In their secret rooms

I wrote down each turn, every street name, all the way to the library at Copley Square. It was a grey fogged up evening made for walking. When walking, I kept glancing down at the hole in my arm where another arm could have fit right through it. It kept feeling like a hole. When I crossed the bridge home, this woman in gym clothes walking towards me and her small girl waddling behind her and calling out, her on the telephone saying "don't ever have children, i swear", and its starting to rain. Its been long, time walking and walking all day; Arlington, Abington, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The library at Copley Square, it was much too large, and I hadn't known what to do there. I looked for the books. They were all hiding, in their secret rooms.

58 people have been murdered in boston so far this year...

in Christian Science: hell and heaven are both states of thought that correspond to the presence, or absence, of self-centredness that characterise the individual undergoing the experience of death.

me and my little jar of marajuana-- at the public library, the goodwill store, the corner mart. Everything I buy is small and non-reusable. My grandmother sleeps in her daughter's bed now. She does not know her middle name and I cannot tell it to her. Somedays I sleep past shame and wake up ready to run. I put my sneakers on. I have nowhere to run. I watch the news even when I try not to. The television stays on like a warning signal. A young man the cops shot down in New York. He's dead now. I shouldn't have to think about him. If I weren't here, I wouldn't. And she's fallen again when they wake me up, and I wake up shameful. She's fallen. In the hall near the bathroom. The nurse shows me her bruises. I don't care, I can't care. I need to use the bathroom badly. These are our sad little human conditions. The children at school Sharon tells me about, who wake up with crusted milk on their upper lips, whose mothers don't teach them to wash their hands or wipe their asses. These kids, she says. And where are my children now? All of them bright-eyed and listening, old enough to drink and laugh at such things. They think I'm crazy, they miss me, they've forgot me now entirely. And what if I didn't re-enter the world? What would anyone think of that. The girl with her jar of marajuana, walking herself like a dog through South Boston, scanning the beaches for broken glass. A plastic bag I keep things in.

At first he was much possessed to howl at me
from his post inside the garden, as if invoking
me to enter, and knowing that I could not.
The birds sprinkled outwards from his direction,
his howl like an icy shiver through the yard.
No, I would not enter, though i saw him
and i sometimes watched him
walking in circles around the sick and dying
tomato plant. Once a deer got caught in the wire
mesh enclosures my father had made
to keep the snakes out of the blueberries,
and I could not see him behind this huge
panicked deer. I admit then, I almost ran out
unthinkingly, to free him. But my father appeared instead,
and he will not howl at my father. He runs and hides
in the compost pile when he sees my father.
My father, who freed the deer and rescued
countless toads from the imminent jaws of his sit-down
lawn mower. There's a wolf in the garden,
I told him one night, and he laughed as he stroked
the top of my head, like a small pet's.

I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days...

I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days. My hair is a long knot behind my back. There is a red blemish on my left cheek. It looks distinguished there so I leave it. I rearrange the photos of my mother atop my grandmother's old piano, the photos of her as a child, a teenager. Here she stands between her two brothers, her hair red and huge about her. Here she is dressed as a child in a catholic school uniform, my mother, she wears a tie. At home she is wearing eyeglasses, thick black pointed rims. I've heard her recall them so many times. In the photography rooms she can see without them, she can smile half-way. Then beside and in front of her, I've placed a new favorite. I call her the nun. She is a nun. I never knew this woman, this nun of my family. I thank her, I love her for that. She was not a cheerful woman, said my mother. But she is such a wonderful photo, sitting on the right in a white and wooden chair, the most joyfully spectacled woman beside her. Another woman I do not know sits beside her. She is holding a baby in her lap. She is wearing a pink or a faded red dress and sitting with this nun on someone's lawn. A tree fills the whole frame behind her. She is so lovely in her pink, with her baby and her nun. And I don't give a damn who she is.

anne sexton- 45 mercy street

45 Mercy Street


In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign -
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was...
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down -
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

For Shits & Sweeteners

Well, yes!, I say to the ice cube tray,
who spills three solids on the hardwood
floor. Yes, you once-were,
you once were water,
weren't you? You frigid bitch!
Now you're frozen and hard
as a brick, you old hag-
I can't drink you like that! No, I can't,
and I won't! I will dip you
in coffee (not-cold-enough coffee) and bathe you
in milk (not some poor old cow's milk),
let the cows eat hay! I'll soak you in soy!
And sugar, why sugar,
you just sit right there, sugar,
on the shelf, there, sugar,
in the pantry, there
sugar.

note from will granberry

just woke up from a nap
you were in the dream
in a pool in los angeles i said "im gonna get room service alllll week"
then i went to the bathroom and realized i had a vagina
and my bellybutton was falling apart
it was awful

from stop me if you heard this by jim holt

Schmulowitz: "Liberty, Laughter, and the Law" he spoke ringingly of how jokes have "detected and exposed the imposter and have saved man from the impression of false leaders."

Voltaire: "Those who know why this kind of joy that kindles laughter should draw the zygo-matic muscle back toward the ears are knowing indeed."

Alfred North Whitehead: "The total absence of humor from the bible is one of the most singular things in all literature."


"Of the three theories of humor, it is the incongruity theory that is taken most seriously by philosophers today. It too, however, is open to objections. Why should incongruity be a source of pleasure? Shouldn't the asymmetrical, the disorderly, and the absurd cause bewilderment and anxiety in rational creatures like ourselves, not merriment? The nineteenth-century philosopher Alexander Bain observed:

There are many incongruities that may produce anything but a laugh. A decrepit man under a heavy burden, five loaves and two fishes among a multitude, and all unfitness and gross disproportion; an instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege, and all discordant things; a wolf in sheep's clothing, a breach of bargain, and falsehood in general; the multitude taking the law into their own hands, and everything of the nature of disorder; a corpse at a feast, parental cruelty, filial ingratitude, and whatever is unnatural; the enitre catalogue of vanities given by Solomon-are all incongruous, but they cause feelings of pain, anger, sadness, loathing, rather than mirth.

(Bain was a dour Victorian Scotsman, with little capacity for the darker forms of humor; but one sees what he is getting at.) Some forms of incongruity, moreover, have aesthetic value without being the least bit funny: the ironies of Oedipus Rex, for example, or the dissonances in Mozart's String Quartet in C major.

Even if not all incongruities are funny, nearly everything that is funny does seem to contain an incongruity of one sort or another. For Kant the incongruity in a joke was between the "something" of the setup and the anticlimatic "nothing" of the punch line; the ludicrous effect arises "from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." (In the Critique of Judgment, Kant illustrates the point with a story: An Indian who is dining with an Englishman looks astonished when a bottle of ale is opened and the contents come gushing out in a wave of froth. "Well, what is so wonderful in that?" asks the Englishman. "Oh, I'm not suprised at its getting out," replies the Indian, "but at how you ever managed to get it all in.") Schopenhauer thought that at the core of every joke was a sophistical syllogism. But some jokes simply defy syllogistic analysis. (Lily Tomlin: "When I was young I always wanted to be somebody. Now I wish I had been more specific.")"