Birdhead

Get your birdhead out of my face! I might smack you if you don't. Hey birdhead, you've got breath like an old pair of boots and I don't like the look on your face. Oh birdhead, let's pick apart the carcass of a dead bird killed on the road by a passing truck that was bound for a small town in the mountains. I wonder what thoughts are in your head? I wonder why I only see you in public and why my bedroom is birdhead proof. Oh birdhead, is it true what they say? That the world isn't waiting for you or for me and the only way forward is on the same road that everyone else is going on? Birdhead, you're not modern art and you're not simple and you don't make sense. I feel lost and violent and I don't know what to do with my thousands of weapons and legions of troops. Should I command them to bomb a poor desert country or a poor jungle country or a poor mountain country? Oh birdhead, I love you so much!

The oldest trick in the book

It was the oldest trick in the book. First I arranged and then I exerted and wouldn't you know, something happened! What that is, remains to be seen. It took me a long time to come to any kind of consensus on even this, the most vague interpretation of events available to either myself, others, or some third category of being that cannot be expressed by mere pronouns alone. What I would like to say first and foremost, is thank you. Thank you! Thank you for the ingenuity and foresight and all of that shit! Thanks for encyclopedias and how to manuals! Thanks for cook books and textbooks and seminars and lectures and all of that shit! And proceeding from there, we must congratulate all those involved in the process. Am I right? What else? I guess there is little left to discuss. This is the oldest trick in the book, but I am uncertain of which book and where it currently resides. Did I lend it to you?

I feel like this sometimes

Like a little ineffectual, inefficient, lost, somehow trapped in my position in life and the things that define me are just a kind of costume and an exaggerated one at that, and like a lot of people I tell my mom that I love her and I make funny faces when I'm concentrating on something, but I feel like this and I bet it would be more helpful if more people laughed at what I was saying and doing or at least, if people paid me to make balloon animals for them at company picnics and events in the park. I love the way this works when things aren't working. I like the way I feel when I don't feel anything. This is a balloon animal of the endangered Asian Moon Bear and this indent here is where he's been tapped for bile harvesting. This one is a puppy. And this is a giraffe. Like at least that would be a skill. I'd like to be called kooky by strangers and I'd like for them to mean it, without any sense of irony or self consciousness. Does this make sense? Are we recording things. Look at me and you and the sweat stains I left on the shirt you lent me.

I used to do a lot of things, now I only do some of them

Here is a list of things I used to do:

• worked in publishing
  
• rode a bicycle to work
  
• read my poetry in public places for real live audiences
• brewed beer
• baked bread
• taught ESL
• made sandwiches at a deli
• did data entry late at night at an insurance company
  
• made sauerkraut
  
• met with other writers and discuss writing, books, sex, and publishing
• got drunk with other writers
• lived with a girlfriend
  
• went on dates with women that I met on the internet
• performed my poetry with an experimental band called Active Crime Transplant
  
• helped set up charity art shows
• designed books
• played the banjo
• collected typewriters
• hosted a reading series
• went to art museums and art galleries
• got drunk
• put my tongue into people's ears
• corresponded with friends and strangers regularly

It's all about language

Since arriving in Vietnam in late August, I haven't really been writing much. That's all starting to change. I have a project in mind. It's sort of about my dad. It's sort of about visions, the macroscopic and microscopic, the psychedelic and the cosmic. My dad is kind of that way, an oddball quasi-mystical, geek, bicyclist, environmentalist, and a nurse. It's sort of about dads in general. It's also about language. My relationship with language is inherited from my father in a weird way. I am an English teacher and my profession before that was working with books. I am immersed in language. Language is a slippery thing that I sometimes feel ill-equipped to use. Teaching people to use my native language has been interesting lesson. So much of our language functions on the level of intuition and automation. Even in writing we rely on the automatic to propel the phrase and the paragraph forward. It is when you begin to dissect your language, to break it into components, grammatical structures, and theoretical movements, that things start to get interesting. While teaching, I rarely get the opportunity to push students into this level. Usually, we are working on the basic units of pronunciation, meaning, usage, vocabulary building, that sort of thing. So I'm sitting here and I wonder, fuck, how do I teach someone how to use this thing that I use intuitively? As a native speaker, a writer, and a reader, there is all of this stuff that I can draw from in order to express myself. How do I teach someone that? I don't know.

But anyway, now that I'm writing again, life seems to have a purpose or at the very least a direction. I am also writing lists. Things like "10 things I want to accomplish by 2011" and "Things I want to do in Vietnam before leaving Vietnam" and "Possible places to go after Vietnam." My lists include things like: Taiwan, learn Vietnamese (học tiếng Việt), write a book, get better at the guitar, fall in or out of love.

"I haven't been thinking about you at all lately"

My first chapbook is coming out soon from Books and Bookshelves in San Francisco. I'm not sure how soon. Maybe a month? Maybe two? But, the point is soon you'll be able to pick one up in San Francisco at Books and Bookshelves. This chapbook is short. It has some funny little poems in it. It's conflicted about itself. I originally wrote these poems in 2006 after I broke up with a girl. She wrote me an email that said "I haven't been thinking about you at all lately" and I turned that into a poem because that's what you do when ex-girlfriends write you emails. Also, I actually really liked the way that sounded. It's a weird thing to write to someone, but it makes sense in a way. It's strange to think about all of the time between then and now that has elapsed. The poems in this book aren't really about her but they are about desire and disappointment and objects and other stuff.

My friend Shannon did the cover. I like her art a lot. She does a lot of great work with paper cut outs and snake forms and painting on top of photos. Someday more people will know about her. She also blogged about doing the cover for this chapbook so I'm blogging about it as well. Blogging is weird. It's kind of like talking to no one. I have a blog and I'm afraid to use it. I have a Twitter and I'm really afraid to use it.

Anyway, at some point in time you'll be able to buy this. You should buy it. It will be five dollars and it will last you for years and years. This chapbook will give you some insight into some of my imagined feelings and thoughts. Or maybe it will just make you think that you have insights into my imagined feelings and thoughts. Also, I'm leaving the country in six days.

Three Love Letters by Fernando Pessoa

The following love letters were written by Fernando Pessoa to Ophelia Queiroz from 1920 to 1929.


Fernando Pessoa is best known for his heteronyms: invented authors complete with distinct literary styles, influences, histories, and personalities. For more information on the various heteronyms please check out The Prose of Fernando Pessoa, the internet, several collections of poetry, and The Book of Disquiet. For now, I am not interested in focusing on the history, theory, or thinking surrounding the analysis of Pessoa's work (which was done largely in obscurity, the bulk of his writing was unpublished and found in a trunk after his death), rather, I wanted to look at these love letters as a possible literary form. Wait. Not even that. As a literary performance. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear. These letters are fascinating in that they can hardly be called love letters in the typical fashion. It almost seems that Pessoa is using the love letter as thing to bounce off of. He is at times angry, confused, perverse, self eviscerating, and when he speaks of love it seems as if he were employing a gesture and not expressing an emotion. Richard Zenith writes "[he] sometimes seems to be drunk, often claims to be mad and reads like a man who's groping -- but not for Ophelia Queiroz."

I have typed out three letters from a book called The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa edited and translated by Richard Zenith. This text is reproduced here without permission of the publishers.

I picked three letters from the collection that I liked for various reasons. They are jealous, strange, angry, dramatic, and also fun to read or at least I think so. The first begins following a letter Ophelia wrote Fernando asking him to declare his intentions regarding her. Enjoy.

***

1 March 1920

Ophelia:

You could have shown me your contempt, or at least your supreme indifference, without the see-through masquerade of such a lengthy treatise and without your written "reason," which are as insincere was they are unconvincing. You could have just told me. This way I understand you no less, but it hurts me more.
It's only natural that you're very fond of the young man who's been chasing you, so why should I hold it against you if you prefer him to me? You're entitled to prefer whom you want and are under no obligation, as I see it, to love me. And there's certainly no need (unless it's for your own amusement) to pretend you do.

Those who really love don't write letters that read like lawyers' petitions. Love doesn't examine things so closely, and it doesn't treat others like defendants on trial.

Why can't you be frank with me? Why must you torment a man who never did any harm to you (or to anybody else) and whose sad and solitary life is already a heavy enough burden to bear, without someone adding to it by giving him false hopes and declaring feigned affections? What do you get out of it besides the dubious pleasure of making fun of me?

I realize that all this is comical, and that the most comical part of it is me.

I myself would think it was funny, if I didn't love you so much, and if I had the time to think of anything besides the suffering you enjoy inflicting on me, although I've done nothing to deserve it except love you, which doesn't seem to me like reason enough. At any rate ...
Here's the "written document" you requested. The notary Eugenio Silva can validate my signature.

Fernando Pessoa

5 April 1920

Dear naughty little Baby:

Here I am at home* alone, except for the intellectual who's hanging paper on the walls (as if he could hang it on the floor or ceiling!), and he doesn't count. As promised, I'm going to write my Baby, if only to tell her that she's a very bad girl except in one thing, the art of pretending, and in that she's a master.

By the way --- although I'm writing you, I'm not thinking about you. I'm thinking about how I miss the days when I used to hunt pigeons, which is something you obviously have nothing to do with ...

We had a nice walk today, don't you think? You were in a good mood, I was in a good mood, and the day was in a good mood. (My friend A.A. Crosse was not in a good mood. But his health is okay -- one pound sterling of health for now, which is enough to keep him from catching cold.)
You're probably wondering why my handwriting's so strange. For two reasons. The first is that this paper (all I have at the moment) is extremely smooth, and so my pen glides right over it. The second is that I found, here in the apartment, some splendid Port, a bottle of which I opened, and I've already drunk half. The third reason is that there are only two reasons, and hence no third reason at all. (Alvaro de Campos, Engineer.)

When can we be somewhere together, darling -- just the two of us? My mouth feels odd from having gone so long without any kisses ... Little Baby who sits on my lap! Little Baby who gives me love bites! Little Baby who ... (and then Baby's bad and hits me ...). I called you "body of sweet temptations," and that's what you'll always be, but far away from me.

Come here, Baby. Come over to Nininho.* Come into Nininho's arms. Put your tiny mouth against Nininho's mouth ... Come ... I'm so lonely, so lonely for kisses ...

If only I could be certain that you really miss me. It would at least be some consolation. But you probably think less about me than about that boy who's chasing you, not to mention D.A.F. and the bookkeeper of C.D.&C.!* Naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty ... !!!!

What you need is a good spanking.

So long: I'm going to lay my head down in a bucket, to relax my mind. That's what all great men do, at least all great men who have: 1) a mind, 2) a head, and 3) a bucket in which to stick their head.

A kiss, just one, that lasts as long as the world, from your always very own

Fernando (Nininho)

9 October 1929

Terrible Baby:

I like your letters, which are sweet, and I like you, because you're sweet too. And you're candy, and you're a wasp, and you're honey, which comes from bees and not wasps, and everything's just fine, and Baby should always write me, even when I don't, which is always, and I'm sad, and I'm crazy, and no one likes me, and why should they, and that's exactly right, and everything goes back to the beginning, and I think I'll call you today, and I'd like to kiss you precisely and voraciously on the lips, and to eat your lips and whatever little kisses you're hiding there, and to lean on your shoulder and slide into the softness of your little doves, and to beg your pardon, and the pardon to be make-believe, and to do it over and over and period until I start again, and why do you like a scoundrel and a troll and a fat slob with a face like a gas meter and the expression of someone who's not there but in the toilet next door, and indeed, and finally, and I'm going to stop because I'm insane and I always have been, it's from birth, which is to say ever since I was born, and I wish Baby were my doll so I could do like a child, taking off her clothes, and I've reached the end of the page, and this doesn't seem like it could be written by a human being but it was written by me.

Fernando