Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

"Bright and sunny" does not make "35 degrees" any warmer. Too much pie, too little leaf raking! The car is happy now and full of antifreeze. The sun is almost down. oh & Too Much Pie. So good.

disconnected late november R. home home again.

Germans who "nigga," part two: This is not a joke, my friend.

Meanwhile I huff and I puff and I Imogen Heap.

107 steps. And the beat goes...

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

Twelve.

A Sleep and a Forgetting

Our birth is but the sleep and the forgetting,
though sleep takes up the greater time and bathing
occasionally breaks up this pattern
of sleep, forgetting, sleep, forgetting, sleep,
whenever you slap water on your cheeks
and your dead skin sloughs off into the sewers.

It's not a bad life, really, one of setting
a schedule, then of sticking to it, only
remembering exceptions, as does the housecat
who always takes her meals without emotion
ever since that time you failed to feed her
for no apparent reason. Otherwise

that I've forgotten how it feels to love you
(those letters I found recently and read
again as crisp as slick dry skin on a pillow)
has kept me up nights, this past week or two,
in darkness--with no apparent tears to keep
your memory from fading into sleep.

-- John Gery

Eleven or a one-two.

The Voice Is Familiar

The voice is familiar.
Power transferred to the brain
and then the heart.
Or is it the heart first?
Two weeks ago
mother asked what she'd taught me.
Hands twisting in her lap.
Sure she'd given nothing.
These are all her stories,
chants before bed
to make the shadows vanish
or on rainy days
to remember sun by.
I knew her childhood
better than my own.
Easy to get lost there
so that, some twenty years later,
we come back, join hands,
turn the lights down.
She searches for her mother,
I search for my mother.
Is she under the bed,
beneath the glass of a picture,
in hair which even now
hasn't lost its color?
I'll recognize her on sight.
She looks like both of us.
She comes in, sits by the door,
loosens the scarf from her neck,
turns to her good ear, inclines her head:

-- Rochelle Ratner

Ten.

from the list

Cons:

she had nothing
but time on her hands:
silver rings, turquoise stones
and purple nails

i rubbed my thumb
across her palm:
a featherbed
where slept a psalm
yea, though i walk
I used to fly
and now we dance
I watched
my toenails blacken
and walked a deadened trance
until she woke me
with the knife edge
of her glance
I have the scars to prove
the clock strikes
with her hands

***

she kept her deck
beneath her pillow
and had promised
me a reading
she stuck a bookmark
in my heart
and walked away
it was autumn then
the leaves
suddenly flames
the sidewalk
burning cinders
I walked the streets
as if the sun
had called me boy
mad at the world
on aging feet
shuffling
her cards
shuffling
my feet
head
to the sky
blue
the clouds
her cards
the clouds:
her cards
shuffling
the skies
a storm passes
new clouds appear:
the chariot
the priestess
the moon
in broad daylight:
an omen

-- from She, Saul Williams

from the list

Pros:

3. After London, Northampton will seem mild and accomodating: the glowing late-term mother to be, rocking and humming, light spring shirts and stockings sprouting from skeins hand-spun. Most Massachusetts Februaries are the volatile near-dead of Medea's desolate planning; Plath grown tired of fighting the urge to drown her own.

It's always been true what they say about Catholic school girls

x

"I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamoured of danger. It can be seen in a look, a walk, a smile, and it is in you that it creates an eddying. It unnerves you. This violence is a calm that disturbs you."

-- Jean Genet

ShaClack-Clack Ohm...

x
presented my feminine side with flowers. She cut the stems and placed them gently down my throat

x
Lord, I've known sleeping women. Women who've slept for lives at a time, on sunny afternoons, and purple evenings. Women who sleep sound, and live silently. Some dreams never to be heard of again. I've known sleeping women and have learned to tip-toe into their aroma, and caress myself. They've taught myself how to sleep having swallowed the moon Sleep 'till mid afternoon And yearn for the silence of night to sleep sound once again.

Painters of the wind, who know to open the windows before closing their eyes. Finding glory in the palette of their dreams. She had no dreams that night. The windows had been closed. The worlds of her subconscious sufficated and bled rivers of unanticipated shivers and sounds that were not sleep. She was sound asleep, and he came silently.

-- Saul Williams, excerpts

feminist girlfriends and you can't help but to get it when you're sleeping with it
the automatic affirmative (but I just like the beat, man)
German students who "nigga"

j'ai du disparaitre.

Vous sont la femme assez pour être mon homme? A bandé la main dans la main.

x

I am too tense,
decline to dance
verbally. The flower
is not in its colour,
but in the seed.

- John Newlove

I am going through his emails deciding what (of rage and pain and fear and frustration and helplessness and lust and grief and joy and hope and love) to delete. What to save, having failed already. When I save these for whom do I save them? Will I read them again or is it that I don't want to be the one again to say no to you? If I have dropped you out the car window at a cool 80, rolled up the window only to light a cigarette and put it down again, can I be kind to your letters? It isn't any kindness to you with no hope of a reply. Then there's that crux: how am I to remember you? I shape our correspondence with every nip and tuck.

Nine.

90.

Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss:
Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scoped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite
But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.

It's always the way. Eight-and-a-half.

102.

My love is strengthen'd, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear:
That love is merchandized whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new and then but in the spring
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore like her I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.

-- WS

(Somebody back east is saying, "Now why don't he write?")

I remember. Eight.

Love Pirates

I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle
under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing
into your hair and thinking of nothing. I want
to lie down with you under the sails of a wooden sloop
and drift away from all of it, our two cars rusting
in the parking lot, our families whining like tame geese
at feeding time, and all the bosses of the earth
cursing the traffic in the morning haze.

They will telephone each other from their sofas
and glass desks, with no idea where we could be,
unable to picture the dark throat
of the saxophone playing upriver, or the fire
we gather between us on this fantail of dusty light,
having stolen a truckload of roses
and thrown them into the sea.

-- Joe Millar