please gel please gel please gel

Part one of my possibly failed jam experiment, during which I spilled sugar all over the floor, burned my fingers, and yelled at a lemon.

If you write a poem about love …
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death …

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

poetbabble:

New addition to Christmas List: Best of Luck T-shirt From Barrelhouse.

(Oh But the Pushcart one is good too…)

http://skreened.com/barrelhouse

Oh god, “Ask me about my chapbook” is priceless.

austinkleon:

David Lynch on why he turned down RETURN OF THE JEDI

Goddamn, I love David Lynch. This is the best 3 minutes and 25 seconds I’ll watch today, probably.

p.s. Chris, this reminds me of you.

A reusable glass bottle designed to hold tap water on your dining/breakfast table in the most elegant way possible.

My mother has a saying. Do you want to hear it?

Fear of loneliness of or being oneself

Hi I. Hi me, on this, a birthday. Hi,

internal eye of this year’s storm. Hello

you: point without an exclamation. Wave

a single hand, then wave the other, pair

them off. A sacrifice concise as this:

pity your pity today, and let it lie.

An alibi for a scoffing enemy.

Myself, and my most toxic company:

myself. These withered candles leak their wax.

What could these last wet decades turn, and wane.

Picture me, today, as a metronome.

I’m home, away, one way, the next, and strike

each hour, and strike again, a single tone,

one arm, one fist. Alone, exalt, against.

___________________

*Bragging rights: Jess Piazza is a friend & colleague of mine. Read this poem (and another one from her phobias/philias series) here.

(via chriscantwell)

Have we already talked about how I used to be obsessed with this movie?

sagatrope:

From Wikipedia

The archetypal Catch-22, as formulated by Heller, involves the case of John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier, who wishes to be grounded from combat flight duty. To be grounded, he must be officially evaluated by the squadron’s flight surgeon and then found “unfit to fly.”

“Unfit” would be any pilot that is actually willing to fly such dangerous missions: as one would have to be mad to want to take on such missions.

But the “problem” is that to be declared “unfit”, he must first “ask for evaluation”, which is considered as a sufficient proof for being declared “sane”. These conditions make being declared “unfit” impossible.

Love this book. Need to re-read it.