grauform.izzy aspie

syndrome.

my baby told me
"i described you to my friend and she asked is he aspie?
is he what? sounds like aspergers syndrome to me.
i don't know; what's that?" but looked
it up herself on the Internet,
failing there to develop
a satisfactory sense of what
that syndrome signifies.


special-needs.

i told my baby
"when i told my mom's friend,
the special-needs educator, of my
past girlfriends all telling me
i have aspergers (in their
respective efforts to better dig
where i was coming from, no doubt),
she said they were psychologically abusive,
and i made excuses for them."


spectrum.

"so, what is it?"
i described my sense,
via the usual sources and also via mom's friend,
that it characterizes individuals toward the
well-socialized or highly-interactive end
of the spectrum of autism-related conditions,
and that it was hyperlexia in me they'd
thought denoted aspergers, "but mine's learned."

a mordant mordent

"Why make things more tense than they already are?"

she said and then
she threw back her head
and laughed like everybody
was doing it

and suddenly, uncomfortably
everybody was

virtually dumped :(

Once, a woman in my class dumped me, quite gently, via email, although we'd never undertaken any activity together nor communicated much beyond exchanging copies of lecture notes (which, in itself, within the law school milieu, may seem like something akin to courtship behavior), and further, hadn't even done so much as that in months:

Dear Oomph,
Because you bring out my weirdness, and my weirdness is problematic for me,
I'm afraid we'll have to have some time apart. It's not you; it's me. Sorry.
Cathy Crazed

I, more or less impotently infatuated with another woman, was stunned. Had Cathy Crazed really thought there was something between us? How had Cathy Crazed thought this? Had I in any way encouraged it?

A Spy on the Street Where You Live, pt. 3

But what can I say . . . to make it clear? How can I say that to her, when the groveling started sixteen years ago—or thirty two, if my stars really do point at her—was ineffective then, and has, it would seem, continued, to resurface now? How can I say that, which every brokenhearted singer has ever sung, that every adult has recognized for the screen-kiss kitsch it is, as a vehicle for commercial culture and greater need, to this stranger whose company I crave with a thirst I’d say anything to slake? Never trust a junkie or a crooner: My mama done told me, they’ll both do anything for another hit.

And, how, after all, if she won’t return my calls, who gave up writing weeks ago, who won’t be getting in touch, nor speak to me at all? If the sun refused to shine, perhaps she would return my calls; or if the moon plunged into the sea, perhaps she would call me. Of course, if that happened, phone service would likely be adversely impacted, not to mention low-lying coastal areas, and we, refugees, going nowhere.

If it were but a matter of faith,
if it were measured in petitions and prayer . . .
but it is not, nor do I care.

Barring the fools’ unforgivable sin of rushing in and talking out loud; even choosing not to tell her about it, how can I even think I crave such things, and continue to think of myself as a person? No: Must struggle, must ramble on; must . . . resist . . . compulsive . . . romantic . . . hyperbole.

A Spy on the Street Where You Live, pt. 2

And there’s Lerner and Lowe’s Fair Lady, herself also a figment from Ovid as Pygmalion’s Galatea, but, back then, she didn’t have a street, just the pedestal.

The audience of the modern musical, for dramatic development, had to be shown that Eliza Doolittle was not only sophisticated in ladylike civilized artifice, but also filled with the feminine graces known to prompt poets’ odes and lovers’ praises, through the introduction of a rival suitor to the Professor’s as yet unspoken devotion.

Rival suitor sues to see her, and succeeding, has found a reason to sing of enchantment pouring out of every door, has cause for singin’ in the rain, and dancing in the street.

People stop and stare; they don’t bother me,
For there’s no where else on Earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I won’t care if I can be here on the street where you live!

This is before the rain, of course. Properly validated, Liza falls for the Prof.

Excised from the arc of plot, this recorded and rerecorded song is simply everyman’s love song. Again, the lyric is not about the beloved, whose presence merely imbues the setting, but a report on the state of mind and heart of, or simply part and parcel of the art of, the singer. As always, at first, I’ve just seen a face and can’t forget the time or place of that first sight. Then, with or without overtures or encouragement, merely because I want to hold your hand and can’t stop my brain, or maybe because I’ve been watching . . . every breath you take, the residence of the beloved is discovered. Then the wooing, the suiting starts, or the stalking—the difference lies in her consent—with the overpowering feeling that any second you may suddenly appear.

A Spy on the Street Where You Live, pt.1

A Spy in the House of Love, or Stalker on the Street Where You Live

It is only a woman that can make a man become the parody of himself.
--French Proverb, the Rev. T.F. Thistleton-Dyer

Under . . .

I cannot step out of my home without asking myself whether I’m only going out in the hope of seeing her, here on the street, and knowing that if I do or do not see her, I’ll be looking for her anyway, and judging and chiding myself for it. Let me tell you a little about what I know of me and this fervent furtive infatuation.

Conditioned by love songs to be the perfect American romantic id, in addition to being the paranoid monomaniac ego of me, I am attuned to poignant phrases pertaining to the street where she lives, or some synonymous heterologue, distinct as a singular wandering star in the collective romantic meme-pool of popular music, an ersatz zodiac of coupling if not graveyard of the language and dreams of modernity.

This has been powerful imagery for me since before she moved onto my street.

There ought to be a lot of love songs dealing with this theme, but I can only think of two, and another scenario, to which I add this, my words and tone, my own inept tune.

But soft! What light in yonder window breaks? It is the East!

Not even a love song, but some higher-art embodiment, in perhaps its most perfected form, this is certainly the archetype, the articulation of romantic love that has most imbued the cultural discourse; has so imbued this discourse, that Romeus and Juliet are commonly invoked as exemplary lovers, despite their tragic non-consummation. As if they’d got hitched, bought land, and made it fruitful across the long gloss of their bliss.

Yonder window, wherever it is, irresistibly attracts the romantic speaker’s attention, displacing the governor of the dome of the sky, the prime indicator of direction and time throughout human history. That window becomes the East, and Juliet is the sun. Wither she goest, so the speaker’s heliotropic heart and attention, perpetually dawning.

amidst the distressed texts

(pursuant to the continuing efforts to elucidate the notions of destructive writing and antihumor, here are more evasive descriptions, along with some select milestones in how i, oomph cavilrest, came to hold my cavils here, and also rest, at Hellmark Press excerpted from recent note to a mentor. we join it already in progress):

... I am shamed to admit that [career] does indeed occupy a lot of my attention.

Attention that would be better spent on family, friends, music, literature, food, coffee and tobacco! And often is so spent: One of the great benefits of being in a (semi)professional milieu where one may feel one has no status or significance, is that thoroughly embracing that statuslessness can give one a great deal of freedom, provided one can nurture enough ego through to enable one to exercise same.

Recently, in a fit of silly dejection over my professional trajectory, I started to blog. . .

. . . after a youth as the son of an early-adopter fascinated with computers, and through those heady days when networking became the Internet and all that it promised -- I am somewhat of a grudging, late-adopting Luddite insofar as social networking media and communications technology are concerned. I have endeavored to maintain no Internet footprint. In 2007 I got my first cell phone (pay-as-you-go); I just began my first contract with a mobile service one billing-cycle ago; I used dial-up to access the Internet until December 2010; also I joined Linked-In.

As a writer, over the course of almost 20 years, I have written a lot of stuff, a lot of fragmentary stuff (perhaps intended as part, or a sketch, of something larger), and a lot of different versions of the same stuff, without ever developing the will-to-publish sufficiently to impose some order and finitude on the collection. I even wrote a poem about it: [citation omitted: see another revisionary testament]

But, well, honest assessment concludes that no executor or -trix would have such interest and patience, and that those bundles of letters no longer exist.

So, a moment of mortality-colored realism with respect to the ol' oeuvre led me to imagine some server at some blog service somewhere -- and the internet archive -- as the place to commit all the revisions to one copy that would be, more or less, under my control, while sure to survive any catastrophic hardware or software failures here at home.

Also, as a writer-cum-snarky-absurdist-gadfly, I have been working on distressing found language in various ways, and then seeking numinous implication of meaning or beauty amidst the distressed text, which in aggregate I flippantly call "destructive (unsaid: as opposed to creative) writing" so that I don't sound naive. Sometimes someone asks me what destructive writing is, and I am hesitant to make conclusory statements about it, but don't mind sharing examples with the very patient interested party. One thing almost all destructive writing has in common is that it is hard to read.

(unlikely that any executor or -trix as imagined above would have any idea what to make of the various destructive writing projects in various stages of distress and numinousness there in the bequested drives).

Also there is a similar(ly absurdist) notion of "antihumor" that I am loath to explain, but I know it when I see it. I don't mind sharing illustrative examples, but have a hard time putting my hand to one. Old vaudeville tropes like "take my wife" and "boy are my arms tired" recontextualized and merged into shaggy-dog stories. ("Antihumor? I hardly knew her!")

Separately, another alter-anima had made some music using some audio sources that were public domain and some that were not, and craved an easy way to share it, and other collections of sounds.

And separately-separately, I have been, for some years, through the cafepress.com DIY-shop service, making t-shirts and cards, mostly for myself, under the name Hellmark Press, which, in turn, has been affiliated with the People's Peaceable Assembly Line, who, as you'll recall, dutifully "reported suspicious activities" in regular letters to dear norm.

So, when, in March, a visiting friend, glancing at a doodled cartoon on a scrap of paper, said she'd buy the t-shirt that featured that cartoon, it all fell together. Except for the technical aspects, which I soon learned in the usual fashion. And, since then -- don't tell anyone -- I've been Oomph Cavilrest, who runs Hellmark Press (your best source for the hot educational hip-hop beats of DJ Pebkac!)

. . . Disclaimers aside, that's pretty much where I am. To some degree it gives me comfort to be done with a lot of the individual writings, and the blog format offers some interesting organizing options. As a great deal of the ethos of destructive writing lies in a sort of hostility or antipathy to the traditional bourgeois reader, and, as narcissistic (and bourgeois) as blogging is essentially, I haven't given much thought to pleasant navigation for the reader, but the labels are a pretty good way. . . .

pedantic, i am bitter, vii

mutant sonnet (extra feet)


when i was young and lived across town from my beloved,
at night i would walk out and look at the sky and know
that star-swathed moon-graced planet-strewn arch above
gazed down on my beloved as she slept or dreamed below.

older, i and my distant beloved spoke on telephones.
i imagined we both closed our eyes, as i did, to float
in dazzling cavernous meditative space, although alone,
conjoined in echoing chord, each voice donating a note.

and later, my far beloved i addressed through letters.
while composing, and while awaiting reply, that space
now mediated by no moon nor wire where we, together,
mutually contemplate, abide, converse, an implied grace.

learned sufi poets call beloved their coy elusive gnosis,
find in every moon face tone intimation of the divine,
scry their lifelong jubilant quest with grim obsessive focus;
see in my composite beloved divinity similarly sublime:

no secret sacred ethereal space exists for us to meet,
beloved, idealized fantasy no mortal woman could be.
by the same token, those, who have at times animated
my muse-beloved, they were no gods, offered no satori.

and these, the words fanatic i address fantastic her:
beloved, floating in the graceful luminous airs of
transcendent contemplation, these graceless words are
not love poems to women; they are clumsy prayers.

'k bye!

Once, a woman I had been seeing long enough to breach some of our cultural body taboos called me while I was studying. “Hi,” she said. “How are you?”

There were several volleys of the basic small talk exchange formula, then another salvo was voiced, with a change in tone that made my hair stand up, made my solar plexus sink in alarm: “What are you doing?”

By syntax, this should be just normal “fine, thanks, and you?” territory, but something in her tone made me stand up and go to the window of my darkened bedroom, replying “reading,” as I walked. Maybe it was the sound of traffic outside my window, faintly audible in delayed stereo over the phone line.

Straight out of film noir, I stood to the edge of the window, out of the wash of light and line of sight of the street, and kinked sufficient space in one of the plastic venetian slats to peer through.

“I see you,” I told her, “or, rather, your car.”

pedantic, i am bitter, vi: sloppy not-a-sonnet

Your windows are dark.

I realize that implies that I miss you and I do.
But I also could, with access to you,
Grow used to not feeling unfaithful to
Be home and know you’re home and not call you
Or slighted to receive no call from you.

I don’t know how we can achieve such ends,
Remain such trusted confidential friends
And excise our wonted co-dependence
Avoiding too much injury and repentance,
But hope we’ll remain where’er our path wends
Friends as karma or providence intends.

The above may allow the inference
That I’ve not been fantasizing of you,
Which would be inaccurate, and untrue.

pedantic, i am bitter, v

shall i write another sonnet now? nay, shall i
write another song? shall i succumb to the thrum
on my heart beat sweet fingers i have dared
not dream so long? shall i try to ply a new troth, blaze
a fresh way through, to light a hopeful smile anew
beneath this long-hallowed hanging brow? shall i strive?
or is it a lie, luring my fantastic heart to inflate,
great with scheming song, to float a bare moment
unencumbered of doubt and fear, ethereal, ere
crashing again, in pathetic wreckage of brain, heart
and pen; hope and energy spent, back on the far shore
of the broken continent of love, back pinned, eyes
baked open in the empty stare of the arid plain:
the strain or stain and blame, and finally shame.

~c. 2002

pedantic, i am bitter, iv

I would become poem and not poet:
Not flattening sublimity to page,
poor pinned abstract concentrate of beauty
flensed from visceral life, inchoate.
A poet must from living disengage,
stalk epiphany yet never know it,
in word and self alone may build his home,
acclaim his value's solitary gauge.
Only song bestows meaning 'pon flute, the
player knows who performs his sacred praise.
I would divest this calculating self
for it compares not to how you root me;
you are my living flesh my breath my bone,
grown entwined, my love, will we be poem.

~c. 2000

pedantic, i am bitter, iii (arrhythmic sonnet)

if i were to keep a journal of on-
ly her and have nought but the slightest af-
finity for words, it cannot help but
be Zarathustra's rhapsody: genet-
icokarmic complement rendered in
ink and cynic hyperbole. if this
hand were to continue its obeisance
adoring in these cragged characters'
embrace along these pages' edifice,
the impending ages could do no less
should these blest phalanges' progeny thrive
than to canonize, to cast this sublime
hand, these metacarpals in marble, for
a beauty only writ to honor, her.

~c. 1998

pedantic, i am bitter, ii

Let words not 'tween thy lips and mine intrude
As yet again the hemispheres insist
For solely in thy kiss do I consist,
Within thy pulse commence and too conclude.
Let not thine ear nor mind believe my lies
In contradiction laying siege thine heart;
Though our words fade as yet again we part
Significant remain our skin, our eyes.
She did not go without effect or trace
Nor glimpsed my face to mirror all her tears:
On our separation thrive my fears,
I breathe to sleep again in her embrace.
Vain in word to adequately mention
The full magnitude of my intention.

~ c. 1996

kicking it around

“There he is,” Catherine stopped briefly, looking meaningfully at Sheila, Bev and Aleph, and then pointedly back into the center of the quad, where several young men and two girls moved in curious choreography while kicking a beanbag back and forth, before resuming her stride and her lilt, “playing hackey-sack with that girl, who looks like you.”

Sheila and Bev giggled, glancing furtively at Aleph, who smiled, just a little.

They all watched the game – particularly that girl and he, who almost seemed to glow – silently for the few moments it took them to traverse the westward length of the quadrangle toward the dining hall. As they passed, three of the players – two boys and a girl – broke from the circle and also headed toward the dining hall, while that girl and he, and another boy, kept dancing around under that arcing bag.

They moved in concert.

“Well, at least that’s not his heart they’re kicking around,” Sheila quipped as they left the quad.

They laughed, Bev and Catherine and Sheila, while Aleph quietly said, “Oh.” She paused, glancing back, her slight smile lingering.

“Yes, it is.”

with recommendations like these . . .

[circa 2003]

Dear [Director of Admissions] –

The following letter of recommendation, in support of Kaye Sarahson’s candidacy for admission to L'Université des Arts Culinaires, comes from an admittedly strange perspective. I have been her friend for about 12 years and also her coworker for about 2.5 of those. I will try to depict some aspects of this long relationship that I, as a writer and law student, imagine relevant to your appraisal of candidates, including her longstanding interest in and passion for cooking and feeding her friends and her ability to manage a staff striving to accomplish complex tasks in chaotic circumstances. In brief, Kaye is smart, a good manager, effective and reliable under pressure; she is also avidly and actively cultivating her knowledge, skill, repertoire and apparent talent for culinary arts. I hope you will bear with my somewhat rambling review, and thank you in advance for reading this letter and considering my friend’s application.

no dream but the one

doubtless doubles unreal error down nested mirror all ways:


A man does dread
losing his head over
something he cannot control

and a woman’s friends
’ll go to any ends to
prevent her kissing a troll,

yet although she winces,
hoping frogs can be princes, she’ll
pucker up once, just to see,

another revisionary testament

to the executrix of my affairs, charged with the collation of these,
my rants, ramblings, journals, theses, articles, essays, odes and airs,
do not forget to compare the revisions archived on obsolete memories,
backed up and compressed across all these terabyte-years’ drives,
where the editorial carnage of my karma, tho’ i am gone, lives and thrives.
and also ten or so bundles of envelopes, each tied with a garter or bow,
in attic box or basement bag, dusted and webby and piled with other
such bundles in different hands, with bachelor possessions stowed,
and their disparate, desperate answers, in my scrawl, elsewhere. and the photos.
yours is the hardest choice, the proverbial tough row of earth, a winding road,
to discern the truest voice, or leave them, as more fitting their objective worth.

overheard in girl talk hell

"I have thought of a wholly untapped source of hilarity: nursing homes!"

you heard it here.

in related works, i offer only the following, not particularly hilarious, reflections on an elderly couple i once knew, who were patrons of such an institution for a time:


it is final enough. to die by your own hand a mere month—is it?
or years: since she lost her mind—after the beloved passed,
suffering done at last in the crying white tennis-shoed
persistent living if you can call it that facility. final.

another awkward valentine