This car is mad crescent fresh, I want this in baby blue with crushed diamonds up in the paint job. I want white leather seats, soft as silk. I want it. I am Johnny Depp flying across the desert at night, trying to get to Vegas and write my story. If I crash the first one I’ll buy another one, hell I might have two laying ar ound just in case I want to try and drive both at once like an old timey chariot race. One will be retrofitted for English driving practices, then I will stand, one foot on each of the doors, and drive two cars at once. Fly on, my blue steeds.

It’s important to do good work. But also to be doing THE good work. And I don’t mean that in a religious sense (obviously, because when do I do that?) I mean that in the way that you choose your projects because you want the next door to be even more magnificent than the last. So, can you tell if one door might have a unicorn as opposed to a used car?

Steve Reich Hears a Pentecostal Preacher

it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gonna rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon rain hew
it’s gon fwip
hitsit’s gon fwip
hitsit’s gon fwip
it’s gon fwip
it’s gon hitsfwip
it’s it’s heep
if heep it’s heep
if heep it’s rain
heeit’s rain heeit’s rain
rain h rain h rain h raib
sgon! ifraib sgon! ifraig sgon!
raigsgon sgon sgon rai
sgon r sgon ra sgon r sgon rai
it’s g fwip
it’s g fwip
ifsy g fwip
he rain
he rain fwip
herain
herain

Not all of the poems are like this one, but risk abounds throughout. He’s a person who realizes that sometimes the only way to make a poem is to kick the shit out of it, and then sort of prop it up there and step away.

There, it was only place that could
claim purpose, and it didn’t.

Art

Start again, start again, start again.
Look at starting. Look away.
Start again.

Record

That sound–a limb moving in
light wind, faintly touching
shingles on the roof.
It’s drawing.

Drought

The bird compared its feet.

Isn’t it nice when a favorite film appears on cable and you can just watch it, even though you have it on a DVD? I like it when this happens, but the moment I see that the language has been changed so Betty can read her bible while watching–I turn it off and put the original in. For instance, we were watching Kill Bill the other evening, and they not only changed the language, they changed images as well: “I’m Buck and I like to Fuck” was changed to “I’m Buck and I like to…party,” and the keys to the “Pussywagon” read “Partywagon.” Let me spare no time in telling you of my contempt for people who will seize upon proprieties of “bad words” while caring not a jot about films featuring the patriotic bombing of grass hut villages.

I seriously think I want to become more active in initiating a backlash against the easy moral high ground claimed by people who don’t typically look closely at the grounds for anything other than their own gross appetites and spiritual cliches. People who tend to object to nothing but “bad words” are the people who will go see an art film and shit themselves with peeve because their limits were not consulted before creation and distribution.

I see students often now who trot out a practiced grimace when a literary work contains the word “damn” or “hell.” How long before the word “Pregnant” again becomes “in the family way”? I have had students object to the word “slavery.” But they balk when I ask whose interests are most served by not mentioning slavery–those who were victims of it or those who would just as soon have nobody reminded of the fact that it was ever present in America?

Language cleaners would do well to note that complete success, on their parts, would simply result in a new set of forbidden words. Humans need the opportunity to transgress, and they will find it. And an age-old inspiration for this is the feigned blush of the righteous.

If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.