EMERGENCY EYES

prose poem prose poetry short-short flash fiction

A 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:

And here's a slightly blurry, slightly out-of-date short video where he explains the K-Web:


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February 16, 2009

Normally, I'd never willfully put a commercial here.


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February 13, 2009

This is a cool time to be an American .


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February 11, 2009

Hospitality: a Word We've Heard

If you're waiting for a bellhop, you'll be waiting a long time. We're done with bellhops -- still have the bell, though no one hops to it. Carry your own bags. That family in the lobby sitting reading pamphlets in the breakfast nook -- pay no attention to them. They live here, all the time. Your room is 318. There is no second floor. Rooms go from the one hundreds right to the three hundreds, right up to the roof where the pigeons live. If you require a wake up call, call yourself. We recommend yelling loudly into the phone -- but please remember, quiet hours begin at ten pm. Then they never end. It is 9:20 pm now. You have forty minutes. Make of them what you can.


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February 10, 2009

Santa, as we all know, is an anagram for Satan.


Click the pic, kiddo.


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February 9, 2009

And now it's time for a poem by my friend Dustin.


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February 8, 2009

Two Stories

It all comes down to one or the other, a stranger comes to town -- or -- I'm getting out of here, me. Moby-Dick -- do I even gave to say? Canterbury Tales, Waiting for Godot, the Holy Bible -- either half. Either some clown comes in the door stinking of pine needles and sheep fat, or we wake the next morning, set fire to the bed, and reach up to snag at the tail of a passing jet heading to the Sugarland Fairytale Country where people still drink in pubs by firelight and a maiden with dark flashing eyes tells us of a crystal egg long held by the hag of the deep forest. Win the egg, win the maiden, eyes and all. So we're off -- stamping across the pungent pine needles, looking into the heart of darkness (another) and feeling for the stone blade in our deep pocket. All around us, from out of the earth, from under mushrooms, sheep emerge, warming our ankles and eyeing us warily.


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February 7, 2009

Trees, Stars, Hands

A certain distance away, a precise number of trees arranged around a clearing, direct as to posture, pointing at the stars above invisible in the obscure blue of daylight. Six trees, each equidistant from the next along the rim of an invisible circle drawn long ago by a man with no hands anymore. A now invisible man with a missing hand, a missing everything, and six trees, precisely arranged, to prick at the undying stars, to show for himself.


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February 6, 2009

Screech

She's out hunting ghosts. Which means she's out photographing puddles. "I’m off to get 'em," she says. "Be careful of traffic and wear something reflective," we say, and we watch as she gets the usual far away look in her eye, imagining the streetlight-yellow shrouds hovering in sheets across the intersection, then the wraith of the cross-town bus -- the number four -- then the oil-slicked dreams of limbless flight, then the waking covered in white plaster, frozen in a dreamless sleepwalk for months, in a hospital. She's remembering it dreamily, we can tell. So we'll have to follow her -- our little shutterbug ghostbuster -- with our strong lights and bandaids for the adventure.


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February 5, 2009

Shh. Don't tell anyone.


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February 4, 2009

The Warmth of November

The rain comes as no surprise. The skies are gray. And then the rain comes. A girl in cowboy boots, striped pants and muffler around her neck, hiding her chin, walks with her hands in her coat pockets, a bag on her back, through the gray air. The pinpoints of mist become actual-all-the-way rain that falls on us in this town from the November clouds that have today, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, come to lie over us, awaiting march -- these clouds are no surprise. The girl pushing out perfect white clouds from her lips -- which she then steps through, step after step on her way home and possibly to love -- is, and wonderfully so.


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February 3, 2009

And now it's time for Joseph Cornell's 17 minute surrealist film Rose Hobart:


Thanks to the superlative UbuWeb


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February 2, 2009

Replaced with My Duplicate (But Evil)

Why come are you always checking me for tattoos? I'm James, James your husband. No you cannot see my fillings; take your fingers out of my mouth. Darling, it's me, James, your husband for real. See, that birthmark that looks like Barry White, it's on my ankle like always. Remember that time you lowered yourself onto me and we made love in the middle of the Washington DC Zoo, remember the joggers watched us from across the stream? Nobody knows about that but me, James, your James. Darling, let me sit down, please. It's been a long day and I'm tired. You wouldn't even believe what Hoover did in the meeting this afternoon, he-- Dear? Please leave my ears alone. Is there a beer in the fridge, maybe? Dear stop. No, those aren't suture marks. That's the normal folds any person has behind his ears. I'm James. Your James. The one and only. Listen, if I was a homunculus doppelganger sent to suck out your soul, I'd tell you. Trust me. Trust your old Jimmy.


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February 1, 2009

So much depends on William Carlos Williams.


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January 31, 2009

Still Life Midwinter

A light dusting of white on the picnic table frozen to the backyard. Four clay flower pots growing squat frost blossoms in January by long night showers of starlight. In a shattered hammock, a maple branch snapped off by November. In the foreground, a tipped chair beside a wineglass in pieces on the flagstones of a porch. In the miniature belly at the bottom of the broken glass, a thin red retina of the last of the autumn wine. Sitting in the window, warm, looking out at January, I am watched.


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January 30, 2009

Starshine, Sunlight, or Birdshit

Feel a sense of something missing? Go searching for it. Stand on the roof of your house. (Check yourself free from drunkenness first.) Throw open your arms for it. What is 'it'? Whatever falls into your clutch.


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January 29, 2009

Walking to class through a foot of snow today, I listened to John Martyn's beautiful, dramatic, quietly funky 1970 album Stormbringer. Ever since I learned about his music about a year ago, I've not been able to stop listening to that album as well as Solid Air. Much of today's freak folk / indie music owes quite a bit to Martyn's amazing music of the 1970s, even if the musicians might not know it. After teaching my afternoon class, I checked my email and discovered online that Martyn had just died. So RIP John Martyn, one of the best British folk songwriters of all time. And if you've never heard him before, check out these songs: the title song from his 1970 album Stormbringer , and the title cut from his 1972 album Solid Air (written for his recently deceased friend Nick Drake (yes, that Nick Drake).


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January 28, 2009

And now it's time for Frank Relle's photographs of New Orleans at night .


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January 27, 2009

My Wet Hair, Your Wet Hair

Down by the river, along the abandoned warehouses where the railroad tracks used to be, it was raining. High summer and we did not run for cover. Running through fields, we jumped occasional broken bottles. Dark clouds rolled by overhead and we laughed. Standing, sides touching, warm there, watching people pulling into parking lots, scurrying with newspapers on their head. One had a folded sports coat balanced. Hand in hand we walked up the hill home, dripping in the rain and not caring. On the sidewalk before my apartment, I looked and saw small blades of grass stuck along your ankles. Why I did not lie across the steep concrete and, one by one, lick each green glint from your cool skin, I'll never know.


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January 26, 2009

As the World Spins

"I never know what day it is," said Simon (simple Simon). "That's what I love about you," said Lucy. "That I don't know the date?" said Simon. "That you're such a self-reflective person." Simon placed the coffee spoon on the saucer and looked down at the line the buttons of his shirt made from the hairs of his chinny-chin-chin, over just to the right of where his heart supposedly was, over the ripples of his ribcage, the growing boulder of his belly with its flesh button hidden somewhere, and into the sunless seas of his jockey shorts. A pearly button flashed in the morning light pouring in from the window above the breakfast nook. "Simon?" asked Lucy. "What are you thinking now?" "Lucy," responded Simon, "I'm reflecting."


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January 25, 2009

Thanks But No Thanks

"I don't like being friends with someone who's friends with everyone," said Kelli. "I feel cheap, as if I'm just a six dollar inflatable raft bought at a Circle K by the beach, used by one kid then left behind like a bucket browned with chicken grease, some wrappers, a broken pair of pink sunglasses. Some other family picks me up, a different kid kicks out on me, pisses over me in the waves as he's watching his sister on the beach. Come nightfall I'm a shark's chewing gum."


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January 24, 2009

You're Clearly Wrong (You're Not Here)

A mile is no Declaration of Independence, a frozen thing, endlessly repeated but never altered. Five thousand two-hundred blah blah feet, my eye. A blue jay mile is a thing elastic, for instance, sometimes ten miles when the wind is high and there's a certain nut tree on a certain hillside ripe with worms. Sometimes twenty when every leaf must be turned, uncountable twigs lifted, twisted, replaced and stepped over. So there's one instance -- just consider the blue jays -- and you'll see a mile is no Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be spring, summer, autumn, winter, I want you near me, I'd walk a mile to get to you, I'd crawl.


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January 23, 2009

And now it's time for I Met the Walrus.


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January 22, 2009

Eleven Eleven Eleven Eleven

It's Veteran's Day. The mail isn't coming. Veterans are coming today. They'll come into the house, stand around in the kitchen, lie in the bath tub, flop into the closets, stack up in teetering piles on each bed in the house. Float up to the ceiling until they block out the lights up there. Cover the carpets. Obscure the furniture, block the windows. To get from room to room, you'll have to just give up and crawl over the warm mash of bodies. You'll be almost up to the ceiling fan, but if you keep flat -- like they tell you on TV when encountering quicksand out on a stroll -- you'll be able to make your way, room by room, to the kitchen for a cup of tea, to the WC for a tinkle. And as you slump and pull yourself over the moist masses of bellies, shoulders, fuzzy heads, angled elbows and sharp jaws, and you notice the eyes following you, the faces turning as they can to trace your passage, why not smile?


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January 21, 2009

Cute Little Threats

The ladybugs have arrived. Go out front and look, they've taken over the front of the house. I don't recall painting it polka dotted last week. those are ladybugs. And they've gotten inside -- I don't know how -- through tiny cracks we've never noticed, perhaps, splits in the wall, or where wall meets floor, that open up as the years go by, silently in the night, as frosts slips in or thunder shakes the foundation. The ladybugs find these ways in -- they exploit them. (Is 'exploit' too strong a word?) Anyway, they're inside again. Another October, apple cider light, and ladybugs crawling up the walls, tightroping across the slats of window blinds, coming right for us as we sit on the couch watching yellow leaf clouds roll across the browning lawn. A ladybug flying directly at one from across the room, as if honing in on a wine glass at one's lips. And it keeps coming. They keep coming.


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January 20, 2009

The thrill has not worn off. Today is a wonderful day. Goodbye and good riddance W. Hello Obama!


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January 19, 2009

Can You Purposefully Plant a Wildflower?

Everybody's garage door is yellow but mine, every picket fence fresh white save the one ringing my house. A weathered gray, it pokes toward the sky a very little distance. My neighbor's cars are all speckless. Mine -- I could grow wildflowers on the hood. And I believe I will -- delicate papery-blue blossoms, a confetti of microscopic yellow. When I drive away from here, all the bees will follow. And the butterflies. I'll have them as well.


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January 18, 2009

And now it's time for two poems by Raymond Carver (containing a total of three exclamation marks):


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January 17, 2009

I Am Man, Please Do Not Watch Me Pollinate

We brought the tomato plant inside when the frost came to town. To our surprise, here at the end of November, new flowers have bloomed, two of them. Excited we might have fresh, un-fishy tomatoes for xmas, it strikes me: but there are no bees in the house. A black cat, yes -- but nil bees. Standing in the living room in fire flight of morning sunlight through the southern windows, I look from the flowers to the cat to myself. I reach for my stinger, prepare to buzz.


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January 16, 2009

RIP Andrew Wyeth .


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January 15, 2009

And now it's time for an Egon Schiele tree.


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January 14, 2009

Care to listen to some poems of mine?

I have been featured again on WFIU's The Poets Weave , a poetry show on the local NPR radio station.
My segment was broadcast this last Sunday, January 11. You can listen to the 5 minute show as an MP3.


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January 10, 2009

Measure for Measure

Thom needed to feel what a day felt like again. He thought he knew, remembered from some undefined day in his childhood, what a day felt like – and this gave him a chronic low-level unhappiness, as he strained beneath the thought of days going by in a winging rush, with the grave ever whooshing forward from over the horizon. At times, Thom felt ashamed of himself, for allowing himself the easy out of chronic dissatisfaction. So in the spirit of bold scientific endeavor, leftover from an childhood of torturing ants and putting raw eggs in milk cartons, he decided to take the actual measurement of an actual day in this actual thirty-sixth year of his actual one and only life. Thom called in sick at the office (no one noticed), made a pile of peanut butter sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, and set himself up in the living room, sitting cross-legged in a pile of pillows. No TV, no stereo, not even a magazine or book. No telephone. Alone, he would sit alone in this room and live one full day, from waking to bedtime, each hour, each clicking minute of clicking seconds. 8:05 Thomas observes the light along the wall by the entertainment center. 8:20 The light begins to crawl up the wall. 8:25 Thom snores. 8:26 Shadows begin.


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January 9, 2009

You should find and watch Christiane Cegavske's stop-motion animated film Blood Tea & Red String. Here's the trailer:


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January 7, 2009

Sparky Food
-or-
Poor Richard Talks To Himself Without Speaking Out Loud

Keep waiting. Take hold of this rod; it helps with the waiting. Feel a jolt every now and then. That's the sky. It's waiting too. Not very happily, as it happens. So now and then it throws bolts. Look upon them as food for thought.


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January 3, 2009

My brother and his wife breed dogs in southern Ohio. Three of their puppies have gone all Hollywood now, being the young stars of Marley & Me.


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January 2, 2009

What the Stones Said

In the woods, he stumbled over a pile of stones he'd never seen before. Each one told him a story. There was a round one with three parallel notches in it. As he held it in both hands, the middle notch peeled open in the center. He could see teeth up in there. A voice came out: I wasn't always stuck half-assed down in the mud in this half-assed forest. Once I lived in a penthouse in a high rise in a city filled with glitter and violins and hundred dollar cigars. The women would polish my noggin with their shiny hair. Little men carried me, room to room, on a red silk pillow." He transferred the weight of the stone into his right hand. "I ran a company that sold bandages. Everyone needs a bandage, right? -- is how I figured it. Like toilet paper and baby food. So, I'd get right in there, make myself indispensible. I bought the largest --" He shifted his weight from his right foot to his left, tucked the elbow of the hand holding the stone into his ribs for support. "In two years, I was a big as Johnson & Johnson. Sold bandages with cartoon hippos on them, ones with flowers and stars printed. And then I thought -- it came to me one night in my hot tub -- What if I bought a razorblade company? That way --" He dropped the stone. It fell slits-first into the mud at his feet, burying itself half up to the middle. As the blood returned to his forearms, he reached for another of the stones in the pile. This one had no slits. Its face was smooth. Silently it hummed -- Mountains... Rivers... Sun... Shade... Cool, cool earth...




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