notes
early poems 1994-1997
06, starlight talk: probably an offshoot of my (continuous) attempts to reproduce smashing pumpkins lyrics. echoes "galapogos".
08, vania {disassemblant edit}: an oft-edited poem, with about ten incarnations since i first penned it in september '96. also lyrics for the first song i ever wrote for guitar. this version is the most recent, from sometime during early '99.
13, bayonette: i had concrete plans to turn this in to my school's literary magazine, loophole, but chickened out last-minute. reading it now, i'm kinda relieved i did.
16, cyma: again with ripping themes from pumpkins songs...line 18: "the boy i used to be" is a variation on a line from "disarm".
18, the jewels of cytherea {abstractive edit}: like "vania", a poem with many versions and an accompanying guitar melody.
22, myopia: line 20: "bereft, unborn, and dead"...this exact phrase appears in "bobbysoxer" also, which i think was an editing error on my part. the line originally appeared here.
25, quietus: line 43: "dusk to dawn, twilight to starlight"...the most obvious pumpkins' reference; the names of the two halves of their "mellon collie" album.
imperfection
02, proma: the title comes from a visit to the dentist. 'proma' was the company that manufactured the annoying plastic lights they loved to shine in my eyes.
13, sara somewhere: this might have had something to do with a close childhood (non-romantic) friend of mine who, for the most part, 'grew out' of me and then moved away when i was 14. i haven't seen her since.
21, elapse: line 1: "the little girl inside of me" is a line from a smashing pumpkins song, "hello kitty kat". written during a study hall, after which i showed it to erin. she gave me a funny look and told me i was fucked up.
imperfection II: ars gratia artis
02, marrow ruby: written while watching chris kattan do his 'goth talk' skit on saturday night live. 'blazing' was jason's term for smoking.
06, serotina: bored during a study hall in the library, i scribbled this in my (worthless) planner. title comes from the word serotine, meaning late-blooming. i borrowed this adaptation of obscure-adjectives-made-into-girls'-names from a smashing pumpkins song, 'tristessa' (from tristesse).
07, sub rosa: one of the few earlier poems i still like. title is a latin term, meaning secretly. lines 13-14: "you give nothing, but enough to make me feel everything"...might have subconsciously been referring to a longtime crush.
12, kiss me somber: another of those that still mean a great deal to me. part of this was conjured during an argument with my mom; i was standing in the kitchen, writing-slash-rearranging the phrases in my head while she was yelling at me.
15, i and you: cute little thing, isn't it? i'm not sure where the line 'smiley's shining to you, here-go-lucky charm of you' came from, or what it's supposed to mean. being obsessed with syllables as i was, i think i initially had "the sun is shining to you, happy-go-lucky charm of you" instead, but changed it because it didn't sound right.
21, disoriental: i know exactly who inspired this one, and where: some anonymous asian girl standing in line for splash mountain at disney world. strange, but true. those who know me well know that i'm easily attracted to asian girls, and this might actually have been my first proper realization of that fact.
28, zeus: the one poem of mine that has been read by the most people. this landed me a second place in the 1998 pegasus contest, and is all over the internet.
30, brutal: line 10: 'someone who'd dare swallow death'...refers to n. hawthorne's "rappaccini's daughter".
34, the dark: a song lyric inspired by the movie "event horizon".
38, misgivings of a prolonged dementia: my favorite. i don't even remember if this scene actually took place, i have a memory of this that to this day seems very real, but unconfirmed. the house i'm referring to is at the end of my street, and i used to walk by it every day on my way home from school.
43, delirium sparkled: always prompts me to ask myself how much crack i was smoking that day.
48, from blackness come a backwards sun: my gifted teacher attempted to correct my grammar on this one...told me i should have written 'comes' instead of 'come'...that darkness is not a plural term. being me, i dismissed it as poetic license and never changed it.
50, flux: an imagined conversation between myself and some perfect being, perhaps a god, perhaps not. i thought of it as anonymous.
blur afterthought
07, meteor: like 'zeus', this got me a lot of attention. won first place in 1999 pegasus. what they probably didn't realize was that it was thematically based on a man beating his wife.
10, whiskher: from the summer of '98, while i was house-sitting for my sister. i scratched this on a notepad while listening to sarah mcclachlan and spying on a girl from the other side of the block. she appeared to be making out with a backstreet boys' poster.
12, we'll always have atlantis: the quotations in parentheses were taken from love notes that erin had written me during the course of our relationship.
17, despairancy: about the disintegration of my relationship with erin.
23, stonekissed and mudworthy: an expression of my longing for(-slash-mild-obsession-with) nichole, as the summer of '98 was winding down. line 2: "sweltering in the midst of summer heat"...working at the park, in 100-degree weather, in a stand without air conditioning but plenty of heat.
the coming of autumn
01, blink 4 eva: bethany's old e-mail address. it was cute, and so was she.
02, speedkiller: doing 100 mph on a back road behind hershey one late night after work, i thought of this.
05, vox angelica: this came after one of the first times since the breakup (three months before), that erin and i had a, er, rendez-vous after school.
14, chaos' overture: a bit of storytelling(-slash-foreshadowing)...makes me wish i could paint.
20, pity for the butterflies: during my senior year i had an ungodly amount of free time to write, especially with having an independent study class (though i never really studied anything) every other day. i remember sitting in the auditorium, alone, typing parts of this into my calculator for want of a single sheet of paper. this first version i accidentally erased later, without copying any of it down, a writer's worst nightmare. the end result is me trying desperately to rewrite the damned thing from memory, and a lot got lost in the transition.
22, hell is within: courtney once told me that she couldn't find a proper rhythm in this, i suppose it depends on how you read it.
23, menace: line 1 is a variation on what i think is a walt whitman line, "the butcher boy puts off his killing clothes"...this was in updike's "midpoint" when i first discovered it. line 123 exhibits one of the few times i have ever dared to recycle a line from an older poem of mine, this one being from "intravenous".
26, mother medusa: yet another prose-poem-esque piece, possibly due to the fact that my english class was reading a lot of shakespeare at the time...might have found me inspired by the likes of "othello" and "hamlet". line 123: the tigris/euphrates comparison was borrowed from veruca salt "awesome".
29, the end is nigh: me playfully mimicking poe or shelley, i'm not sure which.
30, catharsis: the quote at the beginning is my own, but lines 81-82 are from smashing pumpkins' "zero". this was certainly inspired by the theme song to "hamlet" (mel gibson version). line 116: "the angel on the swing"...liz, whom i was dating at the time this was written, had asked me out while we were on the swings at a nearby playground.
36, nymph: i ironically titled this as such because i originally looked upon its subject as more of a fairy-like angel, not a nymphomaniac. it later turned out that she was both.
49, upward from haven: lines 34-35 make it obvious that i was influenced by othello.
51, ode to synthia: this always reminds me of the part in homer's "odyssey" where odysseus has his men tie him to the mast while he listens to the sirens' sweet voices.
53, disinfected: akira is, no surprise, a famous asian model(-slash-pornstar?) who i was slightly enamored with for a time.
55, akira (flight of fancy): line 2: "manifest ecstasy"...one of my favorite 'snicker'-phrases.
57, soma-holiday: gets its name from one of my favorite novels, a. huxley's "brave new world". soma was the drug of choice that the characters used to escape reality. three grammes was sufficient to knock a person out cold for an entire weekend, hence, the holiday.
60, visceral solstice: much as i dislike this poem overall, it has its moments, i must admit. lines 24-27: "to deny his humanity, one must live it, to live humanity, one must accept it"...lines 40-41: "i understand that i'm really not a product of evolution after all"...
64, shyra unicorn: shyra...something i would name my daughter if it fit with my last name. one of the few things i've ever written which actually got a response from people. a woman from michigan read it on the internet somewhere and wrote me an e-mail saying how her daughter's name was shyra and this poem was basically her life in a nutshell. sometimes i can't help but wonder how coincidental these things are.
65, the chosen one: this was really written for tracy, though i failed to dedicate it...i remember the two of us having a conversation along these lines during lunch one day, only not as melodramatic.
67, blindside: line 28: "what a perfect myth - the raging river of 'what if'"...
68, mutanphetamine: first appeared on nora's site in the fall of '99, under the pseudonym 'dark horse'. the 'echo,echo,echo' effect wasn't quite my own creation, i do recall seeing it in some form, somewhere else, though i can't pin it down.
70, entreat: this came at a time when i was still hung-up on nichole, still drowning in some perpetual heartache.
72, crux: so i thought it would be funny for me (the objectivist) to have a conversation with jesus.
73, eclectica: my first true attempt at experimentation. filter out all the crap and you might find a hidden message somewhere in there.
74, dreamachine: made its 'grand debut' at a writing seminar in early march '99...everyone still thinks this is my best poem, and i suppose it had better be if it's gracing the title of my website. the story behind this is rather trivial, in that it was merely me becoming deeply infatuated with someone whom i - key word - knew would never date me. but she did take about 30 seconds out of her life to give me the most passionate open-mouthed kiss i have ever had, on valentine's day of all days, which led to more heartbroken, pussywhipped desire on my part, which all came out in this poem. i could have died at that moment and been satisfied.
78, the banality of lamentation: at the time i was profoundly interested in death and near-death experiences (nde's, for short), and was reading through an article about the nde when i got the idea to use some of its content in a poem. the first 56 lines were indeed paraphrased from that article.
89, deftly she withers: lines 36-37: "an avatar out of time, a myth but for my love"...another one of those makes-me-smile phrases.
90, under the eclipse, part I: my poetic adaptation of the story of icarus, who escaped crete with his father on wings of wax, only to fly so high that the sun melted them and he crashed into the ocean.
92, missives for the danger girl: one of courtney's nicknames was 'danger girl'. it has several personal implications which i cannot explain.
94, invasion: lines 36-37: "somehow i always find the femininity in my lethal toxin"...possibly had some connection to my girl troubles.
97, beware the python: an ungodly lengthy prose-poem, serving as something of a continuation(-slash-conclusion) to the aforementioned "menace" and "...as the world dies". line 196 conveys a deep secret: "i am the god of wanting everything i can never have"...one of my most telling phrases.
disassemblance
08, antipathy's verse: sadly, this was meant to be scary but it turned out to be kind of humorous, at least from my current perspective. the middle section (lines 35-52) was written for colleen, who i very much disdained. it's a pretty skanky verse.
10, provocation
11, rape and honey: these two were written during the late spring in '99, while i was trying to coax kim into dating me. the title of the latter is a term coined by billy corgan in an interview with mtv: "l.a. is the land of rape and honey..."
13, steeplechaser: does it give you the sense of a romeo-and-juliet scene, perhaps?
20, soulace: again, one of my few poems that actually received heartfelt response...kim and courtney both adored it. i'd spent four sleepless nights in some kind of agony, and let this kind of vulnerable shit slip through. lines 23-24: "tell me the reason that you're still erecting walls"...me being shut out. insomnia+ depression+ insatiable wanting = soulace.
24, dreaming of fidelity: what i could have(-slash-should-have) done with this was scrap everything after the 'prelude'. but i didn't, and thus i'm still stuck with an ending i've never been happy with (nor will i ever be). it's too bad that i'm too stubborn to change it.
swans in attack mode
01, swans in attack mode: i came up with the title while taking a break from my summer course at the 'ville. the pond by wickersham hall is always full of ducks, and two swans that relentlessly chase them around, trying to bite off their heads.
06, mafia: me poking fun at myself, as was the case in nearly all of these poems.
a synthetic nature
01, spiders: section I was written on the toilet, where much of my inspiration finds me. the ending (hopefully) explains the jumbled, unorganized mess that makes up the rest of this.
03, untitled III: driving out in the middle of nowhere, during a late evening in the summer of '99, listening to karl hyde recite his arcane underworld lyrics, and not-quite-hidden snippets of conversations juxtaposed in between.
04, algebraic quantum sex: kim and i were hanging out in her old attic bedroom on a terribly hot july day, and i scribbled this on a notepad while she read my older poems on the other side of the room.
06, polarium: after i saw "the haunting" with tiff.
07, the death of ana sweet: similar to the aforementioned "we'll always have atlantis"...this was after kim...afterthoughts: things she sometimes would say to me, others i imagined; all my regrets for being such an asshole...
09, amniotic hymn: about the night i spent with audrey at the bowling alley, tripping on pharmies during the rock-n-glo.
13, pretentacles: something soft and dark and sensual that i can't put a finger on.
15, glint: my take on the male hormonal response, and the interactions between man and woman. one of three poems in my s.l.f. feature. some of this is loosely based on desmond morris' "the human animal", which runs a fine-toothed comb over all the inter-sexual signals and attempts at procreation. lines 130-131: "the subliminal tendency to bring that cup to my lips"...as laura would later take note, is one of my habits during conversation and/or flirtation.
20, bleeding hands: a work of art or a waste of time, depending on who you ask. i've had so many perspectives on this, but no reasons as to exactly why it was written. still obsessed with the coma and the n.d.e. and other forms of disconnection; drugs; death; sex. a fascination with doors, the opening and closing of. still kind of haunts me.
24, what i learned about life: attempting to summarize the majority of my beliefs, but some of these aren't quite right, and i'm not sure if that was intentional or not.
25, insecticide: line 5: "dabble in liquid paintings of Adler"...when i first diagnosed myself with the adler's (inferiority) complex.
28, memory for the end of the world: keely didn't understand the ending, lines 42-43: "than when i myself was a child"...a clarification of to whom i am speaking. children of the earth poem. around the beginnings of my preoccupation with environmental concerns, which would last only a few months.
32, i was never one to contemplate: accurately encapsulates the initial half of my relationship with tiff. line 31: "i'd almost given up on you"...from a phone conversation about the previous summer, when she pursued me for months without my knowing it.
34, download: line 1: "two infinities"...the title of a painting by one of my favorite artists, freydoon rassouli.
38, dark mistress of the underworld: a nickname tiff bestowed upon herself after a night of prolonged (and equally trivial) arguments. line 21: "imaginative legs"...a favorite phrase of mine.
39, vanity raped my pen: line 32: "random summer midnight rendezvous with a girl whose face i couldn't even see"...refers vaguely to my experience with un late in the summer of '98, though we certainly never had sex or, for that matter, a relationship.
44, bohemian warfare: one of many, many poems written in the style of bukowski. i enjoyed writing disgusting poetry about disgusting people.
45, j'étais sans voix: french titles are so smooth. this one is supposed to mean "i was speechless", but forgive if the translation is incorrect, i only had two years of high school french. "dream of the night life" was the first poem of courtney's that i ever read. this is my ode to her.
47, ur: things i learned in european history, 11th grade.
48, ŕ l’amour de ma vie: "to the love of my life" is the intended title. provocatively sexual, 'glint'-ish, a multitude of things that can actually be touched, and felt, and enamored. a rarity.
54, the waiting room: first appeared on nicole's old praxis website, and then s.l.f. circa fall '00. line 57: "ending is better than mending"...from a. huxley's "brave new world", i have copied that line a thousand times without shame. the last few lines might have been indirectly inspired by scott holstad's "breakfast machine".
56, i promise: another in my short list of favorites. lines 21-22: "how dare you haunt me as if you were my childhood?"...make my heart sink every time.
60, the hypocrite has left the building: bit of an antithesis to "memory..."
62, exit 20: "so be it"...the end result of a cultivated frustration.
67, binochulus: obvious john updike influence. mathematical curiosity pervades.
68, VSEPR theory: 'valence shell electron pair repulsion' theory, pronounced vesper. my first official rejection letter, courtesy of mr. w. sell. "...images are vivid, but some of the metaphors do not work (in my own simple mind). perhaps you will find your audience." echoes of bukowski, "see here, you".
69, diamagnetism: line 149: "shrink-wrapped in this skin of sex"...the beginning of the end for me and tiff. i was fed up with being a sex slave.
73, ventriloquism: i think of this as my best poem, or if nothing else, the most poignant. tiff and me breaking up...two people once perfectly in love...everything broken into a thousand pieces which all exploded in my face. suicide threats, self-blame, and neither of us even let go for months and months. march-april '00...the most depressing months of my life..."and i am not sorry for any of it".
77, six hours ago
78, (symbiont): the night i realized i couldn't escape her as easily as i once thought.
79, yours truly,: to courtney, who felt like i had a 'hole in my hand' when i wrote this.
81, pyramind: the quotes are from edith hamilton's "mythology".
82, ex facto: the first time i admitted my disdain for poetry.
84, exothermic rxn: to a girl named diana who i knew very little about, but was nonetheless inspired by. she was too young, so there are a few exaggerations on my part. the rxn (reaction) abbrevation comes from my chemistry professor...proof that the subject did in fact have a tangible, passing influence on me.
93, the floodgates: another soul-bleeder i thought to be milking my vulnerability, and i hated it so much i nearly erased it altogether. luckily i didn't.
94, c: coming home from class one summer day i conjured two odd theories, one of which dealt with relating time travel with light, and the other which examined the possibility of light actually being godlike. following this i stayed up late to watch the sunrise and, consequently, came up with the phrase in line 24: "god is just a light bulb".
95, rhode: to nichole, who suddenly decided i was no longer worthy of her conversation, after four years of friendship.
100, the truth: so poetry is now the life process. who knew?
101, monochrome: originally written a year before i actually put it to use...i set it aside because it was very different from what i was writing at the time (i.e. "diamagnetism", "ventriloquism", etc.). kind of story-like.
105, vanishing point: the second half of "monochrome", in a sense. more storytelling.
109, outdex: i thought this was one of my better poems, so the lack of response was rather...erm...disappointing to say the least. my guess was that nobody understood it, which isn't too far-fetched by any means. lines 95-99 are my favorite.
111, anhydrate: envisioning myself in a mental hospital.
117, chicane: signifies the beginning of the e.e. cummings influence. the idea of having a parrot interrupt my delivery of this poem was just too bizarre to pass up.
119, chimodre: the poetic rubix cube. this one took me an hour to figure out.
120, boa expander: beth once asked me to write her a poem, and i did the same day. then, i just let it sit there for about nine months before i dug it up, blew off the dust, and 'finished' it without ever changing a single word.
121, craquelure: to a thanks-for-nothing girl named lisa, who i met during new year's '00-01, while i was sky-high on pharmies and extremely drunk. i distinctly remember her and her friend anita tickling me on the kitchen floor of somebody's house out in the middle of a cornfield in halifax. when i tried to get through to her afterwards, however, things were markedly different. in a way this also partially applies to someone else i know, but can't mention; specifically, lines 47-48: "my love for you becomes a lost art".
123, tyr: to be read backwards, bottom-to-top, like a devil's dream.
124, optic nerve: another bizarrely-structured poem most definitely inspired by the likes of e.e. cummings, as well as autechre. the speeding-up and slowing-down of the rhythmic pattern echoes some of their songs.
125, pantheist: written two months into my current relationship, when things were going much, much slower than i had ever expected. the title is partially an inside joke on my and jason's and andy's behalf, and i am ashamed to say that i cannot explain it here. this poem keeps gaining new connotations and/or implications, and to explain all the possible meanings of the metaphors would simply take up too much time and effort.
126, xing: akin to cummings' famous "said he, said she" poem, but with a distinctly personalized twist.
127, oh: me under the influence of percocet, trying to overcome writer's block. originally written sometime last fall...and entitled "invigorant", as some will recognize...the original version did in fact have all the letters. unfortunately in the process of copying this down i (conveniently) forgot some of them. is there a pattern?
129, pianeau: my idea of how a computer would go about writing a poem.
132, radii: several poems juxtaposed on top of one another.
133, standing on a trap door: written on the fourth floor of ganser library (at school), while i was trying desperately to write a 10-page report on 20th-century american composers. the building of course had a broken air-conditioning system at the time, so it was about a hundred degrees up there. somehow in the midst of that, this came to me.
134, andante moderato: an italian musical term meaning something alone the line of mid-tempo. mozart used it in one of his symphonies.
135, obx: i kept seeing the 'obx' sticker on vehicles everywhere, so of course i assumed it was a religious term, and attempted to use it in a tongue-in-cheek context. unfortunately, i found out later that it merely stands for outer banks, n.c. this poem is something i am extremely proud of, regardless of your opinion on it.
rupture
01, free birds come back to their cages: part of the title is from a book on Chaos theory, given to me by one of my math professors during the summer of '01 (the original read, "systems that return to their cages"). i find this rather brief selection too unsettling to expound upon; some things are simply better left unsaid.
03, novascotia: a midst-of-autumn poem, not surprisingly overwhelming in its emotional bias. this was a point at which i was (partially) convinced that i was in another doomed-to-fail relationship; line 37: "(stillborn)love"...affection without a tangible meaning.
08, 100,000 dead lemmings at the bottom of a great precipice: one real bitch to work out, but i found the completion of this particularly rewarding. by far my favorite poem of the lot, a statement of genuine and uninhibited devotion, even at the expense of the self. note the distinction made between "loving" someone and being "in love" with them.
09, dolly llama: refers back to the poem "obx"; the metaphor of learning about someone's past in comparison to peeling an orange is recycled here, if not to a somewhat deeper extent.
10, all good things come in threes: illustrates both my particular fascination with watching a girl cover up her treasures after doing the deed and my obsession with the back, in one fell swoop.
14, pony up: written entirely in one sitting during a late december '01 evening, when alicia told me she had applied to a school in virginia. the most personal thing i have written since "ventriloquism"; the great many details must be discussed in private.
15, rapture: draws partial inspiration from "optic nerve": in short; a formatting nightmare: