Audience of Strangers

I am feeling odd tonight,
and cold. It was a warm night;
they liked my hair
--cold purple, warm purple, amethyst and plum--
better than I thought,
and it was good to listen,
and Sarah left me a spindle and a bag of fiber
I don't even know the name of.
Top?
It's not-white and faintly scratchy. A princess
would spin it into diamonds. Gold only comes from straw.

But I have
so many things to do, so many nearly done
and books begun
and cleaning undertaken
and rooms and jobs and plans and good intent
that I can feel them teetering above me
just one more
just one more and they will come down and paralyze me in a pile.
The word is tsundoku. I think of time in terms of books.

and so tonight I will finish one step. Just one.
And go to sleep, and waken lighter in the morning
and feel the sillier for writing all this down
with line breaks studding it like beads
in an enthusiast's first clumsily assembled earrings.

There was a poem I ran across a few years ago. Fairly short thing--I have an impression of eight lines or so--and I don't think it rhymed. It was a discussion of lovely colours, and how they weren't so lovely in the right (wrong?) context; the only line I can remember is something along the very loose lines of "And green is lovely, but not so lovely in a wound."

My Googling skills have failed me. Anyone?

ETA: Found! It's "Pathology of Colours" by Dannie Abse. Thanks, aurora_verde.

Apparently I've gotten *way* too used to waking up to let Sierra out.

Tired, and awake, and sicker of job applications than I could possibly have conceived. Also vaguely hungry, and thinking Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" is one of those poems that I suspect is vastly more referenced than read, and that is saddening.

Also cold.

Going to go have tea--something without caffeine--and hopefully then I can get back to sleep.

PASSER MORTUUS EST

Death devours all lovely things:
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness, — presently
Every bed is narrow.

Unremembered as old rain
Dries the sheer libation;
And the little petulant hand
Is an annotation.

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

========

For the sake of explicit clarity; no, I am not having relationship issues. Everybody relax.

It's been a very ragged sort of day. I always wonder how much the mood I'm in when I read something new affects my perception of it.

Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.

And then adieu, -farewell! -the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

- Edna St-Vincent Millay

Past romance, jazz, and cigarettes. There's a dearth of sonnets on the subjects.

I should get new batteries for my camera. The pigeons have been abominably cute on the way to work the last couple of days.

Tossed up in response to lunchtime discussion. Am currently contemplating the degree to which IC poetry for a LARP relates to document creation--prop letters and seals, IC documents, that kind of fun stuff. (Apologies to those who see it twice.)

Yay, paper, in all its myriad forms.

( IC poetry. )

( Context. )

I do believe I'm getting old.

( Boring knee pain. )

S'yeah. I'm waiting for my doctor's office to call back. I'm going to Victoria on Wednesday unless they say something like "My god, you've got knee cancer and we *absolutely* have to operate on Thursday! Knee cancer can only be excised by the dark of the moon!"[3], but it would be nice if she (or someone in her office) could take a look at that and possibly prescribe a brace[4] or anti-inflammatories or something before I go.

*sigh* I just want to go home, put my leg up, and curl up with a nice chunk of horror fiction.

In other news, my sister got a job (yay!), I'm pretty sure I didn't (but there will be another), and some of H.P. Lovecraft's poetry has this really catchy beat, like Poe. I think "The Bride of the Sea " is rapidly becoming my favourite. Grimjack is still entertaining, Katharine Dunn's Geek Love is engaging, the French rugby team (and guests) quietly blew my mind, and I still don't hate my job.
---
[1] During which I did not actually get coffee, but a jumbo pack of TicTacs. I've developed this weird fondness for them as a snack, which given how cheap they are and how many you get in a box is something I am simply not going to question.
[2] Of course, if I had indications that one of my *cats* had been having trouble putting their weight on one leg for a day and a half, I'd've been calling the vet by then.
[3] Actually, if they say *that*, I'm getting a second opinion. But you take my point.
[4] Although I think braces are over-the-counter, I am happy to take recommendations from health professionals.

Reading Yeats is like standing in a wet winding sheet on a desolate moor with winter coming down through the sky, in the transition between numb immobility and the wind letting you feel you're alive by slicing you open to the core.

I wonder how much of the mediocre fiction I've read has been immesurably improved by the fact that the good writers and poets have gotten to my brain first and tramped it up into a state that better responds to evocation through words--how much writing works because I *want* it to work, because it's so good when it does.

There's a type of candy called blue wires. Maybe six inches long, half the width of my finger, a thin blue-raspberry coating around a white-coconut core, like the stuff you can find in Licorice Allsorts.

I want some. Right now. The sort of "I'd get the bike out of the closet and bike the half-hour to South Keys if there was anyplace open down there that sold it" want that is just not being negotiable. Fortunately there are no inadequate substitutes in the house. It's a very specific want.

I looked up Richard Brautigan's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and found it suitably hyperlinked off a ?personal? site at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Why didn't anyone tell me there was poetry about the Internet? I mean, I don't think it's all that great--it seems too stuck in parallelling online to the physical world, a hunt for data, a landscape charred by flamewars, a world that's just a metaphor away from one you can walk around it. But the metaphors feel jammed in, forced to fit.

( tangent )

It's that kind of disconnect. Shouldn't there be some way of seeing this other than as a physical land?

Sondheim's What Happens When Dreams Look at the World is interesting, though; still with the physical metaphors, but they seem more Dali/Never-Ending Story-esque, a more delirious world. More of a feeling of a setup fuelled by desire; and for all its practical value, I think that's what fuels most of the interaction and experience online. I want to see this. I want to show you this. I want to know this, find this. I want to know that someone's died in London seven minutes after it happened, I want to see what someone I've just run across had to say five years and two countries ago, I want to extract the original documented appearance of that lovely funny quote about English being as pure and pristine a language as a cribhouse whore.[2]

Ellis described a representation of the connections once as a blue rose opening, a diagram that added a point of light every time a connection was made spreading out, unfolding in a kind of brilliant blue glory as the world woke up and the data sank in. All mapped across someone's eye in a high-tech decoration for a contact lens. Because it's fun, it's fashionable, it might be useful but by damn it's mostly there for what you want and what you want are pretty things, distractions, connections.

Random four a.m. thoughts.
---
[1] "O embleer Frith! [...] And kill them, you say, and help ourselves to the great burrow? We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires! Help ourselves to misery and death!"
Fiver always rocked.
[2] Because she is. Lovely lady, wonderful tricks, but a damn thieving tramp who'll roll you and rifle your pockets for linguistic nonsense if you happen to walk by her in the street. Now I'm doing it with the physical-world metaphors. It's really hard to escape. I'm tempted to label it Jungian.