1/30/04 to 1/31/04(more worthless crap)

You take the test among the ferns and rosebushes
and breathe the aroma as around the pond the music plays,
the piano sonatina that propels your thought patterns
to the speed of turbochargers. Happily your nerve-ends
do not fuse as they might had you been attacked with nerve-gas.

The rapidity with which the manuscripts
will be returned, the envelope flipped open
and the pages stuffed into the self-addressed
stamped envelope supplied with the manuscript.
How often does this take place at a given hour.

Whenever the light turns green, not most of the time.
The flowers in the park more often bloom than
someone finds fault with what you've sent them.
O sorry, this doesn't suit us now, good luck elsewhere.
A police car flashing lights at a southerly exit.
They're catching reckless drivers. Yesterday, two days ago,
an accident occurred, with at least three vehicles
near the sign shop on a corner across from this place,
and they swept the curb after the cars were towed,
no evidence of teh safety glass that broke into even,
predictabler fragments, like oversized sand-grains
and from a vantage of four stories the bent hoods
looked like the parts of Marx toys or folded tinfoil,
not the kind that would be used on foil cylinders
for recording brass bands (piano in those days, the 90s,
was impossible). In fact, the curb where the accident was
has never been cleaner since. Happy accident then.
Without the accident, the curb wouldn't have been so clean.
They missed the ink jet printer with the eight-foot carriage in the shop,
which can print giant signs and billboards or decals
at the customer's specification. A medium without the message.
Idleness, apathy, envy, contempt--these are the emotions.
Scorn engenders indifference. Bad fortune engenders envy.
People can live together, even understand one another in conditional ways
when they're relaxed, watching television or arranging flowers.
A man with an earring and gray hair discusses the war
with my mother at the check-out counter and mentions how
his masters degree in science cannot get him a job.

In which ear did the gray-haired man with the masters
degree in computer science wear the ring?
What kind of ring did the man wear? Was the hair
a salt and pepper gray or did it border on shocks of white?
Mountains of mail that accumulate like corn-stalks
which belong in the compost. A compote being
suspended between a gelatin dessert and a jam.
An opium compote a variant of dessert
distilled for paragoric or cough medicine.
The redness of poppies on the Aegean from the blood
spilled for them.

As the gold of the ears of wheat that carpet the plains
and make the people, descendants of pioneers armed with little more
than spelling primers, wary of the ten-diollar word.
Don't let them infect my garden, no sir. Get the Raid
from the shed, which will outlive me, as the equity will climb
sky-high.

What the counselor wished to say was
all the effort leading to sterile or negative results
plainly resolves itself into something good eventually
that you can tell your grandchildren if you have them
as I do. Make sure to insert the term successful everywhere.
Fill the larder with canned goods before the siege.
Water the wine. Draw buckets from a well.
Don't touch your bank account and freeze your assets.
Of course she is free to say that brighter skies are coming.
A journal exercise reduced to spleen-venting.
The ponderous writer whose face seemed frozen in a frown,
even as he disembarked from a motorbike, and whose characters
when lost in thought bit their upper lip--
a housewife, her father, the newspaper boy with the Huffy bicycle flinging Grit over the fence--
when confronted with a moral dilemna (shall I tell or no?)
they bite their upper lip as if they came from the same family, a family of men perhaps,
who in a remote past clubbed one another, pillaged the caves and groves of the enemy,
stomped demonstrably upon their hunting grounds, but now, almost hairless and refined,
their skin like alabaster or parchment and their brains enlarged,
bite their upper lip when in anxiety, whereas others, from other planets perhaps,
scratch their heads or wring their hands. But those gestures are for other authors, other tribes. Swig the glass by the pool, Henry, and bring me another one too.
She's just a kid but she's sure sweet and delicious, I'd like to get a hold of her and squeeze, he said, under the influence of another double bourbon.
He love wrecking his brain and blurring the detail, breaking into a sweat
adn losing eyesight and hearing wouldn't detain him--he loved the feeling as the numbness and the warmth crept over him so he could sink into himself like an anumal will sink into his burrow, having eaten either his offspring or his feces.
God damnit, it sure feels good--don't knock it until you've tried it, son.
Innumerable subplots murmur here for the asking. Tireless kobolds can be faintly heard,
cobbling the plots together--crises, seizures, sweaty rages, monologues of love or agitated set speeches. A smell of soup, cologne, and musty body odor.
Let me drink kerosene from a glass slipper: let every liquor that burns my throat purge me of my hubris.

Clusters of fragmented glass swept carefully
towards the curb from teh same street

A cotton wad, a long cloud frowning

the unsightly lavender of the setting winter sun

.....................
1/31/04

How dry the weather has been; my fingers crackle from the static electricity: there hasn't been snowfall in over a month. The salt and mud on the vehicles has become clay-like, kaolin-white dust. The clouds are elongated, icy looking. In the sunset they turn lavender. Fewer starlings appear on the ledge: one or two I shoo away. But fewer than last year. Nightfall must arrive at 4:30, or even later? Mars looks like desert without the amenities of the prickly cactus. Before I begin work I must watch a film on safety. The mid-winter doldrums. An uneventful stasis.

Landscape, the human figure dethroned, decentered. On Mars, an undifferentiated flatness, dust, some bedrock, more often miles and miles of iron-ruddy rocks smaller than the ones stonesmasons call dog-killers. So in that case there aren't even geographical landmarks unless the explorer probes a mountain or the ridge of a large crater or perhaps that canyon that lashes across the surface like a scar. So the landscape available is even more denuded of possible focal points such as nymphs, dryads, shepherds, crotches of streams, groves, single trees, cattle, fences for cattle, things that cross or intervene, or mark a threshold, or suggest a possible direction to be taken, say a road or valley.

Mars is the ultimate landscape because the eye isn't being called to attention towards anything, and thus it looks computer-generated-- a band of sky, a band of red soil with small rockss with little to distinguish one from another, their fractures random, uncalled for, there only because they can be there, just as those desktop screen-savers generate uncountable geometrical shapes from an algorithm, Rube Goldberg pipes or Piranesi rooms or Rubik's cubes that gradually fatten into parti-colored basketballs.

(Two complete journal entries dating from late January 2004.)