Royalties for Parenthesis

dedicated to sacagrapas.





Forgive my interludes
Personal page breaks in sentences
Instead of thinking linearly,
I think in thick stratums
separate echelons of assessment.
I dress myself one sock at a time,
yet very slowly with each garment.

(Parenthetically escorting a phrase is,
in a sense, procrastinating the next section of a sentence.
As a literary device, parenthesis allow a sentence to linger –
in life, parenthesis are the ‘Boondoggles of Dawdling’)

Easily sidetracked,
I use Pac-man as a sad distraction
to (figuratively) defer my tasks to subsequent
positions in syntax.

I promise,
I’ll mow the lawn,
right after several commas, a dash
and quite possibly
an inadvertent semi-colon.

& after that, I’ll pay my debt
to the person who invented the parenthesis –
the devisor of these deviant lines

I owe him much more than any other ‘Punctuation Progenitor’

I attribute my side-speak and
lack of grammatical concentration to this inventor.

I paraphrase myself with these elliptical hugs:
what unfurls to me through renditions,
to others, is covered in coagulated words.
I puncture my life
to find undulations in time –
to breath between the lines.

Though they don’t serve their intended purpose:
(clarification for strangers)
It is the parenthesis I favor.

me jeanie fay and pete

Gold Hill Inn, Colorado

July 4th, 2007

Mushroom Tater

our potato is growing limbs so we put a hat on it and it's fallen off the kitchen table twice already.

it's alive!

And Yet, At the Same Time

Think of the longterm damage-
You might be S.B.D.ing eternally!

No one wants to emit an audible fart in a silent assembly.

If I were the wind
I'd blow you away.

Cup of Philosophic Coffee

Carol Shields says "Just Be!"
Inspirational axioms for dithered individuals:

"Live to the Brim"
"Stop to smell the Lilacs!"
"Say everything with enthusiasm as if an exclamation point accents it!
and it is written in cursive script!"

Buy your Cucumber Juiceboxes in bulk to stock up for Aestivation Season

When forced toward spontaneity I say "yea yea sure - here you go"
then
I retract all statements and
shrivel at obligatory footprints in front

I Flail & Sprawl
a constant stagger of maybe

And don’t think you are any different – you are indefinite as well
Do not deceive yourself to think that you are statuesque and fixed
We’re all just plasticity of ourselves over and over (at least I know am
and it makes me feel better to admit it)

so
though I'm promising you 3:15 every AM in August,
once you jump and break her heart for it,
I'll most likely
back away slowly
and sprint in the opposite direction.

but then again...
maybe I won’t. Who can really know? That’s the tragic humor of it is that
we can never know
until we know
and then and only then
will we know
whether we wanted to know
or not.

if only our lives consisted of rolling around on the carpet & fake fighting with a towel, pouncing ghosts and waking up to a holiday at every sun's ascendancy.

instead
our lives are threads of webs spun so intricate, it drove Picasso to abstraction,
silk worms to masquerade
and snails to double aestivation.

"At least your worries are a cup full of buttons - call me when your cat eats half a stick of deodorant"

Everything relative:

whatever you've hurt
someone's hurt it worse

whatever you've lost
someone else lost it more

whatever pain
someone other severer

worries? no worry is worse than
a poisoned puppy

to regain consciousness of what is lacking

all, every, entire crack-rod/twig/spoon "thrust into a snug place"
holding power in a kind of tunic
exclusive small enclosures
wasted, spent in vain – no longer to be found in a bag-sack or satchel

in gallabuxur*, deprived of life.



• gallabuxur is icelandic for "jeans"


(an etymological translation of one of my past poems... can you guess which one?)

"Take the bins out Sunday night, so we don't forget in the morning"

we're all commingled containers-
sticky substances in the base of our jugs

we're jagged edges of aluminum cans,
soggy tops of cardboard milk cartons

we recycle ourselves-
bump up against other beer bottles and artichoke jars

we're all labeled accordingly
but the glass smashes when we're dropped from too high up
and my label breaks
your's tears
his is soaked in neglected liquid
hers, plastic and in tact

it's after the smash that we learn to live at bottom of the bin together,
broken and mixed

from a crouched position

Sometimes wonder where my elbow is –
If I cannot lick it, is it present?

Teeter two senses on the same precipice
Just as The Grasshopper holds, in accordance,
two visions

two visions concomitantly occurring,
prey and predator, lying down together

:patterned stiletto landscape
perforated crumblings of earth, dirt:


A parallax, clearing a space for fusion,
as well as diplopia
A perspective shift of necessary tension

Horizon as threshold,
– not a line
– certainly not a boundary
A place of configuration and continuation

SNIPpets

From my last post, inspired by such writers as William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, I've decided to start a small collection of short poems where I Say Nothing In Particular. Through these little poem-pets, I will have a collection of dust and cloud-dew.

Aren't you all excited?

Are you still there?

I'm here, come back! I'm alive, again!

SNIP

every writer should have their own:
“say nothing in particular” poem.

this is mine.

-Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)

Words are things; and a small drop of ink
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

for jeff, from prague

the mac computer sat, overnight,
in a shallow puddle on the kitchen table

in the morning, she refused to type.

no one knew where the water had come from
there was no evidence of a glass
having been knocked over by the cat

"maybe it was an ice cube. ice
leaves no trace."

The evidence disappears.
If I ever commit a crime,
solid water will be involved.

for orange peel:

a fish with asymmetrical
fins will swim
in a circle
forever w/o
end

hearsay

she said she heard someone say:
"there is no such thing as synonyms"

and there aren't

just words that say the same thing differently...
"like does not like like that is obnoxious" mm says

and he who writes error with four
r's is being symmetrical, maybe -
tidying up a mess

a pangolin as an artichoke
a noun as a mistake
things we can reflect on
or is it expression, creation?

we mimic and stir, is all

someanimals inacanoe

newness! (nooness?)

as i quoted in the last post, the concept of "busyness" should hit another level of severity. i guess you could use swamped or immersed or submerged but those sound so negative. i am busy in a good way. creatively, but also workedly. everyone should enjoy their work and i do, so i do lots of it.

this is my update: we're running the show here in boulder. i will not specify what we are running, but i can guaran-fricken-tee you that we own a slice of this joint by december 2007. and who's "we", you might ask? we is confidential and will be disclosed shortly.

so this is a very surreptitious post. please continue to check back for updates on "we" and "what".

It's button time.

-meghann

busy as a bee

dear blog readers,

i am sure, by now, you have given up on reading/checking this place of writitude.

much is going on in life right now. i quit a job, acquired a new one, and i am back up at 3 jobbes. exciting - yes. sad to say goodbye to one of my dear dear coworkers who makes me laugh and think ab life thrice weekly, but it is time to see the sunrise.

i promise to all friends of mine a wonderful gift of art/writing/update/personal words of endearment within June month.

love and miss you all,

please continue to return to this site, as it will continue to be digitally written on.


muah!