A book printed inside a book: halfway through, there’s the title page again, and the table of contents and the rest of it. You think, I’ve just read this, but you find yourself reading it again anyway, anxious to find out what will happen when you get to the middle. What happens is that suddenly you are back into unexplored territory, and you feel both lost and relieved. You get to the last page, and look: the outer book resumes where it left off, halfway through.
You set it aside. Does the cicada climb back into its shell? The book within the book has already crawled out and is waiting for its wings to dry.
In your spam folder, one of the messages purporting to originate at your own address reads: Hey, why do not you write? You forgot about me? Outside, the moon is at perigee — the closest it gets to earth all year. Perhaps that accounts for the numbing cold.
You fumble with the camera settings, shorten one of the tripod legs so the camera can stand on the slope, and peer through the LCD screen. The moon is the very same color as the lamp on your desk. Tonight it has a companion, too: Mars is just a hand’s-breadth away. You try to picture yourself as a red planet.
That haunting snippet of music you kept hearing on NPR, between stories on “All Things Considered”? Thanks to npr.org and the internet generally, you were able to track it down within minutes and listen to the whole song for free, because someone had thoughtfully uploaded it to YouTube. But alas, aside from that snippet, the song had nothing to offer, and it kept offering it for more than five minutes over progressively more synthetic beats. You try listening to a couple other pieces by the same band, and they’re so horrible you can’t get past the first minute. You’re reminded of a woman you glimpsed once in a side-street for several seconds, and how she haunted your imagination for years thereafter. What does the imagination know? Just enough to be dangerous. But the internet — the internet knows too much.
I am thankful for pine needles.
I am thankful for uncivil engineering.
I am thankful for rapture-ready Christians.
I am thankful for my balls.
I am thankful for synergistic competencies across solution implementation, product/platform technologies and selling channels.
I am thankful for Potted Meat Product.
I am thankful for like, whatever.
I am thankful for standards-based curriculum mapping.
I am thankful for palpable resentments on a stick.
I am thankful for Thursday.
I am thankful for fresh pink pencil erasers.
I am thankful for leveraging on-demand business intelligence solutions.
I am thankful for the Incredible Hulk of dogs, Wendy the whippet.
I am thankful for the hypertext transfer protocol and to the republic for which it stands, except where otherwise noted.
I am thankful for “88″ sounding like “fortune fortune” in Cantonese.
I am thankful for habeas corpus, Corpus Christi, and corpus delicti with special sauce.
I am thankful for gratitude.
I am thankful for two-headed snakes blinking in sync.
I am thankful for latent-trajectory and latent-growth-curve models for a dependent variable having ordered categories.
I am thankful for every serviceable device.
I am thankful for sand.
One with the head of a crocodile, one wearing the fresh skin of a newborn just beginning to lose its glow, one in a trench coat and shoes black and shiny enough to confuse the moon into setting an hour early, one who sniffs and shuffles papers, one with the wings of small bats neatly folded into the clean and green coffin of his pocket, one who claps loudly at inappropriate junctures, one with an extruded plastic handshake and a business card printed with the wrong email, one who seeks absolution in the polite smiles of his opponents the birdwatchers and trout fishermen, one who used to be the most powerful senator in the state and now turns his back on the public hearing — the assembled citizenry with their ignorant concerns — to bark into a clam shell too narrow for the sound of surf.
I will miss the incandescent light bulb, its hairless, faceless, chinless head as if from a gelded angel. I will miss that single, glowing synapse. That one bright idea appearing above our heads in the comics, quintessence of the thought balloon. I wouldn’t mind if light bulb jokes died along with it, but I’m sure they’ll persist in some form as long as the obtuseness of other people seems worth a laugh.
There’s no denying the compact fluorescent bulb’s comparative sobriety, though — it’s as blandly utilitarian as a radiator coil or a wastebasket. I’m sure there are those who will miss the radiator coil if electric cars take over, and wastebaskets probably already have their aficionados, but neither comes close to the incandescent light bulb’s fungal charisma. Flea market booths that today specialize in antique glass insulators will someday do a brisk business in burnt-out bulbs. Little girls will stop for a closer look: Daddy, what sort of doll did this come from?
And Daddy will say, its body was hidden from us, we didn’t think about it much. Its limbs were long seams of a greasy midnight that used to be trees, and had been buried halfway to forever in the hearts of mountains. And when we moved the mountains to disinter them, streams and rivers died, the lungs of miners turned black, deadly mercury spread across the earth. This was the dangerous kind of doll. We were happy not to have it around the house.
You can have everything as long as you keep your eyes shut. I’ve been practicing this with horses, with hats, with consumer electronics, with money, with vacations, with specialty cheeses, with weapons of mass destruction. I hear them gather, humming & purposeful, like sex toys or the avatars of deities in which I don’t fully believe.
I start the way an oyster does, mulling over a mustard seed of lust. But it isn’t a seed, is it? It’s a worry bead, a tumor: its growth is by simple addition, & contains no taint of metamorphosis. I conjure, I cadger, I cajole these prodigies of the pituitary gland into being my body doubles & starring in the movie of my life while I sleep.
The teachable moment arrives in its dollar-store shoes & hand-me-down corduroys and takes a front-row seat. We properly interred citizens shift uneasily on our plush velvet beds. Why is the blackboard green now? Who hung that Muslim star map over our heads? The teachable moment brings laughter into the classroom, and never wants to do anything but play with the fingerpaints, which are edible now, they say, & taste like corn syrup. Look, a face! Red mouth, open, open. Angry hot grill. But the blue doesn’t taste as good as the others, so pour it on thick: jeering bluejay, jailbait, merchant marine. Swirl the primary colors together until they all turn to mud. Only the corners of the paper stay dry. Teachable in what way, we’d like to know. Comfort in one’s own skin is the mark of a mongrel. We are all strangers & sojourners in the earth; our name is Legion. American Legion. Why can’t the road crews spray that feral patch of prairie against the fence, that growth the plough’s steel scalpel could never reach? What have they done with our cypress spurge, which smelled so much like lilacs in lilac-time? Quickly now, before the paint dries! But the moment is gone. The millipedes go back to their homework, its evil twin.
Bandage yourself in green: the color of a wound that has festered beyond healing. Sink into the moss, that peaceful mob. A 17-year cicada chants Pharoah, pharoah but no one else joins in, because this is in fact the 18th year — it missed the party. The pharoah has gone back under the ground. His colorless green ideas sleep furiously: an ignis fatuus, born of decomposition. Moss spreads soft as velvet over all the burned and barren parts of the earth.
The genetically modified poem is critic-ready, designed for the sanitized fields of modern mass production. It is the trademarked property of its creator. Its lines have been engineered not to reproduce themselves in anyone’s imagination.
The genetically modified poem produces its own growth hormones, easily outstripping its unmodified competitors. It’s the ration of choice at the poetry feedlots of Iowa, where so many manuscripts are fattened up for publishing.
The genetically modified poem has much higher nutritional value. Its every syllable is packed with nuance, assonance, and B vitamins. You hardly need to read anything else.
The genetically modified poem is a wonder of nature, containing the line-breaks of William Carlos Williams, the sudden insights of Basho, and the easy surrealism of late Neruda, not to mention the genes of a flounder.
The genetically modified poem has been stripped of idioms and idiosyncracies to maximize its shelf-life, which more than makes up for its inability to reproduce. Light-weight and modular, smelling ever so faintly of an autumn sunrise, it will outlast us all.
Thanks to readers on Identi.ca and Twitter for their enthusiastic feedback on an earlier draft, published piecemeal.
Snowflakes in the bathroom mirror this morning as I sit on the pot. Happy equinox!
Later, in Via Negativa’s spam comment folder, I find line after line of question marks. My finger hovers over the delete button. Am I sure these were merely characters in an exotic font my desktop can’t display? What if someone really meant to question me this thoroughly? Or maybe it represents some poor, lonely soul’s existential crisis.
One spam comment I can read is only slightly less cryptic:
Onion booty. Big booty. Latina booty. Doctor booty good. Big black booty. Yoga booty ballet…
I suppose the ellipsis is meant to suggest that the booty-related possibilites are endless, but I’m frankly not sure how you would top yoga booty ballet.
And I’m agog at the idea of onion booty. Almost everything I cook has onions in it; a sharp-nosed friend of mine tells me I always smell faintly of onions. I like the way they relax and turn translucent, then slowly caramelize into brown sugar, or stay crisp and shapely in a stir-fry. But when I google “onion booty,” it turns out to be the name of a thoroughly unpoetic porn site, featuring “asses so beautiful they make you cry” being defiled in a variety of ways that one may or may not find unspeakable, depending on one’s tolerance for such things, but which are at any rate quite predictable. No layers of mystery here. Nothing like an onion.
The question marks that once were letters also probably said something utterly mundane. I’m reminded of my brother’s work with the Indus Valley script, which has so far defied all efforts at decipherment. One self-styled expert with a Harvard connection has been advancing the theory that they aren’t glyphs at all, but mystic symbols of some sort. People used to think that about the Egyptian and Mayan writing systems, too. It’s so easy to assume that anything that’s cryptic must be profound. But Steve is beginning to suspect that most of the surviving Indus Valley inscriptions actually record commercial transactions — that’s why they’re so brief and repetitive. If this is true, the language may never be deciphered.
The snow didn’t amount to anything here, but farther east, I gather, some folks got an onion snow. It’s onion-planting time for sure. The snowflakes sit briefly on the thawed earth as if they were seeds, encoded with full libraries of DNA. Then they melt, and turn into ordinary water — the currency of the planet. And a week later, all along the edge of the woods, the tall green glyphs of wild onions.
I am not ready to let the colors back in. The sky in black & white retains a pleasing uniformity: it’s either a wall of light or the nightly well. Shadows have authority, making a man appear as solid as a tree and a tree as stolid as a gnomon. I am not ready for brown & green & blue & the grievances of noon. I am not ready to stop being white & seeing white as blankness, the default setting. The kind of self-effacement that ennables is still so comfortable. The old ways might have been wrong but it was a wrongness that required careful attention, like the shape & set of a fine felt hat. It was ugly, yes, but it fit. Now we have such a crowd of proud misfits, loud in their ain’ts & their complaints, shrill as the shills who killed their appetite for books. I watch their hands shaping the air & think, what if someday we all switched to sign language & to Braille? What would that do the hard cell of self? Then perhaps we could free ourselves from the shame of misbegotten speech: the N-word, the F-word, the C-word, the S-word. Then we could all luxuriate in a world of scent & soft outlines — a touchy-feely city on the hill. Then only those without any hands would still stand on the wrong side of the wall, their unbranched shadows inching across the snow.
If there’s anyone in all of Facebonk who has yet to do this so-called meme, I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t like doing things that everyone is doing until no one is doing them anymore. That way if I can’t be original, at least I can be retro chic.
I have the head of a rat, the tail of a snake, and the body of a lawnmower.
I am the direct descendent of the lost tribes of Friesland, who were quickly found again after a perfunctory search of the premises.
My favorite philosopher weighs fifteen pounds and lives behind the furnace.
I like sandwiches better than life itself.
When words fail me, I have them fed to the geese.
I channel a mute spirit with autism. Let’s just say that channelling isn’t either of our idea of a good time.
Whenever I can’t sleep, I recite acronyms to myself. I always nod off in the middle of a C.
When I was six, I grew a third penis in the middle of my forehead.
The internet changed my life! I forget the details.
Cardboard is my middle name.
My favorite color is not in the visible spectrum. It’s shy.
Angels disgust me.
At 18 I was a drug mule, the offspring of a drug horse and a drug donkey.
I shot the sheriff.
Nobody can tell when I’m blushing with this goalie mask on.
I have never actually dated a sheep.
I believe that children are the future — at least for embryos. For the rest of us, old age and death seem more likely.
I know Jack shit, but only in passing. It’s not like we’re friends on Facebonk.
There’s a dog-shaped hole in my heart. Or at least I think it’s a dog. It could be a coyote.
When not fighting crime, I use my powers for morally ambiguous purposes.
I am music, and I write the songs.
When I was your age, I was grateful just to be unemployed.
Everything I need to know I learned from studying prestressed concrete.
I’m not wearing any lederhosen.
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. And believe me, I can’t dance.
I mean actual, honest-to-Whomever fog: clouds that form on the ground instead of in the sky.
Of course, when you live on a mountain, your fog might well be someone else’s cloud, especially in the winter and early spring. But this time of year, you can rise above the clouds simply by walking uphill. Or you can stay inside and wonder vaguely, between bouts of election-season-induced fury, who the hell keeps knocking on the roof.
A woman has seen her own heart on display at a medical exhibition. Scientists have discovered a species of brittle star whose outer skeleton is covered with crystalline lenses that appear to work collectively as an all-seeing eye. In the past few days, researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. I’m just wondering what the heck is in our water supply, what the heck is in our oxygen supply, of the metallic outside salts that create a rainbow effect in a sprinkler? What is oozing out of our ground that allows this type of effect to happen? It caused me so much pain and turmoil when it was inside me. Seeing it sitting here is extremely bizarre and very strange. Restrictive cardiomyopathy causes the heart muscle to stiffen so the heart cannot relax normally after contraction. As the disease progresses, the heart muscle continues to stiffen and eventually contraction is also affected. Thanks to evolution, they have beautifully designed crystal lenses that are an integral part of their calcite skeleton, said Hendler. Those lenses appear to be acting in concert with chromatophores and photoreceptor tissues. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. Not just around our sun and our moon anymore — everywhere we look, the visible spectrum… is rainbows. This cannot be natural. Finally I can see this odd looking lump of muscle that has given me so much upset.
__________
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the publisher or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's, where I'm doing a reading on April 10.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop" Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
Smorgasblog
Mark Doty
And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O'Keefe flower and a jellyfish.
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Dick Jones' Patteran Pages
The painter washes his hands on the flannel of the sky
Everything is in gouts of colour
And the hats of the passing women are comets
across the evening’s fire.
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Parmanu
But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
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Mutating the Signature
Don’t bring your tires
stripped of hot rims, or used
condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
needles. Leave the headless
doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
cans.
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the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
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everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
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slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
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Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
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