one of the best things about being famous would be how embarrassing my dreams would become. one of the best things about being famous is how embarrassing my dreams have become. barack obama stole a bike and grazed among the homes of his childhood, where it was night and a carnival and a world was probably ending, and he gripped and blanched and escaped the city and crossed the depression of a fence and slid inside a dark barn, where hillary clinton was perched in a loft, cooing and fluttering and casting a long shadow that reached the tip of his bike’s own shadow. barack obama just walked right into a town bordering the ocean, and he knew that something was wrong, though he stepped down onto the sand anyway, dipping his head into the water and worrying, finally rounding to take a seat near the grass, where the beach began. hillary clinton moved closer to him. she took his hand, and they watched as the full, incurious waves began to elaborate, finding and replacing everything. 'don’t worry,' she said, 'i’ve been dealing with this for thirty-five years.' and now whenever he sees her it’s only gratitude, and when anyone asks he doesn’t know what to say, and he wants to show her how the carnival hides the gas station, how his hands bend against the curl of the water, and the barn she provided.

here are some election jokes:

1. Barack Obama (after winning a primary and greeting his overwhelmed crowd, as the roar finally dies down): You know, I’ve been through some rough shit, but tonight is all about me.

2. Also some kind of joke about voting the issues. I already know how I'm voting this year; I'm voting the issues.

FACE JOKES


While passing your priest after mass and shaking his hand:

You: Father Lou, welcome to my face.

While ordering at a restaurant:

Server/Lady Server: Okay, and for you?
You: Let's see, I think this evening I'd like to welcome the meat loaf to my face.

While looking into the distance:

You: Hey what's that!
(Someone turns, you move in closer, they turn back)
You: Welcome to my face.





BUS JOKES


Just after entering the bus, while standing and looking around:

You: Welcome to my face.

Just after entering the bus, while standing and looking around:

You: It's been a long journey.

Just after finding a seat in the bus, while looking around:

You: I call this bus closeness.

I had a dream that rumors of a New Egypt were spreading throughout the Ozarks. This summer I'd like to talk about it and look for it.

Ever since tentbox and I solved that murder mystery my right leg has been poisoned and last night I couldn't feel my right ankle bone but I don't even care; I hope this same thing happens to my right leg a million times. Several days after I solved the mystery I did a lot of things like high kick in front of the mirror and play wiffle ball and talk about my religious views before I even realized that my right leg was poisoned. I'm really glad I can attach a "case closed" tag to this mystery, even though it was so hot and my left foot ended up bleeding and my right leg was poisoned and we were briefly detained on suspicion of trespassing and murder.

I went to Austria for about a week and I guess we were supposed to go to some health care conference so my mom could talk about pregnant teenagers but all I ended up doing was listening to Toby Keith and going to T.G.I. Friday's. I don't know anything about country music but I know that I would like to think about hailstorms taking a toll on my family and giving directions back to the interstate and never complaining and never asking why. Something about the way country music bubbles and mortifies and gurgles all over your skin makes me feel like I'm nine years old and at the bottom of a pool or river, so while I was in Vienna I liked to imagine myself squinching my eyes and sinking to the bottom of the Danube while hearing 'You Ain't Much Fun Since I Quit Drinkin', then suddenly elevating out of the water and slamming into the grass just next to that clearing in America where Brad Paisley is exploring the crevices of a bar fly under the moonlight. It's kind of like that Pablo Neruda line, "Tyranny cuts off the singer's head/but the voice from the bottom of the well/returns to the secret streams of the earth/and rises out of nowhere through the mouths of the people," except in this case the tyrant is Europe and the voice is Toby Keith's. My godmother's husband used to play drums for Toby Keith. My grandfather knew Spanky McFarland I met Meadowlark Lemon my ancestors fought General Cornwallis in the Revolution I e-mailed Al Roker Adam Duritz hit on my mom I called a munchkin on the telephone Mr. Rogers wrote me a letter Warwick Davis and I lodged a complaint with eBay Bob Dylan gave me his guitar pick MaCaulay Culkin read me his poetry.

HERE IS A PICTURE OF MY FAMILY BEFORE WE ENTERED THE CORN MAZE


That morning we noticed you summarized at the crest of the slope—before we entered—
dark against the low roaming light like a two-dimensional star hustling near the birth
of a film, a yawing shape discrowned beneath the opening credits: the Consort of Sheep
as himself. The field, we saw, lay directly below the slope, and you traced it from
the second floor of a thin house: a square of corn surrounded on all sides by pasture,
rambling with trees that would sniff and lean away, murmuring complaints. It was just so
out of place at the center, and we might have thought you placed it there once,
the Architect of the Corn and we your poppets; we might have thought this—almost—
though we knew the vegetables were our own. It was only moments inside when I sensed
with devotion the sprouts folding into themselves, their sounds caving into gust and
finally eardrums, and like everyone else I wanted to be alone. From across the corn become
partition, before they disappeared, I could hear them breathing, and their reports entered
the batter of first light, cold snaps. I was the youngest and still afraid, and so I lurched
outside the shoots and up the slope to your thin house. Here is the picture. What do you
have to say to me now? Are you responsible? No. You never could understand the wind
at all. You too are alone. You are only a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores.

TERRORS OF ROMANCE AT THE DIPLOMATIC COMPOUND


Past the gates
beyond the guard
beside the long hungry sidewalk

an attaché crawls through and breathes on
the grass

no knees or feet all ruby elbows
and indented palms the whole night
abashed and slinking away to the measure

of his plodding
his trousers combing the earth.

East and toward the consul's den
what he calls the bullpen
a stake of light slides through the sill
and breaks through the turf below the window.

His own face tumbles through
he somersaults to the consul's feet
he lifts one eye to the consul's mouth which is blameless
and full and leveling the fullness of its quavering

as it replies "say ad referendum subject
to the subsequent concurrence of respective parties

say convalescence at the mouth of the Tigris

say several sets of rights

I know this house is an almost absent
and darkening spot in a dark corner
in a wandering capitol

but it mortifies that absence
when I hear you speak the names of things."

Oops I hit the median. Apparently you're not supposed to call it the median, but that's what I call it. It was snowing and freezing and I had been thinking a lot about the name Karen, and the person Karen. Do you know someone named Karen? I hope not; no one does. Your mom doesn't count. Before I hit the median I walked into the backyard and looked at my Dad's dead tomatoes and dead...turnips, and in the ice his plants were both dead and a neighborhood of spiders. The chomp when I walked said Karen and the tomatoes were named Karen and this picture is named Karen.

There are about a hundred different things going on and most of them have to do with dead malls. I've been thinking a lot about places that still exist even though no one sees them anymore, and at the top of my list is dead malls.

( dead malls dead malls dead malls )

For the past year I've been dropping the phrase self-realization crisis in all kinds of expansive and inappropriate situations. Sorry I gasped and touched your knee cap; I was having a self-realization crisis. Sorry I was unresponsive in your stack of newspapers last night; I was too self-realized to stay awake, and consequently unable to drive home. A few weeks ago I decided to live in a hermitage near the Abbey of Gethsemani for about a week after the semester, and I scattered some not-so-subtle hints throughout my circle of family and friends that a crisis of self-realization might be imminent during this period. At the hermitage there were a lot of raspberry-smelling books left in the cabinet by the bed, and a lot of them were by Thomas Merton, an international monk rock star of the mid-twentieth century and Gethsemani alum who died in Thailand when a poorly grounded fan electrocuted his heart. He wrote a book called No Man is an Island, and it's all about selfless love but in a good, interesting way. It was so good that I thought maybe I was about to puncture the veil, but later I fell asleep and dreamt that I went to the cineplex with my best friend, an Asian nevertheless named Ghostface Killah, who was arrested at the theater. When I awoke the dream had soured me on selfless love, and so I left the house and moped through the first light on the Gethsemani grounds. Here are some pictures I took that morning on a hill and in a low chair, in a sequence of after, before and during:

here is something interesting. read this poem and please don't assume that it's supposed to be a good poem:


Elegy for the Native Guards

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . .
—Allen Tate

We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare—
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass a lee—
half reminder of the men who served there—
a weathered monument to some of the dead.

Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.

The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance—
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?

All the grave markers, all the crude headstones—
water—lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high
round, unfinished, half-open to the sky,
the elements—wind, rain—God's deliberate eye.

am i and everyone i know a lot better at poetry than i ever realized? should I start writing "eracism" poems myself? anyway what I'm getting at, if you don't already know, is that this is the title poem from the book that just won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

also the don ho RIP glossy 8x10 signed in beautiful silver sharpie that i placed on ebay only sold for 9.50, so i'm going to have to find another way to recoup my debt after losing my wallet. according to my secret hits counter, this means that approx. 50 people looked at and then decided against bidding on this glossy signed 8x10 photo.

the new about me portion of my facebook profile says 'where do i go at night,' and this question has become increasingly important to me the more time i devote to considering it. i want to do stuff at night. i don't mean i want to go out and drink beers; i already DO that. i mean i want to be in the middle of a field at night, doing stuff, like digging my hand in the ground. an ideal vocation would be manipulating nature for a profit. some have suggested that i work in agriculture or for a state park, but i don't like to work and that's not what i'm talking about, anyway. i don't want to cultivate; i just want to push or remove things. like i just press bark further into a tree, or maybe rub grass in my hand until it itches, and somehow i get paid for this? i believe there is a lot of primitive and important ground at our periphery, fields of neglected ground on which no one ever does stuff, and it just eternally sits there, bristling. negative/magic energy has conspired to distract and disallow us from discovering these fields at night and placing our hands inside them. i don't WANT to drink beers tonight; i don't WANT to hear a lecture about the medicine wheel. i want to go do stuff.

i remember once this girl and i were walking out in a cornfield in the middle of the night, before i had really given nights and fields their deserved consideration, and suddenly a man in a dark cloak with what looked like a rifle emerged from the cornstalks and yelled 'halt!' at the both of us. at the time i guess i just assumed he was a lowlife or a drug addict, but now i think that maybe he was the conspiring negative/magic energy manifested in the form of a sentry and mandated to stop us, because we were accidentally too close to reaching the peripheral ground on which no one ever does stuff. three nights ago i was at the back patio of a bar arguing with someone about how to spell my name when a large cat quickly climbed up the branches running up the side wall of the bar. something about how bloated and coarse it was made the cat seem very basic and purposeful, and i suspect that it was not far removed from being in a field outside the city, doing stuff, having only returned for rest or some other practical reason. i don't know exactly where the cat came from, but i want someone to be startled when they find me there.

i'm thinking about creating a geocities website that explores THE FOOD PYRAMID. if anyone else wants to get in on this, they're gonna have to have a pretty good excuse.

lately i guess i've been screaming a lot at night. i don't remember screaming, but usually the next morning someone upstairs will say 'i thought i heard something weird last night; were you screaming?' and i'll say 'you know what, i think i may have been.'

shannon, over the past 24 hours i've been piecing together the murkier chunks of this last dream and i believe it may relate to the fact that i've been stealing your shampoo at night. i don't really buy my own shampoo because i've never quite been able to make it to the supermarket, and i guess shampoo is too intimate a product for others to buy for me, so for the past six months i've been using pantene auburn and burgundy expressions shampoo. lately i've noticed that my hair may be turning a little auburn, and so i thought if i stole your blond highlights shampoo, this might cause the two shampoos to cancel each other out? anyway in the dream i screamed about there was a lot of blond hair, and i think the blond strands were threading together into a tan mat on the top of which i painted a map of the new world. i remember this whole process being medium-upsetting, but i can't be certain if i screamed about it. who knows. regardless of what made me scream, i remember thinking that it was probably the best thing that ever could have happened to me, because after that the dream really started to take off.

Dear Mulan,

One thing we all have in common is that, day in and day out, each and every one of us attempts to reconcile our dread, our awe and our vulnerability with an enduring, almost acrid desire to play volleyball. With this in mind, I have created an additional livejournal username, volleyballmaybe. This will only consist of volleyball-themed poems, and various cracks at articulating my feelings about the sport. Visit it for volleyball-themed poems.

ANOTHER TENSE MOMENT AT MASS


During the homily a woman
begins to paint a portrait of the Holy Ghost

ANOTHER TENSE MOMENT DURING HOLY COMMUNION


The boy licks the host from his braces