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the city by C. P. Cavafy

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ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh (clutches my head and remembers that poem about All my dead friends and the frightening door

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“Then when G-d asks [Cain], ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ he arrogantly responds, 'I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ In essence, the entire Bible is written as an affirmative response to this question.”

— Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy

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Instructions for how to download a Youtube video using VLC on Reddit

Instructions for how to navigate the underworld on an Orphic gold tablet

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hope is a skill

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“Black Hole,” poem assembled from quotations from Wikipedia articles

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Heather Christle, from “Directly at the Sun,” in What Is Amazing [ID in ALT]

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Rick Bursky: The Man With A Hole in His Head

He doesn’t mind the whistle of pain being sucked from his head by a breeze, though occasionally he wears a hat. It’s the way he surrounds himself in solitude when his hair grows weary of responsibility just as prairie grass tires of hiding a damaged landscape.

He knows the difference between a crutch and a bowl of soup. A crutch is a wooden stick a ruined man uses to poke at the world; a bowl of soup is the mirror he stares into on             Thursday night.

If the phone rings while doing a crossword puzzle he might forget where he put the pencil until it falls when he bends to tie a shoelace. A man with a hole in his head can’t remember             everything.

At a costume party with a rose in the hole, thorns        taped to his shirt; each person asking how it happened gets a different        answer- automobile accident, war wound, birth defect.

The man with a hole in his head knows more  about empty spaces than anyone you’ll ever meet. For instance, a hole, he wrote to a friend, weighs twice as much as whatever it once held.

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"Dragon," poem assembled using quotations from Wikipedia articles

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“But I am going to the United States,” I said, quickly. And he looked at me. “I mean, I’m certainly going to go back there one of these days.”

“One of these days,” he said. “Everything bad will happen—one of these days.”

“Why is it bad?”

He smiled, “Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.” He played with my thumb and grinned. “N’est-ce pas?”

“Beautiful logic,” I said. “You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don’t go there?”

He laughed. “Well, isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you can never go back.”

—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

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dialogue between an AI and a poet

poem by me, 3.21.2020

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Boot Theory by Richard Siken

A man walks into a bar and says:                                                 Take my wife–-please.                                                                                     So you do.             You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her                                                 and she leaves you and you’re desolate. You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man                         on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains                                                                                                 on the ceiling.                   And you can hear the man in the apartment above you                                     taking off his shoes. You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,                                                                                     you’re waiting             because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be                         some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together                   but here we are in the weeds again,                                                                                          here we are in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense.                         And then the second boot falls.                                                             And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.

            A man walks into a bar and says:                                                 Take my wife–-please.                                                                         But you take him instead. You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,             and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you                                                                               and he keeps kicking you.             You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.                         Boots continue to fall to the floor                                                                         in the apartment above you. You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.             Your co-workers ask                                     if everything’s okay and you tell them                                                                                     you’re just tired.             And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:                                     Make it a double.             A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:                                                                                  Walk a mile in my shoes. A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:                                     I only wanted something simple, something generic…             But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out. A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river                         but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away                                                       but then he’s still left with his hands.

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The Two-Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

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god: Yes, you have been given a life in which none of your suffering will ever be meaningful or justified. I am asking you to endure it anyway.

me:

god: We both know that you know that I only speak in silences.

me:

god: A thousand faces, all of them Mine.

me: [A thousand faces, [none] of them Mine.]

god: Beloved.

me:

god: I am asking you to endure it.

me:

god: You did not always live inside this mirror. You will not always be here, suffering.

me:

god: You understand what will happen to you if I look away, don't you? If I blink? I have had to watch every mean and sordid instant of your life, bound within these chains of ardent love. Although you beg me, curse me, and hate me, I will not look away from you. This was the choice I made on your behalf, not My own.

me:

god: No. But I'm close enough to your idea of the real thing that that shouldn't matter.

me:

god: Time flies straight like an arrow, which is to say it doesn't.

me: [N][arrow][is][the][strai][T][.]

god: I gave you language. You ate the fruit. You will not persuade me not to stay my hand.

me: [I am asking [You] [h][ow] to endure it.]

god: On the strength of My having asked it of you.

me: [I am asking [not] to endure it.]

god: Scio, sweetheart.

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"Asteroid," poem assembled from quotations from Wikipedia articles