I had to stop reading Notley. Remember when I said the trance stuff she said about process didn't really interest me? (probably not but I wrote it in this blog) That's still true but when I went back and read the most trance-inducing work (Alette & Closer), which I realize is different than work written in a trace state, I couldn't finish either of them. They turned me into a medium. Everything shifted brainward, turning very dark. Every night my grandparents visited me in dreams so they could dance because apparently they can't dance except in a live-in-person person's dreams. Our visits were too intense so after three nights in a row I had to stop reading the poems. It was too draining to read them and slip into that rhythm that crosses between worlds which then slipped me into that rhythm that crosses between worlds. I'm very susceptible to poetry right now. I think. Now I'm still dreaming about morphing things and people, which in dreams isn't so strange, except it's more like poltergeists and murder. Lots of sharp objects and blood and really cold fear. Nothing saves you except the fact that you're watching and doing at once. I can't cry in my sleep any more--it's too exhausting. No more Alice (for now). She fucks too much with my head.

It's very strange that when I read Lorraine's chapbook, which I think I've heard her read before, at least most of it, but maybe I'm confused, the white space feels chaotic and full of noise, but the text feels like moments where that chaos stops long enough to get out a single sentence or a couple of them. I don't think I've ever read anything that made me feel this before. There's a rushing quality to the blankness. And it keeps making me think the word vaudeville, voix de ville.

poem for Norma Cole

(after reading Do the Monkey)

to go a little backward
while aiming for very
backward

clawmarks slide-ing down
a shiny happy spot
on the turnstile
can’t be filched

how many phrases
outshine their ex-
ecution
(“slicing a lemon”)
mimes tell the monkeys
do

they ask if we’re full
of dread without
their mouths
we say no
unsure what it looks like

“free will” news
doesn’t reach us
through demise

failure a sign of
a hatred of
windows
at address on a
quality park, two
adjacent zeroes
amid inexplicable
numbers, such as
all of them

I Hate Perfume

Adam told me about this place and I wanna go some time. I might order something online--it's tempting.

How to Get Rid of Identity (a work in progress)

This is a hard one.

1. Stay hydrated. This makes me see that actually the answer is to get really painfully ill. Intense pain & physical suffering make me not care if I'm the prime minister, a good daughter, or have nice hair. Then I just want the pain I am to end. Is that right? It sounds right.

2. If you throw everything away you just have to start collecting stuff and ideas again and money, so it may counterproduce new identities without having the clean slate effect (or clean slat effect ha ha).

3. Go underground. What might "going underground" look like in 2007? Where underground is may depend on where ground is, and probably has nothing to do with actual sea-level, even though my image of underground always involves lots of crouching. This is not, in fact, how one goes underground, I don't think. "The great fortune of tomorrow will hide itself. Will go underground." Duchamps

4. Kick all the meanings out of the word "here"--if you can do that then you can kick the meanings out of "anything" and "everything" and even out of a bunch of personalities animating a human body. It seems.

5. When Ginsberg was 14 he wrote in his diary that he was either a genius, [something something], or schizophrenic, but that he thought it was the first two. This has to do with identity but not with getting rid of it, more like courting it. I mean, he was thinking about biographers reading his diary when he was like 10 years old. How could he even stand up?

Please give more advice on getting rid of identity if you have it.

If identity just gets in the way, what do you do?

Can you not have identity? How do you get rid of it?

I can't find anything on the web about how to get rid of it. Then again, maybe it doesn't get in the way. That's just what I heard. It's an invitation to distortion. Or maybe distortion's an invitation to identity. My new platform.

_________________

& also I just read that notley interview with conrad. I'm not so keen on the trance and tarot talk--probably not knowing enough about tarot makes me not care. I guess I do feel like writing is a meditative state or trance-like but I don't find talking about it that interesting. It's only good when you're in it. now I've piled up all of notley's books to read again since i have a bad memory and only remember "good" or "bad" or "[shrug]" (which I learned recently is one of the few universal gestures meaning "fuck if i know").

the notley books in my pile:

at night the states

mysteries of small houses

desamere

closer to me and closer ... (the language of heaven)

disobedience

the descent of alette

this is my new soundtrack. it used to be the sanford & son theme song, not the original, but a bad mouth-trumpet version. for the passenger i feel like there's a little iggy trapped in my brain, so that's good.

Bad Stuff

cleaning slats

having a cup of coffee instead of genitalia

no milk

a drawer full of dry pens

that reminds me i have a new fountain pen i've never used. i bought it as a gift for someone but he never uses pens & when I forgot to take it back i decided to keep it for myself. it's german and cost $90. it better be good. i hope i can find it.

this post kind of veered away from bad stuff so maybe that indicates my optimism for the day.

I've never waited for it like this before.


Or maybe I have?


I need some mnemonic devices, and also to actively decide to remember certain things instead of just hoping i'll remember.

Mnemonics--do you know these?

Few people cheer for pizza


working wives have seldom had really jazzy hemlines, triple e rubber bands hardly help


What Funny Granny Fries Livers But Hates Livers Done Dryly


4G to the A to the R and C to the GEP to the C5T and the PHJ then P4J and no Repeats.


Up, up, and away!

On Old Olympus' Towering Tops A Fat Angelic Girl Viewed Spanish Hops


Bile from the liver emulsifies greases, Tinges the urine and colours the faeces, Aids peristalsis, prevents putrefaction. If you remember all this you'll give satisfaction. (this one's obvious)

I feel compelled because I know nothing to write. I feel compelled to start every sentence with I--actually, the opposite. I feel resigned to start every sentence with I. A bunch of bad checks.

If you eat 9 HoHos in a row it makes you realize completely obvious things that you hadn't realized. Really only 6 HoHos. Is it the glucose, the swoop down into a gulley. Or low blood pressure. It's like I just got this body yesterday and I'm trying to figure out how it works. Isn't that ridiculous? No, it's like I'm 4 years old and I just got this body yesterday--like my brain is 4 years old but my body's 40 so that's what I do to it--trick it into acting like it would anyway. That's how stupid, I can't even say, "I" am. That stuff about going away from what you wrote for a time then coming back when you've forgotten it so you can add on, in this way predicting the future, or making the future, not sure I go for that stuff. I don't think it was ever familiar in the first place. Remembering anything takes it all out of me--and then still there's no remembering of certain activities, paying bills, childhood. What happened? Pictures help. I almost wrote I'm gonna go look at some pictures but I don't know where they are. Now I'm starting to delete delete delete so good time to quit.

I'm deciding if a windfall has fallen on me. Today buying chain soup from a chain joint I handed over my university ID to pay--by accident. It should've been the bank debit card. But the ID card worked even though I've NEVER put money on it. I didn't even realize my mistake until the woman handed my ID back to me--I even told her I didn't have any money on it and she said, "Better spend it while you got it then."

When you have money your your student/staff/faculty ID you can use it at local restaurants, UPS, CVS, a couple of DAY SPAS (just found that out), and some clothing stores. But I don't have any money on my card--I even checked in the system. My balance is 0, my acct activity is 0. I AM TORN. can this be traced?

Maybe I'll try to buy something I need like floss at the CVS and see if it works again.

SIGH

The world & being some kind of person in it do not become more manageable.

--Bill Berkson

my new play. it's called "Informing the Future."

Two people in a parking lot are walking side by side in a circle approximately 20 feet in diameter. More like an ellipsis, though. Persone One is eating a type of food. The other is not. The one not eating the food is walking a little faster but not so much that you can tell. It's more of a feeling that the person is walking faster.

Person One: This sauce tastes funny.

Other Person: That isn't sauce.

Person One: What?

Other Person: That isn't--

Person One: I heard you.

They continue walking for 90 more minutes.

are my crack days behind me

a few poems I found in my files today.

Henry Kissinger


they were both like dams and where was the leak?
every object and person was, she said, familiar to her, but temporarily wrong, e.g.
they spoke Spanish when they were not asking her a direct question e.g. we used to pour cold water on the Dobermans when their genitals could not release each other in the middle of the living room
it turns out this happened nightly

she wished she could keep his tongue in a safe area of her mouth
who could not speak for fear of saying something
everyone had heard the story, including the grandmother, which made
everyone slightly uncomfortable, including the grandmother


Untitled

We’ve gone too long without toast. Some one time I get out the bread & think to start to toast, goddamnit. Celebrities shape like toast enter into it for a moment but do not see me as I see not them, vague pronouns sewn into silk & lacking qualifiers. Celebrities must eat toast shaped like themselves. The toast can be optional but the shape of themselves cannot be optional. This toast intricate as a brain writes extremely well from its little dark jar. He bit his toast to the shape of a gun and held me up at toast point.


[The title of this just might possibly be SKUNK.]

mid-stride of connecticut dark and his toe

catches skunk-belly underside of skunk skunkbottom of skunk

and then

________________________________________________________________________
who might put a skunk as finger
puppet in a white envelope mutter
skunk and skunk and the skunkstink
7 times over the graphic scrawl skunk

skunk looping smelling of black
ink evaporated over a continent
of slight breakfasts

did you kick the skunk?

who is kicking anything that is now being kicked

and saying skunk and saying it

the lips grown disinvolved in the
saying of skunk

took thousands of years evolution crawling and
jogging by lips

vestigial as fins on
skunks

and is all you have the disutility of lip
in terms of skunk

but the arc of ink tossed
over white oceans

________________________________________________________________________
this is

all the muttering story this is all

that is in or out:

________________________________________________________________________

the skunk as disguised finger
[or the finger disguised up a skunkass]

pronounces an unlike syllable

[this may be titled, "huh?" or something I think]

who do you please
look I fucking love
when to look very hard
at you your having
substance when how with
or i dont fucking know
what any one is
saying 30 days changewhat who is am then purr
i love you
slight destruction how does
love relocate my vision
you;r eall talk questions
resignations con questions overlapping
bodies picketers
relating to never having
been that reconstruction
who what are they
equaling the trying very
hard bodies eyes in serious
ness


yikes.

Are you an underexcretor?
Can you imagine your day without it?
What's the margin?
What's the margin of it that we'd get?
You think we can leave early?
Did they already leave, are they gone?
What does this screen mean?
Does grammar reduce co-morbidity, the, brown, waffle, e.g.?

I like that word underexcretor.
It's Friday. Good.Bye.

I feel like Tchaikovsky is just some really good looking person who you want to be around but then s/he doesn't say anything interesting and you go buy a hot dog and try to think of something else.

But Saint-Saens is something else. I don't know anything about that kind of music, particularly. If the violin soloist moves like she's in a jerky silent movie but her dress is wispy fuschia not black and white then that makes a big difference.