NYC is snowed in. It's 60 degrees here in LA. From the relative balminess of this coast, I suppose I don't get to say how much I wish I were there, in NYC, curled up in a warm apartment (leaking radiator and all), watching the season -- I haven't been able to write this missing, this sense of knowing that I am in the wrong place for all the right reasons. Los Angeles seems void of metaphors, though I know it must be full of them --

Only the abstract makes sense today, which doesn't bode well for the writing I'm SUPPOSED to do this afternoon. What makes sense is broken, cobbled together with memorywires and odd moments and missing, missing, missing --

Essay: The Infinite Assonances Within
by Eleni Sikelianos

The New York phone book is suggestive of a sublime
genius, beyond human origin, a domesticated list
of names drawn in much
as an evil spirit will be drawn & contained within
a small, blue safety bottle. Here are heroes and djinns. We are drawn
not to its contents but to its mystery. It should be microminiaturized
by hand & worn
on a chain around the neck, an Ifrit in a cucurbit, to touch upon
delicate, upon agile & dexterous,
a light field ergonomically created at night, a theory
of the means of the process of the toucher who touches upon
names, a field lightly. The names
escape in a black cloud of naming. And if it were graven
in the eye corners it were a warner
to those who would be warned
at that corner or this:
when the index has power enough
to weigh down atomic factors, the tactile corpuscles take
advantage when the touching is touching
upon a field restrained within the adjacent names which harness
the possibilities of flesh and spirit properties, anatomophysiological practicalities
of famous violin players’ brains; what is contained
within the touching finger? the little pinky
is not irrelevant, nothing
is. The sum of names does not point to the souls of this city
or to the distance between bodies but
rhymes, hence, hey, everybody is
those that touch
the ones they're touching & she who touches
upon a thing dark or light might read us thus
what is happening anywhere, what has happened, and what will