Leon

I realized that I haven't thought much about going back to Marlboro. Perhaps because it doesn't feel terribly real. I don't know if it will feel real, even when I'm there. I was in Brattleboro for a very long time; when I left, I did not look back. Did not remain in contact with my close friends there, did not even think about the place much after I had gone. I rarely write about Brattleboro now, a few odd poems in 29 Cheeseburgers but that's about it. It is strange, though, to look back and think about how alive I felt there. The place was full of its own pain, as any place is, but that place felt inhabited, like I was inhabiting it and inhabiting myself when I was there. I had an identity. People touched me. I was human. I don't feel particularly alive or human here. I don't so much inhabit Boston as I haunt it. The ghosts were there in Vermont, but they were all around me. Here, now, I'm one of them. I don't feel especially like "I" am going back "there" because bit by bit "I" ceases to exist, or at least the I that existed when I lived there, and the "there" has ceased to exist as well. It is not the same place I left, the place I left has ceased to exist in the same way that the self that existed there has ceased to exist. It will be like dreaming of that place. It's curious how we rarely see ourselves in dreams, but when we do, there's always a reason. In a dream one has no body, because in that space bodies are irrelevant. We are made corporeal for moments, when it is important, sometimes it is just the body remembering itself. Or the mind remembering the body. Sometimes I look at this thing my mind inhabits and I wonder just what it is. A vessel of some kind, or some sort of vestigial organ. It still acts like it always has, perhaps a little slower, but I know that it will react in the expected way to the usual stimuli. I don't know what it will do returning to that place. Will I suddenly begin to be the person I was when I left? I have no particular emotions as regards that person. A stranger. Would I talk to him at a bar? Probably not. I'm not interested in my own stories anymore. After so many years in bars, you hear alot of stories. I'm not sure I'm interested in stories of any kind anymore. Endings are mostly predictable.

I like to take photographs of running water because I like to prove to myself that something random is still capable of happening. But I suppose even the water has a pattern.

By the rules of narrative, I'm supposed to feel something going back to this place. But I don't. Or rather, intellectually I think it's an interesting idea, and I like the idea of bringing my words back to the place where probably many things started. But the nature of the place has no meaning. I lived with a woman. I was a photographer. I had long hair. I was a vegetarian. I had rings in my ears and in my nose. I worked in a record store. I taught photography to kids from an insane asylum. None of these things has any meaning to me anymore. I might have been someone else. They may have happened to someone else.

It's late and I'm not altogether certain what my point here is. Ultimately, I suppose I don't have one. I have no point, no body. I'm a white word painted on a white surface. I rarely recognize myself in the mirror anymore.

I'm excited to stay in the hotel I once lived across from. Now I am one of those strangers in that hotel. My own ghost will watch me from across the street. We won't recognize each other. I have no time for you, ghost, and no love either.

I am curious, though, but I'm not sure about what. You look at your own hand in the dim light and wonder what it's for. You kick the wall and wonder if it will hurt. Perhaps something there will have some kind of meaning, a message I wrote to myself for the future, when I've forgotten everything. But I'm not sure I speak the language anymore.

Areola mux murk

Cataloging the inventory for the 108 Yart Sale Indie Bookfair I feel like a kid in a candy store. Except with spreadsheets.

Lots and lots of great stuff, if you are in Boston May 1 & 2, you owe it to yourself to come and take a look at these books and give your money to your friends and heroes.

And bring me some coffee. And maybe flirt with me. But more importantly, COME BUY BOOKS!

On its way.

AUBERGINE

Raw meat

or unrusted blood

the furor of 

a hollow     copse

of darks blushed

sanguine; selenium

shadow-tone night

seen thru eyes beet-

veined by purple pinot's

vinestains or an 

angel's mouth, handjob

in the vineyard

     crystal streak of

blood's brother     the deeper

plants the heavy

ichor-filled

eggplant-skinned     no sepia

no nectarine     surly phantom

who yanks  O Aubergine

Aubergine

Aubergine

The comments field keeps disappearing. I haven't removed it, I think there's just something wrong with the Haloscan servers.

Hey, FACTIVA has some literary magazines. [Evil Laugh] BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

As if I didn't abuse this job enough...

Blogger is irksome today.

I'm thrilled to be a part of Runaway Spoon Press's anthology of pwoermds Ampersand Sqaured. I'm a big fan of pwoermds, and this is a fantastic anthology. The size itself is satisfying, approximately the size of a book of postcards, with the pwoermds in a pleasing bold font. Reminds me also of flashcards from kindergarten (learning English) or high school (learning French); I suppose this constitutes "learning English" as well.

I'm a big fan of pwoermds. I like that they are elemental, reducing the dynamics of the word to one of the smallest possible units, they draw our attention to the true pawns, the true building blocks of this act of poetry: the words themselves. These works become our occidental ideographs, working sometimes visually, sometimes upon the context of the mark in relation to other marks, or echoing other marks; they are to our language what those mythic "Chinese" characters described (inaccurately) by Fenollosa are. The dynamics of the works function in a similar fashion:

In this Chinese shows its advantage. Its etymology is constantly visible. It retains the creative impulse and process, visible and at work. After thousands of years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown, and in many cases actually retained in the meaning. Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses in national philosophy and history, in biography and in poetry, throw about it a nimbus of meanings. These centre about the graphic symbol. The memory can hold them and use them. The very soil of Chinese life seems entangled in the roots of its speech. The manifold illustrations which crowd its annals of personal experience, the lines of tendency which converge upon a tragic climax, moral character as the very core of the principle--all these are flashed at once on the mind as reinforcing values with an accumulation of meaning which a phonetic language can hardly hope to attain. Their ideographs are like blood-stained battle flags to an old campaigner. With us, the poet is the only one for whom the accumulated treasures of the race-words are real and active. Poetic language is always vibrant with fold on fold of overtones, and with natural affinities, but in Chinese the visibility of the metaphor tends to raise this quality to its intensest power. -From The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.

In the pwoermds, we can see that evolution of English words, as they copulate with each other and with graphical, concrete elements to form mutated signs.

An informative essay by Geof Huth traces the history of the pwoermd and comments on the works in the anthology. He speaks about the demonization of pwoermds, and minimalist art in general by those who fail to see that any work of art is an organism or a compound, made up of a system of cells or molecules. The minimalist is more of a chemist than a sculptor, engaging the materials at their most base level. Indeed, in the case of the pwoermds, the minimalist is an alchemist, fusing sometimes unrelated, sometimes related units into new forms, creating chimeras, mules and tangelos.

I have deliberately not mentioned any of the pwoermds here in the hopes that the reader will go to the anthology itself to see them. For locals, I'll have a few copies at the Indie Bookfair at the Yart Sale in Somerville this weekend, otherwise, you can contact Geof Huth by way of his blog in order to order a copy...

I wait for a voice like rain
on an umbrella, the silver april weather
rushing like molten glass to
the speaking fissure where harp
strings stretch as sutures, solemn
& the white darts fall
where they may--a dark face
backlit, harboring the terror
of words: burns eyes when read
this necronomicon my heart holds
burnished secrets, my poison
idols: a little ghost
collects in the damp lamplight the green
hairs on my barren arms make a banyan
tree. Some wasted thing, a letter
in a bottle in the hull of
the Flying Dutchman: tiny metal balls
in the bloodstream are all that's
left of that adventurer, no dry
season, a shadow tells a story
to the votive candle: I might've forgot
myself in you, remember my arms
as if they were alive, a cage wrought
with jade holds a canary face-
up, I named this constellation
for you before all
those suns went out.