"Tomas did not realize at the time,
that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love"-Kundera
Saturday, December 4, 2010
A Letter (To Those Who Need To Know Me)
continents have moved faster than this thought. Board this ship, take no ticket home.
Forgiveness,
It has been said,
is for anybody who needs safe passage
fortunately for this
pack of ciggarettes, forgiveness is not a code my body wears too comfortably
if the ribs,
when pressed to the bedside
hear birdsongs
in the shaking
or in the morning
when my fingers wear
the neck of a poem,
(Dylan Lyric whispered/Samsara/waking up to unknown beds)
moonsong of the head, dressed like Forgiveness,
a girls tremors press my lungs,
(we have chain-smoking/,
we have confessions,
Poem of Throat,
every exhale says the same):
“i smoke a pack a day now, but it feels like 5”
she whispers back in smoke, i watch for the exhale,
(an exhale feels like dawn, drawn out
marked by new starts)
the cotton sheet has turned to continents
moving beneath us,
ash spills onto the bed like shipwrecks
cracks open, resin of a lie
of a wish,
a 2 prayer a day smoker,
I have known no boat home, no safe passage
find me, hiding in the islands of a lighter,
i have heard the hometown humble in her laughter
it reminds me of childhood,
the house was more tidal wave
more riptide,
a push towards absolution
the home was miles wide,
it had cracks in its floor,
I swore by the sand mother carried home,
her love was a great barrier, nobody knew how it got there
or how long it had been,
I thought we would make it someday,
I never knew why we were so lost
i casted prayers onto the backs of waves
the ocean is forever unforgiving.
to those who need to know me,
watch for an exhale, try and see what its saying:
my dad is a Bouyi, out there in the dusk,
coming in and out of the tired ocean,
you can see him from miles, going through that door,
nobody knew when he would come up again for air.
the ocean is quiet beneath.
of course I could talk about maps,
but that would be too easy,
I used backpacks to carry them,
but the ink always bled its directions into
the blue horizon,
you can’t carry maps and swim at the same time
you might never have the questions
at the same time
as you have the answers
everybody has known the weight
of gallons of Atlantic held in their clothes,
I wondered how the water stayed in my sweater for so long,
how even after you get out, you still bear the weight
of a hundred shipwrecks,
to lessen the weight
(one day you will see)
is to burn your prayers
the metaphors have become self aware:
to lessen the weight,
is to get closer to death,
to inhale, to regret,
the metaphors have become dangerous,
the ocean when speaking to itself
says:
“this is not my home forever,
a bed of corals, of barriers, of shipwrecks, of distance,
one day in absolution, I will become a cloud, exhaling everything everyone wanted me to be”
and for me,
well theres only so much to be said
while above water,
when I’m out at sea,
I press my head
to dawn
ask it to give me back
my maps.
Forgiveness,
It has been said,
is for anybody who needs safe passage
fortunately for this
pack of ciggarettes, forgiveness is not a code my body wears too comfortably
if the ribs,
when pressed to the bedside
hear birdsongs
in the shaking
or in the morning
when my fingers wear
the neck of a poem,
(Dylan Lyric whispered/Samsara/waking up to unknown beds)
moonsong of the head, dressed like Forgiveness,
a girls tremors press my lungs,
(we have chain-smoking/,
we have confessions,
Poem of Throat,
every exhale says the same):
“i smoke a pack a day now, but it feels like 5”
she whispers back in smoke, i watch for the exhale,
(an exhale feels like dawn, drawn out
marked by new starts)
the cotton sheet has turned to continents
moving beneath us,
ash spills onto the bed like shipwrecks
cracks open, resin of a lie
of a wish,
a 2 prayer a day smoker,
I have known no boat home, no safe passage
find me, hiding in the islands of a lighter,
i have heard the hometown humble in her laughter
it reminds me of childhood,
the house was more tidal wave
more riptide,
a push towards absolution
the home was miles wide,
it had cracks in its floor,
I swore by the sand mother carried home,
her love was a great barrier, nobody knew how it got there
or how long it had been,
I thought we would make it someday,
I never knew why we were so lost
i casted prayers onto the backs of waves
the ocean is forever unforgiving.
to those who need to know me,
watch for an exhale, try and see what its saying:
my dad is a Bouyi, out there in the dusk,
coming in and out of the tired ocean,
you can see him from miles, going through that door,
nobody knew when he would come up again for air.
the ocean is quiet beneath.
of course I could talk about maps,
but that would be too easy,
I used backpacks to carry them,
but the ink always bled its directions into
the blue horizon,
you can’t carry maps and swim at the same time
you might never have the questions
at the same time
as you have the answers
everybody has known the weight
of gallons of Atlantic held in their clothes,
I wondered how the water stayed in my sweater for so long,
how even after you get out, you still bear the weight
of a hundred shipwrecks,
to lessen the weight
(one day you will see)
is to burn your prayers
the metaphors have become self aware:
to lessen the weight,
is to get closer to death,
to inhale, to regret,
the metaphors have become dangerous,
the ocean when speaking to itself
says:
“this is not my home forever,
a bed of corals, of barriers, of shipwrecks, of distance,
one day in absolution, I will become a cloud, exhaling everything everyone wanted me to be”
and for me,
well theres only so much to be said
while above water,
when I’m out at sea,
I press my head
to dawn
ask it to give me back
my maps.
Autistic Saint, rough draft of a short story
heres this short story, but this fucking blog sucks so bad it doesnt let me do anything with the spacing. its hard to read. but here ya go
I’m walking with my client through a suburb in a part of town I haven’t learned yet.
First we walk to a corner store a few blocks from his apartment, I get a oatmeal raisin breakfast cookie and something to drink, and he gets nothing because of course he has no money. We almost make it out of the shop- but just as were walking out the front door he turns to the store owner and yells:“DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD?!”because of course, the guy is of asian descent and invariably likes chinese food..Normally these remarks of his worry me, but the store owner seemingly undisturbed yells back: “Yeahh of course!”-R goes into this store almost everyday, and so the store owner must be desensitized to his innocently racist remarks.I guess I should take some time to explain R. He has a phobia- ok actually he has many phobia’s, but mostly he has one phobia. He has this irrational fear of Bearded Men. He hates them, or he fears them, I’m not quite sure which, but either way if you let the fucker within 2 feet of a poor guy with a beard he will yell something like “Santa” or “Grandpaaaa” at the awestruck guy and then he’ll walk up to them with this real off-putting smile, eyes buldging and rabid, with his right hand raised, or I should say cocked. Now what is a poor shmuck supposed to do- he obviously see’s this somewhat creepy and definitely troubled man and has no other reasonable choice but to give him the damn highfive. Too late. At the last minute where its starting to look like a scene out of some really corny PSA, R retracts his highfive hand and instead gives the guy a nice cold slap to the face. Everytime. Just like that. Sneaky son of a bitch that guy is.He also has this phobia of blacks, asians, indians-all people of color, and practically anyone who looks different than him he harasses! But the way he does it (and because he obviously looks a bit off) usually makes it seem sort of innocent.“DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD??!!@#$%??”“DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD??!!@#$%??”“DO YOU?!!”
Thank god the guy was cool about it.When he see’s woman its more or less the same:
“DO YOU USE THE WOMANS??!!”-in reference to their personal bathroom choices. Maybe thats how modern he is, he recognizes that with America’s myriad sexual identifications people have an overwhelming choice to make when standing in line at toilet, even the clearly done up type of woman, whom he usually chooses to ask. R has been known to take great liberties in his own facility choices- there has been more than a few times where staff have had to wrangle him out of the little girls room. We do not live in the same world.As we walk I can’t help but to notice how quiet it is. The town is small, but I mean its not this small; its practically dead at 1 in the afternoon. Down the block aways some folks are building a home, it’s giant wooden exoskeleton shivers a bit in the cold November air. Because it’s November the air holds every smell heavily, the cutting of the 2 by 4‘s for the house burns in my nose. The smell of woodchips and of playground seems so eternal. I smell these smells every fall, and every fall I relive my childhood through them. It seems like I have only lived in Autumn, like every single memory has only consisted of the smell of bark and forest. The memories are relived like a karmic circle. The damp of this dirt has been the only fitting setting for my life story, and the narrator chooses over and over again to only meditate on the scent of woodchip’s- it’s melodies and it’s eternal quality.
At the intersection we pause and I am overwhelmed by the serenity, I hear only R breathing and I light another ciggarette. Now the only noise is the burning of the paper and of heavy breathe. Nothing moves. Not a damn thing. To the right of us a house sits empty, the FOR RENT sign looks like a timid ghost, too afraid to leave it’s forever-ago window. Directly across the street a 2 bedroom rambler shares the same story; FOR RENT. Oddly, kitty corner of the first house its the same thing. I began to wonder if everyone had just picked up their shit and left. We took a right down another street, I was in search of somebody- fuck, anybody. Finally saw someone, some college kids walking home from campus. They didn’t say anything either.
R slapped his hands on his thighs and walked beside me. Speechless.The houses didn’t even speak, nobody watered their gardens, nobody stood in limbo in their driveways, idling their metal vessels in preparation for their next menial location. The suburb normally speaks in a languid, almost disconnected dialect, one of American restlessness. This suburb had nothing to say. All the cars were parked, but no one seemed to be inside of them, or their houses. We finally came to the end of the empty street and I could read a sign that said “Fairhaven Storage.” Just beyond our line of sight stood a commercial storage facility- right in the middle of the fucking suburb, I had never seen anything like that.“You see that R, who put that there?”“Yes”this was his favorite answer. The building was about 20 garages long, the garages stood there alone and without any rational justification. I guess that by its-self it wouldn’t be that weird, if it weren’t for what I saw directly across the street- Three college students stood in a circle like the last ones on earth. Next to them was an old shuttle bus from what looked like the 60’s. The sign above the front window read simply: “Shuttle”, but it was one of those signs that spun to show different faces when the bus changed locations, so “shuttle” was flush bottom of the sign and a new word lay frozen in mid cycle and indecipherable at the top. I wondered what the bus wanted to say. I wondered when time had stopped for it. What winters had that bus traveled, had it lost its battle to? What had it intended to reveal to onlookers before the winter surged and it became another ghost in the suburb? What made the scene even weirder was across from both those things there was a farm, a old rustic one. It had a sign jutting from the livestock fence, in faded black letters:
“Millway Farm” hung their, not saying a thing. When we started down the path I didn’t think that what was ahead was going to be a farm, because the road ended with a turn around, at the right of which stood one of those road barriers with the reflective red and white strips that normally indicate a sudden drop off. After the sign the concrete stopped, and then there was only gravel and unkept dead grass that formed a small platoue. On one side of the barricade there was suburbia- alabeit a ghostly and deserted one, it was still modern. On the other end was this platoue that we stood on that overlooked an abandoned grey farmland. When one says “farmland”, what is normally evoked is luscious green fields that seem to stretch for miles. But what we saw was the opposite; monochromatic grey fields and stables that were not expansive but narrow, smooshed by a long line of towering tree’s. It reminded me more of a morbid post war european country side than it did America. The barn was small and a flat charcoal shit grey, the stables didn’t look like they had ever housed life. We stood there for a few minutes and R paced back and forth clapping, nobody said a word.It was like that the whole way back to the apartment. The silence was consuming. All I could hear were footsteps on the worn road. After awhile they became monotone rhythmic thuds all striking in unison, I began to loose all sense of self, it was so silent that I almost questioned if we were the ones making the footsteps at all. The other thing that could be heard was the air, it was so cold and lifeless that you could almost hear the air thinking about its self and every once in awhile the air would mix with the November SkyBlank and produce the eerie noise of wind. The whole time we were surrounded by well kept houses. It was truly lonely.As we walked R breathed heavily as if in anticipation of something, and every once in awhile he would freeze and would stare at the air. He would look so attentively at these things that it made me wonder if I was in fact the crazy one. We walked and everything became rather formless- the houses bled other houses, their contours made of sky and of brick. Over and over again he stared at the nonobjects and there I wondered what it was he saw, what the hell was it, was there a whole world unknown to us? The sun shone through some elder tree’s, and as R turned about this way and that like a lighthouse on a dark ocean, the light poked through his mustache giving him a holy aura. There he was, this autistic saint, peering into worlds, worlds that we surely only dream, constantly clapping his hands in the way a person does when they let someone use their open palms as punching bags. He does it impulsively and without regret. At the same time he chuckles maniacally. As I watch him I can’t stop thinking he gets something that I don’t, he gets some cosmic joke, whereas I look at the barren suburb which gives away like the mouth of a restless river to the dying American farmland, and i’m not understanding the modern emptiness, its just not adding up- he’s having conversations with the wind, with the silence, the silence that most Americans can’t bear. At home he’s like that to, he will pace around the rooms and he will laugh here and clap there, and I will be silent and he will be content, he in his world, I in mine, bored and restless. Feeling like I should push a suburb into a grey field, like I should expand somewhere. I’m looking for the forms, I want to know what he is palming while he claps, but damn him, that saintly autistic never lets me in on the joke.
I’m walking with my client through a suburb in a part of town I haven’t learned yet.
First we walk to a corner store a few blocks from his apartment, I get a oatmeal raisin breakfast cookie and something to drink, and he gets nothing because of course he has no money. We almost make it out of the shop- but just as were walking out the front door he turns to the store owner and yells:“DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD?!”because of course, the guy is of asian descent and invariably likes chinese food..Normally these remarks of his worry me, but the store owner seemingly undisturbed yells back: “Yeahh of course!”-R goes into this store almost everyday, and so the store owner must be desensitized to his innocently racist remarks.I guess I should take some time to explain R. He has a phobia- ok actually he has many phobia’s, but mostly he has one phobia. He has this irrational fear of Bearded Men. He hates them, or he fears them, I’m not quite sure which, but either way if you let the fucker within 2 feet of a poor guy with a beard he will yell something like “Santa” or “Grandpaaaa” at the awestruck guy and then he’ll walk up to them with this real off-putting smile, eyes buldging and rabid, with his right hand raised, or I should say cocked. Now what is a poor shmuck supposed to do- he obviously see’s this somewhat creepy and definitely troubled man and has no other reasonable choice but to give him the damn highfive. Too late. At the last minute where its starting to look like a scene out of some really corny PSA, R retracts his highfive hand and instead gives the guy a nice cold slap to the face. Everytime. Just like that. Sneaky son of a bitch that guy is.He also has this phobia of blacks, asians, indians-all people of color, and practically anyone who looks different than him he harasses! But the way he does it (and because he obviously looks a bit off) usually makes it seem sort of innocent.“DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD??!!@#$%??”“DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD??!!@#$%??”“DO YOU?!!”
Thank god the guy was cool about it.When he see’s woman its more or less the same:
“DO YOU USE THE WOMANS??!!”-in reference to their personal bathroom choices. Maybe thats how modern he is, he recognizes that with America’s myriad sexual identifications people have an overwhelming choice to make when standing in line at toilet, even the clearly done up type of woman, whom he usually chooses to ask. R has been known to take great liberties in his own facility choices- there has been more than a few times where staff have had to wrangle him out of the little girls room. We do not live in the same world.As we walk I can’t help but to notice how quiet it is. The town is small, but I mean its not this small; its practically dead at 1 in the afternoon. Down the block aways some folks are building a home, it’s giant wooden exoskeleton shivers a bit in the cold November air. Because it’s November the air holds every smell heavily, the cutting of the 2 by 4‘s for the house burns in my nose. The smell of woodchips and of playground seems so eternal. I smell these smells every fall, and every fall I relive my childhood through them. It seems like I have only lived in Autumn, like every single memory has only consisted of the smell of bark and forest. The memories are relived like a karmic circle. The damp of this dirt has been the only fitting setting for my life story, and the narrator chooses over and over again to only meditate on the scent of woodchip’s- it’s melodies and it’s eternal quality.
At the intersection we pause and I am overwhelmed by the serenity, I hear only R breathing and I light another ciggarette. Now the only noise is the burning of the paper and of heavy breathe. Nothing moves. Not a damn thing. To the right of us a house sits empty, the FOR RENT sign looks like a timid ghost, too afraid to leave it’s forever-ago window. Directly across the street a 2 bedroom rambler shares the same story; FOR RENT. Oddly, kitty corner of the first house its the same thing. I began to wonder if everyone had just picked up their shit and left. We took a right down another street, I was in search of somebody- fuck, anybody. Finally saw someone, some college kids walking home from campus. They didn’t say anything either.
R slapped his hands on his thighs and walked beside me. Speechless.The houses didn’t even speak, nobody watered their gardens, nobody stood in limbo in their driveways, idling their metal vessels in preparation for their next menial location. The suburb normally speaks in a languid, almost disconnected dialect, one of American restlessness. This suburb had nothing to say. All the cars were parked, but no one seemed to be inside of them, or their houses. We finally came to the end of the empty street and I could read a sign that said “Fairhaven Storage.” Just beyond our line of sight stood a commercial storage facility- right in the middle of the fucking suburb, I had never seen anything like that.“You see that R, who put that there?”“Yes”this was his favorite answer. The building was about 20 garages long, the garages stood there alone and without any rational justification. I guess that by its-self it wouldn’t be that weird, if it weren’t for what I saw directly across the street- Three college students stood in a circle like the last ones on earth. Next to them was an old shuttle bus from what looked like the 60’s. The sign above the front window read simply: “Shuttle”, but it was one of those signs that spun to show different faces when the bus changed locations, so “shuttle” was flush bottom of the sign and a new word lay frozen in mid cycle and indecipherable at the top. I wondered what the bus wanted to say. I wondered when time had stopped for it. What winters had that bus traveled, had it lost its battle to? What had it intended to reveal to onlookers before the winter surged and it became another ghost in the suburb? What made the scene even weirder was across from both those things there was a farm, a old rustic one. It had a sign jutting from the livestock fence, in faded black letters:
“Millway Farm” hung their, not saying a thing. When we started down the path I didn’t think that what was ahead was going to be a farm, because the road ended with a turn around, at the right of which stood one of those road barriers with the reflective red and white strips that normally indicate a sudden drop off. After the sign the concrete stopped, and then there was only gravel and unkept dead grass that formed a small platoue. On one side of the barricade there was suburbia- alabeit a ghostly and deserted one, it was still modern. On the other end was this platoue that we stood on that overlooked an abandoned grey farmland. When one says “farmland”, what is normally evoked is luscious green fields that seem to stretch for miles. But what we saw was the opposite; monochromatic grey fields and stables that were not expansive but narrow, smooshed by a long line of towering tree’s. It reminded me more of a morbid post war european country side than it did America. The barn was small and a flat charcoal shit grey, the stables didn’t look like they had ever housed life. We stood there for a few minutes and R paced back and forth clapping, nobody said a word.It was like that the whole way back to the apartment. The silence was consuming. All I could hear were footsteps on the worn road. After awhile they became monotone rhythmic thuds all striking in unison, I began to loose all sense of self, it was so silent that I almost questioned if we were the ones making the footsteps at all. The other thing that could be heard was the air, it was so cold and lifeless that you could almost hear the air thinking about its self and every once in awhile the air would mix with the November SkyBlank and produce the eerie noise of wind. The whole time we were surrounded by well kept houses. It was truly lonely.As we walked R breathed heavily as if in anticipation of something, and every once in awhile he would freeze and would stare at the air. He would look so attentively at these things that it made me wonder if I was in fact the crazy one. We walked and everything became rather formless- the houses bled other houses, their contours made of sky and of brick. Over and over again he stared at the nonobjects and there I wondered what it was he saw, what the hell was it, was there a whole world unknown to us? The sun shone through some elder tree’s, and as R turned about this way and that like a lighthouse on a dark ocean, the light poked through his mustache giving him a holy aura. There he was, this autistic saint, peering into worlds, worlds that we surely only dream, constantly clapping his hands in the way a person does when they let someone use their open palms as punching bags. He does it impulsively and without regret. At the same time he chuckles maniacally. As I watch him I can’t stop thinking he gets something that I don’t, he gets some cosmic joke, whereas I look at the barren suburb which gives away like the mouth of a restless river to the dying American farmland, and i’m not understanding the modern emptiness, its just not adding up- he’s having conversations with the wind, with the silence, the silence that most Americans can’t bear. At home he’s like that to, he will pace around the rooms and he will laugh here and clap there, and I will be silent and he will be content, he in his world, I in mine, bored and restless. Feeling like I should push a suburb into a grey field, like I should expand somewhere. I’m looking for the forms, I want to know what he is palming while he claps, but damn him, that saintly autistic never lets me in on the joke.
Friday, September 17, 2010
A part of A part
Pome about a Poem
Ghost
Threadbare
Heart
Breathe
Palm
Bird
Rose
Bible
Handgun
war peace
Love
Death
Whiskey
This Home:
Onion
Ribcage
(Dove
Bullet
Prison ----- Hello
Father ---+ Goodbye
Ciggarette ---> Mother
Palm 1. Hands
a part 2. Equality
of a part of a part
Your Ghost
of a part of a part
is threadbare
of a part of a part
as a warm bullet
exiting the ribcage of Love
Thursday, May 14, 2009
We are Forever
I wonder, are we timeless. Like a Moltov cocktail of flowers, never quite leaving this rebels hand; are we in or out of time? Soon will be yesterday, and yesterday last year, and so forth, until we are nothing but fading light beams, and unspoken concepts. Mortality is nothing but a clock ticking away with varying events and conceptions of time and space as it's hands. We are half past this event, this milestone, 2 seconds away from this idea and this perception.
All move equidistant from death. Never are we closer or are we any farther away from death, we are always moving parallel with it because that is our logical end. We were born to die. Q-->P, at least for this case, but this also must indicate that in a way we are infinite. As a collective we are always born and we always die, this process is the soul bearing for our reality. When looking at society this way, we realize that we are infinite beings.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Procrastination
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