Thursday, May 31, 2012

Understanding different languages

An Argentinian chaco tortoise (Chelonoidis petersi) and the Patagonian mara (or Patagonian hare--Dolichotis patagonum) competed in un maratón. The Argentine people placed their bets. 

"Eres un animal muy lento," said Patagonian mara.  "¿Cómo vas a ganar?" 


"Vamos, vamos Argentina," chanted the Argentine people. "Vamos, vamos a ganar..."

"No puedo ganar la carrera," said the tortoise (Chelonoidis petersi). 

"...que esta barra quilombera," regaled the Argentine people.


"¿Perdón?" said the Dolichotis patagonum (Patagonian mara/hare). "¿Por qué me persigues?"

"No te deja, no te deja de alentar!" concluded the Argentine people.

 "Porque," said the rival of Patagonian mara (hare), "Años más tarde, de todas las personas que pasaren por tus huesos--despues que la gente ha tomado tu piel para calentarse--I will be the only one to understand your goal in running."

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Combustion of the mind

What if a phoenix didn't rise from fire, from ash, but simply awoke quietly, in private, and suddenly it stood and revealed itself as if nothing had happened, that it had not been near its nest when it ignited nor was it aware of the tragedy. Were there survivors? it asks. Would Herodotus's skepticism seem a bit more desirable than the human imagination?

Copa de Oro

Bradbury flew Icarus too close to the sun to snatch Yeats's golden apples the way they teach you to swim, sidestroke, pass the apple from the hand to the basket hanging by your pruned foot and then grab another, like swimming into firmament with no gills or heat shield. As if the Earth simply sneezes and woosh! there we go, expelled from the atmosphere for a moment to look back at her and exclaim. For a virus we are optimistic about finding another body.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Ballad of an aspiring musician

By 3:23a.m. the guitar strings have all snapped. Thank God, say the upstairs neighbors. Praise be unto Allah. The room darkens, and suddenly it is apparent to all that no one could sleep in all this silence.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

TITLE thoughts in hyperlink /TITLE>

<REINCARNATION/>
<"perhaps suggests a rose by any other name"= is still alive but unable to scream/>
  <"I saw this documentary once about folk who cannot scream"= avalanches of terror built and unreleased bury them/>
   <"alive because their skis are broken 9a metaphor0"/>
    
<IN SPACE />
   < "if folk die"= they float forever/>
    <"never stopping"=until they strike another object/>.   

Thursday, May 24, 2012

/ to find a calmer shore

Pink scratches draw a road map crossing my forearm / a puppy fights her imagined war along these routes.
Chlorine roughens my hair into coppery wire / grey swivels high above the water and far off thunder suggests conductivity.
All in all a rough afternoon / doggy paddling through wine water cerveza

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Avoidable contact.

It's easy. To lose control. Keeping traction, that's the trick. To stop the fiberglass from rushing in.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

an equation (solve for x)

Aftermath is the rubble we wade through looking for another explosion.

Monday, May 21, 2012

halogen eulogy

After all, the night is not a thing but an absence of things, and what is an absence but something we cannot allow to seep into us, or rather, we cannot allow the things that are in us to seep out. That's why to look up at night is the same as to look down from the night, like a still summer lake tucked into blackness, stars above and below the surface. At one's will it is not night, it is florescent day. Let there be not night! Yet we cannot stay awake. Not for too long. And if we do manage to keep awake until dawn, we will sleep through the sunlit day into the florescent day, and soon there will be only an absence of things which we mistake for the thing we so feared losing. We will not even realize it is missing, so long will we have obscured the shadow of night. All the while we will tell ourselves it is a thing, this absence of shadow. But we are confusing terminology here, just misinterpreting two halves of a loss.

Memories sprout from our heads

The memory of you comes as if through a tunnel, a long concrete cylinder like the one that soldier killed himself in, too lonely a place to bear. So this is a tunnel we reach to the edges of, to pull ourselves through though we never can leave it entirely. The dog runs beneath the vaulted ceiling, laps up and over the futon, shoving the cushion to the ground as she tucks her legs into her stomach, peels her ears behind her spotted head, keeps pace. The wise old tortie and the roundish orange tabby (sometimes Garfield swiping food, sometimes Winnie the Pooh stuck between fence posts) tucked in the closet of a bedroom strung with quarter inch cables and boom stands and guitars leaned against walls. My music room, across the hall from your photography room. A room for each of our unfinished business, the things we would later abandon without ever thinking we could let go. A burgundy ring around the bathtub the color of hair dye, the color of the SUV a drunk totaled from behind at a stoplight. The stain in the tub reminds me that this memory is outside the tunnel and I am not, because your hair is no longer that color.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

R is for

Hand in hand
in the cricket night
we watch the rocket ship
ascend
a tower
not into heaven but into
nothing
empty
impossible to breathe
so we hold our breath, still amazed at it
like magic
still waiting for it
to suddenly come down
but it is just another light now
in the cricket night

Friday, May 18, 2012

Symposium, expanding & contracting

Buddhists and Whitman say the body unlocks the universe, the cosmos, the searing yolk of the spiral. One Armstrong said, what a wonderful world, the other said it was one giant leap. Scientists and Moby say "We are all made of stars." Jesus Christ's father once said let there be light, but only small islands of light in an empty dark. The sensation of falling that causes you to jerk in bed, though you have not fallen, is called a hypnagogic myoclonic twitch. Doctors call vertigo a sensation of movement when one is still, and psychiatrists call the fear that rushes over one looking into the sky, thinking how easily they might fall into it without clutching blades of grass Anablephobia, but mathematicians say the Earth's equator spins at a constant 1,670 kilometers per hour circling the sun at 924,704.922 kilometers per hour and our sun travels 72,000 kilometers per hour and the Milky Way at 2,155,233.484 kilometers per hour. The speed of the universe is unknown, but it is unlikely for one to become still. Galileo said Earth revolves around the sun. Nihilists suggest we're circling the drain. Though Niels Bohr argues that nothing exists until measured. Measurement is a culinary art and food does a body good, but who can tell which is better, to consume or be consumed?

Thursday, May 17, 2012

I've got a few questions here.

If time is cyclical then why don't we see ourselves? Why can't we predict the cracks in the asphalt that will swallow us? Or call out to keep ourselves from stepping into the paths of our own cars, blistering down the highway with our without us? Why can't we see who we are, and then if who we are is, for instance, a wild and mange-stricken dog, broken and snarling, why can't we turn away? Is it because, cyclical or not, with or without us, to look away from a snarling dog is to become nothing?

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Peninsula

It doesn't snow here in winter. We lace palm trees with lights, white, or many colors. The night sea breeze bites some, forty degrees, and if it dips a little lower we have frost warnings. Bring in your pets, cover plants. Snow, if it comes, melts before it ever touches the grass. One pacific northwesterner uncle wears shorts during a December visit. The rest of us are bundled, probably overbundled. Some of us dream of getting away from this place, the sun, the lightning. Musty air you break a sweat in walking the length of a parking lot. But we don't know yet about snow. If it snowed tomorrow some of us would die, unprepared, idealistic. A mirage in the heat. A mirage in the snow. Maybe that's why northerners come to get out of the hard grey, though you couldn't call it an oasis. Not if you lived here full time. There is a lot of fucking water, though. You have to give it that.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Double Negative

A shallow chemical pool burns and sets an image, and suddenly the memory of birth is gone, the white fading into the shape of something that was never young and will never grow old. In this way, birth and death are twins.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Stratospheric Doldrums

A creamy white swirled by gray, a jellyfish plume cut into the foreground, this is the sky I see today. A curious sensation of drowning in air.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Road

Carving out a road, carving it slightly different from the rest. That's what we do. Our road is many roads cut through many sets of trees, mine an unpainted tar path that winds through the thick pines of a national woodland and you will pass me in sneakers and a dirty tanktop. No, fine sand shooting off from right-angled corners, through a bamboo forest, a rock garden somewhere in the middle of all this where you sit barefoot and meditate, or draw a tiger in the sand, an image you will destroy when it is finished. Or a slippery path of sand dunes and a gentle but unruly bramble of panic grass and sea oats surrounding and crossing the path.  The sky blacker and stars milkier and gleaming brighter than any other spot we know. You stand at the edge of the black ocean, the edge of the long, cool sand, land and ocean and sky nearly indistinguishable, and though I am afraid you embrace me and pull me carefully under. There are many roads, each person's road is slightly different, and though I have several mine are all the same road.  You know the secret, that you are the cause of the sameness of paths. That the reason my roads are one road is because at the end of each is you, waiting for me to find my way.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Flightless Bird, American Boys

How much ground is lost over a lifetime on useless legs, one in front of the other, so fragile and small. Like a glass figurine bird who has lost its way home.  Shuffled here and there in a crowd of patriots.  Easily lost, stepped on.  Dirtied with the mud of their boots.  They're all going the same direction down the sidewalk, non-descript buildings hugging their shoulders.  A sliver of sky peeks between their tops.  But the bird does not know how much or how little of the sky peeks between the buildings, because while the patriots do nothing but crane their necks, point their noses upward, laugh and discuss the rain or the cloudless blue or Apus/Aquila, they cannot ever see him, who passes beneath them and does not look up.