for the record

in the spirit of rob, i give you
the (gradually accumulating) highlights of kimmy's homecoming:
1. rachel and i befriended cute and sleepy australian boy in dorval airport.
2. new mattress delivered by sketchy dudes wearing jncos in a large white truck.
3. fell asleep on couch while watching the king of jordan go scuba diving in the red sea; drooled on the throw pillow, and some crusted to my face.
4. friends rule (lisa pepe, you need to be done with your effing finals already, damnit).
5. sighting of the chainsaw sharpening shop between Long Island Quarry and Kim's Nails.
6. holding the enormous tv while babs (mother-woman) blows dust off of it and into my face. twice.
7. babs hangs a christmas stocking for our dead dog, puts a tennis ball in it, and bursts into tears. what a feel-good christmas eve.
8. receiving a controller that, when hooked up, transforms the tv into a giant etch-a-sketch.
9. falling in love with the amazing, flamboyantly gay boy working at michael's who likes my necklace and calls everyone "honey."
10. playing an intense game of wheel of fortune with jack-jack and beka, being unable to spell "shepherd," and getting my ass kicked by beka. "sleepy hollow" my elbow.
11. being torn apart from my molly at the canadian border. just awesome.

i cannot believe how quickly time speeds.

"Item: the poet has to feed himself and fuck himself."

it's difficult to be left alone when you're home on vacation. and then, when it finally does happen, you pace the house wondering if there's anything at all you should be doing with your time. mostly i devour libary books or simply grind my teeth, but sometimes i choose to do stranger things. this evening, for example, i guilded a tiny plastic horse in a gold stamp inkpad. i've had both the horse and the inkpad for over a decade now and i am truly amazed that the two have never come together before today. why did it take me over ten years to entertain and satisfy such a simple whim? and why should i have done so just now? i cannot imagine what else i have tucked away in the drawers of this desk, what other childhood relics i've yet to guild or press together.
in other news, this is what i've been holding in my hands for the past few days:

what an ingenious cover for a book of poetry that cleverly describes the corporeal and erotic activity that is both reading and writing poetry. and how silly of me to only realize now that i've been lying in bed with and manipulating the body of a woman these past few nights. not that the poems themselves aren't screaming this very message, but i'm not accustomed to attributing such vocal wit and power to something as simple (and complicated) as a photograph. and honestly, i think i would have overlooked it entirely if i hadn't first consumed jong's poetry and digested the ideas verbally, which allowed me to then process them non-linguistically.
i've noticed the same phenomenon in another book of poems i picked up: "The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper." having somewhat of a ridiculous preoccupation with solitude, i snatched the book up without pausing to consider who in the hell Edward Hopper might be or what it might mean that this poetry was written in tribute to him. but i'm glad i did. why weren't picture books this wonderful when we were kids? each poem is paired with the Hopper painting upon which it reflects or builds, and i spent a good two hours objecting aloud and enthusiastically to the various interpretations and elaborations. but whether i agreed with the poem, the words became my decoder to the paintings. for me, nothing is graspable unless i've first slipped my hand into a glove of language, and only through that glove am i able to interpret and reshape the contours of the visual.

All for some bizarre hometown necessity!
Some ache still found within you!
Now it will go with you, this scene
By Edward Hopper and nothing else.
It will become your own tableau of sadness
Composed of blue and grey already there.
Over or not, this suffering will not say Hosanna.
Now a music will not come out of it.
Grey hat, blue suit, you are in a midnight
Diner painted by Edward Hopper.
-- David Ray

i need to read that before i can read and fully appreciate this . how absurdly inflexible of me, i know. i promise to work on it. and to guild all the tiny plastic horses i may stumble upon in my own amply few moments of blue-grey solitude.

christmas list

things i'm asking santa for this year:

1. apple-green sequinned slippers
2. money for books (of poetry)
3. sweet new playgym for molly, preferably natural wood with peeling bark for her to nibble.
4. spandex leggings. any colour, except maybe puce.
5. a backbone
6. undies
7. the magic bullet (so i can, in turn, give it to my roommate rachel for her birthday).
8. a heart
9. a hot-tub
10. a haircut
11. fresca. like 10 cases.
12. a clue

really, i don't ask for much.

her head was a hole lost to time

time conflates before me. everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen equates if i think of it just right. or wrong? procrastination becomes a joke within this mindset. how am i supposed to put off what has already come to pass? i'm not saying i don't have any choices here. i do have choices: i don't yet know what has passed, but that it has. i am small and shriveled, old and more flaccid, gone and forgotten - all of that right now. and now. and now...

this morning i didn't have my headphones on as i walked onto campus: i had been talking to my neighbour during the bus ride, and the exposure of my hands to the cold didn't seem worth three minutes of song. as i cut through the adams building a group of three girls kept a distracted pace at my side. one of them was loudly complaining about the loss of her contact lenses, how weird it felt to suddenly have nothing there.

"it's like... my face feels empty! so weird!"

your face is empty, i thought. and then reminded myself that i must sound that way sometimes, too. that i must feel that way sometimes, too. i didn't look at her face. but i looked at the faces of her friends, to see if their own contained anything at all. nope. feigned interest, maybe.

outside of the adams building there was a cranberry muffin, neatly wrapped in saran wrap, placed on the edge of the sidewalk. i eyed it curiously, appalled at my temptation. later, there was taboule on dr. penfield. a whole pan of it. sacrifices to the gods of absence and time, just waiting to never be already claimed.

of beer and bald brows

i promise you i'll never dream again.

actually, today was a good day for dreams; daydreams realized in the simplest ways are probably what keeps me so goddamn optimistic all the time. i wish i weren't. i wish i saw everything in its harshest light and dullest color. defeated disappointment. unfortunately, i think instead: next time things will be better. do i even have to tell you i cracked my head at an early age on the leg of a rocking chair? the scar must be more than a skid-mark across my left eyebrow.

this beer bottle decidely gives off the richest tone of any beer bottle i've blown across. i've been working on it for some two hours now. nursing the pint and a half and enjoying the pitch as it falls with the water level.

what's your favorite part of speech? me, i'm enamoured of the preposition. the connector that specifies relationships. what could be more informative? what does it matter if i have a noun and a pronoun, a heart and a thought, if i do not know how they comingle, if they comingle?

of. that's my favorite. origin, possesion, source, agency. what else can possibly matter? but it used to mean separation. i suppose it still does, we've just refocused those implications. lexical optimism? i'm not the only one who's cracked an eye.

ps. what's your favorite part of speech? seriously, answer. i know you have one.
pps. the pretty pictures on my blog aren't loading. netscape sucks as a photo host. does anyone know of any functioning, FREE alternatives?