autumning

When bells have stilled
and the dead tongues of stone
sit named and etched with dates:
an apple gets cored by ants.

When the sun dances
on old headstones, a noose
unravels: disarmed - the rope
comes free from its branch.

Our national time passes slow.

translated a running stream and repetition of red

Son, I wake up and I’m a fly in the shower, above the water with so much thin and brave diamonds swearing their apology. Stoplight in the relative—his humid mouth and red. The relative red color and the angles of soundless sleep. The alone control, son. Wire, I awake to flight in the downpour—to leave—to go the lines. Plants of consolidation and the jesters of a shoe. O it will be supposed that you remember who, good of timber, it was absent from the hearth. It is a locked month of payments—bathed mouth and the relative red color—the calculation and the platform barriers it. The single direction, wire, from one state to another, developed of individual where we are all levitating in our feet. What it has colored the gas-carried aircraft to go. In the corners sleep one inter-country that is built by one single house. Singed the exits sleep whole numbered and hold onto the hinges. This part is always wide and hot, but none can climb under the reticular mesh, the night—can climb in bottom the grid at night, threads wake I the flight. A piece of clothing that it peels behind. The relative red color I center. Thus red of the stoplight in the relative one—keeping better in the articulations and the important persons. Down it I drip off? Peels that he says it and is transmitted to the sky with small brass band, with small sheet metal music. Put together with beautiful precision.

It's tired for a sunday nite

or I am.

The spare language we use or save. Here's a description of every thought we've ever had together: blank blank blank.

Diced and snake-eyed. I forget who I'm talking about, ok?

I pay my loans in installments. I wash my dishes with a rough sided sponge. I wish my friends were a constellation I could crawl up next to.

My body was four-sided once and you rolled up to it with your limp and heather. You knocked my ribs around looking for a way in, looking for answers.

Wait, the phone's ringing. Wait, the tapwater's dusty. Wait, there's a stranger handling the door.

My sign is a cramp-handed ego. You're laughing like the grapes have gone drunk. We'll sit in the rain wet shadows with our mouths shut, peeling away the tart skin from the fruits we stole.

Some garden, this. Wait, what are those starbursts on your chest...

football: damn the eagles' eyes

or maybe not. maybe damn the eagles' special teams players eyes but this does not bode well for the oncoming season. to lose to Green Bay on opening day...oof! it may well be a string of sad sundays. if anyone was wondering, yes, i'm a birds fan, even in this age of player ownership and fantasy decentralization. (and the notoriously injury-prone d. mcnabb is my fantasy qb in two separate leagues--keep that knee safe!) it made me feel good to hear marshall faulk pick the eagles to go to the superbowl this year. it's pretty much a wash for any nfc team, considering the strength of the teams all across the afc, but i'd still love to see the iggles make their way to a loss at the end of the end of the season. who knows? indy and new england could play each other and decimate each other's health and well being leaving only a surprisingly strong looking pittsburgh team, a san diego team which may well have the most individual talent in the nfl and a cincinatti team, anyway, you get my point...the lovely and unproven nfc east will be a battleground--an ugly and low scoring battleground. or it won't be and dallas will have a stellar year and i'll have to get into a fight with dino about this some weekend over an egg, cheese, and ham sandwich and some coffee while my dad tries to figure out who it is that's come over to us and chatted him up for 10 minutes.

when i was just starting my teen years, i used to get dressed in eagles gear from head to toe and as the team floundered, inevitably, i would grow angry. serious angry. stomping and shouting and throwing of things and kidcursing, leading eventually to a change of clothing and a change of channel to the afc coverage while my father hung clothes out to dry (even into the late autumn when the socks and undershirts would take a few minutes of being indoors to lose their hanging shape) and made some kind of meal which we'd house together in between games. usually a pound of pasta that would disappear magically as the day grew dark and houselights came up. most sundays involved a late afternoon nap, sometimes all the way through the second half of the late game. immobile sundays.

and yes, i realize there is no consistency to anything that happens in/on this space. maybe that's too bad, but i like things that shouldn't readily be seen together (like chats about football and a renamed map of the heart) and i like how life produces a vast difference in people's interests.

maybe next will be a list of things that i think other people should like with a comparison to things i like. but who in hell cares about any of that? aside from every magazine that ranks anything according to people's preferences?

i am not a magazine. i like you all, whoever you are. thanks for being here and bored enough to read this. Go birds!

On hearsay and dog fighting or: vick and the dogs and the dogs and vick.

someone said the man should be put in the pit.
someone said the man should not serve a jail sentence but be forced into a public relations frenzy and go to talk to school children.
someone said something must have happened to him as a child
someone said his brother makes him look like a saint
someone said he'll never play in the nfl again
someone said he'll be back next year and he'll have a lot of time to think about it
someone said he apologized and he said he had to grow up
someone said animal rights is a relatively new idea
someone said there are too many people on the face of this planet
someone said its bad to care more for animals than for people
someone said people like him should be tortured
someone said that men in the nfl use their bodies like weapons
someone said there are enough people on the face of the planet being tortured already
someone said if you feel like you're being abused there's nothing stopping you from becoming an abuser
someone said animals don't have souls
someone said who electrocutes dogs
someone said the price of his card has gone through the roof
someone said they're sending his jerseys to clean out kennels
someone said all dogs go to heaven
someone said we need to think hard about what to do about this

Heart Revised by Fortune (any number of cookies)

The stagger in heat and misplaced aggression of wind

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world

Today is a puddle, muy grande, my face. Say you like it like this and the slapping will commence. I've been living for the summer with no fans and no conditioned air in my home. You may call that obscene, but the occupation of sweating is a good one.

There seems to be a cycle of talk about sustainability among people I know and respect. I can address some things but fail at many...the global economy is cloaked in oil--this affects the cost of production of just about any consumer good--as almost all things need to be transported and produced. The relation of the cost of transport to the cost at the shop may not be one that's always figured in, but it's there and it alters the price of the goods we buy--from food to flat screen tv's. And what's most important to the issue of sustainability, straight away, (and convincing people that convenience isn't always the best option) is cost. The benefits of altering our means of production and consumption may not seem readily accessible to most folk. Hell, it's more money. Look Ma, my pockets are thin. It's less choice. Where'd that mango come from anyway? We'd have to change a bunch of shit in order to make it happen. You mean I can't grab some hormone-injected, cornfed chickin anymore? Nobody likes change. Especially if it means that people will be less reliant on the larger distributors of goods and services, since this will undercut company-wide earnings and throw a wrench straight at the market's ballooning numbers. Oh and where's my retirement going to come from then? And there's really no good way to switch up our energy sources (or our farming methods and means of obtaining food) if the right people aren't concerned with doing this because it's way more fun to swim in money and burn it afterwards.

I know there's a lot of legislation leaning toward greener energy but I know very little about that legislation. I do know that if we continue to rely on non-renewable resources, eventually they run out. That's their story and they're sticking to it. Ah, but it's not close to happening, right? Even though it may not be in our particular lifetime (though it may well be)--this collective stick-to-it-iveness and shrug of non-concern will widen the gap in the distribution of wealth, and quite possibly lead to an utter economic collapse. (Secretly, sometimes I hope for this but don't really know what in hell I'd do if it happened--I can't make fire with my hands and eventually all the lighters would run out...) Why do people keep waiting? Good ol' TJ with the help of a few friends came up with this: "all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed." And suffer we have and will continue to: complacency, pharmaceuticals (those fricking confusing Cialis commercials--what do 2 people do in separate tubs outside with no plumbing?), convenience, disgust, war, iniquity...

It's like there's a building burning above us--or better yet, like the whole damn sky's on fire and we're all walking around saying, "Will you look at that, huh?" Oh, chickin little, I'm not generally an alarmist and I'm lazy as the day is hot and long (especially this one), but something's got to give here and I don't want it to be the future. Our future. The future of the neighbor kids and possibly your own. I know that there's no more or less matter on this planet than when it was first globbed together and when we're all fouled up and gone it's still going to be spinning until it explodes but I've got a mind that lets me know it's alright to be alive most days and don't want the people from the future to look back and hate what they have because of us. I mean didn't you all see Terminator? Gawd!

And my prattling has gotten nowhere. Time to go wash my clothes in the river.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could sustain the ideals we carry instead of tarnishing them with counterproductive actions? O, Laundromat, sing me a clean song. One that means OK is better than OK.