Monday, July 25, 2011
a pedantic haruspex an admirer of accurate entrails
posted by Scout |
4:26 PM
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
From Psalm 102:
My bones cleave to my skin.
I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.
I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.
For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.
posted by Scout |
4:33 PM
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The water isn't everywhere but there are drops to drink.
posted by Scout |
8:46 AM
Saturday, April 23, 2011
yes there it was, speared on the soul's bright tines
to polish the soul's bright tines
posted by Scout |
10:15 AM
Monday, April 18, 2011
That's the funny thing about the birds and the bees, or the bees anyway. I thought they could only sting once. Love swung into him as a wrecking ball and knocked him flat, knocked him back in time or knocked time flat so he didnt know what hour it was or what year, and tomorrow's presidents had already been born and gilgamesh still walked and it was as if cicero had never really died, with her there on the floor with a face as real as apples and tears and spilt milk. And even though he could not speak, he went through life the living prophet of past disaster to come. And those two children of his, with eyes a colour that no matter where they looked it looked like they were looking at the sea. [or at a cyclone/something]
posted by Scout |
1:14 AM
Sunday, April 17, 2011
asking whether the moon were half empty or half full. and he said that depends if it's waxing or waning.
and he said all smiles are empty. empty crescents like the dark part of the moon you don't see. she said that isn't emptiness it's the full moon.
posted by Scout |
2:09 AM
Sunday, April 10, 2011
their breasts were firm like buttocks, their buttocks soft like breasts
posted by Scout |
4:47 PM
Thursday, March 31, 2011
With the shock of the cut, he emitted a deep, strained sound that - had it come from a goose might have sounded like joy.
posted by Scout |
10:54 AM
Thursday, March 24, 2011
the pearl is my oyster though this day is jason's fleece.
posted by Scout |
10:38 AM
Surely the most consummate form of metempsychosis would be the entity that passes through this and that form of life to reach its final embodiment as a carrion bird, scavenging on the flesh of all the other creatures it has been.
posted by Scout |
8:33 AM
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
o winter skylight vivid refrigeration of the lamb
posted by Scout |
1:24 PM
She said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" And the mirror said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"
posted by Scout |
1:20 PM
the light dappled through leaves... and later, the light mapplethorped through evening palms.
posted by Scout |
1:13 AM
Monday, March 21, 2011
Icarus lives! Wax floats.
posted by Scout |
1:23 PM
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Pas un mot
a brief house
posted by Scout |
4:04 PM
by a fossil-coloured dove
the olive oil bread
posted by Scout |
2:37 PM
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
The absence of "paltry and base" arts keeps "God's true princes... from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors... to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass."
posted by Scout |
2:16 PM
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
After the opera they walked home, Hettie humming and singing the main themes in her ordinary little voice, which sounded pretty.
posted by Scout |
7:42 AM
Saturday, January 22, 2011
High Estragon levels can lead to a loss of libido.
===
"That girl needs to lighten up. Even on a deckchair in the Bahamas, she'd look like she was waiting for Godot."
posted by Scout |
9:26 AM
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
we need at once to recognise the inessential, unreal character of racial categories - and the real, material impact of those categories on actual human lives.
unbodied
posted by Scout |
10:35 AM
Saturday, January 01, 2011
their conjugal decline
posted by Scout |
1:57 PM
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Once you have exhausted the improbable, whatever is left, however intolerable, thrusts in as the truth.
posted by Scout |
11:48 AM
Sunday, December 05, 2010
“ambiguity, self-doubt, andestrangementasfundamental psychologicalcircumstancesorabidingsocialorpoliticalvalues”
posted by Scout |
4:42 AM
Nice little line from Gramsci on the need for a self-reflexive criticism, aware of its own contingency: any valid social criticism must have as its "starting point" an attempt at "'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory."
Flawed, but neat.
posted by Scout |
4:14 AM
Friday, December 03, 2010
sap: Advice from the poets. "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the [PhD student] now." – Samuel Beckett.
kit: I respond to your 'advice' with this line of Oscar Wilde, which sums something up for me: "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." Except that it isn't even proofs but rawest drafts upon which I perform this fruitless surgery!
sap: Nice riposte! But good sir, follow not his advice. Yeats used to say he'd had a "good day" with his poetry when he managed to eke out one line. One instead needs to follow the example of the "moving finger" of Time itself as described in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line..."
posted by Scout |
12:27 AM
Thursday, December 02, 2010
More dandelions for bees.
More suns for planets.
posted by Scout |
8:58 AM
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
By Weeper’s LakeWhere sleepers wakeWeepers slake
posted by Scout |
6:28 AM
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Eve doesn’t bite the apple herself she shares it with two creatures - - or “she broke it in pieces and put the pieces out on the log and sat watching for the birds and the little mammals to come”
posted by Scout |
11:09 AM
Friday, November 26, 2010
Starling Larkwhisk Maybe the solution is not so much throwing in the towel as tearing the towel into strips and tying them together to fashion a makeshift rope. about an hour ago · Like · Comment
Starling Larkwhisk This too shall fail.
posted by Scout |
5:06 PM
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
productive discomfort with dominantn modes of apprehension /ways of seeing modes of historical apprehension modes of apprehending experience//
including individualism itself (seeking vocabs for expressing cllective being, subjectivity, etc)
[not ALL canonical writers of course - but note even bloom on shakespeare! Spre suggess something of this]]
posted by Scout |
3:19 PM
I'm trying to dream up an article (solely to soothe my own sense of my worthlessness to the world) "Loose Canon" to argue about Faulk and Melv - in a semi-paradox, that these are authors deserve to keep their canonicity today precisely because their texts, methods raise the very questions about cultural centre and margin that literary studies is now asking. And that the "canon" of so-called "classic" writers, for all its faults, has actually tended to include those who 8:15 AM break down prejudices/settled ways of thinking - create 'constructive discomfort' with 8:15 AM established discourses [[partly because of their inner dialectical tensions, off-setting of different forms of discourse, etc]] 8:15 AM and that it is therefore actually conservative to DEFY the canon 8:15 AM and progressive to embrace it
posted by Scout |
1:27 PM
"Loose Canon" F and M - in a semi-paradox: these authors deserve to keep their canonicity today precisely because their texts, methods raise the very questions about cultural centre and margin that literary studies is now asking.
Poofreading is very important.
Tristram false dichotomy between two alternative modes of thinking history. Remarkable given Engels focus.
posted by Scout |
6:29 AM
Monday, September 20, 2010
"Knitting with bellybutton fluff." Deremaindered.
posted by Scout |
6:45 AM
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
She was screaming at the leather paneled walls of grief.
posted by Scout |
1:47 PM
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
you feel amazing. you feel so amazing. you feel so good. so good. so good.
you could do anything you wanted to do. you could be anything you wanted to be.
posted by Scout |
2:49 PM
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Genesister:
Defiant Eve ate snake with apple sauce.
== == ==
We wore our own skins like trophy hides, or Prada fur. We were wild with pride that day.
posted by Scout |
1:09 AM
Monday, August 30, 2010
as the east disgorged its contents, the west gorged on its discontents.
posted by Scout |
12:17 PM
Friday, August 20, 2010
engaged, vacunt.
posted by Scout |
1:28 AM
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
“what, to use Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase, each author succeeded in “maing of what he [had] been made.” [JP Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, NY, Vintage, 1968, p.91]
posted by Scout |
8:50 AM
Saturday, July 24, 2010
there are little dead men floating in my pen.
posted by Scout |
8:07 AM
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Did you know that you can have your wedding cake cremated and turned into a synthetic diamond? That's before you have your first-born infant and have the placenta turned into a teddybear for him/her... And yet, ironically, these fossilisations and embalmings only go to prove that "All that is solid melts into air."
posted by Scout |
2:04 AM
Saturday, July 17, 2010
she's galatea, the stalagmite formed at the mouth of a drainpipe
she's
galatea, forming like a stalagmite at the mouth of nightmare.
nightmare lime, the mouth of a dripping nightmare.
posted by Scout |
5:44 AM
Thursday, July 01, 2010
all night with the gothic tappings of a moth in a bucket. damn spirit rappings.
posted by Scout |
11:43 PM
Saturday, June 26, 2010
weeding the widow of her wounds
posted by Scout |
5:57 AM
Monday, June 21, 2010
wet-spots of time.
sick of sleeping on
asleep on the
asleep between
time's wet spot.
posted by Scout |
12:34 PM
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
I was catching my plane - there was not long now, and for whatever reason I was leaving though she would be dying. I had been off almost buying a postcard amongst the fast food stores. It was all so public. I wanted to hold her, now that she was going, but the wheelchair was empty now, and peripheral, and just a bundle of clothes, and all there was to hold was the bottle of bleach. It was a big bottle, the size of a small child in my arms and it was semi-opaque, semi-clear, and inside the bleach was green and I held it and it did not feel so terrible, and it even grew a little warm from my warmth, and loss was something I felt around me, and my sister standing by - and she'd had her own rapprochment. I was holding the bottle crying thinking I didn't want it to be like this, my cheek pressing on the big lid, when And the nearby horse paddock, the polo players and the runaway rabbit and the hatchling chick and the airflight check-in. I had to hold the bottle because somehow she was no longer there in person, or if she was there she was very small. And then she was there again suddenly - like springing me there with the bottle- but she was very small, or not present in her presence, or perhaps just a quarter size, or she was mostly just a voice. And she said in that cruel hurt hurting tone, "when you've finished doing whatever important thing you're doing you might want to say good bye or something because I'm going to be dead soon and you'll have plenty of time to do whatever it is then. Be the happiest day of your life." So so sarcastic. And I wanted to scream, I was crying out "It won't be the happiest day of my life, it won't--!" and I heard my voice all stupid whining choked and ineffectual in rebuttal, and she just said something else, something so hard sarcastic hiding hurt and grim conviction. Something about having a big smile on my face then? Maybe she was dead after that. But why the riding school in the fountain dale in the airport? All those kids from Yale university, on their Druid quest. And I think also she missed her own plane that she would have boarded as a corpse, and that was what it looked like seeing someone die: standing with my aunt and family, and to see someone die they were already gone, you were just standing on the tarmac watching between the faraway pylons the wheeling away by the doctor and nurse or the air hostess of that empty wheelchair.
posted by Scout |
2:59 PM
Saturday, May 22, 2010
you cannot ask the desert why it keeps existing
posted by Scout |
9:07 AM
Friday, May 21, 2010
overheard - some cliched histrionics?
"this is what i wanted from the moment i first met you." "i should have given you that wake up call." "you are so sexy. it's incredible. you are so sexy. so good. so good."
"i thought i had lost my chance. i kept wanting to talk to you. i kept thinking, i've lost my chance to some old bald man..." "thank god i gave you that lift."
posted by Scout |
5:14 AM
Thursday, May 20, 2010
sticks of light
posted by Scout |
5:56 AM
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
kiss me, tenderize the night.
posted by Scout |
2:56 PM
zelda fitzgerald:
Awriterwasallheeverwantedtobe...Butshedrifted inandoutofthearts.Herpaintingreflectedherexaggeratederraticpersonality, decorativethoughitwas.Andherobsessionwiththeballetultimatelydefeated her. Yes, shewassearchingdesperatelyforsomegratificationofherveryown anditwasavalidsearch,butitwasherillness,notScott,thatinterferedwith achievement.8
posted by Scout |
2:52 PM
E. E. Cummings
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the color of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
posted by Scout |
6:52 AM
Monday, April 05, 2010
she was orphaned, omphalost.
posted by Scout |
7:17 AM
His penis flaccid, a froglet's vestigial limb.
posted by Scout |
2:54 AM
Thursday, April 01, 2010
pretty helix, pretty helix
posted by Scout |
1:20 PM
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
"[mutual] disillusionment with the world is... the only real basis for love between man and woman"...
adapted from an essay on melville and arnold.
posted by Scout |
11:31 AM
Extra-celestial.
posted by Scout |
12:28 AM
Monday, March 29, 2010
Melville in Clarel: "the negatives of flesh" ... "the penetralia of retreat"...
posted by Scout |
1:29 PM
"It is not so much paucity as superabundance of material that seems to incapacitate modern authors".
posted by Scout |
1:34 AM
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Tyrone Longchamps - plain vanilla criminal.
posted by Scout |
1:22 PM
Monday, March 22, 2010
"so inconsistent is human nature... that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short" - Stowe of all people!
posted by Scout |
12:58 PM
the little henchwoman. she was at the top of the stairs, where she was not supposed to be.
posted by Scout |
12:48 PM
Eve ringbarked the tree Even stripped off and boiled the bark!
posted by Scout |
7:16 AM
'throwing his life ironically away'
that is me
throwing my life ironically away.
posted by Scout |
7:06 AM
"Let life come asunder, they say. Let water conceive no more with fire. Let mating finish. Let the elements leave off kissing, and turn their backs on one another. Let the merman turn away from his human wife and children, let the seal-woman forget the world of men, remembering only the waters."
"They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains/ the hottest blood of all..." Whales Weep Not.
From time to time, then, Lawrence could write.
They say the sea the sea they say they say they say the sea is the sea they say
posted by Scout |
7:03 AM
Sunday, March 21, 2010
her warm sob that slow plume of sound slow upblooming like blood blushed in water.
posted by Scout |
4:47 PM
leaves have eaten from my hand stones gleam in the snowdrink.
posted by Scout |
9:33 AM
Friday, March 19, 2010
he sat in the indefinite interim with that stuck sand that did not dislodge.
posted by Scout |
1:30 PM
She was an hourglass full of wet sand. Clumped wet sand, too impacted to fall. She was an hourglass overfilled with sand, grains packed in close with no room to move.
posted by Scout |
1:10 PM
in the reeking light
on the white breeze, blood. debris, dropped bark on the hot grass, the shed scabs of trees.
posted by Scout |
6:30 AM
Thursday, March 18, 2010
She didn't seem designed to sit in chairs. She kept getting up, leaning thinly about the room, tossing off remarks.
posted by Scout |
4:08 PM
she had a fridge full of half-eaten things, things that looked to have been bitten and discarded.
posted by Scout |
6:51 AM
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
these hard hearts /
a world too wide and violent
posted by Scout |
1:22 PM
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
When they weren't racing, she would switch to breaststroke sometimes, and he would fall back to watch her slow frog-legging in front of him, and it was as if in that wide, wide dance was the birth of the world.
Sebastian stood: an unembarassed target, and no saint.
posted by Scout |
2:30 PM
Monday, March 15, 2010
I like Deleuze’s remark on novelists who: “characterise the individual as a flow of events and not as a person: ‘…the unique chance that this or that combination has been drawn. Individuation without subject.’”
posted by Scout |
6:39 AM
Sunday, March 14, 2010
solar plexus supernova
posted by Scout |
11:42 AM
the broth of God the spice triad
posted by Scout |
8:57 AM
the broth of God the spice triad
posted by Scout |
8:57 AM
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
The day outside the bedclothes only seemed to get colder as the light grew. She sensed it colder. She lay in the stagnance her had made under the covers, curled tight, so the cold was only on her face and her hair as they lay exposed on the pillow. By cold beheaded.
She dewed into a thaw.
posted by Scout |
11:59 AM
Sunday, March 07, 2010
she spoke the density of sadness in a voice fleet as stone there was a trill in her throat - like a mechanical nightingale and her words came like the words of cut-up prose poetry drawn from a hat.
posted by Scout |
9:41 AM
she repeats unrepeatably.
posted by Scout |
9:27 AM
i am the angel whose mouth is deep
the angel whose rubber mouth is winged
i was the valve inflatable of the that hell of novelty toys, and butchers taut and trim.
posted by Scout |
9:16 AM
All that was left of her was agony.
She was like the snow before it melts.
posted by Scout |
9:09 AM
Saturday, March 06, 2010
the blood is too much like dense air - or is the air dense with blood? i could ask the flies, and they'd say, "it's blood and shit." they know it.
dozens come to feed on it the bellied legs, the flat air conched with death.
posted by Scout |
3:55 PM
in the airlock of regret the airlock of sadness the trapped breathing the airlock of yes
how will i ever cope with what has happened? how will i ever cope with the way things went?
there is this hole called Why that is no grave.
posted by Scout |
3:49 PM
He was a well-paid thirty-four year old managaement consultant, but he still lived with his parents, and tacitly acquiesced in letting them buy the household groceries, and do the domestic chores. But he donated a hefty wedge of his earnings to charities, and he did not trouble to tax deduct these donations.
posted by Scout |
9:26 AM
In the garden he found her dentures, clamped onto the tree, on a low branch, where she had seemingly bitten into it and lodged them. It was like eve had not been satisfied with the apple but had wanted more, more, and had been punished with this extraction, as the hand is cut off a thief.
posted by Scout |
6:15 AM
he felt his mother watching him with that expression morbid and intent. he turned and she was there looking out of him, her stained mouth eager, pouched tight. she had finished her mulberries and soon she would be trying to get out at the back door to get at the tree again. she had removed her dentures.
posted by Scout |
6:12 AM
Friday, March 05, 2010
Ten there was the one about the prostitute, which ended with the punchline "and one for luck."
posted by Scout |
9:19 AM
Thursday, March 04, 2010
He rested, the first day. Just sitting on the back verandah, surveying the stumps, with the saw across his lap, and his palms resting lightly on the heavy blade. He rested most of the second day as well, inside with old newspapers, and crumbling paperback novels, locking the heat out as best he could, but in the afternoon he descended the three steps from the verandah and wandered around among the stumps where they were strewn, trying to guess which one he would decide on, having no idea, showing no preference yet. He tried to imagine them cast on a flood - the way they would float (if they floated) - the way they would turn on the tides (if they did not sink). It was so dry. The ghost-gum lay like crazed bone. The gully gum pachydermal, brittly ruched, brickled. The ironbark slumped dark, sullen - blackarmoured. None looked seaworthy. He stood, arkless and without ocean, surveying the dry miles unrelieved by rain...
posted by Scout |
10:55 AM
Saturday, February 27, 2010
I was fascinated by a poem on the radio where an extended metaphor was unsettled by a simile in which the thing metaphorised was likened to its original self (extended description of horses coming up beach, likened in one line to waves).
posted by Scout |
3:42 PM
Thursday, February 25, 2010
... and god just a calm blood-donor.
posted by Scout |
2:29 PM
the dimwitted bark, the childlike fly he watched the toothmarks of his shoe everything summer-loose.
posted by Scout |
2:27 PM
behind her brow, a pearl of pain
when she shut her eyes she saw it, white
as snowwhite swine.
posted by Scout |
2:25 PM
the gun was her blood on her
her gun was the blood on me
the gunned blood
on her chests the drip of little breasts, and mine staring at hers, the gaze of the nipples head on. My breasts are waltzed pears, they have the look of having danced, they are capered nips.
But no they are not looking at each other, these albino eyes, these soft bulbed pink buttoned eyes - no, the pupils are divergent, wall-eyed, exotropic. And more and less than blind. But some flesh has sight they say - Medusa's locks, of course, and even Merlin's tongue, or so I remember dreaming.
posted by Scout |
2:17 PM
Sunday, February 14, 2010
I had this waking dream that Salome gifted the head of John the Baptist to Gunther von Hagens, who plastinated it and sent it off to Mattell™ as a prototype for their next-generation Little Miss Make-up Doll.
posted by Scout |
1:10 AM
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Since the world was about to end anyway, Donny thought he might as well push that big red button.
posted by Scout |
6:46 AM
Saturday, February 06, 2010
i love Germ Greer's old suggestion that all little girls should be given the option to recognise Barbie as disabled and provide her with a wheelchair, but wonders where that leaves the Bratz dolls. In a top secret NASA extra-terrestrial holding pen? A neck-brace seems inadequate.
posted by Scout |
12:15 AM
Thursday, February 04, 2010
the sightless sky the surfless sea
posted by Scout |
11:12 PM
Sunday, November 22, 2009
the lurid permafrosting of the grisly ancient cakes in the bridal window.
posted by Scout |
7:16 AM
Saturday, November 21, 2009
When Degenerella slashed her wrist, lollies poured out instead of blood. She realised that, like a piñata, she was nothing but a shell full of hard candies. That was when she bashed her head hard into the mirror.
posted by Scout |
12:11 PM
Friday, November 20, 2009
The psychic sat rigid, a cold astrologial dentist, pulling her stars like teeth.
posted by Scout |
8:51 AM
Thursday, November 19, 2009
she was sorting the skulls of dolls.
posted by Scout |
12:53 PM
In her bedroom the litigious light accused every object it touched, growing brightest in the mirror where it sued for breach of copyright.
posted by Scout |
9:13 AM
out of dusk i felt our stone lands falling me apart
posted by Scout |
2:25 AM
to a true vegetarian, sardine cans are only coffins made of tin.
sardine sarcophagi.
mummifying brine.
posted by Scout |
12:54 AM
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
in the mirror she saw her face despairing at its own uneven features
like something cheaply machine-embroidered.
posted by Scout |
1:16 AM
Monday, November 16, 2009
it was only when they were away in the next room when he realised that he had never before noticed the identical twins' identical voices.
posted by Scout |
11:14 AM
Sunday, November 15, 2009
arbor me, harbour me/ exempt me from the night you were my aurora borealis / come and be my fading neon light
posted by Scout |
10:53 AM
Sunday, November 08, 2009
deboned the scaly scythe.
posted by Scout |
11:46 AM
at woman's body's pearly gates voluptuous electric shock (loop to end all loops noose to end lassooing) luckily deep in love and deeply luck in the pearly age, the pearly, pearly evening.
posted by Scout |
11:00 AM
But if grief were rose and turquoise
tranquillity-gas-mask.
he disappeared into complete silence
bourgeois
posted by Scout |
10:56 AM
canned angels.
when opened, the tins smelled of fish.
posted by Scout |
6:01 AM
finding ways to double the shelf life of tinned angels.
posted by Scout |
6:01 AM
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
I worship the wispy mnemonic triggers that free memory from its material detritus.
posted by Scout |
10:45 AM
shuffling through her memories - a pack of cards entirely full of clubs.
posted by Scout |
3:32 AM
Sunday, November 01, 2009
it grew luminously, loomed ominously the dutiful and the banned sever nettles never settled the pungent spooning of the spoonerist.
posted by Scout |
9:08 AM
Friday, October 16, 2009
reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence — cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.
posted by Scout |
10:51 AM
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
He made himself a straw son. He bundled the stiff, mildew-spotted hay into fat hanks and tied them with string. He sectioned out crude limbs, tightening string bows at the knees, the elbows, of arms and legs that bulged and were haired with split ends. Each hand had two dozen bent straw fingers. He held the little knotted body in his heavy arms and wept.
posted by Scout |
1:49 PM
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
She found her lips bleached by the kiss of capital And yet they gleamed redder than ever
posted by Scout |
9:01 AM
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The little girl left her night lamp on, little knowing that, like moths, ghosts are attracted to light.
posted by Scout |
1:32 PM
Friday, September 18, 2009
guinea pig - badger tree climb, scurry up telelgraph poles, next suburb then come back. 2 story hutch taken to barbaecue - girl had taken dolls - went check guinea pigs all this cigarette smoke came out - turned out the two dolls had hid in there to have a smoke. Kokoda cave grandpa simpson drowned drag waterlog wrinklehead. No engagement party food had to slice v thin single tomato. kit ballroom dance.
posted by Scout |
1:09 AM
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
He hadn’t expected that his child would be a fat girl. Perhaps he had unconsciously been assuming that the child would look like the boy on the diaper box at his mother’s house—the one she used to store washcloths.
Nor had he expected that this fat girl would be popular. She made friends easily at school, friends both fat and thin, both boys and girls, fitting in easily as a pliable peg in a flexible hole, happily enmeshed and always full of enthusiastic stories of the schoolday, the week.
He hadn’t expected to have a daughter who was good at squash, and at shot-put. He never expected that he would be at a District Sports Carnival watching his daughter take out the silver medal in shot-put, and taking bronze in discus. He had never expected to see a daughter of his grinning plumply in a photograph, with a ribbon around her neck, entirely unconscious of her fatness.
He did not expect, when she turned sixteen, that his daughter would sit with him at a calm kitchen table, telling him of her plans for university: law or social work or both, and her plans to do whatever good she could do in the world.
He had not expected to have a fairly fat seventeen year old daughter in the top three of her class in every subject, with her charity commitments every fortnight, and with the friendly, slightly overweight boyfriend coming around for dinners on Friday, always cheerful and respectable.
He was never quite sure whether he or his wife could claim any of the credit for how well Lucille had turned out, and how well-adjusted she seemed. He himself had always been a thin man. He didn’t even like cake.
posted by Scout |
11:20 PM
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The gargled argh, The pain antboiling out of her eyes, Ballistic.
posted by Scout |
11:54 PM
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The girl he introduced to her had a hard laugh, liked bricks baked very hard and brittle in a brick oven. But Esther was happy for her father. She imagined how it would feel to be him, to be a man his age and have this pretty young glistening bit of sex attach itself to you so smilingly.
posted by Scout |
11:26 AM
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
death of a brakeman.
nicole whitelaw.
posted by Scout |
2:35 AM
Sunday, July 12, 2009
He had to get back to trainee nurse xx's adventures at the royal hospital for romantic diseases.
when he looked up, he saw an expression of pure absorbed joy and luxury had come over the boys face at something in the book. D looked away hurriedly.
posted by Scout |
12:07 PM
if wash jones were more like sutpen, he coulda got his own back at sutpen by planning ahead to have one of his nameless brute descendants sign on to work with the West Virginia Mountaintop Mining project And thereby literally undermine Sutpen, symbolically, at his very foundations. Such that 2000 years from now Thomas Sutpen whom Faulkner's novel addresses Will have sprung out of a black hole.
posted by Scout |
11:27 AM
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
He tripped by chance the hidden wires of her anxiety.
The aeroplane shook hard, and the calm blue announcement came that the oxygen masks would be dropping, but when they dropped they were plaster death masks, each slung on a calm clear noose.
A calm noose of airpipe.
posted by Scout |
2:42 PM
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
in pursuit of mythic sustenance
her telescopic spear
stabbing the hot hearts of
the wildebeest whales
drenched, dead reckoning
murder. murder and loss.
posted by Scout |
3:48 AM
Monday, July 06, 2009
Adam realised late in the day that what felt like a thorn in his side was only the hatching open of his incubated rib.
posted by Scout |
7:51 AM
Friday, July 03, 2009
hollow, caustic
holler, costly
hallo, cast
horror cost.
posted by Scout |
4:13 AM
she ladders and asps she ladders and asps for hours she ladders and asps
she snakes on down to him her viper eyes vituperant her wild smiling snaking
onto him. she lathers he gasps she lathers he gasps he riddles her slitherwriggling organism. organist.
posted by Scout |
3:59 AM
Thursday, July 02, 2009
"I will not be made responsible for any injuries resulting from my beauty."
He laughed. "All right."
She studied his throckmorton.
"I mean it," she hissed. But she was smiling.
posted by Scout |
10:30 AM
on pigment beach on a sun-gulled day watching the light's glut glutinate on wheaten waves
i approach the sea i feel the sea its sunlit icesharp stun
the air above the water below the air above the water below the air at eye level the water. the water above the water below. the water above, the water above.
the drowning.
i was told the deepest mountains have their base in the deep sea floor: kilometres of dead rock drowned kilowatt hours of dry sunlight up above
up above the water which runs up above the water which flows up above the water
which waves up above the drowned.
posted by Scout |
10:21 AM
Friday, June 26, 2009
from wuthering heights to withering depths
cracking the oyster's world
he was the world's oyster, the oyster's pearl
guzzled in salt, grizzled in the drift.
i have forgotten how to salt breezes.
i have forgotten to let kathy in.
i am the mobled queen! the mobled queen
is good. we all are good.
posted by Scout |
9:29 AM
Sunday, June 21, 2009
is the gleam of breathless eyes the sightless cry of chance?
that one eye the soul's wet cloaca.
i want to grow a second row of teeth, and a second row of eyelashes, like a glamazon-river shark.
posted by Scout |
12:53 AM
Saturday, June 20, 2009
We emerge from love, gelatin-silver luminous.
posted by Scout |
6:08 AM
Thursday, May 28, 2009
her yellow cough.
posted by Scout |
2:00 AM
I am Adam's Eden leaf, censorious
Or a widow, my censorious sensorium
Empty of the light of life, the lux of lust...
I am there all the time without me
Which means flesh.
posted by Scout |
1:11 AM
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
I am often asked if there is a 'good' screen version of MD. I say "no." I would love to make one. Stylistically, it would have to take some queues from Winterbottom (in 'Tristram Shandy' mode), Sally Potter, Greenaway, and the guy who attempted the b/w film of Ulysses. And it would be FUNNY and make creative use of voice-over, montage and cutaway.
posted by Scout |
6:37 AM
Monday, May 25, 2009
the jekkyl breeze hydens into a gust.
posted by Scout |
3:51 PM
Thursday, May 21, 2009
exquisite little distinctions between nuanced moods.
I've been reading "the wings of the dove."
posted by Scout |
2:06 PM
sad with sadness
tired with tiredness
the yearnverbs flat
collapsing
into adjectives
sad adjectives
sad, sad adjectives
trailing their adverbs, sadly.
posted by Scout |
1:55 PM
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
his wordhammer shattering / her petroglyph
posted by Scout |
2:00 PM
Saturday, May 16, 2009
the day will come at a loss in the nude fog and soon the sun will start the starving light will feed in the thick trees glistening
posted by Scout |
2:06 PM
The fanged wind snaps in, lassing.
posted by Scout |
1:59 PM
The mix and match and lips the pick and mix kisses
The green lips of the spun bottle spitting the foamdregs.
Throughout primary school and then high school she'd had to hide this terrible secret of her brilliance, which lurked behind her eyes like a ghastly deep-sea fish, horribly luminous. She was constantly afraid someone would see it, anxious it should never surface, lest the bends should explode it into light.
posted by Scout |
1:56 PM
Friday, April 03, 2009
i am understudy to a tired organ-grinder.
* *
I was fifteen when my seventeen-year-old sister Kaitlyn had her baby. I was sixteen when she and my brother Josh moved to Victoria.
I remember her lying in the ward bed, the thin blue hospital sheet up over her loose form, her eyes down in the baby's face. She looked deep in the baby's face and then she looked up at me and said, "Mickey, he looks just like you." Josh and I went over and looked down into the clenched little face. He did look just like me. Josh grinned.
It was my sixteenth birthday when I learned who the father was. I remember Josh standing over by the kitchen window at my grandma's, the curtain lace pattern cast on his cheek like gold stubble by the sunset. The small fluro over the cooker was flickering. Apart from that it was dim.
posted by Scout |
6:47 AM
Thursday, April 02, 2009
The aporetics of travel. Elizabeth Bishop; the touristic world is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’”
posted by Scout |
1:43 PM
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Even as I type he is cockoo-cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo-crroo-crroo-crrooooooing AND my dream was full of pigeons, and also baby corellas that you and I were feeding microwaved broccoli, while we were AT the Brighton pavilion Prince Regent residence which, bizarrely, had Town Hall station mall and woolworths built on top of it, AND an old apartment by the woolworths where our mother was moving in with reeeeece and a gay couple - one of whom was young and clever but ugly - the older one of whom was better looking but moronic - and reeeeece was being strangely nasty about it.
Indeed, every night this week I have had a dream where you and I are in some strange place together playing with animals. Ask me about my octopus epic next time we speak. KRAAAAKEN! Actualyl, I don't remember that dream enoguh well enough to tell you by now I don't think but it was amazing. We were in the Hamilton hills, run through with motorways that cloverleafed through them, and the whole things had a sortof perspex roof over them because the rest of the universe had been filled up with water - the whole universe! - like some massive deep sea aquarium - and two things that were swimming RIGHT over our heads while we were running trying to get somewhere fast trying to dodge the cars, were a BLUE WHALE and the BIGGEST OCTOPUS EVER, like insane, like the size of a football field, swirling and curling itself, amazing fluid movement, sweeping right over us like a storm, coloured this deep blue with these darker pink spots down its legs, and then when it came right over us, swirling and dilating, we could see up its black hole, and that was when we realised that the octopus was the soul of the whale we had just seen. SO strange!!!! and meanwhile there we were in these grassy hills - that looked like banks of seawweed under the perspex dome-ing - and yet the roads, the roads! which, incidentally, were marked just like our old Lego ones - the same road markings. xxx Sappy PS - incidentally - we thought that the whale had its penis out - hard to work out. = = Every night this week I have had a dream where Kit and I are in some strange place together playing with animals. The one the other night was amazing. We were in the Hamilton hills, run through with motorways that cloverleafed through them, BUT the whole area had a sort of perspex roofing over it because the *rest of the universe* had been filled up with water - the whole universe! - like some massive deep sea aquarium - so we were under the perspex that held the water above - and amongst the many mysteries of the water held just aloft, two things that were swimming RIGHT over our heads while we were running trying to get somewhere fast trying to dodge the cars, were a BLUE WHALE and the BIGGEST OCTOPUS EVER, like insane, like the size of a football field, swirling and curling itself, amazing fluid movement, sweeping right over us like a storm, coloured this deep blue with these darker pink spots down its legs, and then when it came right over us, swirling and dilating, we could see up its black hole, and that was when we realised that the octopus was the soul of the whale we had just seen. SO strange!!!! and meanwhile there we were in these grassy hills - that looked puny, like banks of seawweed under the perspex dome-ing - and us scuttling like crabs - and yet the roads, the roads! which, incidentally, were marked just like our old Lego ones - the same road markings.
posted by Scout |
2:40 AM
Sunday, March 22, 2009
your violent smile. toothed with blood.
posted by Scout |
3:25 AM
your violent smile. toothed with blood.
posted by Scout |
3:25 AM
Friday, March 20, 2009
how she loved him,
her defrosted mammoth
how she wept
when one morning, once more, he froze over.
== ==
how it felt
in the morning when she woke, and
felt the brontasaurus licking her breasts
with that rough rawhide tongue
and that scent of cyclad,
evergreen.
== ==
"A fascinating woman. Nipples the size of dinnerplates. An excellent mathematician."
posted by Scout |
4:30 PM
i will always always always let you lie my sleeping dogs
posted by Scout |
12:33 PM
While we conflate about this bleating flame Let us confute, confound Compound our guilt, with lambent blame, Rake our ribs. It's not the same
Let us gather round this tawdry flame And tell sad tales of language acquisition.
Tell, all told, until our simple circuits break Our soldered sections, crumbling genuflections (At the heart of every circuit is a crucifix).
Tell, and tell, until our simple hearts break off: A dot dot dot A stop stop stop
Oh this gay addiction! This discontinued continuum This stopstart flataback This jumpstart startagain This jumped-up uppity Bust dusting of grunt, this grill Of stitches, steel, and mousse A vomit laughter. A puke opera. The lovesong of windy beaches Belching bleach.
Such magnificent augmentation! Magnificat! Magnifico! Oh, keep me wheeling...
== === ==
For Deremaindered:
I am heavily Catholic.
'Paradise Remaindered' - Nicholas Milton. Distant blood relation - maybe. May as well be. For all we know.
The developing world? The overdeveloped, artificially augmented world, more like. The only axis of evil I know is the crucifix. Or that little line that strikes through the dollar sign. The cross barring of all open doors. The barring of ways. The gold bars, brick solid, burying all of us alive.
The Chancellor of Brown.
== ==
...there to press her prescient breasts!
he hated the taste of his tongue.
green dress and catheter.
= = = =
not augur, augmentation. not prophesies, protheses. calendar and calculator. catheter and calibrator.
posted by Scout |
12:22 PM
the fifth plinth
we bore out our hundred days at the microwave café
coal is at the finest level sunlight when we let loose aloft.
For Deremainderer: Ritner - A Protoretrospective. (Plate I, above): Herculists. Plate II: The Herculisa. Plate XLVII: Herculisa with Green Dog. A Brief History of Brevity (Complete and Unabridged) [Sequel to 'A Short Guide to Length'] The Scent of the Hypotenuse
Trapp's Last Crêpes = the protagonist, Bruno von Trapp, is referred to throughout solely as 'The Spoonerist'. (his slysdexia)
posted by Scout |
12:13 PM
the groove vinyl diaries
It was endowed, emboweled with great girth -
to kiss not her but what moved in her and waited, her protoghost -
giusto ciel
we can all dream. i do sometimes. i fantasise about my inner man.
giusto ciel
Inoculate Your God!
if you want abs of steel/ check out my iron lung - here in this prufrock honolulu
the graphic panic. the tragedy of haddock.
== === == the wife-twin story:
he'd been acting funny about the lunch since the day she first mentioned it (the twins)
she had spoken to this Nadia over the phone, a few times. A deep, pleasant, motherly voice that suggested an older woman. Probably a handsome woman. The phone itself was four years old, but it had never lost that new smell. The whole office had never lost that new smell, a little like rubber, a little like baby powder.
he returned to the office. he wore that epidural smile. She would not let him pacify her.
== == ==
for the infinite sadness:
NB "smacked up on my side of the glass" to end?
or maybe use the convenience store boy?
== == ==
the list there is a debility in breath there is a livery in skin there is a litany in breasts there is a library in life there is a genesis in debt there is a michaelmas in love - a reckoning.
*
there is a hunger that is dust that is not dust there is a dust that is dust and is not dust. there is a sheaf of wheat set in stone and it makes men doubt shakespeare. there is a plethora of self-styled bards their barks worth than biting - their wounds self-inflicted for art. with a view to art. which fails as art. meat is murmur.
== == ==
these slow sheathes his yelp was urgent, jugular. he juggled his feelings pacing, apace the microwave hummed he heard the soft egg pop.
her eyes seized on his. they built on his gaze with gazing. she saw suddenly how old he was. she hadn't felt youthful in years but now she felt her heart's green beat, alow, alive, the keen hello of youth and strength.
and there were his poems, other people's poems hacked and spat out: you my woman hot. you my woman cold. you my woman falling down, down and out and old... he could have been a little more sympatico.
== == == ==
when you pressed my knees that blue ladder | struggled up my spine with your blind chameleon tongue eyeing my innards, out. we gouged love from the black medulla of blent flesh. our eyes would not admit the sun. i remember whispering it is late. how did it get so late? where did the day go? where did the hours go? i remember that fuck: a slow protest, scornless, not unlike childbirth.
== == ==
why did i dream about him? his hand finding my hand his hand finding my hand his hand it has been so long since i have fallen in love.
== == == ==
He wrote anonymous reviews of his own work.
She put out her hand. "Trudi Naylor." "Bob Allcock." "That's a pretty name," she smiled. Allcock looked stuck. "Thanks."
Then there was his friend, Baxter the Bodice Ripper. Hum hum hum. The bodiceripper came over. He wore his shades inside. He smirked like a player. Parsley hooked around his snaggletooth. She hated him on sight, and new that she would screw him. She felt a strange urge to see his underpants. Once, for revenge, she had sewed a little name tag into the CKs of her ex-boyfriend.
posted by Scout |
10:48 AM
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
still when the last of love is dashed there is a litany in skin and in the blush and flex of limbs the blunt percussions of blind trunks the budging bludgeon of bone and bone on bone.
in our last deciduous visions deciduous evergreens in the vast brush of trees in the clip of wind in the wild, fast flush of the spitting breeze there is an acquisition that is loss a promotional valediction, hawking mourning.
posted by Scout |
10:11 AM
Monday, March 09, 2009
Hello, how are you? I am writing this killing time at the zoo in the darkness of voodoo light And I will see you at the zoo, the dead cup full of whooping, the cold zoo Our bodies full like zoos with jibbering and shrieking and disease And pacing felines YES! We are making our brouhaha quietly inside It's all the rage, it is no scowl, no, it is like whispering dimly "hi" and slipping out dark as loam. If i were to go softly from this place To go softly out of this place squeezing shut my eyes til there were no more gaps left open In my fool heart (a heart ajar) would they observe me? Instead I will start jumping, whiling my will away No stars to watch cold through the blue day as I whirl No stars to open between the leaves, instead we will be surrounded by little blue gaps, hard leaves of sky pattering down on us through the canopy as if the wind were an "as if" as if the the wind were a senseless thing outside of time.
i loved that mouth. i wet it with my joke cold teeth, tongue dreaming of lethe wharf and queen mab moistening. inside she was as coal.
i was full of impressions - i could not remember if she were my wife or my sister, that cool dove.
posted by Scout |
2:46 PM
Thickly alive he leaned greasily in the dirty café chair. Wearing the complex bead necklace that looked like a swarm of locusts feeding at his neck. There is time with every piece of writing when it is time to let something *in* he said, though he had not read it, leaning in. Paragraph 3 for example. That was going to be your aleph. But you lost it. *Here.*
From her vacant yet engaging eyes, stilled beams of empty, ossifying light. If only ice could bend. He has a mind to lash out. He feels like a boy in a zoo, at the enclosure of some dull animal, wanting to throw a rock to make it dance.
From her pretty lips, spilled beans.
posted by Scout |
2:39 PM
The hedgehog and the badger lie together, wildernestled. Restless and passionate stars holepunch the hard hull of night Exploding in their millions in his head, a wildernest Her touch nettles through him, in his lungsblood he feels a huge vocabulary of different sighs fight for breathingroom. He can feel it is about to hurt, he can feel so little but he feels above all things this love like mutiny, or the theory of a rebel scientist.
posted by Scout |
2:35 PM
A story, The Million-Dollar Clock. The college. She's just a receptionist. Call her the receptionist. [Write this out, as instruction to reader]. Use the infinite sadness. The dropped plums. The barge of aisles limbs the drained straining of the autopilots, the shoppers, their bulging plastic baskets and emptying eyes and there somewhereelsetobe and the loudspeaker colleague announcements and the two-for-one three-for-two reaching of the toomany women and the sexless men and the tumbling through the fingerdirtof mushrooms for those that frown least. And the baldness of the balding woman on the checkout with the hairnet holding what was left of her hair in place so you had to stare, eyesnared, netted, lost in medical speculation and nameless regret.
On a sudden impulse, taking up the apple: "Oh, this one is my apple, I bought it in another store." The lie feels right, wild on her tongue. The shop girl hasn't the least interest in suspecting her in this, the pettiest of thefts. She feels the thrill, an airless rising in her chest. She feels the pressure of her bra's underwire gudging into her ribs.
Inside her, he was a speculum, obtrusive. She could not bear the sweaty scrutiny of sex.
posted by Scout |
2:27 PM
The scotch poured in the petal cracked the pot calling the scald scale the rabble the sable scrabble the circus fish with their bright hard mouths the sea mice with their mouthtraps the clowns with their gapemouths Gary quite contrary how does your garden grow with silver cells and pretty wagers all in columns and rows Under the river tavern where the death barge bobbed, flippant shiverlets of light His brackish accent racketed in the dockyard beams. Outback, the pitched cicadas and the fluent huzz of bees.
posted by Scout |
2:10 PM
Sunday, March 08, 2009
A solarium of earthquakes.
posted by Scout |
4:49 PM
Friday, March 06, 2009
new plan...
1) Introduction. Introduce the basic terms of comparison, and give an overview of the dominant historical discourse of each author's period, to suggest what they were writing against.
2) Rather than treating Absalom discretely (perhaps a summation via Forter given intro) move into Absalom and Moby-Dick together, for a comparative treatment. Suggest that we see Melville beginning to use narrative technique 'historiographically', as ideology critique, in ways that would later intensify. Treat the emergence of: i) discontinuous/multilinear narrative as implied critique of linear progress narrative; calling attention to that which is excluded from the mainstream of historical discourse, and the complex causation or overdetermination of history by a multiplicity of structural factors (versus individual agency or unilinear development). ii) the use of a submerged or sotto voce narrative undercurrent to suggest the repression of traumatic aspects of history, namely race and labour conflict. iii) destabilising racial hierarchies, blurring the boundaries of race and class categories, to suggest interdependence, interpenetration, dialectical relationships. Suggest, in concluding this section, the increased pessimism seen in Pierre, as disillusionment set in, and the intensification of racialist thinking in the antebellum decades of debate over slavery. The above work will be split over three chapters and will mainly focus on MD and Absalom, but will have reference to other Faulkner texts (especially GDM) and will look forward and back to other Melville texts where appropriate to support interpretations offered, or to show further development of an idea offered in MD.
3) Treatment of Benito Cereno in light of the preceding, exploring Melville's more intense focus on the politics of inexpressibility, on race/labour issues, in modelling the thinking of history. Suggest that, by this stage, Melville's resonance with Faulkner is highly visible - attribute this
4) Conclusion, suggesting how the Melville/Faulkner comparison suggests the persistence and pervasiveness of particular American historical problems as ideological contradictions, in that each treats similar problems in similar ways but writing at considerable geogrphical/temporal distance. Summarising my arguments about the movement in Melville's writing, having reference to his continued interest in challenging the American national success story seen in later texts (Confidence Man, Israel Potter), the haitus after CW, and his return to these questions in Billy Budd with even greater subtlety and complexity - contrasting Faulkner's development in the opposite direction (to more straightforward, direct engagement with traumas of Southern history). Labels: i
posted by Scout |
10:45 AM
Thursday, March 05, 2009
nada surf
afx leaving song
him join me in death
posted by Scout |
8:46 AM
Saturday, February 28, 2009
sclerotic.
==
The father hopes his son will pre-decease him.
He himself was raised in luxury, slurping at the oystered world. A golden boy, gilt if not gelding.
In dreams he sees the finish line, already spattered with blood.
posted by Scout |
5:41 AM
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
this was the dream:
she knew her mother was coming, soon but not yet. the threads of web stretched from the sill to the pillow. the spider web in the corner of the window, testered to the bed, helped her distinguish between this and yesterday, for in her head they were reduced to little snapshots, jpegs almost. in the web, the little spider with its deep red back was moving, housekeeping, making adjustments. did she mind that she had slept with her head near the spider? should she kill it, remove it? she had a fuzzy, sunny, frightening feeling in her head. the light weighed on her, the morning. she went to the phone, and when she checked back she could not see the little spider at first. she could see the bee. a big bee, lodged in the web. the web seemed to have thickened. then she saw the spider again. near the bee. she thought, now, with fear, that she would definitely have to remove the spider. but already there was a cockroach next to the spider, next to the bee, and then there were two spiders, she saw at last - one must have come across from the space beneath her pillow and joined its fellow in the web. they were either sisters or identical lovers, she couldn't say, but she realised, with a kind of basking horror, that there were many big insects in the little web now. there was the big hairy bee, the cockroach - immense beside the spider - and a blowfly, a moth, and other large insects (maybe a beetle or locust) too large for the tiny web or the tiny spiders it was as if the big insects were not simply becoming trapped in the web but had flown there on purpose, flocked to it, lodging themselves on impulse, in abandon and the tiny spiders were moving about them, curating, checking threads, adjusting and they were still, and they hung impossibly large - the black roach, the big round black and yellow bee - with the little red-striped spiders moving about them not hungrily, not to drink but as if they were curios in a museum, or exquisite artefacts, or totems. the little incestuous spider couple moving with that calm, molesting silence.
posted by Scout |
2:14 AM
Monday, February 23, 2009
she didn't just want me tamed, she wanted me topiarised. if she could, she would have pruned me into shape, choosing on purpose some ridiculous design: a teapot, maybe.
posted by Scout |
6:17 AM
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Picking at the scabs of the bleeding obvious.
posted by Scout |
9:59 AM
when he kissed her suffering lips he couldn't hear her heart scream like a little sprayed spider.
posted by Scout |
1:57 AM
Sunday, February 15, 2009
through the slobbing water.
posted by Scout |
9:56 AM
breathe, keep cool, for you are what you are. keep breathing, cool, what will be will be. stop no clocks and start no stones rolling spill no milk and don't split your tongue. rug up, clam up for the coming winter for winter's dells and the hours deep. breathe, breathe, breathe be alert, not alarmed for the day's awake though the night is dark.
posted by Scout |
9:01 AM
now we're sleeping and the wash of words the worn, washed hush is gone from us, gone from us like god in a car rally big money rat crash now and here and loud at last then silent and in flames like lush, hushed tongues white hot, laid flat with spittled heat with specks of silence.
posted by Scout |
8:57 AM
Saturday, February 07, 2009
his house was so huge he had a room for blue nudes.
posted by Scout |
9:57 AM
Friday, February 06, 2009
it was her heartsleet, drumming the deepfreeze the heart's cold propulsion into slush
he didn't dare a glance into that harassed vacuum
the mushrooms, blind grey blooms - blank bulbs, nudged up white and rude around the earthy roots.
posted by Scout |
6:05 AM
through the throbbing star through its bleared trajectory bisecting.
*
he was six when he realised that the smell of the sun was really the smell of dust.
posted by Scout |
2:26 AM
Thursday, February 05, 2009
he did not build a snowman. he built a snowmannequin.
*
the snowdoll:
was living and breathing.
he painted the lips of her snowfilled mouth.
posted by Scout |
2:08 AM
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
but how he loved her bottom-heavy body! buttressing her bottomheavy body the white bolsters.
**
on the boredom of wise monkeys
He said, "You can hit me if you want." But she was looking at him instead. It hurt worse than hitting. "You can hit me really hard," he reiterated. She just looked.
*
The first time he saw her, the train. He couldn't stop staring, he had to say something. The first week he let her go, Monday to Friday, but the next week, the Monday, he made eye contact. He smiled: "What are you eating?" "Imitation peanuts," she said. He let out a friendly scoff, "Sorry? What are imitation peanuts?" She didn't answer that, she said, "I have a peanut allergy, so I don't eat the real ones." "But what are they? What are they made of?" She still didn't answer, she said, "What was our last stop?" And it was only three years later, when they were already married, that the moment came back to him, and he thought to ask again, "What were those, the day we met? Those things you were eating." She looked puzzled. "The peanuts," he pressed. "The imitation peanuts." "Oh! They were peanuts." "Just peanuts?" "Yehah. It was a trick I picked up in high school - every time I had something nice packed for lunch, my friends would nick it, everyone scrounging in for a taste and none left for me, so I took to saying everything was something else. If I said chocolate was chocolate substitute, no one would take any." "Jesus." He's shaking his head. "All this time." She let out a giggle after that. It wasn't a girl's giggle, it was different. The jibber of a bored monkey. It seemed to pass judgement. On him? On this moment? Their past selves? But he let it pass. "So you're not allergic to nuts," he said through the silence, watching her reach for the crisps. "Nope." And he thought aloud, "No you're not, of course you're not... When we made those brownies..." He trailed off remembering. The giggle again. He looked in her face. As she aged, it was gaining lines, wise ones. He thought of her back then, smart and bright on the rattling train. It was not something regularly pornographed, wisdom. There were the topless bimbos in horn-rims, the kinky librarians, sure, drooling into Ulysses, but the mags never showed this kind of face. A sage face, or a shrewd one, wise, or whatever it was. She crunched chips. "Want one?" she grinned at him, chewing. This was their Valentine's Day.
**
The snowman was caving in now, smiling its frowned drizzle of sauce towards its belly.
posted by Scout |
9:32 AM
Monday, February 02, 2009
i wanted to make your dreams come true hoping you might love me like you used to a tit for tat, a that is that - but i fell flat, i stumbled. pawing at the slippery walls of your left ventricle, i found it steep, i slid into the deep deep blood of some stray vain and i was strained away, remaindering.
posted by Scout |
12:11 PM
i am cold and i cannot stop smiling i haven't smiled once.
**
he ran his thumbpad down her spine and whispered, that way danger lies.
**
a short story the tigress ate the afterbirth. but afterwards, she could not bear the night. she paced her cage and tremors filled her skin. she could still taste the blood along her gumline. the red gums ached. in her belly, the meal churned thin. the afterbirth had come and gone before, but afterwards, there was no infant. she did not want to ask herself why. she did not think, it might be that i have bitten off and chewed up more than i can bear. she lacked language, lacked any sentience of the subjunctive. she paced through the thin churning and remembered the paws in her belly, the rolling of the cub, and her guts rolled down, and soon it would be time to take some water.
posted by Scout |
12:02 PM
non fiction:
It might puzzle others, if they saw them, but I know what they are straight away, I'm used to them. These white irregular patches I see sometimes on the black desktop: the salt dried from densepuddled tears.
posted by Scout |
9:31 AM
His eyes appeared on screen and he came at her with his whowhatwhywherewhywherewhen and she could see from his slack shoulders that he was still fat.
After the sexy angst of angry sex, the sobbing. After the sobbing, the cider and the television’s fizz.
The snowman had kiwifruit for eyes and his smile was ketchup.
I was surprised when I saw the time. The airports were all closed and so was the sky, with its shuttered dark.
From her eye, the tear blimped. It dropped to the tabletop, flattening. In the garden she heard him still swearing, his throat roughing air up at a high pitch, the shreik of a skinning cat.
She thought of the next house, the quiet doctor doubtless inside at his desk, with his quiet evening disrupted. She thought of him stubbing his pencil led out mid-crossword. The cryptic clue squinting up at him and the shreiking from next door and the doctor looking from the crossword to the window, seeing only that incongruously peaceful apricot tree, pallid with blossoms.
posted by Scout |
9:30 AM
Sunday, February 01, 2009
you smiled at me for a long time, yes until your smile seemed something slowgrowing on me, like moss
and with this kiss, a loss, no less; the most of things is such - a fading frost.
posted by Scout |
3:49 PM
Saturday, January 31, 2009
They were all around, these arty lizards, and there was me with my Health Magazine, my 'Your Tooth Enamel and You.'
[fictive]
posted by Scout |
2:01 AM
seeking smile starry smile starless smile
posted by Scout |
1:38 AM
the labour day rain the gushed quick Styx flecks of ice cream wrapper weeds of crud.
that eye-gouging sight! his woman, her dress are drenched.
she will always hiss a little when he smiles at these moments of meeting he navigates only by sonar blind love's blindness.
bound south as night piles high like a whistler nocturne: dark. and her hissed laugh
sharp from between the teeth of the starlit smile that he can't see.
posted by Scout |
1:25 AM
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
subsequently, at sea something happened, yes... i felt that satin relapse of sigh into heave, heave of the sea and whelm of ropes, and wind, and shanties spurted wet from the dead lips of popped kelp
[or: of popped kelp pods].
posted by Scout |
2:10 PM
Thursday, January 22, 2009
as he talked she watched his pink tongue and thought how it might feel stroking, strobing on her own with his body thrusting, threshing into hers like a storm through bracken.
posted by Scout |
7:40 AM
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
happy christmas to you, from the portable isle of complexity i take with me everywhere! big hugs, hope everything goes right today, from a fun-filled kind of angle
posted by Scout |
3:30 PM
Saturday, December 06, 2008
i am in sadness, the whale's belly.
posted by Scout |
3:43 PM
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
the hideous flower paintings would be there awaiting him like last christmas.
posted by Scout |
5:53 AM
her face is a little porthole where a stowaway peeps out, forlorn
posted by Scout |
5:52 AM
i pine for sixty fife men
all ninetee fore years old.
posted by Scout |
4:32 AM
the torn rough plum its cheerful terror of skin its sweetness of wetness on lips: upbeat electrocution: a whole orchard of eden apples.
posted by Scout |
4:29 AM
Thursday, November 27, 2008
the sky peached through moving clouds off west looks quite beautiful
posted by Scout |
7:10 AM
Friday, November 14, 2008
a cold crayon drawn up her spine
posted by Scout |
6:03 AM
The next time she was in the store the American was there, the New Yorker, with that voice. When he spoke it was like all of new york had died and been buried in his voice.
posted by Scout |
6:01 AM
Thursday, November 13, 2008
that girl at the gym, that Eve, her knowledge appled forth in wry remarks about his fitness.
===
Preceding scene to terrible sadness:
general store or mini supermarket. Man cat food (?) jellysnakes? Short. Offered coins. All this direct speech. Then: He heard her voice. He looked at her. He told her to eat shit. [END sec - back to house alone, sadness]
posted by Scout |
8:25 AM
all hell
away from the sand in a room rife with light
he said he would write from life.
posted by Scout |
8:19 AM
Monday, November 10, 2008
He watched the tragic blooming of the frail umbrella. Beneath, her face appeared in a blank daub when she turned. She said nothing. His heart beat. He missed the jagged little sallies of her imagination. He watched her quiet lips for a hint of motion but saw only hesitation. She did not smile, and his own smile was gone. Sunk. "Delilah," he said, his breath visibly hanging between them. for a space. "You—" she started, but didn't finish. Characteristically. But he had seen it when her lips moved—the pearl gleam of her teeth, the suggestion of wetness and breath. On his naked neck and hands the faint rain was cold. Pricked specks, precise. Her umbrella was patterned with flowers, pastels—lavenders like early dawn or dusk. It was an old woman's umbrella, through which the winter glare lit her youth strangely.
posted by Scout |
9:20 AM
Thursday, November 06, 2008
already in the slow decaying orbit of menopause.
posted by Scout |
7:09 AM
Well to begin by agreeing on something, I will tell you what pisses me off: that they avoided making the race issue central (in my opinion) *during the campaign* but the second he was elected, they felt they could start hammering away on the issue as if it were the sole purpose of the election - at least on the BBC. THAT I do find cheap.
Once more I reiterate, I don't think many people *were* voting based on race - but I have to say, I still think that even if they were, they'd be quite entitled. Are the sins visited on the next generation? Well, if you take an individualistic perspective, looking at particular mums and dads and particular kiddywinks, it seems a silly idea - why should I feel a legacy of guilt about the genocide of Australian aborigines - I wasn't there!, right? But there is the fact that in nation-building in Australia and United States, the oppression of subordinate races was an enabling condition, and the vested interest of the dominant culture in legitimating its power structures and its very status quo leads to a perpetuation of that dominance and oppression which is as visible in the US in relation to so-called 'African Americans' almost as in Johannesburg. Just a generation ago, Welly, these people could not vote. Can't you see how history - a history of generations being denied the very liberty and political equality for which the US has always so ostentatiously celebrated itself - their exclusion from those rights occurring not just legally, formally, but at ground level through everyday people's attitudes - including people of McCain's generation - might be entitled to find it inspiring, as a symbol, that identifying with the historically-abused, dehumanised demographic minority had made it into the "biggest, whitest house in the country"? Culture doesn't die with each generation - we're born into it, inherit the structures past generations developed, put in place - and we benefit from them - or suffer by them, depending. So yes - the sins can be visited to some extent. In my opinion : )
I DO however see where you're coming from -like, I understand the spirit in which you're saying what you're saying. So yeah : ) But as I study William Faulkner and Herman Melville, I'm kind of permanently immersed in centuries of American cultural panic over race - over how to make black people seem a little less than human - make them something that is "not us - not American" - and so the symbol is inevitably amazing, to me. Personal view : ) But happy to differ. Thanks for taking time to respond. Oh, and Danes are racists. It's because they're closer to monkeys than us. So don't let them lead you astray.
posted by Scout |
2:35 AM
Monday, November 03, 2008
Threadbare from multiple washes, her leggings were getting see-through, but she owned no full-length mirror, so she didn't realise, and she didn't notice people looking in the supermarket because she was too busy squeezing the underripe plums.
*
In a sense she didn't feel like her mother was dead and gone, because when she looked in the mirror she could see her mother's face in her own face, but at the same time, it only seemed to confirm the loss, for it was her mother's dying face that she saw in her face.
posted by Scout |
1:56 PM
It is only when she's at the table, leaning forward on her elbows, wrists cocked and getting sore now as she peels the sixth stiff potato, that she senses the beginning.
It is slow, but entire, and it will not be slow for long - it will come all at once, any moment. But slow at first - the slow and silent stormtrooping of the pall across her body, down her corridors, into her core, that stormtrooping of slow snow, filmic but without soundtrack, a dense spread, a dead wet billowing, and one second more and it has taken hold completely, surrounding, swamping. She is suddenly caught inside it, a big white puffy astronaut suit suffocating her, but without which she knows she could not breathe, and already she cannot breathe.
Her heart. Her heart. She lets out a little laugh, gasless, barely a gasp, and under it her heart begins its throbbed drumming, hard and neither cold nor warm, only sad, with that sad lukewarm character of sadness, that dense infertile weight. She seems to feel the red cells run her bloodstream like lost bees, travelling from weighted bloom to weighted bloom without finding pollen, dragging their unpollinated bodies through a thick molecular air, but it's only her blood, that blackish lightless liquid, its insipid trickling running the same course of terrible sadness to which there is never an answer.
Not a question, sadness. No shape to it, no phrasing. For a long time, now, she will not move - not unless the telephone rings, in which case, she will start her screaming.
posted by Scout |
5:11 AM
There was a kind of snow that only fell on warm, grey days—on days without air, where space was never quite space and light was not light. A pecking, specking snow inside that could neither melt nor evaporate, because it was never really frozen - it wasn't even cold. It came in slow determined billows in flakes like washing powder, flakes like chips of marble, white phosphorus, or napalm. But it didn't burn her. Its textured absence had no taste.
The thlupping bubbles of hard-boiling water rail at the saucepan's brim. and she reaches for the heat knot to adjust it down. She hears the tightening sigh of the gas withdrawing its breath. Its light blue burn beneath the saucepan looks somehow imagined.
A few minutes later, she is straining the seven potatoes, seeking the peeler. She glances at her wristwatch, her grandmother's wristwatch, and sees the digital time, and knows there are probably only a few minutes to go now, and it isn't so much that the drumming is louder, or even nearer, but just that she has pricked to it. She has begun to wait.
Always, the kids at school, would wonder aloud how they would meet their ends. Some imagined murders. Most predicted cancer or heart attack because it required little imagination; it agreed with statistics and their own family records. She herself predicted cancer. No one said suicide and no one at all said revolution, military upheaval. They were seven, six, eight years old. Death was grandparental.
Sick of waiting. She looks again at her watch. It has got to the point where she wishes the doors would hiss open, let the sadness rush in. It occurs to her, though not as a realistic possibility, that it might not come today. It is late, although it has been later before, and still arrived. It is delayed. Trains may delay. Signals fail, and are serviced, and corrected. It is not timed like clockwork. Not exactly.
posted by Scout |
4:56 AM
No it didn't belong to her, it knew so little about her, she knew nothing about it, she did not belong to it; they were like two persons sitting awkwardly together in a rail carriage for a while, that was all, knowing it was only for a time, not long enough to bother exchanging more than a quick glance, and eventually one of them would get up and depart, and it was always the sadness that departed, leaving her rattling on, and it seemed perfectly natural that it was the sadness that should go first, that she herself never departed. She stayed by herself in the carriage, alone, saw other passengers come and go, until the train would complete its circuit of the track and pass back through the same station, at the same time, and the terrible sadness would come.
Sometimes she would find herself on her knees, on the carpet, with her knees scratched up, white bloodless knuckled clutched hard on her thighs, with her lower lip sucked back hard between her teeth, groaning like a nun in immaculate labour.
posted by Scout |
4:50 AM
Enora waited for the hour when the terrible sadness would come. She knew it would come, knew when it would come, and even now she could feel it drumming up, with the slow caution of water towards a spill. And she knew it wasn't really hers, the sadness - that was the funniest thing, how it would rise and descend (both) out of nowhere, coming over her, up from under her, a cold electric blanket, failing either to stifle or surprise her.
posted by Scout |
4:43 AM
Saturday, November 01, 2008
the green wheelie bin was brimful of topshelf pornography.
posted by Scout |
4:44 PM
dark without noise, the blue-beaked night off the radar, with a vast expanse empty of its own urbanity.
posted by Scout |
4:40 PM
A short story:
"I'm gonna kill myself," my mother kept saying. "I'm gonna kill myself." I'd listen, but I didn't believe her. I didn't believe her because I used to have a friend who was always saying that, a good friend who went funny one day and started telling me all the time "I'm going to kill myself" and at first I took it seriously, got worried, but then time went on and she kept saying it but she never killed herself, and after that I stopped listening - we drifted apart. So I heard mum when she said it, but I didn't believe her. Then mum killed herself. Hard to believe, but she did. And it was only a couple of months later I heard that my friend had topped herself a year back, too. I'd just never heard.
posted by Scout |
1:09 PM
Harding's most famous "mistake" was his use of the word "normalcy" when the more correct word to use at the time would have been "normality." Harding decided he liked the sound of the word and made "Return to Normalcy" a recurring theme. Critic H.L. Mencken disagreed, saying of Harding, "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."
posted by Scout |
1:42 AM
Friday, October 31, 2008
"I suppose you like to read." The voice was a cold shred, a rasp. "I like books." Then, as if to excuse himself, "My sister likes reading too." "Yes, I supposed she would. Of course she would."
..
"I don't read. I was what you call an 'avid' reader in my youth."
--
Africa for twenty years. "Which part?" "Does it matter which part?" Not to him, maybe. He didn't know enough - not yet. But surely to Eudora... "I suppose they sent you over here because I'm old - they expect I will be able to tell you stories, like a grandmother in a book." "I don't know." "They think I'm either old and wise enough or old and silly enough to be full of things I know and remember and tell them to you. So we will be like family. Well. What I know. What I know. I don't know what I know. I don't know them, the things that I know." Her dry little eyes were pinned to the window. He could see her gaze cutting at the glass, her eyes etching jagged little patterns on the pane, sharp little scratches.
posted by Scout |
1:35 PM
yes, I do, generally, then I quit my job and i revel in unemployemnt 2:56amSSS : ) bless your buttons 2: T How are you? 2:56amSSS i'm getting a job i'm ok! pretty healthy really : ) marking essays plus i have a supervisee a honours-equivalent gal writin on faulkner 2: t it's 3am after halloween I'm a bit drunk 2:57amSSS lol bless you happy halloween *cuddles* 2:57amTTT ah, faulkner 2:57amSSS in theory, i am "working" touch of burnout, tho! 2:57amTTT I must finish one of his books 2:57amSSS lol 2:58amTTT yeah... 2:58amSSS i think he probably used to say that. any money he never read one. 2:58amTTT hahahaha ! how is the UK at the mo? are yougoing OK (health aside) 2:59amSSS pretty good - i got meself a new supervisor which scares me a bit coz 2:59amTTT wow 2:59amSSS she aint the critical kind she's more the "yeah that's so fab you're so fab" kind which some might find reassuring but i find deeply scary think i'm an academic masochist 2:59amTTT yeah I get ya 2:59amSSS crave punitive but productivwe ciriticism! 2:59amTTT HAHA! yeah 2:59amSSS had kit over here bout 3.5 wks was awessome 2:59amTTT your are fab though 2:59amSSS had fantastic time 3:00amTTT oh cool! 3:00amSSS gallivanting over the country on train passes 3:00amTTT just had dinner with ness and now 3:00amSSS yeah shux honey i hemidemisemi-fab anyway :L ) 3:00amTTT hence v drunk nou, I mean 3:00amSSS quality! but no kit ! she's up w our mum miss the family and the boyfy 3:00amTTT yes, in coffs 3:00amSSS but hangin in there hey - 3:01amTTT i bet … 3:01amTTT is it all OK? 3:01amSSS oh yeah, it's totally good we worked crap out a lot - we had couple of months on the rocks there, 3:01amTTT yes, i thinkso xxx 3:02amSSS how's the writing : ) 3:02amTTT but write her an email 3:02amSSS lol facebook students 3:02amTTT ah... yes... writing... 3:02amSSS it must be strange, to be teacher, suddenly feel like a big grownup person i still think im 16 sometimes not being doing a whole lot hey? 3:02amTTT I thinkshe [Br W] alsways felt a big grown up person, and Being Young was off 3:02amSSS i try get back into it now and then but theres far too much else going on i long since lost the thread, or the plot, or whatever : ) 3:03amTTT no, I'm doing too mcuh 3:03amSSS yeah she kinda implied that to me once 3:03amTTT aha 3:03amSSS bout her time at summ hill 3:03amTTT what are you writing? mmm 3:03amSSS when i was at summ hill with her i remember i didnt know her very well btu i was ragingly jealous of her hair and her singing voice : ) couple of loooong short stories 3:03amTTT 3:03amSSS that don't seem to want to get in shape. 3:03amTTT as in, novellas? 3:04amSSS i sort of have this strong 'aura' of what they're about and how they would be shaped 3:04amTTT edit edit edit 3:04amSSS but the specifics keep eluding me : ) yeah. 3:04amTTT "kill your darlings" 3:04amSSS well, novellas, makes em sound, too like, proper 3:04amTTT I've been told 3:04amSSS indeed - in fact i love "hacking" i call it "hacking" not editing its so liebrating to highlight a whole bunch of paragraphs and instead of editing hitting 3:04amTTT yes, and also slashing 3:04amSSS the "delete" button burning i havent tried yet : ) 3:04amTTT YES no need 3:05amSSS no, too teenagd : ) 3:05amTTT it's all soft copy 3:05amSSS do u write on paper? i do everything on computer it's a problem - my computer performs every function in my life that the microwave doesn't perform. 3:05amTTT I write poetry on paper 3:05amSSS Shocking way to live : ) 3:05amTTT heheh so coz I wrote poetry onpaper, anything I want in that vein, I write on paper first I dunno why 3:06amSSS Did you ever read any swinburne? it's probably a good idea, ur paper thing 3:06amTTT writing on the bus? at work? 3:06amSSS i do a lot of writing on the back inside covers of paperbqcks and on bus tickets lol 3:06amTTT but it's not the means 3:06amSSS both phd and creative 3:06amTTT it's the words ha 3:06amSSS all i ever come up with these days is fragments and ideas that trail off useless. sometimes i miss that feeling at school that there was budding talent and a future in which to develop it 3:07amTTT not useless ifyou put all the fragments together yes 3:07amSSS instead of now, when u feel like you should have 'arrived' and didnt and are no longer a budding renaissance woman 3:07amTTT Iknow I miss the feelingof poetential 3:07amSSS but just, like, well... apathetic? or, seemingly so. SAME! sigh. 3:08amTTT it's not tho, for you, it's the sense of Middle 3:08amSSS maybe. did ur course finish sweet cake? 3:08amTTT in the middle there's little excitement' and little pay off yes ish one did another didn't I'll see if I get a PHd next eyar 3:08amSSS still enjoying? at all rewarding? 3:09amTTT yes and yes 3:09amSSS awesome. that would be fun - sense of expansive time. fantastic to hear! 3:09amTTT I find, in writing, the oddest things can be rewarding a line 3:09amSSS there was a writers discussion group today for anyone who idly writes crap and feels like whinging to others about it or boasting or sharing or whatever but 3:09amTTT a poem 3:09amSSS sasddly clashed with my supervision yeah a single image! 3:09amTTT a single comment in a semester damn I want to read more of your stories 3:10amSSS really? awesome! we shold trade some time... a nice little one so i aint swamping you none! 3:10amTTT just writeFrom Your Heart if you know what I mean yea please? 3:10amSSS totally. 3:10amTTT please! 3:10amSSS i loved reading your poems : ) 3:11amTTT you would never swamp me 3:11amSSS the marrickville et al. shux little button. 3:11amTTT yay yeah, I like that one 3:11amSSS well i gunna rattle on my merry way coz duty calls me alas but let's do a trade. 3:11amTTT I was meant to write 12 poems, ad I wrote 50 3:11amSSS lol 3:11amTTT yes let's til soon mwah 3:11amSSS you are miss prolifica prolix xxxx smooch! xxx 3:12amTTT as are you - you just hide it smatch xxx 3:12amSSS i am miss scraps. the bubble and squeak of the written word xxx 3:12amTTT til soon xxx 3:12amSSS xx
posted by Scout |
9:10 AM
"She made a slow mash of her life with soft gums. Eudora Welty was getting old. But in those moments where she closed her eyes and stopped croaking - in those slow, slow moments where she would sit shut-eyed like a pendulum without motion - he thought he could see the shragged tatters of something like youth still [[Scraping by//shrieking past]] under her eyelids."
add anything!
posted by Scout |
8:37 AM
Thursday, October 30, 2008
she could no longer write or even read in a linear way
instead a panicked scattering of her eyes across the page
having nothing to do with sentences or
paragraphs.
==
her black translucent throat pulsed, trolling.
posted by Scout |
9:17 AM
Saturday, October 25, 2008
defied, deified
posted by Scout |
11:53 AM
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
but there the thing is, fatsolidblundrous.
lodged in the catchment area of my soul.
posted by Scout |
11:42 AM
Monday, October 20, 2008
sick of my own hold music. sick of my own hold music. sick of my own hold music.
and sick
sick too
of not being able to tune between my stations my endless headstatic of too many frequencies twiddling the anxious dials
and then
sick of my own hold music.
posted by Scout |
3:29 PM
Sunday, October 19, 2008
When we have thrust our metaphors aside And looked at things as they are The land is still a dead man And the ocean a stagnant dead woman.
*
Behind every great man is an exhausted illusionist.
posted by Scout |
2:43 PM
In the correlated, corrugated corral he slept on his feet, nose down in dreams.
Outdoors, his groomsman railed hard—spat puns in a vacuum.
=
First of all, let's not pretend that it's realistic. It's not supposed to be realistic. I don't expect you to believe me; I don't think the thing itself expects to be believed. It's just what happened.
=
posted by Scout |
6:00 AM
(in a passionate whisper)
"You are -- maybe you always will be -- my Damocles."
posted by Scout |
5:59 AM
He wrote to Bob and John only because he wanted a second and third opinion on just how gruesomely awful and terribly wrong and cruelly disgusting the whole thing had been.
posted by Scout |
5:46 AM
So I was just thinking how the stars are hot in cold, cold space, like Lawrence's whales in cold water.
posted by Scout |
5:41 AM
And the girl, the slot machine, stood in the night store's cold breathing, like ice. She could feel it still lodged their in her chest. Her heart was a five-pointed star with the spars snapped away.
Something that was possibly once beautiful. Something that could no longer even be fragile, because it was already too broken. It was like her blood was spiked, running cold with a substance colder than cold blood, a substance cool and alkaline and niggard. And from the gravel her shoes crushed light sounds; the gravel like cold cash, dry ice.
It was when the middle distance ceased to fill and empty itself of the sound of passing trucks, when her watch beeped the late hour, that she peeled back the wrapper and started to gnaw.
posted by Scout |
5:33 AM
Stars that will each one day age and die. But not 'one day' for they make day, stars do, or something. Orbits that will in time decay; the planets stray; stars that will some time age and die and new stars and too many infinite billionsof years likegasps of god lapsing neverelapsing i cannot believe they will die yet they will swell red giant pustules of light and shrink and die and the days die with them and one day, no day, dayless dark.
posted by Scout |
1:54 AM
Is the love worth the money?
===
I just crossed to the road's bright side, but the light has thrice denied me.
posted by Scout |
1:42 AM
Friday, October 17, 2008
my misanthrope
she filled up her memory with hate fifty terabytes like years, lost in facing back, despising: loathed hours loathed love lost and when i try to help her trash it it recycles: cached, bitter, black.
posted by Scout |
10:07 AM
Thursday, October 16, 2008
dragged her bagged sack of bones up too many stairs, too much money spent in deadbent gasps of living death, until the till told: TOLL.
the long toll suddened on her deep, white ear. the earlock opened, all the mortal coils unwound with sound. that "it is time", that
TOLL. the simple fee appalled her with its simple 1, 2, 3 a simple rhyming scheme of heavy beats bowled in her chest, a bolus lodged, dislodged a boulder, and it dropped.
i am free, she said. i am not free. nothing is. we pay, we pay. it keeps us safe, that $, $, $, that 1,2, 3.
posted by Scout |
1:29 PM
the cruel addict barked her smilebite vast gnarled harping breath of siren-singed calumny, calumnia, "HARK."
that slow joke, "HARK" as if, in one wet breath, all hate, all hot, the slotmachine of life would rain out change, as if to hear the scream
I WON!
posted by Scout |
1:26 PM
Monday, October 13, 2008
earthed and fused, i was safe, safe, safe the electrical fault would have to wait the fire drill the fire drill the little hiss would have to wait.
i feel it wait i feel it wait i feel tight light i sense the wait i tense its weight i have to wait my electric fault will have to wait.
earthed and fused it keeps me safe the drug retards my fire escape. i cannot snap. i cannot flake. the burning wire will have to wait.
why is the trauma of static so dense? i never liked those mosquito coiled illusions of safety in stillness. alarmed the silent fire? caged unconducted energies? wires won't touch. wires won't touch. sparks don't match. i won't wait.
posted by Scout |
4:27 PM
Thursday, September 11, 2008
She had this wonderful, matriarchal, magisterial way of cherishing each of her perceived inferiors as a Child That Would Never Grow Up. That way, she could play mother, without the threatful implication encroaching that these little people might someday grow up to be *just like her*, equals.
posted by Scout |
5:11 PM
More for urban mermaid:
loan sharks
Did I ever tell you about the time (king neptune, sea) [[ to the cowfish, who was somewhat bovine and rustic in appearance... [the sea pastoral - vs urban environment] The cowfish was sad, but accepted = when she leaves, his wife would be pleased - jealous of his attentions to the beautiful mermaid - said real women had curves, never supposing it best that curves looked better when they were not, like hers, all convex (concave)
In her negotiations with the crown of thorn starfish, mermaid had managed to calculate...
So when she washed up on an obscure beach near palm cove... [Sydney exec conference - first guy who saw her whipped out his iphone rang 000 - thought having heart attack, rushed off - the 2nd, the 3rd all screamed panicked ran... Happily, the first guy came back from hospital, false alarm, armed with new mental strength and a plan... He a hypochondriac, hallucinating. Thought saw mermaid in youth?] [The guy who gets her used to swim we later learn, but feet too small to keep up at prof level - big pool at his posh place] She keeps asking special shampoo because ppl at JW Walker don't like the algae/seaweed smell - she smells like the bins out back of a sushi shop.
He could hardly carry her because he was not a big guy and complete with her well-muscled tail, scales and a hefty tailfin she weighed in at an uncool 93kg.
Her shopping list: Seaweed (fresh) Seaweed (dried) Sushi Caviar [[he starts sending lots Ashfield for the range of asian groceries, Chinese supermarket... Expensive taste for abalone!]
Her love of numbers. Anyway, maybe if I get my nose in business there (ashore), I can get us some attention - some help! (not well liked by other mermaids, not even her brothers and sisters... hoarded shells as a child; tried to institute standardised shell currency versus current casual barter system...]]
He hyponchondriac... She describes coral, millions of tiny organisms - he, a being composed of millions of tiny symptoms... (gave up swim because busy at work, and that is when the hypochondria set in ... he "felt" things, something "wrong" - she picks it's the work that was wrong. He webbed toes, perhaps?
She: "At sea we don't tend to get married," she told him... "We sort of just do what comes naturally..." He: "And have you done... what comes naturally... much?" he asked, nervous. "How would I know!?" she exclaimed, "I'm a fish, you know? I've only got a 3-second memory for these things." She watched his face a long moment, then burst out laughing: "Just kidding!"
Her name; Jingilli? Jingilly?
posted by Scout |
2:44 AM
for urban mermaid:
way with numbers
swimming pool
blue green algae hair - antidandruff shampoo?
petwash mobile to work
disability pension qualifies
against the garish farce, her unfazed face, unsmiling, tight, blotched with rage. The open bill lay on the table. A fight to the death with debt. Fighting debt with debt. Envy the green-lipped vase. A docked dog.
posted by Scout |
2:35 AM
Sunday, September 07, 2008
a will for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains a will !—and to say at the end that which I said at the beginning—man will wish Nothingness rather than not will anything at all .
posted by Scout |
6:47 AM
subterfugit
simmering, shimmering
shit glitter
posted by Scout |
6:34 AM
the misleading errors of language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become petrified therein)
= nietzsche
posted by Scout |
6:31 AM
Thursday, August 28, 2008
i guess i guess i am, or was, electroloved? electrolost?
posted by Scout |
8:56 PM
Thursday, August 21, 2008
i will be staying tonight, and hopefully seeing nanna or at very least you for our famous late brekky tomorrow... How are you? Excuse my crappiness of getting in touch this week, I ave been behind on some things and trying to catch up. How is work, and the 2nd Empire indulgence of home? I hope you are not, like me at times, feeling a little remaindered and redundant?
I had a dream... many, in fact, most of them horrifying, but on this occasion I had a dream with a sparkling interlude; I dreamed we developed a new 'cultivar' of ladybeetle. We had an ordinary red ladybeetle with black spots, and grafted it on to the legs of a bee. When the grafted bee/beetle had babies, they were not red with black spots but instead were yellow with black stripes (and some with black spots). It was sort of beautiful - the dopiest thing about it being, of course, that there are already yellow and other colours of ladybeetle, so we weren't even doing something wild - just a variation on a theme. They thrived at the back of a garden, brightening shadows.
posted by Scout |
5:09 PM
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
i should add: it continued slightly like kit and i were joking a few sentences to each other i said "ok so he's a really ugly baby - but you know, when he gets older—" and kit laughed "—and starts breaking things—" and i said "—and becomes a delinquent thug moron - " and we both just started laughing in a funny despair.
posted by Scout |
2:18 AM
my dream last night horrible we got rushed into having our wedding with liek one morning to prepare for it and we were sort of part of a queue in this ugly space that didnt look anything like th epicture we'd chosen it from and i didnt even have time to put the lovely dress id bought on or i got confused so i ended up wearing this little silver cocktail dress that looked trashy and we sort of were pissed off still about the venue and wed run late and missed the dinner by the time we got called up and rushed in there and there were liek 3 other bridal parties crammed in the one space so we were sort of too pissed off to pay attention and anyway the ceremony litterally consisted of "do you take this woman?" do you take this man" and "you may kiss the bride" and we sort of missed and half our party was too far away finding seats for the lunch we'd missed anyway to see and then i stormed away screaming i wanted a divorce (jsut so i could do it again) then someone told me married people werent eligible to renew their scholarship for a second year or something i couldnt believe that was it and that i was married. and i went in this little room and found the dress i wanted to wear and was about to resentfuly change into it then kit came in and i was screaming at her next aprt of dream just a sudden jump to the future where i had this baby and i was in our garden at 21 west street and anyway there was this creepy man inside doing the floor or something and he had no chin at all, his head just sort of fell into his neck, but a sort of little cleft bum chin sitting on his neck, and he looked all skinny and weird and gross and i was talking to kit who was disapproivng of me for something and we strolled down the back of the yard where there was an empty aviary wnear the humpy with dead sticks in it and it was only then when i asked kit to hold the baby that i noticed it had the same chinless bum chin and these weird rapist eyes. it was so so so so so horrible.
posted by Scout |
2:16 AM
Sunday, June 29, 2008
pugilant purgarotio.
insolent inferno.
pharisaical paradiso.
an inferno inferred!
a paridise paraded!
purgatorio's purrs!
and what happens, what? when they realise that the Babel Tower *is* Mount Purgatory, and that both, that all - heaven, earth, hell, purgatory - are all in Sisyphus?
posted by Scout |
1:30 AM
pugilant purgarotio.
insolent inferno.
pharisaical paradiso.
posted by Scout |
1:18 AM
Saturday, June 28, 2008
From Dante's inferno: The souls frozen in this circle of hell are immersed [in ice] so deeply that only half of their faces are visible. As they cry, their tears freeze and seal their eyes shut- they are denied even the comfort of tears. (Canto XXXIII)
[via wikipedia - of all things]
posted by Scout |
2:33 PM
to whom my death will be as stars on a dead field large and unmeaningful
posted by Scout |
1:35 PM
dumb and dubmer
dumb and dubmer
he, he, geddit?
posted by Scout |
12:54 PM
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
from website 'indecent images':
Rossetti's life fell into an ongoing cycle of drugs and alcohol, and his household was an icon of domestic disorder. He had affairs with a number of his models. Among other things, his personal zoo is legendary, including owls, wombats, parrots and peacocks, among others.
The first of his wombats, named Top, was a frequent guest at his dinner table, where it habitually fell asleep in the centerpiece. Top is believed to have been the inspiration for the character of the dormouse in Lewis Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
In 1872 he tried unsuccessfully to end his own life.
posted by Scout |
3:53 PM
Monday, June 23, 2008
when we got back again she was still in the chair.
she was still in the chair when we'd put the things away, and unpacked the dishwasher, squinting perhaps without knowing it, in the downstairs dim.
she was still there when i went to the back door through the stink smoke and opened it a little.
in a few days she would still be there, her brittle back braced hunched she would still be in the chair.
she was still in the chair.
she was still in the chair.
she is still in the chair.
life, life, life.
the long of it so long.
the short of it so short.
the monotony so deadening.
the variability so disorienting.
the fear and want.
the apathy and willingness to lose.
fold, strive, collapse. lie still.
feel fat.
fade.
long. hate
yourself
the world
wonder if it matters
know it does not matter
if it matters.
posted by Scout |
5:33 PM
Monday, June 16, 2008
and after the last laughs of lust have left there is a surreality in skin—
posted by Scout |
5:27 AM
Friday, June 13, 2008
Hopefulessly
posted by Scout |
9:54 AM
But doctor, this operation... is it reversible?
As reversible as life itself!
posted by Scout |
12:44 AM
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
I've never forgotten the day I was on a train and a man wth his toddler saw his toddler licking the filthy disgusting train window. He immediately snatched the child back, grabbed out a napkin and - to my complete perplexity - began urgently wiping at the window. Rather than the child. I personally feel I'd be more worried about the train filthing my kid than my kid filthing the train, but I like the non-anthropocentric priorities there. Anyway.
posted by Scout |
5:20 AM
Monday, June 02, 2008
the devil went and did some soul searching found it hard to think of search terms so he threw in some wildcards came up with a few hits few broken links few fansites about other devils with the same name but nothing specific.
posted by Scout |
12:43 PM
Monday, May 26, 2008
there you are, strung up high in the hung jury of my heart ready to drop!
and me in yours too, i bet me in yours too.
posted by Scout |
1:13 PM
Saturday, May 24, 2008
definitely a word that should NEVER have been lost from the english language:
"glowffin"
means: blinking on awaking.
as in, "I woke and did glowfinn, thinking how i missed my Admiral"
posted by Scout |
2:42 PM
Anonymous. c. 1300 5. This World's Joy WYNTER wakeneth al my care, Nou this leves waxeth bare; Ofte I sike ant mourne sare When hit cometh in my thoht Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht. 5 Nou hit is, and nou hit nys, Al so hit ner nere, ywys; That moni mon seith, soth hit ys: Al goth bote Godes wille: Alle we shule deye, thah us like ylle.
posted by Scout |
2:30 PM
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Yes, daddler your theory is correct but not complete - it's survival of the rattiest, the fittest - but the particular survival strategy is has developed is to sleep in the jutting lower jaw (aka lower bunk bed) of the permanently open mouth of the cat, snuggled on the tongue. this keeps it warm, slippery, and well-lubricated for fossicking in tricky bins, and also imparts something of the cats 9 lives to it, though in the case of the deformed Lewisham cats, their genetic mutations means they don't get just 9 lives, they get fourteen, but seven of these are what are called "part-lives" in that through each must be endured a congenital affliction so profound that its chromosome deficiencies mean the cat cannot be classified as part of the feline species at all; indeed, some taxonomists (and taxidermists) believe that during these half-lives the thing that the cat is falls outside the animal kingdom altogether.
posted by Scout |
12:40 AM
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