to balboa

I saw everything was tinctured by giddy hope and fear. Around this corner you'll see a treasure, or a terror.

Walked on and on. Into this sunny landscape I'd seen plenty of on screen but here it was in my face. Kept walking into it completely aware of every person I passed, staring and taking in such horrors and delights. But what were the smells? Very few. The sun had baked them away. Dry pavement, lush grass on campus en route to the park. A plain faded brown baseball cap, sunglasses. Earbuds, pulsating tunes. Into the sun, opening up into a view, arid enough, and distant. But then into a weaving crisscrossing path through the hugest most diverse desert trees, and a shocking edge: the cliff. Or a mere step, ten feet or so of a steep-ass slope down to the true drop. Blinding heat now. Glorious revenge, silent and technically non-threatening, of nature; mutely terrifying, as in you know what it can do. Helps to be reminded.

thriving overheated life, arid and still

Arugula in the Morning

This is all I've got for you people, you see, I do still have that edge--

Says the teacher of writing writing about writing so that he can feel as if he's written something

But he hasn't. Sad bastard's washed up.

You'll need to keep on going

this than that

I'd established a certain aesthetic, and I had to stick you to it. Otherwise you would've gotten away!

The perfect malady for what you cannot suffer, that is what I offer.

The shapes sneaking away; I hated waking up to the thought: the water will run out and you'll have to climb the mountain. But that's the part I looked forward to. What came before is still dragging smartly behind me. When you've already got your ambition, this will counteract that, and what are you left with but a regret you'll by necessity ignore? Dry eyes, tired mind, wasted day.

All the same, Clea is fierce in her imagining of loves whose bodies she sees no more than twice a year. And she too has an ill-fated love (in Narouz) of whose existence she has not been made aware nor can she spare its death pangs, loneliness calling out for the unknowable beloved when caught in the situation of dying.

(Nearly excised: In the way of illustrating to myself that soon I'll need a paragraph break, she is leaving the room: she has seen the extent to which she is an Other—by that I mean censorious, tyrannical. Yet if she is like most subjects she is concerned above all on realizing her own ends, pursuing her Will how she'd better retrieve her own project of subjectifying, subject-constructing, and the like: writing, love, learning, and finally, the F bomb.

I am finally unable to revive my writing about literature by steeping it in quotidian Ids and Egos; for these can still be seen truncating discussions on cyborg selfhood, ghosts in machines and leading to truly well-applied theories of relativity: knowing there is no actual point but throwing ideas up to make life interesting, at least if one stays at home reading as I do.
The problem I find is a benefit for Harraway; it might approach a solution. She says that a cyborg begins its existence lacking any notion of lacking anything: there has been no Fall for the cyborg race. It simply began, for all it knows: except we know how it happened, and the cyborg has in its databases access to all that we know on paper; and as a cyborg, it too can feel the portents of this knowledge, the qualities that defy normal terms in our daily lives, all that elusive stuff experienced most frequently with music or before sleep, betwixt the shower and the street. This could be the uncanny, but as an inescapable buzzword in literary studies, for the purposes of this paper, the uncanny will happily take a break.

We can all agree that the tone established in the last movement was caused by lighting (primarily).

"Good work here," said I, the father, the prince of pauses. I am endorsed by a mother who never knew misery until she met my father the contractor, the would-be architect who wasn't interested in the great schools of building and design. I cannot say why he never took it in that direction, simply not one for grand moments in history, even those forming the backdrop of his art?

My feet, disturbing dirt, land just before the door, half on and half off the Welcome Home mat. I am most welcome here, I see the props of an extended family through the fog of the door window. On the dining room table, poking out from a heap of bills is the brim of an orange hunter's cap bowed from a shaggy unkempt head whose owner was last seen marching up a path through tall pines. I'd like to call them spruce, but those form the border between our property and Ray's--they are taller than you'd expect of a line of Christmas trees, and would have lost their convivial roundness if they weren't set so tightly together. Our property (technically their property) is surrounded by a breed of pine that is freakishly tall and thin, not one of which has collapsed during our valley's periodic windstorms.

I wonder what I've abandoned, the people recently depicted or merely mentioned. I have only just now introduced them...you know why? They mistrust me and my artistic plans, they insisted on working for me only if I cast my personal motivations aside. It wasn't a set of ghosts they have successfuly fled until now. They did not, in point of fact, flee. More likely I forgot to collect them after school: two sisters, waiting an hour before closing their books, just slipped their other belongings back into their bags, glanced at the time, and trudged off. They aren't likely to suffer regret on my account, they know I haven't changed. But I persist in summoning them--join us at once, Steff, and call your mouthy sister Emily, let her know your brother is in town, he might step out of his bedroom in time to interact lest this family never look and feel like the real thing. But he's been dyeing his hair black, Dad, he avoids the sun for a pasty complexion and all that. His reality isn't doing so well, the sisters maintain, closing with, "Certainly you are so bold as to call James yourself."

Moving to the straightened arrow

Try to manage complaints on an empty stomach.

"Just answer the question about the cat!"

Now, he didn't have to say when to show up. We already knew this was a Nazi-evil bastard, a damn brat kid wearing a black hunting cap, likely for squirrel
(to contrast out of season).

And what can the spring say upon your nasty return?
That we didn't know how much like typing with your left hand this would be. Wow.
Who's going to hit the space bar next month?

Just wipe your tonsils in the sink, of formaldehyde they stink.

Bitter alone, in a cage of sorts, caring for children, Claire strikes us as haggard.

Her fleeing now is immanent. Against scraggly old hair a lovely sheen--not dormant but certainly nothing overt, the kids won't be hurt. She can go.

The schoolyard cackles a coyote, the kids come back.
Not always for the noise...of a triangle struck just once, meaning: get back here, I see one.
Their hearing it is just fine.

So easy to miss, no one ever did. But first I gotta hear it, me apart. An incredibly dense and lush song:
The Good Life
by
Weezer.

Sure, you'll need headphones for the whole dose. Somehow easy to miss so much.... in the ears is that anger, having to have a chorus--and the conclusion is three or four vicious, heavily ironic crashes.

Your goddamn younger brother keeps popping up on Facebook, I have no time to add this kid.

Speak when

Dedicate your sacred moment each day to my bad news, and you shall repair.

This stuff makes me itch.

Would you like to borrow a lighter?

Shake it in the wind--but not too much!

smallish pub

There was a small hole I could peak through--to see what I was up to.

It was a matter of faith. For years I had practiced the life of a faith-based person, full of fear, wanting revenge on the flesh, craving in a tragically backwards fashion my own redemption. It had turned morbid long before my quitting the religion could make it stale.

Fishing around for compliments at a local pub, I heard the Mountain Journal people cavorting at a table near where I had sat before laying my arm on something sticky. Their topic: Vietnam vets residing too close to an old blown-out dynamite factory with no potential for repair.

Stories were shared, memories skewered by the resident critic of the Journal, the same who sketched what the artist later rendered full in color and dimension. The subject of homemade whiskey was dropped when the bitter local sap dripped from the interlocutor's palette.

They moved on to textual questions while nodding intonations toward my corner of the pub.

Not to suggest they knew of my proclivity with a pen....but it did seem I was a candidate, especially if their conversation were suddenly to lag. Do not imagine the old bookish hick, dear reader, unless somehow you've an historical understanding of the following:

That any manner of strength could go into felling and stripping trees into logs and directing them down the local creek system towards the Allegheny river; that this could be managed by strong poets and muscular husbands alike, each for himself interested in personal or familial well-being. I ask that you consider these diverse white heroes of a hilly new economy for the sake of a story that has no intention of developing. But to regroup: the lumber industry had its ramifications, they cannot be reduced to the necessities of the brute.

My thread was canceled, or should I say transferred, before Last Call.

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…well, Grandpa loved his words, and furthermore, he Claire’s 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?