an admittedly perhaps premature (perhaps purposefully so) review of John Green's "The Fault in our Stars"

It is rare for a book to spawn a review before i have completed it, and vastly rarer still to initiate such said spawnage after only a few chapters. This rarity is further compounded when a book causes facial confusion to such an extent, as The Fault in our Stars (by John Green), and although that is perhaps only a circumstantial effect, it is worthy of at least a small and timid note, and perhaps as equally timorous of a note would be that i am not sure where it was that i was pointed toward this book, but the fact that Marcus Zuszak (author of The Book Thief, which is like the best book ever written (and i mean that in the sense of it (if not being the best book ever written) being at least roughly similar to the best book ever written) gave it high praise in his backcover blurbage, which allowed me to skip to the side of my slight (insecure?) discomfort caused by the tag on the spine of the book (applied by the library staff) reading loudly “HIGH SCHOOL” and proceed to first deem the book a capable solo accompaniment to my first-thing-in-the-morning platelet donation appointment, and then secondly to delve into its pages as my strong coffee and chocolate chip cookies were delivered  (as i lay in my prone position with the needle lodged painlessly in my right median-cubital vein).

Soon after the apheresis machine completed its second return cycle, the aforementioned facial confusion began (scarcely before the second chapter had initiated), and at this point perhaps the Tums were brought to me only seconds too late to prevent the tingling in my lips (being that the Tums mitigate the oft-experienced side-effect of the citrate (which is added to the returning blood to prevent clotting)), but it was late enough that i could not completely invalidate the possibility of the causal nature of the citrate and its involvement in the increasing strange sensations i was noticing in my face (which had by this point expanded curiously into territories outside of my greater oral-lipular boundary).  Even if i was able to ascribe my somewhat-numb-lippiness to the citrate, I became more and more convinced that the other uncontrollable facial affectations could have some basis in the words that were being absorbed into the cellular matter of my brain.

Given this partial certainty, it was required that i rest the book upside down on my prop pillow (on top of the half-body heating pad and blanket installed to maximize my comfort and speed of donation cycle) and consider at least every few pages, what exactly it might be in these words that could cause such distinct and decentralized sensations in my facial topography.  Was it that the characters were “real” to me in some innovative manner?  Was it the parallel overlappage intersectedness between the lighthearted (in the most respectful manner possible (which is actually quite respectful)) description of children with cancer and the fact that i was currently involved in a donation process that was destined to benefit actual (non-fictional-book-based humans) cancer patients? Was i simply experiencing a hitherto unnoticed hormonal fluctuation that made me unaccustomed to these particular facial sensations?

After pondering these hypotheses, and multitudes of other possible explanatory directions, i resigned myself to simply reading the book and maximizing my enjoyment of it by somehow monitoring and possibly managing to keep my concurrent brain chatter to a minimum.  All of this being said, there remains the possibility that ultimately this (so far quite fine and distinguished) book will disappoint me, but if i allow myself to examine even that small fear, i am rebounded by the myopically hopeful belief that even that disappointment will be exactly what it is i wanted.

In closing, i would also like to thank my long-suffering wife, the pulchritudinous and otherwise also amazing Melissa Fuller, for allowing me to convince her away from the good computer and (mostly for my particular requirements) keyboard.  I formally and publicly apologize for insisting the usage would be quickly resolved, when i (if forced to consider my excessively wordy proclivities) would have to admit that perhaps i was less than totally unmisleading in my characterization of the timeframe required for the completion of this venture.  I shall struggle to make this up to you (along with the thousands of other tiny things i am already struggling to make up to you) until the instant at which i perish.

thought of you yesterday...

(a birthular message to my amazing professional sculptor brother in law, Matt Babcock)

thought of you yesterday...

but failed to send you birthday greetings, so here they are today, after all the fanfare has died down and you are waking thinking that instead of the joyous day of celebration you experienced yesterday, with all of its fancy community-wide reverie and remembrances of the last year of your existence, complete with detailed exegeses of each of your trials, tribulations, and triumphs, that instead today would be more of a "back to the grindstone" type day where you trudged to your workshop and engaged in some revelatory creative endeavour that, at its root, contained a cryptic semaphore from your soul to the world at large, your metaphoric symbology cascading morse codified bits of your soul-beat and animalian spirit into the vast wilderness of humanity, perhaps muttering to yourself occasionally "consarned soul-beat and animalian spirit, and consarned too is this cursed endeavouring mythos and pathos and ethos I have been shackled with", but instead of making the sisyphistic, trudging trip to your workshop in such bleak and conflicted spirits, nay instead you have started your day with a small, concise, and tidy missive from your brother in law, who chose this time with such great care and tenderness, so that he might best establish a small and meaningful point of contact with your existence, and perhaps convey to your reactive mind a small token of non-particulate matter that suggests to you his (and his lovely wife's) egregious respect for you and your creations, and indeed if there were a word that conveyed great jealousy of your engagement in such overwhelmingly creative soulcraft, without that word having the pejorative sense of envy, but instead simply of sublimated esteem for both your character, the millions of tiny characters inhabiting your brains, and the beatific manner in which you so gracefully release those characters out into the world, allowing them the full Maslowian ability to actualize themselves and the selves of others in the parallel processes of our collective slouching towards some unknowable singularity, that would be the word he would use, and that word alone.

love, 
c&m

Note: if you want to see some of the amazing things Matt creates (and you should want to see these kinds of things indeed), check out his website 

his name was Woodstock

he was a small white goldfish

i had when I was a small white child

he had a red cap shape on his head

and when I was siphoning

part of his water from the tank

i siphoned too close to him

and sucked him up into the hose

where he got stuck headfirst

a few inches from the end

i blew back into the hose

and he popped back out into the tank

swimming straight into his castle

that was just a small clear plastic butter dish

with a square cut out for the door

his pectoral fins gently fanning

to keep himself centered

in shock and in place

i worried about him unmoving

that way for an hour

then reached into the tank and pulled out his castle

after which he swam around

like a normal fish again

i think about Woodstock today

when I find our big black dog behind his crate

in the bedroom at the foot of our bed

lying on the rug with his head down

on crossed front paws

when we have both been up

and in the other rooms for hours

i think about Woodstock today

as my wife lies on the couch

watching and then turning off

a TV show about texting while driving

a handmade wedding quilt pulled up to her chin

as she curls deeper into another nap

i think about Woodstock today

as my eyes and brain turn endlessly

to distraction after distraction

hopefully to hyperlinked weathermaps

documents applications and emails

and i try to imagine the sensation

of being pushed backwards

out from this compression

against the grain of our skin and fur and scales

and swimming back to the shelter

of our little improvised plastic castles

then i try to imagine the sensation

of a giant hand reaching in

and lifting them away 

out of context and without permission

(i recommend trying the audio version first, since this is meant to be heard more than read)

audio version - soundcloud link

I have this vision of my eyes scattering about
huntering and gathering among all of
your Facebook status updates and shares and likes and tags
and all of the amalgamated mental excavations
and throat clearing and yammering
and discombobulating it and then putting it back together
with the posting and reposting and replying of others
Others you may or may not be connected to
by anything greater than both of your words ending up
in the about an hour ago like comment share
post follow unfollow threaded undertow
we have all signed up for and friended for
and only partially filtered
and only so rarely unsubscribed from
and in my vision it makes perfect poetry

I see all of your words broken up
and recombining as if on their own
after being bitten by a radioactive meme
and the genetic mutation is occurring in full CGI
long lensed zooming special effects in my imagination
the DNA unzipping and new words flying in
from the far reaches of your worldscattered connections
and being inserted at the exactly correct location
clicking into place with sounds like mousebuttons
effortlessly building up into this sublime genetextual ladder
that twists off into the reaches of the interwebs

I know that when you find out I am taking your precious words
out of context and without permission
simply because I want them
you will take it as the highest kind of compliment
along with the ego stroke that I value your brief interjections
and smatterings of non sequiturs enough
to cut them and to paste them
and to consider them even for the fleetingest of moments
and it will pique at you enough to get you to follow them
around the corner and down the alley of another page
trailing them towards the everscrolling away downwardly bottom

I’ll tease you along with the candied promise
of what I did with some tiny subsection
of something you felt worth typing
and hope you navigate unthinkingly
to this completely separate and more intimate domain
where visiting it is in itself an admission
that you can’t help but acknowledge that you place
some infinitesimal value on what I have done
but not so small a value as to be unmentionable
because after all it is because of you
that you are following the trail I have created
because it is the trail of you
the scent of you
the promise of some small bit
of the fading contrails of your day
that is what started your small single click journey
and by this point of course it has gone beyond that gesture
to involve a swipe or two on your touchpad
perhaps a rabbit tip tapping on your down arrow key
or mousehand pointer hovering
over a position on the side scroll bar

I select from the top and then again
where the Facebook-inserted word “yesterday”
appears for the first time
and I take it to the top of my page
because it bracketizes this quixotic tilting at Facebook
with glimmering amnesiac nostalgia

With the title settled neatly into position
I sift for the keystroke-worthy chunks of your life
harvesting the words “this speaks for itself”
since self-referentiality pivots nicely
into the meta meta meta of voided context
but then I am oddly compelled by
“In the distant future, two superpowers control Earth
and fight each other for all the solar system”
and the line “They're always in the mood for love”
is a natural follow-on to create some dramatic tension

I am sure I could somehow segue
into this the talk of “cooking it in bacon grease”
and “like a lunatic” seemed to butt up against it
so nicely that they stick there together
and a Beckish inspired splicing places
“now I'm walking around saying”
next to “Sleep well, anonymous child. Sleep well.”
and one line below“Maybe you couldn't hear me”
and I see the ending eventual hopeful note
struggling to poke its head through it all
with “My daffodils are still coming up”
and “My crocuses are up”
the punchy “Our daffs are up an' at 'em!”
the terse urbanity of “chicago blooms”
and then the line that I see as wrapping it all together
“I can't wait to see what else comes up...”

I hold that thought as my mantra
as I sift and resift and group and regroup
“I can't wait to see what else comes up...”
as I look for the metaphorical connection
between battling superpowers and bacon grease
and saying things to no sleeping child in particular
and not being heard and not paying attention
and being a zillion times more efficient
and the whole time a small child is shouting in the background
about voting for Doris the chicken

At the same moment that it all starts to congregate
and congeal into something intensely manageable
where I find the ability to perceive both the whitespaces
and the blanks and the form among the formlessness
I see beyond this first finished masterpiece
to the timeline in the righthand margin
refreshing and updating off endlessly into the future
and as I follow it out the endgame is crystallizingly clear

I see the self-referentialty of the forced feedback loop
the peculiar entropic mobius twist we have gestated
I see the evolving subtlety of slight semantic shifts
in the words you choose as you become more aware
of their possible destination
I sense an elevated stature and generosity in your words
as if you are precompensating for the gaps
that might remain to be filled between those words
and those of someone else who also
without reference context or demarcation
is adjusting themselves accordingly
like the blind men with the elephant
when there isn’t even an elephant to touch
and they are all just talking about what it will be like
when someday they have an elephant to describe
in their fractured handscrabbling tinyworlded way

And it gets to the point where you are now posting
and reposting with this OCD ADD ADHD fueled focus
and fully randomized and refreshed reward schedule
to see what new amazing creation
had been forged from your excretions
you are posting horrifically tender metaphors
with garnishes of colloquial idiomastic simile
your comments are multi-layered densely unpackable images
and it is all meant to be so incredibly helpful
and I am so flattered by your contributions
to our convoluted conglomeration

But the things you are all post share commenting
have now become these perfectly wrapped vignettic lines
that self-sufficiently contain everything needed
for fully self-aware explication and revelation 
without the semantic company of others
and if I were to slice and dice and Julienne Fry it all
It would be like slapping a stencil of the triangular-tongued
Guernican screaming horse head over a starry starry night
and then stretching the canvas thinner at the margins
to make room to thread Magritte’s steamtrain
through the fireplace of Whistler’s Mother’s mouth

It would become a hack with no release for the attack
and no nuance to the yammering and jib-jabbering
it would get so fractalated pixilated and muddy
that it would reduce itself into absurd solipsistic fibrosis
and it would collapse white dwarfedly inward on itself
under the weight of all the tiny eyeballs and expectations
and the growth of our gravity would distort all nearby orbits
until we had to admit that we are no longer
traveling in a gentle circle together anymore
scratching each others imaginations along the way

And it is my fault
I have invited you along on this ride
I have buckled you in
and I have showed you 
how to use your oxygen masks as musical instruments
I have handed out peanuts and Cokes to all of you
and walked up and down the aisles
collecting all of your plastic cups and napkins
and now we are in a flat spiral dive

And one moment later inside the admission
of our non-circularity
is the realization that each orbit
is only reducing the inward distance
by one single zero one bit each revolution
and the g forces are exponentializing with the speed
until the only thought I can keep in my mind
without it getting flung off
like toddlers on a redlining merry go round
is that soon we will arrive
at a linguistic singularity
that must be avoided
at all costs
my apologies
like
comment
share

an antiquarian history

in the beginning was the shell
and my feet were moving over the face of the waters
and somewhere between the beginning and my feet
there was the ehlers-danlos
and after that the softness of my feet
and you my god always you
unable to be begotten away from you
from thousands of miles away
there was you suggesting i walk the shoreline
with your wordless askingless asking
and then the doing the no pausing just the doing
the doing without the thinking or the waiting
because of the sweetness of your wordlessness

and then there were the steps upon the sand
and the bruised clouds roiling in over the bay
and after the roiling of the clouds there was the shell 
the shell that was there in the beginning
when it begat the waiting for the finding 
and then there was all of mankind 
and all of those creatures who moved along the ground
right beside it without ever seeing it
and all of the birds in the sky that flew over it
without ever swooping down to look at it
and the evening and the morning were the days

and then there was the finding of the shell
that was there in the beginning
then there was the looking 
and at the very same time of the looking 
was the seeing 
and then there was the knowing
and the knowing was begotten by the cleaving
the halving of that which was there in the beginning
and the convolutions of the hollow cavity in the shell
spoke of the knowing with its half tunneled half pattern
that was created there after the beginning
and then there was the the seed within itself
the half hidden homunculus nesting in its outer ear
its own tiny spiral opened to its host

and then the knowing was you
once again always you
looking down from the firmament
into the broken tightening half spiral 
that i had created of myself in my own image
the knowing was you
seeing the pattern and the form of the cavity

and then it was you finding the curve
at the heart of that cavity
that could hold you so perfectly
while you rested

it was you beholding it
it was you
seeing that it was good

five stanzas for enso

i love the round sound your tongue makes
when it curls back into your mouth

like a the sound of a large marble

dropping into a quiet pond

from just above the surface

i love the uplifted yearning angle of your head

and the rabbit twitches in your left hind leg

when i find that one spot on your neck

where the white of your chest

meets the black of your shoulder

i love the long grunt you make

when you wake for a moment

and stretch the black fur bouquet of your legs

all the way down to your toenails

before falling right back asleep

i love how you ride shotgun

when we drive home from the park

your big head sticking out

the passenger side window

and your cheeks rippling in the wind

i love the way your forepaws

pin my left foot to the floor

as you work on your rawhide bone

and every time i run my hand across your side

your tail spins like a propeller.

on the pathology of emotive amnesia

ever since i was old enough
to start remembering

my mind would often find itself

skittering along the surface

moving too fast and shallow

to place the exact reason or thing

that left me with the feeling

that i knew that i had

i would retrace my short-term history

scrounging for the reason for my mood

until i found some small or big something

a new micronaut toy

my aunt polly bought for me

when we visited her in chicago

with green metallic wheels

where a person would have had legs

the slow fungal death

of my siamese fighting fish aurora

in his tiny round bowl on the breezeway shelves

ed tuxbury telling me to give him five

and when i gave it

and held out my hand for five in return

him spitting into my palm

a kevin schwantz replica #2

arai motorcycle helmet

in red black and white

with a dark smoke shield

finding cindy werner

kissing mark warford

when she should have been kissing me

a photograph i had taken

of my best friend

framed in a doorway

against the sky

the light curving perfectly around his calf

once i could re-triangulate my position

and be certain mind and mood

had synchronized their watches once more

i could settle back

and let it wash over me again

but then i saw you last night

trying on the spherical pendant necklace

with 3.2 carats of natural world diamonds

in canary, ice blue, aquamarine, and white

encrusting its latticed surface

and i knew i would never forget

those exact coordinates

now

when i misplace the memory

of what it was i was looking forward to

or away from

i will always find myself again

in the center of that small jeweled world

resting in the curved hollow of your bosphorus

watching the sunlight sparkle in

shifting from one shade of the ocean

into another

nineteen ten

(a work in progress…)

we know only a little spanish

so we speak like little children

so we think like little children

this is good

this is not good

we speak of no shades of grey

having only black and white

and our minds relax completely

into vacation

as we graduate to

this is excellent

my name changes to  juan carlos

and melissa's e turns into a long a

we learn slang from a taxi driver

how to say

this is wicked

we learn the words for open

and for closed

from the l.e.d screen

on the safe in our room

by reading the yellow and black signs

we learn what is dangerous

new words enter us

and new words leave us

like the name of the not so ugly

fat-bottomed rats we saw

carrying bright chunks of papaya

back into the forest

we add an afternoon

between our good morning

and good night

we drink micheladas with the locals

and ask how do you say this

pointing at this

how do you say that

pointing at that

and we learn to drop our s’s

so our good nights

sound less like they are coming 

from the pages of a textbook

and at the end

we check out of our hotel room

returning to our infinite shades of grey

and both of us can  pronounce our room number

perfectly.

deiceneuve diez

(un trabajo en progreso…)
  

sólo sabemos un pocito de español
así hablamos como niños pequeños
por lo que pensamos como niños pequeños
esto es bueno
esto no es bueno
hablamos de ningún tonos de gris
teniendo solamente en blanco y negro
y nuestra mente relajarse por completo
en vacaciones
como pasar a la
esto es excelente

mi nombre cambia a juan carlos
y e melissa se convierte en una larga a

nos enteramos de la jerga de un taxista
cómo decir
este es perveso

que aprender las palabras para abierto
y para cerrado
desde la pantalla l.e.d
en la caja fuerte en la sala de
mediante la lectura de las señales de color amarillo y negro
nos enteramos de lo que es peligroso

nuevas palabras a entrar
y nuevas palabras nos dejan
como el nombre de los no tan feo
grasa de fondo ratas vimos
llevar trocitos de papaya
de nuevo en el bosque

añadimos una tarde
entre nuestros buenos días
y buenas noches

bebemos micheladas con los locales

y preguntar ¿cómo se dice esto
señalando en este
¿cómo se dice que
señalando que

y aprender a bajar la s de
por lo que nuestra buena noche
sonar menos como lo vienen
de las páginas de un libro de texto

y al final
que visita de nuestra habitación de hotel
Volviendo a nuestro infinitos matices de gris
y los dos de nosotros puede pronunciar nuestro número de habitación
perfectamente.

for the woman in the short black skirt

   

dancing alone in the carpeted space

behind the last row of folding chairs

at the michael jackson dance revue

at the playa del carmen resort

who had enough tequila last night to forget

that she had no real idea of how to dance

her legs spread apart on the floor

stalking from side to side in wobbled jerky steps

waving her arms and body around

even when the music stopped between numbers

and the performers changed their costumes backstage

shedding their thriller zombie rags

for something more formal

she kept gyrating in the silence

but had enough focus to see

that people were watching her

and enough sense to tell

that people were judging her

she turned to a group of us

and slurred loudly

as she continued to move to the rhythm

she had found in the distilled nectar of the agave plant

drawing out all of her syllables

telling us that we should all be dancing

that dancing was a beautiful thing

and it felt wonderful

and continued with a few other unintelligible things

as everybody moved back away from her

just a little bit further

towards the back wall

the mexican dancer playing michael jackson

stepped back onto the stage

a fedora placed low on his head

and microphone curved

from his right ear to his mouth

she turned back toward the stage

and the next song began

and she continued to move without grace

dancing to a beat that nobody else could hear

her movements were awkward and random

in all the standard ways

that american too drunk on tequila girls move

it had nothing to do with the music

it had nothing to do with michael jackson

it didn’t flow

it wasn’t gainly

it wasn’t smooth

but as the performer on stage

struck that iconic michael jackson pose

his head angled down

so we could only see his mouth
with one hand on his crotch

his other hand in its white jewel encrusted glove

stuck down and out to his side

i glanced back to the woman in front of us

and it wasn’t pretty

but i knew that she was right

it was beautiful.

anisoptera

   

- for rollin everett
(i can't think of dragonflies without remembering you)

i used to think of writing

as chasing after something fleeting

like a rare dragonfly i needed

to capture in my neural net

put pins thru its wings

and frame it under archival glass

but after all these years

it has become something more serene

more patient and abundant

they surround me constantly

and all I need to do is hold out my hand

and one will light on my fingers

see how it waits so quietly there

not even twitching its transparent wings

while i describe it to you.

          Photo used under Creative Commons from Joi

a la izquierda

    

sitting on the end of the pier with you

on the western coast of cozumel

our legs dangled over the edge

a half drunk black russian by my right side

and a watery mai tai by your left

we watched the fish glitter by beneath us

and talked about our past loves

mismatches missteps and grace

the one who ran away from you

into the woods of abilene kansas

knowing you would run after him

and catch him

and then he would propose

the one with a kitten-shaped hole

in her heart

who told me i was careless with mine

and was right

and others who were right

about other things

and wrong about still others

and though there were so many

stars in the sky that night

and so many fish in the sea

my attention kept coming back

to our shadows

and how they were cast onto the water

by two lights above and behind us

in the corners of the thatched roof

one showed our shadows off to the right

outlining the shapes of our bodies

with a slight gap between them

in darker shades of grey on the blue

the other bulb sent another shadow off to our left

and that light was stronger

and because of its angle

and because of its brightness

and because of exactly where we were sitting together

the shadow it cast was much clearer

the contrast at our edges was much higher

and it cast our bodies as one single shape

sliding gently over the waves

and out into the ocean.

four months and three days

  
today while packing

for our trip to cozumel

i opened the small wooden box

in my closet

that holds my watches

tie bars cufflinks and passport

and sitting on the top tray

coiled up and off to the right side

was mingus' collar

a strip of blue nylon webbing

with a blue anodized bone-shaped name plate

a round silver rabies tag

a purple heart award for bravery when neutered
with most of the purple worn away

and a few short white hairs

stuck into the fabric around the buckle

so little

and so much left behind

on the modern study of galvanism

   

this year my birthday

was stretched out over two weekends

and a week in between

as we do when our plans get grander

than our time or resources

and a single day is no longer enough

and on the last weekend of my birthday

the presents arrived

a glorious stuttering train of surprises

involving much closing of the eyes

so they could furtively pass by

from one room into another

before being officially unveiled

and with the stretching of the event

we ended up teetering on the ledge

of february 13th

and my basking in the me-ness

was pulled by the carriage return of monday

and dropped into the red heartiness

of valentine's day

and in the same way you had considered

hanging onto one of my birthday presents

for this other event

i realized too late

that the words i wrote for you last week

would have fit this day so perfectly

and the drout of the worry

and the worry of the drout begins

and so i turn to the things you gave me

last saturday night

and consider each one as a metaphor

i can use to court the rain

and make that perfect smile of yours

bloom in the mid-february sun

the suitcase seems least possible

with its imagery of leaving you alone

it sitting on a luggage stand by a closet

in a courtyard by marriot

in some small midwestern town

though the way its handle reaches out

to hold my hand

as we wander through the airport

is touching

and the swiss logo with that silver plus sign

floating in the small red square

has some potential

the boldly pink and black Countess Mara tie

the one that could have stretched between events

if i hadn't been there with you

shopping with you to find the perfect one

it could work well for this piece

but as i delve further into its provenance

i find that paisley is sometimes known as

"persian pickles" by american traditionalists

and has many other botanical and dynastic references

and none that tie back as well as i want

into the knots and facets of this day

the peanut butter chip chocolate cookies

you baked for me at your parents' house last night

are a tempting option

representing the fusion of your culinary skills

and your ability to take the tastes i love

and create a recipe

that is at once my favorite cookie in the world

and is similarly working its way into the hearts of anyone else

who has been lucky enough to have one in their mouth

but of course the best option is the single rose

the red rose held in a skeletal hand

the red rose whose stem intertwines 
with the ribs of the skeleton

on the numbered and signed lithograph

FRANKENSTEIN by David Lance Goines

for a January 21, 1984 showing

of the 1931 movie at the Pacific Film Archive

how could you be anything

but that rose to me

the way you nestle into my chest

surrounded by all those bones and pistons

cams crankshafts and hoses