Last night
she dreamed that she
was so angry her womb
boiled over, a cauldron of
toxins.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Each time
there is another
tragedy people ask
why? Someone knew and did nothing.
That’s why.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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Your skin
has the pattern
of the cracks in the glaze
of my teacup up close it shines
so thin.
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Inspired by:
Orange
leaves grey-blue sky freckles patter
under those clouds storming
in your troubled
round eyes.
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Inspired by:
When the
chill comes creeping
there is some comfort in
finger-combing his warm hairy
buttocks.
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Inspired by:
Wear a spider in a walnut shell
or wrap it around a raisin and swallow.
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It is the yellow month
of fever, the curl of the leaf
the crisp stalking footsteps
of hunter and thief.
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A glass
of white wine and
an hour defending
myself against the Keeper of
the Crypt!
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Trunk and
crotch nesting with
thighs split oak branching and
Pan’s bright pink penis mirthfully
hewing.
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Men in
ball caps look for
“adventurous” women
to drag down into their dog-hair
rec-rooms.
Football games, beer
classic rock, barbeque.
This is the plight of a prairie
cave-wife.
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Lately
I am quiet
as a sea sponge sighing
tugged and longing for the distant
surface.
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The familiar fur of Fall
fell over me, savagely.
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When you must bag a buck
or chase down a little doe
you’ll have to get your luck unstuck
so don’t choose the too-tight bow.
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So much
whorling of words.
I want space around me.
I want to stay the size of a
thumbprint.
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Peruse
advertising
admire images
of humans smooth and flawless like
angels.
Pursue
perfection through
capitalist gospel
of spending, attainment, and self
worship.
Produce
pantheons of
crowned Californian
queens with surgery, products and
potions.
Promote
parables of
human authority
with psalms, prophecies, proverbs and
prayers.
Prostrate
yourself before
idols of enrichment
your flags, televisions, machines
of war.
Portray
commitment to
moral purity and
expose your hypocrisy through
scandal.
Proclaim
that you are not
Nature’s hairy black ape.
No, you are the progeny of
Man-God.
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Poems
quite often will
thrash an idea to death
pummeling images into
stupors.
Cinquains
approach calmly
and with a single stroke
cut its throat releasing all to
silence.
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I did
not choose to be
accused, nor forebear the
pain of the pear, nor to my death
succumb.
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Inspired by:
“We suffer as we choose.”
- Alan Moore
Please
adopt me
this moon bear.
She was milked for
her bile.
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Inspired by:
It isn’t
so much the touch
of palm against pubis
but rather the gasp when you grasp
it, oh.
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I think
about your life
drawing near it’s ending.
I want to comfort you with my
body.
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We don’t
know each other
but thank you for saying
that the world misses me. Maybe
it does.
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Ah good.
So you’ve matured.
You think for yourself now.
That’s why you’re a bitter old church
lady?
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Twenty thousand times
you glimpsed upon my page
all the glints and gleanings
of my subconscious presage.
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As the multitudes extend in their beds
conforming to the remedy of sleep
emptying into husks
the scofflaw primps
into a plum confection
scented sweet as clover
and rolls into her limelight.
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Inspired by:
read write prompt #92: word gems at readwritepoem
I pour
the tea you pour
your sad heart out to me
then we turn over a card to
help you.
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They are
so credulous
easily mesmerized
like brown mice in the thrall of the
cobra.
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A plot!
The Reptilians
endorse vaccination
to horde all the spoiled meat for
themselves!
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Inspired by:
(Samples from ’super human radio’ – Carl Lanore speaking with Aajonus Vonderplanitz)
“When I was a fruitarian, ejaculatory orgasm was pleasurable but exhausting,” Vonderplanitz explains with the same matter-of-fact tone he will employ in a detailed discussion of bowel movements following dinner. “I got depressed and irritable if I had regular ejaculations. Now that I con-sume so much raw protein and fat,” he continues, “I enjoy sex from one to six hours daily and have up to three ejaculations. I finally feel like I have achieved heaven on earth…
I was in Vietnam when I shat out a forty-five-foot tapeworm,” Vonderplanitz announces, waving his hands excitedly. His students nod appreciatively. “I know how long it was because I chased it across the room and measured it. Then, for some reason, I had a craving for onions. I ate two of them and immediately felt better.”
At the heart of Icke’s theories is the view that the world is ruled by a secret group called the “Global Elite” or “Illuminati,” which he has linked to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax. In 1999, he published The Biggest Secret, in which he wrote that the Illuminati are a race of reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.
Life expectancy in the United States is now nearly 78 years, up from 77.7 a year ago, according to a report issued yesterday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Canadians are living longer than ever before. Statistics Canada says life expectancy for those born in 1997 is 75.8 years for men and 81.4 years for women.
-CBC
The Idea
was programmed
to spread like a cancer
and mutated into something so malignant
that it would kill anyone who
refused to feed it
with faith and believers
encoded with the instruction
that if the survival of the Idea were threatened
pull the pin, destroy the host, self-destruct!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
God in his Heaven
Hurled from the window
The Bastard of Angoulême and the Duke of Guise
laughed at the corpse at their feet
and a servant of the Duke of Nevers, cut off its head
as a gift to the Pope who expressed Rome’s admiration
for the river of stench and the swarms and the slaughter
with a golden rose and hymns.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Above all, Huguenots became known for their criticisms of worship as performed in the Roman Catholic Church, in particular the focus on ritual and what they viewed as an obsession with death and the dead…In what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 24 August – 3 October 1572, Catholics killed thousands of Huguenots in Paris. By the 17 September, almost 25,000 Protestants had been massacred in Paris alone.
“The massacre was interpreted as an act of divine retribution; Coligny was considered a threat to Christendom and thus the pope designated 11 September 1572 as a joint commemoration of the Battle of Lepanto and the massacre of the Huguenots”.
Circa 1570.
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I too felt a tickling trill, like a pearly string, cool as fingertips, beneath the skin on the back of my neck, and I dreaded the contagion, the green-black thrashing, the ghastly senility of that surging bloodslick, the weedy folds of it’s moon-white mouth, a giddy cage of needles.
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Lamenting joy to Georgy Riecke, who wrote:
“I have been poisoned. I know not how and care not why. Rest assured the sad thick venom of happiness is swimming like some grinning eel through the quick rivers of my bloodstream.”
Happiness is like arsenic.
A taste can be medicinal
but a whole mouthful
is a fatal poison!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Just one of my typically absurd statements to Georgy Riecke.
She made
me a captive
to domesticity
and I lived like a wolf on a
tether.
See how
her temple shuts
out the sky? Sadly, back
then, I couldn’t remember my
origins.
Born on
Faunalia
given to Artemis
I guard the goats and speak in my
rhythms.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Brevity
is levity.
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Inspired by:
“Brevity — I can’t say enough about it.”
-Gabriela Anaya Valdepena
Smeared and
rubbed, ground to dust
pulverizing mortar
of lust; my bloody innards blown
asunder
slain by love, oh god of thunder!
Woman hast such power
thus, remains a slave?
Ludicrous!
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Inspired by:
A discussion of “smitten” as the past-participle of “smite”.
Summer
is ending now.
Thistles become rabbit
tails shedding into silver stars.
My life!
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The wind
doesn’t gust here.
It’s breath scrapes, then pulses.
Sucked air, sky melting, corn silks, blank
throbbing.
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Admiring the tumescence of a bonobo’s vagina. Eating a creamy melted brie.
Ah yes, the exquisite effervescence of a glass of Gimli Goose. These are the moments that make my life magical!
Bored and fiddling with cyst.
My Carpathian Carpet Cat hast shat in his box. The dust of antiquity riseth ‘neath nocturnal scritchings.
Humbuggery or happenstance? You be the judge.
Off for a jog to the urban sewerscape. A few moonlit jumping-jacks in the deep lushness of bush thistle, mayhaps.
Come on! This isn’t Aristotelian alchemy! It’s just the hokey-pokey!
Coaxing a flaccid member. (Yawn.)
So the boss said “Are you going to get any work done today?” and I said “Nope. Too drunk.”
Ugh! Someone open a window! The atmosphere in this spacecraft is suffocating!
Deep contemplation, universal Oneness, and abdominal bloating. 
Date arrived. His bicuspids held more menace than a wooly-matted ditch pig.
I can’t eat dinner. My anchovy pizza came with crushed heads. There are eyeballs scattered on every slice.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
If you
didn’t exist
then I wouldn’t either.
I wouldn’t have wanted to
before you.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
She is
all lips and tits
obscene with engorgement
and hungry. Hungry for a love
career.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
It’s Blonde vs. Brunette in the race for a competitive (reproductive) edge. See their breasts do battle.
“The size of the plate determines her value…”
Fall 2009’s Most Punishing Heels
Internalized misogyny goes anthemic.
“So come over here and tell me what I want to hear
better yet make your girlfriend disappear
I don’t want to hear you say her name ever again.”
Girl violence getting more lethal: “Most girl violence revolves around conflict over boys.”
Girls with silicone faces: The awful plastic surgery epidemic
“People want aspirational images…people won’t buy magazines with larger women in them.”
Why pink is popular and bigger is better: Bonobo Biology
See also:
I’ve brought
grotesqueries
sliced moose nose and
crisp pig’s tails, sparrow tongue pie, bone
marrow
to stimulate
your intellectual
umami, let’s keep the language
meaty.
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I was interviewed by erotic story-teller, Fantasia Lillith, on her Pillow Talk blog.
Click here to read.
If they
can’t take credit
for the earth’s creation
then they’ll incite her destruction.
In spite.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rabbits.
The black aura.
Crying, fainting, crawling.
That tremor, the shake, the earthquake
within.
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‘Quae finis what will be the end, aut or, quod stipendium what fine, manet me awaits me? Effare speak out; luam I will pay, cum fide with faith, jussas poenas the penalty required.‘
-A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy
Horace ‘The Epodes’ and ‘Carmen Saeculare’
Epode XVII – A Recantation
‘Now, now, to your powerful arts I at last surrender,
I beg, on bended knee, by Persephone’s kingdom,
And by Diana’s unchanging divinity,
And by the books of incantations, whose effect
Can unfix the stars, call them down from the sky,
Canidia, leave off your magic spells at last
And let the onward whirling wheel, reverse, reverse!…What more do you wish? O sea and earth, I’m on fire,
More so than Hercules steeped in Nessus’ dark blood,
More so than all the Sicilian flames, alive
In fiery Etna: you’ll be a glowing workshop
Of Colchian poisons, till I, turned dry ashes,
Am carried far away by injurious winds.
Tell me what end, say, what punishment awaits me?
I’ll pay the penalties, faithfully, you demand,
Ready for expiation, whether you order
A hundred bullocks, or wish the mendacious lyre
To ring out for you: chaste and virtuous, you shall
Tread through the stars, as a golden constellation.
Thanks to Melind4, who found this post of mine lifted and mutilated by a blog scraper spam bot:
L: Bitch isn’t a style? What are those uptight puritans at Yahoo maddening to abandon? They embrace no mould out to censor and expurgate the cache!
—
L: What’s this??? Fags is not a style marred either??? Conspicuously minimizing!
—
B: It’s to the ground, toff. I played trope.
L: Yes, but I’m flourishing to jolly you on the triple with burn.
B: Hey! Duh is a style!
L: Heh.
—
L: What are you doing? Why didn’t you accomplish piss on the triple?
B: They won’t grip piss.
L: Hmph. NO PISS???
B: No nothing up teasingly.
—
L: Well, there you go to the loo. Pick pain.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Excerpts and links may be acclimated to, provided that jammed and shined adoration is certainty, and with dent and harmonious ‘ to roadway to the nonconformist at bottom. Unauthorized permit and/or duplication of this line without demonstrate and written consent from this blog’s prime mover and/or P is strictly prohibited.
Commenting is a authority, not a mould out. Good comments choose be cherished, deleterious comments choose be deleted.
You may
leave figs and coins.
Inspiration will not
be influenced, indentured or
purloined.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Don’t think
it’s as easy
as humping to market
my muse is Artemisian
not whore.
And it
won’t matter
if I’m forced to pander
or starve, harnessed to the plow; she’s
aloof.
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The modern Artemisian Order consists of the sisterhood, plus the Philos and Gargareans… The female members may hold position as either Sophias, who lead with their wisdom; High Priestesses, who keep the rituals; Amazons, who defend the way of life; or Maidens, who assist with their strength of mind and spirit. The Gargareans and Philos assist the sisterhood by protecting their sacred ways.
and
Last night
while sleeping I
was pricked by a feather
on the cheek so soft but so sharp
also.
Earlier
that evening
I’d been asked to explain
my own contradictions and just
couldn’t.
I’d worn
marabou sleeves
I should have made you see
that a thorn doesn’t contradict
its rose.
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It’s a
man’s game and his
rules we obey but when
women are players, oh how they
call names!
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Inspired by hearing Eva Peron referred to as “the world’s most powerful whore”.
I write
that my heart is
a purple pansy wrapped
up in cords like a man o’ war
dripping.
A friend
calls: I worry.
Your aura is black with
spidery roots so dark that they’re
purple.
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Black aura:
A protective, secretive aura. Black generally means one is shielding oneself from outside energies.
Indigo/violet aura:
Dark shades indicate that the person has obstacles to overcome or is feeling misunderstood.
There is
a motive to
the annihilation
of the self in formulaic
writing.
Reduced
to normative
patterns, phraseology,
perspective is predictably
flattened.
You are
confined in the
conventions of style
to the monotony of the
machine.
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All the
grim monks growing
their lumps under cassocks.
Haters of beauty, these lustful
hairshirts.
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KC said:
My dark star basks in the super frigid coolness of your enormous shadow…
Laura Chase said:
I’m like an African water-buffalo and you’re a little oxpecker dancing across the flea-bitten breadth of my enormous hairy ass.
I’m a sunbathing crocodile and you are the leech-pulling plover who minces in the mirage of my hot reptilian breath.
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I spin
in a circle
a red light revolving
mourning and howling for the dead
at night.
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Tonight
when it started
to storm the memories
struck in strobes in silver sheets of
needles.
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God was a selfish lover.
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The wind picked up and pitied me
now the light can float through me
and I burst into prisms.
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I am
just a piece of
business I remembered
and felt like I’d just slept with a
hooker.
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Religion is Cockocracy.
It’s followers are Cockocrats.
They disseminate Cockocrisy.
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Dogs use their tails
for communication.
Docked tails are a
signifier of allegiance
to human mastery
over an animal’s body
to enhance aggression.
The cutting of tails is the
canine equivalent to infant
male circumcision.
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Have any countries banned tail docking?
Yes, there are countries, which have banned cosmetic tail docking for a considerable number of years; Norway since 1987 and Sweden and Switzerland since 1988. Since 1991, Cyprus, Greece and Luxembourg have also introduced a ban. Tail docking has been banned in Finland since 1996 and Germany since May 1998. Political pressure was exerted in Germany to have hunting breeds exempted, however exempted puppies must be the offspring of parents that were specifically used as hunting dogs, not just hunting breeds. In spite of many claims to the contrary, there is no proof that an increase in tail injuries or serious health problems occurred as a result of the ban on tail docking in these countries.
In England, since July 1993, only registered veterinarians can perform tail docking. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons has declared that the docking of tails, other than for therapeutic or prophylactic reasons, was unethical. The RCVS stated in 1996, that such docking is capable of amounting to conduct disgraceful in a professional respect, and described such docking as unacceptable mutilation.
In Australia, one State, the Australian Capitol Territory has banned tail docking. It is hoped that other States will follow this example.
-WSAVA Tail Docking Position Statement
See also:
dock (v.)
“cut an animal’s tail,” c.1386, from dok (n.) “fleshy part of an animal’s tail,” related to O.E. -docca “muscle,” from P.Gmc. *dokko “something round, bundle” (cf. O.N. dokka “bundle, girl,” Dan. dukke “doll,” Ger. Docke “small column, bundle, doll, smart girl”). Meaning “to reduce (someone’s) pay for some infraction” is first recorded 1822.
-Online Etymology Dictionary
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He was
the sum of what he could purchase.
Who would he be without
brand names proving
his worth?
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Hey kid.
How ya doin?
I can see you’ve got the
murder eye and both our hands are
shakin’.
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Castel (1995) insists that those most affected are youth, especially the less
educated and non-skilled youth and young adults who have fewer options for integration into the labour market. The decline in manufacturing industries and in “good” working class jobs (i.e., secure and unionized jobs), affects them the most (Castel, 1995; see FitzGerald, Stockdale, & Hale, 2003; Websdale, 2001). Many are left with “McJobs” (Ritter & Anker, 2002) as their only option – those unstable, low-paying service sector jobs that promise very little in the way of career development or advancement. This lack of integration into the workforce can result in disqualification for civic/political integration and for broader social integration (Castel, 1995). When combined with other forms of social marginalization, such as a lack of meaningful ties with family and friends, discrimination based on gender, race/ethnicity, ability, and/or the stigma of having been in conflict with the law (see Davies & Tanner, 2003), some youth and young adults are left with a sense of exclusion and pessimism about the future (Chettleburgh, 2007; Totten, 2000; Wortley & Tanner, 2005). Castel (1995) calls this group the “surnuméraires”, the “excess baggage” who may seek prosperity and stability, but who are stuck in a social “no man’s land” and are doubtful that it is achievable. Given their lack of integration into the workforce and into mainstream society, these youth often give up on traditional means of “success” and adopt survival strategies that are based in the present, on living “day to day” (Castel, 1995).
-Gang Violence Among Youth and Young Adults: (Dis)Affiliation and the Potential for Prevention
When men strain to look past me
beyond me, not at me
I know my Medusa
such power is ghastly.
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Inspired by a prevalent male mythology:
…Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception. It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige. They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men. As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.
I lifted this meme off my pal Jake. His had sixty-five questions. I thought twenty would suffice.
1. What’s the closest thing to you that’s red?
My “Quo Vadis” organizer and daily planner book. ‘Whither goest thou?” I can barely function if I don’t plan and write everything down.
2. Did you meet anybody new today?
Nope. I was running errands and was just the usual routine and all the same familiar faces.
3. What are you craving right now?
Excitement! I want to toss my organizer into a raging bonfire! I want to lose track of time! I wanna ride a llama around Paraguay! Eat snails in Spain! Let’s dive to the bottom of the ocean and stroke the giant brains of coral!
4. What comes to mind when I say cabbage rolls?
I think about how no one ever pares down that tough aortic cabbage vein. It’s like trying to gnaw through a tree branch! And the rice! Dry inside! Gah, it chokes me! My grandmothers’ holoptsi were so delicate, translucent, skin-thin. And inside — the rice was creamy, smoky, peppery, rich. And what about the sauce? No one gives a hoot about the sauce anymore??? It doesn’t matter. I can make them myself. I know the secrets.
5. Are you emotional?
Why do you ask?
6. Would you go out to eat with George W. Bush?
Sure! I think it would be good for him.
7. What are you listening to right now?
Firecrackers. Sirens. Swearing. Motorcycles.
8. Are your parents strict?
Not at all. I was a feral child.
9. Do you like cottage cheese?
Of course — but only if it has the big substantive curds. I don’t like it drooly and drippy with whey. Then you put some green onions in it and some coarse ground black pepper. Very good. Mmm.
10. Have you ever met a celebrity?
Yes. I spent an entire afternoon kicking back with Wayne Gretzky. Prince smiled at me and grabbed my hand. Iggy Pop gave me such a penetrating look that I felt like he’d thrown me against the backstage wall and had his way with me. Ah, I have lots of stories, but you have to take me out and ply me with liquor to hear them.
11. Is there anything sparkly in the room you’re in?
Yes. The ring I’m wearing. It’s a black mamba tree snake with glittery eyes.
12. Have you made a prank phone call?
Oh yes. My young friends and I reveled in pranks. I used to call this one girl and when she answered I would bite into an apple and chew in her ear. She would just sit and listen. I would eat the entire apple, chug a glass of milk, then burp and hang up. Haha! It’s still funny! Why did she listen? Hahaha!
13. Ever been on a train?
Yeah. I took a train to Vancouver and back one time. I was wearing rhinestone sunglasses and leopard skin pants and I met this guy with a mohawk and a black leather jacket and we fell deeply in love for several hours in the back of the bar car that bright winter day.
14. Last time you cried?
I cry every day.
15. What was the last question you asked?
Actually, it was more like a machine-gun burst of interrogatives. (At my friend, Tina): Who the hell goes for drinks at a Pancake House in a godforsaken shopping mall on Tuesday night? What? What? What do you mean it’s full of people? How can this be? Who are you talking about? What? Who? Oh a bunch of drunk local ‘loogans? What do you mean I should come down there? Why… is anybody single…? Yes, but are they wearing ball caps and work boots and sweats with no gotch?
16. Favorite time of the year?
Bonspiel! The Chinook! When all of Winnipeg goes completely crazy and we wear shorts in the snowbanks and fire up the barbeque for frenzied, giddy week and a half in February!
17. How often do you talk on the phone?
I love talking on the phone! I can talk all night!
18. What are you wearing?
My FUCK PATRIARCHY tee shirt.
19. What was the most recent thing you bought?
A bag of lemons and some chicken wings for dinner.
20. Have you ever crawled through a window?
Oh hell yeah. For many years I prefered crawling in and out of windows to using a door. That’s how I visited my friends, escaped from dates, and got out of school.
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You know
I didn’t just
bud off the shoulder of
Zeus. I did have a life before.
I’ve lived.
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A game of Literati with my buddy Brooks.
L: Bitch isn’t a word? What are those uptight puritans at Yahoo trying to pull? They have no right to censor and expurgate the dictionary!
L: What’s this??? Fags is not a word now either???
B: It’s over, dude. I played trope.
L: Yes, but I’m going to burn you on the triple with singe.
B: Hey! Duh is a word!
L: Heh.
L: What are you doing? Why didn’t you put piss on the triple?
B: They won’t take piss.
L: NO PISS???
B: No nothing about fun.
L: Hmph. Well, there you go… pick kink.
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I like
my poetry
best when it’s free like an
apple from a tree it’s just meant
to be.
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© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
I’ve lost
my belief in
human mythologies,
fictions, hypocrisies. Nature
is law.
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His head
is as round as
a budgerigars blue
like lovebirds we nuzzle and coo
coo coo.
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I want
to exist in
the present, this moment.
I don’t know how I got here and
don’t care.
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Let’s talk
about the news
and the bird in the tree
talk about anything; not you,
not me.
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When he
quoted proverbs
solemn as Solomon
it was like the breath of the crypt.
Dust. Ashes.
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The clef
of her calf was so
lyric.
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Do you
hear that? Listen…
Those aren’t crickets whistling.
It’s an orchestra of car thieves
sounding.
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A report from Statistics Canada says Manitoba had the highest homicide rate among provinces in 2008, and Winnipeg had the highest homicide rate among major cities.
And despite a 44 per cent drop in vehicle theft, Winnipeg continues to have the highest rate of stolen automobiles in Canada.
Summer
in the ghetto
the sativa in bud
whole goddamned neighborhood smelling
of skunk.
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L: (Swats a mosquito) Got him!
Child: Don’t you mean HER?
L: Whaddya mean?
Child: Only the female mosquitoes drink blood.
L: Ha! That’s right.
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What do the males eat?
Male mosquitoes live on plant juices, sugary saps, and liquids arising from decomposition of plant material.
I was at my cousins thrift shop.
She was beautiful, in a sheer negligee
and had four breasts, two and
two at the top of her thighs.
I was talking with my family.
My dead father was there.
He said that men masturbating
is what causes them to kill women.
I was silent. I bit
through the glass of a jar of garlic.
The glass was in my mouth.
I went to the kitchen and saw other broken glasses.
Back at the thrift store
I had forgotten my eyeglasses
then I fell to the floor
but my cousin didn’t notice.
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Thrift Shop
To dream that you are at a thrift shop, suggests that there are still things to be learned and gained from past experiences or what is seemingly worthless.Cousin
To see your cousin in your dream, represents something or some aspect of your character that is somewhat familiar… In particular, if you dream that your cousin is ignoring you indicates that you are not acknowledging some aspect of yourself that is represented by your cousin.Transparent
To dream that something is transparent, indicates feelings of vulnerability. Or it may represent your ability to see things and literally see through people and their motives. Thus the dream may be symbolic of your actions and your true intentions. Alternatively, if something is transparent, then it represents clarity and understanding.Nightgown
To dream that you are in your nightgown, suggests that you are acknowledging and expression aspects of yourself that you were previously uncomfortable about.Breasts
To see breasts in your dream, symbolizes primal nourishment and your need to be nursed and cared for. The breasts represent motherhood, nurturance, and infantile dependency. Alternatively, breasts represents sexual arousal and raw energy.Thigh
To dream that you are admiring your thigh, signifies your adventurous and daring nature, but you need to be careful with your conduct.Family
To see your own family in your dream, represents security, warmth and love.Father
To see your father in your dream, symbolizes authority and protection.Dead
To see and talk with your dead parents in your dreams, represents your fears of losing them or your way of coping with the loss.Men
If you are a woman and dream that you are in a room full of men, highlights the masculine aspect of yourself and forces you to acknowledge your authorities and aggressive side.Masturbation
To see others masturbating in your dreams, denotes your anxieties and concerns about your inhibitions. It may also be a reflection that something in your waking life is not as satisfying as it might be.Killing
To dream that you have been killed, suggests that your actions are disconnected from your emotions and conscience. Killing represents the killing off of old parts of yourself and old habits.Women
To see a woman in your dream, represents nurturance, passivity, caring nature, and love.Silence
To dream that you are silent, indicates an inability to express yourself. You may feel inhibited in voicing your opinion and how you really feel.Garlic
To dream that you are eating garlic, signifies your practicality and sensibility in matters of the heart; you look for security over love.Glass
To dream that you are eating glass, highlights your vulnerability, confusion and frailty. You may have difficulties in communicating your thoughts across and getting the right words out. Alternatively, it may symbolize your hurtful and cutting comments. Perhaps you have been hurt or disappointed by something that someone had said. Or you need to be careful in how you phrase and word things or run the risk of offending others.Kitchen
To see a kitchen in your dream, signifies your need for warmth and spiritual nourishment.Broken Glass
To see a broken glass in your dream, denotes feelings of powerlessness, guilt and/or low self-esteem. Perhaps you feel unqualified or inadequate in dealing with a situation.Eyeglasses
To (lose) eyeglasses in your dream, indicates that your vision and perception is impaired.Lost
To dream that some(thing) is lost, represents unresolved issues or feelings regarding (what) is lost.Fainting
To dream that you are fainting, suggests your inability to confront some unconscious issue or feelings. You need to be more aware and acknowledge those feelings.
Don’t pull
the catfish from the
river. Don’t split his lips.
His tender pink lips, blood, barbels
twitching.
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People
being peaceful
walking hand in hand and
smiling, living their lives, swaying
like trees.
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Hold still.
Trust is like a
roe deer leaping. Don’t speak.
I will eat from your hand, sunlight
blinking.
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I must
have these LARP boots
authentic medieval
they curl at the toe like a boll
weevil.
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Today
I woke up with
these words resonating
loudly in my mind: chicken coop
/dollhouse.
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In the
sun cracked back lane
dandelions your brown skin
twelve string warm breeze no words our heads
nodding.
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Four p.m.
at the Blues Jam
drunks gaze cross-eyed at me
having lost the dexterity
to roll their own joints.
Twisting the wrapper I think pupa
and my whole life flashes in front of my eyes.
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1773, “post-larval stage of an insect,” special use by Linnæus (1758) of L. pupa “girl, doll, puppet”
Has no mouth. Flies only when it’s dark. Four and a half inches across. Lives one week.
Saturn has been depicted as the punishing father, but also as the Grim Reaper, who cuts life short. Mortality is the ultimate restriction, and as Father Time, he is the wise one that inspires urgency in our quest to fulfill our life mission.
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A surface membrane
a surface branded
human parchment
owners mark the surface.
The epidermis encloses an animal
signs identify livestock
human skins domesticated
flayed skins.
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Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood is a lively history of the meaning, function, and act of castration from its place in the early church to its secular reinvention in the Renaissance as a spiritualized form of masculinity in its 20th century position at the core of psychoanalysis.
Mangoat
Too hairy
Must shave
And warn others
No foam
All alone
Gorilla hair
Must go
Creme corn
Creme corn
Yep
They danced
Tarantella
to release the poisons
boredom and privations.
They danced
till their hearts stopped
till they bled from their ears. They danced
and wept.
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Who was your first prom date?
I went to a senior high prom with a guy named Dave. I was 12. He was 17. He gave me an orchid. I lied to his parents. It was a good time.
Do you still talk to your first love?
No. But if I did, I bet I know what he’d say.
What was your first alcoholic drink?
It had to have been either O.V. or CLUB beer. Haha! I still like saying that… “CLUB!” Haha!
What was your first job?
I was an usherette at the Concert Hall when I was 11. The rest of my friends had a gig gluing the dots on fuzzy dice. However, due to the use of airplane glue in a contained area, things got a little confusing. It was not uncommon to see dice with four dots on three sides, for example.
Who was your first grade teacher?
I can’t recall the name, but she lived across the street and I got to walk with her to school every day. I often brought a bucket of tadpoles or a garter snake or a freshly slain elk heart to show the kids in class.
What was the first concert you went to?
I was 12 years old and I was in the front rows for April Wine. Still one of the best drum solos ever. Jerry Mercer, fucking A. Woo!
First tattoo?
Well, at least that’s one idiotic mistake I never made.
First movie you remember seeing?
At a very tender and impressionable age, I remember watching “Planet Earth” by Gene Roddenberry.
Here’s the plot summary from IMDB:
A man awakens from suspended animation and finds himself in the 22nd century, where he finds that women rule the world and that men are slaves called Dinks. He is captured and sold as a slave, but escapes and hooks up with a male rebel movement.
Who was your first room-mate?
When I was 17, I had a room-mate named… something. And I used to prank him by turning his Picasso picture vertical every day. It drove him completely berserk. Hahaa! Hahaaha! Of course, one day I came home to find that he had moved out and had all the power shut off.
When was your first detention?
I had detention every day in the sixth grade, usually for smoking at recess.
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Falcon
came to see me.
Her eyes were dark and clear,
grasp steady, breast tawny; “Screed! Screed!”
she cried.
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The fact that the Falcon is a solar creature could mean there is something in your life that you are highly passionate about, and the Falcon is asking you to take action on this passion… Make your passion a reality by pursuing it methodically and as strategically as the Falcon would pursue his hunt.
-A Light in the Darkness
Playing Literati with my buddy Brooks.
B: Why you competitive so-and-so…
L: CASSIA. It’s a herb.
B: Herbs! It’s always cooking terms and textiles with you…
L: I used it in a recipe poem. A cure for plague.
B: It’s like a double affront.
B: You are like Jason Vorhees in this game. You can not be stopped!
L: Haha… who’s that?
B: The killer in the Friday the 13th movies.
L: …Well, of course the foreskin serves several purposes; it protects the glans and keeps it supple.
B: Okay yes supple.
L: Supple.
B: Yes supple.
L: Hahahahahaa!
B: Hahahahahah!
L: The AGAR is GLUIER in the MORGUES!
L: GROG and CHOPS! GROG and CHOPS!
L: HAZY IDIOTS!
L: Oo! Look! The MANGE!
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…Before genital mutilations of our children can cease; before male violence against woman can end; and before human violence can be eliminated… a moral revolution must take place. Pain must be declared immoral and pleasure must be declared morally necessary if we are to become moral persons. In the words of Walt Whitman:
“IF ANYTHING IS SACRED THE HUMAN BODY IS SACRED”
The Ashley Montagu Campaign Against the Torture and Mutilation of Children
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
Domino spewed a looking know
to truly decent nature ravings.
Don’t ugly Domino! Back! Don’t!
Domino be beliefs, words spewed
looking words, share answer.
A Christian! A Christian!
False.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
A girl
in Africa
is held down and
her fragile clitoral hood is torn and
thrown away.
While men
in business suits
celebrate the cutting
of a baby boy’s delicate
foreskin.
A child’s
body is not
your property. It is not yours to
sacrifice to God or
ideology.
And this
doesn’t change
because you’re American
hold your faith in high regard and imagine
yourself to be wealthy.
The rituals
of circumcision
are a human rights violation and
the defense of yours as different is the ultimate
hypocrisy.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
This poem was inspired by a conversation I have been having on Jonathan Turley’s blog.
So, the other day I was commenting to Danielle Cross that:
Poets
are worse than
ptarmigans.
Meaning that there are so many that seem able to stealthily avoid detection. Myself, for example, as I stubbornly refuse to tag with the word “poetry”.
It is purposeful. I take some kind of perverse delight in knowing that whomever is reading my page had to Google some obscure phrase or antiquated poetic form and arrived by a slim algorithmic chance; or that I had found them first and read everything they’d ever written before making a sudden emergence from the electronic ether with a cleverly contrived comment; or at least that there was some complicated and circuitous route to finding me — so complicated, in fact, that they may never find their way back.
So I am not a self-promotor. I am more of a fox in a burrow.
And, occasionally as I’m springing about, I rustle the willow buds or catkins and a huge flock of poets come exploding from the underbrush.
It causes me to wonder how they could have possibly eluded my deviously ingenious tag searches. What is it about poets (and diarists) that they seem most comfortable and well-adjusted when virtually no one is reading them?
It’s a bit like walking around the house naked with the curtains wide open and then being mortified when someone looks in and waves — because then what? One might feel obliged to perform, I suppose, and with this is the risk of self-conscious inauthenticity.
I understand. On the flip side, the pursuit of popularity has many pitfalls. And it’s corrupting influence is one of my most beloved topics. The pandering, the puffery, the grandiloquent sycophants! It is truly a spectacle to behold. I can’t help but to ridicule it.
Yet, we all must dance with the devil and negotiate this fine line; because good writing that is never read is just a crying shame. And a good writer who doesn’t even know how good they are — or isn’t acknowledged by others for how good they are — well, it just breaks my tender vulpine heart.
So, I am going on the prowl. I will find these ptarmigan-poets and roust them out of obscurity, and corral them together in company that I hope will encourage their audacity.
Really, it takes such a enormous amount of courage to do this kind of writing, and even more to put your name to it and say, “I am a poet. This is who I am.”
It is, without a doubt, one of the more difficult things I have ever had to do; as I described to my elusive friend M.L. earlier tonight:
I wake up in the middle of the night and think: Omg I’ve ruined my life! (Then I remember that it was already ruined and that I have nothing left to lose. Yay!)
So, the nom de plume (if you will) for this, my latest mischief, is Wedge of Swans.
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I saw this meme on the When He Kisses Her, It rains In a Thirsty Desert blog.
1. If you could turn back the hands of time to correct one wrongdoing, what event would you choose and why?
At the risk of sounding ignoble, I would have to choose an event from my own life. And it only seems right that it would be something I did — rather than something done to me.
Hm. Yes. So many possibilities… and so little chance that I’ll be discussing them here. Next question! Next!
2. Are you one for tradition? If so, what traditions do you strongly believe in? If not, what makes tradition hypocritical?
Rituals and traditions are the ceremonial forms of social conditioning used to create group cohesion and shared identity. The circumcision of children is one particularly reprehensible example. I do not support groups that encourage confessions, that exact lifelong commitments, or that put people through physical and mental rigors; as these practices are so closely connected to the techniques of brainwashing.
3. You were taking part in an event and you had to crossplay, who would you crossplay as and why?
If I were to assume the role of an opposite sex character? Hm. Okay. I want to be Salvadore Dali because I dig his dandy style. Particularly the extravagant moustachio! I would wear a yellow suit, twirl my surrealist cane and sport about in spats! I would pop out of cakes covered in candied fruits! I’d be conveyed in a compartment carried by eunuchs! All would be frippery and folly! I would have a seductive accent and paint nude celebrity portraits of people who aren’t even famous! I’d surround myself with women called Fifi and Gigi and Tralala! All my food would be smothered in sauces and I’d never wear pyjamas!
4. If you only had one day left to live, how would you spend your last day? Would you be tempted to live fatally if you knew you were to die the next day, and if so, what extreme measures would you take?
I’d make few calls and visits to say goodbye. Write a quick poem for posterity. Eat a huge and expensive meal. Get laid. Knock off a few enemies (see you in Hell, suckas). And, if there were any time remaining, I’d just like spend it outside listening to the birds and enjoying nature.
5. What are your top five sinful materialistic items, ones you’d expect from others including those closest to you? Why is each in the position they are in?
I don’t understand what this question means. It’s not even like English. Sinful… Sinful? Are we talking about decadent luxuries?
I don’t have any.
6. I am…
A humble poet. And I believe that I was living peacefully and abundantly in the mountains of Mycenae until I was mistakenly reincarnated into this new life as a fantastically sexy woman in the north prairies of Canada. It’s been an extremely troubling experience. I wonder what I’m up for next.
7. I feel…
Like a new scandalously dramatic phase of my life is beginning again.
8. I see…
Through things. I see motives.
9. I need…
To survive.
10. I love…
Those little buns with the sauerkraut inside.
11. I wish…
To feel freedom again.
12. I think…
A lot. About everything.
13. I hear…
Sirens. Constantly.
14. I crave…
To have knowledge of the future.
15. I fear…
Receding gums.
16. I hope…
That it will be alright. For all of us.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The work of a red-headed sapsucker.
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I was
just hangin’ out
watching some guy beating
another guy with a crowbar
when it
struck me that it’s
the sassafras in the
root beer that’s clogging the slurpee
machine!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I never “walk” per se;
but I can swagger, strut or sashay.
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Learn how
to take. Accept
kindnesses and giving.
Emotional anorexics
love starve.
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Grade two.
Recess. New school.
They play boys kiss the girls.
Gang rape! Gang rape! Gang rape! they yell.
I run.
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Ten years
old, we held hands
I like you, he told me
even though my brother says you’re
a pig.
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Why don’t
you understand
that I love you? he asked
closing his fist and punching my
jaw off.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
He was
only nineteen.
You deserve happiness,
he said. But I’m sorry. I’m not
that man.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I know
you said bad things
because you can never
have me. You can never be me.
Poor you.
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My favorite poet, Evelyn Lau
wrote a poem about a heron
in this month’s CV2.
I take it as a sign
to not lose hope.
Just carry on.
Continue.
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For the two-legged with Blue Heron as a Totem, there will be a desire to establish themselves as a unique and independent Being, often making these souls the revolutionaries that disrupt the status quo of society in order to elicit change and evolution.
i.
I can see by the way the pupils of his eyes bloom as he looks at me
that I am not real to him, I am a fantasy.
And with every question he pries and pecks like a hammer to smash it.
I give him what he wants, I ease his release with the rationale
that burns my wings on my fall back to earth
so he may soar away independent.
Alone, with myself to love, I regret nothing.
ii.
A year later, he has married his barbie, his tabula rasa, the girl who
answered all of the interview questions correctly
the one who tantalized him with her tight white slacks and an issue of Cosmopolitan.
She is artful as a cat and she bats at him while the the ball of yarns unravels
and he calls to me for comfort in his troubles
but I am unsympathetic to his seagull cries, red-rimmed eyes, divorce proceedings, limping and bleeding.
The man is a fool, like I have been, but unlike me, he’ll do it again.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
My pet
theory that love
can be immediate
from burrowing in someone’s neck
is proved.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Thanks Tina.
I am
effervescent.
There is no one like me.
But most men would rather talk to
my ass.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
When in
the process of
erasing yourself it
is helpful to know that someone
might care.
Not the
kind of caring
that wants to tell you off
and criticize behind your back.
Not that.
But the
kind that says Hey
it’s hard to feel this way.
I understand. It’s okay. And
I’m here.
Support online crisis and suicide prevention services by clicking on the sponsored link at the bottom of my homepage.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
i.
Insouciance done.
Domestic explode.
Epicenter carbon.
Canada goose inequitable
protective greenhouse.
ii.
Nerdy contradiction!
Surrealist bleep!
Ostrich swag
refractory serge
overdid debonair!
iii.
Grizzled tweed.
Interferon. Saboteur.
Luxury, encyclopedic,
prefix circle –
disservice secure.
iv.
Fluency serfdom.
Extramarital tableaux:
clear-cut imprecision
third contrition
unaccountable animosity.
v.
Supposed territory
full-blown stalemate.
Canine plaque.
Casual! Resuscitate!
Glamorize audacity.
vi.
“Alluring teammate…
hindquarter showpiece!”
Volatile stupefaction?
(Nix sparing applause.)
Orphanage!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
This Dadaist poem was constructed using the Coyote Cult random word generator.
What are you wearing today?
Jeans and my Misfits jacket. Denim boots. Some turquoise to protect against snakebites, and black hoop earrings.
What’s for dinner?
Dirty rice and hot sauce with tears in it.
What’s the last thing you bought?
Two braids of sweet grass and some sage and cedar smudge.
If you had $100 now, what would you spend it on?
Tequila shots and strippers.
What’s your favourite fruit?
The fragrant lemon.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
You are funny
to call me flinty.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Cattails
burst into
cotton.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
White sky.
Tar. Dead skunk.
Ditch frogs.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
He was
our Frankenstein.
A sad frightened monster
created, imprisoned, destroyed
by fame.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
Lovely, the swift sparrows
brought you over black earth
your task of love has just arrived
a whirring of wings through mid-air
– so rarely one of understanding appears
so unusual in the world.
There is a great roar of falling rivers in my ears
and the trees are close around
I understand all you say so well
I treasure your letter and all you are.
If only you were here
to walk with me
through the pines and warm stones
you don’t know the mountains
hurry to catch up to me
it is a long trail, and the time is short.
“Poets need to write love letters” says you
indeed it seems so.
I am ever so grateful for all the self-revealing things you say
which explain the very you, which you give me to know
the ancient who invented the alphabet should be canonized
as the Saint of lovers, and you, Sacred.
Infatuation, the rushing sound, the voice and tone,
the trick of the eye, the habit of the hand
friendship must have a touch of ecstasy
—O good Lord, more than a touch.
It isn’t worth anything if it hasn’t rapture and fondness
just like falling in love.
Your brief sentences are very telling
but perilous when used too freely
and possibly there is a danger here.
As I look down the Clove
I see all the tree tops wind-blown far below
and billowing and tossing like a driven tide.
Possession carries one away body and mind
what now I desire above all in my mad heart
is a dangerous whirlpool which ought to be marked
“Danger!” –but isn’t.
Be my friend, fill your fountain pen,
terrors melt in tears and smiles
come, free me from aching care, and win me
all my heart longs to win.
What I often think I need is a new name.
Do you know all about that mystery of the New Name?
Where does one get it—
if I could be endowed with a new magical name,
perhaps I could get away.
I dare say we were sent together
and for some transcendent end.
It is all so veracious and beyond the ordinary.
The soul is terribly lonely
and cannot understand itself
yet you heard my voice, far off, and listened.
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Glittering-Minded Deathless Aphrodite by Sappho
Bliss Carman’s Letters to Margaret Lawrence (Letters 1 -22).
North End.
South End. The Ancient Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine emblem floor mosaic in granite, marble, and gold. Fancy-schmancy.
Thrift shop finds: quaint miniaturized gallows and guillotine. Vive la laïcité!
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They like
their stout stalwart wives
and their king-cabs and their unions
the nervous
sensitive girls are mostly let
to languish on the prairies
alone.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The escape is foreknowing
windily the way it is
and only I obscured.
The escape is the
ending of everything airing
and I subsiding.
The ellipses are insinuating
like smashed saskatoons
like fly swats.
I grew antlers
I am commonplace
and overrun by the poplars.
My escape is penmanship
whimpers and fingerprints
a breakthrough into
fanatic misspellings.
The escape is chlorine
frostbite, a rifle
a chipped tea-rose teacup
a leather belt, a Bible.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
A spirit replies to Pat Lowther’s Interview.
Only
by knowing the
whole accursed story
can the irony of her end
affect.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Too late.
I am ruined.
My only wish was one
last kiss before I left this earth
alas.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I’d already seen the European version
where boundaries were violated
by someone in a position of power.
Where the girls learned that they must be polite and take it
then that they must forgive it.
This is very important for every girl to know.
Tonight, the rite of passage involved having the models adorned
in expensive, elaborate white wedding dresses, and instructed to weep
as if they’d been abandoned. (As if, indeed.)
And they act out a pantomime, to demonstrate that suffering is beautiful
and that marriage goes beautifully with suffering, yet there is also something garish
something whorish in their spurning, so this was a good rehearsal.
Afterwards, the girls are trotted out
in front of the judges, the authority figures
for their judgement and redemption, for their trial of ritual criticism.
In every girl, some flaw is detected.
Some didn’t suffer enough, another chastised
to “suck it up” because beautiful girls aren’t entitled to complain.
Each girl is sternly warned she will have to work much harder to please.
It is important to remember that this is a continual process.
No woman should ever be allowed to believe that she is good enough for long.
One girl talks back in defense of herself
only to be stared down and scolded into submission.
For the rest, it is tears and pleading and promises.
Parents, tonight your daughters
have learned so many necessary lessons
that will guide them through life:
Girls are in competition. And girls must be perfect
in order to compete. But perfection is unattainable
so, by her nature, she is never complete.
Suffering is desirable. It is feminine and ideal.
This is what the audience pays to see.
Suffer and stay innocent. If you embrace these concepts you will be admired and enriched.
Being angry and speaking out is being “the victim”.
Being silent and looking fierce is empowerment.
Girls who talk back will be punished. They will be made an example of.
So the girl who defended herself gets cut.
The rest obediently line up for their next shoot
intoxicated by pain mixed with gratitude.
Masochism. Martyrdom.
The rules! The rigors! The ceremony!
It’s all so damned transcendent.
Television is keeping the cult in culture
mass executions of spirit
at the unguarded gates to womanhood.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Janice Dickinson violates the privacy and personal space of the models. Her ridicule has lecherous overtones. She falls down the stairs. She becomes enraged and abusive. She then makes the girls feel more sorry for her than they are for themselves so that they will forgive her.
A look at the ritual of criticism. A panel of peckerheads ready to rip.
A beautiful woman sits in front of a video camera. Her name is Sena Cech and she is a fashion model. Her tone is matter-of-fact, as though what she’s about to describe is commonplace in the industry in which she works. The scene: a casting with a photographer, one of the top names in his profession. Halfway through the meeting Cech is asked to strip. She does as instructed and takes off her clothes. Then the photographer starts undressing as well. “Baby – can you do something a little sexy,” he tells her. The photographer’s assistant, who is watching, eggs her on. What’s supposed to be the casting for a high-end fashion shoot turns into something more like an audition for a top-shelf magazine. The famous photographer demands to be touched sexually. “Sena – can you grab his cock and twist it real hard,” his assistant tells her. “He likes it when you squeeze it real hard and twist it.”
…This is the ugly, sleazy side of the modelling industry, the side few insiders like to talk about. It’s one of the most secretive businesses in the world, which is ironic when you consider that it is also one of the most pervasive. Its stars are some of the most recognised icons of our time, household names whose bodies are frequently emblazoned across 40ft-high billboards, yet apart from the occasional flurry of publicity about anorexia or drug-taking, outsiders know surprisingly little about the multimillion-pound business which profits from some of world’s most beautiful women.
-The Guardian
The Eight Stages of Genocide
Soldiers of the Army of God
Cognitive dissonance
Frank Schaeffer Exposes “Pro-Life” Movement’s Domestic Terror Role
Obama Breaks Down Why We Need Separation of Church & State
I am
writing the same poem every
day, several times a day.
The words change but
I don’t.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Before
I went flying
I thought what might have been
but the time left for regrets was
all gone.
So I
just spread out my
featherless arms for the
impact of past decisions and
owned it.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I saw this meme on the Dianne Rambling On blog.
1. What is your least favorite candy bar?
It’s called a “Cherry Blossom” and it isn’t so much a bar as it is a teeny chocolate-coconut bombe of vile cherry slime and a gag-inducing maraschino centre.
2. If I were to call you, what would you say?
I would say, Lookit you freakin’ psycho, I don’t know how you got this number but I can guarantee you that if you show up here you’ll be sucking mud like a catfish at the bottom of a lake in Ontario before morning.
3. What is your favorite type of leaf?
Pft. Welwitschia mirabilis, of course.
4. How many hours did you get last night?
Zero. I was very busy all night. I watched some videos of Anne Sexton, learned how to make Ghanaian Chicken-Peanut Riceball Soup, thought about becoming a licensed hypnotist, investigated Boric Acid, and took a virtual tour of the Forum Boarium.
5. Take a picture of something. Post it.
Okey. Chili burger!
People in my life say they know what’s good for me.
And not a one of them has ever read my poetry.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Black boughs of elms clasp
like the loosely interlaced fingertips of lovers conversing
at a table in a deli with a dark red floor
that serves borsht as sweet as grape juice
with a spoon of soured cream.
Under the canopy of this lingering touch
century-old houses with thorny hedges
like the grizzled hairs of grey beards
and the blue cast of spectacle glass
and the flaps of screen blown loose on squeaky porches.
The mottled sunlight filters through
in moving patterns like running water
like theatre, like fingers on a piano, like a coal in the ashes
in a stove in a kitchen in a confrontation
between a girl and her father.
Can you smell the mint of the geranium
over the shouting and the crows
and the darker green of crabgrass and the
spring door and the running and the boiling of the dumplings
and the embroidery of aprons and the capture by the hair.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
You did
what you had to do.
You learned how to protect your own
sanity.
This is probably what saved you.
You could disappear without
leaving.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Dreams. These
were not for the likes
of us. We were taught to give up
to settle
to be drudges, for safety’s sake.
I knew none who dared yearn for
greatness.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Dated attitudes towards gender ‘holding schoolgirls back’
The women’s rights movement has encouraged women to compete harder and they are now more likely to go to university, get good degrees and become doctors. But girls from working-class backgrounds have been left behind, according to the research, published today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
I do not belong with you.
I’ve changed.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The end. I run out of food
and friends.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Hate law: an obstacle to
Christians.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
and
Summer!
Long sultry days.
Patios, barbeques
pools and places where I am not
welcome.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Brindle beard dudes
slapping daps in dog patch.
A sipping mite scratched
surged with panicked gas.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I cut
my meat. I eat
my peas. I chew over
your moral hypocrisy and
judgement.
Your face
glows righteousness
while you lecture me on
how good you are; how straight, square and
proper.
And just
for good measure
some insignificant
admission of failure to be
humble.
I push
my plate away
and stretch a thin smile, yet
another dinner poisoned by
virtue.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Yup. They hate Science for evolution and abortion
but they just looove that in-vitro fertilization.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
What was the bridge between the posse movement and anti-abortionist fanaticism? The Sovereign crowd viewed women as chattel, and the prospect of an independent woman deciding to seek an abortion didn’t sit well with them. I gained some insight into this line of thinking in another piece I once wrote about a young woman in Oklahoma who aspired to join the Christian Identity group, hoping that its followers would teach her to shoot and become a guerrilla. Instead, the men asked her for sex. When the woman replied that she wanted a relationship first, one of them replied, “Women are for breeding.” According to one faction of the group, women who have abortions are race traitors and should be stoned to death. With that in mind, the fact that some members of the far-right became violent anti-abortionists perhaps shouldn’t come as such a surprise.
-A Brief History of the Radical, Violent Right: How Racist Hate Groups Joined Up with Abortion Terrorists by James Ridgeway
Young Canadians should be prepared to follow in the footsteps of their forebears and fight for freedom and democratic values, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said today.
-Kathleen Harris, Sun Media
In many ways, Stephen Harper is even scarier than Stockwell Day,” said Dr. Harry Morgentaler. “He appears moderate on the outside, but the underlying message is the same. Mr. Harper will systematically initiate a quiet, stealth-like plan to erode a woman’s right to abortion.” Dr. Morgentaler reminded us that Mr. Harper has made concerted and well-documented efforts to recruit fundamentalist groups to win the Conservative leadership.
Octomom and her termite thorax.
Pregnant
and all alone?
You’ll be damned if you do
damned if you don’t, little mama.
God bless!
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This video contains offensive language.
And even more reasons why men won’t date single mothers.
Have you ever wondered what a leper feels like? Try it and see.
There are two primary areas that catapult single mothers into depression. These are:
-Increased number of life stresses
-Decreased amount of social support
Men won’t want you, but it’s illegal to marry your girlfriends too?
Not much talk about sterilizing men who don’t pay their child support though. Society seems a little less keen on any enforcement which might adversely effect men’s plans to date, remarry and/or make more children.
Raising a child with a disability? You are doubly fucked, sister.
Half Of All Single Mothers Getting Welfare Have A Disabled Child
A recent analysis examining disabilities among children and mothers in low-income families indicates that low-income families (whose incomes are below 200 percent of the poverty line) are almost 50 percent more likely to have a disabled child than higher-income families.
“In the current welfare environment of strict work requirements, limited cash assistance, and reduced benefits for disabled children, low-income single mothers with disabled children are especially likely to face difficult conditions,”…
If we
make abortion
illegal will women
go to jail? We’ll tell you later.
Trust us!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
STATISTICS:Anti-Choice Incidents of Violence & Disruption Against Abortion Providers in the U.S. & Canada
Post-Roe Illegal Abortion Deaths
Barren Nettle: I think the people who should be revered aren’t the baby mamas but are the people who have shotgun marriages. Apparently a lot of those shotgun marriages worked out because they used to have them a lot and the divorce rate was lower…
Joy: Do you know what the ramifications of giving a child up for adoption are? It’s not that easy a thing, Anne.
Barren Nettle: Well, for the child it’s a lot better… the worst lottery ticket you could buy your child in this world is to be raised by a single mother, the best lottery ticket you could buy your child is to give them up for adoption.
“Chemical restraints” are used to keep kids manageable while in care.
Single mothers? Lazy sluts.
Choose Life!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Video from UK. Troubles are the same for single mothers everywhere.
I found these meme on the I’m Booking It blog.
1. What author do you own the most books by?
Since the Book of Whispers arrived in my mail today — it’s Gabriela Anaya Valdepena! (Kisses, darling.)
2. What book do you own the most copies of?
I no longer hoard books. I can’t see the sense in it. I like to use my local library. If I buy it, I don’t keep it. I pass it on.
3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
I didn’t notice and I don’t care.
4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
None! I can only belong to Nikolai Gogol … and Eli Wallach as Silva Vicarro… and perhaps the Vicomte de Valmont.
5. What book have you read the most times in your life?
The dictionary.
6. Favorite book as a ten year old?
The Story of O by Pauline Réage.
7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
I only read great books. The least great was probably May Sarton’s Anger.
8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo.
9. If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
The Immoralist by Andre Gide.
11. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
I recall having difficulty reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I never did finish it.
12. What is your favorite book?
The Plague by Albert Camus.
13. Play?
Twenty-Seven Wagons of Cotton by Tennessee Williams.
14. Poem?
Margaret Atwood’s Half Hanged Mary.
15. Essay?
It was about the pornography of ancient Rome and attributed to Sir Richard Francis Burton.
16. Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
J.K. Rowling.
17. What is your desert island book?
Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture.
18. And . . . what are you reading right now?
Watching the news has been hogging up my reading time.
-A scene from 27 Wagons of Cotton
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Brutes and bloodthirsty zealots
want your babies for their holy war.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
The conversation I had today on Johnathan Turley’s blog.
Onward Christian soldiers.
Jesus Camp.
Sarah Palin says abortion clinic bombers and assassins aren’t terrorists.
Foster care in Texas
The Handmaid’s Tale.
“The sexes are strictly divided. A major value of this society is that it values reproduction by white women more than reproduction by other women: women are categorised “hierarchically according to class status and reproductive capacity” as well as “metonymically colour-coded according to their function and their labour”… The Commander makes it clear that women are considered intellectually and emotionally inferior. Women are not permitted to read and girls are not educated.”
-Plot Summary, Wikipedia
“Soldiers – don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you – who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.
Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate – only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers – don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.”
Agaric, ginger, germander and gentian
cinnamon, spikenard, saffron, and myrrh.
Black pepper, baldmoney, white honey, castor
balsamroot, pennycress, cinquefoil, rose.
Eucalyptus, rhubarb, ginger, iris
fennel, valerian, cypress, and bay
hollowroot, catmint, horehound, rapeseed
styrax, clove, red clay.
Lavender, lemongrass, frankincense, anise
opium, crocus, clove, carrot seed.
Bitumen, nutmeg, Canary Island wine
incense, long pepper, cassia, turpentine.
Malabar, juniper, cardamom
parsley, sea salt, sativa.
Mash with viper flesh
and boiled scorpions.
Roast, pot, bury and age.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
what would happen if the earth stopped spinning
what would happen if yellowstone erupted
what would happen if the sun went out
what would happen if there was no moon
what would happen if an asteroid hit earth
what would happen if meiosis did not occur
what would happen if the sun exploded
is my tv digital
is my dog pregnant
is my license suspended
is my house haunted
is my child gifted
is my cat pregnant
is my husband cheating
is my bank safe
we should have death penalty
we should have cell phones at school
we should have guns
we should have picked our own damn cotton
we should have school uniforms
we should have dropped the atomic bomb
we should have casinos
we should have shotguns for this
my mother is a fish
my mother is a fob
my mother is insane
my mother is a baker
my mother is bipolar
my mother is dying
my mother is driving me crazy
my mother is an alcoholic
my mother is a narcissist
my dad is a fob
my dad is dead
my dad is an alcoholic
my dad is my hero
my dad is 100 years old
my dad is a math teacher
my dad is a rockstar
my dad is dying
my dad is a jerk
i can’t get a job
i can’t get a girlfriend
i can’t get an erection
i can’t get a boyfriend
i can’t get a boner
i can’t get a credit card
i can’t get a date
i can’t get a tampon in
i can’t get a six pack
is my girlfriend cheating on me
is my girlfriend pregnant
is my girlfriend crazy
is my girlfriend bipolar
is my boyfriend cheating on me
is my boyfriend bi
is my boyfriend controlling
is my boyfriend abusive
how do i know if i am pregnant
how do i know if he likes me
how do i know if she likes me
how do i know if he loves me
how do i know if i have herpes
how do i know if i have a yeast infection
how do i know if my dog is pregnant
why do i fart so much
why do i have green poop
why do i owe taxes
why do i have so much gas
why do i sweat so much
why do i have no friends
why do i sleep so much
why do i bruise easily
why do i have so much discharge
my wife is a gangster
my wife is a high school girl
my wife is pregnant
my wife is retarded
my wife is fat
my wife is 18
my wife is depressed
my wife is an actress
my husband is a jerk
my husband is an alcoholic
my husband is depressed
my husband is lazy
my husband is selfish
my husband is boring
my husband is a liar
my husband is an idiot
my husband is in love with another woman
my husband is a loser
my job is killing me
my job is boring
my job is making me sick
my job is making me depressed
my job is too stressful
my job is hell
my job is slowly crushing my soul
my job is ruining my life
i regret voting for obama
i regret my abortion
i regret having children
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Get the fuck out of my face before I beat you with the scrag end of my intellectual truncheon.
You see, I’d imagined slathering the floor with honey, rendering the lizard sweet and immobile.
I make fast enemies.
*Hears the distant neighing of Wild Horse Spirit.
Snow? Are you sure it’s not just your entire town’s accumulated dandruff and skin scalings blowing in the Santa Ana winds?
I very much enjoyed the meditation of the carding and the spinning. But have you tried the shuttle and loom?
You know you are from Winnipeg when: exposed skin freezes in under a minute, but you still go out for a Slurpee.
I like to sing tunelessly, eat boiled eggs, and leave used kleenexes on my desk.
Ayn Rand presumes no false humility.
Um. I don’t like this site. They have the Book of Mormon listed as the second greatest book of all time.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I’d actually given up on Twitter, but I’m inspired by this mass psychic experiment.
New rule:
from this point on
no more defending those
who should be defending me — but
haven’t.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
From now on, Emma’s way.
Which came first? Pariah or
poet?
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
i.
Robed for the ritual of
of shame.
ii.
Renunciant, lay your wreaths
of blame.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Orange juice
isn’t orange juice
it’s sugar water
insecticide and
orange essence.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
I read a lot of blogs. Some days, it’s all I do. And I read so many really good ones — I want to let the rest of you know about a few of them, at least.
So here is a snippet from twelve blogs on my subscription list. I let the post I selected just be guided by chance, using the WordPress “random post” option.
Cati Porter: Poetry, Motherhood, and Other Creative Endeavors – “If you stop she will find you”
It has been three years/ since you last saw her./ You have remained chaste/ and undaunted by your/ own desire for Desire.
…Lea Kelley Saying Thank You For… : Things that make me laugh, cry, and wonder… LIFE IS ART – “Thank You Metaphoria”
Some raindrops get stuck. They don’t seem to move until some other raindrop comes along and adds weight to their path./ Others hit the window pane and fall straight to the bottom, clinging to all the raindrops in their way, taking them down.
CEWEJIMMY’S Weblog- “Face Off”
You think that I can’t spot the lie?/ What you say behind my back/ So pleasant and so helpful/ your unadulterated sneak attack
Nickpierce’s Blog – “O.K. So I”
So don’t be skeered/ Should you see some/ psychic upheaval made carnate/ just tell yourself/ ’tis only pen and paper
Georgy Riecke: Piercing the Mists of Obscure European Culture
- “The Road to Quebec”
Suffice it to say, I have had more ’strange encounters with famous writers’ than can be counted on the fingers and toes of a thousand horny toads. Many of these will no doubt dribble into this blog as the days drip by.
Musings From the Newly Hatched – “Unstoppable”
Her face grows dark and words spew forth. My lovely daughter’s/ spitting ash and lava, with some smoking words I’ve never/ heard her say. I do not stop her…
…Coffee Stains and Cigarette Burns… : Just How It Is – “Writer’s Block”
I can’t remember; I can’t decide, I can’t recall what I should keep in mind. It’s thrown away; it’s buried deep, without a headstone in a field of weeds.
bl3enude – “day 0 (good friday, bad saturday)”
but the sad thing is that the people reading this blog have more insight into who i really am than anyone else has ever known. i have never known how to relate to people. i really dont understand that. i just want to look into the mirror and see me, and be ok with that. and have others look at me and see me, and be ok with that.
Laura Elise Poetry – “The Best Lesson”
Maybe astronomy has just made me jealous/ of your astrological sign, because/ Lions and Leo/ charging across your chest/ look a lot better than/ Crabs and Cancer/ crawling across mine.
…psychotic thoughts… : An insight into voice hearing and the rest of my life – “Predictable Sex”
So tonight I’m meeting R for dinner. We’ll have sex afterwards. We always do. We always find enough to say to each other but we have little in common. I’ll say I like something and he’ll tell me he hates it and vice versa.
An Urban Animist – “My Relationship With Maned Wolf”
Misdirection is a useful skill. Through leading others to believe one thing about you, you can protect another part of yourself. It’s about tapping into glamour and using shields to guard the vulnerable and precious parts of yourself.
The Little Planet Daily – “Ask The Biologist: My Boyfriend Is A Mouth Breather”
Your boyfriend is descended from tribal apes, as you are, my dear.
No more
European
pecksniffery directed
at the Inuit! They’ve been through
enough!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Governor General Michaelle Jean cuts out heart of seal and eats it
In my dream
I was watching you
on a video.
You had met a friend
of mine. You were
at her house.
You were praising
her weird retro
stereo speakers.
She laughed and you
jumped into her unmade bed
with apparent familiarity.
You lay on her sheets
on your belly your legs
spread and bent like a frog.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Back when
everyone got on
the bus, I refused and
waited alone, for that’s just what
I do.
Of course
they disapproved
saying I was stubborn
to turn down a lift everyone
could use.
And as
they rode away
I thought they’ll be dead soon.
Look at their eyes. They are losing
their blue.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I saw this meme for liars on Ahinga blog.
Pride
What is your biggest contribution to the world?
I think it is quite obvious that I am just a little ray of sunshine bringing hope and joy to all who meet me. I teach people that if you dream it hard enough — you become godlike and your whole life just busts out in fragrant flowery abundance.
Envy
What do your coworkers have that you wish was yours?
I really envy other people’s lunches. If I think I can get away with it, I will sneak a few bites from the tupperware containers in the lunchroom fridge. Sometimes I’ll even lick their fork and not wash it after. I can’t stand the thought of them getting the first taste instead of me. This is also why I make sure to have a rude, hasty carnal interlude with any guy who is interested in a friend of mine. If they ever wind up walking down the wedding aisle together I get a real rush of satisfaction from having sullied their perfect love.
Gluttony
What did you eat last night?
I just threw a humongous slab of tofu in the blender and drank ‘er down with a swig of tepid vodka.
Lust
What really lights your fire?
I really love it when I hear men referring to me by just my hair color and size, ie. “that skinny blonde girl”. I am always gratified to know that, in their myopic eyes, I lose all my individual characteristics and dimension. Ultimately, it’s so burdensome having to portray myself as being anything more than just a hazy superficial impression. Humanity: who needs it, right? Lord love ‘em, these men really set me free.
Anger
What is the last thing that pissed you off?
I don’t get pissed off. I have a positive, hopeful attitude at all times and nothing disturbs my vacuous, placid serenity.
Greed
Name something you hoard and keep from others.
Every time I see a cute living thing, I just want to take it home, imprison it, and keep it completely separate from its own kind. I think it is particularly sweet to house prey and predators together. How many delightful afternoons I’ve spent eating roast chicken with my cat while our little caged bird looks on. Truly, there is nothing so adorable as watching my captive animal menagerie slowly losing their minds.
Sloth
What’s the laziest thing you ever did?
Once I lost my toenail clippers and, rather than go buy a new pair, I decided to turn it into an art form and compete with Louise Hollis for the world record title. Mind you, I was also too lazy to care for the nails properly, so I just let them go all raggedy-jaggedy and horrorshow. Eventually, they all snapped off. I have them still sitting in a pile on my coffee table if you would like to examine them.
Now I’m
in love with
the Daily Telegraph.
Priests and politicians beg for
mercy.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
MPs’ expenses: It is the people’s right to know, and our duty to publish
The backlash has started – or at least it is being attempted. The Telegraph’s determination to inform the public about the way some MPs have used the system of allowances and expenses as a way of boosting their personal interests and incomes has come in for some criticism over the past few days…
The extent to which some of his colleagues have paraded their self-pity at feeling unloved by the general public has not been dignified. It has also not achieved its goal of making the electorate more sympathetic to the plight of those MPs whose greed, selfish thoughtlessness and occasional outright fraud we have exposed.
More surprising than the twitchy irritation of politicians has been the attack from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr Rowan Williams has complained that it is time to call a halt to publication of the information, because the point “has been adequately made”, and the “systematic humiliation” of those involved is a threat to democracy.
and
Welfare Fraud: The Constitution of Social Assistance as Crime
By: Professor Janet Mosher, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University and Professor Joe Hermer, Division of Social Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough
March 2005
We are drawn then to the conclusion that the receipt of social assistance itself has become criminalized through the category of welfare fraud. Simply being on social assistance results in one being positioned as a penal object in a climate of moral condemnation, surveillance, suspicion and penalty. This criminalization is particularly gendered in that the majority of people on social assistance are women, and the majority of them are single parents. Prejudicial, historically embedded views of single women and single mothers–that they are irresponsible, sexually loose, lazy and ‘need a man’ to support them–pervade stereotypes about those on social assistance…
…The insidious character of this criminalization completely devalues women as mothers–that for example being a single parent surviving in poverty constitutes simply ‘sitting around’ and ‘doing nothing’. It is no wonder that being on social assistance has been characterized by an experience of fear, retribution and isolation–qualities that ‘cracking down’ on welfare fraud intentionally generate.
Fraud snitch line causes problems for NDP February 8, 2000
Manitoba’s NDP government is continuing to operate a welfare fraud telephone line that it harshly criticized while in Opposition. Now the debate over the fraud tip line is putting the NDP in a difficult position.
…New Democrat Doug Martindale once said of the tip line, “It allowed neighbors to squeal on neighbors. We used to associate this kind of surveillance with the Stasi police in East Germany, but now we have it in Manitoba.”
The minister says he’s reviewing whether to keep the tip line, but won’t commit to eliminating it.
…The Conservative critic says politicians must be held equally accountable for what they do in government, and what they say in Opposition.
Smocked drones
implanting eggs
to multiply inside
the white queen her thorax engorged
with veins.
Larvae
wiggling out
pale slippery litters
wet appleseed eyes colonize
the hive.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rising Multiple Births in the United States -Rogelio Saenz & Bethany DeSalvo
The Future:
The United States has experienced major growth in multiple births with the coming decades likely to produce an increasing prevalence of such deliveries. As white women have increasingly postponed childbearing and pursued fertility treatment when they or their husbands/partners are infertile, there has been a widening racial/ethnic divide in multiple births with white babies being much more likely to be part of sets of twins or higher birth-order deliveries compared to babies of color.
Racial Disparities and Multiple Births
This article examines the association between race and multiple birth rates in the U.S., based on the theoretical framework that questions the equitable diffusion of medical technologies across racial groups. In the wake of advances in fertility enhancing treatments, we conceptualize the current diminishing of the racial gap in the rate of multiple births as an outcome of social influences… The results strongly support our view that socioeconomic inequalities play a major role in the current diminution of the black to white multiple birth ratio via the socially limited access to fertility enhancing treatments.
Jon, Kate, and the Breakdown of the Evangelical Family
… Jon and Kate are evangelical Christians. The Gosselins are folk heroes in the evangelical community–their sextuplets were the result of infertility treatments during which they refused selective abortion and carried all six babies to term. TLC downplays the religious aspects of the show, but legions of conservative church-going fans delighted in Kate’s stern discipline, cheered Jon wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Bible verses, and devoured the couple’s Christian parenting books.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported that fewer than 20% of U.S. fertility clinics actually follow the recommended guidelines regarding how many embryos should be transferred in a single cycle of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Since these guidelines are written by a professional organization, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, and do not have the force of law, it is not surprising that many clinics would ignore them. It is nevertheless quite startling to realize that more than 80% of clinics openly flout professional guidelines.
The problem with ‘embryo adoption’
June 24, 2003 – One of the strangest outcomes of the ongoing debate over embryonic stem-cell research is the government’s use of taxpayer money to support a little-known private organization called Snowflakes. Devoted to encouraging couples to “adopt” human embryos, Snowflakes has received over $1 million from the Bush administration and Congress.
Adoption Statistics: Foster care
Based on current AFCARS estimates released January 2000, there are approximately 520,000 children currently in foster care in the United States. Of these, 117,000 are eligible for adoption.
Race/Ethnicity – Approximately 64% of children waiting in foster care are of minority background; 32% are White. 51% of all foster children waiting for adoption are Black, 11% are Hispanic, 1% are American Indian, 1% are Asian/Pacific Islander, and 5% are unknown/unable to determine.
What are the outcomes for children in foster care?
After aging out of foster care, 27% of males and 10% of females were incarcerated within 12 to 18 months. 50% were unemployed, 37% had not finished high school, 33% received public assistance, and 19% of females had given birth to children. Before leaving care, 47 percent were receiving some kind of counseling or medication for mental health problems; that number dropped to 21% after leaving care.
The true
face of evil
isn’t at the extreme.
The middling cowards pull the
switches.
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I am
deeply in love
with Lars von Trier for the
shape of his nose, his big brain, and
dry tears.
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Every
dysfunctional
organization needs
a scapegoat: family, school, workplace,
nation.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
…When the role model of what a man is does not allow a man to cry or express fear; when the role model for what a woman is does not allow a woman to be angry or aggressive – that is emotional dishonesty. When the standards of a society deny the full range of the emotional spectrum and label certain emotions as negative – that is not only emotionally dishonest, it creates emotional disease.
If a culture is based on emotional dishonesty, with role models that are dishonest emotionally, then that culture is also emotionally dysfunctional, because the people of that society are set up to be emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional…
-Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney
Scapegoating is a serious family dysfunctional problem with one member of the family or a social group being blamed for small things, picked on and constantly put down. In scapegoating, one of the authority figures has made a decision that somebody in the family has to be the bad guy.
They don’t just randomly appear. Scapegoats are created, plain and simple, through guilt & shame.
Scapegoating is a hostile social – psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence. Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from “approved” enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature….
McCollege
is not a place
for intellect.
They put you
in a paper hat
to be bullied
by dunces.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
American Education History Tour by John Taylor Gatto
Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best “police” to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.
The Conformity Police: History of the Global Brain by Howard Bloom
…Coordinated viciousness serves a function within the group… It builds the backbone of a social structure, polices it, and then compels conformity.
Watch FREAKS AND GEEKS!
Is there
some kind of law
that on turning forty
you have to be a surly old
grumpus?
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1.) Are you a vegetarian?
I do not believe it is reasonable to expect people to physically or mentally endure the rigors of this particular climate without eating meat. If you think otherwise, I invite you to bring your gortex-covered bony bourgeoise ass up here and wait on a transit bus in -50 windchill.
2.) Do you believe in Heaven?
No. Unfortunately, I have come to believe that any moment of brief transcendental bliss that we might experience is little more than a last gripping convulsion of the watery brain flesh. Just imagine the incomprehensible irony when — pft!– the lights go out. Ha. This senselessly unfair ending is entirely consistent with life as I know it to be. I expect nothing more of it.
3.) Have you ever come close to dying?
Dying and I are more than close, we’re intimates.
4.) What jewelry do you wear 24/7?
I have an actual aversion to the idea of sleeping with jewelry on.
5.) Favorite time of day?
I get to be quite the buggy-eyed creatrix between three and five a.m.
6.) Do you eat the stems of broccoli?
Are you telling me that there are people out there not eating their stems? Oy, what wastrels. I’d like to smack them with my canoe paddle.
7.) Do you wear makeup?
Only when I’m on the make. Otherwise, I really couldn’t give a rat.
8.) Do you believe in abortions?
Ah ha. If I don’t believe in something does it cease to exist? Rephrase the question, please.
9.) Future child’s name?
There will be no children, but I will gladly name the future fruits of your loins: my picks are Socrates, Snaky, Junior, Bud, and Sparky.
10.) Do you snore?
No. I grind.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I wish
I had been there
with you in cherry red
drinking the last drop, having the
last laugh.
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Hee hee.
That group photo
of you at work all dressed
in beige and black — all alike
how nice.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I really have no idea how much depth men experience in their friendships. It doesn’t appear particularly intimate, although they do seem to enjoy assembling in a herd and standing amongst one another.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
As I pointed out in my poem, this is one cultural psychodrama that people never tire of. It is reenacted, in one form or another, every day — it is the defining archetype of American entertainment.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
The Laughable, Ugliness, and Scapegoats
When a city suffered from plague, famine, or other public calamity, an ugly or deformed person was chosen to take upon himself all the evils which afflicted the community. He was brought to a suitable place, where dried figs, a barley loaf, and cheese were put into his hand. These he ate. Then he was beaten seven times upon his genital organs with squills and branches of the wild fig and other wild trees, while the flutes played a particular tune. Afterwards he was burned on a pyre built of the wood of forest trees; and his ashes were cast into the sea.
Welcome
into the world
where you are free to live
within the framework provided
to you.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
My friends grew old overnight
their mouths turned down and bitter
beach-gold skin grew thin
beneath cardigans and sweaters.
Their mouths turned down and bitter
they lost their sense of humor
the blood began to thicken
beach-gold skin grew thin.
They lost their sense of humor
their eyes cloud flat with anger
drudgery for a dollar
the blood began to thicken.
Their eyes cloud flat with anger
hardships growing bigger
lonely, poor, blue-collar
drudgery for a dollar.
Hardships growing bigger
they blame our past together
condemning all our memories
lonely, poor, blue-collar.
They blame our past together
when we had hoped to be happy
they hack at it with daggers
condemning all our memories.
When we had hoped to be happy
when we smiled in the sun
we dreamed beside the river
they hack at it with daggers.
When we smiled in the sun
and life stretched long before us
wishes nesting in our hands
we dreamed beside the river.
And life stretched long before us
but there were so few choices
we struggled in our snowstorms
wishes nesting in our hands.
But there were so few choices
the days kept growing shorter
frustration, hardship, sorrows
we struggled in our snowstorms.
The days kept growing shorter
we split up and got blinded
I’m sorry it wasn’t better
frustration, hardship, sorrows.
We split up and got blinded
my friends grew old overnight
beneath cardigans and sweaters
I’m sorry it wasn’t better.
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Me: Its horrible what is happening to peoples mouths. I mean little yellow jaggedy teeth aren’t a thrill but these huge neoprene pearly gates of evangelical heaven are really CREEPY.
Z: Very.
Me: I just wonder — what is going on UNDER those veneers?
Z: It makes one appreciate gnarly British teeth.
Me: Personally, I don’t care how bad the truth is — as long as it’s the truth.
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Have you
conducted your
life in accordance with
the highest principles, ethics
morals?
Yes sir.
I make this oath
before you my judges
megachurch, and American
God, yes.
It has
been revealed that
Miss California has
been exposing her implants for
photos.
Grandpa
fought for my right
to bare-breastedly speak
my mind. He did not fight for gay
marriage!
Trump, in
bishops mitre
declares the twenty-first
century, asking who made these
dumb rules?
You did
sir. It is your
contest of fresh female
flesh marketed as “young, pure and
cornfed”.
Well, she
did the right thing
with the surgery and
soft porn and lying; her future
is bright!
Come child
let the golden
haired Donald clean your sin
wear the crown of redemption, oh
martyr.
God bless
America
its plastic kings and queens
sinners scapegoated, saved, and born
again.
Next week:
the mammonites
versus the sodomites
Janet Jackson and her spiked tit
of doom.
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Jenny
is the type who
believes that if she just
insists she’ll bully autism
away.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
I see.
You were wanting
a symbol of my love.
Here I was thinking I give the
real thing.
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Another meme, passed along by Human, Being blog.
What are your current obsessions?
I tend to be drawn in by all manner of things archaic and perverse. My latest fascinations have been Egyptian faux beards for women, stone phalluses for the drubbing of thieves, and the baking of bone marrow.
What’s for dinner?
Tea, beans and brown rice.
What is your greatest fear at the moment?
Exploding sac aneurysms.
What are you listening to?
Dogs barking, motorcycles, sirens, and swearing.
If you were a god/goddess what would you be?
Nemesis! Avenger of hubris! Chariot of griffins!
What are your favourite holiday spots?
Sometimes I get to go to the Lake of the Woods. It’s wonderful be out on the cold water with the black granite and pine, and the blazing tamarack with the bald eagles overhead and the loons calling…
What are you reading right now?
I am being swirled in the warm sweet liquor of Roses of Crimson Fire by Gabriela Anaya Valdepena & Richard Denner.
What are four words that describe you?
Friendly, mischievous, intense, and audacious.
What is your guilty pleasure?
Faux snakeskin boots and tasseled moccasins.
Who or what makes you laugh?
Georgy Riecke: Piercing the Mists of Obscure European Culture cracks me up. It’s all this thrilling talk of wild-eyed Russian nihilists and the idiosyncratic practice of the Speyer doctrines. I find it hilarious.
What is your favourite spring thing to do?
It might be nice wearing little cotton dresses instead of a parka and ski-mask. Except that it snowed here yesterday.
What is the best thing you ate or drank lately?
Pan-fried Manitoba pickerel. Either that or the strip of elk-meat jerky I had up at my friend’s farm. You just have no idea how delicious it is. And cabbage soup. And a tomato sandwich.
When was the last time you were tipsy?
I seldom indulge to that degree. I do like to have the occasional bracing shot of vodka or tequila, or a cup of whiskey by a bonfire, or a cold beer with some venison and boiled beets — but I’m just not one to be cross-eyed sipping elaborate concoctions out of fishbowl-sized glasses or lurching around all blotto and maudlin on wine. Not usually anyway.
What song can’t you get out of your head?
By the Heat of Your Light -Juliette & the Licks. It’s exquisitely… yearning and mournful. I do enjoy torturing myself with it somehow.
Your fears?
I absolutely cannot touch terra cotta, frosted glass, or flour. It causes some kind of blood-curdling sensation. And, like everyone else, I’m also afraid of driving uncontrollably off bridges, strangling on gristle, or accidentally sticking a knife in my head.
Best new blog?
Cries in the Night: Whispers in the Dark is the most compelling storytelling I’ve come across in awhile — it’s a nail-biter — and I like the sorta grim, straight-forward, unblinking style of her writing. It’s rough stuff.
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Dozens
of articles
on plastic surgery
cellulite and dieting marked
“must read”.
Above
recipes for
dough balls, short cake, cream sauce
roast lamb, quiche, pizza crust, cheese mousse
streusel.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
and
Overrated
1. Hot tubs.
2. Chocolate.
3. Lingerie.
4. Shaved chests.
Underrated
1. Witty conversation.
2. Canned peaches.
3. Pyjamas.
4. Hairy asses.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Those wed ill who wed in May.
-Proverb
Lara
was beautiful.
Lara spoke what she saw.
Jupiter cut her tongue out in
revenge.
On the
way to her death
Mercury fell in love.
Their children refuse to be kept
quiet.
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i.
He said
he was moving
in with his (dead) brother.
Drunk, I wanted to move in to
his suite.
ii.
I went
to her place in
Detroit crossing over
the border illegally to
break in.
iii.
We’re in
my living-room
I start crying I can’t
breathe I fall I crawl and cling to
his knees.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
To dream about an apartment, symbolizes a financial or situational state.
To dream that you are drunk, suggests that you are acting careless and insensible. You are losing control of your life and losing a grip on reality. Perhaps you are trying to escape from a waking situation.
To dream that you are moving away, signifies your desire or need for change.. it indicates your determination and issues regarding dependence/independence.
To see or cross the border in your dream, indicates that you are entering a new phase or transition in your life. You are encountering new territory. Alternatively, it represents the conversion of two states of mind or attitudes.
To see an intruder in your dream, represents your feelings of guilt. Consider also what unfamiliar feelings or thoughts may be breaking into your peace of mind.
To dream that you or someone commits a crime, represents feelings of guilt and shame. Your inner fears are hindering your growth and progress.
To dream that you are in the living room, represents the image that you portray to others and the way which you go about your life. It is representative of your basic beliefs about yourself and who you are.
To dream that you are crying, signifies a release of negative emotions that is more likely caused by some waking situation rather than the events of the dream itself. Your dream is a way to regain some emotional balance and a way to safely let out your fears and frustrations…To dream that no one hears or responds to your cries, represents your helplessness and difficulties and frustrations in trying to communicate with others.
You may be lowering yourself and your standards. You may be doing less than your best.
To dream that you cannot breathe, indicates that you are feeling exhausted.
…Indicate that you are feeling very emotional. Feelings of inadequacy and issues of power/control also come into play. You may have more than you can handle.
D: Did you hear that explosion or those gunshots or whatever they were a few minutes ago?
Me: Yeah. I was in the parking lot and I heard it right behind me but I didn’t wanna turn around.
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Poison
letter in mail.
Sliced my finger open
gave me an infection. Brought me
bad news.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by: Free, over on Narcissist Stop blog.
A bunch of crafty things that make me want them.
Total cost of actually buying all this stuff: $500 USD. Nuh uh.
Ladies Apron with Frill
Sterling Silver Ring - I AM THE LAW
Afrenzy Bobbs
A Stitch in Time- Neo-Victorian Tiara
Microscopic Organism Brooch
Thick 'n Sketchy Scarf in Bronzed Green
Black Grapy Needlework Necklace
Burgundy Felted Scarf
Snow Rose
Cut Out Dress in White feat. Le Cigule
i.
Flat eye
Reptilian
toenails thick and horny
tail thrashing smelling your sex with
fork tongue.
ii.
The Greys
have long, slender
prehensile penises
and they ejaculate by the
bucket.
iii.
Shadows
got underneath
the bed sheets and filled me
up with the freeze of fear-blind white
darkness.
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© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Fauna,
holds the healing horn
of red clover, raspberry leaf
and the root of unicorn.
Bonae Deae,
vestals in the temple
the brewers of leaves
grinding damiana; milk, honey and tea.
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Damiana and other Fertility Herbs
Damiana liqueur (in the goddess bottle)
Damiana is tea mixed with sugar for its ability to enhance lovemaking… Damiana can also be smoked, whereby the effects are somewhat similar to Cannabis sativa although milder and more relaxing. In some places in Australia, Damiana is used as an alternative to tobacco when smoked with Marijuana. Damiana has a synergistic effect with Passionflower which when smoked in a combination has been said to be extremely relaxing and promotes lucid dreaming.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
I stayed up all night
talking with Hippopotamus.
We talked about the strength
of the unrelenting opposition
I’ve had to fight
to protect myself
and how deep I had to wade in
to defend my right to exist.
Hippo said, do you still see
that life or death struggle before you?
Yes, I said.
That is why I’m crying.
Don’t worry, Hippo said,
I came to stop the bleeding.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
The main enemies of the hippo are crocodiles, lions and hyenas.
I was playing Mob Wars.
I attacked a more powerful Capo.
He put up the million dollar bounty
and called a hit on me.
When I got out of the hospital
I punched him in the face
and sent him a message:
I laugh at your feeble threats.
He laid down the money
to have me whacked again
and again and again
while I mocked him in my traction.
He spent about fifty million bucks
having me assassinated
and I just kept coming back
like a bad smell.
It made me feel… well, a little bit special
that he would hate me with such devotion
sort of like love
but different.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Brooks and I playing Literati again.
Me: Hi. Wanna play?
B: Okay.
Me: I’m going to demolish you.
———
Me: *Sigh. This is one of those games where you ruin the board…
B: LOL
Me: … and it just draaaags on and on.
B: Of course we’ve been pausing for your lovely “smudging with sweetgrass against plague” tutorials.
Me: Yes, and I may have already saved your life. But you are a passive-aggressive player.
B: Are you referring to my usual hyper-aggressive — almost blitzkrieg– use of the villainous “c”?
Me: Well, this time you dicked us around with vices, zits, and your infernal pox!
B: Haha.
Me: I was being so nice with my swanks and yaks and slag cheeses — then you had to start in with all of your day bed drama in the left upper corner there — like some bon-bon eating diva.
B: Haha. You played day and drama.
Me: No. I played drama and ye. Ye olde style drama. Not your soap-opera style day bed drama.
B: Your Literati style is best described as aggressive-aggressive.
Me: How DARE you try to show up my triple-word score heron with your triple-word score ibis?
——-
B: I woulda won twice, were it not for your egregious use of the bingo.
Me: Haha!
B: And your almost constant “c” futzing.
Me: Futzing!
B: Yeah. Futzing Scrabble boards from time immemorial…
Me: Hahaha!
B: …then you shove that off on ME who considers futzing to be anathematic to the spirit of pure play.
Me: What a dandy speech that was.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I had to post this video that I just watched on one of my subscribed blogs: blu3nude.
All existing theories now out the window. My loaf is officially baked.
I’m sorry
we don’t pay
for that cognitive therapy
be a good girl
and settle for
this chemical lobotomy.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Nothing
like a witch hunt
to inspire the Muse
of paganism and past lives.
I too.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Rev Algernon S. Crapsey… became internationally known as one of the first ministers to support non-literal interpretations of The Bible and embrace evolution theory. Although he won many converts, he was vilified by established churches of all denominations, and was tried for heresy and excommunicated by his own Episcopal Church.
The Witch by Adelaide Crapsey.
In this poem Adelaide seems to be making reference to the legendary Simonetta Cattaneo de Vespucci. It is sad that they both died of tuberculosis. Simonetta at twenty-two years of age and Adelaide at only thirty-six.
Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey
September 9, 1878–October 8, 1914
Adelaide Crapsey
by Carl Sandburg
The poem that kept the memory of Adelaide Crapsey and her cinquain verse form alive.
Respect
is so hard won.
You were an outsider
confined by your times and doomed to
die young.
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Inspired by:
The cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey.
“Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?” “For that
She is beautiful, delicate:
Therefore.”
I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.
Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk. .as strange, as still. .
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?
DISCOVERING ADELAIDE CRAPSEY: CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT
…who could possibly be intellectually interested in someone who was considered a local “poetess,” someone who had never published a poem in her lifetime, someone who didn’t even make it to the Norton Anthology of Women, and someone with a name like Adelaide Crapsey.
1. What is your favorite word?
Hm. Today I like the word “percipient”.
2. What is your least favorite word?
My least favorite word is “boobs” and “boobies”. I find infantile words, particularly when used in a sexual context, to be uniquely nauseating.
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
I love to talk and laugh.
4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
That people are generally petty, scheming and ill-willed and cannot be trusted.
5. What sound or noise do you love?
The wind in the trees and birdsong.
6. What sound or noise do you hate?
Horns, sirens, alarms, screaming and swearing. All of which pour in through my barred windows and set me on edge all day and night.
7. What is your favorite curse word?
Bugger.
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
None.
9. What profession would you not like to do?
I would not like to participate in the inhumanity of any bureaucratic system.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
“You didn’t deserve that. Its my fault. I’m sorry.”
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Inspired by:
“Ten Small Self Explorations” on Free’s Narcissist Stop blog.
Seldom
has anyone
recommended me as
any example of how to
proceed.
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Inspired by:
Puncture
neck with arrow.
Collect hot blood in gourd.
Plug wound. Scramble with fresh milk or
sour.
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Inspired by:
Free, on her “Narcissist Stop” blog writing about her many lives and incarnations, including the Maasai tribe.
When there is little milk for protein, Maasai tap blood from their animals without killing them.
ABCs of Me
This meme courtesy of Human, Being.
A .
- Age: Legal.
- Annoyance: My bane are tedious pissants who have nothing better to blog than the endless minutia of their petty daily gripes in “hate” lists. The tone of irritable preciousness and scab-picking ennui makes my guts churn with revulsion.
- Animal: Channel catfish.
B
- Best feeling in the world: Poetic justice.
- Best weather: I like the ominous and surreal shift of light just before a wild storm. It’s vivid.
- Been in Love: Always in love.
- Been on stage: Many times. Sometime scintillating, mostly mortifying. Good performances rely on alert, engaged, and receptive audiences.
- Believe in Magic: I might cherish my own peculiar notions.
- Believe in God: No.
C
- Cake or pie: Lemon, rhubarb, saskatoon, or crabapple pie. With tea and cream. Mm. That’s lovely.
- Continent/Country to visit: To Greece. To write my bildungsroman.
- Cheese: Gamboling Goat.
D
- Day or Night: I can’t tell the difference.
E
- Eyes: Blue like lake-water.
- Everyone’s got a: stick up their butt sideways.
F
- Food: Borsht.
G
- Greatest Fear: Governments that turn against their citizens.
- Good luck charm: Turquoise ring.
H
- Happy: A little drunk, a little sunburned, and barely dressed.
- Holiday: Feast of the Larvae.
- How do you want to die: In a hail of gunfire, speeding over a cliff, bursting into flames, then sinking to the seabed to be torn apart by googly-eyed shellfish.
I
- Ice Cream: Tiger Tiger.
- Instrument: Kazoo.
J
- Jewelry: No. Cash is fine.
K
- Keep a journal: Why record a routine? I write every day. That’s it.
L
- Laughed so hard you cried: I told a 7-11 clerk that my friend had a crush on a guy named Dilbag. The aftermath was uproarious.
M
- Movies: I’ll like it if it’s “foreign”, independent, or documentary. I can get a little churlish about the mainstream.
N
- Number of Piercings: Hey, don’t mess around with anything that could result in keloid scarring.
O
- One wish: A delicate whipped meringue of sweet frothy freedom on a hunkin’ hot slab of bedrock security.
P
- Perfect Pizza: Anchovy and mushroom. Extra thin crust.
Q
- Quail: Yes. I recoil in horror almost daily.
R
- Reason to cry: Why bother? No one gives a rat.
- Reality T.V.: Rampage of the narcissistic greedsacks.
S
- Sushi: Man, I like that butterfish. (Also known as Wart Perch.)
- Skipped school: Ha. Chronic.
- Slept outside: Luckily, I never passed out in a snowbank for long.
- Sing well: We’ll never know.
T
- Time for bed: When I go cross-eyed from exhaustion.
U
- Unpredictable: Some say I am prone to sporadic fits of apocalyptic pique.
V
- Vacation spot: The dark misty realm of the Unconscious.
W
- Weakness: Boots and jackets.
- Which of your friends acts the most like you: Oh ho ho. I don’t think anyone would want to do that.
- Wanted to be a model: Why? Wanna claw my fucking eyes out now?
- Where do we go when we die: I don’t know about you, but I got recycled.
- Worst Weather: Windy.
X
- Ex’s: Rue the day.
Y
- Yellow: Piss, gall, pus, and poison.
Z
-Zoo animal: Rar! Free all animals from their wretched imprisonment in the human hive!
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“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Thanks for the heads up Duffboy.
…Throughout history, change has been slow. Successive groups of incompetent leaders have replaced those that preceded them, but the underlying social and economic problems remain because the basic value systems have gone unaltered. The problems we are faced with today cannot be solved politically or financially because they are highly technical in nature. There may not even be enough money available to pay for the required changes, but there are more than enough resources. This is why The Venus Project advocates the transition from a monetary-based society to the eventual realization of a resource-based global economy.
We realize to make the transition from our present culture, which is politically incompetent, scarcity-oriented and obsolete, to this new, more humane society will require a quantum leap in both thought and action.
With polluted runoff still flowing in from industry, agriculture and massive suburban development, scientists note that many new pollutants and toxins from modern everyday life are already being found in the drinking water of millions of people across the country and pose a threat to fish, wildlife and, potentially, human health.
In Poisoned Waters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith examines the growing hazards to human health and the ecosystem.
It is the great anomaly, the United States, that has long perplexed sociologists. America has a large, well educated middle class that lives in comfort—so why do they still believe in a supernatural creator? Because they are afraid and insecure.
…In part to try to accumulate the wealth needed to try to prevent financial catastrophe, in part to compete in a culture of growing economic disparity with the super rich, the typical American is engaged in a Darwinian, keeping up with the Jones competition in which failure to perform to expectations further raises levels of psychological stress.
…Rather than religion being an integral part of the American character, the main reason the United States is the only prosperous democracy that retains a high level of religious belief and activity is because we have substandard socio-economic conditions and the highest level of disparity.
ACTIONS FOR SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
1.) EXPOSE THE FED CARTEL: BOYCOTT CITIBANK, JP MORGAN CHASE, and BANK OF AMERICA.
2.) BOYCOTT THE TV NEWS NETWORKS: CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX etc.
USE AND PROTECT THE INTERNET.
3.) BOYCOTT THE MILITARY.
4.) STOP SUPPORTING THE ENERGY COMPANIES.
5.) REJECT THE POLITICAL SYSTEM.
They’ve seen the future and dislike the present
New York Times
A masked advocate.
The Harp constellation.
The couch of a wild beast.
A pasture to fatten
with lore and learning.
A lesson to teach.
Terns and skimmers.
An empty stomach.
Trifling cheek.
A horse without a rider.
Immodest or sinister glances
to entice and attract.
A honey-eating parrot
uttering falsehoods.
A sticky bat of Ceylon.
A pluck, an armed bullhead.
Openly distrustful.
A glowering sky.
A confused jumble of sounds.
An avalanche of volcanic water.
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Inspired by:
Words generated by a sound-alike algorithm of the word “Laura”.
As recorded in the spidery handwriting of one such specimen:
Embark on indiscriminate exploratory missions.
Navigate with third eye.
Maneuver along faint associative trails.
Check credulity protocols.
Initiate intra-psychic interactions with alternative life-forms.
Engage in experimental intellectual intercourse.
Collect raw data samples of symbolic and harmonic elements.
Catalog and categorize extraneous information according to benign, hallucinogenic, or poisonous properties.
Analyze and assign meaning to abstract and intuitive information patterns.
Introduce colloquial interspersals.
Collate by coincidence.
Load random inferences and indulge allusions.
Communicate significance in urgent twenty-syllable bursts.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Rabbit
I understand
you now. You are so right.
It is good medicine. I will
run rapt.
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The Runner’s High as Meditation
Several runners describe running as a form of meditation. The rhythm of the run and the cadence of footsteps pounding the surface, coupled with the regular beat of the heart create a “meditative attention” state through which the runner is able to leave his thoughts behind. One runner describes it in this way: “You reach this state of mind only after you’ve gone through the concentration state, and instead of shifting back to your daytime mind, you fall in to deep mind instead.”. There is a sense that the runner moves from conscious effort to an effortlessness which many describe as weightlessness, “light and free, animal wild”. Worries, nagging fears dissolve as the runner enters a trance state, a “kind of empty and wordless elation”.
Me: I like that.
Tina: What?
Me: That. The world tree.
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Hippos
have a thick skin
seamed and scarred from fighting.
Vicious and aggressive, said to
sweat blood.
Hippos
piss backwards
and defecate over
everything. They will spread the shit
around.
Inspired by:
…The hippopotamus asks those with this totem to act upon their intuition without analyzing it while maintaining a practical grounded life style.
Hippopotamus are amphibious and have special adaptations for life in the water. It can safely stay underwater, able to breath, hear, and see the world above without having to expose its body. When this medicine if fully developed those with this totem have an innate ability to know what lies beneath the surface of any situation. They speak and see truth and demand that others respect that truth.
…Although the Hippopotamus is extremely agile and flexible in its movements it has a tendency to develop set patterns. When they leave the water at dusk, they prefer to follow the same path creating a rut in the ground several feet deep. The hippopotamus teaches us to find a path that works for us and to stay on it to reach our true destination.
Last night
I dreamed that I
was accused of something
I had not done. I looked to friends
for help.
But they were not
certain. I was angry.
They used this to justify their
weakness.
I went to a
grief counselor.
I saw a menagerie.
A hippopotamus gazed up
at me.
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Accuse
To dream that you are being accused of something, indicates that you are feeling guilty. It may also mean that you are having some doubts about yourself and the choices you are making.
To dream that you accuse others, signifies disagreements with those around you.Abandonment
To dream that you are abandoned, suggests that it is time to leave behind past feelings and characteristics that are hindering your growth. Let go of your old attitudes. A more direct and literal interpretation of this dream is that you have a fear of being deserted, abandoned, or even betrayed. It may stem from a recent loss or a fear of losing a loved one. The fear of abandonment may manifest itself into your dream as part of the healing process and dealing with losing a loved one. Alternatively, the dream indicates that you are feeling neglected or that your feelings are being overlooked.
To abandon others in your dream, suggests that you are overwhelmed by the problems and decisions in your life.Anger
Being angry in your dream may have been carried over from your waking life. Dreams can function as a safe outlet where you can express your strong and/or negative emotions. You have some suppressed anger and aggression that you have not consciously acknowledged.Bereavement
To dream that you are in bereavement, suggests that you are repressing your grief. Perhaps something is bothering you more than you realize. You need to express your sadness and not keep it inside.Counselor
To see a counselor or dream that you are one, suggests that you are seeking for some support and direction in your life.Menagerie
To dream that you are at a menagerie, signifies varying degrees of problems.Hippopotamus
To see a hippopotamus in your dream, symbolizes your aggressive nature and your hidden strengths. You have more influence and power than you realize. Alternatively, it indicates that you are being territorial. Perhaps someone is overstepping their boundaries.Chew
To dream that you are chewing something, suggests that you are sorting things out and carefully thinking it over.Water Lily
To see a water lily in your dream, signifies grief, sorrow, and bereavement.
Last night
walking downtown
a rabbit crossed my path.
Rabbit, rabbit! Hare, kit, cunt and
coney.
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Rabbits are… contradictory, paradoxical creatures: symbols of both cleverness and foolishness, of femininity and androgny, of cowardice and courage, of rampant sexuality and virginal purity…
Cunning rabbits – Etymology of rabbit, cunt, and coney.
Divination by means of any objects that happen to present themselves. To this class belong omens drawn from chance meetings with a hare or an eagle.
Under
the new regime
we must write about what
they like: hunting, machineries,
control.
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Art mags decry double standard
By Althia Raj, National Bureau
18 April 09
As the federal government plans to cut funding to small literary and art magazines, Conservative MPs have been busy doling out cash with much fanfare for non-literary magazines in their own ridings.
Edmonton-based Report magazine, which bills itself as “Western Canada’s conservative voice,” received $27,124 last month.
Conservative MP Patrick Brown announced $23,666 to a magazine dedicated to snowmobiling and $38,329 is going to help Canadian Fly Fisher Magazine in Tory MP Daryl Kramp’s Belleville, Ont. riding.
The announcements come as the Conservative government finalizes details of a new periodical fund that will cut subsidies to magazines with an annual unit circulation of under 5,000.
John Barton, editor of The Malahat Review, an internationally recognized literary publication with a circulation of 4,000, recently started a Facebook group to mobilize opposition to the cuts…
Local amateur wrestling in North Winnipeg.
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The Laurentide ice sheet retreats
across four thousand years of sandstone
sagebrush, spruce
wooly mammoth, marsh, and melt water.
Soft lake sediment scratched
and scarred into strand lines.
Dug, grooved, glacier-dragged
gouged into large alluvial fans
spring pits, oxbows, ridges and deltas.
Wet, worn, weary, and weathered
the northern lake plains drained.
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Inspired by:
Lake Agassiz and the Laurentide glacier.
A teeny tiny taste of what it might have looked like. Pretty damned amazing.
Mmmm. Hypnotic.
And mega crackly.
Tina: Yep, I see two guys comin’ up the backlane there…
Me: Fortunately, our submarine sandwiches will look like machine guns.
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Clerk: … So then, to obtain your identity card, you’ll have to bring the necessary documents and attend a forty-five minute interview.
Me: A forty-five minute interview? With who? What for?
Clerk: I don’t know.
Me: Oh. I see. That’s when we’ll have the opportunity to be interrogated, swear allegiance to the Antichrist, and be imbedded with the implant. I think I know where to go. Room 101, at the Ministry of Love, right?
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Inspired by:
Most privacy commissioners in Canada, federal and provincial, are against a national ID card system…
The most frequently raised concerns about national ID cards are that they constitute a perfect surveillance tool and lead to an invasion of privacy, especially when abused. Moreover, national ID cards are seen as foreign to Canadian society and its values of free movement and civil liberty. If there is a need for identification, the current use of driver’s licenses and passports is viewed as sufficient. Last but not least, the enormous and potentially uncontrollable costs of a national ID card system is seen as being disproportional to any benefits that it would have.
A mere two years after the phenomena of Paul Potts
the amnesiac audience has forgotten that beauty
isn’t synonymous with talent. A beetle-browed woman
in a house-frock sings, providing an opportunity
for the sexy blonde judge to quake in rapture.
Her pupils dilate, her shimmering lips part in ecstasy,
the orchestra lifts and swells, and the audience has a mass standing O.
Simon smiles as if to say “I can’t believe I pulled this off
again” and another televised contrivance is raised to new heights
as legend.
This would have never flown in the early eighties, Back then, being homely, unknown, and hugely talented wasn’t impetus for a quasi-religious spectacle; it just was.
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Inspired by;
Video killed the radio star
Faunus and I tangled.
It lasted half the night.
Rough games will always get heated, between such
spoilsports.
Faunus and I tangled
up in bracken moonlight.
A clever ruse, a jest, a dodge, a play of last
resort.
Faunus and I tangled
rolling from left to right.
Settling it, skin on skin, my pale pressed on
his swart.
Faunus and I tangled.
We made love out of spite.
Tempers tend to move this way, hence spirited
cavorts.
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Coffee
a walk downtown
on a lovely spring morning
then get hit in the head with a
hatchet.
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Two girls charged in hatchet attack
The Winnipeg Sun, 14 April 2009
Charges have been laid against two teen girls accused of striking two women with a hatchet and robbing a third during a two-hour spree of terror in downtown Winnipeg yesterday.
Whipping against darkness like firelight
beat like a priest in a cell
moans and cries stream out of the sanctum
as salt lashes of surf
thrash the spread of the shore.
Waves pulse like parted petals of cyclamen
excited Andromeda overwhelmed
as the screech owl leaches
a red-feathered swelling
the scaly sea monster twitches its tail.
As an eel clamps to a clam
or a whelp latches on for the lick
as the lapping tide guzzles and drains the rock cave
to be sucked to the pit like a mango
sucked to eventual silence.
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Inspired by:
The 11th letter of the Greek alphabet.
Rabbit
says “you must run”.
Run. Outrun. Let it blur.
Distance yourself from the past. Don’t
look back.
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People.
If we must cling
to fervent beliefs then
let it be the Revolution.
Viva.
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Inspired by:
To put it starkly, the level of popular religion is not a spiritual matter, it is actually the result of social, political and especially economic conditions.
Today, as you struggle to see the good
amid the colorless dirge and soul-destroying grind
of our alienated and desperate existence;
remember to be grateful, at least
that we are not infected by parasites.
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Inspired by:
Velocity of ascent is inversely proportional to gravitational suck.
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I want
success so that
I can leave my lowly
hovel and be a much bigger
recluse.
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Me: … So anyway, that’s what happened. That is why I’m a grouch.
Clerk #1: What?! You! You are always smiling! Always smiling!
Me: No I’m not. My life is a misery. Really?
Clerk #2: You! Yes! Always happy! Happy! Smiling!
Me: What? How can this be? You’re pulling my leg!
Clerk #1: Happiest of all the people who come here!
Me: I can’t believe it. But, even if you’re right, even if I am smiling all the time I really am crabby. Hugely crabby. Crabby on the inside!
Clerks: (Laughing).
Me: What the — ! Give me a mirror! Am I smiling right now?
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One should
never indulge
in divinations if
not prepared to have sleepless nights
for life.
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In answer to my question: Why?
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Poems by Bronte Sisters:
To see thee stand prepared to fly, And flap those useless wings of thine, And gaze into the distant sky, Would melt a harder heart than mine.
In vain–in vain! Thou canst not rise: Thy prison roof confines thee there; Its slender wires delude thine eyes, And quench thy longings with despair.
THE CAPTIVE DOVE – Anne Brontë
POOR restless dove, I pity thee;
And when I hear thy plaintive moan,
I mourn for thy captivity,
And in thy woes forget mine own.
To see thee stand prepared to fly,
And flap those useless wings of thine,
And gaze into the distant sky,
Would melt a harder heart than mine.
In vain–in vain! Thou canst not rise:
Thy prison roof confines thee there;
Its slender wires delude thine eyes,
And quench thy longings with despair.
Oh, thou wert made to wander free
In sunny mead and shady grove,
And, far beyond the rolling sea,
In distant climes, at will to rove!
Yet, hadst thou but one gentle mate
Thy little drooping heart to cheer,
And share with thee thy captive state,
Thou couldst be happy even there.
Yes, even there, if, listening by,
One faithful dear companion stood,
While gazing on her full bright eye,
Thou mightst forget thy native wood.
But thou, poor solitary dove,
Must make, unheard, thy joyless moan;
The heart, that Nature formed to love,
Must pine, neglected, and alone.
Rabbit
season really did do its work.
Garden decimated.
Start all over
again.
I’d thought
that this would end.
Throw my seeds to the wind.
Famine. I forgot how to eat
anyway.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Sensing a wily coyote
the hare will zig the zag
she knows the scent and the rangy coat
of a salivating wag.
The hare will zig the zag
this dog has the amble
of a salivating wag
his rug is turds and brambles.
This dog has the amble
bones clatter on his rack
his rug is turds and brambles
she throws him off the track.
Bones clatter on his rack
she hides down in a hole
she throws him off the track
he stays on the patrol.
She hides down in a hole
she tunnels up and out
he stays on the patrol
grinning through his snout.
She tunnels up and out
the eager coyote follows
grinning through his snout
she leads him to a hollow.
The eager coyote follows
his ruff and collar bristle
she leads him to a hollow
he minces through the thistles.
His ruff and collar bristle
she leads him through the timber
he minces through the thistles
her leaps are smooth and limber.
She leads him through the timber
he doesn’t suspect a thing
her leaps are smooth and limber
she bounces on a spring.
He doesn’t suspect a thing
he’s dogged in pursuit
she bounces on a spring
she’s setting out the route.
He’s dogged in pursuit
the chase has made him blind
she’s setting out the route
he doesn’t look behind.
The chase has made him blind
there’s something on his tail
he doesn’t look behind
he moves along her trail.
There’s something on his tail
close by and black and looming
he moves along his trail
intent and all-consuming.
Close by and black and looming
a bigger beast is coming
intent and all-consuming
three hearts are fiercely drumming.
A bigger beast is coming
something far more savage
three hearts are fiercely drumming
on the verge of bloody ravage.
Something far more savage
fangs seize upon the cur
on the verge of bloody ravage
the coyote loses fur.
Fangs seize upon the cur
skin the bony hide
the coyote loses fur
hare just keeps in stride.
Skin the bony hide
coyote splayed and gutted
hare just keeps in stride
wild appetites are glutted.
Sensing a wily coyote
the hare will zig the zag
she knows the scent and the rangy coat
of a salivating wag.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Reader’s Digest writing prompt and Pamela Villar’s pantoum poem.
Ideas
always feel “right”
when everyone agrees.
The disharmony of dissent
rings wrong.
When choirs
get kerfuffled
and they don’t like your tone
tuning forks turn into pitchforks.
Kill! Kill!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
The eight primary symptoms of groupthink are:
-Illusions of invulnerability where the group think it is invincible and can do no wrong.
-Collective efforts to rationalize or discount warnings.
-Unquestioned belief in the moral correctness of the group.
-Stereotyped views of the out-group, often as too evil, weak or stupid to be worth bothering with.
-Self-censorship as people decide not to rock the boat.
-Pressure to conform.
-A shared illusion of unanimity (everyone always agrees with everyone else).
-Protecting the group from contrary viewpoints, by self-appointed ‘mind-guards’.
The trouble with this gift
is that it blows the candle out.
No surprises anymore.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
A phone call;
a comparison;
and the Writer’s Digest prompt “The trouble with…” on Pamela Villar’s blog.
Gabriela: Ugh! What makes men like him think that they are smarter than us?
Me: Why does he think he’s smarter than us? Because he looks like the prophets! He thinks because he resembles the men in the history books that he’s a wise patriarch! But he’s not! And I’ll drag him through the muddy streets by the scruff of the beard to prove it!
—-
Me: My pen is priapic!
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Oh, that poem that you read!
It was so whiskery.
Look at my stockings
they’re in shreds.
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The front door slams
the latch slides shut
and a row of muzzles
line up along the window frame
wavering.
A voice calls out:
Yes? May we take your complaint?
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Inspired by:
ENFP:
Many champions project their intuitive and perceptive abilities out into the world and are constantly wondering about future possibilities that can improve themselves, others, or situations. This can get champions into trouble if they do not express this to others correctly; or if others or groups take suggestions from champions as criticism or as the champion telling them what to do, instead of viewing it as the offering of an idea. This can confuse champions who have not yet realized that some people do not like change, or that some people can perceive this offering of advice in regards to change as the identification of a defect. This is because champions who are not at odds with themselves typically like to improve upon themselves and their situations as new information becomes available.
-Wikipedia
Some read the poem with a comb
they rake against its tender scalp
and fixate on every flake
in their deluded state
like a crackhead
smoking dandruff.
There are those who come to grub
whose fingers bruise and smudge
they scan the words
like microfiche, police reports, like letters in a drawer
on a hunt for clues of guilt, violations of social norms
they jam their fingers in the chinks and sniff eagerly for blood.
And there are several, fervent in their belief that every poem is about me
that I am composed of twenty-two syllable stories
an open book, a diary, an autobiography.
But I am the composer.
Others insist that the genesis of my poem is in them and their life.
It keeps them up at night. And, yes, they would be right.
Go ahead
discover some shred
some vestige of yourself
knowing that it isn’t your entirety or mine
it is just a moment in time
and it is not any less about you as it is about him
or she, and this is where the truth of it is, in universality.
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Inspired by:
IEE:
The IEE is particularly sensitive to and observant of manifestations of spontaneity, social awkwardness, and psychological compatibility or incompatibility. This comes from a combination of (perception of who people really are, their personality, motivation, and how much they are revealing their personality and ‘true selves’) and (sensitivity to people’s feelings and emotional state). This sensitivity makes the IEE very choosy of social situations — whom to interact with, what group to hang out with, how much time to spend with which people, etc. IEEs are likely to vocally criticize social atmospheres that they regard as strained, stifling, or stilted. IEEs tend to comment a lot on people’s personalities and social situations and share insights on possible causes of people’s relationships, behavior, and life strategies — even if no one asks for this insight.
IEEs have a penchant for one-on-one communication with intense sharing of insight gleaned from one’s life experience.
-Wikipedia
The crest
is a bolus
pushing its way down through
a too-narrow tract about to
explode.
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Shall I
have nothing I
want? Not ever? You
strangling bitch, let go, let go
damn you!
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Charming
how your hands shake
when you talk to me but
you have me confused with someone
else, so…
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D: What do you think of this picture I made of you?
Me: I like the starry eyes. I like that my lips are smiling.
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I can
see you are sad
again. You need a hug.
Don’t worry, it will be over
quite soon.
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While ordering a pizza.
P: You must get away. Get away.
Me: I will never get away.
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I wish
it was just fun
again and we could play
and laugh again. I don’t know what
happened.
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Inspired by:
…The entirety of the elven life, the Way, is one of fun, love and laughter.
…Their `religion’, if you will, is based on such games.
How dare
you defy her?
You’re obliged to obey.
Creativity can curdle
like cream.
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Inspired by:
By ancient tradition, the White Goddess becomes one with her human representative–a priestess, a prophetess, a queen-mother. No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident…
-Robert Graves, The White Goddess
For Becky, in memory
Drum behind the navel
make her fingers cymbal
sea-spray like a dolphin
cascade in a fountain.
Her body waves, it’s tidal
the pulse of hips and chanting
cascade in a fountain
salty like an ocean.
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Inspired by:
Erato: muse who presided over lyric poetry, from Gk. erastos, verbal adj. of eran “to love.”
-Online Etymological Dictionary
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Asking my friend’s fifteen year-old son for advice.
Me: So, that’s my dilemma. What do you think? What should I do? Should I change?
R: No. I don’t think you should change. One of the things I like best about you is that you never talk down to me. You never talk to me like I’m just a kid.
Me: Thank you. You’ve helped me.
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A poem composed from words in a Literati game.
Ed, Joe and Daisy
the kids, Tiny and Grimy
chug pud and slew yeast spuds
crow causes gout and iron gas grumps
greener viny regains tides
fie fey forgiven.
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Inspired by:
My buddy Brooks and I playing Literati.
B: I love those tales of the Luddites doing anything they could to fark up the looms and such.
Me: Hahahaha! The looms!
B: Haha! Man, it was a huge threat!
–
Me: What the hell “not a word”? FRITA! Wife of FRITO LAY.
–
Me: A doob is a joint so a dube is a condom.
B: I guess that makes sense in a North End kinda way.
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Inspired by:
and
Dedicated to false prophets, their lucre and their legion…
Good news! Life is fair and we all get what we deserve! Renounce your shame and filthy conscience! The weak and the murdered are responsible for their own misfortune and the ego is the earth’s redemption!
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Inspired by:
The eternal echo-chamber of pop-culture inanity which attempts to rationalize the hardships of others as being due to “bad attitude”;
and
“It seems to me that it is too much positive thinking that got us in this economic mess in the first place.”
-Gabriela Anaya Valdepena
and
Up on
a pedestal
admiration does tempt.
Yet for her all mortal love is
exempt.
Her gaze
incinerates the wooden joists
that elevate manhood’s
grand citadels
to lust.
Let hot
attentions blow
in flattering gusts– mere
invocations from cinders, piles
of dust!
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A teenaged mother pushing a stroller.
Half a block ahead
tricked-out baby-daddy lavishes affection on his
fighting dog.
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Wake up
and rise a ghost
drift through the day unseen
like thin clouds, my strata wafting
in mist.
Even
in a mirror
there are no memories
of me I can not picture my
own face.
Cameras
outline someone
a soft pencil sketching
like silvery grasses bent by
light strokes.
Nothing
can be preserved
without protection, no.
Wind will do it’s work, like fog I
disperse.
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It hits
so hard, a warm
comforting, flooding rush.
Until panic of losing it
sets in
the anxious clutch and bug-eyed brood.
When it’s gone, crawl the floor
with desperate
yearning.
Fuck you.
Anything. Just give it to me.
Fix me. I need more. More
intensity.
Love me!
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Me: Something terrible is going on.
A: I know. What do we do? I just want to be a normal girl.
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All the
beauty money
can buy. All the money
beauty can buy. Can’t afford it?
Then die.
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Inspired by:
Self-harm: A British disease
The Independent – Sunday, 22 March 2009
The number of people harming themselves deliberately has leapt by a third in the past five years, according to new figures seen by The Independent on Sunday. The biggest rise in self-harm and attempted suicide has been among young women between the ages of 16 and 24 as they struggle to cope with the pressures of modern living in Britain.
… According to new research published by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the growing gap between rich and poor has led to an increase in mental health problems such as depression and self-harm in countries including the UK and US. People are surrounded by stories about the rich and famous – lifestyles that are unattainable for the majority. These inequalities cause psychological and physical stress which leads to mental and physical health problems, the report concludes.
…Published earlier this month, Mental Health, Resilience and Inequalities by the WHO and the Mental Health Foundation revealed a strong link between income inequalities and poor mental health. Inequality is now known to be a constant trigger for the “fight or flight” response in human beings. Over time, the perpetual stress is thought to get “under the skin” and lead to permanently raised levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, as well as causing depression, higher blood pressure and other biological changes associated with stress and mental illness.
Lynne Friedli, author of the report, said: “We have to face up to the fact that mental well-being depends on reducing the gap between rich and poor. A large divide leads to a mentally unhealthy society, and many associated social problems. In the UK in particular, we’ve failed to acknowledge this link, preferring instead to blame people’s lifestyle choices.”
… Rufus May, a clinical psychologist in Bradford, said: “Demonised by the media, subject to scrutiny and evaluation in terms of their looks and appearance, and a school system that is increasingly prescriptive, young people don’t have space to be creative or learn how to express how they feel. Self-harm is a release. It anaesthetises people from the pain of feeling wretched and unworthy. It helps us escape the pain of living in a competitive, self-conscious world where we rarely feel that we are making the grade. It can also be an expression of anger. This is one way to briefly be powerful and take back control. The scars of self-harm are like protest graffiti, and we need to listen to it. The answer is not more therapy. We need to teach young people how to communicate and care for themselves and one another.”
I paid £3,800 for a breast enlargement: How much does it cost to run your body?
The Daily Mail, 23rd March 2009
Summary: A 23 year-old woman spends $6783 Cdn. for breast enlargements and it costs her an additional 3k per year for her regular beauty upkeep.
The entire “Femail” section of the Daily Mail is fanatically devoted to critiques of women’s bodies, dieting, beauty treatments, plastic surgery, fashion, food, illness, money, marriage, vapid consumerism and celebrity worship.
These themes are characteristic of most geared-to-women news sections.
Free verse #4
-DOMINO, 5 January 2009
The April Elle: To Be A Genius Is To Be Privileged, Expensive
-Jezebel.com
Does this look like $88,067 worth of beauty to you?
-The Rage Diaries
Equal pay is a step too far in recession, says rights body
The Guardian, Monday 16 March 2009
The body responsible for safeguarding equality in the UK will tell the government today that the economic climate is too fragile to impose equal pay reviews on business.
With women’s pay on average 17% less than men’s and the gap increasing, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, formed 18 months ago, will say that the reviews should be excluded from the forthcoming equalities bill when it publishes its recommendations.
Summarising the strategy, the chief executive of the EHRC, Nicola Brewer, said an entirely new equal pay act was needed, and called for “radical reform in the future.” This would be a long-term exercise, requiring several years of work. More immediately, the commission’s approach is based on “encouraging” companies to improve their record voluntarily.
…Despite the government’s commitment to eliminating it, the pay gap rose slightly last year and women working part-time are now paid on average 36.5% less than men.
Weddings are off: marriage rate falls to lowest level for 144 years
The Times
March 27, 2008
Claire Tyler, chief executive of Relate, said: “According to recent official data, two thirds of the population now feel that there is little difference socially between living together and being married. We are also finding that those who marry today tend to be older and wealthier. It seems that society is separating along socio-economic lines and the common experience of marriage no longer exists in the way it used to.”
…Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent, said the statistics obscured a deeper problem. “It’s not that cohabitation has replaced marriage, it’s that more and more people are not able to have close relationships. People who are not married feel they resonate with the times.”
Little benefit for working single mothers
The Telegraph, 19 Apr 2008
Labour’s tax and benefits system makes it more lucrative for single mothers to stay on state handouts than return to work, according to research from the world’s chief economic and social authority.
One-parent families on the rise
BBC, 11 April 2007
Nearly a quarter of children lived with only one parent last year and nine out of 10 of those households were headed by lone mothers.
Now, the backlash
The Guardian, 1 July 2008
The sex industry is booming, the rape conviction rate is plummeting, women’s bodies are picked over in the media, abortion rights are under serious threat and top business leaders say they don’t want to employ women. It all adds up to one thing … an all-out assault on feminism.
Reveal a hidden truth about my inevitable fate
Heartless
mechanical
hairy beastly brutes, oh
Oberon! My eyes. This chapter
too cruel.
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Inspired by:
“Titania and Bottom” Edward Landseeer
Edwin Landseer, English, 1802-73. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
“A Midsummer Night Dream”, William Shakespeare
TITANIA
Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.
BOTTOM
Where’s Peaseblossom?
PEASEBLOSSOM
Ready.
BOTTOM
Scratch my head Peaseblossom. Where’s Mounsieur Cobweb?
COBWEB
Ready.
BOTTOM
Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your
weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped
humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good
mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret
yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and,
good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not;
I would be loath to have you overflown with a
honey-bag, signior. Where’s Mounsieur Mustardseed?
MUSTARDSEED
Ready.
BOTTOM
Give me your neaf, Mounsieur Mustardseed. Pray you,
leave your courtesy, good mounsieur.
MUSTARDSEED
What’s your Will?
BOTTOM
Nothing, good mounsieur, but to help Cavalery Cobweb
to scratch. I must to the barber’s, monsieur; for
methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face; and I
am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me,
I must scratch.
TITANIA
What, wilt thou hear some music,
my sweet love?
BOTTOM
I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have
the tongs and the bones.
TITANIA
Or say, sweet love, what thou desirest to eat.
In the Shakespeare play, Titania is a very proud creature and as much of a force to contend with as her husband Oberon. The marital quarrel she and her husband are engaged in over which of them should have the keeping of a changeling page is the engine that drives the mix ups and confusion of the other characters in the play. Due to an enchantment cast by Oberon’s henchman Puck, Titania magically falls in love with a rude mechanical (a lower class laborman), Nick Bottom the Weaver, who has been given the head of an ass by Puck, who feels it is better suited to his character (which bears a resemblance to the story of Lycaon).
Lycaon was the son of Pelasgus and Mece in the form of a wolf was the origin of the myth that Lycaon, the founder of his cult, became a wolf, i.e. participated in the nature of the god by the act of sacrifice, as did all who afterwards duly performed it. (Lycanthrope)
Bottom is enjoying his sojourn in Titania’s bower: Peaseblossom amiably scratches his head, while Cobweb goes off in search of honey for him. As Bottom sleeps in Titania’s arms, Oberon walks in. Feeling pity for Titania’s pitiful love for this ass, Oberon squeezes an herb on her eyes to release her from the spell. Titania awakens, telling Oberon about her strange dream of being in love with an ass. Oberon has Puck remove the ass’ head from Bottom.
Nick Bottom is a member of a group within the play commonly known as the Mechanicals, a troupe of foolish/clumsy men, all of whom are craftsmen in Athens. The Mechanicals are Bottom, the weaver; Snout, the tinker; Snug, the joiner; Starveling, the tailor; Flute, the bellows-mender; and Quince, the carpenter…
The Fairy Queen Titania is awakened by Bottom’s song. She has been enchanted by a love potion made from the juice of a rare flower, once hit by Cupid’s arrow, that her husband, Oberon, King of the Fairies, spread on her eyes in an act of jealous rage. During his enchantment over her, he utters “Wake when some vile thing is near.” The first thing she sees when she wakes is the transformed Bottom, and she immediately falls in love with him. She even commands her fairy minions to serve and wait upon him. Later, Oberon finally releases Titania from her enchantment. After being confronted with the reality that her romantic interlude with the transformed Bottom was not just a dream, she is disgusted with the very image of him and also seems very suspicious of how “these things came to pass.”
and
Cinquain #70
Nick Chopper!
and
Spring spirit guide
Rabbits! Rabbits! Rabbits! Rabbits everywhere!
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Why are
kitchen knives so
pointy? You slice with them.
Not puncture, stab, and impale. Oh
shit. Ouch.
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Also see:
Sagittarius Sun-Signs tend to be very straightforward in speech but clumsy physically. This is why Sagittarius is supposed to be the sign of good luck. If it weren’t, they would all either be murdered before the age of 10 (“What did you say to me!? I’m going to kill you!) or break their necks in ridiculous accidents.
Watership
Down chapter three
quotes Xenophon Anabasis.
This is a strange coincidence
methinks.
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Inspired by:
Stichomancy: Meme of Prophecy and Hidden Truth
and
and
The Numerological Significance of the Tarot
3: Three is the number of the triad, of the unit formed by duality and its offspring, of the three faces of the goddess (virgin, mother, and crone), of the creation that is made possible by joining forces with another, the tripartite genitalia of the male and the genital triangle of the female.
Rabbit/Hare Trickster/Fear Caller
Rabbit (Coinean) and Hare (Gèarr) are… associated with transformation, receiving esoteric knowledge and intuitive messages.
To some tribes he’s known as Fear Caller because he brings whatever he fears most to himself. He’ll see Coyote and will tell him to stay away because he’s afraid of him. When Coyote doesn’t hear, Rabbit calls louder and louder until coyote notices, then preys on him.
The Anabasis… describes the desperate efforts of the Greek army to make its way from Babylon to the Black Sea through the heart of hostile territory.
Foxes here, weasels there, Fiver in the middle, begone dull care!
-Watership Down, Chapter 3
Swami says
to work without wages
makes you divine.
My blue-collar friends
have done it a lifetime
and we are not saintly.
Swami says
work in chaste silence
and in humility peck the lowly veg.
I say it is divine
to drink a raucous bottle of beer
and to feast on ruddy hot meat.
Swami says
there is something inside that needs
purification.
Wrong swami
until I am as wealthy as you
I need not repent my appetites.
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Also see:
We had exposed ourselves
to a malignancy of celebrity
and bad writing
forgetting that we
by our very nature
can never be voyeurs
we do not reflect like mirrors
we are the open doors.
I saw the symptoms
when she became infected.
I worked towards an antidote
to restore her veil and alchemy
and this morning we drank
a dose of the cleanse
the curative word:
Your dream is already reality
so it is critically important
to go naked at The Library
step into the spotlight
and ignite, phoenix.
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Me: Artists must live as if their lives are already being written about.
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running over train tracks
cutting through backyards
riding in the backs of trucks
stealing out of gardens
climbing up on roofs
crossing river rapids
shooting pellet guns
drinking from the well
wrestling with my cousins
sleeping in the sunshine
plucking wild raspberries
rolling down the hills
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© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Reveal a hidden truth as a piece of wisdom that can aid me
You chose
the chapter well!
I shall read every word
with the most assiduous care
indeed.
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Inspired by:
The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
CHAPTER XIX
That One Should Avoid Being Despised And Hated
And as experience shows, many have been the conspiracies, but few have been successful; because he who conspires cannot act alone, nor can he take a companion except from those whom he believes to be malcontents, and as soon as you have opened your mind to a malcontent you have given him the material with which to content himself, for by denouncing you he can look for every advantage; so that, seeing the gain from this course to be assured, and seeing the other to be doubtful and full of dangers, he must be a very rare friend, or a thoroughly obstinate enemy of the prince, to keep faith with you.
And, to reduce the matter into a small compass, I say that, on the side of the conspirator, there is nothing but fear, jealousy, prospect of punishment to terrify him; but on the side of the prince there is the majesty of the principality, the laws, the protection of friends and the state to defend him; so that, adding to all these things the popular goodwill, it is impossible that any one should be so rash as to conspire. For whereas in general the conspirator has to fear before the execution of his plot, in this case he has also to fear the sequel to the crime; because on account of it he has the people for an enemy, and thus cannot hope for any escape.
Reveal a hidden truth about my future
Prophecy
for the future
can sometimes sneak up and
crack you one with a heavy blunt
object.
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Inspired by:
In the Neolithic Age
Gunga Din and Other Favorite Poems
Rudyard Kipling
Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,
And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,
For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: –
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!”
Reveal a hidden truth about something which is difficult to admit to myself
Alas.
No surprise to
me. My presence disrupts
matrimonial blissfulness
like a
fox strolling into a henhouse.
Hard experience taught
me to just stay
away.
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Inspired by:
When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Chapter XVII. A Clash and a Kiss
“I’m afraid we can’t keep it up very long, Kit,” he said. “With Jim trailing Bella all over the house, and the old lady keener every day, it’s bound to come out somehow. And that isn’t all. Jim and Harbison had a set-to today–about you.”
“About me!” I repeated. “Oh, I dare say I have been falling short again. What was Jim doing? Abusing me?”
Dal looked cautiously over his shoulder, but no one was near.
“It seems that the gentle Bella has been unusually beastly today to Jim, and–I believe she’s jealous of you, Kit. Jim followed her up to the roof before dinner with a box of flowers, and she tossed them over the parapet. She said, I believe, that she didn’t want his flowers; he could buy them for you, and be damned to him, or some lady-like equivalent.”
… The general purport was that Mr. Harbison had no desire to explain further, and that the situation was forced on him. But if he insisted–when a man systematically ignored and neglected his wife for some one else, there were communities where he would be tarred and feathered.
… I heard nothing more of the trouble that night. Max went to Jim about it, and Jim said angrily that only a fool would interfere between a man and his wife–wives. Whereupon Max retorted that a fool and his wives were soon parted, and left him.
Kit:
kit2
• noun the young of certain animals, e.g. the beaver, ferret, fox, and mink.
Reveal a hidden truth about my subconscious.
Saturn
planet of death
rules in the twelfth house of
my subconscious wearing the dread
red mask.
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Inspired by:
and
… Saturn represents death.
… Saturn’s House position shows where specifically you will experience the greatest challenges and limitations. This is an area which will absorb much of your time. No matter how hard you try to avoid commitment in this area, you will be forced by circumstances to overcome your fears and become an expert in the field indicated.
and
The Masque of the Red Death – Edgar Allan Poe
… But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus, too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise –then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.
Reveal a hidden truth about my past.
Outside
there are sneaking
wild boars, giggly finks
narrow-eyed authorities and
werebitch.
Fork-tongues
grinding their axes
digging up hatchets and
whetting their blades on butcher belts
for me.
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Reveal a hidden truth about my past.
Heartless,
of course, yes, you
would have had to be a
machinery to endure this.
Help. Help.
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Inspired by:
In the books, the origins of the character are rather gruesome. Originally an ordinary man by the name of Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman used to make his living chopping down trees in the forests of Oz, as his father had before him. The Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his axe to prevent him from marrying the girl that he loved. The enchanted axe chopped off his limbs, one by one. Each time he lost a limb, Nick Chopper replaced it with a prosthetic limb made of tin. Finally, nothing was left of him but tin. However, Ku-Klip, the tinsmith who helped him, neglected to replace his heart. Once Nick Chopper was made entirely of tin, he was no longer able to love the girl he had fallen for…
In The Tin Woodman of Oz, Nick Chopper finally sets out to find his lost love, Nimmie Amee, but discovers that she has already married a man constructed partly out of his own discarded limbs. For the Tin Woodman, this encounter with his former fiancée is almost as jarring as his experiences being transformed into a tin owl, meeting another tin man, Captain Fyter, and conversing with his ill-tempered original head.
Reveal a hidden truth about my past.
Briefly
I remembered
how good it is to feel
good. I began to think I might
survive.
But it’s
unrealistic.
Captivity, dread, and
darkness will not give way to my
pining.
Here
the only hope
is renouncing hope.
Focus on a spot on the wall
and wait.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Imprisonment is one of the most stressful human experiences and figures high in all comparisons of negative life events. A combination of environmental and personal deprivation in unpleasant and often frightening circumstances can lead to the perception of extreme stress.
My friend
Aviva called
the snowbanks have melted
she saw our dead rock dove out of
it’s grave.
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Reveal a hidden truth about my lovers or admirers
As the cresting curl and ebb and toss
of the Audience who swell and foam
as the tides pour out and come rushing in again.
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Inspired by:
Mosses From an Old Manse and Other Stories, “Drowne’s Wooden Image”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
…The crowd still followed, gathering volume as it rolled along… The airy image, as if conscious she was the object of the murmurs and disturbance that swelled behind her, appeared slightly vexed and flustered, yet still in the manner consistent with the light vivacity and sportive mischief that were written on her countenance …
…”The world looks darker now that she has vanished,” said some of the young men.
But the aged, whose recollections dated as far back as witch times, shook their heads, and hinted that our forefathers would have thought it a pious deed to burn the daughter of oak with fire…
I’d dreamed that a black cat
ran out of my apartment
it became my neighbor’s cat.
I opened the fridge
and found a rabbit
I picked it up and fed it herbs.
I did a divination
rabbits in the snow
were fatigued by nets.
Today the snow was melting
a friend made me a gift
of a brown rabbit.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Cat
Dreaming of a cat is a generally unfortunate omen and it shows treachery as well as a run of bad luck. If you chase the cat away you will overcome your adversaries or turn your bad luck into good.
Refrigerator
To see or open a refrigerator in your dream, represents your chilling personality and/or cold emotions.
Snow
To see snow in your dream, signifies your inhibitions, repressed/unexpressed emotions and feelings of frigidity. You need to release and express these emotions and inhibitions. You may also be feeling indifferent, alone and neglected. If the snow is melting, then it suggests that you are acknowledging and releasing emotions you have repressed. You are overcoming your fears and obstacles.
Rabbits
To see a rabbit in your dream, signifies luck, magical power, and success. You have a positive outlook on life. Alternatively, rabbits symbolize abundance, warmth, fertility and sexual activity.
Feeding:
To dream that you are feeding someone, indicates that someone in your life is in need of love and acceptance. That someone could be an aspect of yourself.
Net
To see a net in your dream, suggests that you will find yourself caught in a complicated life situation. You are feeling trapped.
“What is the difference between a ‘Spirit Animal’ and a ‘Totem Animal’?”
While the terms are commonly used interchangeably there is a difference. A ‘Spirit Animal’ is an animal spirit that comes to impart a wisdom or teach a lesson; while a ‘Totem Animal’ is an animal spirit that is called upon or invoked for power or protection. Simply and generally speaking, a ‘Spirit Animal’ is a guide and a ‘Totem Animal’ is a guardian.
-Spirit Walk Ministry
Your Current Place
Rabbit
Poor Rabbit! No other animal is so associated with fear than Rabbit that nervous little bunny who hops and leaps at every little sound. Rabbit has come to you today to ask you to have the courage to face whatever difficulties you’re having instead of running away to a safe burrow. Face your fears, examine your old fight or flight patterns, and determine once and for all to stop hiding away.
-Animal Spirit Guide Free Psychic Reading Online
The White-tailed Jack rabbits turn from brown to white in the fall and from white to brown in the spring.
The White-tailed Jackrabbit (Lepus townsendii), also known as the Prairie Hare and the White Jack, is a hare found in western North America.
Bedbugs
mate by stabbing
and then raping the wound.
Excited by the injury
they permeate, invade
inhabit the
other.
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Inspired by:
All bedbugs mate via a process termed traumatic insemination. Instead of inserting their genitalia into the female’s reproductive tract as is typical in copulation, males instead pierce females with hypodermic genitalia and ejaculate into the body cavity. This form of mating is thought to have evolved as a way for males to overcome female mating resistance. Traumatic insemination imposes a cost on females in terms of physical damage and increased risk of infection.
-Wikipedia
The Cycle of Abuse
Honeymoon phase
Characterized by affection, apology, and apparent end of violence, with assurances that it will never happen again. During this stage the abuser feels overwhelming feelings of remorse and sadness, or pretends to. Some abusers walk away from the situation, but most shower their victims with love and affection. There may be self harming by the abuser to gain sympathy from the victim and threats of suicide if the victim leaves are common. Abusers are frequently so convincing, and victims so eager for the relationship to improve that victims, who are often worn down and confused by longstanding abuse, stay in the relationship.
-Wikipedia
Winnipeg rye bread, coleslaw, corn, two slabs of pickerel, pan fries, and Pilsner at The Nook.
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You thought I was a Pomeranian, but you were outfoxed!
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This post is in response to a post by one of my favorite bloggers, Alderson Warm-Fork, who was discussing two of my favorite topics: animal liberation and the objectification of women.
This passage, in particular, piqued my interest:
How does this relate to PETA adverts showing nude or effectively-nude women? This trend, this societal obsession with the naked female form, fits the definition of objectification because it “emphasises and prioritises” the things that can be done to that form – things ranging from ‘desiring’, ‘fantasising about’, to ‘touching’ and ‘having sex with’. Even the action of ‘seeing’ is emphasised – the whole point is not just what this woman looks like but that she is showing herself. No individual image need carry such an emphasis – the pattern of endless repetition clearly does so.
And as with animals, objectification is linked with violence. If the principal feature of women is their suitability to be acted upon, to be seen and desired and touched and had sex with, then their other traits (such as the ability to choose, to make rational decisions) are obscured, and actions, such as rape or harassment, which conform to that ‘essential nature’ (sexual object) while conflicting with the secondary trait (rational chooser) make a lot more sense. Indeed, if a woman’s essence is to be desired, then any action which displays desire, from wolf-whistling to badgering her into unwanted sex, can be seen as a ‘compliment’, a benevolent act.
I encourage everyone to read the entire post. It makes some very compelling points.
Most of which I will not address. These are simply some thoughts that occurred to me while I read:
Are women objectified by being nude? Or are women objectified only when their nudity is interpreted as sexual?
Are women objectified by being photographed? Or is it by how they are photographed? Or is objectification projected on women by the audience itself?
Is the female body somehow guilty because of its power to provoke desire? Is it her weapon? Is she obscene? Then should her body be suppressed, if only for her own sake?
And is the notion of the male gaze still relevant, particularly now that women take active agency in the creation of their own images? Or are female photographers so acculturated to viewing ourselves as sexually fetishized objects, that we just unconsciously follow convention in further exploiting ourselves and others?
As a female photographer who takes self-portraits, these are some of the questions I contemplate daily and have argued about for years.
My own opinion is that I do not experience either nudity or overt sexuality as being harmful to women.
And I do not think that it is necessarily harmful when women are depicted as objects (eg. as inanimate “landscapes”, or as objects of desire).
It is the perceptions attached to nude portraits of women that are problematic and the contexts in which they appear that are so often imbued with negative meanings.
What is unfortunate is that so many women seem to be seeking the understanding of their identity and evaluations of their worth and value through the experience of being a coveted object. It is as if the Self can only perceive itself and be validated through the eyes of others. It is as if to say, “I am an object. Therefore, I am useful. When I am a thing, I can serve a purpose — if not to myself, then to serve others.”
I believe that objectification of the female body does become insidious and dehumanizing when it is linked to the notions of property, commerce, and commodification.
I see the female image as being dehumanized through a specific association with “products” — which are pristine, homogenized, available for purchase, expendable, and disposable.
For example, I once heard a beauty contestant talking about how the industry will grade and evaluate a contestant by the same criteria as livestock: by her proportion, dimensions, and symmetry. Instead of achieving her value through her individuality and uniqueness, she is reduced to an ideal type specimen. These contests are for eugenic fantasists to categorize and classify women according to breed.
Mainstream commercial images further promote images of women who are surgically “enhanced” with silicone and fillers, synthetic hair and plastic nails, veneered teeth and artificial eye color; an essentially “man-made” and mass-produced version of Woman who is created by men for men. She is an improvement on Nature, designed for a sexual purpose, eternally tight and young, and she won’t even rot when she dies — just sent back to the factory for recycling, one supposes.
These examples epitomize objectification, as I understand it.
And I think that it is through these depictions of women as domesticated, as manufactured, as sexual currency, as marital property, as perishable items, and as inherently indistinguishable one from another, that our humanity becomes threatened.
But, in the final equation, this is just a symptom. To some extent, men will continue to have contempt for women and women have contempt for themselves because of the gross inequities that we continue to suffer as a group; economically, politically, legally, and socially. Many of us have always been too tolerant, too patient, too polite, too compromising, and too accommodating. Passivity is a quality that is scarcely respected in this competitive world of materialism and aggression.
In light of the severe injustices done to women globally, concern over our image is minutia. Image is not what is important. The self-esteem and confidence that comes from being truly equal is what matters. And women have yet to achieve this goal, anywhere in the world.
Even if we never saw another nude photo of a woman ever again, it wouldn’t do any good. Sexual repression and censorship are an even worse form of enslavement. When our bodies are viewed as taunting obscenities, women are blamed for their own victimization.
It is when simple nudity is no longer viewed as a manipulative ploy or a slavish capitulation to inequity, we will have finally achieved our sexual liberation. It is our perceived complicity with injustice, I believe, that robs of us of respect.
(I also want to say that this situation puts attractive and disenfranchised women in an ironic and untenable position; play the game, be a nice tamed little pet, feather your nest, and you are a traitor to your sex. Or refuse, and suffer the hardships alone in the wilderness where you can starve and be righteous. Just like desperate little animals, with children in tow, women are tempted to trade in their feral freedom for the captive security of the leash. Alas, the grateful, suffocating, soul-destroying love of a warm lap and a handout!)
Power differentials will likely always be intrinsic to sexual expression. Specific attitudes provoke predictable responses. That is, when I appear vulnerable, you feel strong; when I appear passive, you feel aggressive; when I appear dominant, you feel challenged. Without this shifting interplay, sexual interest is difficult to provoke. Attempts to create a politically-correct erotica, for instance, have fallen flat. This is why, I suspect, there has been a backlash of interest in BDSM in the last decade. Sexually speaking, someone has to get on top — like it or not, there will be no defeating the will of Nature.
Advertising has very specific motives in provoking a response in the viewer. In particular, advertising wants men to feel strong and virile. It doesn’t want to make men feel threatened and arouse their castration anxieties. Flaccidity is bad for business. So, for this reason, images indicating female submission will always receive undue emphasis in economies where men continue to have the lion’s share.
Finally, as passionate as I am about abolishing animal captivity, I feel strongly that we need to close the deal on the business of liberating women before we can begin effectively and successfully negotiating for the liberation of the beasts, fish, and fowl.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
“I’m an opera singer, not a pin-up!”
-Yolande Betbeze, 1951 Miss America winner refuses to make any further public appearances in swimsuit.
Her rebellion creates the first great schism in beauty pageant politics.
Women ‘200 years behind’ in drive for boardroom equality
Women have failed to make an impression among the elite group of rich and powerful people who control Britain’s boardrooms and public bodies, according to a report published today by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC).
Unless there is a dramatic change in recruitment and promotion, it will take 200 years to achieve an equal number of women in Parliament, 60 years to win parity in City boardrooms and 40 years to reach equality among the judiciary.
Women make up just 10 per cent of the directors of FTSE 100 companies and barely 20 per cent of MPs, according to Sex and Power: Who Runs Britain? 2007, which looks at women in the public and private sectors. The report warns that change at the top is too slow, and in some cases has gone into reverse.
Corporate boards still lacking equal female representation, author says
Douglas Branson is a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and a specialist in corporate governance. His most recent book, “No Seat at the Table: How Corporate Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom,” was published in December by NYU Press.
Women still missing at the table
Corporate Canada has few women at its boardroom tables and there is little evidence that the situation will change anytime soon.
Reveal a hidden truth about my personal relationships
The feet
fatigued by fears
bog in smothering snow.
Puss, you can see with your eyes closed.
Go, go, go, go, go, go.
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Inspired by:
Xenophon, Wikipedia
Xenophon’s writings, especially the Anabasis, are often read by beginning students of the Greek language…
Anabasis was the (loosely-adapted) basis for Sol Yurick’s novel The Warriors, which was later adapted into a 1979 cult movie of the same name…
The full excerpt from Xenophon on the topic of rabbit hunting:
And now when it is clear that puss is there, there let her bide; she
will not sir; let him set off and seek another, before the tracks are
indistinct; being careful only to note the time of day; so that, in
case he discovers others, there will be daylight enough for him to set
up the nets.[11] When the final moment has come, he will stretch the
big haye nets round the first one and then the other victim (precisely
as in the case of one of those black thawed patches above named), so
as to enclose within the toils whatever the creature is resting
on.[12] As soon as the nets are posted, up he must go and start her.
If she contrive to extricate herself from the nets,[13] he must after
her, following her tracks; and presently he will find himself at a
second similar piece of ground (unless, as is not improbable, she
smothers herself in the snow beforehand).[14] Accordingly he must
discover where she is and spread his toils once more; and, if she has
energy still left, pursue the chase. Even without the nets, caught she
will be, from sheer fatigue,[15] owing to the depth of the snow, which
balls itself under her shaggy feet and clings to her, a sheer dead
weight.
Rabbit totem, Crystalinks
Rabbit’s medicine includes moving through fear, living by one’s own wits, receiving hidden teachings and intuitive messages, quick thinking, strengthening intuition, and paradox. Rabbit also represents humility, because he is quiet and soft and not self-asserting. Rabbit reminds us not to be afraid. Fearful thoughts reproduce (like rabbits) and bring the very thing we fear. Rabbit people are so afraid of tragedy, illness, and disaster, that they call those very fears to them to teach them lessons. If you see Rabbit or in any way feel attracted to him, it may be telling you to wait for the forces of the universe to start moving again, to stop worrying and to get rid of your fears. It always indicates a need to re-evaluate the process you are undergoing, to rid yourself of any negative feelings or barriers, and to be more humble.
Fertility. Magical. An animal sacred to the Goddess Andraste in particular. Its movements were sometimes used for divination; Boadiccea used a hare this way just before her last battle with the Romans. Associated with transformation, the receiving of hidden teachings, and intuitive messages.
Andraste – The Warrior Goddess, The White Goddess
There is the mystery of Boudicca’s name; Boudicca means ‘victory’…
The goddess invoked by Boudicca before the last battle is reputed to be Andrasta (also known as Victory).
The girl’s name Laura \la(u)-ra\ is pronounced LAW-rah, LOR-ah. It is of Latin origin, and its meaning is “the bay, or laurel plant”. In classical times, a crown was made from the leaves of the bay laurel for heroes or victors as a symbol of honor and victory.
Philologists, who chase
A panting syllable through time and place. –Cowper.
[1913 Webster]You see this chase is hotly followed. –Shak.
[1913 Webster]
Reveal a hidden truth about my personality
Count of
Mounte Cristo
counsels me to increase
phlegm, live pure, mellow out, improve
humor.
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Inspired by:
Phlegmatic – Wikipedia
A phlegmatic person is calm and unemotional. Phlegmatic means “pertaining to phlegm”, corresponds to the season of winter (wet and cold), and connotes the element of water.
While phlegmatics are generally self-content and kind, their shy personality can often inhibit enthusiasm in others and make themselves lazy and resistant to change. They are very consistent, relaxed, rational, curious, and observant, making them good administrators and diplomats. Like the sanguine personality, the phlegmatic has many friends. However the phlegmatic is more reliable and compassionate; these characteristics typically make the phlegmatic a more dependable friend.
Humoural personality test: your score.
choler, or yellow bile: 24.00%
melancholy, or black bile: 36.80%
blood: 26.20%
phlegm: 13.00%element: earth
qualities: cold and dry
color: black
taste: sour
season: autumn
time of day: afternoon
body organ: liver
period of life: maturity
signs: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
planet: SaturnMost of us have some black bile brewing in our organism. But that doesn’t mean that we are all melancholics. Those who are generally balanced may have episodes of mild melancholy, akin to the blues. Those who are less balanced might be more affected by it and develop a syndrome akin to depression. Melancholics used to be identified by their pale, sallow looks, their lack of appetite and tendency to withdraw from society. Generally, though, it is healthy to harbour a dose of it: it helps us temper our enthusiasms, keep our feet on the ground, practice introspection and contemplation, appreciate art, and empathize with the distress of others.
If you have a high proportion (over 30%) of black bile, however, you may be too withdrawn and indulge too much in self-doubt. You may be prone to obsession and anxiety, to fretting over small matters, to seeing the glass half-empty and using your sense of the vanity of all things to justify your inability to engage in life, work or love. To counter the effects of black bile, drink plenty of water and exercise; go for an hour-long walk every day. Try to break a couple of old habits, and once a week, make a point of discovering a new place, either in your home town or elsewhere. It also helps to frequent sanguine friends, to shun troubled lovers, to avoid sad music, to eat plenty of cooked vegetables and also two or three squares a day of bitter (over 70% cocoa) chocolate.
Bang on!
He wore a large brown mantle, one fold of which, thrown over his left shoulder, served likewise to mask the lower part of his countenance, while the upper part was completely hidden by his broad-brimmed hat.
-The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
A cape
a brown mantle
like the wings of a hawk
a layer of soil
an earthy crust
of dried blood
the froth or foam
or scum or spittle
of seawater
even the slimy secretions
of snails.
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Inspired by:
mantle Online Etymology Dictionary
O.E. mentel “loose, sleeveless cloak,” from L. mantellum “cloak,” perhaps from a Celtic source. Reinforced and altered 12c. by O.Fr. mantel (Fr. manteau), from the L. source. Allusive use for “symbol of literary authority or artistic pre-eminence” is from Elijah’s mantle [2 Kings ii.13]. As a layer of the earth between the crust and core (though not originally distinguished from the core) it is attested from 1940. The verb meaning “to wrap as in a mantle” is attested from c.1450.
Mantle – 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
The verb is used for the creaming or frothing of liquids and of the suffusing of the skin with blood.
Mantle – Biology Online
1. To unfold and spread out the wings, like a mantle; said of hawks. Also used figuratively. Ne is there hawk which mantleth on her perch. (Spenser) Or tend his sparhawk mantling in her mew. (bp. Hall) My frail fancy fed with full delight. Doth bathe in bliss, and mantleth most at ease. (Spenser)
2. To spread out; said of wings. The swan, with arched neck Between her white wings mantling proudly, rows. (Milton)
3. To spread over the surface as a covering; to overspread; as, the scum mantled on the pool. Though mantled in her cheek the blood. (Sir W. Scott)
4. To gather, assume, or take on, a covering, as froth, scum, etc. There is a sort of men whose visages Do cream and mantle like a standing pond. (Shak) Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm. (Tennyson)
1. A loose garment to be worn over other garments; an enveloping robe; a cloak. Hence, figuratively, a covering or concealing envelope. [The] children are clothed with mantles of satin. (Bacon) The green mantle of the standing pool. (Shak) Now nature hangs her mantle green on every blooming tree. (Burns)
3. (Science: marine biology) The external fold, or folds, of the soft, exterior membrane of the body of a mollusk. It usually forms a cavity inclosing the gills. Any free, outer membrane.
The lower part of his dress was more distinctly visible by the bright rays of the moon, which, entering through the broken ceiling, shed their refulgent beams on feet cased in elegantly made boots of polished leather…
-The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Snort. Hork.
Sneering hot spit.
A refulgent loogie:
expectorated expression
of truth?
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Inspired by:
1828 Noah Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language:
REFUL’GENT, a. Casting a bright light; shining; splendid; as refulgent beams; refulgent light; refulgent arms.
So conspicuous and refulgent a truth.
–Boyle.
1913 Webster
refulgent Online Etymology Dictionary
1509, from L. refulgentem (nom. refulgens), prp. of refulgere “flash back, shine brilliantly,” from re- “back” + fulgere “to shine” (see phlegm).
phlegm Online Etymology Dictionary
1387, fleem “viscid mucus” (the stuff itself and also regarded as a bodily humor), from O.Fr. fleume (13c., Fr. flegme), from L.L. phlegma, from Gk. phlegma “inflammation, heat, humor caused by heat,” from phlegein “to burn,” related to phlox (gen. phlogos) “flame, blaze,” from PIE base *bhleg- “to burn, be hot” (cf. Skt. bhrajate “shines,” L. fulgere “to shine,” fulmen “lightning,” flagrare “to burn;” see black). Modern form is attested from c.1660. The “cold, moist” humor of the body, in medieval physiology, it was believed to cause apathy.
They judge with fury, but they write with phlegm. –Pope.
[1913 Webster]
efflugent
fulgent
lucent
beamy
Stichomancy is a form of divination that seeks to know the future by randomly selecting a passage from a book.
Go to Facade.
For each question below, select the appropriate Genre and request “One Passage”.
Concentrate on each question beforehand and record the results faithfully.
1. Reveal a hidden truth about my personality – Category: Adventure.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas:
mysterious arrival had attracted the attention of Franz stood in a kind of half-light, that rendered it impossible to distinguish his features, although his dress was easily made out. He wore a large brown mantle, one fold of which, thrown over his left shoulder, served likewise to mask the lower part of his countenance, while the upper part was completely hidden by his broad-brimmed hat. The lower part of his dress was more distinctly visible by the bright rays of the moon, which, entering through the broken ceiling, shed their refulgent beams on feet cased in elegantly made boots of polished leather, over which descended fashionably
2. Reveal a hidden truth about my personal relationships – Category: Classical.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Sportsman by Xenophon:
case he discovers others, there will be daylight enough for him to set up the nets.[11] When the final moment has come, he will stretch the big haye nets round the first one and then the other victim (precisely as in the case of one of those black thawed patches above named), so as to enclose within the toils whatever the creature is resting on.[12] As soon as the nets are posted, up he must go and start her. If she contrive to extricate herself from the nets,[13] he must after her, following her tracks; and presently he will find himself at a second similar piece of ground (unless, as is not improbable, she smothers herself in the snow beforehand). [14] Accordingly he must discover where she is and spread his toils once more; and, if she has
3. Reveal a hidden truth about my lovers or admirers – Category: Drama.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Captain Hunnewell is a party to the bargain.”
“And I,” said a young man who overheard him, “would almost consent to be the third victim, for the liberty of saluting those lovely lips.”
“And so would I,” said Copley, the painter, “for the privilege of taking her picture.”
The image, or the apparition, whichever it might be, still escorted by the bold captain, proceeded from Hanover Street through some of the cross lanes that make this portion of the town so intricate, to Ann Street, thence into Dock Square, and so downward to Drowne’s shop, which stood just on the water’s edge.
4. Reveal a hidden truth about my past – Category: Fables.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum:
inside.”
“Then I am really in danger,” declared his Majesty, positively, “and it will be wise for me to consider a means to escape.”
“Where can you go?” asked Jack Pumpkinhead.
“Why, to my friend the Tin Woodman, who rules over the Winkies, and calls himself their Emperor,” was the answer. “I am sure he will protect me.”
Tip was looking out the window.
“The palace is surrounded by the enemy,” said
5. Reveal a hidden truth about my subconscious – Category: Horror.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe:
sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulged in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time,
6. Reveal a hidden truth about something which is difficult to admit to myself – Category: Mystery.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart:
tarred and feathered.
“Meaning me?” Jim demanded, apoplectic.
“The remark was a general one,” Mr. Harbison retorted, “but if you wish to make a concrete application–!”
Dal had gone up just then, and found them glaring at each other, Jim with his hands clenched at his sides, and Mr. Harbison with his arms folded and very erect. Dal took Jim by the elbow and led him downstairs, muttering, and the situation was saved for the time. But Dal was not optimistic.
“You can do a bit yourself, Kit,” he finished. “Look more cheerful, flirt a little. You can do that without trying.
Take
7. Reveal a hidden truth about my future -Category: Poetry.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Verses 1889-1896 by Rudyard Kipling:
To show a fellow-savage how to work. Still the world is wondrous large, — seven seas from marge to marge, — And it holds a vast of various kinds of man; And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban. Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night: — There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And — every — single — one — of — them — is — right!
8. Reveal a hidden truth as a piece of wisdom that can aid me – Category: Political.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli:
either an hereditary or a newly formed principality; because the sons of the old prince are not the heirs, but he who is elected to that position by those who have authority, and the sons remain only noblemen. And this being an ancient custom, it cannot be called a new principality, because there are none of those difficulties in it that are met with in new ones; for although the prince is new, the constitution of the state is old, and it is framed so as to receive him as if he were its hereditary lord.
But returning to the subject of our discourse, I say that whoever will consider it will acknowledge that either hatred or contempt has been fatal to the above-named emperors, and it will be recognized also how
9. Reveal a hidden truth about my inevitable fate – Category: Theatre.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare:
Peas. Ready
Clow. Scratch my head, Pease-blossome. Wher’s Mounsieuer Cobweb
Cob. Ready
Clowne. Mounsieur Cobweb, good Mounsier get your weapons in your hand, & kill me a red hipt humble-Bee, on the top of a thistle; and good Mounsieur bring mee the hony bag. Doe not fret your selfe too much in the action, Mounsieur; and good mounsieur haue a care the hony bag breake not, I would be loth to haue you ouerflowne with a hony-bag signiour. Where’s Mounsieur
10. What is the most important hidden truth for me to know at this time – Category: All.
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde:
‘to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something great.’ The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions: yes, that is the secret of the artistic life – for while art has been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the soul. But only to those who worship her above all things does she ever reveal her true treasure: else will she be as powerless to aid you as the mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical nature of Heine.
And indeed I think it would be impossible to overrate the gain that
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M: Why are my children nocturnal?
Me: Maybe you’re the wolf mother.
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Cigarette burning
old tongue
madman poem
breathed coffee.
Coasting car
cloud animals
birch bends
crackling town.
Lights come
across hair
fine mouth
wet opening.
Close eyes
face mirror
still sea
audience breathes.
Neck breaking
clarion blast
flowing arc
short chaos.
Ash became
broken coins
busted inside
curled bones.
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Inspired by:
A Word cloud of our combined poems.
Months churn
want words
silvery swarming
ant-bitten sentences.
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Inspired by:
Hey Len,
You’re not all that.
I can’t make the show but
you can drop by the ‘hood after.
Bring beer.
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Inspired by:
… a similar furor has stirred north of the border, with the charcoal rasp of Leonard Cohen providing the soundtrack. Those seeking tickets for the artist’s upcoming tour before they went on sale last month were being redirected (from Ticketmaster) to TicketsNow.com and prompted to purchase seats well over face value.
TicketsNow was reportedly charging between $568 and $856 for tickets with a $99 to $250 face value.
Hung clouds
crow hissing
gnawing heart
inscrutable antennae
inconsequent truth
the genuine cunt breathing
pale flower
innocent grass
wet buttocks
bristling ash.
Inspired by:
Pay phone, dung hill, garbage can, grey sky, pawn shop, naked trees, taxi cab, “for sale” sign, & peg leg hobblin’.
The memory of myriad girls
the sweetened cunt and stolen snatches
of trembling poems and innumerable
upliftings of buttocks on the roadside
in red cars, in barns, in backyards
the sunsets of flashing eyes and
the lonely joy of sunrise.
-Howling lexicon
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Inspired by:
and
Whosoever
will penetrate and grind
that cloud of fire silk
to a deep inscrutable thunder
comes for all infinitude.
-Big Tom lexicon
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Inspired by:
and
Ashamed of respectable things
he wrapped himself in a purple secret
as would enfold emperors.
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Inspired by:
and
The fig green sea
turned stormy
and in we went
over our heads
our hands cried
aloud then drowned.
-Nonsense lexicon
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Inspired by:
and
rita
plenty sorry
it always turns out badly
miss your fat back gravy
and sleepy kisses
praise jesus but we fight like hell
love, murvin
-Gravy lexicon
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Inspired by:
and
Who? Me?
Certainly not.
It will always be hard.
Much harder than it has to be.
You’ll see.
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Inspired by:
Christina Patterson:
Whoever said that writing, or life, would be easy?
Everyone knows that writers are not difficult to distinguish from a ray of sunshine
Saturday, 7 March 2009
The Independent
…Where did this myth come from, that life should be easy, and that the art that reflects it should be easy? Human life is produced, as the Bible says, “in pain” and so is pretty much any art worth having. If it appears to be effortless then that’s a testament to the skill of its creator. And if reading it, or listening to it, or understanding it, involves a bit of effort, then so much the better. You can’t have richness without a bit of effort. You can’t have layers, or depth.
There is a troll who takes his toll
as I pass over the bridge to Sleep.
Three poems, every night:
ankle-high and fathoms deep.
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Feels like
astral attack.
Pain in solar plexus.
Heart beating me up from inside.
Nights wrest.
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Secret
of a happy life:
self-esteem
What does it mean?
self-love
What does that look like?
Nobody knows.
How do we do it?
We have never seen this.
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Summer.
Two college boys
paid to move furniture
a sheet of glass drops behind us
explodes.
I hear
them whispering
afterwards “did you see
her when the glass fell? she didn’t
even flinch.”
So what?
So what? I think.
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You don’t
think so but we
are a new genre of
disaffected and underclass
poets.
Inspired by:
Fictions: women writing in working class contexts
by Priti Kohli
Thinking through critical perspectives about class in social and cultural contexts, Valerie Walkerdine examines dominant social theories as a way of explaining how working class perspectives have been culturally undermined. In her book, Daddy’s Girl, Walkerdine identifies one of the crucial problematics in the way that class has been constructed within binary terms. She elaborates that “in a number of domains, middle classness has become synonymous with normality and working classness has been viewed as a deviant pathology, to be corrected if possible by correctional strategies that will make working-class subjects more like their middle-class counterparts” (Walkerdine, 1997, p. 29) (1) This kind of theorizing treats the “proletariat [as having] some lack or defect” (Walkerdine, 1997, p. 31) and seeks to ground the reasons for making working-class lives invisible to and from cultural perspectives. But, as Dorothy Allison writes in Skin: Talking About Sex. Class and Literature (1994), the push for such polarized understandings of subjectivity, through the presumptions underlying dominant narratives, needs to be challenged.
…Bringing about changes in whose narratives are told, and as importantly, who tells them, can happen in literature if all lives are “taken seriously and represented fully–with power and honesty and sympathy–to be hated or loved, or to terrify and obsess, but to be real, to have the power of the whole and the complex” (Allison, 1994, p. 165).
Factory Girls and Serving Maids
Victorian Working-Class Women Poets Archive
An Address to Nature on its Cruelty
-Ellen Johnston
O NATURE, thou to me was cruel,
That made me up so small a jewel;
I am so small I cannot shine
Amidst the great that read my rhyme.
When men of genius pass me by,
I am so small they can’t descry
One little mark or single trace
Of Burns’ science in my face.
Those publications that I sold,
Some typed in blue and some on gold,
Learned critics who have seen them
Says origin dwells within them;
But when myself perchance they see,
They laugh and say, “O it is she?
Well, I think the little boaster
Is nothing but a fair imposter;
She looks so poor-like and so small,
She’s next unto a nought-at-all;
Such wit and words quite out-furl
The learning of ‘A Factory Girl.’”
At first they do my name exalt,
And with my works find little fault;
But when upon myself they gaze,
They say some other claims the praise…
Rosen, Judith.
Class and Poetic Communities: The Works of Ellen Johnston, “The Factory Girl”
Victorian Poetry – Volume 39, Number 2, Summer 2001, pp. 207-227
What we call literature, and what we teach, is what the middle class — and not the working class — produced…Few working women had the patronage or the material means to publish poems in volume form, a fact that some scholars have mistaken for creative silence.
Media Representations of the Working Classes
Social researchers and scholars point out that the mainstream media typically skew their portrayals of economic classes towards the white middle and upper classes, with all their privileges. They rarely represent the interests or perspectives of working-class women and men.
Richard Butsch, in his article “Ralph, Fred, Archie and Homer: Why Television Keeps Recreating the White Male Working-Class Buffoon,” notes that the entertainment media tend to exaggerate affluence, and under-represent working-class men and women…
In her article “The Silenced Majority,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes that the media rarely represent the interests or experiences of working class women and men. In news and current affairs programming, the “experts” who discuss issues affecting the working classes are often white, professional, middle class men. She continues that members of the white working classes are portrayed as dumb, inarticulate and old-fashioned. Such stereotypes serve to silence the concerns and perspectives of working class women and men in the media.
Working-class women resent stereotyping
-Alison Utley
Working-class women are being profoundly affected by the stream of negative images of themselves in the media, according to new research findings.
Sociologist Beverly Skeggs says her study, involving 12 years of intensive research with 83 working-class women, challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of feminist theory.
“The majority of the women strongly resisted being identified as working-class because for them, the working-class woman has no value,” said Dr Skeggs, senior lecturer at Lancaster University’s Institute for Women’s Studies which opened last week.
The reason for this outlook, she discovered, was that working-class women were stereotyped by the media as “slags”, single mothers or no-hopers.
Impostors in the Sacred Grove: Working Class Women in the Academe
by Melanie L. Long, Gaye Ranck Jenkins, and Susan Bracken+
Despite the influx of women and minorities into the academe, the prescribed mold of the academe requires that one be (or become) upper class, white, and male. At the very least one must assume the characteristics attributed to upper class white males in the academe. Characteristics such as rational thinking, scientific objectivity, intelligence, and proper speech are valued. Members of the working class are considered to be stupid, uncouth and irrational. Women are perceived to be emotional, irrational and are also frequently perceived to be less intelligent than their male counterparts. Both women and the working class lack the ability to be objective, according to the perceptions of upper class white males who continue to dominate the culture of the academe. Women, especially working class women, are not perceived to be capable of traversing the route into the Sacred Grove. A working class woman cannot hide the fact that she is female, but through cultivating the characteristics treasured by the academe, she can construct the façade necessary for acceptance into the Sacred Grove.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
It’s not a commercial.
The blog is a book that
writes itself as you read.
It talks back. And
it makes you a part of it.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
J: I think some what you’re publishing is part of a writing process, in fact at first you were explicitly doing writing exercises. To me that’s not really expecting the audience to simply accept what’s written, or written as a kind of self congratulation, it’s inviting the audience to look in on the process, which is quite, well, intimate.
Me: I see the blog as a bit of an impromptu orgy really.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
What are 20 poetry books (if there are twenty) that made you fall in love with poetry, the books that made you think: I want to do this, I need to do this. What are the books that kept you going? Don’t put down the books that you think you’re “supposed,” to like, but list the core ones, the ones that opened all of this up for you. Here’s my list (in no particular order):
1. Anais Nin: Delta of Venus
2. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Coney Island of the Mind
3. John Tytell: Naked Angels – The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation
4. William Burroughs: Junky
5. Theodore Roethke: Collected Poems
6. William Carlos Williams: The Collected Poems
7. T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems
8. Leonard Cohen: Book of Mercy
9. Jim Morrison: Wilderness – The Lost Writings
10. Pete Townsend: Horse’s Neck
11. Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace
12. Margaret Lawrence: The Diviners
13. Robert Service: Collected Poems
14. Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales
and Poems
15. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
16. Angelo Moore: The Missing Link Presents Dr. Mad Vibe’s Comprehensive Linkology
18. Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Noah Kramer: Inanna – Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer
19. Beowulf
20. Johann Wolfgant von Goethe: Faust
There are
tangled feelings
blocking the passage of
poetry. Please help me unravel
myself.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Let’s do a test.
Do you think
that right now
I am speaking
directly and even
exclusively
to you?
Do you believe
that because
these words
are being
(magically)
transmitted
on a screen
and into your
living room
that they must
certainly carry some
secret significance
known only to yourself
and I?
If you have answered yes
to either of these questions
I am diagnosing you as
a computer crack head.
Please go out
get some fresh air
and try to take
a more rational
perspective.
Postscript:
This poem isn’t
personal.
It didn’t even
know you had
this problem.
Inspired by:
No one!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Sorry, sorry. I can’t come to the party.
I am uncomfortable around
kitchen islands and reclining sofas.
And the purple sparkly rabbit dildo,
for all that it signifies, makes me wretched.
Please, please. Accept my excuses.
I could not behave.
I am deeply involved in poetic pursuits
and nothing gets inside me
that isn’t human in the daylight.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Apparently, affections do
get misplaced from time to time.
Like an episode of the Benny Hill show
where it’s one sexy nurse after another.
I know it’s difficult. You must try
not take it so personally.
Many jades live this way,
treating life as a farce and a slapstick.
And we’re all preposterous,
blind in our buffoonery, and love–?
No more than a rollicking game
of musical chairs to an oom-pa-pa band.
She tipped her hand.
No one owns anyone, so no losses to grieve.
Just a simple rearrangement
of the human furniture.
Even schoolchildren know the steps, see:
She was from the country, but now she’s up a gumtree
She let a fellow beat her, and lead her along
What’s the use of cryin’, she made her bed to lie in
She’s glad to bring a coin in, and join in this song
Oom pah pah, oom pah pah, that’s how it goes
Oom pah pah, oom pah pah, everyone knows
She is no longer the same blushing rose
Ever since oom pah pah!
- Nancy, Oliver Twist
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
You were right
when you called me a Persephone
gnawing on the roots of narcissus
no wonder I can smell the ants and earthworms.
And I might never escape
to my Minoan mountainscape!
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I thought about going to see Lenny.
He’s slumming in Winnipeg next week.
Tickets ain’t cheap. It’s the golden fleece.
I could get heroic, but I’d rather eat
a charcoaled slab of Canadian beef
a boiled cabbage and some pickled beets.
But if you go check it gimme a tweet
about any poets there
in the good seats.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Cohen was born in 1934 in Montreal, Quebec, into a middle-class Jewish family. His father was of Polish ancestry…. His father’s will provided Leonard with a modest trust income, sufficient to allow him to pursue his literary ambitions.
In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University… After completing an undergraduate degree, Cohen spent a term in McGill’s law school and a year at Columbia University.
Cohen applied a strong work ethic to his early and keen literary ambitions. He wrote poetry and fiction through much of the 1960s, and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances. After moving to Hydra, a Greek island, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). The Favourite Game is an autobiographical bildungsroman about a young man who discovers his identity through writing..
Tickets will cost $89 to $249.
L’Absinthe
Edward Degas, 1876
Absinthe. Green amber.
My heart was a coal
now ashen, now ashen.
Tipping carafes, tilting the clock
shadows grow long
the knife in my back.
… Papa has come to collect me
and proselytize, oh, endlessly.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Childhood
through to old age
no safety for Woman
on Earth, no refuge in death, nor
the grave.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
“Just a Pig”: Former Morgue Employee Confesses to Raping As Many as 100 Corpses
Dear Ms.
Chase: We regret
to inform you, re: your
inquiry, that the
world has run out
out love. Nothing
left for you.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
i want to plant the fragrance
of women in my path
in your mouth and burning chest
to finish you off by taking away
the obscure battles between love and its agricultures.
-Pablo Neruda lexicon
facebooks stealin’ ur eyes luv
i’m liek magnets
oh shud i… can i’s halp mah wants?
mwuhaha lolz
-LOLMAGNETS lexicon
naked i mouth you taste where the hurt was.
-sexicon lexicon
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
“I am the has-been that never was.”
-Aviva
“Laura is (almost) the perfect man.”
-Jill
“Look what your blog has done to me!”
-Gabriela
“Oh no… Another Dove downed by love.”
-Me
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
She cried “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me ? Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura,
make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
-Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” 1859
Throughout her lifetime, Rossetti claimed that Goblin’s Market, which features remarkably sexual imagery, was a children’s poem. (Wikipedia)
Listen to the whole ghastly story of the sisters and the Goblin fruits HERE.
Laura and the Goblins
Laurence Housman, illustration from the 1893 London edition of “Goblin Market” published by Macmillan.
…Although Engel’s unconventional, imaginative tale has an economical, unpretentious prose style and a deceptively simple plot, the novel achieves its power through the complex symbolic and mythic levels on which it operates.
-The Canadian Encyclopedia
Prepuce.
Sulcus. Meatus.
Frenulum. Root. Bulb.
Acorn cup. Flower bud. Mushroom.
Corona.
Inspired by:
God, why do good things happen to bad people?
vena profunda penis: a deep vein
sulcus
plow (n.) O.E. plog, ploh “plow, plowland (a measure of land),” possibly from Scand. (cf. O.N. plogr “plow”), from P.Gmc. *plogo- (cf. O.Fris. ploch, M.L.G. ploch, M.Du. ploech, O.H.G. pfluog). O.C.S. plugu, Lith. plugas “plow” are Germanic loan-words, as is probably L. plovus, plovum “plow,” a word said by Pliny to be of Rhaetian origin. Replaced O.E. sulh, cognate with L. sulcus “furrow.” As a name for the Big Dipper, it is recorded from 1513. The verb is first recorded c.1420. Plowshare is first recorded c.1380.
bulb
1568, “an onion,” from M.Fr. bulbe, from L. bulbus “bulb, onion,” from Gk. bolbos “plant with round swelling on underground stem.” Expanded by 1800 to “swelling in a glass tube” (thermometer bulb, light bulb, etc.).
acorn
gland – 1692, from L. glandula “gland of the throat, tonsil,” dim. of glans (gen. glandis) “acorn,” from PIE base *gwel- “acorn, oak” (cf. Gk. balanos, Armenian kalin, O.C.S. zelodi “acorn;” Lith. gile “oak”).
corona
1658, from L. “crown, garland” (see crown).
I will fill my bowl at the omphalos of Narcisse
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
Institutional-green foot-pump sink in high school girls’ washroom.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
All this
self-improvement
has gone too far! I don’t
want to be good! I am a bad
apple.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
I knew if I looked in
the subconscious I’d find
the source of something stagnant
in the cellar of my mind.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
TWELFTH HOUSE: This is the House of
SPIRIT, SURRENDER, SACRIFICE & SECRETS…
“…how you sacrifice your self-interest to serve the needs of others: social work, charity work, volunteer work, being with people confined in institutions (hospitals or asylums or prisons);
how you surrender your sense of self (ego): to a higher power or to Love, willingly to another person, unwillingly to a dominant person, or unwittingly in a co-dependent relationship;
how you are affected by things which are hidden: sub-conscious fears or guilts or resentments or hates, past-life karma, skeletons in closets, potentially damaging secrets, secret enemies or saboteurs, secret plots, secret motives, hidden agendas, suppressed knowledge, secret societies, occult wisdom, hidden meanings;
how you appear “mysterious”, how you keep your secrets, how you keep others’ secrets;
how you deal with the unknown, how you seek a direct connection to hidden knowledge by means other than intellect or logic or rational thinking (through the non-rational: imagination or intuition or extra-sensory perception or spiritualism or prophecy);
other associations… bodies of water, chemicals, drugs and drug dependencies, perfumes, dancing, ecstasy, spirituality, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, persuasion through imagination, illusions, deceptions, self-delusions, escapism.”
When Aries in The 12th House
“The presence of Aries in the twelfth house shows an active subconscious life. Aries is ruled by the assertiveness of the planet Mars. The natural instrument of forceful action is considerably hampered by being secluded in the house of disappointment, failure and subjective values. The native is drawn to people who are at least temporarily out of commission, behind the eight ball, or in some state of rejection by society.”
Saturn in the 12th house
“With Saturn in the twelfth house, you may have an unrecognized fear of discipline, structure, or limitations of any form, for they feel binding or constricting in some nebulous way. If so, this can stand in the way of your fulfilling your goals and objectives. Your own unconscious fears – which you incorrectly interpret as being threatened by others – cause you to retreat and to seek solitude. This placement can also indicate a self-centeredness that has to be dissolved through service, suffering, or personal sacrifice. You’re attracted to psychology, the human psyche, and the mystical and religious, as well as careers that involve isolation or solitude.”
Saturn in the 12th house
“Saturn’s house is one of the most important points in any chart because there our basic feelings of safety are tested and there we may have to fight against fear… Many Saturn’s twelfth house fears have something to do with creative work, often fears are actually the power that drives Saturn to creativity. Jean Cau (Saturn in the twelfth) said that all writers are like children, who are afraid in the dark and thus tell their stories.
I know the bottom…It is what you fear. I do not fear it. I have been there.
- Sylvia Plath (Saturn in the twelfth house)”
Chiron
you have starved me.
Lilith, I’m listening.
Instruct me. Telepathically.
I’ll eat.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
and
Lilith: The North Node:
“The North Node is also known as the Dragon’s Head. This is considered fortunate or helpful. It is also considered to be the life’s path that should be followed. The North Node is said to represent the present karma and how it should be furthered. It shows where the subject is heading, although it may be made difficult by challenges and obstacles to be overcome. It is where we have to strive to continue on our path, but the rewards are good fortune.”
LILITH IN ARIES “…often causes an extreme strive for autonomy, leading to problems in partnerships. With flirts you are courageous, quick and also successful, possibly tending to one nite stands.”
LILITH IN THE 12th HOUSE “…seems to create an urge for illusions, fantasies and intoxication. You are probably susceptibly to drugs and easily impressable. On the other hand, this position gives a very strong creative and inspirative capability.”
Chiron/The South Node:
“The South Node is also known as the Dragon’s Tail. This is considered unfortunate or hindering. It is also considered to be the karma from which one has derived. The South Node is said to represent the abilities and habits brought forward from the previous lifetime. It shows where the subject has come from, bringing with it characteristics which may be best left behind. It is to these habits and maybe undesirable traits that we tend to fall.”
CHIRON IN THE 6th HOUSE “…lets you sink into martyrdom from the view of other persons. You limit yourself voluntarily, want to attract mischief voluntarily, although you know exactly how you could help yourself, because you are equipped with analytic abilities, and you are also very criticism-talented. Your objectivity, perfection urge and your activity are noticeable and probably you rather want to suffer, instead of risking anything in order to find healing, of which you know that it exists and that it is attainable.”
CHIRON IN LIBRA “…lets you misjudge problems in relations and contacts to your fellow beings. Perhaps you recognize the problems because of your psychological and analytic abilities, but again and again succumb to the temptation to do nothing against it. You long for harmony and stability, and therefore avoid everything that could lead to those circumstances. You possibly accept grief, instead of aiming for healing.”
North Node in Aries, South Node in Libra:
“North Node in Aries represents a karmic drive to embrace your identity, to make your own decisions and live your own life. The South Node in Libra represents a longing for relationship. The longing is so strong and intense, that you often will try to make the connection by doing the Libra thing, trying to be the person you think your partner wants. This never works. You will find fulfilling relationships only when you embrace your own desires and wants (Aries), take the risk of being your own person, following your impulses.”
With North Node in Aries, our South Node is in Libra.
“Co-dependency, indecisiveness, and a tendency for problems in one-to-one relationships are some of the issues this position suggests. With this position, we need to learn to love ourselves, to trust our instincts, to lead without fear. We tend to fall back on co-dependent relationships due to a fear of independence and of standing alone. We are indecisive and don’t trust our instincts. We fear expressing our independent wishes and asserting ourselves because we prefer the comfort of being considered “good” people. Learning to act on our impulses, which implies a certain amount of self-confidence, is one of the lessons of this position.
Striving for internal peace, rather than focusing on achieving peace and balance in relationships, will improve our relationships and bring us happiness and satisfaction.”
North Node in the Twelfth House
“A tendency to worry unremittingly, to be plagued by vague (and sometimes not so vague) feelings of guilt about under-performing, to lack faith and trust in a larger more spiritual plan, and to over-analyze ourselves and others are some of the issues this position suggests. With this position, we need to put some faith in spiritual powers or the “big picture”, to let go of some of our fears that we are not doing enough, to love ourselves and others with more compassion and understanding, and to be humble, feeling safe in the knowledge that we (and others) are not perfect. We need to trust and develop our imagination, as well as our capacity for compassion. Learning to let go of some of our obsessions with rules, details, and fears of not doing things perfectly will help us to achieve a greater sense of balance and to ease our fear of failure and guilty feelings.”
Aries North Node, Libra South Node
“Your Aries North Node Soul wants to find its courage…
…As you exercise your independent nature, rather than re-enacting old tendencies of enmeshment or co-dependence, you inspire us to want to be with you, and to hear your stories, your truth. Don’t be too cautious. Earlier in this life, or in former lives, you may have heeded too closely to rules of justice, reason, and skillfully “getting along” and in the process compromised parts of yourself in a deadening attempt to please and accommodate. Now you are called to let conventional roles and habits give way to a more exciting, truthful, and passionate nature. As you dare to follow through on what truly excites your curiosities, you leave behind your South Node traces of dependency and–dare we call it “normalcy?” In this life, you don’t want linger too long in any social group, for your Soul needs some alone time as well as a good dose of adventure and risk taking…
Soul Purpose: Courage, survival, entrepreneurial pioneering in any field. Dependence on your own skills and abilities, rather than enmeshment with others.
Shadow: Compromising behavior and fearing to share your deepest feelings, ideas, and talents. “Going along with things” leads you into the shadows.”
Calculate your own South Node (Chiron) and your North Node (Lilith)
Chase:
1297, from O.Fr. chacier “to catch, seize,” from V.L. *captiare (see catch). Meaning of “run after” developed c.1350.
At the snake pits of Narcisse
in a crack in the limestone
the snakes ball up
in a writhing black mass
like the priestesses
at the Python in Delphi
inhaling the hissing vapor
skinning the mystic scale
masked captives
in a ritual love-trance.
Every year I’ll fill my bowl.
Fill it to overflowing.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Inspired by:
Narcissus
Crawling on his belly.
The black mass of mating balls
In the painting, “Priestess of Delphi” by The Honorable John Collier, a priestess – the Pythia – is depicted in a trance state, seated over a fissure in the rock through which vapors rise from the underground stream. In her left hand is a sprig of laurel – in Greek mythology, Apollo’s sacred tree – and in the other hand a bowl meant to hold some of the water from the stream containing the gases.
Laura is a female name deriving from the Latin word for laurel.
Domino: Hooded or cloaked.
A dream, a bowl, an onion and a poem.
The Pythia – an initiated female priestess who had undergone extensive training and conditioning that included fasting – would sit in the adyton, breathe the vapors to induce a trancelike state, and prophesize to those who waited to hear her words outside. The prophecies were obscure and cryptic – in fact, one synonym for the word “cryptic” is “Delphic” – and open to very wide interpretation.
Limestone bedrock
“While food and water are plentiful in Manitoba’s Interlake region, and other parts of the province, it’s the availability of winter dens in limestone bedrock that make this area an ideal home for red-sided garter snakes.”
I told
him: it’s okay
we all need to forgive
ourselves. (But I don’t take my own
advice.)
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
Tina
likes to say how
her cat Kam has more friends
on Facebook than I do. That cat
kicks ass.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Against
the advice of
exorcists, a slim book
of demon names was riffled by
a thumb.
Someone
tapped me. It was
Dead Liberace. He
asked if I would, please, talk to his
mom.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
It was one of those drunken summer afternoons
Pear picked up his guitar
and his penis slipped out and swung
like a metronome
to “Feel Like Makin’ Love”.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Red roses, swelling
the bleak sky, sinking
pain pulls love apart
black horses rearing
the whites of eyes
your skirts, broken blossoms thud.
A train of lace, the steam of blood
an awful silence and trailing mud.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
Sit down
and let me stare at you. I know you
are thinking what I am.
Deep thoughts. Deeper.
Deeper.
Inspired by:
Tarot Cards: Tarot and the Conscious and Subconscious Mind
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G: I don’t
like company
coming up to the house.
My home is my sanctuary.
My lair.
Me: Ya, the
underground den.
No one comes to my place
free of risk either. Don’t toy with
spiders.
G: I had
better beware!
Me: Trip over my guy-wire
and you’ll become my naked lunch.
(Laughter).
Me: All the
best poets are
reclusive. Party? Say
fuck your party. Everything will
be fine.
Contains allusions to:
Naked Lunch: this is all happening telepathically.
See also: REEL and GEMINI MOON.
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Me: I pay
attention. You
go into tri-monthly
estrus. You mate like a female
brown bear.
A: Write about a poem about that!
Me: Oh, don’t goad me. I will.
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Cool
and cerebral.
Curious. Mischievous.
Often suspect in intrigues and
high jinx.
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Hopeless
romantic for
equanimity and
peace. Only loves to love. Hates strife
and pain.
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Appeal
will be based on
the size of the genius,
creative virility, and
fierce gaze.
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Who knows who is looking
and I don’t care. Poems slough
off me like scales. I’m in the
present. I’m unattached.
You might be fascinated
you might be repulsed but
this is what I have to do. I have to
crawl on my belly. I have to
spit out the poison.
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These poems
are elusive.
What do they mean? It’s like
catching sardines — so swift and so
silver.
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That guy
his little eyes
would glitter like a wild
pig every time he did it or
watched it.
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I met Evelyn Lau
she was shy
she said because her
soul was showing
when she told me
she liked my leather jacket
she must have meant
the tough skin
the protection of a hide.
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From now on
nobody talk to me
without cupping my breasts in your hands.
Everyone kiss me
kiss my legs
until I stop crying.
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1. Under threat or arousal ejaculates ink.
2. Don’t come in. I’m inside-out.
3. I knew that before it happened.
4. Slit skirts, torch songs, drive-in movies.
5. Poetess. Out of element. Seeks deincarnation.
6. Long roads circle back to the beginning.
Inspired by:
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He was like a man who
didn’t have a house so
I gave him a hammer and
he beat himself to death with it.
(When I tried to stop him
he’d beat me with it too.)
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For you
when you leave me
you’re just away. For me
when you leave me you might never
return.
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The most
frightening thing
is kindness. It provokes
mistrust. Cruelty is familiar.
Like home.
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Women
who know they are
weak hate themselves and hate
others for what they suspect them
to be.
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I hung
the bagua mirror
and wore the turquoise sphere
but watch my back, they’re coming from
the rear.
Inspired by:
To protect against and counteract bad luck caused by arrows of Sha.
At all times and over the world, turquoises have been worn as natural protection against the powers of darkness. If in earlier times they preserved horse and rider from unexpected falls, they are regarded today as the protective stone of pilots, air crews and other occupational groups who are exposed to an especially high degree of risk.
In modern gemstone therapy, those suffering from depression are recommended to wear a turquoise or a chain with turquoise beads. The turquoise’ cheerful colour is said to endow reticent personalities with more confidence. It is also often given as a gift, a stone of friendship, for the turquoise is said to be responsible for faithfulness and constancy in relationships.
“Keep six” is prison slang. To ask someone to “keep six” means to keep a look out. Your scout says “six up” to indicate trouble.
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1. Blue eyes and a needle nose.
2. Bralessness made me a bad girl.
3. Bad choices? What choices? Fuck that.
4. A chip off the old shoulder.
5. She was kind. Kind of crazy.
6. You shouldn’t have envied the damned.
Inspired by:
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She’s a roiling thunderclap. A purple prairie storm.
First, there’s a change of light.
Hyper-real and super-still. Hot. Spreading yellow like a bruise.
A wind whips up. A chilling, churning gust. There is still time to get inside.
It might pound with hail a few minutes and pass.
Or, in a flash, turn a bridge to skeleton cinders.
More rarely, scorched earth, but beware wildfire.
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Through the glades of shady trees
the glaze of drizzling syrup.
The wind is singing all day long
and at night it breathes so sweetly.
I comb the hairs of my bleating goats
that glisten through my fingers.
The olives have a chewy meat
while for rhymes I listen and linger.
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I dreamed I was
a cherry tree.
And people came
and plucked the
best of me.
A little bug
came to keep
me company.
He sat on my leaf
and sucked the sap
that I did bleed.
I wasn’t alone
but I was empty
and infested.
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I’ll take this!
And I’ll take this!
Hm. This looks good…
The rest?
The rest is scrap.
Throw it in the bin.
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You are an object.
How are you useful?
Your value will be determined by your usefulness.
Do you have a market for what you are?
What label do we put on you?
Speak up! I don’t understand you!
Where’s your certification?
Put yourself to use.
What use are you?
Do you dance or amuse?
Are you a whore?
What is your worth?
Are you a cheap thing?
Let me see your teeth.
Do you have anything of value at all?
If you’re going to just lie there like carrion
you’ll have your pockets picked.
The birds will eat your eyes.
What are you good for?
For being kicked?
What are you?
Worm food?
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Crying
and bleeding are not becoming.
Stained clothes shouldn’t be worn.
Bury it and
move on.
Thank you
but some things won’t
stay underground. I wake
up in this dress again every
morning.
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D: So when people are mean to you, the most important thing is to never let them see you cry.
Me: Why not?
D: Because then they’ll just do it worse.
Me: Yes. That’s true. How old are you again?
D: Sixteen.
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When I lived high on the mountains
I didn’t have many problems
as there weren’t any people
just cypress pines
and turquoise sky
centaurs and silence.
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A world
inhabited
by flat-eyed conformists
robotic thuggery, day-lit
maulings.
Inspired by:
Mobbing can be understood as the stressor to beat all stressors. It is an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker. Initiated most often by a person in a position of power or influence, mobbing is a desperate urge to crush and eliminate the target. The urge travels through the workplace like a virus, infecting one person after another. The target comes to be viewed as absolutely abhorrent, with no redeeming qualities, outside the circle of acceptance and respectability, deserving only of contempt. As the campaign proceeds, a steadily larger range of hostile ploys and communications comes to be seen as legitimate.
… Workplace mobbing is normally carried out politely, without any violence, and with ample written documentation. Yet even without the blood, the bloodlust is essentially the same: contagion and mimicking of unfriendly, hostile acts toward the target; relentless undermining of the target’s self-confidence; group solidarity against one whom all agree does not belong; and the euphoria of collective attack.
At the Mercy of the Mob, Kenneth Westhues
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I regret to inform you that the situation has become quite hopeless.
Yes, I suspected as much. Thank you for the confirmation. It’s surely come time to stick a gun in my mouth and move on.
Death is lovely this time of year.
Yes. Well, I never travelled.
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I think that
we both know
that I know.
It’s a pretense
I pretend not
to see.
I see the end
of everything
And I know the traitor
in everyone.
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We’ve been alive a long time
You are old and eternal like me
But you are one of those blood-sucking Bacchanals
And I am loyal to Artemis.
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Can’t breathe.
Too many minds
thinking. The room filling
with feelings and cross-purposes.
Webby.
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In her dream, I threw an onion at someone.
I had it thrown back at me but I caught it
in a pink bowl.
Onions
To see onions in your dream, represents the deep layers you need to get through in order to unveil what is really underneath. You need need to dig a little deeper into a situation or problem.
Throw
To dream that you are throwing something, indicates that there is someone or something that you need to rid yourself of from your life.
Catch
To dream that you catch something in your dream, suggests that you are in need of or that you need to incorporate that something into your life.
Pink
Pink represents love, joy, sweetness, happiness, affection, kindness. Being in love or healing through love is also implied with this color.
Bowl
To see a bowl in your dream, symbolizes the womb and sense of security.
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When in human form
will retain pack-mentality
and hierarchical social structure.
Tend to organize into small enclave groupings
and demonstrate fierce territorial instincts.
Scavenging and subterfuge are
typical survival strategies.
Packs will strive for dominance in
isolated pockets, usually on lower level
fringe of social strata. Often establish
strongholds within office environments,
helping professions, and community organizations.
Markers include sloped shoulders,
coarse bristly hairs, raised hackles,
exaggerated submissive displays,
a preference for “camouflage” colors
on the beige scale, and flat-soled footwear.
The matriarchies can be rigidly
conformist. Alpha females will indicate
aggression and arousal through the
jangling of large key rings, pursed lips,
note-taking, and narrow-eyed warning glances.
In a group, become easily excited
to escalation. Volatile, but seldom violent.
Generally will confine themselves to
in-fighting but will occasionally attack
a vulnerable predator or grazing species.
Compulsive and inappropriate
laughter is the only reliable
hallmark characteristic of this family
of werewolf. Any mortal who is hearing these
sounds will experience troubling anxieties,
disturbed sleep, and an acute startle reflex.
Laughing’s no joke for spotted hyenas
Spotted hyenas, the social, carnivorous creatures often referred to as “laughing hyenas,” live across Africa and east to India. Their laughing sound, however, “has nothing to do with hyenas having a good time,” says Sarah Benson-Amram, a zoology student from Michigan State University, who spent two years in Kenya studying the hyenas and recording their sounds. “In fact, they’re usually pretty stressed out. Often they giggle once they’ve been attacked.”
The hyenas live in groups of up to 90 animals called “clans,” says Benson-Amram, and it’s a female-dominated society.
“You’ll often have just a whole mess of hyenas trying to get food, trying to get access to a carcass,” she says. “So often you’ll have some aggression at that carcass. You’ll have one hyena biting another or displacing another, so when that happens, the hyena that has been bitten or displaced will often giggle. So you hear a lot of giggles at carcasses.”
The Largest Clitoris in the World
There is also the situation when females lick each other’s clitorises, which is a greeting or an affective behavior that strengthens links between individuals. Oppositely, a female will never lick the penis of a male, since it is subordinate – the highest ranked male is inferior to the lowest ranked female.
Nurse Ratched is a classic alpha female of this type:
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Soft breasts
the symbols of
a culture of nurture:
food, mercy, warmth, comfort, hope, life–
obscene?
Obscene
to Mammon, to technology
to the new gods of “man-made”
who hate what flows
for free.
Inspired by:
Revealed: The true horror of everyday life in Zimbabwe
Starving children eat rats, families turn on each other and farmers kill their own livestock to survive. Smuggled film brings Mugabe nightmare to world’s attention
Not for public consumption: when are breasts obscene?
Breasts are used to sell even products that have nothing to do with breasts but everything to do with sex and these are not judged obscene. Ironically, when By Choice Midwifery of Des Moines, IA, used the same marketing technique to encourage breastfeeding, most people found the ads offensive.
Awful Plastic Surgery: Bad Boob Job
Facebook, the popular social networking website, provoked a squall of maternal wrath when it yanked photos of breastfeeding babies that women had posted on their personal profiles because it deemed them a little too revealing. This, by the way, from a website that allows photos of women in thongs and bikinis and of couples making out; it has even accepted paid advertising for a dating website that featured a topless model.
When men cannot combine sex and love in one relationship, they may split their love according to the “Madonna-whore” complex. As Freud wrote, “Where they love they cannot desire; where they desire they cannot love.”
The truly surprising thing about Salma Hayek breastfeeding an African baby: it’s quite moving
This idiotic headline reveals just how alienated women have become in relationship to their own bodies. But watch the video just to experience the dumbstruck awe of celebrity saint worship.
Can’t you just see the Vanity Fair cover now? St. Salma and St. Angelina? Hera and Aphrodite? The celestial airbrushing and photoshop? It’s BEATIFIC. The reconciliation of dualities!
Wet nursing — assisting in the perpetuation of the species for a mere thousand centuries — “quite moving” indeed.
mammal
1826, Anglicized form of Mod.L. Mammalia (1773), coined 1758 by Linnaeus for the class of mammals, from neut. pl. of L.L. mammalis “of the breast,” from L. mamma “breast,” perhaps cognate with mamma.
succor
c.1225, from Anglo-Fr. succors “help, aid,” O.Fr. sucurres, from M.L. succursus “help, assistance,” from pp. of L. succurrere “run to help,” from sub “up to” + currere “to run”
nourish
c.1290, “to bring up, nurture” (a child, a feeling, etc.), from O.Fr. norriss-, stem of norrir (Fr. nourir), from L. nutrire “to feed, nurse, foster, support, preserve,” from *nutri (older form of nutrix “nurse”), lit. “she who gives suck,” from PIE base *(s)nu- “flow, let flow,” hence “to suckle” (cf. Skt. snauti “she drips, gives milk,” Gk. nao “I flow”).
nurse
12c., nurrice “wet nurse, foster-mother to a young child,” from O.Fr. norrice (source of proper name Norris), from L.L. *nutricia “nurse, governess, tutoress,” from L., fem. of nutricius “that suckles, nourishes,” from nutrix (gen. nutricis) “wet nurse,” from nutrire “to suckle” (see nourish). Meaning “person who takes care of sick” first recorded in Eng. 1590; the verb is first attested 1535 in sense of “to suckle (an infant),” 1526 in the passive sense, alt. of M.E. nurshen (13c.; see nourish), originally “to bring up or suckle a child,” sense of “take care of (a sick person)” is first recorded 1736.
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Eclipse your identity.
Whore out your talent
to sweaty-fisted
corporate Mammonites.
Massage the Message
into the masses.
Bring everybody off
to the de$ired conclusion.
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Under the ponytail
there is no soul.
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The cause
of childhood
obesity is clear.
Poverty and nowhere safe
to play.
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Inspired by:
Fresh, healthy food too expensive, say Canadians
The poll showed 47% of Canadians don’t buy fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy and whole grain products, lean meat or fish because of the cost.
…”Depending on where you live, some Canadians are often paying more than double to almost six times the price for the same basic healthy food,” the report said.
The foundation said governments need to “create a level playing field” for consumers.
…For example, the poll found the cost of six apples ranged from $1.71 in Edmonton to $5.02 in Calgary. In Ontario, where apples are grown regionally, the cost varied from 90 cents in Peterborough to $5.49 in Dryden. A 2.7 kg bag of potatoes ranged from $1.50 in Toronto to $2.15 in Whitehorse, to $6.95 in Yellowknife, N.W.T.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation said the wide variation in the cost of healthy food is even more disturbing when compared to the relatively stable price of pop, chips and cookies.
…The study also found that healthy foods such as dried beans and frozen spinach were unavailable in almost one in three grocery stores where the foundation shopped.
Walking
in Winnipeg
is a provocation.
Police capitulate. Women
stay home.
Inspired by:
Woman swarmed during rush hour
Police warning people not to walk alone
Police are warning people not to walk alone on city streets after a 34-year-old woman was swarmed and injured with a sharp object in a West End mugging during rush hour Friday.
…”This is a warning to the general public that safety is something we all have to be mindful of, regardless of what end of town you’re in,” Michalyshen said.
Muggings happen and the city has seen its share of street violence.
… Michalyshen said the woman did the right thing in handing over her valuables, but the attack is also a warning for the rest of the city.
“These types of incidents aren’t always happening in the wee hours,” the officer said.
People should avoid walking alone and they should always steer clear of secluded areas, Michalyshen said.
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Who said
it can’t get worse?
In fact, it can. Then, when
you can’t take it anymore, then
it stops.
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Two hard white eggs
bulge, cracking up, boiling
in hot salt water.
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Always
remember what
I said. It could be worse.
You could have gonorrhea in
your eye.
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Starving artists? That’s not far from the mark
The study reports that artists over all are working for near-poverty-level wages, with an average annual earnings in calendar year 2005 of just $22,731, compared with $36,301 for all Canadian workers – a 37-per-cent wage chasm.
In fact, of the 140,000 artists analyzed, 43 per cent earned less than $10,000…
… Indeed, while there are more female artists than males (74,000 versus 66,000) in the country, female artists over all earn much less than their male counterparts: In 2005, a female artist earned on average $19,175, a male $26,714 – a span of close to 30 per cent.
1. The first guy I kissed had “Love” and “Hate” tattooed on his knuckles. I was twelve.
2. I have no plants.
3. My favorite color is clear.
4. I am on a secret mission to free all the world’s animals from domestication and captivity.
5. I like black ice cream.
6. I sleep with the light on.
7. I can smell red ants.
8. My professional experience includes cigarillos and machine guns.
9. The first person who ever punched me square between the eyes had tattooed knuckles also.
10. I might possibly be the biggest movie snob in the world.
11. I do not eat cephalopods. They are soul-mates.
12. I love to cook and I do great laundry — but I’m a resentful and cantankerous housekeeper.
13. I don’t care for company. Go visit the circus or zoo.
14. I consider it my duty to say outrageous things in public so that other people will have interesting anecdotes to tell.
15. I constantly read dictionaries.
16. I am the same online as I am in person.
17. Life didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, but I am exactly as I always wanted to be.
18. Intuition is my sharpest sense.
19. I’m allergic to Winnipeg.
20. I am unattainable. Got that? You’d better.
21. My favorite ring is a black mamba.
22. I am conscious of destiny.
23. I’ve got a great walk.
24. I could have been anything, but it all would have killed me.
25. If I do get too old, I intend to go back to smoking, eating hashish, and riding motorcycles.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content
I spend
so much time saying what I’ve done
and am about to do,
I can’t get to
doing.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
When I
was a goatherd
the men called me “Farouche”
my lovers were Innocence, Trust
and Truth.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The most
important thing
isn’t that it’s perfect.
Or whether anyone likes it
or cares.
It’s not
for trotting out
to the highest bidder.
It has no motive, no pretense,
no worth.
Price tags
won’t stick to it.
Nor will labels, like “pride”.
You can want but you can’t own it.
It’s pure.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Why was
I reborn to
this primitive world of
neanderthals, zealots, satyrs
and fools?
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Gabriela, your commitment to fearlessness is an inspiration. Thank you for the book.
*Curls up forthwith.
This is
the nude body of a woman.
Here is where we come from.
Just like the Earth
and Sun.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
If I had been the audience, this is what I would have leapt up to say to The People!
Dr. Phil says that
your naked picture
on the internet
could ruin your life.
Why? What is this
loss of respect
that accompanies nudity?
I don’t understand this
piousness and prudery.
Hey Phil
when are you going to stop
blaming the victims? Let’s talk
about the real issue. Yesterday
in my town
two men tried to abduct a
woman in broad daylight.
The police said it is safer
if we don’t go out alone.
Excuse me. Do we live in
Afghanistan?
We don’t need to hide indoors
or take up the veil.
We work and pay taxes.
Our police and our courts
need to do their jobs
to defend our right to exist.
We’re 52% of the population.
Y’know, it isn’t public nudity
that’s the problem. I think it
just might be the solution.
What about you, Phil?
Whaddya got under that
padded jacket? Got some
nipples under there? Why
are yours inert and
innocuous while hers
are obscenity?
Here’s the deal. Everybody–
drop ‘em. Show us what
you got hiding behind those
puny prayer books. And if even
one of you sanctimonious
prurient pricks
make wood for the little girl,
it’ll be you
that can’t walk in the streets
alone. Got it?
We women, we’re gonna live
our lives — freely, naturally,
happily, nakedly — any way we want
and we’ll make no accommodation
no compromise of our freedom
for perverts who have tried to scare us
by turning nudity into pornography,
and who make beauty a villain
and try to keep our sexuality chained in cage
like a dirty secret.
Sexual violence is predominantly
a men’s problem
and you’re not going to make it our problem
or our responsibility or our shame
any more.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The photographer was asked
whether she asks consent
from her unwitting subjects.
No, she said.
There was always “issues of tension”
with photography.
Whose tension? I wondered.
The tension of people who have just been
photographed like animals in zoo?
The studio manager said
there is beauty in how people
“occupy their space”
like flesh mannequins
she said.
Flesh mannequins.
Indeed, I thought.
maybe other people only exist
as a convenience for exploitation.
Another photographer
was criticized for
stereotyping inner-city children.
When asked about it, she said
that her work was simply “too honest”
for people to accept.
What would we ever do
without these artistes
explaining who we really are?
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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Today the Doves went to see A Graphic History of the Black Panter Party USA. Admission is FREE.
It was interesting to learn that the Black Panthers had an active interest in forming alliances with feminists and homosexual liberation groups. There is a piece of writing by the Panther’s Supreme Commander, Huey P. Newton, on this topic which should not be missed.
For more, check out: Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins by The Subversive Historian.
Also went to see the Jennifer Stillwill exhibition, Grate Expectations at the Plug-In Gallery. Click the link to see her sculpture entitled “Range” (constructed with Kokanee beer bottles) and her explanation of the Slurpee “Brain Freeze” piece.
Click this link and “Featured Images” to see how the Royal Albert Arms Hotel looked way back in the day. I remember the pre-patio incarnation.
And back in the Hood, we happened upon some Dumpster Art. What is a blumpkin? You’ll be sorry you asked.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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My new favorite show.
Doorman: Five dollars each.
Me: Nope. We’re from the North End. We don’t pay cover charge.
Doorman: Okay. All three of you for five dollars.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
When I
was a goatherd
I gazed myself in streams.
So — not only was I beautiful –
I was bubbly, gurgly, gushingly,
brilliantly, beautiful.
I was quenchingly, rapidly, windingly,
sparkly beautiful.
I was cool and I was wet.
And they said I had discernment.
They said I had clarity.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
What’s this?
You mean to say
that the human body
doesn’t require thousands of dollars
per year spent on constant cosmetic intervention
and medical maintenance?
What if
everyone swore off
shampoo and facial toner
and menstruated into sea sponges
and rubbed rocks on their armpits
and brushed with baking soda?
What if
men had dangling foreskins
and kinky nests in their butt cracks
and women just stopped stuffing themselves with chemicals and synthetics
accelerating their evolution into dolls
that melt instead of burn?
What if
it became normal to have emotions again
and babies weren’t born in litters
and we ate from gardens
and walked in bare feet
or even on all fours?
What if we all stopped looking in mirrors?
What if lived our lives outdoors?
What if we chased what we ate
instead of starving?
What if we hugged to stay warm?
Would we love ourselves more?
Inspired by:
Maintain your ’do without shampoo
“All I have to do is wash with water, then brush my wet hair with a washcloth 100 strokes each side,” she said. “This moves the oils from the scalp, spreading them evenly across the hair … Within two weeks, my frizzy ends became less flyaway. My hair began to shine again, getting wavy instead of bushy.
The Southern California woman who gave birth to octuplets this week has six other children and never expected to have eight more when she took fertility treatment, her mother said Thursday.
How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness
Disruptive young people who are medicated with Ritalin, Adderall and other amphetamines routinely report that these drugs make them “care less” about their boredom, resentments and other negative emotions, thus making them more compliant and manageable.
The many faces of Courtney Love
Her face seems to morph into something different every few months. Last year, she had a Joker-esque smile for a few months that was insanely scary.
Pregnant women warned off make-up
Growing concerns over the exposure of pregnant women to chemicals that may lead to birth defects have prompted calls for a new EU-wide cosmetics labelling system which would mark out some products as off-limits to mothers-to-be.
The move follows the publication of a study which found that women exposed to high levels of hairspray during pregnancy were twice as likely to have babies born with hypospadias, a condition in which the urinary tract grows on the underside of the penis. The Imperial College London study suggested that the birth defects were linked to chemicals in hairspray shown to disrupt the hormonal systems in the body and affect reproductive development.
Bundling was the traditional practice of wrapping one person in a bed accompanied by another, usually as a part of courting behavior. The tradition is thought to have originated either in the Netherlands or in the British Isles and later became common in Colonial America, especially in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The aim was to allow intimacy without sexual intercourse.
Traditionally, participants were adolescents, with a boy staying at the residence of a girl. They were given separate blankets by the girl’s parents and expected to talk to one another through the night.
The bundling of lovers belongs to the folklore of a rural people. The precedents, among many races and in many ages are widespread and venerable. Even the casual student of our history is aware that the rural background of the majority of our people was a determining factor which colored the philosophy of our Constitution, and which, in fact, affected the machinery of government under which we still operate. Thomas Jefferson praised the virtues of country life, planned for an America unsullied by urbanism, free, happy, and rustic. The society which Jefferson hoped to perpetuate, dreamed of perfecting, was, among other things, a bundling society. We no longer bundle. Nor do we win Revolutions and produce Thomas Jeffersons.
A pheromone… is a chemical that triggers a natural behavioral response in another member of the same species.
Types
2.1 Aggregation pheromones
2.2 Alarm pheromones
2.3 Epideictic pheromones
2.4 Releaser pheromones
2.5 Signal pheromones
2.6 Primer pheromones
2.7 Territorial pheromones
2.8 Trail pheromones
2.9 Information pheromones
2.10 Sex pheromones
2.11 Other pheromones: Calming (appeasement) pheromones (mammals)
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Brooks and I playing Literati.
B: First class minds should not be addled with pedestrian chores.
Me: It should be illegal for me to do housework.
B: You know what’s terrifying in the end? Literally anything could take up all of your time. If someone wanted to, they could clean 24/7 …
Me: And some DO.
B: … and still there would be things left undone.
Me: Yep.
B: It’s that demon that we lock in the cellar closet.
Me: Life is too short and too dusty.
B: That’s what I want on my epitaph.
© Laura Chase and DOMINO, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given, and with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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Nominated for the Academy Award “Best Actress in a Leading Role”, “Best Actor in a Supporting Role” and two nominations for “Best Actress in a Supporting Role”.
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