Home >  Monthly Archives: June 2015

200 / 42

She used to say “worsh” instead of “wash.” She was big and gray and wore house dresses that smelled of stale cigarettes, and when I got home from school I could smell her in the house in the place where she folded laundry—in front of the TV, watching her shows.

She is dead now and I never think of her anymore—or, now I have. Her name was Theda Ruby.

We played under the porch of her house, in the dirt. I found these old Matchbox cars and Star Wars figures buried in the dirt, left there maybe by the older boys, before the booze and spoilation. On the porch, Theda’s husband Jim doubled over in one of those sawing fits of coughing we could hear a half a mile away.

Theda folded my underwear to feed him.

There was a story about how Jim lost his license. He rode the mower to the bar at the bottom of the hill. I don’t know if it was true, but it seemed like it. Their hope was real, but more so the complications. They were like figures caught in the dirt of generations, waiting to be unburied.

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140 / 69
 
Here find
  a topography of mood_
Not ideas,
  not events,
But the tectonics of emotion_
The fret and
  subduction
  of hope and
  malice.
[130]

1024 / 34

More than once, I’ve considered discontinuing the Instagram feed for this project.

The problem isn’t the photos, but these things:
The End
The screen capture poems.

There is something off-key with the screen captures—something groping about them, something juvenile.

But then again, there is something groping and juvenile about this whole project, which adds to its perverse appeal. Too much is avoided when one fears being deemed a lightweight. And so I press on—even with the Instagram feed.

And still, something happens when one converts this:

A window behind you.
  Put Virginie out there.
  Teal Vespa, marron hair.
Scarf horizontal,
  A skirted lovely prude
  Speeding out of view.

To this:
140-65
Some reduction occurs. The image changes the words, somehow cheapens them.

It may be the company that screen captures keep. This kind of cheerleading bollocks:
Misquote
Or angsty scribbles:
Being_Medium
Maybe.

Maybe it’s the lingering privilege we still give to books, which, at least inne ye olde dayes, were made by printing words on pages, not through the impregnation of a screen. Screen captures are doubly cheap: images of images.

But I don’t think it’s any of these.

I think it must be that taking photos of poems and posting them on the Internet is the final capitulation to the screen. A surrender to the mediocrity of the medium.

You look at these things and wonder whether it’s the end of the road for the poem, the poet or poetry—take your pick—and quickly thereafter follows the discomfort that comes from not knowing what to do with such morbid understanding.

But here_
Topography
Out here on the Interwebs you find the fret and the subduction of hope and malice, the tectonics of emotion. This is the place were the plates grind together uncomfortably. The process, the project, and the product may never be completely satisfying.

[309]

140 / 70
 
For the utopians
 among us
Remember_
The artifacts
 of our pain
Have borne us
 better_
 and longer_
Than our
 as of yet unmet
Better selves.
[130]

200 / 43

“I never set out to make pain the subject of my life’s work. I always thought I would have something more profound to say than, ‘I hurt.’ But all along there was pain in all its protean forms—the stitch-tear uterine hell, the suffocating isolation, the woolen two-headed gloom, the stabs of anxiety, the regret, the loss, the abiding sense of failure. It fouled the well water. Or it was the well water. I can’t tell which. And I found myself trying to make it go away, or deal with it, or explain it, or overcome it…

“Helpful voices have tried to reassure me: Pain is a gift. It is an inspiration. But I refuse to call it a gift. I refuse to deem it some dark muse. I will not knight this poison. Rather, at times, when I am feeling kind to myself, I will permit this consolation. The fact that I am still sitting here, knuckles knotted around a blue Cross pen, does not mean that I have beaten pain, or transformed it, or transcended it. Rather, I have accomplished the brave and ordinary thing of generations. I have endured.”

Anda Boyles, 2003

[196]

140 / 71
 
A black glass
  storefront
reflects,
imprecisely, the
  obverse of
a billboard.
I can’t construe.

//Temperance St//
[108]

1024 / 35

Tim Hortons
“I went to the Tim Hortons because I wanted to feel Canada, to be at one with its pulse and energy, to really get Canada down into my bones.”

– Olivia Townsend Ivagoe, travel writer

[35]

140 / 72
 
Here’s the shelf
  I kept empty for you_
Dust, demitasse,
Ein Gösser, an iPad,
Some damned glam mag
  I never even looked at.
[120]

200 / 44
 
Poppy – bleachy, gap-toothed girl
	picking the stalls at South Bank,
	sunning her milky gams
	on the grass at Saint James Park.
We trundled out to Oxford
	in a carriage like an armpit.
	She told me she dreamed
	of cliff sides on Highway One.
Me, I dreamed about her—
	what it must be like
	to lace fingers in a fuck,
	to have a fight, to get so close
We stop seeing each other completely.
	But with each train lurch
	I felt my shackles keenly.
	My hand kept to its own knee.
Oh my, what tired bollocks, this
	love song mush, microwave 
	passion replaced, week later, 
	by some other horny stuff.
Forget Poppy—the point is this—
	There’ve been so many Poppies 
	they’ve come to settle thick
	like silt inside a bottle. 
These days, I have to hold my head just so
	lest an idle thought (Oxford) shakes
	it all up again, turns whole days
	into a mess of mud and water.
[162]