Driftwork

Poetry

Imagine a man in a ditch

The wheels of his car still spinning

I don’t mean he despairs

I mean, if he does not

He sees in the manner of poetry

Steve Tomasula after G Oppen

Shall we?

Not far from this very bluff where I am now is the beach where I once told a woman about talking to myself; actually I can almost see the very place, right down there. Now, just for a while, we’re going to pretend that I’m talking to myself again, like I used to. Now, just for a while, we’re going to pretend - don’t take this personally - that you’re not here at all. Most of the best things I’ve ever said, the most fluid, stutterless, sonorous things, were to myself, and now I’m going to try one more time to say everything I can find in me that might be worth saying, and hope that whatever I find in me to say is only the road, and not the place to where the road is going.

Snow Crash

black desert of the electronic night

Boxer Santeros

Do you ever feel like there’s a thousand people locked inside of you? But it’s your memory that keeps them glued together. Keeps all these people from fighting one another. Maybe in the end, that’s all we have. The Memory Gospel.

Daemonomania

For thus it is in the passage times, times such as they began to understand they were living in. In those times we come to understand  our membership in certain long-established - in fact horribly ancient - groups, sodalities, brotherhoods or armies, of whose existence we had never before been aware. Indeed our coming to understand that we are brothers or comrades in them is not different from out sudden discovery that they exist: an excitement, a euphoria, a fear even of what we are about to be called upon to do, or perhaps fail to do. (105)

End of the world

When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn’t come all at once but passes and repasses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin. The coming of the end might at first lift and shake just one county, one neighborhood, and not the others around it; might feelably ripple beneath the feet of these churchgoers and not of those tavern-goers down the street, shatter only the peace of this street, this family, this child of this family who at that moment lifts her eyes from the Sunday comics and knows for certain that nothing will ever be the same again.

And through the world ends sooner for some than for others, each one who passes through it - or through whom it passes - will be able to look back and know that he has moved from the old world to the new, where willy-nilly he will die: will know it though all round him his neighbors are still living in the world, amid its old comforts and fears. And that will be the proof, that in his fellows’ faces he can see that they have been left behind, can see in the way they look at him and that he has crossed over alive. (John Crowley Daemonomania 17)