grand prix

Thursday, June 12, 2008 | |


grand prix
lost, massachusetts. june 2008, maybe 7 pm.



ages 2 - 13 yrs were purely books
ages 14 - 17 yrs were purely ricocheting madness


ages 18+
the years when i realize that the madness helps me read books from a lesser distance, but more importantly, that i can still read (and it gets me more choked up now)



picking up the paces

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 | |







ashland, massachusetts. 6/8/2008, 4:30 pm.


picking up the pace. pace? pieces? paces? someone threw the potential energy parachute of summer off a cliff and it's going.


i asked for the map instead of your hand

Sunday, June 8, 2008 | |


mass pike access road, massachusetts. 6/7/2008. 5:00 pm.
mass pike access road, massachusetts. 6/7/2008, 5:00 p.m.


friday night i drove over 150 miles- passenger seat occupied, pocket burnt through.
my friend and i act like seventh graders around each other. but i'll put it all on where we are; that giant expanse of farmland children build tiny huts all around, that cove where the charles river gets its quiet baby start. ridiculous and shy and loud with sudden laughs.
and instead we just walk around, liking everything, boots covered in mud we can't see through the dark. sitting on the same stump like we could both fit, all twelve years old, all silent good excuses, burning out my flashlight's lamp, scared of that cat that wouldn't quit looking at us no matter how deep into the woods we got.
reminded how sand or shoulders or car sickness feels. overwhelming silent situational comedy. especially after i've pulled out of the driveway, headed the twenty-five miles home. that book i forgot to ask for, that arm movement i forgot to complete. a smile in the dark,


new kids teach me about new places,
new places teach me about new kids.

glittering degrees

Thursday, June 5, 2008 | |








nantucket island, july 2007. last summer.



today i read a poem. i read it because i have such well-read friends, and they leave their booky eyes all over the place, quips on the internet casually strewn for people like me to find, people who used to read but now just refresh the news page as that novel yellows on the desk beside them.

this is probably illegal, but, bob hicok, you seem kind.




A Primer
by Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.




that is most of what i have to say.
but beyond this, in my maniacal silent search of the world wide web after hearing only

There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque...

Then Ohio goes corn corn corn

billboard, goodbye, Islam.


i found an interview, with the kind bob hicok, in which somebody accurate and comforting notes that he has no "glittering degrees." no bachelor, no master, phd, mfa-

and so the unlikely future's glare is stopped, matted, no longer tightening my eyelids squinting against the impossibility of diffracted and tactless success, the success of childhood dreams, when mountains still were heights they could never be, past the mist into what looked like a town made of clouds that my mind called heaven, that whole mess of success that lingers in my bookish fact-ed mind even after i've learned the limits of my potential century here, after i learned that everest didn't crest over the exosphere, was only 8,848 meters.


i've wiped my brow! i've said that everything!-- everything is okay.


learning everybody

Tuesday, June 3, 2008 | |

afterstorm
natick, massachusetts. 5/27/08, 5:15 pm.



so today i finally took down that sign i wrote in my sleep, the one that said "REMINDER THIS SUMMER IS NOT FOR HATING EVERYBODY IT IS FOR LEARNING"

van rides almost home

Monday, June 2, 2008 | |




finished basement
middlesex county, massachusetts. 5/2008, late.



last night as i climbed into the shower at 2 am to wash off the insect repellent and everything else, my feet stung in the hot water. the more busted up my feet get, the more i realize the growth and hindsightability of this summer.
things moved by all different in the car today after biking so long. all that messy early evening light and sharp blues from the car radio whirred so fast but lazy and it had about as much detail as my eyes do when they're closed.
on a bicycle, though-
that green whir has as much detail as my eyes do when they're closed and i pause to think about something and it comes back all angles, cubist and strange and impossible to ever sense with the senses i've got.

happy june.





real but not live




implicated