Greensboro, Thirty-three years they held me from your too-short days, your portions still rare in creation— the gravel snap, the smell of bacon, the country roads winding the hillsides heavy with leaf smell. Here I am, shuffling fool, left the car door open To read with fingers the crumpled mask of a hickory. This Braille of messages only a captive can read: You are free! In the night, the silence is deep and old, empty of the cough and grouse of the prison pod. And I keep the window open where the neighborhood dogs call one to the other. In mudrooms or carports or patios at the end of leashes, they strain against the pull of night. And I am with them, I feel their need. Morning is the lush voyage from bedroom to breakfast, eggs and grits, the cold, dewed grass at dawn, the unaccountable explorer’s freedom to amble down to the road and stop to talk to a woman. We are driving downtown now. To its in-between-ness, to the old overlaid by new, like the Jefferson Standard topped by the Jefferson Pilot, How freedom is restlessness, and restlessness is change— Everything rendered different, not better, and down on the streets, the storefronts, I do not know them; their marquees offer services I cannot picture. Then we pass the Woolworth’s, a hydrant, an elm I remember, and the years are on me like fever— The earthly sense of being from a place and then the nearness of that place. The push and pull of it, moving inside my body, nearly broken by waiting, but not altogether broken, It’s vestal cells still alive and now altogether open— They breathe the soap and grit and fry cook odors of this Southern city. I bring in worlds of it. It marks me— The midday traffic mutters (amiably) on Martin Luther King, A crew cutted toddler stumble steps behind his gram, Fatty freshets of barbeque waft from a storefront, A woman in cornrows hips against the bus stop. I hear country, gospel, hip-hop— snatches from shops and cars, glinting, hopeful of the many, so many trails of freedom. Are all these gifts yours, Greensboro? Is this your homecoming? Or is this profligate Earth, again, returning to its child some portion of what was denied him? An earthly paradise? Well, no. There are still prisons out here, war, illness, fear, injustice. But here, now, in these days, these few days of expanding, there is only us, Greensboro, the sober blue dome of your sky, your trees in first leaf, azaleas flushed with spring, and here— The motley aisles of a grocery store, where a man like me can live this electric, this angelic feeling of standing in line with a Coke and a bag of chips that he picked out for himself and will buy with his damned own money.
Home > Category Archives: 200
[479]
OK, SLK is in the house. Scott Lou Keener. Copyright. Buzzing off of post softball beers and feeling OK about the preceding day. Drew a cartoon. Plus, the Mighty Mites beat a bunch of duffers who clearly skipped little league for piano lessons or something. And yes, I have to admit that being able to drop the ball centerfield on top of the Asian girl with her glove on the wrong hand still brings back some glimmers of self-admiration. Triple. And I made some nice grabs at shortstop. And down to Miller’s on Main where the UVA douche bags were out in force. Fast forward. Here is me drinking straight out of a pitcher of MGD and I think I’d better go before I set myself up for a hellacious Monday.
And back here, to a kitchenette overlooking a duck pond. Only no ducks! Ah, but if you close your eyes, you can picture yourself anywhere. Open them up and there is all the ordinary just waiting for you. Kitchen table cluttered with drawing stuff. Sparse fridge. Socks drawing on a chair (don’t ask me why). And the creeping feelings you got to keep down until bed. Things not to think about. Like why you got to hammer the ball at a girl that clearly cannot catch it? I know her. Her name is Lynne and I think I could call her tomorrow and say sorry, but that would sound slightly creepy or like a come on, or both. A creepy come on. And then I think maybe that’s probably why I wailed the ball at her. Because I like her, and smashing a softball at a woman is the 34-year-old version of putting gum in her hair.
And the cartoon isn’t all that great. The drawing is clumsy. It doesn’t say what I was trying say, not really. Loneliness isn’t a lunchtime. It’s a gas. It’s radon leaking up through the ground into everything until it sticks in all your cells. Maybe carbon monoxide is a better metaphor. But it doesn’t matter, because I can’t seem to push these thoughts to perfection, and all my attempts spoil in a day or two. Go bad like a bowl of fruit. I think I’ve got it only to come back a week later and find it all wilted mess. Fuck, and now I’m thinking about that girl, Lynne.
[409]
Hey, Scott Keener here, still squatting on Jim’s site. So, I’ve posted a new cartoon, below, more recent this time, with a different title, mostly because I got tired of explaining to people that the name “Bumbops” didn’t haven’t any meaning, really, and that I had just made it up out of the blue. It certainly didn’t have anything to do with bopping anybody in the bum, like some people (cough…Cam) kept saying. Although I guess everything has a sexual meaning if you dig hard enough. Freud and all. But I meant it to have no meaning, which is harder than having some obscure significance. Everybody’s always looking for the hidden meaning in everything.
So I made this cartoon about getting these tattoos and that part happened. But the part about them being dedicated to motor oil and auto parts I made up. Same thing with the punchline with the clam diggers, naturally. The unsettling thing about the dream was that it really did seem like something that I would do. I had that sinking, gawdawful feeling that I had gone and done something really stupid again, and now the next days, weeks, months, years would be dedicated to living with this new, hard reality.
Yeah, I’ve gotten tattoos that later on I’ve realized are kind of stupid. But mostly the regret comes from the things that I’ve done or didn’t do to other people, the stuff I said or didn’t say. When I’m saying goodnight to my son Mack on FaceTime instead of being in the same room with him, when his mom passes me off to Mack without a single word, its like a tattoo I can’t have removed, an embarrassing and hurt-filled stain that I carry around with me all the time. The people who know me see it. I see it. Maybe everybody can.
[309]
Since Jim hasn’t updated this website in, like, weeks, he told me that I could post a few things here. Hi. My name is Scott Keener. Interloper on websites, head-poker-inner on the Internet, and attempted cartoonist (see my 1024 below). Though, I’ve been told my cartoons are “unfunny” (thanks, Mom), they’re inspired by John Porcellino’s King Cat Comics, which, as anybody knows, are less funny than just flat-out profound. And so I scribble in his wake.
Jim says that the posts are only supposed to be 200 words, but I’m too lazy to count–or better, too lazy to edit, so I’m just going to type until it starts to feel 200ish–which I take to mean just long enough to be piquant but not long enough to be tedious. In anyways, these things are supposed to be guidelines, right? Like speed limits or degrees of misdemeanors. At what point does possession cross over to intent to distribute? I can’t remember these things and couldn’t afford enough to worry.
So about me. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, but don’t get me wrong. I don’t go to UVA and I don’t listen to DMB. I just ended up here as a contractor at a company who whipsawed me down here at the tail end of some colossal corporate reshuffle. As a member of the yawning 99%, I find I must work. And so I live here–caught between TJ’s prissy college and the flat-out redneck wastes that stretch thither in every direction. At least there’s Humpback Rocks and Skyline Drive, not far off, where you can go and breath. I spend a lot of weekends up in nem nar mountins, chewing on grass. That, and drawing.
[281]
Penny Polyester, London, 1983. Data entry specialist. Shall we go for tea? Knightsbridge. Serpentine— A pantsuit all gray and green. Mum says never marry. Well, Mum sounds rather mean.
[28]
This week we learn how to get that brick oven pizza taste you love right in your own home. You might be thinking: Impossible! But I’m here to tell you that with a little elbow grease, propane and dental floss you can do it too. It all comes from loosening the rotator cuffs. Tell your wingman to stand clear before you try it! And if you have a galley kitchen, you might want to tape up some pillows—just in case. Now, if you’re lucky enough to be from New Haven or Jersey City, the next step will come naturally. Otherwise, I suggest gum bands on the socks. Oh, and don’t forget to stage your ingredients somewhere handy. I have a belt I made from an inner tube and duct tape for the essentials (see inset) but pinning up the corners of an apron can suffice—and without the hazardous glue odors. OK, turn the TV down, and make sure you hold the floss in your right hand. That part is critical! I can already smell that bubbling cheese and fresh basil, can’t you? It’s going to be a great night for brick oven pizza!
[200]
Last summer, a woman saw me walking my daughter Ella along the beach at the Outer Banks. It was past sunrise, the breeze picante with salt and sea vapor. The waves labored quietly, laying down their crosswise sheets of ocean to keep a firm walkway upon the verge.
This woman, she stopped us to say how lovely it all was: How lucky we all were to be there enjoying it, what with all that was going on in the world. Her eyes turned vaguely inland. Beyond the dunes, beyond the million dollar homes heaped upon the sightline, people suffered. Wars raged. Refugees died on makeshift boats to reach shores like these.
And I thought. I felt, this isn’t right. I don’t want to live in the dreams of the suffering. And if this sleepy luxury is my inheritance to this child, if only to conjure some sense of a paradise beyond, then it is a false one, one that I can neither give nor guarantee.
But that’s too much to tell a five-year-old, or even a kindly old woman on the strand. So I said nothing and continued on with the girl, hand-in-hand.
[196]
foodie (n) : oh, who among us could doubt you? : you, who know a consommé from a bona fide bisque? : please don’t let us buy those tomatoes, hateful things— hydroponic, hard as nipples. : and look at this, look— I tried to caramelize onions but they just just burned to mush. What THE FUCK is wrong with me?
[57]
“From time to time, I’ve tried to be exhaustive, to follow the details of experience where they lead. … But it’s all too much to describe without launching into a scourge of debilitating minutia, clogging volumes without directions. So I prune this thicket into ‘stories,’ even the most sophisticated of which are, in the end, childish simplifications. We are not built to perceive, but to ignore, to filter, simplify and neglect. Try as I might to keep myself ‘open’ to the world—to see all of what is around me—I can’t even get from my bed to the bathroom without neglecting a universe of joy and horror and sorrow, life, death, pain and pleasure, triumph and failure—and that is just in my own hum-drum town. What must it have been like for Jesus to feel all this? To lack the luxury, really, of limitations?”
Jake Wilson Whitlow, 1999
[151]
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923
Almustafa, the Prophet, dispensed his wisdom to the people of the city of Orphalese after twelve years among them. Looking back at this book as a story, not a work of philosophy or theology, I wonder what he might have said had Almustafa not been a wanderer, a recluse, an outsider with the luxury of looking in. What would he have felt about these people had he been born among and had grown up on their streets? What if he had loved their daughters and had been spurned by them? What if he had felt the spit and fists of their sons? Or had toiled for the vain and small-minded merchants, had been the object of gossip, suspicion and disregard? What would Almustafa had said to them if he did not have the luxury of leaving? Like this, all things seem clearer and more manageable at a distance. It is so much easier to love the townsfolk as you are bidding them goodbye.
[167]
“You see—no—you see beneath the crosswise strips of phrases laid—it’s like papier-mâché put over a plain and simple thing—an egg—and built up, layered over and over and shaped and painted Amazon blue and with fat gelb spots so it becomes this EGG—it says—this thing—it says, look, this isn’t just some sign system, the words just don’t stand for things, no more than things just sit at the end of words, it says, when I make an EGG of an egg, what I am doing is saying less in MORE, expending words like bullet rounds, billions of them, until there are burnt, hot shells all everywhere, and the thing itself is left riddled and warped and smoking and smelling like burnt vulcan rubber, it says, no, it says this thing, whatever it is, is more than what we think it is, and that the words that I used to make it, or describe it, or whatever I was doing, are more than what they mean—THAT is what I am trying to do. I wake up every morning and I try to do that.”
– Creye Givamene, 1963
[198]
immaculate (adj)
: i used to think
her pale blue
like her hijab.
: these days i
see nothing
and much of it.
: a tesseract,
untainted,
and for always
: unfolding.
[28]
“All art is political, even art that pretends not to be. For what is apolitical is consensual. It condones the status quo. Or if it is accepted indifferently by the dominant class, it is the status quo.”
– Anton Lucash, 1968
[39]
“What could be more leveling and mundane than bill time? An afternoon writing checks for water, electricity, phone and insurance and any remaining pretense that I have been elevated by my ‘art’ to some higher plane has been washed away. By the time I’ve licked the last envelope and put the letters in the mailbox and raised the red flag, though, a poem or some morsel of a story has slipped sideways into my mind. It grows bigger as I come back down the drive—like this passage—tempting, rounded, elusive. No, writing has not elevated me, but rather it has connected me to something essential, something (almost) hidden in the day-to-day world around me. It is the method by which I have lived with the mundane, or better—how I’ve discovered within the mundane something always giving, something always extraordinary.”
– Anda Boyle, 1993
[145]
“It is a mistake to think of the goal of philosophy as controlling emotion. The goal is to preserve emotion. The sage creates a space inside where hope, anger, innocence and desire are preserved from the treachery of experience.”
– Anton Lucash, 1972
[41]
Not far from Karlsplatz
I stooped on a coping
and
looking up,
I found at last
an analphabetic,
an
almost painless
aloneness.
Up there.
A billboard word_
Teutonic, looped, globby_
I could almost understand.
[34]
These East Coach beaches sleep under mists of sameness. North to South. An opiate syringe. Zarathustra, dreaming, saw an eternity of returning: What begins as the rites freedom_ pot, condoms, kegs in trash cans_ in the end is willess recurrence, a ritual of paperbacks and sand toys in the trenchant morning. And like videotape or prophesy, the strand frays in each retelling. So in time we forget what we sought or how we came to doubt these vague attempts at reclamation: Sand retreats. Dunes crumble. The houses fall to sea. Yet we return past the flatland soy fields, down the pine-lined corridors. We return under the jumbled coastal signage, power lines and cable crisscross. We return over the blazing steppes of sand to towel plot, sand chair or beach tent. We return to find returning has changed us. Barnacled, waterworn, like something the sea has thrown up upon its littered selvage_ so much like the old thing but somehow unworkable_ We have been rusted to postures of recline, staring oceanward, each face stamped, one after the other, with the same searching squint.
[182]
I have a friend—we’ll call him Matt—who still doesn’t have a cell phone. Says he doesn’t need one. I’ve always envied Matt. Not needing a cell phone. I wanted to say that Matt is self-sufficient, but he’s not self-sufficient, and knows he’s not. Doesn’t pretend to be. I don’t see him anymore. He lives overseas with his wife and kids. I wanted to say that I miss Matt, but I don’t let myself miss people. It scatters my atoms. Matt may not miss me, but I can tell you that he is missing someone right now, and he will admit it. Matt doesn’t live by proofs. I even bet he’s gotten a cell phone by now—for work or so his wife can get ahold of him. And I bet that when he went to pick one out, Matt didn’t get all over himself about it, as if he were sacrificing some first principle. I would have quietly hated myself about it. Matt doesn’t hate himself, quietly or otherwise. I envy him for that. I wish I didn’t have a fucking cell phone.
[199]
I slept off our train ride hours in the room and woke up at first of dusk. you won’t know, and when I say this it’ll sound like I’m talking about something else altogether_ Yet, when I closed my eyes I could feel me still moving.
[49]
“They were gone then, grown… Maxine and I spent a full weekend disgorging the attic above the hallway. It all came down—boxes of school papers, fusty bags of outgrown clothes, bent dioramas, sports gear, dozens of battered shoes. We worked and sorted, trying to pick out the few precious items that would survive the move. One point, we found ourselves paralyzed amidst the boxes. Dreamily, I was fingering folds of hot pink tulle. She had pressed against her lips the matted collar of a tiny winter coat. Lost in these relics, it occurred to me that the past is not so much real as it is totemic, representing to us all that is lost in our very present.”
— Anda Boyle, 2011
[122]
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]
“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]
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.
[199]
She wasn’t wearing Her wedding ring. Why do I care? I’ve got no dog in that fight. But still, What a voluptuous window_ An empty finger. A glimpse of pain Or possibility Just beyond a parted curtain.
[39]
Prayer is not for believers. It is for those incapable of belief_ Dim-hearted bankers, like me, Hoping to earn on interest What they could not pay in principle.
[28]
Habit’s a far sight From predisposition, Which can’t be shown To prove the crime. So watch for ticks and slants, How she turns away Before she says goodbye.
[30]
A couple of months ago, I was thinking about how I would keep my site “fresh” in its second year of infancy. I was working through a lot of material that I had sitting around from years of futile scribbling and worried that I would run out of shit to rehash.
I proposed to myself that I would try to be looser and just sit down and hammer out things that I was thinking about. Despite inviting violations of my “no-blogging” dictum, this was at least an exercise in letting things flow.
So having wasted 92 words prefacing the following, I can now vouch for the fact that I am writing this in a Panera at 9:45 pm on a Friday night, “letting things flow.” Picture the bearded ündermensch in his go-to khakis and tee shirt force-feeding his computer in his undying quest to do something, something that isn’t utterly small and demonstratively mediocre.
And yet, the fact is that this—yes—blog post achieves nothing more than the aforementioned smallness and mediocrity doesn’t end the conversation. For it seems to me that the World Wide Web is history’s greatest pulpit for all that is small and mediocre.
It is where the small and mediocre come to crow and cry and jump up and down in the hope, if not for adulation, then at least for the ephedrine bump of the almighty “like”—by which the crowd merely says, yes, we see you. You exist. Now back to Snapchat and Sudoku.
[252]
Third time I colored my hair
I pitched a hiss
At the Hair Cuttery bitch—
Too dark! Look at this!
The roots are showing.
It’s all the wong shade.
Dear sweet Lord, fuck that—
I’m going gray.
[39]
The profligate city sends forth its species. A coffer of segways bumble over Wisconsin. The solitary dump truck lows and shudders, Still hoping for a mate.
[26]
Now that this site is a year old, I am going to step back to reflect on the project that I set out for myself—writing for the web ecology.
I should first point out that I have stopped thinking about ‘writing for the web ecology.’ Mostly, I just try to come up with something to put on the site twice a week, which is really a matter of looking back through my old stuff to see if anything looks reparable, or trying to shape some nugget of an experience or thought or feeling into a little piece of prose or a poem.
That’s just writing. The medium little matters, except that the web provides an interface and my ground rules about length and format provide the constraints—including the troublesome 200 word count rule (which I occasionally break, like now). As for what I write, I have been deliberate about a couple of things.
First, I don’t write anything topical, like commentaries on the day’s events. I guess that stems in part from being the kind of guy who is always thinking about something else. Also, I don’t find my own political views—or other people’s for that matter—terribly interesting. In any case, I need not reiterate that ISIS is an abomination or global warming is real. There are better sources for such information, and this web site, I fear, won’t tip any debates.
Second, I am not ‘blogging’ in the sense of keeping an online journal. Believe me, no one wants to read my journals—a lot of maudlin junk. More than this, I have always had a sense that my daily comings and goings, such as they are, are in a profound way, irrelevant. If I reported that I had dinner with colleagues at the Gasthaus Wickerl on Porzellangasse, why? Did the experience change me? Or is it rather more notable that nothing changed at all? I walked out feeling all the same.
And there is one other thing, and I think it comes of writing fiction, that it has always seemed to me that scenes could be made to make sense with every particular rearranged. That if I had not gone to the Gasthaus Wickerl, the Gasthaus zur Oper might have done just as well. And if the Oper will suffice, what’s the point of the Wickerl at all, except to crow that I ate my food in Vienna. And what could be more tiresome than crowing?
[418]
“Drink at night. Beg during the day. Borrow cigarettes and shill for quarters. Sex in the bushes. Wet and dry. Leaves stuck to concrete. The warm breath of bakeries. The call of the crowded bars on Howard Street. Those animal weeks and the seasons spent in scrounged sleeves and picked pants. The jabber of the crazies and the taste of dirt and liquor. The still dread of body pain. Pee burning down a pant leg on a frigid night. A hollow day passed on a park seat in October.”
from Percival
by Anton Lucash
[94]
1993
Fair-haired Goldmund, where have your wayward paths led?
Thin-lipped Narcissus, what truths have your deliberations fed?
2004
Having long ago dismissed your dyads
Father of intellect,
Mother of creation.
I keep busy distilling fresher extremes
Cheetah is awake,
Porcupine is dreaming.
What is this proclivity to conceive in poles
Wolf and lamb
Donkey, elephant
Fidel and infidel
That molds the world we make in thought?
It must be (would you agree?)
Not the poles we seek, but the perfection
The poles imply: The last, best thought.
The end to speculation.
2015
Note to self: Have you found
The last best thought?
2026
How about now?
2037
now?
2048
I am tired. Now.
Think I will go to sleep.
//Hermann Hesse//
[115]
I can’t tell you I can’t tell you How much you hurt me, How I longed for freedom, The terrible magic of Crete. I got as far as Rhodes and failed. That much I will now admit. There were stars there. Red wine. The sea deep and dark as life. Kristina naked in the waves. Philosophs rambling on a roof. A kiss proffered and not accepted. That is where I left things. Halting, incomplete. A word half-said. You know there are pages in life That will not pleat, will not fold, And time that will not pass away. I made a deal with myself To forget them but thus far have failed. Nor can I forget you, Nikos. I have kissed you. It won’t be undone. //For Nikos//
[131]
I want your God, That electric force, Epileptic revelation— That lightening, That star tilt That wakes up on wet grass. Deep, rich, blue. Holy morning. And sense the threads Between me And everyone And everything. To stand, a man, In truth. Alone. //Whitman//
[43]
Quiet, quiet. Exegesis of perfect prose. I want to live there. Not on your pond, but upon your pond in prose. Find the softness, the clarity in speaking. The God who calms, absolves, Follows quietly over bracken and branch, The trees black pillars In the long vaporous light of morning. The sounds of villages distant. The distant train retreating. I hear you speaking. Not a possible life, I hear. But a possible heart. I hear, A possible self. I hear Quiet. Quiet. //H. D. Thoreau//
[85]
Ten days in NYC learning the law with the Best / Brightest. August profs just this side of greatness, their Ivy League creds, Political appointments jogged out at every intro. Cuff links, seersucker—Roscoe’s in Martha’s Vineyard again!— Coral glasses worn to match the pants, to match the silent satisfaction of Yale and Princeton, safe from their dingy outskirts, Northeast train-linked sub-orbs of the Old Order, Preserved by the White Shoe Law Firms, and, of course, the Schools. It means something still. It is written in their lives. I said that when a guy like Matt, Good guy all and all, Comes up out of the best private schools in New York, Slides into Yale and thence to Stanford, The future is loomed by Four Towers: Law, Medicine, Finance, Office. It’s almost as if their world Is smaller than ours: It’s Manhattan and Palo Alto, London and Beijing. But as for the rest of it, All the fly-over squares of wheat and subdivision, All so forgettable and sad and lamentable, All so small, terribly small and terribly sad, And did I say lamentable? Fly over it all they must—and they do. A good lawyer will turn that claim around, Find the exceptions, and the exceptions are There—children moving up and down the ladder. Harvard produces its burnouts and malcontents, Listless intellects disgusted by the options before them, Earnest civil servants, shopkeeper’s daughters rising on pride. These stories are true, But so are the Partners, the Politicians, the Professors— The scions of our American royalty. And, yes, of course, I’ve wished to be among them. But the day dreams, the best ones, are always to go down and Out of it, not to come up. To burn my checkered jacket in a barrel On Brighton Beach and write poems on a shoe. For herein lies the truth that is perhaps The greatest comfort to the obscure: Turning away from that kind of fortune has always been Braver than earning it.
[336]
Surefire Novel Concepts: Country Club Coming Of Age Story Recovering Alcoholic Tries to Revive Relationship with Estranged Son Elderly Woman Mourning Spouse Discovers a Dark Secret Child Witnesses Horrific Murder; Bravely Exposes Killer Pantless Troubadour Finds Love in Offbeat Romance Plain-Jane Meter Maid Corrupted by Dashing Double-Parker Pathological Genius Enjoys Eating Human Earlobes Masturbating Monkey Becomes Hero of Circus Anthropomorphic Walking Stick Journeys Across Ohio Lonely Secretary Falls in Love in New York at Christmas Big Spending Orthodontist Learns the Value of Dollar-Cost-Averaging Woman with Titanium Hip Harassed by TSA at LaGuardia Hoboken Family Runs out of Sunny Delight; Mom Won’t Buy More Bored Mujahid Rents Love Actually; Changes His Ways Procrastinating Lepidopterist Makes Up Novel Concepts School Girl Carries Two Billion Years of Natural History in Veins; Ignored by Classmates Forty-Eight Seconds of Precious Existence Squandered by Accountant Woman Stands in Breakfast Aisle Reading Back of Aunt Jemima Pancake Box Boy Listens to Song Bird by Window at School; Later Can’t Remember The Tune Necessity Confused with Desire
[171]
Botox eyes,
Collagen pout,
Three hundred dollar highlights.
Quilted Coat,
Yoga Pants, that
Fat black blinkered Mercedes_
Is there some
Little faith rattling round
Down under it all, Mother?
Or just the fumbling need
To be seen, or,
Somehow, to see?
//Georgetown//
[42]
Pogo picked the mouth, Dwyer style. Wrote a note: “Harder to be half than none.” Pogo notwithstanding, Minny chose the heart, Borda style. Always said: “It’s the heart that hounds you.”
[32]
“If I close my eyes and clear my thoughts, and just feel, I sense there that same faint disturbance that I have always felt—the despair just on the other side of containment. And a mere touch, a mere word, could wreak the flooding.”
Anda Boyles / 1998
[46]
Sat up at six in bedsheet gnarl, So she took a mental sick day. By noon she stood under the hallway arch, Pinned between the bills and cleaning kitchen. Worry is a vapor: It fills any space. It clings to nits and mountains.
[43]
NON-FICTION «-- 642-699 The girl in the gingham blouse Peruses other worlds of undiscovered offices— DAMNED GOOD RESUMES COVER LETTER MAGIC UNLOCKING THE GMAT She reads, Mosquito nervous, wishing down into glossy pages For that Rockefeller Plaza Moment When Career will take shy fingers into handsome hand, Take her up that high-speed elevator into Bauhaus skyscape, Into the taught and hard wood negotiations over 47 Hudson Acres, over the reverse-merger of Time and Value, of Coke and Pepsi, of Jay-Z and Beyoncé_ Out to the Palladian River Walk, out to the long-weekend bric-a-brac shops, Down to the rainy, shop-bright streets, to the places where shoes are sculptures, dresses dreams_ To that Black Tie Renoir Wedding where Industry himself will speak his vows on the Willow Walk. And from there, what? She sees the First Class duvet warmth of Red-Eye Starfall. Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ll be landing in Madrid in thirty minutes. Wake up love! The gaudy, bought boulevards of Old Europe are waiting… THE IMAGE OF SUCCESS THINK LIKE A WINNER YOUR LIFE IS CALLING She shuts and stacks each guidebook, neatens the spines. This noiseless, this doubt-filled longing. NON-FICTION 636 – 642 --»
[191]
Ten months in bagging this job, and Already you’re looking for a new one. Is progress the lie? Or is the lie like that on a golf course, Where the ball just keeps rolling No matter where it lands?
[40]
Admiral: A Definitional Issue— We need a shared vocabulary to move away from “common operating picture” to “common knowledge system.” Executive: A Programmatic Issue— We need a concrete budget build in the POM over the FDIP. Where’s the requirement on which to hang this concept? Consultant: A Cultural Issue— We won’t get there with technology alone…who are the critical enablers who will catalyze this sea change? Jim: When I hear this static, it’s like_ It’s like I am holding a ticket to a dull but earnest part of town where the gentry wear their jargon and every style hides a frown.
[106]
Jesus pours drinks at the foldout bar_ Two martinis. Shaker rings on the leather top. He turns to you, biting an olive. This is The moment you’ve been waiting for: Say it! Say it! Aw, but the moment’s past. So You sip. You make nervous chatting. Years later, you’ll think about that night. About all that was, all that might have been.
[65]
Our old solid state hummed like a death ray warming up. I dashed to the kitchen to fetch a snack. The racket proceeded pictures and I caught a confrontation mid-stream as two jealous lovers volleyed threats in the living room. I stepped in just as the woman screamed, “Get out!” And followed her finger_ The cat lay swathed in afternoon on the window sill. //TELEVISION_4//
[65]
No partner in the history of Williams, White, Tearney, Case and Carver Ever slouched on a cement bollard At the doors of Paddington Station, Drank two pound Spanish red From a screw top bottle. Good chance that any lad Who ever did Never filed brief In the second circuit. And some blokes never leave their village. Some mice never leave their wall.
[62]
CHAPTER I All on a dirt joke once Rachel McCree Donned that whalebone corset— The logger’s wife suckin in Center stage that Kentuck cabin, All while Sam Nead’s wife hid her crooked grin. The wasp-waisted lady Who lost her vay-lise at Sterlin Station Could ne’er imagine The odd fate of her precious intimate— Strung like rack o’er barreled body Til dainty baleen snapped and Loosey flesh oozed like blubber ‘Tween all them rippin seams. They heard a long, loud crackin— Like the fell of a far-off timber. The corset broke in two. Left that Rachel nekked. Squattin Over hard-packed floor, nethers bearlike, Breasts but bladders long-gone flat. Sam Nead’s wife forgot her crooked grin. Then, a long off silence. As after the mill’narian tree falls, And the woodsmen stand round That stump musing over the thing they killed— Over all the fear hidin in the hollows of malice. CHAPTER II Can’t tell you, after all, the mind Of John McCree come in from that Frigid wood, hands numb from swangin, Just to find his wife of thirty earthen years Standin in gingham over his supper stew. Cryin. //TALE OF A KENTUCK CORSET//
[199]
Drop a stone into the sea, It sinks. Sooner you drop it, deeper It sinks. Times, a stone sinks so deep It settles. Upon the sea bed It settles. Look back_down through Layers of light, Down to the mottled mosaic, The pebbled bed. You can’t find the stone. It’s become Part of the mosaic, Part of the sea itself. //Khalil Gibran//
[64]
“What is the meaning of freedom when all of your choices lead back to the same place? The freedom to choose exactly what is is mere justification—a spiritual sleight of hand.”
Jake Wilson Whitlow, 2011
[35]
A latchkey kid, I came home to a silent house, Threw coat and bag to the floor. The cockatoo squawked and settled. The cat slunk under the couch. The grandfather clock struck four. I wandered from room to room_ Nothing but framed faces on tables, A note from the housekeeper to Mom. But you were always there for me, Always waiting. I touched the knob Before I turned you on_ A moment of grace and remembrance. //TELEVISION_3//
[77]
I wake up in the morning with my phone stuck to my hand—this small black rectangle made of equal parts vanity and distraction.
At first I was cool about it. Just used it for calls, directions, an occasional text or e-mail, but then one Christmas I couldn’t stop playing Temple Run, and I realized I might have a problem. I deleted the game and thought I was on the mend.
Now I’ve gone and joined Twitter, Instagram, started a Facebook site, and everything has gone to hell. The phone devours my attention, pulls at me like a sculpted wedge of neutron star on the kitchen counter.
Yes, I know it’s all the same school ground stuff—popularity, friendship, validation—they come pipping out of the device like a morphine drip. All I have to do is push the button. A drug I’ve tested and know I must someday quit for good.
But then I see the small black rectangle on the bed stand, and in sleeplessness my hand fumbles for it. A thumb-mash of the call button and I get the next splash of morphine—a brief visual patch for this yawning, chemical quiver.
[199]
The woman with tuber hands puts tubers to lips, puts tubers to heart. Could she catch a coin if I even threw it? The man-spider crosses next to the curb, locomotes on rusted rods_ Outstretched eyes search the faces above. The bone girl comes last, begging basket laced in plastic petals. She carries a baby caked in soot. The driver tells us not to do it, but how can we resist? Coins and bills trickle from the vents. Their anguish is palpable; their anguish is gone. Their joy is palpable; their joy is gone. They are palpable; they are gone. The bus moved on. //DELHI TOLL STATION//
[107]
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]
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]
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]
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]
I see you now through this bubble of ambition. Two hands touching glass. I’ve tried all my life to find a way around it, but wherever I turn it is there. And there you are, where you have always been_ waiting on the other side.
[46]
So, there’s this thing that people call “The Internet of Things,” which must mean there are THINGS on the Internet! What are these things? I picture exotic and plastimetallic creatures—subsentient beings sucking the sweet tronflow at the edges of the matrix.
Like most of us, they’re only really good at one thing—making coffee, maybe, or washing dishes, smelling for smoke or listening for the first tingles of earthquakes. They don’t surf yet—but they can chat—and call out “I’m here!” and wait with infinite patience until they are called to task by distant masters.
The Things speak a staccato of electron and photon, a gabble that can be denatured, like these words, into a slipstream of ones and zeros, a digipatter of offs and ons. And they talk incessantly—worse than the worst Ugg-footed middle school girl-clutch.
And look—Gargantuan Things have joined the conversation—power plants, warships, the high voltage spines of nations. They natter; they conspire. The Internet of Things accumulates. It gathers know-how—an Orc built one cell at a time. The Orc may well soon finger its own cords. Gingerly tug the foot-end of its umbilical with dawning surmise.
[200]
“The great myth and misdirection of American culture is its obsession with comfort—the illusion that out there waiting (somewhere!) is some temperate zone where all of our struggles are abated and our pain comes to an end. Worst of it is that some of us even seem to find it, at least for a little while.”
Anda Boyles, 2009
[59]
Boozie gets me up at 5:30. We play pretend in the dark. Look, she says, We can see pictures in the stars_ Peoples. Kitties. I can see galaxies_ Nebulae, nurseries for moons and stars, That far off opal quasar That will someday be our home.
[44]
New Haven boasts the world’s smartest vagrants. There was one, old gopher all clad in leather, Lecturing at the coffee shop on the green. Said the longbowmen of England could outdistance cannon-shot, and the undergrads had no cause to doubt him. I wondered then on the value of education_ What they were learning there would carry them no farther than the threshold. The rest they would forget in time. But Yale! Now, there was something! That name would adorn them forever and be their pass key to boardrooms and law schools and legislatures… Did they know then? Did they? Did the hobo playing professor? What their parents knew when they endowed them with these resumes_ The great hidden principle of meritocracy_ That caveat that no high school guidance counselor seems to know or at least dares not mention_ That brilliance without status is nothing at all. And status without brilliance will always, Always, be good enough.
[157]
Will there be a day When your chin will leave Its perpetual palm? When every question You have asked Will have its answer? Those days lie in fiction_ But no novel You have read. Life ends in half rhyme, In a doorknob touched And not opened, In a comma Whose next clause is unwritten By art, Or else by the artist, Like me, Who could not find his answer.
[69]
Writing has not died; I don’t think it ever will. Yet, like any living thing, it will adapt. The ecology of the written word has changed dramatically. The rise of social media has changed the way that people think, interact, and express themselves. We generate huge volumes of written content every day. We trade jokes, opinions, and anecdotes. We publish blogs, articles, photos, videos and music. The expressive force and entertainment value of these media are immense. Add to this the proliferation of Internet programming, some of it high quality, which provides a steady stream of comedy, drama, and romance. Poetry and short-form prose can seem like mice under the feet of superfauna. Yet I think poetry and prose can remain relevant by adapting to this new environment. JimPerry140 is an exploration of poetry and prose adapted specifically to the ecology of the Internet. “140” attempts Twitter-ready writing of 140 characters or less. “200” is a blog of prose and poems of 200 words or less. “1024” pairs words and images. All content is pushed out on social media; this site is a repository. All writing found here is mine alone. All quotations are fictitious.
[190]