Franz Kafka, professional procrastinator – an excerpt from Mason Currey’s compendium of famous writers’ daily rituals. 

Also see: The science of procrastination and how to manage it.

(via explore-blog)

Now we know there’s always something
from the past—perhaps unnoticed then,
perhaps not even from your own past—
lurking in a nearby future, waiting
with its duct tape and its cable ties,
its idling boat in an unmapped cove,
a lashed-palm lean-to on the deck
where the weary torturer takes off
his plastic shoes to take his naps.
If later comes, you will recall
you knew they had you when you knew
you’d seen it all before—
the implements and makeshift generators,
the manager’s motto taped to the wall:
be the cross.

It started, as all such things purportedly start, on an otherwise ordinary day several weeks ago when someone’s border collie transformed—without warning—into a moderately good-looking man with whom that someone began spending all her time all over the house engaged in what the local paper referred to as “questionable activities” until someone discovered what was going on when she didn’t show up for work three days in a row (like, why did it take three days to start wondering) and a relative of hers who is a policeman was convinced, probably without very much encouragement, to kick open her locked back door and inspect the premises.

Then an encampment of demons—membranous wings and leathery codpieces and brassieres, the whole bit—suddenly sprang up in the fields and pastures just outside town, alarming farmers who attempted to spray them away with huge hoses and failing in that took up their pitchforks—yes, pitchforks—and other rustic implements and attempted to no avail to chase them away. Nothing like having a gaggle of demons pointing and laughing at you. Then pixies—shimmery tutus, and very cute, but ill-tempered—were discovered eating gingko leaves and small mammals in the park. I myself discovered half a dozen or so teeny tiny cheerful clean-shaven men drinking the cooking sherry in the pantry. From then on, it’s just been nonstop.

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bird on phone pole, same bird the whole time

Noisy birds— the one-note one
hollering so loud and close
it’s inside your head:
wake up, and then the
complex one iterating,
five minutes here and
five there and then
here again but faster.
If no one hears,
does it even matter how you
squeeze the interval
or sweep the yard?
But what do I know,
it’s the bird’s world.
In my dark wood,
birds too far up to hear
make nets to catch
the stars and weather,
down here there’s
not enough air left for
the middling get-through
when the future’s done,
just the sound of not listening,
the buzz of mere medium,
so no matter what you say
it’s just the meme
passing through you,
phatic static
and a lot of hailing.
Not that anything is
wrong with that of course.
It’s just my morning
now the freeway’s louder
than the birds.

Image: British Library http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/illuminated-manuscripts/page/2/ 13th century, Sloane MS 3544, f. 24r

Good lord but you did hard time in the library.
Strolling through once, I saw you holding
An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding at arm’s length, looking at it
as if it had arrived early for dinner
just to tell you it didn’t love you, had
never loved you, and twenty years later
you’re still standing there with a naked face
and a spoon in your hand.

Where were we in our Pynchon seminar—
Maxwell’s Demon, concatenation,
coprophagia?—when you dreamily said,
“What was that song my father sang
in the bathtub when I was a girl?” to which
Professor P replied as if you’d said
knock-knock, “Mrs. E, I don’t know what
song your father sang in the bathtub.”
When you I thought when you were
a girl, when you were.

Oh all the heady things I knew then
that look now like distant hills or army
tanks in some damp country where I
don’t have a map and don’t have a tongue,
now that I know what I don’t know.

But I get you now, now I know
nothing ever stands between you and
the look of things when you’re fifty
and nobody knows you and you don’t know
who you are. When everywhere you are
some kind of traffic cop is looking at you
sideways as if to say you dumbass, why
didn’t you just gun it through the light?

In the middle of some night, your father’s
singing wakes you like Billie Holiday
inside your brain: do nothing till you hear
from me. How we obeyed, how we
never heard from any me.

Those were not distant places
in the end they were close by,
those hedged estates we passed
empty inside but nonetheless lit up
like carnivals or fires, strict way stations
where the trains we waited for were not
the trains we took, beds we sat beside
to watch for the little hour that’s
always gone before it comes
because it always comes too soon.
I see you now in places where you
cannot possibly be, I dream of you in
places that aren’t places but pure time
as close as all the lonely satellites that take
all night to slide across our sky
the muddy riverbanks that made us
that smelled like blood and tin
and deeper in that sense that you belong
someplace you’ll never see
or never see again.
It’s the silence that sits inside thunder
all the early things that let you know
that dirt that grows is the same as dirt
that buries, that the sorrows we all bear
it’s just as well we bear alone,
the thing that can’t be mended
the way they’re always borne.

vsw:

Spanky

from the VSW Soibelman Syndicate News Agency Archive

www.vsw.org

“Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.”

incidentalcomics:

Day Jobs of the Poets

(via penamerican)

A man with an axe and a girl, we only hope he’s actually a forest ranger and that she’s related to him somehow, probably his daughter, she’s looking on in that polite but hanging back in your mind way that kids look on when adults are making you look at something and never telling you why they want you to or why you have to sit there and be still until whatever it is they’re not really explaining to you is over, I just came out here because Mama wants me to ask if he wants coffee in a thermos, those tadpoles down in the creek yesterday hope they’re still there wonder if they’re frogs yet, maybe he’s working his way around to saying something about me scaring the bejesus out of Yaya last night, really shouldn’t have done that, wood feels good on my feet, warm, smooth, why is he all closed up over that thing like it’s trapped him or something?

He’s a little wound up in a kind of acting-ordinary way, trying to figure out how to say what he has to tell her, every way he runs it by in his head it’s just too much, he can’t say it the way he’s thinking it, can’t say hey, Sport, Little Suzy, I’ll be away from home doing forest ranger stuff for a few days, and I want you to keep this axe close by so you can defend the family if need be, I’m not saying that anything is going to happen, it’s just that there are several rogue bears roaming about and tearing things up, reckon I ought to show you how to shoot the rifle before I go, and a homicidal maniac called The Purger or some such nonsense on the loose, thought to be hereabouts, though your uncle Jimmy and I think he’s probably actually still in town somewhere, and you know how your mom gets when anything’s not going exactly smooth and easy, lord knows I love your mother, I really do, but she’s real high strung and if one or all of the bears and or The Purger shows up, she’s liable to get herself hurt trying to defend y’all, not that I’m saying that’s gonna happen or if it did happen that she’d do that but I’d just feel better if you just had some kind of precaution laid by just in case, now if you hear anything rustling outside around the house don’t assume it’s anything, but stay inside, you hear me, just stay inside, don’t go running out trying to chase it away, it’ll probably just be the wind or something, you know how you and your mother have that wild imagination, I do love your mother, and I love you and little Yaya, and I would never just run off and leave y’all even though your mother acts like it every time I’m away for more’n a day, everything is gonna be just fine and I’ll be back in a few days, lord willin’.

He turns and looks at the kid and smiles his crooked kind of smile, we imagine people who know more about vegetation and wildlife than they probably should smile crooked smiles, or just people who always have a little sadness mixed up with the love in them. He says, “Lookahere, Suzy, Sport, how shiny and sharp this thing is. And I oiled the handle too. Yeah, we usually keep this thing out in the woodshed, but it’s lookin’ so good I think you can keep it in the house, maybe even in your room or something if you want to. Never can tell when a girl might need an axe. And put some shoes on.”

photograph from National Archives todaysdocument :
“Forest Service Ranger at Stillwater Sharpens an Axe While His Daughter Looks On” 07/1973—Anne LaBastille, Photographer. From the EPA’s DOCUMERICA series

In the beginning there was a small door,
but escape was less attractive then
than forests full of undiscovered species
like yourself, you thought. So many things
you did not think, things you did not hear—
monkeys truly like yourself screamed alarm
from tree to tree. But surely danger did not
apply to you, lounging on beaches where
the sea drags pebbles out and in and out,
your mind entangled with the flow of things.
Back at your campsite a god disguised as
some random someone passing through
prepared a dish you tasted only once
and now forever long to taste again.
Why were you so busy dodging luck?
It took such work to find the wrong places
and love the wrong men, the ones you
crowded, the ones who crowded you,
the one you found to leave you to your
solitude, the one you found to leave.
Free of all encumbrance, now you know
nothing burdens like the want of love.

illustration: The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (1658)
http://publicdomainreview.org

the doll is dreaming
the girl is dead
the girl is dreaming
the doll’s alive

the doll wants a new dress
the dress wants real skin
the doll will skin the girl
but wearing skin is
not the same as
being alive

the girl knows things
the doll doesn’t know
the doll thinks she knows
things no one can know
the doll wants things
no one can own

the doll wears the faces
of the girl’s friends
takes everything
the girl can’t give
gives the girl
no place to go

the girl is dreaming
she is dead
the doll dreams
she’s alive

the girl dreams
her dress is in flames
the doll dreams
that she drowns