1. |
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Please go gentle into that good night.
For Pluto, you can see the stars in Flag.
Rage, rage against the artificial light.
Go into the darkened pines so that you might
capture stars in their patterned zig-zag.
Please go gentle into that good night.
In modern times, ‘gainst sky our cities fight
and swallow dark in heavy, plastic bag.
Rage, rage against the artificial light.
For speeding cars the streets demand our sight,
but, Dylan Thomas, here rest your iambic swag
and please go gentle into that good night.
With corners etched by forest, space is tight,
so instead we give in to nature’s nag
to rage, rage against the artificial light.
Go to Mars Hill, and from its height
bathe self in darkened gift to Flag.
Please go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the artificial light.
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2. |
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They (antecedentless) say Paris is the city of Romance,
but my memory can romanticize nowhere like
Carnoules:
population: 3 385,
train station: 1,
farms: infinite.
Zola may have put Christine in Paris, but in Carnoules,
Winter Solstice Midnight can cast me as real-life
damsel-in-distress, lost and penniless at a train station,
well enough,
an old librarian my bibliothèque savior
keeper of the only internet in town.
Ex-pats may trip into greatness along Parisian rues,
but I enjoy my trip into the sucking mud
of a Provence rainy season
tuned to the current pulsing through
ankle high electrical fence:
arms full of hay, grain, mucking shovel for equestrian lovers.
You may enjoy long walks along the River Seine
contemplating the hues of love, requited or not.
I’ll take the Carnoules stroll along stream
for the half-hour trip (both ways) away from horses,
towards town and grocery stores
for a day’s worth of chocolate and wine,
that we always plan to make last a week.
La Tour Eiffel has fireworks on New Year’s, oui,
but my Russian log-cabin mates
have a hookup to Russian television:
complete with Putin giving speeches
surrounded by Russian ballerinas and middle-aged pop stars.
They are only slightly insulted when
I accidentally pronounce Putin as “poutain.”
You take Paris,
I’ll take a tiny sliver of horse farms
tucked neatly between Marseilles and Nice,
and while you blend like beige into
a backdrop painted for another’s ideal,
I will construct my own
in the tiny crevices of an ordinary elsewhere.
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3. |
Hometowns
01:26
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Hometown is a word a little heavy on the o’s,
a little light on the consonants,
and full of space,
merely pricked by lip to lip or
tongue to roof. Even with two trap doors,
the word is still full of yawning.
I eat dry, desert air in my empty lungs,
chewing on the idea of vacant nostalgia,
but merely fall into hometown’s spacious o’s.
Space
is what people move to the suburbs for.
Space
is what people leave them for too.
I space on what I did here for seventeen years,
and wonder if time merely melted into
Crayola Crayon Dalí under sun not meant for man,
remembering surrealist blur of
a loneliness, jarred inside a house of beige space:
careful not to get burnt on the desert outside.
We lived here for my dad to work with outer space:
to send rockets into a cool night sky invisible on gooey
desert-baked asphalt, sticking to my feet
to hold me in place,
despite rocket propelled from H to N,
I breath through hOmetOwn hoops to
finish. To move the fuck on
past the city’s borders into that unknown, unseen
space,
the faceless kind that’s anywhere but here.
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4. |
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5. |
Inu's Sad Dream
01:49
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6. |
Lost in Bordeaux
02:09
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Ceci est notre petite Américaine, Lizzy, et elle parle français très bien! Mais, attention, on encore a besoin de parler très doucement pour elle à comprendre. Elle vient d’état Arizona. Elle est avec nous pendant quatre semaines. I Pendant le premier deux semaines, nous restons dans notre AM maison à Bordeaux. Nous sommes visités la centre ville, et nous avons pris le petit train qui donne l’histoire de Bordeaux, et Romain a écouté en Allemagne parce qu’il est rigolo. Nous aussi sommes visités une vignoble COMPLETELY à Saint Émilion, mais il pleuvait et Lizzy a peur d’alcool parce qu’elle est très américaine! Les autres deux semaines nous avons passé à Cap Ferret dans notre maison des vacances et avec notre bateau. C’était très LOST agréable, et je pense que Lizzy apprend plein de français!
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7. |
Mayer
01:02
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Night sky is most beautiful
with company of nothing:
cityless, peopleless, lightless,
drowning in desert emptiness.
I enjoy the feeling of being
small.
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8. |
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Split city, sprung from straddled Limfjord,
you industrialize Denmark in brick across the watery scar
cutting Nørresundby from south-side Aalborg.
American me wants to toss Legos to this fjord,
like tea. Like childhood tea party, I will
leget godt—play well in rebellion.
I will dye your fisker, fish, rainbow with
the plastic brick you’re so little known for,
the one you refuse to medium
Ai Weiwei’s art with, shying away
from the rebellion into which children eventually grow.
I wonder which side of this fjord
you seed with the seedy.
Which soil nourished your neo-Nazi government?
Where is the fig tree you use to fuel Syrian-refugee fire?
Is it the same cemetery in Nørresundby
where your Viking ancestors rot?
Or south, beneath Jomfru Ane Gade:
the longest bar street in Northern Europe.
Do you ever worry its cobblestones will be worn to bre
ak, and that you will be swept into the rushing
aquafer of your alcoholism hidden beneath?
My dear happiest country on Earth, I only ask
your kærlighed, your coziness, your kartofler.
Smiling, I ask that you mix ink in warm blood
against cold winter, and etch your cozy hygge into
the base of my neck. Fill me with your culture,
please,
I need a way to fight
my fermented darkness through your
twenty-hour long nights.
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Grandpa Rosevelts Sandy, Oregon
Inspired by intelligent alien friends who like to study the American south-west (because tradition dictates some things), but also north-west, we like words and strings and ambient things, but not fluctuating vocal tones, because then our aliens would go have other, more monotone friends. ... more
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