on the broken trampoline

stretch my arms,

the wind current

will lift me, i will glide

somewhere not here

no crash-land, my body

will be laid like a pillow

on some beach

with a sound like a long

kiss on malleable sand

well then i’ll walk

to a place where i can tell

you that i am here

and then i’ll walk

to the place where you are

and i’ll fucking break down the door

and sleep on your goddamn chest

i have eaten some stuff

that other people have killed

i told somebody

that i was literally dead today

i imagine myself followed

by the ghosts of these things

as i meander around the kitchen

i told them

that i was literally

haunting them

by talking to them

invisible bugs on my cereal

an intangible, years-old pork chop

all rotting in my cup of tea

and i pretended

that i was joking

can ghosts haunt each other

————————————————————————————-

thank you for reading

the last time i posted was just before midnight on december 31st 2010

i’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to post again (via guilt at taking so long to do the poetry packages for people)

things are stressful, i live in a cupboard, i can’t find a job, stuff

if you want to hear the above poem in my voice i read it out loud with the stanzas in a different order some time into this http://www.last.fm/music/Oh+Yeah+This/_/Cross+Hunger-Border song

(i sound terrified and i am terrified)

thank you you cute-ass people

i love you, you are all cute as heck

here is a ghost chococat, just for you

hi um, surprisingly quick follow-up to the last post

i now have this little thing that i do that a bunch of people seem interested in

what it is, is i write stuff on stuff and send it to people

i will write poetry specifically personalised for whoever requests it, on found objects and things

so it can be on stuff like pages from books and magazines and postcards and other little things that i cherish

or it can be on things like, polaroids of my poetry written in unusual places

or like, a CD where each successive track is me saying a word from the poem

it’s a package, so you’d get a whole bunch of these things

you could ask for any theme you want, in the poetry or the things they are written / presented on

it only costs £5, which is roughly $7.50, which is roughly €6, etc. (plus shipping costs)

if you are interested in this send me an email at inauric@gmail.com

or even if you are not interested you could send an email too, or something

if you are super-keen, or have already made it clear that you definitely want a package (i have a list sitting next to me here right now) here is a pricing list:

i don’t know exactly how long it takes but an estimate is that the UK will take 2-5 days and everywhere else will take 4+ days

this isn't me, this is a ghosty picture of my ghostfriend mauver

thank you, um

also in follow up to my previous post, which included a top ten favourite musical releases of 2010 list

here is a free mixtape of music selected from those 10 albums

http://www.sendspace.com/file/86tgwh/

one track per album, not necessarily a favourite, in order of the list

1. Forest Swords – ‘Hoylake Mist’
2. Los Campesinos – ‘Who Fell Asleep In’
3. Johnny Foreigner – ‘Harriet, By Proxy’
4. Neverever – ‘Young Runaways’
5. Erykah Badu – ‘Love’
6. Baths – ‘Seaside Town’
7. Islet – ‘Ringerz’
8. Nicki Minaj – ‘Did It On’em’
9. Scissor Shock – ‘knife in the head of all false abstract expressionists’
10. Lil B “The BasedGod” – ‘My Window Sill’
11. [Bonus] The National – ‘Afraid of Everyone’
12. [Bonus] Beach House – ‘Norway’

and also two extra bonus songs that i’m sort of obsessed with but weren’t part of a good enough album to be on the list

also

http://twitter.com/BebeZeva/status/18173123111157761

how awesome is that

i am super looking forward to Pop Serial #2 coming out, via http://popserial.tumblr.com/post/2437823982/i-have-a-couple-boxes-full-of-copies-of-pop-serial

til next time, stay ghostmodern

hello kitty band-aid

when i am here

i forget where i used to be

when i am not here

please don’t remember

how i kept forgetting

when i am there

i will cash in

all the words i had

for a new body

and i will lay that body

in a road in times square

and hum to my self

hum hum hum

here is my contribution to the "photographs with 'i am like october when i am dead in them'" meme, i guess?

• i will carve a spaceship from my internet flesh

don’t bother trying to call me

i will be busy carving a spaceship from my internet flesh

• our little private jokes

my need to be wanted

your want to be needed

we laugh

and feel infinite

not in a good way

and neither of us know

that both of us feel infinite

we never say that we are fucked

(forever)

i guess that

if we fucked forever

we would never have to feel

• what did you think

of that time i stopped talking

stopped leaving my room

stopped eating

you didn’t even know that happened

do you like my poems

• my first step

in radically dissociating

from my body

is to eat

all of this fucking

peanut butter

• when you find this poem

on a screwed up piece of paper in the trash,

please don’t read it

it hurts when you read it

my writing process

• remember the night

we talked about light speed

paradoxed ourselves dizzy

sat in a field, shaded

in the midst of blinding roads

and felt something

straining us from the grass

what was that

and why did we hold on

• i curl up in the empty bathtub

record myself making baby noises

feel purpose

lay with my phone on my chest

think about living on neptune, tea,

sticky rice

i feel the radiation sink in

imagine it filling gaps where words were

i sleep

sleeping in a bathtub is so nice

————————————————

those are all of the poems

i dedicate them to Poncho Peligroso [ http://ponchopeligroso.com ]

i am sorry i haven’t done this thing in a while

words are hard

a few great things happened while i ‘wasn’t blogging’

i handed out steve roggenbuck’s chapbook to a bunch of people

here are a couple photos of me holding photos of emilie holding copies of ‘i am like october when i am dead’

the first one also has jonny’s foot in it

the second one had too much brightness or something so you can’t see the words and written in biro next to it is “a poem by steve roggenbuck, sort of”

another thing is that Poncho Peligroso sent me a bunch of really neat stuff

including a moleskine notebook, a copy of ‘richard yates’ by tao lin and a copy of ‘eat when you feel sad’ by zachary german

i haven’t written in the moleskine notebook yet, it’s so pretty

i have read all of ‘richard yates’ but have not finished ‘eat when you feel sad’ yet, this is not a comment on the books it’s just the thing that happened

i really liked ‘richard yates’ it made me feel terrible pretty much throughout it

well um here are some more pictures

a note that came with the mail, it says, "Dear Snail Shell Escape Artist, I BELIEVE IN YOU, KEEP IT TOGETHER, YOU'RE A FUCKING POET. sincerely, poncho peligroso"

pretty books on top of pretty moleskine on top of pretty envelope

and the pretty envelope too it says "To: Aurist (who is a ghost)"

so uh yeah thank you so much Poncho Peligroso you are the best

i hope you enjoyed my words and this post or something i guess

here is a list of my favourite 10 releases from 2010, because i can

it will probably change a lot later but i don’t even care i’m making this god damn post

—

1. Forest Swords – Dagger Paths

2. Los Campesinos – Romance is Boring

3. Johnny Foreigner – You Thought You Saw a Shooting Star but Yr Eyes Were Blurred With Tears and That Lighthouse Can Be Pretty Deceiving With the Sky So Clear and Sea So Calm

4. Neverever – Angelic Swells

5. Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)

6. Baths – Cerulean

7. Islet – Wimmy

8. Nicki Minaj – Pink Friday

9. Scissor Shock – Psychic Existentialism

10. Lil B – Rain in England

—

thank you i don’t know when i will be back

recently the blog of the “limited-edition art/literature print magazine” Pop Serial mentioned my review of steve roggenbuck’s chapbook

http://popserial.tumblr.com

felt kinda dizzy because they have some amazing people that do stuff for them

and sorta the fact that it’s the first time anything i have done has really been on a thing that a lot of people would see

they

(Stephen Dierks, the guy who runs it i do not know if it is on his own or not)

are producing their second edition of their thing

it has Tao Lin, Noah Cicero, Heather Christle, Sam Pink, Daniel Bailey, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Kendra Grant Malone, Matthew Savoca, Ben Brooks,Brandi Wells, Prathna Lor, Audun Mortensen, Frank Hinton, Miles Ross,Megan Boyle, Michael Inscoe, Jordan Castro, Ana C., Cassandra Troyan,Cody Troyan, Brittany Wallace, Feng Sun Chen, Carrie Lorig, Rebecca Olson, David Fishkind, Andrew James Weatherhead, Erik Stinson,Richard Chiem, Shannon Peil, Brett Gallagher, Ben Rosamond, and Steve Roggenbuck on it

it has art by Aidan Koch, Mallory Whitten, Sara Drake, Lyra Hill, Ryan Manning,Philip Tseng, Van Jazmin, Elizabeth Arnold, Tracy Brannstrom, Mrinalini Kannan on it too

which is quite um

there’s a lot of wow, for me, here

and it needs funding

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/10155056/pop-serial-2

and helping to fund it will get you a bunch of cool stuff

like

$10 gets you a physical copy of the thing

$500 gets ”1 copy of POP SERIAL #2 + 1 copy of POP SERIAL #1 + 1 phone call of disbelief/extreme gratitude from me (Stephen Tully Dierks) if you want + 1 video of me (Stephen Tully Dierks) doing the ‘celebration dance’ + 1 copy of my college creative writing thesis, SOUL IN PARAPHRASE (yes, that’s actually the title) (only 1 available of this particular prize) + 1 copy of any book you want (I’ll buy it for you) + 1 copy of I AM LIKE OCTOBER WHEN I AM DEAD by Steve Roggenbuck”

and a lot of stuff in between $10 and $500

my thing here, is i am completely broke

so what i am going to do is make an offer or something

the cover art of the 'music' thing

jist:

i sell music at

http://aurist.bandcamp.com

music that i made

any purchases made on there

i will donate every penny that isn’t stolen from me by paypal fees

(though those fees are not much i guess)

so um

you get 11 pieces of ‘music’

and the satisfaction of funding a really amazing art / literature magazine

plus if you want me to give you a blowjob or whatever, anything else i’m down for that

so uh

please consider it

i am drinking my last cup of mao feng green tea

i am now all out of mao feng green tea

i am so poor

i feel sadness

the wrapping around the envelope is made up of an A4 sheet of paper with stuff about Romanticism and Gothic/Neo-Gothic literature.
some of it is annotated in pencil
‘bourgeois’ is underlined twice
‘Republican’ has a ring around it
one thing written on it says “France starts revolutions thraught Europe” and ‘Europe’ is rubbed out.

there is also one other piece of paper in the wrapping, it says

14

‘perry,’ now that is a good name.

also the envelope was written on, thanking me for spreading the chapbook and for tweeting about him. i feel connected to the world briefly.

the first thing i did when i got the chapbooks was think how amazingly cute they were and accidentally re-arrange them into reverse number order (they are numbered from 1 to 20 and on number 14 the 4 is pretty roughly penned on and i instantly connected to it).

there isn’t a poem in the book that didn’t make me feel really strange and happy
it opens with the line “i don’t care about reading a poem” and i like how disarming it is from the off

i feel like these tiny poems really capture little frames of things that have happened in steve’s life
like they are almost ‘accidental poems’
steve has a really great eye for poetry in tiny things most people won’t notice

i almost cried a few times at some of the images presented
particularly the line “five months ago i saw a video of a dog being thrown into a garbage compactor”
yesterday i had watched the video via http://youcanhelpstopthis.com
so the image resonated with me a lot more than maybe if i had not

there were also a lot of lines that were really absurd and made me laugh
i think that ‘absurdity’ is my favourite thing in literature
“oh, you have a smock on”
is repeating in my head a lot

there is also quite a lot of imagery that evokes in me a feeling of ‘autumn’
corn harvest, sunflowers wilting
stuff is sorta dying
or “i,” the sort-of narrator, is leaving things or escaping things

there is sort of a really strong sense of distance which I think contributes to the quiet absurdity
“you are gone / for lunch i had peanuts”
i really want to eat some nut things now but maybe not peanuts

i am going to be pressing these chapbooks into hands
beware if you know me
or like run a book shop / coffee shop or something near me
stuff is far away from me, you can run if you like

there is bonus text and a video at

http://iamlikeoctoberwheniamdead.com

i would really recommend that you check steve roggenbuck’s stuff out
his sense of poetry makes me feel good
also if you want to help distribute them, and you do because they are really cute you should send an email to
steveroggenbuck@gmail.com
or maybe talk to him on twitter

http://twitter.com/steveroggenbuck

also he has a website with all sorts of wonderful poetry and stuff in Helvetica font. Helvetica is really good

http://steveroggenbuck.com

i hope that you liked my first ‘not a poem’ post on here

i really liked the picture of steve with a hoodie on laying in front of a chess board

I know what I do when I

do it

 
would the only desires I can found

fade

when this current

singes my flesh further

skin intact

 
what more can i rely on

and I travel for an hour

and I am late

for you

and I am in the wrong place

and I tell you that I am in the wrong place

so you come to the wrong place

where I am

and you talk

as though I am interesting

and I listen

because I don’t know how to talk

and I feel

like I am letting you down

some day, I will affirm

that I am pretty amazed

that awe, and bewilderment

are vanishing, some how

like some thing, is working?

 
for now

here are,

some words

to offer me “help”

you are not allowed

to tell me not to feel bad

and if you allow me to feel bad

that would “help”

so

everything I own is breaking

but not as fast

as me

which is okay

because that means

I will run out of me

before I run out of things

and when my skin comes off

and there’s just mist underneath

I will go travelling