More of Them

oh my gosh i'm working i'm working 
it feels so good to finally be able to procrastinate in a merited manner
i'm joking but only as much as you'll find it amusing


Dig this: I'm doing pseudonymous writing for MTV as their Nerd Rock Correspondent. Thrilled am I. It's crazy. My name is 'Benjamin Daniels'; 'Daniel' is my middle name, and nobody saw fit to consider prior to application of said nom de plume that there just might be an erstwhile MTV personality named "Benjamin Daniels"—and there is! Life, I am frequently assured, is full of coincidental matter.


(Which reminds me—isn't coincidence in the temporal sense of the beholder? On past occasions of smoking cigarettes outdoors, before returning indoors, I would ask my companions, "Shall we coincide?")


Okay. I'm also editing manuscripts for a start-up publishing company. Aaaaaaaaand I'm still doing the freelance (a modest craze), which sort-of ensures that I am unlikely to ever feel stable. I was refused for disability, and they've threatened to take away my Medicaid (the total annual cost of my medicines exceeds $100,000 USD) and food supplement. But I haven't even been paid! And my tax return, due on Friday, is due also to be eaten, most thoughtlessly, by the watersewerelectricphoneinternetmortgagecomputer entities (I refuse to see them as being people) just as soon as it arrives. I am told that solvency is overrated, but it's been years since I've accepted that as a valid opinion.


The rain fell today, onto the snow, creating a town-sized puddle in which every pedestrian (however momentary the stint of their schlepping) was submerged well past their ankles. I call it "Soup of the Day." And now it's going to be March, and I would love a bona fide reason to be cheerful. I shouldn't say that, because I LOVE my family, but I'm hard-pressed to pretend that this current situation's anything other than absolute crap.


But I have to put some more old poems on here. I still don't have most of them, on account of my computer being in the shop, but that matters less than a whole lot else.


I'll start with a love poem. It's from 1998. I had been stunned into aliveness. The title came 5 years later, on the heels of torment that had been unfathomable.




5 years in every direction

i love you and you love yourself in

beams of freckled fringency, with

waves of subtle stringency, with

flat, distinctive englishness, your

landscapes pocked with canvas bare in

summer seas of stars and blood, a

lilted, spacious leavening – these

fruits with roots in heaven bring what’s

told in its unfolding.

(The font just changed, but that's because I've got a recalcitrant touchscreen.)

This next poem is old as shit, which means (in this case) that it's from 1995, when I was seventeen. I don't even think that I was sad when I wrote it, but there you are, and here we go:

Mean Either

fearing not sleep but a missed opportunity

free of diseases but free of immunity

scared and ensnared by a spurious unity

pleading despair to a jury of ghosts

scattered in dollops the reasons for everything

baked underwater i wait for the phone to ring

time that elapsed when i thought myself practicing

rose-tinted glasses proposing a toast

Now another, just 'cause it's a just cause. This is a poem about Molly, whom I adore. This is also old, but not that old (2003). When I met Molly, everything became very exciting very fast. It remains so, and all of my irascibility, so evident in this post, dissipates when I imagine her sleeping and the sound of her voice.

capital letters

it was helpful for me to remind my

self when starting to write this that it

doesn’t have to be new because well

everything was always here in its way

(rusted-out and lethal fire escapes/droppings

on windowsills and awnings/stubblefaced

dirtyshirt laundrysoon me/sink full of

dishes rinsed and unwashed/dying pen and

dead lighter/words and words used and used
/sealed bottle of vitamins /eight o'clock twilight
/hours-old coffee to go/obscenely mild june
/cars parked over crushed containers/people 
attired in various oblivions/sneezes and the 
odd blessing/lilac and refuse and swears in 
the wind/fingernails bitten beyond the quick

/floors and unpacked-box tabletops)—

but what no one would ever know to

look is that every moment that i am

alive is precious beyond prediction

and dizzy with its fullness of you


Thus refined (and in much-better mood), I'll attach a Deep Freeze Mice song onto this post. It's the opening track of their 4th record, The Gates of Lunch. 
"Red Light for the Greens"

Waxing Intractable

2/8/2001, 10:48 AM

Hi. I'm on Molly's computer (the one with the strange keynoard problems).

There's a lot that will happen when everything becomes whatever it will be that enables me to support the claims made at the beginning of this very sentence (remember that?).

This will be a brief post.

In mundane news, I am still trying to ken how Blogger works. It seems to be somewhat limited. For one thing, I'd like to have the posts be listed in chronological (rather than reverse-chronological) order--anyone?

For now, I will classify my whole please post comments as fodder for discussion attempt as a failed experiment. Since I've been thinking such a lot about failure these days, I have decided here to post an old poem, from 2002.

a failed haiku

at ten nineteen in the morning this morning; in the face and/or faces of foolishness; in the spirits of our captors and their unintended kindnesses; for the sake of both argument and concord; suspended by our own cables under the thumb of this as-blisterful-as-it’s-infinite ether – i with you am alive and living and we together never have known less

at this exact second that’s now-ago over by, i speak in present tense as if to report from some-or-other scene, but i lie without trying, for the body of time that anything takes in its transit makes it like everything sudden and untouchable i forget why

solitary wanting never roots right and even though it’s written plainly all over our aging bodies it’s never sufficient to cripple a system that banks on there being a next moment and a lot of anothers, all of whom employ different techniques (many of which are tediously mirrored in printed literature) in order to say the same thing: “a new past has arrived and more is forthcoming – try not to think too much about it”

so there

and in that torsion that rending that rapture that rupture that turvy and swerve and inverting, we behave accordingly. we fall in love with someone/something/someone’s things (and it is only a story a portrait in reverse forever and irrevocably partial a mosaic both gray with doubting and radiant with serenity) for what

i could combine into one sentence all of that which everybody knows but doesn’t say and let its broadcast lull me into wherever it is that i am, or combine into one unfairly abbreviated dream all of that which i say without knowing, but a memory’s present is only and ever an irrelevant elegy