to cling
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:11 PM

 
Putting It On Wax
The Real Real Behind The Real

Saturday, December 04, 2004
movie scene #1 - MORNING, THIRD FLOOR CONVERTED ATTIC BEDROOM IN AN UP AND DOWN DOUBLE APARTMENT, CLEVELAND.

<>

cut from black title screen to backlit silouhette of a nude woman opening the blinds of a curtainless window.

cut to man in bed viewing this from behind. a look of contentment as he raises his head to look more intently. and then his head drops to the pillow.

G I R L

- good morning pillowhead.

M A N

- call me at lunch.

G I R L

- the cat got out.

M A N

- i'll get it. any trains?

G I R L

- not one. they're random.

M A N

- no way. ok. call me at lunch.

G I R L

- here's the phone. it's on the nightstand.

M A N

- cool.

he rolls over. fade out.


posted by sw # 8:19 PM
Monday, June 14, 2004

eternal thoughts of what happens to us after

there will still be birds to watch out a window somewhere
and snowmen will stand guard over us in the winter
the badlands will still be there too
and we’ll go over them.

there are pages in a heart that turn
and hands that keep their grip.

spw.


posted by sw # 8:27 PM
Sunday, December 28, 2003

PLAYING PHILLY AND CLEVELAND IN BALTIMORE

never let yourself get beat deep.
run once in awhile.
beware underneath.
double coverage.


posted by sw # 4:24 PM
Wednesday, December 10, 2003

just because you say you are on an emotional roller coaster it doesn't mean that you are on one. half the things you say are made up. the simplistic shit you bring up. and you're over there on some fucking roller coaster. well then put your hands up. at least enjoy the ride. you just go around in circles with your emotions slung like a purse, like a dead skinned rabbit slung over a butchers arm. i've got nothing sympathetic to even think about you.
posted by sw # 7:04 PM


Friday, December 05, 2003

i want it to be like coney island in 1917 with boys briskly whisking wrists inside peepshows. they fucking dance boy i tell you those women move. people just discovering synthetics, and those nylons could sure hold an ass up high. especially under nickle payed for stagelights from the hawker outside. 1917 and not a care in the world.
posted by sw # 10:15 PM


Friday, September 05, 2003

yet another setback. dragging it on and on. carry on they said, carry on. it is a weighty matter that greys this slow. a wrinkle stemming from columns of sameness. there's always another hill. always. we stretch into the distance and go on and on. late into the evening we pass coins across bars and barter that last dollar down to nothing. ground up we'd all look the same. really. and the people jeer all the way. they invent new reasons and weights. they shift change everything into doubles. and there is no picking between that or the other. just yet another setback. heavy crosses and tight ropes and mirrors. leave it to them to bring the hammer.
posted by sw # 8:11 PM
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 9:37 PM

 
Side lessons

All I have to say isn’t only one thing,
There’s other stuff too,
In the background.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 9:32 PM

 
(Fat snowflakes at 4am when you can see your breath and hear nothing but silence.)

Trudging through the snow all I could think about was angels and finding Josh's jeep door. I told him not to park it in front tonight. Too many idiots out tonight. Tonight was the NCAA Big East Championship Game. This place was like a different planet. My apartment had become the Star Wars cantina in the middle of a national media event.

Earlier we had been sitting on the porch outside away from the breakdancers. I have no idea how they got there, but getting a beer from the kitchen was a journey through time. My livingroom was the Bronx suddenly 1980s. I'd like to think it wasn't them that did this, but the timing was right. It sounds racist, I know. But he was thinkink it too. I felt like confessing to one of the tv news cameras. Wolf Blitzer save us all.

He got up and just walked away. I followed. Didn't say nothing just walked. We've been searching now for awhile and I don't think we're going to find the door. It was one of those soft shells and we were never going to find it. I gave up and just walked the earth. We walked in thin half frozen grey sludge packed tight; tire tracks, grey. Streetlights say enough when no one is out and the plows have gone through.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 10:08 PM

 
I want to get money to buy special education students each a nintendo wii as a means to enhance their motor skills.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 2:53 AM

 
amsterdive pt.2

remember you were here and couldn't score any higher,
and we just wander through dodging bullets
stealing bicycles and laughing.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:41 PM

 
students/ teaching/ respect/ 1960s stanford prison study

I have made them aware of both our inherent and assumed roles and seek to further educate them as to the intrinsic value of study, both of human society and self.
I will try as best I can to monitor the assumptions that are prevalent on my end of the teacher/student dynamic, and will challenge students to keep me to this attempt.

why I should respect them…

though their assumed role is of a “lesser” status, their inherent role is simply a matter of their humanity progressed up to the age at which I receive them. due to their limited experience, it is my task to make them aware of the larger issues and complexities that occur at both the societal and personal level. I will respect the student first as a human, secondly, and most significantly as a learner.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:57 PM

 
To My Wife

Some things are as predictable as lesbians with dreamcatchers hanging on their car's rearview mirror. And the way we miscommunicate with these paltry words just adds to the thick soup of errors. It is like we are hanging in there in the late rounds of a boxing match where the punches are slights and the knockout blows come late at night over videogames. We grasp knowing that summer always comes for everything. Even us, beautifully.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:13 PM

 
combat.
twenty six hours in a ditch.
"i'm blinking.", the soldier whispers to himself.
he is alone...for the moment.
"fuckin sun. come on! RISE!", there is a desperation
in his voice as his subconscious speaks without him.
the paranoia set in hours ago and any minute the air
could be filled with frustrated grunts and howls like
the sighs from a wild old boar as it lay suffering in
the night, dying.

the uncertainty.
the thin patience.
the 'fuckin sun' about to break.

"where the fuck is my cigarette!", he says, as he
starts losing more than just his mind.
"damn!"

the poor man stops to take a breath and realizes that
he's turned his back on his post, just as a tiny
crackling sound reaches the very edge of his ear.
"no.", he says as the words don't even leave his
brain.

the worst fear.
the worst possible scenario.
the reinforcements are late.
the sun, just about to surface.
the moment has come.
every nerve and muscle at maximum tension.
man confronting death.
the fear of god.

the crackle now a rumble ready to burst into a graphic
image of the ugliness and strength of a true enemy.
the soldier pulls forth every ounce of testosterone
and adrenaline he has in his miniature-feeling body
just to open his mouth and make an attempt to release
some form of battle cry.
a high pitched but guttural shrill starts emanating
from his every pore,
"grrrrhhrrggrrrrggggrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!".

and just then, every higher power in the history of
all the gods must have heard the ultimate pleading
wail from the pure essence of a single human being as
he went running, freed, into an empty field at the
crack of dawn.
a plastic soldier in miniature
compared to the vast space of mud before him
not yet dried by the sun
or clotted containing someone else's blood
but not his no
his was screaming through tired veins
and tired eyes too sick of rats and sunrises
towards barbed wire and men amazingly not running next to him
a twisted football game of field position

"MOTHERFUCKERS!", he cried, drowning himself in such
a completely malleable body with rubber arms flailing as
if the sheer sight of him would deter his enemy, and
for that moment he might as well have been seduced by
either listening to Blue Room with his eyes closed.

the slow-emotion cut off from cares.
sweat like the everglades in his brow.

his un-needed skin finally crumbled to the earth as he
rose up and out with clouded destination.
he soared closer and closer to the peace that the end
brings, brighter, lighter, forgiven.

just then, his overall blissfulness was cut short by a
truly uneasy feeling, brought on by the glaring eyes
of the entire 144th platoon standing and staring in
amazement at what they had come all the way there to
reinforce.

immediately back in his shell, he opened one eye,
to see familiar faces,
not enemies.
he opened the other eye, to see the field,
still empty.
to see the full effects of paranoia carried out.
he stood still.
confused and disappointed.
not a sound was made by any of the other troops, not
even an offer of a helping hand.
they were scanning there own minds, each and all of
them, for a drain, eager to empty out some of the
pressure caused by the good chance that that guy
standing in the field over there could very well be
any one of them.

the soldier took short breaths,
every other one, trying to slow the speed of his
heart.

an over-sized drop of sweat dangled off the tip of his
nose while he tried to bring the connection between
his mind and body back to functional, enough to get
his toe off the ground and attempt the first step back
towards his war-mates, but in the bottom of his sight
was a flash of white and red particles, leading him to
the acceptance that after everything he'd just been
through, right now, there was an excrutiating pain,
interrupting his embarrassment, caused by a bullet from
behind a distant tree, that entered the back of his
right knee and, in a split second, sent his knee-cap
dispersed in front of him, fragmented with a shower of
blood, this time his own.

he fell to the ground, curled into a ball, and
clutched his distorted leg, while the 144th platoon
scattered like cockroaches for any place to hide.

it was as if the lightswitch for the sun was in the
apartment of hell and had been flipped,
and no-one,
with squints and scared tears,
was used to it.

"I'm blinking"
he thinks again like an old movie
the picture thrown haltingly in basement walls flickering
but the lights are fluorescently on
causing whiteness
of knuckles, of enemy soldiers eyes in trenches this close,
of god, of cartilage splayed out like torn up end bits of notebook paper
floating in puddles,
puddles that contained his knee in bits near trenches,
filled with the reflections of day blind allies, or truth.

he's run this far and will never walk again
out of the no man's land between curled up agonies.
under a sleeting rain of bullets with his head in
the dirt, the man secretly gave up. the battle for
him, was over.

he did not have to pretend to be dead
for he was sure that he already was.

the wind picked up out of nowhere, as a messenger of
the certain fate which was a large black cloud rolling
in from the east, god's piss.
"(rub it in, why don't you.)", the pathetic, old,
one-legged man thought to himself as he shook his head
as violently as he could to get rid of the flashback.
"I'M NOT MOVING!", he yelled at the evil faces of
heaven as they relentlessly rolled toward him now
yelling back in thunderous voices.

"mr. randall!", a high pre-pubescent shrill came from
through the trees to the bench that he was not budging
from. the old man heard his name mixed with the roar
of god and yelled back at the clouds again, "LEAVE ME
BE!"...

"hello?", the young voice searched out for the old
man's ears, "mr.randall?


******* CHAPTER 2 *******



"You know what kid..."
"what mr. randall?"
"when I was your age I was already working, and I didn't go around all day pestering old men arguing with GOD while they were sitting in their serenity spot!"
"huh?"
"you're sorry."
"I'm sorry."
"yes, i know."
The small one starts to cry about 4 steps into running away.
Randall looks more at the rain and less at anything else.
His mind gets cluttered but strangely blank with the thought of war...
and reason... and... hosiery.

The way they'd dance you'd think it was the end of the world. He wasn't so much captivated by the whole thing as much as he was transfixed by the sight of twenty four nyloned legs kicking a Can-Can in Coney Island. His eyes never made it to the s-curved hip lines of those sequenced beauties but lived for the spot on their thighs where nylon leg met with three inches of skin and then two garter straps. He was watching the way those three inches were framed. It should hang in every art gallery in the world he thought. Twenty four of them in a row.

It used to be that nylons did that to him. Now he wears two of his own. One for each stump of the legs he left behind in no manÂ?s land. WhatÂ?s the use of a serenity spot if you can be interrupted by any punk orderly that comes along. He had been doing alright. Progress was being made. Progress.

It was an age of expectation of miracles. After the war it seems the whole world was trying to make up for lost time. The woman seemed suddenly easier. He liked to think that it was the combination of going without men for a few years and a newfound awareness of how good their legs looked all bound up in those nylon stockings. Everyone had a job, a girl, a welcome home parade, and a story. People were inventing things besides new ways to kill each other. His first moving picture show was the night he got back to New York. Got there a few minutes late and tipped the usher to wheel him down close and not use the flashlight for fear of calling too much attention.

The usher took the money with half a smile and got slowly half way down the aisle before letting go of the handles. Randall's limb-challenged bitterness almost expected it to happen but he still couldn't believe it. He didn't even get mad as he crashed into the screen while the giggling usher yelled from the back, "Is That Close Enough For You?"
The black and white characters too close, the charging of laughter barreling down the slope and crashing into him just as he had with the screen, the god-damned bitterness... everything was grey and blurry as Randall and his still working top limbs did not do anything. He thought he should just leave. He thought if his legs were still there he would run out the fire door just to the right, but quickly concluded that if that was the case this sort of thing would of never happened in the first place. The only come-back was to do nothing. He closed his eyes, listened to the story and imagined his transistor. So there he sat, motionless and emotionless until the laughter died, the movie ended, the joke was over, and everyone in the audience left feeling shitty about themselves and sorry for a man so used to embarrasment even Randall himself felt the whole fiasco was wasted on him.

***** Chapter 3 *****


He ate in the cold. That punk kid orderly had the windows open on the first nice day of spring. It created a draft. Drafts made him cold and that sonofabitch had no respect for an old man still lost in the trenches of a soon-to-be forgotten war relegated to history books like the march of Nampolean's army through Egypt. His son had called again. His eggs were getting cold. That useless fuck.

*****Chapter 4 *****

No man's land standing right there waiting to get hit and nothing. But on the march back from the front they had been hit by an artillery shell. Randall's legs lay wasted on the side of the rode eight feet from where his body wound up. Randall passed from that picture into one in which Mitchell took a last gargling breath and expired in a mouthfull of blood and a look that said both help i'm sorry remember and momma all at once. They were about to go to paris on leave. Six days off.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:25 AM

 
23 possibilities concerning how a bra wound up in this alley drenched in a puddle and soiled.

1. it could have been a drunk couple. a guy with real class taking his date behind the dumpster for one from behind real quick.
2. maybe a garbage bag broke and it fell out. but then why isn't it surrounded by used paper towels, cigarette butts and milk cartons.
3. a girl, gnashing of teeth, flesh on bone.
4. maybe a bum had it with his stuff, taken from a former wife's bedroom drawer and savored for it's safe warm smell.
5. liberation just short of burning it.
6. it was born there and was now in the waning years of its existence.
7. the lady upstairs saw it flutter down like an angel yesterday as she pulled in her line-dried laundry.
8. it sprouted from a seed that fell in a crack in the pavement and was tended by an undersexed adolescent.
9. there was no bra, no puddle. just an alley, alone, in mid-mastubatory imaginative delirium.
10. it was a cry for help.
11. the white flag of surrender and abandon after an ignored truce and a long night of drinking.
12. the moon cried it out, like salt in tears.
13. it was an improvised sling for the wounded.
14. somebody somewhere had the matching panties, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
15. the neighbor got it switched up in his laundry and tossed it over his shoulder in a fit of loneliness.
16. a message intended for a spy.
17. it used to be a dove before the spell ran out.
18. as part of an elaborate hoax meant to befuddle anyone who saw it.
19. it was painted in later.
20. it was an omen, a sign of things to come.
21. the bird had perched on her window all night long waiting for it to come off. at just the right moment it swooped in but it was too heavy to carry it all the way back home.
22. he couldn’t keep doing this. what if somebody found out.
23. it was raining too hard for it not to.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:22 AM

 
all the things i used to live to make have been killed out of me and replaced by the things that i live that make me kill. the things that used to kill me are now the things i live off of. who i am is not who i was but who i was is not who i was but am now. and what those things are don't matter as much as what they aren't anymore. what has replaced those things is now irreplacable and the irreplacable things that came before have been discarded. nothing is the same anymore. it's all the same to you but to me you are all the same and not me. i used to do this now i just don't. i keep discarded things somewhere where things were easily discarded before. i've let go and hold on now even tighter.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:03 PM

 
The way they'd dance you'd think it was the end of the world. But Erle wasn't so much captivated by the whole thing as much as he was transfixed by the sight of twenty four nyloned legs kicking a Can-Can in Coney Island. He had been off from the hosiery factory since the day shift. Erle's eyes never made it to the s-curved hip lines of those sequenced beauties but lived for the sopt on their thighs where nylon leg met with three inches of skin and then two garter straps. He was watching the way that three inches was framed. It should hang in every art gallery in the world he thought. Twenty four of them in a row and Erle could barely contain himself. You can't imagine the longing of a young german imigrant working in a hosiery factory.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:19 AM

 
i've got too many choices and not enough options. shit's narrowing down as it speeds up. and fucking mall traffic. every fucking day with the mall traffic. here's some advice early on. NEVER WORK AT A MALL RESTARAUNT.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:26 PM

 
Peter Jennings is surprised about the complexity of basic American thinking. He fails to realize how media savvy even the least of us has become. In fact, the least of us tend to be the more atuned to coverage. He was surprised that people weren't reacting as much to the daily news swirl that he and the rest of them are so sucked into. We tend to think more long term, more abstractly. Peter Jennings doesn't get that we just assimilate the daily shit and pile it onto an even bigger pile of shit entitled: "the shit we already knew". This comes as a shock to him? It's funny to think that these heads don't stop talking long enough to think about what watching all their blab does to a person, how it just adds and adds.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:09 PM

 

- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:53 AM

 
a proposition

in the entirety of native american creation stories, none can be found containing original sin or the notion of a fall from grace. this is a fundamental supposition, completely contrary to the belief system of Christianity. As members of a predominately Christian society, and when considering the entire body of western literature, we must consider the native American and their belief in an initial harmony. effective use of initial harmony would change the dynamics of modern storytelling.

ex. begin a story with initial harmony. nobody is upset, nobody is suspicious, nobody is at fault. the storyline would consider the entrance of a disharmonic presence, and through struggle, a return to harmony. therefore, the “sin” or disharmonic presence, is ultimately fixable.

or

ex. rather than fixable, no occurrence of disharmony need develop. the story would be about the creation of a lasting object. worthy of praise, worthy of attention, worthy of storytelling. things start good, get better, and ultimately transcend.

- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:59 PM

 
it’s fucked up these loops that we spin in
for Dave Gangloff

I keep thinking that I need to remember that it is not about me
I don’t need to get all inside myself
picturing my own death
spinning out of control
man wasn’t there a phone call cigarette journal song pen shit pillow food drive
drug project mix tape old movie email game laundry drink news show ball game shower
some other thing but this
I am not leaving and I need to remember that it is not about me
it’s fucked up these loops that we spin in
it’s fucked up that that love swallows everything
and spits it out in a mouth full of sleeping pills.

spw.
8/1/04
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:50 AM

 
"just four choruses. more than that and you're just practicing." - Charlie Parker


- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:52 PM

 
ray charles

My dad loved him
and I think if I put it on even now,
especially now,
he would still love it.

- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:25 AM

 
the tuesday night fights suck tonight

we got women that box
round boxes punching bags
and we wait for some skill to slip
calculations of swiftness
instinctual prey
ripping and tearing
and carrying home over our shoulders.

- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:36 PM

 
NOTES FOR WAITERS, AN EVENTUAL NOVEL

Chapter Eleven
"On The Dropping of The Check"

When your waiter brings you the check it can only signify one thing; the waiter wants you to leave. In an ideal world this would be the moment when you reach for your wallet. Too many of you don't.

The check signifies a bringing-to-a-close of whatever it is your doing there. It means that you should be leaving now. By not doing this you place your waiter in a moral situation when it's probably not most opportune.

The waiter, having dropped the by now forgotten and isolated check, must now wait. For all that a name implies the contrary is true of most people who have the job. At $2.13 an hour that is just asking too much. $2.13 an hour simply guarantees that the waiter will wear a uniform, show-up, and have a cheap corkscrew on their person when called upon.






- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:39 AM

 
------- Merely (Academic) --------------

I shit on the memoir.
If you are going to use my time
at least lie to me a bit.
Give me fiction.
I already have a life
of my own.

--------------

----------- Merely (Academic) Alternate Version ---------

I shit on the personal memoir as a genre.
At least lie to me.
I already have a life.

---------------

- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:20 PM

 
Un-lowed

(at this end of this poem I keep the dollar)

the beauty of an elegant line
and the ability of cardboard to hold up through rain
had never, I believe, been held in so much proximity.

american design holds that the elegant line
can be found most anywhere
the beautiful simplicity of the round Honeywell thermostat
a chalk board wish bone formation in a blur of X's and O's
the brooklyn bridge
the arc of a well wind-blown trash bag in a movie
and most noteably at the time,
the aerodynamic line that stretched from my car fender to my windshield
as I exited the freeway and sat at a red light.

cardboard is commodity for the homeless.
it is a tangible sign that defies our general inability to fell trees and gather wood.
it is also disposable and therefore readily accesible.
cardboard is useful both as shelter and signage.
the man on the exit roadside employed the latter usage, signage:
HOMELESS. HELP FEED.

i admire the simple linguistic line,
the to-the-pointedness outweighing the implied necessarry reactionary sympathy
black marker on wet cardboard
soggy wet like a dollar bill found in a back pocket after swimming
unlike the dollar bill in my hand i thought destined to reach the sign holder
windows rolled all the way up safe against wind, sound, guilt, contact









- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 1:45 AM

 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Reflection of a choke)

the buzzer sounds
and I haven't even
got my shot off(

spw

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 12:39 AM

 
man shoots cow, other man shoots first man.

man is from California, in Montana
other man has never met a man from California, considers most of them to be queers.
other man tells this story once in town.
man had no business hunting.
man had only owned a gun for a day or so.
other man patrolled his acres on horseback with a gun for where the barbwire was down.
other man had land, Montana-sized land.
man was fleeing from the west. fleeing his old life and striking out anew.
other man live on an old dirt road.
other man had actually named the road himself. And made sure the post-office knew when the change had been made.
man lost it somewhere, bought a gun, and had intended to kill something.
man was unsure if he was the something that he was going to kill.
man pulled off the Montana rd and walked and walked and walked.
other man said that the man had been crying.
other man had his dad’s old shotgun.
man had never been armed before.
man was probably going to be the one he was going to shoot.
man put the gun to his mouth and decided, after serious consideration, that he should take it out again.
other man, pondering the flatness of the earth, saw man walk out of the treeline, armed.
man saw a deer in the clearing.
other man swears that he took steady aim at one of his cattle.
man vigilantied the cow he thought was a deer.
man gave it the bum’s rush. fired at point blank range.
other man took the events into consideration and then fired a shot himself.
man took his place next to the cow.
other man found out later that man was from San Francisco. Probably a queer.

- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 10:22 PM

 
**** CNN *****
*** HEADLINE NEWS ****
** BLUES ****

gaining a sped up halflife bits scribbled bits its fragmented slip screen ticker type factoids crawling towards my sped up halflife.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 11:47 PM

 
so the big deal is that i've been dreaming of the dying breath of a great man.
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 10:41 PM

 
$
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 10:43 PM

 
[12/8/2002 7:41:12 PM | swheeler] --IMPOSTERIAL POSES --
[12/8/2002 7:39:22 PM | swheeler] i asked a man
[12/8/2002 7:38:29 PM | swheeler] when they opened,
[12/8/2002 7:35:53 PM | swheeler] he said he only just started
[12/8/2002 7:29:11 PM | swheeler] sleeping there.

spw
- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 10:46 PM

 
--Downtown Arcade --

a mustached lady
with her red-tipped blind stick
is kicked
by the dome haired asian kid
so heavy in her pink moon boots.

spw


- posted by Sean Wheeler @ 10:41 PM