81. Widower

Sometime after the fact you tried growing a capsicum pepper plant in the backyard. Something with roots, you thought, but also that yields fruit, that wants to be useful. Isn’t it what we all want? But not too useful: it was a bitter pepper. When the battery in the wallclock died you first thought time was miserably slowing down, but no, then it stopped entirely and here you still were with only a lame clock for company. You didn’t bother to replace the battery. In your dreams you see water. Oceans ask you for their desired hurricanes. You lack speach until you wake. So you put off sleep, residing in the backyard and waiting for the late-summer sun to set, just you and the plant, waiting.

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Posted by t Sep 28, 2010

73. Habit

This is how slowly it happened. One whole day holding the pack, noting how satisfying its corners felt, how certain. It never stopped being surprisingly light, something so sturdy and rectangular should be heavier. But how sturdy was it? That whole first day it shuffled from pocket to pocket, upsetting the normal ordering and placement of pocket-dwelling articles (standard issue: wallter, notebook, pen, change, paper scraps). The next afternoon the wrapping came off, a long ten minutes beside a sidwalk trashcan. Out comes the first of 19 Class A cigarettes, which are known to cause cancer, emphazema, and loss of virility. Two afternoon hours with a cigarette unlit smoldering between fingers walking in and out of department stores and clothing boutiques and down the crowded streets. And every time the pace quicked no, no. Slow the legs down. Don’t walk too quickly, as if there was a rush, or anywhere to go. Savor it.

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Posted by t Sep 20, 2010

72. On an exhibit at the Mudam (2)

The body is distended across the room, each particle present at the next particle, each antiseptic run a component machine. Plastic, oilless, clean. Seemingly the antithesis of growth, rather, pointed achievement, and stagnant. Still the green growth interferes, is welcomed, was always necessary; the seedling-generator succinct in its contained world.

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Posted by t

70. On an exhibit at the Mudam

Great generator, loop-void growing green at the edges, cannot keep out the living. Only water, lightness, plastic and the free-moving air. Then the sprouts will flourish. Then the white-walled womb looks more fertile. Still, those high-flying tubes and convoys make a bad go at veins. The corpus spread all about the room, distended as body/moment/machine.

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Posted by t Sep 18, 2010

15. Untitled

Our protagonist, clicking through a short Nabokov novel on his Kindle, not half as sophisticated as one might hope this activity might make one, considers shaving, as it has been several weeks and his chin-growths have begun to itch. He considers the woman from the boat ride two days earlier — Swiss, not French as he originally surmised — who are now doubtless camped on one of the half-dozen beaches sugaring the Eastern coast of this insignificant Greek island. In fact, not doubtless at all, because he saw their encampment yesterday when strolling to the farther shore. Several even napped on sleeping pads beneath hastily erected shelter, tent nylon stretched between two much put-upon trees beside a low stone wall at the edge of the sand; the cover protection from the only real threat on this rock in summer, the ever-loving sun. Our protagonist takes another spoonful of thickened, honeyed yogurt the Greeks eat for every meal and tries to shake the thought of those women from his mind, and while he’s at it the obstreperous heat on the last day of June, and goes back to flipping through Transparent Things, click click click.

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Posted by t Jul 1, 2010

12. Self Portrait

Six French girls at the table two down from mine on the back of a ferry from Piraeus are looking at the drawing of tyhe guy sitting next to them, charcoals mostly with the odd colored pencil sketch, and they’re into it and talking to him and one of them is particularly gorgeous, smoking cigarettes and flipping through his sketchbook looking like Athena in gold bracelets and big gold earrings hitting the right notes against the iris-blue Mediterranean and my buddy Ron looks over at me from his magazine and says “get a load of this guy behind me with the sketchbook” and I say I know, I noticed, un-fucking-believable they’re eating it up, and suddenly my envy becomes an inconsolable sadness, not because I am never, ever going to have sex with this beautiful French girl with slight rings beneath her eyes and a carnival of well-proportioned features comprising her equanimous face, but because I’m afraid to talk to strangers, and I never finished learning French and am too shy to practice and when I see beautiful girls on the far side of the room I am filled with an unabating, sharp-hearted sorrow only John Darnielle songs can ameliorate, and so now instead of doing something brave I’m drinking red wine with Ron and trying to forget I’m alive while the June sun, unsympathetic to the young and free, tries to bury itself once and for all beneath the Peloponnesus and leave all of us (me, Ron, six French women, the universe, whoever) in the dark and our own worst enemies.

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Posted by t Jun 27, 2010