denuded ideas in chopped
ready to go-mix sources
of wisdom set one
against the other:
change
u
try
so hard
but u can’t
u won’t but
u try again and again
u fail better again and again
What I’m Reading:
“A train stopped on the plain / Deaf stars sleep / in every puddle / And the water trembles”
— Vicente Huidobro / “Hours”
Your lupines are mine;
Mine, because I ogle them—
Lasciviously.
What I’m Reading:
“as always i am an ungrateful child, a student
first of ingratitude. ungracious as a wasp.”
— Sam Sax / “Pedagogy”
“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.”
— Wallace Stevens / “Of the Surafce of Things”
“Some time ago, I wrote an essay about napping outside how I would, for instance, see a carpet of moss in the forest or a cradle of rocks on a summit, and then feel inexplicably tired, lie down, and fall asleep quicker than I ever could in a bed. How, also, I’d awoken in a blizzard on a mountainside; another time in a graveyard with two men standing over me, asking if I was ‘practicing’; woke in a field with a mouse in my pocket eating the peanuts I carried. I felt a freedom to be in the wilderness that I know is not given to everyone.”
— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
“The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.”
— Robinson Jeffers / “Rearmament”
“What is this secret power of trees that makes us so much healthier and happier? Why is it that we feel less stressed and have more energy just by walking in the forest?”
— Dr. Qing Li / Forest Bathing
“Perhaps walking is best imagined as an indicator species, ‘to use an ecologist’s term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble.”
— Rebecca Solnit / Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down. / Only the night is / wound up tight. / And ticking with unpaused breath.”
— Charles Wright / “Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes”
“A week of black, amnesiac sleep followed my homecoming. Exactly what I wanted—to be obliterated by the insistent presence of the sea, as the sea had done to Cape Cod.”
— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
What I’m Listening To:
“I got high I thought I saw an angel
But he was just a ghost
He was making wooden posts out of my family
What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”
— Aldous Harding / “What If Birds Aren’t Singing They’re Screaming”
I was assigned a sanity rating at birth that does not compute. The birds don’t sing as much as they scream—a singer once sang that, and it was recorded—go and check. I’ve checked my packets, and all the seeds are missing, not even so much as a coating of seed dust. I ingested my ulterior motives and they are now the extra padding in my posterior. None of this has been pasteurized (or proof-read for that matter) and it’s been proven that dingoes occasionally will eat scabies. Hold on … something seems amiss with my autocorrect. Just keep holding there. I’ll be back.
What I’m Reading:
“The world I see looks to me like a game of children.
Strange performances and plays go on night and day.”
— Ghalib / “Some Exaggerations”
What I’m Reading:
“I’m waiting for the words / to catch up to my heart / which is / elliptical at the moment”
— Jason Bayani / “Someday, Again”
There’s a need to say something—but what?
That I’ve run away from home again?
That I’m trying to figure out why Pablo Fanques Fair was such a scene?
That the scree and other debris that gets in my shoes is really comforting?
No.
I’ve run away from home on a fast ferry!
I’m picking off a dozen deer ticks before I get the Lyme bullseye rash.
I don’t want the Lyme. I don’t want the Covid.
I left my neighborhood for another neighborhood—pictures tomorrow.
Stay tuned—more news at 11.
What I’m Reading:
“I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.”
— Edward Abbey / Desert Solitaire
Lower the lifeboats—
We tread nose-deep in dis-ease—
Lifelines beyond us.
We roil dark water and sink.
The mermaids sing for no one.
What I’m Reading:
“I’ve spent my entire life living on a fault line / I know all that’s been made is inherently broken.”
— Jason Bayani / “Someday, Again”
The fable persuader
The deep pocket pusher of dreams
Fine line sharpener of fancy and flight
Scrimper and scavenger of marrow-bone pithy and white
Nails plastic lobsters onto dead sycamores
Inscribes chalk circles in the middle of the street
Loves Luci Dead Limb
Cries at the wax of the moon
What I’m Reading:
“Darkness starts inside of things
but keeps on going when the things are gone.”
— Christian Wiman / “Darkness Starts”
What I’m Reading:
“People sometimes come to galleries feeling that they need to understand … when all they need to do is respond.”
— Mike Collier, to Dan Rubinstein / Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act
“I stole the yellow bird
That lives in the devil’s sex
He will teach me how to seduce”
— Joyce Mansour / “I stole the yellow bird …”
“on Sunday after church I took a walk
so I could discuss your nipples
with the friendly woodpecker
who visits the birch tree”
— Wayne Koestenbaum / “David’s Nipples”
“It’s called Cyclone Mocha, but it might as well be called Cyclone Exxon or Cyclone Chevron—they were among the companies that ignored the clear evidence of pending climate crisis and kept pushing their product till the Bay of Bengal was a hot tub. And it’s oil companies that are currently mounting a drive in California to overturn a law that would simply prevent them from drilling directly next to schools, hospitals, and homes. Rage is not an answer, but it is the thing that comes before an answer.”
— Bill McKibben / “Thoughts, Prayers, Rage, Resistance”
“Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.”
— RK Fauth / “Playing with Bees”
“I’m feeling excited about writing, but it’s only because I’m not doing it. When I’m doing it, I feel miserable. When I’m not doing it, I can’t wait to do it again. It’s so frustrating to write, and I get so depressed when I’m writing. Right now, I’m not writing and I feel great about writing.”
— Anelise Chen / The Creative Independent interview
“Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is – it teaches us to naturalise cruelty … Capitalism is a system into which we are all born, we have it inside of us, and patriarchy is part of that system. I tried to work with this idea that we eat each other in a symbolic way. With women it’s so obvious, because you can talk about human trafficking, war and the way women are made invisible in different spheres. Here in Argentina, they kill women every day. Capitalism and cannibalism are almost the same, you know?”
— Agustina Bazterrica / “Bookmarks” / The Guardian
“… the world is violent. Why should fiction pretend it’s not?”
— Ottessa Moshfegh / “Bookmarks” / The Guardian
What I’m Listening To:
“I’m getting sick and tired
Of feeling like I do”
— The Mighty Lemon Drops / “My Biggest Thrill”
