This Time
1.
This is when the story becomes a poem.
Woolf, James, and Eliot sit round a small booth in Bloomsbury. Woolf rambles on about the sea and James smirks at the fact that he is the only American in the round. Eliot flips through the paper and together they girn and gowl, hardel and write as they begin round three of that golden stuff.
In walks Vanessa and Woolf jumps with joy. Things fly out of her pockets.
Now,
Imagine they’ve all got smartphones and oh how times have changed! James is on Wikipedia looking up British jargon; Freud is counting his followers on Twitter and ironically, has a rather large following of the opposite sex. There’s: @Robot_Mom and @JuliaChildMajesty – not to mention @Bakeablechildren. Woolf is taking hipstamatic photos on her iPhone that her sister will later use in a gallery on the Strand. The bartender rolls his eyes and picks up another round. Crisps are going round, as are swear-words, until Leonard walks in and all goes silent.
Words push their way into sense and with sense comes the hardeling.
2.
The hardeling is in the nerves. If I invent a constraint, then I charm you. My introduction must match my style. Whether our circles connect is or is not somewhat within the words. Our words. It’s also our electric registers. Even, the internal rhyme of this poem. It’s really about the want.
Imagine we are a predicate. Fill it with helping or being.
All I want is a drumble of your virtual time. Think of what was given way back when…
What’s a little button-pushing action?
Here a ‘like,’ there a ‘like,’ everywhere a ‘like-like.’
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You know language is complicated and felth. And, artificially speaking, intelligence can be learned; so who knows what you’re really like. Look at what’s happened to dating.
Look at the spuddled mess of our beloved messenger: Cupid. [ uh huh, ok. Sure, you’re trying ]
Messages are so compact, but not mine. I teeter on. I keep it rambling, baby, yea!
No forswunking here. I mean what I say. I don’t need emoticons, though I like them. I like showing you what I’m going to tell and why the hell not?
So what if we’re all feeding into a societal porn or societal norm online– memory gets replayed now. We alter it. Create your own scenes. Miswire. Use words to mean different
words, but don’t darg the intent. The intent should be golden, purposeful and proud. The reference to them never appears because I don’t want it to. Here, I’ll try not to moffle:
I speak from the heart. Always will. The screen-size doesn’t matter. Size doesn’t, too. I have restraint. Now, I feel dirty in my rambles. In my brambles. and gambles. Oh well, my personage is crystal clear.
© Umansky 2011
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Turning Over Phrases: key to joy
Listen and listen good, I clicked [add to spell-check] when I saw that your name turned red. I blushed and thought: How romantic! That’s the beauty of this felthed time. I can spuddle with what I deem romantic; with what I deem to be romance. Tug it, tweek it, tune it til it’s just-right. Each digital act is darged by a display of affection or gratitude;
attitude or charm. There is a bit of me, here, between bone and heart-bone. A bit moffled but still plush. It has been too long; too gone, since I’ve felt this kench. An interior kvetching, here, beneath the breast. I am looking at the digital for something heart-felt; something coded: HEART! Something worth-worth [sharing]. Something worthy of an investment. But then again,
I am a salesman. (My father’s daughter ). My words, a financial gesture between myself and my word-bank. I am selling you an aesthetic experience. I touch-type [x][x][x][x] and a word is now forswunk and forswinkled. I am so endearing; so enduring. Can’t you see I’m being genuine? This is potentially profitable. Don’t you want to cash-in? The heart is a loaded weapon.
[Did I say weapon; I meant, investment.]
© Umansky 2011
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Our foremothers were grateful. For the corset. For the cincher. For the girdle. The bloomer. For the bustier. For the bra. For the panty and the drawstring waist.
For Goddamn Little Miss Elastic.
For silk. Chiffon. Gossamer and lace. The fishnet, the back-seam; the push-up; the strapless; the open-front. The halter.
Then man created the “stay-up” and with it, the depletion of the garter.
[SNAP !]
And now … what would our foremothers think of “the thong?”
The Spanx? The convertible bra?
We have come so far.
[Would they be proud, sitting on the porch in their rockers/ Peeling potatoes over the kitchen sink/ digging up rhubarbs or turnips on the farm; dusting the china-cabinet with a shmata; reading by the fire or the hearth
– would they even care? ]
They used to just be grateful for their health,
but now, we have it all
all at our fingertips
[and I don’t mean sewing]
We can wear pants; we can cut our hair. We can control our “cycles.” We can create our own children.
Strip it all !
Let the seam tear…
We have come so far
from giving in
from sucking in
Let it all hang out,
like a man.
(c) Umansky 2011
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Borrow the hours, the ours
17 The Lord said to Eve, ‘you are free to use your own pronoun. & Eve said to God: I want the body and the thirst. I want to always speak first. I want the becoming and the coming and the…the mixing of the self with the sun. Now, that you have gendered me; engendered me; & remembered me– make me my own. Give me my own pronoun. Give me my own material. Give me authority.
21 After harkening at the dusk-song, God said, ‘With the glory which I had with thee; the glory I had with thee; the glory I have had and had had; before the world was; before the world is; that was THE GLORY. That shall be yours- in yours; of yours, Mother-Of-All-Living-Things.
34 Then dusk became sunless and still, God spake,‘You are the artificer. You are the artifice. When I behold you – you are paler than the blanched. Into thy bosom, I have given you one heart, and if one borrows [it]; if one maketh [it] othered; if one borrows [of] thee unrightfully – cradle the earth in your arches and as a thread to a shoelatchet; a beam to the sun- I will make it NOT so. Young men have eaten here. Yes, young men have ate. Empty thy heart like a stomach. Take me a heifer; a goat; or turtledove & when the morning arises – I will tell thee the story of you & you will gather up light. My kindred. My country. My singular beauteous thing. Be your own. On your own. In your own. Be yours; Be ours.’
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Every Thing Possible
To be believed is an image of truth & not-truth. Thinking outside the box. The function of [space] rests on your fingers. How we categorize the thinking of functions is like immigrating across time. Even cockeyed gibberish translates into some vernacular. Into bits of alpha-male flanked on the screen.
It is sensational. It is artisanal. It is extra sensory that
everything at once still ends up in someone’s mailbox:
electronic or not.
It would be an insult to the possible to succumb to it. If the box you lie in makes you ill; sod it. A theory or grams uncritically ties the page to the mast; the mast to the page. Pitch a sail and traverse the intellectual field: find a lover.
From the erotic to the neurotic; an alternative explanation is:
do –it yourself.
Is: annex what is potent and ride it out at your desk
[everyone’s doing it]
So, men will continue; with their dirtiness. He didn’t dislike you – it’s the porn.. It’s the digital SHE that represents the real (if you’re delusional). The menaced-men investigate what is reached: they take their political past and their psychosexual flair and auctioneer their best traits to the highest bidder:
A startling departure: the electronified woman. [ Surely Darwin didn’t see that] What baffled naiveté we own, to stand in the midst of such beauty and desensitize it. To come through so perfected through a screen. To do-it-myself with myself as if waiting for the phone to ring. A call not made. Disconnected. Disdained. The lazy days. The lazy ways. The lazy phrase. So urgent is that– that immediate gratification; immediate satisfaction; immediate attraction that it Kings your life. Stirrings resonate in the mind. The physical is unified. The need to be held becomes disembodied –as SHE is disembodied when you hit [power off]. Did she lie?
Her treats are too sticky. Her sap is too tricky. Her figure is jerried-up just so to speak [or peak] before it sours. These [little] questions are all harrowing; or all narrowing.
Go back to the mind, and feed it. [REFRESH]
The soul: the original electric.
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Forget what you already know.
Get caught up in it.
Alphabetically not electronically
Be pastoral with language.
Feel the grain.
Phish, but remember where the bait is.
Count your chickens
before they go viral.
I could be bringing this to the masses in hard copy
[Forget the hardware.]
I prefer the printed word.
[Not pressed.]
No links required!
Use your noggin.
Not your smartphone.
Use your smarts.
Handle the page &
Cradle that word.
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The day is long as the sea is wide as the pen is free.
Antiquate me; let the pages yellow. Show me what’s been folded down and ripped-out.
Grant not another word; or an otherword
Maybe just one more word,
here at the tip of this tongue.
That darling. That little darling. That small starling of a stole moment is gone. But…
I saw:
two magpies on the side of the road
[I felt they were blackbirds.]
Their white stripes some new fancy.
Let it be lucky. Let it be luck.
*
In any tone; in any register; expression is really in the eyes.
And fate,
in the hand of the penned.
In the written word of another. Word or non-word. A collaborating effort of letter and mind. Of leather and mine. Of the latter and the make.
Oh, the keening of wonder. The lusting after what word to put next to the next and the next and the next.
The placements of our lives is on the page .
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Mother, this is slow-loading. Why don’t we just go plant our own pods? Plug into the wild of the wired. No need to add a voice to this whirring. This cloud of analog and dialogue and Once Upon a Dial-Up.
I’ll be the first to say it: a good domain name is hard to find.
(Especially if you’re jonsing for the perfect one)
The pickings are slim.
A Cliff, Dick or Harry could get caught in the spam. I’ll keep keeping. Keep needling the hay; needling the time between reloads, refreshes, rescans.
[Auto-remind: Maybe Norton can help descript this techno-babble-baloney?]
What happened to clean? To pure? To loyal. We’re just caught in the filth and the cached; the
autofill and the default.
Predict what’s coming.
Does it need a little elbow-grease? Compressed air?
Translate the page into French. Change my background to Pretty-like. Pretty is as pretty does. You big pretty-brained tinker toy. You can’t even talk back.
[How do you like them apples?]
© Umansky 2011
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