:: i like my roof. ::

:: Friday, September 29, 2006 ::

Lament for Patroclus
hudson

Oh Muse, sing to me a cry of grief for Patroclus.
First in honor among the Achaeans, and foremost in tragedy.
Patroclus, you revered for a gentle soul, stood always ready to succor a fallen comrade
Or drive your spear in the grim work of blood and dust.
Nevermore will you sing your odes to the deathless gods
Nor raise comrades' hearts with tales of immortal glory.
Patroclus always praised among the Danaans and yet held fettered by Achilles' pride.
Patroclus you had earned far better than to be stripped by Hector's grasping hands
But who can resist the will of the gods?
Oh Patroclus, your fate was sealed when lovely Thetis knelt,
And though Achilles your doom decried
His rage was like the knife that strips the last life from the charging boar.
Patroclus, filled with fear for your golden-haired brothers
You rushed out and you did defy the swirling mists.
But the gods cannot restrain themselves
And their promise made cannot be broken.
Patroclus you could not thwart the bowed head of Zeus
And so you fell before the arrows of Phoebus.
Like a salmon driving against the current giving heart to his kin
You leapt and darted and you made it up the waterfall.
You seemed to be but light arcing over to the calm,
But the waterfall was another's climb
And Apollo cast you off and as you fell I heard the world cry out.
Patroclus I wept for your body as it lay on the pyre.
And all the Achaeans wept with me as never would they weep for another again.
And oh, Patroclus, never will your like stride so lordly across the dusty ground.
I will weep for you every night.
I will not hear your sweet voice
Or see you so beautiful in soft repose.
I feel your loving touch on my shoulder – I look up with wild hope
But I see only the hands of my grief
The soft smile of my memories.
And such phantoms will I see all until the end of days.

:: 2:26 PM [+] ::
...

On the morning he set out, the sun did not rise. When he sat to eat his meal of cold cheese and lamb, his shadow lay directly under him, and all the clouds seemed to circle for a moment around the sky’s apex. As the vanished sun moved past its zenith, he rose and shouldered his pack, taking a moment to settle his bedroll in the small of his back and adjust the lashing of his shovel. He walked on, the wind following him, hot dry desert twirls spinning through the tracks of his passage. Tumbleweeds danced along the aimless road he walked, trading dusty centuries of tall tales with countless red rock outcroppings.

When the wind began to move to his left, then to his right, his steps became less sure, and his beans began to make noise in his pack. He found himself, after some turning about, in the crook of a low twist of weathered stone. The wind blew past his alcove as he built his small fire and tapped his can of beans on the rocks of the fire pit to even out the beans and the sauce. As the beans cooked in the coals and the strips of pork sizzled on the spit rigged over the fire, the rocks began to speak to him, in the tongues that his ancestors spoke, the language of the smudged flames and painted rocks, of the brush that can live for years in silence, growing ever more resinous in the crevices of the long red ridges.

Slowly, the sky turns orange and pink, and the desert murmurs the prayers of sundown, though the fading light owes nothing to the sun. The whispers of the dust and scrub seem to say that it has been long since the sun traveled only beneath the earth, but in their long memories it has happened before, and in time will happen again.

After his supper, he spreads his bedroll next to the banked embers of the fire and rummages in his pack for his small tobacco sack. He sits on the bedroll, his back against the rock wall, facing the fire, and begins to sift strands of tobacco from his hands into the strip of cigarette paper creased between two of his fingers. Lights it from the coals and lets the sandstone caress him. Tell me your dreams, he says to it. Tell me the visions that blow over you, and tell me the currents that stir your sedimented memories.

He sleeps then, his cigarette out amid the remnants of the fire. Forever, the rocks say to him. Forever you will lay here, as the others before you and after in my memories. I know where you go tomorrow and to whence you return. The rock on which you sleep has lain carved in your shape since I first rose from out of the sand, and will remain as long as the wind blows past its face.

As he sleeps, he sees everyone who has trodden this path before him, uncountable faces, hands, hips breast, and they lay down with him, a thousand hands stroking his chest, a million lips pressed against his neck. He twists and turns in his bedroll, pressing himself against the multitude of half-felt memories caressing him, and as the day breaks, he rises with the sun in a momentless burst of ecstasy.

In the world he will wake to, nothing will have changed, but he’ll realize at once that it is a different world. He’ll climb out of his bedroll, stretch, lace up his hiking boots, and start walking again, the wind at his back. It’s nice, he’ll think, to have the sun today. I wonder where it went, and why. Above him, the sun will murmur and grumble, and he’ll quicken his pace.

He’ll crest a low ridge, and looking down into a low flat bowl, he’ll see the wind moving from his back to blow around the bowl, tightening and tightening. A dervish dancing in the center of the bowl, and he’ll move toward it. At the center of the bowl the wind will die, and taking his shovel off his pack, he will strike into the hard baked dirt and dig without cease until his shovel strikes metal with an age-hardened clang. He’ll try to lift the unblemished sphere out of the hole he has dug, but it will rise of its own, and he will stand in the air, transfixed. A great light will pierce him and he will cry out, and all the moments of the desert will sing with him.

He finds himself standing naked as the sun sets, next to the ashes of his campfire, still warm from the night before. He passes the night standing, dreamless, the rocks pressed against him on all sides as he stands untouched in the center of the desert.

In the morning, he dressed and rolled a cigarette, and when the sun reared its head above the horizon, he set out for home.

:: 12:20 AM [+] ::
...

on writing erotic poetry and walt whitman

i want to write
fuck
like walt whitman
but i can 't quite get my mind
tongue
around your cock
and i can't fit my pen
self
into your ass
so i sit outside and smoke my cigarettes
rub my impotence
and hope for a blinding epiphany of desire
to liberate my sex poem
and burn you
stain me
with the hot moist of your passion
pull your paper chest
to my lips dripping ink
from the sodden
sultry
sexual overflow
that can only inspire me
to write like
i fuck more
like walt whitman
:: 2:14 PM [+] ::
...

No stars; city night
We sat, drinking and loving
While grass turned to green.
:: 1:51 AM [+] ::
...

In your dreams I wear vintage Armani
Because I shuffle through village thrift stores with alliterative names
Looking for the perfect jacket to wear
When you see me asleep.
In your dreams my shirts never have spots;
I don’t spill spill anything I don’t
want you to lick.
Every strand of my hair is in its place is in its place
Except one
The one you push back to make me look just right.
In your dreams I always look perfect
So that you can take me and tease me into disarray
Tell me im shivering when you know I’m not cold
spill salt in my lap
wipe it off
linger
say you’re so clumsy.
In your dreams I get flustered when you try to trap me
In your dreams you’ve caught me wandering in the forest
I keep coming back to
I never could resist a green that bright.
Even in your dreams I never thought I’d find such precious colors.
I want to climb every tree in your dream
And I want you to see me stretched out amid the leaves
Because in my dreams I’m in your dreams
And I dream you see me right.
:: 1:37 AM [+] ::
...

sometimes its so hard to tell the difference between what the left and right are angry about...

"We have a state apparatus whose members envision themselves ruling over a mere administrative unit in a globalized world, whose members have a great deal more in common with members of their class from other countries than they do with their countrymen. Such patriotism as they possess is purely ideological, in that they love a country only insofar as it exemplifies and advances their principles. That some inhabitants of those administrative units might have some human affection for it as a distinctive "country" is proof of their need for further ideological training, and for more immigration so as to sunder the retrograde links between place, ethnicity, and culture.

Our élites have abandoned the nation state for reasons of ideology and cupidity, and, as they possess such extensive power, it is unlikely that anything short of the inevitable catastrophe will avert their headlong rush into abstraction. In the meantime, they are quite successfully calling into existence a new people. "
by cyrus
on redstate.org
:: 9:21 PM [+] ::
...

visit my class's site at http://www.captainstone.net
:: 7:27 PM [+] ::
...

Hudson Williams-Eynon

December 17,

It’s driving me crazy. I can’t think of anything else. I try to write and all I hear is that maddening ticking. It’s not a clock, because the clocks in the school are silent, and anyway it isn’t counting on and on (infinitely if you have the spare parts and a repairman on retainer), it’s counting down, every tick a block pulled from the Jenga stack of minutes left. It needs to stop. It’s worse than the pile driver last year in poetry. At least the pile driver was building something, not tearing down the walls of all my mind’s focus.

* * *

“What’re you writing?”

“The ticking in the walls is driving me insane.”

“Word? That’s hot. Fiction writing?”

“As of yet. It’s the prologue to a memoir of the last days.”

“Oh. Well. Good luck with that. Um. Peace, man.”

* * *

December 18,

It is implacable. It will not cease until the stack falls, and I begin to feel like it is pulling the blocks out of my mind and tossing them into a disorganized heap in a dusty corner. At least when I do that to my room I can still find everything. My mind makes much less sense all out of order like this.

I can’t believe no one else hears it. Its almost below audible, just close enough to subsonic to echo in both my ears and my bones. The reverb shakes the walls and rattles the windows. Maybe someone is drilling dynamite into the foundations.

* * *

youmanist42: Yo

youmanist42: Whats up?

whynot2k: explosives are fascinating

youmanist42: Oh. What?

whynot2k: bombs.

whynot2k: i want to learn about bombs

whynot2k: how to make them

whynot2k: how to trigger them

whynot2k: you know, so i can learn how to disable them

youmanist42: Well…that’s cool. Why the sudden interest?

whynot2k: dangerous times.

* * *

December 19,

I have to find where it’s placed. The bomb is somewhere in school. It’s stealing seconds from the time to all of our doom, and I’m half out of my mind with the ticking. The bomb has lodged itself in my brain as surely as it has been secured in the building it will destroy. The ticking is taking apart my mind much slower but with as much certainty as the final explosion will take apart all of our bodies.

And no one believes me when I talk about it. No one else notices the ticking, and when they ask me what I’m talking about, their eyes are wide and their mouths pursed. One eyebrow stays raised as they listen, while the rest of their face slowly relaxes into their accustomed foolish self-assurance.

* * *

“They’re so useless.”

“So are many people. Which ones are you referring to?”

“All of them. They’re fine when it comes to finding kids with drugs or enforcing lunch period restrictions, but when the real deal appears, they shrink from responsibility and push it away, turning their faces from the light and burying their heads in the pillows of normalcy.”

“I suppose they do. What’s the real deal, man?”

“It’s no use. There’s no ticking in your ears either. You are good to the core but just as insulated as everyone. I’m sorry, but this must be my burden alone.”

* * *

December 20,

It takes shape in my mind. The red wire, the green wire, the blue wire all connected within the bomb; the clock that will soon be ticed out; and the payoff, a tube of reactive chemicals curled into itself like an adder hiding behind a deceptively patterned web of concealing shadows. It all fits together so neatly. My hands move in the precise motions of its creation. It’s so clear, as if I had a design sketch laid out in front of me.

Half the work is done now, but it’s not over. Though I think I see which wire to clip, which color to pull, the ticking isn’t yet gone from my ears. The perfect place to hide a bomb is still only vaguely illuminated, a hidden niche carved out of the darkness somewhere.

* * *

“Shrouded. It’s hidden somewhere in the shrouds.”

“Listen man, come out with us tonight. You haven’t been yourself lately. You look haunted or something.”

“You don’t understand. I have to find it. The place to put it. I know it’s there, I can hear it, I’ve seen it.”

“Yo, what’s up with you? You can tell me – you’ve known me how long?”

“I can’t. You don’t hear it, you don’t understand. No one knows this ticking, this counting down to Guy Fawkes of the leaders of the future.”

“You’re not making sense, man. What’s ticking? Who’s Guy Fawkes?”

“Aye, there’s the rub. Who is Guy Fawkes? More important, where are his kegs?”

“Now you’re talking my language. I’m sure there’s a keg we can find somewhere.”

“I have to find the place. Soon, all these fools will be consumed. I must hurry.”

* * *

December 21,

I have found it. It is a good hiding place for a bomb; nestled into an alcove, out of the light. This bomb is beautiful. It is almost a shame it cannot remain like this; frozen ticks louder here but less urgent, red, green, and blue wires the only color in the dusty tomb that is the basement.

My hands move with a purpose, a clarity, and a refreshing sureness that has long been absent, like wind on your forehead at the height of a feverish delirium. Finally, the way is laid out for me. The blue wire is the brightest thing I’ve ever seen. In the last instant after I clip it, before the ticking ends and I fly outward in explosive quiet, I have time for one last thought: Did I clip the wrong wire, or the right one?

Then it ends.

:: 12:51 AM [+] ::
...