We have our shows_ He likes Matlock. Maude for me. But he is gone, And she_ She watches the window_ The bus stop channel Where pigeons pick trash Round the feet Of the gentry, Lost In the scape Of their devices. //TELEVISION_1//
[42]
200 / 8
Home > Monthly Archives: May 2014
140 / 11
Tad wore a fitted shirt, epaulets, buttons above the elbow. I spent most the meeting wondering just what those buttons were for.
[130]
200 / 9
The ocean holds light like a bottle, color wasted to darkness in its depths. High above the sun-soaked surface, we watch the current draw a turtle across the course of the ship. The carrier splits the dome of his sky_ casts him down under calloused keel, down into the screws’ mad vortex. A solitary turtle, reeling past the blades, tumbling through the boil of cavitation, can never fathom what world expands above the venter of this leviathan. He is like we shelled turtles who hang over the catwalks and gaze upon the skin of his world_ an endless bottle of light. //SIX MONTHS//
[103]
1024 / 6
Figure 6. The ghost in the center is my mother. I am the toddler in her hands. One summer day forty years ago, enough sunlight was reflected from her skin, from her hair, from her clothes to ingrain this image on a strip of film. A billion other photons scattered, their collective moments indicating all directions. And because each traveled at the speed of light, each carried its own time with it. I wonder now. If I could find but one of those particles_if I could somehow get between it and the dark distance of all our endings_would there be enough light left to see what she was, or why, or what all this has meant.
[117]
200 / 10
Of the need for e-mail one shall opine_ of millions of dollars, of paperwork tide_ Think of Marcus Aurelius repulsing the westward tribes_ The fight is all and is nothing at the same time.
[34]
140 / 12
Twitter counts the spaces, the linebreaks. That’s just the way_ You pay for every pause, for every slice of whitespace.
[118]
1024 / 7
Plate 7. Vendramin Family, Titian (1543-7), National Gallery, London. An afternoon may be spent perusing from face to face, imagining the workings of this Venetian family. Perhaps most striking is how Titian depicts the boys. It is as if Mum dressed them up in their Sunday best but could not get them to sit still. One wonders if Andrea Vendramin (center, in red), having no doubt spent a considerable sum, was annoyed to find his sons looking this way and that. Or was he struck, as we are five centuries later, by the intense intimacy of their boredom? Titian’s genius is not in the faithfulness of their likeness but in the immediacy of their emotion. Fair warning for Mum (and Dad) who would cull the family album to empty smiles and wooden postures.
[133]
140 / 13
Megabus_
For 27.50
you can sit by Big Mama Menthols_
and though she doesn’t have to,
she’ll give you Nip Chees,
ask you where you’re going.
[134]
200 / 11
I’ve heaved up and down stairs with you_ a wooden fatchild, dumb in your unpowered innocence and upon an end table set you. And plugged you in. But the moment I turn you on you transmorph into a grinning carney, with all guile held behind you_ beyond the tube, circuitry, and box back. //TELEVISION_2//
[55]
140 / 14
Hitting return will turn you into a pompous prick. Twitter’s NOT for poems! So beat it! And don’t let me catch you humming on the subway.
[132]