It's hard to know, i suppose, if a sound can be confused with a thought when a window is left open. Passing through thought like stumbling out a window, braced against the pane, one arm holding the frame, trying to answer a call from just beyond the glass. Only the call was bird, a pretty parakeet, whispering gangsta rap as it pecked sunflower seeds and dribbling bits of resonance into the dirt. Birds are sounds, something like phones in a garden. --i didn't mishear or mistake, but the parakeet had cut the cord when no one was on the other line.
I will soon be entetaining a habituation where i'll have to write and read a lot. I need to make my thoughts simpler and my language flow more easily. I would like to create a daily exercise with three typewriters. The first would have the word "Complex" above it, the second Simpler, the third Simplest. I'd move down the row applying 15 minutes of thought directly to each machine, repeating the same thing on each but in different formulations.
Soon i'll read and write a lot. I need thoughts to flow simply. I would like to create a daily exercise with three typewriters. Above each, I would post the words "complex," "simpler," "simplest." Moving from one to the next i'd write the same thing differently.
i will read. i will write. thoughts simply exercised on typewriters will flow in three variations.
haven't been here in a while. maybe i'll come by sometime soon.
Dear Friends,
A few words with you this evening.
I am (for the next 11 months) living in a new city, with new people, doing new things. It's all very bright and shiny. And along with this entirely new life, I am beginning a new blog. Not that I am abandoning Vox, but I am. (For the next 11 months.)
This week marks my first as an "Artist-In-Residence" in Spartanburg, South Carolina, USA. One of the requirements as an official AIR here, is of course, blogging. SO. I will continue to write, fairly regularly, as part of my salary now depends on it. If you are interested in collard greens and peaches, I suggest you check out my new blog:
http://sarah.hub-bub.com
or
www.sarah.hub-bub.com
(It's the same link.)
If you're not interested in the above mentioned, maybe you will find something else to tickle your toes.
Hope you're all grand and dandy and fiesty and not sweating as much as I am.
More highfives than normal,
Sarah
Singled spaces taken from the point perspective of a lean. My head lays down on the pillow and hands move in a trusty fashion even though the letters fall solidly beside their own turf. Here is the piece of the puzzle, here is where the idea lies just behind a sulking stone, here is when stars find their...stars are an unfathomable concept. i regret to write about them. Nothing more incomprehensible than entire galaxies bending like reeds to a moving sphere. how intolerable that we are them. Cities like spotted constellations, sun spots with thoughts spread by her napkins. "no one cares" they say, a surprisingly un-sophisticated statement by a star, "not us nor them." Celestial ecologies sound like an intake--of breath, of distance between the lens and the pupil, of the space around the elbow facing the (hear)t, something like the sound of that farce. Have you ever been driving and you think to yourself that you are like them and they are you and you think, but moreso you shiver, the reception of your own thought. Shiver or thought, which offers itself as a symptomatic offspring? Intuited ideas or ideas form intuition?
signals are to their importance as suddenness is to its caveat.
--spoke
There breathes something so honest. So pure, so raw. The first time a concept is approached.........the first utterance of a concept. Whether on paper in private, or en mass in cyberspace, or casually on the phone to one recipient.
But that first admittance, actualization and pulsating birth of a concept--its most potent stage--cannot be revisited. With each discussion, each dissection, each outward expression, something is lost. The core nutrition begins to dissolve as refining proceeds.
A concept wilts, tired of its own frequency. It becomes dull and self-aware. Ubiquitous and formulaic. The spread has begun, and it further thins its transforming quality. To witness itself too often is to birth the ordinary.
Walking in the park today, fueled by the chiming energy of the sun as it filtered through, electrifying new green buds, I wanted nothing but to commit my experience to paper. To cement the purity before it began to dissipate, before I had the opportunity to dilute it through chatter. I wished violently that no one cross my path with whom I'd desire to talk. So valiantly, and vainly, I wanted to preserve the potency of the moment--a reconciliation and forgiveness I had endured by simply opening my eyes and facing my cheeks west. Such a simple reverence, but broad and voluminous.
The winter intolerable; a fade into the fog of despair--unable to predict the inevitable appearance of spring--forgetful of nature's cycle. Withdrawn, myself hibernating with the buds. And now so obvious it is, that the light persists always.
The shades we wear obscure its presence.
3 solid springs had passed since I've taken notice of the resplendent few weeks in which blossoms surface. 3 springs I ignored the gradual emergence from drear solitude. Wrapped in the concrete of Brooklyn, the only obvious method of discerning the season was by counting pedestrians. Or sniffing the air. For 3 springs, I had missed its brilliant birth--the rejuvenating spirit and tender touch. And now, when I least expected, but most desired, I have experienced contentment.
PINKBLUEGREENBLUEPURPLE.
I am captivated by its complexity, rendered so accessible. Nibbled on chickweed, gnawed onion grass, plucked violets.
(Sigh) I jumped. I smiled. I ran. I sat.
Whispering willow, weeping. Waving. Creeping surreptitiously...a tentacle brushes my ankle, as if animated and intentional. I paused at the trunk, caressing its tendrils. One lonely wisp, wandering amidst the others. A tug, it seemed to embed its soul in my hand. I greedily pinched the whip from its source. Immediately guilt devoured my action. Too late. With shame I dangled him around my neck, feeling remorse--his severance so final. His fronds grazed the ground, battered, pulverized. My eyes unable to confront their capitalist crime.
I wandered to a place of rumination, pondering upon similar notions of selfishness and greed, sprouting in a frequent letter by post exchange with a friend. Intricate, thoughtful, raw honesty of intuition--all released and given up--to 1 friend, over miles and miles. When the exchange first began, I was jealous of my friend, for receiving my mail. I wanted to retain those fresh utterances. To have (at least) duplicates of my instinctual outpourings...an egotistical grasp...
...and yet I haven't. Because the relinquishing--the invitation to share selflessly--is so tremendous, accumulating with each word. The impact beyond the content and decor of the letters. Beyond satisfactory. A form and process, to release those infantile notions, to offer them. To be free from the bonds of the self. To diminish and dissolve, indiscernible from the nature that spurns it..a most fertile harvest.
Symptomless poses falsify the outer layer of an indescribable garment. She sheds its shoulder strap and the unreconciled comes falling off. Steel beams are left squandered in a puddle, singular and millions. Tub ducks are in tow, little quackers sparking away in yellowness. Stolen in a glow of yellow haze left in a sun loft between temple and moonshine. Funny how the color yellow sparkles the death watch like a twink in the eyes. Seems to brighten the world in an unreasonable scurry of ghostly turmoil. Singular dubbed duplicitous is the yellow way. A smarting incisiveness driven by an artificial seedling. Drop the pail spill the water, the sound tempts the most godly. Each opera sparks and the dog chases, tail pointing northward. Each turn bounces off the overburdened horse and skips tracks like a spun away train.
$5.15 an hour. $21.98 to fill the tank. 21-year-old pet cat paddles my face violently. (She's declawed.) 13 resumes dispersed. $16 dollars in tips. (For 27 skinny vanilla lattes with whip.) 2 glasses of wine at dinner. With 2 parents. 3 doctor visits. 9 nights of insomnia. 5 monthly bills. 89 salty tears on a shoulder, (x6.) 3.8 miles around the park. Somestimes fast. Sometimes slow. 10 hours of dreams, that seem oddly real. Just in time for a self-imposed 11 o'clock curfew. 49 surreptitious steps from the kitchen to my bedroom. 8 years ago, my bedroom.
Is this my life? Am I really breathing this? A stale space somewhere between boredom and frustration and Groundhog Day the movie. And if I am certainly occupying this space and time, how? Just how? What birthed this subtle reality, a bland calculation and tabulation of the ordinary?
An overdose on the ordinary.
Approximately four nights a week, I ask myself these questions. Right about the time the first 6 sips of a bloody merlot penetrate the cerebellum, and a whisper of escape glints in my skull.
I look to my left, and sitting in front of a crisp red and white woven checkered placemat, I see my father. His face has character, the creases are evidence of an animated existence; a warm demeanor that softens with each wince of joy. He chuckles with every bite, and his crows feet deepen.
I look to my right, and hovering over an identical placemat is my mother. She is chipper and professional. Her hair is newly clipped, always. And her makeup a compliment to the powersuit of the day. Her teeth radiate as she tells us precisely how parents of today have myriad difficulties.
I look directly in front of me, and I see a wall adorned in white paper, speckled with miniature red fruits; a hypnotizing flat space. There is a visible seam between two panels of wallpaper, and it invisibly divides perfectly our table in two. Half of me existing on either side, a reflection.
Where I see the wallpaper, that's where my sister should be. But she's not. And that was the first sign that maybe I don't belong here anymore.
