Observation #1306: Life Force
The most lively people I’ve known all hoist the dead around within them: father, mother, brother, sister, themselves.
Definition #9
Consicousness (ca. 2008):
An editor of the already edited.
Aphorism #3.16
One man’s psychoses are another man’s principles.
Definition #4
A man
is a premature act
of self defense
hardened into habit.
Definition #2
A cynic
is an idealist
who’s seen too much.
New Historians
New Historians
pore through the past
writing check lists
for the present
and a wish list
for the future.
This is not history.
This is the only history
worth extending.
This Week in the News, April 7-13, 2007
A corpse in a cowboy hat spews bile at the mic.
This time, he says he’s an idiot.
A drove of men crowd around a bombed car in Karballa.
All look excited. None sad.
14 take pictures with their cell phones. The rest want a camera.
What does the Titanic have to do with Jesus?
You’re a screen upon which all else is projected.
You wear your image of an image that looks almost like you.
Everybody watches. Nobody watches. You squint in such light.
Let the dead stay dead. Allow rumors of resurrection.
This method will back up all of your profile data for each profile in the profile data location, as well as the registry.dat or profiles.ini file that records the profile location. All profile data will be backed up at once, together.
James Cameron. Hubris. Noun.
You won’t speak to one of the several hundred faces you glimpse every day. See, they’re pictures.
“The schizophrenic is not, as generally claimed, characterized by his loss of touch with reality, but by the obscene proximity to and total instantaneous with things, this overexposure to the transparency of the world.”
Don Ho dies at 76. Hawaii will never be the same.
You see more of them if you don’t leave the house.
The body of Christ is a thin thin wafer. Stamped into a perfect circle.
1 in 4 Americans have a mental disease.
The other 3 are sick from thought.
1 in 2 have a broken part of some sort.
Baker of Jesus crackers. There’s a job.
Jackie Robinson. Somebody to believe in.
A woman in Idaho has had convulsive hiccups for 8 months. “I do believe in
the power of Christ,” she says. “I’ve seen miracles. Mrah-rhhrrpp. Happen.”
C’mon, plaster Jesus, jump off that cross against the castle, snatch the only man who gets to talk, shake him around in your huge right hand, scare us.
“In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything….”
The total value of player salaries who wore number 42 was 147 million.
Or twitch a foot.
“He is the obscene victim of the world’s obscenity.”
A state trooper in Kentucky was driving in a rainstorm
when he hit a horse and rider on an unlighted rural highway.
Tell us a parable.
The rider was charged with DUI of a non-motorized vehicle.
Tell us you meant something else.
The horse was euthanized at the scene.
C’mon, you can do it. You’re 9 feet tall.
.
© 2007, joesmith
The Back 40, Martin’s House, 1968
When you ask me
where the boy went
I listen
with the ears he left me.
He’s not here
in the sounds we each inherit
or the dinner down the hall
that sniffs around our room.
I have to catch him
past you
through the paler square of paint
through the nail hole
that bore
a former tenant’s portrait.
He’s alone there
still
beneath the slant-roofed ceiling
peeling slivers of old rose wallpaper
from anemic green plaster
older than both parents
added together,
threading the wall’s
dusty marrow
between thumb and fore fingers
wondering
how a house can be
ground down
easier than soil.
He points me out
through the window,
counts the miles
it takes
for a lit April crack
to reach us,
says I can’t
cry
when yardsticks
splinter across him
courtesy of Assumption Hardware
and Mom
too hot
in her prom dress picture.
He stops me
at the boundary
to his dense lilac hideout.
Leave him.
And his aromas
and tin can collections.
He only wants
a more dangerous fossil,
some press of angry bone.
Anything scarier
than a sandstone fern.
Next year
he rides
200 horses
over forty acres.
He dares me to race him
down quarter-mile rows
loses me running
through the wardrobes
of corn, their yellow hats rattling
over silky waist beards,
sharp sleeves whipping at him
slicing welts across his cheeks.
It would take days to find him
if ever he panicked.
He can’t
like Dad
find faith
in the odor of heaven,
some promise
of record harvests.
But he knows
grain claims air
from those who walk it
and nobody
goes up
the only elevators he’s seen.
His history’s a river bottom
that floods every spring.
His summers confess
to nothing but their sun.
He may come now
when you call him
and bring us
his stare.
.
© 2007, joesmith
Cross Talk
Cross Talk
Left hanging
will be a saying
in the destined nation
a millennia or two since my aching feet
and palms are ripped from this rare piece of reused tree.
I thirst
for better revelations
than bumper stickers promising
to free machines from their manifest sins. Sorry
friends. No rapture will come to your four-horsemen town.
I am that I am
a haggard rabbi with no burning
bush to mask my fiery parts, a shmegege
with a headache and a holey bag of rocks. I’m all
you’ve forgotten and never did like the music you make me.
Eloi Eloi
what the lama sabachthani.
Why the mystery? No mystery really
about a cuckold for a Dad with a whole god
against him and Mom nailed clearly by a conspiracy of stars
and moving
always moving
from sung insult to sung
insult, from chicken yard to chicken yard.
Wherever we were, chickens and sand. I might as well be yellow
in Belgium
with dry-eyed nuns
staring down my bloodless toes
while a farmer stalks their sisters. Know only
that I loved the feel of a breeze up my rough muslin skirt,
that the kingdom
is begotten within a sodden
you, that the sky is what won’t listen,
that my lot is but this single miracle to darken
what won’t face me. Did it. Not bad. No visions. It is finished.
© joesmith, 2007
Wisconsin defined
This obscenity of cheese.
Shot deer out for a cartop ride.
Tongues stuck out from the truckbeds.
The peculiar habits of the Northern
Red-necked, Beer-gutted Xenophobe
Trolling the green for swarthy shades.
And abject depression of a whole state
On Monday morning when the gods
Lose Sunday to foreign mortals.
January 2008, © joesmith
