life rx 7 mar 24

put the fun back in punishment

Mar 07, 2024

the devil, and a stanza from Larry Levis’ “Make a Law so That the Spine Remembers Wings”:

So that in jail he will have the time to read
How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode
The king's wrist died of a common cold,
And learn that chivalry persists,
And what first felt like an insult to the flesh
Was the blank "o" of love.
Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.

the aleatory

Devil’s food cake was invented in Ohio. Doesn’t that tell you everything, really? All those houses on suburban courts named after deer, mallards, Tuscany, vanished vistas? All that white, all those houses? The blank “o” of love. Once, driving home to Pennsylvania from Iowa, I drove through a tornado in Columbus. I could see it to the left, a few miles away, but still. “Huh,” is what I thought. That was all I thought. I wanted to get home. And some moments, if you stop in the middle, you think you might never get to leave them again. I never understand the people who sit under overpasses in the downpour: Don’t you want to get out of here? And you know what came on the radio? The Beach Boys. Wouldn’t it be nice. I could see literally nothing. My life was better on the other side of that moment. There is confidence to be found in living through fear.

the assignment

Any slander is an attempt to bind you. Above all else, the devil offends.

writing prompt

Let’s say you’ve already met the devil in this lifetime, and I do mean literally. You stood in the same room, and everything.

Who was it?

How can you tell?

a chune

“The Devil in His Youth,” Protomartyr