Thinking

"To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky." -Martin Heidegger, from: Poetry, Language, Thought

I don't know

"I don't know, but I get the feeling I'm going to have known." Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, page 106

I wear a helmet on the subway

is that wrong?

I Have Become Home

During the moments I thought about the days
I was listening to them; they were nearby,
because I was so far into them.
I did a dance to them because I had the right thighs
and spine. I made them go inside because they were mine.
Go inside all those who are mine. I have produced such a change.
Do you remember what played on the rainy station?
Once you came home and asked “how long until we’re there?”
I was never obstinate, nor were my hands, because
I had the mechanism of a person familiar with distractions,
and that allowed me to hammer on the bike.
What I would place over them: my hands.
My weight was there to drag wet with corn oil and sand.
A filter reflected only the yellow light, consequently,
your conclusion was stated with that apt tinge.
I felt dizzy enough to absorb the shock of compensation when
I discovered what had been chipped and crushed in the canvas bag.
I jammed with great frequency on the wooden floor—
it was of wood. It was a miracle of one, so I breathed
from my tube with honey spread on the ring of the high part.
It made the examination of the jam most difficult. One time
I aggravated it when I bumped it inadvertently
while trying to listen to you breathe as you slept. The appearance
of the leather strap made it all the more disturbing.
I was drawn to the fleshy parts of you
that had been dilated with sorrow.
A counterbalance got skewed—I understood and I hammered.

Minus The Exploding Egg That Burned My Lip For A Week

I'd have you if you'd let me walk on the sandy
field of your soft lap. I mean I like you
when you're mean to me in the still grass
by the little cottage we named "The Little Cottage."
I must look lost if you're asking me if
I'm lost. A dazed feeling overwhelms me when I look at you.
"Don't shun the world, shed it." Alone, a lot,
a bicycle makes a good companion over
a bridge or in a state of panic: I think of you
in the green room where we gathered
to remember what we left behind. Remember:
what lies ahead is just as exciting and fucked
as what came before.

A True Story

An eagle was brought into the store to promote this new lotion called "Eagle Lotion" and things just went haywire from there. Becky got her hand bitten by the eagle and then her ear and then it was hard to find the medicine because of the commotion with the loose eagle and her screaming. There was just too much distracting energy in the room when we should have been helping staunch the flow of blood from Becky's ear and hand.

So, even though I am known as "Can Do Dude," I split the scene and stood out in front of the store with a guy that smokes. "You make your words, your bed, your life." he said. "And then she follows you to the pool for facts." That's some fucked up shit.

Becky's okay, she was almost scabbed up by the time help came. Are you all you aimed for relief?

Soothing Poem

Swimming in detail
cardiac meat is spasming
a straw knife
etches poultry: good!

Now our guests
form mean groups
make math clubs
and beat skins blue

Think "razor wire"
as the panel turns
pink while the mold
cools septic ticks

Todd Colby & Brian Joseph Davis

Todd Colby & Brian Joseph Davis

Friday, September 29, 2006, 7 pm
Pete's Candy Store, 709 Lorimer Street, Brooklyn, NY
FREE!

Pete's Candy Store is pleased to present:
The Multifarious Array
Pete's Fall 2006 Poetry Series

L to Lorimer, G to Metropolitan
Info: 718-203-3770

Done

I might have become longer
in your absence. A degree of gravity
might have inhibited the growth
of mistakes while you were away.
A shortage of light made my skin
pale and moist. Worms have
settled in the garden
where once stood sunflowers
and peas. The tools in the tin
shed are stained with mink
blood and foul oily dirt.
The slaughter of fireflies
have left the padlocks
with a faint electric glow.
Dried and brittle bread
sits curled on the card table.
The chairs are dusty and rusted.
All the food in the dead fridge
is black or green from mold.
The litter box is full of dead flies.
My arms are asleep
so I can't feel my hands
writing this down.
I scratch my nose and it feels
like your hand.

MTV & Me 13 years ago

It's me, gulp:



http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/index.jhtml?id=1539536&vid=104320

Fox Vanilla Float Air Shock Flavor

"I love that, that's my favorite flavor." Elizabeth Zechel on Fox Vanilla Float Air Shock Flavor

(A slow rainy Saturday in Brooklyn).

Today's Soundtrack:
Xiu Xiu
The Books
Cansei de Ser Sexy
CocoRosie
Barkmarket
Vetiver (still)

The Books: Lost & Safe

The new Books CD, "Lost & Safe" is the perfect accompaniment to early morning scribbling. Rain spitting on Brooklyn, gray to blue to calm. The entire building is asleep. This place is feeling. A nectarine sweater with soft shoulders. Soft, graceful, elegant,
ruptured little by little and then some. Ride my bike to Nyack? Eat some toast? Sit right here!

After Zaytoons

Anne Boyer and Jordan Davis

Two entries from their respective blogs today that made me smile:

Poets are homely AND infantile, so no one gives them anything, and they do not even have the good feeling of having their shit together, of COMPETENCE or of being IN CHARGE. -Anne Boyer
http://www.odalisqued.blogspot.com/

My point in putting all this energy and time into talking about poetry is not to demonstrate how governance in aesthetics might be made virtuous. I host a show, publish, review, anthologize, expatiate, blog, read, and write to make a place for work that drives me BANANAS F*CKING FOSTER. -Jordan Davis
http://equanimity.blogspot.com/

Their blogs should be part of your day, everyday.

The Modern Intensity

Well below the bulk of the day
there will be an advance of thought.
The struggle will be obscene,
some will shout, others will disguise
themselves as figures of authority.
There will be late stray intruders
pumped with impressive exaltations
that will erupt around daybreak,
when you'll witness their modern intensity.
Confidence will be less than desirable. A small
deviation will do great harm to the things you love.
There will be swirls of green foam
that you'll find most impressive.
By nightfall you'll be stuck a mile out at sea
on a buoy with no eye drops.
Rainfall from the midnight sky will startle you.
Knots will gather in your lower muscle.
The gloaming will bring dread.
It will be a slow eve.
The hours will wilt you into heaven.
Love, enough.

Paris

I'll sit down and tell you all about my trip to Paris as soon as I can grab a few minutes of my own to sit a spell and write down my thoughts in a little golden book of goddamn lies.

Elizabeth Zechel in the shirt I drew on

Red and Orange Being Warning Colors in Nature

It could be argued that cloud formations are actually bacterial dispersal vehicles because microbes have been found in abundance in clouds.

Things

I've liked certain things so much that I wanted to devour them. Isn't that what got me in trouble?

Brooklyn

Lately, while I'm riding my bike home from work, I get so giddy and revved up that I can't help announcing to people on the sidewalks that "I am riding my bike in Brooklyn!" Or that "I am riding my bike home from my job!" There's a delicious and ticklish joy in shouting my announcements to total strangers as I speed down the street.

Late

How strange it is to lay next to a sleeping body.

Mike and Todd Colby

Thanks Heaps

"For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of space, of moments and discontinuities." -Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle

Such a miracle to ride my bike home in the humid dark with red safety lights flashing from the bar ends of my handlebars. Knowing I'm halfway home as I cross the metal bridge over the stinky green canal. Up the hill past the crazy kids, the funeral parlor, and then past the brownstones with all my silver and flash. Breathing hard as I climb six flights of stairs with my bike over my shoulder. I open the door: somone is holding a blueberry smoothie!

Blue #1 Aluminum Lake

Kissing places on the neck so hard that the lips feel the bones holding up the head.

I felt my sparkle reduced to a grotesque kind of fever.

I want to be significant, refreshing, and informative
like a soft drink poured over the New York Times.

The evening is so dumb.

Your lips may taste like amber but I will not take off my top for your business associates.

If you rub the stillness from my machines I’ll open the window for mommy: SUN BEARS!

The realization that perhaps it was something- the peach perhaps, yellow but browning- a dingy plum dripping juice- and he sucked it off his fingers and lifted the jug with the same sticky hands.

Pepys buys friends oysters in a tavern, comes home and breaks Elizabeth’s basket (that he’d purchased for her on his travels).

When the doorbell rang and the people in the movie didn’t get up to answer it, I realized it was our doorbell.

Elk and Frogs. What the purported film of Big Foot showed it eating.

Amber. The smell of amber. Malin & Goetz? An odor spreading across my heart. A lumpy curtain. Still, just as belligerent, just as heartwarming, just as hysterical, just as oceanic. Just a piggy. Just limping into the lavender and amber. Malin & Goetz. Synthesized Lotus Root.

Vetiver/Tools

"There is no way in which tools can take one out of touch with reality."
-Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope

I can't stop listening to the song by Vetiver called "Belles."
It breathes through me. The headphones inhale and exhale.
I start to feel dizzy and then I don't.
Just a pleasant sense of longing.
And then I play the song again.

1:27 AM

"I want you to listen to this." -John Lee Hooker

Home

"Are the stars less wondrous when you can identify what they do up there at night, does the earth become accursed upon discovering the terrible things we visit upon it? -Heather McGowan from The Duchess of Nothing

Morning Reading

"everybody
has one missing piece
and all the beauty's
about it"

-Eileen Myles, "A Mixed Experience"
from Lungfull #12

Elizabeth Zechel's "Unfortunate Event"

Remarkable

When you sleep
sleep becomes you.
Blades of grass
stick to your belly.
I could swallow you
as a stream of gas ripples
over oranges
and bursts into flames.
See your finger tip
bleed red sugar?
See that onion
turn into a mint?
Darling,
stuff the candied
ginger slice
in an album
of early pangs
late hums
and cool runnings.
The sleeper's
slow hand soothes
these rigid days.
I’ll be here
when you get back.
Remarkable.

Another David Lantow and Todd Colby Collaboration

Want to see more?
http://www.dlantow.com/collaborations.html

The Action Adventure Series!

That's right, David Lantow and I have been working on a graphic novel called Sympathetic Detonations: The Action Adventure Series for several years and now it's finally available for purchase from Rocketship here in Brooklyn at 208 Smith Street (or phone 718 797 1348). David and I have collaborated on literally hundreds of art projects (he draws/paints and I provide the words).

You can see more of our collaborations here: http://www.dlantow.com/collaborations.html

"One should not have faith in dramatic decisions." -Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, p 74

"Even a sublime need, such as the need for salvation, is still nostalgia, a longing to go back." -Levinas, Meaning and Sense

Sanfroid/Schadenfreude

Re: Tina Brown and the failure of TALK.

"But Ms. Brown brought her customary purpose and sangfroid to the exercise."

"I have been swimming in a howling sea of schadenfreude for the past three years."

Elizabeth's Onion Pie!

Silver Toast

Eating plums is like eating bruises
a most delicate modular feeling
it's simply boring to bite
down to the bone
in public arenas.
A month goes by, I'm sleepy
making myself generous
to the pink in my skin
rubbing salt blue cream,
oil scented with musk,
"may I objectify you?"
"why of course!"
it helps push art into politics into science,
it folds when I recline
pushing something hard, it tasted
like blood severe and yellow-
I could taste it on the dash.
Suddenly there's no more money
"my experience is such that..."
etc.

"If you can't find anyone who can stand you, you can't find anyone who believes you've got anything they want." -Adam Phillips, Equals, page 87

"I can perhaps even imagine (though it is not easy) that each of the people whom I see in the street is in frightful pain, but is artfully concealing it." -Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations #391

"The active aim (to torture, to look at) is replaced by the passive aim to be tortured, to be looked at" -Freud, Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality, page 127.

"I flutter now on this flush pomegranate bough." -Keats

Good Job!

He used a cotton ball to dry the wings of insects after it rained.
He rinsed his hands with lemon juice to free them from the effects of microwaves.

Good Job!

Pea Soup Fang

1) The sequence of cop photos in the White Castle.
People start punching and the whole group goes wild.

2) "Hello, I am a gum designer, and roads, I design roads too," he says,
adding, "I have an urge to stand still."

3) Our helpers are good at going fast.

4) Belt hack, snooze Vicks.

5) I could kiss the better portion of your face and laugh while doing it.

You'd Think

The trouble with towels
is that they're aren't enough of them
to crush the constant stain of tears.
Well, you’re wrong.
There's a vestige of a membrane
where the eyes should have been
and that makes it hard to shop
even under the best of conditions.
It prevents me from sticking my fingers
in other people's shoes and finding
things that I could use, for real.
My head is a trouble ticket;
full of couples gasping at my kinks
while aching all night for what wobbles,
coils, and disappears.
Oh sleepless night of dark jelly!
Oh milky fingers strange and sincere!
You open and close on nothing.

Thinking in Wish Speak

I have a good cement fix collar.

I have a beautiful taste in my mouth based on laughter.

(A shock-wave across a milk-filled inflatable pool).

6 COOKIE NIGHT. TURKEY. POTATOES. BLUEBERRY TROT.

Seriously laden with gifts.

Help you get it together.

Help you love the neighbors.

Right on! Good vibe!

A Pink Golf Shirt Pulled Over The Moon

1) You can carry the moon that way.

2) He's twisting tissues and sticking them up his nose.

3) What do you make of that?

4) Have you found a new way of waving yet, or of motioning a waiter over to your table with a check?

5) Are you feeling the sidewalk through the thin soles of your shoes?

6) No sense, no purpose, no destiny, no fate, adrift.

7) Give yourself over to the creamy blue light until a tart ray of sun pierces your skin.

8) Cancer is metallic blue.

9) It's a healing song for America.

10) Funny it doesn't work for everyone.

11) Toasted almond ginger mix.

12) You'll walk or slide; you've got all the time in the world.

13) You think it's fabulous and I'm with you.

14) You will come out, pair off, and wander away again.

Welcome

"Mirror makers know the secret-one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror." -Jack Spicer