violence on boulevard montparnasse

every day is a violence.

mornings are of no nutritional value. plates stacked in the sink. knives and soap. old crusts of bread like guilty underwear. delicates to be hand-washed. a half-smoked cigarette by a half-opened window.

one walks in the rain to work.

one works through the wet cement, brushes by the angry, the late, the barely competent. umbrellas rise and fall in a blink of consent: sometimes you take the bottom, and sometimes you take the top. sometimes the metal jabs, and the fabrics rub distractedly, making hasty love like the married. no kisses. one stops, and, one excuses oneself.

one checks at one's watch. one has things to do. one always does it wrong. and always, one murmurs to oneself that if it were not for these things, why, next time it would be all right. and then the hour pools and drips like a dying candle.

but sometimes it does not. sometimes you tap the wet cement and all of a sudden there is an undivided thought.

a pale, unhurried girl passes under the small protection of an umbrella. chance twinkles and ticks your eye, and bombs:

why don't I unzip my fly for you? you yell!

wop? she is reduced: a backpack, and a japanese shock. you sacrifice yourself to free her world. you've flashed her your body, baptized by rain. and she is a white dandelion, suddenly blown out.

to step in a puddle is to mutilate your reflection. to scream is to state the obvious. she is sixteen and you have just ruptured her poetry. what do you do?

how do you do? She cries.

crying is stating the obvious. it rains. you go to your job. and you sit at your desk.

at home the fridge hums like a gas chamber. when you contemplate, you contemplate the obvious. your ash tray is full.

it doesn't help that you've given yourself to the sky, nor that you've made a dandelion fly. again, you are you.

you cut yourself a note. today was your day.

compulsion

in the rounds of repeated thoughts, all meaning was lost

future knocked
present off the ground
past took wind
and squeezed into a furious little ball
the moment
which, weakly protesting, might as well throw in the towel

carpe diem, and the day was seized,
pounded, thrashed, kicked and buried,
masticated like beef jerky

all the photos reexamined for their significance
evidence of life been lived, oh curated life

pause. and read the newspapers.

but then the cries begin again
flash, the signs carried by smiling, oiled bodies
the bell, the blood, the whispers to begin

again, begin again

but already we know the scores.

yet like a battle cry, the performer flings his paint
throws his life blood, against
the ideas of life, the ideas of blood

to fling oneself against one's ideas of self
and in the bubbling
battleground, lose one
or smash the other

you read.

the disemboweled words can be no recognition
the vanquished lies in the arena, basked in sun, ready for all
the tiger sinks in its cage, the crowd lifts up its thumbs
the winner stands in a pool of blood
everyone endures their freedom

but still
the scores had already been published
yesterday
the ink had melted the press
and you
were sitting in the editor's chair
all this time, wondering what to do with your life

anthropophagique

pandora opened her mouth
and that was the hole out which came hope
and those were the words, the phantoms, the 123456
that became language
that became bibles
that became all of this

sounds, uttered in the eating of man
chewing, tearing, hunger became the words
which is all nothing except the spit, the shit, the spit, the shit of society

what we call society
what we call 10000000000000000000 human beings
who have idea enough to call themselves human beings
and language enough to utter those sounds
and people enough to propogate

it

ii and then t
w and then h and then aaaaaa
tell it to me like i am a baby
tell me the ha the ha ha the halves that become wholes the ho the hope
tell me the rhymes that become rhythms and castles that become law

all of the molecules
tell me about those molecules

i am the hole between the words
you are the hole between my thoughts
we are the space between our lives

the true
le trou

i eat
and i eat
and i eat
and i eat
and i eat
and i eat

i eat myself into me.

What I Know About Jack

After dusting off his glasses, he realized that there was no dramatic change.

His living room is the color of shit. And his face blends perfectly into it.

The white girl was still dancing the Arabian dance, three songs later, and that's cool with him. He had already run out of Kahlua, and now relied solely on repetition to keep high.

Buddy Jack lied on the couch next to him, asleep. The green cathode light of Arabia reflected off Jack's shiny little face, mirrored the movements of water, and incense, and plaid skirts. This girl Jack met on Facebook, who was supposed to meet up for real, with all her many girlfriends, never showed up. (Who the hell meets up with strangers from Facebook - that's what I asked Jack.) But Jack didn't listen to me, and now he's all Jacked-out, asleep.

Such is life, again.

I peeled away the brown paper of the Kahlua bottle. I tossed the bottle against the dirty frat wall. I imagined a smash, a splash, and all the glass shards like rock and roll on the brown carpet, but instead the bottle bounced, in tact, twice, and rolled limply on the floor, next to Jack's feet.

(This disappointment was too great for me, and I left the apartment. Two steps to the door, and no one noticed.)

Meanwhile, Jack's friend was still sitting on the couch, watching the Arabian girl who was now eating popcorn and grinning at her naked girlfriend. He, jealous, too was disappointed - this night of broken promises, and facebook pokes. Jack began to snore, and Jack's friend took a tissue paper and snuffed him out.

This is how Jack died.

At the funeral, his high school friends had a lot to say. And some underclassmen who never knew him, but heard of him from friends or was friended by him on facebook. And Jack would have been happy to know that overall, he was a well-liked man. His creepiness was attributed to his friendly spirit, and his acne was attributed to his incompetent doctor who didn't know jack about skin conditions.

His friend, who accompanied him in his death throes, swore to a fantastic ending: white girls in Arabian dresses that they met in a club downtown, and partied with all night long until they crashed at Jack's room, from exhaustion.

It's April snow when the first words hit the page.
I run from line to line, tasting the cold / the aberrations

the snowflakes melting on my tongue, these chewy words, this watery English

In storm:
Flurries hit cement, smack against buildings
uniqueness lands on my car window - dribbles down tracks of itself

Self, self, self, self, self
All collected like that.

In April, nothing sticks, it's all amusement.
Splatters the world in sugar, but leaves no cake.

poem

Walking off a plane into a desert,
a heat becomes a hurt:
sanded skin, I gaze down from tall.
Toes care not for love, specifics, all.

A longing is a scar. The air is dry.
The ground is full of weather, oceans passed
evaporated evidence of skies,
ancient breaths, boulders, dust: our vast.

Bygones you and I, like fossils of raindrops, rise
into an endless sun that hugs away the details.
Cancels the proofs, the crazy eyes
that soft in cordial sunsets, caressed the shales.

Away. For always, there is in that a way.
And why, would I in rhymes find you again?
Away! For I could not in deserts find a prayer
To say. Or in this burnt oasis claim you friend.

My longing is my scar. The clouds are dead.
My muscles find the earth, the soil burns.
We split the cactus needles, bed by bed,
collapse all castles: rusting turn by turn.

Cafe 212: "Objects in the Room" Writing Exercise

1. TRASH CAN

"Feed the crap through my flap." I'm touched by a hundred hands an hour, enjoying only the refuse of my customers: the pent up soda cans, impotent sandwich meats, the aluminum bags that nestle and crackle, then slide. Even with my brown, harsh skin; these square ridges; this smell of mine - I am needed. They pay me to wear this dirt like a sequin dress: "Trash Only," on my designated chest.

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2. BLUE JAVA MUG

The idea for the Blue Java mug originated when Mr. Perry Schumacher, III, Jr., a third-year CC student of Economics-Political Science major, was constructing his resume (a la Morgan-Sachs), and needed one detail to lift him above the rest. He pushed the sleeves of his Kenneth Cole shirt up to the crook of his elbow, exposing his delicate but well Bow-Flexed forearms. This helped him think, as great thought was indeed required for his object. How to lift a gold-rimmed trust fund man like Mr. Schumacher III, Jr., above a thousand other equally bespectacled princes of Venture Capital America....

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3. FIRE BELL

The alarm bell rang, and the glass vibrated at an unseemly frequency, flushing back and forth. "Oh shit," said Juan, as he pulled his legs together at the conclusion of a six-step on the first floor. "Oh fuck," said Donna, as she ripped the roast beef out of her sandwich in Cafe 212. The piano hummed, excited by the surrounding sound waves. On the third floor, Professor Linglelittle, lecture mid-sentence, pushed his glasses up to his nose. His glasses were shaking too. All the student government officers in the Student Government Office immediately began drawing a plan as to how to handle this dilemma and to best serve their difficult, interschool, multi-desirous constituency. They had already formed committees and were right about to elect Committee Officers for the new offices, when BOOM. The glass house rocked.

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4. PEARL NECKLACE

Theresa received her pearl necklace from her grandmother at age five, the day before Nai Nai Gloria's impulsive trip to Las Vegas. Rumors from the card dealers say, the woman married a fat Russian man with a lip twitch and five million red chips swept clean off a roulettes table; Gloria was a fine-looking mid-life lady, with a keen passion for things that clinked or twinkled. Off she disappeared into renaissance at the very beginning stages of her granddaughter Theresa's life, leaving only this string of Oyster entrails in memorandum.

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5. MATT'S HAIR

Matt got his curl from a rabid cow, everyone knnows it. Jeremy once said to me as we were passing smoke on the I-90, chasing leprachauns and former victims of Michael Jackson, "You saw Matt's hair right?" "Yeah," I huffed. "That shit was stolen from a rabid cow," he puffed. "Oh okay," we said , as we blew the house down. Thereafter, by some miracle of rabies, Matt's hair clung to the bottom of the house like old glue on hands, a thin, skin-like nettle. It held the pieces together. I dove into Matt's curl, and drank of its rabid milk, and I transformed into an animorph. Not a real animorph, not one of those super-cool characters in those chapter books, but one of their flipping illustrations, just one, taped onto the corner of a fucking children's book, in the back black alleyways of Barnes Noble.

perspective writing exercise

1.

Wet on my face. Big, soft honey with mouth open, wet out. Touch my nose and smell like a belly hurt. Honey has big teeth. Dark open mouth, and I can't move. This is a funny tickle. The wet is hot and I can't breathe.

"Aw, look they're playing!"

This is called playing. Wet is now on my neck. I fall, but the bed isn't soft. Wet is on my face again. Something hard and heavy on my heart. It hurts. The wet is hot and I hate it and I can't breate. Crying is letting go of the funny in your belly.

Mama is bigger than honey. Mama has a strong hold. Going up is quick and happy. Honey is now very small. Mama's face smells like the bed.

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2.

This is the kid human. It smells like food. And sheets. And taking a walk. I want to take a walk. But it's not time. Come on, kid, let's take a walk.

The kid tastes like bowl water. Stuff is coming out of its eyes. It's moving its arms very fast. Uh-oh. No walk. Yes walk? No walk. Kid doesn't want to walk. Okay!

But I do! I want to go through that door. Smell the street! The street smells like bowl food! I ate the bowl food that was on the table, and the big woman got mad! Woohoo! It smelled like cars. Woohoo!

Walk me, kid, I'm ready. Here, take my neck plant! You can grab it, just like this.

Oh no, what'd I do?

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3.

Oh, my poor baby! I go to the kitchen for just one minute, and that damn dog is all over Henry again. Stupid dog, what does it want? I'm gonna get George to call the vet, tonight. We really have to do something about that dog. The vet better cure the thing, or that's one dog that's sleeping in the shelter tomorrow.

What does the thing want now? Why does George like that smelly thing so much anyway?

Oh no! My fish is going to burn!

But wait, poor Henry. Oh Henry, he really does cry! Not like his sister, Babette. Babette was such a sweet baby.

Babette? Where's Babette? I'll get her to pick Henry up.

No, I should really do it myself. But my fish is going to burn.

The Gift

My heart - it was a time
All things beloved, only once
He made the daylight leap, and night-washed lines
between warm lips, to collide

Into the open, whirling clock
I take, one take
And straight, already memory
gazing up at future, past

All life at once, his face
On no separate whole


-Vivica Grace