Translating English --> English
February 5, 1998
Providence

Each person writes a little something. That little something is then translated by another person. And then again, perhaps. And again. "Translation" is loosely interpreted; the translator may apply whatever rules or whims s/he sees fit.

1. Everyone comes by the road. They come on the road or they come by the road. They get there. They break. They breal horribly in half, smiling and frowning all the time. They don’t know how to dance. They smile and laugh and lift thei feet occasionally from the ground, wiggle their hips. Their lips smiling, and hips wiggling. Everyone wiggles their hips. I like to wiggle my hips. They go back and forth. I wiggle with him and her and all of them. We go and come on the road for a while. "Sharpen your smiles on the stone," you say, and we break in half.

 

This road will take you anywhere. Stay on the path, or stray from it. You’ll luncheon.

You’ll luncheon, despicably, on 1/2 of a sandwich, contorting your mouth into a grimace, a wincing rictus of pleasure or pain. You have two left feet. You’ll wince and mince, lifting and lowering your clunky boots slowly and deliberately; you’ll shimmy suggestively. Your mouth contorted in a grimace of pain or pleasure, your booty gyrating. Every booty gyrated. We enjoy the gyrations. They wobble to and fro. We gyrate with boys, with girls, we are indiscriminate. We stay on the path; we stray from the path. "Hone your bone on the grinding wheel," you instruct us, as we luncheon on 1/2 a sandwich.

 

2. In the beginning, the earth was null and void, and without value save that which we impart to it, for going about and around in it. However the case may be it can yet be said that he was, whether he would admit to it in a place of public discourse, quite naturally, for he was natural in all his graces, never one to finish a sentence if (or kiss and tell of course but no gentleman will do that even ender duress) if some way could be found to arrange -- look over there! Is that a butterfly? Yes that with the violet wings! Why it’s nothing if not a rarity, odder even than snow in July, or luck in a hard place, or eidetic memory.

 

Genesis. Nonexistence. Enlightened state. Circumnavigation. Hedging. Diahorrea of the mouth. The sexual inflation that machismo demands. Verbosity. Sleight of hand. Colorful. A mutation: when hell freezes over. Stale fortune cookie. Photo documentation.

 

3. Are you writing already? Send me e-mail! You are bawdy and minty. Dirtily Minty. You can’t say you don’t/ Tasting dirt in the evening. Circles marked on me in the window. Under my eyes. Send me a letter. Our former housemate is a virus. After I tasted perfume, say it’s platonic. Catatonic or cathartic, gender converters and adapters. "Lost a coin on purpose, ..." Finding a sailor’s anchor abeach on the floor. I am speaking in my own English; don’t stop being so warm.

I just switch between the two that are dying. And stretch out something new.

 

--Are you writing in readiness? Gender female. Who are body and mind. Dirty little mind.

--You can’t say you don’t like it! Tasty one: flirt in the evening; circle closer, mark on me with your winsome, there. Bend me one better. Sunder my eyes. Our older playmate is the wildest. After we’ve tasted -- perform! It’s not platonic. Can’t contort enough; it’s magic under the covers. Lust, the coin of purpose, binding the jailer. Thank her -- in bed -- on the floor.

They are shrieking without language; can’t escape the heat.

It lusts. Switch between the two that are lying together. Stretching out and begin anew.

 

4. Outlining

An outline summarizes the major ideas of a written work in topics (major headings) and subtopics (subordinate ideas). You can indent the subtopics to different levels to show their relative importance in the outline. As you’re brainstorming, move topics up or down to change their level. Hids (collapse) subtopics to highlight main ideas or show (expand) subtopics to focus on small details.

 

Encircling

I encircle, submerging the minor modes of a spoken mark in topography. Major headaches. Andn submarines, located ordinarily in the tropics, idolize you. Canonize the subtropics; two different levers shower our relatives, who are important in the outlying terrain. As the storm’s brewing, the tropics move up or down to change their level (their limits). The subtropice are hidden beneath the High Ligh -- man’s ideas subordinate to the Big Show, which expands or focuses on small details accordingly.

 

5. He would’ve written it, but puns can’t catch cunts. Under this pile of Chaucer, with all the fart jokes, I taught raunchy students doodoo. Shoeleather touched my hand, and a paragraph was padded with dirt and mint. We shared gems, cheating at writing. Kidding around, muddying the pen with our switching tales, we mistakenly opened the gate, and burst out into the world. Neither of us had ever seen corn grow, but only seen it eaten. Now we are lost in the fields.

 

With piles of it, piles of it, under all of it, the kids, they didn’t know shit. I waited for a studenet, traded padding, I scratched her leathery cunt. It was a shoe-in. She wrote a paragraph. I breathed on it, cheating. We shared together in the mud, traded more stories and she moved her butt around, very quickly. Other than where she meant. Quickly. Other, either. A corny story I know, yeah the same thing. But I could only eat her burst her gate. I could only write her world.

 

6. When I walk in the rain I pretend to remember how to breathe. Sometimes after taking in big gulps of air, I find I do remember and lay down.

I am lying, and searching for an image to boot. I need a picture, something to fill my head like a bomb and drive all the other facts into the ground. And now I need one so I choose rain. Not because it is raining, but because it used to rain in the summer -- on Long Island, in Colorado, in Maine; great torrential rains which would wash out trails and terrorize my ears with thunder. That memory, that crackle, is the sound which I now choose to drown out the rest of my head and leave me in silence.

 

Sometimes I think about air, but only when there is water nearby. At these times, I fall to the earth -- I feel the earth and look for fire, until something explodes....

The rain does not pitterpatter, but it explodes a boom in my ears, between my ears I feel a boom and the pop of memories of past pitterpatters. Or of past booms, and pops of ideas which water the ground that I walk on.

The water falls to the earth and explodes, and I am left up in the air, growing.