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1d669ba
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I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
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myth
poetry
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Steve Erickson |
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74a6cb0
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If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.
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Steve Erickson |
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dedc24d
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Isn't it weird when that happens?' says Zazi. 'It's like the first time I heard the second Pete Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit--and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn't changed. The movie hasn't changed. It's still the same exact movie, but..
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Steve Erickson |
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f58e191
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By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.
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Steve Erickson |
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f4b8c4f
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It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.
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Steve Erickson |
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36def3c
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When L.A.'s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.
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politics
government
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Steve Erickson |
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38dd182
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When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.
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Steve Erickson |
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1407efd
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1939. Love rages. It cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more.
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Steve Erickson |
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ba973b2
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The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to last forever, that was supposed to be the heart's burden into eternity, only for that burden to be laid down by too much time and, worse, too much banality, too much of everything that's beneath love, not good enough for love.
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Steve Erickson |
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f94c09f
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Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.
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Steve Erickson |
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4c3eb40
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That's editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It's telling us everything. It's telling us things we don't even know it's telling us. It's not just telling us what these characters think, it's telling us what we think. It's manipulative as hell, there's no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that's 'manipulative,' what they really mean is it's not very good at its manipulations,..
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Steve Erickson |
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5dcb750
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He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn't have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn't last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn't free. Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.
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Steve Erickson |
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6dc4d33
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But of course the Western changed along with America's view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody's free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America's just too fucking confused, can't figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured..
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Steve Erickson |
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a30c232
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America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two?"
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Steve Erickson |
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b9887c1
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This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.
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Steve Erickson |
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902107a
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The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done.
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Steve Erickson |
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1e2ecbf
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Since I've never had a dream,' she begins, 'one night I woke and went looking for one.
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Steve Erickson |
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aa4016b
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Lets say from the first moment of my life, everything's always been about me and nothing else, including apocalypse and chaos; let's say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith--this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise...Let's say I'm faithlessness made flesh, the modern age's leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some bro..
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Steve Erickson |
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c861580
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You're in the lights and he thinks you're exposed, he's in the dark and he thinks he's hidden. But he's not hidden, he's dead, and you're not exposed, you're alive.
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Steve Erickson |
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1a024fa
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I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn't an act of fury, fury isn't part of it anymore. It's more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation.
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Steve Erickson |
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f4b86ac
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You keep looking around for who's in fucking charge, and there's just nobody like that at all. The cops just ride their horses back and forth through the park, up and down Fifth Avenue. Who the hell's angry on Fifth Avenue, that's what I want to know.
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Steve Erickson |
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f587bea
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He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can't see it anymore, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward.
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Steve Erickson |
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ac370d1
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When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen - that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface - gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everythin..
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light
reality
truth
impressions
shadows
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Steve Erickson |
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d26d121
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In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else's in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of b..
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Steve Erickson |
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f51ed04
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The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are.
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Steve Erickson |
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c38899a
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Qualunque sia il caso, lei e sparita dalla mia vita. E il prezzo che ho dovuto pagare per aver flirtato romanticamente con l'apocalisse. Sono stato cosi sciocco da credere di poter giocare con il caos, mentre era il caos a giocare con me.
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steve erickson |
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6731664
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I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thou..
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Steve Erickson |
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ac65c5c
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Everyone, she says, is his own age of meaning.
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Steve Erickson |
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bf60604
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Let's say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breaths.
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Steve Erickson |
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9125dbb
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As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.
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Steve Erickson |