corresponding

damn girl i miss you. what are you doing? what could you possibly be filling your time up with now that i am gone? crap in comparison, i'm sure. dude i am trying to figure out whether i should send you this letter that V sent me that is like the most amazing, sweetest thing anyone has ever written to me, but i feel like that may be wrong, BUT we are m.d. styles together and we are only right ... so maybe i will. i keep f you and you are not there and it makes me sad. good news is i am coming down at the end of june to pride march in the village and i totally want to see you maybe you can join us, me and V, we will see i guess. i am just chillin' at my house helping my mom pack and shit, it really sucks. i have no friends and no car here, well really i don't drive but who cares! your plan is high larry us honestly, oh shit were you in nyc when you saw that i keep forgetting, are you in your new place yet? how is it? how are the mens and the womens? good i hope. so are you and love styles through for good? it's weird but i am pretty sure i won't ever see m again, bizzare. anyway my phone is dead but dude i would love to see you some day some how. oh! maybe july4th? you are probably like "riiiiiight", i don't mean to force my presence in your life, but for real b i am not going anywhere, so maybe then we could chill in nyc and run around all love styles and shit. ok so tell mewhere you at youngin', what life is like, and perhaps i will send you the most beautiful love letter ever written. ok mad crazy love styles,
-- a

the love language project

... coming soon ...

bashô says

"Midsummer"

Bashô says the body is composed of one hundred bones and nine openings.
Within which flimsy structure the spirit dwells.

Floating by the park at dusk, through the heavy trees,
the white building glides like a ship.

An amber lamp is lit in a top-floor window
and a woman in her robe is leaning on the sill, eyes closed to the sunset.

A violet shadow is pouring down the side of the building from her long hair.
Two pigeons are perched in the next window, against a black room.

Beyond the trees, down a rough slope, the river is winding
around the island, flowing into the sea.

Slowly the mist off the river coils around the building, concealing it.
And just as slowly it lifts.

Only now the woman's lamp is extinguished.
Her window remains open, the curtain flutters,

but there is no sign of her, laid down to sleep in the darkness—
her pale body with its one hundred bones and nine openings

from which the spirit will one day slip, like the mist seeping
back through the trees, along the river, out to sea.

-- Nicholas Christopher

haiku

so much sadness
among us
even the car
wept

Césaire - the automatic crystal

hullo hullo one more night stop guessing it's me the cave man there are cicadas which deafen both their life and their death there also is the green water of lagoons even drowned I will never be that color to think of you I left all my words at the pawn shop a river of sleds of women bathing in the course of the day blonde as bread and the alcohol of your breasts hullo hullo I would like to be on the clear other side of the earth the tips of your breasts have the color and the taste of that earth hullo hullo one more night there is rain and its gravedigger fingers there is rain putting its foot in its mouth on the roofs the rain ate the sun with chopsticks hullo hullo the enlargement of the crystal that's you...that is you oh absent one in the wind an earthworm bathing beauty when day breaks it is you who will dawn your riverine eyes on the stirred enamel of the islands and in my mind it is you the dazzling maguey of an undertow of eagles under the banyan

Translated by Clayton Eshleman, Annette Smith

pan's great expectations

"Ah! Great Expectations!"

Sam likes to say, "Ah! Great Expectations!" at least three or four times in every conversation. He is twelve years old. Nobody knows what he is talking about when he says it. Sometimes it makes people feel uncomfortable.

depository

writing and words and wondrous bewitching life. topics concerned with here, among others.

for years i had been dreaming of flying and waking and sleeping and flying and waking again. ceaselessly. for days i crossed cobblestones directionless, stumbling about vacant as a shipwrecked boat left to bake in the sun. winds blew through me, tinting my skin the grayish blue of a stormy sea, a bruised eye, some birds. night turned to morning and light ripened and faded and slipped under the windowsill in endless shadows and cycles of silent sameness. once back in the room, i lay still and paralyzed with alarm at the thought of my life, the red carpet blindingly amplified the sun searing savagely through the glass and she said "you'll get used to it" with the snark of a bird that could eat my child. i shivered, teeth jumping and dancing like loose old marionettes in my mouth, bats flinging themselves wildly against the walls of my head, a cathedral sprung up at the base of my throat and sounded the call to worship.

Dreaming

August 8, Montréal, hot

A dream of rubbing cold water
Down the rocky back of a strong woman.
In the sweat of a summer evening
She is stretched over so that the water and my
hands flow from waist to neck, lifting her stuck
muscle-shirt. I try to find her breasts, but the
dream changes. I am wetting back her thick curly
hair with my hands. She is smiling. I know and
love her face. I don't know if she loves mine.

Later, in the moonlight, I negotiate something
vaguely sexy with another strong, rocky woman.
Not sure (still) whether she digs men or not;
Another known and loved face and body,
But in an unaccustomed openly erotic place
She goes to the iridescent payphone across the
room. It flashes nervously that line two, downstairs,
is in use.
I sit apprehensively on one arm of the couch,
tipping it up on two legs.

A robber in the skylight has climbed up the
scaffolding outside and points a flashlight at my
underwear.
I am shocked, and think of hiding my fading desire.
911.
In the wake(ing) of this unnerving scene,
(in Jesus name, Amen)
an angel sits outside my open window,
playing a saxophone.
I want it to leave, since I ve always thought angelic
music was cheesy when played
on the saxophone.
It persists. I sweat in my bed

- Loren Carle

what i write on the train ride home to keep my head from combusting

once wending around a corner in the fog i blinked and fell down the chute of every tomorrow i'd ever imagined, down a rabbit hole.suddenly the dead sea i swam through daily began to stink and rot inside me, fear entered and grew in every cell of my body, spreading like wildfire permeating shafts of light, metastatic. it bounded through me like a sudden apocalyptic rain and thundered maddeningly in my ears, my hair electric.a pulse beat in my head day and night drumming defeat and futility in a syncopated rhythm through my blood. i felt dead. my heart choked.the landscape sagged under the weight of all this worry. unable to stand, bowled over by the great inertia, the vapid ideas and meaning and nothing and the unceasing nauseating movement of everything around me, deafened by the screeching wheels of trains careening wildly into subterranean stations and the pungent odor of exhaustion and urine settling into my nostrils, a symphony of friction and filth, the relentless howling of the wheels bowled over by the constant buzz and whir of chatter, by the go-nowhere conversations and the endless go-nowhere days.spinning into a dizzy place where the puzzle doesn't match and garbage flies through the gray sky like scary plastic birds laughing the pounding of the frantic herd scrambling across concrete and bodies a dull roaring asleep in my ears bristling and sparking just beneath my skin.searching led me nowhere, i swung into a dark and disastrous place where everything looked hideous in the light. trapped on a splintering ladder, trying to forget all my questions and the scabs and open wounds festering everywhere around me. dreaming frantic paranoid dreams of bleeding, eating flesh and salt and falling, falling through time to arrive at the end of my life, waking up panicked, terrified, swallowed up by fear and the pathetic rush of greed and ghosts running here and there talking of money and disease, nothing i understand

i only have these hands, a cracked clay pot and a love of wood and light. plants and purple smog stroke each other at dawn in the chilliest corner of my bedroom and i smile. the green stem of my body angles upward like a root sprouting into the day, squinting into the din nothingness scattering seeds to the wind come what may airing out the empty places and breathing light