modified from the original

The art of losing:
filled with the intent
to be lost.

Accept the fluster,
the hour badly spent.
The art of losing,

losing farther, losing faster:
where it was you meant
will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.
Three beloved houses went.
The art of

two cities,
two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but

(the joking voice, a gesture
I love)
too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!)

(One Art by Elizabeth Bishop)

The Tempest

I cried to dream again
I cried to dream
I cried to
I cried
I

again

dream again

to dream again

cried to dream again

I cried to dream again

To be nostalgic for the place you are and the time that is—can we call that self-indulgent melancholy or is it something more?

Notebook 002

Three teen girls at a table in a coffeeshop. Full of of laughs, likes, ums, oh my gods.

Two of them are trying to get the third to say something. She laughs and oh my gods and nos.

"Well, type it then!"

On her phone, I guess they mean. Send a text message that says whatever is unspeakable.

Notebook 001

Stuck in my apartment all weekend.

Always assumed our building was soundproofed—but now I hear a neighbour. She screams randomly throughout the day. It might be sex noises, but I don't think so.

It makes me wonder if my other neighbours have crummy sex lives.

Sometimes she sings. She has a good voice, but it's the kind of voice that knows it's good so it doesn't actually convey much other than the fact of its goodness.

Maybe the screams are her singing Diamanda Galas style.

Question: is singing loudly while alone kind of like masturbating?

Tweek

So the challenge of coming up with exactly 100 words per entry kind of turned me off updating this blog. It also made me do weird things with sentences. Trim fat and trim fat and trim fat. End up with 92 words. Go back and add 8 words of fat.

That's why I've decided 100 will be the limit, not the exact quantity, from here on out. I have a lot of material accrued in my notebooks. Time to do this properly.

Nan 1

Nan loved to news around and to gossip, but it drove Pop. He'd be poisoned with her if she got to talkin when he could hear.

He'd say "Ellen! Don't be talkin!"

And Nan'd come back with "Whist! I'm not talkin, I'm only sayin!"

Nan had an abrupt way. If you were on the phone and she got tired of you, she'd cut in. "Well I must let you go, now." And she'd hang up before you could say anything else.

(I never witnessed any of this. It's hearsay from my parents. Nan and Pop have been dead for a long time.)