It’s time!
Lori’s Birthday Surprise is Tomorrow!
And Lori’s actual birthday is on Tuesday!
(In case you were wondering, she’s giving herself a day’s berth (PUN) mostly because she knew she’d be staying up the entire night before getting shit done, and she didn’t want to be tired on her birthday, duh.)
See ya in the AM (or, more likely, PM)
xox
Lori’s Birthday Surprise… Even Closer!
T -3, jerks.
xox
Lori’s Birthday Surprise
In six days, Lori Adorable is turning 23, but in five days, you’re the one who’s getting the surprise 
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T -5
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xox
Two Poems for the 10th Anniversary of September 11th
Trigger warning for violent imagery
Instead of doing the whole ‘this is what September 11th means to me’ essay post (which, to be fair, I did sort of do on the video blog you’ll be able to access next month), I’m going with poems. Yes, I write poetry. Yes, this is three days late. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s see how poems go over with this audience (be warned, the second one is mildly epic):
_____
Harmony
for the Second Week of September
___
I
Across Septembers certain things
still sound the same—
my little ornamentals:
secret sadnesses that swell
as low and shallow mordents,
slipping up sometimes to wash upon
the groaning principal:
shared sorrow necessarily
sustained on a sea string
of a cello
___________It is braced
_______between
this country’s absent calves,
and music flows from where they aren’t
like water through canals
___
II
Across Septembers certain things
still sound the same—
a stoic giu’ arco stretches out
from the clear, cool morning,
from the sun-scorched mourning,
from the rain-rimmed mourning,
From the clear, cool mourning,
the same stream spirals on
in a fathomless fermata;
there’s no signal, yet,
to stop
____
Reaching for Butterflies
(A Found Poem*)
* Sources:“Let There Be Peace, and Trade,” by Iver Peterson, from the June 21, 1998 issue of The New York Times; “The Height of Ambition” by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, from the September 8, 2002 issue of The New York Times.
One.
____All successful people have ___stories that are part of their ___personal mythologies. ___The story about Guy ___Tozolli began in 1930, ___when he went to see ___All Quiet on the Western Front.___He left the old Loew’s ___transfixed by the closing image, ___Lew Ayers being shot ___as he reached for a butterfly ___in the trench mud of World War I.
Guy Tozzoli led the team
of dreamers, planners,
architects, and builders of
the World Trade Center.
Sometimes it seemed as if
he had personally willed
into existence the tallest buildings on earth.
The most beautiful moment
on his daily commute each morning
was his first view across the Hudson.
Some days the skyline appeared
with such clarity, contours
so stark, the view suggested
abstract sculpture,
carved of the water and the sky.
The eye rose
from the Battery,
settling at the obvious trail head.
But on that morning, Tozzoli
lurched to a stop.
In a motionless mass of cars,
he stepped out and stood
among dozens
confronted with an incomp
rehensible sight:
not far above his office
in the north to
wer, waves of thick,
oily smoke, bill
owing
from a gash.
“It’s going to take us a long time
to fix that.”
No one answered.
Then he heard the scream:
the second plane gunning
past the Statue of Liberty,
then
an orange billow of flame,
chunks of steel, a blizzard
of paper.
Tozzoli got back in his car.
On the Manhattan side
he said, “Listen.
I built that place.
I’ve got to get down there
to help.”
“I don’t care if you’re the pope,”
the policeman replied.
“You turn this car around.”
For the first time,
everything
was doomed to come undone.
_______
____
Tozzoli and the others made
dozens of decisions, small and large,
many now half-forgotten,
deeply buried, like clues
beneath the rubble.
They determined the enormous size,
they shaped it
into an icon, they drew
the blueprints for its construction,
they had written the script
for its eventual destruction.
Dozens of decisions, become matters of death.
____
____
Two.
Nudie Tuesdays 9/13
It’s your favorite time of the (every other) week! I’ve got some new color pixxx for you on the Galleries page today, courtesy of the amazing Mark Velasquez. Make sure to check out his site, and then read some of the nice things he said about me over here. Finally, if you’re so inclined, you can click through the jump to “wet” your appetite with some high-larious R-rated outtakes before looking at the gallery itself…
