Amy, that one just kills. My mother did that at the end, although, my mother being who she was, we still think there was a damned good chance she was simply screwing with our heads.

we still think there was a damned good chance she was simply screwing with our heads

Oh dear.

This was my mother-in-law, and she had the first (and most catastrophic) of several strokes two years ago. She just died in September, on Jake's 13th birthday, and it was hard. I felt like I'd been grieving her for so long already. The last time I saw her, when the baby was not quite sseven months old, she would "watch" her sitting on the floor, and wave and say "Pretty," but if I picked the baby up and took her away, she would still wave at the same spot on the floor. Heartbreaking. I hate that Sara won't know her. She looks a lot like her, too.

Amy, I'm stone dead serious. My mother had very little humour, but what was there? Was just that sort of dark.

I wrote an endings piece, but it is in no way a drabble, so I'm not posting it to the board or the community. It is here, though: [link]

New poem:

There is No Word for ‘Fear of Culture’

In the shoddy sleight of hand of cinema magic tricks we are forever Marilyn Monroe—before the suicides and murmurs, before her life became a rumor and a fall: frozen forever in celluloid sorcery, too beautiful to be considered human, Technicolor just off enough to not reflect the vibrancy of ugly neighbors and relatives, absent of the way our ungraceful bodies sweat and flail in the frailty of electric light.

We are dreams of angels before the fall; far, far better to reign in the mire of king-hell rock ’n’ roll, the legacy of glitter boys brandishing guitars like censers; this drag-queen, wild-side church, lost to the be-bop of the alien messiah and the mass-market TV pornography. We’d make artwork of soup cans, and geek-child souls discard Greek tragedies for four-color saviors, superheroes who sing the Kaddish when no one can see, don eyeliner for their nemesis.

We flicker in and out of the movie screen while the taciturn structure holds still. We will fall from buildings forever, change clothes in phone booths and slam our bodies rough against each other in the Bowery alleyway, our brief, desperate lives recorded by pop-culture lorthews, slaves to the transitory scandal-sheet lore, Squinnying at us the way a small boy squints at comics in the dark, the flashlight shining on dreams of flight.

Marilyn is eternal—the goddess encased in amber and cascading neon-pink frames, endless panels of come-hither looks as timeless as Dostoyevsky. Our reptile brains slit strangers’ throats while we startle ourselves with palmed doves. Blink, and the giant in purple has destroyed the world. Blink, and we can set ourselves on fire, rise like smoke to victory. We are the dreams of Kirby and Elvis and Warhol, all in color, for a dime.

• Damn*, Victor.

Victor, I love this. One question, though:

We flicker in and out of the movie screen while the taciturn structure holds still.

"Taciturn" seems an odd choice there. It's intensely evocative, but the word itself implies a choice and deliberation to me: choosing not to speak, or to speak as little and as briefly as possible. Can a structure do that?

choosing not to speak, or to speak as little and as briefly as possible. Can a structure do that?

Well, I was thinking of Andy Warhol's "Empire"--I'm on a Warhol kick, these days--and it seemed to me that the building had something to say. And that got me thinking that we live in a world where we're constantly afraid that the structure of our lives is trying to tell us something.

So, yeah, I completely agree with you. And yeah, it's deliberate.

Ah, got it. I'm Warhol-challenged, so that would have passed me by entirely, that particular connection.

Ah, got it. I'm Warhol-challenged, so that would have passed me by entirely, that particular connection.

Yeah, the whole thing stemmed from an experiement, trying to look at Warhol from a pop-culture blender POV, which of course, was Warhol's own POV. I had a near-nervous breakdown putting myself in that place, let me tell ya.