fowlqua's Xanga

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:20:19 GMT

Giving houyhnhnmorwyvern.wordpress.com a try.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:31:16 GMT

Clouds, the wisping things, traverse the aca-bowl from edge to edge. I fix my eyes at a curly clump and begin a quiet count. The smeared cephalopods migrate, underbellies nacreous with street-light. My rolling swarm of suspended droplets spills around an airplane trail. I measure its fantastic progress, whisper to myself its name: hail the Ghostly Cephalopodic Galleon, Tossed Upon Woolfian Cloudy Seas.

During a thirty-count journey from one horizon of my vision to the other, the cloud retains no shape, but ever tumbles and uncurls into mayhem, held together only within my knitting stare.

What holds me together? What on earth holds all of me together? The hundred things I know, the thousand things I don't know, the countless steps I skip, the random steps I tarry over. What retards my entropy? At what point, I wonder, might I dissolve into some humming pile of rags under the highway?

Who's watching me?

Friday, April 17, 2009

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 03:33:42 GMT

3 MORE PAGES OF ACCUSING THE MODERN WESTERN AUDIENCE OF ORIENTALISTIC SENTIMENTS AND THEN

wondering what it would be like if my dad actually gets the job in Nigeria.

I guess it's not Lubbock.

good friday

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:45:11 GMT

cut some bluebonnets, legally actually when on private property, interspersed with some small purple aster-looking things and some deep-red round-petaled ones, and surrounded them with great spikes of indian paintbrush. tied together with white ribbon fallen from my pirates fan. then ran around looking for somewhere or someone to present them to and ended up at michelle towards the end of her art show. i'd assembled the easels.

during the art show, consumed several chunks of guyere and chased away the taste of wine with a coke with an "o" sticker on the bottlecap, for ophelia apparently, in humor of some psychedelic hamlet production plans, because of my flowers and my larping garb.

oh yeah, our college night theme was larp, and there were quite a few pool toys involved, and a little too much green body paint. i have grown to like striding down a commons with cape flowing wide. and tearing across fields with the wind lifting my cape. good cape this year, a fuzzed hobbit brown and a weight that really hangs, and a hood that falls over my forehead for hitting books against. a lady on the metro with asymmetrical cornrows and one giant hoop earring reached across the aisle and sort of stroked my cloak.

walked to smashburger then to half-price books: Mystic Warrior: Book One of the Bronze Canticles, monster-sized with an appendix and an opening line of "In the 492nd year of the Dragonkings," after which I read no further ($1), Kafka anthology ($1), memoirish nature descriptions by Annie Dillard ($1), That Hideous Strength (48 cents), and my favorite, Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea ($1.75). Then I realized I was still wearing my larping costume and got myself out of the scifi/fantasy section.

I sat on a staircase to read while the others finished up. A little girl with frightening dark eyes, according to Rory, sat next to me and became my friend. Her name was Mackenzie Elizabeth something and she gave me a flower though she was sorry it was squashed from her hand, and I gave her my ball of spanish moss on a stick, one of several dropped from the campus trees this week.

and I'll try not to leave out the two herons, or the squirrel crunching his piece of branch and dropping bits into my hair, or how I completely forgot to go to work this afternoon for the first time.

so, any day in which flowers (or moss balls) pass hands three times is probably good. or any day you spend wearing a hobbit cape in public, I guess. though maybe those are just the small things.

it was good, but there's something I'm trying not to think about.

unrelated news - I'm the script coordinator next year. Thousands of football fans will be hearing my witty, witty words at halftime every game. Thousands. Zillions.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:43:14 GMT

and more slavery, dubai this time, where else? will we ever grasp tanstaafl? grotesque reshapings of the coastline, shark tanks lining the hotel walls, and feces washing up on the beach.

and I'm remembering my dad's sudden offhand bitterness after my mom got off the phone with her sister: the cinderella girl supporting an entire household. he doesn't know why, but this happens a lot among filipinos, he says. my mom, too, at aunty nancy's before my dad met her. the giddy neverland of sloth, the allure of pretty things, pulling the world lopsided.

I'm bewildered. but I know that I am lazy too, that I really, secretly just want to stumble upon wells of talent within myself someday so I can ride out the rest of my life upon a lucky, giddy geyser, another shade of black gold. I'm not sure what separates me from the perpetual clubbers, the monkeys with six figures, the slave drivers both unwitting and witting.

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls...

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Alex K: *contemplating dyes in warhammer online* Should I get sea foam or sea blue? I think sea blue.
Sarah: No! Sea foam.
Evan: Well that settles it. Sea blue.
Sarah: No! Foam is way better. Foam is more poetic.
*Everyone stops listening*
Sarah: Why would you want blue when you could have turbulence and pollution? Why do you want the placid blue when reality is turbulent and dirty?! *frazzles out*

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:16:01 GMT

The other day my mom made an album on facebook and called it "Some of my Favorite Family Pictures." Mostly pictures from the Philippines and Australia, when my brother and I were smaller and the world was perpetually swathed in sunwashed green fronds, where black swans paddled and Ifagao natives stood dressed in woven red while a mop-headed girl kid made gaping smiles. On the phone she said that she missed those times of leisure, before she ended up at nursing school, then as an assistant to a hand surgeon, full-time by the hour. My tuition is expensive. Her sneakers are pink and gently curved so her feet won't hurt.

She is tired every evening, and I do not forgive myself.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:45:38 GMT

Where are my memories? I feel like I've just heard footsteps behind me, turned around and grabbed at mist.

No I'm speaking on the completely literal level. Maybe there's something the matter with the fact that I have to probe for a minute before I can accurately tell someone what I did last weekend. My old friends seem to dissolve; I can only remember them by telling people about them. Like getting bored of an intricate symphony, unable to feel the underlying continuities. What about the time that... and the night when we... and something was really funny and I don't remember why..

I've got to record the days. Not for "posterity" or whatever. I want to see the shape of the universe.

My wet hair clump has crept about forty degrees to the right and billowed magnificently around my ear and I love it. I don't think anyone has any idea I'm this freaking pretty.

Thursday afternoon, the room turns away from the videogames for a moment to find me pretending to weep. "I'm having to get rid of all the songs that remind me of you!" as I lift an accusatory finger in my new ex-boyfriend's direction. A collective guffaw!

This break-up has honestly been kind of fun. Though you're going to find me with my arms wrapped around corgi for most of spring break.

The postcolonial loldog deserves our compassion. If you want to know, ask.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:55:56 GMT

Thought while biking across Wilton:
As a basket case, one can do many things that others cannot. For instance, one can exhibit the behavior of a basket case, knowing that it is not through some uncharacteristic blunder, but because one is a basket case. Should one feel lighter, freer? or does it just take the edge off things?

(on a different note)
Different people, their vibrancies. Maybe every word - the very center of the prototype - the frame, spindly, of the concept - is a parody. When you recreate someone, when you repeat their turns of phrase and recall their habits, you turn them into what they usually, often are. Every word is a shimmering cloud, uncertainties and unlikelihoods mere outliers, yes, but still, any shape given it is a kind of reduction of what it is in its entirety, at the same time that it is a mastery, invisible lines traced with imperious scepter. What are we, actually?

(on another note)
FREEEEDOM

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:05:55 GMT

My position on the curve makes such a huge difference. Everything around me has taken on a completely different shape, these past few years; I am, quite simply, a little, little fish. I thought I could hold on to something about myself, walk to class with the same sized strides as yesterday, look at the world steadily. My words, perhaps. I thought I might return to them, day after day, and see that they were the same, the same sound.

Only I stopped writing like I used to. Reading, too. I stopped because my writing had always contained this assumption: that I occupied some sort of space, that my thoughts had some extension. It was easy when I was something explosive, spilling into the sky. Spiking gaily into space and waving hi to the stars. A nice loneliness in uncharted chaos.

I find new things; it is what I do. I don't want to open my mouth unless a plant grows out of it, a carnivorous plant. So I wait.

Maybe that's what writing does, shoot you out to a little space station. Maybe there is more to a thinking spot than a murmuring decibel level. Maybe I need to choose just one place for doing things, quit living out of the backpack, keep all my clothes and shoes in the same room. How could I have stopped thinking. Everything's new with new eyes. I forgot.

Can I say it's all because I went to this place? Would things have been different at another college? Would I have been bright, would my little screwups have been more einstein-adorable?

It's also completely possible that I have crud in my brain. Compartmentalized pill box of a translucent purple plastic, rattles when I walk. Some days I think the crud is in the box, but most days it really is something bad in my head.

Monday, January 05, 2009

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:38:28 GMT

my plane's shadow runs the earth
chased by a sun lightly leaping from puddle to puddle;
now burrowing invisible through thick swaths of grass
til a wetland bursts dappled orange,
open mouth of a pleiosaur, then dims again;
now he weaves upon windshields and slick slabs of asphalt
and lilts and TILTs between backyard pools;
at last, as a river grows wide across the earth,
he breaks from the water with golden scales,
roaring: he swallows me