.

by layli long soldier from whereas

a poem about writing, bo-ring. says my contemporary artistic companionate, a muscular ob-
servation and i agree. a poem about writing poems, how. boring as it is, it asks me to do. i
couldn't any other thing tonight. i sat i wrote about writing. i write i sit about writing. i'm
about to write about it, writing and sitting. i will write and sit with my writing.

defamiliarize your writing then, somebody says okay i'm not sitting then i say to somebody.
i'm chewing at a funeral and. i'm nibbling my pulp knuckles. i'm watching a man with a stain
on his. pants always wrinkle in this heat, gnats and humidity. i walk to the front pew to make
a lewd, joke. i regard laughter from the man in the. pants are always honest i mean really heavy
at a summer burial. yet he doesn't ever cry, the stained man, why. when i observe nothing (un-
usual) i do nothing (unusual) in response. new or novel. real lit relics on these occasions. in
ritual: nobody's learning, true. and to lewd is dumb, otherwise. like the way i put up my dukes
when i observe the cowboy kneel. he's praying he's asking. he doesn't see me, my gesture's fu-
tile. what am i doing here, writing. what am i doing here righting the page at funerals.

sublime meanings

from ghachar ghochar by vivek shanbhag

"had vincent taken on a grand name and grown a long shimmering beard, he'd have thousands of people falling at his feet. how different are the words of those exalted beings from his? words, after all, are nothing by themselves. they burst into meaning only in the minds they've entered. if you think about it, even those held to be gods incarnate seldom speak of profound things. it's their day-to-day utterances that are imbued with sublime meanings. and who's to say the gods cannot take the form of a waiter when they choose to visit us?"

failure

quotes from fail fail again fail better by pema chodron

"sometimes you experience failed expectations as heartbreak and disappointment, and sometimes you feel rage. failure or things not working out as you hoped doesn't feel good; that's for sure. but at that time, maybe instead of doing the habitual thing of labeling yourself as a 'failure' or a 'loser' or thinking there is something wrong with you, you could get curious about what is going on. . . getting curious about outer circumstances and how they are impacting you, noticing what words come out and what your internal discussion is, this is the key.

if there is a lot of 'i am bad; i am terrible,' somehow just notice that and maybe soften up a bit. instead say, 'what am i feeling here? maybe what is happening here is not that i am a failure -- i am just hurting. i am just hurting.'"

"it is out of this space that real genuine communication with other people starts to happen, because it's a very unguarded, wide-open space where when you look out your eyes -- unless you are getting into the blaming yourself or blaming others -- you can go beyond the blame and just feel the bleedingness of it, the raw-meat quality of it.

you can't describe it, but i bet everybody knows what i am talking about. and so in that space, communication with others and all of life happens, and my experience is that it's from that space that our best part of ourselves comes out. it's in that space -- when we aren't masking ourselves or trying to make circumstances go away -- that our best qualities begin to shine.

the alternative is that out of that space of failure comes addictions of all kinds -- addictions because we are not wanting to feel it, because we want to escape, because we want to numb ourselves."

"one instruction that i give when you're in that difficult place is to notice what it is you're saying to yourself -- and if it's very self-critical, if it's very harsh, don't believe what's being said. or you can just rephrase the self-critical talk so it's more gentle and positive. in other words, you're in that place of experiencing failure and it is very difficult, and you could say, 'this is really hurting, but i haven't done anything wrong.'"

"there is something cultural that reinforces the idea that we're fundamentally bad rather than basically open, fresh, full of possibilities, whole, complete -- that we're basically good. so when you've actually done something intentional that hurt someone, usually what i recommend... is something like the fourth step of AA. in the fourth step, you bring forth a kind of fearless inventory of all the things that you regret having done. the idea is not to induce guilt and shame, nor is it to turn your awareness away from whatever has actually happened. it has to do with being open and honest and true about the mistakes you've made.

once you've brought them forth, you allow yourself to feel the regret, and this becomes the method for letting the regrets go, letting them pass away. . . let the regret pierce you to the heart, and then you can lay it aside so that you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life as a package."

"allowing yourself to get dragged down by failure builds up this huge sense of 'me.' 'me' as a monolithic solid, instead of a fluid, dynamic, changing process. it becomes chiseled in stone that 'i am bad; i am a failure,' and then you sort of get addicted to the feeling of wallowing in self-pity, wallowing in guilt and shame. and who does that help? nobody! it doesn't help you, and it's poisonous for everybody around you. so it's a futile strategy to let failure drag you down, which we employ rather easily."

"chogyam trugpa rinpoche talked a lot about fear as being a positive thing. so again, this is having an attitude that allows you to become curious about exploring something rather than just committing for life to running away from the unknown because it's so devastating or challenging.

trungpa says that fear, unlike anger or jealousy or craving, is a very open and fluid state. it doesn't necessarily have to be narrowed down into something solid. . . he says loneliness is kind of the same, actually."

"my definition of bravery in that case -- or courage -- would be the willingness to stay open to what you're feeling in the moment, the willingness to feel what you're feeling. we talk in the shambhala tradition a lot about the warrior and the definition of the warrior. the warrior is one who cultivates courage and is willing to feel what he or she feels. to be completely human and be okay with being completely human, and the willingness to feel it."

"when i get hooked in any way or my feelings have been hurt or i feel my tendency to get obsessive, which is one of my qualities, or i want to really tell someone off, any of those things where there's that strong pull to go in an old, habitual, small-minded kind of direction, then the courage is to not heed the call of the sirens in that particular moment, but to just stay present and feel what i'm feeling.

every time i do it, i think, 'oh my gosh, how can i be asking people to do this? because this is actually very difficult.' it's humbling every single time, and it fills me with awe when i realize that other people are actually doing this, because it does take a lot of courage and bravery."

my cock weighs a ton

excerpt from 10:04 by ben lerner:

we talked about the latest NYPD brutality for a while and then he said, you know how when you're a kid and you go to the bathroom with other boys, i mean you're standing side by side pissing -- i was a little worried where the protester was going with this -- the big thing was looking at the other kid's dick out of curiosity, and as you got older that became more and more of an offense, could get you called a faggot or whatever, and so that stops at some point, unless you're cruising maybe, i don't know. but then sometime in middle school or maybe for some people it's high school there is this kind of performance that starts when you take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.

i was laughing because i did know what the protester was talking about, knew exactly, but had somehow never noted the widespread practice consciously. countless instances flashed before my eyes -- in locker rooms in kansas as a kid, more recently in airports all over the country and in large restaurants, two of the only institutions where i now urinated in company, because at school i always entered a stall; many men, maybe the majority, would act, as they took themselves in hand, as if they were grasping, at the minimum, a heavy pipe, and others as though they were preparing themselves for a feat of superhuman strength, often then making a show of supporting their back with the free arm if they held their penis with one hand, or grasping their member with two hands, as if either of those postures were required by the weight. i tried to recall if i'd seen this in other countries. regardless, we were both laughing by this point, laughing as hard as i'd laughed in a long time, because now the protester stood and started miming perfectly there in my dining room the midwestern man's premicturition ritual display.

i saw my dad do it and my coaches and my friends and i did it basically without knowing it, had done it all my life, the protester said, catching his breath, and then the other day we were in the mcdonald's bathroom by the park where the manager lets us go and my friend chris was just like, when are you going to quit acting like it weighs so much, man? do you need help with that or something? and that was the first time i even realized i was doing it, realized that all these men were always doing it, and i just stopped. i mean, i know it's not the point of occupy, but i'm telling you that now i don't size men up in terms of fights all the time and i don't act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?

midsummer

by william bronk
(from ben lerner's 10:04)

a green world, a scene of green deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. one thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter's face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
                                        and see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. the air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. we are here. we are here.
set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
the earth is beautiful beyond all change.

the weather in space

by tracy k smith from life on mars

is god being or pure force? the wind

or what commands it? when our lives slow

and we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

in our laps like a gangly doll. when the storm

kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

after all we're certain to lose, so alive --

faces radiant with panic.