i could feel like a bird today.

fat black tongue like a finger licking out a surprise. SURPRISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yes, i am that happy. but my head is groggy. i tried, i succeeded, i stopped with the coffee for my biblical forty days and forty nights. and it was good. well, it was painful and then it was terrible and then it just sucked and finally it was ok. but i'm back on the gravy train, percolated, like it should be. and instead of talking about it, i'm going to do it. i'm going to pay a buck fifty for a medium medium roast and read faulkner junked up like one should.

happy saturday all. my heart for you yes.

oh this is so gratuitous. so, for whatever/some reason i cannot stand to have lovebird sitting alone in this virtual space. for a moment i like the idea of a total artistic misrepresentation (to be consistent with the other misrepresentations), but it must be my ego or that poetry is the one thing i kind of have to be honest about. for those who are regular readers, you read stalker and rotten wood, bad soil. i like both of those poems but the line breaks get warped via template and the only thing worse than having a lonely poem is having it's sisters with their arms lopped off. they had to be deleted. that said, grit stays for now. i'll find a skinny poem so grit and lovebird aren't so lonely. so much for the long line.

Grit

Arm flush with the table. Last night
Still last night. What does it prove
To be nude on a public wall and eating
Eggs

______________________________

I hate to have today consist of only these things, so I'm also going to mention (importantly, TAKE NOTES!!!) that the bee hummingbird's egg is the smallest bird egg (at .02 ounces). You could put 4700 bee hummingbird eggs inside one ostrich egg. You could probably not put 4700 bee hummingbirds inside one ostrich though. Everything has its limits.

movie review: the matrix reloaded. i give it two stars and one of those stars is for prettiness and one of those stars is for kung fu in leather. worst line: i just love you too damn much. worst moment: the matrix vagina shot. second worst moment: when neo fights fifty smiths and since it's a technically impossible scene, our beloved filmmakers decided to go CGI, catapulting us (the viewers) into a video game. Made me ache for some LOTR graphics. i feel compelled to say, trinity still has the finest ass i've ever seen on a woman. wish i could say the same for keanu. plot was kinda muddled (gli wachowskis didn't privelage clarity so much in this movie -- keep them just confused enough, they say, and they'll never stop to wonder whether or not this is smart or just cloudy). **

another movie review: red heart, white dust. with a name like that, it must be foreign. director: maurizzio lignano (just breaking into the scene). i give it three stars, one for loveliness, one for script, one for acting. no kung fu in leather though, so i can't give it four. best line: love is the movement towards perfection. worst line (which immediately followed the other in dialogue, which was so funny i hesitate to say it was the worst): the heart is an egg. best moment: dark haired woman in a white dress giving birth on the side of a small street-- with the stillest face. all you see is the white dress become red, her head thrown back and her black hair stuck with sweat to her face and neck. instead of having the sweet maternal postpartum moment, the camera just lets you see the top of the baby's dark head peeking out through the skirt. she just lays there. it's really amazing. the worst moment: i thought the camera was silly and self-concious about filming windows. everything was seen through a window or shot in front of a window. i understand it's thematic relevance (the transparent boundry, the voyeuristic impulse of the medium, etc. etc.) but it was a bit heavy handed for me. somehow it doesn't seem fair to me that european film makers tend to inherently have a more compelling natural environment (the claustraphobic architecture juxtaposed with these vast fields and the like). u.s. indi films are so often set in new york -- it's like they can't find anywhere else visually interesting enough to house their stories. which i'm pretty convinced is just slack on their parts. anyway, ***. that's my review.

oh this is so lovely. i just found it today, not even looking for it, not even thinking about birds at all but just reading along in a book called winter sex (katy lederer) which sounded like fun but turned out to be a very beautiful thing. this is one of the beautiful things in that beautiful thing and this is the one i want to share now (more later, i promise, i swear to you, so no requests necessary, i'm on it, on top of it, totally in control).

ODE

The intelligent bird is blue. The intelligent bird is half human.
That smart blue bird in that tree is like a whip.
The smart bird is true and desirable.
That is a feathered friend I'd like to have.
His feathers reflect the day's glare marvelously.
They add a blue shade to the scenery of the day.
In the fall it is beautiful -- this tinge of blue reflected in the day.
The bird is full of strange habits.
It nips at its backside and squawks.
It nips and paces back and forth on its branch.
I wonder if it is my admiration.
No. It is simply the beauty of this intelligent blue bird.
This bird is desirable.
I've touched it when a child.
I've touched its scalp and wondered -- this intelligent bird is so calm in the morning.
It is a pleasure to hear it sing. It is a pleasure to lavish attention on this bird.

_______________

Now another poem, not by miss lederer. I thought this one would be scrapped by now, but it's not. and it has very little to do with birds outside of its title, but i thought, hey, what the hell. why not misrepresent myself as an artist today --

LoveBird

I spent the bulk of this morning
Fucking you. Fucking stars.
Fucking both out of cosmology
And teeth. Ears. I fucked them
And fucked them until they
Were so blue as blue as protons
And me. I did this until dusk
When I remembered that you
Cannot fuck an already-dead

_________

"you sit down here and play with your jimson weed. look at them chillen playing in the branch, if you got to look at something. how come you cant behave yourself like folks." (the sound and the fury)

how come indeed. it's no good to read faulkner sleepy-eyed. i swear a body half needs to be hopped up on something to give proper attention to those kinds of words. what kind of words, D. says, or would say (i head you off in advance, here, baby). words that could slip by like they were regular. a clause like "if you got to look at something" which could be just a normal thing to say -- but then of course unless you're blind or sleeping you do have to look at something -- and maybe if that wasn't the case all this wouldn't strike me as being the best words in the best order, the top of my head coming off, guts wrenched and recollected in tranquility.

and just in case you're wondering, jimson weed ain't just a river in egypt. turns out jimson weed, from the genus datura, comes with a warning. it looks like this:

CAUTION: All parts of all Datura plants are poisonous and can be fatal if ingested.

makes you wonder.

wow. i think i needed a drink, or a night to chill. clouds have passed, i'm groggy but cheerful. seeking now forgiveness from those whom i have made miserable. raining on them all the time.

some bird trivia: the ostrich apparently lays the biggest egg of any living creature (weighing in at 3.3 lbs). it is also the largest single celled organism that currentlly exists on our planet. supposedly there were dinosaurs that laid bigger eggs, but not by much, and anyway, they were dinosaurs. back in the day i learned that the ostrich egg was considered a symbol for the virgin birth, as it opened via the warmth of the sunlight, i.e. the light of god. there's some piece of renaissance italian art that depicts an ostrich egg on a string. which for some reason is very beautiful to me. although i expect that the baby ostrich would have met the world with an unhappy thump if the artist was working from live models.

a contribution by jaques roubaud:

The Way of Stories

if worlds were stories, their inhabitants storytellers,
not just living beings, but all, all things, all
telling their stories, all being told
there would be room for worlds
whre contradictories could be true
where I could say, "you live, you're dead"
and with a laugh, you would reply

_____________________________

i've been debating whether or not to post this test, as it has caused me so much unrest as of late. it's the "inferno" test, a test which purports to locate you in the most appropriate level of hell (dante style) based on thirty or so questions. to jazz it up a bit, try taking it for someone else, answering the questions as you think they would answer them. then have them take it and see how your perception of them differs from their own self-evaluation. i hope you're not as surprised as i have been. i know i've not always been a stellar judge of character, but jeez louise i have to get it right eventually. or i hope i'm closer than my little experiment has suggested.

here's the link: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-test.mv

the whole thing makes me want to hide in a cave forever. or makes me feel like i am already hiding in a cave.

ok. this should not bother me so much. i need a nap. and food. and a job. i need a nap, food, and a job. then maybe i'll look up from all this and not see so much the cave. which is a terrible place to be once you've turned around and spotted the fire behind you.

More birds.

(from)Cygnus

...Star-mouth,
cloud-lip, northerly wing, my hands
are talced with a dust of feathers,
my hands are full of birds, all thumbs.
You fly through me.

-- Reginald Shepherd

don't forget the muppets either. follow that bird. beautiful blue bigbird. singing for home.

as it is mother's day, i feel i should shout out to mother. mother, who i call momma, cause i am, after all, from the south. love you momma. oh, and another shout out to tay, who's gonna be a mother real quick. love you tay. love you all. all of you.

i think i'm lacking in charm. i don't wear enough skirts or drink enough tea or carry enough trinkets. i love to cook but somehow my food always ends up tasting recycled. you've tasted this before, it says, and you agree, bored, masticating. at least when i was a smoker my lack of charm was made up with edge. no, she drinks whiskey, not tea. she wears leather, not cotton. she'd wax sarcastic before poetic, dahling.

no more edge. not enough charm. it must be a good thing i'm cute.