Thursday, April 30, 2009

The Motion of Nothing [April 29th | 110/365]

I rearrange my sentences
to avoid using the
second person singular pronoun
when you're within earshot

a dark blue sky
mountains in the distance
whiteness without any shadows
footsteps in the snow

Brownian motion makes certain
that eventually we will
find ourselves crossing paths
without having planned to

a light blue sky
wispy clouds hanging still
the city we inhabit
a door I've exited

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Birds of Poetry [April 28th | 109/365]

poets transfigure wings
into words and
hope for transference

birds of paradise
live in forests
with easy foraging

mask the emotions
with quick movements
spelling out fiction

Sunday, April 26, 2009

EURO PEAN DREE MING [April 26th | 108/365]

ican tsee thes tars
disa pear buti know
they must havf orme
tobe this affe cted

youd idnt want meto
undr esss yuan ymor
howb orin gyou said
lets gett oobi znis

astr onom ical trms
were poor mate rial
form akin rhet oric
ford escr ibin love

ther isal ways time
forn ewwd ansm oovs
ipro test dqui etly
know init wass gone

Tanka [April 26th | 107/365]

The familiar
song reminds me of other
sun-excited days
I spent swatting mosquitoes
waiting for you to appear.

The Pleasant Interrogation of Madison Gallas [April 26th | 106/365]

I'd describe as a stabbing motion, yes. No, I never see any moment but I feel the piercing. Sometimes it's simultaneous, sometimes sequential and sometimes it's a singular incision or perforation of the mind.

I've never felt this tightening you describe, I always have enough leeway within to expand and contract freely. There is nothing for me to defend, either from or against. The space I have scouted is empty. There is no sense in violence, I have no one to attack.

I suppose many would describe it as a fight if they had watched but no one is watching now and no one watched then. It's all a matter of simile and metaphor, really. Some things the mind consider like one another, though never completely, not the same at all.

I'm loath to consider it realer, to describe it as a truth, but I could surrender to it all the same. My constitution can barely survive as it is. The eyelids feel swollen, the skin cracked, an unseen hand pushes on my chest and my mind is pierced. My mind is like a dancing flame.

Friday, April 24, 2009

An Excuse for Inaction [April 24th | 105/365]

these letters represent nothing
just wind flowing through
vibrating matter and we
know matter is higgledy-piggledy

the order of letters
is only a fluke
not ordained or chosen
by a thoughtful being

meaning is set out
unsystematically and without purpose
by arranging accepted signifiers
in somewhat ordered fashion

the unpremeditated is suspect
of being simply rote
thoughts manifesting in action
that is my excuse

Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Great Declaration of Learned Helplessness [April 23rd | 104/365]

The message we send forth today
Let's stop your heart
Out of the depths of horror and sacrifice
Will be born again
The glory of mankind

You restrain a dog
And shock it with electricity
It stops trying to escape
Once it realizes it can't
That all it can do is whimper

This then is the message
Which we send forth
States and nations bond or free
All the men in all the lands
Who care for freedom

You put that dog in an open box
And shock it again
It doesn't jump out
But lays down and whimpers
And stays there until its deliverance comes

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Scavenger Hunt in Hell [April 21st | 103/365]

he just kept shouting
why must you godammit
always cry when you
don't find it first

all teams must disband
the only reason you
hang around him is
his lateral thinking skill

you call this shit
a fucking scavenger hunt
she shouted pushing him
into the birthday cake

the guests didn't expect
that the last clue
would turn out to
be a suicide note

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The Release of the State [April 20th | 102/365]

The ball of the Sun dips into the sea
And disappears like a man mistaken for the Messiah
We all know what he is going to say
But we await it eagerly just the same
And fall apart with joy when the words are shouted

Monday, April 20, 2009

Spring Tanka [April 19th | 101/365]

The Buick broke down
on the way to the airport.
The daffodils droop
by the side of the highway
moved only by the brisk air.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

The Quiet Song of Madison Gallas [April 18th | 100/365]

I see acts that aren't there and I can't tell what or who casts the shadows around me and I'm sure that I saw movement in the abandoned building across the road.

I sit on the balcony and listen to the hum of the currents and think about turning on the light in the room behind me so that I can be backlit.

I am lonely it's that simple and I savor my involuntary solitude while I feel gravity pull me into the chair while I cease to think.

The arrangement of clouds leaves visible only fragments of the constellations and the freedom is terrifying for how can I move when my movement could bring me anywhere.

I have stopped asking what will become of me since I started getting answers I didn't like from people I couldn't see whose voices soared like electric wires.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Spring Haiku [April 17th | 99/365]

The first mosquito
of spring hovered, ready to
feed on the sleeper.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

The Beasts of the Earth [April 16th | 98/365]

Our arms were ripped off by contradictory paradoxes
Which annihilated each other on contact
Leaving the reflecting constellations to form themselves in the blood
Pooling around us

Nothing is the mother of thought
Nurturing the ungainly and the impossible
Mindcreatures tottering on unreason away from light and matter
Falling apart and alive

The clemency of the brain towards the dying young
Makes our morals pornographic
Subject to the whims of revelation
And not the forever desire of old communities

There wild animals of elsewhere live unimagined
Bothered with intelligence and a familiar sky
The everchanging viewpoints of logic
Cut through imagination and unravel the lack

the speed with which [April 15th | 97/365]

stumbling as I run down the hill hoping my legs don't buckle and I keep upright

the thoughtless organism swims in her bodily fluids wandering fast and aimlessly digesting what it can

the velocity with which we exit the tunnel suggests a temporary reality to my overstimulated mind

rocketing towards old age we treat our lives like journeys with destinations instead of an existence

Monday, April 13, 2009

Four Pillars of Language [April 13th | 96/365]

air give him air
so that the machine
makes a note of
his words and inflection

fire still leaves imprints
at the low resolution
edges of his vision
but not much else

human thought is extinguished
by the swift rearrangements
of the possible channels
it can flow through

earth is cartoon contrasted
by the relative emptiness
surrounding it like black
around a word balloon

Faded Surfaces Suggest Time [April 13th | 95/365]

faded flags and spines
of books sitting in
an office abandoned at
least a decade ago

the only person repeated
in photographs must be
the former occupant his
smiles look like hisses

he is missing from
the photograph of children
with teeth the hue
of their white shirts

a dictionary collapses during
my wait the pages
heaping in the space
behind the other books

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Language is full of words to describe the horror but instead we got poetry. [April 12th | 94/365]

We think in terms of literal flowers when we should think of visceral guts.
Really no one cares about all this last century whatever whatever yeah.
Friends gather with a bottle of wine and disbelieve in the existence of time.
There's a shift coming some think and it will either do fuck all or destroy everything.
Tomorrow seems unlikely as a when to end the world but I guess every time does.
Minds are fixed actually you said but I find it hard to think that way.
Factual information can just as well be untrue it just has to be fact-like.
The speakable is nice and functions as description enough to go by.
We have to struggle to ascribe words to paper instead of fallible human beings.
Stories move close to a register intended for daily usage but we have to give.
Hands are part of this conversation and bodies from all and every degree and angle.
The experience was almost entirely physical and without words to smear it.
Let us make the soldiers march against each other into our freshest defenses.
Mud falls away from mud in clumps and buries the packed earth under feet.
Democracy is represented in these stories and must give account of itself.
Shelter in the face of chaos and a joy destroyed by setting men free.
Laughing children mimic stories that shine into them from their sun.
Give it to them give in to them give of their everything it is time to.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Spring Tanka [April 10th | 93/365]

The attitude of
the rain as it hits the glass
changes with the wind.
I adjust the angle by
opening up my window.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

In Want of Compline [April 9th | 92/365]

the bells of dawn
sound loudly even now
an hour past midnight
and I can't sleep

silence becomes too loud
when the brain seeps
into the real world
through the sound cracks

not even a light
can dispel the shadows
of noise that night
casts on a city

dreaming should be enticement
enough to fall unconscious
dreams shouldn't simply be
but be worth dreaming

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

In Entropy [April 7th | 91/365]

In youth the road away from my home city went past an immense name made by ripping moss out from a side of a mountain.

It took sixty years to disappear.

The basque sheepherders who moved to Northern Nevada learned quickly that a shallow cut in the white bark of Aspen trees heals black.

Their words rot with the tree.

If I tried to shape earth to have the plants sprout into the letters of your name I worry that it would grow as if translated by a bad dictionary.

My name instead of yours.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Fun Times [April 6th | 90/365]

You have become a line drawing
An old sketch briefly handled
While packing boxes before a move.

I live in a forest of words
Like a lifeform entwining
The growth of others.

We should have abandoned our principles
And attempted madness.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Staring with Shut Eyes [April 5th | 89/365]

wasn't there she said
this parachute regiment insignia
a heart in a
parachute I like that

people's bravado when recently
dumped is always alike
the for the best
and too good for

an epistemology in error
reduced to conceptual desire
anticipates memory she said
imagination needs mind control

squirrels should not be
this fat in spring
without starvation what is
the point of hoarding

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Sleep Kills Meaningful Conversation [April 4th | 88/365]

voices through the floor
some sounding from mind
others vibrated into existence
by an electric command

there are no people
only the shifting hardwood
and the air molecules
rushed into new positions

downward pressure by chemicals
keeps the brain shut
and the boy alert
and mobile during daytime

all this is elementary
or would be if
you were less needful
and wanting in companionship

Spring haiku [April 3rd | 87/365]

Someone's vomit floats
in the fishtank. A cat licks
a sleeping woman.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Cold Constellations [April 2nd | 86/365]

The cold air tunnels its way through every layer of cloth I place athwart its path reaching the skin and spreading in all direction like an alien flower taking over earth previously occupied by life not prepared for this new form of being like you is a certain kind of idea that certain kind I can barely resist and only if I strive to resist and make an effort to like everything it was eroding and eventually nothing would remain but before there would be nothing we would be nothing so as far as we were concerned it was forever and so we were happy and we laughed watching lines appear on our faces that one day we would be able to extend and make into patterns like the constellations we made out of stars on a winter night staring at a clear sky lying as close as bark to a tree.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Manifesto

I was asked to write one of 13 manifestos for the website For a New Green Society. The one I wrote is called Art is Waste: Recycle It! The manifestos run from being serious to being satiric and some I can't tell where on the spectrum they fall.

Spring Haiku [April 1st | 85/365]

Put screen in skylight
to keep out bugs. The sky is
now pixelated.