Postcard 36

Oh woman -- into the world through you; your legs the masticating swallowing mouth of the world. And it hurt and bruised that little death, but your lips embraced each inch of me. The stargate, the eternal return, the cant never go home again. I spent all life trying for that again and again, can't I just crawl inside? Masticating legs, stretched hips like an ash white bow. Stretched hips like mountains pushed up in mantled eons. Melted stone, warm magma. A little death and a clean bright world. A bright cry out. Its no wonder you moan, its no mystery. Its no wonder I cry out. Its nothing but mystery, new! Hold my head in the cusp of the new world, hold me supine upon your dark breasts and morphine mother's milk for the too much new world. Nepenthe nipple, a tender but violent lotus flower taste. A  new fissure ever unfillable. Oh woman. Woman when I gaze, it is all because of you. Oh woman, how did you feed my navel? Glory Glory Glory, every pain is birthed from you. The new world, the bright new world, is from you. The desire is from you. The end the end is for you.  When I finally return will your legs embrace me, will you crush me again between your hips, will I swim within you again and cry out through my navel? and will there be a new bright world to wound us?

Postcard 35

I work best
a) 15 percent
b) more than 15 percent
c) Man, be real. Be real
d) when I'm juggling several projects at once
e)under close supervision. Despots.

After a client hires me and we agree on a deadline, I
a) Hey, look what came outta my pen!
b) You cannot be fucking serious. Fuck with the bull, get the horns
c) You're pretty much messing with me and
     I'm convinced its not your intention but you confuse me.
     I'm trying so hard
d) copy anything; this stems from the idea of not copying,
     but actually using the elements as your design
e)...

My last big mistake was
a) men would rather have their fill of sleep, love
    and singing and dancing than of war
b & c) Is so dated and in our qualified opinion may have been executed
     at about this date
d) made because I had too much on my mind
e) I believe that I'm viewed as very expendable and the large agencies
    are interested only in keeping more profits

My office and/or drawing table looks like
a) nature provides
b) a layout for architectural digest
c) llll llll llll llll llll llll llll llll llll llll llll
d) just total bullshit
e) ?

My Motto is
a) the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on
b) can't get under it. so wide, can't get around it; you must come in
    at the door of earth: nobody wants you when you're down and out!
    ...of mamie's sins and sorrows: if you can't give a dollar, give me
    a lousy dime. I wanna feed that hungry man of mine.
c) pressure and chaos are midwives of creativity
d) in short, this is just capitalism at work. Supply and demand.
e) What you do will never be good enough


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Postcard 34

"There is a human heart on the beach!" The california sea hare is the largest known gastropod. It lives in shallow salt water. It is herbivorous and takes on the hue of whatever it eats. It has an organ that produces a poison that makes it inedible to al but the most voracious of predators, the starfish anemone, which will just eat around the offending parts. When frightened, startled or unexpectedly stimulated, the sea hare emits a pungent purple dye. It is unlikely the sea hare experiences fear; it has only a rudimentary nervous system. The sea hares that I see are all red and dying. They live in the eel grass beds and wash up on our gentle beach. They can be the size of a dinner plate, but most are the size of a fist, or a heart. They are washing up en masse, a dozen or more with each tide. Are they dying because of global warming, pollution, ocean acidification...? Quite the contrary. They are dying because they have over-succeeded. As I stated, they are the size of a human heart, the hue and texture of a heart as well. Before they expire they respirate gently and rhythmically. The human heart also lives in shallow salt water. The human heart is also incapable of fear and responds instinctually. On the beach the sea hares eventually die and putrefy -- food for the flies until the tide takes them back out. Alive and in the water, the sea hare un-chambers itself and can swim, translucent and graceful, rippling and beautiful. Swimming freely, they resemble nothing so much as the human female sex organ, the labia. The labia, too, is connected to tidal rhythms and cannot experience fear. No one has yet complained of disembodies labias in the water.



Off postcard note: The california sea hare is hermaphroditic, and participates in sexual congress as both male and female at once, forming sex chains of up to twenty animals, lasting for hours or even days, even though the mechanics take only a few minutes. 

vulnicura, reviewing the experience of listening

vital and mature, a woman who is lover first mother first wife first woman first, making love one desperate time moments flashing like red behind eyelids each a whole -- thinking being too linear, this is pineal reasoning. her lover an oblivious coagulated ox, her husband rendered -- rendering slowly  -- will go will be gone will never be a stranger. the death of our, the death of a place carried whole, the last heartbeat of the shared coordinates -- moments of lyric reason bound by a beginning and an end. affirmation of the me being between two skins. beats and strings, music is secondary, blood and nerve.

she has written a novel in the ephemeral rise of the sad wave of orgasm, the descending crush, the crestfallen return to the greater body. ocean beats on land, rocks as passive as oxen. secondly there is hopefulness  -- the somehow wishings of all unscarring futures.  maybe he will come out of this loving me? somehow somehow.

nownownow we are together so familiar so naked. hearts rattle against each beat trying, finding synchronicity -- it all compresses now like atoms ready sucking in the past to a finepoint. can we capture it can we explode together make a new universe in this womb this room

this is an exhale afterglow, a break apart moment, an abortion -- you did this here, you are the fuel of this explosion. she is the projectile burning it up. murderer

let me say who you have murdered: the meyou (the man woman), the mechild (the mother child), the youchild (the father child).

a swarm of sound, an Icelandic Saga, rolling ars, wintry flourishes, stark emotion.
this is a savage cry on a blank ice sheet tundra -- a curse, this is the pain pleasure orgasm spoiling clean sheets with organic anguish.

grinding grinding, peeling off hopelessness regret, grinding hips together like hemispheres, grinding to hope. there is no hope. Hopelessness is safe from death.

in pain she is giant, a goddess radiating thorns of light, ice splinters. I am broken when I am whole, she declares, I am whole when I am broken. I speak finally and roar like arctic winds and landslides. roar like implosion.
Is the fusion? No this is fission.

"we are the siblings of the sun

lets step into this beam
every time you give up
you take away our future
and my continuity and my daughter ́s and her daughters'
and her daughters' …" 

This novel is a difficult read, the chapters only hold as the whole. this is a difficult read and not enjoyable at times but immediately necessary. Plug this story in, wrap it around your ears and hear the story told around a cold hearth of the dying embers of family broken, the immediate emotional viscera spilling out from a wound like the afterbirth of a scarred crone, illuminated and born again. If you are a man in this world - this is woman, if you are a woman add this to your sagas, so long unspoken, so necessary.

Postcard 33

I am a great screaming incoherence. Are you too? I am desperate for that perfect womb, when all my cells were one, again and again and again. How do you feel? I am a planet mighty -- my plates grinding, my core liquid iron. I can only push and pull with weak gravity -- I am dense and I am empty, says the gravity. I feel the tension. I feel the friction of a billion bolts of lightening. How are you today? I am held here by only the pushes and pulls of so many loves. Held right here, moving but still. Goddamn, I want to be free. I am flying apart and cooling. Goddamn, I want to be held. Would you like anything? Sometimes, I am clear purpose without meaning. Sometimes, I am nothing but desire. Sometimes, a stone stirs up and turns to life. Sometimes, life settles to a stone. What are you up to? What is more, I am built from a magnificent past unwitnessed, and greatness stretches out from me like dust. But I am now, and I see now and there is no terror like the terror of now. The almighty terrible and meaningless power of now, coming from who knows where and going to...? Hope this finds you well and dancing.

Postcard 32

There is a future possible where everyone is well balanced and healthy and happy and content. There is very little pain, perhaps  -- somehow -- less death. I don't know, computers maybe. 

Many people want this.

There is of course, no art. There is no pursuit nor striving. There are no desperate attempts: 

to capture motion and breath in clay; to bronze a horrible and shared destiny; 

to shout! shout! shout! that we are here and that we matter with crushed pigment and oil on a flat stretched canvas that can be carried and dropped; 

to slam a pen to blank sheets again and again trying to suss out meaning from meaninglessness with feeble trapped words that can all burn; 

to fling sound at each other relentlessly;
to push hips and chests and lips together tight pathetic.

There is no need for any of this is a well balanced world. Out of all the infinite possibilities, I am glad I do not live in that universe.

Postcard 31

The old man on the mountain, or had she been a woman? Anyway, it did not matter. It had ceased, with all things, to matter. That being kept one fat toe on the mountaintop and stretched the rest into the astral plane. That was one transcendent mountaintop. Some climb mountaintops. Some build cabins in the woods. Some bury their writing in jars. Some wrap their women in fabric black as the astral plane. Some love every and all the same. Some sell no booze on Sundays. Some say everything is pain. 

Here, have some holy book quotes from the scrolls: 

"If you suspect you have achieved transcendence, go to a family reunion." G.B. 

"You have got to come back from the desert." J.C. 

"When you think you've got it, it slips away. When you know you do, you don't." L.T. 

"At least I know it." S.A. 

There is a razor thin silver thread and you can pick it up and turn it onto a spool and follow it straight out of the maze and off the face and on and on. Each turn of the spool will make the thread more sharp and brilliant. You could slice case hardened steel. You could trim a carbon diamond. You could split an atom. Onward you can follow it -- a blazing purity across the planes. On and on. But every thread has an end and you will find yourself with a spool of dull wire in one hand, an un-frayed radiance doused by your other hand and darkness all around. Not many ever think to lay a blood red thread back into the labyrinth. Though it has walls and other frightened frightening beings, it has light and shadow, life and death. Out there at the end of that brilliant thread -- nothing. 

So I vow to dig up my work. To call something a possession. To grab another heart and hold on tight. To cast pearls among swine. To get angry and sad. To let any light shine.

Postcard 30

Well, here we are in the slight lee of a vast scatteredness -- walls, stones, a bit of liquor. If you stand up the wind will catch you. Have you ever felt a wind like this? It does not buffet like a normal wind; it is not strong like wind. It does not sweep and scythe off the top layer of everything. Not this wind. It does not pass straight through the soft tissue of fat muscle and sinew. This wind has held more bones than any soil -- and…

Stand up past the meagre parapet, stand into it, the flow that pulls. At the highest peak in the range, sun cooked, snow swept  wind climbs to you in a sheer and unbroken buffeting -- an ice bath. This is the wind of cleanse. No matter what, we are naked in it, swimming. Every pore is open, our eyes burning in clear sky sun. Open your ears! Standing there above the crown our minds are swept open and free. Nothing nothing nothing coming from toes or fingers, hands or feet, legs or arms, faces blow clean off. Only one of us must be wise enough to pull us down before we're blown away.

Postcard 29

∞ <  0 - ∞ > ∞
The Cosmos sure can give a person a sense of the infinite. I am of course speaking of the television program. The stars these days rarely suffice. Consider the many infinities that time and space afford us. The infinite of the many, the infinite of the divisible, the infinite of the negative and the infinite of the nothing. A brief look at numerical history shows what is obvious. The Chinese stopped at the ten thousand, the Romans st one thousand, the more ancient cultures refused even zeros. What is obvious is that the concept of the infinite -- so apparent there and there and there -- is outside our understanding. We see that it is there, but what is it? Even more astounding is that anything that holds the property of the infinite, holds the properties of all the infinities or at least the potential. So an infinite is really a thing (t) T∞∞∞∞.
Does that change anything? Since we are the apprehends of all this, lets make it subjective. (two aphorisms I've heard recently are: 'We live abbreviated lives' and 'we finally get life figured out, then we die.') First, we are the creatures of boundaries and each boundary we apprehend is of our own design. The universe contains no numbers or words other than what we force upon it. There are only things that are themselves systems, and many things that are contained as systems of other things. Only very rarely are those systems 'closed' systems. Truly, the only closed system is the cosmos itself -- maybe.
A person, a thing that is a system that participates n many systems, that is an assemblage of points in time, does contain the infinite as all things do -- and follows that a person contains all infinities.
You, as a person, are a multitude of infinities, limited in quantity only by the boundaried units you use to contain what is beyond your understanding. Try then to apprehend yourself without those tools, loose meaning and see that only time, entropy, is a limit. You then imagine yourself out of even that -- free.

Postcard 28

The girl at the coffee shop is unknowingly a champion of literature. She excels at a single thing -- the ceasing of my pen. And who knows what else. There is a person on the other side of the back that faces me, but it is not concerned with me and does not concern me. A slim and specific young woman, perhaps a bit awkward  and unsure in the world. Maybe frightened of potentialities or cracked by a violence or a series of acts done without consent, with aggression. She moved from a small town, a family confounded by parochialism, patriarchy, provincialism -- a family that answers an uncles penetrating hands with disbelief in her, with belief in dead men gods. She came to the city where an acquaintance beckoned -- a girl she had admired for her power but here she is, that girl is a hot mess. She keeps it together but cannot figure what for. The boys here are worse -- at least back home it was an honest violence, a clear hatred of the unknown or unplumbed. Sometimes she gives them what they want, sometimes not and they tantrum. But she goes on, a feather caught in a tree's autumn leaves.

Or more likely that stranger to me is an artist with a firm view and a nuanced hand, who treads lightly only to conserve an electric strength, who turns fear into action, compassion into care.

She breaks my pen -- I cannot turn a person to character. And the man that I am, her lines like a long horizon.