Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in vernonfatmilk's LiveJournal:

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Friday, June 19th, 2009
2:10 am	Don't come to me ten years from now-- holding your belly-- telling me how you didn't know I'd still be here, turned in, my feet, in time, turned slow, smoothed like fog, shuffling sand, my sparkling mouth shut like rock; don't tell me some truth, how it makes you sick. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
1:31 am	SLOW         This is who I am.   This is who I want to be.   Despite weariness. Despite the darkest hour without dawn. Something.   What is it? A formation. A gathering. I have become kind.   So, thank you for waking me, for setting me true, for binding my hands to free them, for letting me forget sometimes to remember.   I believe in a blankness of mind, a pregnancy of words.   I have a sense of space fencing the effable.   I have no sense of what to say.   Though I believe the things that I say.   Though I believe the things that I say.   ----   And I say the things that I believe.   (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
9:45 pm	GREEN       I crawl at dusk as if it were dawn, dew on the ground, fruit on the vine.   You can't talk to me now,   you in the lit window,   slim shadow in the yellow glow of a house heart,   me in the blue garden.   I haven't come to seek you out unaware to you:   my averted gaze is a gesture of love.   The grass feels my face when I take a cheek to it.   I'm soothed in this way, preparing for my night as   you do your day.       ARROYO         Thrashing in white heat waterside,   honing your mind to a sharp edge,   you cloak your body in wax and honey,   to steel yourself—yes, and to sweeten yourself;   you slip into the forestdark and go deep.   I wish you well.   From a lower stand across the stream, I wish you well,   sharpening myself also, but slowly, mindless and naked,   browsing leaves like a glossy deer. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
12:24 am	FOR MOST PEOPLE         the hurt is enough   the hurt, the hurt   is more than enough most people   most people are not supposed to be   most people are not supposed to be   irrecoverable I am one of those   accounted   lost   the inconsolable   the hurt which is enough is   by design   driven forward managed and manipulated   it is aged   it ages   it is aged toward diminishment (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
1:11 am	SEE ME I want to ask heavy questions though the time's not right [ surgical, a manner of speaking have a store of thought fill to the ceiling if I can deny myself what will be left to deny a case, a disease, the way I lose myself attention, a loss the opposite, a loss [ what gains what gains reaches a snag puts a tear in heavy cloth an opening for passage of sight of air mostly but also, small enough things which is called fit a less-than approaching equal-to, but never equal-to or greater-than (Comment on this)
Monday, April 9th, 2007
7:13 pm	bogen journal 1 Side yard , Montcliff.  There’s a bird buried there, in a plastic ziploc bag.  It was always green, if not green than it was always earthy smelling. If a suburban house could have a terroir, this would earn gold ribbons.  My uncle, the haphazard gardener.  Greg and I used to set up plastic chairs and a large fishing net, and we’d play tennis, or what we understood to be tennis at 7 and 8.  The  side garden was always dark and moist.  The hill with the ice-plants was it’s foil, bathed in sunlight from Monday to Saturday. Slatterns, etc. Bees. Mason jars, and if you put a jar over a bee, and kept the open face down, they wouldn’t, or  couldn’t fly underneath, as if their trajectory were fixed toward lofty destinations.  The bird was a sparrow, and it wobbled in flight close to the concrete slabs. It had a maimed wing. My grandfather force-fed it bread crumbs, and it died, and we cried about it, according to our understanding of mourning. Things tend to grow in that plot of land. There might have been ivy growing on the dyed-red cedar fence planks.  There were never any weeds.  The sun, im sorry, might have hit it in the morning, while I was on my way to school, two blocks down, but id never see it.  The cypresses in the front was what I remembered to be bathed in early morning sunlight, and it was mythical, and was my own bit of a tuscan estate, but instead of fifty cypresses, only two, and they were bursting with cobwebs and spiders, and had tennis balls lodged in them, lost lost lost. Only now I can think of what was on the other side of the garden facing fence.  Black people lived there, and we’d hit our balls over the fence into their yard so often, than they gave us a life-long “OK” to stop ringing their doorbell and walk over and get the ball ourselves.  They don’t live there any more. But what was next door was probably not another garden. If there is only a limited store of good earth in the world, then that garden must have received fifty times the share that it deserved, as proportion to the square footage it occupied.  There was a gate there, and after my cousin started growing chickens, a chicken cage, and after he started growing koi, a koi pond.  It was a reasonable piece of land, and earned its rent. Good earth, good earth, good earth.  The vegetables that it yielded were not enough to sustain anyone, reasonably, but the wonder surrounding each article that came up from the ground was enough to sustain each of our imaginations—I speak on behalf—for at least 4 hours.  It may even be that the garden was not a vegetable garden.  I like to think it was.  That damned earth was so rich, though, and it isn’t a stretch to say that vegetables would flourish in that plot. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 1st, 2007
3:12 am	That Don't Right     Two daughters married in three months; I’m sorry I couldn’t go; someone had a stroke   four years ago; he died last week and, as we speak, a sailor accounts for things   before shipping off; one waits for another to “Oh”, and “I didn’t know,” and “I’m sorry;”   a cousin wasn’t allowed to marry last year; she had her baby on an island she wasn’t   supposed to have her baby; so many answers when I question a noise; I cook books;   I make up sounds to hear, maybe, like the wet tongue-noises between two parts of sleep;   like a cat; ever since grandma outgrew possession, the flopping on floors, mom coming home from   Catholic school, kneeling by her side with a warm towel, scolding… (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 31st, 2007
1:40 am	Flop, Vision                 Two daughters married in three months—                                     sorry I couldn’t go. Someone had a stroke four years ago. He hadn’t said a word.                                       He died last week and as we speak a sailor accounts for things before shipping off.               He and he wait for the other to Oh, and                         I didn’t know, and I’m sorry, and I’m Sorry. A doctor moved to Torrance. He joined the Air Force—               his family isn’t happy. His eight-year old wears a bow-tie to piano recitals and I’m thinking about thrombosis.   Last year, my cousin wasn’t allowed to marry.                                                 She had her baby on the island—                                     she wasn’t supposed to have her baby on the island. There are so many voices                           when I ask, What was that? I cook the books, I make up sounds for hearing—wet tonguing noises                                     between two parts of sleep.               Before everything, my grandma passed her possession stage, flopping on the floor,                                     mom coming home from Catholic school,             kneeling at her side with a warm towel, scolding. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
9:52 pm	The way the script works in the book.  What I’m doing in the section where the script is actually intelligible is just play.  I’m just gonna do my own translation on Ezra Pound, because he claimed to be able to translate all kinds of stuff.  How can you translate Chinese when you don’t know Chinese? Okay, well he did it anyway because he’s Ezra Pound, right? So that’s some serious flexing of cultural superiority.  So I said “whatever, I’m gonna subject his translated work to my own criteria, and it’s gonna be the most unfair, because I’m the one setting up the criteria—there’s nothing in the world telling me I can’t.” So I took some of his poems from “Cathay,” which, of course, were already translations from other people—the most roundabout way possible.  So I did my own homophonic translations into Baybayin script, and what came out I immediately translated back into Roman characters, and it was nothing but gibberish, but that’s the point.  The Laughlin prize judges       Your vocabulary seems to demonstrate a deep relationship with the Roman Catholic faith.  Can you speak about this relationship?   There are words that are immediately on the surface, and we accept them because they’re constantly repeated at us, like a litany, like the kinds of prayers that we memorize. When you recite the Our Father, and you’re immediately acknowledging yourself as a sinner—I have issues with that, because we’re not even thinking anymore when we’re saying these things.  There was a man I was dating a while ago who was Buddhist, who said, “There’s something about this prayer, the Our Father…” and he started handling it like a foreign artifact.  That is very interesting to me, because I know [the prayer] like the back of my hand.  It’s like how we can do the Pledge of Allegiance without thinking…But these are words, they’re sacred, they’re powerful, they mean some thing, and there must be something about this that I really do believe, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, something about my place in this world as a sinner.  So let’s go back to what’s really being said, here like the war prayer [in “Poeta”]: “Let our boys be successful in battle.”  But what are you really saying?  You’re saying, “Let’s—by the mandate of God—go into this other place and tear their country to pieces.” That’s the flip-side.  That’s what’s really being said without explicitly being said.   Did studying in the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley give you a kind of philosophical framework?   Absolutely.  One thing that really stuck with me from an African American lit’ class I took with Barbara Christian was Toni Morrison’s saying that there’s a master narrative, and there’s what we write: the counter-master narrative.  That was incredibly eye-opening for me.  Ah, so we are writing back towards something, and that something is what we have all been conditioned to believe is the absolute.  Of course, now, its’ a little bit more complicated—I think there are multiple counter narratives.   Have you ever seen “Apocalypse Now”?   No I haven’t.   It was filmed in the Philippines. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
9:15 pm	And if we were to take that Spanish away, how would we be able to communicate? There’s the script, and who among us modern day Filipino-Americans can read that? That script is not communicating with anyone but myself and people who can actually read it. And the Spanish is integrated so strongly into our modern Tagalog that we wouldn’t be able to communicate without it.  Then there’s the present-day: living in San Francisco in these multi-cultural communities we hear it. Spanish is as normal in every day life as English is. And looking to the future I ask, are we forging alliances?  Are we creating another lingua franca in which high, literary English is not any longer the norm, and that  language which oppresses the rest of folks who are not able to access that for reasons of lack of access to the institution, to the canon, to the university to the legal system, whatever.  The fact that we hold on to this really high English marks us as among the elite in our community, and we have to honor that. If I were to say, “no, I’m just gonna go ghetto now, I’m gonna leave behind my institutional upbrining, I’m gonna leave behind my university education, and I’m gonna be like one with the peeps”—that’s insincere and I’m not down with that. But at the same time, there is the language of the institution, and then there’s the language of the rest of the world, and we have to deal with and acknowledge the language of the rest of the world.    And the script?  Where did you learn it?   There’s a professor at Berkeley, Ben de Lumen, and he’s actually in the nutritional sciences department.  He was doing this as a side project because it was really fascinating to him.  He happened to be the vessel of knowledge at Berkeley about this script, and so when we started to see his work—and there was an article in the local paper about it—it was the first time I’d ever thought about Filipinos having their own alphabet.  And then I thought, why would that be so unusual.  Every culture in the world needs to be able to communicate amongst themselves, even those that primarily rely on oral traditions.  Even they need to have some kind of documentable system of communication.  So just realizing that Filipinos had an alphabet independent from the west—why should that be so revelatory and mind-blowing?  It should be a very natural thing, but it’s not because we’ve been so—I hate using the word colonized, it’s so strong and accusatory—but we’ve been so conditioned and taught to think that there’s no culture in the Philippines until the coming of the Spanish, that they gave us an alphabet, and they gave us religion.  No, no, every single culture has their own (26.23).  It’s just like learning any other system of language—you just write in it.  I don’t know if you saw my pictures on my blog with me just writing Alibata on everybody’s skin with a black sharpy at this party—it was so hilarious because people were saying, “what is that language?  It is so dope!” they’d never seen anything like that before. And again, it was this artifact, it was this exotic, foreign archaic artifact—in many ways it just is because it’s not used in modern Tagalog.   Is that the language [points to tattoo on Barabara’s arm] 27:28 (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006
5:05 am	Vernon Ng E210-Irish Poetry Laura O’Connor 4 December 2006 Empty Nests: Elegy and Anxiety in Seamus Heaney’s Clearances Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away! (Hardy 9-12) Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry Shall string some constant harmony,-- (Crane 20-21) Such attics cleared of me! Such absences! (Larkin 10) The elegy appears as an extension of a speaker’s discourse with a dead subject. The nature of this discourse is most interesting when we consider how it is an embodiment of the trends and ruptures in the speaker-subject relationship before the subject’s death. The history and the nature of this relationship are in question, and the elegy seeks, in large part, to address these issues. In Seamus Heaney’s elegiac sonnet-sequence to his mother, Clearances, the speaker’s relationship to his mother is laid bare. We can induce certain aspects of their relationship through a close analysis—we can understand the development of the speaker’s linguistic and tactile relationship with his mother, beyond her grave. The first poem in the sequence which appears as a personal epigraph, establishes tactility and generational transference as primary concerns for the speaker. It establishes the parallel, in the speaker’s mind, between domestic labor—in the form of coal breaking here—and literary pursuit (“[Striking] it rich behind the linear black,” [0, 9]). This parallel (or collapse, is you will), was first established by Heaney in his earlier poem “Digging,” when he claims he’ll dig with a pen instead of a spade, as his father and grandfather did. The fourth sonnet in Clearances figures as a template to read the speaker’s linguistic relationship with his mother. The section explicitly outlines the nature of linguistic practice he is expected to follow, according to his mother. The prescriptive nature of the mother’s opinion on speaking forces into conversation the rest of poem, and questions how the child has synthesized his mother’s advice. The work of this paper will concern the interaction between tactility (as a subject in the elegy) and linguistic practice, and what each tells us about the relationship between the speaker and his mother. Although the method will be primarily descriptive, the paper interrogates a psychological space. I question, first, the extent to which the speaker’s mother has allowed the speaker to view himself as separate from her, and, second, the extent to which the speaker’s mother has allowed the speaker to view himself as separate from others outside the mother-son system. A discussion of this poem as an exceptional member of the genre of elegy might be useful. In a certain sense, an elegy is marked as an instance of or coming-into-being of mourning. Mourning, in turn, is bound up as an instance of anxiety. In Clearances, it is apparent that anxiety figures neither as a topical concern of the speaker, nor as a mode of expression. In this way, the poem can be characterized as a rejection of imitative form. For example, a speaker’s obsession with a subject’s loss might be conveyed through obsessive formal repetition (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” for example (Bishop 1,6,12,18)), or a speaker’s desire to converse with a dead subject might cause the poem to take the form of direct discourse, as in the final stanza of Roethke’s “Elegy to Jane” (“If only I could nudge you from this sleep, / My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon” (Roethke 18-19)). Heaney’s refusal of this kind of writing is telling in a few important ways. We might interpret the common use of imitative form in elegiac poetry as an actualization of the poet-speaker’s desire to keep at bay the anxiety incurred by loss—by allowing the formal elements of a poem to mimic the content and thus underscoring a given emotion. Something much more complex is at work in Clearances, as Heaney subverts the impulse to dramatize through formal imitation. If not imitative, then what is the nature of the speaker’s anxiety? This question seems central to explaining how the poem figures into the genre of elegy, and more importantly, central to understanding the speaker’s relationship with his mother. Language   The fourth sonnet in Clearances comes closest to outlining the nature of linguistic anxiety in Clearances. “Fear of affectation made her affect / Inadequacy whenever it came to / Pronouncing words ‘beyond her,’” the speaker says of his mother (IV, 1-3). In this way, the speaker understands his mother’s habits of speech. There is more than a note of frustration when the speaker characterizes his mother’s practice in such instances as managing something “hampered” and “askew,” (IV, 4). The sonnet begins with an accusation of the mother. The mother’s linguistic practices are understood by the speaker as arising from “fear” (IV, 1). It is telling that the fear of one is “affectation,” or artificial behavior—the speaker is interrogating (for the audience and, perhaps, for himself) his mother’s contradictory behavior. Indeed, this is a potential cause for the speaker’s anxiety, and it is made even more apparent when he describes his mother’s comment as having more a note of “challenge than pride” (IV, 8). Given that the mother is speaking on her son’s knowledge (“You / know all them things”), it’s hard not to view the mother’s comment as an attack on the speaker’s difference and linguistic sophistication. With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well- Adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better… (IV, 8-12) The speaker’s response to this seems passive-aggressive. He concedes to his mother’s bidding, externally, but then makes a prescriptive statement about having to go against “what [he] knew better.” The word “betrayal,” sets the standard for the diction in the closing lines: …I’d naw and aye And decently relapse into the wrong Grammar which kept us allied and at bay. (IV, 12-14) Language is turned into a kind of futile war in which “wrong grammar,” oddly enough, is the only point of alliance. It’s important to note, also, that “at bay,” takes as its antecedent both mother and son—“wrong / Grammar…kept us…at bay,”—since “at bay” usually marks a unidirectional movement. The speaker is essentially sharing responsibility with his mother for the distance that exists between them. Jahan Ramazani, in Poetry of Mourning, suggests that the speaker’s betrayal of his mother’s linguistic code is itself modeled on her betrayal of her knowledge of proper middle-class parlance (Ramazani 355-56). Also, that “Betraying the mother’s linguistic code, [the speaker] repeats the child’s original betrayal of the mother for the symbolic order, a betrayal that he is now compelled to repeat in writing this poem,” (Ramazani 355). This is a forgiving reading of the speaker’s relationship with his mother, yet Ramazani fails to address the possibility of the speaker’s resentment toward his mother for provincializing her language, and for asking him to do so as well. However minimal the speaker’s resentment though, the mother’s linguistic code necessarily invokes some anxiety in the son. He can either accept it or reject it—and he chooses the former during this interaction, however critically and skeptically, in retrospect. Still, the situation serves as a precedent for the speaker’s subsequent linguistic encounters: up to and including the elegy itself. With the fourth sonnet in mind, the speaker’s anxiety plays out in very peculiar ways throughout the sequence. In the second sonnet, the speaker assumes the voice of his younger self and the voice of his grandmother in a manner befitting his mother’s teachings. Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone. The china cups were very white and big— An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug. The first four lines appear to be the sense-impressions of a young child. The sentence tend toward very simple subject-verb(-object) constructions: “linoleum shone there,” “brass taps shone,” and “the kettle whistled.” The effect is that speaker’s voice is matched to the time-period he is describing. The simplicity and sparseness of the memory flattens the speaker’s language, and causes him to momentarily lapse into a more primitive mode of description. Heaney here claims a stake in the heritage of Thomas Hardy’s The Self Unseen. In the description of his grandparents, we can almost substitute Hardy’s “She sat there in her chair, / Smiling into the fire,” (Hardy 5-6) for Heaney’s “grandfather is rising from his place / With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head,” (II, 10-11) without jeopardizing the tone of the poem. The parallel here is one of nostalgia, also. Hardy’s poem ends “Childlike I danced in a dream” and “Everything glowed with a gleam; / Yet we were looking away!” (Hardy 9, 11-12), framing the speech act as a critically retrospective. Both poems foreground the most visually striking sense-impressions; Hardy’s “Everything glowed with a gleam” compares to Heaney’s “linoleum shone. Brass taps shone” and “they sit down in the shining room,” (II, ) and— more to the point—both comment on how the gravity of the mannered events (given through sense-impressions) are known only in retrospect—Hardy laments, “Yet we were looking away!” while Heaney’s lament is preempted by the grandfather’s ejaculation “What is this? What is this?” (II, 13). Hardy’s poem, which shifts in voice and scene during the middle stanza, seems to shed light on the voice-shift in Heaney’s poem as well. The aforementioned child-voice becomes further articulated between lines four and six—from descriptive to prescriptive child-like language—then finally shifts back to the poet-speaker’s voice after the stanza break. “Sandwich and tea scone / Were present and correct,” suggests an understanding of some social code, where sandwiches and scones can be understood in terms of propriety (II, 4-5). At this point the speaker adopts and demonstrates his understanding of his elders’ social code. The sonnet continues, “The butter must be kept out of the sun,” and “don’t be dropping crumbs…Don’t reach. Don’t point,” (II, 7-8). The speaker has fully internalized certain castigations from his grandmother, presumably. Heaney leaves these statements as narrative statements—rather than enclosing them in quotes, or italicizing them—which suggests that the speaker is unable, or is unwilling to differentiate his speech from its source. The voice in the second stanza of the sonnet starkly contrasts the preceding stanza. Short, didactic sentences are thrown into relief by the long, descriptive sentence: It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead, Where grandfather is rising from his place With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head To welcome a bewildering homing daughter The single, complex sentence appears to mark the return of the author-speaker’s voice, rejecting purely remembered sense impressions, conveying instead a kind of mise en scene of the preceding stanza, relieving the audience from the claustrophobic conflation of voices and sense-impressions. A similar conflation occurs in the sixth sonnet, when the speaker recounts Holy Week masses from his childhood. Sentence fragments indicate a return to cataloging sense-impressions, as in “The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick. / Elbow to elbow,” (VI, 4-5) and “Dippings. Towellings.…Cruet tinkle,” (VI, 10, 12). The effect of this is to collapse the distance between the time of narration and the subject of narration. This itself represents an instance of anxiety on the speaker's part; the speaker's trend is to catalog sense-impressions when no human influence is immediately at hand. The impulse to catalog appears almost as a nervous response to a lack of narrative influence. Since the external voice in this poem is the disembodied one of the choir, the sonnet proceeds almost purely as an accumulation of physical and sonic observations. The responsorial psalm is incorporated into tapestry of the rhyme scheme--"As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul…" (II, 9) begins the rhyme which is completed in the eleventh line, while "Day and night my tears have been my bread." (II, 14) completes the rhyming couplet and ends the poem. Allowing the final words of the sonnet to be spoken by the psalmist--indeed, words from the Bible--is an even more acute manifestation of the speaker's anxiety. In this poem, the poet-speaker's voice seems to have escaped him. MORE In the next sonnet (VII) the speaker recovers his own voice--the functional narrative voice suffused into a poetic lament by the end of the sonnet. The subject of this section is the relationship of the speaker's parents as viewed through the scene of his mother's deathbed. The interaction between the parents is interrupted by the speaker before it even begins: "In the last minutes he said more to her / Almost than in all their life together," (VII, 1-2). The tone is certainly critical, and this comes from the speaker's frustration, perhaps, that his father did not say more during his "life together" with the speaker's mother. From this we can deduce that the speaker privileges speech, and considers a lack thereof to be a kind of deprivation. ‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad When I walk in the door…Isn’t that right?’ (VII, 3-5) What the father tells the mother constitutes the only direct quotation included by the speaker in Clearances. It's startling to note the morbidity of the father's speech. To paraphrase, the father is describing for his wife the interaction they are to have at her funeral mass to be held at New Row. The rhetorical situation might be described as a premature elegy. In one sense, the father's words are useless as we are later told that "She could not hear," (VII, 7). Communication is stripped of its functionality on several levels. The intended recipient of the father's words (his wife) cannot comprehend what he is saying, and besides, what is actually spoken resists functionality. Even if the mother could hear her husband, she couldn't actually believe that he is earnest in saying, "you'll be glad / When I walk in the door [of the church]." Of course, the father's speech act is intended to transcend the functionality of language. His words may serve no economic function, but instead seem to serve an emotional function for both the father and his children, who are "overjoyed" to witness the scene. On one hand, the father's speech seeks to redress his silence toward his wife "in all their life together,"; and on the other hand, the healing gesture of redress is understood and appreciated--however voyeuristically--by the children. "He called her good and girl," the speaker continues, stating first his judgment of his wife ("good"), then an assertion of their biological difference ("girl") (VII, 8). According to the narrative, these constitute the last two words spoken to the mother before she dies ("Then she was dead,") and complete what the speaker allows of his father's elegy-before-death (VII, 8). The shift from narrative to lyric, as it were, occurs between the ninth and tenth lines. The clear statement "The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned," (VII, 9) is completed by the much more vague "And we all knew one thing by being there," (VII, 10). The clarity in the ninth line can be attributed, in part to the colloquial use of the word "searching"; this is substituted for the grammatical "The [search] for a pulsebeat." The meaning of the second part of the sentence is obfuscated for several reason. First, the object of the clause, "one thing," cannot be linked to any single meaning--possibly, (1) it that serves as an antecedent to the cryptic "a pure change happened" (VII, 14) or is a postcedent to the communal knowledge that "she was dead." Second, the possible meaning of "one thing" is further obfuscated by the adjunct "by being there," (VII ), which implies that knowledge of the "one thing" completely depends on one's presence in the scene; this is problematic for the reader who cannot have physically witnessed the mother's death. And third, the conjunction creates the expectation that second clause logically tracks from the first one, which is not the case.   Before she even knocks. (II, 9-13) The kettle whistled. (II, 1-5) (Comment on this)
Monday, November 6th, 2006
1:37 am	Come Off I see his point in cutting the bells down, the naked tower, the day to day interjected. And noise, having taken shape and flight, preys on townspeople by way of church-path and field-path. The ears turned ragged. Meanwhile, the naked field, the earth, stamped flat, feet losing wonder in the over and over discovery of violent step. As if the brain were pulsing, the distorted industry of one mind stopped a minute, machine-music only, the beat— ghost of no mind for body or product. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 23rd, 2006
2:29 pm	Homo Sacer   Tall in the dark, nostrils stretch, and the dark mouth follows, and a breath of anise. This appears familiar, this study in the elongation of orifice. I know by clues people have agreed in secret to strip a man naked, bar a soft scapular on his back. Ghoul who offers harbor, curious and false—hip-bone shaking message-heavy with my ear to it— clear up this question made by your singing bone, the articulate muffled by stretch of skin. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
5:19 pm	Homo Sacer   Nostrils stretch tall in the dark, and the dark mouth follows, and a breath of anise. Intercourse, that study in the elongation of orifice, appears familiar. By induction, I know people have agreed in secret to strip a man naked, save a soft scapular on his back. Ghoul—bitch turned girl, offering harbor, curious, false—hip-bone shaking message-heavy with my ear to it— clear up this question made by the singing bone, the articulate muffled by stretch of skin. (Comment on this)
3:54 pm	Homo Sacer   Nostrils stretch tall in the dark; anise, dark mouth follows. Intercourse, that study in the elongation of orifice appears familiar. In filled-in memories, I know people have agreed in secret to strip a man naked, save a soft scapular on his chest and back. Ghoul—bitch turned girl, opening curious harbors where they’re needed; hips, and big bones under, swaying message-heavy— clear up this question made by the speaking bone, the articulate muffled by stretch of skin. (Comment on this)
3:44 pm	Homo Sacer Nostrils stretch tall in the dark— oil-dark, anise-dark mouth mimics. Intercourse, that study in the elongation of orifice is familiar, and mocks—and in filled-in memories, I know people have agreed in secret to strip a man naked, save a soft scapular on his chest and back. Ghoul, bitch turned girl, opening caves—curious harbor— where they are most needed; hips and big bones under, message-heavy, swaying heavy; clear up this question made by a speaking bone—the articulate muffled by stretch of skin. (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
3:30 pm	To claim a refund, readers who bought a copy of the book on or before Jan. 26 must submit proof of purchase. This will not be limited to a dated receipt however: hardcover buyers, who are entitled to a $23.95 refund, must submit page 163 (chosen at random, according to the source familiar with the negotiations); paperback buyers (entitled to $14.95) must send in the front cover of the book; those who bought the audio book ($34.95) will have to send in a piece of the packaging, and those who bought the e-book, at $9.95 apiece, must send in some proof of purchase. (Comment on this)
Monday, August 28th, 2006
12:41 am	Be ready, I said to myself, And I was. Beams appeared, Revealing not, instead, blinding me.   Three birds spoke to each other, And I understood what they said, Fully,   By their glances.   Be mindful, and I was.  If in a field I caught myself   Not among the stalks, I would sever a finger.   My hands are stumps, as long as I can Recall.  The birds, The birds have multiplied. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
12:34 am	When I see a young couple and I know that she’s sucking his dick—   and he’s feeling big about it,— how does one proceed   effeminate bodied, fatal minded, with too much in the drywall asking to be let out,   busted through— * I can hear the warbling birds’ ballyhooing their pleasure or their lack of concern.   Not bats tonight, low, lost in the once-new stucco geography, not tonight.   Save the owls for another. If you throw a mouse-sized thing in the air, at night, maybe a rock or a rubber ball… *   I hate movements toward unreasonable faith in God and the bottle. I will not stop. I hate   the idea of laziness in Mexico, Jewry in New York. I want to be better.       I hate and I hate and I hate. * I am in my body            and I’m within my rights. I am in my body, bundled telegraphy of nerves and nerves. I swear I am. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 22nd, 2006
5:42 pm	For Convenience, it started on the sidewalk where you spent most of the time throwing up. And spells,   and early morning stairwell cries adding up to the great miracle of me. But was it is it so I can retire, too, some time, far from what ails me, mom, which is to say, far from what I love?   A tight line runs through everything, through the kitchen, through white sneakers, curling around baseballs.   When a gemsbok pops out of its mother—that line, again, bunched up in afterbirth. And at barbecues, it’s a condiment on hot dogs; it’s not just anything   edible: it spikes at home when we’ve gone, I know.  It's menopause.   It’s thin, but it’s a land line, too, and a hair line; I don’t want to exclude things.   It’s a fault line.   Every time we say goodbye, it recedes so far it threatens to go  altogether. But it isn’t menacing, it just says, the line.  It always has something to say. It always has. (1 Comment |Comment on this)