Deep in the dregs of a late night, I noticed that the recently-announced Google Wave had a update sign-up form with a field for “a message to the Google Wave team (Haikus, sonnets and ASCII art all accepted).”  As my sense of irony went to bed about three hours before me, I pounded out this Shakespearean* sonnet and then submitted it.

Google Wave

Though twice in vain The Goog I have appeal’d
for beta links and privilege in advance
of those who wait for bloggers’ slick reveal
and those who frown on alpha’s dirty dance,
I shall again into this box submit
what flimsy, metered dreck I might expel
from finger-bones and frazzled skull (and wit)
this late at night, when Google Readers swell
with fresh, post-dated news, and coders dream
of sheep inventing other sheep.  The wave
that splashes here is nothing yet but steam
and salt in blinking eyes, some sand that gave
this clam a pearl.  But bring to me the storm
of Google Wave, and watch me rock the form!

If my Google accounts are suspended in the next few days, I wouldn’t blame them.

*It’s extremely important to point out that here, “Shakespearean Sonnet” refers to the form, not my impression of its quality.  Sweet Bard in heaven, I’m so sorry.

That plastic boat I lost down the drain years ago
has come sneaking back,
harboring behind the corners
of quarter-shut hallway doors
and near-empty rooms.

My boat is back--above ground,
half-full of city piss and dog vomit,
hull repainted by the brackwash
of underground lights, which
still slosh and glow alongside
the edges of my long, stern shadow.

What sailors I sent out
with balance and impressive hats
have gone below to rigged decks,
to pump bilge and sewer sweat,
and to hedge their rubber-band bets
by tacking in the far coasts of my home,
by awaiting further word from their admiral.

The last real adventure
sinks slowest, drifts farthest, barely dies.

My tongue is haunted
by skeleton chickadees
and skeleton sparrows. 

I can taste their cigarette-flavored wingbones
beating from throat to tip
when I open my mouth to let the wind in.

I was four, and I held up corn
bits behind a closed window.

I can feel their toothpick feet prickle
when I walk in the open, and
when I don't sing, which is always,
their paperclip ribcages swell
out to scrape my teeth.

I was eight, and I fed them
alka-seltzer.

My dreams are about gravity,
and the smell of dead flies
falling into ashtray beaks.

I was sixteen and driving angry,
and I ground silence into the pavement.

But when I speak, throat open,
they flutter and lift my voice into strange altitudes
with jetstream buzz and lamppost stutters,
and my mouthful of gristle and twigs
(and childhood murders)
is barely ghost enough to fly.

In a breathless display of retroactive reporting, I wish to relay that the launch of Some Cold, Bright, Old-Fashioned Facts was a resounding, nay, reverberating success.

My reading came near the conclusion of this thunderclap-shaming word-Valhalla.  If my sense of audience appreciation is as accurate as my sense of hyperbole, then I believe that no heart was left unbroken, and no bone left unhealed.

(The Sun, pictured upper right, leans in close to hear every syllable, scorching all but the poet.)

Some friends, publishers, and authors went to the Shadow Lounge that night for the monthly poetry slam, which DJ Brewer was masterfully cerimonializing.  In a single day, I was drilled into the molten core of Pittsburgh’s young poetic sphere.

My birth clone Zachary was present through the entire epic, for which I was elated.  He hints that a commemorative animation may emerge from his Hesphatean techno-toils.  Here endeth the epic.

The book itself looks great, and sold well at the event. The whole thing got written up in the Pittsburgh Examiner, replete with a picture of me looking distracted behind a table.

Next: deliveries, library donations, finding poetry readings (went to a great one run by Brian Francis on Saturday), finding critics willing to review me, menial labor, resuming lasped human contact, and (burning brain willing) actually writing.  Thoughts, threats, ideas on any of the above?  Pretty please, lemme know below.

After months of composition, editing, and waking up in an entirely different city, Some Cold, Bright, Old Fashioned Facts, a short book of my poetry, is being released tomorrow!  The book launch is taking place in the Mellon Board Room at Chatham University at 5:30 p.m., where I’ll be hooting and grunting my way through a selection of ink stains that made their way into this chapbook.  Some Cold, Bright Old-Fashioned Facts will be on sale at the launch first, then from Word Parade Books’ website, and finally on amazon.com.

“Grendel’s Mere”

They guard the secret lands,
the wolf-slopes, the howling grounds,
the dangerous fen-ways, where mountain creek
water goes downwards, under mists of the turf,
under the earth.  It’s many a mile
far from here where the mere stands,
beyond the frost-hung groves, where
water overwhelms a forest enclosed by roots.
Each night may see an evil omen:
fire on the tide.  No child of man lives
who’s wise enough to know its depth.
Although hunted by hounds, a moor stepper,
a stag strong in horns, were he to seek the heart of those woods,
drove from afar, he’d give his life first
before saving his head for a fate on that shore,
so “safe” is that place.

Shiftily translated by your truly.

I’ve been reading Beowulf (mostly in Heaney’s translation) and the Sagas of the Icelanders, which are medieval accounts that read like sensible modern fiction, and are about Norwegians who revered poetry, fashion and farming, while exploring and homesteading new, uninhabited islands.  Also, they were the fucking Vikings.

I’m trying to write a story in the style of the Sagas about colonists of Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter.  It’s the best analogy I can think of for a people homesteading an entirely uninhabited place, and I suspect that actual galactic colonist accounts, passed through a couple of gravity-warped generations, would possess a similar sort of hard-to-believe matter-of-factness.  Bits and pieces to be posted in the distant future.

At the bus stop, I am older and out of work,
and some little kid points a twig at me, and says "bang."  So,
chuckling, I drop down, undignified ground impact
and "ahhh, you got me."  His mommy smiles, looks away,
and her champion fires at my knees,
which are already shot, so I fall back
with "awww, you got me again."  He walks up, tall
from here on the ground, where his footsteps roar
with the coming traffic, and he brings his weapon up over my face,
with his velcro shoe on my shoulder, and he says in his pride,
"I'm gonna get you for good."
Because he is so sure, so sure,
I can do nothing but this:
I bite the barrel of his gun
and and twist it away so that it pulls
him down and with splinters in my tongue,
I say "just because you got something
doesn't mean you'll have it for good.
Goodbye."  Mommy gasps, child cries, the buses come,
the bullets stay, goodbye, goodbye.

When wolves send letters by mail, they tend
to over-lick the postage stamps
and back side seal; I think because
in the glue hide the sticky ghosts
of sheep bones and horse meat,
which I to say I am sorry
that this poem is sent
to you soggy.
I could smell in the letters
that seal it together the dirty hints
of your fine words and your clean flesh
and could not help
but to slobber.

A cursory survey and map of sites and events of interest around Dartmouth College, with a particular mind to those matters upon which traditional modes of cogitation and rational inquiry are perhaps reluctant to step. A historicallous map by Matthieu Pierce and Zachary Pierce.

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!”
–Robert Frost, from “Mending Wall”

View Dartmouth Dreaming in a larger map

Matthieu Pierce
Poetry, writings, internet hijinks.
Formerly of matthieu-a-gogo.livejournal.com and elsewhere.  Henceforth, here and elsewhere.