Tonight

They walked from the lights into the shadows cast upon shadows of the forest until the lights went out like tiny floating candles and then there was just one shadow. They couldn’t know where they were in this kind of night. If not for the sounds of the snapping branches, the wind under their loose nightgowns, they could have been anywhere, they could’ve been in their beds with their eyes shut. Sarah was the first to stop walking, though Danielle couldn’t have been able to tell who the stopping steps belonged to. All she could notice was that the collective rustle of their feet and their nightgowns clicked into a lower gear at some point. Three sets of noise became a pair. Danielle thought of the girl, whoever she was, staying behind and listening to the sounds of the other two as they walked on and listened for her. In the dark it could have been either of the girls to stop, thought Sarah. It could have just as well been her stopping back there, and stopping later. In this kind of night how could she know a difference?

Deep Down Thomas

Thomas, tall, long-limbed, pale, looked upon the brightness of the waterfall and the light which jumped off it like white fish. It had taken him half a days hike to get there, to see this miraculous thick torrent. His hut was four miles of dense forest south. And in the hut his wife slept, naked because of the heat. Thomas, looking at the falls, thought of her, and then thought of how cold the water might be.
The roaring of the water was muted in the slow darkness beneath the surface. It certainly is rather cold, thought Thomas, still holding his breath in a tight knot in his chest. Then he saw something. It was barely a flicker. Orange. He broke the surface into the loud bright day, inhaled and dove back into the purple water, searching. He swam toward where he had seen the flash of orange—or was it yellow, he wondered. The purple turned to grey, the grey turned to black. Between his ears, the chords of his brain tightened as if they would snap. And just when he couldn’t take it, when the chord was so tight that it vibrated like the strings of a violin, he saw it.
A giant gold eye, bulging and as big as a cereal bowl. And around the gold gooey eye, the orange glory of a gargantuan goldfish, resting in thick tongues of black seaweed. Slowly the eye, which had been shut with a golden fleshlike eyelid opened and Thomas saw the shining white of it, and then the blue. An eye bluer than the sky, bluer than the waterfall. The eye looked at Thomas and Thomas looked at the eye, and Thomas could see his small reflection floating in the bright blue iris, the size of an action figure. The sound of the chord strung between his ears had reached the pitch of a woman’s scream. He didn’t have much time.
“Why are you so large, Fish? And why do you sleep so deep?”
“I sleep so deep because I am tired. I am large with the bodies of my kin.”

Matthew St

Movie I made for my Narrative Filmmaking class this year. Check it out, homies:

watch with headphones on.

http://vimeo.com/4712918

Mother Haze

The first time I saw you
you stepped off the curb
the streetcar slipped slowly
your hair was disturbed
the brown was strewn,
rivered across
a fading flush
as your thin limbs tossed
to the rush of your heart-beat:
covered in stiff wattage
locking your neck--
the whine of a ship's deck
bowed by wind

Dogs

The lonely dogs lurk
Skeletal by the feed
Black and black
at me

jaws clap clap
like oysters
about my neck

Up is the sky
down is me
about are the dogs
lonely?

New Season

Really a day just like all the others, bit warmer, brighter,
But for this cool wind which is a bit of a surprise,
toilet seats you think, colder than they should be, coldest
Thing around, colder than a hot bath that is too hot is hot, cold
like a baked potato is hot as a furnace, unbelievably hot, hot like a bite,
like a slap, like the book falling in the library, wind cold like that,
Offending sheltered buttcheeks,
Warm like spring.

Faulkner Speech

I was finishing my super late Faulkner final paper today and I read this and thought it was just really amazing. (Sorry for being a douchebag and having two faulkner posts.)

Faulkner's nobel prize acceptance speech, 1950:

"I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

[Supposedly when he read the speech, hardly anyone could hear or understand what he was saying because of he has a really heavy southern accent and spoke too quietly. People clapped politely and he walked off stage. It was only when a transcript of it was printed the next day in the newspaper that people read it all. Soon after became regarded as one of the most important nobel prize addresses ever given.]