Battlestar This!

In a world reeking of suspicion

Bedfellows make strange politics

Parcel Post

I order me

to pick up the burdens of the world.

Go ahead -- they're right over here.

Am I blind?

Quick, Qlean, Quill

The aphoristic style is too fat

For easy digestion.

It needs strong stomach juices.

Eructile Dysfunction

Institutions: both brutal and puny.

Claim to give life while they take it.

Can't live up to either.

The Thin Stratum

After moving piles of books and boxed books away from the bedside, vacuuming the carpet and baseboard, wearing a medical mask for respiratory protection, and working up a heated sweat, I shrunk the book stack down to 24.

Band Of Outsiders

Four decades since my first Godard, this one -- from four and a half decades ago -- spent an evening with me tonight.




Black and white late autumnal 60s kookie American-bit Paris, innocent Odile in her plaid skirt and plunked fedora doing the Madison (which I had forgotten for four decades but whose sophistication struck me from the film as having stood out as a dance then, too, too old for the consumerist youth culture of which I was then a part -- we being a 'band of outsiders' with little taste except for rebellion -- sophistication of a kind which certainly made it fail compared to the herky-jerky sock-'n'-rock-'n'-knock violence from cage-dancing frug artistes to mosh pit), doing it with her two would-be exploiters, her naivete and lucky decency ironically getting paid-off by theft from a thief, earning her and her lover a steamship trip to Brazil with a pompomed beret aslant her cute head.

Yuk, Yuk, (Yuck!)

Hecklers should be shot, their relatives (administratively, hushedly) numbered among 'the disappeared', and wherever they've possessed land that cannot utterly be resanctified in identity as 'other', that land should be sowed with salt.

Lonely At The Top

I like us. Sometimes we like ourselves too much.

We do good, and represent good things. Sometimes we think we do the only good, and represent the best things.

We reach out and embrace others in friendship. Sometimes we don't understand that they want their own 'quiet time.'

We know a lot. Sometimes we think we know all the important things.

Why don't the others just have the good sense to understand how good we are and how much better they'd be, being like us? Sometimes they reject our gifts, and the bad manners, the obstinacy, must mean they're bad.

If bad, they must be corrected, what they do must be put a stop to, and being good, it's our job.

Somebody's got to do it. After all, being good isn't enough.

Beau Geste

Yes. A death mask. But not the somber, over-massaged, face

Musculature of the lax, la belle au bois dormant.

Instead, the crush of cremated ash, the odd bone part like a charcoal pencil bit

A genetic abstract, boxed, inurned, the cap of a career

Sound Of The Rocks

David Carradine.

Ulysses tied to the mast.

Unplugged ears, receptors of the music.

Her sounds, their sounds, vibrations systemic.

Wanting that journey, going far, far.

Any Mistake

Embarrassment travels light-years

At Mock speed.

Shudders

My siesta today was rocked by iced coffee, and after the hour I slept, I woke up thinking about 'sensitivity' to whatever the 'forces' are. I wondered whether I had been directed recently to rewatch The Innocents, that great filmed version of Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw.

And whether that, in turn, sent me to try reading a bad neo-Gothic novel about haunting which, in turn, made me look for something good, Ghost Hunters, which centers as much as it can on Henry James's brother William.

I wondered, in that after-nap, whether I could find a 'reader', one an anonymous man with six questions in his pockets and no desire to debunk might visit and ask, read.

My evening walk was very windy, and the setting sun was red behind the clouds. Fear was rushing through the tall trees, but the electric lights held.

Forceps!

Me a 'medical professional'? Never. Only occasionally do I want my hands in the goo.

Sunny Side Up

To find my tan, they had to send up solar flares.

And when they thought they spotted it, they dispatched a road crew to dig it out.

I don't tan; I metastasize.