Re: a comment on Us Sinners by BrandonW	19-Nov-05/11:47 PM
You dummy. By declaring that I would declare myself the winner, you're declaring yourself the winner. I win.
Re: a comment on Us Sinners by BrandonW	19-Nov-05/11:45 PM
Saying "trump" is not positing a response. It is only trumping. The rest of this comment is your typical madness. To wit: DOVINA: I particularly don't believe in assuming beliefs in others when they have not clearly stated blah blah blah ZODIAC: I don't do that. DOVINA: I never said you did. I was commenting generally. ZODIAC: But you're assuming beliefs. About me. DOVINA: Trump. I'm "wily".
Re: a comment on Blackout, Amman, November, 2005 by zodiac	19-Nov-05/11:49 AM
I was able to avoid the locusts. I wasn't able to avoid the mosquito, who was, and still is, real-life.
Re: a comment on Bread and blackthorns by Caducus	19-Nov-05/11:47 AM
- Oh, almost forgot your gift: HISTORY Jennifer Michael Hecht Even Eve, the only soul in all of time to never have to wait for love, must have leaned some sleepless nights alone against the garden wall and wailed, cold, stupified, and wild and wished to trade-in all of Eden to have but been a child. In fact I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place.
Re: a comment on Bread and blackthorns by Caducus	19-Nov-05/11:46 AM
I was referring to your comment "A Right Brain cannot get this I know", which is surely directed at me. You'll deny. I won't care.
Re: a comment on Us Sinners by BrandonW	19-Nov-05/11:41 AM
As a woman, you are disqualified from describing the perfect woman. Your perfect woman is undoubtedly a man.
Re: a comment on Us Sinners by BrandonW	19-Nov-05/11:40 AM
I think when you or I assume God, we almost always assume Christian God. You can argue, but "There either is God, or there isn't" is a very Christian-God-minded thing to say. I'm not hedging; I don't particularly believe in believing. I'll refuse to admit or deny the existence of anything unproven or unproveable. Call it a pier, then. Fishing, anyone?
Re: a comment on Us Sinners by BrandonW	19-Nov-05/11:35 AM
Is that Mark Twain? This is: "If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be - a Christian." "There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him - early."
Re: Gerry's Song by ALChemy	18-Nov-05/11:10 PM
PS-I'm glad you're posting. I was afraid we'd scared you off it.
Re: rubble rooster by FreeFormFixation	18-Nov-05/10:37 PM
Tread along, tread along, tread along, yeah. You're like a stick of macaroni in bed. Eat the ritual food, my friend, So that your macaroni will be steady in bed. Bling-blabling-bling-bling! - Bunny Wailer
Re: i remembered by skaskowski	18-Nov-05/10:32 PM
No comma after "greed"; no period after "plight"; no comma after "cry"; comma rather than period after "try". Oddly good.
Re: A daisy chain for Nina by Caducus	18-Nov-05/10:30 PM
Here is a story I never told you. Living in a rented house on South University in Ann Arbor, long before we met, I found bundled letters in the attic room where I took myself to work. A young woman tenant of the attic wrote these letters to her lover who had died in a plane crash. In my thirtieth year with tenure and a new book coming out, I read the letters in puzzlement. She is writing these letters to somebody dead? There is one good thing about April. Everyday, Gus and I take a walk in the graveyard. I am the one who doesn’t piss on your stone. Oh, winter when snow and ice kept me away. I worried that you missed me. Perkins, where the hell are you? In hell; Everyday, I play in repertoire the same script without you, without love, without audience except for Gus who waits attentive for cues like a walk, a biscuit, bedtime. The year of days without you in your body swept by as quick as an afternoon. But, each afternoon took a year. At first, and most outright, I daydreamed about burning the house, kerosene and pie plates with a candle lit in the middle. I locked myself in your study with Gus, Ada and the rifle my father gave me at twelve. I killed our cat and our dog and swallowed a bottle of pills knowing that if I woke up on fire, I had the gun. After you died, I stopped rereading history. I took up Cormick McCarthy for the rage and murder. Now, I return to Gibbon, secure in his reasonable civilization, he exercises detachment as Barbarians skewer Romans. Then, Huns galloped from the sunrise wearing skulls. What’s new? I see more people now. In March, I took Kate and Mary to Pierre’s. At the end of the month, ice dropped to the pond’s bottom and water flashed and flowed through pines in Western light. The year melted into April and I lived through the hour we learned last year that you would die. For the next ten days, my mind sat by our bed again as you diminished cell by cell. Last week, the goldfinches flew back for a second spring. Again, I witnessed snowdrops worry from dead leaves into air. Now, your hillside daffodils edge up and today, it is a year since we set you down at the border of the graveyard on a breezy April day. We stood in a circle around the coffin and its hole under pines and birches to lower you into the glacial sand. When I dream, sometimes your hair is long and we make love like we used to. One nap time, I saw your face at eighty with many lines, more flesh, the good bones distinct. It is astonishing to be old. When I stand after sitting, I am shocked at how I must stretch to ease the stiffness out. When we first spoke of marriage, we dismissed the notion because you would be a widow twenty-five years or maybe I would not be able to make love while desire still flared in you. Sometimes now, I feel crazy with desire again as if I were forty, drinking and just divorced. Ruth Houghton had a stroke. Our daughter sent me the album of the photographs Roger took in his documentary “Passion”. Inside and outside our house, every room, every corner, one day in September 1984, I howled as I gazed at that day intact. Our furniture looked out of place as if vandals had shoved everything awry. There were pictures on the walls we put away long ago. The kitchen wallpaper shone bright red in Roger’s kodacolor. It faded as we watched, not seeing it fade. - Donald Hall, about Jane Kenyon
Re: soon i will travel by ay deee	18-Nov-05/10:16 PM
Agreed.
Re: a comment on Gerry's Song by ALChemy	18-Nov-05/10:16 PM
It is gay.
Re: Gerry's Song by ALChemy	18-Nov-05/10:15 PM
Nice. The second-to-last line tripped me up, but for a poem meant to be read in the accent of Groundskeeper Willie, that's no biggie.
Re: a comment on Love letter by zodiac	18-Nov-05/10:08 PM
THE STORY OF HAP After a disastrous stint as an exchange student in Mexico with his ex-girlfriend Claire, Hap returns to grad-school in Orlando, is taken to north Georgia in a botched carjacking, meets his future wife Katie, gets nabbed in a crooked speed trap, moves to Chicago, completely dissolves his marriage, rebuilds it, meets his doppelganger, finds religion, and loses it again. All of these parts exist, though mostly not in a form I'd be proud to show people. Despite the similarities, his life is nothing at all like mine, except that we've been to all the same places. Currently, Hap's a soil-scientist with a grown daughter on a Fulbright grant to Jordan. His life's about to be changed by a suicide bombing in a Starbucks (he is unharmed) and his daughter's relationship with an Arab. If he's not a feature film (in the Lost in Translation vein) within five years, I'll eat my dishdash.
Re: a comment on Love letter by zodiac	18-Nov-05/10:00 PM
Well obviously love letter's a misnomer, since he's leaving. I stand by jingle, though. Its original title, up until the moment I posted, was "Riff for a Lazy Rhythm". "Shaken baby syndrome is a severe form of head injury that occurs when a baby is shaken forcibly enough to cause the baby's brain to rebound (bounce) against his or her skull."
Re: a comment on Love letter by zodiac	18-Nov-05/9:55 PM
I've thought of another one: My wife and I have an imaginary baby (known only as The Baby) conceived at the first moment of our relationship. Right now he's almost four-and-a-half years old and still occasionally referred to, usually in the form "Where's The Baby?" or "I wonder whatever happened to The Baby?" As far as I know, The Baby's been locked in the closet for the last three years. Also, my wife is one of the best special educators in America, (that's not just me talking, most people say this,) amd has several years' experience with actual shaken babies. This has not stopped her from declaring Shaken Baby Syndrome her "favorite disability" and occasionally, publicly pretending to be a shaken baby.
Re: a comment on Us Sinners by BrandonW	18-Nov-05/9:49 PM
In the interest of bridge-building: Of course I don't believe any god wrote, inspired (in the scriptural sense), or approves of the Bible. I don't particularly believe in God. I do, however, believe that if you assume the Christian God, even literarily, you'd should also assume the Bible's true.
Re: a comment on Us Sinners by BrandonW	18-Nov-05/9:43 PM
Yes, I left you that dodge. If you answer seriously now, I promise I won't bite.