I just want a moment of truth so vast...

Ground Zero // David Lerner

whenever I say things like
"poetry is a lethal weapon"

my friends get nervous

I can't really blame them

they've visted me in
enough loony bins and dryouts
to know that

the line I walk between
image and fact

is sometimes thin indeed

I've fought my share of battles where
the only blood spilled
was inside my head...

Brecht said
he didn't write his plays
to warm the cockles of the bourgeois heart

now he was bragging, but

what with freebase, croissants, all-talk radio and
credit card blow jobs

we're already entertained to death...

and when I say things like
"poetry's a war"

my friends look at me careful
and measure the whites of my eyes
against the blue of my nerves
and sigh

hopefully poised for ironic topspin

but ready to call my doctor
in the middle of the
night

I stare back at them blank-eyed

just because I'm crazy
doesn't mean I
don't make sense

if I sometimes tilt at windmills
head first

it's probably because
I need a new head...

and when they ask why
I say how

when they ask how
I say when

and when I say when
they say

"But I have to go to the doctor
that week"

or, "I'm busy with my dogs"

or, "I'd rather eat Chinese"

or

it sounds good on paper
but what's in it for me

Nothing, I reply

nothing at all

except a chance to drink fire from a glass
and spit it back in some asshole's face

nothing but a license to
chase the Devil around the block
with a big blue sword
that is sharper than his horns

nothing I can run down in a heartbeat
or prove with math

but I cross my soul and
swear to kill

if I'm lying...

the world can eat itself alive
for another 1000 years
for all I care

I was never much good at
abstract compassion

I just want a moment of truth
so vast

that all the lights on the planet
dim for a second...

we're right at ground zero
the times are suffused with murder
perfect with disbelief

and I say

take an emotion
and file it to a point
with everything you have and haven't

shoot it through the laser
that beats in our bones

turn the sound up
way past 10
and don't sweat the distortion...

and who knows

perhaps one day we'll come to
a fine and deadly pleasure

one free breath

I believe in saying it all and taking it all back

I have made a plan, which is interesting, and oddly settling, even though it is painfully vague. I will stay here for the summer, because I would have to pay for here anyway. And I will find a paid internship, or work, or something else that makes me happy and gives me some money and something to learn.

And then, then I will move on. Leave here at least, maybe DC, if I get the perfect job offer. But maybe abroad, because I don't have experience there and I need more field experience, really. Ideally good field experience, great field experience, with an organization that is awesome and helpful and wonderful and that teaches me an endless amount of things. And then maybe I will come back here, apply for jobs back here, find work and a home and a place that I can live alone and buy a dog. And that will be good too. And it's okay if that all happens soon, now, if one of the jobs I really like wants to interview me, wants to hire me, likes me. I'll be okay with that, I'll find a home and a puppy and settle in and that could be good too, but it's nice, for now, that further decisions don't need to be made, enough have been made for now, and what needs to happen will happen.

"I run on whiskey and risk, and ennui and impatience"

Method Suicide | Jacob Scheier
Method Suicide

When Konstantin kills himself,
the actor is off-stage not even pretending to kill himself.
This is why Chekhov is so brilliant and died
only three years after falling in love for the first time. Of course,
Chekhov was saying something about plot
having little to do with events. If The Seagull were fiction,
Constantine’s brain splatter
would fall neatly between a set of brackets.

The phone rang like a gunshot
in the other room. I nearly believed you that time,
though you were playing too many characters
for a realistic comedy. You cannot be Konstantin
and at the same time tell Trigorin/the audience,
“You have just killed yourself!”
The whole thing felt a little Brechtian:
your near death stimulating
only on an intellectual level -
suicide as social gest.

This is why you will never be a great actress.
You can’t just want to die.
You have to live it.
This is what separates the great performances from the mediocre
(I think my mother trained in Stanislavsky).

Chekhov frequented brothels.
He was incapable of trusting or loving a woman,
which might not be different things.

I didn’t leave you after the first attempt,
only because I was reading Lady with Lapdog at the time
and I thought Chekhov was saying that suffering was a requisite
for authentic love.
I didn’t know he was just telling a story,
that suffering is just a description of the landscape,
that love is the only requisite for love.

In my dreams there's a horse, he stands eighteen hands high

I can see his face, when he talks to me over the phone, across all those miles and all those mistakes. I can see his expressions, the way he pulls his cigarettes towards his mouth, rails against everything he knows, rants for twenty minutes before thinking to ask how I'm doing. I can see how he thinks, but I don't know if he realizes what he's arguing for, when he says I should come home. Move back, that the people there are better for me than the people anywhere else, that there's something more to home that nowhere else can contain.

And I want to lash out, ask him if he realizes how trapped home makes me feel, tell him to read my writing from before I left, the pages and pages I scrawled out about how much I wanted to leave, wanted new, wanted passion and discovery in a manner that there can't supply me with anymore. And part of me wants to give in, move home, curl up next to him and forget about the millions of other possibilities, the million other paths.

But if it didn't make me happy three years ago, two years ago, what about it would make me happy now, what has changed that would make it enough. He offers words, ideas of home, but it is not the home I left two years ago, there is little left of that version, and there is nothing to signify that what remains is better, just different, just less connected.

And I won't say no, I won't swear no, but nothing drives me to return there for anything beyond short visits and vacations. It is not that there is nothing there for me anymore, it is just that there is so much more somewhere else.

every boy's in love with his girl's best friend

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
o Interview by David Brancaccio, NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005)

neat

http://blog.yimmyayo.com

I wish that you were here with me to pass the dull weekend

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/9HiOtb/www.opacity.us/

so cool

You've gone away enough when will you decide to stay

The semester has barely started and I'm planning my escape already. Although I don't yet know what it will entail, a summer of travel, visiting friends in Nairobi, grad school in another country, Thailand, Vietnam, a series of places I've never been? I am unsure, the plans don't need to be made yet, not exactly, but I want to find more places to explore. I want to move South, or East, or to warmth. I want an endless amount of time to explore in and no where I need to be.

That single word it landlocked me, Turned the masts to cedar trees, and the wind to gravel roads

Megan Falley | The Honest House
THE HONEST HOUSE

In an effort not to crawl back to you, I crossed the 2 train off my subway map in blue ink, called it a river, sold my canoe.

Swept the soot from the chimney into a vase, scattered it all over Manhattan. Husband, I pretended it was your ash.

Spoke your name in past tense and still, when we found ourselves in the same bar, phoned a mystic. Told her I was seeing ghosts.

When you confessed your mistress, her red hair, her scars, how you learned them from up-close, from inside out, you were no longer the man I married but a dead deer in the center of our swimming pool.

Our dog has always considered you a burglar. Knew to spit, bark, bite before I did. Once while you were sleeping, I stitched her electric fence through your skin. I wear her shock collar on nights I go out drinking, on days I can’t find a reason to stay away even though you have left so many behind.

I’ve watched you with other women. The way you hand fruit to supermarket clerks, how your eyebrows lift at anyone with fake nails. Your favorite party story is how you once,publicly, pleasured a girl with your band mate’s drumstick. It’s no wonder we don’t love the same music.

On our first date, I bought a dress off a woman in Brooklyn so I could stay with you one more day. Last week I threw your clothes from our roof knowing they would have fallen faster had there been a body in them.

When I found a picture of your ex-lovers tits, used as a bookmark, I began opening every novel upside down like a teenager shaking birthday cards waiting for cash to fall out. This explains my love for fiction. We were never married. The dog is not ours.

While washing the dishes I watch from the window as the children we never had drown in the piss-filled pool. I’ve never tried to save them. I invented that pool, this sink.

Did you know that the metronome inside us quickens when telling a lie? I want to build an honest house, where the motion detector is so sharp it knows when my thoughts leave the room. Where the clap-on lamp works as a polygraph. When you swear you still love me, the lights flicker.