Cat Power - Metal Heart

Showing Off

Julian Lynch - Garden 2

A Poem for You

I would never fall off the edge
of something just to see you better
but I would walk by your house
in a wounded dressing gown
down on 15th I'd kneel and scrawl
a great poem with chalk
on the sidewalk in my own hand
hopscotch my way over the lines to you
that you could never destroy
I would do that to amuse you even
if you thought it was for a stoop sale
I'd do it and it would be clear to you,
that's who.

You can't begin to see a year
when you look into a day
you can't even see a face
when it's a fingertip away.

Poem for Summer

I could become entertaining if entertainment was something
you were craving like a good kiss in the middle of a deep
recession is just so relaxing in the empty part of the night.
Sleepless and sweltering tonight with fond memories of you.
That small of your back with the peach fuzz, that's more like it.
Pressing my body against the sludge of summer
as I try to stay upright on Court Street. Oh regret,
you are such a pain in the ass, yeah right.
I am lower than the 6th floor. I'm in love with water.
Maybe what I really need to do is make a mistake
that I can easily correct so I can feel like a champ again
in the dainty summer of my twilight years.
I'm there when you need to pick up icky things.
Remember when baby powder was supposed to stop
ant infestations? That was a crowded time. That
was then. Now just look at all that green out there
waiting just for us.

Red Fudge

There would be an instance where
I might be propelled inside of a vessel
the thin membrane holding me
in such a bright place jamming
my way through a jam session
looking for a drawer that I can go through
because I was looking for an old note
or something, something I keep
there that reminds me to remember
but I can't find it, nor the drawing
or anything that reminds me of anything.
A postcard from someplace I've never been
a piece of firm paper without visiting
anywhere but Brooklyn my heart is red fudge
musty slop and sludge but it can move
from place to place making blood
go around and around my body moving
through space it can do that at least
I have that.

Saturday Top 16

1) Where the Wild Things Are.
2) Hannah from Jade.
3) Rag and Bone (on Christopher and Mercer Streets).
4) Solo Ride to Nyack -- I got some thinking done.
5) I thought of you 100 times today. For realz.
6) Kind email from Jennifer L. Knox.
7) Union Market.
8) All day feeling like people were making eyes at me.
9) Walked from 34 & 8th to Canal and Lafayette in new sky blue Vans.
10) People really like soccer.
11) CB2 on Lower Broadway.
12) I really did think of you 100 times today.
13) Grapefruit Juice (craving all the time).
14) New York City Ballet Dancers in my Apartment.
15) New orange placemats.
16) I didn't talk to anyone I know today.

Coffee

Whenever I buy a pound of coffee I always feel like I am showing great faith in my ability to survive for at least another week or so.

The Complicated Math of Daily Separation

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"It is quite possible that the glands of a sad person secrete differently from those of someone who is glad; and also that their secretion is the or a cause of sadness. But does it follow that the sadness is a sensation produced by this secretion?"

"I feel pain in the wound--but color in the eye?"

Ludwig Wiitgenstein, 1929, from the book Zettel

Henri Michaux

"Go as long as possible, all the way to the end of your defeats, to the point of feeling disgust. Then, when the magic leaves, the residue--there ought to be some--will stop overwhelming you. That's how to get through, if you want to get through. If it really matters to you. Saturation. Before that, you can't do anything definitive, either in contemplation or criticism. Afterward, almost no problem."

Henri Michaux from Tent Posts (italics are Michaux's)

Just This Morning

Light

Will you lift that part of you up
so I can see when you start to drop
all around us things stop
for an instant I am free of you
like a belt no longer wrapped
around your waist is free around my neck
in the twilight you consume things
that make the night disappear
under a dial like a rotary phone
with a cord and everything
you've seen me in those clothes
you've thought about me in a darkened theater
triangles have the fame of altitude
so please feel good or better
away from your drugstore cotton
and your secret vial just please feel free
when I lift the space around you until
it covers the part where people walking
to work look just like the sleepy animals they are
think of a hand reaching
out for air forming a little cup
of pure oxygen I can't even have that
to walk on the same street with your face
in my mind out like a light.

Saturday Top 10

1) A deer! Above Nyack.
2) In my book: a laundry receipt from June, 2009.
3) Espresso Shake, by S'Nice. Jesus.
4) The word espresso looked weird to me for an instant.
5) Bumping my head was worth it.
6) Fake-ass rice cheese crackers. They're kind of good.
7) Bird on 5th.
8) Tony Hayward: What the Fuck?
9) Badlands viewing #40
10) In 10 Minutes it's going to be too late.

Ready to Ride!

My trusty Cervelo R3 is all tuned up and ready to ride for my 2nd 100-miler of the weekend. Yay bikes! A well-tuned bike is an instrument for dreaming. Writer cyclists: Alfred Jarry, Francis Picabia, and me!

Art Show

Monster

There are people studying me
and they will tell you some things
about me that I don't even know yet
like I am becoming more monstrous by the hour
they will make hideous faces
when my name is spoken
they will draw you closer to them
and inject red honey into your left ventricle
pump you so full of their vileness
that your heart will stop working
they'll share their sinister map
that shows you not only where people are
but what they are thinking about you
as you think about them all rosy
and forgetful of everything
but the pain you are causing them
with your happiness.

Duplicity

Wednesday Morning with Martin Heidegger

"What is decisive is not to get out of the circle
but to get in it in the right way"

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p143 (Joan Stambaugh translation)

Messages

Really?

My Birthday Weekend in Pictures

Monday Top 10

1) Waking up to you watching me.
2) The sweetness of morning, even while hurrying about.
3) Almost taking the sign for you from the bookstore bathroom on Prince Street.
4) My Rag and Bone obsession.
5) There is a high-pitched white coming from my bone system.
6) A matter of majesty, elegance, hypnotism, and grace.
7) Realization: maybe I'm capable of having good luck too.
8) Getting better at love.
9) Breathless at Film Forum.
10) A Magnolia birthday cupcake with candle and everything (corner of Bleeker and West 11th -- in the Park there).

Happy Birthday to Me from Jane

Baltic & Court

The Fall - Prole Art Threat

Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

"Lay me down
in silence easy"

Thinking of You

Thursday Top Ten

1) Walter Benjamin.
2) Papaya and Pineapple Enzymes.
3) The Last Novel by David Markson
4) 105.9 FM
5) I Am a Beautiful Monster by Francis Picabia.
6) Very very bird.
7) Associating certain shirts with certain women in my life.
8) The same goes for certain jeans.
9) Todd Night.
10) Alone.

Thursday Morning with Walter Benjamin

"The wisest thing--so the fairy tale teaches children to this day--is to meet the forces of the mystical world with cunning and with high spirits."

W.B. from the essay "The Storyteller" in the collection of essays Illuminations

Shannon Lee Hayes (via HTML Giant)

More of Shannon Lee Hayes' work here.

Rag and Bone

A light out like a life out, lit

When you come home to bed.
What goes on.
You are a person
coming home into a room.
A bed in the room. Washing
your face or cleaning your teeth, my ears.
A brush of felt. Calming myself down
a bit. Panting a bit as long as there's a hidden delicate beam.
Guilt trapped in ecstasy.

She'll forget me when her brain goes.
She'll forget me when her brain goes.

Rest in Peace, David Markson (1927-2010)

My Plans

When I find the meaning
of feeling fabulous I'll let you
know in a letter that I'll never send
keep you guessing as to my whereabouts
leave messages in other voices
send packages from foreign places
the sidewalk will get cluttered
with chalk writings describing your days
I will do something with a fork that
will allow me to breathe easier
when I leave a room that you are in
I will work on an idea tonight
I will not get overcome by the quaint obstacles
of time and space and shit like that
I will develop a certain method of grinding or hopping
so that the bed will move from the wall
the floor will be slick with silicone
I will rub a word into your back
and you will feel it pleasantly lodged between
your shoulder blades whenever you need me.

Francis Picabia on a Bicycle (with a dog)

PJ Harvey - Rid of Me

Captain Beefheart - Dirty Blue Gene

My Pony (for Jane)

A contraction would bring a pony
into view into the room into my actual
apartment with the hooves and horse shit
and all of that. The oats. The bucket of oats
strapped to the pony's mouth in my apartment
that incessant chomping (ponies eat a lot).
I would train it and take care of it and take
it out for walks. I would never
become disinterested or consumed with
any sort of resentment or anything like that
at all. Sensors all over her body.
There might be debris from the pony
or realistic noises the pony would make (strong
things to consider). To think of cute
pictures of the pony that I could take
with me with the pony like resting my head
on it or pretending the long main hair was
my hair and taking a picture of that with
my face against the neck of the pony
and sending that photo to my friends.
Blond pony! Ponies have big eyes
so I would have to work on not letting that
freak me out when I was like just sitting
around looking at my pony, you know?
All the people I know would
see me having that pony and would know
how serious I am about having that and doing
that but that would not be the only thing I could
talk about because I could also have conversations
about other stuff too, like Francis Picabia.

Rest in Peace

We lost some great ones this week:

Peter Orlovsky
Leslie Scalapino
Louise Bourgeois
Dennis Hopper

The Moon from Jane

Hello Golden White

By lifting a piece of the city you can
wave to me because it has a handle
because you have a free hand because
you are happy to see me and wave to
me from across the expressway your
hand is moving as fast as the cars
but not so fast that you are oozing
that the insides of you are getting jarred
in such a way that you are oily
no you are simply waving and I am waving
back and smiling in a way that means
I am glad to see you that the summer
has really begun that the day is signifying
something new before the city starts
to stink before the fog burns away
before we start to eat each other
and all of that.