Thursday, June 23, 2011

A Series of Lies: Dieting


I told myself, I can make it one week. What do I go without for seven days normally? A lot. I am sure I haven't had pizza for a while. So, I decided to go raw vegan for a week. S'gonna be nothing!

The second night at 3AM I made myself a frosting sandwich.


A Series of Lies: CBS Evening News


When I was in kindergarden I invited my friend Danny Taylor to come over to my house and play. We made a fort out of these colored cardboard bricks, lifting them with this cool robot arm grabber toy, a recreational version of the device that elderly use to fetch things from high shelves. Danny grabbed the air with the robot arm and said something like, "I'm gonna grab your booby." Regardless of not knowing what that meant, I thought it was hysterical. I thought it was so funny that I repeated it to my mother that night. She was like, "Where did you hear that word?" I knew it was a naughty word from her tone and I didn't want to get my new friend Danny in dutch so I thought quick. "On TV," I said. "Really?" my mom said. "What TV show?" I thought again, this time not quite as quickly or as nimbly. "Dan Rather said it," I said. I don't remember what happened next. She probably sent me to my room for a few minutes before I broke out and watched television with her. All these years I've still been too embarrassed to ask Danny Taylor what a booby is.

-Parker Winship

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

the word- a dictation of girls' night.


why are there three toilet paper rolls on the floor?
uh, huh.
want a fish soul, it's time to call it a day. it's time to take
the mood away
it's time to wind up the mood away

take off your make up
real love never happens
but how can we
say real
unknown til we
experience
unpredictable
10am?

maybe,

smoky eye make up
get free drinks from
lance
i think
the word "love"
has been made
soft

we don't truly mean
what we mean


we don't fully comprehend what that word
means


we overuse it

we receive it
and feel betrayed

it ain't the real word.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

I will be the tree he will climb someday


I am the tree he is going to climb someday
until then I will imagine the tiny nymphs by
nymphs that I bleach straight down the drain
of my mother's kitchen sink and I will plant
a many-fruit tree.

Every year I'll graft on a new species, the one
sweeter than the next. Or maybe I will stick
to all types of apples? The matter isn't the
flavor, though. It is the preoccupation of
my need to grow something. I don't very much
feel like waiting until he gets back from the
frozen himalayan polyandrous society where he
kissed the goat herding, pink breasted asian
princess who remained celibate for as long as
he desired.

And I will meet a Greg or a Stanley who will
build a great, multi-purpose, plastic, wooden,
and steel ladder that he will climb up and his
sweat glands will inspire my tears, crying for
the sake of crying because I haven't cried all
year and it is overdue. And that Greg or Stanley
or Stu will pluck those just ripened fruits and
he will take far too much time mincing those fruits
and tossing them into a salad in a blown-glass bowl
but I won't eat.

And after hours of taking my hand and singing to me
that he needs me and that my woeful complacency must
sincerely mean he isn't worth me. In fact, he isn't
worth anything. And I will assure him, babe, that that
truly isn't it. He is a champion. A javelin that children
will aspire to be from age three. A modern firefighter in
a suit of armour. From then on I will cut open my own
avocados and he will lay in bed with books that read like
insipid coffee. I will tell him I want his children and
we both know it's a lie.

But this lie is our lie. It is my lie and it is a better lie
than continuing to orgasm over the idea of my knots and branches
cold to his touch, calloused by the salt water and moments--
sundials worn out over the time he has been gone. I suppose
I can thank Penelope, my sister in this stagnancy. Without her
I am sure I would have forgotten what the difference was between
cold and warm wash.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Where is she?


going on about maybe her gonads and his pets and
her dad's panic attacks over speaker phone is all right,
but with every open container in the back of her brother's
beamer covered with broken pistachio nuts scarred Carmen, i bet.

I am sure she took an advanced placement government class
as a senior in her rural high school where tony merriman winked
at her in the hall after fourth period for at least a week or two.
She learned how to wax her eyebrows with Lacey from across the
street one weekend and in another she shared a bottle of bottom
shelf gin with tony's older brother who just got his last paycheck
from nolan's grocery store.

and she would go on to root for a team at the university she chose
over the next state's, maybe michigan's, best private college.
face painted red and walked dogs to pay for spring break with
a couple of socialists and a few poets but no nobody really stopped
her at any where but right after class to ask her a question, really,
about how she was doing. so maybe she got up and did things like
run the streets and possibly choose alleyways over well-lit boulevards
because the danger tickled something more hidden than her g-spot.

but she could never marry for money so she worked her ass off and
took those business trips nobody else took because they had kids and
great pyrenees to think about. she saw algiers and met quiet men from
bali and she sat

at this pier, alone, in Seattle.

She realized she really had nothing to give or to take--not one breath has
she stolen from another human being except for once. Once she took
Jay Hesse's robin's egg blue crayon and he did not know what to do with himself.
It took him at least five seconds to decide between screaming for Ms. Little's
help or to negotiate calmly for his ocean back. He was drawing the back of
his Antarctic habitat and needed desperately for the soft, subtle blue's support.

And he screamed. Carmen sat back in her plastic, kindergarten classroom chair
and held darkly onto that crayon like she had the power to evaporate an entire
sea. Jay roared and the whole classroom paused. Suspended. Caused to simply
witness because of one simple grab and hold by one simple, taciturn girl.

And nobody asked, "how in the world was Carmen San Diego?" So she will settle
for at least a while, in the girl's bathroom, for "where in the world is that girl
who made Little Hesse's crayon box one less?"

a long sentence or a poem, maybe, but mike schiltz.


i held my breath the whole time
it took to cross the mississippi for the first time
in my life...check,
one,
two.


by Michael Schiltz

A Series of Lies: Montreal


Maybe Montreal. It could be Chicago
jazz up there of the jokester on the corner
who thought I was a Quebecian but really just a naive
infant looming on the discovery that
everywhere is dirty and colinders always let out at least
one noodle and people rape,
kill, steal, lie all the time.

strained eyes & a double shot helped me see
that even the clean Canadian city isn't free from this.
Stars still aren't apparent unless pointed out by
the ones who ignore shit on shit on shit straggling
in a toilet that ain't up to standards
anywhere.

yet still it flushes the same way, north of this equator. I stole
the love-ly car & lied, "I'll find us a good parking spot."
& bought a pack of cigarettes with the property of
cyanide.

Up there they hide them behind metal curtains so the fact that
smoking exists is kept from the kids. Can't hide it for long. And,
I visited a cathedral for a boyfriend I'd break up with in a
blank, static phone call a week from then.

Maybe travelling isn't far off from just staying home.

A Series of Lies: May 2010


On Easter I drove an hour to go tell a boyfriend that I would break up with in a week that I loved him. He said he had a surprise for me and I said, "should I wear pants?"

Because it is good to know.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

curiously swamped by complicated cases of gaze


a cataract eye, capable of Catawampus critique,
disguise.

-mario viramontes !!!

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Nicotine Dream #3: Moombas


We're crouched behind a piece of coral. It's more likened to an orange mass of molten rock. There are buildings behind us, coarsened and gutted by a smoky war. When we turn around and look through the first floor we see pipes, a bathtub, but no bed or wall hangings. I suppose we're in battle, but it's comical or one-dimensional like a troupe of children trying to jump from rock to rock, pillow to my mother's twice-broken coffee table, hoping that the lava will not gulp them up. It's like playing Mario (before he became 3D), jumping on Moombas and avoiding canon balls with chomping teeth. This battle is not a bull running and we're not about to tip a canoe.

Every night my companions change, but only in identity. Whether it is my friend or my mother-in-law, they still function the same. One is wild, throwing grenades that curiously resemble palm-sized candy hearts. One is praying to a god that begins with an “A,” begging me to take them to safety. One is myself, always still, thinking. I suppose I am more of an observer, like a viewer in the back row, so engulfed in a motion picture that when the latina prostitute cries, my heart sinks. And when her lover pays for her freedom, I am free myself!

There is no movement of plot other than far away colored gas drifts by, never really injuring a thing, maybe overturning a pebble, or causing my friend to wimper.

Tit for Tat


D: Sometimes it is okay to be shallow. If someone's so dumb i almost lose hope in humanity but if they are physically attractive, it's okay if they're dumb. "Congratulations, you're dumb as fuck but you have a C cup..."

K: So a C cup is beauty?

D: or a D cup.