for a taste of genuine moche ambrosia.

whole, it could almost be taken for an artichoke-- its lapidarian shape makes it appear leafed, layered. cut, it is unimpressive at first and looks like it should taste like raw potato or wet white fur. but the flavor is so interesting, like papaya-kiwi cough syrup, or mango nitrous oxide. i probably waited a day too long to dig in; the fruit was a bit slimy and browned with oxidation almost immediately. but i've never tasted anything so astonishingly sweet by pure nature.

   
i also saved the seeds in case anyone is interested in planting a cherimoya tree in their front yard. a new england climate isn't ideal, but something will grow, i'm sure of it.

gypsy ladies

October 2006, south shore Long Island. Taken with a 35mm Chinon CM-4 with a chipped lens.

advances in origami

i finally did it, i finally folded the unicorn
i've been trying for about a year. at least a year. but up until today, i always ended up completely mutilating the hindsection and giving up.
not this time! it took me about 90 minutes, but i did take a break to make coffee and eat anisette cookies that our neighbor, helen the seamstress, brought over.



merry christmas, y'all! i can't tell you how thrilled i am about this small thing. plus i got a fat square stack of fresh paper this morning, so i might try my thumbs at a mantid or a spaceship or something

hands remember

here is something great by a band called seabear
they are from reykjavik, iceland



in other news, today i held a baby marsupial called a sugar bear in the palm of my hand. she had sticky feet and i would have taken her home if she did not cost $489.00

l'hippocampe

June 2008, Mermaid Parade, Coney Island. My photograph.

did y'all know that the french word for "seahorse" is l'hippocampe? and that the hippocampus of le human brain was named after it because some psychobiologist thought it looked like a seahorse and that's it? i guess it was originally a greek word. little sea monster. i think it looks a bit more like a pea-pod, pea-pod where all my dreams and guess-who games are slumbering...

sporkmanteau

today my dad was talking to me about a movie he watched with my mother. "last night we watched this biopic," he said, except he said it like myopic, as if it were the adjective form of biopia, which is a word that does not exist.

"it's bio-pic, dad," i took it regrettably upon myself to inform him. "i know it looks science-y, but really it's just a plain portmanteau for more expedient facsimile transmission."

"what's a portmanteau?" he asked begrudgigly.

"a smoosh word," i explained, with the eloquent air of a scholar. "like spork."

"huh," he said, and touched his face. "bio-pic." world, rocked.

i actually just learned the word "portmanteau," which is a portmanteau, while conducting related research during a recent attempt to memorize lewis carrol's jabberwocky. that attempt only lasted about ten minutes because i realized that that poem sounds cool and everything, but when you think about how much time the dude spent writing it in perfect rhyme and meter and everything the fact that it exists is actually really depressing, and i realized that anyone who is going to spend even more time sitting there trying to memorize it probably needs to get a life

lewis carrol purported this conceptual "portmanteau" to explain all the bullshit nonsense in "jabberwocky," even though even if you took the time to translate the poem into plain english (get a life) it still probably wouldn't make sense. it is french, liberties taken, for "coathanger." i can only assume this is because sporks did not yet exist in 1871. i feel that a spork is a much more straightforward metaphor. symbol. synecdoche. whatever. sporkmanteau. i'm tired good night.

anyways, he (my dad, not lewis carrol) also pronounces enamored like en-ah-MOOR'd and Hmong like hhhaaahhhhh-mong. i guess i shouldn't talk, in light of the liaison incident last year, but ever since that terrible day i always triple-check my pronunciations. i think a tendency towards misguided emphases may be genetic, honestly. my sister's always been one of the guiltiest. despite being a recovered addict she still says the noun the way you're supposed to say the verb, and don't even get me started on our "political" discussions.

even something as basic and personalized as our last name is a subject for heated debate, like literally everyone in my family says it a different way and everyone is convinced that theirs is correct in the history of the castille del mare dialect of sicilian italian. even my mother, who is pennsylvania dutch.

i guess i know how the sloths must feel. long time the manxome foe we seek. just don't make me say "vase" aloud, because every time i see it in print, i am tempted to find alternative uses for coathangers.

the oracle

They feed their questions into it and do not speak them.
The hum of the electronic brain invades the neat hall
and four minutes later flowers the perfect solution.

Then they know what to do. These men whose brains
have placed each cog and valve without a fault
beam at the end of the machine and shyly confess

the whole thing would have taken them much longer
or perhaps their answer would have been postponed.
They rummage out other more difficult cases

and wait for the answer in confused excitement;
again it emerges in homo-mechanic language.
Happy and confident they give us a chance.

We are much honoured; we hold conferences and
discuss what the most fitting question should be;
when we find it we march and surround the machine:

the problem is fed in, the drone irregularly
distends, no answer is laid. We grow old and visit
everyday the clean, compact brain and wait.

-Taner Baybars, Turkish-Cypriot poet (b. 1936)


I found a slim red-brown softcover, "modern POETS: british and american," published 1966, inscribed on the title page with my mother's maiden name, English IV, Rm 314, 10/11/68. Am continually amazed that she was a real person then, that objects like this exist to testify. Shorthand, sideways, blue ink, page 64: "Way down below the ocean/Where I want to be./She may be."


(from my favorite Jeunet film ever, La cite des enfants perdus)

old love letters

some days i just feel like my life is so goddamn lame

"let's take a trip" i just text-messaged jeremy in connecticut, after i rearranged all the books i left in my bedroom in my parents' house in roygbiv color order "let's get stoned and go dumpster diving let's gouge our eyes out"

"hahaha" he answered "yes yes yes and no"

i guess he is having a better day than i am


from La vida de vagabundos americanos

i spent all morning reaching into my love letter collection shoebox and reading what came out

that sounds vain, that i even have that shoebox... it started with three pages dated june 1986, drafts to a woman named carol by some christian bird with grass stained knees a shit ton of apologizing to do. i found them between the pages of a library book and it would be years before i'd get any of my own.

but "you're more than a macaroni and cheese sunset," went, in earnest crayon, one of the first, maybe worst (arguably the best), followed by about a million other crayola-colored puns. "color me in love, x. ps: thanks for bringing the color back into my life." yeah, that's how you do it, boys. gag me with a bowtie macaroni picture frame, but i guess we were fifteen and it's not like the next dozen were any better

Norval Morrisseau

Canadian Ojibwe shaman artist, 1932-2007



Just after his death last winter I discovered Morrisseau's work at the Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan. Mural-filled rooms. It throbbed with something. Ephemera. We sat in front of The Shaman's Drum, wanting to reach through the ceremonious glass case, and said, Let's go make things. But I knew what I had power to do couldn't pulse like that. I wrote him a poem called "Bauble" in the spring, which I am kind of embarrassed of now.



Come to my dinner party, Norval. I will sit you between Esther Bubley and my uncle Gary, and we will talk of human sadness, what comprises a feather, the first snake-dance caught on flickering film in 1894.

this fluoxetine is working

Today it's about truth and hope
and there are no ha-ha's
between me and the living.
World, I'm no one
to complain about you.

Matthea Harvey, 'Out of Order' (from Modern Life)

when i woke up, there'd been a blizzard

photo by Gísli Dúa Hjörleifsso, Iceland

a big part of me wants to take a nap in my underwear
in the hammock that my dad never took inside even after summer was over
just to see what color my skin turns, just to think the thoughts that would slug snow-mottled and peculiar silver through my cold, cold, cold brain

a honeycomb of lights, the world pours in

i read cathy park hong's book of poems, dance dance revolution, pretty much cover to cover on the train from boston to new york

i was awed and humbled by the way she wove a narrative out of an oscillating setting, interpolated memoir. and this entirely invented language that was easy to understand. wtf wtf wtf how did she do that.

there are like seven poems called "almanac" and every single one is my favorite.

One intermarriage:
A wedding with bowls of expensive oranges.
The bride in a kelly green shawl,
her long, elegant arms draped around
the limbless groom.

onward, upward

there's a way to let gracefully go