Reading Books Underground (JR)

With the end of school mid-May, the start of summer employment, and my move to Brooklyn, I’ve been doing more of my reading underground. Specifically, in trains. Instead of feverish — if sporadic — two-hundred page evenings of devotion, I now wade through books as the tortoise, not the hare. Reading on trains, twice a day, on average 34 minutes per trip, has altered the texture of daily life, the ways I experience New York. Instead of being a slave to The Savage Detectives, I cohabitate with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 2666. Fewer late nights in the living room on the couch, having been kicked out of the bedroom by my employed girlfriend, unable to not keep following Arturo Belano and our collective fate of obscurity, (or worse, happenstance notoriety) through Mexico, Europe, and South America, the atmosphere occasionally ruptured by poltergeists driving death-laden semis, shaking the apartment.

Even askance glances at other commuters are changed. My aesthetics heightened to some absurd transcendent level where it feels like I understand the totality of everyone around me, their inner sum from their appearance. Or maybe I don’t feel I understand anything at all, but merely take in the passengers’ appearances in a hungry, superficial visual chomp. I smile. Even if it’s illusion, I laugh at all of us. Or at least that’s what 2666 has done to me.

Train station ghosts at the (DF)

The train comes and goes
and leaves the station empty.
Water drops from the street above
plink in puddles they’ve created,
and the sound speaks down
dark tunnels.

The doors close, the train kisses
this stop goodbye and whistles
off into the black tunnel.
The doors close and the train
takes the young with it.

BTDubs (ST)

My book review of Kathleen Willis Morton’s The Blue Poppy and The Mustard Seed is in the current issue of Tricycle — check it here.

Untitled (ST)

He was always on fire. Nobody knew
how to put him out.
When he sat down for dinner
the fork and knife turned molten
in his bright hands.
He slept on kindling and his dreams
were eddies of smoke slipping under the bedroom door.
If a wind caught him at the right time he might roar up
anywhere, say an office supply store,

old poem, still untitled (DF)

Disaster doesn’t “strike.”

It waits until we find it.

 

We hold banisters

To keep from floating off—

We commit television interviews.

Somehow, we are sucked into that cabal

As part of a vague promise,

          lurching forward until we’re

Incarnated in our own vicious dreams.

 

Guest Google Poem: “How does”

how does it work

how does solar power work

how does the human brain work 

 

how does it feel to die

 

how does the thermometer work

how does fluoride work

 

how does it feel to be loved

how does this work

how does a kite fly

 

 

-Erin Wexstten

Google Poem: “Where is” (DF)

Where is my refund?

Where is the love?

 

Where is Chuck Norris?

Where is my mind?

 

Where is the G Spot?

Google: “Where am I” (DF)

Where am I from

 

where am I in the process

where am I did anyone see my pants

Life is so unusual (DF)

Some are of the school that you do not let stress show. Everything is dealt with internally. Convenient, but it results in an internal life, which involves struggle. And struggling alone, with yourself, sometimes feels like the definition of insanity.

How do we deal with this when it comes? I am the only one who looks out the window in to the garden on our street. Just now, leaning far out the window, with a soft, misty rain in the air, looking at all the empty windows. The stone ledge beneath my hand is wet but clean, for once, and I notice the difference in mood of the birds singing in the trees and bushes. I can tell they are resting; it’s evening conversation. 

Google: “the displacement of”

The displacement of a bone end from a joint is called

the displacement of a harmonic oscillator is given by

the displacement of a vibrating object is measured by

the displacement of a wave traveling in the positive x-direction is

the displacement of a wave traveling  in the positive x-direction

            is where is in m and is in s.

 

the displacement of a wave traveling in the positive.

the displacement of an object is

the displacement of native americans

the displacement of atoms in solids by radiation

the displacement of concepts.