Ode to a pink lady apple
08/26/01
O, pink lady,
bucolic bride,
blushing against a hunger that I exhale
to shine you in my shirt;
Archimedes conceived of no purer
study in density,
the orange night condenses on your shy
integument, and I can't help but notice that
it doesn't phase you,
coy mistress of my lips,
but juggling you and you alone between my anxious hands
is no antidote to the ripe and regular sweetness
calling from behind your cool summer sweat.
How did I survive this everlasting un-birthday without you,
the self-propelled cyclical memory
of our yesterday together,
cast like a fishnet or an October dusk
over the triumph of my detachment?
Old as man's weariness
your fading tartness only hearkens
the advent of a new aeon of birth and decay,
But tonight, temptress,
you are the wildness of a virgin in pain,
the seal of your flesh fresh for the breaking.
And I, I am not ignorant
of what lies beneath that burnished blushing gold,
who polished you—
Your creator set spinning
a Charybdis of luscious depth
whose savor now drips
from the tip of my nose.
We are almost one,
and the half of you nourishing me already
is an artery direct from
my strength to that sultry shore
where you crashed into my belly
and out of my ravenous intellections for now.
But there is no separating you from this intellect,
Crisis fulcrum fountain of energy in transition,
though henceforth you will shine only in the snapshot
Of that breathless ecstasy, your irrevocable consumption.
Run from this greed, pink lady,
#4130,
shaking hips you don't have;
but your destiny is tied to mine,
I predict your paralysis
basking in the wink of my delight.

<<My professor is forcing me to fuse the creative writing pieces into a journal. I wrote the above verses because I bought these pink lady apples from Garden of Eden Market on 23rd and 3rd whose sweet tartness must have been completely unique to that tree planted by some prehistoric shaman. I couldn't stop thinking about those apples at work all day on Monday but once I got home I savored the anticipation, to which lovely moments I devoted some thoughts Neruda-style.>>

Philip
11 September
It's difficult to fight back tears every time I hear someone on the street saying, "Holy shit," or "Oh, my God, Oh, God.” From my safe, craggy cliffside perch I get the feeling that the decay flowing through these deco valleys is spreading, that erosion isn’t far away from the eyrie. Thank God NYU closed, many facilities are open to the community--especially those who were evacuated from their building but I suppose others just need emotional support. The radio stations instructed us to wait until blood donation was better organized before heading to a center (almost every hospital in Manhattan); under this cloud of cosmic helplessness, a bolstered conscience must be the only empowerment available. Desperate blood shortages, but I heard the lines are four hours long—wow, I’ll wait until evening.
It's heartening to see complete strangers offering to shelter and feed one another (free water, free grapes set up on card tables in the street, replacement trainers for old people walking over to the bridges)--if I could convince myself it weren't inappropriate I’d be recording the looks on people's faces as they shiver through the crisis together; the twinkle when they realize their huddle is strong. Bittersweet symphony. It's probably impossible to get out of the city right now. What frightens me most is the possibility that we won't recognize the world we find ourselves in a month from now, that this is only the beginning. I’ve been reading for five years now about nuclear suitcases from Chechens and brainwashing and bribing Spetnaz weapons technicians. My poor mother.

12 September
The air here has an eerie feel to it, still the numbness of mourning, but not only: the mood is suspended disbelief, ancient tragedy, the flavor of the resilience of the human spirit, and America's naïve optimism (‘the only nation ever established with a reason’). I can't imagine it being much closer to a war zone, especially the buses of police, olive-green beasts and APC’s filling the streets for at least a block in every direction; a billion- or so candle power spotlight is performing some essential function for 25th street and Lexington's intersection. When I came home yesterday afternoon there were National Guardsmen in fatigues directing traffic with automatic rifles.
They told me I could sign people in downstairs this evening. How can they slouch over bars or connect with the place in themselves where laughter originates? Functional sadness is the only state that makes sense to me right now; solemnity, sobriety. There's almost no respite from sirens, and I want to reflect, to write. I would talk to someone if I thought words would do the trick right now--a hug would help more. It’s a wan cloud hanging over this American century, mocking an imperial twilight, condensed with the blood of prophets and wise men. Mystery, Babylon the Great.

14 September
I can’t tell day from night. The billion candlepower light must be doing something good for the city, but my vigilant throes of insomnia are such a slap in the face during the sham normalcy looming over scrambles to focus. Vibrant conversations, organically interrupted, by mutual consent kept tucked away for future utility reassure me, my third wish has been granted: silence, at least this week, makes sense to them. But I’m sleepy at the wrong times, spontaneously energized and haunting the doorstep of Pandaemonium with my boiled eggs and nectarines. No rest for the wicked. The thought crossed my mind—naïve American optimism—that rats can be smoked out, who can’t answer when asked where they were “when I laid the foundations of the earth?” And the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. This is the smell of a world in transition, a consciousness to be kept on record assuming a race to receive it. I remember from Theodore Monod’s obituary, “purists are necessarily against a lot of things;” I’ve read and heard the word ‘against’ so many times in the past few days, I like its texture: contra, versus, anticipating a rainy day. I will save up some hope against the next rainy day, pennies from an old herringbone blazer I haven’t worn in years.

The final creation. It’s a last, lonely soldier and a lost voice, and lovely how these periods arise (to punctuate one) with the feeling that one has exposed everything wanted or known how to say, and when next some part mineral deposit shines through it will care for itself; may that be more security than sloth. “For indeed I wonder, do I dare, or do I dare…?” Expand. And you, patience, are respectfully requested to remain, despite clipped phrases, choppy incoherence, yes ‘eccentric, interwoven, yet regular then most when irregular they seem,’ less the illusion of a bridal chamber for the consummation of perilous realizations—keep courage company. For this musing represents the denial of the Evil Genius, who has hidden, my love, from your kiwi grin. For you I love, O eternity, and I deny your right to capitalization—who among your suitors hasn’t seen how that makes you squirm!
Yet and all, herein lies a mystery: the returning impression that all sense was present in the onset of adolescence, barely less recognizable (though integral), identical to that other most magnificent clairvoyance - the cyclical lustiness of anaesthesia. Who can refute the true limits of human freedom now? Only the very voice which has smithed the bars, but first demonstrate reason: all this will be yours someday. Disconnected reflection? One should say not, if one intends by recognizing the cosmic futility of all human pursuits to entrap the Evil Genius in a consciousness no longer self-aware – less sneaky pseudo-positivists will know who you are.
And indeed I do dare, since the relevance of what is now revealed remains irrefutable: Paul was the first anti-neo-Platonist. Albeit the alternative is inside-out negativism, against which even the lamest ridicule may not be reserved. Paul, piteous slicing censor. This word barbaros was born when the Greeks heard the language of some hyper-boreans or Germans to be convinced it consisted in repitition of the word bar-bar-bar-bar-bar. Ad infinitum – What majestic bigotry! Premium adapters, conquered in a skirmish with your do-ing subordinated to quiditas, an immovable what-ness will do nothing, and in so knowing overcome. 20 October 2001 (Silly Nietzschean Blurb)

<<I think this day I'd picked up Ecce Homo. Actually, I'd put off my weekly creative writing until Saturday before class and I woke up in the zone...this flowed out. I'm a much nicer guy than Nietzsche. Well, more generously sentimented.>>

Trichotomies
Circular women,
For instance propping up a block of buildings
with their most-secretest wishes and “yes, sir, have a nice day,”
the taciturnity reserved only for parents and passers
seedless
forgotten wavelengths
your eyes freeze together
mesmer whispering of the color of dust
in affectionate terms to your conscience
knowing no rung will hold the combined weight.
You become unapproachable,
vibe grown diffident with comfort,
and resigned to expand
to proportions inverse of the barometer futility finally penetrates;
wet with the dessicating mists known best by ancient sailors and stumbling through shops in the city center, into a beer garden with
a rose but
an empty buttonhole
a paper crown for your imagination;
who could admit a
warrior in a battle against yourself?
I will continue to visit you
with my healthy digestion, remember the time we unfolded corners
in all the unfinished books left
stacked alongside new shapes of paperclip invented
in the nights when rest
was an asthmatic gasp, a laureate grapple and
On days when the future ascends
and declines like a streaming triangle of geese, when descriptors resonate like the wilderness
you love so much, to have suffered bafflement
by a wind so slight and to know is the spell
the flickering, righteous commiseration, is to hang your instrument upon and sit inside
a willowy chase—
mute flecks of light, the rhetoric of longing—
across from the moated penumbra of home.

leafy city

airy cabbage in a peeling kitchen
beguiling a next generation of fishers
and no less than a tickled baby’s giggle

mourners roll into side-splitting coffins
buoyed out from a camel’s split hump
stitched into song
hacking on pins
dripping along god’s cupped knuckles
glee gathering like flies on solitude
thrown
back underwhelmingly in your face.

<<Damn, dreamweaver won't let me tab the word solitude into a solitary position. Visual prosity!>>

Shark on the telephone

Age wandered away
soles slapping hugely.

Gravity broke hearts
sent a thoughtless gift.

Flipping skin inside-out
disintegrated in the circumambient absence
of symmetry
predict me
deify
disabuse anew;
(ring)
I am Depth’s thundering caution
And a spy’s fierce eyes
To slash your too-fast tasting
To pluck your wingy prudence
As a nail from a lamprey’s head.
(gape)
You belong in salt water
winding across bent horizons
swallower of suns set at freakish angles
to view
unfantasized horrors describing rational flesh;
who are such dizzying unity
scraping muddy spires from (scattering taxonomies)
your blood-encrusted heel.
(drizzle)
Pretend restraint,
retroussé
Nothing is waiting,
born fresh, forfend.
In competition against what gasps
what static ecstasy
Crimson flashing at the finish line
Floating on corneal corners
never close enough to focus.

And the first dimensions, trap-grip slipped,
Pistol-nosed hum,
Were a prismatic wince.