7/7/08
voice snapped
7/2/08
Blessed Unrest
5/28/08
Three Rail Corner
5/26/08
the time has come soon forgotten
5/20/08
Crooner's Litany
5/18/08
Chamber
5/13/08
Hidden Games
5/5/08
Come morning, rotten morning...
5/4/08
Agitated Postures
4/29/08
Trick of Light
4/26/08
Trailed by a Curse
4/24/08
Faith in Resentment
4/10/08
A History of Sound from the Borderless World
4/9/08
Sieve of Melody
4/8/08
Weight of Return
3/30/08
Endless Joke
Both of us, he said, play before an oblivious audience. Yours are too consumed with their next station, in Eile, rushing onward to where their pleasure & pain await them. Mine are the near-dead, papyrus-skinned, deaf, compulsively wetting the roofs of their mouths, waiting for the Word, embittered over the failed promises of their pension plans. We play for ourselves. With ourselves. But if an audience is oblivious, truly oblivious, he replied, then they're not an audience. Just people happening by & no one can expect any more or less from them. Are you only playing for yourself? In a church, aren't you playing for someone else? Someone who you know is listening? Mortals may be oblivious, but you've captivated the infinite. I don't play for anyone but myself, the organist said, if I did, then the music would have no direction. No force. Plagued by distractions. Certainly not for God. If I wanted to play for an idol, I would do it for one worth believing in: money, sex, posterity. The moment you humbly present something beautiful, something you've pieced together out of pure humiliation before the infinite, it dismantles it with unworldly tact, then spits it back in your face. Maybe then you should present it with pride. The organist told him he had nothing to be proud of & that he wanted to keep it that way. He lives out of a suitcase. Has a wife that posts pictures of their dead son on the walls of her room, pointing to them, laughing silently to herself. Once she wrote with lipstick when will the joke be up? on her bathroom mirror. When the asylum worker tried to wipe if off, she bit him in the arm. He told him he played at a Russian Orthodox church in the West that reeked of death. They lit hundreds of candles to hide the stench. Incense & petal water. Nothing. Only when the doors finally close after the last congregant, will the church smell once again of an empty tomb.
3/17/08
Far Cry & Fugue
3/14/08
Abandon All Vision...
When he crossed into the East, the pain had gone away. Strings first plucked with numb fingers, trying to crawl through the music. Elated, the apostle of idiocy, leaning against the wall of the station, tapping his foot where feet passed, the cross-hatched streaks & prints & pummeled cigarettes. Street raised, naked in the sharp air skimming off the trainyard. Eyes closed, he pealed out Not Fade Away & slapped his hand on the guitar. What was the chorus again? Love is love or love is real? He always forgot the chorus. But if love is love, then doesn't that mean love is real? He clapped his hands over his head & stomped in the dirt, making true his promise to sift away with all the others, those loved & those rustled against in narrow aisles. Some coins rang in the case & strangers danced. He didn't need to open his eyes. The world being all that is heard. He crouched down on one knee, began humming while trying to fashion from memory the melody the Turkish kid had woven but it soon spiraled beyond his fingers so he stuck to the scales he knew, singing you gotta walk that lonesome valley all by yourself & no one here can walk it for you. His sweaty hands slid down the neck & he lost grip of the trembling, taken away from the pulse of her body.
3/10/08
Sifting Paths
3/8/08
Torn Voice
He was riding around on his bicycle, trying to find a pay phone to answer about a possible gig next week. Coasting from one busted booth to one unlit corner of piercing glances till finally finding a dial tone, then remembering that he had no money. First things last. Day once again depleted of direction. A host of hours among which he was too fearful & fickle to command. A pang in his stomach but he didn't budge & got back on, riding down the bike path along the sidewalk. The sun breaking through again. A guy walking his bike on the path. On his shoulder, people strolling by. He had to skim through, almost hitting the guy & asked what the hell the problem was. The guy answered in English, telling him to suck it. He slid his bike around, let it fall gently to the ground & walked back over to the guy & asked him what he'd said. The guy kept repeating nothing, nothing, keep on going. What'd you say, mother fucker, he asked again. The guy’s bike stood between them. He leaned over, asked louder. I said nothing. Keep going. The guy calmly walked on. He stood on the sidewalk. The wheel of his own bike still spinning. Breathless, bargaining with the pain inside. You haven't done that since you were kid, wrestling the Patchett brothers in their backyard, scratched like girls until fists started to fall. Words would never set you off. Failed to see their magic when spoken by fools & violence is the ruin of many a night. Proud of nothing yet beholden to pride. Frail voice of youth. People who had gathered moved on. He got back on the bike & went home & plundered his roommate's room for loose change.
Fearless Symmetry
Fiction too often betrays the reality of time & being. Or perhaps we allow it to, we initiate this betrayal by our need for symmetrical, operatic narratives, destinies strung on a bow. Are they attempts to deny the nature of existence? How can satisfaction be gained from disregarding the chaos of life, the halting progression of time, cyclical patterns, moments of amnesia & blinding clarity? Narrative is not mechanical or even logical. If it creates suspense or metes out resolutions, it does so spontaneously, on numerous occasions & sometimes the resolutions turn out to be cataclysmic & sometimes the suspense is a cold hand in a movie theater. Narrative clenches, expires, bursts & hiccups infinitely. Fiction should embody that infinity, that impossibility. That's where the engagement, the seduction of the drama lies. The organic imprint of eternity. Each work of fiction self-generates its own narrative logic: ideally, a logic which devours itself whole. Fiction that establishes its own rational scheme & then asystematically disassembles it in a dance or trance-like fashion. Discovers then dismisses the laws of its universe, opting instead for a form of intoxicated gnosticism. The writer chooses to have no faith in the logic of his work. He cannot depend on its structure. He renounces reason as language unspools before him. Like a hermit who long ago lost faith in god but who remains cave-bound, blissfully entangled in his own visions.
3/6/08
A Card In Hand Keeps the Devil Away

A bar on a street with a name that changes according to who you ask. Quiet as an embarrassed child. The steel moon smelted: a molten drop. He lost a game of chess to Der Alte Mann who bought him a beer anyways. Forever consoling. Since neither knew the other's language, they sat & drank. Across the bar a girl with purple hair & a dog collar slapped a man. Pool balls breaking. He started carving small letters into the leg of the table with his pocket knife. Drizzle outside. Der Alte Mann slumped in the booth with palm on belly, rising & falling. Hairs in his heaving gray beard stained yellow. fear spits the soul out. He walked home & realized he had no money. All that was left in his wallet was a three of hearts. Peasant card. Worth its name when the hand is strong. But starved & cowling in isolation. Had enough food to last until Friday. Ride the trains when he needed to by sliding in, watchful of men with grim faces, cheeks always the same beet red, who would try to weasel a ticket out of him by claiming he's a criminal. How do you talk yourself out of it, bumbler of words? Half-drunk, his scratched glasses hazed in the dust & sweat. Enough excuses & a look of earnest dread & you can slip through anyone's fingers.
3/5/08
Transmigration
The stranger crosses into the city, wanders thru streets whose names he can hear reverberating off his bones, sinking down, rubbing against the words that have nourished him like a cruel father with a bent spoon & a book spread over his lap, luminous with markings that spill across the page like sand. A thousand steps & the river’s murmur fades, the streets narrow, each face in the passing windows darkens beneath huddled shoulders as the smell of beef & dumplings
seeps from gratings. When he crosses into a city that will never lower its unwelcoming guise, he approaches the unthinkable—that instant when the life he can hardly recall blurs & becomes overtaken by the life of one who was born there. The prisoner of a language that will never be shaken from the tongue far from a river whose light will never cease to sear the eye.
seeps from gratings. When he crosses into a city that will never lower its unwelcoming guise, he approaches the unthinkable—that instant when the life he can hardly recall blurs & becomes overtaken by the life of one who was born there. The prisoner of a language that will never be shaken from the tongue far from a river whose light will never cease to sear the eye.
2/27/08
Lessons on Falling for the Risen
After she left, he read the rest of the chapter. It ended with a young man, the son of the book's patriarch, burning down a silo in the middle of a field. Even though he was finally able to remember the cast of characters & could disentangle the conflicting destinies that arced through the a span of what must've been centuries, he still had no idea what was going on. Whether the language had any command over the beings that killed, fucked & betrayed in that world crudely rendered. Those sprawling sentences he would have to stop in the middle of just to exhale only to forget where he was, what had taken place, who had been redeemed & who cast away & begin once more. He read the same few pages, saw the same silo burning several times on the parched hill before coming to some closure that could set him wandering. His chest weightless in the dwindling light, a few spectral hours, as he rolled near the river with beer in hand & played his guitar on the cold grass. Some Turkish kids ran over & he let them play it. One kid played & the rest laughed & whistled. He handed it over to another, a scrawny kid with a mouthful of twisted teeth, whose fingers danced like spiders over the strings. He sang what sounded like a lullaby for the damned & unraveled melodies unheard of as the rest fell into a trance. After the kid finished, he handed the guitar back & thanked him with a solemn smile.
2/25/08
Or Wonder By a Few
2/24/08
Scattered Cues
The roommate left early the next morning: he was giving tennis lessons to elderly women at some pre-fascist recreation club in the Tiergarten. The girl came in the kitchen with her hair knotted & eyeliner caked in the corners of her eyes. She asked him if he wanted to get some coffee & they walked to a cafe down the street & she told him that his friend was a child who is trying to attain manhood by manipulating the women in his life, convincing himself that they dance to his cues & will always comfort his distress. She said that she was letting him do the same to her but that she was aware of it & could easily distance herself from the abuse & witness his delusional games with a detached fascination. She talked for another hour as he listened & right before she left to go to work, the wind blew off the squares of napkin paper she had torn & piled at the edge of the table.
2/23/08
Some May Call It Void
He was sleeping in a kitchen in the West during that tail-end-time of the summer when the leaves begin to rot, renting it from a friend who was sleeping in the bedroom of the apartment. At night he sat on a broken bench near the window in his underwear, distracted from the book in his hand by the contorted images that unwound in his head of some old house on a hill, steam rising off a river, splashes of otherwise silent toads. He reached this hallucinatory state every night before sleeping, finally lying on the floor when he couldn't open his eyes any more. As long as he could sleep immediately & not listen to the purr of the refrigerator beside his head, the sound of the roommate's grunts as he fucked the girl he was seeing at that time. He also couldn't bear the pain in his stomach from eating only bread & butter until the pieces clogged up his intestines so that he was walking around with two weeks worth of bread in his stomach, enough to feed a glutinous church congregation. During the day he would wander around streets half-drunk with plenty of excuses to talk up older women who basked in the waning light of sidewalk cafes. Ask them if they thought the world was getting more chaotic or if we were only getting worse at enjoying chaos. Drink up what other people left in their glasses at the bar. Stare at the swans that skated under the bridge. Waiting for them to open their eyes & dip their heads. Coming back home so many nights through the cemetery, sometimes hearing the rain still fall through the trees onto the headstones. One night he returned to find the American girl & his roommate leaning out the window in the kitchen, spilling some champagne on the ledge, some on the mattress & sheets on the floor. They passed the bottle to him & he took a few sips & with his guitar he began singing "Mean Old World" by T-Bone Walker as the girl dangled her naked leg out the window & the roommate swayed his head.
2/21/08
Fragile Defense
Do you realize that I'm a fragile man? I'm not a warrior like some or a hero like few because I would never know which idea I'm fighting for.
2/20/08
Self-axis
Self-consciousness, self-awareness, whatever you wanna call it, is advocated & even championed as a path towards being a more fulfilled individual, someone who seeks out those experiences in life that count among the most enriching & rewarding, someone who "knows what they want" & pursues it with fervent dedication. Such awareness is often synonymous with authenticity, another rung on the ladder of individual expression & understanding. It also affords one a better grip on the ethical repercussions of their actions, how they can achieve a better relationship not only towards themselves but also towards others, thus becoming a more responsible citizen or lover, mother or daughter. Self-consciousness or self-awareness also inhibits the individual. When one is more aware of what one does, one often is given over to doubting oneself, questioning motives & actions & thereby resisting spontaneous expression, intuitive responses & creative choices. Artists who question their choices too often tend to drain their creations of life force, immediacy & effectiveness & yet an artist who fails to question their choices can create sloppy remnants of ego-maniacal episodes. I am by no means claiming that a balance between the two is the type of harmony that each individual should strive after. I am the last person to have faith in a balance between any two seemingly opposed elements. I often like my world-views crooked & ungainly, my concepts asymmetrical & my art discordant.
2/19/08
As if he didn't hear...
The rain was too much of a coward to fall steadily, to bear down on the city, ravish it with its rhythms. Only bouts of grayness spreading over the buildings, through the lindens & across the eaves. Cars like whispers in the mist. He walked around trying to pretend as if he didn't hear the tension in the voices that emerged from the blindness all around him, the wrath that reared up from each vagrant call, each motherly admonition, the unfathomable pleas to a sky so long blanketed in its own petty tears that no pitch could rouse the light to release itself over the bodies that groped down the street as if it were a tunnel unto the gate of dawn.
2/17/08
Mumblings
I wake up. Open up the window to the courtyard. Standing there with the cold on my skin.
She mumbles something from the bed, wrapped up in the sheets, still asleep. The light does
not fall through the clouds. The cold only seeps deeper. She says my name, then speaks of a
city whose name I've never heard before. Pigeons scatter across the sky. I stand there until
the cold burns then turn away from the window & crawl back in bed, ready again to taste her
poison.
2/12/08
The "poem" about the "Poet"
I once wrote a poem for a "poetry workshop" called "The Poet." I was inspired to write it out of sheer frustration, vitriol & childish pleasure after being subjected to the masturbatory monologues of the "resident poet," the "facilitator of the workshop" during the first "session." The poem that I wrote was composed of a series of blunt statements: "The Poet licks Mayakovsky's asshole," "The Poet is a bum disguised as a lecher," etc. The other "participants" in the workshop, those gathered around the rickety table in a moldy chamber of untouched poetry books, didn't quite know how to a muster a response, drained as they were of all inspiration after having listened to an hour of poems & their subsequent "critiques," or "readings." They made their rounds of inane comments, stamped their feet, their fists, expressed total confusion, utter indifference. A few friends had joined me for this workshop & were trying to hide their laughter with their hands. I sat there dead still, a poker-faced charlatan. The "resident poet" offered up his "critique" then excused himself, scampering off to the toilet. A girl at the end of the table with permed bangs that jostled over her eyes said, "I just don't understand what you're trying to do. Do you? Maybe you could help me, help us understand." Maybe I could've, now thinking back on it, but then I wouldn't be able to see my friends trying to hide their laughter in a ship of fools.
2/11/08
Frail Refutation
I would leave, but I don't know a better place to live in this world, at this hour, during these wretched days. I've never left a place without first having a vision of where to go. I couldn't even consider another life without the hazy hope of a better place to dwell & wander around in circles. I have no other city on the hill. No other language I'd like to hear & recoil from not in horror of the language itself, but in the self-realization that I have no will to let it speak through my soul, to be possessed by it, housed within it. No, I've been suckling too long on the mother tongue: my mouth is petrified according to its sometimes dour tonalities, its wave-like pulsations & phrasal fluidity. Where would I go? Where would I begin again? Armed only with the knowledge that I can abandon any place without reason or that I can forget as easily as I can walk away & that both come second-nature to me? I would leave, but I don't know where else I would suffer so gracefully, where else I could learn the art of careless living, where patterns fail to apply, where lightness of being is passed around on a mirror, where I could spend months anticipating the next transformation & realize that I just underwent a dozen of them.
2/5/08
Radical Performance
If a man is being willingly dragged down the road by another man, is that a performance? If everyone passing by deems it a "performance," then it's OK to walk on, laugh, smirk, or admire such radical histrionics. If it's a performance, then it automatically has no tangible effect, or is thought to have no tangible effect. But a snapped spine or bloody hand is an effect of a series of actions & yet it's deemed a "performance" just as a play would be, or a musical act. Of course, pedestrians might yell, raise a fit, tell the "performers" to "take it somewhere else" like to a pre-ordained performance space, a place where rituals are enacted beneath the security of concrete ceilings, barricaded by rows of cushioned seats & surrounded by a wall of benumbed gazes. An element of drama is distilled from a theatrical performance. The audience has agreed to participate in the event & therefore the chances of total surprise are minimized. They expect drama & are not as affected when it occurs. Whereas when performances are enacted in streets or in other frequently stultifying environments, then surprise is maximized, pedestrians automatically become audience members & are hurled into a thicket of emotional responses that've they neither prepared for nor have much control over. Drama is reinstated. The most effective performances are those that redefine the very nature of performance, that turn citizens immediately into audience members, that truly dramatize their daily lives where the rituals of urban motion crash into the rituals of a spontaneous performance.
2/4/08
Notes to a Testament (Part III)
I’ve made my admonishments against fear & I don’t regret being admonished every time in return. Just for the pure abuse of it. To be rattled, knocked around before the lifeless gazes of my compatriots & enemies, or no audience at all if my demise is enacted upon such blissful grounds. Wagging my finger at the thorn in my side. This is not the way to go, friends, but it’s undeniably preferable to being humiliated by a sleeping beast than by one you’ve roused with the sheer will of your words. I know I’ve lured fear before into the only space where my body stays tethered to the floor, where my breath’s unleashed at syncopated intervals. Full heave, cough, tremble & expulsion. Am I fighting against a force which should only be met with renunciation? Before you personify your own inner devices of immolation, remember that the steadiness of your sanity hangs in the balance.
2/3/08
Notes to a Testament (Part II)
1/22/08
Notes to a Testament
I told them I would dance on graves only if the weather was right & if the rain was light enough & slid down my arms like honey. This is a not pastime for the frivolous, those "ill at ease" with the sound of such steps, the travesty of such rhythms as the auburns slacken on the hillside. Empty tombs upon which I dance which reverberate to the side-step, the Newport skip, the shreds of a mazurka remembered from childhood days when the family maid rolled through a few numbers on the Wurlitzer in the living room as the lace curtains billowed & Mother was in bed, nursing the fever that accompanied her soul like a shadow in each of its debilitated permutations. Hollow as the music of this earth. When the dirt beneath your shoes clouds in the headlights fanning out over the nameless graves, the lanky grass, the path that leads to the gated white house. Sing
the music of this earth, nervous son, as the rain beautiful beyond any memory bounces off the stones.
the music of this earth, nervous son, as the rain beautiful beyond any memory bounces off the stones.
1/20/08
At play, the night
I think I can remember the rules of the game. I just don't remember how those rules are carried out. Who declares the winner? Whether I should sacrifice myself rather than accept defeat? What the symbols mean on the board? How this porcelain sword is supposed to move across the black & green squares? I can pretend like I remember. Answer to no one. Continue with my cracked shield until sacrifice is the most advantageous option & no victor, now matter how felicitous his spirit, shall witness my dissolution.
The rules are never remembered. They become elements of a fantasy no one dares call into question.
The rules are never remembered. They become elements of a fantasy no one dares call into question.
1/15/08
Strong Odds
Colleagues gather to play poker each Thursday night in the basement of a bar. Their haggard, expressionless faces hunched over in the smoke. But even a novice observer can sense the anxiety welling up in their eyes. The sudden scratching of the shoulder. Fingers rolling on the table's edge. After all, each man but one will lose almost the entirety of his week's earnings. Each man but one will stumble home, imagining scenarios of revenge and redemption. Every week, the same man takes home their wages. 7 years of playing and not one game has slipped through his fingers. He sits at the table with a wide grin during the entire game. The same grin no matter the status of his hand or the confidence projected by the others. He never folds. And even when he's lost all but a few dollars, his smile remains, and he stays in until the game is his again. The others have grown to accept the inevitability of losing, and yet they begin each game with the same crude jokes, the same excited gestures as if the outcome is and will always remain undecided.
1/8/08
Two Hallucinations
1/2/08
redemption is another drug

Snow buried what remained of last night's fireworks. Then melted, coursed down the streets in muddy ripples. It's been longer than you can remember since you had a night that you couldn't remember. Why you wake up missing your jacket and smelling of vomit in an apartment overlooking a rutted field, rows of abandoned buildings. What the unseen sun hasn't thawed. On the street of Invalids. In a city rearing up for apocalypse.
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