Phrenolog

Laughing Poem for New York

Sept. 6th, 2008 / 6:30 AM / Manhattan

And all I can do is laugh, the great laugh of the city, that incredulous laugh of remorseful joy, the laugh of walking down 6th Avenue at dawn knowing that it's another story, and our pain and pleasure is only footnote to the footsteps on, one by one down on the pavement of the city, each hour one by one down on that cruel clock of the city, cold dream-engine and fear-engine, fastidiously creaking out its existence like any of us, unable ever to pause or sing its praise for us, drawn down to the subways and down to the towers and fortresses, able neither to speak nor hold its peace between us.

All I can do is regret that city and its million stories, or sit down barefoot on the ground and cover all its stories with the soil, garbage black and true and steaming with the taint of death, and gather up the flowers and the laughter from that one redeeming truth of lovers and the city: that time reduces everything to dust and no time is dependent on the "why" of life or love�just please remember that the city gathers not the stones of shame but rather begs of you to laugh and know that death waits gently for us all, and gently praises both the city and its shame�and creaking walks the shadows of its streets, the whirlwind play of nights that daily prey upon us and the way we ply by trying not to stop it�

Sonnet for N.

The heart beats,
the yellow flowers grow,
the growing burden on the sky
wages dark on the blueness there,

the wandering bleats
of trumpets slow
in distant fields lie
calm in a silence there,

and the crow entreats
the dusky haze of twilight, low
on the horizon, to die
now like the light upon your hair,

black as the vault of sky,
naked as the sky laid bare.

--Brooklyn, 2008

Millions Now Living Will Never Die

I've experienced several breaking points in my life, but this one tonight was the easiest and most positive. It's not a snap, or a "breakdown." It was more like becoming overfull of the pain and sadness, to the point of overflowing, a feeling that in a way simplified my actions, and I completely spontaneously wanted to call Megan. Up until this very point the thought would have made me even more wretchedly sad. But it was as if I simply no longer had the choice; that I simply missed her so much that I would do anything to ... what? Hear her voice again? Perhaps... but as I recall, though it was not even an hour ago yet, I just wanted so badly to tell her that I missed her. I wanted to hear that she missed me too and still loved me. I didn't think that was even likely; but I was so desperate that I had to take the chance.

For weeks I had been avoiding talking to Megan in any way, and likely as a result, becoming more and more depressed. I still find it gut-wrenchingly painful to think of her with this new boyfriend. He's not even new now, really. Is this just insecurity on my part? Is no-one confident enough to be immune from that pain?

The other night, when I was visiting Ruth and Laura, Ruth asked me something about pain, possibly something like how I deal with pain. I thought about it and was mildly surprised to find that I simply felt used to it. I don't think I've ever fought pain; can it be fought? I've always simply let it hurt me and hurt me until it went away. It never occurred to me that there would be an alternative, though now I know some people fight it weakly with TV and shopping and other modern nostrums and snake-oils.

It's not like I've "lived with" pain in the way that all too many people truly do. Generally I consider myself to be a quite happy person, and I think I always have been. But I've also always�first implicitly and later explicitly�accepted the highest highs for the lowest lows, and immediately accepted those trials and the great suffering that is fundamental to all life, and fundamental equally to true happiness.

Soon, I

Soon, I�ll fold the martyrs
up into inkblots,
sing to and barter with the stars
for a half-pound of light,
and coax dinner out of the pan.

I�ll write stanzas that span
canyons, soon,
soon, I�ll sell the car
that dad gave me, but not
its grief or memory.

The lunar cleft demands that
I continue soon into
the dreadful alleyways of the night,
but I�ll be fine, he says,
I�ll get mine and you�ll get yours.

Soon I�ll know the bleak refrain of death, (he says,)
the life that�s in the chlorophyll,
and spin that�s in the spider�
and I�ll hope that I can at least
become a little closer to
my father, the martyr,
soon to be the ink I�ll spill.

--Place and date unsure. I'll have to look it up in the archives. My favorite lines are "the life that's in the chlorophyll / and spin that's in the spider."

Verona Fifth: A Fragment

I cannot claim I�ve never cried
aloud for time to quit its silence.
I cannot name that sovereign dusk
that shatters sky with violence,
and renders us as silhouettes
at one both burned and violet.

--Gainesville, (2004?)

The rest of the poem doesn't live up to this stanza. I might chuck the rest of it... or reconstruct a new poem around it.

Suffer as I Have Suffered

The other week I wrote a new EBM dance track called "Suffer as I Have Suffered" under a new project name, Mucinogen, which I think will pretty much take over from STAUB. At first I thought I'd do both but, might as well simplify.

I threw together a little site today so you can hear the song: http://mucinogen.com/

The funny thing is, last night I was talking to Brien's girlfriend Kristhal, and she ended up sending the song to her friend who runs a radio program in Mexico called "Terror Alert: High" on Radio Mente Abierta. You can listen to the program here: http://radiomenteabierta.com/teah/?p=16

My song is towards the end, maybe the 3rd to last or so? Enjoy!!

Enskanklopaedia Skattanica

...is funny to me.

Cave Paintings

We rarely need reminders of what we've lost. But curiously, we always seem to need reminders of what we have.

I love Harlan Ellison.

Found this tidbit in an interview with him on the Onion AV Club:

"As an outsider, I look on the human race as highly flawed. My feeling is that any species that can paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling and write Moby Dick and put someone on the moon does not have to settle for McDonald's toadburgers, novels by Judith Krantz, and American Idol. I get very annoyed at the potential that is in everybody, and how little people will settle for, and how easily they are turned away from their true purposes that can enrich them, by the most transitory silliness! Whether it's Paris Hilton or KFC food!"

I think it's funny he considers himself outside the human race ;)

A New Autumn Twilight

Together we will observe
the slender bough of a new Autumn twilight
(black ink on black water)
tremble silently with each bird alighting
or leaf falling, shudder
with each new belief we
heap upon the branches,
accreting like snow�
and we too will bend
with the weight of our
own hands upon ourselves,
and our stone eyes
drawing down the trees
of a new Autumn twilight,
as dusk gave way to dark,
as stone gave way to dust,
as the black leaves gave way
to a kinder earth.

--Brooklyn, June 6th, 2008

Notes at a Dark Hour

"I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it." --Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, p.172

Ted's Bad Idea of the Day

So a few weeks ago I was returning home down Moore St. and found a huge-ass canvas by a dumpster with a hilariously awful painting on it that looked exactly like something recovered from a Florida retirement home: wide horizontal stripes of heavy-body pastel-colored acrylics, hatched with diagonal indentations, then spattered with a fine spray of black that made it look like some kind of Oreo ice cream. It was funny to look at, but my intent was to strip it all off and use the canvas over. So I bought a can of Rock Miracle methylene chloride solvent, which is used for stripping paint and furniture, got some chemical handling gloves and went up on the roof today to take care of this sucker.

Bad idea.

I leaned the canvas against the elevator mechanical room wall so I'd be in the shade, put on my gloves and started pouring the methylene chloride onto the canvas. This stuff is really thick, light-amber colored, and smells utterly revolting. It's completely open on the roof, and windy (which became really fucking irritating because of my hair), but even then when I caught a whiff of the solvent I almost threw up. So if you're ever going to try to strip something with methylene chloride, don't EVER try it indoors under any circumstances.

I could tell that the solvent was quickly softening the paint, which was really thick in spots, and I continued brushing it all over the surface and adding more. The stuff was really turning into a disgusting goop as it dissolved the acrylic and ran down the canvas. Now, in my impetuousness I hadn't bothered to put anything under the canvas, because I knew any kind of plastic would just get dissolved as well and I was tired of putting this off. In retrospect, I should have at least put some fucking newspaper under there, christ. The goop slid down onto the roof surface and turned into a repulsive mess. I continued scraping and applying and scraping, but it eventually became clear that the canvas would never be clean, and it was smelling worse and worse despite the steady wind. The bucket of water had accreted a foul layer of dissolved paint and solvent floating in it as I periodically rinsed the brush. I was shedding the sludge off the scraper directly onto the roof for lack of some kind of crap-vessel, and after some time, decided the whole thing was a lost cause.

I set the canvas aside and tried to scrape the sludge off the roof, creating a sickening smear that turned gasoline-black from the roof tar with streaks of pastel blue and white. I hadn't set up near a drain so I couldn't try to wash it off, otherwise the water would just pool, and this roof is shitty enough as it is. I found an old, weathered cardboard box elsewhere on the roof and used parts of it to scrape up as much sludge as I could, but eventually gave it up and decided no one would notice, or care, or really be able to do anything about it.

As I was taking the bucket, brush and scraper back down I realized the frame was still good, and that I should have just taken the canvas off in the first damn place, so I came back up with some channel locks and tore the whole surface off, stinking of methylene chloride slime, and threw the canvas in the dumpster.

Lesson learned: stripping canvas ain't worth it! But I've still got more canvas from my last series of stretches, so at least I've got a good frame for free. Or at least, the cost of a few wasted hours.

Specific Gravity

I am trying to measure
that specific gravity of poetry
that draws it down with words
into a dark deep
with such weight that
the dark is bent down
around old sailboats
and broken reefs
and other memories

and becomes tied up in
itself, crushed by heavy syllables
like "I" and "you,"
bearing down upon the
dark floor of being,
living insofar as coral
lives to sustain life,
alive because it will not die.

12/22/07 - Port Richey, FL

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