Tangled Rope

This is a repost from last year’s NaPoWriMoNov Google Wave, for archival purposes.

A little free verse while I waited for the rain to come (it didn’t).

Sweep and Mop

Streams of wind scream and bleat,
sweep dust and vapours along the linoleum streets,
expunge the gutters of stick-mud timbers
clearing for the coming storm.

Inside a warm cafe we watch the dry firebolts crack
above the city skyline of kitchen appliances and tv sets.
We wait for the splash and dollop
of the great silver celestial mop
which, in wide washing swaths,
will push grit, screws and gears, loose tumbled robot sprockets
underneath the buildings' shadowy pockets
places we can forget and never clean.

----- half-mast
---- spear
--- arrow
-- pen
- needle

+ mug
++ fists
+++ cactus
++++ bed of nails
+++++ stars

-+ cross
--+ dagger
---+ sword
--++ mace
----+ shovel

• Just taught the worst class session of the course, on a topic that I knew inside and out. Blaming it on caffeine starvation. #
• Radiator too dirty and blocked to clean. It must be replaced. Is that all you got, day? #
• I don’t know how I lived without Pluckr on my Treo. #
• @opencontent Let me know if you put content or slides up. Sounded interesting. in reply to opencontent #
• @gsiemens Lucifer’s a rock star! in reply to gsiemens #
• @fncll @gsiemens So as not to be redundant, I’ll stamp my big elitist foot. in reply to fncll #
• Playing with Diigo –> Greader –> Plucker. There’s got to be an easier way. #
• GReader –> Folder –> Public –> Pluckr path is sort of fugly, but it works like a charm! #

I’m reading Nabokov’s “Ada” for the second time, and am struck by how authentically the author seems to love his characters, regardless of their flaws. To love a “round” character is to engage in an unconditional love, much like we often project upon God–a claim which, I understand, does nothing to reduce melodramatic conceptions of the author as god-like.

I’m working on a long work of fiction myself this year, and it is a frustrating and overwhelming experience. Nine days out of ten I sit down to write and must combat myself. I do not want to return to the story, do not want to smooth out the wrinkles as I go, untangle the knots that I’ve tied, or twist new rope and tie new knots for links. Part of the problem, I’m realizing, is that I may not love my characters as much as other authors do. I know them, I try to distinguish between them, I think I understand them, many of them I respect and admire, many of them I have just contempt for, and some I do feel a paternal love for, but do I love them all?

It may be that as I am only 1/3 of the way through the writing, and I am dealing with 6 protagonists and just as many antagonists, the characters have not developed enough on the pages yet to allow for a recognition of them as authentic, independent beings. And how can one love a thing of mere fiction; one can only love fictional things that represent and mean real things.

Hmm, hmm.

A Summer Foot

Five toes, uncannily fat and even,
   wide her foot
   span of a sandal.
She stretches
showing dark brown impressions beneath,
sweet cushions from toe prints.
Her big toe, unstirred by my glance,
points it’s convex nail up
   a devil’s horn.

She has rye bread eyes, strawberry yogurt lips,
hair like hong cha, too;
but I can not bear to catch that beauty–
safer to stare towards the floor,
dissembling digits that end her limb.

She stands, and I foresee how she
     steps sandled through sudden summer rain,
    dips in to test the tub,
   extends from the water when shaving,
  drips to the rug when leaving, and
 slides slightly cold and alone
toes-first inside the sheets.

I dug this out of a moleskine I’d used on the ferry from Plymouth to Santander in 2007. I revised it as I typed it.

How the rainy years do vaporize!
Each day more translucent than the others!
We ache across the fog of gaping love
like estranged brothers,
throwing breadcrumbs to the midnight skies.

April 30th

Snow runs straight across the road parallel and pale gray,
plankton on the unseen currents.
Normally Summer upstages Spring here,
but this time April ends with this howl,
having inhaled numberless seasons of mockery.

A magician, before diving in the tank
to break his breath against death,
first fills his blood with euphoria,
and stores it.

Everything is backwards.
I’ve wakened from the walking sleep of day
ending the warmest April in this freezing Spring fool’s night;
The heater in my car feels cold like a vacuum;
Classical plays on the punk rock radio station;
Twenty minutes ago my head rested on my wife’s warm ribs,
who scratched my hair-thick head.
My nose whistled, a mewing puppy,
comfortably quiet despite echoes of laughter
from the universal joke whispered every day.
I’ve never caught the punchline, but I’ve heard enough;
even though they get the details wrong,
the details don’t matter.

The universe, they say, will contract like an elastic band,
and with itself bury itself,
or it will expand until the elastic breaks.
And if it contracts, it will expand.
either way it must have somewhere to go;
oblivion or persistence—involuntary either way.

And now the snow has stopped, on the road:
remnants of a light Spring rain.
And the car has warmed.
And the green light grins, Go.
Go to a place you never go
for a hot drink and a cinnamon roll.
The light licks it’s green lips,
Go,
and,
There’s nothing you’ve forgotten,
nothing left at home,
except the funny passing moments
you call love.

Eventually the puppy will begin
to dig holes for his bones;
not out of practicality, but because they are so precious
he knows not what else to do.
He’ll plan to come back,
but never will,
having forgotten the holes and the bones, and any
way, having
somewhere better else to go.

Anthropomorphizing Spring

Laid lazy across the horizon two mountain ranges form feuding families,
a mix of soft curves and angles, both are draped with snow white stoals
two jutting peaks, warrior guardians to the rift between them,
a canyon tomb of their clans.

Beneath an unbending, single-minded cloud, who spread's it's eagle wings and shades
grow gray rows of outcast trees, starved branches eerily ashamed of their budding greens
and the baptism their roots shared with the grass in the winter run-off.

While the trees meditate in the cold spring wind the grass just bristles;
as it's million precocious leaves wait to begin cheerleading for the tulips
youth misled by perennial beauty, by the winter run-off,
rushing towards the dry, interminable summer,
or, of their own accord, misleading.

An English sonnet wherein any resemblances to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Inspired, of course, by Richard Lovelace’s Song (To Lucasta, Going to the Wars).

Going Out

Yes, dear, I’m going out, though it’s past ten–
But don’t wait up; relax your aching head,
stay: watch TV, or chatter to a friend,
sleep and warm our sanctimonious bed.

Where? Though any answer can’t suffice
or satisfy this pure, protective question
let’s say the store to fetch a bag of ice
a prop to freeze my firey intention.

An affair? What could that offer me?
Besides furtive eyes and red smiling lips,
besides impulsive sex, and mystery–
these toys can’t touch our anchored, wedded ships.

Don’t say a word; parting is sweet sorrow!
I’ll return by twelve, or, at worst, tomorrow.

A bref double, using one of Turco’s identified forms.

Clacks and Clatters

Foreign matter clatters hard on the floor.
Sleep is broken in a crashing instant–
–listening to waking, nakedly prone…
It’s just the cat, strutting her distemper.

But there’s something else: silence, a knock
I stumbled to, and answering the door
I found a bare-boned, calcite skeleton
clacking his jaw, and waiting to enter.

I offered it a chair, left it alone
returned with tea, but poured out slick, dull clay.
Clack. He said. So I applied and shaped it,
fleshing a clay mask out from the center.

My own was mirrored in the face it wore
I tore at my hair but found only bone