Your del.icio.us tag could could be mistaken for a come on

I owe more words, but for now let's revel in the beauty of Kevin Brown's:

Diagramming Won’t Help This Situation

by Kevin Brown

Grammatical rules have always baffled
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns: I am unwilling to be him
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them~the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement~and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing
part of speech we can never seem to find.

"Diagramming Won't Help This Situation" by Kevin Brown, from Exit Lines. © PlainView Press, 2009.

When There's Nothing Left To Burn...

...you have to set yourself on fire.

What We Talk About, When We Talk About Love

I thought this was so perfect. Just perfect.


Not To Trouble You

by Leonard Nathan

Not to trouble you with love, I mean
those adolescent dreams of great, of greater,
or of greatest loving, let alone
the crumbly personal kind—compared with, say,
the public good or harder thoughts of death
obliterating thoughts of love, or after-
thoughts of love outgrown or love undone;
and not to be ironic either, not
to forget we come into the world alone
and leave it so; and not to be claiming more
than you can give, uncertain as I am
what I require: something like love, I guess,
whatever it is we've done without so long,
so faithfully and with such tenderness.

And these, compliments Graham Greene to Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, as he courted her in over 1,200 letters, poems and conversions to Catholicism:

"Darling, it's wonderful when the person one loves most in the world encourages one in what one loves next best (even though far less). … I've never met so complete a companion as you. Those winter evenings you describe seem to me the only thing worth having. It's companionship with you that I want & just that sort of companionship …

"And the whole thing would be an adventure finer than ordinary marriage, because it would be two, not merely fighting for each other, but for a shared idea. Darling, it sounds fantastic, but the fantastic is often wildly practical, as when Columbus put out from Spain. And I remember you wrote once that you did love me, though it wasn't in a way I understood, but, darling, it's a way I do understand, & it's the final because there's no reason why it should ever end, which is very different to the other. I wish to God (& I mean that literally) that this dream could come true."

Oh god it's wonderful/ to get out of bed/ and drink too much coffee/ and smoke too many cigarettes/ and love you so much/

I was writ large, like a queen or a saint

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

By the Hammer of Thor

The craziest frickin’ day of your life.
Imagine that.

The craziest. Frickin’ day. Of your life.

That commands attention. That warrants worry. Or, in the very least, at least in the case of a d. Graham Kostic and I, it propels you to shell out $40 for a 5K Warrior Dash, replete with mad cap obstacles (see: chemical maze, the hell fires of Armageddon, jankety old car lot, and post-apocalyptic Magic Kingdom Main Street mayhem).

So Graham and I arrive with our matching race shirts. Graham provided the inspiration and initial design template. I botched said design, went rogue, and created these gems (keeping in line with the catch phrase theme, ‘IN IT 2 WIN IT’).

Graham and I weren’t so much IN IT 2 WIN IT as we were in it to have our photographs taken. With each photograph we aspired to become the face of the website. It’s just good math. We are in matching t’s. We are SUPER amiable to all the surrounding runners (save the times Graham would try to raise my mildly competitive spirits by pointing to a runner nearby and loudly asserting ‘We’ll definitely beat HER’). We were the Warrior Dash pep squad, so it stands to reason that the hour plus 5 k’ers that kept pace with us would appreciate our efforts to raise Warrior morale. They respected our need for interval theatrics.

And that’s just the first lap.

Here’s a sampling of what followed:
I almost lost Graham to the chemical maze. Barrels of chemicals EVERYWHERE. And some had spilt. TWIST!

I had a hell of a time trying to climb the never ending series of mounds. If I had vertigo it would have set in because that was an endless vortex of loops.

The suspended wooden planks were no more than 1 foot wide! With my big monster feet I had to gingerly tip toe across the planks. The crowds behind us were wild. Graham seemed to have no trouble. He took it slow to placate me. He’s a dear friend.

There were rusted out cars. A whole field of them! We were expected to hurdle them. And we did. We also sat in the back of a bus for good measure. And shade.

And wouldn’t you know, but positioned right before the façade of a super cute town lay a long, deep pit of murky water. We were nervous, and far from prepared, but we counted down and ran through. There was some back splash and I found it particularly adorable when Graham asked, post-murk, “Am I dirty?” The best being a Warrior, who had long usurped us in ranking, returned to the murky water obstacle to reclaim a shoe he lost. And he found it. What a hunter! He also found a bonus box of rusted nails. In the murky water. Where people oft loose their shoes. Oh Monster Mash!

Move on to the hell fires. Graham and I were certain it was all for show. Like a warm Disney production, but were we ever fooled. Those coals were piping hot and we were expected to leap over thick, hot flames. Oh doctor… Thankfully I have freakishly long legs and Graham is very limber. We moved forward without sustaining burns of any form.

And on to the mud pit and the grand finale. It looked harmless. I could not deduce why everyone was crawling when they could just as easily walk across it. I put on a great big smirk and cased all the goons we’d soon pass as we approached the mud pit, but were my cheeks ever red! There was barbed wire near the base of the pit and we HAD to crawl under it. Graham went belly first, like a true warrior, whereas I tip-toed around and tried to stay as mud-free as possible. I finally conceded and ate dirt.

We moved forward, hand-in-hand to the roar of the crowd screaming “IN IT TO WIN IT”.

And I guess we did. Just that.

Beauty is 10, 9 of which is dressing.

Beauty
by Tony Hoagland


When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.

After all those years
of watching her reflection in the mirror,
sucking in her stomach and standing straight,
she said it was a relief,
being done with beauty,

but I could see her pause inside that moment
as the knowledge spread across her face
with a fine distress, sucking
the peach out of her lips,
making her cute nose seem, for the first time,
a little knobby.

I’m probably the only one in the whole world
who actually remembers the year in high school
she perfected the art
of being a dumb blond,

spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,
tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill
which was her specialty,

while some football player named Johnny
with a pained expression in his eyes
wrapped his thick finger over and over again
in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.

Or how she spent the next decade of her life
auditioning a series of tall men,
looking for just one with the kind
of attention span she could count on.

Then one day her time of prettiness
was over, done, finito,
and all those other beautiful women
in the magazines and on the streets
just kept on being beautiful
everywhere you looked,

walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance
in which you sense they always seem to have one hand
touching the secret place
that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—

It was spring. Season when the young
buttercups and daisies climb up on the
mulched bodies of their forebears
to wave their flags in the parade.

My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,
amazed by what was happening,
then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head
as if she was throwing something out,

something she had carried a long ways,
but had no use for anymore,
now that it had no use for her.
That, too, was beautiful.

So Said Siddartha..

..."I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins"

And in moments that compel clarity, so says Keith:

me: well I want you to take care of yourself
that's a mandate
oh Keith
the same refrain
I just want my life to have meaning
I feel like I'm just ambling about
keith: yeah I am there right now too Hula
me: what do you do, love?
keith: I mean i know how you feel
I think i have to find meaning in something above work, school and just enjoyment
keith: We need to find what has meaning first you know
I think that is most difficult

me: so true
so, to make it less cumbersome
let's approach it like it's a mission
or journey
or something
I like the idea of slaying dragons in pursuit of greater truth
what do you say?
keith: that sounds true to me. So when you have an idea how to attack this dragon bounce it off of me please
me: yeah. I could disspell certain wisdom
:)