I need some way to jolt this space. Any ideas?

Imagined Arguments

Refining verbal jabs is important to do before their need arises. Otherwise you are left with stabbing the air with the middle air, straining for the proper note of “Fear me!”

My patience with your entitled, privileged horseshit is at *negative* 99,000!

or one of my favorites,

Yes, I realize you are a special snowflake fallen from the butt-hole of angels above, but…

Careless, dismissive gravity is the key in all this.

Stones

Through the torrent of noise, anger and circular mediocrity, there appears a kernel of truth that I want to keep with me. Like some piece of exceptionally smooth stone I have found that might be precious, if I wanted it to be.

Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity

Damn this book. It defeated me. At page 400. I couldn’t take it anymore. Testing the reader’s patience at every page, Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity is a 680 page tome in desperate need of an editor.

Here’s what Slate had to say. It’s accurate, especially the graph. Which is cool, along with being accurate. I enjoyed the scatological tidbit about a lawyer who apparently doesn’t know how to use a toilet. I suppose these things happen. Why did Sergio feel the need to clog up an enjoyable, comical rhythm with the inanity of every single thought and action that the lead character might undertake? This is not okay. I am actually angry. 400 pages. Get a fucking editor.

Key @ Peele: Substitute Teacher

[Mix-Tape] Wonderwall by Oasis

[Poetry] One Last Poem For Richard by Sandra Cisneros

One Last Poem for Richard
by Sandra Cisneros

December 24th and we’re through again.
This time for good I know because I didn’t
throw you out — and anyway we waved.
No shoes. No angry doors.
We folded clothes and went
our separate ways.
You left behind that flannel shirt
of yours I liked but remembered to take
your toothbrush. Where are you tonight?

Richard, it’s Christmas Eve again
and old ghosts come back home.
I’m sitting by the Christmas tree
wondering where did we go wrong.

Okay, we didn’t work, and all
memories to tell you the truth aren’t good.
But sometimes there were good times.
Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep
beside me and never dreamed afraid.

There should be stars for great wars
like ours. There ought to be awards
and plenty of champagne for the survivors.

After all the years of degradations,
the several holidays of failure,
there should be something
to commemorate the pain.

Someday we’ll forget that great Brazil disaster.
Till then, Richard, I wish you well.
I wish you love affairs and plenty of hot water,
and women kinder than I treated you.
I forget the reason, but I loved you once,
remember?

Maybe in this season, drunk
and sentimental, I’m willing to admit
a part of me, crazed and kamikaze,
ripe for anarchy, loves still.

I Don’t Need Poetry Anymore

I don’t need poetry anymore.

I folded it up and left it behind on the A train, wedged between seats. I left it hanging outside Central Park, wavering uncertainly in the wind as I rushed underground, in a big hurry to catch my ride.

It wasn’t appropriate anymore to dig through my heart for noise that will let me make music. For screams that can be leashed out to words and tied to meaning. Who will be around to explain that things changes? The world becomes unrecognizable and it drifts.

We are grown now. Unless it is ‘eggs’ to the grocery list, there is no need to scribble anything urgently anywhere anymore. Much less in parks, or the inside of a church or waiting next to the bodega, sniffing the sharpness in the air. There is no poetry in trains anymore.

Time has lost its wisdom. It’s become distracted and hurried. And cluttered in a way that poetry can no longer sweep clean. There’s no order here, no rhymes and clicks that make sense.

Dreams

Something gets snagged, caught. Not clear what it is yet. A piece that you can only taste, that doesn’t have words yet, not even a story or people. All you remember is feeling afraid and unhappy. It made you wake up and pay attention to the ceiling. I negotiate wisps of my dreams back. It solidifies reluctantly as if it were giving away a secret. There are cracks in my dream, and bits have slipped through, escaped my lazy scrutiny.

Brenna M. Munro’s South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come

Demanding gay rights as a condition of loans, aid, and alliances can all too easily become the West’s civilizing mission of the day — which exacerbates the underlying conflict being worked out across the terrain of sexuality. Narratives of colonialism as white men saving brown women from brown men are all too easily reproduced when the Western media casts, for example, the rape of lesbians in South Africa through the familiar romantic imperial triangle of black victims, black savages, and white saviors  — in this case gay rights activists from the West.

Joseph Massad offers a critical account of the incitement to discourse about “homosexuality” in the contemporary Islamic world in particular, suggesting that international gay rights activism in the context of both modern fundamentalism and ruling postcolonial elites in need of convenient “enemies” has, in practice, had devastating effects on Arab or Muslim men who have sex with men. When homosexuality is made to carry the burden of ongoing histories of domination and cultural conflict, the visibility that is the cornerstone of Western gay and lesbian politics can bring extreme vulnerability, even as it offers the prospect of new kinds of legibility, political representation and citizenship. Gay rights activists from the West, therefore, need to be far more aware of the racial and postcolonial politics that intersect with questions of sexuality when they engage in public discourse about the sexual mores and politics of “other” cultures or attempt to make interventions on behalf of “gay” people in the global South.

—- South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom by Brenna M. Munro.

Not the most obvious train commute reading, but I read Munro’s work almost entirely on the subway. Dense and intense, it was a gripping, queer-fied retelling of the apartheid story, the South African story, and stories of migration.

The saddest thing in the world

Woke up this morning, brimming with troubles. Brewed coffee saved me.

I thought about what the saddest thing in the world could be. If it could be just one thing. Surprisingly, I came upon a coffee-shop at the end of a long, empty highway — dark, ill-lit — an elderly white man smoking and drinking coffee. He is facing devastating loneliness — the kind that cannot be allayed by the mere presence of other people. Attempts are being made to distract, and it is not working.

It waits, with weight as real as touch. Fear.

The kind that plunges deep inside you and watches you.

[Video] Toaster Possessed

[Mix-Tape Fridays] Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin

[Poetry] “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

“Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Blank Auditorium Productions

It’s almost time

Who does this idea belong to?

Crunch. Munch.

Tweet.

Need food. Hungry, man.

*blank stare*

You are not moving the mountain stone by stone. You are just carrying the stones up the same mountain, you damn fool.

“Ladies and Gentlemen — Can I please have your attention?”

Tweet.

Cough

Tweet.

Sigh

*Non-blank stare*

*blank stare*

Tweet

Tweet.

Tweet.

It’s started.

New Kids On The block,had a bunch of hits
Chinese food makes me sick.
And I think it’s fly when girls stop by for the summer, for the summer
I like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch,
I’d take her if I had one wish,
But she’s been gone since that summer.
Since that summer

Hip Hop Marmalade spic And span,
Met you one summer and it all began
You’re the best girl that I ever did see,
The great Larry Bird Jersey 33
When you take a sip you buzz like a hornet
Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets
Call me Willy Whistle cause I can’t speak baby
Something in your eyes went and drove me crazy
Now I can’t forget you and it makes me mad,
Left one day and never came back
Stayed all summer then went back home,
Macauly Culkin wasn’t Home Alone
Fell deep in love,but now we ain’t speaking
Michael J Fox was Alex P Keaton
When I met you I said my name was Rich
You look like a girl from Abercrombie and Fitch

*blank stare*

*blank stare*

*blank stare*

Can the Real Slim-Shady please stand up?

Sit down, what’d you doing?