The goosh and guff;
talking to one another.
The wonder and the I;
you'll shoot your eyes out.
Heart beats turn into engine revolutions.
Pass the card. Feeling her fingertips graze
the edge
of my collar.
Gaze at her eyebrow,
groomed and its cant!
Sharp, fast, and hard
before she looks up.
Lightning come without thunder.
Sharp, fast, and hard
with her intersection
and "who the hell did your hair, darlin'?
Wish you were wearing
a shade of lipstick
beneath your eyelashes,
as her fingernails cross your palm.
Erection standing against the seam of your pants,
wonder if she would lick you clean
the way you would give.
Years to hours to days.
Hack her phone.
Wet.
Double bag the 2 liters.
Double bag the boxes of cookies.
Double bag the 18 carton eggs.
Place the loaf of bread atop.
"I do not need a receipt."
original works of parts
Cats In the Ceiling
A smile cracks night chapped lips
hearing the cats in pursuit of each other.
Under the bed, across the couch,
to the sink and weight room they zip.
Cat claws fumble for traction
on vinyl, on rug,
blown through speed traps,
on one another"'s coats! Tumble weeds of fur
in their wakes along the course.
Not a creature stirring
save for
them hooligans.
hearing the cats in pursuit of each other.
Under the bed, across the couch,
to the sink and weight room they zip.
Cat claws fumble for traction
on vinyl, on rug,
blown through speed traps,
on one another"'s coats! Tumble weeds of fur
in their wakes along the course.
Not a creature stirring
save for
them hooligans.
Christmas Song 3
Remember when you used to listen to music?
I don't either. You said you were coming to visit.
I didn't touch myself for three days
to heighten the sight of you.
To tune my nostrils to what the scent of the
backs of your ears might be like
elbow to elbow at the bar
after so many year
could have beens. Just maybe
what you wanted was nothing a boy had to offer
two years sweating getting over
"good enough" fail.
Pretend. Call. Saddled and run to ground regardless.
Pretend. Call. Call to call off.
If I said "yes," you would not have come;
gone home with the comfort of knowing
I would.
Thieves. I tried. Wake clothed, apples in pockets
mid afternoon. Remember advice given solicited
before work set its tooth
ready to go against reason and ration
for you. A long day
waiting.
The second day, emptied ash trays.
Remember when you listened to music?
Instead of drowning out.
To heighten the sight of you.
To tune my nostrils to what the scent of the
backs of your ears smell like now and
quaff. Full and deep.
Shift the location,
the ash tray for the glass.
Convince the self he did not want to use
you. To get off. Shift
backward. Follow through.
Lights out on the eve.
My head in your lap.
Would it have killed you to kiss me.
I don't either. You said you were coming to visit.
I didn't touch myself for three days
to heighten the sight of you.
To tune my nostrils to what the scent of the
backs of your ears might be like
elbow to elbow at the bar
after so many year
could have beens. Just maybe
what you wanted was nothing a boy had to offer
two years sweating getting over
"good enough" fail.
Pretend. Call. Saddled and run to ground regardless.
Pretend. Call. Call to call off.
If I said "yes," you would not have come;
gone home with the comfort of knowing
I would.
Thieves. I tried. Wake clothed, apples in pockets
mid afternoon. Remember advice given solicited
before work set its tooth
ready to go against reason and ration
for you. A long day
waiting.
The second day, emptied ash trays.
Remember when you listened to music?
Instead of drowning out.
To heighten the sight of you.
To tune my nostrils to what the scent of the
backs of your ears smell like now and
quaff. Full and deep.
Shift the location,
the ash tray for the glass.
Convince the self he did not want to use
you. To get off. Shift
backward. Follow through.
Lights out on the eve.
My head in your lap.
Would it have killed you to kiss me.
Lemonade Scratch Paper
My brother and I. What was your hair like back then? Grinning and drawing our versions of Michael Keaton and Jack's Batman comic books. Misspelling "boom" "bom." In all fairness, guns do not go "boom boom boom boom." The sound is more like "bom bom bom bom." When we finished we swapped pages to see what our batmen were going to do next in our pulp comic books and laughed and awed and exchanged notes. Remember when we used to draw our own pornography too? There was an afternoon playing with lyrics and writing songs and our ROJA club. The roaches of joes apartment. No girls allowed. We had business cards and held official meetings. No sisters allowed either. We had gun fights with folded paper. There was a rap song whose headline was about making lemonade and the best ways to do it. It was our theme song and at the very end, recorded on a yakbak was the closer: "Don't waste time / standing in a line. Come right over / to our bank!" And an illustration of a pile of money in front of a teller's window. That bank would not stay afloat for long. Everyone likes free money. The riots! The world is not take a penny
leave a penny.
With great aspirations and the best of intentions. As laid down by ROJA standards and reinforced honor super omnia, we set forth. Wind at our backs, my brother and I. What was your smile like back then? What would your Timothy Burton batman comic book look like today. This instant. The sound is more like the sound an iron rod makes when struck against brick. Like a staple gun on steroids with a penchant for burning matches.
leave a penny.
With great aspirations and the best of intentions. As laid down by ROJA standards and reinforced honor super omnia, we set forth. Wind at our backs, my brother and I. What was your smile like back then? What would your Timothy Burton batman comic book look like today. This instant. The sound is more like the sound an iron rod makes when struck against brick. Like a staple gun on steroids with a penchant for burning matches.
How I've Imagined Myself With You Through the Years
I am sitting
and you are petting my hair
to let me know the war is over
(arrows light out
off target
toward our position,
my ax ready)
and while you pet my locks
and shards of metal there
you say
"Not yet"
and feel my scalp tighten
while I grin.
Your fingers dig in
to my dreads
and scrape against my skull
to let me know you are grinning too.
I laugh and you wince
about what I will have to do
because of your touch
and the two of us
on the cusp of glory
that will still have to be earned.
Already missing you,
but you'll clean up with
your broadsword.
There's nothing two titans cannot do.
Against an army? You and whose?
Petting my hair and my self
looking up at you-
there is nothing we cannot do.
The arrows fall where we were.
"Sic-em."
and you are petting my hair
to let me know the war is over
(arrows light out
off target
toward our position,
my ax ready)
and while you pet my locks
and shards of metal there
you say
"Not yet"
and feel my scalp tighten
while I grin.
Your fingers dig in
to my dreads
and scrape against my skull
to let me know you are grinning too.
I laugh and you wince
about what I will have to do
because of your touch
and the two of us
on the cusp of glory
that will still have to be earned.
Already missing you,
but you'll clean up with
your broadsword.
There's nothing two titans cannot do.
Against an army? You and whose?
Petting my hair and my self
looking up at you-
there is nothing we cannot do.
The arrows fall where we were.
"Sic-em."
Hate Tank
Keep back 300 meters.
Yes, meters.
Parade float.
Confetti cannons blazing.
Free hugs and lollipops and sundaes
if you ask nicely.
Toys for guns
out back.
With a thirteen thousand dollar donation
you too can have control of Sol 278 &
vaporize anything on the face of the planet
once he is aligned with your selected target.
Complete demolition not guaranteed.
Target size must be less than two inches by two.
Objects in screen may not be synced real time.
Margin of error is two feet in either direction.
No refunds upon purchase.
You may not destroy your selected coordinates
however you will be graced with a live feed
of the general vicinity to see the effect
your selection and your donation to Sol 278's
upkeep makes to make your world
a little better.
Keep back 300 meters.
Yes, meters.
Parade float.
Confetti cannons blazing.
Free hugs and lollipops and sundaes
if you ask nicely.
Sol's been operating for several years.
It is hit and miss.
For 13 billion dollars
you can vaporize anything
down to the size of a golf ball
and the other two hundred yards around it.
"For the low price..." everyone remembers
the old commercials.
That thing was a flashlight
by comparison.
Sol X0X0 is where it's at.
Confetti,
free hugs,
lollipops,
and sherbet.
Money to burn? Pick up a pint
and spend, spend, spend, spend!
Yes, meters.
Parade float.
Confetti cannons blazing.
Free hugs and lollipops and sundaes
if you ask nicely.
Toys for guns
out back.
With a thirteen thousand dollar donation
you too can have control of Sol 278 &
vaporize anything on the face of the planet
once he is aligned with your selected target.
Complete demolition not guaranteed.
Target size must be less than two inches by two.
Objects in screen may not be synced real time.
Margin of error is two feet in either direction.
No refunds upon purchase.
You may not destroy your selected coordinates
however you will be graced with a live feed
of the general vicinity to see the effect
your selection and your donation to Sol 278's
upkeep makes to make your world
a little better.
Keep back 300 meters.
Yes, meters.
Parade float.
Confetti cannons blazing.
Free hugs and lollipops and sundaes
if you ask nicely.
Sol's been operating for several years.
It is hit and miss.
For 13 billion dollars
you can vaporize anything
down to the size of a golf ball
and the other two hundred yards around it.
"For the low price..." everyone remembers
the old commercials.
That thing was a flashlight
by comparison.
Sol X0X0 is where it's at.
Confetti,
free hugs,
lollipops,
and sherbet.
Money to burn? Pick up a pint
and spend, spend, spend, spend!
Warm December
Every other shot fell through the net
like the rim had cooties.
Every strike to bike pedal sung
like the brakes had Spring time behind their backs.
The sun still set early.
The street lights still lit on cue.
In this Winter come
I am reminded I am around the corner.
Fire pit perfumed and snow baited
Spring weighted
I am still the Winter you.
like the rim had cooties.
Every strike to bike pedal sung
like the brakes had Spring time behind their backs.
The sun still set early.
The street lights still lit on cue.
In this Winter come
I am reminded I am around the corner.
Fire pit perfumed and snow baited
Spring weighted
I am still the Winter you.
Forced Fusion
If you blur your vision and squint,
while crossing your eyes
and your heart,
with all of the lights turned down,
he will appear for a few fractions of a second
and then slip out of phase.
To it, I am funny.
A curiosity. What do you want with me?
It has no name. I named it once in the past
and it was very unhappy about
the names I gave it.
Waking the morning after
reincorporation. The evening after
forced fusion
between the destroyer and the creator,
I am damaged.
I am not benevolent. I am violent
when joined with my other half.
Singly we are joyous,
together we are terminal.
It laughs, chuckles, or groans and coughs lightly
depending on what hits your ears as laughter.
"What do you want with me?" It laughs
and I squint and ask if anyone else
is in the room.
I have a shadow.
It is long and unkind.
Without it I am nothing.
Without us it is nothing.
I believe there are many like it.
Until I die, unfortunately
this one is mine.
while crossing your eyes
and your heart,
with all of the lights turned down,
he will appear for a few fractions of a second
and then slip out of phase.
To it, I am funny.
A curiosity. What do you want with me?
It has no name. I named it once in the past
and it was very unhappy about
the names I gave it.
Waking the morning after
reincorporation. The evening after
forced fusion
between the destroyer and the creator,
I am damaged.
I am not benevolent. I am violent
when joined with my other half.
Singly we are joyous,
together we are terminal.
It laughs, chuckles, or groans and coughs lightly
depending on what hits your ears as laughter.
"What do you want with me?" It laughs
and I squint and ask if anyone else
is in the room.
I have a shadow.
It is long and unkind.
Without it I am nothing.
Without us it is nothing.
I believe there are many like it.
Until I die, unfortunately
this one is mine.
Rudolf the Red Nosed Dreadnought
after Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in the spirit of the holiday tune and Space Battleship Yamato
Rudolf the red nosed dreadnought
had many a very shiny nose.
And if you ever saw them
you were probably evacuating home.
You would have to go off world,
because its fire boiled seas.
If you heard Rudolf was coming
your world's leaders grew weak in their knees.
When she first set sail across the stars
the alliance came to say
"Rudolf with your nose bright red,
can you put the myths to bed?"
During the second action
the crew was a bit too green.
It was a rout and poor Rudolf
had to make a swift retreat.
The interstellar war wore on
and her name was a forgotten rose.
Back then, all of her crew wished
they were uniformed in other clothes.
Then the tides began to turn,
year after year blood flowed.
All of the while, mighty Rudolf
became to be feared and well known.
Then one nebula skirmish
turned into a final fray.
The forward warships cornered
all began for the alliance to pray.
Out of the haze came a light,
Rudolf the dreadnought in its unspeakable might,
to wipe the stars clean
with seasoned glee.
All of the other systems loved her.
For everything terrible and wonderful she would mean.
Rudolf the red nosed dreadnought
went down that day and forever more
in galactic alliance history.
Rudolf the red nosed dreadnought
had many a very shiny nose.
And if you ever saw them
you were probably evacuating home.
You would have to go off world,
because its fire boiled seas.
If you heard Rudolf was coming
your world's leaders grew weak in their knees.
When she first set sail across the stars
the alliance came to say
"Rudolf with your nose bright red,
can you put the myths to bed?"
During the second action
the crew was a bit too green.
It was a rout and poor Rudolf
had to make a swift retreat.
The interstellar war wore on
and her name was a forgotten rose.
Back then, all of her crew wished
they were uniformed in other clothes.
Then the tides began to turn,
year after year blood flowed.
All of the while, mighty Rudolf
became to be feared and well known.
Then one nebula skirmish
turned into a final fray.
The forward warships cornered
all began for the alliance to pray.
Out of the haze came a light,
Rudolf the dreadnought in its unspeakable might,
to wipe the stars clean
with seasoned glee.
All of the other systems loved her.
For everything terrible and wonderful she would mean.
Rudolf the red nosed dreadnought
went down that day and forever more
in galactic alliance history.
Smoker 48
Single file
Down the aisle
Until you meet your match.
Years from now
Learned your how
Come home, door greet: "meow!"
Not the one
That was as fun
More like a "the key tray is for your gun
Too." Ahem. How was your day?
Mhm, uh-hunh, okay.
Good on you. I am too tired to play.
Single file
Down the aisle
Until you meet your match.
"It's in your head"
Perception's bed
Moth wings on walls, pinned spread.
Where do they go
Rejects row
Moonrise fast, sun rises slow
When viewed from the bottom of a well.
Inhale fast. Exhale. Time bled away in spell.
Gray ruins and rune map evaporate
into the evening wind,
Where I am buried, I can never tell.
Down the aisle
Until you meet your match.
Years from now
Learned your how
Come home, door greet: "meow!"
Not the one
That was as fun
More like a "the key tray is for your gun
Too." Ahem. How was your day?
Mhm, uh-hunh, okay.
Good on you. I am too tired to play.
Single file
Down the aisle
Until you meet your match.
"It's in your head"
Perception's bed
Moth wings on walls, pinned spread.
Where do they go
Rejects row
Moonrise fast, sun rises slow
When viewed from the bottom of a well.
Inhale fast. Exhale. Time bled away in spell.
Gray ruins and rune map evaporate
into the evening wind,
Where I am buried, I can never tell.
I Am Going To Die
I am certain that when I die
it will be behind the wheel.
Not because of something I did,
but something I did not feel.
A loose cotter pin, a harmonically vibrating rod.
A bearing wearing metal on metal.
A bolt sheared through in last Winter's frost.
A gear one tooth short whose odd metered song
is lost beneath the 8 cylinder chorus and
the timpani's growling at the tail.
With a thump and a clunk
the dominoes will flop,
into oncoming traffic I will go
until the first law yowls "stop!"
My eyes will burst free of their sockets.
My shoes will fly off like rockets.
Over and over, or maybe over and under,
shell, chassis, and plumbing torn in shreds.
One hundred yards up the street,
beyond the last of the glass
my hand will lay
still gripping the shift knob's steel.
Another ten beyond that,
they'll find my head
with a knowing smile:
"I knew I should have double checked that seal."
it will be behind the wheel.
Not because of something I did,
but something I did not feel.
A loose cotter pin, a harmonically vibrating rod.
A bearing wearing metal on metal.
A bolt sheared through in last Winter's frost.
A gear one tooth short whose odd metered song
is lost beneath the 8 cylinder chorus and
the timpani's growling at the tail.
With a thump and a clunk
the dominoes will flop,
into oncoming traffic I will go
until the first law yowls "stop!"
My eyes will burst free of their sockets.
My shoes will fly off like rockets.
Over and over, or maybe over and under,
shell, chassis, and plumbing torn in shreds.
One hundred yards up the street,
beyond the last of the glass
my hand will lay
still gripping the shift knob's steel.
Another ten beyond that,
they'll find my head
with a knowing smile:
"I knew I should have double checked that seal."
Come Alive
The darkest day you will ever see
will never be as night as what
you left behind.
If you're telling me
never wake terrified.
If you're telling me,
no lights on at night.
If you're telling me,
face up to day sky.
Thunder rolls and nighttime flashes
get longer between snows
that come and go.
If you're telling me the darkest nights
will be lost in childhood, then
I can be any way.
will never be as night as what
you left behind.
If you're telling me
never wake terrified.
If you're telling me,
no lights on at night.
If you're telling me,
face up to day sky.
Thunder rolls and nighttime flashes
get longer between snows
that come and go.
If you're telling me the darkest nights
will be lost in childhood, then
I can be any way.
Board
When everything goes. Must go. Must go!
Decision time. Into the atmosphere
and take our chances there.
Me and my and the voices there.
So simple. Boil down to one cover waits
to be uncovered
and depressed.
Glass on top of red,
in case it needs depressed
by gloved fist
when the world is spinning and
grip the yellow and black tape
less your arm is broken
in rocket powered escape.
Laugh and nod with your
engines leaking fuel to the fire
after fragment punctures. Go!
The board lights up red and
the worst dread imaginable
dragons descending on a single soul
with one shield and one fire begs
options.
Let go.
Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire.
One hand on the helmet,
one hand on the lever.
DO OR DIE.
Never say never. And Squeeze.
Glass constellation. Leave.
Decision time. Into the atmosphere
and take our chances there.
Me and my and the voices there.
So simple. Boil down to one cover waits
to be uncovered
and depressed.
Glass on top of red,
in case it needs depressed
by gloved fist
when the world is spinning and
grip the yellow and black tape
less your arm is broken
in rocket powered escape.
Laugh and nod with your
engines leaking fuel to the fire
after fragment punctures. Go!
The board lights up red and
the worst dread imaginable
dragons descending on a single soul
with one shield and one fire begs
options.
Let go.
Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire.
One hand on the helmet,
one hand on the lever.
DO OR DIE.
Never say never. And Squeeze.
Glass constellation. Leave.
Who Hates You
Shrugging off cinders.
Rise. Rise!
Shrug cinders.
Open eyes.
A warfield.
A hatetank.
Capsule form.
One to know and three to grow.
A warfield.
One to know.
Skip a dose.
War, in red eyes.
Rise. Rise!
Shrug cinders.
Open eyes.
A warfield.
A hatetank.
Capsule form.
One to know and three to grow.
A warfield.
One to know.
Skip a dose.
War, in red eyes.
Who Loves You
Taking long walks near the ports and docks
around the neighborhood, where the Fox and
the chapel is kind of hood.
Not hood in the way that people think is today.
Hood in its own struggle to be somebody
instead of someone else's piss puddle.
Working on a way. Working on a way to try
to save the fucking day for people not like me,
but people who had a turn or two to put them there
and need to learn how the trees sway
When the wind blows it hits us all.
When the wind comes they have someone to call.
I don't. I float and they... Yeah... they try
and I cry helping them to get their piece and
helping them to get their lease, helping them
and running from the rain that will definitely freeze.
Talk it out slow, it'll come alright,
let it buck, pay your buck, but don't let the bow
break. Everything is about to shake in Winter.
It's been fun Summer, things are about to get leaner.
Do not make me talk to you like some kind of tweener.
I've had enough of the growing up shiiiii
here's my middle finger.
In all seriousness, who loves you girl?
In all seriousness, who loves your world?
Can I gain access. No. Can I gain a vest. No.
We are best friends. Just friends. Just ... world
happens. World happens. World happens.
World happens. World happiness.
Do you know how I struggle and I wonder?
Do you know how I think about being close to you
when thunder comes? I never knew storms
could be different 'til they were.
I didn't know evil thought
until you looked at me when I slurred.
What do you need, son?
What do you need, ma'am?
What do you need, son?
What do you need, ma'am?
What do you need, son?
What do you need, ma'am?
What you need, son.
What you need, ma'am?
The question and answer
is "I am!"
around the neighborhood, where the Fox and
the chapel is kind of hood.
Not hood in the way that people think is today.
Hood in its own struggle to be somebody
instead of someone else's piss puddle.
Working on a way. Working on a way to try
to save the fucking day for people not like me,
but people who had a turn or two to put them there
and need to learn how the trees sway
When the wind blows it hits us all.
When the wind comes they have someone to call.
I don't. I float and they... Yeah... they try
and I cry helping them to get their piece and
helping them to get their lease, helping them
and running from the rain that will definitely freeze.
Talk it out slow, it'll come alright,
let it buck, pay your buck, but don't let the bow
break. Everything is about to shake in Winter.
It's been fun Summer, things are about to get leaner.
Do not make me talk to you like some kind of tweener.
I've had enough of the growing up shiiiii
here's my middle finger.
In all seriousness, who loves you girl?
In all seriousness, who loves your world?
Can I gain access. No. Can I gain a vest. No.
We are best friends. Just friends. Just ... world
happens. World happens. World happens.
World happens. World happiness.
Do you know how I struggle and I wonder?
Do you know how I think about being close to you
when thunder comes? I never knew storms
could be different 'til they were.
I didn't know evil thought
until you looked at me when I slurred.
What do you need, son?
What do you need, ma'am?
What do you need, son?
What do you need, ma'am?
What do you need, son?
What do you need, ma'am?
What you need, son.
What you need, ma'am?
The question and answer
is "I am!"
Saint
I can see. I can see. Can you?
The destroying angel, cumming. Cumming.
Cumming. Landing. Do you know the breadth?
How far the wings reach when wind licks the tails
of their edges? I want to show you. I want!
Duck under and get. Frosty. Believe.
At their edges, a tongue lick.
What are you afraid of? Nose to stone.
Sweat beaded nose to smooth stone.
Lips parted. Buds and minuscule hills of tongue
along the crest of your pink hilltop. Dew
& humidity breathed along the grass.
Cotton bison near your
Tracing plate armor. Around the compound
mice dance and play.
The angel winds. Shift to kiss.
A proper remembrance. Right and good.
Do you
compound fractures
never had it this good
where you shit
mathematical modeling engines for
kissing your toes
to speak to satellites
computer aided design for what
no one knows.
You are not permitted to leave.
The destroying angel, cumming. Cumming.
Cumming. Landing. Do you know the breadth?
How far the wings reach when wind licks the tails
of their edges? I want to show you. I want!
Duck under and get. Frosty. Believe.
At their edges, a tongue lick.
What are you afraid of? Nose to stone.
Sweat beaded nose to smooth stone.
Lips parted. Buds and minuscule hills of tongue
along the crest of your pink hilltop. Dew
& humidity breathed along the grass.
Cotton bison near your
Tracing plate armor. Around the compound
mice dance and play.
The angel winds. Shift to kiss.
A proper remembrance. Right and good.
Do you
compound fractures
never had it this good
where you shit
mathematical modeling engines for
kissing your toes
to speak to satellites
computer aided design for what
no one knows.
You are not permitted to leave.
Smoker 47
I still remember
talking to you and sly.
Attempting to light
myself on fire.
One dread going up
like cartoon dynamite.
While you talked
about flying lessons.
Erica. So far. So privileged.
Lighting yours
On the tip of my dread
before telling me
I was on fire.
talking to you and sly.
Attempting to light
myself on fire.
One dread going up
like cartoon dynamite.
While you talked
about flying lessons.
Erica. So far. So privileged.
Lighting yours
On the tip of my dread
before telling me
I was on fire.
Hydrostatic Pressure
The word for
continuous
wicked moisture
through cinder
blocked.
The gloves
soaked in mineral spirits
have not dried.
Asphalt rubberized past
sticks to them.
Jeans too.
Told a self to keep it clean.
Tee shirt is already grease blacked.
The kind of mud that does not wash.
Does not wink and sigh
inside a dryer.
Cannot be music-ed away or
pixie dusted.
Fire the shopping bag
fuming mad
along route 8.
Shuttle the plastic beneath the seat,
beside the hatchet,
kissing distance from
a road yacht,
rust ready to jump fenders
arc spark stylie.
Hate trickles in,
200 pounds per square inch
along the foundation side
like a cat claw multiplying force
tip to bone.
One molecule
traveling at
with his mates
traveling the same
muzzle velocity.
Remember falling asleep
in Physics for Humanities and
less stress?
Water does not either.
The stink of lingering asphalt
coats everything tried on
to begin the day. Teeth brushed
brings black along the silk road.
Know the only way.
Make skin match,
stink the same.
continuous
wicked moisture
through cinder
blocked.
The gloves
soaked in mineral spirits
have not dried.
Asphalt rubberized past
sticks to them.
Jeans too.
Told a self to keep it clean.
Tee shirt is already grease blacked.
The kind of mud that does not wash.
Does not wink and sigh
inside a dryer.
Cannot be music-ed away or
pixie dusted.
Fire the shopping bag
fuming mad
along route 8.
Shuttle the plastic beneath the seat,
beside the hatchet,
kissing distance from
a road yacht,
rust ready to jump fenders
arc spark stylie.
Hate trickles in,
200 pounds per square inch
along the foundation side
like a cat claw multiplying force
tip to bone.
One molecule
traveling at
with his mates
traveling the same
muzzle velocity.
Remember falling asleep
in Physics for Humanities and
less stress?
Water does not either.
The stink of lingering asphalt
coats everything tried on
to begin the day. Teeth brushed
brings black along the silk road.
Know the only way.
Make skin match,
stink the same.
By Now EP
The Cupcake
A mouse riding a matchstick is a tiny witch
with tiny spells to spin and tiny ingredients to gather
all around the world. Vein of nine month grape.
Leaf shard of tobacco. Coin of copper and
flake of nail. And one morning lash of eye.
Twelve jimmies of rainbow and a palmful of sweet snow.
On cliff-sides and forests, through caves, across mesas.
Jesus fucking Christ, I need to vacuum.
Let's Do Something
"Come hang." "Don't be sure. Come hang,
I am not asking." "That's fine, don't drink too much."
"My friend would like to meet you." "Now is as good
a time to start as any." "They're not judging you."
"You can leave whenever you feel like it." "Of course
you can come back if you need to walk a while."
"Well, we may lock you out if it's late." "Take
little walks." "You should stop by is all that I am saying."
"See if you feel like it, then." "Come hang."
"I will put up a tire swing when I don't have to call
every time." "I don't have a jungle gym, but
you can climb on the furniture if you have to."
"I don't think I have a domino set, do you?"
"We have some clear and some liqueurs.
Bring whatever you want."
"I can't help you with that." "I've been waiting too."
"The next total eclipse is 2067." "I know, right."
"Haley's comet dissolved by now, way out in-" "It
totally could have if it hit something."
"No, it didn't survive its last trip around the sun.
I am pretty sure it blew itself apart. Granted, on its way
out." "Absolutely the plans are pretty open."
"Just me, Alex, Meredith, Jen, Ash, Cox, Whinny, David,
Chibs, Phil Will, and Brii."
"Yeah, I will see you then." "Sounds great."
Doorbell
Phone goes off depthcharge. Phone goes off depthcharge.
Surface! Air! Twelve atmospheres! Air! Surface!
Still waves and wavelets reflect the sun.
Slopes break and peel away, foam and shimmer.
Whorls and weirs and miniature wake
spread tongues of afternoon fire glimmer
yellow, gold, and rose peals of bell and steeple and
glisten armor shingle. Rise.
The front door stands clear.
Out comes the helm first
then shoulders. Then spine and tails whip.
Stumble and stumble the two stairs to front walk.
Hunched groan. A father snaps free.
Another. Another. Faster coming.
Joints breathe. Checked at the awning,
car keys fall from hand.
Cobwebs and caught flies fall from rafters.
Undisturbed dust showers silt. Wings good for swims
or flight, still caged and rustling behind.
As far as I go, no further.
The mouth of our cave.
Turn the mailboxes flag if you would like to leave a note.
I am drunk. I am violent. I am not a citizen.
You are. Can I borrow one of your
depthcharges? Scales flake and fall,
sonorous as steel plate against concrete.
I would like an alarm for tomorrow.
How else will you watch the sun rise,
with a dragon to watch it with you?
I will cut them off when you
sever your own nose. I already have a collection of them.
When you begin a collection of your own, perhaps.
Meter long feathers bend,
snap, and fall away.
Push joints in ways they are not built to move.
Force movement backward
into the voluminous negative space of cave.
Slip the mouth into its latches.
Prime the weapon. Turn the warhead live.
And, I will come for you,
not a minute before.
The Cupcake (Inacinch remix)
I am not a muffin yet!
I have muffined. What's your problem?
I don't have a problem. I am just saying, muffining is hard.
I am a cake in a cup instead of a cup trying to hold in a cake!
Like a muffin do?
Like a muffin do!
Can you imagine what a muffin does while its waiting to be
eaten after it comes out of the oven? What does it say
to its muffin breaderin?
I see what you did there.
You'll muffin out, cake in a cup. Give it time.
The timer is going off in about five minutes. I am pretty sure
there is no way to accelerate biological functions.
Challenge accepted.
I hope you get eaten first.
You will get eaten last. I hope you are prepared
for seeing what cannot be unseen
with no one to talk to about the horrors that will
tear your paper cup soul
to pieces.
Doorbell (Junkieaccel Remix)
What! What!?
I cannot get enough up off the floor
say force see force and call it a draw
on four on three on two see me, I
chase down
a bird shot
like a dog cross
a bog
and bring it back to-
the taste of blood is amazing.
Fabulous. Delectable. Shiver.
Wonderful. Familiar. Lovely. Addict. Blossom. One
of a kind.
More. More! Sample. Please. Pretty please.
I cannot go out tonight.
If you must-
A tooth so large it's mistaken
for bones of a 'saur laid naked.
I can't go out
because I will pout
while being myself
and mistaken.
A mouse riding a matchstick is a tiny witch
with tiny spells to spin and tiny ingredients to gather
all around the world. Vein of nine month grape.
Leaf shard of tobacco. Coin of copper and
flake of nail. And one morning lash of eye.
Twelve jimmies of rainbow and a palmful of sweet snow.
On cliff-sides and forests, through caves, across mesas.
Jesus fucking Christ, I need to vacuum.
Let's Do Something
"Come hang." "Don't be sure. Come hang,
I am not asking." "That's fine, don't drink too much."
"My friend would like to meet you." "Now is as good
a time to start as any." "They're not judging you."
"You can leave whenever you feel like it." "Of course
you can come back if you need to walk a while."
"Well, we may lock you out if it's late." "Take
little walks." "You should stop by is all that I am saying."
"See if you feel like it, then." "Come hang."
"I will put up a tire swing when I don't have to call
every time." "I don't have a jungle gym, but
you can climb on the furniture if you have to."
"I don't think I have a domino set, do you?"
"We have some clear and some liqueurs.
Bring whatever you want."
"I can't help you with that." "I've been waiting too."
"The next total eclipse is 2067." "I know, right."
"Haley's comet dissolved by now, way out in-" "It
totally could have if it hit something."
"No, it didn't survive its last trip around the sun.
I am pretty sure it blew itself apart. Granted, on its way
out." "Absolutely the plans are pretty open."
"Just me, Alex, Meredith, Jen, Ash, Cox, Whinny, David,
Chibs, Phil Will, and Brii."
"Yeah, I will see you then." "Sounds great."
Doorbell
Phone goes off depthcharge. Phone goes off depthcharge.
Surface! Air! Twelve atmospheres! Air! Surface!
Still waves and wavelets reflect the sun.
Slopes break and peel away, foam and shimmer.
Whorls and weirs and miniature wake
spread tongues of afternoon fire glimmer
yellow, gold, and rose peals of bell and steeple and
glisten armor shingle. Rise.
The front door stands clear.
Out comes the helm first
then shoulders. Then spine and tails whip.
Stumble and stumble the two stairs to front walk.
Hunched groan. A father snaps free.
Another. Another. Faster coming.
Joints breathe. Checked at the awning,
car keys fall from hand.
Cobwebs and caught flies fall from rafters.
Undisturbed dust showers silt. Wings good for swims
or flight, still caged and rustling behind.
As far as I go, no further.
The mouth of our cave.
Turn the mailboxes flag if you would like to leave a note.
I am drunk. I am violent. I am not a citizen.
You are. Can I borrow one of your
depthcharges? Scales flake and fall,
sonorous as steel plate against concrete.
I would like an alarm for tomorrow.
How else will you watch the sun rise,
with a dragon to watch it with you?
I will cut them off when you
sever your own nose. I already have a collection of them.
When you begin a collection of your own, perhaps.
Meter long feathers bend,
snap, and fall away.
Push joints in ways they are not built to move.
Force movement backward
into the voluminous negative space of cave.
Slip the mouth into its latches.
Prime the weapon. Turn the warhead live.
And, I will come for you,
not a minute before.
The Cupcake (Inacinch remix)
I am not a muffin yet!
I have muffined. What's your problem?
I don't have a problem. I am just saying, muffining is hard.
I am a cake in a cup instead of a cup trying to hold in a cake!
Like a muffin do?
Like a muffin do!
Can you imagine what a muffin does while its waiting to be
eaten after it comes out of the oven? What does it say
to its muffin breaderin?
I see what you did there.
You'll muffin out, cake in a cup. Give it time.
The timer is going off in about five minutes. I am pretty sure
there is no way to accelerate biological functions.
Challenge accepted.
I hope you get eaten first.
You will get eaten last. I hope you are prepared
for seeing what cannot be unseen
with no one to talk to about the horrors that will
tear your paper cup soul
to pieces.
Doorbell (Junkieaccel Remix)
What! What!?
I cannot get enough up off the floor
say force see force and call it a draw
on four on three on two see me, I
chase down
a bird shot
like a dog cross
a bog
and bring it back to-
the taste of blood is amazing.
Fabulous. Delectable. Shiver.
Wonderful. Familiar. Lovely. Addict. Blossom. One
of a kind.
More. More! Sample. Please. Pretty please.
I cannot go out tonight.
If you must-
A tooth so large it's mistaken
for bones of a 'saur laid naked.
I can't go out
because I will pout
while being myself
and mistaken.
Mystery
There was a cat in the fire yesterday.
Eyes like red nails and a mouth like embers
inside of a bucket, smoking too.
All of its rust fell off in a heap, flames blue.
It stretched and it yawned and it burped up
purple tipped flames through the insides
of an invisible flue.
Night air and night winds down
can you be a town that only ever sells shoes.
Your little toes. By the fire.
Dissolved and de-volved and backed up when I'm 'round you.
Or me. You and me. You and eye.
The eyes of the cat look a lot like a bat
grown too large to hang from a ceiling.
The fire flies died the first time that the temperature fell
and the lights that are rising play a game of
satellite William Tell.
On the left, in shrubbery, a dog dives
to clip a grasshopper's wing.
Good boy.
Eyes like red nails and a mouth like embers
inside of a bucket, smoking too.
All of its rust fell off in a heap, flames blue.
It stretched and it yawned and it burped up
purple tipped flames through the insides
of an invisible flue.
Night air and night winds down
can you be a town that only ever sells shoes.
Your little toes. By the fire.
Dissolved and de-volved and backed up when I'm 'round you.
Or me. You and me. You and eye.
The eyes of the cat look a lot like a bat
grown too large to hang from a ceiling.
The fire flies died the first time that the temperature fell
and the lights that are rising play a game of
satellite William Tell.
On the left, in shrubbery, a dog dives
to clip a grasshopper's wing.
Good boy.
Wherein Words Cease
Here. This. Now. Always.
Forward. No.
Please. No.
Rake the skin. Peel. Sever. More!
Drink all. Tear. Rip. Cross section.
Spill and catalog and drink.
Sip the path. The curl and trail.
The tip and pool. The scatter. Lick.
Know. The origin and sea.
Turn back. Look away.
Sample and core. Press and preserve.
I have not the stomach.
Sit still. On the cool museum floor,
forehead burning, palms rough.
Sit still. See the glass.
In skin. Chains upon chains of information.
Locked and waiting.
Clean. Uniform. Homogeneous. Undistrubed.
Please stay. Please stay.
Forward. No.
Please. No.
Rake the skin. Peel. Sever. More!
Drink all. Tear. Rip. Cross section.
Spill and catalog and drink.
Sip the path. The curl and trail.
The tip and pool. The scatter. Lick.
Know. The origin and sea.
Turn back. Look away.
Sample and core. Press and preserve.
I have not the stomach.
Sit still. On the cool museum floor,
forehead burning, palms rough.
Sit still. See the glass.
In skin. Chains upon chains of information.
Locked and waiting.
Clean. Uniform. Homogeneous. Undistrubed.
Please stay. Please stay.
Sun Ray
Turn the blast shields. The blinds. It is supposed to be cold tonight. I have been told. The clouds are stopping by before. We will make them crackers and jam. I am out of tea. Check the boxes. The old boxes. There are bones in them. We are always out of tea. We will make them crackers and jam. And butter in a small dish.
One day the sun will be so bright anything it touches will be vaporized, you know. You have slept poorly when you wonder. Of the sound that world will make each morning. Until everyone out of doors within hearing is dead. Because you slept funny. Noises squeeze through the front of the bones and bits of your face when you press a fingertip to the corner of your nose. Where it meets your eye and a droplet dries.
They are coming to visit later. Sunglasses make eyes lazy. Rain is not stopping by and it is good to be sure to leave the orange juice upstairs. Do not forget to pick up tea. The blankets feel the way you said your skin did back then. None of my business now. Waving ripples in their pool. Get up and towel off and put on clothing.
In the kitchen. The sun is blinding. The window and shields must remain open. For the animals. The moon will not know if I am home if it cannot see me when I sit inside the rug in front of the kitchen sink and make ripples in its pool inside the dark. I do not have toy boxes anymore. Project boxes. Project boxes. Close the blinds. Open them. The moon. The clouds will be by later for crackers and jam. Lawnmowers have not been mowing. Is always very soothing on the ears. Are the windows to the sinus cavities. You know.
Undress. All of it. Take off your clothes before swimming. Or they will get wet. The clouds will be by later. We cannot wait for crackers and jam. The photos will not turn out well in the shade. Try to get some sleep. Instead of driving down the two lane roads. With the rumble strips dividing conscious and unconscious and vaporization. Coffee is lazy. The sunlight slipping between the slats of the blinds is dazzling.
One day the sun will be so bright anything it touches will be vaporized, you know. You have slept poorly when you wonder. Of the sound that world will make each morning. Until everyone out of doors within hearing is dead. Because you slept funny. Noises squeeze through the front of the bones and bits of your face when you press a fingertip to the corner of your nose. Where it meets your eye and a droplet dries.
They are coming to visit later. Sunglasses make eyes lazy. Rain is not stopping by and it is good to be sure to leave the orange juice upstairs. Do not forget to pick up tea. The blankets feel the way you said your skin did back then. None of my business now. Waving ripples in their pool. Get up and towel off and put on clothing.
In the kitchen. The sun is blinding. The window and shields must remain open. For the animals. The moon will not know if I am home if it cannot see me when I sit inside the rug in front of the kitchen sink and make ripples in its pool inside the dark. I do not have toy boxes anymore. Project boxes. Project boxes. Close the blinds. Open them. The moon. The clouds will be by later for crackers and jam. Lawnmowers have not been mowing. Is always very soothing on the ears. Are the windows to the sinus cavities. You know.
Undress. All of it. Take off your clothes before swimming. Or they will get wet. The clouds will be by later. We cannot wait for crackers and jam. The photos will not turn out well in the shade. Try to get some sleep. Instead of driving down the two lane roads. With the rumble strips dividing conscious and unconscious and vaporization. Coffee is lazy. The sunlight slipping between the slats of the blinds is dazzling.
Knuckle Ball
The first time I was punished
for no Earthly reason I could explain
I let loose
and split my middle knuckle on my bed post.
The frame lifted up
shifted
the opposite parts of the wood
smacked against the wall
scratching the paint.
I breathed heavy.
My right hand trembled.
The beginning of "never again."
The skin was peeled to bright pink.
Blood seeped and sought air
in little fired balloons
gaining altitude.
I worried I would never be able to
use it again.
Worried I would have to explain
when I was let out
why my hand was swollen.
Why homework would not be easy.
Punished again. For what?
Stare at it.
Stare at it.
Lick it.
Get better.
Get better!
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean it.
I screwed up!
He is going to kill me for this.
The paint.
Is the bed alright?
The door was unlocked but I knew
setting foot outside
was a near death sentence
as close as I knew death to be then.
He will take me within an inch of life
and then some more.
Breaking distance down
to an infinite closure of life and burial.
The sob. The sniffle. The intakes opened.
Instead of sound
born power.
Unlimited power
then. To destroy.
Lick the knuckle.
The fractures ran deep.
Wailing on a tree until the aluminum bat looked
like a boomerang. Jack and I walked home.
Into the teeth of a dragon. Stopped often to piss
and cat call at birds and whatever sat in gutters
or lawns.
The first knuckle to be blown out
healed crooked. The others followed.
They all match now.
I laugh because it is good to laugh.
Fracture after fracture. The skin peeled
like a sardine lid
back then.
Now it is too thick to peel with a single blow.
Permanently deformed.
"Permafucked."
Eventually the joints will seize with scar tissue.
Eventually the wrists will begin to fuse.
Time will become fuzzy and lose resolution
no matter the actions taken to preserve fidelity.
I will look at my knuckles and not remember
where they came from.
for no Earthly reason I could explain
I let loose
and split my middle knuckle on my bed post.
The frame lifted up
shifted
the opposite parts of the wood
smacked against the wall
scratching the paint.
I breathed heavy.
My right hand trembled.
The beginning of "never again."
The skin was peeled to bright pink.
Blood seeped and sought air
in little fired balloons
gaining altitude.
I worried I would never be able to
use it again.
Worried I would have to explain
when I was let out
why my hand was swollen.
Why homework would not be easy.
Punished again. For what?
Stare at it.
Stare at it.
Lick it.
Get better.
Get better!
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean it.
I screwed up!
He is going to kill me for this.
The paint.
Is the bed alright?
The door was unlocked but I knew
setting foot outside
was a near death sentence
as close as I knew death to be then.
He will take me within an inch of life
and then some more.
Breaking distance down
to an infinite closure of life and burial.
The sob. The sniffle. The intakes opened.
Instead of sound
born power.
Unlimited power
then. To destroy.
Lick the knuckle.
The fractures ran deep.
Wailing on a tree until the aluminum bat looked
like a boomerang. Jack and I walked home.
Into the teeth of a dragon. Stopped often to piss
and cat call at birds and whatever sat in gutters
or lawns.
The first knuckle to be blown out
healed crooked. The others followed.
They all match now.
I laugh because it is good to laugh.
Fracture after fracture. The skin peeled
like a sardine lid
back then.
Now it is too thick to peel with a single blow.
Permanently deformed.
"Permafucked."
Eventually the joints will seize with scar tissue.
Eventually the wrists will begin to fuse.
Time will become fuzzy and lose resolution
no matter the actions taken to preserve fidelity.
I will look at my knuckles and not remember
where they came from.
A Folding Star (relativity 3)
A star from which nothing save for light can escape
if and only if it beats the event horizon.
"You're going to be just like your father."
When he said that to me
walking to the gas station
many years ago
to buy smokes
I almost pulled the trigger that would send his teeth
straight back through his box and down his throat
to shit out later.
Later is now. And I am fighting gravity.
I told him he was right
after I digested what he said
from the switch to the target
and the 38 inches between.
I've mulled it over many times since.
Fought hard to prevent it when it bucked its head
through the hundreds of thousands of hundred
minutes.
Still livid. Still in flames. He saw it.
Why can't I?
I am not a falling star.
"The brightest burn most brief."
There are no quips
no witticisms
for a folding star.
No systems
can form around.
Heavy caution on approach.
Other dimensions rule.
The only sure bet
is coming close
will rocket you
farther than you could ever reach
on your own.
if and only if it beats the event horizon.
"You're going to be just like your father."
When he said that to me
walking to the gas station
many years ago
to buy smokes
I almost pulled the trigger that would send his teeth
straight back through his box and down his throat
to shit out later.
Later is now. And I am fighting gravity.
I told him he was right
after I digested what he said
from the switch to the target
and the 38 inches between.
I've mulled it over many times since.
Fought hard to prevent it when it bucked its head
through the hundreds of thousands of hundred
minutes.
Still livid. Still in flames. He saw it.
Why can't I?
I am not a falling star.
"The brightest burn most brief."
There are no quips
no witticisms
for a folding star.
No systems
can form around.
Heavy caution on approach.
Other dimensions rule.
The only sure bet
is coming close
will rocket you
farther than you could ever reach
on your own.
Return of the Painted Dinosaur (shoal mix)
Stone to prism.
Prism to amber tint rainbow.
When the bones are exhumed
time will be too.
Laughter to talon.
Talon to skull.
The children we be alive
to laugh at its wire frame.
Compose a museum.
Every letter to digits.
Fuzzy and fuzzy and fuzzier!
Do not fidget!
What color was he
when he roamed the Earth?
Yellow red and black.
Red and brown and black and blue.
Gently cut away stone
with a brush.
With a pointed half centimeter hammer.
Like the end of a tooth.
Not so hard, not so hard,
that nursery rhymes
set the blows adrift.
If they do, collect and remember
each stroke may
destroy eons gift
and if that does not provoke hesitation
you are forgetting
what you dig up,
while live,
saw you a meal
for the taking.
Prism to amber tint rainbow.
When the bones are exhumed
time will be too.
Laughter to talon.
Talon to skull.
The children we be alive
to laugh at its wire frame.
Compose a museum.
Every letter to digits.
Fuzzy and fuzzy and fuzzier!
Do not fidget!
What color was he
when he roamed the Earth?
Yellow red and black.
Red and brown and black and blue.
Gently cut away stone
with a brush.
With a pointed half centimeter hammer.
Like the end of a tooth.
Not so hard, not so hard,
that nursery rhymes
set the blows adrift.
If they do, collect and remember
each stroke may
destroy eons gift
and if that does not provoke hesitation
you are forgetting
what you dig up,
while live,
saw you a meal
for the taking.
Pill Bug
Everything hurts.
I got too happy.
I got reckless.
Flesh wound.
Rub some dirt on it.
Wrap your rib cage in packing tape and flexible ice packs
and stroll on.
Rotatorcuff? Rotatorcuff??
Rub some dirt on it!
Sore hip?
Move it! Keep fluids flowing.
Melanin will take care of that pink
missing strip.
Everything hurts.
Do not curl up.
Tuned up with billy clubs.
Do not curl up.
Pull a quirky t-shirt over top.
Duct tape toilet paper over what still bleeds.
You're fine. You're fine.
Do not be alarmed.
Everything hurts!
And?
Help me?
Adjust your settings upward. Time has a second component,
do not forget.
I got too happy.
I got reckless.
Flesh wound.
Rub some dirt on it.
Wrap your rib cage in packing tape and flexible ice packs
and stroll on.
Rotatorcuff? Rotatorcuff??
Rub some dirt on it!
Sore hip?
Move it! Keep fluids flowing.
Melanin will take care of that pink
missing strip.
Everything hurts.
Do not curl up.
Tuned up with billy clubs.
Do not curl up.
Pull a quirky t-shirt over top.
Duct tape toilet paper over what still bleeds.
You're fine. You're fine.
Do not be alarmed.
Everything hurts!
And?
Help me?
Adjust your settings upward. Time has a second component,
do not forget.
Relativity 2
I once believed that I moved with the trees and the moon.
I still believe I move with the trees and the moon.
Trapped.
Snapped up in a cage.
Caught by the scruff.
A runaway. And calmed.
The leaves sing to me.
The diamond vomit sky and the moon nestled in
the bottom of a toilet
days and weeks after swallowing the diamond.
Fishing and squeezing and crushing and fishing
for the day
swallowing the moon was a good idea.
It should have passed by now>?<:: p="" zddf90-="">IT SHOULD HAVE PASSED BY NOW!
By now at least. Calm weapons. Hooks and strings
inside the bowl. Calm down.
The moon rises and we stop
clenching. We stop prodding.
We swallow.
I still believe I move with the trees and the moon.
Trapped.
Snapped up in a cage.
Caught by the scruff.
A runaway. And calmed.
The leaves sing to me.
The diamond vomit sky and the moon nestled in
the bottom of a toilet
days and weeks after swallowing the diamond.
Fishing and squeezing and crushing and fishing
for the day
swallowing the moon was a good idea.
It should have passed by now>?<:: p="" zddf90-="">IT SHOULD HAVE PASSED BY NOW!
By now at least. Calm weapons. Hooks and strings
inside the bowl. Calm down.
The moon rises and we stop
clenching. We stop prodding.
We swallow.
Rip Saw
Fury.
Fury.
Fury.
Patience.
Fury.
I know. I know. I know.
Fury.
Take it ea-
Fury.
I know. I know. I know.
I know. I know. I know.
Fury.
Fury.
Patience.
Fury.
I know. I know. I know.
Fury.
Take it ea-
Fury.
I know. I know. I know.
I know. I know. I know.
Dandelion Castle Fall March Anthem
Big sky! Big clouds! The beasts have come
to burn and browse and roll their bellies to the sun
beneath shadow swims all everyone
so we go go go and make good drinks
and laugh and dance and praise and sing!
*humming tapping staffs and heels x1
Upright we walk to the fields to talk
to plants and birds and wind
and step to edge to pond to see
the fish that grow while sun sets low
and every string comes taught as a bow.
*humming tapping staffs and heels x1
We all give drums while harvesting.
We all give wholeheartedly.
To the sun sun, earth earth.
Each one of us
from sand silt birthed!
*tapping staffs and heels x1
Unto the fall and autumn wall,
we burst apart and live
through winter; our casks smashed again,
to breath in spring
and walk heaven!
*stomping heels x1
repeat from the top*
to burn and browse and roll their bellies to the sun
beneath shadow swims all everyone
so we go go go and make good drinks
and laugh and dance and praise and sing!
*humming tapping staffs and heels x1
Upright we walk to the fields to talk
to plants and birds and wind
and step to edge to pond to see
the fish that grow while sun sets low
and every string comes taught as a bow.
*humming tapping staffs and heels x1
We all give drums while harvesting.
We all give wholeheartedly.
To the sun sun, earth earth.
Each one of us
from sand silt birthed!
*tapping staffs and heels x1
Unto the fall and autumn wall,
we burst apart and live
through winter; our casks smashed again,
to breath in spring
and walk heaven!
*stomping heels x1
repeat from the top*
Glass Shard No Larger than the Razor's Tip
Sitting still: four thousand three hundred & 2 decisions per square inch.
Driving: six thousand five hundred and seventy six decisions per square foot.
Cycling: nine hundred and two thousand, five hundred and six decisions for every two and a half feet of road distance covered.
Standing: six hundred and twelve to five hundred and 8, pushing nine, decisions per inch.
Sleeping: zero point zero repeating to nineteen zeros and then a one (7 million billion bit coins per day, approximately 18.2 million twellks [tk]).
Jigging: four hundred and two decisions per square inch.
Dancing:sixty six decisions per cubic foot.
Boxing: ten decisions per cubic foot.
Forty thousand cubic feet per minute at three trillion inch seconds divided by cumulative leaf wax, hold the nomial and trailing for stones, glass is about fourteen thousand decisions per thought, correcting for Coriolis, if the paper weight is going to make it through the window skipping off the lip of the desk, taking subsonic/near sonic flight into consideration. just saying.
Radioshack to fucking Radioshack
because I already tried the grocery store and their sign specifically says "this is where electronics go to die and be parted and be reborn into new electronics" and I know for a fact that cannot happen without the power of tweezers, good day ma'am! And good day to you too sir! And I hope your child catches AIDS if I do not find a tweezer to...
...he used to tell me to be nice every day when I left for school. If I find those tweezers, the cashier is getting stabbed first once I get them out of the package. The assistant goes next, while he's on the phone to the police, not because he was on the phone, because he didn't trust that sometimes people need stabbed. With tweezers. That they sold me. Multiple times. Until they die. Maybe you shouldn't have sold them to me.
A hardware store that doesn't carry the fine arts
is no store for hardware at all.
Keychains and no... ...ooooooooo.... ...shit list.
Can I present you a certificate?
Embossed. With the nut emblem.
It is exactly what it sounds like
and yes:
hot wax dipped
shaven
imprint. Always shaved.
Never know when you have to present documents in a court of law and I will be damned if those wax printed nuts do match my own. I'll feign surprise.
Punching: 33 decisions for each foot second.
Headbutting: 1 decision per foot second.
Wrecking: three million three hundred and thirty decisions for each foot second.
Hugging: twelve decisions per pound inch squared.
Panting: sixty two cubic feet per minute.
The lighting is terrible. Simply terrible. How does anyone work like this? Kidding. Brilliant.
Blow the blood away. Stop licking. For heaven's sake, stop licking. Cut. Cut. Cut! Remember that song about no time for caution? Well, yes. It does sound nothing like anything Queen has sung and NWA sold out a long time ago. It's the natural ecosystem. To imagine or attempt to imagine anything else is simple fool hardy. If you had any rocks knocking around down there I could dismantle your entire affinity for hardcore hip hop and what you believe to be rap that is listen worthy without even bringing up Voldermort, but I won't.
Run DMC was great and did you leave your panties in the dryer? I'm pretty sure those weren't yours. Yes, they weren't. Is yeah in the dictionary?
dab dab dab dab
I don't think it is. I will bet you five dollars. Just five? Yeah, just five. I did my laundry good. You know...
Schrodinger, yeah.
It counts as a cunundrum.
A cunny drum?
A quinnundrum.
Tiny glass blade balanced on the tip of a metal one. A two millimeter, perfect, replica. Skin of palm filleted, wet nurse ready, tweezer brigade shot dead at every turn. It is okay. Fifty twos have been circling. There are two ways to find a needle in a hay stack in life. Okay, three. One of the three, without someone to toss the stack while you watch behind a fifteen hundred lumen spotlight, is to light the entire stack on fire
then dig through the earth behind.
Blow or suck and swallow.
Blow and let it be the gift that keeps on embedding. Suck and swallow. Do not be foolish. At best, for a few weeks swallow funny until I adopt. At worst completely miss and roll it up again somehow.
Sitting Still: five hundred and fifty one decisions per minute.
Balancing: four million three thousand five hundred and six decisions per cubic centimeter.
Blow. Prism slap against glass lip.
Lick.
Yes, tastes like glass. Dab palm.
Yes. Tastes like glass.
Driving: six thousand five hundred and seventy six decisions per square foot.
Cycling: nine hundred and two thousand, five hundred and six decisions for every two and a half feet of road distance covered.
Standing: six hundred and twelve to five hundred and 8, pushing nine, decisions per inch.
Sleeping: zero point zero repeating to nineteen zeros and then a one (7 million billion bit coins per day, approximately 18.2 million twellks [tk]).
Jigging: four hundred and two decisions per square inch.
Dancing:sixty six decisions per cubic foot.
Boxing: ten decisions per cubic foot.
Forty thousand cubic feet per minute at three trillion inch seconds divided by cumulative leaf wax, hold the nomial and trailing for stones, glass is about fourteen thousand decisions per thought, correcting for Coriolis, if the paper weight is going to make it through the window skipping off the lip of the desk, taking subsonic/near sonic flight into consideration. just saying.
Radioshack to fucking Radioshack
because I already tried the grocery store and their sign specifically says "this is where electronics go to die and be parted and be reborn into new electronics" and I know for a fact that cannot happen without the power of tweezers, good day ma'am! And good day to you too sir! And I hope your child catches AIDS if I do not find a tweezer to...
...he used to tell me to be nice every day when I left for school. If I find those tweezers, the cashier is getting stabbed first once I get them out of the package. The assistant goes next, while he's on the phone to the police, not because he was on the phone, because he didn't trust that sometimes people need stabbed. With tweezers. That they sold me. Multiple times. Until they die. Maybe you shouldn't have sold them to me.
A hardware store that doesn't carry the fine arts
is no store for hardware at all.
Keychains and no... ...ooooooooo.... ...shit list.
Can I present you a certificate?
Embossed. With the nut emblem.
It is exactly what it sounds like
and yes:
hot wax dipped
shaven
imprint. Always shaved.
Never know when you have to present documents in a court of law and I will be damned if those wax printed nuts do match my own. I'll feign surprise.
Punching: 33 decisions for each foot second.
Headbutting: 1 decision per foot second.
Wrecking: three million three hundred and thirty decisions for each foot second.
Hugging: twelve decisions per pound inch squared.
Panting: sixty two cubic feet per minute.
The lighting is terrible. Simply terrible. How does anyone work like this? Kidding. Brilliant.
Blow the blood away. Stop licking. For heaven's sake, stop licking. Cut. Cut. Cut! Remember that song about no time for caution? Well, yes. It does sound nothing like anything Queen has sung and NWA sold out a long time ago. It's the natural ecosystem. To imagine or attempt to imagine anything else is simple fool hardy. If you had any rocks knocking around down there I could dismantle your entire affinity for hardcore hip hop and what you believe to be rap that is listen worthy without even bringing up Voldermort, but I won't.
Run DMC was great and did you leave your panties in the dryer? I'm pretty sure those weren't yours. Yes, they weren't. Is yeah in the dictionary?
dab dab dab dab
I don't think it is. I will bet you five dollars. Just five? Yeah, just five. I did my laundry good. You know...
Schrodinger, yeah.
It counts as a cunundrum.
A cunny drum?
A quinnundrum.
Tiny glass blade balanced on the tip of a metal one. A two millimeter, perfect, replica. Skin of palm filleted, wet nurse ready, tweezer brigade shot dead at every turn. It is okay. Fifty twos have been circling. There are two ways to find a needle in a hay stack in life. Okay, three. One of the three, without someone to toss the stack while you watch behind a fifteen hundred lumen spotlight, is to light the entire stack on fire
then dig through the earth behind.
Blow or suck and swallow.
Blow and let it be the gift that keeps on embedding. Suck and swallow. Do not be foolish. At best, for a few weeks swallow funny until I adopt. At worst completely miss and roll it up again somehow.
Sitting Still: five hundred and fifty one decisions per minute.
Balancing: four million three thousand five hundred and six decisions per cubic centimeter.
Blow. Prism slap against glass lip.
Lick.
Yes, tastes like glass. Dab palm.
Yes. Tastes like glass.
Understanding Three Point Perspective
Who would catch you
if you lost every piece
beneath your ramparts
is not the right question.
Who could catch you
if you lost every piece
locked together, felled,
is the right question.
Despise the impossible.
Place anger efficiently.
Spit at vision.
Vision is imagination
with enough spice to try
what falls to possibility,
the impossible walking it's shadow,
but "hey" we're happy to be here, all the same.
It is what it is.
Swallow a balled up sock.
We're happy to be here, all the same.
Walking it's shadow in the wake of everything possible.
Why didn't you catch me?
You could have. Were I you.
Were I you I would have, except I am and I could not.
Why don't you understand that?
I would have tied your shoes for you everyday
for three decades before I asked if it bothered you.
I could have. I could have.
Now I do. I tie my own shoes for two and make myself blush
each morning before skipping over the threshold,
a glance shot through the mailbox.
I would if I could.
Should anything
happen to you,
I could wait.
If I could.
Power. Force. Control.
Option. Would? Yes, still.
How fun to be the same.
if you lost every piece
beneath your ramparts
is not the right question.
Who could catch you
if you lost every piece
locked together, felled,
is the right question.
Despise the impossible.
Place anger efficiently.
Spit at vision.
Vision is imagination
with enough spice to try
what falls to possibility,
the impossible walking it's shadow,
but "hey" we're happy to be here, all the same.
It is what it is.
Swallow a balled up sock.
We're happy to be here, all the same.
Walking it's shadow in the wake of everything possible.
Why didn't you catch me?
You could have. Were I you.
Were I you I would have, except I am and I could not.
Why don't you understand that?
I would have tied your shoes for you everyday
for three decades before I asked if it bothered you.
I could have. I could have.
Now I do. I tie my own shoes for two and make myself blush
each morning before skipping over the threshold,
a glance shot through the mailbox.
I would if I could.
Should anything
happen to you,
I could wait.
If I could.
Power. Force. Control.
Option. Would? Yes, still.
How fun to be the same.
Hiding Schizophrenia
A never polished rivet
on a slip joint of the only bridge to mainland.
Each trip across
rattle.
A last rivet,
polished, painted; rot surfaced again
before dusk.
Everyone below decks!
Everyone below decks! the call repeats.
Hatches slam, crew scramble.
Sea rise. Enemy territory. We are not going back
for any reason!
Clear locks!
Clear locks! the call repeats
until each door is checked.
Senses dull. Antenna rise.
Red phone. And only the red phone.
Screens and arrays light.
Switches become live.
Practice and perfect.
Maps overlay,
gauges pin to their maximums, settle.
Every soul inside
breathing their prayer,
wheels rolling across the interlocking teeth
held by a cylinder of iron
at two miles per hour.
Have the engineers been out today?
Have they returned after the noon rush?
Why don't they weld it?
How long has it been?
Wonder it hasn't, right?
Below decks. Below decks.
I will get you through this.
Cruisers and bombers and mines and runabouts above.
Windblown sea below.
A rivet strains and fires a thunderous crack & holds.
on a slip joint of the only bridge to mainland.
Each trip across
rattle.
A last rivet,
polished, painted; rot surfaced again
before dusk.
Everyone below decks!
Everyone below decks! the call repeats.
Hatches slam, crew scramble.
Sea rise. Enemy territory. We are not going back
for any reason!
Clear locks!
Clear locks! the call repeats
until each door is checked.
Senses dull. Antenna rise.
Red phone. And only the red phone.
Screens and arrays light.
Switches become live.
Practice and perfect.
Maps overlay,
gauges pin to their maximums, settle.
Every soul inside
breathing their prayer,
wheels rolling across the interlocking teeth
held by a cylinder of iron
at two miles per hour.
Have the engineers been out today?
Have they returned after the noon rush?
Why don't they weld it?
How long has it been?
Wonder it hasn't, right?
Below decks. Below decks.
I will get you through this.
Cruisers and bombers and mines and runabouts above.
Windblown sea below.
A rivet strains and fires a thunderous crack & holds.
Clear Blue
Lightning.
Fire.
Ice.
Smoke.
There was nothing we could do.
Whisper laughter scream on down the road.
There was nothing we could do.
Rape.
Motor.
Fuck.
Drift.
We took the double yellows
as hard as they could go
with breaking and braking and breaking law.
Cuss.
Burn.
Cuddle.
Cuss. Rape. Motor. Fuck. Drift. Knighting. Check.
and mate. Break circuits and do not fuck.
Whisper laughter and do not cuss.
Motor without rape.
Rip.
Tear.
Scoot.
Motor.
A way to piss.
I miss you all of the time.
Hawk and spit and haaawk and spit.
Greasy.
Greezzy.
Greeeeezy.
Smooch.
Fire.
Ice.
Smoke.
There was nothing we could do.
Whisper laughter scream on down the road.
There was nothing we could do.
Rape.
Motor.
Fuck.
Drift.
We took the double yellows
as hard as they could go
with breaking and braking and breaking law.
Cuss.
Burn.
Cuddle.
Cuss. Rape. Motor. Fuck. Drift. Knighting. Check.
and mate. Break circuits and do not fuck.
Whisper laughter and do not cuss.
Motor without rape.
Rip.
Tear.
Scoot.
Motor.
A way to piss.
I miss you all of the time.
Hawk and spit and haaawk and spit.
Greasy.
Greezzy.
Greeeeezy.
Smooch.
30 Yards to the Fence At Hokr Landing Station
Barbed wire always looks like sun shower glitter
when the sun is out.
Authorized personnel only
dotting the links in pocket square efficiency
with a dribble of regularity on top
to nudge without threat of death
suggested in scream tones.
The birds have no problem,
landing, gripping, hopping to and fro.
I do.
Watch the sun swim through
and pour itself into the grass and clouds.
If I had carpet gloves, maybe?
Carpet hands. Stone hands.
How little of a shit
am I for not mounting a raid?
Box cutter? Bolt cutter? Twin contrarotating saw!
Gas torch? Spoon? Fingernails? Let's go underground!
Shoot the links out with hyper accuracy.
Secret agent man! Double oh double oh.
A world wide tortoise towing a planet through space!
An aphid lands on my hand.
Walk quietly toward my wrist.
Sniff the sandwich crust still nibbled.
The weather's been alright lately.
The clouds interesting while taking lunch.
I've been told there are thing out there.
I don't buy it.
Everyone talks shit over the radio.
I don't buy it.
It always looks like new rain atop the fence. Glitter.
If I walk away, people will die. People I will not meet.
I believe it, mosquito. I believe it, dandelion. I believe it, clover.
At Hokr Landing, there is a fence that says
"authorized personnel only."
One of the best power stations the country has known.
I've seen one person working here, chimney swift.
Don't quote me on that.
Reversing sections of its grid
can turn her into a fusion device.
Have you seen a sunrise at midnight at the equator?
Leaving Hokr Station
never.
Winter would come early. The sun would still rise, but bumble bee,
all of the flowers would die if she ran unattended
and poisoned the troposphere and winds
like an oroboros's icy sigh.
All of us sleeping in her snow,
far worse than a sunrise bathing our beds in its soul
while we dream of a beach and a sea in the fields
inside the fences
at Hokr Landing Station
when the sun is out.
Authorized personnel only
dotting the links in pocket square efficiency
with a dribble of regularity on top
to nudge without threat of death
suggested in scream tones.
The birds have no problem,
landing, gripping, hopping to and fro.
I do.
Watch the sun swim through
and pour itself into the grass and clouds.
If I had carpet gloves, maybe?
Carpet hands. Stone hands.
How little of a shit
am I for not mounting a raid?
Box cutter? Bolt cutter? Twin contrarotating saw!
Gas torch? Spoon? Fingernails? Let's go underground!
Shoot the links out with hyper accuracy.
Secret agent man! Double oh double oh.
A world wide tortoise towing a planet through space!
An aphid lands on my hand.
Walk quietly toward my wrist.
Sniff the sandwich crust still nibbled.
The weather's been alright lately.
The clouds interesting while taking lunch.
I've been told there are thing out there.
I don't buy it.
Everyone talks shit over the radio.
I don't buy it.
It always looks like new rain atop the fence. Glitter.
If I walk away, people will die. People I will not meet.
I believe it, mosquito. I believe it, dandelion. I believe it, clover.
At Hokr Landing, there is a fence that says
"authorized personnel only."
One of the best power stations the country has known.
I've seen one person working here, chimney swift.
Don't quote me on that.
Reversing sections of its grid
can turn her into a fusion device.
Have you seen a sunrise at midnight at the equator?
Leaving Hokr Station
never.
Winter would come early. The sun would still rise, but bumble bee,
all of the flowers would die if she ran unattended
and poisoned the troposphere and winds
like an oroboros's icy sigh.
All of us sleeping in her snow,
far worse than a sunrise bathing our beds in its soul
while we dream of a beach and a sea in the fields
inside the fences
at Hokr Landing Station
Update Drivers
I assume it is something like Entemanns donuts.
It is nice when the pastrys come around,
though impossible to live with.
I love to eat a woman's pelvis, all of the way around.
It is a very unique event down to the second,
but impossible to live with
on a steady diet. Explain what it is you love to do,
in light of what it is you love to do and can.
Not impossible to live with.
No one eats only cookies & milk and lives for long.
Get some sun. Prey day licked.
Impossible, no. Yes, to live with.
It is nice when the pastrys come around,
though impossible to live with.
I love to eat a woman's pelvis, all of the way around.
It is a very unique event down to the second,
but impossible to live with
on a steady diet. Explain what it is you love to do,
in light of what it is you love to do and can.
Not impossible to live with.
No one eats only cookies & milk and lives for long.
Get some sun. Prey day licked.
Impossible, no. Yes, to live with.
Bullet Time
The plate left fingertips months ago.
A moth beat its wings against window screen hours ago.
Seconds ago shower and towel whipped cat
after buffing skin until it reddened.
Weeks ago breaking codeine to sniff
just in case it could increase or break affect.
Seconds after toe nail clipping.
Spit splashing in the sink paste white
three days hours baskets full.
Twenty cigarette buts put out,
fished from stashes found snooped
neighbors watched making conversation.
Wreaths burned and pines too
in a fire two years gone and retinas on.
Eyelashes trained individually
each half minute, staring into the vanity mirror, tweezing.
Each week caressing my throat and
by the three thousandth mile on the seventh second
motion sickness starts to set.
Car door slams and stretch into a yawn
five days ago.
Change your shirt and reach into a closet full of ammunition
ten years old.
Fourteen days ago the mirror said "no" flatly.
Twelve hours before waking gasp.
Paint each fingernail in cross thatch blue
with perfect symmetry tomorrow
sleeping one hand out to dry in the a/c breeze.
Feet still on the fire escape to catch morning rays
before pictures
hours before decent and all hell breaks loose,
clutching firing explosive bolts
"where is the counter?"
Everything that should be marble
for a split of a split of a split second
is stone. Months ago.
All coming to a halt,
the plate breaks
in an odd number of triangles.
Do not mind
the fine grade
of the shards;
that no one will clean between your toes with tongue.
A moth beat its wings against window screen hours ago.
Seconds ago shower and towel whipped cat
after buffing skin until it reddened.
Weeks ago breaking codeine to sniff
just in case it could increase or break affect.
Seconds after toe nail clipping.
Spit splashing in the sink paste white
three days hours baskets full.
Twenty cigarette buts put out,
fished from stashes found snooped
neighbors watched making conversation.
Wreaths burned and pines too
in a fire two years gone and retinas on.
Eyelashes trained individually
each half minute, staring into the vanity mirror, tweezing.
Each week caressing my throat and
by the three thousandth mile on the seventh second
motion sickness starts to set.
Car door slams and stretch into a yawn
five days ago.
Change your shirt and reach into a closet full of ammunition
ten years old.
Fourteen days ago the mirror said "no" flatly.
Twelve hours before waking gasp.
Paint each fingernail in cross thatch blue
with perfect symmetry tomorrow
sleeping one hand out to dry in the a/c breeze.
Feet still on the fire escape to catch morning rays
before pictures
hours before decent and all hell breaks loose,
clutching firing explosive bolts
"where is the counter?"
Everything that should be marble
for a split of a split of a split second
is stone. Months ago.
All coming to a halt,
the plate breaks
in an odd number of triangles.
Do not mind
the fine grade
of the shards;
that no one will clean between your toes with tongue.
The Rain Keeps Going
Overcast and horrific. The humidity is murder between squalls down pour.
Another afternoon off of the Allegheny
where I wait for my phone to ring for a fishing trip.
It does not.
How good was the sex when thunder rolled and lightning struck.
Fingering my keys and wondering how long it would take to drive into your front door, parking pretty and spotless without a permit because I will not stay long and do not you worry your head.
Another afternoon off of the Allegheny with no fishing in sight;
no prospects, no free time, and no sense of humor.
How good would that trip have been, heels up on a windowsill, considering driving regardless.
I love you. I laud you. I will get loud for you. Overcast and horrific.
Easing into Monday. Feeling the land beforefeelingthelayofthemap. Wait?
Overcast and horrific. Humidity is murder.
August around a corner.
"Don't you wanna get some?"
"Let's do this!"
The rain keeps coming, penetrating Monday as a side experiment. It's not an adventure if it happens every day said a person to no one. Confucius said a lot of things, did he not?
I am aggressive. I am faulty. I am fingering my keys.
Another afternoon off of the Allegheny
where I wait for my phone to ring for a fishing trip.
It does not.
How good was the sex when thunder rolled and lightning struck.
Fingering my keys and wondering how long it would take to drive into your front door, parking pretty and spotless without a permit because I will not stay long and do not you worry your head.
Another afternoon off of the Allegheny with no fishing in sight;
no prospects, no free time, and no sense of humor.
How good would that trip have been, heels up on a windowsill, considering driving regardless.
I love you. I laud you. I will get loud for you. Overcast and horrific.
Easing into Monday. Feeling the land beforefeelingthelayofthemap. Wait?
Overcast and horrific. Humidity is murder.
August around a corner.
"Don't you wanna get some?"
"Let's do this!"
The rain keeps coming, penetrating Monday as a side experiment. It's not an adventure if it happens every day said a person to no one. Confucius said a lot of things, did he not?
I am aggressive. I am faulty. I am fingering my keys.
Oh Dissonance
With you, we are the same. I think
our sun will be named in numbers.
Our second will be named in verbs.
Only verbs, oh dissonance. With you,
points and planes turn into fauna.
Leaves to grid campaigns and pastels.
War is a song I heard four days ago
and accented seconds ax picks against
the universal fabric of time and ohm.
Chaos is emphatic; the way cotton can be known to scream if you squeeze it too tight, but squeeze it hard and harder too and then push your fingernails in and then your finger tips too until your nails touch your palm and wail, ripping your knuckles, left and right, apart as if they were poles charged by fusion and record the window tinsel fall, with wind-age, cooling veins, while your throat glows.
I think our son will be named. Born again is about as silly as. A way to see forward can get. Tricky if you are easily amused.
War is a song I heard four days ago.
Only verbs, oh dissonance. With you.
With you, we are the same, I think.
our sun will be named in numbers.
Our second will be named in verbs.
Only verbs, oh dissonance. With you,
points and planes turn into fauna.
Leaves to grid campaigns and pastels.
War is a song I heard four days ago
and accented seconds ax picks against
the universal fabric of time and ohm.
Chaos is emphatic; the way cotton can be known to scream if you squeeze it too tight, but squeeze it hard and harder too and then push your fingernails in and then your finger tips too until your nails touch your palm and wail, ripping your knuckles, left and right, apart as if they were poles charged by fusion and record the window tinsel fall, with wind-age, cooling veins, while your throat glows.
I think our son will be named. Born again is about as silly as. A way to see forward can get. Tricky if you are easily amused.
War is a song I heard four days ago.
Only verbs, oh dissonance. With you.
With you, we are the same, I think.
On Threat of Death (soliloquy from a film)
Would you like to rephrase that question?
I will be thrilled to rephrase it for you.
I will be thrilled to rephrase the rest of you, too.
I will be thrilled if you can find a way to rephrase that question because, if you don't, I will drop your stomach where you stand and watch you fall to the floor and swim through your feelings. They're going to rape you good in hell. Good and long and loud and I'll be sitting up there, next to your stone with a thermos of good chili and a tape recorder and a half smoked cigarette, proving to the world that there is an afterlife and laughing tears.
I don't want to be famous.
Not for proving there is a hell, anyways.
Don't make me famous. Rephrase that question.
I will be thrilled to rephrase it for you.
I will be thrilled to rephrase the rest of you, too.
I will be thrilled if you can find a way to rephrase that question because, if you don't, I will drop your stomach where you stand and watch you fall to the floor and swim through your feelings. They're going to rape you good in hell. Good and long and loud and I'll be sitting up there, next to your stone with a thermos of good chili and a tape recorder and a half smoked cigarette, proving to the world that there is an afterlife and laughing tears.
I don't want to be famous.
Not for proving there is a hell, anyways.
Don't make me famous. Rephrase that question.
Thread 2
You gotdamn runaway.
You gotdamn runaway!
After you,
after you,
nearly lost my sight.
Lost, lost, lost
my mind.
See runaway. Sea
runaways.
You gotdamn runaway.
All of ways.
Run run run run.
Run run run run.
You gotdamn runaway!
After you,
after you,
nearly lost my sight.
Lost, lost, lost
my mind.
See runaway. Sea
runaways.
You gotdamn runaway.
All of ways.
Run run run run.
Run run run run.
Thread
I am not too strung out this time.
This time I will remember your face.
I will remember the exact clock.
Remember the phone ringing back.
The ghosts. I am not strung out
this time.
Taking in a runaway.
Taking in a runaway.
A runaway.
Grinding up pavement.
I have lost my mind.
A dumb clipped runaway.
A deaf ship runaway.
Answer your phone.
Answer your phone.
Answer,
you runaway.
You runaway.
You god damn runaway.
Just a runaway.
Ran away
no
more.
This time I will remember your face.
I will remember the exact clock.
Remember the phone ringing back.
The ghosts. I am not strung out
this time.
Taking in a runaway.
Taking in a runaway.
A runaway.
Grinding up pavement.
I have lost my mind.
A dumb clipped runaway.
A deaf ship runaway.
Answer your phone.
Answer your phone.
Answer,
you runaway.
You runaway.
You god damn runaway.
Just a runaway.
Ran away
no
more.
Chemical Strip Mine
"Are you gripped with a sense of overwhelming euphoria?
Are work lamps shifting on their own?
Is your sense of balance askew?
Can you recite the alphabet backward?
Do your joints ache?
Has your nose been running?
Are your eyes inflamed?
Is there numbness in any of your extremities?
Are you experiencing warming sensations beneath skin?
Do you feel an overwhelming fatigue?
Are you gripped by a feeling of well being and/or nausea?
Vacate the premises immediately.
The vapors have exceeded safe levels.
You are dying.
Vacate the premises immediately."
Are work lamps shifting on their own?
Is your sense of balance askew?
Can you recite the alphabet backward?
Do your joints ache?
Has your nose been running?
Are your eyes inflamed?
Is there numbness in any of your extremities?
Are you experiencing warming sensations beneath skin?
Do you feel an overwhelming fatigue?
Are you gripped by a feeling of well being and/or nausea?
Vacate the premises immediately.
The vapors have exceeded safe levels.
You are dying.
Vacate the premises immediately."
On The Fly Adjustments
Because someone thought
it'd be a great idea,
a good laugh,
to just eat all of the blue paint.
Oh yeah, bud. I didn't forget.
Quite a laugh. Quite a laugh.
You got me. Hah. Hah!
Fuck off. You knew I was going to use it.
Jack ass. Fucking jack ass.
WHAT THE HELL, MAN?
No, it's not fine. I specifically. I fuck.
I fucking specifically told you
to not eat the fucking paint.
This is why we can't have nice things. Fuck.
I needed that! I put it aside for
you know what? I don't care. Good job.
Fuck you.
Keep it moving.
it'd be a great idea,
a good laugh,
to just eat all of the blue paint.
Oh yeah, bud. I didn't forget.
Quite a laugh. Quite a laugh.
You got me. Hah. Hah!
Fuck off. You knew I was going to use it.
Jack ass. Fucking jack ass.
WHAT THE HELL, MAN?
No, it's not fine. I specifically. I fuck.
I fucking specifically told you
to not eat the fucking paint.
This is why we can't have nice things. Fuck.
I needed that! I put it aside for
you know what? I don't care. Good job.
Fuck you.
Keep it moving.
Banjo (add some bpm and a drum machine and we've got ourselves a motherfucking hoedown, but for now, slow it up)
One tick for every tack of a rain drop on my back.
Let's do it nice and well with a bell on every tail.
No one likes a ring a roses hanging round their neck
when the rest of the band has gone and sold in Eiffel tech.
I hope you liked the banners
'cause they're goin' all away.
To their foot lockers,
shopping bags,
and boxes full of nuts.
Some people like to ask and shout for
"who's got the guts,"
truth is,
you mu tha fukka,
already know whose won.
I learned on Miami FM
hate can be fun but the real deal
is running 100 minutes out to work
and having a homeless gent
drop a log on your shoes with a smirk.
I don't like cities and
ya know I don't take to jerks.
Every house should have a back door
to walk out when the grass is high
and the sun is low.
If you want to, you can swim
between the daisies and 'lions
with your body in tow.
A little bit of barge
with a little bit of speed.
Giving the rest of your body
whatever it needs.
As long as the console is right
so will go the rest 'the machine.
The only split bag of grapes that will make the day better
is the sun deciding to hide its face and crack open the weather.
I never complain too hard because the days get a little long.
Every body will learn to change and, hell, never bet on "never."
Let's do it nice and well with a bell on every tail.
No one likes a ring a roses hanging round their neck
when the rest of the band has gone and sold in Eiffel tech.
I hope you liked the banners
'cause they're goin' all away.
To their foot lockers,
shopping bags,
and boxes full of nuts.
Some people like to ask and shout for
"who's got the guts,"
truth is,
you mu tha fukka,
already know whose won.
I learned on Miami FM
hate can be fun but the real deal
is running 100 minutes out to work
and having a homeless gent
drop a log on your shoes with a smirk.
I don't like cities and
ya know I don't take to jerks.
Every house should have a back door
to walk out when the grass is high
and the sun is low.
If you want to, you can swim
between the daisies and 'lions
with your body in tow.
A little bit of barge
with a little bit of speed.
Giving the rest of your body
whatever it needs.
As long as the console is right
so will go the rest 'the machine.
The only split bag of grapes that will make the day better
is the sun deciding to hide its face and crack open the weather.
I never complain too hard because the days get a little long.
Every body will learn to change and, hell, never bet on "never."
The Book of Shadows
"They will come
six, times the day, of our Lord's descent
on this world and man will know
suffering beyond every war waged
upon the soil,
folded upon the rising blade
of his own heart, supports.
Billions upon billions of bodies will be lain, bricks
to walls left empty;
the ground swollen will burp
fleck mossy stones blood blackened with
aquifers soaked beyond their ability
to hide atrocity
while the living tread above.
They will come, six days
after our Lord's descent into the lust
to free this earth of the Antichrist.
The second and third halves of our trinity.
Our mediator, busied with petty violence,
will loose his brothers and their kin.
His victory will be won.
We are lost."
six, times the day, of our Lord's descent
on this world and man will know
suffering beyond every war waged
upon the soil,
folded upon the rising blade
of his own heart, supports.
Billions upon billions of bodies will be lain, bricks
to walls left empty;
the ground swollen will burp
fleck mossy stones blood blackened with
aquifers soaked beyond their ability
to hide atrocity
while the living tread above.
They will come, six days
after our Lord's descent into the lust
to free this earth of the Antichrist.
The second and third halves of our trinity.
Our mediator, busied with petty violence,
will loose his brothers and their kin.
His victory will be won.
We are lost."
Her Cadet is Restless
It will be your time soon
Beneath stars and clouds
And a bibbed cow slipping
Round the moon at warp two.
Rest your sleepy head
Upon your bombardiers balled scarf,
Thrupping propellers
Before your closed eyes,
Corkscrewing kite tails
Between mountains of white.
Blue higher above
And below? Fires belching night.
Astride that red checkered
Silver finned bolt,
Tea cups clink and Jessie moos.
"the tea is fine and the evening chill,
Have you seen my honey, the spoon?"
You sup and sigh that it's alright
if she spends tonight in your room.
Way up here beyond the sky,
The moon, approaching the asteroid dark,
No one can find where you lay your head,
The wars rage on, a world apart.
So high up here
Cool milk with a little sugar
Is ready for you when your rocket ship touches down.
Fluff your blankets and your pillows
And go back when you're able.
The galaxy arms you rest in
Will keep the beasties away.
Off to dreams with you
My darling, sleep sound.
Bent Nail Puzzle
I do believe
folks are born with a pole.
A single pole.
I do believe
folks are born with a pole.
Two of them.
I do believe
folks are born with poles
sometimes two.
I do believe
with two poles
the only thing
that can keep us together
will be fury
on a scale
somewhere near
the all spectrum scream
of quantum mechanics breaking down.
folks are born with a pole.
A single pole.
I do believe
folks are born with a pole.
Two of them.
I do believe
folks are born with poles
sometimes two.
I do believe
with two poles
the only thing
that can keep us together
will be fury
on a scale
somewhere near
the all spectrum scream
of quantum mechanics breaking down.
That Instant
You accept you've been flimn-flammed by the kid who lives a couple blocks away and you will never see that 30 bucks you loaned him again when you end a text message draft with "...it doesn't mean we stand kill be friends" without swype's word recognition assistance.
In Sky Black
Radian. Radian! Bass blacked.
A radian!
A Raiden!
God from the sea!
Close enough to kiss you
feet among the weeds
with the ankle deep rolling out.
Shells glistening,
edges eye blacked.
Radian. A radian!
Held up,
a penny for your flares
at arms length.
Fury live inside.
Caged radian.
Flicker sun time blacked.
You are
a paw bearer.
Twelve dozen hands on a cord.
Strung through each to a belt.
Flickering armor.
Dried tongues liquid, recuse yourself, light bearer.
All dressed up
in sky black.
A radian!
A Raiden!
God from the sea!
Close enough to kiss you
feet among the weeds
with the ankle deep rolling out.
Shells glistening,
edges eye blacked.
Radian. A radian!
Held up,
a penny for your flares
at arms length.
Fury live inside.
Caged radian.
Flicker sun time blacked.
You are
a paw bearer.
Twelve dozen hands on a cord.
Strung through each to a belt.
Flickering armor.
Dried tongues liquid, recuse yourself, light bearer.
All dressed up
in sky black.
Sunshower
Rainbow DEFCON 4.
V2s hopping into the cloud line.
Pick pocket stems of white.
Streamers through the sky.
Rainbows flushed and blushing.
We made this. Our construction.
Our super weapon.
Their's.
Our super weapon.
V2s hopping into the cloud line.
Pick pocket stems of white.
Streamers through the sky.
Rainbows flushed and blushing.
We made this. Our construction.
Our super weapon.
Their's.
Our super weapon.
Timeless 2
What I've been searching for all years.
Snuffling around event horizons.
Bending light.
Supercolliding.
Strapping weight on to main boosters.
More and more and more weight. Fuel.
99% light. 99.9% light. 99.99% light.
A little more.
A lot more.
What I've been searching for all years.
Snuffling around event horizons.
Bending light.
Supercolliding.
Strapping weight on to main boosters.
More and more and more weight. Fuel.
99% light. 99.9% light. 99.99% light.
A little more.
A lot more.
What I've been searching for all years.
Tracers 2
So I thought that I could swim.
Out like a bird fish in the trees.
Oh, boy, I went out on a limb
thinking breasts and nips were me.
Go 'head and take trends in.
Low blouse: see mind seize.
Out like a bird fish in the trees.
Oh, boy, I went out on a limb
thinking breasts and nips were me.
Go 'head and take trends in.
Low blouse: see mind seize.
Out of the Bed of a Truck
Sending "I owe you"s
and "I love you"s
from the bed liner of my truck.
Looking up at stars and down
at my knees tented
believing there is all of you
inside me. Lip sweating
cooled by the evening breeze
I know the sky
is looking down and blushing.
Power nap.
At the after party.
believing there is all bass to hear
and all your base belongs to me.
Ash over the lip of the truck bed.
Think maybe someone is watching.
Know we are safe
and ash again.
A plume of smoke
rises toward the tree limbs above our faces.
Breathe easy for once.
You are in good company.
and "I love you"s
from the bed liner of my truck.
Looking up at stars and down
at my knees tented
believing there is all of you
inside me. Lip sweating
cooled by the evening breeze
I know the sky
is looking down and blushing.
Power nap.
At the after party.
believing there is all bass to hear
and all your base belongs to me.
Ash over the lip of the truck bed.
Think maybe someone is watching.
Know we are safe
and ash again.
A plume of smoke
rises toward the tree limbs above our faces.
Breathe easy for once.
You are in good company.
85% Paper (junior year anti-hero filmography thesis)
still failed the class on an attendance rule (missed three classes, but the professor allowed me to keep attending and turn in the paper and grade it [I would have passed if not for the instant F for missing three classes and had I known, I wouldn't have bothered]). Sometimes I have thoughts I would like to pursue with intense and focused effort. Those times come and go, but the yearning to share, critique, explore, and pick apart, and build mind never fades. Came across this while browsing some old rough drafts and sharing is caring. Still very upset at Eric Velasquez. If you run into him with his skinny jeans on CMU's campus, punch him in the face and offer him a shot afterward on my behalf. Fakehawkwearing side saddle hugging wannabe sumbleotch! Seriously though. If not for that stupid attendance rule... nothing like knowing you've failed three weeks into a semester to motivate you. Not that people have different ways of learning and contributing. Penalize the shy... =sigh=... Not at all. i will kill you in the face-> I do wish I had more time to work on it. I suppose I do now. It was fun. Spent several days ramping up to it and then banged it out with a few cans of red bull and a couple packs of cigarettes when I realized there was no more time to play with the idea and it was time to shove something out for a grade. B+ is fine by me. If it had counted on my transcript I might've actually graduated and gotten my paper only two years late instead of never.
09 May 2008
The Anti Hero:
Asian Extreme Cinema’s Impact
The anti hero genre was built by the hard boiled detective film and the film noir movement and many of its characteristics and nuances have been firmly established by a long line of films, most notably by films like Kiss Me Deadly, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Maltese Falcon. Furthermore, these traits, established through character, plot, mise-en-scene, and cinematography, have become cultural signifiers in identifying and delimiting the anti hero genre; the genre surpassing the film in ideological importance. The anti hero is no longer a part and parcel of the hard boiled detective film as much as the hard boiled detective film has become a part of the anti hero genre, leaving space for the expansion of the genre into other cinema besides the hard boiled detective films of the early and mid Twentieth century. New to the genre is the movement known as “Asian extreme” cinema, featuring notable directors like Park Chan- Wook and Takashi Miike. Asian extreme cinema is changing the ideology of the anti hero, eroding some tropes and reinforcing others, while at the same time affecting the American understanding of the anti hero in ways that fundamentally challenge the anti hero’s origin in hard boiled cinema and film noir. Arguably leading the charge of this new movement is a trio of films directed by Park Chan-Wook known as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. These films together form the Vengeance trilogy and a challenge to the hard boiled, gangster, and noir pedigree of the anti hero genre, but before a filmic discourse can be established in detail, the genre itself must be explored and delimited to properly frame the discussion.
The anti hero genre is not composed of a single archetypal character from which all others can be derived. It instead originated with a collection of characters from film noir and hard boiled detective films, beginning with, of course, the intrepid hard boiled detective of the mid 40’s and 50’s novels and screen productions. Productions like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly and T-Men. In each of these productions there is presented the figure of the detective or agent who must seek out the truth to reveal evil doers and bring them to justice often while simultaneously juggling their own self interests in the process; sometimes with success and sometimes with extreme failure in their self interests, be it greed, or wealth, or power, getting the better of them. Some productions, like Kiss Me Deadly, even dropped the detective embroiled in personal scruples altogether, presenting a new kind of detective who could often be confused for those he sought to bring to justice. A detective who straddled the line between good and evil with little to tie him to one side or the other and little in the way of a conscience in his pursuit of truth. Adding to the genre is the noir gangster of films like Angels with Dirty Faces, The Big Heat, and Asphalt Jungle. The noir gangster forms the core of the story of the disaffected business man or common blue collar citizen, jilted by society with nothing to fall back on but his own wits and ruthlessness to achieve status in a world of darkness. Crime becomes his business and his downfall. Further fleshing out the anti hero genre is the story of the couple on the run, the fatal couple, appearing in films like This Gun for Hire, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Blue Dahlia, and Bonnie and Clyde. Sometimes driven to crime, sometimes falsely accused, sometimes misunderstood, and always linked by a shared passion for one another, the fatal couple forms an integral part of the anti hero genre as one of the most retold and rescreened character combinations in film noir. The viewer is endeared to the commitment between the couple, often lovers, and their desire to remain together in the face
of all odds even though they are pursued by, and often operating on the wrong side of, the law. The anti hero genre is composed of these major characters, with each character contributing to the tropes of the genre; tropes like the fallible hero, the hero who stands on murky moral ground, the protagonist who is simultaneously a vigilante, the corruptible hero, the couple destroyed by their lust, the protagonist whose motivations are clouded by passion, and the hero who exercises no restraint in his quest to achieve his personal goals. These tropes do not exist in a vacuum, but are constantly being interpreted, reproduced, encoded and decoded, through mise-en-scene and cinematography and the act of watching film, allowing the anti hero genre to take on denotative substance as a genre.
Here, Stuart Hall’s model of the communicative circuit becomes useful in explicating just how the tropes of the anti hero genre are created, communicated, and deconstructed by the film’s viewer. The communicative circuit is composed of a multitude of steps that serve differing purposes, purposes that must be defined. These steps, in order, are technical infrastructure of production, the knowledge frameworks of production, the relations of production, encoding, the message that is transmitted, decoding on the part of the receiver, again the relationships of production, then the knowledge frameworks of the recipient, and then the technical infrastructure of the recipient, and finally reproduction (Hall 94). There are two highly distinct sides to the communicative circuit as well; the production and distribution side and the reception and reproduction side (Hall 91). Each side and step is vital to the transmission and mediation of the discourse that takes place between the origination of a message and the reception of that message, a discourse that structures the anti hero genre. The production side of the technical infrastructure limits the frameworks of knowledge, in this case frameworks that inform the genre, which can be encoded into a production and transmitted via a medium to the recipients.
On the recipients side the technical infrastructure limits the frameworks of knowledge that can be used to decode a message, the message being that of who and what an anti hero is. In the middle is where the idea of media actually happens, media like radio, television, newspapers, and most importantly in this case, cinema that convey the message (Hall 94). Stuart Hall stresses the importance of encoding and decoding above the other steps of the circuit because it is, for him, where meaning actually occurs. For Hall the medium is largely arbitrary to the knowledge frameworks and technical infrastructure that go into encoding and decoding the tropes of the anti hero genre. Mise-en-scene and cinematography are tools of production, but also act dually as tools of reception and reproduction on the opposing end of the communicative circuit. Around the middle of the communicative circuit, the message’s transmission, is where cinema takes place in theaters and is received by viewers. The viewer’s ability to decode mise-en-scene and cinematographic devices directly impacts how they are able to interpret and regenerate the tropes of the anti hero genre on the reception side of the communicative circuit. Recognizing the meaning behind the use of perspective relations, framing, on screen and off screen space, angle, level and height of framing, the movement of the frame, lighting, shot composition, and the duration of the image are all critical to understanding and interpreting the tropes that are encoded into production (Bordwell, Thompson 1993). For instance framing the main character with a high angle shot can convey a sense of powerlessness in the greater scheme of the plot while framing the character with a low angle shot can convey a sense of power, agency, and even menace. Composing a shot of the main character with a mirror image of the character in the same shot, looking into the mirror, can convey a duplicitous personality or a sense of inner conflict, indicative of the anti hero’s plight of dealing with inner demons while struggling to maintain some sense of a moral compass. Introducing the main character with high contrast
lighting, keeping him in shadow and others in bright, washed out, light can convey a sense of the main character’s darker traits overtaking his noble questing for truth. Bisecting a frame with straight lines like staircase banisters, wall elements, and fixtures can convey divisions between the character’s intentions and the character’s actions and can also convey a closing in of the main character’s world, the tightening of the noose of justice around the anti hero’s neck, or can convey the bars of prison that lie in the character’s future. Using a long take can portray the circuitous and ultimately futile flight of the impassioned couple running from the law. Or using a long focal length can frame the main character in the foreground with other characters in the background, splitting the focal points of the shot to bring oppositional forces in the background into the same frame of realization as the main character’s efforts to establish control over his destiny. A widely cropped take of the main character can convey his isolation and weakness in his efforts to exercise control over the dark world around him (Saada 175). The information, the tropes of the anti hero genre, are all encoded during the production of the film, and are later received through cinema, decoded by the viewer, and reproduced in the recognition of the hard boiled detective, the noir gangster, and the fatal couple as characters within the genre of the anti hero. While earlier hard boiled and gangster films build the anti hero genre from within its limits, Asian extreme cinema, more specifically Park Chan-Wook’s films, forms a departure from the typical coding of the anti hero in ways that fundamentally change how the genre can be understood in terms of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and character.
As examples of how earlier hard boiled and gangster films build the anti hero genre consider Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beaty) represent the fatal couple in Bonnie and Clyde while Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) represents the hard boiled detective, all of
whom operate within the anti hero genre. The cinematography, mise-en-scene, and character elements encoded into these films production clue the viewer in to the genre’s elements present in the films. Bonnie and Clyde opens with Clyde considering stealing Bonnie’s mother’s car as Bonnie looks on, nude, from her bedroom window. Bonnie comes down from her room to talk to Clyde and Clyde begins talking about his past time in prison. The two together head into town for a soda and as they talk Clyde flashes a gun. Bonnie claims that he does not have the fortitude to use it and Clyde, rising to Bonnie’s challenge, immediately heads across the street to hold up a convenience store, commanding Bonnie to stay put. Here the viewer gets the first hint that the two are destined to become the story’s anti heroes. A very wide angle shot dwarfs Bonnie as she stands alone in the street on the far right while Clyde, at the far left, disappears into the store.
Their love at first sight is destined to fail as a fatal couple, doomed and dwarfed by their future deeds and ultimately they will be separated by death dealt at the hands of the law. After the heist the two race away and Bonnie, impassioned by the experience, ravenously attempts to have relations with Clyde as they speed away, symbolizing the path of reckless love they have embarked upon and imploring the viewer to sympathize with their passion though they have just brazenly violated the law. The viewer must decode the character’s actions and only then can the conflict of love and violence be seen for what it is; an encoded trope of the anti hero genre as represented by the fatal couple. In a following scene, the couple is hiding out in a run down farm reclaimed by the bank and attempting to share a moment of intimacy. In the scene Clyde tries to respond to Bonnie’s advances, but cannot because he is not a “lover boy.” As Bonnie turns away from him, disgusted and hurt, a medium close up crops her from the chest up as she turns and holds onto a gun instead, clutching it close to her heart, reiterating that the pair’s volatile relationship with its somewhat innocent beginnings revolves around violence and crime,
distancing the viewer from the couple and their abnormal relationship. The viewer is further distanced, both literally and figuratively, from the anti heroes in a scene in which Bonnie flees from Clyde to attempt to go home and see her mother. By this point the two have committed several crimes and slain multiple police officers and there is no way they can continue to slip away from the officers unscathed indefinitely. As Clyde finally manages to track Bonnie down in a corn field a high extreme wide angle shot captures the weight of their situation. Their actions have distanced them from all hope of redemption as the drag net of the law looms all about them, encoded in the bleak vastness of the distance framed in the shot. The forced alienation of the protagonist pair further encodes them as anti heroes, operating on the wrong side of the law, consumed by the violence that parallels their passion, their powerlessness to change their heading, and distanced from the viewer by their abnormal actions. The Maltese Falcon presents more evidence of the encoding of the anti hero genre in cinema and the building blocks, its tropes. In an earlier scene the hard boiled detective Sam Spade is speaking with a potential client, Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), when Cairo pulls a gun on him and insists he be allowed to search Spade’s office for the Maltese falcon. Spade begins to comply and places his hands on the nape of his neck, but then as Cairo jams his pistol into the small of Spade’s back Sam turns on him disabling his gun hand. There is a short sequence in which Sam continues to advance toward the now helpless and physically diminutive Cairo with a sadistic grin on his face before finally knocking him out unconscious with a single blow to the face. The cruelty Spade exercises in dispatching Cairo evidences his murky moral compass. He is signified, through his character’s actions, as an anti hero very early on in the film. In a later scene Sam Spade confronts another possible client, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), about what she knows about his partner’s death. When she insists that Spade should trust her because she bought his
confidence earlier on in the film Spade replies that his confidence is not so easily won, but before the issue is dropped he grabs hold of Brigid and places a kiss squarely on her lips hinting that where money has failed a sexual liaison might suffice. Here again Spade’s character as the story’s protagonist must be called into question and here again his actions code him as the corruptible anti hero standing on shaky moral ground. In yet another scene Sam Spade is being questioned by two detectives, Lt. Dundy (Barton McLane) and Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond), about his whereabouts during the time his partner was murdered. The use of shot reverse shot during the questioning reveals the fine line Sam Spade is walking in his pursuit of the truth behind the Maltese falcon and his partner’s murder. The first low angle shot has Sam Spade’s back to the camera appearing much larger than the two officers as he easily dodges their efforts to pin the murder on him, but as they threaten to pinch him and take him down to the station for questioning the reverse low angle shot has Sam Spade framed on either side by the now much more menacing, much larger, detectives. The shift from manipulator to manipulated and back again is indicative of the lack of control the anti hero can exercise over his destiny as events that are larger than him dictate his future. Though Sam is able to exercise some agency in his existence he is still unable to control most aspects as a common man would. Bonnie and Clyde and The Maltese Falcon are both examples of how the anti hero genre is built up through the use of tropes encoded into cinema and decoded by the film’s viewer. Asian extreme cinema forms a departure from the encoding established by the hard boiled detective film and the gangster film, altering the genre to make the anti hero appear more normal, human, and accessible to the viewer where hard boiled and gangster films have served to make the anti hero less normal and more distant.
In Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the main character Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) is a deaf mute who must raise enough money for a kidney transplant for his ailing unnamed sister. Through the course of the film he becomes the victim of the circumstances he creates for himself in his efforts to secure the transplant. He first turns to normal hospital channels, but finds that an organ donor is not readily available and that his blood type does not match the blood type of his sister. He then turns to illegal organ dealers to give up a kidney and
$10,000 to secure a kidney for his sister, but the organ dealers take his money and his kidney and do not hold up their end of the bargain. Penniless and without a kidney Ryu then learns that a donor kidney has become available at the hospital for the sum of money he lost to the black market organ dealers. He then turns to kidnapping out of desperation and kidnaps the daughter of Dong-jin (Kang-ho Song), a prominent businessman, to hold her for ransom enough to pay for the transplant. However, when his sister learns of the lengths he has gone to she commits suicide to unburden her brother. Ryu then takes her body to a river bed, with Dong-jin’s daughter in tow, to bury her and in the process Dong-jin’s daughter slips into the river without his knowledge and drowns, her cries for help falling on Ryu’s deaf ears. Ryu fills the role of the film’s anti hero, but his actions are as moral as his circumstances allow them to be. Here the tropes of the anti hero genre are not as helpful in describing Ryu’s behavior. Ryu is almost a complete victim of circumstance with nothing going as he originally intends. He is forced to make the best out of the worst outcomes and eventually pays with his life by the films end as Dong-jin seeks him out and ultimately kills him in the same river bed where his daughter perished. Regardless, he still represents the film’s anti hero because his moral decisions, though influenced by outside forces, are still decisions that are questionable; decisions such as choosing to fall to kidnapping to make up the money he needs, resorting to black market organ dealers in
the first place, and even swearing vengeance on Dong-jin after Dong-jin murders his fiancé in his efforts to track him down. Ryu clearly stands on murky moral ground, even though it is the only traction afforded him by Chan-wook’s plot. In Park Chan-wook’s follow up to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, a melding of roles takes place, casting the protagonist as an amateur hard boiled detective and a revenge seeker. In the story Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is imprisoned in an undisclosed location away from all human contact, but for feeding times, for 15 years, his wife is murdered while he is imprisoned, and his three-year-old daughter is sent away to foster parents. Upon his release he falls for a sushi chef named Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang) and finds out this his former captor now tormentor, Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae), will kill her and every other woman he has and will ever love in five days if he does not find out the reason for his imprisonment. So begins Dae-su’s quest for the truth as a hard boiled detective who must stop at nothing to find out the secret of his imprisonment, but also his quest for vengeance against Woo- jin (though he cannot kill him until he finds out the truth). The vengeful slant of the otherwise typical hard boiled detective film clues the viewer in to the fact that Dae-su signifies some kind of incarnation of the anti hero genre, but the coercive elements of the plot, the fact that Mi-do and others lives are at stake, here again shed new and somewhat contradictory light on the anti hero genre, stretching its former boundaries anew. On the one hand Dae-su’s no holds barred pursuit of the truth is indicative of the anti hero trope of the hard boiled detective’s lack of scruples, but on the other hand he is pushed to that point by circumstances largely out of his control. In addition the viewer is brought into Dae-su’s world on a very intimate level with use of many close ups. He is portrayed as being human in spite of his violent efforts to save Mi-do from the over arching clutches of Lee Woo-jin. An example of the intimate portrait is a scene in which Mi-do and Dae-su make love with Mi-do insisting that all she wants is to be good to and
for Dae-su even though the scene is portrayed as being a painful experience for her. Dae-su is painted as a protagonist full of human emotion and in dire need of Mi-do’s love, even though the scene is preceded by scene’s of almost shocking callousness and reckless abandon on Dae-su’s part; scenes such as when he forgoes the opportunity to talk down a suicidal man on a roof top, allowing him to jump instead, and when he starts a fight with street toughs for the simple pleasure of knowing his shadow boxing while in seclusion could equip him to properly fight should the situation arise. In an act of utter humility and compassion, Dae-su goes so far as remove his own tongue to protect Mi-do from Woo-jin’s efforts to reveal the truth of Dae-su and Mi-do’s incestuous relationship. Such acts force the viewer to identify with the anti hero in ways that the hard boiled detective films like The Maltese Falcon and Bonnie and Clyde fail to do, establishing an intimate link between the viewer and the anti hero.
Asian extreme cinema is changing the ideology of the anti hero genre, making the characters it is composed of more, not less, human as the tropes of the genre have done through the mid and late Twentieth century. The anti hero genre was built by the hard boiled detective film and the film noir movement and the majority of its characteristics have been firmly established by a long line of films, a pair of particularly notable films being Bonnie and Clyde, and The Maltese Falcon. The traits of the genre, established through character, plot, mise-en- scene, and cinematography, traits like the morally ambiguous quest for truth, the impassioned couple on the run, the disillusioned common man turned gangster, the detective clouded by greed, ambition, and lust, and the hard boiled unscrupulous detective have become cultural signifiers in identifying and delimiting the anti hero genre. New to the genre, and a force for change within the genre is the new movement known as Asian extreme cinema featuring the likes of Takashi Miike, director of Iichi The Killer, and Chan-wook Park, director of the
Vengeance trilogy. While Asian extreme cinema has served to reinforce some aspects of the genre it has also served to broaden and humanize the characters within the American understanding of the genre’s limitations through films like Old Boy and Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy are simply the tip of the mountain of Asian extreme cinema and while they are prime examples they are by no means the only ones. Every film that could be helpful in showcasing the changes caused by the advance of Asian extreme cinema could not be discussed because of breadth constraints, but further study of the anti hero genre and Asian extreme cinema’s role within it would certainly reveal even more impact than what is explored in these pages.
Works Cited
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art an Introduction. U.S.A.: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993. 90-101.
Huston, John, dir. The Maltese Falcon. 1941. Warner Brothers Pictures. 2008. Park, Chan-wook, dir. Oldboy. 2003. CJ Entertainment. 2008.
Park, Chan-wook, dir. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. 2002. CJ Entertainment. 2008. Penn, Arthur, dir. Bonnie and Clyde. 1967. Warner Brothers Pictures. 2008
Saada, Nicolas. “The Noir Style.” Film Noir Reader 4. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini.
New Jersey: Limelight, 2004. 175-191.
09 May 2008
The Anti Hero:
Asian Extreme Cinema’s Impact
The anti hero genre was built by the hard boiled detective film and the film noir movement and many of its characteristics and nuances have been firmly established by a long line of films, most notably by films like Kiss Me Deadly, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Maltese Falcon. Furthermore, these traits, established through character, plot, mise-en-scene, and cinematography, have become cultural signifiers in identifying and delimiting the anti hero genre; the genre surpassing the film in ideological importance. The anti hero is no longer a part and parcel of the hard boiled detective film as much as the hard boiled detective film has become a part of the anti hero genre, leaving space for the expansion of the genre into other cinema besides the hard boiled detective films of the early and mid Twentieth century. New to the genre is the movement known as “Asian extreme” cinema, featuring notable directors like Park Chan- Wook and Takashi Miike. Asian extreme cinema is changing the ideology of the anti hero, eroding some tropes and reinforcing others, while at the same time affecting the American understanding of the anti hero in ways that fundamentally challenge the anti hero’s origin in hard boiled cinema and film noir. Arguably leading the charge of this new movement is a trio of films directed by Park Chan-Wook known as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. These films together form the Vengeance trilogy and a challenge to the hard boiled, gangster, and noir pedigree of the anti hero genre, but before a filmic discourse can be established in detail, the genre itself must be explored and delimited to properly frame the discussion.
The anti hero genre is not composed of a single archetypal character from which all others can be derived. It instead originated with a collection of characters from film noir and hard boiled detective films, beginning with, of course, the intrepid hard boiled detective of the mid 40’s and 50’s novels and screen productions. Productions like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly and T-Men. In each of these productions there is presented the figure of the detective or agent who must seek out the truth to reveal evil doers and bring them to justice often while simultaneously juggling their own self interests in the process; sometimes with success and sometimes with extreme failure in their self interests, be it greed, or wealth, or power, getting the better of them. Some productions, like Kiss Me Deadly, even dropped the detective embroiled in personal scruples altogether, presenting a new kind of detective who could often be confused for those he sought to bring to justice. A detective who straddled the line between good and evil with little to tie him to one side or the other and little in the way of a conscience in his pursuit of truth. Adding to the genre is the noir gangster of films like Angels with Dirty Faces, The Big Heat, and Asphalt Jungle. The noir gangster forms the core of the story of the disaffected business man or common blue collar citizen, jilted by society with nothing to fall back on but his own wits and ruthlessness to achieve status in a world of darkness. Crime becomes his business and his downfall. Further fleshing out the anti hero genre is the story of the couple on the run, the fatal couple, appearing in films like This Gun for Hire, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Blue Dahlia, and Bonnie and Clyde. Sometimes driven to crime, sometimes falsely accused, sometimes misunderstood, and always linked by a shared passion for one another, the fatal couple forms an integral part of the anti hero genre as one of the most retold and rescreened character combinations in film noir. The viewer is endeared to the commitment between the couple, often lovers, and their desire to remain together in the face
of all odds even though they are pursued by, and often operating on the wrong side of, the law. The anti hero genre is composed of these major characters, with each character contributing to the tropes of the genre; tropes like the fallible hero, the hero who stands on murky moral ground, the protagonist who is simultaneously a vigilante, the corruptible hero, the couple destroyed by their lust, the protagonist whose motivations are clouded by passion, and the hero who exercises no restraint in his quest to achieve his personal goals. These tropes do not exist in a vacuum, but are constantly being interpreted, reproduced, encoded and decoded, through mise-en-scene and cinematography and the act of watching film, allowing the anti hero genre to take on denotative substance as a genre.
Here, Stuart Hall’s model of the communicative circuit becomes useful in explicating just how the tropes of the anti hero genre are created, communicated, and deconstructed by the film’s viewer. The communicative circuit is composed of a multitude of steps that serve differing purposes, purposes that must be defined. These steps, in order, are technical infrastructure of production, the knowledge frameworks of production, the relations of production, encoding, the message that is transmitted, decoding on the part of the receiver, again the relationships of production, then the knowledge frameworks of the recipient, and then the technical infrastructure of the recipient, and finally reproduction (Hall 94). There are two highly distinct sides to the communicative circuit as well; the production and distribution side and the reception and reproduction side (Hall 91). Each side and step is vital to the transmission and mediation of the discourse that takes place between the origination of a message and the reception of that message, a discourse that structures the anti hero genre. The production side of the technical infrastructure limits the frameworks of knowledge, in this case frameworks that inform the genre, which can be encoded into a production and transmitted via a medium to the recipients.
On the recipients side the technical infrastructure limits the frameworks of knowledge that can be used to decode a message, the message being that of who and what an anti hero is. In the middle is where the idea of media actually happens, media like radio, television, newspapers, and most importantly in this case, cinema that convey the message (Hall 94). Stuart Hall stresses the importance of encoding and decoding above the other steps of the circuit because it is, for him, where meaning actually occurs. For Hall the medium is largely arbitrary to the knowledge frameworks and technical infrastructure that go into encoding and decoding the tropes of the anti hero genre. Mise-en-scene and cinematography are tools of production, but also act dually as tools of reception and reproduction on the opposing end of the communicative circuit. Around the middle of the communicative circuit, the message’s transmission, is where cinema takes place in theaters and is received by viewers. The viewer’s ability to decode mise-en-scene and cinematographic devices directly impacts how they are able to interpret and regenerate the tropes of the anti hero genre on the reception side of the communicative circuit. Recognizing the meaning behind the use of perspective relations, framing, on screen and off screen space, angle, level and height of framing, the movement of the frame, lighting, shot composition, and the duration of the image are all critical to understanding and interpreting the tropes that are encoded into production (Bordwell, Thompson 1993). For instance framing the main character with a high angle shot can convey a sense of powerlessness in the greater scheme of the plot while framing the character with a low angle shot can convey a sense of power, agency, and even menace. Composing a shot of the main character with a mirror image of the character in the same shot, looking into the mirror, can convey a duplicitous personality or a sense of inner conflict, indicative of the anti hero’s plight of dealing with inner demons while struggling to maintain some sense of a moral compass. Introducing the main character with high contrast
lighting, keeping him in shadow and others in bright, washed out, light can convey a sense of the main character’s darker traits overtaking his noble questing for truth. Bisecting a frame with straight lines like staircase banisters, wall elements, and fixtures can convey divisions between the character’s intentions and the character’s actions and can also convey a closing in of the main character’s world, the tightening of the noose of justice around the anti hero’s neck, or can convey the bars of prison that lie in the character’s future. Using a long take can portray the circuitous and ultimately futile flight of the impassioned couple running from the law. Or using a long focal length can frame the main character in the foreground with other characters in the background, splitting the focal points of the shot to bring oppositional forces in the background into the same frame of realization as the main character’s efforts to establish control over his destiny. A widely cropped take of the main character can convey his isolation and weakness in his efforts to exercise control over the dark world around him (Saada 175). The information, the tropes of the anti hero genre, are all encoded during the production of the film, and are later received through cinema, decoded by the viewer, and reproduced in the recognition of the hard boiled detective, the noir gangster, and the fatal couple as characters within the genre of the anti hero. While earlier hard boiled and gangster films build the anti hero genre from within its limits, Asian extreme cinema, more specifically Park Chan-Wook’s films, forms a departure from the typical coding of the anti hero in ways that fundamentally change how the genre can be understood in terms of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and character.
As examples of how earlier hard boiled and gangster films build the anti hero genre consider Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beaty) represent the fatal couple in Bonnie and Clyde while Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) represents the hard boiled detective, all of
whom operate within the anti hero genre. The cinematography, mise-en-scene, and character elements encoded into these films production clue the viewer in to the genre’s elements present in the films. Bonnie and Clyde opens with Clyde considering stealing Bonnie’s mother’s car as Bonnie looks on, nude, from her bedroom window. Bonnie comes down from her room to talk to Clyde and Clyde begins talking about his past time in prison. The two together head into town for a soda and as they talk Clyde flashes a gun. Bonnie claims that he does not have the fortitude to use it and Clyde, rising to Bonnie’s challenge, immediately heads across the street to hold up a convenience store, commanding Bonnie to stay put. Here the viewer gets the first hint that the two are destined to become the story’s anti heroes. A very wide angle shot dwarfs Bonnie as she stands alone in the street on the far right while Clyde, at the far left, disappears into the store.
Their love at first sight is destined to fail as a fatal couple, doomed and dwarfed by their future deeds and ultimately they will be separated by death dealt at the hands of the law. After the heist the two race away and Bonnie, impassioned by the experience, ravenously attempts to have relations with Clyde as they speed away, symbolizing the path of reckless love they have embarked upon and imploring the viewer to sympathize with their passion though they have just brazenly violated the law. The viewer must decode the character’s actions and only then can the conflict of love and violence be seen for what it is; an encoded trope of the anti hero genre as represented by the fatal couple. In a following scene, the couple is hiding out in a run down farm reclaimed by the bank and attempting to share a moment of intimacy. In the scene Clyde tries to respond to Bonnie’s advances, but cannot because he is not a “lover boy.” As Bonnie turns away from him, disgusted and hurt, a medium close up crops her from the chest up as she turns and holds onto a gun instead, clutching it close to her heart, reiterating that the pair’s volatile relationship with its somewhat innocent beginnings revolves around violence and crime,
distancing the viewer from the couple and their abnormal relationship. The viewer is further distanced, both literally and figuratively, from the anti heroes in a scene in which Bonnie flees from Clyde to attempt to go home and see her mother. By this point the two have committed several crimes and slain multiple police officers and there is no way they can continue to slip away from the officers unscathed indefinitely. As Clyde finally manages to track Bonnie down in a corn field a high extreme wide angle shot captures the weight of their situation. Their actions have distanced them from all hope of redemption as the drag net of the law looms all about them, encoded in the bleak vastness of the distance framed in the shot. The forced alienation of the protagonist pair further encodes them as anti heroes, operating on the wrong side of the law, consumed by the violence that parallels their passion, their powerlessness to change their heading, and distanced from the viewer by their abnormal actions. The Maltese Falcon presents more evidence of the encoding of the anti hero genre in cinema and the building blocks, its tropes. In an earlier scene the hard boiled detective Sam Spade is speaking with a potential client, Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), when Cairo pulls a gun on him and insists he be allowed to search Spade’s office for the Maltese falcon. Spade begins to comply and places his hands on the nape of his neck, but then as Cairo jams his pistol into the small of Spade’s back Sam turns on him disabling his gun hand. There is a short sequence in which Sam continues to advance toward the now helpless and physically diminutive Cairo with a sadistic grin on his face before finally knocking him out unconscious with a single blow to the face. The cruelty Spade exercises in dispatching Cairo evidences his murky moral compass. He is signified, through his character’s actions, as an anti hero very early on in the film. In a later scene Sam Spade confronts another possible client, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), about what she knows about his partner’s death. When she insists that Spade should trust her because she bought his
confidence earlier on in the film Spade replies that his confidence is not so easily won, but before the issue is dropped he grabs hold of Brigid and places a kiss squarely on her lips hinting that where money has failed a sexual liaison might suffice. Here again Spade’s character as the story’s protagonist must be called into question and here again his actions code him as the corruptible anti hero standing on shaky moral ground. In yet another scene Sam Spade is being questioned by two detectives, Lt. Dundy (Barton McLane) and Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond), about his whereabouts during the time his partner was murdered. The use of shot reverse shot during the questioning reveals the fine line Sam Spade is walking in his pursuit of the truth behind the Maltese falcon and his partner’s murder. The first low angle shot has Sam Spade’s back to the camera appearing much larger than the two officers as he easily dodges their efforts to pin the murder on him, but as they threaten to pinch him and take him down to the station for questioning the reverse low angle shot has Sam Spade framed on either side by the now much more menacing, much larger, detectives. The shift from manipulator to manipulated and back again is indicative of the lack of control the anti hero can exercise over his destiny as events that are larger than him dictate his future. Though Sam is able to exercise some agency in his existence he is still unable to control most aspects as a common man would. Bonnie and Clyde and The Maltese Falcon are both examples of how the anti hero genre is built up through the use of tropes encoded into cinema and decoded by the film’s viewer. Asian extreme cinema forms a departure from the encoding established by the hard boiled detective film and the gangster film, altering the genre to make the anti hero appear more normal, human, and accessible to the viewer where hard boiled and gangster films have served to make the anti hero less normal and more distant.
In Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the main character Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) is a deaf mute who must raise enough money for a kidney transplant for his ailing unnamed sister. Through the course of the film he becomes the victim of the circumstances he creates for himself in his efforts to secure the transplant. He first turns to normal hospital channels, but finds that an organ donor is not readily available and that his blood type does not match the blood type of his sister. He then turns to illegal organ dealers to give up a kidney and
$10,000 to secure a kidney for his sister, but the organ dealers take his money and his kidney and do not hold up their end of the bargain. Penniless and without a kidney Ryu then learns that a donor kidney has become available at the hospital for the sum of money he lost to the black market organ dealers. He then turns to kidnapping out of desperation and kidnaps the daughter of Dong-jin (Kang-ho Song), a prominent businessman, to hold her for ransom enough to pay for the transplant. However, when his sister learns of the lengths he has gone to she commits suicide to unburden her brother. Ryu then takes her body to a river bed, with Dong-jin’s daughter in tow, to bury her and in the process Dong-jin’s daughter slips into the river without his knowledge and drowns, her cries for help falling on Ryu’s deaf ears. Ryu fills the role of the film’s anti hero, but his actions are as moral as his circumstances allow them to be. Here the tropes of the anti hero genre are not as helpful in describing Ryu’s behavior. Ryu is almost a complete victim of circumstance with nothing going as he originally intends. He is forced to make the best out of the worst outcomes and eventually pays with his life by the films end as Dong-jin seeks him out and ultimately kills him in the same river bed where his daughter perished. Regardless, he still represents the film’s anti hero because his moral decisions, though influenced by outside forces, are still decisions that are questionable; decisions such as choosing to fall to kidnapping to make up the money he needs, resorting to black market organ dealers in
the first place, and even swearing vengeance on Dong-jin after Dong-jin murders his fiancé in his efforts to track him down. Ryu clearly stands on murky moral ground, even though it is the only traction afforded him by Chan-wook’s plot. In Park Chan-wook’s follow up to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, a melding of roles takes place, casting the protagonist as an amateur hard boiled detective and a revenge seeker. In the story Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is imprisoned in an undisclosed location away from all human contact, but for feeding times, for 15 years, his wife is murdered while he is imprisoned, and his three-year-old daughter is sent away to foster parents. Upon his release he falls for a sushi chef named Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang) and finds out this his former captor now tormentor, Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae), will kill her and every other woman he has and will ever love in five days if he does not find out the reason for his imprisonment. So begins Dae-su’s quest for the truth as a hard boiled detective who must stop at nothing to find out the secret of his imprisonment, but also his quest for vengeance against Woo- jin (though he cannot kill him until he finds out the truth). The vengeful slant of the otherwise typical hard boiled detective film clues the viewer in to the fact that Dae-su signifies some kind of incarnation of the anti hero genre, but the coercive elements of the plot, the fact that Mi-do and others lives are at stake, here again shed new and somewhat contradictory light on the anti hero genre, stretching its former boundaries anew. On the one hand Dae-su’s no holds barred pursuit of the truth is indicative of the anti hero trope of the hard boiled detective’s lack of scruples, but on the other hand he is pushed to that point by circumstances largely out of his control. In addition the viewer is brought into Dae-su’s world on a very intimate level with use of many close ups. He is portrayed as being human in spite of his violent efforts to save Mi-do from the over arching clutches of Lee Woo-jin. An example of the intimate portrait is a scene in which Mi-do and Dae-su make love with Mi-do insisting that all she wants is to be good to and
for Dae-su even though the scene is portrayed as being a painful experience for her. Dae-su is painted as a protagonist full of human emotion and in dire need of Mi-do’s love, even though the scene is preceded by scene’s of almost shocking callousness and reckless abandon on Dae-su’s part; scenes such as when he forgoes the opportunity to talk down a suicidal man on a roof top, allowing him to jump instead, and when he starts a fight with street toughs for the simple pleasure of knowing his shadow boxing while in seclusion could equip him to properly fight should the situation arise. In an act of utter humility and compassion, Dae-su goes so far as remove his own tongue to protect Mi-do from Woo-jin’s efforts to reveal the truth of Dae-su and Mi-do’s incestuous relationship. Such acts force the viewer to identify with the anti hero in ways that the hard boiled detective films like The Maltese Falcon and Bonnie and Clyde fail to do, establishing an intimate link between the viewer and the anti hero.
Asian extreme cinema is changing the ideology of the anti hero genre, making the characters it is composed of more, not less, human as the tropes of the genre have done through the mid and late Twentieth century. The anti hero genre was built by the hard boiled detective film and the film noir movement and the majority of its characteristics have been firmly established by a long line of films, a pair of particularly notable films being Bonnie and Clyde, and The Maltese Falcon. The traits of the genre, established through character, plot, mise-en- scene, and cinematography, traits like the morally ambiguous quest for truth, the impassioned couple on the run, the disillusioned common man turned gangster, the detective clouded by greed, ambition, and lust, and the hard boiled unscrupulous detective have become cultural signifiers in identifying and delimiting the anti hero genre. New to the genre, and a force for change within the genre is the new movement known as Asian extreme cinema featuring the likes of Takashi Miike, director of Iichi The Killer, and Chan-wook Park, director of the
Vengeance trilogy. While Asian extreme cinema has served to reinforce some aspects of the genre it has also served to broaden and humanize the characters within the American understanding of the genre’s limitations through films like Old Boy and Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy are simply the tip of the mountain of Asian extreme cinema and while they are prime examples they are by no means the only ones. Every film that could be helpful in showcasing the changes caused by the advance of Asian extreme cinema could not be discussed because of breadth constraints, but further study of the anti hero genre and Asian extreme cinema’s role within it would certainly reveal even more impact than what is explored in these pages.
Works Cited
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art an Introduction. U.S.A.: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993. 90-101.
Huston, John, dir. The Maltese Falcon. 1941. Warner Brothers Pictures. 2008. Park, Chan-wook, dir. Oldboy. 2003. CJ Entertainment. 2008.
Park, Chan-wook, dir. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. 2002. CJ Entertainment. 2008. Penn, Arthur, dir. Bonnie and Clyde. 1967. Warner Brothers Pictures. 2008
Saada, Nicolas. “The Noir Style.” Film Noir Reader 4. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini.
New Jersey: Limelight, 2004. 175-191.
Folding Star
As we've grown older
we've grown
I know.
I am perpetually blue.
In the on times I think of you.
I try to reprogram guidance protocols;
the compunav continues to point
at you.
The space in the map
that comes back,
numbers off of the charts,
all black.
I don't want to die today.
I do not want to die today.
If we must know,
we must know.
Text message sent
in lieu of a phone call
along the event horizon.
The gravity is alright here,
"how goes it there?"
Gay as a Jay bird
flirting with forty somethings in the outlands.
Bring 'em home.
As we've grown older,
seeing you across the bar,
believing a pact
may not be that far off.
Whipping through the inner system,
parking in the asteroid belt,
collect a souvenir
on a moon Earth's gravity has never felt.
All baubles, all cheese and crackers, snow globes
from planets you've never seen.
Holes and stains and colors, eyes melt,
that should not exist on jeans.
I see you at the far end of the room.
I see you talking yourself down.
I see you, folding star, supernova.
I see you, traveler the same,
black hole,
please don't mind
that I am drawn over
close to
in to
all
about
you.
we've grown
I know.
I am perpetually blue.
In the on times I think of you.
I try to reprogram guidance protocols;
the compunav continues to point
at you.
The space in the map
that comes back,
numbers off of the charts,
all black.
I don't want to die today.
I do not want to die today.
If we must know,
we must know.
Text message sent
in lieu of a phone call
along the event horizon.
The gravity is alright here,
"how goes it there?"
Gay as a Jay bird
flirting with forty somethings in the outlands.
Bring 'em home.
As we've grown older,
seeing you across the bar,
believing a pact
may not be that far off.
Whipping through the inner system,
parking in the asteroid belt,
collect a souvenir
on a moon Earth's gravity has never felt.
All baubles, all cheese and crackers, snow globes
from planets you've never seen.
Holes and stains and colors, eyes melt,
that should not exist on jeans.
I see you at the far end of the room.
I see you talking yourself down.
I see you, folding star, supernova.
I see you, traveler the same,
black hole,
please don't mind
that I am drawn over
close to
in to
all
about
you.
Quinny
Wrestle.
Fight me darling,
potholes left where lips release
along the dividing line
between Cancer and Capri... ...the other one.
Don't think too hard,
tongue wrapping your belly button
into a gift basket
my nose nudges open.
Eyes glance up,
knees tucked over
my shoulders push back and
for heaven's sake relax.
Allow your hips to relax
while this hippo laps
all tongue at the river
eating like a boy
with a sugar tooth
and short of blood.
Fight me darling,
potholes left where lips release
along the dividing line
between Cancer and Capri... ...the other one.
Don't think too hard,
tongue wrapping your belly button
into a gift basket
my nose nudges open.
Eyes glance up,
knees tucked over
my shoulders push back and
for heaven's sake relax.
Allow your hips to relax
while this hippo laps
all tongue at the river
eating like a boy
with a sugar tooth
and short of blood.
Quin Quin
holding you close and feeling the bulge of your pussy makes my dick all squishy. holding you up and fingers to your chin, cupped, lips meet and I bet you have a reason to be here. But. But I think you might not. May not? I may not, but I like to think I may have a reason to knot your hair with my cock. Inside you, fingertips beside you, think of ways to go wide of you, but maybe not. I had a vision to lay you. You, a vision to lay me? Please tell me where the vacants lot. To play please. I know you'll never be me. You know right now I'm off the person that I want you to see, but got! Some kind of robot human, some kind of robot vag with a hard jay. There should be some kind of way to soft fuck may but maybe not. I know you don't know that you know me already, but maybe slop can be something we do put our noses to eat. If you don't then don't make me feel alone to eat. While we're eating shoulder shoulder don't feel me faking a way to get out. All I want is your lips across my face. Making your breasts all my new faves. When I'm pissed off let the differential lock.
Peeling out in a parking lot under moon. Your ass in the truck bed bumping too. Ghosts screaming at the standard shift knob. Underneath the gas pedal, find your clog. Holy shit, cross my face, your panties, get home, let's blaze, tit in my mouth, lets, BLOW!
Peeling out in a parking lot under moon. Your ass in the truck bed bumping too. Ghosts screaming at the standard shift knob. Underneath the gas pedal, find your clog. Holy shit, cross my face, your panties, get home, let's blaze, tit in my mouth, lets, BLOW!
Shovel Head
More plates on the bar.
Lick the metal grains from the creases in my palm.
Clap my hands.
Lick them again until the taste is
entirely in my sinuses.
Clap my hands.
Wipe the blood from the hoop of my nostril.
Mash the ball 440 feet.
Or was it 300 yards? Drain it from 30.
Set the match to every word
taken to a grave. Crush my father's skull
in my metal laced hands
in the second act of Blade Runner's
death above and blowing through
my lungs, my veins, my bones.
Or when he did not
get up,
mumbling about his teeth and drink,
the bar-back shaking his head,
"go the fuck home,"
I went to the park
and slept.
Every word to the grave.
Every ball ever played.
Crush his skull until the shards get stuck
in the creases of my palm and
chew the tang until it's in my sinuses and
push another pair of plates on the rack.
This I Believe 4
I believe in cigar boats.
I believe in cigarette trips.
I believe in cemeteries.
I still believe in rainbows.
I believe in vaginas and their scent.
I believe in having 6 pairs of the same sunglasses.
I believe in having spare keys.
I believe in a good pair of shoes.
I believe in tee shirts.
I believe in spray paint.
I believe in cocaine too.
I believe in blank paper.
I believe in audiobooks.
I believe whatever happens in a bathroom
was meant to happen.
I believe being talked down is alright.
I believe in mirrors.
I believe in a solid pair of jeans.
I believe in breasts.
I believe in condoms too.
I believe in eyeliner and leashes.
I believe in lightning.
I believe in bass.
I believe in bass.
I believe in teachers.
I believe in bass.
I believe in cigarette trips.
I believe in cemeteries.
I still believe in rainbows.
I believe in vaginas and their scent.
I believe in having 6 pairs of the same sunglasses.
I believe in having spare keys.
I believe in a good pair of shoes.
I believe in tee shirts.
I believe in spray paint.
I believe in cocaine too.
I believe in blank paper.
I believe in audiobooks.
I believe whatever happens in a bathroom
was meant to happen.
I believe being talked down is alright.
I believe in mirrors.
I believe in a solid pair of jeans.
I believe in breasts.
I believe in condoms too.
I believe in eyeliner and leashes.
I believe in lightning.
I believe in bass.
I believe in bass.
I believe in teachers.
I believe in bass.
Smoker 46
Living through symbols
is a shabby way to go.
Reducing the enormous palette
to sixteen colors at best.
Except. When it comes to love.
I will kiss you on the cheek.
Some things never change.
Some things should never change.
is a shabby way to go.
Reducing the enormous palette
to sixteen colors at best.
Except. When it comes to love.
I will kiss you on the cheek.
Some things never change.
Some things should never change.
Love Song for Spring 2
I know that I don't know you very well,
but I ask you to stay for a spell.
Not to talk or to listen
or to enjoy a blisses
staring out the windows of your house.
Can I stare with you?
The cats are jumping and running.
Flowers leaning toward the sun beams.
Glasses sweating tear drops,
and the ashtrays growing gray fields.
Your husbands on his way home and
my boyfriend's on his way here.
His girlfriend said she's gotta work late,
and the chip dip is collecting flies.
Can I remember the apple
still sitting on my coffee table
while I glance at your toes poking out
of the lip of your skirt and take in
everything outside of near?
Two more sips from the wine glass.
Two more drags and anxiety passes
in to where Winter grows
miles from here.
but I ask you to stay for a spell.
Not to talk or to listen
or to enjoy a blisses
staring out the windows of your house.
Can I stare with you?
The cats are jumping and running.
Flowers leaning toward the sun beams.
Glasses sweating tear drops,
and the ashtrays growing gray fields.
Your husbands on his way home and
my boyfriend's on his way here.
His girlfriend said she's gotta work late,
and the chip dip is collecting flies.
Can I remember the apple
still sitting on my coffee table
while I glance at your toes poking out
of the lip of your skirt and take in
everything outside of near?
Two more sips from the wine glass.
Two more drags and anxiety passes
in to where Winter grows
miles from here.
Love Song for Spring
Video taping your bow tie tying.
Watching you smile and look away from the lens.
Secreted an orange into your back pack.
Watch you sleep and watch awake.
Has anyone ever told you
how charming you are when you do not breath?
Sexy pint. Sexy crease in the continuum.
The trees will be blooming soon.
The fish will be kicking too.
Can I ask you. Can I ask you.
Will you come with me?
"To where? Outer space?"
Will you please come with me?
Watching you smile and look away from the lens.
Secreted an orange into your back pack.
Watch you sleep and watch awake.
Has anyone ever told you
how charming you are when you do not breath?
Sexy pint. Sexy crease in the continuum.
The trees will be blooming soon.
The fish will be kicking too.
Can I ask you. Can I ask you.
Will you come with me?
"To where? Outer space?"
Will you please come with me?
The Workman's Song
to the tempo of quick step blue grass
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(instrumental)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Silicosis all throughout your lungs.
Your boy'll say you had a good run.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
He said, she said, wear a mask,
I said I am right on task.
To get silicosis and, in a few, up and die.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
One of these days, roll over to your wife,
yawn, and she's gone to grab a knife
Thing she woke up to, skin be zombie blue
.
I'm just going to hold my breath.
Hammer and chisel will do the rest.
I've still got good air 'side my breast.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Crystals cutting up your insides.
Undercutting all of your pride.
Don't you know the margin just ain't that wide?
I'm going to blow my nose real hard.
Get out every last single shard.
Son, you best believe I'm keeping guard.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(instrumental)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Silicosis all throughout your lungs.
Your boy'll say you had a good run.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
The nurse said "weeks, he's got a few.
Next of kin: would that be you?
Yes, it's silicosis and he will die."
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(instrumental)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Silicosis all throughout your lungs.
Your boy'll say you had a good run.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
He said, she said, wear a mask,
I said I am right on task.
To get silicosis and, in a few, up and die.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
One of these days, roll over to your wife,
yawn, and she's gone to grab a knife
Thing she woke up to, skin be zombie blue
.
I'm just going to hold my breath.
Hammer and chisel will do the rest.
I've still got good air 'side my breast.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Crystals cutting up your insides.
Undercutting all of your pride.
Don't you know the margin just ain't that wide?
I'm going to blow my nose real hard.
Get out every last single shard.
Son, you best believe I'm keeping guard.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(instrumental)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Silicosis all throughout your lungs.
Your boy'll say you had a good run.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
The nurse said "weeks, he's got a few.
Next of kin: would that be you?
Yes, it's silicosis and he will die."
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