Poetry is fluid,
wet stuff, but hot.
My poetry is lost to me
the way liquid pours from volcanoes.
Once written, it hardens,
fleeing from my memory.
I can see the shapes of words I once knew,
but their meanings are rocks,
and I cannot penetrate them
without breaking them all apart.
sooooo late…
Just got back from Rurik’s Halloween party. He always throws a good one. Laura and I spent most of the afternoon running from one store to the next looking at costumes and trying to find something we wouldn’t mind being. Eventually, we got her a vinyl witches hat and a target witch dress (it came with black wings that she didn’t wear, and was called something else, but yeah,) and I got to be her black cat. It was a good costume, in spite of costing very little and being kind of unoriginal.
I wrote no poetry yesterday. I tried to write something just now, so at least I made an attempt, but it’s so late that my eyes are closing on me all the time, and my heart just isn’t into it.
I’ll try to write some later today after I’ve gotten a good sleep, in between bouts of GTA: San Andreas. I haven’t actually played it yet, and it’s sitting on the coffee table calling my name. Bed is calling louder though, and I absolutely must obey…
novels and novelists, plots and plotists
How’s this for a list of things to include in your novel: a list of “Human Universals”, link via Kottke, who says “All known human cultures share these attributes.”
Tonight I met a bunch of nanowrimoers, most of whom I’ll never remember their names. But I also met Sharyn, who I seem to have an inordinate amount of things in common with, and Katherine who I have met before and find oddly intriguing… (Also, she calls me “Mozilla Man” because the first time I met her I was wearing a Mozilla T-shirt, which is obviously appealing in an entirely too geeky sort of way.)
I had a very productive shower today, where I figured out the motivation for one of my main plot points in the novel that I haven’t even really thought much about, but which I will be writing next month. Man, lets hope I can avoid sentences like that last one come monday!
self reflection in prose poetry
Inspired by DrBombay’s new Bombay Thoughts
Is every prose poem a stream of consciousness, or just this one? And do all streams of consciousness really just flow in a big circle back to talking about consciousness and/or writing about consciousness, or anyway being conscious of the fact that you’re writing, which is damn near writing about consciousness, because the written word is really just consciousness commodified and collected on paper, or screen, or wherever it happens to be, in the same way playing the piano is really just music commodified or collected or something. There’s a word here that means what I’m trying to say, but I can’t think of it just now, and I hate when I can’t think of words because it’s like a part of my brain is malfunctioning. That happens probably a lot more often than I care to admit, my brain malfunctioning, and words not coming to the top of my head when I want them to come out of the top of my head is really just some kind of malfunctioning byproduct. I’m like the top-of-the-headless horseman when it comes to words and remembering them. If this weren’t stream of consciousness, I’d stop to think of the word. Probably stop for a long time, and by the end of it, I’d have found the word, but it wouldn’t seem quite right. It would still seem like there was a word out there just a little bit better than the one I’d finally remembered, and I would still be unsatisfied, dreaming of a word that was just a little more perfect like some kind of deja vu for words.
thoughts at five am
Things I’m thinking about at around 5am.
- The Worlds of Warcraft beta is almost over. They’re going to be down for a few days, and everyone has to download a new client. When the servers come back up they’ll be officially starting the “stress test”, which probably just means open beta. Anybody can sign up. Usually these things don’t last too long, so I’ll bet the game actually gets released in the next couple of weeks at most. I wanted to be sick of this game before it was released… but there’s just so much to do! I will refrain from buying it in november, however, as I’ll be doing nanowrimo.
- I really want to go see the documentary film Blogumentary next friday at the oak street. It’s part of a local documentary film festival called Get Real. Some of the other films sound quite interesting too.
- I can’t believe I’ve blogged every day this month so far. That is definitely a personal record of some kind. Even last november I missed eight days or so. (of course, I was probably too busy blogging to post then.) I’m sure I won’t be keeping this kind of pace up during Nano next month, but I do hope to update fairly regularly.
- Speaking of nanowrimo, tonight is the twin cities kickoff meeting/party. The first really is starting to creep up on me, and I still have only a vague idea for my novel. I thought that by this time I’d have thought of (and no doubt rejected) several other ideas, but no, I just haven’t given it enough thought really at all. I may end up going with my first idea because I have no others. (Which is what I really didn’t want to do this year, because it’s pretty much what I did last year. This year I wanted to have some small plot outline at the very least.) Wish me luck, and if you’re doing it, maybe I’ll see you tonight!
- I’m sleepy.
Post it note poetry
Ode to Sharpie
thick black marker
perchance to pen in permanent
perpetual ink
shiny surface stealer
staying true to your words
words staying true to you
Instance Poem
Life is one long poem
beginning to end
verse after tedious verse;
each thing we write
a small instance
of a larger poetic picture.
post it note poetry
Sticky side down
short and yellow, little
reminders, remembrances.
Placement is key, put them
where a poem is
least likely, where
words can surprise.
em pee threes
music fueled files
chilled audio chunks
brittle sound bits
one-ninety-two per second
composed quality over compression
ripped vibrations channeled
stereo into ear esophagi
drum tunnels drilled
as if into a wooden skull
plodding, pounding, pleading
worming, wriggling, weaving
taking over nerve nexuses
brain tissue intersections where
dance moves are stored, triggered,
toes curl, discontinuous spasms
in knee joints, elbows, fingers
curled around an ergonomic keyboard
lifting and falling in lilting sporadic patterns
trying to sit still while between
headphones and hard drive
a symphonic catastrophe
ancillary entomology
gnats on parade
long slithering snakes of ants less parading and more commuting
fat black flies banging heads on windows
tiny round winged moths battering against lightbulbs after midnight
insect motions filed and cataloged
groups of highly specific evolutionary traits
creating behaviors that seem alien to us, foreign,
yet we bang our heads on walls,
we participate in parades, for seemingly little reason,
we do the locomotion.
blurglemeister
I didn’t really write nothin’ today. Had too many emails to go over from this weekend… did lots of stuff with Laura yesterday (sunday) for her birthday. OK, so I wrote some mindblubs. Also, I’m not feeling so woofy. Lots of spam comments today. Feels like I got dog breath and some enlargated esopho-glandiaries.
keyboard shortcut dancing
flying in and out of real life
some kind of psychic link with the interface
the lines between computer and human blur
hands that don’t leave home row
shift into the computer
until I am attached at the wrists
the typewriter eating William S. Burroughs
has nothing on me because
I am eating the computer, my eyeballs
sink into the monitor like drops into water
the surface tension pulls the rest of my head after
CTR-W, CTR-W, CTR-W, but it won’t close
I can’t ESCAPE, CTR-ALT-DEL does nothing,
but I’m able to CTR-C, ALT-TAB, CTR-V myself
into the next document
noting the timestamp here is much later
and there is no bloated Word markup
marching at me from the margins
I’ve CTR-S’d myself,
for the moment at least, and I
breath a comma of relief