a life unformed
a life imbibed in errant teeth & muscle
hair missing its natural head
imperfectly formed world
impostor globe of skin
a sibling incised
excised
space in absentia
a world unknown
“Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It’s discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to 0 of the novel.”
Don’t let that giant Meyer lemon out by the well anymore.
The lemon is taking all the minerals and nutrients out of our water by a process of reverse go-go-frugging — and I ain’t talking about no telemarketing research malfeasance and such.
No, I’m talking about that giant lemon playing The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” — and acting out the final scene from Pink Flamingos by our well out back.
Don’t you hear that song like clockwork at 6:09 every morning?
Oh, and don’t you think it’s a coincidence that the ubangi bangi car drives by just after we hear that song every Monday thru Friday?
Don’t you see how we’re depleted of calcium and magnesium? Don’t you see how withered we look?
Our water is full of empty water, Madge!
No minerals.
Ain’t you been feeling pekid? You certainly look it!
Looka’ that lemon out there dancing like it’s 1963!
This is Fall at 6:42 a.m. on 11/14/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (2/4)
The cat runs from underneath the bed and stands sentry below the window.
Crunching glass at the top of the window behind the blinds.
A squirrel?
No an otter.
A tree otter? you say.
Errant, from the gnarled oak, I say.
We have a backyard that is simultaneously outside and inside the house.
This otter scurries down the tree and up on the bed.
The otter tunnels below the bed, behind the blinds, and up and out of the house.
The cat, stupefied and seconds late, jumps up swiping at air and catches its claws on the blind — hangs there — nonplussed.
Hey! There’s a hole in Thee Window where the outside world flows in and out.
A tall lanky man jogs through the edge of our bedroom, out for his morning run with his equally tall and lanky greyhound, and right out through the hall.
We have leaks in the house.
Holes.
The otter is back, but I stand firm and stare it down from the other side of the window.
Now it’s a groundhog.
Now it’s an otter again.
You complain. You don’t want kingdom animalia running through the house.
The otter and I stare each other down.
A standoff.
“Commit yourself to the process, NOT the project. Don’t be afraid to write badly, everyone does. Invest yourself in the lifestyle … NOT in the particular piece of work.”
It’s precisely because motility is important to the sperm that it listens to futures reports. The price of pork bellies is of paramount importance to fertilization… and the Fibonacci 50!
Sing and dance for Magellanic skies are bearing down on every sperm, and everyone still swimming is despairing of exploding plastic coils — they’re refractory and they’re concupiscent, elegant and resplendent all at once — even the twisty-tailed stragglers are trying.
The potential is righteous with me…
… and you, and a dog named Boo.
A girl like you. A girl named Goo, that thinks and predates the partridges, the pear trees, and the sonic tableaux.
Think of the tree and its allowance — its unfurling spectacular in its singular come-uppance — spectacular and oracular!
Leave the headlands to the Powderheads and the powder to the Jacobites. Once upon a guillotine I saw the news, the graphic elements, the chyron and the pews — and we raged for the angels. We sang: “Kill Your Television Now.”
I am suddenly quiescent (and senescent) and the market has squatted on the pantifiers.
Do crotchless pants catch fire? Try the chaps, they’re in the next section over.
And I got to know, and I got to know, and I got to know…
… which swimmer makes it to the egg.
“I shall always be depressed, but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”
cluelessness was her aspiration
omission was her inclination
forgetfulness was her destination
tra la la, she said
cluelessness was his indignation
commission was his situation
punctiliousness was his inspiration
tra la la, he said
it seemed to work without resignation
what a revelation
tra la la
“I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”
— Ann Patchett / The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
“!Clase de bamba, clase de bamba!” is what the bird says every time I move.
It squawks too — if I don’t move — but clase de bamba is on repeat for the last 15 minutes. It’s a hot, dingy little office overstuffed with papers and old phone books — the White Pages. The White Pages! — dating back to 1959.
And hundreds of pictures of Fidel Castro strewn about in every pose imaginable: fulminating spittle in mid-diatribe at a lectern, smoking a cigar with García Marquez, hugging Allende, saluting troops with Pinochet, glad-handing a sugar cane field hand. Then there’s Fidel in a baseball uniform. Fidel and his brother Raul. Fidel and Che. Fidel, Raul and Che. Fidel and Kruschev. And my favorite, Fidel and Nixon smiling camera right.
It’s just endless, hundreds of pictures, and every one of them has a rifle sight painted in lipstick over Fidel’s face.
Seriously, lipstick. The open tube on the desk is Revlon Kiss Me Coral. Says so on the red dot on the tube.
The air conditioning unit is laboring something fierce, rattling in the window frame. And that fucking bird is going on about clase de bamba.
Skip tracing is a special way to meet humanity — its kindnesses, empathy, and its beautiful places. Especially the lovely places where this humanitarian lives and works. This Riggleman.
He’s a souse. It’s clear from the two dozen gin empties in the corner. The ashtray hasn’t been emptied since 1978. God damned clase de bamba must be his favorite thing to listen to. I couldn’t sit here all day with this mangy parrot going on and on.
I’m talking about the pre-millennium neuroses and the pumpkin-psychotropic blues.
It reminds me of Florida this sickly place. It’s hot, full of love bugs — sparing on the brotherly love — and it smells of piss and cigarettes.
Riggleman’s a fast one though. Always seems to be a half-a-step beyond the long arm. Betcha’ he’s shuffled off to Florida — the state shaped like a gun and an impotent penis all at once. The dangler at the bottom end of the good ‘ol U.S. of A.
Now there’s a picture.
This is Fall at 4:40 p.m. on 11/07/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (1/4)
“In a way, it’s an act of authorial control to withhold information, but I also see it as an utter evasion of authorial responsibility. I just sort of hand the system over to the reader and say, I don’t know what this means, but I’m out of here. Sure, I have my own feelings about what I am interested in investigating emotionally. But, in the end, my intention doesn’t matter.”
— Rumaan Alam / ThePaisReview.org, “Something to Hold On To: An Interview with Rumaan Alam”
Nothing in the darkness. First thought best thought was moot. His brain went mute, all circuits switched. Long stretches of imperfect dendrites. Long stretches of boredom and damnation. Then a spark. Detonation. Clean developments. Cold synapses. Withered axons.
Sounds from outside the darkness: the missing foundations and the people who made unholy noise. Every time he developed a word another appeared wanting to take its place. Darkness darker than the extant black seeped in.
She clapped the clap of the heartless, and thought it better to go to sleep. Either / or propositions appeared to light up the darkness and dimmed. It was light and dark again every few seconds. Then it was dark forever.
The dark mocked them. They craved the silence just before words were spoken. They craved silence.
There was a tinkling before the great silence.
“Gtting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”
— Joyce Carol Oates / Interview with Robert Compton, Dallas Morning News
