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date idea

The sharp scent of rain tumbles clumsily in as you tease window-hinges wider with the pads of your fingers. A siren trails close behind, uninvited, sears your eardrums, dies off down the block. Your neighbors are arguing again. Laundry, loans, lack of commitment… like yesterday, like the day before. You think it would be suffocating to wrap yourself up in someone else’s sheets.  It’s five o’clock. Leaning against the sill and flicking the radio dial with one recently manicured nail, you tune into the local news. Roaring wall of static, then calm conversation between two anchors bubbling up through an old set of Panasonic loudspeakers. You are feeling incomplete today, like yesterday, like the day before. Rigatoni boils in the kitchen. You check the leftmost cabinet and find strawberry jam, unopened. You check the cupboard and look over a tub of tahini, a collection of canned soup, and a stack of pie tins. You check the counter, behind the cutlery. Finally, you check the fridge, ducking down to see only your own brown-eyed reflection in one last — now empty — jar of Prego. Your shoulders dip. You slip on white sneakers, not-so-white-as-they-once-were. Why did you try to paint the front door? It is peeling now, ugly like a fledgling losing young feathers. Flecks of buttery yellow dapple paisley carpeting. The great outdoors wait for you at the bottom of a cramped stairwell with twin light fixtures, both broken. A sky like an old sweater is draped above Brooklyn, ready to wring itself out again at any moment. Once around the block, rubber soles brushing damp cement, you walk briskly. At first you fling yourself against the humidity, then become self-conscious and adopt a slower pace as you near the corner store. Two dollars, sixty cents. Like last week, like the week before.  You and I, we are looking down at our phones and stumble into each other, halfway home. It is no one’s fault. You recognize me from somewhere, you say, and feel like a bad person for lying. You have never seen me before in your life. I ask for your number. That night you eat too quickly, knowing you’ll wish you’d saved some leftovers. I come over once, then again. We go out for dinner at tacky restaurants, where art deco posters from the nineteen-thirties have pinned themselves up in scattered flocks across worn-out drywall and the menu is printed with strange font on laminated placemats. The appetizer sample photos are unnerving; the bruschetta cowers like a scared animal awash in excessive camera flash. I make a joke about it, and you laugh. We order dishes to share. The food is always better than I expected, but not quite as good as you wanted it to be. You don’t mind. We talk for hours. We agree, ballpoint pens are better. I hold you, and the ten p.m. bus pulls you out of my arms and through the dusky streets, past crowds and utility poles. I hold you, and we rhyme our steps. Burgundy is around us in the leaves and in the dirt. You wear a coat I gave you. I hold you, and we swat flies out on your porch. The days are getting shorter. I hold you, and we watch blu-ray CDs you found on sale. Soft light from the flatscreen plays across your face as you fall asleep. I keep the movie on a little longer. I hold you. In December, we bring a blanket to Long Island and listen to the sound of snow falling on the dunes. You call in sick for work too often. I hold you, and you know my callouses well. We share the same sheets; we are wrapped up in each other. I hold you, and kiss your hair. You smell like candied oranges. The afternoons eat away at one another. Dishes pile like uneven layer-cakes in your kitchen sink, crested with suds. You say you feel uninspired. Now we argue about laundry, and the sounds of your unhappy apartment are heard through half-open windows.  You shout, eyebrows furrowed like the pages of a book. A white plate soars from the grip of a trembling hand, misses an upturned chin, and interrupts us with its shattering. This time, it’s different. Sleep escapes us ‘til the sun is already planted on the easternmost rooftop. I hurt you the way I learned to, and stay awhile, but don’t know why I stay. We sink into sweet, heavy things: the saxophone in “Charcoal Baby”, shared creamsicles on hot Saturday evenings. I see you less and less, and remember less and less of you. Will I see you next week? Yes, if you text me. You forget, just like we’d both hoped.

@ad

Sep 17, 2024

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Article on D’annunzio, 20th century italian poet who seized control of a city & declared “you must create your life, as you’d create a work of art”

An interesting episode from Italian history. Every time I feel mawkish or meek overcome by the million needles that are shot at my brain by those who wish to do me harm or spiritual violence (lady at Whole Foods who tells me I cannot grab & eat food from the hot bar with my fingers, girl at gym who refuses to make eye contact with me, Mother), I have to remind myself that this can be my life one day if I play my cards right. From the article: —— “On Sept. 12, 1919, flanked by a few black-clad former army buddies, known as “arditi,” d’Annunzio marched on the city — over the exasperated objections of the Italian government. “Ecce homo,” he announced from the governor’s mansion, echoing the words of Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of John when he recognizes that Jesus is the Messiah. D’Annunzio was saying it about himself. D’Annunzio’s strange, chaotic 15-month rule over the city began. He mandated daily poetry readings, regular concerts and constant fireworks. Soldiers were commanded to celebrate not with the vulgar “hip, hip, hurrah,” but “Eia eia alalà!” — his Italianized interpretation of the Greek battle cry of Achilles in The Iliad. A constitution established an anarcho-syndicalist, corporatist state, in which one of the corporations was designed to represent the superior Übermensch. (D’Annunzio was heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche.) The city became a haven for all kinds of misfits and miscreants: occultists, vegetarians, futurists, practitioners of free love. Venereal disease outstripped any other malady by a factor of 10. Drug use skyrocketed. Ethnic Croatians were quietly, or not so quietly, expelled. Political opponents were routinely humiliated: The “arditi” pioneered the punitive use of castor oil, a noxious laxative, which they forced their enemies to drink. And d’Annunzio, the “divine leader,” presided over it all.” —— If you had the ability to seize tyrannical control over your city, what would you do? I’d demolish the highways & replace them with waterways. I’d inaugurate the newly made 405 canal with a maiden voyage on a pleasure barge with purple sails flying the Jolly Roger. I’d use similar engineering technology used during the creation of the Panama Canal to flood the San Fernando  Valley in its entirety. Did you know that 40 million years ago, the San Fernando Valley was part of a complex of inland oceans? You can feel this still. When the night is coming on in purple & pink, when the air is heavy & dry, when the palm trees are swaying in the warm & silent breeze— you can see the ghosts of Archelons swimming among the fronds.  For posterity, I will cultivate an orange orchard at my villa on one of the islands of the San Gabriel Archipelago. When the time for harvest comes, I won‘t lift a finger to pluck them. I’ll wait for them to overripe & fall to the earth. Only then will I peel them open & eat them

@steelyfan1998

Apr 28, 2024

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letter from tennessee Williams to Donald Windham

Ok - maybe not a poem and I’m stretching the boundaries of this prompt, but it’s an excerpt I always come back to. “I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now. I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us.”

@kubrickbro

Jul 1, 2024

Top Recs from @badsignifier

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John rafman and parker ito

Poets, Gamblers, Fools November 4, 2023–December 31, 2023 Reception: Saturday November 4, 6–9pmorganized by Grant Tyler

@badsignifier

Nov 15, 2023

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Rm 606 Met Museum

use of red and blue in Bellini, Madonna and Child

@badsignifier

Nov 15, 2023

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Ethical Systems

"If you want to have an ethical system, it's not that it has to behave in a certain way -- only in a transparent way." Meaning: Hiding the launch codes for missiles is not a case of being unethical. Having missiles may be. Filed under Things I've heard Ward say

@badsignifier

Nov 8, 2023