Learn Parallax

n. An apparent change in the direction of an object, caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight.

A quarry ran alongside us to the right. I mentioned Garden State and how I'd always wanted to stand along the cliff of a deep pit. He promptly took the next side road and we sifted through sammiches to find the least soggy of them all: Ostrich.
-would you like buffalo or ostrich?


After a brief hike toward the edge, with locust-looking grasshoppers bounding alongside my stride, I concluded that the hike would be too long and it would be better to just soak it in from afar. So I cracked a Karma and he joined me on a weather-worn rock to look over the horizon of the drop-off. Silence and vast skies.





Back at the car, I mentioned how my last lengthy roadtrip had been with David and how he told me I was a terrible photographer on the banks of Coney Island. Christoph briefly introduced me to the basics of photography. Here are a few of my attempts at implementing my new knowledge:







Notice the perfection of shadow inclusion!

Lost Already

Navigator deficiencies.



Shouldn't you be watching the road?

How to Purchase a Styrofoam Cooler with a Stranger

Though set to depart at eight o'clock a.m., he said he'd wait a few hours for the company and free sandwiches. Though we'd shared a short discussion in a dark front yard, a passport scan on a stoop in front of sushi and a mutual love for adventure, we were still technically strangers. Though we thought a twelve inch styrofoam cooler would suffice for an Ostrich, Buffalo, Boar and Turkey sandwich, we were wrong. Off we were, southwest-ish toward Tucson...

Visits schmisits!

Jackie came to visit for a week and we began by hanging out with the dagster.



She likes to write, too.



She loves Jackie cause she looks like me :)


Jackie lived the Naropian life for one day which consisted of biking to class, eating Steak Quesadillas and drinking Margs at Rincon del Sol during a one hour break, then watching pretentious writers/artists (in this case film-maker) use their lecture time as an excuse to make people watch her films (which were actually pretty kickass) and then going to Dolan's for a whiskey during the next one hour break. The whole Summer Writing Program ended at Catacombs, a dive bar beneath the Hotel Boulderado. We sat at a table and wrote for a few minutes then rode our bikes home. So tired.



The same deer comes every day to visit our backyard and eat our weeds. Jackie, Pete and I whistled sweet songs to her as she munched on our wild, unwanted plants.



Hiked Sanitas...






And unfortunately, I'm not much of a paparazzo, so those are basically the only Colorado photos we gots.

Onto Syracuse! Trenton Waterfalls!



x RESTRICTED AREA x


You take the secret trail scattered with NO TRESPASSING signs...


WEE!


getting closer...


And Along the Way...

this is eddy's flower- he left it behind but I kept it.


Please save this to your desktop.




Mushroom ears!


We made it!!!


dancin on the edge


Jackie and camo rock



Much bigger than they look -


Smiles because this is one of the reasons I come home...



"Oh look at the pretty red leaves!"


They're red for a reason:


See how the mossy elephant has poison ivy eyes? Yeah, so did I, after unknowingly playing with the poison ivy. And poison ivy ears- itchy ears are no fun.




To finish off the wonderful waterfalls adventure, we made a friend with an inch worm in Jen's car. Inchy!

Modest Mouse @ Red Rocks

My good friend Jon rented a Converted Van/Limo for his friend Kelsey's 21st birthday to go down to Red Rocks Amphitheatre and I was lucky enough to be invited along. Spent the night hanging out with Detroit kids, drinking Crown Royale and dance halling every night.

Speachless about the beauty. MoMo rocked me, too :)

Ryan Adams, Devotchka and Lucinda Williams are playing tomorrow night and I am so tempted to sell something in order to go...

"Anyone can play the ripcord guitar.”

I can’t stop whispering you
You, my lung lozenge slab to suck on
Thumb for comfort, you were.

You’re bones are just a nice dream,
A karma airbag for my crash.

Scrolls of siestas on Wednesdays flicker in your history:
People trip over the power cord, land into your vegetable lap.

Beyond the gabled rooftops that guard my youth,
I tumble like a cloud for you.

I might be wrong, but you’ve crushed my tin box once before
& I cannot con your spinning plates

Instead, I’ll schedule (without appropriate permissions)
a bending occurence in this
permanent daylight.

Chances are taken like free drink tickets these days
– happenstance surrenders.

To keep my mind to one album would be A Destruction of Trust.

Wish I could, but, in flux,
I come, love, and I leave.
Can hear, but never reach.

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.