Such Is Life

Treasure silly days over your rubble. Spring is haunted and your life was crowded with beautiful fallen words like emeralds. Across the centuries I turn myself in and begin a conversation. The leaves themselves, an autumn army of maps, sing childhood promises. No is the word that winds.


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At the time of the prose poem's emergence, French poetry was dominated by the Alexandrine, an extremely strict and demanding form that poets such as Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire wanted to rebel against. Further proponents of the prose poem included other French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. The prose poem continued to be written in France and found profound expression, in the mid-20th century, in the prose poems of Francis Ponge.

—Wikipedia







My Life

The city to take is in a room. The enemy's plunder is not heavy and the enemy won't take it away because he doesn't need money since it's a story and only a story. The city has ramparts of painted wood: we will cut them out so we can glue them to our book. There are two chapters or parts. Here is a red king with a gold crown mounting a saw: that's chapter II. I don't remember chapter I anymore.



Superior Degeneracy

The balloon rises. It is bright and has a point that is even brighter. Neither the oblique sun which casts its bolt like a wicked monster casts a spell, nor the cries of the crowd--nothing will stop it from rising. No! The sky and the balloon are but one soul: for it alone does the sky open. But, oh, balloon, be careful! Shadows are stirring in your gondola, oh unlucky balloon! The aeronauts are drunk.



Mystery of the Sky

Returning from the bal, I sat at the window contemplating the sky. It seemed that the clouds were immense heads of old men sitting at a table, and that someone was bringing them a white bird adorned with its feathers. A huge river traversed the sky. One of the old men lowered his eyes towards me. He was even going to speak to me when the enchantment dissipated, leaving the pure twinkling stars.

—Max Jacob






Cool Places on Pillowcases

Looking for cool places on pillowcases on a summer night! No Columbus ever set out on a more perilous exploration; no Astronaut ever set out on a more difficult mission—as my fellow insomniacs especially, will doubtless agree. Consider for example the fate of would-be summer sleepers who, while looking for cool places on pillowcases on a summer night, fall out of bed—and who then find themselves lying on the floor, with bruises on their heads and shoulders; and who end up with feet in the air, lying there completely upside-down.

—Michael Benedikt

Alice Coltrane has died.

George Bush: "If you don't like my plan, tell me yours."

Zoo Atlanta is the new home of a panda cub.

Emerson on self-reliance. Shell and BP are you listening?

Reflecting Pool

Chaung Tzu dreamt
he was a
butterfly and
upon waking realized
that he may
actually be a
butterfly dreaming
of being a man.

If I dreamt I
was Chaung Tzu
dreaming of a
butterfly dreaming
of being a man
would that
man ever realize that
life itself is the
dream from which
we’ll never
awake?

Five Bright Shadows

There were five bright shadows
inside each thought, when I met you
at the edge of sanity
we discussed the state of chimeras
and their relation to our skin
painted with sunlight
in a forest of excuses
I haunt the foreplay of existence
and just before the best orgasm
you’d ever had
the telephone blooms telemarketers
but we continue right on raining
the echoing thunder lasts for days.



Nonexistence

This nonexistence principle,
let us discuss it over dinner among
dwarves and follow its
cuneiform pattern upon our fingertips
avoiding the truth of the matter
that you are a cruise ship of calm
and I am a Norse god attacking
my steak with stock options.