The Common Man
“Turn Forever”
I drive hard and fast, the way a real resurrection should feel,
like the last 10 seconds of every round when the stopwatch man thumps the canvas,
like the third time you had sex or the first time you were with that second girl–
drove up to the big city, bought the booze, knowing where it would lead,
was it in Madison or Los Angeles, Chicago or New York?
Like all things equally beautiful and ferocious.
Like a string of metaphors that just go on and on laying end to end
like a road that adds up to the all the symbolism you see in your days–
like how you happened to have change equal to the ages of your children in your pocket,
or how you found that rusty nail in your jeans, remembering you picked it up
when you refurbished the one gable roof over that wishing well,
so you grasp it tight and hope for something,
like maybe that there’s a life after this
because you’ve worked awful hard being nice to everyone,
while not taking shit from anyone who could afford to keep their mouth shut,
and that should be worth something, in fact if someone asked you about it you would
say that is probably worth everything, or almost everything, or it should be.
And if you’ve come this far you should probably take a deep breath,
hold it in until you feel your lungs expand, and you feel their
edges, like the limits of yourself and the rim of the
expanse of immortality. You probably smoked a little in college but that shit
scraped off long ago; still you should feel it at the bottoms and not be afraid
to stir it up a little. Grab a cold one for winter or a warm one for summer,
if the world stretches out in white, then it is bleak and you are alone,
but everything is alone,
you are the same;
if it is hot then the world stretches out in freshness and the new
things are everywhere and they are all alive just as you are alive,
you are the same.
Love the changes because
it turns, turns, turns…
We’ll turn forever, you and me.
You have chosen this life.
Out of Pocket
“Change”
Soft spoken novice, we lifted you up
and gave you voice, filled your pockets
with wishing well nails we painted blue
to symbolize the sea. Some Christians
carry one shiny nail because they say
it reminds them of Christ, but these are
rusty because they’ve been circling the
water a long time. They’ll remind you
of the breadth of your step—how far
it is out your front door. Smile and shine
like a sharpened edge because at this
pace, your prey will never be able to
outrun you. And you might last a lifetime.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
I recently finished reading this book on a long car-ride back from Green Bay, Wisconsin. And with that sentence leading this off, I’d like to say this is not my typical review writing but a general commentary on the novel.
The book bears a good deal of similarity to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There’s an established premise within the first couple of pages that addresses something equally political and human that will be investigated throughout the book, there is a series of shorter stories involving different characters that comprise the whole, there are authorial intrusions that not only act as general commentary but they directly address the construction of the writing and the characters treating them as fictive entities, it’s good, and there’s a guy who has extra-marital affairs that his wife knows about and is somehow expected to accept by the guy. But do not be led astray by this long list of similarities! This is a different book, and it addresses different issues, as well as some similar ones, as Kundera’s other works. My edition was translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim and was printed in 1994 by HarperPerennial (I found it in a used bookstore actually.), and I recommend the edition–not that I can read Czech, but the style seemed similar to other Kundera books, so I imagine it was well-maintained or there’s some big conspiracy between all the translators of Milan Kundera’s work.
The book is divided into 7 sections: Lost Letters, Mother, The Angels, Lost Letters, Litost, The Angels, The Border. Kundera, in one of his authorial intrusions where he directly addresses the writing of the novel, describes the sections as variations on each other, which, although he has done writing that played in the same way before, adds an interesting twist on the breaking up of narrative throughout. The war of the political versus the cultural is played out during the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia (and the many other occupations of the country are occasionally brought into play as well). The fear and probability of how a culture’s identity can be erased by political propaganda and control are expressed within the first section, and brought into the narrative with the first line of section 2: “It is 1971, and Mirek says that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (3). The book does not limit itself to this topic, but it revisits it frequently and plays out a few variations, as Kundera has dubbed the sections.
Overall this was a fantastic read, and I recommend it highly. The book readily breaches into discussing its own intellectual prerogatives, but as always Kundera invites the reader to share in his theories. It addresses contemporary matters and maintains a firm grip on analyzing the evolution of the modern world, while not getting bogged down in its own language.
It’s just over $11 at Amazon.com. Click here to buy it/look at it from their site.
A Venture Gained
So it’s been awhile since I marketed anything, and by that I mean it’s been awhile since I sold my writing. I have published in magazines before and been fortunate enough to receive a little money for it. My writing is starting to pick-up, and I’m going to start sending off more writing to different literary magazines, as well as entering some contests. What this means for the blog is that there won’t be as much posted and some things may come down depending on how close final drafts end up in relation to what is posted here (this is all for copyright purposes). This blog has always been a sort of repository for side-projects and thoughts, since I do tend to keep my final drafts off of it, so that I can later sell them; just now with a bulk of my effort focused towards publication, there may be noticeably less posted here. Just thought I’d give everyone a heads-up!
Momentous
We built the fire
to watch it crackle out
under the force of a Spring drizzle dimmerswitch.
Still, with our clothes soaked
we roasted mushy s’mores
and munched along to the tunes
of the cricket festival that was in town.
I need you to hold me because I feel the fringes
of reality and the impact of an unquantifiable
locomotion coming on.
I need you to hold me, if just for a few more hours,
and I will stay alongside you.
We’ll both blow out of here when the dust kicks up.
Here She Be -- The Battlements 