I got a good grip on the hollow stem and a couple of dirty leaves of the screaming yellow dandelion and pulled steadily, feeling the taproot, buried deeply in the dirt of my front lawn, start to give. There was a moment when we both knew it was about to snap and leave each of us with what we didn't want, another shot at spring.
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++I call it remediation --You really screwed up his painting, he's going to really kill you, I mean, it's totally wrecked. ++The belt sander almost caught on fire from all the impasto bullshit. It turns into goo. --There's strips of cardboard too, all stuck on the canvas and then painted over. It's stupid, you saw it before, didn't you? It was like he painted a close up of greasy, yellow and brown plaid sofa, from the mid 70s, like the one his mother lost her virginity on he probably thought, he even signed it, I couldn't believe it. ++ It's certainly f***ed now. You're dead. --I used that thing Joe left, the grinder for the window frames, you know, that screamer...it was like the Spanish Inquistion with electricity, it begged for mercy, but I forced a confession out of it...flayed it alive. You can see the sun through it now, it's more of a lamp shade than a painting. ++He said he paid $1,600 bucks for it. --It had at least $750 of paint on it. ++Is it finished? At least you could finish it. --I'm going to write on it, with India Ink. ++You better do it soon, they're all coming back on the weekend. It's sort like a parchment or something. --I've got to fix the rips so they don't tear any more, then I'll finish it. ++It's weird. All the anxiety that gets into this stuff. --It's really working. It really is. ++You're still dead. --Shown the tools, we all confess.
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I meant that we were the begonias, under this glass, row upon row, forced to bloom -- pink begonias. The greenhouse is full of begonias, row upon row.
An image of a greenhouse in winter, seen from the outside, after dark.
You're trudging along the road, it's getting quite cold, you can see your breath, you're going to buy a plant for you mother's birthday.
A teardrop pulled from the box of fragile old christmas ornaments. So thin, as if it's worn out and waiting to fall down.
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I dislocated my right shoulder by putting too much weight on the Olympic bar for the military press, or maybe it was the bench press, or the chin ups, or my slapshot, the stick stuck to the ice causing me to yelp in my helmet O-O-O that hurt.
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I blasted a stupid tulip with my kicking foot. A fake-ish pink one, there were millions of them and so what. It exploded like chickadee, leaving one dumb green stem waiting for a medal. I went berserk and kicked about fifty more, it was the most beautiful chaos to ever rain on this sunniest of Sundays and trailed by a crowd of Chinese tourists, I ran for it. I ran for it for a while, all the way to the phony lake surrounded with more tulips, millions and millions more in regiments. I just started pumping my skinny legs and headed in, kamikaze style, and must of got about five-hundred or so, totally wiped out the reds and was jumping up and down on the purples when I noticed my grandmother sitting there in her wheelchair holding an ice-cream cone that was melting over her hand and lap. So what? I thought for the second time, I mean so what? What's with the tulips? What's with Ruth? I lost my concentration.
This is always the turning point, this lack of focus.
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Somehow, Elton John had written a melody, but Bernie Taupin couldn't think up any lyrics. Maybe the music wasn't as good as usual, maybe there wasn't a good hook. The song was called "Over there's my house". I've got to get this down before she comes back. She always does. I've written the lyrics, now. Just watch. You'll see.
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Ok, It's tough sledding, but a little snow's not going to stop me. Nope. Just staring straight ahead, in my tunnel, trudge trudge trudge, it's still pretty far to go, far far far, but I'll make it, as usual, your legs know it and that's what keeps you at it, sniff sniff, dandelions are dead by now, that's for sure, frozen dead, even the greenhouse's dark, spooky with the stars shining up there, what a moon tonight, a witness, wide-eyed in winter, I did it, I did it, I'm coming home.
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I want you to think of it as a science, a social science--you know what I mean? It's as if there were a laboratory, a trial of strength, an answer. You know.
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Lab life. Waiting for the Louis Pasteur of moral morbidity to start isolating strains in a culture of digital pig urine. Turn on the centrifuge, we're going home.
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Two bugs with really long legs and invisible wings were bouncing up and down up and down up and down chasing each other I guess in the middle of the jungle beneath this big leaf that had been lifted up by the broken tip of an old machete in an act of feigned curiosity.
This was after the little serpent squiggled in the mud after the jaguar tracks after the tumour was cut from the trunk and the miniscule termites poured out even after the treefrog but well before dusk when Clarindo told us to turn on the light.
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Clarindo, Clarindo, you bullshit artist, those tracks were just dog's from the village, your light attracted that Cobra Grande who rose up only to fall on my back, then pressing its head on my chest it listened to hear if I breathed. And all you could do was bang on the Ceiba.
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In other news, I'm finding it difficult to share this page with my Facebook friends; it always generates a link to a notification saying that "you are trying to access a page that does not exist," which is bogus. Any ideas on how to do that?
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I don't know how to do that but I do know how to get Hatrack to tell you that you are trying to hack it but it CAUGHT you trying to hack it.
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What do ya call that suture that joins the skull bones? Well, I laid mine on the platter, dropped the diamond stylus in my groove:
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At the end of the road there were these two trout sizzling side by side in a frying pan, a brook and a rainbow.
So the brook looks over at the rainbow, you know, with his good eye, the one looking straight up, and asks "Steelhead?"
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Have you ever played any of the Animal Crossing games, particularly the latest? The mechanism by which the game teaches you various emotes involves talking to a "comedian" who spends his mornings cleaning up the local nightclub. That "comic" manages to be a surprisingly rich source of pathos.
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He lifted his warm stool bag from its chrome hook and rolled his way into the puddle of light expressed by the tungsten of his last 100 watt bulb to see the story unfold: a broken white ring of raw onion churned in the bag with the otherwise usual fare(was that a peanut?) segmented and glistening, a guest!
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It's a science. He rolled over to his laptop and sent a message to Brian: Cestoda. Taenia solium. What next?
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The great lake is frozen, so solid it presses in on its shores and buckles on top of the beach. Great broken plates jut up and sparkle under the blue of a jet-hollowed sky. If you were to walk out, beyond this glittering wreckage, one thousand steps further, you'd find it cracked open, punctured, as if something's fallen from the sky and gone through, leaving this pitch-black and specific hole. You'd have to be careful or lucky to work your way out to the exquisite edges, and to decide which wrong way to run when it gives out under your feet.
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Yeah but, yeah but, if it's so solid, then how'd it break? I've counted footfalls and a thousand doesn't get you too far, they'd see you from shore, from Gladys's kitchen window, sipping coffee, "he's going way out, what's he gonna do? Jeesus Mac, he went through!" Or the airplane on approach to General Mitchell in Milwaukee, some guy's looking out the window of 8A, waxing poetic, sipping on the dregs of his diet coke, maybe chewing the ice cubes, and then he sees a speck, and then it's gone. He catches his own reflection in the window, cranes his stiffening neck a bit more, and swears he saw you go through. It's all mixed up with Milwaukee anyways. I swear if ot were me I'd've jotted something down in my notebook though -- "Big ice, big hole, a man? walking? as if going all the way, Poof! Vanished. My own face in the glass." Which way's North anymore? Things turning into themselves. All that jazz.
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An empiricist, I stick with my facts, make explicit what we all know implicitly, without demanding of any concept too much precision, no more than it allows-- just enough to get us out over the ice. So, "A crystallographer of sorts?" you say, but I'm afraid I can't give a straight, geometric answer: whatever the Field Guide of Rocks and Minerals said when asked: It's all a geometry of hardness achieved by invisible structures, fatal habits, why (as I put it) even the invincible diamond cleaves along symmetrical axes to small to be seen. Threshold, my lexicon for traveling too far out on the ice.
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It's just a silly game until it's over. I turn the radio off, ears hiss, I see just how she stood: her shoulders hunched to launch herself into the rush of Blues, they're all behind her now, she spins, she laughs, she gives the game an oblique chase, just like the bus she can't believe she's missed, she'll spin and laugh, she turns to look for me, the silly game is over.
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Everything’s worn out Mijita, and I love you. Our sheets are threadbare and stained, your shoes, all of your shoes beneath our bed, how my back aches from gathering dust to be ready again for us:
our candles, our mirror, all of my roses you’ve hung by the stems, and tonight tonight’s for anchoas, Manchego, Manzanilla, to the moonlight inside of our silly flamenco.
And I’ll be too tired tonight to know why my love, why it’s so cold, or are we so drunk in the kitchen again on the Cava we drink and we drink that you can’t remember?
Tonight is for sunflower seeds, your pipas, for gambas al ajillo! And all of the shells you spit into the ocean, Mijita, we’ll sweep from our floor in the morning
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And the snoring. It was the snoring that sealed the deal. How could someone so beautiful snore like that? A tritone in the flesh, an unexpected dissonance, aural graffiti, the untapped eroticism of the epiglottis, I don't know how to put it, sleepless with your bangles dangling down darker than the darkness.
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deerpark27, my article "Translating 'An Otomi Song of Spring' from the Nahuatl Codex Songs of Mexico" from Translation Review is up at Taylor & Francis Online if you are interested in checking it out: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/q5sjcJrByaUkW3Y8wkfB/fullPosts: 1144 | Registered: Feb 2001
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I've received another telegraphic communique from my father: "Still hot. Today normal clouds. Alacran!" as if he only had a moment on a lucky connection that might at any minute be cut by rebels,except he's at the St. Regis again, overlooking the infinity pool overlooking the sea smashing into the cliffs. Alacran is a kind of tequila. "Helicopter fixed." Good. What helicopter? I remember jumping out of the smoke filled canopy of the old one during that Nigerian fiasco, sickened by the smell of phosphorous and burning skin. Who are we to judge the good life? Instead,I pick up my pellet rifle and draw a bead on the grey squirrel with the rat tail staring at me from the cross. Pffft-Zing. Ricochet! Jeezus, I could've blinded myself. No time to reload.No time at all.
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I guess if I wanted to learn something, I would've asked a real Indian, not one of these phonies, foot sticking out of a wet blanket, then built myself a so-called whirligig,you know. Or sewn a cape from the pelts, yeah--a metaesthetic squirrel cape. It's one long lesson in beautiful nonsense.
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Hard to say, really. And did I tell you the one about the jellyfish? O, the vile jellies! Let me screw my hook back on. There. Now, if it weren't...Ehh-hemm... for all the, the clickity-clacking...Yes...of our...of our... v-v-v-virtual t-t-turnspit, well then whaa? Motor? Meat or Skewer?
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I'm just gonna lie here and stare at your nose, it makes me feel good, I've seen it before on a totem pole, in Chapultepec Park; or was it the Black Hawks taped on the old bedroom wall? Anyhow, asleep on your back, inscrutable Inca, devour my heart.
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