Bismuth Subsalicylate (C7H5BiO4) and other thought.

Pepto Bismol
I read it's the only over-the-counter drug that will turn into a metallic slag if you torch it.

I've started taking a contemporary poetry class under Professor Scott Rudd. As a teacher, he's one of the most passionate, expressive, clarified professors that I've had yet. As a poet, he's still top-notch by my standards. Here's one of his pieces I found while digging up stuff about him.

As Flesh

There was news this evening

The model loved
gave birth and divorced

She returned to work the next day

*

Casualties near the Somme
translated

into spectral photographs

wavelengths
of a broadcast

airing at night

*

Passing through
the curator’s arrangement

of skulls
crude tools
and serrated spearheads

all now still
specimens under glass

bits of ulna
in a drawer
out of sight

*

In the next booth
a man recounts his day
to a lost missionary

fingerprints blackening
a spoon

the odor of diesel
reaches my table
----------------------------------

So yes, I'm looking at something very real and happening and it feels very good to be a part of it. And I've been latching onto everything that feels good to me lately, even though I know that's a very bad path to go down, because it's become increasingly difficult to maintain a neutral state lately. My mind has been standing still on the down escalator.

I got to a point yesterday in Scott's class where I realized that the only moments in these days that I actually wanted to keep were the times I spend with the people I love on Sunday, and the times I spend learning about my world from an understanding of the poets who came before me right there in his classroom. I think that narrows it down to about 10 hours a week where I actually want to be alive.

I saw an abstract painting the other day that looked like some bright colors (blue, yellow, red)  and a bottle of Pepto Bismol. I don't know if you can use Pepto Bismol instead of paint. It was really nauseating, and I had to sit down for a while.

There was a second poem that I had been writing when I was walking across the downtown area of Rochester at 2200 hours on the coldest night we've had so far this winter. The cold was opening something in me, even before I met Scott and I think might have even been more inspired than Two Dog Night, just in somewhat different way. Two Dog Night was inspired by everything I wrote about in the poem itself. That was more ruminating on an actual set of events than it was reaching for something more abstract inside myself. Like a Pepto Bismol painting. This one was inspired by the cold, and the city, and the happy. I want to remember where I was right then and finish it someday soon. Perhaps when my understanding of poetry is a bit more fleshed out.

When I was really young, I would drink Pepto Bismol when I felt like I had to throw up.

One last thing about poetry that I've been inspired by in my hours of complete sanity has been blackout poetry, or the idea of creative destruction. Basically it consists of vandalizing or censoring a written work of art, or even just a written work of work, and creating some sort of clear, raw meaning in the words you leave unmolested. Lines of poetry will emerge from the ruins you've created, if done right. I've seen quite a few examples of it being done right at this point, and want to find some time and energy for myself to try it out. I selected my canvases already; there's an old paperback copy of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut that I finished recently, and a long forgotten political philosophy book written right after the end of world war two (nuclear bombing) that I found for 10 cents in a bargain bin.

Pepto Bismol... abysmal
...
...
ok kids,
It's Word Association Time.

Pepto Bismol
I think of...cheerleaders(pep?)...in hell. You know. Thick, molten goo; an oozing medley of flesh and fire and screaming and damnation.
I think of children vomiting and sobbing and begging their parents to do something that those poor people can't actually do. Some form of comforting or rescue that just doesn't exist in this world. I think they're clutching their little burning bellies with their slimy fucking hands and understanding something about their world that probably hadn't ever occurred to them before.

I don't think I'm going to get any homework done tonight.