Biography

"I have latterly become intolerably repulsive to myself... Had I been persistent in my desire for women I should have had success and reminiscences. Had I been consistent in continence I should have been proudly tranquil."
--Tolstoy, diary June 25, 1853 (tr. Aylmer Maude)

It can seem to me that my mind is entirely full of gray shit, and that nothing more can go in. It lies quivering like a section of dark Jell-O with dust on the surface, collecting, blowing, twinkling.

2 from Boris Pasternak's memoir Safe Passage, pub. 1949 (tr Babette Deutsch):

• "I agreed that formlessness is more complex than form. That an unguarded volubility seems attainable because it is empty. That spoilt by the emptiness of trite patterns we take just that exceptional copiousness coming after long desuetude for the mannerisms of form."

• "The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers."
  

(Regan) "Spull Point"

She is too tired to pry open her mind, too funny about its little mussel moistness.
My life is so difficult, she thinks. But it would be very easy if I became stronger.
She is out on a sand spit in a salt marsh, the tide beckons to her.
Three white wading birds track fish in the grasses. Snails sleep in the mud. I stay still to watch the birds stand so alert, and because when I walk I get more sand in my running shoes. I try saying, Nature, come to me and stir me up. Snap me up like a shining fish. Consolidate me.

If there is a force of nature who makes sense of imprecations like this one, then it is content to bide its time until the day comes to snap her. Now the wind drives rows of tiny waves against each other.

NUMBERING THE PROBLEMS I THINK ABOUT EVERY DAY IN ORDER TO FINALLY MOVE PAST THIS OBSESSIVE, SOPHOMORIC CATECHIZIN

(They said, ‘You must find your path to a fulfilling life!’ But I was distracted by the impression that life had different details in it.)

A man reads a book in a chair while guns blaze.

Two fates cross paths: mine, and the fate of the man I did not comfort.

I used to be sharper because I read harder things. I had been on some journey. I set out with the soul of my wit and made my home in all of these white worlds of prose, that coruscated and hummed to me. They made a mobile galaxy. I was the demiurge who said how good it was. I was always feverish and I mumbled.

At eighteen I was already overwhelmed by the condition of being, and I wrote in order to turn aside the onrushing future. Then my father died, other events pushed in to catch me up to speed. I never felt at home again with a blank piece of paper. I did other things for a while and in some ways developed myself.

When I write I am always, already, contaminated with other social needs, and tuned to a crowd of voices: imaginary modeled voices of my friends and peers; and of my enemies, people from whom I have demanded judgment, who I’m always on trial before, until I can pronounce on their behalf, ‘That’s just the naïve, shallow, lazy thing he’d offer us.’ That’s just the getaway you could have expected him to make: from the threat of a blank page, into a blind alleyway of selfish amusements or petty agonies.

That is a paragraph, and it gives me a voice with broad appeal. I say this for no-one, and the paragraph abides un-disseminated. The casual reading ego offers to my paragraph its trite retort, which is the concept of self-esteem in the system of American fulfillment and social health. I can worry about my self-esteem. (I can sleep with women, I can ask for more than I deserve, I can challenge my friends to top me.) But from my senses and my intellect I still want new knowledge, and if I am patient, my private faculty which explores, looking to describe and narrate, will draw up behind the roil of reflexes which receives: praise, rebukes, aggression, attention.

Now, as I meditate gingerly (with scorn for my frailty rising), leaving my first intended topic to linger at harbor, I am approached by my own thoughts. There are so many more than there used to be, when I was eighteen, and they are more recognizably epochal, more banal. They repeat themselves, and whine like bells in a slot machine. I have permitted myself to play out my consciousness, and win a little, lose a little. I have let my time slip away. I think of women on telephones: who might call me, who might boost me with their alien weather and affection. Who is with me in this circle of Purgatory: us who went about things the wrong way, got teased in middle school, and became self-conscious and emotionally diagonal. My dog is barking like mad in his sleep. The sound comes out as a little beep like a sneaker squeaking. I’m alone with my cultural inheritance and the chugging of these so-called mitochondria.

And so, I wonder: Can I write again with feeling and style? Or is it a lie, is it sealed off, and I’m lonely for music, addictions, lust, parties, camaraderie. Brotherhood, a father.

(I guess it is a lie. A sargasso sea around me.)

Sing, muse.

I have found the time to be alone. Only my dream of civilization is here, in a white roil, like a bathroom after your shower. People speak into my mind, but not with tidings, and so I slip low-down and try to nest like the newt close by a cool brook that rushes the pollutants away and carries home my food and drink, and my bundled recollections: reflected in water they have a milder character.

Don’t rush with the stream. Don’t form plans, or let sentences fall on their feet and slink away. Observe the quality of mind which is most alarming: that mind is like an oily shark steak into which something has sliced. Where is the fat, and where is the clean spur of pearly bone? Ask your questions. What do you draw from the sheath when the day is dead.

Mind is a direction, and you think the truth has no direction.

Mind is a presence, and you think the truth is absent and mystical, as though we saw through a glass darkly.

Mind is an appetite for aggrandizement, and you think the truth is allied to coldness, to incorruptible serenity of a permanent stillness beyond God, where nothing but thought would dare to go.

Finally, mind is truth, where you think the final truth is an eye put out with a burning brand.

You are attracted to the sweetness that reposes in a void, where we will no longer be made to endure. You hope for the best (a library) but cherish the worst (death, like life, is an accident in an accidental universe). Every day, you should pull yourself out of bed and set to smoldering with the sun under the heat of your appetite for true texture. Every night, under new moon and full moon, you should fall asleep resigned to die in a nameless shrug of pitiless, dwindling reactions.

‘God make me a vaulted tomb to rest in,’ you say.

‘God bite me in the belly, and rend my guts like a hind,’ you importune.

‘Bother me, strew my belongings,’ you say.

‘Unseat me. Disabuse me, and rake me over fires.’

‘Uncouple my sureties and blaze on me the signal that men die away.’

Blood drops from me in licks before I break.

I see it on the floors of days and recognize its taste: warm and multiple, like poetry. (xxx) The time itself passes through me before I can smell or touch it, and I fat in secret on spilled fluids from other creatures. Only my cell phone and my email account are active; for the rest of the white galaxy, I see slumbering forms like soldiers curled up on a killing field.

‘Fulfillment’: I am condemned. I am in on the forbidden secret of experience—that is, I move about in a sensual, deadly world—but I am locked out of truth, which would have to be constituted of an assumption of all subjectivities, and beyond these, of all universal activity, sub specie aeternitatis. I wish to know why I have to suffer, but moreover, why I have the words to form unanswerable, painful questions about my condition. (‘It’s a sad side-effect,’ they might say. ‘Words are symbolic. You may pretend that they thresh truths from falsehood.

‘Why do you chortle, “I know I will die?” You do not know what it means, “to die,” and so you let your guts speak for you. You are guilty all over, with the fallen-ness of your many words for qualities.’)

You are seduced by the incantatory:

You do not easily proceed.

Are you bored by your repetitions?

The heart beats a repetition.

Every day you shit.

Every day you can die forever.

Every day you can ignore and do violence to anything you have learned. You can burn all your journals and forget how to read. You can become brain-damaged. Then you will only be a very sad story (maybe a powerful tragedy if your philosophical efforts seem muscular enough). You hunt nuance, to get around the plain speech of cultural inheritance.

You are seduced by the incantatory. The poet confides, “We share sex, we share death, we share the speechless dread between the stars. Can I sing for you?”

“The future is full of people you care about,” that is the premise of writing. When you say ‘contaminated by the social,’ this is the reactionary expression of a fear, born out of past exposure to the painful side of social life. I make myself approvable, want to be liked, I want to use the speech of my companion to put him at ease and kindle him, so I can please myself by liking him, as we like ourselves more and more and spark together in effortless conversation. But I react to a fear of appearing a clown, prick, or dupe, or worse, an outsider, and master my will until it ripens into a self that others expect every day, and I expect it every day. Then they offer me ‘creative self-expression’. ‘I do not wish to make art,’ I snarl. ‘I do not wish to make a poem. I am the convexity left from the impress of an absent poem, and I know there is no poem.’

Whom do you address, when you write in confidence? After a few hours of catechizing, time will trickle, like water. The future is crowded with readers, offspring of yours, who are in on the joke with you. (You can think of a thousand different terms to describe something, or a thousand different categories to put it in to!) Someone will receive the burden of your mysteries, like a box of non-poisonous snakes. There will be quiet, you will imagine sound.

A Life of Fantasy, or, Fantasy Come to Life

"Franz Kafka gave me a short essay on Soren Kirekegaard by Carl Dallago. He said on this occasion:
'Kierkegaard faces the problem, whether to enjoy life aesthetically or to experience it ethically. But this seems to me a false statement of the problem. The Either-Or exists only in the head of Soren Kierkegaard. In reality one can only achieve an aesthetic enjoyment of life as a result of humble ethical experience. But this is only a a personal opinion of the moment, which perhaps I shall abandon after closer inquiry. '"

--Gustav Janouch

A Place to Grope to

There is no voice that approaches bone as close as the voice of the disembodied ghost, who has not yet learned to live.

In learning to live, we break with the written record, which is a record of failures to act, and march in the footsteps of Jesus, who wrote nothing, or the Emperor, whose speech occasioned a condition of emergency. We are like a crying baby, which is supposed to make one of the sounds most discomforting to the human ear.

More from the philosopher: "It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future."

Isn't it helpful as a stylist to be able to stipulate, "in the fresh sense of the word"? Writing should be taken fresh by someone with fresh starry eyes, like the lovers in Frank O'Hara's poem "A Pleasant Thought From Whitehead," about how awesome it is to love writing poetry.

In desperation, we look over pages of print. Nothing "pops out," like a magazine pull-quote, nothing "rings a bell," like a helpful prompt from an acquaintance. Only this, in an old essay on T.S. Eliot's mature poetry: "Imagining characters whose feelings are insubstantial or puzzling to themselves, the poet moves swiftly--and often too swiftly--from asking what these feelings are worth on the plane of personal living to asking what their status is in relation to the absolute. In the long run the feelings are left even emptier than at first."

Presently, everyone is allowed to choose the dissipation that suits him best. If it wasn't for art, I'd just be a fucked-up person who was in other respects regular. Since I did discover a while back that there is indeed a written record, it has been weighing me down and forcing me into unusual contortions of spirit. I have felt grateful for the tragedies and disillusionments in my private life because they made me a better reader. 'Help me build this o so exquisite bridge.' In a letter to his newly-divorced wife on May 26, 1973, Lowell wrote "It's a desolate thought that all I have from the past is grandpa's gold watch and some fifteen books." That is super-desolate, and his grandfather thought he was an embarassment to the family. Charles Altieri wrote on "Skunk Hour" that "[the narrator] encounters the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning, which is perhaps the result of all pursuits of sheer lucidity." That's super-desolate, too! But during a phone chat, when my friend and I decided that this was the result, it was more like a piece of badinage and we recuperated easily. It depends on whether one is using 'lucidity' in the 'fresh' sense. Everyone is allowed to choose the dissipation, the exculpation, the disability, that gets him past this result and back on the phone or back in the restaurant, a little out of breath, to resume the chat.

Facts, Dreams, Events, Whatever

Speech to no one in particular, thoughts while flossing my teeth, hollow sounds of the voices of people not present, imagined, impassioned conversations carried on over minutes and hours in self-imposed seclusions, whispered soliloquies, muttered apologies, rhapsodic expostulations to nobody, unraveled and generously footnoted in a spirit of complete contrition, manic crescendos of second-guessing, culminating in strangled self-doubt, or in arch comedy, or in professions of meek good faith, or in episodes of variously directed and fully impotent desire: to make clear, to lay out, to endorse, to proscribe, to communicate with fresh terms the strange triangulations that lead mens' minds in their loneliness to grope for clues to their history and destiny.

"When I was working on Life Studies," Robert Lowell says, "I found I had no language or meter that would allow me to approximate what I saw or remembered. Yet in prose I had already found what I wanted, the conventional style of autobiography and reminiscence. So I wrote my autobiographical poetry in a style I thought I had discovered in Flaubert, one that used images and ironic or amusing particulars." (Hamilton)

This is the introductory phase, in literature, of a long and weary farce: the contamination of literary discourse by the half-conscious whimsy and chat that ordain our lives, as social beings, like the points of a compass.

Jonathan Raban noted the ugly side-effects of this liberty in Lowell's revisions.
"[H]is poem on Flaubert ended with Flaubert dying, and in the first draft it went 'Till the mania for phrases dried his heart' --a quotation from Flaubert's mother. Then Cal saw another possibility and it came out 'Till the mania for phrases enlarged his heart.'"

Another critic, responding in 1974 to The Dolphin, imagined the poet summarizing his working method: "Here are the facts, dreams, events, whatever; I present them; they are unimportant, incomprehensible, and boring."

Here I am compelled to record that I searched on the internet for more writing on "robert lowell flaubert". But having accidentally searched Merriam-Webster instead of Google, the only result I got was the suggestion "reprehensibilities".

So without quite knowing what, I move to share.






Hospital in Bridgeport where Lowell was treated after US entered World War II

Ultima Thule on Nine Dollars a Day

"Now, it may be intolerable to believe that when the angels were created, some were created without being giving foreknowledge of their perseverance or fall, while others were given full and genuine assurance of the eternity of their bliss.... Every Catholic Christian knows that no new Devil will ever come in the future from the ranks of the good angels, just as he knows that the Devil will never return to the fellowship of the good angels."
City of God, XI: 13

"As If you Could Kill Time Without Injuring Eternity"

(Thoreau)

Eternity is the enemy that has gotta die for human beings to live in accord with reason.
The one thing I don't want outliving me is eternity.
As soon as one bad thought or one miserable soul is permitted to hang on until it secures a home in that sweaty, black abyss, they all will.

This will seem like 'ad plures ire' but in practice it will be the same as waiting forever for a train while a baby cries and a disordered person weeps and a sick old man coughs.

And on the other hand. Why can't we be at home in death? "There is no death," Ivan Ilyich said to himself. Our lives would definitely be better.

I myself would be kinder to people I met, and if Tolstoy is not to be the cause in me of any practiced kindness, at least he's the cause of some ruminations on kindness. Kindness also gives you the sense of 'ad plures ire', because all kind people imagine themselves in a smug conspiracy with the universe and the universe's eternal promise of healing and renewal. This promise of healing and this conspiracy constitute a bond between human beings which reaches past religion, but not quite to the threshold of reason. It loops.

"Green Box Cutter" (Mark)

It was night and I was alone on the first floor. Who is outside, I thought. I went to the window. There was his face, looking in. He was bald and his head shone. I recoiled and went to the interior of the house. My sense of having any special personal situation ended, and there began an impersonal situation which contained me inside of it.

What could I do if we were going to meet. I went through the kitchen drawer, at first very cold and distracted with adrenaline, and then, there came a calmness all through, a calmness coming to meet me at the high hill above some valley. There were pens and dirty coins in the drawer and I saw the bright green box cutter. What a fantastic turn of events, in a nightmare: to be relying on the bright green box cutter. I had never been cut by one.

The razor blade, someone must have loaded it innocently, came forth into the light of the kitchen at a cunning angle when the switch was thumbed. I went outside and onto the sidewalk holding the box cutter. There was a row of streetlights down the block. The air started to turn the metal handle cold. I noticed him standing still in the shadow between streetlights. I felt an obscure gratitude for being allowed to use the box cutter for this perverse and ingenious new application.

For an instant I thought the box cutter was useless. Then, I saw it drag a bloody line or two. To see the blood made a difference. The box cutter was a tool that put us on equal footing. He swung a metal rod at me, a tire iron maybe, and I went beneath it and reached for his body with both my arms.There was a brute solution I had arrived at, which held together with the clarity of a poem: I clapped his back and drew him close with my left hand, to embrace him, and with my right hand went up and down his belly with the razor, listening to the clicks when I knocked his shirt-buttons because he wasn't wearing any jacket. He put his hand against my eyeball; I reached to tear his throat open if I could do it. I felt the box cutter snag in his hard larynx and I jerked it free, following the direction of my cut. All the blood in his neck began coming out on my arms and the temperature made me remember what it was like to wet your pants. I tried to cut the same spot, it was a lucky feeling, but he brought the metal rod to my forehead so that I flopped, trying to hold the box cutter at arm's length so I wouldn't cut myself, and like a firm kick the street hit me in the backbone.

He pulled back into a golf stroke to hit me again; I stood myself into his crotch and forced the razor tip into his thigh so that he fell. I hurried to kneel down on his chest and I cut his face back and forth with steady rhythm, like an orchestra conductor, I tried to let all his life out and kill him by getting his neck opened all the way. There were many fibers around inside of his neck that were like strong guitar strings, that gave and let go of their tension. I pushed in and down, around where his jawbone curved, until the box cutter went through and knocked on the pavement. What most surprised me, during the time I looked at his dying, was the high level of detail I was perceiving all around me without effort, so that, for example, the imperfect edges of his front teeth now had on them a specific set-up of dots of reflected streetlight that turned the enamel orange, and then a different set-up, no less specific, of dots of blood that were matte black.

Virgina Woolf on Emily Bronte

"She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to write it in a book."

More Greatest Individual Lines in Hip-Hop

"Ya ass all over like paraphernalia."

(Busta, "Light Yo Ass on Fire")

"Roger Sherman's Headstone at Grove Street Cemetery"

Born in 1721, and in 1793,
He 'died in the Prospect of a Blessed Immortality'.

4 Helpful Hints at Dusk

"Everything on television is educational in the sense that it teaches something."
--Richard Serra, Television Delivers People (1973)

"I could love myself if thou didst but speak to me, O God! If thou wouldst tell me that I am fulfilling a task imposed by thee, I could make myself walk through rough roads forever."
--George Sand, Diary

"I admit that unweeded soil grows wondrous things, which nobody can predict. And these things we have in abundance. But it would be a rash man who would call it a harvest."
--Jacques Barzun, "The Centrality of Reading" (1971)




From Jorge Luis Borges, "A Profession of Literary Faith" (1926):

"Everything is poetic that confesses.... I have conquered my poverty, recognizing among thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page. The page that justifies me, that summarizes my destiny, the one that perhaps only the attending angels will hear when Judgment Day arrives.
"Simply: the page that, at dusk, upon the resolved truth of day's end, at sunset, with its dark and fresh breeze and girls glowing already along its streets, I would dare to read for a friend."

Sheer Literariness

"The lights were put out in the house; all sounds died away; only the nightingale filled with song all this bright, silent, unencompassable space. 'What a night! What a glorious night!' thought the count, drawing deep into his lungs the fresh and fragrant air of the garden. 'But there's something amiss. I seem to be dissatisfied with myself and others, dissatisfied with life itself. What a dear sweet girl she is! Perhaps she really was offended....' Here his musings took a new turn; now he saw himself in the garden with the country girl in the most odd and varied situations; then the country girl was supplanted by Minna. 'What a fool I was! I ought to have simply seized her round the waist and kissed her!' And with this regret in mind, the count went back to his room."

"Two Hussars," Tolstoy 1856

In the Hallway of an Old American Building

"We are presently seeking in faith what we shall then joyfully share in vision." -St. Augustine, Sermons


On giant paws crept the State like Death's cat
Here where the blood and rust come home to scab
A parasite, on the back of the beast's dick,
That bundles its way through the scrum of shits and grunts
Foreshortening the tissue of brilliance,
Of levity, to a hard pustular mass.

What do you need, they ask me
I am looking for a way out, I say but with stilled lips
Where are you? they ask
Inside an egg, I mutter
An egg so big? they ask
Maybe, I murmur
EWE HALVE EYE DEE
Then my guts spoke for me
URINE TROUBLE

"And Even, Even If They Take Away the Stove (My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy)"

I have a stove
similar to a triumphal arch!

They take away my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!

Give me back my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!!


They took it away.
What remains is
a grey
naked
hole.

And this is enough for me;
grey naked hole
grey naked hole.
greynakedhole.


-Miron Bialoszewski (tr. Czeslaw Milosz)

["szara naga jama/ szara naga jama/ sza-ra-na-ga-ja-ma/ szaranagajama."]

(Becky)

"TEARJERKER"

(She has only to speak to him on the phone, as he calls her out of the blue while she is nude in her bed--two minutes of catch-up conversation, and then she goes to masturbate, dizzy. Her roommate can hear but as a married thirty-five-year-old she's uncurious and lets masturbate who will. And the roommate is no voyeur or anything. Just a nice lady. Becky saw nothing as she was bringing it home: no cock or hips or back of neck or anything. She saw him smiling at her in seventh grade but her focus came to be all about the pencil drawings he made of baseball players. The notebook paper and all the eraser marks, that were so delicate, and so attentive, as bad as the drawings were, the eraser marks so meticulous and artful and fretful, so vigorous and then swept all clean with the darkened side of his palm with such rigor, he must have frowned over them, he never signed the drawings. His hand against the strewn hot spliffs of twisted eraser rubber. She shuddered and gulped and gulped.)

Who's an artist? Who's a real artist? Who's some boring cliché? She looked for the last wine bottle. Who is a real specimen, and who's the knock-off? Who's the true Animal, the animal intelligence with whatever, with God showing through, and who's the Scholastic with chalk on her sleeves and goo all in her bedsheets from the rubbing? She found a flask with something and put that in her cold coffee, and drank that down in one, two swallows. The north wind was picking up outside on the avenue. What a conversation that had been! She remembered them doing the dirty pictures on the Lite-Brite in his mother's basement and she felt like crying. It was some bad PMS. It had been an ugly year, too.

The other dude had told her that when boys cry it felt like busting a nut. That was somehow true, it was all tied together down there, in the waterworks and all that leaky endocrine shit that accounted for the leftover bullshit in human affairs. Gordon, with his sadistic expertise in slowly fucking her, bringing her to real tears. Why couldn't this whole tragedy be brought to a close already. Why weren't we all given clear vision one day so we could get out of bed as the Solstice was hitting and see what a lump of junk it was. Her room was so dirty! Her room was so fucking dirty, and half of this stuff was Gordon's! And the other half was quite useless to her. She needed, what? A toothbrush and a fucking tampon. She was moving to Los Angeles. She was moving to Los Angeles. It was fucking freezing.

It was better to go than stay. It was better to go out than stay in. It was better to be open, to share and attack and move forward, than to slink back and retire and nurse one's shame. It was better to go out, be drawn into the world and brought back under its power, and to fall in love with a man's face and body. And now she thought of in the Starbucks, the couple right out of college who were so mature but in two different ways. They were healthy, tall, and clean but with a hippie edge like rich Vermonters or liberal arts in Massachussetts. She was acting out the role of Being in a Healthy Relationship. She was saying plainly, 'Can't you just tell me you're mad at me?' He was mad, his grey eyes shone, but he wouldn't admit it to her. Just tell me. No, I'm not mad at you. She made it her business to get him to admit. They were mature but he would not admit. At last he refused with great finality and gathered her in his arms, his hands thrust between her backpack and fleece, drawing her close with a look of angry, devoted love. She was defeated by his emotion and by her own emotion returning. Becky wandered out and in her imagination watched the scene repeat and repeat. Sometimes the girl was played by Becky. Sometimes the boy was played by Becky. Sometimes it was other people watching Becky and the boy, or Becky and the girl, and weeping at this defeat. What good, after all, was discipline and carefulness. It was just like rock and roll. Everyone was overmastered.

• When the time comes, it will be unmistakeable.

More Greatest Individual Lines in Hip-Hop (50 Cent edition)

"Shell hit my wisdom tooth, I *kkhh--pt* spit it out"

(50 Cent, "Like Me")

(Becky)

"I KNOCK YOU"

Human beings Love each other--
Love your fellows, Mother fucker!

That was all she could put on that piece of paper before the evening bout of introspection was over.
Yeah, it was a poem, and it rather rhymed, but anyway, it could end up being a long time (in time terms) before she might be able to set down a hard-won insight. And she thought on this: amazing revelation, won from suffering.

She thought, You go through these different experiences--(and cliché, that was what this was)-- and it forges you. By looking straight ahead, meeting other people but not being swayed by them, you come out More Fully Yourself as a Human Fucking Being, and that's all you can hope for if you're not some kind of social revolutionary. (But what about Michelangelo Buonarotti?) What's the alternative? Sitting around the day long, sipping coffee in the morning and beer in the afternoon, wine in the evening and coffee in the early morning. There was so much junk in her space.

She thought of a whole ordeal, setting her apartment on fire or smashing a storefront, all the risks involved, the mis-reading, the imprisonment. And then, something super-profound: oblivion, obliviousness. For an hour, or an hour and a half, the vision beguiled her: oblivion wise and cold, no metaphor accurate. But the phone rang.

And it would be a boy, who wanted her, or a girlfriend, needing her ear, super-petulant. These days she delighted in company, it made her.

The phone rang, but she put it down again when she saw the number. She knew the digits. She had never needed to program the name. She looked at it, she made an effort to become secure in herself, and then for a moment she allowed herself the bodily experience of her own hands, arms and fingers, by their nerves and tendons, ramping up to answer. She steeled herself back again with a hard thought and put that shit down. She knocked it on the nightstand but she did it very gently.

'I won't answer, I'll knock the phone,' she said to herself. Yeah: She had been forgetting aspects of life-routine and forgetting herself around boys, but she would not forget which boys were no good. 'I knock you most gently,' she inwardly intoned. Becky would let the Eucharist come to her. As a text message on her phone. Or as one of those emails dashed off in a drunk fury of empassionment. (An email beginning: "All I want to say to you is...") The words that these boys wrote her were so forgettable. If they had any real passion they put it into super-stupid stuff like rock and roll drumming.

The phone said it was 11:45 at night. What was she doing, it was still so early! (She wanted an audience to practice her new maturity and reserve upon.) She thought if she should call back. She watched the phone sit on the nightstand for a little while with its clock-belly up in the air. Or if she should go out. Infinity passed and returned. Like a stray cat she fed out of kindness.

It was almost full winter. Any day now she would discover her first gray hair. What would she do on that day, what would she be doing? By then the Eucharist would have come.

"Smalls" - A Doggerel Epic

(The Smallsiad?)

1. URBIS MUNDI - THE ENEMY'S REARED HEAD

The televised signal stabs into space
The ivy vine covers the brick
The party collapses divisions of class
The cocktail is making guests sick.

Something for Nothing was promised by God
Then reneged on by agents of peace,
So as comfort in time of a Borderless War
They memorialize the deceased.

Little by little the catheter fixed
To incontinent bladders of lust
Demolishes all of the signposts affixed
To the flooded-out inroads of trust.


2. WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

I'm every bit as zealous as your friends--
I simply don't believe in 'talking down'.
If people at the party
Cannot understand the jargon
It's not my style to feel for common ground.

There's only one or two great pressing problems:
The quickest route to paradise on Earth,
And whether to attend the claims of Beauty.
(The second you could group under the first.)


3. THE LAND OF THE THOUGHTLESS DEAD

You came to the metropolis to overlook the Turks
Who band together, gangster-style, to cross-promote their works
You found a chain of correspondence, going back to clerks
Who slaved in gas-lit offices, with hidden aesthete quirks.

The second Herman Melville moved to Massachussetts' sprawl--
The instant Wallace Stevens heard the Necessary's call--
The moment Andy Warhol saw his silk prints on a wall
Somebody in Accounting had to fill their jobs, or stall.

An appetite for paperwork is all you need to thrive.--
(I think the unemployment rate is less than 4 point 5.)
If you can get through undergrad, then you can stay alive
And knee-deep in some day-job from the moment you arrive.

(The class of petit-bourgeoisie, the managers and bosses,
Responsible for hirings and the nets of gains and losses,
At some point past (in undergrad?) mayhap have written glosses
On the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Yeats, or icons, saints, or crosses.)