DIARY OF THE DOG

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So all along I've been trying to understand what this blog means for me, since I didn't grow up, like my youngest brother and sister, 18 and 20 years old, with the internet to make themselves. I started it thinking it shouldn't be too much of a diary, since I've got one of those and I didn't want my personal life to become a record. I think I've changed my mind, to some extant. Friends and Strangers I love you. I secretly stop in and suck up your glam gossips, and I've tired of those sites that do so much proseletizing there isn't enough of anything dirty or human. I'm going to give a little more of what I like to get from you. I changed my outfit too, because school starts Monday and I need a new look. oh and in my desperation I gave myself a new Mohawk:

























DOG by Tomaz Salamun


Dog! what do you do with your hair?
You roll in the mud like a pig.
You stand up and spray me.
You blink and yawn.

Dog! who was your mother?
Don't you have brothers and sisters? Did
they all leave you and go to sleep behind
some corner? You're hungry. Lazy and mongrel.

Dog! I have never seen you before.
You run on the street and stop.
You run on the sidewalk,
then on the street.

Stars will fall on your head.
You are strange. Leave the
tin cans alone.
Dog! you are so strange.


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Reading this week Hicock's INSOMNIA DIARY--I wanted the new one, but the bookstore didn't have it. . . I don't know, I've touched his books in the stores before but never actually bought one. I think I've been scared of how easy he sounds. I'm nervous about what that will do to me. I'm always on the lookout for a poem that tastes like fois gras--so good it's bad for you, and a little controversial to boot. I like a little scandal in my mouth. So I was thrilled to open this book and find lines like this:

Drunk, I kissed the moon
where it stretched on the floor.
I'd removed happiness from a green bottle,
both sipped and gulped
just as a river changed its mind,
mostly there was a flood in my mouth

--I don't even seem to mind that this kind of drunk lyric is so readily domesticated by the next few lines (because I wanted to love the toaster / as soon as possible, and the toothbrush) and I think this is how H. balances romance with "the boredom of living". It's been a roller derby of a summer what with depression, a wedding, my family's illnesses, deaths and disowning, and the drug-high of my new book--departures all, intensely born. I accompany them with laughter and a sad eye. My younger brother just left for Paris for the year. Where are you, right now? On what train? In what unknown distant dawn? My friend Enda today said that he'd seen his favorite sister only a small handful of times in the last seventeen years, and he wondered how many times there were left in their life to see one another. I was going to say I wanted more time with my family, or more time to write, but I think I'm less of a lament than I used to be. I want my time to count for something, with my loves, and with my hairdos!























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GREEN MOONS

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Tonight I'm filled with doubt, until a few lines put themselves right. Then a walk, toward the waves leaving sentences none of us can read, and a moon with its sharp rind, archer's green, lash of the ecstatic. . . and then I sighted a few stars whose names I knew, arcturis and mars, and I let myself be seduced by a bit of darkness, and some shells broke like half-clocks under my feet and I heard the small deaths in the water, and some salt spoke to the whorl of my ear, saying I didn't know you / were coming so soon / without your mystical brothers , and then I combed the books there for a few more talismans against believing our hearts are worthless:

"The Trees" by Phillip Larken:

The trees are coming into leaf
like something almost being said;
the recent buds relax and spread,
their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
and we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
in fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

and Miltos Sachtouris:

"Only my soul whispers
in my ear saying:
it grew dark you grew dark
why?
aren't you scared?"

and tomaz salamun:

"Blockheads. Murder is
an ingredient of love."

Friends and Strangers,
good night.

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