A little café at Cole & Irving – I’m sitting in the back yard patio with a babbling water fall. It’s a place designed for solicitude and intimate conversation, so long as you are not annoyed by the occasional pigeon landing on your table. I switch one table to the right in order to obtain more direct sun light. There is the sound of songbirds and wind blown foliage. The man behind me gives a long, loud (startlingly loud) sigh - aaah - and plunks an almost empty paper cup down on the table. Tweet, tweet-at, tweet-tit, aaah - and except the grinding of metal on metal of a passing N train stopping one house over, you just might have been out in the countryside. Another sigh - uh uh aagh - and a plunk of the paper cup. Another songbird joins in making a complex duet but without any harmony.
You can act as if you are not acting, but you cannot pretend that you are not pretending
I slept another four hours this afternoon. A little bit of sniffling confirms my theory that what ails me is physical and not emotional. But as of yet there are no aches or pains. To hell with her, that silly woman, she said that I could go fishing. What? Why would I want to go fishing? And I flew downstairs and out the door smelling of beer.
Erotic desire cannot be recorded or stored, cannot be the site for the production of information or knowledge – Elizabeth Grosz – Space, Time and Perversion, 1995
It breaches the inner most regions, secret parts, of the body, but does not leave anything except that it cannot hold onto. Lust can not know itself, it does not know what it is or what it seeks - Elizabeth Grosz – Space, Time and Perversion, 1995
I had barrowed my high school English teacher’s Chevrolet (a red Impala - 1964 or 1966 – she had bought it from the insurance settlement after her husband had died) to move some boxes from my new place of employment to my old place of work (shouldn’t that be the other way around – normally this would have been true). I parked the car in the employee lot and transferred the boxes. But when I returned the car was not there or maybe I had forgotten where I had parked it – like it sometimes happens in the those big mall parking lots. Oh your daughter Georgiana’s smell was still in the sleeping bag that she had barrowed when she and my sister went on an overnight with the Girl Scouts. I sniffed at it like a dog. That was a long time ago. You are no longer teaching noiw – you are my co-worker now. Can I borrow your car to move some boxes? Georgians, I asked after her, but it was just a formality – I didn’t really care anymore.
I was sure that I had just forgotten where I had parked it that damn car. Morning fades into afternoon and still I can’t find your red Impala but I am sure that I will spot it any second now – I am transversing the lot row by row, spot by spot – there is no red Impala anywhere. I try to get help from security but now I can’t even find the keys – your name, tag and phone number is on a tag attached to the key ring – I don’t even know how to get hold of you – I can only explain that I think it is red and that it is an Impala – the year? Sometime in the mid-sixties. Tag number? I don’t know. The security men are whispering among themselves and calling in on the walkie-takies getting instructions. I keep walking the parking lot. Now there are multiple lots, not just the one as there had seemed to be before. Once I came upon a whole group of red cars but they had been compressed (like a junkyard car compactor might have accomplished) into wall boards (sort of like sheet-rock) and all of these red cars belonged to the mechanic at the company’s auto shop anyway.He had had them recycled on company time. All of these compacted red cars only took up the space of just a single Japanese motor-cycle.
I ran my hands along the surface of the compacted red car wallboards and accidentally flipped a switch that started the engines of all the compacted cars. I was unable to turn them off – so I ran around the parking lot holding aloft the 2-D cars with their wheels spinning until they all ran out of gas. Security came and insisted that I stop loitering in the lot and leave the employees’ cars alone or they would call in the police and have me evicted. They had already lost patience with me after my first run in with them. Now it’s the next day and I still have not informed her that her Red Impala is gone. How had she gotten home? Now I’m at the loading dock. I am looking for something. It is important, but I’m not sure what it is that I am looking for. I sift through a lot of papers and small electrical appliances that have been dumped there. I have to decide what should be kept and what should be shipped to California and what should be pitched into the trash. I supervise the loading of a semi-trailer truck of the stuff that is being sent out to California. Lastly I sweep up the place. I never did find that Red Impala. I never did notify her that it was missing – surely she is aware that something is amiss by now.
I can feel how a telescope points at my head like a gun / A comet’s tail beats on my face and passes by stuffed with eternity – Vicente Huidobro – The Selected Poetry of, 1981 p89
WHY I JOINED THE TEA PARTY
Francophone Anglophone
Call me up sometime
Let us commiserate regarding
Our postcolonial condition
Without a metanarrative
We take up our burdens
And follow the diaspora
Calling postmodern nomadmistic men
And women and all transcendent
Genders. Calling on one antoher
Orientalialists, Islamophobes and citizens
Of former socialist states
Counterhistory is a counterpower
Reality lives on only underground
Looking up from praying for preying drones
From our local mosques
And our synagogues
Denouncing the government, accusing those who fix bayonet, those who slatue liberty, those who you can hear, those who float and never sink, those who hamletize and vietnamize, those who think they think, those who masturbate with gloves on, letting their poetic imagination run wild, exposing those who love it or leave it, those who have feathers, those who bumpersticker, those who have their meals six times a day while others, the poor slobs, have their daily bread approximately once a week, and they shouted against those who, those who, those who screw in the dark with their eyes closed – Raymond Federman – The Twofold Vibration, 1982 p15
A recent study found that children raised by lesbian mothers do better on some psychological measures than do children raised by heterosexual parents; specifically they did better on self-esteem and confidence and also performed better academically and had fewer behavioral problems
Society injures human dignity in order to weaken people’s ability to fight against the limits class imposes on their freedom – Richard Sennett – The Hidden Injuries of Class, 1972 p153
The ultimate in trivia
To become an answer
On Jeopardy
So much for the latest
Political cause
This instant’s instant solution
What is the Tea Pary?
Who is Sarah Palin?
Lady there are too many birds / In your piano / Dragging autumn over a thick / Forest of palpitating nerves and dragonflies – Vicente Huidobro – The Selected Poetry of, 1981 p71
What is eternal has to be re-invented for each specific application.
Love or rejection have no importance for the true poet, for he knows the world moves from right to left and men from left to right. It’s the law of equilibrium – Vicente Huidobro – The Selected Poetry of, 1981 p77
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