Harumph.

I haven't particularly impressed myself here, but I did it, so I pat myself on the back. I guess. Going to take maybe a month or so to edit these, see what I wanted to say in each one, and how many of them are actually somewhat original. Think it's DeLillo who talked about working your thoughts out in writing. So many of these poems are about a speaker searching for an identity somewhere, that I think it's apparent that I can look at the exercise as that--attempting to define some of my beliefs so that I might be able to define myself better without the use of judgement or your general Orientalism.

(97)
My identity
is ever shifting
and unstable

because of your presence
in the atmosphere
looming over me.

Like Jupiter's pull
on the asteroid belt
keeping it from planetizing

like the US's constant sway
in the Latin America
of the nineteenth century--

I don't know who I am
or who I want to be
and it's all your fault.


(98)
Newspaper headlines:
THE MAN WHO JAPED
about a college professor
who cut off the head of some statue
in Boston
as the revolutionary festivities started
getting it on.

It worked,
you know?
We are changing the world now
bloodlessly
but with lots of destruction.
I turn a page
in this hospital.

32-YEAR-OLD MAN
STOLEN AT BIRTH
LEARNS IDENTITY
It's getting better,
there's proof everywhere for that fact.
A noise--
someone tells me that I have a visitor.

God, I miss Tyler.


(99)
Squeeze the words out
like the quick way
of drying a sponge
and feed what I have to say
into your machine
so as to supply me
with the mirror that I've always wanted
and a sort of back cover synopsis
of who I am.

Or not.
Maybe that question is the point.
Man looks up at the sky
and he calls out
"Who am I?"
or
"Why are we here?"

And it doesn't matter
if there is anything up there
or if it is listening or not.
This person is thinking
or at least
this person believes
that he is thinking.

I think
sometimes
at least
that that's
plenty enough.


(100)
If god were alive today,
we clearly wouldn't recognize it,
and it'd probably hate all the technology.
The way I see it,
this deity
would make itself manifest in reflections
like the footsteps poem--
people looking at themselves and seeing another as well
one similar and different at the same time,
one absurdly beautiful.

All his evil beliefs aside,
Karl Marx was most wrong
in his anti-religious behavior
because as Burke said
"man is by nature a religious animal."
And I am just a writer
who delights in believing contradictions
like Rodó praising both Emerson and Poe
but we have to have some kind of
real truth to believe in.

Pseudoscience
stems from explaining
what we do not understand
with simple theories and axioms,
ideas like Occam's Razor,
and to the people who believed them,
the views made sense.
So what we understand to be true
is clearly just as fluid,
changing ever so swiftly

as bending down to pick up something you've dropped while you were out shopping on a rainy day and looking into a puddle and seeing that other face.

A somewhat random assortment.

(89)
I like to hide
behind book covers
and closed doors
because I'm such
a horrible conversationalist.

It's not that
I don't like
thinking on my feet
because none of this requires an awful amount
of deliberaton.

But for some reason
the written language
is important
perhaps because of nothing more than the fact that
I can't always pronounce some of the words I write.


(90)
If you could just supply me,
dear sir,
with the largest mirror ever conceived
and a self-sufficient spaceship,
as well as maybe twenty-seven people
I could set you up
to view Earth at the beginning--
we'll get back to you in six billion years.


(91)
I want to watch a M*A*S*H marathon with you
my arm sometimes around your back
us occasionally holding hands

maybe we'd be passing a smoke back and forth
or a bottle
and would inevitably fall asleep
on the couch around 3pm.

Suppose you were to wake up
ans say,
"Andy,
get around now,
we didn't sleep at all last night,
so we might as well go to bed early."

Yeah,
I'd like that.


"I think therefore I think I am"
I know this much is true:
(the rest of this page
is intentionally left blank)


(93)
Just as
you get trees
rather than a forest
when you sharpen your eyes

or when
hearing
taken to the extreme
causes schizophrenia,

--I'm not being a radical--
I support surety
also
as an Aristotelian mean.

It is pointless
to continuously
stick on the lack of any truth
when we debate,

but it is much easier
to fall into the trap
of thinking that we can learn
oh! basically anything

past a reasonable doubt
and to a specific
unquestionable
truth.


"all the unborn chicken voices in my head"
they keep me up at nights
rattling through the walls
the radio stations i pick up on my fillings

there's always something
that sounds like a murder
on the hour

tonight
a woman's voice,
"yes, please, yes"

and it disturbs me
because i've been brought up not to eavesdrop
and also

because i've been listening to this channel for much too long
and i'm bound to be disturbed
by how this story turns out



(95)
Auto Text
"I'm in class."
"Should I call you later?"
"Where are you?"
"Hey!"
"Leave me alone."
"Luv ya!"
"We broke up two weeks ago,
gosh darn it,
never start a conversation with me again."


(96)
So you put the hours in
and what do you have to show for it?
A meager burst
in temporary self-confidence
that doesn't even expand
outside of the academic sector.

Or maybe I'm just misinterpreting it,
because I'm not done yet,
I have 30 more pages to read before bed.

22

no wrappings or explanations or what not, too late for that...and to apologize

(85)
God,
I remember
those old poems
that I wrote last semester--
these innocent little musings
semifiction
that used funny language
and did not really
mean anything.

And now
I look back at what I've written
in these past few weeks
and all I can see is
an opinionated teenager
who will continue
to eye somewhat longingly
the next attractive girl
that he will never speak to
who will fall behind
in yet another book assigned
and go to yet another class
unprepared to speak.

This boy
who's barely still a boy anymore
is not making a mark anywhere
that is of any importance
and that bothers me.


(86)
I'm a horrible
fiction writer
because I write
what I want to happen
rather than what I want to read.

And because of this
I am not enough of a sadist
to portray the realism
preached by famous dead writers
and soap operas.

Right now
in the novel
that I've started,
I realized
that I have nothing new to say.

So it goes on the shelf,
and maybe I will return to it
with the next bit of plot
stolen from a dream
or the reflection in your eyes
as you bend down to pick up something you've dropped.

Or not,
because it could be blocked.
Plenty of ideas
have died on the page before.


(87)
Woke up on 2/22
at 2:22
and started another
privileged
but unappreciated day.

In the past twelve hours
I remembered
that I hate it
when people won't stop jokes that have gone too far,
or when a professor asks a question about something I haven't read.

But also
that the best feelings of accomplishment
come from physical exertion
and not from the movements of these poor fat fingers
over the keys

typing.


(88)
He's burning
the last pages
of his treatises
in some institution somewhere.

No one ever read them
and now his children
have sent him off
to this nursing facility

so when he puts in the very end
and looks back on his life unlived
and how very little he has to show for it
he is inspired

to join his words
in their hell.

But instead,
he pulls out his pipe

loads it,
and takes a long hit.

So it goes.

Back on Track

Should finish on the 25th. May ride out the month, or hit up to 125-150 range and then cut out the regularity, take a step back and edit/place the poems in an order that suits me.

(81)
I am not a completely balanced individual
and I don't have a very high opinion of myself
so sure
I could write all sorts of poetry
about angsty little emotions
like wanting
to plunge my head
into my reflection
in a sink full of water
on account of saying something stupid
to a cute girl who initiated conversation.

The best thing to do
--probably--
is to just walk off
and read the end of
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
and sulk a little.

Things'll get better
and they'll do so
without me actually writing about it.


(82)
The loner
dislikes being out of the loop
but has grown used to it,
relatively easily,
because the loner
clearly does not care all that much
for people.

The loner
only wishes
that it was always obvious
when they were keeping secrets
or telling inside jokes
because what is the most bothersome these days
is stepping on people's toes and getting on their nerves.

The loner
does not really
enjoy solitary activity
because of its inevitable uselessness
but in fact
has become afraid of interaction and all it entails
on account of the fact that the cliques appear already so close-knit and without room anywhere inside them for someone like the loner.


(83)
He doesn't support
a socialist revolution
but he does think that
we've grown to misunderstand money
and that the right government
could come in and take over
and make the world a better place.

But governments quickly become
scary dark hallways out of nightmares
full of men in black suits with gun bulges of all sorts
so he doesn't pretend to have the answer,
other than to say,
"You can't judge anything
out of context and we are all in a sense equal."

We don't need a currency.
A world that runs on something else
is not out of some fantasy novel--
in fact it's not even really skiffy,
it's design fiction
and his point is that
we can learn from it, if we try

or we can continue to be afraid of change because we lived through the Reagan eighties and because we fault a war of ideologies which helped create in this country a mindset that you should look out only for yourself, and if you cared for your neighbor you were pink or even red, and all communism was a disgusting Russian thing.

And if you take a step back
and actually realize
what you think
and how things really are
then maybe you would agree
that my worldview is at least
as justified as yours and not bound to change in something like 10 years.


(84)
So even with my praise of the egalitarian
I am still very much out for myself;
I land
in some traditional hypocrisy,
when I

refuse to move the smoothie cup
from behind someone's tires in the parking garage
or decide against
trying to help the girl
who may or may not be pulling her hair out
in response to the computer lab's stupidity.

So
if you want to
don't take a single word I said
seriously
because I don't live by example.

four AM

Four'o'clock appears to be a recurring time in the sorts of things I read. Poe has the narrator of "A Tell Tale Heart" muse about how it's still as dark as midnight at that time, Wally Lamb's Dolores of She's Come Undone can only deal with life at college at a time like four in the morning, and Tao Lin has a poem called "4:30 a.m." which consists of the line "I am fucked existentially" repeated for at least 90% of the poem, I'd say. So here we are, it's just past four, and I'm playing catch up. The titles in this batch are all quotes if you care to look them up.

(73)
I used sleep on your couch
some nights
when I was too drunk to drive home
at least until your kid brother grew up
just like his father
and became another alcoholic.

It feels
at times
like we didn't exactly fall apart
but were torn asunder
by something more than us
something stronger than we would ever be.

And now I lie awake at nights sometimes
and consider possibly picking up the phone
and dialling any number
of phone numbers
just to here someone say "Andy"
aloud.

It isn't hard
to get trapped in this body
--in fact it is much harder to escape.
Several hours passing
without hearing my own voice,
some days I feel like I'll never be able to speak again.

And now what I want to ask you
is what your definition of love is
and how that's supposed to change
when we've moved on
and will never see each other again.
Since I'm just a shit poet

and I've always known you for a person who could deliver a much more beautiful and brilliant turn of phrase, although you would not notice it, and would instead move some hair behind your ear and smile at me sheepishly.


"When you have to shoot, shoot; don't talk. "
In the heat of the moment,
it makes sense.
And handling a gun,
fighting a war,
are horrible conditions to be under.

But really
just because you are angry
over some stupid thing I said
doesn't allow you to run your mouth
and say things you don't mean.

Language is unnatural
and everything we say
is contemplated and mulled over in our mind
so I do believe it is right for me
to define people on what they say.


(75)
Stage fright
is what I call writing
anymore
because I think to myself,
if this is a useless
narcissistic exercise
if no one reads it
or no one enjoys doing so,
then I guess it has to be pretty good,
and the only judging that I have of that
is if it feels good
and that's a rare thing indeed.

However,
it seems
in the end
a cop out,
I guess,
to simply externalize the ideas
--dehumanize the writer--
and call it a muse.
So I take full credit
for what I create
for better
or as is likely more often
for worse.


"All I ever meet is witty bastards."
Roger is going to be big one day,
he's going to be a star,
cowriting a movie with Jack Hobby
who's got good birth on his side.

Word on the street is
that besides Roland being strapped,
DB is going to meet this young upstart
and call him the future of Hollywood.

Such schmucks,
Lennon would've called them
"fucking peasants"
and he'd've been right.


(77)
You ran through the forest
when you were a little kid
and learned how to start a fire
with all that you could find.

So I'm sure you don't call it
"monkey hair"
but you gather your tinder in much the same way
as the best scouts I have known have done.

And for everything I've learned
this was the one thing I could never pick up on.
So pitiful--
the primitivist poet cannot see himself in the wild

an independent man.


"At bidding of vast formless things"
Perhaps my favorite poem
is "The Conqueror Worm"
and possibly that says something about me.

You have to wonder
sometimes
if you really believed in psychoanalysis
in someone probing into your mind through questions
if you would want to know the answers
that would tell you what kind of person you are.

Is faith not a beautiful thing?
And as far as mathematics goes,
I would rather not take it to bed,
so I must say that there are other things
to be found in this world
that elicit the odd sort of stirring
somewhere in my brain
an uncertain feeling because of its irregularity
or its omnipresence.

I don't want to
know everything.
I see no
reason for that.
No benefit.
Nor do I see it
as possible.
In fact I call
"know" a pompous verb.
For you still can't answer Edgar, with any seriousness when he writes
"Today I wear theses chains, and I am here.
Tomorrow I shall be fetterless!-but where?"


(79)
When the
biggest black hole
in the whole freaking universe
blinks,
and millions of people
catch it doing so
on their camera phones,
you'll still be stuck in your two bit
McJob,
won't you?

I hate to say this because I know I'm not bound to end things,
but we have like
absolutely no future
for either of us,
do we?

Much less together.


"In my story...but I don't have a story."
He's simply
an only child
who lives a boring life
and is compelled
to write
for some sort of escapism

or so he assumes
but it very rarely
shows itself in some sort of catharsis
something leaving forever
an idea studied for much too long
let go to fly away

no
rather he is simply gone
elsewhere
for the moments when he speaks in his head
and writes down
what he's saying to himself.

It's craziness
and he is clearly
not always a stable individual
and contributes little to society,
but then again, (hopefully)
he isn't really hurting anyone with his delusions.

If the world were run
simply based on Bentham
and not so directly tied
to this Platonic form of truth,
then I would say that solitary delusions
are helpful things

perhaps even something to be studied,
like personal cultures
in a way,
and we're getting there,
because Culture is dying
and "subculture" is simply a misnomer.

Day Late

Been thinking about a planned end to titles here so they'll stoop after this post and will switch on and off maybe when I think of something interesting to put there. Also went to bed before finishing these poems last night, so I'm going to try to get them finished by 9:30PM on the twentieth, but I'm not going to change the time and date from when I opened the file.


"Ceci n'est pas un poème."
This is not a poem
but simply an image of a poem
made up of lines
and concepts
that I decided
were not good enough.

This stanza
was about
walking alone on campus
with headphones in
shades on
ignoring everyone in the world.
And I backspaced it all out
because I realized
that I was saying absolutely
nothing necessary or new.

And there were
100 more words
about how
I'm a pessimist
and I don't like the world I live in
nor the person I am
but I crossed that out too

because it was boring.

"Justice"
Now I'm not one to support monarchies
but there's something to be said
about the voluntary action
that is necessary for political justice.

So I'd have to say
that George Washington
as a president
was not nearly as respectable
as Juan Carlos I.

These are the reasons I give
for saying that
just because of your position of power
as debatably the most powerful person in the world
doesn't mean I have to respect your viewpoint
nor make it perfectly okay to judge.


"I like the idea of it more than I actually like it."
Plato would agree
because you cannot get to the ideal
and Aristotle would perhaps as well,
but would say that the idea of it
is useless,
that we have to work from the real object.

There is a counselor
in the past
taking to a youth
about its presumed depression.

And that youth is not being entirely truthful
on account of the fact
that it does not want to be defined as mentally unwell
as something requiring change.

The idea of the perfect person
is becoming something we truly strive towards
through antidepressants and plastic surgery
but if you lack certainty of your own identity
then you become truly afraid of what might be the result when adjustments are made.

Because I do not know who I am, I am afraid of who I might one day be, and we all know that if you cut open my head and started touching little parts of my brain, you could make me do anything you wanted, and also a metal rod could very easily turn me into a different person, so I write poems like this.


"Maturity"
Cigarette smoke
reminds me of my father
and age restrictions
are clearly a cause
of the number of twenty year olds
that go out every week
and get so thoroughly drunk
that they don't remember a single Friday
for five and a half years of their life.

It just doesn't really make all that much sense to me
to create a law
that keeps certain people from trying something legally
in a capitalist society,
which therefore will have
some sort of subliminal advertising.

You end up with a conditioning period
as you look up to your parents
and your elders.

It's not about it being cool,
I wish people would get that,
it's about growing up in a country
that brags about its freedom
and being given some new
road to be taken.

too much on my mind

This week has been one long Psyduck's migraine, so it'll be good to have it over with. Here you are. I think these are all a little too similar and maybe too stupidly angry or argumentative but I am in no state to make anything better at the given time.


"Show me a time machine and then maybe I'll start to accept your doctrine"
Like the cat
in Schrodinger's box
I would postulate
that the past
cannot be viewed either
through reason
or belief.

And
because of this
we should cut down on judgements
themselves
because they are simply
naive realism.

If we could visit there
then I would admit
that I can't simply
spin all sorts of thoughts in my brain
and think about seven days at one moment
and at another
the big bang.

But we can't and
like zombies
I really don't see this one ever becoming real.


"Intellectual"
You are so obsessed
with coming up with some truth
that you sort of miss the point
which is that when we look for something too much
we distort the image.

And if
by definition
the man
who calls himself
such
can do nothing but concentrate
in rational theory
then there will never be
any answers postulated to the question
Why?
that we can actually respect.

Maybe it's off base to say this,
but isn't a part of the human condition,
contemplating the rhetoric
"What is our purpose?"

Science is never going to answer that question in a just fashion.


"Terrible Writing"
Though he's known
for the stupid kind of joke
made by taking people
too seriously

the man
truly does not want to be read
as giving you treatise or doctrine,
he's writing

too keep his hands fresh
his mind as sharp as it can be
which is clearly quite dull
and also

he must admit
to say something
about the way we live our lives.
He told me that he wants to say something to all y'all.

"I just wanted to get across the idea
that even if the world
we live in
is a great place

maybe
the way we think
is a little too constrictive
and worlds that are less free

technologically
but that understood
the happiness of simple goods
were at least of comparable status to you and I."


"It is much too late and I barely even make sense when I am well slept and not all sort of bummed out at life and scared about my future."
And maybe I'm biased
by the one word title
I would give myself
if you asked me for my
dream occupation.

But I see a creator as some sort of writer or at least an artist and the whole point of life is that there are things we cannot explain to each other and if you start stepping on everyone's toes and telling them what they should believe, you are not going to make friends and Aristotle put friendship even above justice, now, didn't he?

Bum day.

Don't mean to continue these, but goal wasn't four poems a day but 100 for the month, so you know, keep your eyes OPEN.

Hey Eddie, can you pass that nepenthe, man?

Eh. Could take or leave these. Not much sleep last night and if this is how it's going to affect me, then be aware, because I'm not going to get a great amount tonight either, so we may be stuck in this drudgy, gray area.

"doublethink"
Sure,
I'd go along
on the hunting trip
to topple god
and would even engage
in firing
a few rounds
into the back of the metaphor.

But first,
please give me
some sort of truth
elsewhere,
because
being perfectly rational,
all you can do
is create theories.

I only suggest
that before we go
taking people's opium
away from them
we get something new
to give them.
Because the
scientific revolution

stalled
and took a step back
like the French
looking to Napoleon.
If you want to know
why I don't want to
take what you tell me
as hard fact

then I will present
exhibit A,
the nineteenth century.
And I don't follow
the words of any priest
or pope,
but rather
like Lennon

like Socrates,
I go by what
speaks to me from the inside.
And so what if I wear different hats
when I am discussing "truth"
facetiously amongst friends
or when
I'm on my deathbed.


"Relativity"
And so he said
"the only thing
we need to make straight
in this relationship
is that there is no such thing
as complete understanding
and communication is first above all else.

"Because
on this spaceship
connecting with you
only by means of mental link
we don't even have
time in common."


"Why I Hate Debates"
I can only write
about what I think
and can only tell you
how I feel.

Full explanations
are meaningless endeavors,
in my not so humble opinion.
They are,
like translations,
attempts at the impossible
that simply limit
what is really there.

And while
I can pride scientific thought
I have to also wave my hand
and say,
sure,
this shouldn't be teleogical,
but we can still stop sometimes

and be struck by the beauty of it.


"retread"
Ironic
or not,
a part of me,
the less selfish,
the less disgusting,
perhaps the only good part in me,
similar in proportion
to MDC's non Holden Caulfield self,
would be very much happy
in that city of pigs.

This world
is simply
appearance driven
and obsessed with the idea
that knowledge
is the be all
end all.

It makes my head spin too much
to continuously
play the
stupid old devil's advocate
and caution--
there are absolutely no facts out there.

I'd much rather
not have to think
so much
and not have to stand the criticism.

Unnecessary Pastiches and Other Ruses

"All the beautiful people..."
There's a man on a beach

sketching onto a piece of canvas--

the story of our lives
or at least those important among us

like that girl
who pours a drink on her boyfriend
and then goes out onto the dancefloor alone drawing all sorts of stares

or a couple
holding hands
outside your aunt and uncle's house
that you sort of judge as happy
based on how naturally they are standing so closely together

that figure
you saw
flying through the streets at three am

who disappeared
once it got outside of your line of vision

excluding perhaps

only me and Eleanor Rigby.


"The Uselessness of All This"
I write words
in lines
somewhat randomly constructed,
strung along in my mind
from ideas and observations,
and I sew a techicolored raincoat
from all this wornout fabric
that I am finding in the world.

It is sometimes hard to admit
but still a vague
somewhat unnecessary truth
that today recurs to me:
one in five million
chimpanzees hooked up to typewriters
would give you Shakespeare
and I'm sure Bubbles
could easily
do this job
just as well as I.


"First lines from poems quoted at random from some machine that I found in your closet when I was looking around for those drugs that we used to keep hidden there before we both sort of went semistraight because of that one time when you almost ODed"
Lying on the floor, her hair fanned out on the linoleum like a sun
He was a simple man
My father hated that old guy so much
She's a beautiful girl in the shower
Writing is like bleeding

...

[lines 5005-5010]
Sorry was actually a very easy word on his lips
She kissed him, softly, and almost immediately
They held onto each other for dear life
The universe was a hole too big for the either of us to understand
The woman calls out, "Hold me please," sometime in the middle of the night
The man said, "Let me tell you why I'd never trust a lady."


"Impress you much?"
If I pulled up to your door
on a Lapras named after your great-grandfather
and asked
if you thought it was possible
if we might set off for the Indigo Plateau
together
would you skip your classes
for like a week and a half
and ride
side by side
with me on our bikes
catching Nidorans and releasing them
while we revel
in our last summer as children?

Or would you simply
throw out your Jolteon
tear my dreams apart,
take my money,
say,
"Level 22!
Boy, you've got to do better than that,"
and run off with that dude
that I saw you eating lunch with
sometime last semester
and who I heard
from a somewhat reliable source
had plans
to become a gym leader?


"Dragons"
one hundred thousand
is a number with seven zeroes
like the number of spheres
that we had to gather
to bring your pa
back to life

so just remember
that i've sworn you to secrecy
because my father
would not like to hear about
how I sort of dishonored mortality
nor my crime fighting


"It's another Monday night--"
and the evil people have nuculur weapons
which means
that Jack Bauer's
about to be hooked up to
yet another car battery
and tomorrow
we all know
that Gibbs will call another
man in a black suit
who'll shoot some random guy
in Central America.

You know,
we could seriously take
our own personal David Kelly
in stride
because
as Mr. Burgess found out
we are Nixonian
and we don't spread this myth of a clean government
but in fact
we fictionalize
--immortalize--

the proof
of these
so-called
horrible truths
and make light of them
with jokes
along the lines of
"Did you really
expect us to be shocked
with that, man?
Because this is New York!"


"Xenophobia"
Just because
you admit
that some people
inside this country
are bad people,
does not allow you
to continuously
plot
your TV broadcasts
around
foreign invaders
of some sort
trying to get their dirty hands on our technology.

That's really
not much less bigoted
than the next guy.


"Perspective"
Written
on the side of the staircase
of Turlington,
the words
"Dad, I miss you,"
catch my eye,
and I think to myself
in this world
that all but
worships
Tyler Durden and Adam Smith
what that person
most likely might as well be saying is
"Daddy,
you left me
and I replaced you,
my initial image of perfection,
with money."

So
I got a drink
at the water fountain
and went to class
and thought about
my priorities.

Off day.

Much too late for me to be making this decision, but what have you. We'll see if I hit 8 to make up for it on the morrow. Otherwise I might try later in the week. Sometimes ideas come in abundance throughout the day and sometimes they come in abundance in front of the computer and sometimes they don't come because you were too busy playing Pokemon and sleeping and trying to read the Nicomachaen Ethics.

4:15AM 2/15/10

That unlucky number...

"i honestly do not know who this poem is directed at but i still somehow wrote it with conviction" is the name of a poem by Tao Lin and I would postulate that that wasn't completely true about the work that he turned out. Rather the name of the poem was a warning saying that the poem was (a) not about him and (b) not about anyone he wished to name. Maybe I'm completely misreading it, but I like the idea. If you write, a lot of your beliefs and a lot of things that've happened to you, that you want to happen to you, and people that you know, and stuff that's happened to them, and what you think of them, well it all sort of makes its way into the work. I mean, I'm not the only one that this happens to, I can tell that, but there may be people who don't write a single concept that they found based in some sort of reality. So I'm not trying to make universals here, I'm just trying to say that if you are reading a poem I've written then it is mildly plausible that I might be able to tell you who it is about, what the point to it is, but still, like I'd suspect Tao Lin would think, I don't really want to do that in idaknow (Timothy Bryce quote from American Psycho for that word) three out of four instances maybe. And now for the feature presentation...


"Abraham Lincoln Brigade"
All you neo-intellectuals
who are planning on getting
your degrees
in the twentyteens
I would caution you to remember
that Aristotle thought
that objects really should be active
to be doing anything productive.

So just because
you think it's so fun
to stay up until three am
slightly drunk
and holding your philosophic debates,
you might just
want to reserve judgment
on the masses

since I seriously doubt
I'd have seen you in
Spain in the late 30s.

Vonnegut said that being able to die for what you believe in
must be very, very nice
and I'm not there, but I don't really believe in anything these days,

maybe your mind
is that set in its ways
but really I never see any justification for throwing the first stones.


(50)
Such a round number
like a snowball
that is rolling down a hill
getting ever larger
and ever more marvelous.

I think there's a certain someone
that I am sometimes
who would say
that if you find me
untalented
then I will at least
be sure to force you
to admit
that I am prolific.

"Uncertain Longings"
I saw a pair of leaves
on the sidewalk
that looked like sunglasses
lying on the concrete
in the dark of early night.

And I thought
how wonderful it would be
to pick them up
and put them on
and turn to someone with me

and make them laugh
at me like I'd told
a dirty joke
that wasn't
all that funny.


"Dirty Laundry"
So if falling in love
is like going to the laundromat
then
I guess
breaking up
must be similar to that feeling
that you get
as you leave with your basket
full of nice clean clothes
but are afraid of the fact
that you probably left a sock
behind on the dirty floor.

All these things
that they've learned about themselves
are suddenly uncertain
and he doesn't know
if he really knows the person
that he is
or just the man
she wanted him to be.

The inner vocabulary
of our language
that we've drawn up
together
in the early mornings
lying in bed
before we had to go to work,

in five years
will we still speak like this?
Or perhaps more importantly,
should I even give a damn,
now that we'd both much rather never see each other again?

twelfth

"The whole element that maybe I was going for in this one short story that I wrote about this guy who was named after an alias of my father."
This whole process
is changing for me
like it did that one summer
in the UP
when I realized it was what I wanted to do.

And I think
maybe
it's becoming something I have to do.
Does that make sense?
Is that a realistic concept?
Huh?

I really don't know if I'm just being
too melodramatic
so I'm willing to hear other theories about
these thoughts in my head
but
I don't expect them,
so pardon me for judging myself at the moment.

You know,
someone has to do it.


"Calvinism"
As far as I know of it
it's an easy way out
right?

It's like determinism?
Or at least kind of?
You know
they both put forth this idea that
what you are doing right now
doesn't matter.
Or did I misread it,
as I've been known to do?

Well,
anyway,
I'm not so sure
I like this nihilism
that came to me
one day
as if I were Dewey
opening the bathroom door
on a pot party,
but still
I guess it's the best you can really do these days

when you can expect
sixty more years ahead of you
on this earth
and you are only just recently not-a-child,
and you aren't sure you enjoy it yet

like the taste of anchovies,
the first time you ever had them on a pizza.


"I hate what I do just a little bit"
too drunk at your open house
he starts hitting on your mother
and she asks him why he writes books
and turns her nose up at him
but you still think he's sort of profound
when he's fresh out of rehab
and hasn't found his next fix yet
and he sure is kind of cute
in his abstract depression
and inability to not cry
at least 47 times a day
so one day you ask him the same question
at this dinner that he's going to pay for
and then go home alone and sleep for twelve hours

he pushes up his glasses on his nose
and looks for a moment
like he's going to spit into a potted plant
near your table
but doesn't
and says

"well
you know
it beats slamming my head into a wall several times a day.
which is,
i think,
the alternative."


"talented people"
Musicians are just beautiful things
in how they can play on my emotions so easily
and no matter how good I may be with words
--sometimes I feel like I'm not good at all--
I'm never going to be able to have the same effect on people
that a good album does.

I don't like rereading novels
that often
but I can listen to the same
LP five times in a row sometimes
and I think that says something for
the meaninglessness that I feel
some days
for what I do
or what I could do, will do.

I've been writing for so long now
but I'm just letting myself dig into that bag
with the label of catharsis on it
and
I'm not sure I like what I'm pulling out
and throwing into the pond for the birds to eat.

There are a million things
that I want to say
to a million people
but that are going to go unspoken,

aren't there?

Sawn it yet, Harry? I need that wood soon.

Not really feeling particularly good about my line breaks lately. They're getting too Bukowski, short little snippets, a simple sentence spread across pages, so I'm writing sonnets today. At least that's the plan. Mainly sticking to 14 lines with 10ish syllables a line. I might do some rhyming, you never know. This way, however, those breaks are regulated, and hopefully free verse will feel meaningful again in a few days, if you know what I mean.

"'If you aren't willing to take my doctrine straight,' said the man, 'then I'll give it to you in the form of a sonnet.' And he handed me this paper with all this written on it and under that in cursive script, 'Please pass this on to everyone you know.' So I did. Sort of."
Unitarians would disagree with
this but I think it's interesting how
when we examine certain kinds of myth
as a whole we slowly find patterns now
of such things as the number three as in
Plato's republic, Christianity--
now when I go sifting throughout this bin
I find comparisons fittingly:
God of reason tops trinity divine
like the guardians sourced to Socrates,
and Jesus is known for temperance fine
just as the masses must follow for these
perfect societies to function well,
last spirited and holy ghost, how swell!


"butterflies"
I feel them around me floating
in the air like angels of a lesser
kind and I am inspired to pick up
my pen and attempt to capture one at
least and show you its lifeblood in ink spill-
ing as it will off the page and into
our world but in my writing I sully
it somewhat not unlike a Marxist whose
mud pies are unecessary labor
which are thus worthless and I am even
worse considering the fact that what I
have done is a defiling of a true
beauty in the natural sense of the
word--that is to say in sublimation.


"Gravity"
Have you ever considered what holds the
moon in the sky or what pulls on the sea?
Like when it comes down to it have you
really ever given that a thought? New
ideas are hard to come by even
today, so please consider way back when
in the times of geocentric views
of the universe that inspired blues.

Issac Newton realized something one
day and you never really think it's done
for terribly important reasons but
without this science would stay in a hut
afraid to show its face in front of
Aristotle's thought known for its shove.


"Girls on film"
She's leaning on him which might just mean that
he could have his way with her right this sec
but the funny thing is he wants to chat
even if he knows she's delightful to neck
and it's sort of scary to think that they
met on reality television
because sometimes he knows not what to say
and his knowledge of her is a smidgeon
vague like a birthmark because he met her
when she was totally acting like she
wasn't acting which caused it all to blur
what's real and what's difficult to promptly
understand is that she could really like him
or she could quickly change when the lights dim.


They ended up kind of shite, I know. I still sort of like them though.

Damn it.

I hate when this feels like an assignment to be carried out. But still, have to get the writing in.

"Presence"
There is nothing natural
about a mentos
lying on a brick path
or a pair
of brass knuckles.

But there is
so much beauty
to be had there.

From space
it is visible
what we have made
and
for all my pessimism

my "woe is me"
and anti-humanity behavior
I am glad

that our labor when trained in the right places
is one of the strongest forces you can find.
But anyway,
all politics aside,
perhaps the best example of my enjoyment of human creativity

is that
of a simple
fashion show.


"Imperial Rules"
Before his mother married him,
the boy's stepfather
used to stay up in the nights
getting drunk out of his mind
and would ramble
at him.

He'd say
all kinds
of weird shit.

And this kid
was in the tenth grade
and had barely seen
any of the world
so he would listen,
sitting on the couch,
pretending to read a book.

And the man,
Sean,
he'd say things like
"It's funny,
you know,
how lol and 1o1
look so very alike.

"Does anyone else notice
things like that?
Maybe
the only reason
that it ever occured to me
was because
those were the only classes
that I'd go to stoned
and still get Bs in.
So you know,
I associate them
with laughter."

Or
sometimes
he'd rant about his father

or his brother--
some scary New York
Neiman Marcus
suit of a man.

And this one time,
he said something
that the boy would recall
as far into the future
as his own wedding date--
actually told his wife about it,
that night in bed--
this guy said,

"Hey
I get it.
We aren't friends.
You know,
I think this is supposed to be
the hardest relationship
people ever have.
And you're never going to
really like me as a person or anything,
it's not Freudian distate
it's just we have no need for each other.

"And I understand,
but you know,
you just have to
deal with it,
because I'm sleeping with your mother
and I think I make her happy.
So

"rock'n'roll."


"pi"
numerology
has its appeal
even when you are taking
classes in statistics
and writing ugly poetry
to spite plato's
mathematical beauty

It's not hard
these days
when watching
a computer
spit out a never ending stream
of digits
from that neverending decimal

for the young man
who feels too much like an old man
to stroke his beard
and feel like Pythagoras.


"Reunion"
Sam talks to Brad
who's coming into town
for their 10 year
high school reunion
and she talks him into
staying in her house
while he's home

which is odd
because
they never really got along
back in the old days
or at least that's what
he remembers--
a girl who absolutely hated him

and beat him up
pulled his hair,
embarrassed him--
they went to school together
for something like
13 years
and he could not think of one good thing that she had ever said about him.

Sociologists look for patterns
and they try to distinguish things like gender
but science should be a self-destroying mechanism
because just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction
so does every theory have a counterexample.
Here's one--
the tomboy that never really let herself know that she liked you.

Grr...

Lot of anger in this stuff. Skip over it if you wish. Think I'm making important points though. Currently considering going for 8 poems today to make up for my off day. Maybe.


"Thoughts on your video game"
Toussaint is not the black Napoleon
nor Fanon the black Rousseau
but rather
they are
men of importance in their own right
who reached accomplishments
that speak for themselves.

And Ashley,
if you were a real person
and a contemporary,
would you often
at dinner parties
speak about all the nice minorities
who at least act white?

Because I'd like to know what that entails
other than
colonization
extermination
close-mindedness
or
hate.

Pardon me
for not smiling back
at the past
and my heritage.


"Industrialization"
The fancy-schmancy professor
who I found out three months later
was sleeping with my girlfriend
asked the class
what were the benefits of industrialization.

It was an essay question,
but I didn't much care for the man
so I turned in a sheet of paper
torn from my notebook
with the bullet points

colonialism
racism
sexism
war

and smart-assed poets who really don't have any idea what they think is good anymore
like moi.


"If I could be who you wanted all the time."
I
There is no more sought after metaphor
in this life I'm living
than that of the mirror--
some reflective surface
to tell me who I am.

We assume that certain things
are natural and not
learned like culture
to such an extent that
these days
I'm sure plenty of children
never ask the question
"Who am I?"
until college.

And internally I have no answers,
so it's the next conversation,
the next lust or uncertainty,
the next exam grade
telling me how I'm doing
explaining who
this person I know
must be.

II
Over all,
however,
unfortunately,
I have summed
only a tiny bit of knowledge
--a laughable amount, really--
a few "truths."

Which makes each new
exploration of someone else's psyche
a guessing game
of who does this person
want in its life.

I can't even tell you
if I like this six months'
growth of beard
and my increased disregard
for life itself
and I don't know if
this is me or if
I'm a puppet controlled by someone following a script.

III
Every talk we have
will be tempered by assumptions and judgment

But wouldn't it be great
if I could ask you
face to face
what you wanted

and mold myself
in regard to that mirror
as
The Man With No Name
or Tyler Durden,
your biology professor

or the high school boyfriend who you'd still be with if he hadn't gotten drunk at that one party, driven home, and crashed into his own garage door, and then his mother's Cadillac, suprisingly unhurt other than the fact that he's all but lost his face.


"TAPS"
It's raining out
so this one kid in my class
has to put socks on after arrival
because through his mocassins,
otherwise,
he'd be stuck with a lot of drenched wool.

In other news
I'm actually liking
these stylized rain boots
that have found their niche:
with their cute
rubber imitations of fabric--
an example of the importance
of appearance in our world.

And are these things
any less important
than the erasure mark
on the blackboard
that resembles her head
or the face on Mars?


"Dominance"
Your senior ex-boyfriend
that I beat the shit out of
in the bathroom
continuously screaming
"you fucking old man,"
that wasn't about you,
so please
stop presenting yourself to me now
as some sort of prize,
because,
goddamnit,
I don't want you.


"Our relationship as an abstract or surrealist or impressionist painting or something like that and please let me apologize for never being very knowledgeable when it comes to art"
I have the deadest eyes
in all of the SEC
and even though my SATs were shit
I've been heavily recruited.

I'm sought after
for all sorts of pranks
and lessons learned
because I can slump against a wall

in such a way
that
if I'm wearing loose enough clothing
even a forensics expert
would believe me a corpse.

So
I wear my sunglasses
day and night
unless I'm on a job

or in bed
with you
because you are the first person
to see my gift as just that

a funny little particularity
passed down by god
and not
just a means to an end.


"Skience"
Good news
everyone
just about twenty minutes ago now
humanity created a computer
that could read people's
mental make-up
by being fed
at least eighty percent
of the stuff
that these people wrote for public consumption.

And yeah,
I get it,
you just want to say
"yessiree Bob,
that's well and good,
but I don't really care."

So preemptively
I'm going to tell you
the importance of all this.

Consider the following
was Shakespeare a real person who wrote all those plays and things?
and how did he actually feel about his wife?

the machine can tell you that

or this one
how did Lincoln feel about slavery?
were his reasons for the Proclamation
purely materialist?

Maybe you can dig through his papers
and find the answer to that one
but in just a few seconds
the machine can tell you that.

And was Hitler or Stalin
a product of his environment?
If either of those two
were born today
in rural
like
I don't know
Kansas?
would they grow up
just like you or I
or would they turn into
Randall Flagg?
The machine can surely tell you all that.

And for three
small payments
of $999.99
you can buy this thing.

A fucking bargain,
man.


"Mythology"
Is it so wrong of me
to predict
that as regional culture
slowly dies
in a small
globalized community,
the world could be better
run under one governmental body?

If you want the truth
I guess I'd have to tell you
I'm not proud to be an American
because American
stands for both a lack of moderation
and a neo-cult worship
of assimilation
and even if I do love this country
I see myself as some sort of

post-nationalist.

That's just too much
for you,
isn't it?

I'm a blasphemer,
right?
Like Galileo
or Oscar Wilde?

But in reality
this sort of talk
disturbs my
moderate humility
and I am content
with a subtle
iconoclasm
that pales upon the appearance
of its lack of results

like a groundhog running from its shadow.

Thoughts on THE ODD COUPLE...

or really around THE ODD COUPLE. At least one of the poems I plan to write today will be influenced by listening to Gnarls Barkley 2 all the way through something like maybe three times in the past few days. Also, been writing the same poem over and over again, something taking off from Gaiman's "The Day the Saucers Came," and I've written again here, and elsewhere in the 100. Maybe you can tell. I'm not sure. And with these words of caution I'll just add that I think I'm going to start outlining a novel here, in bits and pieces. Some titles will probably be easy enough (think today's'll be "Chapter One"), but you might recognize characters or something. Both Bukowski and Carver seem to have been medium-blending between prose and poetry and I think it'd be good to get ideas out in some sort of lyrical form before constructing a book.


"Please forgive me, but I'm not going to say I'm sorry"
So is it so very wrong of me
to remind you
that only tsunamis can change
the earth's orbit?

Or that nothing we do
is worth it,
because we never really
learn anything?

Even Plato knew
that you couldn't
gain knowledge
in the same way that you can't stare at the sun.

And you can hate me if you want
but I'm just playing Lennon
and trying to get you
to drop the cross

that I made for you
in that first year
after we'd gotten out of college
when I got your best friend pregnant

or at least I guess
we both think it was me
and when you said
that you wanted to stay together,

but I had to show remorse--
I don't think you should hold onto
the noose that I tied when I said,
"Girl, you know you are meaningless,

don't you?"
I won't apologize
but for explanation I'll add
that goddamnit we all are.


"Nothing Can Hurt Me"
I
I'm not going to lie
and say that you can
impact me in any way.

Because
if you simply
inflict mortal wounds

I dislike myself
enough
to probably enjoy them

and if you were
to sever
my brain

I'd thank you
since
I've been thinking too much these days.

Even if you were
to open up my head
and play with my neural mycelia

controlling that fungus
by way of irrigation
and a sun roof

and were able to take complete control of me
I'd be fine with it,
because I've been wanting someone else to take over for a little while.

II
I don't see a problem
with sporting
my nihilism
like a letterman's jacket

and you can call me
what you want
because really
I'm not taking any effort whatsoever to listen.


"My Epitaph"
Please
people
don't believe
a single word
I ever said,
for it was all lies
and worthless crap
that wasn't meant
to be studied.


"Chapter One"
In That House
was the band of the decade
and Sam didn't sign them
which meant that her dream job
was gone.

And she's watching
old romantic comedies
and thinking about all the men
she's been with
or not but wanted to.

Her high school reunion
is in three weeks
and she's getting drunk
every other night.
Oh,

what on earth
is she to do?
you might say
and she'd spit on you
because she doesn't take that pity shit.

Pessimism

Still stuck in a rut. My apologies.

"nihilism"
The apathy seeps into ordinary activities
like a disease
and he wakes up wondering
why he doesn't just go back to sleep.

Video games and homework assignments
occupy half a dozen hours
and the only real thought in his head
is just the repeated question of
"Why?"

Saturday night means
you are getting drunk at a party
and looking for someone to go to bed with
and he's at home with the lights off listening to "Prove Yourself" for the sixth time.



"Primitivism"
I often wonder
time and time again
if I could keep my mind
and go back to the
city of pigs,
would I?

I'm not an independent person
in any fashion
but I also dislike
the ways societies seem to work
and Rousseau's joke
has some appeal.

We place too much importance
on progress
and not enough
on life or happiness
and I think in a very real way
that it's slowly killing the real us.


"Memory"
My computer
is an extension to my brain
just as this keyboard
is a very important part of my body.

It's funny to think
that in the past
all dependable memory
was internal

and books
were few and far between,
something for the few
the rich.

Sometimes I forget
in my pipe dreams
how little I would know
in that world.

My name,
a few short statements about my life,
and maybe some small fragments of something I'd call a childhood,
or pi to seven digits.


"Water Colors"
You really disappointed me,
nineteenth century,
in how you took
something as innocent
as a child's fingerpaintings
and called it science
so that the white male
could be happy
in his disgusting
ethnocentric
mindset.

You knew
where the earth was
but you couldn't even grasp the fact
that we are all the same.

This is why
know-it-alls
scare me.
They are so often
full of shite
and too much of the time
their surety
causes them to be believed.
We must base our beliefs
on the only thing that we know
that we know nothing

because historically speaking,
the people who thought themselves
the most scientifically savvy
are the ones that make me want to vomit the most.

Don't call this a comeback--

--because it really isn't good enough to get such a title. Sort of musing on writer's block in a couple of these. Hope I'm not wasting your time because that would be a damn shame, but I guess I can still sit back on the fact that the blog is located at Sorry for Boring You.

"my worst nightmare"
Prose is an odd thing
where you come in with a thought process
and then these people show up
--these characters--
and usually
in my experience
they tell you what
they're going to do.

Vonnegut would have me
play the sadist
and not waste the reader's time
with pleasantries
like good things
happening
to
good people.

So's anyway
I tried to write this story
about what I imagined
as the worst thing that could ever happen to me
and then things changed,
and suddenly I really wasn't writing about myself

but someone more interesting
and I couldn't just beat this person
I had created
to a pulp.
I'm a failure when it comes to writing
pretty much anything

that you'll want to read on rainy days
and that's not nearly the only thing
I'm a failure at.
I know these truths to be self-evident.
But four score and seven years from now,
maybe I'll be somewhere proud of something that I did one time.


"Ants and Uncles"
When Carl was in
third grade
he spent way too much time
with an hourglass
out in his backyard
burning ants with sunlight.

For some reason
this recurs to him
that summer before going
back to the campus.
This was the year
he really hit it off with that one girl

who went to junior high
with your brother,
you remember?
So anyway,
this guy, Carl,
we met in a poetry class

in 2018
and he told me that his uncle
was also named Andy
and he invited me to this show
and this one time we both got so stoned
that we may have been unable to move for up to three hours.

I learned from him
that my anger was not something to be ashamed about
and we didn't Brad Pitt it up under some restaurant somewhere
but we hit walls once in a while,
so I guess I'm trying to say
girl,

last night
when I said,
I'm too much of a monster
to be in a relationship with you
that was just the paranoia talking
and I really hope you get this phone message before you screw your psychiatrist.


"walking"
Staring at a computer screen is so unproductive.
Did you know
that the writer
actually gets most of his ideas
these days
when he's walking around campus
in his tight ass shoes,
headphones in,
mind elsewhere?

You can blame
his periods
of inspiration's block--
where his preset
goals for writing
suddenly corrode
into shit--
on the fact
that he's not getting out of his house
often enough.


"Citizenry"
Poets
everywhere
please explain
in three paragraphs or less
what you are.

Plato would have you thrown out of his state
and DeLillo says that the novelist is the bad citizen
so that one's taken.

What are your goals in life?
Your occupation, please,
for it can be easily misunderstood.
Plus what can stop
any old kid

who's broken up with a lover
from putting on sunglasses,
skipping classes

and saying
"I'm a poet"?



Good night, folks, have a happy rest-of-the-weekend and try to realize when you are happy. Vonnegut would want us to.

Everyone's an ocean drowning.

1:53AM OFF DAY

I offer you this rubbish of an attempt here. One thing about writing is that you can tell when it's off. I figure that best case scenario I just have one more of these days late in the month and then take off the 28th and still have 100 poems. Well. We'll see.


1:26AM
Still thinking about the poems for today. Blog is set in Pacific time, I think, so I have 90 minutes, but we'll see. Might put in some off days for the month, since four poems times 28 equals 112 and that's more than the goal. Don't like the idea about doing something like that right now though. Too early. So, what have you, I'll try to spin something together. Shit. I guess I'll just do book reviews. Apologies to people looking for quality, I'm doing this the Golden Corral way, quantity being me important. :~)

"Rules"
Second time through
and you get every joke
because this is a novel about
people who don't really want to admit
that they're twenty yet
but are dangerously close
to not being able to hide
that fact anymore.

You are less than zero
when you haven't really
realized that this
isn't high school anymore.

But this other book
is about when your fear stemming
from that realization
has become a cynicism that will haunt you to the grave.

Currently rereading THE RULES OF ATTRACTION if that wasn't obvious enough to you from the poem.


"Holden"
I just don't what to think of you,
man,
it sort of kills me
how everyone thinks
that each new book
is you again, speaking to us for a bit more.

And it's not fair
to judge on the fact
that book reviewers are a very lazy people,
but you do have big britches
which I'm sure you would find beneficial
for the next time you take a girl to the backseat of your car.

Your writer
just died a while back,
but his story is quite the odd one,
because it seems that once he wrote you,
he left this world
and you became the real one.

Reading THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Just musing on the first third to half of the book so far. Holden is everywhere these days, so it's probably a good idea that I'm finally reading it. I mean from MDC to Jake Gyllenhaal movies, this kid does it all!

Epics and Fictions

Bit of weirdness today. I've been figuring out my view on poetry lately--an important distinction that I have made (for my writing at least) is between fictional poetry, where I'm putting on some form of mask, and, well, I guess I'd refer to it as something like "normal" poetry for lack of a better word. This set of poems has elements of both I guess. Along with this thought, I should add that the character of "Andy" may appear in one or more of the poems in this centennial set and I somewhat see this person as my poetic alter-ego. Err...enough with me talking at you...Wait, first I should mention that this set ends in an epic. 77 lines. I think it's sort of worth it though.

"Replacements"
The perfect mate
will always be there for your rainy days
and can make you happy no matter what.

The perfect mate
quickly ends every argument
by accepting all blame.

The perfect mate
will only join you in bed
and never has you up at night worried.

The perfect mate
knows every thought you have
but is not jealous or pushy or anything like that.

The perfect mate
is grown
in the oceans of Ganymede,
gender is chosen approximately
three weeks after germination,
but only by specifications of the future owner.

It sells for $49.95 plus processing & handling
and you should not accept
any imitators--
this is the real deal
offered now in our limited time offer.
Please allow about a month and a half for shipping.


"Regulations of Window-shopping"
Stare at the tops of the stores in the mall
and you can still see people to avoid them,
but do not have to deal with eye contact.
Walk quickly.
Regard nothing with enough thought
so as to create a new memory.
You are just a spoiled
young man
--really just a boy--
scared by his own anger
and converting it to work
into joules
that you are burning
with each step.
Do not run
or otherwise draw attention to yourself
and don't speak.
In fact
please stop this inner monologue.


"Lunacy"
Listening
to the sounds
of Henry
playing his electric piano
with headphones in

is a bit like a dissection
and this guy's going to be a doctor
so
it sort of makes some sense,
don't you think?

Now
on five hours of sleep last night
I can barely stand
so maybe I'm only being floored
by ordinary thoughts

but my mind
is telling me,
"Andy, now,
remember this moment.
There's something here."

Billy Joel playing in the background
is important
and these people I know--
I know I'm making horrible connections
but this campus means something to me

an emotion I can't describe
like the dark side of the moon
and something that I don't always want to admit to
like a chaste boy's crush--
a nondescript feeling shaped

like the back of Quasimodo.


"Under the surface of things"
Do you remember that summer
when you dared me to go into the abandoned theme park?
You said,
"I'll give you twenty bucks,
if you break into
the back of that
fake fortune teller's booth."

And I wasn't really
doing it for the money,
but rather to impress you,
when I hopped the fence around midnight sometime in last August.
I cracked the lock easily
and walked into the back door,
entering a hallway that was much too long to really exist.

Walking down it,
I came upon an androgynous figure
wearing a shirt that said on the back,
"The Human Race,"
and looking into a dark lake ahead of it
that appeared to be made up of
some liquid other than water.

Suddenly
a reflection of a flame formed in the fluid
and it spoke something unintelligible.
The figure reacted oddly,
gesturing with its hand to its ear,
as if it wasn't able
to catch what had been said.

So the fire began again
and asked "Where?"
and the thing in front of me responded,
"Geography,"
and the fire asked, "When?"
and the person said,
"History."

The conversation paused
as answers and questions were mulled over
and I could feel actual heat coming
from the glow in the pool.
"Who?"
it finally asked,
and the form replied, "Politics."

The flame appeared to almost take the form of something,
but it quickly returned to a shapeless blob
and said, "What?"
to which it got the answer
"Math,"
which it didn't really seem to like so much,
so it spit out, "How?"

"Science," was the response,
which seemed to almost defeat the fire,
it shimmered in the lake,
but did not vanish,
and once settled it asked, "Why?"
and the figure said, "Philosophy,"
which caused something to happen.

The flame suddenly made itself manifest
into the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen,
and the person jumped into the lake
and looked back at me pleadingly,
asked if I was going to join it,
and it had the face
of everyone I'd ever known.

I blinked my eyes then
and when I opened them
I was alone in a tiny box
looking out at the roller coasters
like that fortune teller guy that you found so cute did every day
and as I walked home
I kept asking myself

Was I asleep?
Had I ever been awake?
Have any of us ever been awake?
Do we ever learn anything?
So anyway,
this is what I've been thinking about
since I got that letter in the mail from you last week asking if I could lend you
[*indent*] some money.

The inevitable thoughtlessness...

Bothered me a bit to realize last post was a bit misogynist, so I'm going to drop down four poems about women now. And I also didn't really think about the time, so this is coming at 12:19AM, but will be dated as yesterday for format reasons. The blog might still be stuck in Pacifac time, for all I can figure it, so what have you. Titles now are probably going to be first names because it seems to fit better. Addressing a person solely by their last name is considered an oddity most often associated with men, and I'm not making that up, I read it in a Cultural Anthropology textbook, so if I'm being unfair, then complain to Ember & Ember. Also noting that I'm writing pretty much just about dead people, because I think it's a bit odd otherwise.

"Amelia"
On a good day,
maybe,
I think that you found
a door out there
that took you
to some amazing place
that could be ahead for all of us.


"Susan"
I'll admit
that I know you
almost solely
from an oddly shaped dollar.

But I'd love to think
that I'm not completely
wrong
to say that if I'd been alive then

we'd have had similar goals.

This is the thing
that scares me these days--
thinking
if I had been born

in any other age,
would my politics
be as vile
as the rest of them?

I hope not.


"Kate"
The famous man
with your last name
means very little to me
because I'm no musician.

You knew
how to sculpt a novel,
though,
didn't you?

Better than I'll ever do,
I'm sure.


"Virginia"
I somewhat wish
your poem
had an extra line
because then
I could call it a sonnet.

Is it wrong
to consider the fact
that your TB
was clearly
a great deal of his inspiration?

What kind of a person
does that make me?
Your husband
--or was he your brother?--
would not have liked that logic at all.

I mean
I'm not going to speak
for the man
but I'd assume that he'd probably
have given up
his language for you.

Figureheads

I've begun to think a bit too much in verse. Or at least to think a lot in verse. I don't know if it's too much. But I've started writing these little things about different historical people ("historical" being a broad term, I've written about musicians, political figures, writers, well I guess you could say that those are all the same thing, but damn you, please don't...) or my opinion/reflection/reaction to these historical people. So here I'm going to attempt to come up with four of those...I have two in my head right now, and we'll see if I work out another pair.

"Dessalines"
In the movie theater
when I was almost crying
behind those 3D glasses,
I had to ask myself,

would they have been right
if they had decided
to solely massacre
the human population

that was attempting
to usurp Pandora
from the rightful
peoples?

And what does that say
about your actions
in that time
right when you had declared

your nation apart from them--
Fanon would have it
that violence was the only way
you could become men again.

God,
I hate
such scary
judgment calls.


"Bello"
I think you had some
pretty good questions.
But did you really expect
to get answers?

You wanted to draw
lines in the sand
on the beach
of your history.

I admire that.
I really do.
And I'm sure there's plenty you believed
that I would say was full of shit,

but there's something to say
about us being ostriches--
our heads in the sand--
we aren't asking serious questions

but rather just trying to stir up thought
like Socrates or the Drake Equation
and there's a sort of beautiful sadness here,
isn't there?

That nothing will ever be known.


"Marx"
I'm not particularly mad
or anything
but you sure did
become the face
of a political organization
that has never seen the light of day.

And now
when I invoke identities for myself
people probably think
that I follow your way of thought
when I'd say the only things
we have in common

are our beards.


"Bukowski"
I'm not nearly as upset
by your influence on me
as are those followers of Virginia Woolf
who wonder why you were such an asshole

but it's an interesting thing
and not something I altogether support--
how you have captured
way too many things

that
when I only knew them
inside my own mind
I had thought, well, original.

And to think
if it hadn't been
for some throwaway conversation,
I probably never would've known your name,

and had to deal with
the humbling masochism
that is the writer reading
what has come before.

Know thyself.

The Oracle at Delphi would have us know ourselves and take everything in moderation. I'm really not trying to be too profound, but you know how it goes. This is something I can do, I'm pretty sure, so I'm going to try. One hundred poems in February, all somewhat unique and written within the confines of the month. They're all going to be short and probably not very good, but it's a solid idea to keep the production level up, I'd say, and I guess there might be some people who actually read stuff that I've written here and don't have any overlap with my writings elsewhere, so I might as well update a bit again.

"Bluepill"
I'd much rather
be a battery for some machine
with a present purpose
in my own mini merry mindscape
than fight a war
with your futile resistance.

"Sokrates"
Hey man, slow down,
I know you already
threw back the hemlock,
but please stop
walking around this room,
because I have a few
questions for you.

Do I seem like a virtuous man?
What have I done wrong?
If everything is supposed to be
in its right place,
then where is the promised happiness
that you gave to the just man?

God,
I know why you didn't write anything down,
it's because you were serious when you said
you didn't know anything,
isn't it?

Well
I can't fault you
when you tell me the truth.

"117"
I keep my dark passenger
locked up nine nights out of ten
but right now
he's roaming free
two guns in his hands
mowing down people like they're grass.

It's a little scary
these thoughts I have,
these things I sometimes think
maybe I want to do.

This is an exorcism--
playing target practice with heads.
But then someone else
gets the upper hand
and stabs me
one too many times
in the back.

As my body disappears,
I try not to really think about anything,
as I wait to respawn.

"The Good Life"
Just listening to my grandmother
or taking part in a debate on our beliefs
gives me even more reason to consider my outlook
apolitical.

I think somewhere between
Aristotle and Machiavelli
we forgot that life shouldn't be lived
for science or the future or anything but

yourself, the people you love,
and children if you so choose.

We pay too much attention
these days
to what's happening
in fifty years
rather than tomorrow.

Even worse
is our necessity
to know
what Barack is thinking
when we can't even talk
to the person in bed next to us.