thyme

I don't write here anymore. I still come around to check on the general zeitgeist, and to see if igloowhite has written any new revelatory material. It's not that I don't love you all, it's just that my life is very busy and has turned outward at the moment. I am not writing much in general lately, and I don't know why. It's a little sad, but otherwise my life is great.

* * *

Worth reading?

• Prosenoder's Cup 2003
• Beacon Rock
• lift yr. skinny fists like antennas to heaven!
• Tense Movement
• Treading the fine line, eyes blind and arms outstretched
• Before and After Science
• Here Come the Warm Jets
• The Glow, pt. 2
• Each One Teach One
• Desolation Angels, Big Sur
• Tales from Moominvalley
• Nausea
• Of Mice and Men

       * * *

  leaves and flowers shaped like funnels
  cleverly direct water

       * * *

  -- Nighttime drama, September 18 --

  drunken angry crouching howling tires
  crying mother or lover spurned or beaten


  a cold milky diamond of the moon on my sleeping brother

       * * *

Fragments composed on Beacon Rock trail, First of March;

Where, if you stopped to listen, the trees made sounds like birds and squeaky doors,
Where the wind vibrated the strings of the trees to make the sound of trains receding into the distance,
Where the trains receding into the distance made the sounds of avalanches and helicopters.

The rough feel of rocks was like the dust and smoke in the air, which gave everything an understated glow;

Trees made windowpanes, needles curtains, framing the view,
Looking at the sun shining, low to the horizon, realizing that it had been there every day since birth but that it is forever too bright and too beautiful to see.

A desiccated brown river of dirt cut through the green to the horizon, parallel to the river, looking like the great wall as seen from satellites, a swath populated by steel trees radiating buzzing cancer

Walking home afraid in the roar of charging cars, I stepped across a pile of bleached white bones and trash,
And the lonely snout of a daffodil cowered in the lee of a small boulder.

* * *

When Western Civilization collapses suddenly, I will liberate tools and trudge daily up this trail, removing the guardrails. I will replace the sturdy wooden platforms with rope bridges. I will stand on the top of the rock and look out at the crumbling dam and the fallen electrical towers and the river once again flowing freely. And I will feel the danger of the wind again.

THE REALIST:   So—what is it you want to do with your life?

THE IDEALIST:   I want to be a writer.

REALIST:   Like for a newspaper?

IDEALIST:   Not so much.  I think I want something with more creativity than that.  I don't want to just work for some suburban newspaper.  That's not even writing.

REALIST:   So what do you want to write?  Do you want to be a novelist?

IDEALIST:   (unsure) I'm... not sure I have that in me, but, you know, I'd like to... but—I want to write a column for an independent newspaper, maybe features or essays, or short creative work...

REALIST:   And how do you expect to make money?

IDEALIST:   You know, freelance writing, sell my work—

REALIST:   (interrupting) And how do you expect to make money?

IDEALIST:   (off-balance) Ah, as long as I were writing, I think I would be happy working anywhere: a record store, or bookstore, maybe—

REALIST:   (interrupting, appalled) And you call that a life?! You call that a "career plan?" Goals? Jesus!

IDEALIST:   (defending, but not defensive)Sure, (not sure) yeah, (sure) that's a life!  Not the life you want, maybe, but it's a life!  Who wants a "career" anyway?  So much chains and baggage.  To hell with stability!

REALIST:   (spitting words) So typical.  You're a cliche.  (mocking) "Generation X, raised on pop and celebrity, feeling like they'll be dead if they don't make it by thirty!"  (accusatory aside) You weren't even born in the eighties!

IDEALIST:   (now genuinely defensive) Why shouldn't I dream?

REALIST:   Listen to yourself!  You're deluded.

IDEALIST:   Even failure is fuel for art.  Where would Kerouac have been without alcohol?

REALIST:   Alive and happy, a smiling old man!

IDEALIST:   (recitation) It's better to burn out than to fade away.

REALIST:   And where is Kurt Cobain now?  Ashes and dust, what they could gather up and scrape off the walls!  (mocking again) Sooooo tragic. You're a sap. Romanticism is a disgusting attempt to make self-destruction (spits the word with derision) "poetic."  (a stray thought with aim to pain. sly) You probably carry around a ragged notebook filled with Holden Caulfield angsty vomit. (ends more disgusted than mean)

IDEALIST:   Shut up.  You're as much a cliche as I am.  You're a perfect antagonist for one of those vomitious journals, cast as the cynical realist who berates the poetic idealist with a potential for genius.  And the idealist wins in the end, of course.  (pause, defense:) And I don't have a notebook.

REALIST:   Liar. Liar—don't say you can't identify!  Don't say that you don't think I'm right, secretly, silently.

IDEALIST:   Of course I do!  (pause, affects philosophical tone, genuine realization) That's the truth, isn't it?  We're two halves of the same personality.  You're Doubt.  I'm Dream.

REALIST:   (revealed: spit, vomited, hateful) And don't I make you sweat with fear.

IDEALIST:   (triumph) And you fuel me.

REALIST:   (hate) And I devour you.

IDEALIST:   (victory) And I reclaim my blood, purified.

REALIST:   Yet you bleed.  I make your limbs concrete.  I stop your mouth.  And don't I make you sweat with fear.

IDEALIST:   Life can be painful, and still beautiful.

REALIST:   (old mockery) Noble tragedy.  (hate) Don't I make you sweat with fear.  (final)

IDEALIST:   (accepting and victorious)Yes.

REALIST:   (antagonistic yet balancing) Yes.

IDEALIST:   (a note of fear) Yes.

Goodnight.