Tag: blank verse

I’m not sure what the lesson is

The garage is lined with meticulously
indexed old magazines, vinyl records,
World War II artifacts, rare stamps,
VHS tapes and vintage fishing rods.
A Hermes 3000 typewriter, framed
oil paintings, ancient Chinese vases.

He told me about a unit
in Hackensack that had belonged
to a socialite. It was heaped
with trash bags containing Prada
dresses, Hermès scarves and jewelry.
There were also empty vodka
bottles, divorce papers and
distressing financial documents.

One evening in 1985,
Mr. Crispo and a gallery assistant
picked up a Norwegian art student named
Eigil Dag Vesti. After a drug-fueled night,
Mr. Vesti was shot dead while naked
and handcuffed. Three weeks later, hikers
discovered his corpse in a smokehouse,
a zipped leather hood over the head.

Mr. Crispo died destitute in 2024
in a Brooklyn nursing facility,
causing his storage unit to go delinquent.

Michael sold a Man Ray painting
and some Walt Kuhn drawings he found
inside for nearly $50,000.

Its contents seemed routine at first —
tool boxes, hammer holsters, saws,
drills, some Spanish-language comic books.
But deep within the clutter, in a tattered
box, Michael found a Purple Heart.

The address brought him to a home
with a rusted white fence in an
immigrant enclave of Union City.
A pair of dust-caked Timberland
boots sat by the entrance. No one
answered Michael’s knocks at the door.
No one answered his calls after he pulled
a phone number through public records.
Then he sent a letter. He is
still waiting to hear back.

People’s lives are in these lockers.
Belongings can tell you a lot
about a person. When you meet
someone, you might think you know them,
but you just don’t.

From A New Jersey Teen Finds Treasure, and More, in Abandoned Storage Units.

Helpless animals

This morning, we learned that from now on 
divorce is forbidden. Also suppressed 
are the Écoles Normales as well as 
petits suisses, coeurs, double-crème. 
We shall no longer be sold fresh bread, 
and coffee grains will be mixed with acorns! 
For we enjoyed ourselves too much under 
the Third Republic, Pétain has said so; 
and pleasure degrades. Can’t we return 
to the land and to handicrafts 
without singing: Prends Ton Fusil, Grégoire?

Benoîte Groult’s diary, 21 September 1940, from Paris under Nazi occupation.

Manager on fire

Our training ground is across the hedge from
Arsenal. There was smoke and you could smell it.

He usually starts his day at five thirty
AM: two hours before Guardiola.
He planted a one-hundred-and-fifty
year-old olive tree outside his office
to symbolise the history of the club
and the responsibility to look
after the roots every single day. From
using a lightbulb during a pre-match
team talk to create electricity and
energy, to hiring professional
pickpockets during a pre-season dinner
and adopting a chocolate-coloured labrador
called Win, no stone has been left unturned.

From After bonfires, bulbs and a dog called Win, will Arteta get Arsenal going again?

Resistance is futile

At precisely nine in the morning,
working with focus and stealth,
our entire membership succeeded
in simultaneously beheading no one.

We set, on roads in every city,
in every nation in the world, a total of zero
roadside bombs which, not being there,
did not subsequently explode,
killing or maiming a total of nobody.

Also, none of us blew himself or herself up
in a crowded public place.

No bombs were dropped, during
the lazy afternoon hours,
on crowded civilian neighborhoods.

No stun guns, rubber batons, rubber bullets,
tear gas, or bullets were used.
No one was forced to don a hood.
No teeth were pulled in darkened rooms.
No drills were used on human flesh,
nor were whips or flames. No one
was reduced to hysterical tears
via a series of blows to the head or body.

In addition, zero planes were flown into buildings.

Since the world began,
we have gone about our work quietly,
resisting the urge to generalize,
valuing the individual over the group,
the actual over the conceptual,
the inherent sweetness of the present
over the theoretically peaceful future
to be obtained via murder.

To tell the truth, we are tired. We work.
We would just like some peace and quiet.
We stand under awnings during urban
thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness
by the troubled, umbrella-tinged faces rushing by.

We are many. We are worldwide.
Though you are louder, though you create
a momentary ripple on the water of life,
we will endure, and prevail.

A Press Release from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction, 26 August 2004.

Expecting

What my heart first waking whispered the world was.

I picked these summer roses because
they looked so disgusting waiting there
wanting the bees to come and fuck them.
On this lonely afternoon what is left
of my youth gushes up like a geyser
as I sit in the sun combing the lice
out of my hair. It is June seventeen
but the sun keeps going in. Rabbits
die of indecision when an experiment
forces them to be forced two ways.

I need a house, a husband, money,
a job, friends, furniture, affection,
servants to look after the children, clothes,
a car, a bicycle, a destination.
I see now I was the one-too-many.
I was the mistake. The circumstances
in which I find myself are marginal
notes, never the text. In the thick hedgerows
the summer flowers like their rapturous
lives that have nothing to do with me.

(From Elizabeth Smart’s diary, June 1943)

The first ramp in Palestine

The ollie is an essential trick.
It’s a door; if you can open it,
you can open others.

We had to go to Israel in order to skate.

“What do you get out of it?”
That’s what people would say.

Observe closely.
One, two, I get on.
One, two, I get on.

The day the skatepark opened, I was here,
and the army came and fired tear gas.

Let’s make a circle.
Let’s learn another trick.
This one in the front, that’s one.
Two, they’re next to each other.
Three, I lift my foot.

Don’t you feel like you’re flying?

I imagine there’s no occupation,
there’s no wall.

With every new trick it’s like
you become aware of a new life.
It’s like when something has been missing.
And you’re looking for it.
And slowly you find it.

I learn to live.
That’s what I get out of it.

(From Walls cannot keep us from flying)

Burn him!

If ya have to ask, you don’t belong there.

The lake bed is a Euclidean plane 
with zillions of dry fractal cracks. 
The parched Nevada mountains of the Black
Rock Desert rise on three sides. Point the front 
of the vehicle into emptiness and launch. 
Gaseous tails of flying white dust spurt up 
like jet exhaust. Cars and trucks leave huge wakes 
on the horizon, like white prairie fires. 
The place feels like the afterlife. When you 
walk across it, you just drift over 
endless cracked whiteness, lifting your feet 
maybe a quarter inch from the surface. 
The alkali dust is like a fine and 
bitter talcum. Just throw off your clothes. 

Colored strings of chemglow out in the desert, 
woven through the spokes of bicycles and 
mysteriously revolving. Huge dramatic
bowl of desert stars overhead. Fireworks 
and flying flares casting a lurid trench-
warfare glow above the massive camp.
Pagan hierophants in tall headdresses 
and silver lamé march in slow step,
toting flaming standards of arcane device.
Swarms of nude dancers caper up in
bizarre sword-and-sorcery bondage gear. 
The soundtrack switches to repeated, insane,
bestial screaming. An awe-inspiring insect 
goddess – a hunchbacked bug on red stilts – comes 
towering and toppling into the firelight. 
Amy is an imaginative child. This 
is awful! It’s like a living nightmare! 
They go at it hot and heavy, booming-
banging-boogying.

A guy got killed last night.
He rear-ended a truck while zooming 
along the darkened playa on a blacked-
out motorcycle. At night somebody
constructs a fake constellation. Faking
the stars, cutting-and-pasting the desert
sky. Flat on his back, he looks like a giant 
abandoned packing crate, but when he’s 
catapulted into standing position, 
he becomes a striking neon symbol 
of pretty much everything that matters.
It’s time to finally burn the Man. 
They fire up the guy, and he explodes 
in sheets of colored fireworks and giant 
livid gouts of flames. Burn him!
Amy is screaming, wriggling like an eel.

(From Greetings from Burning Man! August 1996)

We are as gods

He has coaxed his skin to produce
a fluorescent protein, ingested
a friend’s poop in a D.I.Y.
fecal-matter transplant, and attempted
to deactivate one of his genes
so that he could grow bigger muscles.

Inside the box, I found an assortment
of lab tools—pipette tips, petri dishes,
disposable gloves—as well as several
vials containing E. coli and all I’d need
to rearrange its genome.

Ants that can’t smell, beagles that put on
superhero-like brawn, pigs that resist
swine fever, macaques that suffer from sleep
disorders, coffee beans that contain no
caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice that
don’t get fat, and bacteria whose genes contain,
in code, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series
of photographs showing a horse in motion.

We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it. 
We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. 
We are Saturn, devouring our children.

(From Crispr and the splice to survive)

Bubbly Creek

One long arm of it is blind, and the filth
stays there forever and a day. It is
constantly in motion as if huge fish
were feeding in it, or great leviathans
disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles
of carbonic gas will rise to the surface
and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide.

Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid,
and the creek looks like a bed of lava;
chickens walk about on it, feeding,
and many times an unwary stranger
has started to stroll across and vanished
temporarily. The packers used to leave
the creek that way, till every now and then
the surface would catch on fire and burn
furiously, and the fire department
would have to come and put it out.

Once,
an ingenious stranger came and started
to gather this filth in scows, to make lard;
then the packers took the cue, and got out
an injunction to stop him, and afterwards
gathered it themselves. The banks are plastered
thick with hairs, and this also the packers
gather and clean.

(From Bubbly Creek on Wikipedia)