Where am I?

Should I start again where I left off? Lift all the loose threads up to braid a poem? Am I suffocating myself with this systematic whirlpool of thought that I tend so carefully? I think I’m being too careful. I judge what I post here by my own standards, and I fear that my thought has grown a bit wild in the dark. I’ve become too sensitive taken up in books, and dreams. Where am I? I invite anyone who visits this place to make a comment and tell me what they think.

A huge weight of heat wakes me as I choke for air. A blanket of flames wraps my feet, my clothes, everything around me is on fire. I run naked out the door into the rain...

I Don't Write a Text

I don't write a text
I write a body with a skin
and bones underneath,
A life.

I don't write a text
I write an object,
With a surface
That covers something unknown.

I don't know what I write
Perhaps it's not for me,
or not to be known at all.

I don't write to remember
I do not write to know.
I do I suppose, write to wander.

As It Were

The truer reason

Feeling spoken with true feeling

Were a word

Always as combined reason

With truer reason a word feeling

Back behind the surface is the substance of imagination, a pure shapeless stuff, sort of like a nothing but like an everything too.

Land of Night

He was swung into the Land of Night by his toes, and was gently flipped right-side-up with his blanket covering him. He could see that outside the blanket it was as dark as his room. The air was cool and pressed close to the ground. The little boy pulled his blanket off and found that he was standing among the stars. The grass at his feet was cool, and the ground warm, and the dew soaked his socks. He looked to the sky above the stars, it was a black as pitch. And so, slowly the ground at his feet came into focus in the misty starlight. It seemed to him that the whole landscape was bundled around him like his blanket, the faint light held everything close. He could see only as far as he could shout and then there was a border of darkness. He felt like he was standing under a streetlamp exposed to the vast night around, that was free to stare at him, this lonely figure. The little boy sat down and drew his blanket so that only his face was showing. Oh, how his eyes shone in that soft starlight as he stared and trembled in wide open awe. So he waited. What do you expect came to him from behind the stars? I can tell you that at the time he expected nothing at all. That anyone should come or anything to happen hadn't occurred to him yet, so that my appearance wasn't a shock but was a gentle surprise. To his eyes I suppose that it seemed I melted into view, like appearing through a thick fog. I stood at a distance from him and observed him quietly, him unafraid and his face and eyes shining shrouded in his thick dark blanket.

The current vision has a placid surface,

but a vicious side cutting undertow,

with tame curls flipping away,

down at the bottom a low watt clairvoyant sits.

So, So, So,

so, so, so,
dress down long shadows
so, cry out mournfully
and unsurely tame

honestly I honestly,
sputter a deep dreary sound,
among
senseless shapeless visions
that cloud the dark
and fill in the night in my sleep.

Beyond Distinction

a wonderful wind opens
up a moment of
vision

a glimpse into an abyss
where from a warbling breath
rises from the listless blackness
a shapeless wonder of a voice,
in a sonorous whisper it speaks:

blackness to the stars
teeth, treasures, gifts,
and power beyond distinction.

Dragging the bottom, drifting along through,
the lowest basement of sleep, memories fall from above,
iridescent alien creatures from a tiny locked box of childish nightmares,
that only visit the deepest dreamer.

The Voice of Experience

In the world of what if's any idea you can have may be confirmed or validated with an active imagination. Figurative speech is a double edged sword, and speaking hypothetically is dangerous. Not unless you can find an everyday example that supports your idea, can you make your point coherent. Telling a true or mostly true first hand account can serve as a guide to your thesis. Figurative rhetoric is wily, you audience members each have a singular background of experience and knowledge that will interfere with your allegory or metaphor. Speaking abstractly and figuratively will lose them. Strictly speaking prosaically may shut their ears. If you want good and true stories to tell, you ought to start enacting your ideas and investing in your thoughts action. The voice of experience is refreshing.

Languagey is meledy,
Sensual is driving,
Good sense is drowning.

The history of art is silence.

The art of history is silence.

The silence of art is history.

The art of silence is history.

The silence of history is art.

The history of silence is art.

Dear Hunger and to my fellow Pain,

I do my best. I’ve lived inside the heart, but the cold has crept in. The bones are weak, and the flesh is warm. Tell me how to be the skin. We will be together forever, won’t we?

Dearly, Joseph

Poor Harold Grand Scare Murder Error

Gravy essed along it when if fires meant lost purses,

Mister Tray gone Miss Listen To Me,

Grand scrap mist missed Miss Cinnamon diction Mary,

Millicent morrow armor plateless faces in people places,

Marital instructor miser man in grief

Listlessly listing lavish tea cups meant rivals unraveled

The beastly snickerer smirked, the rivals trusted the nation.

The book is an architecture, i can hardly imagine it any other way, just as a labyrinthine subterranean complex. Rooms open into caverns of bright summer days, farewells at seaports, hotel rooms, and apartments. The corridors are non places non spaces, they are the narrator, perhaps. The narrator walks the corridors opening doors leading the reader through the building.

it is shapeless

it is beyond metaphor

it is like a wind

it slips along a fault line

like a mountain

onto traffic

I am moving to tumblr. If you like my work please follow me over here: http://josephstrohan.tumblr.com/

Quiet and Night

Just after bath time while your brushing your teeth and pulling on your pajamas Quiet starts getting ready too. Quiet is a shadow of the loud sounds of the day. His job is to fill the whole house, every room, hallway, basement, attic, little boy, little girl, mommy and daddy up, so that with the help of night, which is the day’s shadow everyone can sleep. Night comes just before quiet does. Night flies in gently without a sound to perch on a tree just out side. He is black and once he’s settled you can’t see him unless you catch his eye. He watches you like blackbirds sometimes do, but he, watches longer and more intently as he waits for Quiet to fill your room and fill you up. Then when your asleep Night folds his head under his wing an goes to sleep himself. Once Night falls asleep, Quiet’s work is done, and the house starts to dream and all the rooms in it, mommy and daddy, and you too.

http://13.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kri9gacGi61qz5njko1_500.jpg

Fertile Ground

In a parking lot next to the highway caught between a merging lane and a retaining wall, topped with a fence, covered by a caged pedestrian overpass, he grips the throttle and clamps the body of the bike between his knees. He idles stubbornly and waits for the police to decide to move on.

The season and place are nothing particular around here, It feels like every other night and place here in the city, mean and bored, senseless and restless. Something has to be done, the people need to keep in motion, even in all directions at once. This soil though, is very fertile. While the subdivision sleeps the parking lot teems, around in back or clumped under the dead lights. The neighbours can't breathe, their hearts are wild, their faces pallid. Their hot houses send them out into the night air.

2010

Sleep

Look at me with gentle eyes and speak to me softly,

night's, sweet, child, sleep.

Comfortable Under The Covers, And A Bonfire Warming Your Frontside (The Land Of Night)

These tiny points of light pass straight through me, they seem to cool the air. The horizon is a mist that drops away as near as I can shout. The whole landscape pulls up close around me, and night holds the faint light close. This tepid light does not set the night to ease, the blackness is a border to the stars.

Shadow Games

To shed our shadow cast before us, we need only step over it.

Melodic Chance

The nascent future, the receding past, the passing of time through the eternal present.

Field of Light

These tiny points of light pass straight through me, they seem to cool the air.

The Diary Of A Writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, P.3

“Still worse off is he who, of his own accord, seeks to study and to understand things. Even harder is the lot of him who candidly divulges such an intention. But if he ventures to declare that he has succeeded a bit in grasping something, and that he intends to express his thoughts, he is promptly deserted by everybody. Nothing is left to him but to find some one suitable fellow, or even hire him, in order to converse with him alone; perhaps to publish the magazine for him alone. It is a despicable situation, since it is as if one were speaking to oneself and publishing a periodical for one’s own amusement.”

portrait

Special Qualities of Books

Libraries become a mind after a while, by mere contact the books on the shelves begin to grow together, become linked, start to dream and later to think. Also, it is said that you can get lost in a book, as when you are alone, when it is very quiet, or sometimes not quiet at all. Sometimes reading — can be a waking dream.

Inspiring Thouhts from Fiona Tan's (Island, 2008) at The Vancouver Art Gallery

"Lazing on the pleasant side of boredom"

"...now the air feels cooler and she thinks this place may be becoming her home..."

"When she leaves, she will fold up this place, and put it in her pocket for safe keeping."

"...long long days of endless dusk..."

"Gaining distance is sometimes the only way to get close to what really matters."

Midnight Lunch and a Spring Derivé

A fragment from a story without a working title.

He was swung into The Land of Night by his toes, gently he was flipped right-side-up with his blanket still covering him. It was as dark outside the blanket as his room. The air was cool and pressed close to the ground. The little boy pulled his blanket from him and found that he was standing in the stars. The grass at his feet was cool, and the ground was warm, and the dew soaked his socks. The sky above the stars was black as pitch. Slowly the star lit ground came into focus in the misty light…

The Vertical Man

The vertical man / The vertical man

is a sky scraping syllogism, / is a deep well of light,

bloated with books / dense with understanding

who screams like an animal / who speaks with transcendent artfulness

into a bottomless chasm. / to the fog of time itself.

two cats (not my own though)

From Watt, By Samuel Beckett

Some see the flesh before the bones, and some see the bones before the flesh, and some never see the bones at all, and some never see the flesh at all, never never see the flesh at all.

From The Fourth Notebook, Franz Kafka

"The generations die as do the moments of your life... It's the old joke. We hold the world fast and complain that it is holding us. In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion."

A Fragment from Aurora

I can't stand at the threshold any longer. I slump from the weight of my hat. I wait for a word, a word that's late. The stars are beginning to come out so I sit down into the wall next to the door and wait. The house I sit against is my father's, who's in a great excitement right now, he thinks he's dying. Father is not feigning his illness, although his nerves aren't good, but Mother whips into such a frenzy, so infectious that even a fit of coughing warrants the surgeon, who doesn't come so quick anymore. So, thats why I'm here, hands double-fisted crouching against the the wall of my Father's house waiting for a man to come, proscribe a placebo and permit me some peace.

It's dusk and the room above me has hushed with the surgeon's entrance. A festival seems to hang in the quiet still air, the moment feels ripe. I slip round the corner down the street towards the square. A shore of warm light greets me that bathes the stone there, and I move with the tide of night rising from the sleeping houses onto the piazza. No one is here so I set down and wait, a friend is bound to pass by, tonight. There isn't a breeze, and any movement would seem slow, every step would seem as if in a dream, if a friend were to emerge from the night in the streets.

_______________________________

I stroll down the most touristic promenade in one of those rare golden August moments when not a soul is in sight. I turn down a lane to look for compatriots at window sills. At the first corner, Chiara has her chin flat on her window's ledge staring out dead eyed bored, beyond. It takes only a breath, a sigh in the stillness to lift her away from from ennui. She disappears from the sill out onto the street into arm and arm with me, and without so much as a word, we set off. She isn't cold like the approaching night, she holds those last rays of twilight close to me. We are walking to the river and for the elegant parks on the hills.

Fragmented Form

Our dear narrator is losing control, the protagonist has brought the dramatic twist ahead four chapters, this book is falling apart.

... Not to say Father's feigning this illness, that his nerves aren't good, but Mother whips into a fever so infectious that even a fit of coughing warrants the surgeon, who doesn't come as fast as he once did. So, thats why I'm here, hands double-fisted crouching against the wall of my home waiting for a man to come and proscribe a placebo and permit me some peace. It's dusk now and the room above me has suddenly hushed with the surgeon's entrance...

a patina of memory or a story told in silence

The greasy but neat linoleum, stone? Green glass covered lights make for an atmosphere of moisture despite the dryness in the air. The residents match the décor, nothing changes, and a particularly ornery sentiment pervades the hall.

Each neighbor plays their role easily, after decades of bickering, drama is theatrical and perfunctory. The elevator stands unused in the stairwell, stubbornly disused? The owners of the gelateria below hurry in and out of their flat all night long. I don’t think they’ve slept in three months. Wires, pipes, gas, telephone, all strapped to the walls that predate such conveniences, run in the crotch between wall and ceiling.

Preamble to a Self Conscious Text or A Room in a Book a Door to a Text

Inside this book is a building. The characters inside this book inside this building are actors. The story that they enact is based on a true story that happened right outside this book, in another building exactly the same as this one.

The Fictional Book

If I were to have written this book then I'm sure it would have stayed put. But as it stands this book is a fiction. Its existence wasn't at all stable, with a tiny crackle the book on the table never was.

... The house he sits against is his father's, who's in a great excitement right now, he thinks he's dying...

He can't stand at the threshold any longer. He slumps from the weight of his hat. He waits for a word, a word thats late. The stars are coming out so he sits down into the wall next to the door, to keep waiting...

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