Rob Hendricks > Recent Status Updates

"Now that the road has died / and that our automobile reflex is licking its ghost / with its stunned tongue, / as if we were spinning vertigenously in the spiral of our own selves, / each one of us feels lonely, indescribably lonely, / oh infinite friends!"

"We were in the souvenir / Kiosk behind the throne room / The arrow in my compass began / To quiver, solemn colonels slicing key / Limes into keys into a tureen of wastetoid / Pukes lightly slapped with a platelety / Lasagna by the white hand of a handsome / Waiter in a battalion of balls / On a billiard table loaded w eternally / Tween thoughts reconstellating / The diamond sense of genocide's very / Worst ideas."

"so much spinal cord / looped & curved into spider darkness / hacked out of a calcium tomb, / where water screams back into you."

"My whole body feels like it's vibrating, / like I'm a harp of time."

"I pulled the crumbled photograph / from his fingers. / There's no other way / to say this: I fell in love."

"a world without color that knows the sea's dark blue"

"The explosion / is for all of us and I dedicate the results / to the fish of the sea and the purity of / language: The truth is sadder but who / would ask me to hope only for that?"

"As a listener, I won't retain / by absorbing, but by being absorbed."

"To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not -- this is the beginning of writing."

"Death requires you to completely leave everything that you love, including your one and only beloved ballpoint pen... You cannot meet your friends anymore. You lose everything--every single item that you possess and everything you like, including the clothes you bought and your little tube of toothpaste, and the soap you like to use to wash your hands or face."

The gift is not necessarily excrement, but it has, nonetheless, a vocation as waste: the gift I receive is more than I know what to do with, it does not fit my space, it encumbers, it is too much: "What am I going to do with your present!"

"Rattlesnakes, I heard you say. / One dozen, large."

"How meanings settle upon the eye. Moths in butter. / Contradiction is devotional."

"...what I give by singing is at once my body (by my voice) and the silence into which you cast that body. (Love is mute, Novalis says; only poetry makes it speak.) SONG MEANS NOTHING: it is in this that you will understand at last what it is that I give you; as useless as the wisp of yarn, the pebble held out to his mother by the child."

"...ultimately it is possible to talk about love only according to a strict allocutive determination; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is FOR someone."

I pulled my car over by the farm stand on / Northwest Street. "How's the corn this year?" / I asked the farmer. "It's the best ever," he / said. "You say that every year," I said. "No / I don't," he said. "Yes you do," I said. "No / I don't," he said. "Yes, you do," I said. "I / don't," he said. "Well you do," I said, "but / let's not make a federal case out of it," I said. / "Fair enough," he said.

"Surely the trees are hinged to no definite purpose or surface."

" I'm interested instead in / discretion: what I love and also the spread / of indifferent qualities."

"In Lacan's seminar, [Hyppolite] spoke with virtuosity and particular commitment about Freud's great text on negation. That was because there was within him a subterranean negativity, a primordial 'no' about which we knew little but which was constantly at work."

"We have here a particularly extreme example of what Hegel calls 'extraneation,' or the radical effect of mediation through alterity." (Referring to Jean Hyppolite's French translation of The Phenomenology of Spirit, as surpassing Hegel's original in its generative glory.)

"ginkgo, bristly locust, maiden pink, garden star-of-Bethlehem, wild pansy, / birdeye speedwell, eastern redbud, Japanese cherry, apricot, peach, / American holly, beefsteak plant, maypop, common blue wood aster, / calico aster, eastern white pine, southern sugar maple, scarlet morning glory." -- Tiana Clark

"Boredom is important because boredom is anti-credential, anti-entertainment. And as we develop greater psychological sophistication, we begin to appreciate such boredom. It becomes cool and refreshing, like a mountain river... Cool boredom is like what mountains experience. With cool boredom, thought processes become less entertaining. They become transparent. Cool boredom is hopelessness at its most absolute."