7 Overtures to 2009 (Mikrokosmos)

The Pythia on her rock seat
inhaling rot learned to recite
before Homer's age the very first
hexameters a human voiced.
Full of reek, dead dragon slouch,
the reptile on its rocky ledge,
the putrid serpent, was the true
inspirer of pure poetry.

____Tony Harrison






____i.
Mozart won't walk too slow.
an adagio is never an adagio;
he knew better than most
what happens when you roll to a stop.
so he rolls on,
and the stop paces besides him casually,
nodding slightly, and licking his lips
thinking of the meal the forthcoming
two coins will buy him.


____ii.
- new year's resolution?, you do them?
- yeah, i always have a bunch.
- what have you got then?, __this year
- __thought for ages, only came up with one.
- one isn't enough?
- it is.
- ...
- ...
- so?
- what is it?
- yeah.
- be someone else.
- what kind of resolution is that?
- ___the hardest kind.


____iii.
and today someone looks at me a while.
you been wearing glasses long?
i smile. no. kinda new. he nods,
tapping his hand on his knee to the song.
stares past the lake, where a fish leaps and is heard falling
back in, is it good to be home? as he stares sidelong past me
on not receiving an answer, looks at me kindly
as i assess the words good and home separately
and finally smile back. you know what, it's too long since...
but decide instead to cut to the chase: yeah, it is good.


____iv. (Monz & Mar... thanks for caring)
and news travels in stages.
thoughts to sound, or images.
tapping of keyboards, reflective smiles
selecting photos.
waves reaching shores. a slight lapping sound.
truth is truth, nothing stands still.

q, you ok?

(and wind ruffles sails
and hair, and you've seen it
on a screen, or divined it from the motion of clouds,
and at last leadheavy and permanent as an anchor
it reaches my belly.
not a word spoken about it,
just drifting thoughts, empty bottles, footsteps in sand,
drying seaweed, bruised wood,
the relics of memory, phantasms of all that ever can't be. (is)

yeah. fu&* it. i am.


____v.
this new thing.
wrapped.
made.

( me! )


____vi.
as i unpack my boxes. photographs. books. pens. paper. clothes. i think back to two years ago. and how i didn't have the chance. all that had to happen to thwart these hands touching these objects for 724 days.
(this is the same song , ___in a new key.
(the same life, but a new me)

i stare at shapes, and wonder where i've been all this time


____vii.
and all that's left is past.
and all that's left is passed.
and all that's left is past.
and all that's left is passed.
and all that's left is past.
and all that's left is passed.

?)

quiet cities

shut up in her room, jordi gual goodbye my friends..!!


______i.
nothing more,
just ripples of it,
tides, dragging me out
___and puddles of night
___darker than the rest of it,


______ii.
and the ghosts whose patience
permits them to remain when all is quiet
at the risk of being heard gossiping
(the wind carries their noises a little
___(and the walls ruffle a little

sit in their translucent grievances,
dream a second life out of the first,
a russian doll set of oblivion,

and kick their feet in the blue water of the pool.

an abstract response to gol , the dynamics of [sigh]

____You'll learn to hate me
____But still call me baby
____Oh love
____So call me by my name

______Rob Pattinson













watching the wet dark, by Jordi Gual Goodbye my friends..!!

sooner or later, i'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that i will never have that yellow couch again. the couch i buy in the next fortnight will not be that same cozy, ridiculous, faded yellow. it will not suck you in when you lie on it so that for moments you disappear and live off yellow magic fumes and not air. i will not kiss those women on that couch. i will not sit besides mona and get excited about watching Slipknot concerts, or laughing myself into a frenzy watching Southpark, or falling asleep reading Flaubert while it rains outside. it will not be where i stumble to in the middle of the night when i wake up with an idea to write about. it will not be the safest place in known universe. the safest place in the known universe is exactly where i left it. in the first room on the right, through the double doors at 19 Hegafen St. in the port city of Haifa in Northern Israel. and i am very far away.

__(and maybe that's what death is. being very far away. a wholly new silence. the dark side of the moon. and if that's the case, then we die soo often while we are alive. and no one will ever spot at just which moment it happened. and how long it lasted. and when we came back, if it really is us that came back, or if it's... a newer us. or an older us. or a version of us who prefers to sit silently and let others talk. or who wants to be the center of attention. or has slightly different colored eyes that no one will notice)

locked into rooms by cloudmade walls, 9 stories high off the ground, or double-doored rooms with fireplaces and yellow couches... the whole of history is just about houses and spaces and the sounds and stories that fill them.
________(i found another love letter today. i thought i had destroyed them all, but it seems not. this one i could not throw away. i read it, dropped it to the ground, and realized the moment was too finely directed because No Aphrodisiac ended just then and there was nothing but silence. me sitting on a bright blue park bench i have in my room, and a little card on the wooden floor by my feet.


WHAT DEAN IS THINKING
it is not you darling. you are you and you are fine and we are all ok. but where have i been while you have been living life?, and doing the things people do when they are alive?... work and love and play and make new friends and be excited about things, and sad about other things, and laugh and dress themselves and brush their teeth and complain about the price of movie tickets. while you have been doing that, where have i been? where have i been that has had no address... and no constancy so that i have stumbled awkwardly, my knees moving at jagged angles, into the lives of new friends, and then tripped up and rolled on, away, to other places. what is there to show for myself other than the taste of dirt, the grit of sand in my teeth when i sleep at night? it is not you i am sad for, i am sad for the life i wasn't able to make (for myself), or have (which i wanted). and all these messes and catastrophes i've taken and sanded the edges off and put back on shelves for other people, to clear myself just a little bit of space to work with, and for whatever reason, i feel a deadline has been reached and i wasn't prepared to hand in my work. that's what the feeling is. of being late. of being left behind. of being redundant and obsolete. and useless. that's the feeling. and there is no sense to it. no sense to these comparisons, because we are what we are, and we do what we do, and it's always different and yet always the same in one way or another, and... there you go now. farther away. farthest away. space and time and circumstance. we bid you farewell. a final, unquiet silent sort of farewell. a most brutal internal farewell. a kind that is said and not heard. and not answered. and not even known was said, and no one ever knows what is.was felt,

(the saddest part of all)

*__*__*

time: you fu*&er.

*__*__*

and here my calender says a newest year has begun. i sniff and touch the walls of my room. i can't sense anything's different. i go back to my bed, lie down in the fetal position, and listen to the thunder outside. waiting for whatever's next to collide with me. life is the longest collision course that i know of.

much love gol
q

Things You Do.Think On Days When You Hear News Like I Heard News Today, A List:

____It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
____which the night fastens to all the timetables.

______Pablo Neruda









December 15, 2008 by Hollis Brown Thornton


i find it takes a little while for things to settle with me. for arrows to find their mark. in happiness and in... the other thing. a breakup took 10 days. realizing i wasn't in medical school, and i wasn't going back, and i now had nothing took several months. today's took several hours. My first inclination was to

____1. write

anything, anything would have done. but i restrained that. no no no, i'd have nothing worthwhile to say; and i still don't.

____2. buy a bottle of vermouth and get drunk listening to Chet Baker till teary red eyes see red and collapse into a corner singing nothing to myself.

but then i realized that vermouth isn't that strong and you need a double-shot per drink, which i hate. so i revised to

____2b. buy a bottle of rum (dark or light doesn't matter), and get drunk listening to Counting Crows till teary red eyes see Mr. Jones himself and we say to one another: forget about it right? rightright.

but of course i wasn't going to do that. i've never really ever done that, so that wasn't going to happen. i dealt with it the way i always deal with things, i swallow it, and then try and find a way to expel it from my body.

____3. move the kingsize mattress that's been sitting on my floor back into the master bedroom by myself. it's floppy and heavy as all hell and took about 35 minutes to do. left me panting and mildly sweaty and terribly vexed.

i found myself sitting on my (own) bed, doing nothing much (ostensibly, i had come in to check my phone for missed blah blah), over and over in my head repeating

____4. the phrase arrested development resounds in my head. for years now i think about it sometimes. all the circumstantial walls that keep me walking in circles so that all those key milestones are left unmet. and that's what's got me riled up, nothing to do with you, but how it is that my life has been at a virtual standstill for the last 2 years.

amongst this it occurs to me that

____5. the very living of life is a rat-race. like a silly purposeless game since in the end, every quality.attribute.virtue.knowledge we attain fits into a meticulous score-keeping scheme that rates performance against an ideal personal-best scenario. i am uncomfortable with the idea of life itself, (in the deepest sense), because i am uncomfortable with my perfunctorily going from day to day and... well... not really caring.

and now it is apparent that i'm wallowing in self pity. having discarded points 2 and 2b from my mind, and not having ready access to a gym till school starts in 3 weeks, i do the closest thing i can think of:

____6. find myself on the high-way with a fourpack of V (that's a rather delicious Australian energy-drink that all gas-stations have a discount on at the moment) driving strictly to speed limit and drinking one after the other so that 20 minutes later, my hands are shaking and i feel cold but my skin is sweating.

and as the drive continues, i realize i need to occupy myself with mind games to keep myself from drifting into the abyss of nostalgia and self-scrutiny and post-you-what-have-we-learneds which do nobody any good since the thing we learn most from the past is what Joyce reminds us history is a nightmare of myself from which i'm trying to wake (and at this point:

____7. though appreciate the good advice everyone gave me, realize that i am the memory-machine, and that perhaps tempermentally, perhaps mental-erroneously, i cannot forgive the past, hate the past, and hate myself for the past, and hate the past for the past, and hate the world for the past. (also, i decided that i would eventually have to find a way to remedy this preoccupation,

____7b. thought about my mother crying as she read my novel, and saying, oh baby... it is not right to remember soo much. forget it. forget it all. we all love you, but for your sake, learn to be someone else.

notice i'm driving markedly faster, and am headed towards Ikea, which is a great place to lose yourself and become confused about other things; but i'm still 30 minutes away. i decide to play Sholeh's the Golden 11 game. (pick your top 11 bands, and your single favorite song per band). 10 minutes later when this was finished, i decide to add the word why. (as we all know, i'm a wordy type, so my reasons are most often lyrical).

____8. THE GOLDEN 11, a list (in non-prioritized order)

__- Bon Iver, re: stacks
why?
the moment he says and your love is safe with me and every fragile thing about that is obvious. and everything to do with permanence, and loss and safeguarding 'us' from everything that seeks to divide 2 back into 1's.


__- the Deftones, Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)
why?
if the title isn't enough,
_____________i don't care where just far
_____________________________(away)
_____________i don't care where just far
_____________________________(away)
shouted over and over.


__- Big Runga, Gravity
why?
it's the perfect love song. the most honest, attainable. a perfect symbiosis of music and words, when i hear
If gravity let us go
We would all go flying
And I'll meet you somewhere
in the milky night
Away past the satellites
i actually feel lighter. i drift away. somewhere where all the love i've ever felt still lives, and still breathes, and still sits quietly and watches Tameeka smoke in the rain on my sister's green swing. and sees Vanessa for the first time on the 345 bus... and the other stuff.


__- Bjork, Bachelorette
why?
Love's a two way dream & I'm your one way street


__- Radiohead, (previously has been: Exit Music, Idioteque, Life in a Glasshouse, Where I End and You Begin, but is currently: Videotape
why?
cause. i. know. to.day. has. been. themost. perfect. day. i've. ever. seen.


__- Nina Simone, Don't Smoke in Bed
why?
most poetic lyrics, simplest music imaginable, saddest song known to man, poetry is truth, raw and unbridled.


__- Frou Frou & Imogen Heap (same bunch of people anyway), Hide and Seek
why?
WWWWwwwwwhhhhhheeerre are we?


__- Kanye West, Never Let Me Down
why?
J.Ivy's BOMB monologue that ends: Cuz whenever I open my heart, my soul, or my mouth
A touch of God reigns out


__- Blonde Redhead, the Dress
why?
People hate you when you're changing


__- Calla, Tijerina
why?
after the intro, he whispers.rasps, almost inaudibly, i think i'm coming back home. it's safer if i stay close to home. and suddenly there are a million stories that start and end with those two affirmations.


__- the Shins, Caring is Creepy
why?
the lead in to gold teeth and the curse for this...

and now, i'm done at Ikea. i'm driving home.

____9. windows down. windows up. music up. music down. noise. louder. static. cram it all in there. there can't be thinking if there's no room to think. windows down. music up. louder. it's not distorting yet, make it distort. yeesss. yesss. make a real mess of it q.

and i arrive home. i can't be home. this isn't home. there is no home.

____10. i close the windows and sit staring out at the lightning storm, repeating to myself over and over the year of everything that wasn't , the year of everything that wasn't , the year of everything , year everything , everything wasn't, year wasn't

____11. i'm at Chad's playing Resident Evil 4 for no less than 5 hours, while drinking tea and watching his two kittens play and then fall asleep cuddling. we aren't talking much. time flies. it's late. i know as soon as i leave

____12. i think alot about the Great Gatsby, i think about that stereotypical male yearning to 'catch-up', to be made worthy, to be approved of... a kind of thing that doesn't go away after even decades. I wonder where Fitzgerald must have discovered it. When i read it at 16, that aspect made no sense to me. as i grow older, i seem to settle more and more with the elegiac Gatsby, trying to win back affections that don't deserve him. then from behind the corner it comes back, a variation on Joyce: boats against the current, ceaselessly borne into the past

i start to realize maybe i'm running.

Peripheral Love Stories, Mikrokosmos

__And the coolness of your smile is
__stirringofbirds between my arms;but
__i should rather than anything
__have(almost when hugeness will shut
__quietly)almost,
______________your kiss


______EE Cummings




untitled by .littlegirlblue



____i.
my shoulders hurt, so i think about that. imagine striations of muscle. it's not sunny, but the humid air seems to lick at me and i'm sweating. the recent callouses on my palms protect me and the shovel feels fine in my hands as i take spoonfools to feed the wheelbarrow. i like the sound it makes, each thrust into the massive dirt mound. i like its textures. i imagine i'm a coal-miner. a geologist on a far-flung planet. a man digging a grave. he's still talking. he pants in between sentences, sometimes mid-sentence, but he keeps talking. i'm just workin man, just saving up, just saving up ('what for?' i offer; as long as he's talking, he's not asking questions) my brother's married, ya know? he's got three kids. he makes a good living. he has a life, that's what life's all about right? (he stopped working all together, holds the shovel steady in his hands, gathers himself up as though he had something lightning to say) a house?... a car at very least. i just wanna have something. anything. (to show for myself. Now i stop what i'm doing and look at him. i remember him when he was 13. and at 25 i say 'i know that feeling brother'. and abruptly turn and push my wheelbarrow on before my words have a chance to reach the far bank.


____ii.
someone's got their ipod connected. there's a mad rush to show each other up with songs. a hustle and bustle as people say yeah, but have you heard it live? or yeah, but have you heard Aimee Mann's cover? someone says, dude, you have to check this out and three guitar strums in, someone from the back says firmly: no. __not this song. turn it off. __now. (and everyone's heard it anyway, so they skip on and argue about top-5 lists), and she says quietly to herself, i don't want to hear that song ever again.


____iii.
he's just sitting there.
i know right
he doesn't smoke, or anything, he just... reads
who does that right?
and drinks his coffee, and reads
(of all things)
there's something up with him
totally, there's something totally up with him no one does that
no one
you think he has no friends?
maybe he's new in town
could be.
could be anything.
[look at each other, in a moment come to the same realization, and burst out laughing]


____iv.
and after all that time, all he can think to say is, i wear glasses now. and she nods, and says without humor, yeah, i can see them on your face.

Possibly the Best Evening of 2008

Before:


(those mounds are, going anticlockwise from the right: poetry, literature in general (mostly novels, but also short story collections), music and art are up against the wall, classics (12 o'clock), non-fiction, Bahai books are on the bed, academic is at 8 o'clock with the very intimidating (and misleadingly named) Statistical Thermodynamics, an Introduction at the top)









One Hour Later:



That's most of it done. But I keep finding odds and ends around the place. The row at the bottom is going to be magazines, notebooks, etc. but I need to buy some boxes for it first.

I am telling you all this, because it was quite possibly the most fun I've had in the last 13 months.

Those of you who have books on my shelf, inscriptions, signatures, with loves... be it Anjie's Baha'i World, Everything is Illuminated, a very special copy of Prayers and Meditations, Neruda's short but incredible einte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada, the soo thoughtful birthday present (Entropy Pieces)... and of course Luis's "and all else worth living for" I am glad to have you all near me again. in a way. and to hold you in my hands.

At Starbucks on Christmas Day, a letter to Ashtree

_So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,
__Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
__Mysterious by this love.

______Donne







sonatine: iii, tommy oshima

Dear(est) A-Digg,
____In recent times Christmas has become a day of exile. A day for departure lounges and solo-coffees. A day to measure the relativistic duration of these long Decembers. Like a bookmark, everything they hold in place... new names, like yours, and words I never knew before, and dates and moments and objects... Salvatore Ferragamo half-boots, new ties and the funerals and weddings I bought them for... and the occasions I wore them to. December is a dam. A hard, long, cement wall to try and hold back in place the 11 months prior.
____I had hoped to write a great novel this year. I have not done that. I haven't even written a decent short-story. In bursts I wrote well enough didn't I? The miniatures I display here aren't all bad are they? I only say this because I'm an autobiographicalist. It's what I do: write the autobiographies of moments and daydreams and partial memories and the blurred, deformed relics of history. If I write bad, perhaps I have lived it bad. (lived it wrong). I fear bad writing makes me a graceless man living a jarring graceless life. Maybe it's true, considering all the sweat, shed hair, dirty post-shower water, spit, groans, nail-clippings, trembling 3am fingers, hearty laughs, unslept blackened eyes, rare moments of transcendental prayer, the friction and inertia of hugs, repeated curses (over and over), all those things it takes to build a year, how can that ever be graceful? I suppose looking like magazine models floating through airports calmly, perfectly pressed trousers even after a 12 hours flight, no beads of sweat or stubble on chins, I suppose not everyone can have that.
____What do we do with all this time? Sometimes I think of it and I'm elated. inspired. relieved. Other times... frightened. Right now I'm a little... bland. Time has turned, this year, into a muddy haze of static white noise. I myself, my life too. Time, future, all of it, a translucent substance, a blurry half-forgotten memory-photograph. I see it that way, everything floating, nothing solid, nothing pinned down. nothing certain. I like it this by the way. It makes it easier to move around. There are no right angles left in my world, everything I touch is smoothe. ____Can things exist as music?, half-formed, temporary as vibrating air. Did you know light is just an oscillating electromagnetic wave? Similar concepts have been proposed about matter. Perhaps I am an oscillating field. A temporary anomaly, a ripple along time's clear lake. Perhaps I am just vibrating air, nothing at all. A balloon, a thin membrane holding in some air. (I like that idea). I like the idea of being a set of variations on the theme of clouds.
____It is a Thursday. It feels like a Sunday. Sunday seems to have invaded most of this week.
____I have not been in love this year. A whole loveless year. I'd be tempted to proclaim a loveless year a year not worth living. On the other hand, there are only soo many natural disasters a person can endure in one lifetime.
____The interesting thing is, the way this year has wound down. So gently. Like the last Shostakovich symphony, percussion and a celesta for a full two minutes. not with a bang but a whimper. Like playing, round & round & round & round and all . fall . down . And here we lay, panting and smiling and looking left and right. Gol says I am "stamping out the last embers of 2008"... honestly, I thought they were just getting done stamping me out.
____Anniversary dates are a little... depressing for me. Reflection days (birthdays, New Years, etc) are always a little overcast. Each of my year's is about 2 or 3 in typical human time. Too much happens in my life. Too much stimulation. You should measure me in dog years, that accounts for the discrepancy in my age. Yet despite all the coffee and people-watching, I can't determine the weight of 2008. It is too heavy a year, a singularity point (a point where you must divide by zero - it means your division explodes to ∞... it's what happens with gravity at the singularity point of black holes), the fulcrum between past and future. it is the year that changed everything (and every thing is alot). it was soo wonderful and soo miserable, that's what makes it different- most years, in the final assessment are reduced to 'a good year', 'it was an ok year', 'it was a pretty terrible year'... but 2008... is the worst year ever and the best year ever simultaneously and i can't disassemble it back into blocks and triangles and simple geometric moments. the oceanic vastness of it, it has submerged every doorway, it is refracting the light of the past in new ways, it is the massive dragon in the living room, it nudges pawns, and recomputes all future vectors. i am lost without this year. and i am lost because of it. i hate everything that's ever happened because of this year. and everything that is going to happen in the future is because of this year. everything i hate about life is exemplified in this year, and everything i love about it. i just can't find a way to condense this year into a single word that isn't: 2008?, uhh, fu&^ man. I want to love it. I do. When with time I drift away from it a little (my face slammed into this glass right now it is a bit hard on the perspective-eye) I know I'll come to see its intricacies. It's beautiful stains and marks and the intelligence of its brutality. Right now, I can't commit to 'loving it', or being 'grateful for it', because 2008 is a year that makes me wretch. It is a year that took me from a passionate hatred of life to a... dreamy aloofness. a sort of genuine resignation, the kind that makes one feel... constantly floating, constantly flying, constantly falling... (i exist in space between stars). 2008 was a year I dreamt of dead grandfathers... which for some reason, summarizes everything to me.
____And, of course, the jury has been debating whether it was indeed the year of/for miracles (the jury never decided if it was to be the year of miracles, or a year for miracles). I assume G-Bomb will argue till her dying breath it most certainly was, which is perfectly in character and not the least bit surprising. I don't know what Monz has to say about it... if she's ready to make her call. As for me... I suppose it's time to make up my mind. I think it was a year of silence. a year of anticlimax. a year of waiting for massive things to happen, so much so, that we missed them when they did (L'attendant Godot). i think it was a year of minute micro-changes. a year where insects ate the foundations of every building right beneath our feet without us seeing. (and a year where gardens bloomed outside that we forgot to notice we were soo busy staring at the sky hoping for rain). they were the sort of miracles that pass you by in hallways and elevators and walk right in front of you as you sit at Starbucks. you look, fail to absorb, then look away. it was a year of vampire weekends and perfectly nuanced monday afternoons. they were the sort of miracles that are sculpted out of wind, the shape of clouds, the shadows on grass, the kind you won't understand till you're a septuagenarian, where, as you sit alone and try and fathom your crumbling withered body, you'll stare at family portraits and the dusted faces of paintings you don't have the strength to wipe off, and little morsels of food gathering in the corners of your kitchen you just ignore, and you finally grasp (grasp) in an awesome awkward humility the mutidunious miracle of that train-wreck.
____and until then, you sit at Starbucks on Thursdays that are really Sundays, alone, which you prefer because your thoughts can't be put into spoken words, staring at every-other-woman-wearing-a-maxi-dress and brown wrap up sandals, and children confusedly looking around, and uncaring teenagers checking their cell phones... and scribble in your notebook and people hate you because you are taking up a four-seater-table all on your own. and you sweat and layers of your skin peel off and the frowns on your forehead deepend. you grow more silent and if you close your eyes and reach out your hands can sense the longitude and latitude of wind, and the humidity in the air makes it thick so when you're thirsty you breathe it in, and you try and forget the sound of the alarm that woke you up at 3:45am for months so you could start work at 4, and the dreams of all your yesterdays suddenly start to dwindle, sadly walk across
London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many,
and you feel that, on the other side of this moody afternoon, on the other side of your blurred misvision, on the other side of your most earnest efforts and most dreaded failures, several billion stars are still burning, and that if you concentrate- can feel their tingles of heat on your arms, pinpricks of light, like being kissed by an invisible ant, spots of rapture, the tiniest imaginable slithers of an otherworld, a sense of continuity, the undeaded part of you that after hours without speaking, suddenly surprises you by exhaling a gush of air that says it all, that releases you out of the cage of yourself, and there you sit, air staring at air, anomaly to anomaly, unreflective surface to unreflective surface, and everything you love.hate.cannot understand meets its moment and its death... and time which now means nothing, and victory and failure which now mean nothing, and love and wretched hate which now mean nothing and the lost artform of being human, is redeemed.

perhaps not all miracles are sensed.

much love
q