Visiting

Visiting, all is wrong. Dropped by to stand before the Hasty house, reaching in the pockets of an old jacket. Found my keys and thought of you, son--this is where you have to stay while I'm out in the rain. Greetings from the fall! Dolor-inflicted neck wound's crust getting soggy under the towel-like fabric of my jacket. To James I said, "Your company selects what it likes to see in you," meaning by "company" the characters who have agreed to sit with him for a famiy portrait. "I can explain better once the heat of the moment kicks back in." His grandfather Eugene offers more practical instructions and advice: when to start up the furnace in the basement and how much wood to add later, enough to toast up the home without overwhelming the chimney. These details work the lad on a personal level, suffering as he does an unconscious desire to burn the place. Charring the core would probably suffice for James' subliminal patricide once removed, his daddy angst displaced to the house that Gene built.

Angle

I know that how much of my story gets written depends loosely on how much I share on various social networks. Share too much and I risk taking the thing less seriously on its own merits or for the deeper meanings it holds beyond the blogger's reach. Most destructive is Facebook due to an historic lack of interest from that milieu. Also not so conducive for getting it written is the notebook--I must tailor (not curtail) the urge to hold a pen--yet always, some form of paper will sit beside the computer, its challenger and friend, along with a cup full of pens, my stationary support group. In case I get stuck, in case I no longer feel like doing this, suffering the jovial anxiety about sitting still: Artist ADD.

no comp

They just want to know whether they can trust me. At this point, they are only asking. And what else can I say but the truth? "Probably." Probably. No one asks me to repeat that one, or to elaborate. They'd like to dig under my skin for their origins, most likely, but the stink of disappointment pervades. It prevails. Truth, that raining of hope and despair, learned of first in the case of the Hastens through their "undwelling," an initiation to a life of unfinished work--truth, calling itself by my first name, Aaron, always talking, very eager to get--not to the point, but towards it--this family loves who I would like to make them out to be, and they are slighted with every invitation. They can't stop calling my name, I can't stop listening to their songs--Claire is a tremendous pianist. Her father never liked anyone to say "pianist" without some thought. If they went straight into it, neglecting to ask themselves or him whether "piano player" might be safer, he was visibly displeased. Grampa loved his words, we all know that: he also enjoyed music. Though one cannot find his grammar-man's visage ever accompanying the uproarious grace of Claire's "pianoing." She said it this way herself: the controversy never took off like she'd hoped, he knew she didn't lie down each night for a dream about pianoing. It was ridiculous. I'm crimson just noting it. But the deadly secrets of the Hastens and the Smiths must be doled out, the author must smack the reader with pittances best served with a cold stare and taken on, worn, shown around, by the reader, who must know the looking glass from many earlier attempts. I can only apologize. I want so badly for everyone . . . not to get along, but to come to their own decisions, or to find motivation about deciding: this is crucial, we can begin to speak of drama if I can have your cooperation. What I give to you, what I think you deserve: for this consideration and the acting upon it, you have no recourse against gratefulness. Staring at you with a delicious and eager tongue, eyes twitching the words unspoken: I want to get back at my father, what I have chronically craved is completion, distrusting the idea preternaturally because it was never more than an idea with a terrific amount of contrary evidence popping up with every nuance breaking on me. I understood only so much about things getting done, I could however increase that understanding over such a span of time: my childhood. Your childhood. There was no other, no one grew up with me, I sat in another home that was abandoned . . . I did this perhaps because that second house was in the thick of a process that had nothing but an end. We speak not of finishing it, the red house will be done--returned to the earth--within a decade. As for nostalgia for the family home, just up the road and across the valley--why, the Hasty house is irrelevant when we're here instead. We occupy each and have little concern with the other.

nicely

At work I cannot realize which headgear warms and limbers me best—my arms will not cooperate if I’m snotty or glistening round the eyes from asking a mask to prevent the snot. Her lines follow me as I step on a palette to send it flying up to my palms; I tend to forget what they portend while sidestepping this palette to the nearest edge of the selecting aisle. Then I let it drop to the cement that’ll burst a drum if I don’t cup my ears before the palette smacks it. I’ll get a pair of thick ear-warmers to wrap around the back of my head and a mask for optimal warmth. As for the black beanie patched with the three-triangle Steelers shit, I toss it in the cardboard box steadily filling with discarded empty sticker pages after exertion brings the warmth. Finally my head freezes in the flight to the loading dock.

counts

The shadows had it in for us, curling out from the more religious corners of a house that had a mind to creak but not to foretell or indicate, warn or presage. It made noises, sure, but the higher meanings came from without. The berries in the yard never fell but swelled, crustily infusing each other up on their perches, discouraging her pinching fingers. Likewise she’d intended to update the Constabulary Poets blog as a living testament to her waning career, a cached interface with followers asking to be replenished of the dolorous wit. She’d posted a few replies to their imploring emails. They knew this was the end—they thought it thin, disagreeing with her choice of content as almost exploitative. But the novelty of a public-personal correspondence, her fame extending dramatic council while the Alterity stage threw out echoes . . . it ate up the air of an empty theater; she baked and cursed . . .

Meanwhile the stage lights were snaked out and distributed to the multitude who toured the dirt roads blasting deer with vulgar illumination.

peer odd

On a pair of feet that dragged more than I’d expected, she partook in the dimness of this top level of a house which so contrasted in its boxiness to the curvature of the hill that she had to call it a flat. She wished she had a porch three stories up (the structure is two stories if we forget the basement); her flat looked at a hill sloping down to a perennially leaf-strewn cavity filled in by a house.

am i wrong.

Now imagine I hadn’t said anything, yet the world is commenting on something another me wrote a week ago. I don’t feel like writing it, and so I’m saying: 'There’s a song out there reminds me of when I always felt like it. And indeed I must feel like it!'

There can be no other way: So, capitalize your sentences. It’d make a great deal of difference if the rest of us weathered ordinary space, recognizing the ends of a family line. Witness, after not having sought, the delineation down the words of a theory!

Hence, no one wants to talk anymore, they did never did. There can be no ‘anymore’ as they’ve always been on the outs. I described to a few in the beginning in a diatribe of focal points how those villains, before the age of discussing freeform topic sentences, must still be named so they won’t reach up and fix us. In essence I told these kids to watch out!

This story you’ve heard from me anyway hundreds of times before. And seriously, are you matriculating yet? Oh, again? That is indeed quite nice actually—go, do that; populate so as to propagate your mind, spin it in and around itself, get all its contents diversified for the raging rapport of consensus. My argument, Dolor, is that we can now because we never did. There’s your announcement of total freedom with how we use our language. Since...because in the critical mode—we care less for the product than the process. Looking for an emphasis, I spot something sensual. I fear I’ve gone too long without it . . . honey?

"Right, you called it the sickly surcease."

whiling

Is there anything that can be said for this view? Are there people listening in need of convincing? All: there are those who enjoy following arguments and to them, I wish good health and prolonged attention.

How it turns out is a matter between me and your friends. I'll make sure you're left out even if you sit on the porch. I'll shout outside into a pillow ten paces off just so you'll know we’re bringing something of yours with us.

But as it is, your banishment includes trips to the fridge whenever you're guilty, trips to the bathroom when something outside is squirrely (a miraculous view from the window of one helluva tree). I'm descending soon for hegemonic repositioning underground.

So if you like I’ll pick up a skeleton and paint it before you run.

You can sit on the outside wallowing. For in point of fact, what's further out than you?
And even still, everyone knows the death's head staring off from your desk.
We’re forced to carry you along.

For those who come here to enjoy a contemplative repast—well, this view of art warrants little more than that.

next time bring chocolate

They sit inside a multitude of cans—or a labyrinth if you prefer broken continuity—on shelves through which you glide, blindly shopping, reaching out and, between each reach, allowing time for the list of ingredients to grow as so many terms to incorporate.

—Make sure you rehearse before exiting! Out there it will not appear you did something so passé as shop for ideas. Out there, you must write a book about it: all exams disappear, or so they’d like. “I threw my back out writing them.” You’d haunt the school days with your own Dread Hollow Mix.

And worse, there's a writer out there, likely many years dead, who’s done precisely what you’re setting out to do. This is not so easy as saying you have a literary model because it's one you’ve yet to find.

reclining nude untangling a knot

I almost expected the drummer to fly off, as was the custom.
I was expecting absolutely nothing. Except...

There was a process, and it's lost.
Forgive how loose my limbs are after African tea.
People stare, they sip, and the circulation of air is just--through the smoke.
At the top of the stairs, atop a chest of sorts, I'm wearing a cape and I've got a pen.

How focused I was when I obliterated a tension and an immediate fate...
Who put this out? A range of faces, nerve-ending, receive mine the way I get theirs.
Towards finding out subjects to avoid and capturing rhythms for ensnaring.

Because I think contemporary poets the flimsiest link to a language with depth.
At least it's like this: You can't let the auto industry sit in your poem.

The sentences of Stein would have been a pleasure to type.

She drove a car and the car was opaque, it had a glimmer to it however and the glimmer ran off the paint to add to what was then only the best sort of opaque, purplish paint. The car was driven into a ditch that drove the car down, she kept it running an hour after without the use of her bad behavior. Have no where to run I see they've been running it. A little happenstance, scroungers round my ankles stabbing out at earth and that is the fun borne forth, how stakes of flesh now through a wooden carriage into a wood, sound strong Flintstones. So the sad days were there as of rock, considerations all bent against a rock, how is it that the feet are gone and one cannot expect to have ankles when? Good heavens Ms. Poultice is that the question.

And swerves back into badly broken, bleeding for it is not like this because bad cannot be. Great carriage for asking is it all only over, not to death that would not suit me. How can I help you with what sets you apart from them, dear? Went rollicking after larky, notebook crazy, chirrups cackling as in a land far apart and divided against a trope. Now and then they're here since they have bought cards. Who are they that they're married to barrel chests getting ice cream for beady eyes quipping drollery when the snuff's asleep, they say visiting the grave of whom, whose keys are igniting?