tuckova

ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things

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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

Category: THINKING

  • Ogygia

    She pulls you up from the waves onto her island and into a cave, the walls are cool and smooth in the summer and velvet warmth in the winter, she pulls you in and sets you back against brocade pillows that she wove on a golden loom, your head cradled in the crook of her…

  • a thousand words

    Old photographs, childhood pictures, the ones you show people after they love you because it's too embarrassing otherwise. The crooked home haircut, the awkward mountain teeth, birthmarks, jangling knock knees. Horrible fashion choices, a combination of a different time and the clothing blindness of children. In photo after photo he is standing with a group…

  • extended

    More than half a lifetime ago, this metaphor stopped eating meat. Mostly because some patchouli-scented hippie told her that the panic animals feel when they're slaughtered is held in their bodies and when you eat them, you eat this fear. The metaphor was having horrible mind-sucking nightmares at the time and would seriously have given…

  • knee deep in flowers

    Sometimes it is anguish, the feeling that I have to keep learning the same lessons over and over, the wail of despair, the whywhywhy, the gut punch of it. I will never be any good at this, I will never be any good, and I want to smash my body into a wall, my clumsy…

  • the prophet’s garland

    Cassandra sits in a rocking chair in a large, circular room. It has the slightly stale air of a room rarely visited. The sunlight filters down through the skylights; dust motes dance in the sunbeams. The shelves are lined with mementos, and fingerprints in the dust show which ones have been recently looked at: the…

  • from the casemates

    The moat the drawbridge the tower the turret the little holes where the archers peek out… you know, the usual castle features. You can embellish it up, make it a superfancy metaphor, where the moat is your tears and the turret is where you hide your fragile heart and the archers are, oh I don't…

  • ten pocit

    It is difficult to have deliberately chosen to be a certain way because it is easy and then wonder if perhaps you shouldn't have chosen a different way, or no way at all. To have chosen to stop tasting the foods that make you sick, and then wonder when standing at a table laden with…

  • words for snow

    When it was winter it was winter forever, it had always been winter and it would always be winter. The bleakness of it, the relentless overcast, the ugliness of yellow snow, black ice, gray icicles dripping from the eaves and in doorways. And yet you chose this, and there were small pleasures: snow piled on…

  • pillow soft silicone

    It's afternoon and I cannot concentrate, lost in a time loop of every loss ever, a sadness that feels real but is more likely exhaustion from staying out late so I decide to take a nap. But the dog upstairs is barking, barking, barking, barking, howling, and after about twenty minutes a neighbor opens her…

  • take this longing

    This is the language they speak in the open spaces between them, the spaces formed by their outstretched arms, the language of emptiness and wishes, the things they want, the same things spoken into the same vast vacancy every time, because the wants are never satisfied. I want to see you, touch you, dance with…