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by doug | October 20th, 2008 @ 10:41 pm
Sometimes it’s fun to dig out the old notebooks and try to recapture my emotional state at a certain point in time. This piece, for instance, was written at a little sidewalk café. I do not remember what initially inspired me to write, or what exactly I intended it to mean, but I can read the words and be transported to that chair on the sidewalk under the fading light of a foreign sky. I can feel what it was to be there. Sometimes the shittiest poems are better than the most brilliant photographs.
By the way – according to Babelfish, “hoche” means “shake.” I have no idea.
Hoche
The automobiles pass by balconied buildings:
floating objects among the immobile.
The Brasserie le Do Re Mi bristles with excitement –
the day is over.
Birds perch on streetlamps, awkward,
for a moment, then move on.
The author perches on his bench.
Paris, August 2000
by doug | September 25th, 2008 @ 11:23 pm
I have been rolled into this dim corner, and
from this vantage point, can survey
my haphazardly scattered, neglected friends –
relics from yesteryears strewn, broken and forgotten.
Sometimes the sunlight filters through
the dusty window glass,
illuminating the corpses of castaways
in this little-lost-toy room
like a littered battlefield.
I turn away from my only companion –
a pale baby’s fist long-severed
from its lifeless, plastic body.
It mocks me – its filthy digits
only cruel imitations of the little girl’s
soft, warm hands that held me,
bounced me, shared me in ancient summer afternoons.
You wouldn’t think it to look at me now –
a sad, limp, calloused and deflated
pink blob clad in thin cobwebs –
but I used to shine a brilliant scarlet –
proud, vigorous, loved. But, see,
childhood innocence is fleeting.
Little girls grow up and venture out
into the reality of the wild, vicious world.
We are bartered away,
casualties of adolescence.
Now, year on year,
I can only gloomily ponder
these pathetic, plastic fingers at my side –
imperfect reminders of how things were
and will never be again.
January 2005
by doug | September 18th, 2008 @ 2:08 am
Natalie Goldberg is an advocate of writing for the sake of writing. One of the exercises she proposes in her unparalleled Writing Down The Bones is that of sitting down and making yourself write — and once you start, not letting the pen stop until you are finished (usually these are timed sessions). Just free-flowing thoughts from brain to hand to page, not worrying about making sense. And the discipline is, of course, to make yourself do that every day, whether you feel like it or not.
It is in that mindset that I lay in bed tonight with my computer on my lap, contemplating what to write. I had stumbled across a neat little open-source text program called Q10 earlier this week — an extremely stripped-down word processor reminiscent of those early ’90s PCs with their monochromatic screens. I found that it lends itself very well to a typed version of Natalie Goldberg’s method.
Here is an excerpt from what I produced in the 5 minutes or so that I gave myself (I hope you like your syntax scattered and your metaphors mixed). If you enjoy writing, please consider hunting down Ms. Goldberg’s book. And if you’re feeling nostalgic for amber type on black monitors, check out q10 as well. I think it’s pretty neat.
At night every sound is a snare drum. The breath beside you. The street noise out across the lawns and under the pale, undulating lights; the car doors and dogs. Wooden skeletons pulsing in and out — the house lungs. Loud whispers.
You roll your neck, rub your eyes, rustle the bedsheets, twist, arch, scratch, curl, rest and repeat. Your mind is a twenty-eight page to-do list. Your stupid mouth is just another pore sweating in the early morning autumnal blush.
This is your every, your continuous. Your birth. Spill into the mattress and dissolve there, suspended in the tufts and coils, until you radiate away — your little particles flicking off one by one, counting down, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43.
by doug | September 16th, 2008 @ 12:23 am
Onwards
Strangers’ eyes lock and apologize to each other
wordlessly, beneath the “hi.” Jackets swoosh on,
hurrying the struggling grass.
Kindness is a reflection in a plastic glass
floating inside muddy eddies under bridges – fog shrouded,
submerging, submitting, malnourished.
A pinky finger is tracing mindless highways out
in the pepper-strewn styrofoam salt flats:
a purple sparkle bulldozer.
Out on the sidewalk, one of the uncounted objectors
spills exhausted examples of lost love-strewn language:
“Dodge with me this verbal minefield – I can be
your flimsy, fleshy human shield; blind until the broken sky
allows us daylight, free until my words are cut down –
deflated fruit from a twig-thin tree.
Trust me or at least pretend I have no fractured,
promised past; no silly, stuttered words to rend.
Laugh me on my wistful way.”
There is a word to describe this pedestrian process, but
little silicon threads are the only linguists left;
their flowing electric signals – the only ministers.
From Spring 2005.
by doug | September 12th, 2008 @ 12:15 am
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m phoning this one in tonight. It’s late. I’m tired. This poem is from early 2005, I think.
Destinations
There is nothing more to write; to say.
I’ve watched the streetlamps recede toward darkened highways;
listening to the drumming rattle of sidewalk artists
beating out tribal war chants that have become
meaningless trivia set to awkward music,
their voices – shallow, spilling hollow sounds.
The bonfires have all but winked out;
I see my withered hands dance in the artificial light,
I see them and don’t believe in them anymore.
Contentment curls human beings like these elderly fists:
little repression mechanisms sputtering out listlessly
behind antiseptic partitions and flickering spreadsheets.
My hands dance because that is what they do,
what they’ve always done – what’s expected.
Beyond the tunnel I’ve seen the devil, neglected
and beautiful, primping his useless wings like a parakeet.
Out on the lawn, the flags hang like candle wax –
clinging lifelessly in the stale industry air.
I am as aimless as these old pathways –
little fake geometric patterns that lead nowhere;
an engineer’s grand illusion of function, gone awry.
I walk along them from point to point,
pointlessly meandering through muddy miracles
of pulverized leaves and starving blades of grass.
by doug | September 9th, 2008 @ 7:11 pm
I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.
~Ogden Nash
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