Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Saturday, November 13, 2010

from The Favourite Game by Leonard Cohen

Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.
A bullet broke into the flesh of his father's arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat.
On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woollen mufflers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.
His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

November limbo.

Always 
happens to 
come around this 
time of year.


Tries to call me.
don't hear a thing. 
The second time I hear
but look close and ignore.


In thinking
it has gone I
slip away into a 
world of composure.
My world. Not our world.
I get remorseful in sharing
the things I hold dear.


What things?
It asks
as it
comes to 
the door. The 
things! I confront
as I throw away shy 
and just want
it to go.


I hate 
that 
it
always
happens to 
come around this
time of year.
Bringing cases 
of times
of loss
and of cheer.
We can catch up
Have a drink 
but I don't want it here.


Its friends that were our friends.
Its memories that were ours.


In November.


house guest 
don't want
around.

from Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac

I pray on my knees so long, looking up sideways at my Christ, I suddenly wake up in a trance in the church with my knees aching and a sudden realization that I've been listening to a profound buzz in my ears that permeates throughout the church and throughout my ears and head and throughout the universe, the intrinsic silence of Purity (which is Divine). I sit in the pew quietly, rubbing my knees, the silence is roaring.- 

Do we ever know?

I don't know if what I know I have written is what you know I have written. 
You know what I've said but I know what I mean.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010