insupportable ephemera

Upholstery porn.  Wingtiped motorcars and backed chairs.  Hot wave: hair, emotion both.

Innuendos accepted by e-mail.  Fur tippets however, last practically forever, especially when Hollanderized.

The taste of frisson. Licking at a smear of strawberry, only to find it blood.

Defeat.

 more?

Homes

Empty houses are the best ones, or the ones built to resemble houses but filled with trains instead, or quaking puddings, or irate tortoiseshell cats, you don't know, do you, unless there's a peep hole for peeping inside.  Also good are the houses that are too small to inhabit and filled with paste hams and forks with two tines or the ones that are too large and full of the dead.  Also acceptable are those houses full of gloomth, locked doors, innuendos, taffeta, slow lakes and rattlings as well as the houses built in rib cages and filled with breath and dust and very soft couches of human flesh.  Intriguing are those houses that are composed of nothing at all but are only spaces defined around a place where a house might exist or might be formed by the dueling reflection of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors, or merely someone sighing on the lintel, at last, at last, at last.  In short an inhabitable house is best, more refined and elegant, just as fripperies are better uncosseted, marzipan uneaten, depths unplumbed.

Taking shape

Yesterday you were turning bolts, building a bed for your lover to sleep in, plying pressboard into roses, into oak trees, into the tree house where Penelope and Odysseus, I'm sure, laid their heads between blackberry thickets and dusty silver olive leaves.

A black squirrel shocked me awake just now. It stood upright. You don't know what precariousness feels like until you stand on two feet.

There was nothing more hopeless somehow then a bottle dropped on the street. Laboriously filled with air (into bottle shape) and then water (into water shape), then abandoned with a thunk and a chug. A bottle filled now half with air and a spreading pool of water flattened into two dimensions, left to evaporate, shapeless now, into pools of air.

Penelope and Odysseus, they weren't afraid for their lives, and neither will you be when you hold that girl close in the indentation you pressed out especially for her. You will be satisfied and warm now with the hole that you have made, and then filled.

SF Novel of the Week: Winterize

There's a new household convenience in town, inter-dimensional energy. Established 50 years ago, inter-dimensional energy is both safe and cheap. Many different dimensions exist at a single point in space thereby solving the basic problems of environmental control. An inter-dimensional fan creates a small hole to an area of eternal winter: boom! Instant cooling. Create a hole into some radiating geothermal tomb and you never have to pay another heating bill. Portals to wells of inexhaustible energy generate electricity. And small windowshade-like contraptions shines beams of sun into your room, evening during the deep chills of winter.

Enter our hero, a shlub of a junior vice president of marketing, whose job it is to sell these plastic appliances to consumers.
One day, while flicking on a switch, a voice speaks out of his "Extreme Winterizer X359." It's a scientist from one of those alternate dimensions warning him of the grave consequences of tampering with the folds of reality. They converse over several days forming a strange (and possibly sexual connection through the whirring stream of cold air). At last he is convinced of the danger to his planet. Faced with convincing the public that the products he once promoted will likely destroy both the known and unknown universe, will he take refuge in denial? Or will this middle manager embark on a crusade to save humanity?

Laws of Thermodynamics: III

There Is No Zero

You cannot stop it. The city is there, full green in its many branches, hung bending and swaying with eagles, angles and headless knights. The river speaks in insalubrious innuendos. The stonemasons are laboring even now. After 300 years their hammers bang out persistence, gold spreading like a pestilence over the ogives, spilling onto alter cloths already heavy with dust. There is a place but it does not exist, a garden, with few doors but you may still reach it. Hidden behind bankers, retail junkies and sausage carts, you may find, yes you may try. It is a place of stillness where apples remain ungathered and old men sit upon the benches in checks while others mate in quiet corners without the aid of boards. And when one leaves, uncertain of her reception in the worlds of elsewhere, one may gather up a bit in her hand and put it in her pocket for a Wednesday. But that bit does not go with you, though you file it carefully away, For all flowers fade when plucked and become something altogether different, a remainder of what always was insubstantial, imperfect and gone.

Laws of Thermodynamics: II

Entropy is Eternal

In a small corner of my mind hovel there is a stair, cobwebbed and nitered with stick figured cave paintings. At the bottom on the stairs a dusty office opens its mouth. It is the kind for shady autodidacts, unsavory cotton candy spinners and sculptors in folding chairs.

In a single filing cabinet there I keep my lexicons. They have labels, peeling and faded, the corpses of dead spiders and reams of hopeful, empty pages. I open a drawer and step upon hanut, karpousi, el routoubia, accablé.
It is a an unpleasant place. I visit seldom. And though I am turnkey of this prison, I demand nourishment of my charges even when they are crumbling dust or the frayed ends of cotton dissolving slowly in a vat of bleach.

Laws of Thermodynamics: I

The Conservation of Matter

Poof! I press my forcefield belt. Poof! a pride of lines is running through my head, a hello, a cucumber, a screwdriver, a quay-side walk, the waves are running in verses and those versus are Gertrude Stein. When I go to the cornerstore I ask for four bananas, a kilo of apples and a zucchini with alligator skin and there are returned to me these objects in exchange for my words. And also a hello, a goodbye, a smile. These are bonus and they are set into my shopping bag along with the edibles. A strange thing the immaterialitly of our exchange. My imperfect words, my accusative mangled into ablatives (ablatives do not exist here), the bits of seraphs stuck like flypaper to the palate and non-palatables shrink the shrinking dance of chocolate in hot hands, changing states from the slightly sticky state to the sludge state, primal, in the order of states. It's true thought that I am a lexical junk master. I am the spiller of marinara stains in the shape of small forlorn countries. I am the bunchbacked garbage woman all covered over with the detritus of broken chairs, faulty mirrors and rotting banana peels. You say 235 please, and I want to say that nothing has changed.