The best...and worst of EvilToasterElf

Ms. Haiku wrote:

Yes, that book inspires, doesn't it.

As I poet who travelled through Turkey it didn't take much for it to suck me in. I thought it was phenomenal.

I don't think travel really changes us more than any other new experience, once you realize that you aren't collecting new experiences and new perspective, you're not really living anymore, just existing.

Ms. Haiku wrote:

You mean like bungee jumping?

Travel could help define home depending on the length of the travel. Home for me, after being away from it for 10 years, is the sense of belonging. I didn't realize that I was just on an extended trip until I found home again.

By the way Brick Lane is better written than Snow, in my opinion. I thought the translation of the dialogue in Snow was stiff. The description of Snow and what it could mean was incredible.

Exactly like bungee jumping, be it some new activity, cooking or trying new foods, anything really to avoid walking through the day with nothing but that dark void in the mind where thought should be.

I haven't read any of his other books, but I intend to, the guy has talent. I'm not so sure the dialogue was stiff though, because the book all takes place in such a small time frame, and Ka was the kind of character who seems to exist far better in his own mind than anywhere else.

Droevig wrote:

I moved away when I was 18 to live in belgium for a year....

I was miserable for the firs 5 months or so, but I learned the language and I learned to get around. I barely made ends meet alot. But...

It was the best thing i've ever done with my life. And I never would have beena ble to do it had my family or friends come with me.

I remember when I was travelling extensively around Western Europe, and taking a lot a planes, I would stop for a second right before I boarded. And in a split second I would just kind of take an emotional poll of myself, and everytime I got on a plane there, fully knowing there was absolutely nothing I could do if the plane went down, that at least in the last few days, I have done everything I possibly could, eeked out every last breath of life from the experience, and was perfectly content to go sit down. It doesn't happen too much these days though. But it's something that will stay in my mind for a long time.

Memory


Part I

Old Jackets

Tracing a path along remembered tram lines,
Prague feels like a lost jacket, pulled years later
from a dusty hanger, the fabric
still fits along the irregular frame of my chest.
The restaurants shout their entrée’s like
cuff stains, the waitresses plod along the
back of my eyelids, like so many familiar
wrinkles in the leather.

Memory multiplies with repetition,
water pours into the pot, while the flame
struggles to evaporate it all away.
Though like a siren speeding down
the tourist clogged Wenceslas Square
I struggle to know whether I can still
hear the squalling, or the memory of
the sound.

How hard I try to turn words into pictures,
and make memories into life again.
I try to stretch metaphors along the circumference
of my brain until they become emotion
until I am still scared

of the Czech cowboy police,
until the sweat
of my masturbation is her sweat,
until the heat
of this New York shower,
is her heat, tangled into my nostrils,
with her perfume,
lingering in the folds of my coat.




Part II

Old Photos

At her wake, I spent hours with scrap books,
tottering through photo albums, adding
her memories to mine. It’s funny how you
can watch someone dying through still
images, how the flash bulb catches
the twilight of the elderly, her death rattles
transmitted through the negative.

The sound like an old jazz singer, too stubborn
to admit death has wrapped its scythe around
their vocal cords. I look at her wrinkled face
laughing at some family barbecue, and I hear
Neal Armstrong

Why is it that the tatters of a song
can clear a path through the snow-
covered world of memory for so long?
How can the voice of some singer replace
my grandmothers laugh for two weeks?

The layers of protein in our brains, weather
so thoroughly from the acid of our thoughts.
The dreams though, pile and mix, until what
I thought I was is so adamantly replaced
by what can never be.

I will never be in this photo album, there
are no moments here for me to recollect.
Her face, so vivid inside the casket, has
already began to melt from memory,
like a picture, yellow, and hot in some
attic, trying to scream off the dust, with
that voice, that phlegm the dying accumulate,
displacing everything about life they forget
they once loved.

Being Enlightened wrote:

ETE, part I was definitely good but man, part II....jeez, pulling the heart strings. I love your descriptions, so often they bring tears to my eyes. There's many people I'd love to have a beer and a chat with on this board and you're definitely one of 'em!

BE the feeling is entirely mutual my dear. Thanks for stopping by.