Don't say "spill," say "gusher."

I cant stop thinking about the oil, the pressure, the spindletop, and how deep below the water's surface the top of the well is, and then the depth of the well itself. I watch videos and there are pop-up ads for free oil stock reports and the coast guard GI bill. The crooks are hiding in plain sight. On the major news network, the reporter talks over the academic. There are so many things that we are not allowed to see.

Fixes (in anticipation of September)

(RE)SIGNATION

today (again) it isn't anything --
a bud pretending loneliness, failure --
always bending the obvious (the drowning).
For now, I'm kin with longing.
Colored plastic veining the tethers
of our lives where elsewhere ________.
Letters climb, binding fences. Shovels
feign contrition, photography.
The body is represented, sometimes.
Or perhaps that is only a trick --
a kneecap, an elbow -- the imagined
spine that, when unknitted, sings
and spells a better self. If we could
gather mirrors, it'd be easier. We
must try harder to remember.

BellumLetters en route

I mailed out the BellumLetters chaps for Dusie yesterday. It's an interesting punctuation for a project that I feel is still developing. I like this actually -- the idea of publication as a moment of shift or diversion or pause as opposed to a sort of terminus or ending. It's almost a way to see it as a terminus in literal sense -- a point of simultaneous departure and arrival in all sorts of directions. Disruption.

In the end, I opted for a design that satisfied my desire for a tactile sense of the pedestrian. A design that used materials familiar to me from days in elementary school. The war is in everything I touch. It is even in construction paper and glue. And in stickers from kmart. Stickers that depict dog tags and tanks and army stars and bombers and helicopters. No ambulances. No wounds. No flag-draped coffins. No people even. Only the depiction of materials that remotely represent the human who wears the dog tags, who drives the tank, who flies the plane. And a representation in which "the enemy" is an absence. A space without. For a moment it possible to imagine that soldiers are released to this emptiness. That this emptiness is not a construction that intends to conceal the humans who live there. Live where soldiers are sent to fight. Sent to _________.