February 2012
43 posts
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hold fast - thoughts #233
There is something in the fall. My doctor once explaining that I look too deep. Nothing left of the childhood spent spread on some secondhand couch. While the sun drank in a house in the Pines where I loved the girl next door and would throw rocks at the misplaced horse farm off a main road. Where now I cannot look at myself longer than the walls painted in a bedroom I call safe. Realizing the...
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cider house rules - thoughts #232
We sat with Original Sin. Late night, spread out in some corner of the White Horse counting wavelengths off the neon blaring outside. I heard you mumble “Semper Sursum” over and over and over while I talked of missing out. Scratching my wrist. The copper has patinated and I hate when you shake your head like some epileptic. “We brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural...
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one if by land... - thoughts #231
I have crossed the Atlantic. Often avoiding potshots off inch thick glass while freon fails and Redding sings. There always an argument over whose version held more impact. Me breathless, ‘Cooke lacked the soul.’ Let’s call this an exception, when I wait on baggage claims for something of the late night bumps found along Hackney roads. The revolutionary only met through Bolivian...
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Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. - David Foster Wallace
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typeset - thoughts #230
‘Call yourself a writer? Find a Corona with no correction key.’ I suppose this has stuck with me throughout the months. My own collecting dust as a bookend. I blame the arms, under oiled and bent from years of overuse, some standard issue for those fighting Normandy tides. And at times I regret stacking them vertically though they are not read easily from desk chairs. Titles and...
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excerpt from Big Sur - Jack Kerouac
“One fast move or I’m gone”, I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can’t learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline you take, or Peyote goop up with—That...
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on how to end - thoughts #229
Breathe. A practice long reserved for panicked states of undress, letting it fall. By the wayside as Long Beach opens up to misplaced loops. I jump. Having once called you Paris while tearing skin to expose. But you have twisted marble, 5th Avenue nothing of the memories, knowing now there is no beauty in this breakdown.
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against the grain - thoughts #228
We can lean into chords, reminiscent of Garbo in silence. Lessons learned and there is a pace equated with forward momentum. The laws of physics having no notion here. When we give breath and weight to the scene, nothing defined without our permission. And I suppose this is progression. Stringing the patterns into eloquent ways. Form found through crude lines and curves. Call this unthreading....
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I can see every monster as they come in. - Truman Capote
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Michael dies.
And is buried with honors. His third attempt done right. Some shotgun bought at a Sports Authority with homemade buck filled with pieces of his CAB. There are tears and a folded flag. A garbled recording of ‘Taps’ while two green Pogs try and care. While the old squad comes and reminisces. Us realizing we don’t remember him taking part in any of the stories and I couldn’t...
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excerpt from The White Devil - John Webster
Cornelia: What! because we are poor shall we be vicious?
Flamineo: Pray, what means have you to keep me from the galleys, or the gallows?
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we can fail - thoughts #227
Stuck in Puntarenas, some ferry town built around the concept of passage, I sat ringing my hands on a collapsed storm wall. Watching children jump towards breaking white caps, and I can talk sunsets. The sky on fire over the interior Gulf. It comes in waves, small moments built to roll, and we have been told it takes patience. Or chemicals. But always patience. The pull of time necessary to forget...
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the nonexistent saint - thoughts #226
We can falter around in stuttered steps, movements resembling the tricks of slant rhyme, and you mouthed the words to Salve Regina. A hint of disgust masked by the verses we once learned in Sunday school, while I cleaned my cheeks, and I would have begged for more if I knew you weren’t bruised. From bent fingers caught between the headboard and wall.
Laughing once, drowned by some Irish...
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Byrne vs. Fisher - '56
1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. d4 O-O 5. Bf4 d5 6. Qb3 dxc4 7. Qxc4 c6 8. e4 Nbd7
9. Rd1 Nb6 10. Qc5 Bg4 11. Bg5 Na4 12. Qa3 Nxc3 13. bxc3 Nxe4 14. Bxe7 Qb6
15. Bc4 Nxc3 16. Bc5 Rfe8+ 17. Kf1 Be6 18. Bxb6 Bxc4+ 19. Kg1 Ne2+ 20. Kf1 Nxd4+
21. Kg1 Ne2+ 22. Kf1 Nc3+ 23. Kg1 axb6 24. Qb4 Ra4 25. Qxb6...
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introductions
He sat alone tracing slowly along the curvature and ridges signifying a mane in the ebony wood as birds dived in and gathered. His legs, spread evenly and elongated under the table, were relaxed but tension was built around the shoulders, being the only thing seen when in rank and file. The black t-shirt he wore, skull, dagger, snake in white were the only symbols adorning, contrasted greatly with...
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I read once, ‘All we ever see of stars is their old photographs.’
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excerpt from Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire...
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tunnel vision - thoughts #225
The A is running on alternate tracks. This seems to be an issue when rusted rails need maintenance. Begging for stability, I have set myself to patterns. Counting weathered cracks while you met me once on 8th. To the left of the old vinyls spread out for display, where I found American IV: The Man Comes Around one day. We never argued on whose version held more impact. And you smiled as I swung...
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fireside - thoughts #224
I cannot remember. These lapses becoming more frequent. And I know she smoked over two packs a day. Virginia Slims. Hidden in the lower cabinet just left of the kitchen sink. Cartons bought in bulk on our trips down to Daytona from some roadside smoke shop of off 95. Her holding on tenderly between index and middle. Right hand. The smell. Encapsulating air. But the sight escapes. The smoke running...
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learning when to let go - thoughts #223
My mind tends to run when given no point of finality. Needing to see the last line. The white space binding covers. And I have tried the methods practiced by MFA graduates who now collect unemployment checks after Borders collapsed. The outlines and summaries. But find myself racing ahead. I am the one to read the last chapter.
“What are we left with?”
She sits there with melodic eyes, tracing...
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poetic license: deviation from fact, form, or rule by an artist or writer for the sake of the effect gained - noun
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freshman - thoughts #222
I missed years. Filled with the bumps and bruises found in college drinking games or when taking advantage of some sorority chick in the back of a friend’s pickup. And yes, I spent my mornings sweating out tequila. Swaying in morning PT. Once being maced by a bike cop down some alley off of 6th. Dropping a rusted pipe, I was never one for skirting away from a bar fight. But my youth was...
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edits - thoughts #221
There is something found in the small imperfections. Those shapes that do not sit quite right. And I am exhausted though lack of sleep is not to blame. The four hours needed achieved as of late. It comes down to thought patterns. The dive into turns of phrase. When I run from scene to scene looking for the progression of time and transition. Replacing definitions to fit intentions and call this...
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excerpt from Generation of Swine - Hunter S....
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV...
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broken hearts - thoughts #220
It took the seventeenth visit to remember. The vowels in her name and she writes. Something simple. Words ringing, “There must be a hierarchy. A process to escape.” This said over wavelengths of sickly green, the avocado prevalent in 50’s laminate. And I sit, cross-armed, repeating, “So it goes, so it goes, so it goes.” Wanting nothing of the deadbolts or slide locks placed on bedroom doors. This...
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kismet: an inevitable and often adverse outcome, condition, or end - noun
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an adage - thoughts #219
Caleb runs. Screaming through hallways as he is chased by a young crush. Isabella? Or Lucia? Some Italian name now made cliché by parents lacking originality and I am offered a beer. A stout though I forget. Politely declining. “You sure?” “Yeah, I need to drop him off soon.” Hearing awwws and reallys from the couple I am crowed next to on the studded leather couch. And I...
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excerpt from The Great Gatsby - F. Scott...
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let...
Clint Eastwood is God.
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a dialogue
I wake up in Little Rock and miss the emptiness as an elderly man with glasses that can set the world on fire settles two seats from me. He keeps bending over to see the world go by so I offer my seat and he gladly accepts it along with the theory that I’m a friend to talk to.
‘Where you heading, son?’
Before I can respond I am left breathless. Knowing his eyes catch the color of my bag...
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rushed - thoughts #218
I am forced in close. Stretching arms to reach smudged steel and I suppose nothing is stainless as I smell John Varvatos over Armani wool. His socks don’t match. And he talks with a colleague in short halted statements about what hell it is to work on a Saturday. When dragged into Midtown. An intern misfiling paperwork on some deal in Long Island City. Costing commissions to lapse and he is...
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Blush →
The above piece was written for the brilliant and beautiful Sticky. A look at love, loss, and strippers. Call it my thesis on the art of awkward attempts and letting go. Enjoy and be sure to follow.
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Bienville Parish, Louisiana - thoughts #217
I do not write for the masses and I have claimed this before. Only looking for the small ‘oh fucks’ found when minds collide and though 29 Palms was a much shorter distance that is proving irrelevant. For the wandering to meet. And we may not know the faltered steps needed to gain a track to take, when life falls and flails and disappoints. And do not take this wrong. I am not one for...
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waking the fuck up - thoughts #216
My friend called me after his second suicide attempt. This time he outlived a bottle of Oxy and some old woman down the street was accidently mowed down by a Fed Ex truck while opening her mailbox. He was one of only five that buried her. He said he brought calla lilies to lay. It reminded him of the Sound and Fitzgerald.
Claim that I have been asleep. For five long years and it has been nothing...
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A Call to Action →
I am one of the few. The byproduct of war. And I came home whole, only with a few nicks and bruises and scars not easily seen. Losing too many of those I loved. Staining my skin in memoriam. But I have refused to complain. To come against and use this forum, or any other, as a soap box against our society. Instead turning memory into fiction, playing my role as a writer. Because I joined of my own...
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Fire-Caught - Langston Hughes
The gold moth did not love him So, gorgeous, she flew away. But the gray moth circled the flame Until the break of day. And then, with wings like a dead desire, She fell, fire-caught, into the flame.
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First Steps
It started early but I will never claim, that it was meant to be. Just some young rebel who fought against Sheetrock and the candy aisle with no cause in sight other than the irrational expectations of young minds bored. And my parents were at a loss. Giving in to the art of grounding. No Kid Icarus. No scrambled porn. Life filled with Dirk Pitt for weeks at a time. Dreams of NUMA and Inca Gold....
January 2012
77 posts
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on feeling - thoughts #215
Numb. There being something daunting in a lack of multiple syllables. Seemingly more concrete. And I can blame the obvious nature of what I choose to portray. The letters strung together on conflict. Or loss. Or heartache. The sequences where the world becomes muted and lack the blacks-and-whites I have relied on for years. Blame it on a lack of adrenaline or the symptoms arrived at from diving...
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excerpt from Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
In the beginning, God created earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose...
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Michael tells stories.
Long winded words meant to confuse. And you can infer the truth if you know how to listen but people rarely do. Something of the in-between is looked past.
We sit. Surrounded, with the standard Bulleit and stout that is consumed on rainy nights where water won’t freeze, as we always do when his mouth is open. Girls who get wet over the uniform, old vets who want something of the remembrance in...
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flawlessly - thoughts #214
I wish I could explain. When practiced lines of dialogue fall by the way, caught off guard by the technicolor, my vowels coming in short and stuttered bursts. And I avert my eyes from the new and climatic. Multiply this. The days into decades. As you read the lines and curves I spent years to create. To hide with immaculate flare. In the open, gritting through grins. Practiced when I know nothing...
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fourth term - thoughts #213
I open The New Yorker with bitter coffee. Riding the rails as a mentor’s words spill across folds with words of Atlantis. Missing the point, the poetic stretched overhead in verse and line breaks, with eyes untrained. And it has come to this while repeating patterns as I claim to sit amongst giants. Those that sway generations. Komunyakaa pulling strings from a jungle where mosquito nets...
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genius loci: the pervading spirit of a place - noun