A little something...

I've been trying to do some songwriting but I get distracted by poems that don't want to complete themselves, like Golden Gate Bridge suicides.

Kitchen
after Frida Kahlo

Refrigerators envy me
for my ability to preserve passion
and serve it chilled,
proper on its plate, a lime slice neighbor
best hinted at, rather than thrust
burning onto the tongue.

Stoves envy me
for my ability to cook at the precise degree
and never let pink the pain,
unless someone feasts too early,
nor blacken its meat
when they forget to turn me off.

I envy the sink for its relief
at being emptied and attended to
when looking its worst.

I'm also on a huge Laura Marling kick at the moment:


But then I get distracted again.

Farm kitten

A year or two after the divorce,
living with my dad in the officer’s neighborhood
of Aberdeen Proving Grounds,
he brought home a farm kitten.
A black coat and white fur underwear
And eyes that feared shadows
And paper bags.
She would sleep at my feet, my blankets thin
(my father next door, my brother a yard away),
and play catch with my toes
and her claws.
6 ft high in the bunk bed, I tossed her
like a Molotov cocktail
believing she would ignite the anger
I dared not on my mother.
She would shake and climb again
the slight wooden frame
that was my fort above the unlawful world.

And I would think of my mother
coming home from the vet clinic
where she volunteered,
taking soft steps towards the closet,
peeling open the fake bamboo shutters,
and pouring the oval package meats
of cat-square bits and hard dog crumbs
into the dishes.
After stroking their fur,
she would smirk at my brother and I, slide
the can-opener towards our small monkey thumbs,
and gesture at the cabinet.
She thought we were smarter than our pets
And, thus, deserving of less pity.

My farm kitten nestles between my covered
calves and waits for a twinge of toes.

Before she ran away into the artillery hills
0f rundown Russian tanks and leaking condiment gas,
I began to wear heavy blankets
even during the summer.

I had more to fear from winter
Than any fire.

Fast Hands

Valentina Lisitsa plays Rachmaninoff Etude Tableau Op 39 No 6.

To Possess.

What makes the human species different from the rest of the animals? A question asked throughout our history and never really popularly answered. It's a question that's vexed me from the first time I held a fire ant in my palms. Are we different, or do we want to be to make it easier to reconcile our restless minds?

Possession, my friends. Ownership. Follow me on this.

We were the first species to mentally make the leap from "This is mine." to "What are the limits of what is mine?" We created boundaries. From boundaries came territory. From territory came the mental gymnastics of words, for what are words but sonic division lines? To say, "This space, this mammoth, this bone is mine." creates boundaries of what constitutes a mammoth, a bone, a space. Words define, and yet words are imperfect, for many unimaginable things exist between, among, spliced, across the word.

Temporal acknowledgment only abetted our aberration. Words created past, present, future. Only present really exists, but our triumph of time invented the past and future. With time came better and worse, with better and worse came leaders and followers. We became so trapped within our language that we forgot it was but a tool to serve our life. Instead, we allow language to dominate. It can be seen in every utterance I type. And such beget suffering. We assume that a bottle holds liquid, that a body is not a collection of working cells but itself a cohesive whole; we assume there is a difference between body and soul only because we are raised by our species to accept boundaries. The "soul" lies in our head only because we accept most of our information visually and the eyes connect directly through our brain. Imagine what language we would speak if we our primary sense was touch! But as the brain processes most information, we assume that's where the soul resides.

I will not even go into the ancient belief that the heart holds love.

The majority of our bodies is constructed with either cells with alien mitochondria or bacteria. The DNA that we assume consumes our cells is in the minority. We keep on trying to find our self, but the very notion of self is outdated by biology and cosmology. Our brain cells do not replace themselves, yet our bodies, even on a cellular level, are different and distant from how we were born. The pictures we see of our youth are of alien beings, entirely not what we know except by appearance. Yet we consider ourselves I.

Collected Quotes (Everyone's got 'em)

As I prepare my next blog, here's a sampling of some quotes that I've collected over the years.

"Boredom, I think, protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be."
- Adam Philips "On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored"

"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents."
- H.P. Lovecraft

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
- Anton Chekhov

"That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves."
- Vladimir Nabokov

"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
- George Carlin

"The best minds of my generation can't make bail..."
- Ani Difranco

"What is man but an ingenious machine for turning red wine into urine?"
- Isak Dineson

"There is nothing new in the world except the history you do no know."
- Harry Truman

"Whenever I'm asked what kind of writing is the most lucrative, I have to say ransom notes."
- Literary agent H.N. Swanson

"Difficile est saturam non scribere (It is difficult not to write satire)."
- Juvenal

"Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
- Heinrich Heine "Almansor: A Tragedy"

"The purpose of a story... is not to fulfill some crazy formalistic Aristotelian rule, but to get the fucking reader to read the fucking book."
- Erica Jong, quoted in "Interviews with Contemporary Novelists" by Diana Cooper Clark

"I have no time for lies or fantasy and neither should you. Enjoy or die."
- Johnny Rotten

"We can pray over the cholera victim or we can give her 500 mg of tetracycline every 12 hr."
- Carl Sagan

"'Rehearse death.' To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate beyond the reach of, all political powers."
- Seneca, "Letter XXVI"

"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

"Io rido, e il rider mio non passa dentro:
Io ardo, e l'arsion mia non par di fore.
(I laugh, and my laughter is not within me:
I burn, and the burning is not seen outside)."
- Niccolo Machiavelli

"Music and singing do not produce in the heart that which is not in it."
- Abu Sulaiman al-Davani

"Everyone thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself."
- Leo Tolstoy