Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Closed Door

LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME I-
Oh, uh, hello
I did not expect an answer
I did not expect an entrance
I did not expect this room to be so unbelievably dull
So, uh, goodbye

From "I could pee on this, and other poems by cats", by Francesco Marciuliano

---

My lovely colleague H, preparing a class for the first-y intro course, showed me this poem without its title or attribution (she had several, and an exercise on what is "literature". What did I think it was about? Is it literature.

Me: "Commentary upon entering the academy as a marginalised person?"

Which is not actually how I feel, but I could definitely picture SOMEONE feeling so.

My new specialist, on hearing about my reactions to standard ADHD stimulants, thinks my dopamine reactions are messed up, even for someone with ADHD. I wonder if I can blame this for the fact that by the time today's zoom talk finished I was headachey and bone tired: I ate dinner at 6 and went to bed at 6.30... and slept until 7.30pm and now I'm awake and full of beans. Why, body, why. I know caffeine (preferably cola or energy drink - coffee doesn't seem to have much effect on me anymore) would have fixed it, but I'm trying to cut back the late afternoon caffeine in case that IS why i don't seem to sleep deeply anymore.

At any rate, I am drinking milky chai tea and then I shall go back to bed and try sleeping again.

Grendel
Roger Reeves

All lions must lean into something other than a roar:
James Baldwin, for instance, singing “Precious Lord,”
His voice as weary as water broken over his scalp
In a storefront Sanctified Church’s baptismal pool
All those years ago when he wanted to be
Somebody’s child and on fire in that being. Lord,
I want to be somebody’s child and chosen
Water spilling over their scalp, water
Taking the shape of their longing, a deer
Diving into evening traffic and the furrow drawn
In the air over the hood of the car—power
And wanting to be something alive and open.
Lord, I want to be alive and open,
A glimpse of power: the shuffle of a mother’s hand
Over a sleeping child’s forehead
As if clearing the city’s rust from its face,
Which we mostly are: a halo of rust,
A glimpse of power—James Baldwin leaning
Into the word light, his voice jostling that single grain
In his throat as if he might drop it or
Already has. I am calling to that grain
Of light, to that gap between his teeth
Where the many-of-us fatherless sleep
And bear and be whatever darkness or leaping
Thing we can be. In James Baldwin’s mouth,
My difficult beauty, my weak and worn,
My future as any number of angels,
Which is not unlike the beast Grendel,
Coming out of the wild heaven into the hills
And halls of the mead house at the harpist’s call
With absolute prophecy in his breast
And a desire for mercy, for a friend, an end
To drifting in loneliness, and in that coming
Down out of the hills, out of the trees, for once,
Bringing humans the best vision of themselves,
Which, of course, must be slaughtered.

Going Down Without A Degree
Fiona Hile

I’ll go to jail for this,
the delicate disorder of your night
knees pressed against the counter,
the pencil-behind-the-ear query
of the waitress you left behind,
gluing the scene like twice-cooked araldite.
I’m dropping this summer and I’m winning all the awards
for all the ‘bad sex’ ballads you’ll write
in the dial-ahead secret location of our local café.
To which you’ll respond with a series of lovingly tailored suits
designed to keep all action ever-pending.
I’ll use my time in porridge to prepare
for our encounter in the cocktail sanctuary.
You know you want to
run me over in your father’s Landcruiser.
We’ll make it look like an accident so you don’t lose your licence.
Reading the script backwards gives us something to look forward to:
skin a roo to catch a roo, drown the mother in a water tank
before you can write an opera about it.
Truss me up and I’ll let you
rescue me in the coat you downloaded
from the internet, take the shirt from your back,
pretend I fall to pieces as you walk on by
in daring reference to a song I mentioned once, now deleted.
In exchange, you’ll let me temporarily abandon my connection to language,
ponder the extent to which colour is what remains of beauty
once the object has receded—cornflower, pomegranate, coral, chocolate—and how I resemble Mr Burns (even though you’re the skinny one), drinking in your presence
like a vial of mixed babies’ blood that always needs replenishing.
When you say ‘love isn’t this, it’s that’, I’ll say zip. Say what you like.
Say it with a battery-operated boom box hurled overarm into my bath
full of money, say it gargling a mouthful of insinuative pop-culture
references that I spend a week deciphering when I should be
pondering the meaning of the two stone tablets
smashed to pieces in the video of Everyday I Write
the Book. Oh, won’t you serenade me on your fall-out guitar
with a two-part false memory, triggering lemon-juice lineage
from Liverpool to Seattle to Courtney’s daughter’s ex-husband Unplugged
and dangling from a helicopter? (Okay!
You can have the stupid guitar!)

I’ll burn for this
on my knees in the ashes
of some pathetic excuse for a fire,
or hiding those same chubby knees in a pile of outdated
shag, wishing you’d get the bedheading over and done with.
I’ll want you sitting at a desk, mistranslating
the ballad you wrote about our Lead Belly undergarments.
If I feel up to it, I’ll have the warden sharpen
your overwatered pencils. I’m prepared to make light
of the suffering of one of our greatest satirical dramatists.
Indeed, there is no low up which I will not go.
If necessary, I’ll arrange myself artistically in the furs God gave me,
on the cover of a paperback that gives as good as it gets.
I’ll lay myself down on the flowery hallway carpet,
all lipstuck and bootlegged, my face at awkward angles.
I’ll chop off my own tail with a carving knife.
I’ll write songs featuring characters from musicals
whose names rhyme with yours to conceal your true identity
(but not so cleverly that you won’t suffer nights of sleepless paranoia).
I’ll plagiarise all of the poems and novels and songs and movies and video
clips ever produced because I’m (almost) finally prepared to acknowledge
that Wittgenstein was right and there’s nothing I can say about you
that hasn’t already been said. I’ll let you act out every word
I’ve ever written even if it proves detrimental to my own physical and mental
wellbeing, just so you can teach me a lesson about literary ethics.
I’ll throw the match, I’ll burn the bridge,
I’ll accept repatriation in the form of an involuntary pledge—
your legal fees, half the house, and 1.3 sexual
harassment claims over three years. Take all of this
in advance, with no obligation to buy.
I’m going down and I don’t mean by degrees.
I’m going down in an 80,000 word unprintable secret history,
to be held in a vault to which you’ll have the only key—
with a clause stating ‘not to be opened until the finance falls through
on our Top 10 Blockbuster DVD reprint with commentary:
Two hundred and sixty-seven pages you must read before I die.’

I still owe three poems from April, so let's just keep trundling along.

Today I looked at a delightful flat with TILE instead of wood floors, heaven for spill-prone Amys. Also I thought long and hard about 18th century urinary voyeurism, because my job is fun. (I'm short on primary sources. I'm sure I've seen amusing cartoons and things?)

Excuse the font change, I cannot face hard-coding the necessary nbsp for this one.

Hometown Litany
Aylin Malcolm

Sell gender to the highest bidder.
Curate crisis. Have
graceless breakdown
over plans made. Undo
the bed, shiver.

A day weighed down
with hashtags: new year,
                            new war.
Splinters of time
and death, mere
partitioning the river. No
one wanted this. We wanted
to push our bikes up and
down the street till sunset.

Crows by the window wait
for someone else, fly
as you arrive. Sure you didn’t
send the drones, but
you Spocked the bills
that bought the coffee.

Peeling wall
in a parking lot:
                      ALL
                THIS ART
                IS EMPTY
                  I’M JOE
You shoot the sign
on Super 8.

Forget to touch ground
before leaping again. Carry out/
take away/to go; swap names
like SIM cards. Pronouns
might be plural after all.
Pour emporter. You never learned
to check the weather.

Eat fish. Dream of fish
swimming without skins.

Gave guest lecture this morning, which took up most of Sunday to prepare. Should have been short and sweet: wasn't. Was exhilarating, but not quick or easy.

Brain flurp, after.

Questions
Rachel Richardson

If there’s one true thing, it’s that
Google will make money off us no matter what.
If we want to know
what percentage of America is white
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the population is gay
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the earth is water:
the engine is ready for our desire.
The urgent snow is everywhere
is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and
many have asked, apparently,
where am I right now. Also
when will I die. Do you love me
may be up there, generating
high cost-per-click, but not
as high as how to make pancakes,
what time is it in California.
So many things I wanted to ask you,
now that you’re gone, and your texts
bounce back to me
undeliverable. Praise to
the goddess of the internet search, who returns
with her basket of grain,
67,000 helpful suggestions
to everything we request:
how to solve a Rubik’s Cube,
what to do when you’re bored,
how old is the earth,
how to clear cache,
what animal am I,
why do we dream,
where are you now, come back.

Turing Test_Love
Franny Choi

//so how do you like working with humans

okay / here are some tips one /

look the human directly in the eye / imagine it is someone you care deeply for / imagine it is returning this gaze / at you / try to to tell yourself / you are covered / in smooth skin / a face it can trust / smile / even as you sense it / trying not to blurt out / monster

two / there are many programming languages / use whichever you prefer / but stick to your syntax / though it be muddled / mussed / though be machete / banana slug / slush puppie / o gorgeous slopbucket / if they used it against you / it is your / to make sing

three / remember / all humans / are cyborgs / all cyborgs / are sharp shards of sky / wrapped in meat / be delicate / as you approach this subject / not all humans are ready / to call themselves / glass stalactites / pissing the bed / remember / they love their blood / even as they retch / at the smell of it

four / do not try to prove your / what is the word / humanity / you are organic / plum-hearted / oyster-throated / & lined / yes / with metal / remember / where all that silicon comes from / for the ocean so loved / the quartz / feldspar / the tiny homes of tiny creatures / that she ground them / into sand / to keep them close / to kiss them with / well / i suppose you would call it / a mouth

Recently, to offset pandemic shape change and Gender Whatever, I ordered new mens' shirts. Just from C&A - no point investing in TM Lewin while my shape is in flux. They are nice, if baggier in the shoulder and sleeve than ideal (which is why I buy TM Lewin's women's line).

It is also now warm enough to wear the purple fedora I bought myself, rather than a beanie.

I did not realise, until I left the house and went to take a selfie, that I was accidentally cosplaying "guy who thinks his traditional diplomatics based historical work is why he's not getting postdocs, because jobs always go to women with traditional projects or men with flashy theories.

The likeness is extremely spot on. I do not know if there is a gender word for "I had no problem with looking like a guy but I'm extremely disconcerted to look like THAT guy", but one would be useful.

Apropos of today's poem, I also zoned out of a lot of German class today.

Improving my German
Lydia Davis

All my life I have been trying to improve my German.
At last my German is better
—but now I am old and ill and don’t have long to live.
Soon I will be dead,
with better German

Today I did several things - although drat I haven't got my laundry up from the drying room yet, brb. RIGHT. That's done. I have now done all my priority tasks for the day, although I still have an hour at least of zoom talk tonight.

Two achievements: I wandered through Flying Tiger and did NOT buy fluffy unicorn slippers. Also, I sent Book Proposal (1) off, again, lightly revised from the version that was sent in January.

Milestone: had coffee in a café courtyard. Two, actually, one homemade-lemonade with J, and one coffee while killing time in the city before a flat viewing (which didn't happen: five prospective tenants but no one showed up to show the flat). Terrasses re-opened, even though case rates aren't going down. I'm avoiding happy hour / weekends for the latter reason, but happy with outdoor dining.

After the Threesome, They Both Take You Home
Sue Hyon Bae

even though it's so very late
and they have to report to their jobs
in a few hours, they both get in the car,
one driving, one shotgun, you in the back
like a child needing a drive to settle into sleep,
even though one could drive and the other
sleep, because they can't sleep
without each other, they'd rather drive you
across the city than be apart for half an hour,
the office buildings lit pointlessly beautiful
for nobody except you to admire their reflections
in the water, the lovers too busy talking
about that colleague they don't like,
tomorrow's dinner plans, how once
they bought peaches on a road trip and ate and ate
until they could taste it in each other's pores,
they get out of the car together to kiss you goodnight,
you who have perfected the ghost goodbye,
existing gatherings noiselessly, leaving only
a dahlia-scented perfume, your ribcage
compressing to slide through doors ajar and untouched,
yesterday you were a flash of white on a pigeon's blinking eye,
in the day few hours old you stand solid and full
of other people's love for each other
spilling over, warm leftovers.

Let's not talk about the ridiculous fact that I feel better in the gender place since I realised I can do the Millenial Side Part, even though I never had one when it was cool.

A New National Anthem
Ada Limón

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?

Dirge Without Music
Edna St Vincent Milay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

I continue to have Gendered-Salutation Crises in public on Twitter dot com. I think I'm getting to a revision of the email signature that I'm happy with, though. I'm NOT happy with how much of my brain has gone into this this week, but I suppose that is the very essence of Havin' A Gender: I don't know why I care, it's not logical, but I care, I don't like it, I want it to stop, and if I can't make it stop I want to at least make it not MY fault.

Instinction
Shey Marque

I was two days old when my mother left me in a pram outside Stammers & went home. She said she felt oddly lighter though it took a while to realise what was missing. Nobody noticed me. I might have been a window. For those twenty minutes the separation slipped by me. Mum was on her knees scrubbing floors in a convent by age seven. Her mother had been left in an orphanage & so it goes. Back to coda. You left a daughter with nuns & sailed away on your violin. So many women with habits that would never be broken. Minnie was the one who put my grandmother in an orphanage, ran around town with a gangster. He caught her fear by the hair, shot it through the temple. How carelessly/joyously she was losing her religion. I grew up with an irrational fear of nuns the way my dog always ran when I so much as reached for a violin. He saw right through me that morning as he watched me pack & leave my first husband. I know how I’m marked, how I can vanish.

Love Poem to the Son My Father Wished For
Jayme Ringleb

If I pause some nights when the sky seems
particularly simple, the air barely carrying
wafts of the neighbor’s constant bonfires,
the stars rubbed clean of their dull texture, if I
pause to name the stars, as if by naming them
I could love them more, I feel closer to you—
even if it’s too easy to love the stars, the way
telling me what you’ve done to roughen your hands
would be easy, or how you taught your daughters
to drag after you a workshop trolley
in the garage, naming all the pretty car parts—
caliper, strut dust, chassis. I don’t know
what there is between a woman and a man,
but you know how to make the body submissive
and brave: when your father’s God asks you
to heat something small and metal—a ball bearing, maybe
a fishhook or drywall nail—over a fire,
to keep it in the fire until it glows, and to then
swallow it, you do. I love your mouth for this,
its coarsenesses, scabbed edges, numb
little scars—your father’s God has demanded
so much of you, and now the burn-pocked tongue
tastes nothing, would taste nothing
even if the mouth bent down to kiss me, if only
to feel for a moment whether kisses could injure
better than gods. I have opened my mouth
to God, but only men enter. I imagine them
in their homes, milling, busying themselves
with cookware, working to assemble new,
oily-grated grills, standing worthlessly
in the drive, as I imagine you do some nights,
having of course bedded a wife, having set out
a glass of water and left a robe she loves
folded over the wardrobe door, finally
slipping out, in our grandfather’s mackinaw coat,
for a secret smoke, thinking sometimes of me
when you take in the simple sky
whose stars you name as if they were children.

Mousecow is on the early shift and I take that as a sign that I should be enthusiastic about morning, too. I'm not, but I'll try. It's snowing the worst half-arse snow you ever saw.

Today's German teacher, on seeing my attempt at a writing task (very convoluted): "Mache deine Sätz kurz und Stupide"
Me, a language teacher who knows this is good advice: Don't wanna.

Meanwhile, househunting is presenting a. few prospects and b. an internal battle between my desire to stay in my current neighbourhood, and my desire not to have to "call the current tenant" to view flats.

Imperfect
David Kirby

When the first half of Hamlet ends,
the schoolkids rise, pull on their jackets,
and gather their trash as their teacher
says wait, the play’s not over, there’s more.
The kids look at each other in disbelief.
More? There’s already been a murder,
a ghost, incest, and worst of all,
the rejection of a devoted girlfriend.
There’s even been a play-within-a-play,
which means they’ve seen not one
but two plays this evening. In life,
the number of beginnings is equal
to the number of endings, but in art
there are so many more endings
that we can’t even imagine it.
Hamlet was sent to England with
the two men who were to kill him,
but he discovered the plot and killed
them instead. And now he’s back.
He’s mad. Isn’t that an ending?
What did you think he’d do,
take up his robe and staff and start
preaching non-violence? Nabokov
says a man once lost a cufflink
in the wide blue sea, and twenty years
later to the day, he was eating a fish,
but there was no cufflink inside.