i do like what reading does to my brain... but don't ask me to describe it. i'd have to use some phony baloney artsy fartsy metaphor... and then you'd have to sit there trying to unravel whatever it might have to do with what happens to my brain when i read... or you might decide it's not worth it and wander off to look at the television... or look at the garden... which needs your attention anyway... since the sun has begun to shine at last... but you don't have the energy yet to plant new things...

the planting of new things requires a shovel, a rake, some cheap garden gloves... you worry about damp dark dirt under your nails... the bacteria, you know... and this, of course, is not you at all but me... i slipped away from you again... i'm always doing that.

i'm thinking this journal needs a shift... we've gotten kind of boring, haven't i? (he sees you're having pronoun trouble today) i'm thinking this journal needs something beyond him talking about walking and planting and chomping all the time... because the surface is kind of plain... but the depths are-- who knows what the depths are... still not so exotic.... a ragbag... a small-town radio full of big-town voices... a parking lot... damn them metaphors...

what if i wrote this journal as a blog of thinking through the day as i read stuff... what if... i show you that i'm really not thinking at all... see... here's calvino's invisible cities with marco polo saying things like

The day came when my travels took me to Pyrrha. As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten...

and

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased... Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

it's a philosophical novel or book thingy... it wonders how we know the worlds inside and outside ourselves... it takes for granted that all of us are travellers... in fact and fiction... metaphorically... don't you know...

or i could tell you something you don't already know about thomas pynchon's the crying of lot 49... how i always want to call it lot 47... for some reason... but 49 is a fine upstanding integer... so... why...

or i might mark some new spot i've found online... for example, this morning i was reading giornale nuovo... one of the best blogs... and he spins me over to The Fantastic in Art and Fiction at Cornell... full of great weird old pictures... or silliman's blog that's full of intense poetry talk (and takes forever to load because he only archives monthly fer pete's sake)...

but for the moment... let's look at the roses

sorry they're all so pink... it's not my favorite color either... usually... just around the time the roses bloom...

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my "poems" are competing.

e. e. cummings

 

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