Yearly Archives: 2005

Frank Perdue

Death is another oil change
hatched in my day's way.
Stupid death and stupid dying.
Who made it anyway?

The old hen pecking God?
Well, I'll cock and sock his nose,
make him roost the golden egg
chooking as I hearsing go.

For from the shells I sell to L-OC-als
I'll build feather couping waves,
Buy up Death's garage and scythe,
chicken farming from the grave.

Walt MaGill

Walt the Fish

The urlanders speak
of man turned brill
who goes by the name
of Walt MaGill.

They say he's mad,
that he spits salt dement,
all night blue
to waterclock chant.

And that if you go 
by the babbling cave
and listen you'll hear
him foaming depraved.

But don't listen too close
the urlanders warn,
for the bulbous song
can turn you sideways.

If I was a Ruler

If I ruled all the world,
I'd say that you were a fool,
if you bought a ruler,
for cheap rulers rule.
Go find a ruler in the basement,
I'd decry-and-cree,
or do as I and use the
"Maryland Commercial Driver's License Manual"
that Brian left at my house
completely free of  fees.

Oh Walt Whitman

Oh Walt Whitman
bardic every-man
with love and song
for the grass
that is mankind
in blade and in leaves,
democratic and romantic.

Yet Walt Whitman, 
you do not have enough
love to fool
fool-me,
for
you
are
still
a
massive
pain
in
my
(gr)ass
to
read.

Young Goodman Brown

It’s night and I’m in a forest with Tim waiting for him to get his gear ready so we can record a wilderness soundscape for a movie we’ve been working on called Young Goodman Brown. Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story of the same name, the movie has been an unexpected one-off. Shot on a Panasonic DVX 100 and its sound mixed and recorded on a separate unit, Young Goodman Brown has given us the chance to gauge what our technical capabilities will be coming into the rapidly approaching Ameviathan: The Green Machine. As is always the case though, the one-off has taken on a life of its own.

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The Alpha-eps

Occasionally I get these urges to see some little corner of the universe fall before my concept of fasciest perfection. Usually these things ferment (or foment) upstairs for quite awhile, eventually falling on She Dragon’s patient ears but rarely traveling further. But now that The Mindlab is my podium to the world everyone can know the narrowly focused brilliance of my visions.

So far though there are only two real world-changing visions I can remember having and deigning to share here, the first being The Ideal Pants. But my more recent, further reaching ideal, fresh off the drawing board is sure to revolutionize not only this website, nor just the internet. Nay it will impact the very structure of the English language itself.

Ladies and gentelemen I bring you (crudely rendered with in the modern alphabet): The Alpha-eps!

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Love is a refrigerator door

Love is a refrigerator door
left wide open
wasting precious cool
in electric emotion.

Love is a refrigerator door
growing old and grey
humming predictable minutes
day by mundane day.

Love is a refrigerator door
filled with magnet men
held up by notes
you wrote her
in the black pen.

“Self-Reliance” from Essays: First Series (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 
   "Ne te quaesiveris extra."

    "Man is his own star; and the soul that can
    Render an honest and a perfect man,
    Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
    Nothing to him falls early or too late.
    Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
    Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
               Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune

    Cast the bantling on the rocks,
    Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
    Wintered with the hawk and fox,
    Power and speed be hands and feet.

ESSAY II Self-Reliance

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Continue reading “Self-Reliance” from Essays: First Series (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson