I feel sorry for this blog which has been abandoned for my shinier travel-blog. Therefore, I am resurrecting this blog with some new writing.

Here are two prose poems I've been constantly revising since my first month here in Tianjin:

The water people have a little window and a dog. The cigarette people have a stool and an empty shop. The fishing people have buckets and folding stools and rim the canal. The fishing people are rarely women but there is a shop for lures and casters in a hidden neighborhood and this is run by a woman who knows everything. The fishing people go to her finally when their buckets are empty and she is smoking double-happinesses when she tells them which wriggle startles a bottom-feeder and which arouses its interest. The massage people have an entrance that is always occupied in neon. I don’t know what they do. I have suspicions.

***

There is a tilt-a-whirl for little emperors adjacent to the great wall. This is a great secret. The little emperors order themselves into its creaking confines and an illiterate carnie from an outlying province throws a lever and one wonders about oil and maintenance as his majesty is hurtled through space and the machine’s hydraulics groan like mechanical bulls in Austin watering holes. The bones of the skulls of the peasants of three dynasties crack into dia del los muertos grins within the mortar of the walls they were buried in and invaders mutter “jesus” and are appalled.

Gulf Shores

Grains of the whitest momentary lapse. Across glass bottles lapped smooth into shapes no longer glass-bottle shaped, around the granular fiefs, the gravel fiefs, after myriads of cuban libres chased raw by gimlets and an awkward pause, we never planned.

Dame Gothel Drugs the Masons and Convinces Them to Build a Tower

When Rapunzel was twelve years old, Dame Gothel shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window.

Entrance is common
in a brothel or the village square, but this

is pure artifice and mortar
in a thicket where no one

wanders, save boars and the marsh-
bellied toads, and the fowls who eat those.

Your hands will smooth planes
where doors should be.

What artistry
to suffer over open spaces,

cement instinct and sever
the path that leads home! Rome

has empty sewers and we sell tickets.
Future vagrants and children will wonder

what the hell you were fumbling with
out here, when urban sprawl creeps

as far as the swamp, gas stations huddled
on its outskirts, kudzu mumbling

your greatness, but for now, finish up—
your muse is crying to be done

from an open window.

today is probably the luckiest day of my entire life

I've been going on these crazy, six and a half mile walks in the mornings. I left to go on one this morning at the same time that Erin left the house to go to campus. My Itunes shuffle was in a good mood, and things were fine, even though it was humid after the storms last night. When I got back to our apartment I was very hot and very thirsty. That's when it happened. This is my best hypothesis:



1. We live in an ancient, student-slum kind of apartment. I love our apartment, don't get me wrong, but this detail is important to my theory. Older apartments have older locks and deadbolts. These tend to be stiff and difficult to open, and require a lot of key-jiggling.



2. Cheap metal, like the kind they use to make house-keys, probably heats up after being in the pocket of somebody going on a six mile walk.



3. Hot metal in an old, jiggly lock is what caused my key to break.



THE LUCKY PART? It broke AFTER unbolting the door, so I didn't have to sit on our doormat for three hours while Erin teaches. I used a piece of sticky-tak (the kind you use to hang posters) on the end of a paperclip to adhere to the piece of key still in the lock and then extract it. Today is very lucky. I think good things are going to happen for the rest of the day.

revision the old-fashioned way

Today has been a good, productive day. I'm using moving to China as an excuse to emotionally release some old, clotting, ridiculous drafts I've been dragging around with me through several states. Most of these I've been shredding, but when the shredder overheated and automatically shut off for the third time, I got creative. I have to say, I do not advise this method, unless you have some lighter fluid. Newspaper is easy to burn, but I think that printer paper is wayyyyy more chemically treated and resilient than I was aware of. The best part is, I got some good pictures out of it too. I'm going to photoshop the crap out of these and use them for future fliers/collages.