and in this there is the soft patter of the rain, an incessant thing that does not leave me alone. What a terrible comfort.
Monthly Archives: February 2008
pearl-saliva-tree-fingers
i shovel a mouth
full of pearls, gritty and shiny
until my teeth crack
and my tongue flattens
out of over my jaw and the edges
push against the base and i would
choke with laughter if it wasn’t for my ribs
heaving and collapsing, an armadillo
of bones, and instead
i stretch backwards until i can see
behind me and all the world
suddenly makes trees weeping their limbs
into the mud and fingers sprout out like grass
writhing without palms and
she would have been born without a palm
and i cough out the pearls bloody and sticky
and the saliva drapes over my eyes
but nothing ever blurs, not even the fingernails, not even
the swirls of a thousand fingertips
to be simply blind
lax and cracking, like a painted petal falling apart at the seams. she needles and threads through another day while her spine unravels at her children’s fingertips. i sat solemnly on the porch waiting for the sun to bring some warmth to these bones. a dog across the street mangled the hedges and my neighbor lost his mind throwing cartons of cigarettes at it. these are the things dreams are made sour, she said, and rolled off the skin from her elbow down to her wrist like a glove, bloody and thick. between the veins and bones i saw a pulse and then could not see anymore. to be blind in the heat, i whispered, to be simply blind.
a perfect dream
the truth is i do not spend enough time with them, i am caught up in my own obsessions, in my willful emptying of space, place, in disappearing into the circuits, into the nonsense minutiae of rights management and authentications, the technology of disappearing or disappearing into technology. i fall asleep exhausted into my daughter’s arms, she grasps me through the night, and i sleep and sleep and find rest. my son, my daughter, my wife, all in my arms, a perfect dream
nursery fable
hanzel and gretel went up the hill to fetch a pail of humpty dumpty’s eggs but they came upon the house of the three bears where the first bowl of porridge was too hot and the second too cold and when they were about to eat the last which was just right grandma came down the stairs and they both looked at her and said, my grandma what big teeth you have and the wolf replied, all the better to eat you with! and tore off the grandmother disguise and chased throughout and out of the house where an old witch was stopping by and threw a poisoned apple into the wolf’s jaws and the wolf fell asleep just like that in the woods but the seven dwarfs found him and they were stricken with sorrow and hearing their cries the beast came along and kissed the wolf and suddenly the beast became a charming prince and the wolf awoke with such a fright that he ran off to hide in one of the three pigs’ homes.
vhost edir ldap auth setup
^virtualhost *^
DocumentRoot “data:/www/htdocs/webwork/”
ServerName webwork
ServerAlias loki loki.savo*.us
ServerAdmin admin@savo.us
CustomLog data:/www/logs/loki.savo.us.log combined
LoadModule ldap_module modules/utilldap.nlm
^ifmodule util_ldap.c^
LoadModule auth_ldap_module modules/authldap.nlm
LoadModule edir_module modules/mod_edir.nlm
^directory data:/www/htdocs/webwork^
AuthType Basic
AuthName Private
AuthLDAPURL ldap://planetary/ou=users,o=savopoulos,c=us
require edir-user
Order allow,deny
Allow from 192.168.1
Satisfy any
^/directory^
^/ifmodule^
^/virtualhost^
sleep devotion
every dream has its consequence, some unforeseen cost that can not be accounted for. my mother traded her life for a man that promised her a new world in which he song abandoned her in. and now as her older siblings begin to endure the ravages of time, she weeps because she can only console them thousands of miles away. i gave up a life of words and letters for some sort of normalcy only to lament how precarious and tenuous that normalcy actual is. every dream has its price, if only it was matter of how much sleep could be devoted to it.
knot holes
there is no escape from this. push your fingers through a chain linked fence. feel the paint chip away into your mouth. i taste the bitterness of my life my love, i taste the disgust of the wrongs i’ve done. wasn’t the night once kind? rub your face against the rust, scrape your knee against the foundation. i am nothing more than this, than flesh broken open, than blood ripped out from within. i am weakness, i am pity. cut me into pieces, fit me through the knot holes of all that i am.
ok to delete this
it is ok to delete this post, to wipe it from memory. your daughter struggles with the attentions her newfound brother steals from her. she tosses and turns through the night knowing that something has fundamentally changed. my son gargles and razzes and shrieks like some mad miniature godzilla stuck to our hips as we saddle him around the house. a thick snow blanket over night swaddles our home but my daughter loses her mind at the sight of me stumbling awake. she tugs and pleads and never stops dancing from corner to corner. timidly, her eyes on the tv screen, my wife whispers, do you still like me? you cannot delete this, no matter how much it hurts. it will always radiate outward, it will always overwhelm you. it almost cost you all this.
Project Snowflake: Opening
when they found her, there wasn’t much of her to find. twigs and cracked blush. her nails had always been cut to the quick but painted a deep red, almost black. i would want the blood to be seen, she would tell me, when i made you bleed. her eyes were still open, staring at strewn tic-tacs inches from her mouth. as if she threw them up. a twisted arm was snapped out behind her, her palm in that half grip of someone just barely hanging onto their purse while chasing down a cab. they found one of her shoes by the curb, about fifteen feet away, where she must have tripped, they say, trying to get away. she got away with everything but in the end, it all caught up with her.