Amigoz

White Trash

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles

 

  

 

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon my wires (James Joyce)

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

LIPOGRAM

 

  

  

  

 

A text that excludes one or more letters of the alphabet. The ingenuity demanded by the restriction clearly varies in proportion to the frequency of the letter or letters excluded. After all, most short and many extended passages of literature are unintentional lipograms.

Lipogram in c, d, f, g, j, k, l, m, p, v, w, x, y, z:
     To be or not to be: that is the question

Lipogram in a (&c.):
     To be or not to be: this is the question

Lipogram in e:
     Survival or oblivion: that is our quandry

Lipogram in t:
     Being or non-being: such is my dilemma

(from the Oulipo Compendium)

Crispy Crisis

Here:

back along forth and

walk, there's a look right here:

squash. We plant

into the soaped earth and slice

an orange tomato in half. Wired

through the backyard is a light

strand to the shed where you

keep your bike. The ink is bleeding

I can learn how to paint

if I think like a globe. Taste in touch,

don't tell me where I want to take

you, I've stayed soft so long. How

you will survive the end of summer,

how the pepper plant blooms.

Yours is a blue eye down

from greyer or maybe I

can get this right. We watch

or read in shops a

fly-through tour the south

in America, you say, you can
leave south or sideways
Santa Monica or La Paz. Straight
either way.

Cactus in my calf, Bergman, fifth
pocket sleeping pills,
stint in sand a blood of my arm.


Shake: here is a day that
might rain, a swell in my, ribs
and laugh laugh laugh. Please
I know you, you know I'm
stuck in myself and can't think
of how to say it. Crosswords or
maybe we'll piece this together
on a hospital blanket.

Happy I've got a lot to say to you and
I've had it before and it's hardly and
I'm coming and I've taken you
for granted. Mountains, how
I've fucked up, that girl
above my bed, morning after,
water and heat,
swelling in your toe.

I know it's just a list, and you're
a breath, brown, a kind of case for
it all. You're there in a cold little hut
and I want this for you. I want
to hold your head, save you from
your house, rest, ice and rain. Our
garden is bearing, sick dust is sinking.

Bright Knife

If a cluster of words comes at you, it was probably written by someone else, and if it wasn't written by someone else it was probably already written by you.

-- Michael Dickman, paraphrasing Mark Strand

Diseases of excessive consciousnesses

And why are you so firmly, so solemnly convinced that only the normal and the positive - in short, only well-being - is to man's advantage? ...After all, man may be fond not only of well-being. Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as much in his interest as well-being? And man is sometimes extremely fond of suffering, to the point of passion, in fact. And here there is no need to consult world history; ask your own self, if you're a man and have lived at all. As for my personal opinion, it's even somehow indecent to love only well-being.

--Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (39)

Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You may say I'm not worth bothering with; in that case, I can say exactly the same to you. We are talking seriously. And if you do not deign to give me your attention, I will not bow before you. I have my underground.

-- (41)