Two Birds

Still ain’t flying. Mostly bad brains. Bad Brains. Fast lanes. Past change. The past has changed the past can’t change. Work it out. Let him get there. Work it out. Think of the name. What do you think of the name? Fast lane. Spare me change. Don’t let it change. Stay on the corner against the wall with tattered gloves no change. Work it out. Let it change. What’s the name? The sound. Make the sound. Make it sound. Sound. A loud sound. Change the sound. Bend the note. Blend the notes to get that name. A landscape of names. One big name. God what’s the name? It’s a word in a sound. An idea in a sound. A worm in an apple. A warm tooth. Rolling white skies in beaches of names. Grains of names. The price of grain. The price of your name. The cost of using names. A man made name. Bring down that fire for these caves. These illustrious caves. These illustrated caves. Fire and names. Ready. Aim. Fire the name. Spread out the spray. Hit the name on the head. Squeeze the nail the trigger. Hold steady. Aim.

Slip mountains. Slippery mountains. Open canyons. Fast canyons. War cannons. Name nannons. The game handed to us. Slip ups. Toss up. Throw it up. Give it a shot. Just say a name. Sound it out. Round about. A roundabout way for a straight line. Past time. Passed time. Passing time. A billboard’s name. There’s the name. Rest for a bit. Stay here. Pass it. Give it up. Take it. Just try it. You’ll get it. You’ll find it. Try the name. Dance it out. Try a dance. Give it a name. A big slow sticky rolling changing staying the same on a slippery slope of names.

Boxe Anglaise

This is the amateur boxing match I had on Saturday, April 19th 2008 in Springfield, VT. Bob Kelly helped me by converting the recording from VHS to WMV. I'm in the red corner, wearing American flag shorts. During the National Writing Project's Summer Institute in Vermont I wrote about the fight. Here it is:

Three Rounds
Shawn P. Kelly

Fighting In the White Spaces

“Do you know who you’re fighting?”
“No.”
“What do you weigh?”
“137”
“And you’re from…”
“Burlington.”
“Yea. You’re fighting my guy. He’s a good kid. He’s right over here. So, you orthodox or..?”
“Huh? Oh… Southpaw. Yea. And him?”

“I’ll tell you when there’re only ten seconds left in the round. I’ll yell: ten seconds. And when I do that…”
“Give him everything.”
“Yep, you use all you got. Cause sometimes that’s when you win the round. It’s the last thing the judges see. And you can count – I got it down – you can watch the tape. After you hear me yell on that tape, you start counting. It’s exactly ten seconds.”

“All right. What the hell? What are you doing? I can’t help you win if you don’t keep your hands up. When you go back out there, what are you gonna do?”
“Keep my hands up.”

“Good. You won that round. You know why?”
“I kept my hands up.”
“Yep. Now you need to keep doing what you did and win the next round. This is it. Keep circling him, working your jab. Keep your hands up.”

“You did good.”
“Sorry I got blood on the shirt and shorts.”
“No. Don’t worry about that stuff.”
“I heard you yell ‘ten seconds’.”
“In that last round I yelled ‘ten seconds’ when there were thirty seconds left. You needed those points. And you did good. You worked him.”

“Hey man. Good fight. You kept going. Hitting hard.”
“I thought I had you in the first. Thought you were gonna go down.”
“I thought I was gonna go down too.”

“You should clean up your nose. Ice it.”
“I don’t think it’s broken.”
“No. But it’ll be pretty swollen. You can check again with the doctor.”
“Did you see his eye?”
“Yea. It’s all dark and swollen underneath.”

Animal Memory

Before the fight, his coach pointed out my facial hair. Suggested I shave. His fighter had. But the match started between a clean-shaven man with long hair and a bearded man with shorter hair.
The audience sat on hardwood bleachers. The ring stood in the middle of a high school gymnasium, at center court.

I circled clockwise in the first round. Then he had me against the ropes. He swung again and again for a knockout, stepping into his punches.
I didn’t go down. He stopped moving his feet as quickly.
During his attack in the first, the audience crackled with excitement. But for most of the fight they sounded like static.

Jabs had loosened his hair from his headgear. Each shot made a shoulder-length, sweaty, dirty blonde splash. I knocked him down, fast, but the referee called it a push, shaking his head “no.”

His gloves in flashes, or held tight against his cheeks. Then my blood. At first it was a few splotches. With each punch, more red pooled on his blue glove. But he no longer stepped in. He leaned now.
I started punches with a long jab. Then volleyed fists from each side, like the ball in a tennis match. The torso twisting and lunging.

He came in, clinching after a shot caught him in the head.
We stood close in the end, throwing all weight into looping punches. Analog metronomes reaching back and swinging into each other.

Recording

Not quite a tension. Just a thick expectation that made me feel empty and heavy at once. The ring looked awkward, floating so high at midcourt. But so did I, gangily weighing in at 137 pounds on a 6-foot frame.

I think his coach told him to test me right away. See if he could knock me out. Snap that stick of a man. The solid shots disorient more than they hurt. I started to turn my back during the initial flurry. It’s something I’d done in sparring at first – turn my back – and it’s not only bad boxing, I didn’t like what it implied about my instincts. My heart.

When my nose started bleeding, it felt heavy. Like someone was pinching it with their fist and pulling down. But the videotape doesn’t show the blood. The tape disappointed me the first time I watched it. Reality is more violent. Memory more stuttering.

Hallway

I don’t have internet access in my apartment, so I can only get online at the high school or middle school. However, I found some writing from the last time I was in France, dated March 12th and 13th 2006, and figured I could put it on a flash drive and post it here. At the time I’d been reading The Elegant Universe. I didn’t finish it, and so I brought it with me to France this time too. There are other parallels with the found writing. I mention spirals right away. Talk about cavemen (second entry). Other themes come up that connect to current thinking. I ramble too. I guess I haven’t changed at all in two years.

The following is from the first entry. Not sure why there were only two entries, and two days in a row, though I guess that shows my dedication:

[March 12, 2006]

I wonder if this corridor has always been the same. If the atoms have replaced themselves like skin cells. There’s probably an easy answer in the collective mind of science, in a book somewhere.

I think about how I see my memories differently depending on where I am when looking at them. Then I think about how my memories contribute so much to who I am, and then I think of a spiral moving away.

Voices change over time. In writing, in throats, in heads. In wroads. Roads change too. Even if you stay on the same road you’re on a different road when you move. That’s what makes it a road, that it changes and you can change with it.

I don’t believe in chemicals. Imagine a globe, a spherical map, with each person’s worldview, that tiny point of our heads that rolls out across and through everything, as a light positioned where they stand. And that worldview, that perspective, is something so small holding up, putting together, something so big. That globe is being held afloat by each tiny light extending and wrapping around it.

We see energy. It’s tasted, touched, heard, smelled. Except that’s the passive voice and energy is never passive. Sure, it is directed and manipulated; but it never stops. It just changes. It wants to stop, but there’s nowhere for it to stay put. Because it’s still energy when it stops, it doesn’t die. It can’t be created or destroyed. But humans stop. They’re directed and manipulated. We change. But some of us can stay put, and all of us die. We create and destroy; we are created and destroyed.

I wore a robe for a whole school year, my first year at University, and I didn’t write a thing about it during that time. Why not? I never let myself burn photos or commit suicide, because I never know what I’ll think and want later on. So far things always have reached a new point of being appreciated.

Remember how pure capitalism causes the economy, usually represented by a line graph where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is prosperity, to have extremes ups and downs? So it’s usually suggested that we infuse socialist and democratic regulation to ease the slopes. Sometimes I try to assert control over my emotions and thoughts. Other times I let it go, to feel the highs and lows. I like rollercoasters, especially extreme ones. But riding a modern rollercoaster isn’t comparable to fluctuating among intense emotions. Old rollercoasters probably weren’t too much like it either; except any judgment I make of them now would be comparable to future judgments of modern rollercoasters, and opinions then about rollercoasters then are comparable to opinions now about rollercoasters now.

[…]

Soft usually means vulnerable, but also important. If I were to sleep alone in the woods I’d sleep stomach down with my arms under me so that my hands touch my shoulders. I know this because whenever I sleep without a blanket, often on a floor, I end up sleeping this way to best keep warm. Plus, it’s the safest way to sleep, because you need to protect your soft belly and under-chest, where most of the heat comes from. The other option is to curl into the fetal position, but this only makes sense if you have a sort of protection. Because from the first position you can pop right into action and get a quick view of what’s going. But in the fetal position there’s rolling necessary before you’re on the move, plus you have to expose your softness in order to look around efficiently.

The road changes, but it’s made of the same thing. It changes because of where it is, and I think people do the same thing. As a matter of fact, I think most things do the same thing.

What’s fun and exciting about thinking is how you can do it in different ways. That’s why poems can really get you going. Because a good poem makes you think, and it makes you think in different ways about the same thing. Cause the poem is made of the same thing, and so is your brain, but if you want they can both change and when they do it’s a direct cause and effect. For example, when the poem changes your mind changes, or when your mind changes the poem changes. But I guess that’s really the same thing, so maybe the poem and the mind are the same thing.

This corridor can’t be the same because they must repaint it now and again, plus there’s some gum outside door 315 that wasn’t there yesterday. And when I walked down it yesterday I felt differently than I did today. Still, I bet if I came back in two years I’d recognize it, barring an explosion, though I’d remember it differently than I do today.