what [she] write[s] on the train ride home to keep [her] head from combusting

once wending around a corner in the fog i blinked and fell down the chute of every tomorrow i'd ever imagined, down a rabbit hole.suddenly the dead sea i swam through daily began to stink and rot inside me, fear entered and grew in every cell of my body, spreading like wildfire permeating shafts of light, metastatic. it bounded through me like a sudden apocalyptic rain and thundered maddeningly in my ears, my hair electric.a pulse beat in my head day and night drumming defeat and futility in a syncopated rhythm through my blood. i felt dead. my heart choked.the landscape sagged under the weight of all this worry. unable to stand, bowled over by the great inertia, the vapid ideas and meaning and nothing and the unceasing nauseating movement of everything around me, deafened by the screeching wheels of trains careening wildly into subterranean stations and the pungent odor of exhaustion and urine settling into my nostrils, a symphony of friction and filth, the relentless howling of the wheels bowled over by the constant buzz and whir of chatter, by the go-nowhere conversations and the endless go-nowhere days.spinning into a dizzy place where the puzzle doesn't match and garbage flies through the gray sky like scary plastic birds laughing the pounding of the frantic herd scrambling across concrete and bodies a dull roaring asleep in my ears bristling and sparking just beneath my skin.searching led me nowhere, i swung into a dark and disastrous place where everything looked hideous in the light. trapped on a splintering ladder, trying to forget all my questions and the scabs and open wounds festering everywhere around me. dreaming frantic paranoid dreams of bleeding, eating flesh and salt and falling, falling through time to arrive at the end of my life, waking up panicked, terrified, swallowed up by fear and the pathetic rush of greed and ghosts running here and there talking of money and disease, nothing i understandi only have these hands, a cracked clay pot and a love of wood and light. plants and purple smog stroke each other at dawn in the chilliest corner of my bedroom and i smile. the green stem of my body angles upward like a root sprouting into the day, squinting into the din nothingness scattering seeds to the wind come what may airing out the empty places and breathing light

http://afewmoons.blogspot.com/

The only people for me are the mad ones

I Would Say I'm In a Phase, But I Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over Henri Cartier-Bresson

Obama: Progress in regress: The end of "black politics"

With Obama we might be able to wake from the nightmarish “dream” of “black politics:” in the “mainstream,” in both the miserable Democratic Party ethnic racket variety and the cynical and phony “sobriety” of black Republicanism; and, among “radicals,” the “revolutionary suicide” of which the Black Panther Huey P. Newton spoke, as well as what Frantz Fanon and the late Malcolm X called the “sickness and madness” of black nationalism — only to perhaps be able to face our grim social realities more squarely. If Obama represents the “end” of “black politics,” this should be welcomed, not least as a salutary — if painful — shock to the bad “Left.”

by Chris Cutrone

Read entire article: http://www.platypus1917.org/archive/article112/

Still Life

by C.K. Williams

All we do -- how old are we? I must be twelve, she a little older; 
     thirteen, fourteen -- is hold hands 
and wander out behind a barn, past a rusty hay-rake, a half-collapsed 
     old Model T, 
then down across a barbed-wire gated pasture -- early emerald rye-
     grass, sumac in the dip -- 
to where a brook, high with run-off from a morning storm broad-
    ened and spilled over -- 
turgid, muddy viscous, snagged here and there with shattered branches 
    --in a bottom meadow.

I don't know then that the place, a mile from anywhere, and day, 
   brilliant, sultry, balmy, 
are intensifying everything I feel, but I know now that what made 
   simply touching her 
almost a consummation was as much the light, the sullen surge of 
   water through the grass, 
the coils of scent, half hers -- the unfamiliar perspiration, talc, some-
   thing else I'll never place -- 
and half the air's: mown hay somewhere, crushed clover underfoot, 
   the brook, the breeze.

I breathe it still, that breeze, and, not knowing how I know for cer-
tain that it's that,
although it is, I know, exactly that, I drag it in and drive it -- rich, 
   delicious,
as biting as wet tin -- down, my mind casting up flickers to fit it -- 
   another field a hollow --
and now her face, even it, frail and fine, comes momentarily 
   to focus and her hand,
intricate and slim, the surprising firmness of her clasp, how judiciously 
   it meshes mine.

All we do -- how long does it last? an hour or two, not even one whole 
   afternoon:
I'll never see her after that, and strangely (strange even now), not 
   mind as though,
in that afternoon the revelations weren't only of the promises of 
   flesh, but of resignation --
all we do is trail along beside the stream until it narrows, find the one-
   log bridge
and cross into the forest on the other side: silent footfalls, hills, a 
   crest, a lip.

I don't know then how much someday -- today -- I'll need it all, how 
   much want to hold it,
and not knowing why, not knowing still how time can tempt us so 
   emphatically and yet elude us,
not have it, not the way I would, not the way I'll want to have that 
   day, that light,
the motes that would have risen from the stack of straw we leaned 
   on for a moment,
the tempered warmth of air which so precisely seemed the coefficient 
   of my fearful ardor,

not, after all, even the objective place, those shifting paths I can't 
   really follow now
but only can compile from how many other ambles into other woods,
   other stoppings in a glade --
(for a while we were lost, and frightened; night was just beyond 
   the hills; we circled back) --
even, too, her gaze, so darkly penetrating, then lifting idly past, is so 
   much imagination,
a portion of that figured veil we cast against oblivion, then try, with 
   little hope, to tear away.