i’m reading this, you neither

i’ve also been reading pound’s poems & translations the library of america edition and it’s just so nice-sounding in yer head and in yer ears and in yer mouth when you read them out loud even though more times than you’d like to admit you don’t understand a thing. well that’s not true, a lot of them seems to be about ez complaining that none of his contemporaries, editors, mentors, fellow poets, big-nosed academics, understood what he was doing. which was right.

even that’s news that stays news.

not for the faint hearted cat fancy aquarist

in der friedhof der namenlosen

i buried a cat

a tricolored

three striped freak nebelung

it had jumped off a green steel draw bridge

into the danube

in the superfine morning

of another old european civilization going to the dogs

it had seen

gesundheit!

an angelfish

swimming just under the surface

its in my ears and in my arse

pain of the day is in my right ear

i hit it repeatedly with a half-filled bottle of frestea green tea in a park where maids have their dates with contract builders

it was during a fight with my girlfriend im leaving her and i didnt know what else to say i didnt think she understood me so i just hit myself

its been happening too often thats one of the reasons why im leaving her

i thought it had never happened before but it had

i read my old emails and i did it sometime early 2004 when i was fighting with claire because i was leaving her

it must be some sort of penance for something i cannot help but do to women who care about me

im an ass and im lucky that im only half-deaf

i digress

ever since my dad installed speedy at home i’ve been addicted to the internet.

it’s not like i wasn’t addicted before. at the office i spend all my time online, too.

but then i think maybe what i’m addicted to is digression.

like, say i was reading lorrie moore’s introduction to the special issue of ploughshare she was editing, then i thought about her novel, ‘who will run the frog hospital?,’ and its french title, ‘que vont devenir les grenouilles?,’ which was half about paris (‘one big stairmaster’), and then i thought about anatomica, this shoe store at le marais, where i saw this pair of shoes that i ended up not buying because i hate shops that sell birkenstocks, too, and then i felt stupid because maybe i should’ve just bought them and not stuck so rigidly to all these laws i’ve imposed on myself, like ‘never buy anything from shops that sell birkenstocks,’ laws that i create because i am so afraid of being ‘not cool,’ not cool to whom?, and then i started googling ‘anatomica + paris’, and next thing i know i had been reading the cydwoq—the brand of the shoes—site for 30 minutes.

and now i think i want a pair of zizi homme in calfskin white just like serge’s. i limewired lemon incest but i like la marseillaise much more. the reggae drums.

a pack of gitanes surely would be nice rite about now.

and a quick lunch of lungs.

it’s a read-off!

i’m reading several books at once. i digress a lot when i talk to people, when i write, so why not when i read? it’s not like i haven’t been doing it all my life anyway. but i met jj for lunch at tim and he told me he’s writing 18 books all at once at the moment. now that’s digression. none of which he’s finished but that’s beside the point. so i’m reading rimbaud’s penguin selected poems and letters, new edition in the horrible all black jacket (nice photo of young baby-faced rimbaud on the cover, askew bow tie), tom raworth’s carcanet collected poems that is so heavy (heavy papers) and brickish the spine broke only a few days ago after weeks of bending. not being able to read some words on the inside margins, it makes me glad to have decided not to buy the williams carcanet collected since that would’ve really broken my back at CDG. golding’s metamorphoses again because i read an essay on the greek myths by germaine greer in the guardian, such an easy read for some reason, and now i find i can read in the margins brief summaries of the stories  in the following lines, like “icarus dies”, and just read the ones that sound interesting. am still trying to finish max havelaar, it’s just that i’m not enjoying reading indonesian at the moment, it feels like breathing underwater. and burton watson’s columbia anthology of classical chinese po biz again, because i will never go thru a month without reading at least a su-tung p’o. john ashbery’s your name here because i want my name there, and pictures of brueghel even though i haven’t really touched that for a few weeks. but it’s always in my head.

its like there arent any sales and u still run out of the things u really want

the hardest thing when you start up another secret blog is deciding on what tone to use. because the tone is yr life. and yr life is the life of the blog. thats why its nice when someone asks u to blog and they decide on the theme, readers, register of language to use. life is easier. when no ones there to help u there are things u can do by yrself. like imagining that youre writing the blog for or to someone in particular. a muse. an ex-girlfriend. a future one. a secret one. or u can just follow the letters as theyre released by the tip of yr fingers. u never know.

when u start a secret blog because uve fallen in love, again, neck deep in illicit, forbidden, current girlfriend-hurting love, u start it because u want to get found out. ull start telling people, perhaps not yr current girlfriend straight away, but close enough. someone u know she knows u know. say.

its just that when she told me ‘so even shes just an idea huh?’ (my girlfriend in one

of my poems) what she said sticks. im suspicious of things that stick.

scarletts in love with an idea. and it doesnt matter. perhaps it doesnt matter that i

fall in love with the ideas of love. my ideal ideas of love. if i can keep falling in love

and never run out of ideas.

but with her i was afraid, she seemed so real. less so now that ive

reared myself off her.

perhaps ive missed my one chance at true happiness. but that doesnt matter.

ill get other chances to make another one up.

Announcement 3, point 5: Herr Johani, er ist tot

“Please collect the coffin containing: his body, a withered single rose placed carefully under his hands neatly cupped above the first button of his death-suit by his daughter and a Penguin copy of Pope’s Iliad that he never got to finish, though he kept saying he’d put it on the bedside table so he could grab and read it whenever he wasn’t too tired from seeing his girlfriend all day.”

Pas l’éducation sentimentale

– now i can live without this this distilling of a day thru the cheap (less than aus$10,000) coffee machine of me brain. no more waiting waiting waiting for the splotch splutter swish of dirty brown half quarter no truths into the cracked coffee single-serve cups of me minimum opus.

– i can live without this. we used to hate this whole thing didnt we. it used to hurt even on good days. even when you were writing something true it felt like you were lying thru yr teeth. none of the Hem smugness you wanted so much.

– it was like Flaubert in Madame Bovary. there was no meaning in my life (i shdve really just killed myself) so i tried to create another world in order to destroy what i had (whatever meaning it had left).

– it was like, ‘mme bovary put an extra corner on her husband’s dilapidated tricorn hat.’ this line is extraneous (like the extra corner). ’tis written to convey to you a nothingness the emptiness of life in Yvetot (or wherever) the feeling of breathing in a vacuum. how cd such things exist? how cd it be written without emptying the soul of the writer (assuming he did have at least a half one)? but even if he did he wdve lost it now gone forever in the very act of writing that goddam sentence.

– it feels like the sentence shdve been written in chalk an<span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);
“>d <span style="color: rgb(204, 204, 204);
“>rubbed off after rea<span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);
“>ding.