Cool Like Blue

To see you beneath the lights and shadows
Dancing slow, dancing low, with a rhythm
Stirring, from the heave of your hard, cool hips
Like water throbbing softly.
Slow and low, your ebb and flow,
your hips in the light
Wet like snow.

And the sax player tilts his head
And sways his hips
And my sweat runs cool like blue.

To see you turn your back into light,
your hair wet and awry, strands of silver
Dancing beneath the haze and twilight,
like wild grass in the wind.
Slow and low, your ebb and flow,
I move to you
under lights that glow.

And the club members whisper,
And your hips quiver,
And my sweat runs cool like blue.

And to see you so close now, to feel you
Urge your cool heat, your flushed lips
Pushing soft, hushed air on my damp neck,
Like the smolder of whispering coals.
Slow and low, your ebb and flow,
I close my eyes
to feel you slow.

And a cool smoke trembles
in the air wet like sweat,
A sweat that runs cool like blue.

Seasick

It was our third date after the first break-up.
A weary crossroad, a painful juncture of
Comfort and awkwardness like re-blooming adolescence.
I wasn’t afraid to kiss you or tell old stories,
Intimate, erotic, silly, all were fair game.
But my skin felt like it was moving all over
And I couldn’t sit still or look too long
At the soft spots on your neck that often
Tasted of sweat and yes, of love.

I was trying to be better in the formal sense,
by going out on a dinner date.
But it’s so hard to be formal when your
skin won’t stand still and the little money you have
Is warm and wet from the sweat on your palms.
And No-one would formally take you to eat
Half-off seafood at the buffet underneath
Those ugly neon-lights shivering in the autumn air.
“No-one! is taking you out to eat. It is I, No-one!”

We sat and ate and talked and ate and I naturally
Ate too much and asked too many questions,
Threatened by greasy silence
(No-one! No-one!)
And the shivering of the neon-lights outside.
Finally, I paid and we left to return home
To return home, ah, so long now!

And out in the parking lot your face turned
Like a green maelstrom
And it would have been funny to see you
Get so sick in public if
I didn’t get sick as well.
Two heads lunging
On an asphalt ocean with crisp air
Kissing the sweat on our skin.

I drove us home and straight into bed
A place of familiarity but now distanced
by the ebb and flow of time and of lurching emotions.
Our mutual sickness overcame it all, however,
And for once, at last, we lied together
On the sweaty pillow next to the bucket.
At times we switched in intervals to vomit
Painfully, childishly, lovingly
Into the bucket next to the bed.

The distance was forfeited briefly
Overtaken by weakness and the need,
For once, to be taken care of.


I stroked your hair while you shivered
And I shivered from stroking your hair.
At times I thought no time had passed
(I, No-one!)
And at other times, it felt like years.
Years that I had struggled through this story
And that story, this bed and that one,
One island to the next, wandering,
Wondering if you were still looking to sea.
And in our mutual sickness, we have found each other.
All it took was bad-seafood to see you
Here again, next to someone,
No-one.

A Ghost

Those who don’t believe in ghosts must not have dreams. Ghosts visit us with stories beyond the horizon where the light cuts abruptly to dark. That axis is the land of dreams, and ghosts await us there. Last night I saw a ghost. My dog returned to me and to home. In my dream, he stood there in the garage with dirt caked over his white and shivering body. He stood there like he always did when he was ready to come inside and be warmed and loved. Our love was the hearth to his little heart, and I’m sure it was beating still and rapidly in my dream when he found it fitting to finally pay me a visit. The soil caked over his shivering legs. His eyes looking at mine as if to say, I am home again. His head turned in that quizzical canine way, as if to say, I have returned from where you buried me beneath the dirt and the soil and the twilight and the shadows. And in my dream I saw his shivering body quiver to be loved again, to come inside from the dirt and the earth and return into the beating hearth of the home. His shivering legs quaking in the quietness of the air and the dust. Not cold. No, he was not cold. Only relieved to return home. Back inside and away from the musty soil and the lingering darkness and the stillness of my dream’s periphery. He wanted inside to be warmed by the beating of hearts. Hearts that missed his presence, that could only warm themselves by replacing his absence with soil and flowers beneath the shadows of trees in the dark. And I was scared to let him in, not because of his presence or the soil (which could never get inside anyways, because to get inside it would have to first reach the heart and that is always protected by the threshold of warmth and the hearth) but because I knew my father would shiver there beneath the trees and the shadows. But here, in the softness of my dream my dog had tried to come home again. And I don’t know how long or how far he wandered in the shadowlands of other dreams to return here. Despite the warmth of the collective hearts beating beneath the trees, I shivered and with this shiver I heard the trees whispering to the shadows and the children behind the trees making these shadows. I shivered thinking him wandering softly underneath the horizon where the darkness coalesces with the soil and the shadows. I only know that he followed the timbre of our hearts beating against the twilight. He followed the rippling dust as it shivered in the air, all from the pulse of our hearts there in the shadows. And I am ashamed that I was scared to let him in I only wanted to clean the soil off so that it could not come closer to the heart. Clean the soil and the dust and the silk of the shadows. I wanted to say that I’m sorry he had to travel so far just to find me beneath the shivering trees in my dream. . I wanted to say that I’m sorry that I was scared to go out there in the shadows and search for you. I’m sorry that I cannot explain the shivering or the loss or the twilight. I miss you, and I’m sorry I cannot retrieve from the soil and the dusk.

A Woman In Love

I sit at this coffee table like a ghost.
Listening in on strangers' sincere insights.
A child screams somewhere, but the constant clanks
Of porcelain mugs calms my silent self.

There are two women near me, who appear
from the corner of my eye, attractive.
One is in a new relationship,
fresh from a decade of a dead marriage.

She seems happy, truly, with that
sweet sickness of adoration.
Like this seems too good for her,
like she suspects that happiness will
one day eventually fold up and head to
the next carnival town.

Her ex-husband hit her once.
And she speaks of it almost with
affection. Love, it seems,
Love is a clenched fist.

Not Looking Good for Tess

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say ‘See!’ to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ‘Here!’ to body’s cry of ‘Where?’ till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.


By chapter 5 of Tess, the noose is beginning to tighten around the precious neck. Falling In Love, not to be mistaken with Love, perhaps is only coincidental, only ironic and temperamental. We meet and disjoin, the tiny rivulets of our daily lives diverge, but how often we reflect upon these brief meetings and their possible contingency within our little schemes. How are we to know of our own possible Saviors? She has been fed the crimson fruit, her electric blood and crimson lips polluted by the "narcotic blue-haze" of Alec the tempter. Where is Nature to help her out? Why can Nature devise so many cruel twists of fate to lead her to his house all alone? So many intricacies, yet no help to fend off the wolves.

A Eulogy to Jude

Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.

Well, the world isn't like the storybooks,
growing up is a slow-setting poison.
And in this dark kitchen the shelves never
Hold the room for what I need. Or want.

I keep the TV on because, like any child,
I'm scared of the dark. And silence. And loss.

I'm trying to be a good, little boy,
But the world demands I become a man.
Man who tries to carry pieces of home,
a blanket, a pillow, a wife, a love.

Loneliness is an aphrodisiac
That attracts only the lonely.

Here is my new home, I stand by the door.
I stake out my life, but darkly, obscure.

Her Little Hands

When I'm lonely sometimes,
Or when I feel scared,
I think of the little girl in love.

Sitting at her little schooldesk
With her mind fluttering over
Her life's little images.

A hand upon her hand,
His whisper in her ear,
His hot breath like a puppy dog's
Makes her hands sweat and the black asphalt spin.

She hunkers over her little desk
Reliving over and over her playground wedding.
She writes again, her first name, his last name,
Living out her tiny, precious future.

"I do" she says, "I do-do!"
The children laugh, and her husband-to-be
Stiffens his wet collar and leans closer.
She sees the dirt on his soft cheeks.
She dreams of kittens and soft, white linens.

And meanwhile the clouds darken in the sky,
the playground empties, the paper wedding dies,
And the children are nowhere to be found.
I'm still looking for the children out there.

His last name after her first name,
over and over,
her little hands in love.

For When You Wake Up Screaming

Dreams! How oddly you clot in my soft mind.
Midnight gypsies travelling bed to bed
And spinning silk and singing soft soft songs.
Lay me down to sleep, if you pretty please
And tell me tales of men who once were boys
Who harbored their anchors in foreign ports
And cowered from wolves In swarthy forests.

Dreams! How you gleam
Like moonlight over water.

Well?

Well the sun came out today
and a young couple in love got married.
A family sat in the park
and blew bubbles across the sweet grass.

What I'm trying to say is
Sometimes happiness can seem so so sad.

and we may

When I think how little
I've seen the sun rise
I feel ashamed.

and we may remember

A gift is given every morning
when colors remember the
possibilities of color.

and we may remember

There is something ghostly
in watching a blue dawn melt
into spring flush into tomorrow.

and we may remember
why morning doves mourn

Wouldn't it ease your day
To start one day
watching the sun rise
Today?

A Night Out

What thoughts does she have
as she's carried off by
her clan, her head
drooping and and tears falling
silently onto the shattered pavement?

What thoughts does she have
as her hair falls out of fashion
And clots chaotically like a broken halo
Around her fallen forehead?

Does she fear the wolves
that gather on the hillside?
That gather round her bedroom door?

Slobbering, pawing the light beneath the door,
The wolves that wait for the moon to give up
And die in shame at the way the world is.

Whoever

I tell you what:
You take the words
you wanted to give to me
And give them to him. Or her.
Or whoever.

And I'll take my words
and put them right here
For me. Or you. Or
Him or her.
Whoever.

Funny how you turn

At night, sometimes,
I feel the world spinning.
A soft whir, a
slurred vertigo.

Funny how you turn
towards me softly
And whisper,
"The world is spinning!"

Songwriting COLLAB by Agner and Agner

Let the shades down a little longer
I just can't take the sun today.
No matter what she does,
I'm too afraid to put my guitar away.
I stuff last night's clothes into the closet
To forget about the hours gone past.
Too many worn out sails
On a broken down mast.

And to think it would be so easy
To let go.
To think it would be so easy,
If only you weren't smiling so.

There's no more room for love songs.
Not much room for love these days.
No more room inside my room
To give my blues away.

So I may scribble some words for you,
and put them over a sad sad tune
Old words sung by the cowboys and dreamers
All singing under a sad sad moon.

But what's the point in it, really?
Where here we are at the end.
My songs to you have yet to pull through
So I'll write this one to the trash bin.

And to think it would be so easy
To say goodbye and walk away
To think it would be so easy
If only I could say

That there's no more room for love songs
Not much room for love these days.
There's no more room inside my room
To let my blues just slide away.

Oh and now I'm starting to see
That writing to you is only an excuse
For myself to write to me.

I always looked for answers
Inside the creases of your skin
And now I'm left with the question:
Will this song come to an end
Where my life can begin again?

So here's another love song
One more love song to save the day
Here's another love song
To keep my blues at bay.

Failing miserably at updating movies/books/life

My time off has caused 2 things: Plenty of time watching movies, reading books, listening to music, staring idly at computer screens. But plenty of time has been wasted not writing things down that I'm really enjoying. As of right now I finished Seasons 4 and 5 of the Office in a record time. Season 4 continues to disappoint, but the payoffs come in season 5. I do have to keep reminding myself that Season 4 was sidetracked by the writer's strike. The end of season 5 is right on par with the cathartic ending of season 2. When the Office is good, it is hard to beat.

I have seen every Coen Brothers movie except their most recent. In the next few days, I hope to watch The Big Lebowski again. The humor in the movie is hilarious, but I still think the movie possibly fails as a whole. I saw it as a freshman and was bored by its incomprehensible plot and length, but that was before I had seen The Big Sleep, which the brothers based their movie off of. I was one of the main and only detractors of The Big Snooze in my class last year because the plot was so convoluted that it caused me not to care about any of the characters at all. I want to watch Lebowski again and focus on the absurd humor and possibly try and grasp some of the story. Unbelievably funny lines, however, are as follows:

Walter: Donnie, you're out of your element!

Donnie: Are these men Nazis, Walter?
Walter: No, Donnie, these men are nihilists, nothing to be afraid of.


Have also been watching movies on Best of Decade lists. Extremely impressed with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a 2.5 hour dreamscape. The bizarreness of Lynch's L.A. does not overwhelm the film's emotional center. The key to understanding the movie for me was the dedication to a woman who had died. I'm not even sure if she was related to the story, but that dedication made me think of Diane Selwyn's story as a sad dream of one who has gotten addicted to drugs in Hollywood and lost her chance at the good life. Sometimes you get the feeling that surrealists put in whatever they feel like just because they can get away with it. In Mulholland Drive, every bizarre choice feels right; we almost feel that we have seen some of these images in our own dreams and nightmares. One particular flourish is the Hollywood mafioso that exists in the dark room. Lynch used a dwarf actor's head and sat him in a regular sized body suit. The result is unsettling as we see the underbelly of Hollywood making choice decisions in seedy back rooms. One interesting and amateur observation about Lynch's work is his interest/fascination/detestation of the human body. Dwarves, amputees, bodily fluid, decrepit junkies, voodoo witch ladies, elephant men, absurd sexual situations frequent his movies. The very oddness of human flesh and bodily composition frequents Lynch's work.

The best movie, however, that I've seen in this span has been Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. Only 87 minutes long, this is a depressing and harrowing tale of war and moral decay. Perhaps one of the first modernist interpretations of war on the screen. Early on, we sweep through these barren trenches, and the men line the walls like skeletal figures in a Bosch painting. These paths possess no glory, no fame, no honor. THey are hiding from the horrors of modern warfare upon no man's land. In one of the best war scenes I have ever seen (and I have an annual Saving Private Ryan screening every year)Kirk Douglas leads his men to battle across the wasteland as bombs drop from the sky. The sequence is a dazzling virtuoso of what Ebert refers to as shadows and shapes. Men hunched over spread out across the field. Many men die, and few men crawl over the bodies desperately trying to make headway. Their failure sends the movie into an unconventional path, a litiginous war between the soldiers and the beaurocrats. This leads to a conclusion that startled me with its unflinching cruelty. As three men walk to their execution, soldiers line up to form a pathway. This path reminds us of the trenches; these men can never get out. Their glory is used against them to their death. THe film's last scene involves the humanistic power of music. Listening to the German woman sing brings tears to the forlorn eyes of these weary men. There are no enemies anymore. Their war is against the shrapnel and the clouds of smoke and dust. These men have become bored with death and are more afraid of pain and suffering. Early on, there is a scene between two bards of the absurd talkign about pain and death. This movie has reinvigorated an interest in Kubrick that I thought I would never get.

Chasing Amy (1997)

When a romantic comedy is done right, it has the capability of knocking you out of the park. Two people falling in love provides a sweetness to the low nature of most comedies. Most of Shakespeare’s comedies involve love and marriage. The lovers often don’t know they are in love, change or hide their identities, think they are smarter than they are, love to talk about…love, and find themselves frustrated with their emotional shortcomings. Here is a movie that seems both Shakespearean in content, yet wonderfully ahead of its time in its subject matter and presentation. Chasing Amy is the Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally for Generation X. The boundaries of content matter are pushed to the extreme, yet the sweetness remains intact. When Amy stands outside and admits of her sexual dealings, we’re surprised to hear her candidness. Yes, she did those things. Yes, she may have even enjoyed it. But why can’t Holden and most men forgive women for their past dealings? Why does a man feel like he’s sharing her? The amazing thing is how Holden doesn’t mind her being with other women, but the second it changes to men, he loses it. For all his thoughts and ideas on things, he hits a wall of inarticulation when it comes to dealing with Alyssa’s previous experiences.
In fact, Kevin Smith finally seems to have a goal in mind with his writing. While his dialogue was freeroaming in Clerks, the conversations in Chasing Amy really work towards defining the characters and giving them some bite to their incessant bark. Banky, in particular, is the evolution of Dante and Randall in the original Clerks. He defends Archie’s heterosexuality and the artistic responsibilities of “tracing” in the comic book industry. He is severely passionate about his tiny beliefs and will defend them like a fundamentalist would his religion. His relationship with Holden is one of the first homosocial “bromances”, where we are just as interested in their fights as we are between Holden and Alyssa. A showdown takes place at the end of the movie that tries to apply logic to the emotional insanity of dating, and the showdown is unique and funny.
It pushes the borders of the genre and explores the nature of love between men and women. Kevin Smith's vulgarity hits really graceful notes in this movie. The sexual escapade scene reenacted with the same setup as “Jaws” is an example of class this movie manages to uphold while talking about the dangers of going down on a girl. The framing of the scene disregards the actual sexual activity; instead, it’s about these character’s abilities to adapt the old pop cultures of the past and reinterpret them into their daily routines. Watch how easily Hooper’s Malcom X caricature deconstructs Star Wars as racist propaganda. He’s not saying that the movie is racist; rather, just that he’s smart enough to take it down a racist diatribe. If he wants to. He’s just talking because he’s really good at it.
Jay and Silent Bob’s arrival on the scene is perhaps the best I’ve seen. Once again, here we have another “bromance” that seems oddly comforting as these two losers feel comfortable exposing the pathetic nature of any situation. Jay is so oddly homosexual that it’s hilarious to hear him cut open Holden for losing his girl. One can’t imagine the heartbreak Jay would feel if Silent Bob up and left. They are the human doppelgangers of Beavis and Butthead. Except Silent Bob’s mesmerizing speech about Chasin’ Amy is right on par. It robs us because of its honesty. Here we have them first talking about going down on girls (but remember, that’s not the actual subject), and then it deftly switches to men constantly trying to transform girls into the built-up images that they hold for them. These men start with vulgarity almost as if that’s how you say hello. Then, only when you recognize the sadness hiding behind the pussy jokes do you weave your way into comfort and understanding.