Journal closed.

OMG Trek versus Star Wars.

Notes from a Young Poet 2

At your orisons, your mirror before you
A pair of scissors and these curls of hair
Manhattan shimmers in the snow
And you are aching in your fingers
Your crown sits on the counter
Rusted to the jewel

The marks on your neck
Are from a collar stitched in leather
And you’ve spread ashes on your sheets
And you’ve roared, spent all your violence
Like copper coins among the thieves

I ask, put down your guitar
Hang up your swords
Your coat is in shreds and nests
On the oak trees
Your legs are pale hanging from the chair
And your hair is tangled, my love

The dress is torn by the straps
Caught in branches
The blade is dull but you’ve been
Whetting its repose, you’ve
Cut your hair, you’ve lost your blood

And leaning on the sill
Without a cover to your shivering
Breathing life
You offered your arms bandaged and stretched
To the thrush and snow
Your eyes are blinded, my love

The oak trees in Central Park
Are crumbled snow now.
Whitman is dead, sir.
Orpheus left last year
When the leaves were failing.
He drank your wine
And braved all the way across
Brooklyn Bridge to say you goodbye
As the dawn trembled you saw him up
From your bedroom window and he said
That you were always beautiful,
The most beautiful maybe
Strung like pale willow
In his demented autumns

His fingers were frosted
On the lid of your eye and
The lips of your voice
Your hate was tangled, my love

Your eyes were reckless when they
Were flame and skin all in the rain
They took the sky, you know,
Even the cloud and moon
And the glade where you
Saw yourself swaying in the trees

And think of the cotton under
Your shins, the crumbs on the bed
The asphalt under your window
Rained over like the skin of a drowned girl

And you were naked under the sheets
When your hands spread on
The pillow and the wounds in your breast
Your fingers were crossed and dry with pain
Your heart was tangled, my love,
Your spears dull
Your pen flowed like a river

You are more beautiful than Grendel,
More purposed than Cain,
You will always wander home
A cigarette in your lips

Samson was blind and poor and dying
When he came by New York
And by the bed stroked your hair
His fingers tight to the skin
His hands smooth like marble
And leaning on the pillars
He howled unto storm

You were not dying but what unkind hour
Of your rage,
Your father sees you
From across the city but he won’t call you
You won’t see him

You get up to make coffee but there is no water.
Your painting is half unfinished
The girl has no eyes
She waves her arm over the ash of her hair
And lingers in the focus, scarlet
And velvet

And New York City is taupe gauze
A wet, stained dress
Hanging by your window
Flying away and weaving back
Wavering between the whimper
And the brilliant flash

Stay, Absalom, stay.
You’ve broken all your love
You’ve lost your ring
Your heart is bleeding in threes
Over the rain damp bed

My love, Absalom, oh my love
All I have to offer you are these stones I’ve laid
Like strands of hair
Over river Hudson
And the hills of New Jersey
To the mountain where the waters
Are colder than snow.
And the eye sees too far
And blood drips like words from
Your wounds and your thoughts.



[Notes 1, 2, 3, 4]

A homeless man gave me a flower.

Notes from a Young Poet 1

You wait in Union Station on a
Saturday for Amtrak
Under the clock you
gazed up and that was the moon.
You say it is winter now
hanging up there like a glaze of rain,
sunburnt and delirious.
The trains flash on through
as the tracks pull out their ladders
as if their guts are hollow
and flash so unfazed all through the night.
The moon is chip and paint.
Are you going north in this kind of hour?

You are haunted,
my love, you are alone
your heart is leaving
your hands are wrapped in gauze.

There is no street sign that
will point to where you want
to transport yourself
The place has no name. But you have one
you write it with the soles of your shoes
and the dust of your hair.
And gazing for the train that will
come during some night hour can you
really set out like this, so guileless?
You will sway suspended like
seaweed in a wide, wide ocean,
without summer and without the caved
echoes of fireworks to guide your patience.
The train has no schedule.
The city has no map.

[Notes 1, 2, 3, 4]

Class Schedules, if you would.

English 45C: Literature 1850-20th century
Math 1B: Second semester of introductory calculus
Physics H7A: Honors sequence of physics for physicists & engineers, wave motion & mechanics
German 24: Freshman seminar: Language & Identity (We read Sartre, among others, in English. Where's the German?)

I just bought Bootleg #4 and it makes me want to CRY, CRY, and CRY. Did ever I know the meaning of CRY?

Nothing like having a balcony at night.

Notes 4

On Chomei’s river there is
spray and there is flower.
Both hail those three stunning
seconds and fall inexorable,
which is a funny thing,
for I and the river are the same;
the man and his thatch,
the sagebrush on the mica and the shore bluff
and my very hair curled.

We were born into grace, I know,
but a bird won’t fly forever.
I know grace when I am straining,
when the statue chips away and there is dust
when a plant is dying

But mon frère, you weren’t—
you never tasted privilege but through
the calluses of your hands and you know that
you would not make it through
the year but love, you said,
you said I’m going to live forever
on the bridge
with your hands flying through the rail
And who would lie to you?
With all my hands I gave you snow.

The river is in redshift and you are crimson
You are ghost fire on the water
And I am vain, my love,
I feared that I would never be known—
or know so much, and suffer,
and fall inexorable thus nameless, like a bubble tied
by gravity, branded on nothing
more tangible than my brothers in the river
or memories or rafters or grass

[Notes 1, 2, 3, 4]

Side note--

I think I would want to meet someone genuinely similar to Arthur Rimbauld; and I don't mean the attitude and the drugs. That's easy. That's really, really easy.

I like Love & Theft, so I'm really looking forward to the new Dylan album. And I will be in Berkeley. Oh god does that sound scary.

heterosexuality, I decided that we won't be penpals, because that's lame. We'll be old friends who keep correspondence via the U.S. postal service. Same goes for droppingaitches, sir, but perhaps via email...because your snailmail track record is not exactly perfect. [insert me making face]

So anyway. How is everyone?

Also-- if I hosted a poetry reading featuring me and whoever else I can drag along (do I even know any poets? Jesus!) at a lowkey place, say, the bakery, where I read and read and don't charge and we drink coffee but it won't be like we're hanging out or anything, will anyone come? Keep in mind that this will probably never happen. Because I will bite people.





NOW. The more important issue is: will any one be willing to go to a Tchaikovsky concert at the Hollywood Bowl. (Or a California Philharmonics event at the Disney Concert Hall?) I'd feel awfully lonely if I went alone.

Notes 3

In all my stories there are only three:
I, you, and he,
around a table game of poker
with one card for each.

I’ve only told one story, you see,
of you with a briefcase of flowers
hand picked from the dump
on the outskirts of the city.
You have your fingers on
the handle made of leather.

You wear a blue suit.
Your shoes are warm and seamless.
You wheezed when winter howled.
It was fierce, wasn’t it,
burn and tremor and glory, it was
the wild thin mercury and unlearning violin
and tempest during the low skim summer
with the sun lain late and penny,
and delicate, and when the air parted
in the drumming ecstatic winter
you were sick with a fever but
stayed anyway for the pleasure
of a good godly storm.

But my love you can’t go on
in wonder all the time

Some hour you will turn
and say to me that you are weary
of your trek through the
endless nation.

Some day you will collect
brown and ivory accordion keys
and put them in your case
instead of flowers.
They will endure better
the Appalachian wind
for that will be terse and
for you full of doubt.

[Notes 1, 2, 3, 4]

You who were living once
Lived fierce and greedy here
Like a serpent from the shell
Sloppy and wet you were unpunctuated
Like some wild jolt of ice
Or a news marquee going forever
Never ending its exclamatory sentence

How epic I think to
Live in your stories or to live
In your brittle and angular body
A wriggly Nematoda waiting
In the warm hatch of your stomach
For a life time of uncurling

And then I am not small
But everywhere like a disease
An inquietude straining your motion
Filling your ribs
You who were living once
Lived strong and ferocious
You who were the scarred waters
And the mountain striped
With rubbish and flowers

Yokohama is just inches away
I know
But a map is deceitful
The train hasn’t run here for ages
On the deep seawater through the dawn

I used to walk there unheld
Through the cobble streets to the station
And board and sit and look
Outwards the shallow waves
Carrying salt and sand and garbage
Outwards indefinite all its parasites warmly

As warmly as its children
And rocking until they wake
From their unknown slumber
To rule the body of their mother

Octopus Magazine has some hits and some misses, but when it hits, it really hits.

Plus, Ben Doyle, so you know there's a precedent.

As I was cooking, I realized that I probably have used this phrase many times: No, they can't make a sequel out of that; it's like making a sequel for Clerks.

And then I remembered the city blinking like a box of fish-baits. Like a piano sitting in an easel in the dust in some room in a lecture hall just waiting to be opened, to have its guttural screeches wrung from its making. We don’t have to hate each other just because we do not know the glory of our bodies before they were made. The cold will eat me like a lullaby song. The night is hanging over the graded emotions of sleeping Los Angeles. What a night, what a rhythm to mouth over so tenderly with cigarettes and jokers, brandy and Polaris and Gregorian tactus. For I know, really, that Jesus was a sailor.

I have a laptop that my school is going to pay for. Life is really great.

My Favorite Stevens Poem:

The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Oh Dylan Thomas, you're so funny.

Now, some days you spend entirely uncertain. Hazed, so to speak, your senses overwhelmed. And then you have a very clear moment of patience, involving Uncle Jim's fox face, his wet nose, the bristles of his beard, and precisely at that moment you are the photopaper. You are the sensitive curl of blank accepting blindly the ruinous flashes, all the colliding, demented silver ions. Your nerves are gathered on the pads of your fingers and the perfect shadows of your forearms. It is perhaps what it means to fly.

Where the tracks meet the water
There are never any children playing.
The train hasn’t come in 60 years now,
But a thrill of danger keeps them away.
Only pigeon feet cross the taboo ground.
When the sun goes down
In the evening the tracks soar in parallel lines.
No passing comes to that place.
It used to be that you could play
Hide and seek there and never be found.
When it snows it snows so heavy and raw
And new and blind that you remember
The guttural impression of blood to skin.
At midnight the ramble of the water
Makes out to be phantom and unreal
And who wouldn’t love you there? Who can survive there?
The dawn comes, curling like someone’s cigarette.
A boy cries from the other side.
The faded liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited
Slips out suddenly from the innards
Of an ancient copy of Thomas’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
The oncoming train sings through the chained morning.