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m58 · 7 months ago

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new work from David Wolf

Yielder

Yardage forgotten, solstitial fade, as I reimagine that old severing song leading me to polka right out of ballroom dance class. Ginsberg offered a spontaneous revision to one of my haiku. Sure.

Got a postcard from the Sandhills. Turned it into a found poem: “Everything’s fine and dandy. / Bought myself a mobile home. / Two bedrooms, living room, the works. / All worn out from digging a ditch / 5 feet by 25. / Fell into it last night in the dark. / Shit. / Write soon. / B.” To be clear, America is not my favorite summer movie (things passing in and out of the mind, mind passing in and out of things). Unfair work— that is, the empire—stretched right on through evensong.

With my in-laws, looking for their ancestors in an English graveyard, watching a young family load into their car, I thought of an idea for a short story. The title: “Writing is a Form of Discovery.” A man discovers he is not the moon, possessing, as he always has, a bad sense of chronology, a scratchy faith in kismet, an indifference to Keats’s “Bright Star,” and, like most, a pedestrian sense of oneness.

Again a general cry: the past eight hours! Thanksgivings (oh please!)! And lately? Just hanging at Cap d’Ail. Year’s end, more Googlism, mileage, meaning, lonely, lonely. Hey! The sublime’s fogging to blue, a distillation of roses, knowledge in review, grand allusions filling the French triptych smeared with tankas in drippy translation.

To wit, t’ tweet, to whom it may concern. Sing it. Bah, oui. Creative nonfiction followed me from Savannah to Charleston. Welcome (better late than . . .). On the cab ride to the Camelback Inn Resort and Spa, I spun for the cabbie my now forgotten Killarney Trilogy.

Words listing, I tried to remain upright, riffing another intro, a morning in May exercising fragments, good interpretations, a memoir of one autumn and its remembrance of faux horse sense. Please pass the cookies. Marvelous. And the vin ordinaire.

Echovox stew: meaning matters, before and after and back at you doling out Benjamins like comparisons trumping loosey-goosey, still projecting memories of the latest shooting in sonnet form, cutting across the OK panhandle in the paisley seashore rain, proverbs glowing red and gold in spring’s promising air. Must be the beans. Or Dad’s favorite golf balls bouncing around the interior of the old noodle. Pick up the pen and call it a poem, not an institutional rubric, filler like success, a testamental ambience, a selfie earnest as any treasury of emptiness, variation in the wind yapping. Zurpreeze!

A gathering erasure of firsts strewn along Hackney Pass. How to know precisely how the memo’s useless distraction fouls the pin’s fall into the bin. Tuppence for your thoughts? Well, just the sorry boom of ye olde avant-garde, a shouldering of pesky trite tropes.

Yarner

Turn out the artifacts of your imagination. Tea? illspreoogud. ; ; ature. Hark! Back to some steaming order? Crawling from my solarium to my data turret, I went in search of the nightmare’s measurable outcomes. train whistle blowing in thick fog, echoing up the river valley a third-tone higher, muted I read the critical introduction explaining what is going on in the work. I annotated the sunrise slipping across the page. I may be addressing you soon, fair thoughts for the fair, procedural sludge for the decimators. Feeling mixed, a bit of alachrymosity as I count the embedded chimes springing through June foliage. Waiting for that singular narrative to emerge, endlessly revisable, worthy of memory’s revisitation, I framed the present. Gathered some lavender and white phlox . . . and now on my sox I’ve got burrs that clingle-tangle-stingle. Cool it. Going nowhere. Like the apple that rolled a promising distance from the pear tree. Like the toss that sent it further, into the chaparral. Why the tire swing doubt? I’ll trust the pattern in the rope, the weave, the braid, the tale. Nascence tells me something is still quaking in the lost meadow on the cutting room floor. Eternity, I apologize for all the cuckoo figuration. Hastening to find some peace of mind, I’m up. Understandably sweaty. Maybe I’ll return to the fading climate of wonder. I watch the haze hang. Dry winter endurance, forgotten scratch. Imitation’s theatrics yawn. tree-trunk shadow—drooling a squirrel

Fabler At The Lucky Duck gastropub we see no duck on the menu but of course that’s why they call it The Lucky Duck—cheers! A fly lands on the page I am typing up, less obtrusive than my remembered cat. It will only take a wave of my hand to send the fly on its way. The shoe that was on the other foot has now dropped—after some effort. Brushed a croissant flake from my trouser leg— before a butter stain could set in. The sparkling lights of Nice at night across the bay have given way to the sparkling morning sea— as Black Sabbath’s “Hole in the Sky” plays in my head. Idling, we encounter the road ahead: three signals: red, yellow, flashing yellow: two directions down to one lane: no green. And now a motorbike speeding past that sounds like a weed whacker. through the canicular haze: snow-streaked Alps Got a jolly reprimand—got a real cheerful. Sapped of light and patience for the itch to resolve, we caught the coast lining through the haze and stupefying heat. The level sea, pine, palm, tourterelle, gull’s bark, diesel, rampart ruin— the tableau of morning offers a fine napkin to wipe away the dirt of ardor. “How are you today?” “Fine, can’t complain, no use complaining anyway, I mean, no one’s listening.” “Did you say something?” “I said—.” “Yes, I heard you. Just a little joke.” “Yes, a little one.” “Have a nice day.” “Another joke. ‘Nice day.’ You’re a funny one.”

Teller Love made me want to cry like a ladle dripping acid fog. Cold as . . . mice. Dead, test-rattled mice. Cat-rattled? No. Keep it human. Though once true at heart, the youthful enthusiasms felt now like distant fictions, delusions. Any gleam off the fossil, artificial. I begged the lily to shadow me through the highlands. The narrows of attachment proved easily cast. Harrowed to the last. I stand supplanted in the clearing, in the heraldry of sun and stone, a shiftless relic eked from aught. Guessing as always, I follow the lost eclogue balancing before nebulous ease. Rail, yaw, as we must. As the monuments rot in the pale rushes, the drafts of indolence dim the turn to inward solace. Supple revelry. Supplicatory. Applicable. Billable neglect. Needlework. The air bluffs composure, fleet as honey. The jewel found in the knapsack shines its naysayer’s music. Open, peony bud, we cannot help thinking. Quarried. Time upstages a whiff of Xanadu. What a wind. What a zeal-zoned moment. Late summer afternoon—an owl hooting— on the lookout for an early bird special? All leeward these leanings, roughing up the dimming afterglow, shed, deciduous as sanity. Levity enrages. Almost dawn. Time scuffs the overwrought you in youth. Apropos, out to pasture, no pie dish in the sky pooling rain either. Care insinuates an aperture, a tithing of effortless chirping. Comfort, oscillating most frivolously, outraged rhetoric’s tambourine. Zoning optics neutralized effervescence. What to expect. A dry field, mole mounds, stone cross stretched in pale grass, keep your eyes on your path, your way across, look out for dog shit. Do a little quickstep, quirkstep, quiet as the stardust in the blade, as sunlight on skin. It’s not a lack of this but of that that’s causing it. A lack of that but this. While this. You are busier than you think, which is why you forgot to finish reading that must-read. Must be it, must be the reason, you tell yourself as if you were two. In the flow of it. Dreams free of recent hauntings. Ghosts in the old family home just up the hill. Why did you buy a place so close? You weren’t thinking? Live for the swim beneath the cliffs, the trees. Live for many reasons. Now you are thinking.

We still have plenty of cereal for breakfast. No need to thaw the muffins just yet. If the manual says to hold the button for three seconds, that means three seconds, not a quick count of three. Evasive answers return in several layers of erasure. Unintended meaning of something you said occurring. Power just went out. It’s back. What was I saying? Hardy mums. The word. Took a chance, showered during the thunderstorm, had to. Made it quick. As fern thorns snagged an opening drape.

Closer Open up, said the season. In exchange for the word, I was sent on maneuvers with a love letter from Michigan in my pocket. After the great quarrel, abiding, wincing at the figure “damaged goods,” I penned a poem, an aubade of sorts. What could be done against it all?

Sunday overslept. Meanwhile legend after legend frayed like all the great love poems do, mid-August every year as we put off unpacking, thunderheads thirty miles east. Poems fizzled, frizzled then fizzled. Random gales delivered more origins to the sodden brain. “Indian Summer”?

Golly, hear that report? That’s not dialogue. You and your bear claw were such a sight. So much a live poem, and who needs to write it down, just take it in. Sure I get bored. What’s up tonight? We could start earlier to avoid the question. “Vinny, Vinny, Vinny,” I said, “no solution will redevelop lost spring trees in early leaf or my old Olivetti.” It’s like a hometown layover, a snapshot too brief to consider going home, coming back. A holiday beckoned, the glint of momentum missing from my morning inventory. Poems, some aphorisms, Venice—the lists can be endless. If you regard tourists as fantasizing emperor moths, you may gain some insight into the landfill of “civilization.” Lakeshore love song, glacial teardrop, help move us along to rest down by the river of sapience. Again we were foiled, which prompted me to say, losing all patience, “I ask you, is that your banana on the counter or is it the intersection of Hope and Wisdom, a lost zone demanding lidless ignorance?”

David Wolf is the author of six collections of poetry, Open Season, The Moment Forever, Sablier I, Sablier II, Visions (with artist David Richmond), and Weir (a micro-chapbook from Origami Poems Project). His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals, including BlazeVOX, Cleaver Magazine, dadakuku, decomp, E·ratio, Indefinite Space, Lotus-eater Magazine, New York Quarterly, Otoliths, and River Styx Magazine. He is a professor emeritus of English at Simpson College and serves as the literary editor for Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts.

#poetry #m58

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

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Microsoft contractors are listening to your Skype conversations

Seamus Bellamy:

Look, this is getting old. Just assume that everyone one is listening to you fart, copulate and sing in the shower, all the damn time. My former co-worker and professional tall person, David Murphy, took the time today to rap about Microsoft humping up on top of the digital surveillance dog-pile. He points out that, according to Vice, an unnamed Microsoft contractor has spilled the beans on the fact that Microsoft has been holding on to five to ten-second snippets of folks using Skype's translation functionality to yammer on with on another. Did I mention that he provided samples of the audio clips? There's totally samples of the audio clips. Apparently, Microsoft's having their contractors listen in on the clips to improve on Skype's translation chops.

When confronted about their snooping, Microsoft assured Vice's investigator that the snippets were fired over to the company's contractors via a secure web portal, with all identifying data removed from the recordings.

As David points out, there's no way to keep Microsoft from doing this. Worse than this, the company, oh-so greasily, completely neglects to mention that underpaid humans are listening on what you say during your Skype calls.

From Lifehacker:

...Microsoft doesn’t indicate in its FAQ that your speech is being analyzed by real people. In fact, this description almost implies that it’s a fully mechanical process, which it is not—nor could it be, since a machine wouldn’t be able to pick the correct translation. The entire point is that a human being has to train the system to get better.

I also didn’t see any settings within the iOS Skype app that would let you opt out of this “improvement” process, but it’s possible that Microsoft will change this approach going forward. It would be great to have an opt-out switch or, even better, an opt-in switch for permitting analyses of voice data.

David's Lifehacker post goes on to chat up the fact that when she's not busy cracking wise with Halo's Master Chief, Cortana, Microsoft's digital has the same eavesdropping problem. The good news is that, you can keep the service from listening to you yap by tweaking a few settings in Windows 10. The bad news is that doing so more or less renders Cortana useless.

Smoke signals and bonded couriers are starting to look pretty damn sexy, right about now.

https://boingboing.net/2019/08/08/microsoft-contractors-are-list.html

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ecotone99 · 5 years ago

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[HR] Influence

“No don’t do it,”

“Oh my god don’t do it”

“No. No, no, no no no” repeatedly

Then in unison, “Nooooooo!”

Charles, Becka, and Dylan are all sitting around a comic book in their fort in the middle of the forest, It’s being held together by bungee cords and various large pieces of cardboard or metal or whatever else they could get their hands on. Dylan and Becka get up and find their way to their usual spots, Dylan on a bean bag chair and Becka in the hammock. Charles is still reading the comic book and flipping through the pages

“I can’t believe they would do Dracula like that, the story was going so good but then he had to turn on everyone that was helping him???” Dylan says annoyed.

“I know I feel like its such a betrayal to wha-” Becka trails off while Charles starts to tune them out. He keeps flipping through the pages with demonic imagery. He starts to hear something but can’t make out what it is or where it’s coming from.

“Charlie? You there?”

Charles snaps out of his focus on the noise, it disappears, “sorry I was zoned out, what were you guys talking about?”

“We were talking about how they did Dracula dirty I can’t believe they would do that to his character, I mean I guess if you look at th-” Dylan begins to trail off as Charles tries to focus on the sound and listening more intently this time he learns the noise isn’t something it is someone.

“HEY!” Dylan snaps his fingers repeatedly to grab Charles’ attention, “You okay man? You seem a little off.”

“Sorry about that, I think I’m just tired it is pretty late, I should probably start heading home.”

“Sounds good” Becka responds.

“Take it easy Charlie, same time tomorrow night?” Dylan asks.

“For sure, peace guys” Charles then leaves the comfort of the well-lit fort into the dark woods that surrounds it. There are faint street lights that he starts heading towards. As he walks over the very uneven terrain with all of the sprawling roots and random dips in the ground he can’t help but think about that voice that he heard in the fort, that voice, he doesn’t think that Becka or Dylan heard it, they probably would have mentioned it. He keeps thinking, maybe it was a trick of the mind, maybe it was someone far away that he just barely picked up or maybe

“It wasn’t,” the voice said as if whispering into Charles’ ear from behind. Charles whips around in a quick 180 to find nothing. He cautiously walks back into the clearing right before the road and then does another fast 180 and darts it to his bike on the road and starts pedaling as fast as he can home. He glances down every alley and street as he whips by on his way home, hoping to not come across whoever that voice was.

He eventually makes it back to his backyard, the tv is playing at a loud volume you can hear it from outdoors. As Charles sets down his bike it makes a slight clang, the tv turns off, Charles freezes.

“WHO’S THERE? CHARLES?” His mother shrieked. “Sorry mom, I-” Charles responds as he enters the house but is then taken aback by his mother sitting at the kitchen table finishing what looks like her 7th beer. “I’m sorry for being so late.” He starts to head upstairs to his room, his mother is too drunk to respond and is in her little world.

Charles throws himself into bed with the Dracula comic they were reading back at the fort, he starts flipping through the pages as he starts to hear a familiar voice before it can say anything Charles immediately states, “Who are you and why are you talking to me?!”

“Getting right to the point, I knew I liked you. I am merely looking to improve someone’s quality of life and for who I am, well, I am someone who can do that for you”

“Well, I don’t think my life needs improving.”

“Are you so sure about that? Your mother and friends say otherwise.”

“Listen, my mother’s been sober once before she can do it again and-”

“But for how long until she eventually relapses, you know that it’ll never stop right? It is going to be the death of her, I can guarantee you that.”

Charles begins to tear up as he starts to believe the mysterious voice. Through his tears, he asks, “What about my friends?”

“Well, after you left that had a conversation about you just have a listen.”

In Dylan’s voice, “Thank god he left, it’s getting harder to be around him.”

In Becka’s voice, “Hey come on now it’s not that bad.”

“Oh don’t sound so high and mighty you were saying the same thing last week.”

“I know but, I think his mom is drinking again and, I’m worried that us moving is gonna ruin him, he’s gonna be all alone with her. I think we should tell him.”

“No way, that’s gonna get complicated and confrontational, we only have a couple of days left let’s just lay low and then we’ll never have to talk to him again.”

“I guess you’re right, let’s head home Dad’s probably worried sick.”

“So you see, everything is going to go south pretty fast unless you let me help you!”

Still crying, even harder now, “How can you help me”

“Just allow me to influence some of your decisions. Repeat these words, Mentis Imperium, and I can help improve your life.”

As he repeats the words the voice spoke to him, his mother barges into his room after hearing him talk, “What are you YAPPING about? You little shit!” She tosses an empty bottle at Charles’ head which he narrowly avoids; he grabs the broken bottleneck and slips under the bed.

“Where did you go you little shit?” She runs over to where he was and looks under the bed, then she hears a rustle above her, she looks up to find Charles with the bottleneck raised over his head.

A loud thump is heard from Charles’ room. A few moments later Charles emerges from the bedroom with his hands covered in blood. He heads to the bathroom and jumps immediately in the shower, clothes and all. Once he drys himself off, he gets on the phone and contacts his friend Dylan and Becka. “Hey guys, I know it’s late but I was wondering if we could meet up at the fort? I just need to get out of the house for a while.”

“Yeah, sure dude. Is everything okay?”

“Was it something with your mom?”

“I’d rather not talk about it right now, can we just meet up? Just wanna take a load off with some friends.”

“Okay Charlie, we’ll meet you there.”

As soon as Charles hangs up the phone he snaps out of whatever the voice did to him, he can’t grapple with what just happened he goes into a panic trying to think of what he should do next, call the police? Runaway? He was going into shock.

“Breathe, just, breathe.”

Charles begins to take short breaths which gradually increase to deep long breaths as he starts to calm down. “What...the fuck.”

“That was a part of me improving your life, do you think you were better off with your drunk mother in your life?”

“Not like this, that isn’t improving my life, it's ruining it, I don’t want anything to do with you, leave me ALONE!”

The voice goes silent for a moment, Charles feels a weight taken off his chest, he realizes he is in utter silence. But as soon as it left, it came back.

“Unfortunately for you once you spoke those words we entered into a deal that can’t be broken.”

“What?! What was the deal for all you said was you were going to improve my life, there was no deal, I don’t even know what you want from me!”

“Well it’s very simple, I just want...You. You will be a way for me to influence your world and do what needs to be done.”

“Well, what if I refuse?”

“There is no refusing now.”

Charles runs to the kitchen and grabs the first knife he sees and holds it to his neck, “I’ll do it, I swear I will.” tears start to well up in his eyes.

“No you won’t, you and I both know that you aren’t going to do this because if you did that, you’d be just another useless mortal who wasted his life. We both know that you aren’t a waste of life Charles, you were meant for this.”

“I- I don’t know what to do now I just- I-.”

Charles slowly gets up from the floor and heads to the bedroom, he opens the door and falls once again to his knees

“Oh god, I-” Charles breaks down once again.

“Listen to me Charlie, there is only 1 thing left to do and that is to meet your friends at the fort and finish this the only way you can, there is no going back now.”

Charles goes into his room, averting his gaze from the bed where his mother once was and grabs a stack of comic books close to the door. He then leaves and quietly closes the door, on his way out he grabs the knife that he used from the kitchen and sets out of his house on his bike, towards the fort.

Charles finally arrived at the spot where they left their bikes on the street. Dylan and Becka’s bikes were already there, they came early. Charles ditches his bike and grabs the stack of comics from it, he can feel the knife he hid in the stack jostle around. Feeling sick to his stomach for what he is about to do, a part of him just wants to stop and turn back to his bike and go back home but, a bigger part of him knows that there is nothing to back to. It felt like his body was almost moving against his will, but not like when the voice took over, he knew what he was doing but couldn’t stop himself, no matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t.

As he got closer and closer to the fort the feeling in his stomach got worse and worse until eventually, he started to throw up, violently. Eventually, he had arrived at the fort entrance, he knew that once he entered he would leave a different person. He raised a fist to knock but waited a moment, this is the last chance, the point of no return he could sav-

“Hey, Charlie,” Becka says as she swings the door open.

“Hey guys, thanks for coming again,” Charles responds.

“Anytime dude, is there any comic book you wanna read? I see you brought a bunch there” Dylan says as he chuckles.

Charles can now pick up on the empty interactions he has with Dylan, perhaps the voice was right about Dylan’s feelings towards Charles. A feeling starts to build in Charles, a feeling he hasn’t experienced before, was this, hate? Anger? Fear? Whatever it was it was building quickly and towards Dylan.

“Honestly, I was wondering if you guys wanted to re-read that last Dracula comic, I think that if we take another look at it from a different point of view, it might be really good.”

“Ummmm, are you sure about that? I don’t wanna revisit that awf-” Dylan trails off as the feeling in Charles reaches its max, he’s had enough of Dylan’s talking and just wants it to end. He reaches for the knife in the comic books.

“Just...STOP!”

Becka screeches at the top of her lungs and with a quick slash Dylan’s throat is now leaking blood, Charles in awe of what had just done. Becka continues to shriek as she is paralyzed in fear of Charles. The noise coming from Becka begins to remind Charles of his mother’s screeching when she first came into his room that night.

That same feeling starts building up again of wanting that noise to stop, just wanting everything to stop, but it’s different with Becka, She isn’t actively negatively impacting Charles like the others but amidst all the shrieking that just brought back images of his mother trying to kill him and the sudden realization that if he doesn’t she could escape and get him in trouble so he briskly walks over Becka and similar to how he killed his mother he brings his weapon over his head and strikes it down into Becka’s skull, and he does so repeatedly getting covered more and more in Becka’s blood until the knife breaks.

Charles comes out of whatever haze he was almost as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes he could see what had just happened and he loses it, he just completely ruined his life. He breaks down weeping in the fort, amid his breakdown he realizes there is a red glow coming from outside the fort. He exits the fort only to be bathed in bright red light, Charles doesn’t know where the light is coming from only that it is blinding.

“H-Hello? I-I did it, I-I-I can’t believe I did it,” he falls to his knees and looks up to the sky weeping, he can’t take it anymore, he doesn’t know how he can go on existing after what he’d done.

A black demonic hand waves over Charles’ face and the weeping stops.

He doesn’t feel bad about what he just did, he doesn’t feel anything anymore. He stands up off of the ground and sets off back to the street towards his bike.

“Let’s begin.”

THE END

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