blog for blog’s sake
[The following is a remix of Dr Bombay’s latest poem, Road Rage.]
I bicycle past an
immobile hunk of steel,
stalled out, unmoving.
A fuel-injected stupor,
internally confounded
failure to combust.
Trumpeted indignation,
honk of fury,
incited by impotence.
[Could it really get much worse or self-indulgent than this?]
Continue reading “windows into worlds”
these dot-matrix lines, word-dots
dealt out in little letter-clusters,
are pointillism poetry
machine inked on a
page framed by printer-feed fringes,
perforated holy strips, the frayed edges of this poem
whose message, completely obscured by the medium,
is small and lost among other tiny messages
but from far enough away,
the meaning is clear
a machine on the dark slope
sliding into textual abyss:
300 milliseconds, an eternity
character repeat rates
falling off chronic charts
waiting full seconds for the
comatose command line
to show your fevered strokes
when a path is packed
packets like sardines,
all you have left to
band with are your
memories of mistakes
hoping to hit backspace
the magically correct number of times
these insufferable moments spent
chewing whole fingernails into oblivion
between typing and seeing
Nanowrimo registration supposedly starts today. One month till I’ll be writing like a madman. I think as a sort of “warm up” for the big month, I’m going to try and write a poem a day. I was thinking about this on the bus this morning, and also about how I don’t write enough poems about technology, so I may try and keep to that broad theme for the whole month.
The first one is called foreach() and is written in parsable php.
===
<php
# poem: foreach()
foreach( $thing_you_know as $useful_thing ) {
foreach( $useful_thing as $fact ) {
foreach( $fact as $assumption ) {
if( $assumption['unsure'] == true ) {
unset( $useful_thing );
}
}
}
}
if( empty( $thing_you_know ) ) {
return true;
}
?>
“It’s the birthday of poet Frank O’Hara, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1926).”
Thus begins the writer’s almanac entry for today. Frank was a god among poets. I have often quoted Autobiographia Literaria as my favorite poem. It doesn’t seem to move me in quite the same way it used to, but its brilliance is still apparent.
This afternoon Laura and her sisters and Jason and I went to see Pirates of Penzance at the Guthrie theater. I’d never seen it before, and had only watched the first half of the movie-ized version with Kevin Klein. I have to say that I enjoyed watching the intricacies of Klein’s facial expressions more than I did watching the play. Of course it is a musical, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised I didn’t enjoy it all that much.
Anyway, I did find an interesting quote about poetry to add to my collection.
Although we live by strife,
We’re always sorry to begin it,
For what, we ask, is life
Without a touch of Poetry in it?Hail, Poetry, thou heav’n-born maid!
Thou gildest e’en the pirate’s trade.
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail, all hail, divine emollient!
[after David Mason’s The Lost House, which you can read here]
A girl I hardly knew went with me by the creek,
entering the water behind some trees that grew there
with rolled pants and bare feet. It was not yet dark,
we stood together on the river’s floor.
The sly way I contrived it, my right hand
slipped invigoratingly beneath her blue jeans
in new maneuvers, further than I’d ever dared to plan.
I swear we floated in the ankle-deep stream.
My knees shook, though I was not afraid.
We finally stopped and shook the water off.
Fifteen that summer, we touched and played.
Now, if I saw her in a photograph,
I couldn’t tell you how that young girl looked
that summer night as all our inhibitions thundered down–
like a drunken freight train, burning until cooked,
we stood hot and buried our toes in silky ground.
[I didn’t really like Mason’s poem, mostly because of the implication that what they’d done was almost wrong. At the same time his images invoked this memory from when I was 15 or so myself. UPDATE: I changed some of the wording in my second line. It’s better this way.]
My cat has a shoe fetish;
he likes to dig his paws into them,
roll them around, and
roll around on them.
I thought it was that
they’re like little gopher holes
or caves or something,
until I saw him playing with sandals
chewing on the straps and
burying his nose in the toe part.
Is it the smell?
Perhaps the taste of sweat,
so uniquely ours
that he enjoys?
My cat has a shoe fetish,
and he’ll put his toys in them
like presents for us to discover
when we leave the house.
Just now I’ve noticed that all the clocks in the house are wrong except this one on my laptop. (And perhaps the ones on the other computers, but I haven’t checked those.) It sure doesn’t feel like six am, but I guess it is now!
Today I went to my first Tai Chi class about nine years. It’s really pretty hard to believe it was that long ago, but I looked it up, and the class I took at the U was in winter ’95. I was a senior in HS, and I needed gym credits to graduate from HS. (I also needed US History, which is why I never actually graduated… sure, I registered, but it was the first “real” college class I’d ever taken, and fuck if there wasn’t a lot of memorizing useless dates and shit.)
Anyway, the class was great. I’m still recovering from my cold, or it would have probably been better. Durring the meditation part, and in some of the stretches, I found I couldn’t quite follow all the objectives, because it was extremely hard to breathe exclusively out of my nose all the time. I am actually really looking forward to the meditation portion as much as I am learning and doing the form itself.
Tonight a bunch of the guys came over and we played Settlers of Catan again… it was really slow going, and I kinda feel like I need to take an “official” break from that game. It’s rappidly losing its appeal for me.
Nate and I decided to put a movie in at about 1:30, when everybody else left, fully expecting to fall asleep to it, but for some reason I’m still up. I even got in bed about an hour ago, and I’ve been writing ever sense. I started by just jotting some crap down mindblurb style, and then wrote a poem for every cheesy line I’d written. Click below for the results:
Tonight I left the safety and relative sanity of my house after lounging in bed and on the couch all day, where I had been sick to the very root of my bones. (Still am, frankly, which is why I’m home now, and not at the International Film Festival post-gala party, with laura, and her date.)
I was going a little stir crazy, I think, but after a trip to two different targets, (and waiting in the car outside of a third, where nate tried and failed a third time to find “All of Me” on DVD for $6.99), I think I was starting to stretch the limit of my health when we found ourselves wandering through the vast corridors of the HarMar Barnes and Noble. Man, that place is a monster. It sucks you in.
And about twenty or thirty minutes into it, I was walking around, head throbbing, and I realized I was having trouble focusing on things more than ten feet away. I could do it, but it just took more effort, and kinda hurt. I was just starting to get over my enjoyment of this interesting and different experience (and drifting into the realm of a calm panic) when I found Nate and Jason again.
Anyway, the result, (and whole point) of this anecdote was that shortly thereafter I picked up my first ever box of magnetic poetry while waiting in the checkout line. (Yes, the two other editions on the fridge are Nate’s–or maybe laura’s, but I don’t think either one of them is an “official” megnetic poetry brand set.) Of course it was the erotic edition. I wrote this poem fragment while sitting on our cool (but dirty) kitchen floor breaking the words apart:
private vagina breath
murmur languid screams
yes she ate her fill
Also present on our fridge was a heretofore not broken apart square set of magnetic words from the U’s Environmental Health and Safety Ergonomic Resources department. I mixed both sets for this next poem (which I am proud of, at least presently, and rather stupid/smugly.) The ERGO words are in bold:
===
naked carpal tunnel
rub fingers and adjustable penis
strain hot my perfect pleasure
worship want please a little pain
mount CPU dirty mouse hand
swollen desk ache
keyboard orgasm