((a ticket? WE'RE HURTLING THROUGH THE VOID!))

ash @ 11:44 PM




A House of Bears
Gabriel Gadfly

Run away with me to Russia.
I know. You think, “There’s something
wrong with his brain. It’s cold in Russia
and there are bears.” Don’t worry.
I will wrestle the bears for you.
No -- I will tame them.
I will build a house of bears,
teach them to stack one atop
the other, and we will be safe
and warm even against Russia winters.
Sure, the walls are furry,
and maybe a little malodorous,
but just think: if we get hungry,
we can say, “Hey, spare bear bedroom,
go get us some seal ka-bobs
and a bottle of vodka,” and they’ll do it,
because I’ll have tamed
all the bears in Russia for you.

ash @ 12:38 AM




I can't imagine not sleeping beside you, not kissing the edge of your eyebrow, not wanting you.

ash @ 11:34 PM




In response to Tony's "Boston, You're my Home"...

It took me a long time to really feel comfortable at college; I was too shy in a department of extroverts and opera singers. I was never really friends with my roommate, and I spent as little time as possible in the dorm. I very quickly volunteered to work in the costume shop at the college, and that became my haven. In the costume shop, I could just work and keep to myself. I eventually made a few good friends, but I felt out of place and cripplingly awkward anywhere other than the shop.

it wasn’t until I moved into an apartment off-campus that I really started to make Salem my home. I lived with some of my friends, and we created a weird little place for ourselves. We grew up together; suddenly, we were responsible for utility bills and parking permits and term papers and Theatre Production Hours and snow bans and noise complaints and it was all a little daunting. But, eventually, we learned. We learned what we could live without (cable, ex-boyfriends, modesty) and what was absolutely essential for life (heating oil.) Every new piece of furniture, every pie crust I made, every sewing machine, every ridiculous themed party and morning-after Bagel World breakfast solidified that feeling of This Is Me Now, This is Where I Belong. That apartment was the place where, for the first time since Middleboro, I felt completely at ease. And I could light CANDLES

ash @ 9:17 PM




What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness
The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

Then came 1985.

The first applicant was a young man from NYU. During the interview, he spiked his replies so heavily with “like” that I mentioned his frequent use of the word. He seemed confused by my comment and replied, “Well . . . like . . . yeah.” Now, nobody likes a grammar prig. All’s fair in love and language, and the American lingo is in constant motion. “You should,” for example, has been replaced by “you need to.” “No” has faded into “not really.” “I said” is now “I went.” As for “you’re welcome,” that’s long since become “no problem.” Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.

In 1985, I thought of “like” as a trite survivor of the hippie sixties. By itself, a little slang would not have disqualified the junior from NYU. But I was surprised to hear antique argot from a communications major looking for work in a speechwriting office, where job applicants would normally showcase their language skills. I was even more surprised when the next three candidates also laced their conversation with “like.” Most troubling was a puzzling drop in the quality of their writing samples. It took six tries, but eventually I found a student every bit as good as his predecessors. Then came 1986.

As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that “like” had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. And something new had been added: “You know” had replaced “Ummm . . .” as the sentence filler of choice. The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding “and stuff” at the end. Their writing samples were terrible. It took eight tries to find a promising intern. In the spring of 1987 came the all-interrogative interview. I asked a candidate where she went to school.

“Columbia?” she replied. Or asked.

“And you’re majoring in . . .”

“English?”

All her answers sounded like questions. Several other students did the same thing, ending declarative sentences with an interrogative rise. Something odd was happening. Was it guerrilla grammar? Had college kids fallen under the spell of some mad guru of verbal chaos? I began taking notes and mailed a letter to William Safire at the New York Times, urging him to do a column on the devolution of coherent speech. Undergraduates, I said, seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.

Clark Whelton | City Journal
http://rileydog.posterous.com/what-happens-in-vagueness-stays-in-vagueness

ash @ 8:31 PM




A Word on Statistics

Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn't take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four -- well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it's better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred --
a figure that has never varied yet.

>Wislawa Szymborska

ash @ 8:24 PM




Words hard as stones

All the words I never spoke in time
in the flashing moments when they
could have, might have but didn’t –
they follow me like vultures circling
so that I know something rotten
lies in the field. The apologies
never delivered age in the dead
letter office of the brain, yellowing.

But the promises’ broken shards
have worked their way into
the mattress and poke my sleep,
words I should never have said.

Gossip, curses, whispers behind
closed doors, in bed; words
hurled in argument, justification,
the stinging gnats of lies:

sticky words, overpoweringly
fragrant like lilies in a closed room,
rancid, spiky. Such are words made
flesh, made bread, made dagger.

>Marge Piercy | Marsh Hawk Review

ash @ 8:15 PM




Underwhelmed, if that’s a word

I’d say the book was disappointing,
but I had no expectations
of its excellence, so that would be
misleading. I’d say my team’s performance
fails to satisfy, but its salary
and management point to precisely
such a mediocre season. I’d complain
about the weeds that choke my garden,
but their presence is testament to my
indifferent stewardship. I’d say inadequate
is not the aptest word to summarise
the manifest insufficiencies
of life here as we know it, but I
can think of nothing better at the moment.


>Zachariah Wells | The Walrus

ash @ 8:07 PM




I slip off my shoes and read poetry until the phone rings and I have to pretend.

ash @ 9:42 PM




FAMOUS

The river is famous to the fish.


The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.


The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.


The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.


The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.


The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.


The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.


I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.


I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.


>Naomi Shihab Nye

ash @ 9:34 PM




6:59 AM

I’ve been told
that people in the army
do more by 7:00 am
than I do
in an entire day

but if I wake
at 6:59 am
and turn to you
to trace the outline of your lips
with mine
I will have done enough
and killed no one
in the process.




Skin 2
I don’t imagine you
saran-wrapped in black latex
or seeping out the edges
of something tight and red

I don’t close my eyes
to dream of your back
arched at the impossible angle
of a bow pulled tight
encouraging your shoulder blades
to drip the blood
of stockpiled broken hearts
but I hope the sound
of you not shielding your eyes
from my blinding humility
will one day top the charts

it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard
and you’re the charlie chaplin of your beautifuls
because you make me believe it
when you say it all without saying a word

looking at you it occurred to me
I could sit around all day
wearing nothing but your kiss

you make mirrors
want to grind themselves
back down into sand
because they can’t do your reflection justice

and this just in
I am done with those
who in life would have made me fight
an army of imperfections
a battalion of flaws
tonight we’re going to keep this city up
when they hear our bodies
slap together like applause.



>riley dog

ash @ 9:13 PM




Exact
by Rae Armantrout


Quick, before you die,
describe

the exact shade
of this hotel carpet.

What is the meaning
of the irregular, yellow

spheres, some
hollow,

gathered in patches
on this bedspread?

If you love me,
worship

the objects
I have caused

to represent me
in my absence.


*

Over and over
tiers

of houses spill
pleasantly

down that hillside.
It

might be possible
to count occurrences.

ash @ 7:59 PM




Self-portrait as Thousandfurs
by Stacy Gnall


To have been age enough.
To have been leg enough.
Been enough bold. Said no.
Been a girl grown into that
negative construction. Or said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
celestial, appealed for planetary pleats.
And when you saw the sun a sequin,
the moon a button shaped from glass,
and in the stars a pattern
for a dress, when the commission
proved too minute, and the frocks
hung before me like hosts,
to have stood then at the edge
of the wood, heard a hound’s bark
and my heart hark in return.
To have seen asylum in the scruffs
of neck—mink, lynx, ocelot, fox,
Kodiak, ermine, wolf—felt a claw
curve over my sorrow then. Said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
just short of breathing, my mouth
a-beg for bestial pleats.
And when you saw tails as tassels,
underskins sateen, and in entrails
damasks of flowers and fruit,
when the bet proved not too broad
for you, and before me, the cloak held
open as a boast, to have slipped
into that primitive skin. To have
turned my how how into a howl. To have
picked up my heavy hem and run.

ash @ 7:59 PM