I haven’t done one of these for a while: no conversation (except where necessary—at the grocery store checkout, for example), no music, no use of any device specifically designed to produce sound. Today we dream silence: thinking not of what someone tells us listening not to the stories we are fed speaking not to fill [...]
A light piece today, because I was too distracted at the bookstore. The chair in the cookbooks section is rarely occupied, but there isn’t much space between the chair and the books, so when people are looking at them, it feels like I’m being watched… Twenty-one days, they say to get rid of the thing [...]
Watching Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA on blu-ray from Japan… Born out of the mud once the waters drew back the tone drifts at glacial pace We are humanity Looking for beauty and grace amidst the ruin breath visible in the chill We are humanity Sound and fury, signifying nothing Nothing matters, and yet… We are humanity [...]
Someday I’ll figure out why I keep coming back to that particular metaphor… Nothing left to shout about no voice left to scream Head down focused on minutiae— grains of sand the grain of the slats between the stains Calls for help answered far too late submerged in the fog the cavalry lost in clouds [...]
Call it what you will… The pressure increases as you fall deeper into the abyss standards of propriety fall by the wayside Last I checked the timetables there was nothing in my size and the dark side of the moon was still without electricity Now when I look at midnight it’s through a haze of [...]
This may (or may not) explain a few things… Your character flaw and mine have decided to be friends It’s an inexplicable attraction unrelated to the degrees to which they reinforce each other or cancel each other out Shapes mean more than substance if they fit, it doesn’t matter if they’re not compatible It’s when [...]
Inspired by the opening to chapter one of Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel The Book of Joan: ‘Burning is an art.’… Anything you can make art out of I can turn into an ordinary object so mundane as to be invisible amidst the rest of the furnishings or so dull and lifeless that it requires two teams of [...]
A quiet afternoon… Chemical crispness settling upon my tongue we spend our afternoons in hospital we’re no longer young ‘Can we have a chair by the window? It’s cold today, but there’s sun’ The page breaks in this book come in odd places I know all the words and remember most of the faces but [...]
Sleepy this morning… Her lips, closed, emerge from behind the clouds framed by a jaw both smooth and hard fading in, out in shades of cool grey with a hint of blue I can’t make out the rest of her face she may not be here for me The radio in the corner is stuck [...]
A poem before bed… I don’t care if the moon is bleeding it’s never changed a damn thing here on the ground and it’s never seen me dreaming But it seems the whole world is watching Regardless of what they’ll tell you everyone’s drawn to the sight of blood (21 January 2019) I have books [...]
