Annihilated (Ducasse)

      I was young, and had deep loves, and my heart would overflow with enthusiasm!
      And I mingled with the crowd, I mixed with my fellow men, speaking my thought out loud!
      And they gaped back at me, without understanding.
      And I withdrew from them, and they said to me: Arrogant one!
      And from time to time in my solitude, my loves, my repressed enthusiasms broke out into odes, conversation; and my companions laughed and used to point me out as a madman.
      So I suffered, doubted, cursed, and no one believed me sincere.
      It's as if this heart, once so full of strength and love, were annihilated.

Isidore Ducasse

Chicken Parisienne with popovers

Shadowtrain 33

Shadowtrain Issue 33, with my poems "Accompanied by Body" and "The Flaw," is now online.

Food

Shrimp and artichoke hearts with green tea linguine.

Photo

Food

Buffalo wings with turkey legs?  Why not?

Thought

Mercy is a relative, not an absolute, good.

Serious odds against (Cotter)

She knew the work she wanted to do; there were serious odds against her doing it, social and personal. At some point she realized, emphatically, that she had to create a place of absolute concentration, where no distractions stood between her and her work, where no talk interfered with the new language she was inventing; where she could ignore the knock on the door, refuse the callers, control access.

She was well aware that she was putting herself outside the range of normality. But I never had the impression that she yearned to be inside it. Just the opposite.

Holland Cotter on Emily Dickinson

Prose poem

"The Prose Poem," by Campbell McGrath.

Thought

It's a misfortune to become hooked on other people's dreams.

Thought

Even that which I hate most someone is eager to emulate.

Those molecules (Padgett)

I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people think that life is tragic or sad. Wasn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, wasn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them.

Ron Padgett, from "Album"

Thought

What the wise devise,
the rest will test.

Thought

The only people more misguided than the religious faithful are the religiously adamant.

To think again (Edson)

And so, after considerable thought, I decided not to think again, but simply to exist.
But even that becomes tiresome.
So I began to think again.

Russell Edson, from "The Canoeing Trip"

Enough (Ashbery)

I believe that the rain never drowned sweeter, more prosaic things than those we have here, now, and I believe this is going to have to be enough.

John Ashbery, from "Haibun 6"

Food

Slow cooker pork roast with mole.

Thought

Clearly, if God had to "die" on Earth to atone for original sin, then the sin was his, not ours (one cannot logically do penance for the actions of another). Indeed, which is more plausibly sinful, eating once of a forbidden fruit or overreacting to that act with banishment from paradise and a condemnation to suffering and death (and eternal suffering after death) not only of those who did it but of their descendants thousands of years forward and into the billions? A chastened god should well repent of such immoral fury!

Thought

Do I decide or discover my opinions?