L) Lovers [of course]: A Lullabye [of sorts]

3 Kids. Babysitter rustling them down to tell them a story before bed. It's past bed time. Bed is a word these three kids use for sleep. Both a noun and a verb. I have homework to do.

Once upon a time

What time? Bed time? Day time? Nite time?

Ok you're right. This story didn't take place up on a time. This was before the wind. Before the rain. Not so long before the day or the night.

Before the moon and sun?

No, they were out there, listen. It was dark. It was dark. The mountain was alone in the dark until he heard the sea. She was humming a song and she shined with the rays of the sun across her surface. She shined and she sang and she was lovely.

The specific ocean?

There was only one. One sea and she was all things, she was a raging torment and as clear as a dream, all at the same time. Since there was only one of her, she could be all things, and so she was. All things simultaneously, that means at the same time.

But the mountain couldn't know this because he had always only been alone. There had not even been any other mountains for as long as he could remember. For all he knew, she was just another mountain, and he treated her just like he would treat another mountain.

Now mountains long ago were very tall and they were very far apart. They didn't say much to each other because it wasn't considered polite, and so even as the mountain grew to be more and more in love with the sea, he treated her almost as if she was invisible to him. Luckily, the sea had seen the mountain, too.

The sea doesn't have eyes.

Sure it does.

It does?

Yes. Go to sleep. But you're right in that the sea didn't see the mountain on her own. The fish told her about him.

The fish?

Yes there were many fish of all shapes and sizes and colors who swam from her depths to her shallows and they were her friends. The fish saw the mountain watching the sea, and they heard him talking to his friends about how he would like to meet her.

Who were his friends?

Goats. There were goats who climbed from his rocky heights down to the crags and caves near the tideplain which led to the shore, and they kept him company even though sometimes they annoyed him because they were as stubborn as he was. But he considered them his friends.

And then the sun came through the clouds and it was daytime, and the sun set after a time and it was night. And after many days and nights of watching each other the sea finally broke the ice and she waved at the mountain and said “Hello. You are very tall.”

“Yes,” said the mountain, a little more coldly than he intended, “I am. I am a mountain. Mountains are very tall.”

"I am the sea," she said and “I would like to be very tall, too."

So the mountain thought about this and said, “why don't you come up here and be tall with me?”

And she did. She stretched out her fingers and wrapped her arms around him and pulled herself up to reach the very height of his height. This caused a great wind to blow when she did this. The whole sea moved and a great gust of wind blew in one direction all around the world.

The mountain liked being surrounded by the sea. He liked the colors under the water, and all the little fishes that danced around. He liked the way the sea was all around him, and everywhere he looked she was there, over and under, inside and out, shining and dancing in the light. He could not see anything that was not within the sea. “You are very deep.” he said to the sea one day.

“Oh yes!” she said, suddenly remembering that there was more to life than being up very high. “Yes," she said sadly, "I am very very deep. But you would like it, being deep I mean. Would you like to try it?”

The mountain thought about this and said he would. So he took a deep breath and down they went together, he spread out his rocks, going deeper and deeper, and he fanned out his legs and stretched out his toes and lay back his head until he was at the very bottom where it was very dark, and very quiet, and it even hurt his ears a little bit to be down there, but the sea was with him and it was magical.

It was so very deep. The goats swam around and around like fishes, and the fishes went in and out of his caves like the goats. The sea laughed at him, stretched out down there, and he laughed too. It was nice to be deep. But then he got scared.

“I'm scared that I might drown if I stay down here too long,” he said.

“No, no, there's nothing to be scared of. You won't drown,” she sang happily.

“But I'm scared,” he said, and he really was scared, but the sea just laughed and danced and sang.

“Look at me, I've never drowned down here, you'll be fine.”

But he did not feel fine. He leaned his head up and he picked up his things and he raised himself back up out of the sea and onto the land where it was dry and he could breathe. This caused a great wind to blow when he did this. A great wind blowing in the other direction around the world. And when the two winds collided they picked up some of the fish, and they picked up some of the goats, and these became birds. Birds flying in all around the sky between the sea and the mountain.

“I miss you,” said the sea, “ please come back into the deep with me?” But he could not hear her for the wind blowing all around him. She waved and waved and screamed and cried. And he cried too, because he missed being surrounded by the sea. “Come up here and talk to me!” he cried, “please come here and we'll see how high up we can go together!” But she could not hear him for the wind. And their cries became the first rains, and when it rained the sun did not come out for days and days. And the mountain missed the sea when the rain kissed him, and the sea stretched out her hands, reaching up to the clouds where the rain was coming from. And it was very sad.

But when the rains stopped and the sun came out again, the mountain looked around and saw that the rains had washed a river into his side. All the loose little rocks flowed down the river from him into the sea. And the sea saw that all the rains had lifted her up, and her shore was lifted right to the edge of the mountain, and she smiled.

But they could not hear each other because of the wind.

The sea waved at the mountain, to tell him that she loved him. And the mountain smiled, and thought about this, and he loved the sea right back. “I love you,” he whispered to the goats, and the goats whispered it to the fishes, and the fishes giggled and danced and laughed and played and forgot all about it by the time it was time to go to bed.

And the sea said to the fishes, as she was tucking them all in before she turned out the lights, “how was your day? Did anything happen? Did you hear anything from the mountain?” But the fishes had all gone to sleep, little fish smiles on their little fish lips, and behind their little fish eyes, little fish dreams swimming through their little fish minds.

N) Neurasthenia

Neurasthenia:
Or, “how refusal to edit himself led to poems that were repetitious and full of dreary longueurs”
Or, IMs Away: Leaves me a message

Wednesday, 4PM EST

CoordinateTim: Hey… you there?

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: a failure of the will and it can be dispelled

CoordinateTim: I liked the old guy at the rock concert in your last… Sort of a stereotype perhaps, but I like the gingery acerbity of the guy. Reminded me of you, the future you. Sort of. Old Man Mask. A daunting lizard-wise undertaker of hidden gray wit and sharp edges… dipping liberal helpings from the potato salad while the little kids run around in the wet lawn fucking in the grass. Weird Uncle Masky. Sitting around the fire, smoking dope and distilling hope with his raspy sour pronouncements of what “used to be” now gone, gone, gone.

CoordinateTim: I should get to bed. So, goodnight, d’masq’dman from the future, since you'll probably be the only one to read this. Ever.

11:53 PM

Luigio_5extus: energy can be poured

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: blogular lacuna

Thursday, 10AM

SliceOGringo: “Man-maid, begone.”

SliceOGringo: That’s from a Masque called Tempe Restored!

SliceOGringo: Isn’t that just a perfect find! Cool huh?

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: Making right choices takes time.
Making wrong decisions is harder than you would think.
Should I decide to make choices or not?

sliceogringo: real or imagined problems?

Friday, 9PM MST

Dis4Disdame: Peeking

DMsqdMn17: Duck

Dis4Disdame: Oh you’re there. Spindrift gaze?

DMsqdMn17: Corrupting my concentration with a not-sleeping gift from Wales.

Dis4Disdame: habba habba

DMsqdMn17: Friday night and the lights are low. Graft the curveship between real (high) or unreal (lo!), call the graft God. Pay with yer soul, Serpentine, Seventeen, shedskin, Mr. Skin, Seren Gibson… having the time of your life?

Dis4Disdame: That’s none of your business but yes. I just had the best sleep I’ve had in a long time and am now clean and showered and still all wet even ;)

DMsqdMn17: I haven’t shaved in a Mercurian Year.

Dis4Disdame: Ew. Why not, what’s wrong?

DMsqdMn17: I’m not above vanity. Nor am I below it. I think, on equal footing we understand each other, and have gone our separate ways.

Dis4Disdame: You’re being hopelessly obtuse and I don’t like that you are making me think. Have you eaten?

DMsqdMn17: I'm full. The always

irrational present fills

my sleepless belly

- A haiku by DMM

Dis4Disdame: ♥

DMsqdMn17: I'm tired. Do you hear me? It's real WORK getting out the door.

Dis4Disdame: Writing anything?

DMsqdMn17: What do you think?

Dis4Disdame: I think that like most kids- boys— men your age You make the same mistake of writing about College Dorm Romance or secret little boy dreams… its limiting stuff.

DMsqdMn17: I'm imploding within the pressures I put on myself. The pressures I put on my language.

Dis4Disdame: Stop it. Even Shakespeare said “I ain’t what iamb.”

DmsqdMn17: Ha ha.

Dis4Disdame: :-P

DMsqdMn17: Hey, remember that time when we drove up to Johnson and jumped in the river and then walked to campus all wet and told that guy we were students so he’d let us play Frisbee?

Dis4Disdame: No that was your other girlfriend.

DMsqdMn17: Oh yeah

Saturday, 1:11AM

DMsqdMn17: Sorry.
Auto-response from Dis4Disdame:

goodnight, goodnight
the fallen cry, the empty driveway lights

don't take me home

the time is over goodnight
leaving us the way i thought it might

goodnight, goodnight
~La Rocca~

7:26 AM

Wh0WasThat6uy: Maybe you should apologize to people

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: What to do?

Wh0WasThat6uy: do the world & you some good

Wh0WasThat6uy: before you go loco & start talking to yrself

Sunday, 3 PM PST

DMsqdMn17: So I have this dream the other night that I’m driving this big old '72 Conversion Van down the highway. Really revving it through some great northern forest and there’s lakes that are on other side of me, blurring by, and my family is camped out around most of them, I don’t know how, but as soon as I drive to another lake, my family is already there, picnicking and waving for me to stop. I stopped and swam in one but then I was off again and the day turned to night and the blue sky gave way to glitterblack and I was gearing on beneath wayward projectile stars catapulting like bridges of light across the highway to the horizon. The forest gave way to a major flat freeway and it was dawn and there was my school in an exit off to the right that I missed, it flew by really fast and my friends like sparks flickered in the wind and then the road started to crumble. There were roadsigns labling upcoming lakes but the lakes themselves were dried out dry and the road came up right to the edges of them and stopped so all the van quivered as I rumbled through those dusty valleys but there was a highway over above me somewhere, I saw cars on it, I must have missed it, and then the wind picked me up out of the dust and rejoined the road undulating across the grassy plain. There were big signs blinking YOU BLEW IT, YOU BLEW IT but I thought those couldn’t be for me. And later on as the road gave way completely to grass and then to scrub desert and the van died and I started walking, in a real hurry like, I wore out my boots and my feet were bleeding as I entered into the hills and I could hear music coming from behind me, sirens chasing, and my heart was pumping as I ran into the darkness and there was another sign, farther up and not as bright, which kept saying: YOU'LL NEVER GET A BETTER SHOT and I climbed and climbed up into the darkness

8 PM

Dis4Disdame: Quitcher cryptic shtick.

dmsqdmn17: *mangled smile

Dis4Disdame: I'm making a list of smells that I most commonly remember.

dmsqdmn17: Most of mine are wet.

Dis4Disdame: You know, you don't even talk about the future anymore.

dmsqdmn17: Was it Burroughs who said that women lacking men cease to exist?

Dis4Disdame: misogynist

dmsqdmn17: Yes. So is the world we live in, but I also write about the world /we ought to live in, and could/ which is a world of boundless imagination

Dis4Disdame: not when you’ve limited yourself to the past

dmsqdmn17: “thresh at the heights that imagination spans beyond despair, Outpace the vocable bargains in prayer”

Dis4Disdame: Are you inebriant?

dmsqdmn17: There is no explanation, no need, just a story.

Dis4Disdame: You think you can write yourself out of this? The Markedly diminished interest in activity? Estrangement of others?

dmsqdmn17: We still can't know/ anyone.

Dis4Disdame: Reduced involvement with the outside world? Contraction of intellectual function?

dmsqdmn17: This is a safety thing. Everyone is on the other side of all sorts of barriers now. Between you and me: our fingers, our laptops, phone lines, the western United States, your boyfriend, your breasts, your glasses, my mask, the past, no conceivable future, your pride, my pride…

Dis4Disdame: Fixation on the past? Atypical concept of self?

dmsqdmn17: In the ordinary hours of life I try not to think about it, but now and then lying awake at night, very peculiar hallucinations - I mean, not, they aren’t hallucinations really, but the kinds of thoughts you have when you're suffering from the flu, or you're really sick

Dis4Disdame: “Suffering from the flu” … ?

dmsqdmn17: Doesn’t suffering inevitably lead to redemption?

Monday, 3 PM

OneSwellGuy: Take it easy man.

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: All curiosities soon extinguish themselves.

OneSwellGuy: No one sings all the {planetary} time.

Tuesday, 6:36 PM

SlowaDucha: when it’s all boiled down, what we all ultimately live for is catharsis and fulfillment of bodily desires in little beds. The fusion of hostility and all-encompassing passion for all things that you have on your
Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: Computers powered by angst. Grotesque posturing in our nascent millennium.

SlowaDucha: blog. its primed for hope to emerge. you may look tough, but it's a front. missed opportunities will haunt you. put stock in the happiness of others, not just your own. you have to go somewhere to be somewhere. have to feel something to really live

J) Joshua Deets, Josie's vacation Far Away and J. Alfred Prufrock rockin' 'em, rolling 'em, and burning 'em nebulous up

Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and... oh, so mellow
-The Fantasticks

I know that I'm delusional but I wouldn't call her a ghost.

Just in case, let's call her a ghost.

Let's say I haven't smiled in months.

I know that I have smiled,

but

I'm not sure I know.

The sun's spectrum still tints the sky twice a day on schedule.

At night, before I fade into black, drag into black, fade into black

I turn on all the appliances and breathe deeply

to quell the voice of the ghost, saying my name.

The ghosts all know my name

All of 'em

spread out all over the map on the floor, on the wall, across the ceiling, in the sky

a blue light flickering inside, each star, a blue light flickering for somebody inside looking at all the stars of blue lights flickering, each star...

There are clouds, and above some of them, are clouds. “Sometimes I forget that there are stars,” I remember she said. She said, I remember, a lot. A little of it I remember. Embittered, I look to transingularly combine the past into a singular reflection. A ghost then, a recombinatrix of the past.

That is to say, I feel like I am my own prequel, and I look farther back, farther back still to find happiness. Only I'm old enough now where that happiest I remember being was when I was last least miserable. Black pots with stars on the bottom. Bursting out. The universe leaking, sick wet pools in its seat. Each star coughs for my attention.

Sometimes when the stars have gone dim in the night, they whisper memories to me. Walking and scattering chicken feed, at the base of the budding ivy.

Specters from the past are— their conceit confuses at first—
they re(create the world conceptually, I’m not sure I know a better way to put this. First my sexual slumming and then deeper, further back—
a conversation overheard by a red-headed old blue-eyed man. A cloud within a cloud: A festival of dust called Rock.

“Why do they say that? 'The One that got away?' I let 'em all get away?”

What spectrum distinguishes the light of the one compared to the countless others adotting the heavens of the look-back past?

I had got a text from my Ex's Mom. My ex in a wedding dress, which seemed to me made of the scaly skin of those who had gone before. “take care” she said. Take care is what people say to you when you've burned them enough that they can no longer be expected to give care. In retrospect its easy to ruin a life. My burns were innocuous. I was a star, young and made of light and so blind to everything but my own radiance that I got lost.

Everybody gets lost. I can almost smell the dust. The picture blurs. The old man spins around. His frizzy-red hair turning white, his wide white-blue eyes turning red, his wrinkle-white skin turning redder— what was it he said to us?

“The world is on fire and every solution short of Nirvana is like trying to whitewash a burning house.”

Then he sold us some weed.

Green smoke to ashes.

Dashboards to sand.

Whirlpools of dust at my feet in an oven of howling boys. A woman moans in my memory. Long nights walking through green streets with my feet in the stars, before my time. Waiting for the fat young breasts of truth to hit me show me their milky way.

He sold us some weed and the stars turned into connect-the-dots and I woke up 4 years later.

Is this floor really stone or is it an illusion? I wake ready to leave when a woman moans in my ear, men yell on the TV on the radio, we boys howled, starving, hysterical, dressed in Abercrombie and armed with only our pantless weaknesses.

Frequencies fade. Luminosity dims. It is dark and I’m delusional and the face is hazy, the voice is soft, but I would not call her a ghost.

Just in case, let’s call her a ghost. All them ghosts, those faces in books. Let's read new magazines about old people and update our outdated statuses.

We are communal unto death. It is the death of us. I would have been alone if I had my way. My way was alone, I said, as my friends slowly communed themselves off into blessed unions. It rained and the dust settled and then the stars came out through the clouds.

Through the clouds a high hot young moon, with a shiny pimpled face reflects on our follies with biting satire.

How old I must seem then I don't know.

I don't know how old I must seem

but

I'm not sure I don't know.

Let's say it is cold and I am alone, camping out under the heavens, with the ghost. I would be alone if it wasn't for heaven. I am the ghost. I haven't smiled for--
An old song comes on, past its time, I stare off across the flowers no one sees toward the canyon with the ghost, alone, wondering if she alone is with me.

Twin notes, harmonizing high and low octaves, fading stars stuck in the same orbit, their story you know, you remember that old song...

There is the ghost. I reach out. She is cold, frozen in time, the way I remember her.

M) Masquerade

Did you scribble on the back of the test

even though it said n'existe pas?

 

Have you tried to be someone you aren't?

Who hasn't tried to be more than they are—

--but have you endeavored to be less?

 

Do you pull out your hair?

 

Do you smoke and write?

 

Alleviate the ennui by affecting radiant light?

 

Are you feeling brash?

 

Are you feeling in vain?

 

Ingenious, compressed in concealment 'n' pain?

 

Are you comprehensive in your allusions?

 

Find nuance filling vacant lots?

 

Do you strongly resemble polyhedrons?

 

Is that all you've got?

 

Have you told one person one thing about yourself

an another

another?

 

Have you bet the farm, or do you play it straight?

Simultaneously both, 'risit one or the other?

 

Between midterms and finals is it PRESSURE PRESSURE STRESS?

 

Living in sin, with spilled gin and fast meaningless sex?

 

Do you make long litanies of your phantasies

but phail to get a grocery list aligned?

 

Build castles in the sand

by the ocean

in your mind?

 

Gone separate ways now, in a pretty bad mood,

with Descartes' Subtance Dual, and wine on the roof?

 

Like to watch red ants crawl over gray tombstones and green grass?

 

Have you spent years looking through binoculars

into the bright future

only to find it spun end for end,

telescoping the blenched past?

 

Ask NSFAQs for breakfast?

 

Spend your nights building Great Walls of Sound?

 

Don’t you dabble in derision?

Aren’t you saddled in a hatred of horses?

Kennel’d by contempt for dogs?

 

Do you look away from TVs when the mangled body is found?

 

Talk to your reflection in the mirror, disfigured though it may be?

 

Search for titles for...

...I don't know...

...surprise me.

 

Can your closest close friends see through you better than you can see into yourself?

Do you want so bad to wallow in your familiar miseries that you periodically

put your old friends on a shelf?

 

Get a flat tire

on a cold day

on your merry way

to sadness?

 

That secret you won't tell, and the imminent sweet betrayal--

do you like the word inveigled?

the elation of the fall?

 

Were you a communist in grade school?

 

Are you a melancholy mess?

 

Wear your dyed brown hair down to your tie-dyed dress?

 

Want not to be what you once thought you were?

 

Is he still following you?

 

Is there a spider living in your shower?

Have you named her Cthulhu?

 

Keep the ship sailing past where others have wrecked?

 

Plug your ears when someone cites Robert Frost?

That poem, that poem, augured for naught.

 

Miss the innocent talents of youth,

the braided filaments of which have strung you here

a faraway star, unsuitabl'd speck?

 

Have you got you a roomate who's stabbed you with a knife?

 

Have you rubbed the old coin unrequited

so long between the hearty forefingers of your love life

that its worn down past the faces to nickel, copper

or brass?

 

Hate when people shit pure satisfaction from their ass?

 

Are you coherent or in-, simply tragic, in love?

 

Complex, perhaps overly so, wearing gloves

or makeup or bright tennis shoes or a hat?

Or covering up with subtler tasks...

 

Have you had enough?

 

Put on a mask.

 

En fait, c'est la page dont je parlais

The fact is, this is the place I was telling you about.

 

 

“Come by any time you want, you were right

-Wilco

K) Cay Kar

In 8^th Grade the big-boned Polish Boy

with long knotty hair

declared to us his dream to own a truck

A big truck that he would drive

state to state

and it would have two naked girls--

decals defenestrating in the rear

He showed us the picture of them

he had cut out of a car magazine

I remember this at our reunion today

his body having caught up with his bones--

mostly muscle I mean, his hair cut short

and the truck, he tells me, was only the first step

“Omigod! How the fuck are ya?” he rushes over

happy to see the kid who used to be

masked in popularity

“Meet the wife,” he says, “we just

put down a payment on a house outside of Boston”

My hair is long and I drove a rusty Celica until last week

when it was totalled by an even rustier K Car

when I was drunk

driving home from the bar

where I go after spending my days

as teacher's aid in 8^th Grade English B

at Jackson High.

“We left the baby with her parents” he says

smiling

at his young beautiful bride

and handing me a photo in utero

while I take a deep drink

of my warm beer

to compensate for my missing date

who I left when I moved in with my parents

in their spare room---

I mean basement.

“I'm going to go for a cigarette,” I say

taking a step away

In the 8^th Grade he was the only one who smoked

the rebel now the man, and I think

of the proud statue of our 7th president in the courtyard

surrounded by Seminole students

long-limbed girls and tough brown boys eating tater tots and existing

within one of history's many cycles

of innocuous revenge.