rare morning of the corpse fire

“History goes back into the manual silvered by punctures and the most brilliant actors are preparing their entry. They are plants of the greatest beauty, male rather than female and often both at once. They have a tendency to roll themselves up several times before burning into ferns of ash. The most charming ones take the trouble to calm us with hands of sugar and springtime arrives. We are not hoping to remove them from the subterranean strata with the different species of fish. This dish would make an impressive appearance on tables of every description. It’s a pity that we are no longer hungry.”

- Andre Breton and Phillipe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields

obama winning the peace prize?

this will probably be the only time I ever agree with the Republicans on something. The situation is close to being a world-wide farce (except of course, to those estimable Norwegians). Alexander Cockburn has a few reasonable words to say about the whole menagerie.

seeing is sometimes believing

I’m a sucker for attractive and clean data-visualization. Here’s something for your eyes to chew on.

al jazeera report on Sri Lanka after the war

The part where the government denies the truth of the released video showing SLA soldiers assassinating prisoners is preposterous to the point of being ridiculous. Is the government so delusional and self-assured in its authority as to think that a slide-show showing the postmortem twitch of a dead man’s leg will refute claims to its authenticity? The stickers on the wall of the press-conference room drive home the point. Against a picture of the USMC war memorial (which was itself based on the famous US photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima in WWII), in which the Sri Lankan flag has been photoshopped over the US flag, are the chilling words, “It’s the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.” The message is clear: the truth lies on the side of those with the biggest guns.

a new resolve

Burned the old books
and big words
between.

I saw you at the market,
weighing an eggplant
in one hand.

I can talk to you now
without poetry
between.

numberless (18/04/2009)

Outside: the wet spring light,
evening and the garage doors open
swung like mouths agape
to ingest the cars and a day’s work
in a practiced frenzy
of retirement.
Gutters swell and shudder their moorings
with winter’s clean fat;
the sky pales and sifts the streets
for that one set of eyes
to stall it in its tracks.

Inside: arrives home with weary bone
doesn’t talk
evening news
beer in hand
another day buzzed slowly from the face
and conquered in sleep.

when the brain flaps open and begins to turn

bar stool.
another white elephant.
considering drink, there is only the bottom of a glass.
another white elephant.
bits of her hair stick to his clothes; static. etc.
the force between innumerable things.
pores clog when there is too much water in the air.
water in the eyes. he does not believe in the gaze.
a small victory.
she says, “I have been taking photographs…”
inaffection. there is no force. a small victory.
driving home, there is the radio.
there are no bar stools at home – why not?
renovation. the house has to be rebuilt.
paint peels under nails. he does not know foundation.
at the bottom of a glass. there is a fly.
a small
victory.

cud

Another way is to skim surfaces,
         tread so light
                  over monetary incarnations
that
like a waterbug glee-skipping
limbs caress the tension of ponds,

refuse to submerge even semblances
to that blind suck.

renounce; reveal; rejoice!

Hold all exclamation
         to the white singe
                  of an escaped spoke,
the bronzed slit of a halved
         circumference
known to itself at dawn –-
Who said it?                         soleil cou coupé

There can be no compromise.

If stakes must be drawn
plunge them into hearts and
                  tether the harness
         with a growing vine,
so that ground and rope be living
and in times of rest go slack
                  to accommodate
         the green graze.
Learn at last this widening pasture.

here

all conflict arises from an unequal distribution of knowledge. two people subjected to the same series of raw experience can have no difference of mind. but this is impossible – what appears to us appears only to us, even when that appearance belongs to the same thing. since this ideal of unison is impossible, how to level the playing field? – from the systematic negation of knowledge, which is not the same as the absence of knowledge. to unlearn, to untie. and to learn only this undoing, to live in the space between walls.

and you said, “embrace sentences it find nothing into look and to themselves its.”

retrospect

forget the new space
your mother made
in her coat,
to shield you from the rain -
the only umbrellas
were in your looking back.
plot your trajectories
with a paper bag on your head,
to keep away the flies.
use the time before departure
to depart,
keep them guessing your
modus operandi;
plan dinners
with a provisional space
at the table,
in case you return.
but you will not.
you have lost the way back
like you lost the lottery:
with a shrug against the odds.