Using your fingers count your ribs, this is the most personal accounting.
A bruise is an evolving poem that edits away.
Bones have memory but cartilage forgets.
Muscles have no History but Nowness.
You’ll never know all your nerves
And none of your organs will ever know you.
for me twitter is, at its best, a collaborative poetic experience.
This is a gif
A gif that animates forever
Lookit that gif. Look at it.
That capybara,
forever.
That capybara chillen like that forever.
Lookit his nose sniff and his bro chew in the back there.
It all keeps happening.
A gif is like a god caught on loop
Choose your gifs wisely and your gods wiserer.
He is earning every comforting itch of his butt
Forever
You could close your browser and come back
He’ll still be here for you.
You’re welcome.
(Source: magicalnaturetour)
Some Subway Sketches
- A soot covered sparrow hopping on the platform would’ve been the saddest thing I’ve seen if I hadn’t caved to the compulsion to look away.
- Standing on a street corner will make a Cynic out of you. Diogenes lived on one so imagine that. Riding on the subway is like that street corner amplified. The dirt is more visible and accumulated, the disregard more regardable and the humanity more inhumane. The real difference is that inside the subway car (or tucked below the streets in an underground station) there is no big open sky like on the street corner that gives the Cynic her hope. Riding the train will not make a Cynic out of you, it will only make a cynic out of you.
- Imagine the collected absent-minded ticks of all the subway riders, removed from their original owners and brought together en masse to create a new person of only ticks or, in other words, another ordinary but new person.
me: hey let’s go to Paulie’s sometime
Dolan: It holds rather strange hours
Dolan: That is, I have no idea when its open
me: damn
Dolan: It operates on some kind of edge of the world time system
me: i was hoping it’d be like… 24/7. but of course instead
it’s like the McDonalds At The End Of The World all over again
except instead of a strange system of chicken nuggets
it’s TIME ITSELF
Dolan: Yeah, how do we get into time from inside time? This is the question Paulie’s makes you answer about yourself and those you care about
waste treatment
me: People who work in Waste Management already have the answer
so they eat at Paulie’s freely
and Paulie’s need not worry about providing time
or hours
Paulie’s laughs at the very idea of “hours”
HA, this label you put on some facet of this thing that actually doesn’t quite exist in itself?
Dolan: In fact people at Paulie’s only understand their own ‘hours’ through the passage of waste management personnel — that is, to them, time is a party of four, or a table for two, or a side surprise guest and new set of silverware
me: Starting to wonder if the Waste Management people also manage all our wasted time too
also too
Dolan: Perhaps there is a shortage of time, and they will soon unleash a campaign: reduce, reuse, recycle
As they scramble to reprocess our wasted time and shovel it back to us
me: in the form of chicken nuggets.
Dolan: The chicken nugget rush of 2013, people caravaning across the expanse to the edge of time and brooklyn, fording the avenues, mining nuggets from the clock pipes, dying of exposure
Sweet and sour everywhere
me: the horrible truth is that the nuggets are everywhere and won’t stop coming
all that wasted time coming back as chicken nuggets, a neverending torrent
and still we can’t get enough
thus a shortage of time AND mcnuggets
Dolan: I’m loving it
me: there’s a rumor that there’s a way out of this loop through the kitchen at Paulie’s
that it involves a grilled cheese
but… no one can figure out the hours
Dolan: That’s why I’m applying for a job at the waste management facility. To finally enter the flow.
me: Do you get a hard hat?
Dolan: No, they perform trepination on your skull
me: typical public works
Dolan: No protection. Reception.
me: Death Perception before Depth Perception
Dolan: 20/20
me: It has been [X] days since our last collapsed mind.
that sign’s a favorite since HHAHAHA Days? Thefuckisthat?
the number actually stays as “[X]” in perpetuity
Dolan: Yes. And all of the workers are already experiencing their own eventual and inevitable mind collapses as a kind of object that is getting larger, approaching over the horizon
me: which is alright cuz you can’t even get close to those damn turbines unless you’re a tulku anyway
that’s another sign they have up
“Turbines for Tulkus ONLY”
the illustration for that one is like one of those magic eye images
The celebrated terrier dog “Major” performing his wonderful feat of killing 100 rats.
Having completed the task Major stood up upon his hind legs, forepaws raised to the air, and with pieces of rat still visibly gleaming on some of his teeth he exclaimed with no small measure of perversion, “ONE. HUNDRED. RAAAAAAATTTSSSSS!”
Many of the gentlemen murmured to each other in hushed tones, “Lord, what have we done…” A handful smiled, exchanged large bills over bets, jovially looked forward to the inevitable 200 rat challenge. But one, Sir Attenbery, turned away from the crowd and found a corner in which to hide his tears, verging on hysterics. In his pocket one of the back-up rats squirmed (Rule 17, Section 5 of the Small Animal Destroyers Club insists that extra “prey” be on hand and provided by the host). He had liberated it from the cages in the store-room earlier, while everyone else was distracted by the event. He opened his pocket slightly and dropped in a crumb, petting the small head of the rat with his fingertip, “It’s ok, little one, we’re out of here soon”
Major put on his silken robe and walked back to his dressing room, nose to the air in defiance of all things Terrier. Sir Attenbery’s tears made way for seething. “The bastard will pay. They will all pay.” Visions of rat kings danced in his head.
Looking down the nearly empty platform I see the silhouette shape of a dog, funny to see those perky, almost-bat ears stark against the white tile walls of the underground. A completely still police-dog is something unusual. Obvious kinetic energy stalled as calm potential is something unusual. I wish I could sit and talk with all service dogs. This one is almost telling me something. “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language” or so says Martin Buber. The trouble is translation. The dog pants for a moment and it seems awfully happy but who knows. What is known, though, is what isn’t known, how even its poor master is unawares of the bigger beast they both serve, here, down in one of the bellies of the belly of it. So I walk right past the dog and start climbing stairs.
Those of you who like my writing here but don’t follow me elsewhere might like my latest “True For Tuesday” at my ‘home’ blog wherein i riffed off of a poem that quoted me responding to a microfiction about drones.
Jeremy Wood + Boris, GPS Drawing
Boris was taken out for an after dinner run-around with the GPS receiver. He managed to freely explore all four corners of a nearby field and in doing so, it appears that he was running around in the shape of another dog.
dogs running in the shape of dogs running in the
shape of dogs running in the shape of dogs running
in the shape of dogstars orbiting in the shape of
doggalaxies drifting in the shape of dogs running in
the shape of dogs in the shape of turtles in the
shape of dogs all the way down.
- The train crawls along the elevated and down in one of the streets running along-side and under it I can see a crowd around an SUV stopped with the motor running. One man is being dragged from the car, flailing at his assailant. I crane my neck as we pass, I even get up and move down the car to follow the receding action. I miss action between windows, but I can fill in what I miss, calculate how a punch was launched by seeing how it landed. Most people on the train put on airs of disgust at my interest, but they crane to get an extra look at the violence too.
- Sometimes you’re watching an action flick or some disaster movie and you watch all the characters who weren’t fast enough, who don’t dodge the falling debris, who don’t make it across the crevasse before the bridge collapses. Sometimes you might think “Oh c’mon. I would have been fast enough. How can these people misjudge that timing.” Ride the subway for a couple stops, watch all the people who misjudge the gap and stumble or get caught in the closing doors.
- Nearly every day I pass under and then over the East River. Taking the view from outside time, seeing all of it at once, solidifying my “self” as a smear of energy across the landscape and overscape and underscape of the city, it is two rivers of me above and below the surface that the East River threads through.
