EMERGENCY EYES
prose poem prose poetry short-short flash fictionA Web Journal
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September 12, 2009
Today, as I pulled up to the gate of the parking garage at 2 pm, I rolled down the backseat drivers side window, since the driver's side window is broken. I reached out my hand awkwardly with the paper ticket to see how much I owed. The girl in the little glass box smiled at me, took the ticket, pressed some buttons in front of her, and said "Five fifty-five." I got out six bucks and handed these out the backseat window. When she reached for them she said, "Does it hurt your feelings when someone lies to you?" She had a slight plaintive tone to her voice. I looked at her and she looked at me with a little frown. Inside, I was smiling at being asked this question, which I took completely seriously. I searched my brain and found the banal, "Yes, it does. Especially if it's someone I know well and trust." She smiled at this and made change. I thought I should say something else, something less predictable, so I added, "Of course, sometimes people who love you lie to you to try to keep from hurting your feelings, so it's not always meant badly." I get this idea from reading murder mysteries, incidentally. And she smiled at me, handed me my change, and said, "Have a nice day." I said, "Have a nice day," and drove out under the raised yellow bar and out of the parking garage.
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September 5, 2009
Hi. I'm going to begin updating this web journal regularly again, so feel free to check back. Yesterday a poem of mine published in the Spring issue of Arsenic Lobster, and reprinted in that journal's 2009 print issue, was featured on Verse Daily. I'm chuffed as all get-out about this. Here's the link to the poem on Verse Daily . Here's a link to the other poem published in the issue of Arsenic Lobster .
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June 28, 2009
Ever wondered how many US banks have failed in this recession? Probably not. But in case you have, here's the official list .
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June 22, 2009
Basically, I find Twitter to be a very slightly amusing (at times), mostly pointless waste of time. (I don't Twit myself.) But there are exceptions. My friend J wrote a really interesting blog entry, over at his work's blogpage, about the relationship between Twitter and the current state of affairs in Iran. Check it out.
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June 19, 2009
Today I spent an hour or so reading around online about a recent controversy in the appointment of the next Oxford Professor of Poetry. If you want to know more about the story yourself -- i.e. if you have nothing better to do (such as writing a poem) -- just Google "Ruth Padel Dereck Walcott" and you'll be able to gather the whole sordid story, eventually. I don't propose to weigh in my own opinion, since I have better things to do (i.e. write poems, or even just feel bad about not taking the time to try to write poems because I waste time dorking about online). The reason I mention this is simply that, in the course of my web browsing, I ran across a comment, to an article in some online magazine apparently called Jezebel, that brought a warm glow to my poet-heart. The commenter, rather than weighing in upon the issue in some detailed way (which is understandable given the weakness of the article in that online magazine), gave, in the second of three brief sentences, a pithy description of all poets. [It reminds me, as long as I'm irritatingly nesting phrases out the wazzoo here, of the famous description of Fred Astaire: "Can't sing, can't act, balding, can dance a little."] Here it is for your delectation and reading pleasure, what might henceforth be known as...
The janiejones56 Definition of What a Poet Is:
Listen, I was in a Creative Writing program in college. What I learned is that almost to a person, poets are smart, scarily perceptive people with drug/alcohol habits, who had terrible childhoods. When you get a bunch of those folks together competing for very limited rewards, it can get amazingly ugly.
Indeed. I almost want to get that second sentence put on a tshirt.
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June 17, 2009
And now it's time for the amazing 3-D photographs in The Bar Mitzvah and Other Tales of Living in Stereo via the amazing Square America.
Click pic, hepcat
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June 16, 2009
Happy Bloomsday! I'm getting ready to read Ulysses this summer for the very first time, and am giddy about it. Here's the man himself reading from the novel (the animation is fake and a little creepy, but the voice is real).
Plus, a slideshow of Bloomsday celebrations in Sandycove today, from the Irish Times. See happy people standing around celebrating a book!
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June 9, 2009
Go get a cigarette lighter and prepare to wave it about in front of your computer. This kid does a cover version, on solo guitar, of "Water from the same source" by Rachel's, the contemporary chamber ensemble. And it freakin rocks.
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June 4, 2009
And now it's time for urban camouflage again.
I wish this guy was a friend of mine.
What fun he'd be at a clambake.
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June 2, 2009
From The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Mrs Ashbury collected flower seeds in paper bags. Once she had written the name, date, location, colour and other details on the bags, she would clap them over the heads of the blooms, in the overgrown flower beds or further afield in the meadows, and tie them up with string. Then she would cut off the stalks, bring the bagged heads indoors and hang them up on a much-knotted line that cross-crossed what was once the library. There were so many of these white-bagged flower-stalks hanging under the library ceiling that they resembled clouds of paper, and when Mrs Ashbury stood on the library steps to hang up or take down the rustling seed-bags she half-vanished among them like a saint ascending into heaven. Once they had been taken down, the bags were stored under some inscrutable system on the shelves, which had evidently long since been unburdened of books. I do not think Mrs Ashbury had any idea what distant fields the seeds she collected might one day fall on....
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June 1, 2009
Up Up & Away
Last night I dreamed I could fly. Then I dreamed I was stuck in a lousy tiny room in a hotel and couldn't get out. I asked and received a better room than the one I had, so that made me feel better. When I sent to my new room, it hadn't been cleaned yet, though. And the former occupant, an old man, came back while I was standing around in the considerable mess wondering where to put down by bags. He was so old he'd forgotten that it wasn't his room anymore. Then he remembered -- and he also remembered why it wasn't his room anymore: he'd recently won ownership of an entire tropical island all to himself and his wife. He left the room smiling. I stood there feeling less than happy. Later, in the lobby, I met a South Korean guy who was friendly, gave me some sleeping pills that I didn't ask for, and while we were discussing the recent saber-rattling by the north Korean Crackpot with a female North Korean friend of his, I absent mindedly chewed two of the sleeping pills. I panicked, saying "I eat Altoids a lot, and I think my mouth thought they were Altoids. I have to work in an hour, I can't be asleep." I ran upstairs to my room (still messy) and tried to force a finger down my throat. I kept trying and trying, to no avail. Finally I gave up. I considered flying away. Then I woke up.
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May 30, 2009
Wild Kingdom
Two nights ago, long about four in the morning, when I was having my dinner (leftover chicken and rice) I found myself sitting near the open living room window. A quiet night. Still. The peace of the early summer, grass growing, flowers opening their dewy, pixie-chick-like petals, the air still and warm. Stars pissing about up in the stratashere like they always do, but somehow with a summery shimmer to them. The cat passed out on the futon couch, snoring, loudly. And into this stillness, there came a sudden shriek of some small rodential animal being killed in a gruesome way and shrieking rhythmically as it presumably struggled for its life as said very same life fled from its tiny body through the holes punctured into it by whichever neighborhood cat managed to complete a successful stakeout of the neighbor's rabbit warren hedgerow. And this sound, this agony-call, made my stomach turn (the chicken part of the leftover chicken and rice in my belly calling out to my awakened morality "oh the irony!"). I almost started crying in the quiet that came then as swiftly as the shrieks had split the night air. And in my sentimental despond came the rush of black which was my cat, having shot awake at the sound of cute and furry quarry being harvested, leaping drunkenly from the couch, shot across my toes, jumped onto the piano (only slipping and busting ass once, necessitating a second, entirely less graceful, drunken-frat-boy-esque sally) and smashing her tiny face against the open window screen where she stayed electrified for the next two hours until I put myself to bed (and possibly longer), as the late May sun soon winked light upon the land and I later turned over in bed being chased by phantom carnivores usually, thankfully, too small to do me much harm in real life. The next morning I looked at the cat with a new and slightly wary surmise.
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May 28, 2009
The Good Woman is away this summer in Pittsburgh law interning. (Boo-hoo.) And she's writing a blog about it -- with pitchers. (Cool!) I'm home now and about to start updating this thing more regularly again. Stay tuned, dears.
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May 13, 2009
I'm Great in the Morning
Waking up in the afternoon, wishing it were morning and I didn't have a headache. Pulling up the shades, seeing Indiana out of the window, wishing it were the rocky coast of some northern shore, dark clouds in the distance, heading in. Opening the bedroom door. No fire in the fireplace that doesn't exist either. No bacon in the air. No sweet tea in a warm mug my hand recognizes instinctively as a breast of a girl with smiling eyes. Walking across cold floorboards to the bathroom for a pee. Holding my cock, directing a firehose at a smoldering orphanage as thirteen dewy-necked young nuns watch and heave admiration at me in my yellow firesuit. My hat a red beacon calling them in, for gratitude, for putting out all these grateful little fires of the world.
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May 10, 2009
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May 7, 2009
And now it's time for the photographs of Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs.
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May 6, 2009
And now it's time for Chad McCail's Food Shelter Clothing Fuel .
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May 5, 2009
RIP Dom DeLuise
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May 4, 2009
Here's the second Poets Weave show with me as host. This time it's Dustin Nightingale reading from his series entitled The Pasquinades. Give a listen .
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May 1, 2009
2009 A Space Odyssey
A breathing tube of ink connects the cosmonaut to the atmosphere that maintains life. Wide-eyed mirror visor eye as large as the largest head -- the cosmonaut sets out to explore exotic planets. Baskin & Robbins (for example). The big city park, the one with waterslides, the umbrella tables like giant cocktail umbrellas. A path through the forest along the river, with garbage houses, wine bottles filled with rainwater. Through these spaces the cosmonaut moves as if in slow motion, a giant kid in invisible silver snowsuit, looking and looking and stopping here and there, dropping to one knee outside a cafe to write it all down in his little black notebook. The homeless man overheard telling of how he hunts squirrels "...make a pretty good size candle out of squirrel fat, just hunt them and boil them down...." He's a Martian man waving green feelers at the cosmonaut. The cosmonaut uncaps his pen, puts tip to paper, makes contact.
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April 25, 2009
Want to see southern Indiana-ites drink cat shit coffee? You do, trust me. It's amusing .
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April 14, 2009
Looking for something to do this summer? Come to the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing June 6 to 12. I'll be there.
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April 13, 2009
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April 10, 2009
And now it's time for François-Emile Barrauda's hypnotic 1920s painting, Les Trois Enfants .
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April 5, 2009
The Poets Weave
The Poets Weave is a weekly five minute poetry show on WFIU, the NPR station for Bloomington and southern Indiana. Having been a guest on the show twice, I'm now pleased as punch to co-host with Jenny Kandor. My first show as co-host went out a few weeks ago. The guest was Sarah Ruhlen . Give a listen .
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April 4, 2009
A new poem by Jack Gilbert on Poetry Daily.
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April 3, 2009
Sidewalk Punk Cafe
The midgets all wear leg extensions to pedal their bright blue bicycles. A distillation of disregard. The young lean back and bark-laugh so loud because they've no fear of death. The tshirts with skulls, skull rings, skulls in subcutaneous paint on forearms and biceps keep the death at bay. Otherwise what are they for? And who would bark at the moon these deep afternoons when the sun whites the sky completely out?
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March 30, 2009
And now it's time for E.M. Forster's essay What I Believe .
Tolerance, good temper and sympathy - they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long. But for the moment they are not enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered beneath a military jackboot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff.
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March 29, 2009
A Preliminary Assessment of Your Superpowers
It's four a.m. and outside the world is frozen and black and white. Wind rattles the window pane at your side -- a black mirror reflecting you looking down, your room behind you, a shelf of books, an owl clock with pendulum eyes. At your elbow, the point of contact, the window blemishes with a circle of mist, a disk of fog where your skin touches the pane between you and the night slapped still by winter. Invisible, but there nevertheless on the other side of the glass, a minute cone of warmth protrudes from your elbow. You've made that much difference in the sleeping world at large.
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March 28, 2009
My one week spring vacation became two weeks. But I'm back now.
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March 14, 2009
It's spring (almost, mostly). A livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove. We got the first crocuses coming up in the front yard -- daffodils are popping out down the block. A good time for a one week vacation. Regular daily posts will resume Sunday, March 22. Till then, bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I'm going into the Park to do pastoral dances. You should do the same. Chinchin.
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March 13, 2009
A prose poem by David Shumate (musical accompaniment by Hank Williams):
Trains
I am seduced by trains. When one moans in the night like some dragon gone lame, I rise and put on my grandfather's suit. I pack a small bag, step out onto the porch, and wait in the darkness. I rest my broad-brimmed hat on my knee. To a passerby I'm a curious sight--a solitary man sitting in the night. There's something unsettling about a traveler who doesn't know where he's headed. You can't predict his next move. In a week you may receive a postcard from Haiti. Madagascar. You might turn on your answering machine and hear his voice amid the tumult of a Bangkok avenue. All afternoon you feel the weight of the things you've never done. Don't think about it too much. Everything starts to sound like a train.
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March 11, 2009
If my inner life could be summed up in a single image, it would be a certain Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that I used to have taped to the wall above my bed. I misplaced it years ago and have now tracked a copy down. The strange thing about this strip is that it appeared on the exact day of my 21st birthday. On the day of my emergence as an adult, Calvin arrived to sum it all up for me.
Click the pic.
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March 9, 2009
Shootout at the Barnes & Noble
He carries a patch of sandpaper in his breast pocket. Slips it out, scrapes his fingers across it in six quick flicks, blows the dust of himself away, slips the sandpaper back. He crouches low on one knee, ears alert for alarms, eyes pinpoint focus, keeping open for a flash of red and white -- a bolt. Forward he creeps, elbows loose, fingers outstretched -- touch, pull back, breathe, push in -- slide to the right -- touch, touch, hold, pull towards him. A sound like a twig snap, a click in the background -- he freezes. Eyes ahead, listening behind. Footsteps. Artificial cough -- Excuse me, sir. Can I help you with anything? A leather-backed Emily Dickinson half out of the shelf. Sales assistant looks at the safecracker. The safecracker looks up at another shelf where nothing's happening, holds his breath, hoping for misdirection. The sales assistant watches Emily Dickinson, the safecracker not breathing, and the shelf where nothing's happening, shifts her weight from left Thom McAn to right Thom McAn.
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March 8, 2009
Though that nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I will believe thou hast a mind that suits
With this thy fair and outward character.
Twelfth Night Act 1 Scene 2
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March 7, 2009
Drunk History Vol. 2. The most Franklin adventure.
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March 5, 2009
You do not fuck with Pearl.
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March 4, 2009
Midnight Snack, All Hallows Eve
Snatched from your bed in a haze of lack of sleep, witches roll you in flour -- once removing the Snoopy print pajamas -- and watch for the wet spot. In this they place an apple, inserting you apple-first into an oven pre-heated to October thirty-one degrees. The pie is in the oven. Feel proud to be the pie, you crusty nightmare-addled mister mincemeat, you! A ghoul puffs stale catacomb breath at you steaming on a candlelit oaken table. All eyes -- and worms for eyes count -- upon you as the ghoul gives thanks and opens you up. All the little scaly demons in your skull fly free and you can finally get some sleep.
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March 2, 2009
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March 1, 2009
Goodbye Yellow Aphid
The small spider jumps at you. You catch it cupped in your mitts, raise them to the sky, open them and a dirty gray dove flies out and up and becomes a tiny dot that aims for the sun. And swallows it. The front yard, the Camaro and the crabapple tree, goes dark. Neighbors' lights come on. You look side to side, lower your arms and step backwards into your house -- fear for a moment interrupted with the thought I've never entered my house back-end first -- and slam the door. The telephone rings. The fax begins spitting pages as you hurry from room to room lowering blinds on the hollow faces suddenly at them. Storm sirens go off. Are they keening your name? Would that be a paranoid fear? Did a spider just eat the sun by way of a dove? Did you let it loose?
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February 26, 2009
We can dream that we could ever be as cool as Cab Calloway. We can't, of course. But we can dream.
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February 25, 2009
Vitamin C May Save You
Find a ripe orange, before you attempt anything else. This may be a problem given that you're in Cleveland and it's the middle of January. Try Kroger. The doors will open for you without your touch; by the mere presence of your sad little body the vast walls of glass will peel apart. Abracadabra unnecessary. A rush of green air into your nostrils, and you'll have to step forward -- this may take more gumption than you think you can muster, but you must -- force yourself to step past the threshold into the Krogerian Garden of Eden and confidently pluck an orange from a bright pyramid near the door. You won't be able to see him with your eyes, but if you can kick start your heart awake you may just sense the loving gaze of old man K peering benevolent blueberry eyes down on you from his lofty perch somewhere up inside the dropped foam ceiling.
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February 24, 2009
And now it's time for Ray Charles. In the Evening. 1963. A slow, seven minute burn up to a screaming finish.
Simply put, if you're feeling the February doldrums, listen to this. You'll be smiling by the end. Repeat as necessary.
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February 23, 2009
And now it's time for a recent Woody Allen short short story from The New Yorker .
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February 22, 2009
Full Steam Ahead
The foghorn blew. Marvin turned over in his dreamy dreams. A girls volleyball team caught his eye across a crowded room -- him dancing a seductive samba, then -- the foghorn blew again. The samba and the girls evaporated. Marvin looked up at the paint bubbles on the ceiling above his bed. Aaah-whoom! Marvin looked around his bedroom, saw nothing out of the ordinary. His Smurf figurine collection intact on the shelf above his comic book boxes, a half done income tax form on the desk. Aaah-whoom! Marvin got out of his bed, walked barefoot in his boxer shorts through the living room. Aaah-whoom! Peek through the curtains. A ship. Head towards the kitchen. Be careful not to step on the cat -- wait. A ship? Peek through the curtains again. Out on the lawn (needs mowing), the prow of the largest ocean liner Marvin had ever seen -- steam filling the sky from the three funnels, deck hands milling about doing things with ropes on deck high above the mailbox at the end of the driveway. Marvin shaded his eyes and tilted his head back as he stared up at the ship in his front yard. A clank sent a gangplank down out of the steamy distance, the end landing at Marvin's blue feet. Aaah-whoom! Aaah-whoom! Marvin stepped on.
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February 20, 2009
RIP again to John Martyn who died last month. If you don't know his music, listen to this beautiful song.
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February 19, 2009
And now it's time for a black hole .
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February 17, 2009
Yesterday I had one of those days that make me glad to live in a college town. In the afternoon, I went to see Joyce Carol Oates give a reading from a chapter of her recent book Wild Nights! in which a couple buy a robot of Emily Dickinson to live with them and all hell hilariously breaks loose. Here's an NPR interview where she talks about the book. Then in the evening I went to see a lecture by one of my heroes, James Burke.
Hipster James Burke & a hip, medieval water clock
The lecture was a blast, not least of which for watching him do the Connections thing live. In a few minutes he went from sixteenth century British sea wars to in the invention of toilet paper (which he pulled out form behind his podium and flourished at the audience). I only wish I could have heard him talk about coal tar in the process -- if he had, I think I might have stood up in my chair and waved a lit cigarette lighter. Then he went on to talk about his new Knowledge Web project for school children, which has yet to be launched and about which I knew little. In the process, I saw that it is a contemporary extension of the sort of democratic ideas he put forth at the start of the very first Connections show in the 70s -- and an extension of why he chooses to work in popular media like television and magazines -- about giving the common people access to information in ways in which might just lead to a revolution in knowledge and freedom among other things. I can't do his ideas justice. Here's a cool piece that explains this philosophy: