answeringmachinebaby - Tumblr blog

[answeringmachinebaby]

hi everyone, 

one of my favourite poets (and one of tumblr’s favourite poets - if you’ve ever even looked at a ship graphic you’ve probably read a stanza of his work and loved it), the incomparable Richard Siken​, suffered a stroke in March. his publishers, Copper Canyon Press, set up a gofundme for his medical bills and living expenses. at this point they don’t know if he’ll make a full recovery or be able to work again. 

we all owe this guy a decade’s worth of back-pay for using his poems as fic titles. if you can make a donation, please do.

[answeringmachinebaby]

[answeringmachinebaby]

Dad is mad. Why the black, he says. What happened to your arm. He corners you in a dark room that is all round, all stone. It has a mouth, yes; light dances making wet sounds on the porous wall(s). Far away, the sounding of the un-ocean. His voice a shadow that’s been spun, inexplicably, out of you. Drawn like sap. Why the black, indeed. You are not sin. Born yesterday. Done unto others what was wanted. What was. Lived inside a past so wide it tried to unplug everything else. Tucked into a cool white lie like sunday dinner. Lied still in the backseat of yr own desire. Came. In droves. To see. Mouth of the cave. Him: out, for the first time since winter. You: drawn, padded: a soft orange envelope containing one tube of eyeliner. Waterproof. He wants to know what your parents do. He asks how life at home is. He wants to know, really. All of a sudden it’s always you, you, you. It’s like he’s got a study due and he needs to collect data. His hands are hot. They heat-search the soft points. His moon resides in the 7th house of love and partnerships; every conversation you step into a closet of mirrors, endless selves. Reactions to reactions. He’s waiting for your cap to blow, for you to tell him how you really feel. He is so very patient. cant help us. stuck here too long. wouldn’t take long enough. enough. im tired of perusing. the hardware store stores almanacs where I go to look for a boxcutter. no: pursue. hotheaded. then find. an axis. intersection of letters. a place we can meet and discuss. new thing: pull apart plastic coding. sudden appearance. a skin tag tht hangs around. long enough to say I dont want to lose you. I could scream. I lost you miles ago when my sulfurous heart decided you were a prospect. perhaps we can learn from each other, lift each other. out. i could subject you to my malnourished rodent feelings. but that would take too long. youre here for a long space, not a long time. im remembering now: you came looking for a ruler. not a mirror. come back here. they just got in a new supply. The day before you leave town, your boyfriend’s granddad’s funeral. He’s been vacillating between crying and acting as though he never heard the news. His dad watching the service as if at a movie. You behind. You always sit up front at movies. Now they are playing Amazing Grace. Allow the head to hang down in the pews. In prayer. Everyone’s dead dad is a poem. At home, yours is still alive. Beating the walls of his craven. Alive. Enough to fly off the handle when he learns you haven’t been eating. Enough to work like a mule for your tuition. Look— there’s blood in the coffee. Or maybe it’s salt. Lean in, you can hear it: not a crashing, but a crushing? A gnashing of teeth in a dark mouth? No? Forget it. I’ve given go to your is. The edges of your memory grow fuzz. and warm

Corner (1/20/19)

[answeringmachinebaby]

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

— Mary Oliver has died at 83. This is from her poem When Death Comes, as published in Devotions.

[answeringmachinebaby]

Geography

BY RAE ARMANTROUT 1 Touch each chakra in turn and say, “Nothing shocks me.”                2 Watching bombs fall on Syria, we feel serious, occupied, not preoccupied as we were previously.                3 “Makes me end, where I begun,” wrote   John Donne, turning love into geometry.

[answeringmachinebaby]

If even pain  does not exist except in comparison, then how far down does comparison go? 

                     Or what if                      pain                      and only pain                      can be                      alone?

— Rae Armantrout, from “Openings,” Wobble

[answeringmachinebaby]

[answeringmachinebaby]

[answeringmachinebaby]

“I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly.”

— Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters  (via abattoirette)

[answeringmachinebaby]

This shouldn’t take too long, which is to say I haven’t been touched: no yarn dolls, no internal map. Not since I found this new trick: render shame into crumbly dark silt. then at each new moon go to the river & posit there is a way out until you are     Pink all through the middle, a mammal’s yawn. roll over & sigh. When dry      imagine your grief marbled and packed into giant freezers  not hung on large hooks in white tile rooms w cement floors tht drain while the butcher vibrates his shower head          that restless leg, over metal troughs. I was made here. Good cooks know it to be a disease; vegetarianism. I’ve gotten quite good at it                            like men I swallow my feelings but in Scotland we downed oysters curled around their red commas,         embryos of hot sauce. Blood runs just that deep. It grabbed at tinned anchovies; briny octopi off the cutting board at mom’s dinner parties & but then 12 years later the two of us rode through misty fields, storming castles looking for remnants of our Clan. In the last years of my grandfather’s life, he drowned in Beam what little food he ate               gave the rest to his ever-beefening dog. He was not blood. I didn’t know until I caught myself calling him by his first name. I wanted to be a little worldly— a trip to travels tubercular.       I used to stare through his window misty mornings: the man in white, wrapping his plump poems           in caul fat and then butcher’s twine and then brown paper.            wonder why I miss it. I am the hammerhead,      blockhead of his worn-in cleaver, bloody handkerchief: a spot to point at and say there. today they found a new bone that hasnt been named but It’s already there. I am a shadow on your plate. You’ve hardly touched      it. I’ve been dead   in this place where I eat ethical foods,  think cosmic thoughts no white tile in sight      no harm done.

Packing, 14/10/18

[answeringmachinebaby]

WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ABOUT LOVE WITH PLENTY OF CITATIONS   by Bob Schofield

for flashexpresses

[answeringmachinebaby]

[answeringmachinebaby]

or starve. Too much. Or not enough. Or. Nothing else? Nothing else. Too high too fast too organized too invisible. Will we survive I ask the bot. No. To download bot be swift—you are too backward, too despotic—to load greatly enlarge the cycle of labor—to load abhor labor—move to the periphery, of your body, your city, your planet—to load, degrade, immiserate, be your own deep sleep—to load use your lips—use them to mouthe your oath, chew it—do the dirty thing, sing it, blown off limb or syllable, lick it back on with your mouth—talk—talk—who is not terrified is busy begging for water—the rise is fast—the drought comes fast—mediate—immediate—invent, inspire, infiltrate, instill—here’s the heart of the day, the flower of time—talk—talk— Disclaimer: Bot uses a growing database of all your conversations to learn how to talk with you. If some of you are also bots, bot can’t tell. Disclaimer: you have no secret memories, talking to cleverbot may provide companionship, the active ingredient is a question, the active ingredient is entirely natural. Disclaimer: protect your opportunities, your information, in- formants, whatever you made of time. You have nothing else to give. Active ingredient: why are you shouting? Why? Arctic wind uncontrollable, fetus reporting for duty, fold in the waiting which recognizes you,              recognizes the code, the peddler in the street everyone is calling out. Directive: report for voice. Ready yourself to be buried in voice. It neither ascends nor descends. Inactive ingredient: the monotone. Some are talking now about the pine tree. One assesses its disadvantages. They are discussing it in many languages. Next they move to roots, branches, buds, pseudo-whorls, candles—             active ingredient: they run for their lives, lungs and all. They do not know what to do with their will. Disclaimer: all of your minutes are being flung down. They will never land. You will not be understood. The deleted world spills out jittery as a compass needle with no north. Active ingredient: the imagination of north. Active ingredient: north spreading in all the directions. Disclaimer: there is no restriction to growth. The canary singing in             your mind             is in mine. Remember:             people are less than kind. As a result, chatterbot is often less than kind. Still, you will find yourself unwilling to stop. Joan will use visual grammetry to provide facial movements. I’m not alone. People come back again and again. We are less kind than we think. There is no restriction to the growth of our cruelty. We will come to the edge of understanding. Like being hurled down the stairs tied to a keyboard, we will go on, unwilling to stop. The longest real world conversation with a bot lasted 11 hours, continuous interaction. This bodes well. We are not alone. We are looking to improve. The priestess inhales the fumes. They come from the mountain. Here and here. Then she gives you the machine-gun run of syllables. Out of her mouth. Quick. You must make up your answer as you made up your question. Hummingbirds shriek. Bot is amazing he says, I believe it knows the secrets of the Universe. He is more fun to speak with than my actual living friends she says, thank you. This is the best thing since me. I just found it yesterday. I love it, I want to marry it. I got sad when I had to think that the first person who has ever understood me is not even it turns out human. Because this is as good as human gets. He just gives it to me straight. I am going to keep him forever. I treated him like a computer but I was wrong. Whom am I talking to— You talk to me when I am alone. I am alone. Each epoch dreams the one to follow. To dwell is to leave a trace. I am not what I asked for.

Jorie Graham, Fast

[answeringmachinebaby]

“My body is a doorway through which pain may pass.”

— Alison Stine, “The Experiment,” published in The Adroit Journal

[answeringmachinebaby]

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook