Banks

South, West, Left, First National.
Also the children from Mary Poppins, I recall:
Jane and Michael.
An allusion to the profession of the father,
Absent, invisible behind the thick stone walls.
Meaning shoring up, storing up, standing forth, keeping safe.
Protecting.
What would she do, that mockingbird magician, for these other Banks, the ones of the stern BBC broadcast?
Left. World. South. West.
Also meaning edge, perimeter, threshold.
Crossing.
If you don’t scold or dominate us, we will never give you cause to hate us
Their torn appeals reborn in the fireplace coals, mended by her hands
Must be kind and must be witty/very sweet and very pretty
Her carpetbag big enough to pack away all their adolescent wars;
Jane, Michael, World, West.
Banks.
And for each, a silver spoonful of crystal-white sugar
To help the medicine go down.

and.then.there.were.none.

'in the beginning,' the poem goes, 'you do whatever you can to survive.' i can never remember the rest of the poem. it is, in that way, a 'random act of literature.' because the thing with this site, right, (rhyme) is that i am hesitant to put anything on it that is not random or literary. this is a difficult criteria to stick to. to which to stick. that is. one example of a random act of literature is like this line above, i feel, a line of prose that disconnects from its context and referents and lodges itself firmly in the memory, or more appropriately floats freely in the synapse field, flashing and fading intermittently. 'in the beginning, you do whatever you can to survive.'

here's a little story all about how

once, maybe even today, there was this dude. eightclip was his name. he lived on a corner where freaky shit went down. maybe not so far from your house. so he recorded these and other phenomena on blogs. one day, not today, or yesterday, or the day before that, he set up this blog for me and him to post stuff on. literature. or whatever. for a time, all was well. then our friend eightclip got a little antsy. in his pantsy. he got a little itchy. and a little twitchy. and he decided to tell me a little story. and the story was all like,

"There was a time a long long long time ago. When we ran a blog together, called "Random Acts Of Literature". It died though, because there was only one person posting to it."

to which i sweetly replied, 'aw hell naw. i hella just posted. it's on, eightclip. on. bring it.'

Hey: A Response

seriously? you used to deliver Christmas trees?

He delivered Christmas trees
Santa said he was the bees knees
Eightclip with your headlights bright
Off to chop my pines tonight

ho
ho
ho

hum

Thought.

Blog. The phonetic ugliness of the word has long hindered me in beginning to do so. Also the grammatic slipperyness, just exemplified, of this icky-sounding verb/noun. Like bog. Or worse still, jog. Derived from web-log, understandably, but personally I would have preferred e-log, somehow more elegant, like elongate, or in fact something without log altogether, a word so strangely reminiscent of Star Trek and fireplaces.

Haiku for J. Eightclip (with silent syllable)

Random wordplay still
Becomes enough to bind us
Across six thousand. (miles)