“He should have been telling me…”

 ”to run BankManager.exe, not telling me to execute the bank manager.”

- the gibberish running through my head when I woke up.

366. 366. Serendipaciousness.

A happy coincidence. A brief moment of serendipity that I shall spread across the year. 366 days, 366 poems from the Canzoniere by Petrach.  A. S. Kline has the complete text, as well as many other texts in translation available.  Januray 1st I jump into the deep water of unrequited love and poetry.  Fun!

“Loving the wrong girl…

…only leads to drinking alone.”

-Ikey, October Road

Expect Longing / Residual Expectations

She’s a good witch!

And, perhaps unfortunately, I don’t recall enough of the Wizard of Oz to be really clever about that, so, please, pardon the inane cliche. Carolee and I were playing catch-up with this week’s Read Write Poem prompt, provided by Ceridwen, to work on a collaborative piece. It was an enjoyable experience and a tad bit tricky working with someone else’s ideas, but that also helped the poem open up in directions I wouldn’t have gone. (an aside: i hate the word “collaborate” and the derivative words. It does not have pleasant feel when speaking it, or when typing it.) Other people have collaborated and posted their poems over at Read Write Poem already, so check them out if you wandered here from elsewhere, and be sure to check Carolee’s site for her thoughts on this. This is the Carolee and Tom poem:

Expect Longing

Countdown counted out suddenly
face to face with tomorrow
drunk on imported champagne,
I look to you for a midnight kiss.

For a kiss, I ask, for lips
around this open wound, a tongue
to lap away my worry-words.
This new day tell me, tell me….

Tell me of tomorrow’s failures:
the resolutions forgotten,
the weight that will wait
to be taken from suntanned flesh,

the light I’ll waste with longing,
nights paced away in planning
as if lists and flowcharts led
anywhere but the bottom of the page.

For tonight, I’ll map my designs,
roll smooth, crisp blueprints into tubes,
wonder tomorrow how to stop the ink
from draining through these purple veins.

What mouth will meet these lips
blue with the residue of faded ideas?
What tongue will taste this mouth
rank with discarded promises?

You kiss me slowly then press your cheek
against mine. I look past your shoulder
at the other revelers, still holding
each others’ tongues and I am jealous.

During the process, Carolee suggested we each take the poem we wrote and use it as the base text for a “found poem” exercise. I took… well, most, of the words from the poem, played a little with capitalization and punctuation and have the following “gem” (ironic quotes here) for you all:

Residual Expectations

Down- sudden.
Tomorrow drunk
and a midnight kiss.

I ask for lips,
a tongue
to lap my
new day.

Tell me…
tell me…
tell me of tomorrow:
the resolutions,
the wait for flesh,

the light,
the longing,
the nights.

Tonight-
smooth.
Wonder.
Don’t stop the ink
from draining
through these
purple veins.

Meet the lips
with the
residue of ideas.
Taste the mouth
with promises.

Kiss me.
Slow.
Look past,
revel,
hold each other
and I am.

To A., in absentia.

“…for now let me say, without hope or agenda, just because it’s Christmas (and at Christmas you tell the truth), to me, you are perfect and my wasted heart will love you…” forever.

For all of you, I hope you all have a merry Christmas, whether it is a religious celebration for you or not, spent with those you care about.

And soon enough the new year to look forward to.

“Enough… enough now.”

cadavre exquis

This weekend I had some friends over for a fun evening. I made mousse (tricky bastard, that), my brother-in-law brought some of his wine (very tasty stuff, that) and we did a bit of the exquisite corpse parlor game. It’s going to take me a little while to clean the images up and post them, but here are the texts we came up with.

The sword glows dark in the
night
Breathless, Waiting, until I can no longer
See the scarlet night
disperse the wine. Forsooth young master
You happen to see flowers in the
gutter ball was the end for him, for now
he.

Brilliant like a hawk in the noon
sun beating boldly upon the shaven scalp that
silhouettes the sky with grandeur and
spaciousness
Simply can’t fill the
Void of shallow darkness awaits
me. Me I am. I am me. You are you.
We forget to pull the plug. the bathroom flooded.

Someone must have unplugged the
sun, home of the fire. Burst forth burning
the last emperor of japan, a silly, silly
man bag of power was the gift she
hoped to be the one whom everyone
loved
Never again. Never again. Never again.
Never leave, never stay, always lost, always
afraid.

And lo, he laid the bare goat
upon the last stair, a clear
slipper feet travel over coals of
hot nights, wild nights, do
it
Damn it to hell. take your bull and go
home; the place I will always
find yourself. Find each other Find love.

In the beginning, there was fried cheese.
Then, you wouldn’t believe
it was a dark and stormy
night. Shattered stars on the horizon’s
wings are all you can eat so have yourself
beer is
good.
Have it your way. Suck it Trebeck.

As the dawn of twilight begins to
set the table up and leave the
house
Decrepit. Flipped and Flopped. Left out in the
rain. It puddled around my shoes, so I decided to
jump around, jump around, jump up, jump up
and the following chickens crowed.
be-kau.

The Read Write Poem prompt this week is to do some collaborative writing. I imagine most of the posts that show up over there will have much more intention applied to them.

Analogue: Hatshepsut

Very indirectly inspired by Duchamp

Analogue: Hatshepsut

exactingly carved replica
porphyry
encased in glass
title plaque: Beloved
no jewels
no paint
no cuts of lace
no clasping bodice
simple straight-leg pants
buttoned shirt
low heels
eyes as
dead in stone

A little bit of my life.

I’m having a small, non-christmas related gathering for some friends tomorrow night, for desert, wine, assorted amusements of the more literary variety.  I planned to make mousse, which seemed appropriately decadent.  I got three recipes for three different kinds: a regular chocolate, a regular white chocolate, and a raspberry white chocolate.  I have a few observations after attempting the first, and simplest, recipe, the plain white chocolate.

1. Mousse is a lot harder than the recipe suggests.
2. Mousse should not have the consistency of pudding.
3. It is incredibly difficult to get it not pudding-like without very, very, well whipped whipping cream.
3a.  It is almost impossible to get that super-whip on without an electric mixer.

I only tasted a teensy bit, but that seemed okay, so we’ll see.  I think I may have to rectify the mixer thing before I continue.

Paper is the enemy of words.

Over at …eats bugs. there is a post about a speech Larry Lessig gave at TED.  Go there, watch the video.  He says please, I will issue imperatives.  But open it in a new window, I’m not done here.  So then I went over to www.TED.com where there are so many videos on such an amazing array of topics, I don’ think I can begin to pull it all in.  It is awe-inspiring.  It puts me in mind of how Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulu begins:

…Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality… the we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

It’s rather refreshing to think there are enoughs others out there, enough for this conference to exist, who find the madness exciting.  Along with Larry Lessig’s talk about copyright, Malcolm Gladwell talks about pasta sauce, Steven Pinker talks about veiled threats, and Erin McKean talks about the nature of the dictionary and the English Language.  On the one hand, she gave an eminently quotable talk but on the other she seemed so excited about her topic (not an entirely bad thing) it didn’t seem reality could keep up with her.  But you have to give mad props to anyone who uses the word “synecdochically.” The title of this post is a quote from her speech which I’ve embedded below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4VzuWmN8zY]

For L.

More, I suppose, about dreams and the deaths thereof.

For L.

I wanted to write a poem about you, perhaps
a sonnet in the mode of Petrarch, but the words
were inexplicably distant. I thought, for a moment,
that I was not able to write, that I was out of verses,
but then I wrote a haiku about the last red berry
seen through my window stark against the field of snow.

I wonder if Petrarch ever had this problem,
or if his inkwell poured the name Laura onto the page,
leaving him to collect the sheets and sign them.
The truth, I suppose, that it was one afternoon
and we barely spoke, has not deterred poets before,
but the words are so far away, and the berry right here.