another class poem

too self-centered to be suicidal:
"if you take me away, what is there?"

with a pure love for his physicality,
the question of death will come up differently.

what drives this logic?
shunting blame.

a remnant of the nobility
will have to take up an occupation.

a question of responsibility;
can it be a question of comfort?

he doesn't have to worry about social conventions.
but he does.

he can't really pick up his pen.

written during class with words from class its called Against the Grain

celebrate what is man made over what is natural
modern muse of impotence.
accumulation of lists: tiring, exhausting,
a barrier around oneself.
inter-breeding,
incestual poetry,
never-ending mimesis.
boredom: the effeminate father of all vices.
rejection of the classical, the Christian, the Enlightenment:
an inventory of decadence.
lavish indulgences can only temporarily relieve this boredom.
sodomy: another exquisite pleasure.
being fed up the ass: against the grain.

god is truth.

relativistically, god is about truth.
the characters serve their own type of good.
that's what the author does.
the same words over and over again.
he hates his immortality.
the cat just hangs out on the cover of the book.
obvious nonsense.
caesar wasn't eternal. he wasn't even necessary.
believe in the state, fundamentally.
but you can't really put your trust in the truth, anyway.
do you even know where it is?
give it metaphysical content, this creature.
have a walk on a beam of light.
he has light, and the master has peace.
there's a difference.
the narrative transcends life.

<(*-* <)

another found in class poem, this time from english literature III

connected by the same vessels,
eulogy is parallel to musing
within the context of funerals.

on an average day, an open-endedness
is where you are headed.

the framework is a little confusing.
why am I writing about this now?

go somewhere and write about it.
why am I exploring this now?
a genuine quest - who are you?

two models of beauty and the possibility of humor.
are you scared of it?

one of the best insults is a joke.
reach for the easiest word and use it.

we have to see your eyes, your eyelashes, your lips.
realization: you don't have to answer to insults.

yes, I did completely ruin this process.
and it will be handed down from mother to daughter.
thank you, inner turmoil.

nothingness can be overwhelming,
but set up your point of view.

you are bit at ease in the world,
which is a reflection of you in the deprived landscape.

interspersing of really sensitive moments
with mundane bar troubles.
ambivalent aesthetic sensibility is fine.

finding out in a public atmosphere that people actually care about you.
but you're giving it away, looking at the landscape, trying to fall in love with it.

this is not a linear narrative.
why am I asking this question now?

all of these poems are composed of words spoken in my classes selectively edited

CLASS POEM ONE: Japanese literature
falling into his own trap
did you catch what I just did?
drastic:

contrast aware of contrast
toe any party line, imperial in-between.
I cannot do this and I cannot do that
and it is creepy, image of distress.
choose to climb out if you could
and then five and then ten
and then thirty.

directly in the imagery,
he has a flag and he stands out (in his imagination)
distanced and elevated - insignificant refrain
of smoke, visible and invisible.

permanent stasis is the idea of death
as forever, not single moment remained.

no, skeptical Ko-san, you don't have to
stand out from the crowd of flag-carrying other folks
that represent the purpose of what we are fighting for:
opting to end our lives for the greater good.

CLASS POEM TWO: Japanese literature continued
he would stand on War
if only he knew more about it.
inconsequential details don't separate this reverie from this brutal reality.

dogs of War, no one can tell what I was thinking.
why would I be afraid?
they can't see what I'm thinking.
transparency doesn't exist.
tease until our intentions are made real.
no one will pick up on the little things.
total purging of our private intentions
a more complex figure if he were not to debate.

is this selling it short?
john mccain for president.
a lie.

aaaaaarrggggahhhhhhhhhh. universal suffrage.

suffrage. the right to vote.
that has nothing to do with what i am about to write down here.
sometimes i feel like, emotion.
it is a strong one. it envelops me. swallows me whole.
like a weight in between my shoulder blades, pushing me towards the earth.
a heavy weight champion on my back. a boxing title to beat me down.
i get so close to falling sometimes. but i've managed to stay on my feet, stumbling.
my toes digging into the soil to hold their ground, maintain balance.
the only problem is, then, that i get muddy feet. grit coating them, eventually drying and caking.
like atlas i try to keep my head raised, my arms stretched out above my head, holding it there. trembling.
sometimes i get an itch somewhere on my body. that's when it's really hard to do.
but i try, anyway.

what is happening to america

what exactly is happening to the old united states of america? a black man is about to be elected president? william buckley's son endorsed barack obama? seven years have passed since 9/11 and the terrorists still haven't let off a nuclear device in one of america's metropolitan area?

i cant tell if america is getting better or not? i want a black president. i want conservatives to have no idea what is going on with their political party. my dad is a lifelong conservative republican and he thinks he might vote for barack obama. christopher buckley (son of the godfather of the conservative movement- william buckley) endorsed obama. this is a guy who wrote for his dad's ultra conservative magazine, the national review. next colin powell will endorse obama and we will finally be out of iraq.

the iraq war has been the big event that has marked my slow but steady decline into adulthood. everyone thought iraq was an amazing idea in 2003 and then 3 years later we decided it sucked but we stayed there anyway. over 4,000 of my fellow countrymen have died, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of iraqis who have died (funny how we always forget about them). and yet no one seems to really give a fuck, we just keep spending billions and billions of dollars on the war and killing more and more people.

supposedly things are working out in iraq now. the "surge" has worked, from what they say. i dont really give a fuck. john mccain seems to think it was so great that we stayed there and killed more people and that he seems willing to claim all responsibility for whatever victory there appears to be to some people. i think we should leave.

and when the first black man gets elected president thats exactly what will happen. we will get the fuck out of there. thats why i liked obama from the beginning, because hes the only big-time, running for president politician who had the balls to be against the war back before it started. i feel like i can trust him.

but i still dont know whats happening to america? is it getting better? or are the good old american values still there too? we still seem to love capitalism and imperialism and patriotism and all the other isms. we just call them all different names.

maybe we should call america by a different name now.

this is a subjective translation of way a poem called ja nao me importo by fernando pessoa sounds

jesus gnawed me improperly;
a tear comfy quietly amorously creeps away
soon, navigate quiet cheap amble-y ports
every curt movement ameliorates stars

nevada needs rest.
dole quiet glances over aching,
checkered differences.
come far and pour lazy aid to the irate;
indifference.
a quick search for supine heat can mould such
fits of gentleness.
quiet me, den of roses eating separate dens of roses!

coming undone is hard.
in caves sense and ponder very
secretly every seeming
dead or other vapor.

end solely new and consecrated!
only quell the bright trap
of subtle mundanity.

"all-from, none-into"

In the time before sleep,
between the medicine, the worry -
the idea that I cradle some kind of feeling
in this belly, this crater where I have
hidden countless sighs and
terminated statements, glad to be,
at last, the secret-keeper.

The eyelids, so heavy lately,
the sun drags on them,
and I comply, let it make shapes
in the darkness when I let them close.
I lay in the grass and feel the earth
warmed, the grass cool, the whole thing
welcoming, sensuous.
I abide, I abide.

I accept the actual, I live there
in a house I?ve built for myself
from days in murk and
misgivings, from the stable boughs
of my present future and from a little
of that fine moss I found one day
while appreciating things.

this one time...

so i was sitting on this hill, right?
well, i guess it wasn't really a hill. it was more like a knoll.
and, anyway, i was looking at this huge tree. like, a HUGE tree.
there were no leaves on it, because it was winter and there was snow everywhere, too.
and its branches were liked twisted vines of barbed wire reaching up to the sky.
i was like, "woah." and then looked at the ground in front of me for a while, just a patch of brown in all the snow.
i started getting cold, but i didn't feel like going in. and then i started to shiver in little spurts. like all of a sudden i would go "brrr" with my whole body, and then it would stop really quickly.
i looked around some more, and every 20 seconds or so everything would shake. because i was shivering. but then after a while of that, i was shivering continuously so i went back inside. i was a little upset with my mind because i couldn't control my body against the cold.
and, yeah.

a short history of the civil war

so this still-young nation that was based on equality and liberty and all that

french revolution bullshit

is, of course, based on brutally subjugating people to make lots of money.

and there is polite, but firm disagreement about whether or not this discrepancy is

acceptable. After tense compromises are made between the two sides there is a small but bloody insurrection that foreshadows the whole thing and then wham!

a bitter war is begun with idealistic trumpets, naïve tactics, pomp and even ceremony.

all this immediately ends in awkward chaos and five endless years of death.

the presidents and generals get more clever as the graveyards fill

and one side wins and proclaims its universal moral superiority

and then proceeds to get rich by subjugating the people they defeated

and the people they said they would liberate, but in more polite ways.

a guy in a chair was wheeling himself
up the hill that i was walking down
and i felt a slight pride for life
not for my own
but for all the people in chairs
who wheel themselves
up and down hills

all my poems are the same

she walked over to it and swung open the door
it creaked on its hinges

15-syllable 6 line poem

today i saw a ship sail out of the harbor of my heart
it went floating on, out of my sight and out of my mind's eye.
now i could no longer perceive this ship but i could still feel
the blushing pregnant brides and the nervous elder wives and the
wizened old men just waiting for my fall out of their God's grace.
i could still feel the weight of their looks and i trembled with fear.

crenshaw at king

Sinking ships in
sucking turbines.
Clouds and winds As
Margery drips.

The Gargling saints
Abide the pipe,
Bang, echo of
The churning tide.

Former demons
Convert divine

there is no certainty in anything but the depth of silence
so stamp your feet and scream

State of the Blog Address:

Ah yes i am so witty. Not really. This blog started like six months ago and there have been some good things posted on it. Really good things. Somebody thats not lazy should make a zine out of the best hits. I think this blog may be near the end of its run. If five people leave comments on this entry saying its time to retire then this blog will retire and there will be no new entries. I love you guys. Kiss Kiss Hug Hug

Two minutes later:

Nevermind.

two fifty two
its two fifty two
the minute is now over
never to be had agian
forever
The Pixies Rock!
hey Duncan

for a time, there was nothing. nothing was discernable from any vantage point. and not just in any of the major cities, but even in the woods and by the rivers and in the valleys there was still nothing. there was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt. there was a source of knowledge, and authority, and it made the world work. we played imaginative games that echoed the principles we could see in this safe security - the good guys and the bad guys, us and them.

then there were lots of teachers, both good and bad. there is huge world that many people have tried to understand, and over time through refining those ideas we have a better idea of how the world works for more complicated, more mystifying reasons, reasons we can only understand a small part of one field of all the reasons. we were gonna have to think real hard and real long after listening to a ton of other people who had thought real hard and real long. if we got real lucky and were real smart and clever and dedicated we could maybe get to disprove the way other people said it was over years of long and hard work writing scholarly articles and making proofs. because what all those people before us had said had helped to make the world work all that time we hadnt been around for, so it had to mean something. it had to have made the world work. we played ominous games about destruction in plentiful, peaceful settings, in plush chairs, in comfortable living rooms.

then there was the internet. suddenly there were these discernable figures writing on blogs. i wrote in my blogs and you wrote in your blogs and they wrote in their blogs - or if not, livejournals, or facebooks, or myspaces, or forums, or message boards, or instant messenger, or e-mail, or youtube videos, or art on the internet, or songs or anything else. there were distant discernible figures. they offered explanations (often explanations of how other people's explanations didn't quite add up) of how the world must have worked because they were a part of the new way that the world works. the internet is the new way the world works. and so some blogger, speaking only through his blog and his e-novel and then later his printed works, which are the same thing except they are in print, and so now this blogger tells me how the world works, because he tells a story of the world that radically contradicts other world views and yet rings true for us, or at least, some of it does for some of us some of the time. his blog doesn't oppose the new republic or the new york post or the chicago sun-times or the british broadcasting corporation. now they all tell us how the world works. now we play guessing games about complex equations with lots of variables that we don't know the math behind. we play games of negation or of affirmation. we play games of who is right, of who gets what.

why do we play so many games?

write more stuff!

The windows have dozed off.
The night thick as paint
eases the smoke from your
cigarette down the Hudson.

The moon a silver dollar,
something to look at
while far off footsteps say,
“I wish you weren’t here,
I wish you weren’t here.”

The body by the bank of the river,
some wet movement sound,
the trees too still to investigate,
you are contented.

“I’ll lie here awhile
and talk with you,
the branches are loose and running
over the oil paint sky.”

I wish you weren’t here
I wish you weren’t here.

tickle my fancy

i started a blog.
because i am bored
and all my friends are back at school
it's not literary, or anything at all, really
it's whatever tickles my fancy
but the URL for that name was taken
so it is:
http://tickleourfancy.blogspot.com
i'm probably going to forget about it in a couple days
though.
which reminds me.
if you're ever feeling like listening to music that is good (most of the time)
and that i am into and have chosen myself to add to this list
that everyone can listen to then go to this.

i'd rather walk dogs for a living

at a desk
decorated with a heap of old newspapers
and a phone
buttons dirty with the marks of all the people
who punched its digits
sits one without a care in what he sees
lack of interest,
apathy,
are his motivators
how long will it be
before
?

an exercise in prose that just stops

but the worst thing about it was the all-pervasive SOMETHINGness of the place, the cold shimmery air and the feeling that spiders were always nearby. everything and its confusing din and clatter all the time. particularly the clocks - dear merciful god they get you going! the bourgeois juxtaposition of samovars and gongs and hd tv and rooms filled with old books about all the things that had been destroyed in this place, with norman rockwell prints and a dog's head proudly smiling in a decorated general's uniform that william blake might have drawn after a nightmare.
this divebombing approach to life where you give it a heavily weighted single shot and then after that you either hit it or you get shot up. metaphor doesn't mean anything. if divebombing and divebombers were eliminated from our society, our ills would be ameliorated, McMeals put on our tables, worries taken out of our heads.
our aims are not aimless, but our aims might be off. this is not to say that i am not guilty. that i do not listen to the kinks like i read geofferey chaucer. and that i do not go liquor stores and get carded. and that i can rarely live in the moment. and that i

listen, sir
i am PISSED OFF
it's like when you (me, they) are driving
behind a slow ass car
and the fucking road is curvy
and you can't just
ACCELERATE
and pass them (you, me).
it's like we're sitting there,
exhausted from the fight
but we still have a little fire left
so we decide that, clearly,
the best decision would be
to SHOOT each other's motherfucking heads off.
but listen a second,
i'm dead tired,
my wings are tied nicely with a satin ribbon that doesn't slip off
(an oxymoron),
and i just don't want to take the next step.
so i won't.
i am not going to budge, move,
or exponentially increase my velocity.
sorry.
i love you and everything, but like you said,
i am right.
(was that a lie? somtimes your truthful lies make me doubt myself.)
i wish you were a tow truck.

8.

lots of gas is leaking
from my car.
why can't i elope
with random people

I see in other automobiles
I pass. maybe I should go
buy a pack of reds with
my paycheck money.

or maybe I should
buy some blueberry haze.
would you smoke it?
I know you would.

I might hide in a box.
a cardboard box.

7.

it is 3 PM.
how many more hours do i have
before I take my Seroquel so it can
sedate me. it shivers down

my spine and numbs up my leg
and then it tells me
"goodnight."
you are going to be calling me

back sometime today.
we will discuss how stuff sucks
and maybe even get
philosophical.

i have idle sex every moment
with this machine it seems.

6.

when I think of you
all these stupid political arguments
with my father in his library
seem so pointless.

I'm afraid to punch
a wall, but I really want to.
bruise and disease
infect everything

no matter what. when I
think of you I remember that
we are all just fast floating
butterflies or autumn leaves

or hot air balloons
or high speed jets.

god bless whatever
horrible brick building
we decide to hold up
today or for the next

two thousand years.
calendars: i say burn them all.
there is no need for time
anymore.

this might sound bleak,
but today I was a victim
of road rage
and I showed a man

my middle finger and he was
surprised, but then he did the same.

4.

the great depression continues
on and on and on forever;
not really a black hole,
but it seems like it.

AAA batteries
will power this omericon machine.
the factory-made sugar cube meals
I stuff into my mouth

never really seem to do much.
this is the end of my flat square junkyard world:
a personalized television screen
and another television screen in the rear.

there isn't a bank holiday
or day off work for this festivity.

flanking around the forest
as wide as we can go:
our holocaustic cavalry.
not for you,

but you probably know
that thick meaty beef flesh and flesh
and flesh over bones
of which I speak.

I stayed in the first floor closet
only a little line of light
peaked in
but even then

the star of our solar system
faded into infinite purple black.

2.

from the uncertain
library desk
on which i write
on this thursday night

comes spontaneous
never ordinary
completely genuine jazz:
made in omerico.

always entertaining.
the fruits of our labors
were those seedless watermelons
born of our long and narrow tropical island,

that sandy public speedway
beneath the ocean dark.

1.

I chose instead
to live in an island fortress
as a reclusive king.
my phantom world war armies

met the slow slanted shredding
of cheese,
which is then frozen freezer cold
into some boring motion picture.

I couldn't paint.
I could barely even draw.
but in daydream imagination
and nightmarish nights,

I would look towards endless piles
of arson torched orange hay.