Mirror

Fractal

Sometimes it seems like knives are lookin' at you, 

and it's good to have a friend who understands that.  Patterns

occur in progressively smaller scales, obedience, 

eroded coastlines.  But you might receive an email from a friend

about how hard it is to take responsibility for your own libido,

the movies you watch, the foods you eat, especially 

if there used to be someone there looking at you

over brunch.  Now I should use a word like "fractal." 

From the Latin fract-, meaning broken.  Fractals are useful

in modeling chaotic phenomena, fluid turbulence, galaxy

formation.  What about a word like "stubborn"?  Or "uppity"?

Partly random growth.  Bundled messages.

Leslie Marmon Silko

"The buzzing of grasshopper wings came from the weeds in the yard, and the sound made his backbone loose."  

Prospect Park

Ten Weekend Highlights

1.  Sitting in Riverside Park, looking at people and water. 

2.  Walking down Broadway twenty blocks while talking to Sara and Mandy on the phone about rituals and blunders, instead of getting on the subway.  

3.  Assignment from Sara.  Om surya-ya namaha. 

4.  Reading poems out loud with TC.

5.  Little girl on the subway resting the side of her body against mine without thinking about it.

6.  Listening to "Belles" by Vetiver on my way to brunch and suddenly feeling happy.  

7.  Reading Frank O'Hara on the subway and being glad to hear his voice.

8.  Mimosa.  

9.   Paula!  Prospect Park with Paula!  

10.  Journeying to Brooklyn three days in a row.  

        

Martin Starr is my celebrity boyfriend

Adventureland was ok.  The best part of it was that it confirmed that Martin Starr is my celebrity boyfriend.  

THANKS, TODD!!!

4:40 p.m.:  Just before seeing the movie Adventureland, received gifts of two of his books from my new friend, American poet Todd Colby (after presumptuously hinting around that I would love to have them and does he have any extra copies, and "Oh, that's ok, I'll just buy them from Amazon . . .").

1 a.m.-ish:  Dropped one of the books on the foot of a young Asian woman after possibly being jostled by her on the subway platform.  We both looked surprised, then mildly annoyed, and both started to stoop down to retrieve the book.  Then I said, "Oh, I'm sorry!" and kind of laughed.  Then I bent down to pick up the book and she kind of laughed and kept on walking.  Then I thought, "Damn it, I bent the corner of my new book!" and spent some time compulsively smoothing the corner with my thumb before I started reading it again.  

Gave my friend Douglas some parameters

WHERE ARE MY HANDCUFFS?

Hi, do you want me to give, I have.
Have you "put in" some other bothered dream?
I woke up but it was the end of the poem.
I was over flying at the world buildings
Having put you in some other phrases
I was yrs, stuffed into the world
I was having the sort of "couldn’ts” you have.

We were out of that gypsy now.
Our chin was tired. The static helmet
Throbbed for a dark empty nut.
All night we sat in a floppy grip
Massaging the darkness into submission. 

--Douglas Piccinnini

Asked my friend Douglas for some parameters

Parameters  

The goggles actor returned to welding, unconcerned

with all the syntax or traipsers climbing

rickety stairs with grocers up the poet tower.  Weird, 

like Planet of the Apes and yellow sky.  All the climbing, 

all the "I Believe I Can Fly" and spaceships.  Where's

my art warehouse and who will I goggle at? And "all

dreams are weird, Mini."  

Sorry, my mistake-- it's actually Neil Young Appreciation WEEK

I mean . . . c'mon.  Right?

Stampedin' cattle they rattle the waallllls

I received this handmade window in the mail

"When I started writing, at sixteen, I had a couple of like-minded school friends. Sometimes, when the lessons seemed more than usually trying, we would pass notes to each other between our desks—poems and aphorisms, which would come back with the more or less enthusiastic comments of the recipient. What an impression those scribblings would make! There is the fundamental situation of poetry. The lesson of official life goes rumbling on. We send inspired notes to one another.”   

--Tomas Tranströmer

A guy with the most monotone voice is right outside my office, trying to sell some weird computer program to the woman who runs the Writing Center.

But I just realized that my office computer has Photo Booth.

Today is Neil Young Appreciation Day (in my heart)

Charles Bronson Is My Life Force

I told my friend Josh that I would write a poem called "Charles Bronson Is My Life Force."  Here it is:

Charles Bronson Is My Life Force

(after Josh Bayer)

 Or Neil Young.  Neil Young is actually my life force.  Marianne Faithfull is my id.  Or Marianne Faithfull is my celebrity guardian angel.  Think of her on your shoulder, talking to you in that voice all day.  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is my other celebrity guardian angel.  Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner’s Daughter is my ego.  Allen Ginsberg is my superego.  My superego, Allen Ginsberg, tells me to take things more seriously and also to lighten up.  So I pray every day at an altar to that woman from Dancing with the Stars.  The blonde one.  And why not?  “If you have prayed at an altar to that woman from Dancing with the Stars, you have done it for me.”  That’s in the Bible.  

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

It will desecrate my pure and true love for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar if I say too much about it.  I’ve said too much already.  You may think of me less as a triathlete and more as a person who has made up to five mistakes in her life.  You may ask me, “Do you have a sports hero?” And I will say, “No.”  I will be thinking about goggles and earnest eyes and—oh, what movie was he in?—and then I will think of Stewart Copeland.  Han Solo.  Steve Martin in The Jerk.  Everything I ate in the last twenty-four hours, brand names and all.  How I ate some grape tomatoes with a funny name.  Something something farm.  Glee Farm.  No, that’s the name of Todd Colby’s blog.  No.  Don’t let’s give voice to it.  

[This piece originally appeared in the Comments section of Todd Colby's blog.]

Got some cool new art this weekend. (thanks, tjc)

Here is what I was thinking of

Here is what I was thinking of in the shower yesterday:  One time my college boyfriend, Jason, was driving me somewhere-- I don’t remember where, somewhere in Kansas City—and I said, “Do you ever start to feel like I’m just this carbon-based life form that you cart from place to place in the passenger seat of your car?  Do you ever think, ‘Here I am carting around this sack of protoplasm again?’”  And he said, “No.  I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  We dated for about three years.  

But Jason was a good guy, a quirky person in a lot of ways.  One of my favorite things he ever said was, “Wow.  We’re pulling out all the stops now.  Well, some of the stops.  I’d say we’re pulling out some of the stops.”  We were eating at the Perkins in Lawrence, Kansas at the time.