THEARTHEART

from EVERY TIME I DECIDED NOT TO SET MYSELF ON FIRE

2011-11-27T22:00:00.001-05:00

So what

if these were

notes not

for something more

finished, but for something more

like ruins, not Gothic

Revival Horace

Walpole fakes, not stonewashed

jeans, but real ruins, lived-in almost

to death, a little ruin

of a typewriter that bit rib-

bon ribbon ribbon

until each blackened tooth

smashed, guiding a whole polis

of letters into the sky or bouncing

in the backs of trucks, bags,

boxes? Say these ruins weren’t

like other ruins in

that they were (not actually)

invisible, as in, “invisible

to commodity,” like no one

would ever stand in front of them

in a photograph, or rub

one of their crumbly faces

into ghost, or point

at a dot on the crease of a cheap

map, but ruins only

accessible by stumble, a ruin you come

upon like someone else’s

life left between a stand

of hairy pines, and no one thought

to walk there again, it wasn’t

a way anyone going

somewhere would go, a huge fucking

mess, not left to someone

to deal with, but devastating

in its beauty

because it’s someone else’s so

gone you just know

you’ll never know anything

factual about it, or the person

whose life it was and now

only is, this gorgeous

nothing pointing

everywhere but at itself, this event

you (now) and only now (you)

are allowed to see, an event

that barely even unfolds, but just sits

there in all its inaccessibility

like a flood that isn’t

a real flood because it never moves

and it can’t be a real event

because there aren’t any streets

to walk home on, or string

to unravel, there is only this ruin

running in place, that no one

else will ever happen

across, that no one will ever not

miss, and in gaping before

it it turns

out you have missed something

else, everything, some fat

animal staring at a reason, a bear

bloated and furrowing, so soon

enough you don’t

even see this, this ruin, this impossible

strip of “life” that will

drift with other endless parts

of you you lost

along the way, over all

this time, will shift

and disappear like another

gleaming doorknob

in Brigadoon, so as always

to stay where you are

not, a great big floating thrift store

of late appendages

that orbits just

beyond your horizon

of consciousness, that leaves

you here, a fool in one

of Beckett's plays

fingering walnut shells

to remember the meat

Every Time I Decided Not to Set Myself On Fire

2011-07-29T10:25:00.000-04:00

You flicker

Let’s say you are flickering

More than that

Let’s say you glitter

This has to do with occlusion

The occlusion of your light by a foreign body

Though surely the term foreign is too loaded

A body neither yours nor mine occludes both

of us from each other

But briefly

And then again

So briefly, and repeatedly, that we glitter

Or you glitter and I flicker

We are still and yet we seem to move

We are helplessly animated by the brief

occlusion of our lights

That is what we are

Not according to our will

That is what we are

That is what we are

This night

THE SMILE

2010-11-14T13:33:00.001-05:00

for Nathaniel Otting

The wrong
book hurts
for the beauty
of its words
which clang out in
communities of common sin
is what the Americans say
when they have finished washing
I’m attaching a quote from Emerson
no I’m attaching one from Poe
no I’m attaching no quote
except which emanates from plough
or emanates from clough
a weird Georgic intelligence
for seeping roughly
into the daydream
of tillers
whose smiles
easy without teeth
speak in flaps
to honor destitution’s ease
we grew our beard
long and let it flower
into tufts of pilling fractal
until our smiles were well hidden
so we could take greater joy
in the wrongness of humanity
and not upset them constantly
who are already so upset
but to cry out
silently our deafening mirth
we researched schizophrenia
and read Schilder’s
The Image
and Appearance
of the Human
Body at work
while our bosses slept
off their odious lunches
their pockets stuffed with receipts
so not to be possessed
with the Georgic intelligence so loved
among willing caretakers of the schizophrenic

THE MOON

2010-11-14T13:32:00.000-05:00

for Emily Petit

Stopping to
talk how
this microphone is
bad at me
doesn’t float over crushes
but is spoke now
like stoning who you love
for blood in the snowfall
we can’t stop opening up for
each word with its club desire
we both know isn’t okay
like an igloo for blackness
moon is government too
moon is government too
to breathe hard
on corded phones
nature proper
to this
hymn is blazing
leaves freed solemnly
from the arthritic tree
or is it arithmetic
I was never so bad
as when trapped in feedback
whose beauty comes suckered with glee
the strangest octopus of pagan glee
whose sea evaporates into night
like an igloo for blackness
I think I meant succored
knows it isn’t right
sings only if lit
cries out endlessly
for another chance
at life
at governance
of the moon
which salutes you
for desiring a method
with which to live
inside some well-stoked quotient

THE VOICE

2010-07-13T09:20:00.000-04:00

for Ben Lerner

Let alone
the words
birds won’t say
how love works
today is a bone
pulled apart by clouds
or the way the left
receives the right in praise
depending on the guesswork of sources
or the number of swords produced
let alone the word between
each spiral-headed letter S
promising bitterness in repetition
or burned for
forty straight hours
until squelched
by doves
they won’t say
they won’t leave
they don’t have to
I won’t let them
I’m only a voice here
burning on the very rumor
of these mute birds’ stuttered approach
and a voice loves to burn
so promise me one thing
no bitterness in repetition
as the flame gutters
closed like old
movie theater marquees
dropping letters
like swords
they won’t say
they won’t leave
they don’t have to
I won’t let them

THE OFFICE

2010-07-07T16:47:00.000-04:00

for Jesse Seldess

What might
be overheard
in the lover’s
heavy sleeping head
to think one pore
is as open now
as any orifice’s yawn
could easily be a song
snug in a starry cleft
I opened all of my parts
until there was everything to fold
like a sweet twitching flag
snug in a starry cleft
I felt the office
of my lover’s salute
an old song
they sing on
old holidays
I open
my lover’s head
to tug there
the gem of recognition
that is my office
or at least it’s said
to face a difficult fire
one needs force of requisite desire
but it’s not like that anymore
the breeze leaches so many
unused words from the dumb
hollow of my cheek
I can’t even speak
or in doing
find curious boats
scraping anchor
all alone
yet all together
in my gut’s
heavy acid hallway
is just to say
this is my office
my one charge and regret
that I never once laughed
hard enough to set things right
all night all night all night

THE DRUM

2010-06-27T10:47:00.001-04:00

for Anselm Hollo

First resting
then resisting
a little is
is a little
spark for the cauldron
that lines our skull
so what if the good
days should strike us dumb?
Is the heart’s drum not more
lovely for the devastation of silence?
We form a white circle
of these word-whittled teeth
to spit for grief
into the seething pines
that still unhewn
know only drowning
of sparks
and slacking
of the drum
and reverse it
We pull our tongues
into taut red swathes
until the flaws of language
stand out pale and beaded
from a thick and bloody lawn
so to be lopped into sequins
and placed on the boughs
so the pines can shimmer
in their pricking resistance
and the drum too
can grow taut
across the cauldron
and noisily
all that
sober material will
spin and writhe
in the shimmering pines
that do shimmer harder
as the heart batters on

THE TONGUE

2010-06-13T16:44:00.001-04:00

for Ben Estes

So taste
as day
arranges the red
and orange flowers
from tongue to tongue
like losing the cymbal’s
clang for all its glints
we crept behind the moon
which always insists on sleeping over
a belly for a mouth
an hour past the movie
we were still filming
the way food fills
in the cracks
between your teeth
or song
in sheets
against the windshield
no one believes
air is the enemy
so don’t be afraid
to breathe all this speech
someone already died to say
the moon is on the couch
so we climb onto the roof
and stick out our bellies
which slosh and go flowers
red and orange flowers
hairy and pink-stemmed
like champagne flutes
we always overuse
we do
nothing right
unless by tongue
or by cymbal
in the little time
left before sun drives
all the workers into work
all the workers into work

THE SHADOW

2010-05-18T18:59:00.003-04:00

for Elizabeth Grosz

Toggling time
by eye
a couple blinks
into the future
makes the kids dizzier
to leave one blonde
comma and return through another
while the gap is stuffed
with rough visions of brain life
we watched the shadows turn back
into a dumb basil leaf
when speech combs for beauty
we rave against it
like weary green giants
sleep against valleys
rising and falling
to cry
quietly forward
without the courage
of crying harder
we buried our disguises
within the complication gender
brings easy to our pronouns
which must all be reinvented
watching the shadows turn back again
into a wound on someone’s body
where they were split open
by the disruption blinking makes
time travel isn’t easy
it rips everyone apart
I lost everything
when I went
and had
to reinvent
all of it
even the pronouns
even the way I
turn myself into shadow

THE PAUSE

2010-05-18T18:59:00.001-04:00

for kari edwards

These pauses
fill us up
like Joe’s cut flowers
to shore against the hollow
where talk suffocates luck and safety
to pile the clouds against home
in the eyes of someone’s animal
I tried to unthread numbers
but that’s what time
seemed to be
moving toward
face decimated
by war-sex
verbing all the objects
that knew I’d do anything
to get out of this microphone
saying your bed name to strangers
who only want a light
there’s an ugly hollow
between the waves
this decade
striking out
what goodwill founders
in the open mouths
of the dead we bought
I couldn’t be more not myself
trembling at logic’s severed silver edge
so here’s the hopeless part
my mouth is open
kept that way
the dead
gather there
in the pauses
or else sew flaws
into its tight red webbing
because we must say something wrong
if we want the hollow gone
whose intelligence is proffered daily
like a bright food
that only starves
in cluttered
throbbing pauses
we must trust
the air to carry
us past absence into flesh
our pores pausing open like moths
where dust is part of light
and our song is carried
on by the particulates
we busily sloughed
to fill
the room

THE STORY

2010-05-18T18:57:00.001-04:00

for Ish Klein

What still
asserts here
its closed mouth
hum through sun
asserts all of it
sky in the fly
hand folded into grimy hand
or a pimply Egyptian lime
bobbled onto the cold wet grass
to hide amid the early green
evening shadows like a knot
the thing that I love
is letting that hum
flame quietly from inside
as she sleeps
its yellow murmur
slowly unfurling
between her
strange open lips
stranger still for
what they also assert
in their quiet rumble
the story wants to disappear
like a pulled slipknot does
in the hands of someone young
enough to wonder after its going
and it seems she could
free all of herself merely
by the air’s consort
to rise unevenly or
shyly diffuse through
this sunning room
where hum
moves on

from ONE MONTH

2010-03-12T20:17:00.000-05:00

24

Suppose there is a will
to beauty. Suppose beauty
in horses arises
from sexual magnetism. Suppose
there is a form of living that
detracts least from others. Suppose
diagonals provide an ecology
of resistance. Suppose an image
is necessary to bring about the obliteration
of difference. Suppose we stick
to touch. Suppose the ear is moral. Suppose we
are doomed to love
what entertains us. Suppose fingerprints
are your initial admissions
of guilt. Suppose each surface
implicates only another
inexhaustible depth. Suppose saying
so makes it so. Suppose gravity
is humbling. Suppose there are those who
would think ugly these organs
of pleasure. Suppose they continue
to fear words. Suppose the “earth” is
made of them. Suppose your one
wish was to slough
the body’s fritz. Suppose you called
it a nerve sleeve. Suppose space
could exist without
the collaboration of time. Suppose numbers
were invented by a cult of time
worshippers. Suppose the word “man” began
to strike you as being just
a little humiliating. Suppose gravity
was indignant. Suppose every prize fails
by dint of its redundancy. Suppose help
is finally on the way. Suppose we
have ceased to need it.

25

Did it work? Does
the thought become sequestered
in possession in? Does it leave
particular dregs? A patina of grief?
How long is the journey
of a question? Are we too much
or too little hinged
on the likelihood of it? Did light desire
cinema? Do molecules
know nostalgia? When is this poem
best suited to history? Is it out
there? Still? That mountain
standing mute in
refutation of our philosophy?
Does the quest require
darkness? Is it dark yet? Do you grow
hearts like a shark
loses teeth or need three
like an octopus? Will night’s chill or
morning’s hunger erase
this tediousness? Who is the you you prefer
to leave behind? Is movement too
disturbing? Are we
disturbed enough? Where
does one learn more
about obviousness? Why does one feel
the need for continued invention? See them
there? Wherever the horizon
of the arm traces? That black
cat licking bugs from the Toyota’s
speckled grill? The back erased
to YO?

26

The dollar store
as national symbol. Ethnicity as
selling point for beer.
The American death of perfect teeth.
Engagement with some local
tongue. Wall Street as agora. The secret
dream of every nightmare. Vice-
versa. The tender that marks
the treasury of the heart. Recycling
the entire body bone
by bone. Humiliation’s U-turn.
A chortle borne by intimacy.
The part that samples annihilation
among friends. Heavy hanging
brow of the ungenerous lover. All
questions are lost
in the underlying ballistics
of the statement. Astounded by wealth’s
slow ease. All our dicks in
a row. The wending one makes
around the shapeliness of distant shadows.
War’s ability to survive
without the rich. This bill blown
awkwardly through mind’s commerce.
A dream dreamt in the vaults
at night. A canceling red antidote.
The weariness of horror. The new craft
that arrives in memory’s
stagnant mooring. When I say I
love you that means I will soon owe
you something like money.
The reason it is said. The unreasoning
reason.

27

You say the burglary
of future works is the poet’s
occupation. I say magnetism should not
be overlooked. You say it’s all time
wasted loving the irreparable.
I say the answers are too obvious
to see. You say ambivalence is a sign
of honesty. I say surveillance is
a mode of caress. You say shouldn’t
there be a name for the loss
of ontology. I say I wouldn’t mind
dying alone in the forest. You say the ghosts
have been holding us all
along. I say desire lives inside
the fold’s membrane. You say she slurs
the pattern’s weft to invite
the real’s return. I say the cat thinks
a sneeze is a death. You say
nothing, disgusted. I say we will no longer
be able to inhabit the divided class
structure. You say children
should name themselves. I say words
suffer at the namer’s lack. You say we all suffer
from abundance. I say there is a spiritual
requirement for orgy. You say names
are simply tools for generalization. I say
generalization is simply a tool
for oppression. You say all syllogism
is oppressive. I say let’s move
to some remote Canadian
wood and start over. You say why begin
again when the end is so near. I say nothing
is less possible than not choosing.
You say I abhor my little white smile
salvation light. I say I’m going
to touch you very gently. You say mouth
ship neck horizon.

THE FINGER

2010-01-30T11:08:00.001-05:00

for Anselm Berrigan

Thou shalt
not convert
thy neighbor’s wife
into nebulous brush
scraping ‘gainst day’s folly
yet it be night
success is the lowest art
says Anselm and what’s more
a retouched codpiece at the Frick
or grid with grin crossing Bleeker
and I don’t yet understand
“the magic” of Chardin’s plums
so why am I here
to pollinate a bureaucracy
of cold little men
commenting on Rembrandt
his right hand
nearly bursting
its obscene
bouquet of fingers
joy is just
weird enough it seems
to grope from behind
and diminished in its aftershock
I want to be serrated
the guy at the bodega knows
all too much about my preferences
retouched codpiece over Roman shewolf
wink across to two Vermeers
probably ladies at work
I know I am
sewn contemporary domestic
all my dreams
of going
royal soured
with the understanding
that my ring
finger will always pale
when my middle stiffens

THE LIGHT

2010-01-30T11:07:00.000-05:00

Plastic bag
cat hisses
from the bough
of a dogwood
as sun pisses through
a few stubborn leaves
some drown in backyard canals
some words appear to splash
but this little light of mine
it burns past two uninhabitable planets
before it ever burns me
curb littered with lipsticked butts
I thought everyone quit
maybe they quit quitting
maybe blue newspaper
skin splitting so
a wind
of recovery
can blow in
like strange hair
patterns in the mirror
maybe genetic maybe earned
I took apart the light
by slowly threading my wrist
like a reel of pale film
through its old yolk-mouthed distemper
making my hair feel cumbersome
maybe the skull is expanding
like a mollusk that
desires new ocean digs
maybe the light
was never heavier
than today
blue jay
on dogwood
eviscerated by it
my veins accelerating
from frame to frame

THE FORM

2010-01-20T19:18:00.001-05:00

for Andrea Arnold

Night grass
that twinkles
from earlier rain
pleases the eye
as it shivers under
a girl’s bloody nose
just off the English highway
it’s strange to us both
how our skin never actually touches
except through the congress of magnetism
but does it constitute form
in the way language does?
I left the movie
feeling emptied by resilience
a brilliant emptiness
like returning home
at night
from some
simple day’s journey
but does home
constitute form or magnetism?
I left the house
because it felt like form
was taking over each room
and this life made of stanzas
this little song I made swerving
through them and the night
was more about the girl
crying by the English highway
with the twinkling grass
than it could ever
be about me
the cat purring
and biting
the buttons
off my shirt
an old mobile
of drowsy paper owls
now alert and watchful
over the cramped living room
which is filling with words
as fast as you read them

THE SWORD

2010-01-10T14:35:00.000-05:00

for John Coletti

Sanjuro feels
not unhappy
he’s just broke
camellias floating sly
off-white pile
like black-eyed suds
I asked the question
everyone else thought obvious
how do you fuck
the mountain when the mountain
won’t hear you pitch woo
and when’s this war over
two parts I always say
Sanjuro liked the amputee look
on survey in a Western town
doesn’t mean the words are different
like this guy I know sells
dolphins turn out to be brutal
wildlife dudes dressed up for payback
one hand on the stomach zipper
the other over heavy beard
Sanjuro didn’t want no trouble
he was just built deadly
like sleeping in the way
way back with no dogs
Sanjuro looked at it
like a backwards antidote
infecting the merely bad
with a debilitating goodness
he guessed it
was something modern
maybe post-Malthusian
turned out
everything Sanjuro
had ever loved
depended on this
one simple decision
is a man safer
as the sword or
as the fleshy parts
opening a way forward

THE SNOW

2010-01-03T13:29:00.001-05:00

for Courtney Martin (New Year’s Eve 2009)

Dad’s Buddha
clad in
a tank-top
of fresh snow
accepts our laughter
as later the rumble
strip filled with ice
chimes back to us
its long silver ribbon
this is how weather wakes
such drowsing heads to blossom
like a Christmas tree worm
slowly creeps back to frill
the world is as full
of jokes as the snowflake is
stuffed with miraculous and banal charm
like the flying farolito that streaks
past a lone and baffled coyote
these mysteries persist at song’s loss
and return when our eyes unfurl
and the you you were
is suddenly less and more
full like the sky is
in the ache before dawn
we’ll put on our boots
our hat and gloves
breathe a little smoke
there is no death
out of reach
as John says
there is only
this hiss
before broadcast

FROM

2009-12-14T23:46:00.002-05:00

From a tattered sky
From a sky without wind
From a medicine-bottle
From an oppressive reality
From her
From her thin nose
From his buggy to the post-office window
From his farm
From his pocket
From his business
From his boots
From its six months’ siege
From the stockier foreign breed
From the pale skies
From the same informant
From the inflection of his voice
From the porch
From the sleigh
From the lower openings
From the pure and frosty darkness
From the girl’s face
From the first day
From the train
From the bed behind him
From the whiteness of the pillow
From the throng about the shed
From the first
From the cutter
From the village
From the hills to Connecticut
From the sale of her piano
From the stove
From the banks of snow
From these hints
From where he stood
From within
From sun-up to dark
From hand to hand
From ear to chin
From side to side
From various people
From early morning
From experience

Take all incidents of the word “from” in the first three chapters of Ethan Frome and then rearrange them according to the alphabetic nature of their grammatical constructions—a, his, her, this—but maintaining chronological order within groups. Excise all incidents featuring proper names or places, except where Connecticut is mentioned.

AS

2009-12-14T23:46:00.001-05:00

straight as a plumb-line
just as I come around the corner
yellow as gold
she same as gave you her word
hot as it is
he does not look in as he passes the door
as though they had been hacked with a blunt axe out of pig-iron
a glittering maze of hooves as by illusion
I mislike undecision as much
as though he is not listening
quick as mules
they sound as if they were speaking out of the air
like as not
like as not
a fish nigh as long as he is
just as I get up
I can stand here and same as see it with second-sight
much as I can get my mind on anything
well and hale as ere
I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should
as for ere a sparrow that falls
bloody as a hog
the road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon
as if it had never been there
she watches the boy as he leaves
same as writing
as if her eyes alone are listening
as though the stroking of the saw illumined its own motion
without so much as glancing
as if he had by some means fleshed his own teeth
heavy as lead
collapsing slowly as he works
fading into dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth
lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf
as though they doubted yet
his hand awkward as a claw
as soon
as they rear and plunge
it is as though the dark is resolving him

Take all incidents of the word “as” in the first thirty pages of As I Lay Dying. Maintain chronological arrangement, but determine the size of the incident based on its ability to extend the logic of its antecedent.

THE SUN

2009-11-07T10:16:00.001-05:00

As if
that work
were just earth
cursed by sun
stippled skin itching
to feather so much
coagulating wisp in droves
of yolk-spun music
one curlicue of beard
seared by sun into word
as if all this crashing
into the humiliations of desire
were simply the sun’s curdle
rising nuclear from one’s flesh
no wonder that breath’s silent heft
best tricks the sun into correspondence
with unfettered magic in the plink
of teeth against the atmosphere’s heat
I goad the air into translation
caging a single little yellow fingertip
to see the cables wind
gold against floor’s fake grain
this is what it means
to curate even minor appendages
from the sun’s razored painting
and everyone knew it
was over the moment
these hideouts were born
starting over in vernal
effulgence to spill through
our hands’ fingered crannies
startled anew by
its anger
the sun
burning usually
but not obviously
or ever obliviously
to stoke such orphans
as make up flesh
into a sugary panic
Look at the stars!
the sun seems to exclaim
with all the other stars
laughing behind it in occlusion
the sun could not care
less about theories of time
but looks in on the sleeper
with a genuine sort of horror
for he has never grown tired
of fleeing his own domed colossus
in doomed bursts of ion hysteria
for even the sun grows
enamored of a fiendish distance
where even the solar winds
might seem like a gush
of horseflies lousy with Benzedrine
strangely the sun fails
like a dazed orange
ball bleeding in gasps
like a child shouting
Don’t look now!
when clearly desiring
that we do
we see
the burning
of our limbs
our selfsame limbs
wrapped like straightjackets
around the sun’s billion
bilious vectors of truth
Look at our arms!
we scream in exasperation
more than a little scorched
as the dreamer is transfigured
and the sun recoils trembling
into its web of fingers
Hold me! the sun croaks
out almost garroted for
the sun is desperate
and we do it
we duly proffer
the burning arms
of everything visible
until slowly
the sun’s
great dream begins
an icy meteor
hurtling through space
blind to its peril
as it slowly breaks
into traces of liquid
which sizzle and turn vapor
on the invisible spherical skin
of a million twirling planets

THE PHANTOM

2009-10-19T23:45:00.001-04:00

for Erica Kaufman

What concurrence
turns empty
as the eye
forks toward it
or tongue unspools red
its vain syllable slew
to suture through the brain?
I called you a phantom
because you believed you were more
than some sewn order of forces
turning thrum and tumble one
moment only to go taut
in the organ’s congress
like nodes of claver
to build something
black and ecstatic
day suffocating
with candor
as hideous as
this insect’s green
sieve of beating wing
to outgasp the air
which submits with total authority
talking the leaves into flux
the coarse pink flags your hands
make snapping into further unknown directions
where the body reinvents itself
one horizon at a time
in spastic yellow bursts
face like waves
already less here
letting rage
rage on
in abject yellow
bursts talking backward
which corner the brain
hot for its antidote
to surface on the tongue’s
flummoxed felt pennant spilling open
like a fortune that writes itself
I asked you why the absence
of you became so rigid
and you asked me how
an atom goes stiff
if it’s always dancing

THE OWL

2009-10-19T23:44:00.000-04:00

for Alex Lemon

Durer’s dour
little owl
stares strangely down
from his perch
on the bathroom wall
already less here now
cornering the brain in waves
whose peaks and dips duly
fritz a garish cough of feathers
into the corpse-light morning air
that my piss has tricked
cacophonous, yellow, diving, free, this
is what they mean
reproaching solemnity in fits
of strange glee
or crushing dissatisfaction
into breathable
red powders
we spiraled outward
left the city
took part-time work
freaking the ancient wood
into gusts of ion readiness
I brought you this owl
in case you needed each other
dawning negative at newly liminal cusps
is that what you mean
about god arriving in seizure
his horses just horses
baroque, relentless, and electrical
to hoove through
the body’s flummox
I’m always
this pregnant
with everyone’s child
unruly gut sprung
into tendrils of unknowing
most are thrill offenders
but I’m just taking flight

THE BEAR

2009-10-05T15:41:00.000-04:00

for John Coletti

Waking worn
into day
like tumbling dice
fray into number
I cover the streets
wracked by lesser joys
each quake subsumed going oblique
by the green blinking leaves
make when you stumble away
as the other you returns simultaneously
chewing the absences loose to taut
a litter of bears broke
into the McDonald’s dumpster midnight
remind me to glean
summer horror’s yellow sleep
for every fled
modicum of song
another you
just bursting
cold yet vibratory
like fish thought
new choruses chafing wind
I stopped not looking
again and again got stuck
that way no name forest
heading wherever the limbs fall off
the bear was storing superannuated fat
minus the red happy meal plastic
I went to the cave
looking for questions not answers
stayed for the allegory
all numbers no spirit

THE HORSE

2009-09-19T12:39:00.001-04:00

for Jere Martin

Actually clamoring
open here
the mere fact
of walking away
from oneself to edge
like horse minus rider
or is it the opposite
or is it a map
of us learning how to turn
itself on? I suppose I could
say anything in the vibration
between selves a crude rippling
how by breath it conspires
with greatnesses not our own
one small and suffocating
which duly loses itself
in the coarse rush
just to appear
what it needs
what it needs
actually clamoring
open here
this horseless
panic made frank
like a hand
breaking forth tendrils
of new scarlet readiness
to lunge against solemnity
like a horseless rider
leaves the desert of aiming
somewhere to rush everywhere simultaneously
red tendrils softly tearing off
in gaping chasms of summer thought
nothing now if not more intermissions
between the pattern of self-light
which strobes across the body
tricking every last stillness cinematic
from the jilting red depths
of a lonely hibernation
a desperate maroon sleep
under dusty stalagmite trees
a horseless rider
whose every direction
screams home

THE NEWSPAPERS

2009-09-19T12:38:00.001-04:00

for Brandon Best

Disembeded
from life
through language
only to return
snagging the throat
most are thrill offenders
goading day into shape
or rescuing flotillas of peril
before they go safe again
I wake a little less here
in the predawn dash of scavengers
blubbering on for virtue or
just checking box scores
red neck sick again
as currency passes through
parceling whatever thought
condenses pill-size
for swallowing
for love
of the uncertain
let’s go hungry
as the newspapers say
most are thrill offenders
sunk down in the force
like a flaw keeping sacred
some otherwise rock-steady Navajo weave
fuck yeah I like long walks
resuscitating the earth with song
that’s why I called you
my dark Pleistocene tremolo
my stillness thrumming open
for thrill offenders
and old friends
just someone
thrumming open
on some sacred
mountain flaw shit
pass me the newspaper
almost less here already
so I can torch a path
not exactly forwards but away

Part One

2009-08-19T22:41:00.001-04:00

Mongrel Vaudeville

2009-08-19T22:38:00.000-04:00

SELECT COMPENDIUM OF FLAWS AT 32

2009-08-11T11:02:00.001-04:00

Asymmetrical patch of stomach hair on left side, vaguely triangular
Bundle of tumorous blood vessels under left eye (benign), also known as spider angioma
Surgically implanted mesh threading the abdomen, denotes cyborg
Eyebrow hair of excess length, unruly
Missing rectangle of enamel on right central incisor, bottom left corner
Dry skin under beard, furtive
Scant intake of fruit, with exception of overpriced and bottled drinks
Extreme unction in the face of government-employed authority figures
Still paying rent
Has not read Proust
Dreadful lack of mastery as concerns any musical instrument: guitar, saw, child’s accordion etc.
Boring haircut, several years running
No progeny
Allergic to air conditioning
Annoying proclivity for stating obvious
Exceedingly catholic regard for cinema, untrustworthy partner
Narrow culinary skill set; mostly egg-, stew-, or sandwich-based
Unnecessary volume of alcohol consumption at parties wherein said alcohol is free
Unilingual: American-English
Raised, abrased patch of France-shaped scar tissue on right index finger; the result of a bizarre childhood injury involving a medieval Irish cannon
Compulsively punctual, read early

THE FACTS

2009-08-05T07:55:00.002-04:00

Facts passing
by eye
too fast already
on Sunday train
so like this century
fascinating stupid gorgeous and cruel
like someone you’d never take
seriously but what asshole would sleep
with history in the first place?
slicing through eerie Massachusetts fog
to watch the graffiti blur
into an alien cursive
fascinating gorgeous illegal screaming
I AM FACT
like a gravestone
says WAS
this manner
of dim persistence
made billboard dire
as the palpitations continue
foraging nerve from readiness
in a heavy spectral burst
you were already passing by
lips curving into a purple snarl
or ransacking a thousand quick dilapidations
for their quotient of art
we forged another brief pornography
or alchemy same difference
this too sane century
mediating each disaster
before it comes
so as
to forget
real time death
I AM FACT
for this brief tenure
or am I simply
another of this century’s delusions
torquing into the camera’s path
which passes too quick already turning
every face into its own gravestone
I put this fact on earth
to receive its failure daily
to coax an egress
from truth or goad
all trains south
where spirit differs
and fact
gladly collapses

THE LUNG

2009-07-21T18:46:00.000-04:00

Aleatory day
breaking open
in flashbulb blur
over the hush
and din one moment
jaggedly ushers out-in
with its collapsing magic fold
Brooklyn is like a lung
we fill with our petty noise
our thuggish orange pockets of noise
which rush each jellyfish pulse
of the great grey lung
as it silently huffs
the trees like cilia
the sun only
another commodious orb
for sale
or what
would it mean
to buy light?
Would it mean dice
don’t tell the future?
The signals are all splintering
here at the breath hole
where air vacuums in-out again
and the pigeons fear being breached
I told a stupid lie
about your stupid ugly face
how it dazzled me
in waves of ignorance
wholly my own
skin color waves
how impossible
it seemed
to understand merely
a single face
your stupid ugly face
that the pigeons know
better than I ever will
buckling at each windy cheek
as it heeds the propinquity
of Brooklyn’s bag-like lung-bellow
under the urban sun’s golden shrug

THE POEM

2009-07-17T09:29:00.000-04:00

Coming to
almost less
here for being
actually right here
in a viral fog
magic is never settled
so I make everyone’s fingerprints
count in waves of unhinging
to tour the desideratum like seedpods
floating over our soiled silver pools
I wrote you this book
backwards for staving off logic
which pitiless homes in
almost less here now
that I’m thought
responsible for beauty
writing books
for drummers
whose eyes gasp
with each inky
plastic tree’s perforated collapse
I wanted to intone
something something being here again
without appearing redundant or cold
because there’s only this sordid boil
pulsing sensation into drowsy chords
or pulling back from resentment
I lift my arms
over the unending poem
and shyly quiver
like a beast
not occasioned
to standing
on hind legs
my fingers blurring
at each ugly knuckle
until the music begins
its great white unfolding
like a sea of teeth
slicing the poem into organelles
which seem to function interdependently
if by function you mean burst

THE RIVER

2009-07-17T09:28:00.000-04:00

Leaving cities
is easier
when you breathe
stupid yellow flowers
through a hidden orifice
wheezing on a pistil
in them dead Eastern woods
where fever gets passed counterclockwise
and the river is always on
like a Boombox made of water
a long blue electric detour
that blacks out in swirls
I named this highway
Face Crisis Smile
in your honor
a no-brainer
taking forever
to untangle
a fucking highway
where fever spreads
in all directions simultaneously
a stupid yellow fever
that we can’t stop breathing
in our dead Eastern woods
where the river is always changing
from one call sign to another
borrowing all its hard K’s
from the cold western airwaves
past Face Crisis Smile
a curtain of trees
we all love
a total fucking
no-brainer
for all
you heavy breathers
knee-deep again
to greet lights-out

THE HORSE

2009-06-18T11:17:00.000-04:00

Actually
clamoring open
with joy
the mere fact
of walking here
grown beyond fact
as the stray horse
leaps past all designation
or was a map
of myself turning on?
I could say anything now
in the vibration between selves
like a horse’s rippling flank
makes its conspiracy with greatness
a small and suffocating greatness
in the coarse rush to appear
I am nothing someone needs
or I am I am
the very substance of joy
clamoring open with scarlet tendrils
that break against the song
a hungry horse makes
in its desert ride
wet rhythmic red tendrils
that softly tear off
in gaping chasms
of summer thought
actually encumbered
by sunlight
the coarse
light of horses
stirring up insects
that glitter blissfully
in the contaminating dusk
I am nothing someone
needs more than light
nothing but an intermission
between patterns of self-light
which strobe across the bedroom
tricking every object into cinema
from the depths of hibernation
baroque horses of thought galloping
in the mantic pollution of joy
in the actual body breaking open
to form joy’s map of clamor

THE FLOWERS

2009-06-11T22:28:00.000-04:00

Eternally returning
our faces birds
that roost and rut
in the hair’s mussed underbrush
fly away fly fly away fly
a cold idea arising there
in the wings’ frantic waft
the idea of zero
or all that remains
rudely driven out
like a dog
from flowers
huge yellow
ancient flowers
that I send
hurrying everywhere simultaneously
exuding the terror
that comes with understanding
that the universe you
observe serves only excess
The woman you love blows
the nose at the tip
of her tortoise shell glasses
and not even one blinking iota
burns out in an unnecessary flash
The birds our faces are fly
in and out with courageous urgency
which carries us past sleep
and into the startling dawn
of one moment after another
if only to throttle nothingness
in a yellow rage
if only to thread
tatters of your hand
with tatters of sky
and suffer endlessly
in yellow waves
that patiently drone
in and out
eternally returning
huge yellow
ancient flowers

THE SKULL

2009-05-23T16:57:00.000-04:00

for CA Conrad

Surfacing utilitarian
my heart warps
to succor or goad
minus the parade of analyses
that stem endless in backwater throbs
I have strode coarse in daylight’s
umbra peeling my friends off
the trees gone furious
in doomed hospitality
I repeat
I repeat myself
having invited these words
by their congress with invisibility
hoping you see fit to need
a warm token of return
as the holes vowels
make brace sentiment
to free
every horny passage
from breath to form
like a brook of pages
lapping the soiled whorl fingers
skim against this brick-mitted world
It’s now that I want less
to know how tomorrow is
merely today’s discount hologram
moving unhurried still
mouth open
eyes slicing closed
through fields of disaster
red fields of endless disaster
where I invite each fluttering curse
to issue its purchase of reason
to wag its winnowing brand
and face the music
discordant bone music
muscle music
music that carves
novel blood in swarms
to bear against the skull
to bear against the skull’s magic

THE MOUTH

2009-05-17T19:01:00.000-04:00

It’s autonomic
how pupils scurry
slant by flirt like
brushfire dancing
out mouse and quail
mouth always full
of tooth bells
that toll loosely
waking the snakes
I mean tongues
In between is
and isn’t your legs
scissor the uncomprehending
air stacking volumes
or perhaps that’s unfair
the wind always dizzy
in its wise permutations
the mouth always full
past knowledge
I squiggle in my beard
redly as you
arrive fractious
in the storefront’s glass
fray like a bass
slipping lures
I took sides with death
to oppose it
within without
speech’s jilting need
the mouth always full
the wind parsing what flies
for its modicum of song
the mouth always full
the mouth always full

THE FOREST

2009-05-08T09:17:00.001-04:00

Seeming isn’t something
this city will
relinquish lightly
as a morass
of birdsong fills in
and the darkening column
of day wage parts
to reveal its coarse staccato
heart has shred
like bowstrings to trail
dutifully behind in a red fringe
I imagine Napoleon’s horse
whose left hoof became
some rich fucker’s snuffbox
You always preferred the hospitality
of forest people
but what is a city except
a forest made of people
And when it’s spring the colors
of our leaves spar
with the bare and simple
skin of limbs
until the squirrels that are our
hands wind up everything
to a frenzied pitch
A frenzied pitch made of apples

NEONISH

2009-04-29T10:13:00.001-04:00

Paper tendons
notating desire
Is it possible
to know why?
or caught simple
the directions run backward
for fear the circumspect
will river the ocean
or vice-versa today
I can’t stop eating tones
in lobby, bedroom, chorus, etc.
The weather inside our decisions
lost amid the damage cold
salutations here made of light
still neonish in the way they
blink open or hum when tired
I rescued at least one feeling
among all the zapped-out axons
because it makes you the difference
air heavy with transformation’s red scent
If only the reticence would lift now
as again the birds lay under blankets
we’ve tossed haphazardly with our mouth junk
I won’t go into it except to
say how deadly the sky looks down
coursing with rivets of tongue-slick dew
I want you to leave the country
as soon as another deserves you
punching floats of greed from currency
The rest is merely follow-through
like Alex English from the elbow
though surgical impressions cloud the hand
in their promise of cocktail epiphany
So now we must break
out what remains of trust structures
to defend the saying of names
and inure beauty from pointlessness
or maybe just go home
through powerful brown woods
telling our jokes silently
on paths obliquely squandering
the love we’ve made
You and I
the moon on
its protractor rise
to please
to arrive
neonish

NOT A FEW WANDER HOMELESS ON DARKSOME PATHS

2009-04-14T22:17:00.000-04:00

The snow stops
at our bricks or windows or
it doesn't. It finds
a way into the cool grasp
of thought. It begins snowing through
language even. For hours. I can't
believe how cold it is.

What is this unshaken
peal moving through the memory
of a bell? Is everything
remembered here an appeal
of or to the dead? Just as sunlight
on the sleeper gathers
his shape into new dailiness.

Restless seagulls inch
across the backyard, peck a Casio
keyboard dusted with snow.
Cat prints fill in only
to disappear. In every now another
thing persuades at song’s loss. Leftovers
picked clean. Nuclear morning.

Can it really be so
strenuous, this letting the world
appear? An annual unfolds
or a page curls brown
at the tip. How does one manage
to say brown words? Melody is just
another word for hunger.

What little sadnesses
dance free from the black
backyard cable wires around which clutch
the joyously turned veins
of vines. Even in
the black I sense a blacker black
escape.

We visited your parents.
They bought us fish and tickets.
I broke your glasses.
The wolves are at the door.
This train is stopped due
to traffic ahead. We are sorry
for the inconvenience.

Seagulls gracefully circle
the hastily abandoned
bones of hungry schoolchildren.
It is bird weather where
I live every afternoon at half-past
three. For all
their grace the birds remain cannibals.

Do we ask a mountain
to explain itself? Do we ask blinding
how it became song? A girl
sleeps in the bed. A fine red hair
grows on her arms. My eyes
are clumsy, ensconced. Of course
I love her.

Is the light also as painful on
other planets? Who is more used
to sleep? Half-face, a warm clot
of folds. I bought this black
ring. I wear it
strangely. It does something wicked
to my form.

A rabid bat at
noon. My love and I under a nest
of branches. The pond’s song
playing against
them. Painting’s the tree’s
wish, but it remains doomed
to sculpture.

To protract, as to
elide contract. A tender
eye, as to avoid
a tense one. Otherwise part
of the eye is used to
trap the future. A sentence, as
to obviate ending.

After the rain the static
of birds tentative. A stray
car here or there
like white squall. What would home
be in this city of erupting
knees? This dancing city? You
need to speak up.

Wake neck stiff full less
from dreaming than these
stubbly bits of song. Nowhere’s
salutation. I ask you
where we went just moments
ago? Your fingers reply:
now here.

The whirling ceiling
fan jerks
the cerebellum into pulse
like a wet bell
whose tongue sets
off little forks
of white electric foxtrot.

Let the wit of ants
emerge. Be generous
to the bears. Some
tiny thing needs
time to work itself out
the window. Open
bird for breath.

The clouds in our ears
drain the garbage
truck’s shrill passage. Ad-
vertisements sickly ed-
ify the casual jaunt. Nobody
learns from the trees
on the street anymore.

The fire engines drone
their implausible
reminder: you are not at present
burning. Except that
they are wrong. The fire
engine’s crisis is one
of imagination.

Born of fire in the form
of dust. Ton-specks
speck-tones, stone-light, spectral
tongue to smoke
out a lightning of teeth.
A little fire in our jerk and swerve.
A little dust in our bone-knock.

Walking beneath the beery
twist of summer
branches, foaming
with a flutter of green head, I
teach the children strange
wisdom that will
only serve them in different worlds.

Ugly and beautiful at
once like a camel the tree
trunk’s fulsome
fold-wave works itself
into a standing frenzy
beside the silver sedan as sun
inches past our roof.

Truth is comorbid
with depression and failure
today. Light tuning
the page. Only sensations
that announce
the future from now
on.

ONE MONTH

2009-04-05T11:08:00.000-04:00

21

Is all truth an act
of will? How soon
will the previews
for the film of your
life be over? Are we
saying that courtesy
trumps the struggle
against poverty? If
you understand what
the enemy thinks
does he remain on
the offensive? Where
does the hurdling
of stagnant bodies
come to an end?
How does the sun
overcome violence?
Will you remember
that I asked you this
a year from now?
Does the ear fold
to allow compassion?
Can I touch you on
the edge of fury?
When must we cease
to use the world so
compulsively? Could
I love the earth better
than the sky? Will
emancipation continue
invisibly? Is coincidence
the only illustration
of the radical nature of
responsibility? Can it
wait until the coffee
is done? How is each
name condemning
the person it hovers
over? Is guilt what
you call all that boiled
time? When is now
not why’s bitch? Have
the specter of these
hands been a burden
to you? What would it
mean for the world
to be meaningless? Is
there anything more
preposterous? Have
you been listening
to the avenue’s music
this ordinary morning?

22

Can you tell a man
you have only come
to watch him die?
Is our intermittent
love for living offset
by our resentment
at the labor it takes?
Could this century
herald the necessary
reacquaintance of
thought with body?
Have I done enough
to impress moneyed
enterprises? Can’t
the horror of sex
be allayed by total
abandon? Whence
flows this curdle
of intuition? Have
the schools divested
you of what it was
possible to be? Why
does a good person
go into the nightly
rub of faithlessness?
Is it an act of courage
to depend on beings
of innate fallibility?
Should we live by
fact or truth? How
often should wonder
be smothered? Is
this another chance
to do what it is you
have never been
honest enough to
conceive? Doesn’t
the hand itself fly
out in all directions?
Was it too much to
expect an interrogation
of egotism? Why has
place been made void
by complacency? If
love and hate begin
to muddle are we not
doomed? Did you
also wish that bombs
would shake things
up before the towers
fell? Who can escape
this frantic pulsing
to feel the geologies
of time? Is it more
important to create
or cultivate? Why
are my hands still
shaking? Will they
cease engendering
sexual noise amid
city streets? Where
can I get a hallelujah
around here today?

23

Who is responsible
for the psychoacoustics
of streets? What new
emblem drifts torn
in the spindly winter
trees? Can I depend
on the pink barrier
of skin? How imperial
can a woman be? Is
it fair to ask people not
to mutilate themselves?
Why must we encode
lust? Can I deteriorate
the bonds of culture
to see truth? Will it not
bed in contradictions
and rot? Why love
when the mere act of
loving constitutes a
state of friction? Does
her hand around his
neck give him no
pleasure? Beauty’s
not only the seer’s
need to be beautiful
is it? If I scorn god
do I scorn whatever
good lurks in humility?
Is this enormous
grief part of the dead
people? Who better
knows the tidings
of stillness? Perhaps
my own happiness
is merely a symptom
of the universe’s not
stopping? Do you
garrote everything you
find uneconomical?
When will the animals
minimize the human
infraction? Is trade
always asymmetrical
like language? Do
evolution’s dictates
apply equally to
technology? How
rare is this unfolding
day? The gentle way
our hearts rebound
into praise? This rot
that commends us
to the root of waking?
The overlap where
I feel you falling into
each toothsome gap?

ONE MONTH

2009-03-30T18:58:00.000-04:00

9

What day doesn’t
alter but everything
irrevocably? Can
we sojourners reject
the blinding instinct
to flee? Who says
nomads don’t desire
provenance over
trees? Is this
the final manner we
own to express our
grief? What about
this beautiful fucking
view and the glory
of traveling through
it? Is perfect lust
possible? Whence this
bandwidth of money’s
feedback? Does repetition
fold us into cascading
bolts of boredom or
eroticism or both? Can
you fashion me
some breathable variety?

10

At what point do
the interruptions
common to the act
of interpretation
diminish us? How can
grammar alone leave
me out of breath? Does
love’s indemnity obscure
love itself? How many
ATMs justify the
closing of CBGBs?
Who doesn’t die
from complications?
Is chemistry the chair
we keep falling out
of? Are stars serious
about death? Shouldn’t
one fear the mere
act of writing? Does
each moment retain
its perpendicular goings
on? Why won’t you
give me the answers?

11

Whose black seas are
these unsteadily pouring
into my eyes? Does
racism in collusion
with temperature? Can
our fevering return us
to the electron’s frenzied
hearth? Are you also
a little world so cunningly
made? Do these genii
that speak through our
mouths need help as well?
Where is the sky going?
Where would I be without
these prepositions? Do
philosophers find themselves
hungry for catastrophe?
For whom does this black
wire shudder into shape?
Is vanity throttled less
vain? How often must one
revisit this old blood
jet made precious?

12

Is superstition an
appropriate term
for courting forces
of chaos into step?
Why do our pets
trust us? How is
black symptomatic?
If I forget the color
of your face can I be
said to remain in love
with you? Haven’t
these light-shreds
rent our apartment
into wood-tatters
yet? Why do we use
the plural ‘are’ in
addressing what
would seem to be
the singular ‘you’?
In other words how
is you? What’s wrong
with your happiness?
How does another’s
body intuit how your
limbs will dodge what
it brings into transit?
Can everyone be said
to speak a unique
dialect? Is this organ
for signaling regret?
Does an apprehension
of the end partially
allow its eventuality?
13

Does our architecture
reflect a lusting after
hierarchy? How come
I’m continuously falling
behind? How does hot
dog damage soul? Do
clouds flit about without
disdain? Is school just
another concession
to self-reliance’s loss?
Is there a premonition
of humanity in all cells?
Which of these new
horizons will limit words?
When will the trees give
up and speak? Is each
gait expressive of death?
Is each step a prelude
to collapse? Which isn’t
the way that leads me
to my? And who deigns
to instantiate the final
dispersal of signs? How
wholly struck arrives
life today?

14

Can I fill in one
tone after another
with color without
losing fact? Could
this really be all we
need to perceive
reality? Was cinema
inevitable? Should
you intimate your
capacity for desire
from capacity of your
intimates? How
often returns fact’s
niggling certitude?
Didn’t we deserve
at least this pulsing
dawn death? How
many more times
can we abide by
shoestring catches
of the mind? Is there
a limit to the heart
going timid before
privation? Can I name
this a whirl of ecstatic
commodities? Was
this everything you
felt about canceling
hope? Could our
unmaking begin in
a blaze of the inane?
Was every possible
life intercepted by
a lack of virtue? Is
this a vertical ledger
of despair? Who is it
that gets off on
such wintry stuff?

ONE MONTH

2009-03-15T12:29:00.001-04:00

5

How does one beat
back the profusion
of surface? Where
does the eye orbit in
its desire for a world
of wincing depth?
Don’t these trucks
strike whatever lurks
worrying in your gut
with their rattle?
What natural legacy
might justify this
endless using we
make of the world?
When is an individual
not but constantly on
trial?

6

Does the pink fish
of your tongue slip
silence in between
its dark verbiage?
When will this you
you mistake for
others emerge from
plain view? How
often does Sunday
damn intransigent
thought? Would it
be asking too much
for our feelings to
instruct us? Where
absconds this red
tincture of muscle
and bone? Do one
and two work to
foster their simple
distance?

7

Whose crowd is
this swirl of gulls?
How can one live
with any resistance
to the rod and cone’s
effortless despotism?
Would I lie silently
just to feel the still
majesty of inorganic
matter? What bodies
don’t coincide? Why
wear thin the veil
of truth when one
might simply doff
it altogether? Can’t
the song go on even
in the singer’s loss?
Of man or of sun?

8

When does one begin
such accounting as
doubtless accompanies
the loss of the possible?
If advertisements are
so benign why do her
glazed eyes nauseate
so thoroughly? Is this
other’s breath lacing
our own with clout or
death? Where have all
those uninterrupting
clouds gone? Does
the host’s stain linger
on the tongue? Why
does the hand end
in this creepy wave
of fingers? If I own
a teepee do I have
the onus to perform
spiritual duties? Who
doesn’t prefer living
outside the tyranny of
financial abstraction?

ONE MONTH

2009-03-09T19:41:00.000-04:00

28

Is this the worst finally
upon us? How much
joy do you think you
can sustain? Why do
this girl’s fingers sway
like pennants when
she talks? From where
issue the hollow forces
of irony? Can I drink
what the throat thinks?
Really? Is now when
what coagulates in mind
finds purchase in heart?
Don’t you have something
worse to do? What’s
wrong with tendering
ambiguity? Can the air
you breathe become
the site of some ecstatic
unraveling? If utopia
linguistically denotes
a place without place
can it have any ethical
stability? Why do these
bilious waves of guilt
winter in my gullet?
Can the movements
toward happiness accrue
in radical environments?
Why is this fallen petal
malingering unnoticed?
Does the mere fact of
living implicate one’s
responsibility to try
dying? Would you all
step a little nearer? Why
does the body insist
on remaining so sure
about the ineptitude
of consciousness? Now
isn’t the succoring
time is it? Where flies
life at such impossible
moments? Does the end
of the month mean
that these words mean
something more? Don’t
the bags in the trees
seem to shudder and
weep today? Wither
fawns this emasculate
cosmology? How much
money does an honest
woman need? Can’t
we just lie in the ribs
of this rusting truck
until the sun comes
up again? Why do we
keep the representations
of our loved ones next
to the representations
of our pecuniary worth
within the folds of some
dead animal’s skin? How
horrific sounds the literal?
If I proffer you my hand
with tidings of humility
will you lead me forth
in this year of blistering
joy? Can you sustain
the amity of my hands?

1

Does each
trouble come
from the fact
that our eyes
lie at the acme
of our face?

2

Is silence speech
that doesn’t quite
reach the surface?
Which one hasn’t
sounded at least
the primary depth
of murder?

3

‘Is the cessation
of pain merely
an impoverished
wish?’ Why do
the many only
remember that
they have a body
when it goes bad?
What percentage
of waking life
should be spent
pursuing spiritual
enlightenment?

4

What does it mean
to call a human
being holy? Is rap
a hymn to rage?
Does this white
smile salvation
light look eerie
with reckoning so
close? Who loves
you like a slave?

ONE MONTH

2009-03-03T17:59:00.001-05:00

26

Has the dollarstore
become another national
symbol? Do the variously
ethnic models in this
beer ad on the 5 train
get drinks together
after the shoot? What
is so deadly American
about perfect teeth?
Can the engagement
with one’s local tongue
excuse the onus
of tackling others?
Are you getting off
at Wall Street or
further down the
ladder? Does every
dream have a secret
lever so as to revolve
into nightmare? Does
the availability of the
current phone strip
it of its brrringing
magic? In what tender
lurks the treasury
of the heart? Don’t it
hurt, this recycling
from bone to bone?
Where would we be
without the U-turn
of humiliation? Must
I always get paid
by the hour? Whence
arrives the chortle
borne by the intimacy
of death? What of
the portion of you that
samples annihilation
among friends? How
heavy hangs the brow
of all ungenerous lovers?
Are all statements
lost in the underlying
ballistics of the question?
What astound us
more than coming
under the slow ease
of wealth? Does this
administration have all
its dicks in a row? Why
wend one’s interior
around the shapeliness
of distant shadows?
Can the rich survive
without war? Does each
bill blow awkwardly
through the mind’s dull
commerce? What dream
is dreamt in the vaults
at night? Is this canceling
dawn the antidote
to time’s horror? How
now? How often we
weary? What new boat
arrives in memory’s
stagnant mooring? If
I say I love you does
that mean I will soon
be owing you money?

27

Is the plagiarism
of future works
a poet’s occupation?
Can new relationships
be forged without
magnetism? Why
waste time loving
the irreparable?
Could the answers
in the trees be
forged of invisible
substances? When
does the ambivalence
about surveillance turn
into revolt? Shouldn’t
there be a name for
the loss of ontological
culture? How come
this hanging takes
so long? Who isn’t
afraid of the ghosts
wind makes of air?
And who doesn’t
desire the membrane
of their embraces
anyhow? Where do
I slur my pattern’s
weft so as to invite
the real? What does
the cat think a sneeze
is? How long will I
be able to inhabit
this class structure?
Why don’t children
name themselves?
Are we allowed to
imagine Adam as
a child? Who says
society’s preservation
trumps the spiritual
requirement for orgy?
Why has this parcel
of land not endeared
itself to someone
enough to harbor
a name? Names aren’t
simply tools for oppression
are they? Who still puts
stock in the hierarchy
of narcissists? Why not
move to some remote
Canadian wood and start
over? Why begin again
when the end is so near?
What is less possible than
not choosing? How do
you like my white smile
salvation light? Can I
touch you in dusk’s
winnowing gully? Why
not? How often does
this dose of finitude
encroach on our daily
wreckage? Won’t you
entangle a little every
day with me? Doesn’t
that ship out on the edge
of the horizon shame
us with its honesty?

ONE MONTH

2009-02-26T09:24:00.000-05:00

24

Is there a will
to beauty? Does the
ear demand compassion?
Does beauty in horses
arise from a sexual
attraction to power?
What form of living
detracts least from
the others? Do diagonals
replicate an ecology
of resistance? Another
life might be too
many, right? Can
thought avail itself
of the eye’s weaknesses?
Do images necessitate
a force toward the eventual
obliteration of difference?
If religion and logic
are mutually exclusive
shouldn’t we rid ourselves
of them both? Are we
doomed to love
what entertains us?
Are fingerprints our
initial admissions
of guilt? What surface
doesn’t implicate only
another inexhaustible
depth? If we move fast
enough in arbitrary
directions will we cease
to appear? Is gravity
that mute vector that
explains all else?
How ugly can an
organ of pleasure
be? Do you still
fear words? This ninety
degree angle at the corner
of the page doesn’t lead
to the murder inherent
in hierarchical structures
does it? What is the
“earth” made of? How
often have you wished
to slough the body’s
nerve sleeve? Can
space exist without
the coterminous
abstraction of time?
Doesn’t the word
“man” begin to strike
you as being just
a little humiliating?
Does the occurrence
of clouds allow
metaphor’s genesis in
the “primitive” mind?
Does every prize fail
by dint of redundancy?
Is help finally on
the way or have we
ceased to need it?

25

Is subjectivity subject
to ridicule? Do molecules
know better the benefits
of community? Are
questions merely the effect
of being a thing among
things? Where is light
more cinematic than on
the fading vertical face
of the house across
the street at five o’clock?
Is the location of Earth’s
orbit partly responsible
for nostalgia? How is it
that certain animals seem
always to desire what
haphazard affection we
can muster upon arriving
home? When is this
poem best suited
to history? Why do
the trees stand for all
our conjecture? Carry
this fulsome parcel
of energy past its humble
origins, will you? Can’t
dusk trouble us a little
more in this dingy epoch
of bulbs? Did you ever
find your answer in
a song for devout
“primitives” whose
language you had no
way of deciphering?
What is less important
than thought? How has
each name become razed
from the topography
of the epileptic’s brain?
Is it dark yet? Have your
eyes adjusted? Does
the pestle grind away
at your resolve? Do you
grow hearts like a shark
loses teeth or need three
like an octopus? I
wonder what the news
will hate tonight? Was
the corpse of the Chinese
prisoner pliant in the hands
of the sculptor? Why
can I not leave my body
to the animals of the field?
Will night’s chill erase
the tediousness of our
concerns? Join me for
a walk into the already
opening horizon, won’t
you? How come I have
ceased breathing in
normal intervals? Who
is the you you prefer
to leave behind? Will
it disturb us too
radically to go back
to an existence free
from the sins incurred
by agriculture?

UNMANUAL, PART I

2009-02-15T11:44:00.000-05:00

Start with the world
We say don’t paint yourself
Into a corner but think
How ridiculous the word is
To begin with
Start with the world
One animal
Among others
A man is an idea
Had by an upright animal
Overdosing on protein
Start with the world
The single hair that will soon
Cling airily to neighbors
The impediments we only fail
To breach because
Our bodies are temporarily
Too large
Start with the world
Which does not disturb you
For no reason
The square of tamed light
That hovers at the conclusion
Of the room
There are arms
Dangling or thrown in
Ease or fury
Everywhere
Start at the airport
Of the city that overlooks
A sea you cannot drink
The sky is on
Fire at least twice
Every day
Start without
Shame at the abundance
Your eyes leech
From the periphery
Your eyes used up
Until you sense the necessity
For lovelier organs
For want of a compass
You will cross into immense
And once forsaken territories
Where the language of mute vectors
Like light like electrons or
The urging of gravitational bodies
Is audible still
If I speak of time I only succeed
In discrediting grace
We are all gravitational bodies
Where are we all
Headed?
Start as often as you sense
An aversion to it
The body that is
Now anew
That is to say
You are becoming another
Thing wholly astray
There is no pausing
In wonder
At the wreck of the world
Which is rearranging
Past sleep
You can slow
Down or speed
Up but only at
The same time
Start with the bird
Whose name you don’t
Know now laughing
In its lilac bough
Revisit the bed
At inopportune moments
Watch the coyote
Frisking amid the man’s scattered
Articles until your back
Falls into spasm
Every statement belies
A splinter
Of immanent questions
Breathe as though it were possible
Not to
Fall into spasm
Whenever the phone rings you
Should look at a stranger
Before answering
Begin again
At the quest things
Demand from the habitation
Of air
You share
The molecules of the potato
Stolid with their lack
Of charisma nevertheless
Siphon some morning’s triumphant
Bandwidth of sun
Start with the song
Friends make in their enmity
Of night’s passing
Under the emaciated daybreak
Clouds as gypsy cabs
Scuttle forth in Spanish
Radio brain-squawks
This is the morning the cowardly
Fear
When every glancing
Atom starts over
As it has
Every morning of existence
The trees grinning inwardly
At our hopeless rush
Into open air
Which openly harangues
Us in its patent
Refusal to draw close
Today the air tickles
The back of your throat
Like a daring lover
Who fears not the conspiratorial
Plunge it
Probably invented
Like Ellsworth Kelly
Said, “I wanted to recognize things”

FACSIMILES

2009-02-05T23:03:00.001-05:00

Sunday morning sun coming
Up over the punctuated
Factory glass of Erie
Pennsylvania, the Erie
Beer Company closed
Forever, green scrap cranes
Still, flaccid almost
As gleaming heaps
Of disassembled metal
Split the light in all
Directions, basking
At Erie’s fringes
The sun’s almost
Solemn orb striated
By fingers of cloud
It nonetheless gobbles
Neon at the borders
Leaving Erie on
A cramped, acrid Amtrak
Scribbling on a snack
Car napkin heading North

OF/OFTEN/OFF

2009-01-28T16:24:00.001-05:00

after Lisa Young

You are the center of every
Someone is speaking well of you
You are heading for a land of
Days of the month
You will inherit a large sum of
A diversity of friends is a credit
Speak only well of people and you
Take advantage of your great
You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy
Of good judgment
You are full of a sense of urgency
The best prophet of the future is
Out of an old routine
The love of your life will appear
You have a deep appreciation of
All the preparation you’ve done will
Finally be paying off!
You have a keen sense of humor
You are a person of culture
Your spirit of adventure leads you
As the sweetness of coffee
In a place of cool climate
Wisdom of the ages
Of great adventures
Of interest
The path of life shall lead
The secret of getting ahead
The enjoyment of life
Is often a lonely one
Keep true to the dreams of
Your versatility is one of your outstanding
You are one of the people who
There is a prospect of a thrilling
Simplicity of character is the
Happiness of your life
Art is the
Accomplice of love
You’ll have all sorts of
Your present line of work
Of victory
Soon you will be sitting on top of
God of fortune
You are a bundle of energy
You are a lover of words
And like the role of provider
The star of riches is shining
At the touch of love, everyone
You will always possess
A charm and a sense of
Sometimes the object of the journey is
Off

DANCING WITH DISTANT PARTNERS - Luce Irigaray

2009-01-08T21:02:00.000-05:00

With the objective and subjective losing their boundaries. With each one of all "things" resting one in the other, pouring themselves out one into the other without bounds. A recalling of a state so long past that few can manage to do it...Entrusting to the other the very rhythm of their breathing...Putting language, the precinct of Being, into danger so that it might regain its voice. Its song...Where the only guide is to call out to the other. Whose breath subtly suffuses the air, like a vibration sensed by those distraught with love.

Here Irigaray is talking about the "venture" a poet must make to get beyond the "inert sky of thought" that man has for so long labored falsely within, with the possibility that he might reach something primary, existential, real. This venture begins with the dissolution of dualisms, which unwieldy work like tripwires against the elegance of his dancing. In this new field that her feet step into, she cannot measure herself against “things” as such, but must move within the net of “things,” which have similarly dissolved, and now present only the interpenetrations of their proximity. The poet pours forward, stepping ahead, tracing no path except the one born from a contingency of movement. In this field, the only wrong step is the one laid knowingly; the only way to lose direction is to look for a compass. The poet steps into the already altering topography of his nearest leanings, as if the horizon had been brought to his immediacy, relenting in elastic distortions to his every movement. This is why the venture requires the recalling of a state “so long past that few can manage to do it.” It is situated in the already. The path remains at the beginning of the step, where what is given spreads out, and where the gift of air surrounds one with the necessity of its embrace, flooding the lungs with reasons to continue. And continue they do, pulsing in and out with the advent of air, falling into the rhythm of breath, which is necessarily shared, perpetuating the conspiracy we make with the other, entraining the two in an improvisatory and porous corporeality. The two that is no longer two, but a shifting conglomerate of forces, all caught up in the movement beyond or before thought, which commends the body into flux, the dance made by those who trust the world and call it sufficient.

This is where the song intercedes. One hears the call, as hearing is the primary sense: immediate, proximate, uncontrollable. The call of the world falls upon us with all its solicitous appeal, resounding direly but without threat. The only threat arrives from within, as one must move past the false hope of thought, that which craves its constructed peace, its false balance, its façade of control that rests heavily upon the flimsiest of conceptual borders. The singer must plant her foot blindly, moving in trust toward the world’s appeal. The singer opens his mouth, forming the shape of disclosure, and pulls air’s swirl into the rhythmic bell of his lungs. What arrives revives itself in the body’s dangerous bloom, which obliterates all delicacy, splitting language’s tenuous ligature, splaying literature into its origins as song. Song is the conspiracy air carries from mouth to mouth, from ear to ear. Here Irigaray mistakes the nature of this conspiracy, which is not subtle. The song is ongoing, patient beyond the need of nuance or inflection. The song is direct, as only the most fundamental facets of existence can be, which isn’t to say that it doesn’t swerve or zag or suffuse the world with what Grosz calls “pivots of unpredictability.” This is the movement of throes, those flights of imbalance that eviscerate geometry, galloping direct yet directionless in the unadorned freedom air provides. This is the movement known to lovers, who find themselves raw, and receive each febrile jolt the body suddenly tunes into its porous orbit. The body is a radio, but more than that it is an instrument. The singer opens her mouth and sings back to the world its ongoing call, responding with intemperate glee, returning and retuning her own cells to the oscillatory embrace air makes of us all.

“ON THE BASIS OF A GIFT THAT PRECEDES ALL SPEECH”

2008-12-16T19:40:00.000-05:00

The gift before, the gift
preceding “thought” but
not that of the body, the gift
in perpetuity, that which has
not left us, a gift of the midwife
of “thought,” she who discloses
the basis of a gift that precedes
all speech, the song that shakes
in appeal’s response, the basis
of a tongue, which finds itself
lost in oscillations, in response
to that which precedes being
the gift subsequent to nothing
a stab of phenomena that pierces
the face of being, that ebbs only
to wax into bloom, the gift of
air, that invisible balloon giving
place to voice, the open that is
the condition of life needs not
be reviled, nor reveiled, not
beshrouded, the gift of air is
the gift of disclosure, of voice
that secretes itself by way of air
that plainest of substances, so
plain that it fills even our least
moments with dire wind, so
tough and unerring it sweeps
forgotten through the very
condition of thought itself
the gift that precedes the need
of giving, a manner of retuning
the slip of matter to its curdle
and sway, the midst that most
strikes us before the necessary
interventions of love, of need
that flows in its wolfing gait, of
swell and succor that arrives
from the body unbidden, as we
err into thought so weary of
breath, so bereaved by the fools
gold that is language, again
the gift that precedes this feral
unfolding, finally struck by how
slowly the air must love, the gift
of abundance abiding beside, as
air’s porous grope concedes to
loom and return, the gift that
wakes these atoms into singe

HYMNING

2008-12-16T19:38:00.000-05:00

The appeal that harmony
makes of each bloom
of flesh, each rot
fractal overlapping

matter as light
of its likewise self
shines uncowed by
the sloth of thought

to come as a bloom
of flesh in the open
mouth that is morning’s
body gone song

in the breath sun
makes of its courtly
and distant throb
My son you are weak

beside your own engulfed
manner of flowering
like a shadow that thins
itself into the blade-strew

of rents broaching
the earth and laden
with pinwheel darkness
To blister softly

as the leaves unfurl
and luff in the coil
of wind that wefts
the air to air and

one’s skin to sun’s
simmering orbit
and each gloomy suture
that traces violence

from the world back
to our body belongs
to us as a limb
even as it instantly

absconds like wind
to return in a fled
and phantom pulse
To reenter the margin

of one’s cellular
cacophony only
to stream out in
undignified gulps

when the myriad
splitting atoms turn
over in profusion
To furrow or fold

against the slow greed
that is detachment
so that each coincidence
returns us to the other

and away from the cult
of separation that has
become synonymous with
blind political stupidity

To look upon wood
with the same obvious
glory we do flesh
or some crop of stone

with the same wonder
we mark a child’s
groping frustration
My love I have known

you first and through
that knowing have
remembered a world
so as to reenter it

impurely and perplexed
as befits the senses
which cross in awe
this ever so tenebrous

lurch of moment
that overlaps the next
to form a rhizome
without the benefit

of direction divine
but flowering oblique
with an ignorance
of fear that inhabits

non-human life
To leave humanity
in the great hope
that our entwinement

with the immediate
may extend all as
one’s breath is thrown
to churn amid the air’s

already intoxicating
and transparent muddle

THE FIRST THING A THING

2008-12-07T12:14:00.001-05:00

The first thing a thing

is is a question. One wakes

already in the midst

of things and must go

questing after

the unfolding the being

of each thing successively

presents. What could be further

from mundane than

the forbearance of things? I ask

the light what it

is and it replies

like a mountain, silently

exhuming metaphor from

its path like a gnat. And yet

there remains a thing

to which light is still

beholden. Originary holder, huge

and insoluble all

at once. Give up? Air is our

greatest teacher. Its entire

being consists

in allowances, letting the others

emanate. Only the air is more

humble than mountains. It’s so

tough it hugs all day long.

And yet perhaps

this questing is at the heart

of the problem. Man

turns the cadences

of this sensuous expanse

into things of thought. Surely

the light goes on without

the fiddling of neurons. No one

would claim to know

the mountain more clearly or

even the mystery a tree

brings to our eyes, which allows

the air a voice in quaking.

FASCICLES

2008-11-01T12:59:00.001-04:00

11:00 now the bells complete their horizon

otherwise opening on a novel countenance

the way skin flakes to reveal the further face

cornering thought through a dim freeze

as October intrudes from its calendar crouch

to leap like a skull into a phenomenology

of wind which resorts the atoms into shiver

Does the water emanate from the body

of the earth simply to pool like words atop

the coarse beards of the sleeping elderly

grousing language wintry with brambles

but looking closer we see the fractal grace

the wisps of sound turned awry in the end

so to go darting agile in the ligature of breath

And dance is the only name left for it

this discourteous jangle of fraying nerves

as our neighbors emerge pregnant and clumsy

and beautiful in the hoar breath unfolding

of time’s veiled vesicle fart and recovery

I do believe the sun is keeping us balletic

just as the news ballistic returns in shredding

Fascicles attached loosely in the eye’s veiny

bedding or doubled again with a simple twist

of tongue which clicks damp in the mouth’s bell

of flesh I have been poorly removed while smoke

but range closer in my crumple and grief wince

AFTER TEILHARD

2008-10-07T18:07:00.001-04:00

The appeal that harmony
makes of each bloom
of flesh, each rot
fractal overlapping
matter as light
of its likewise self
shines uncowed by
the sloth of thought
To come as a bloom
of flesh in the open
mouth that is morning’s
body gone song
in the breath sun
makes of its courtly
and distant throb
My son you are weak
beside your own engulfed
manner of flowering
like a shadow that thins
itself into the blade-strew
of rents broaching
the earth and laden
with pinwheel darkness
To blister softly
as the leaves unfurl
and luff in the coil
of wind that wefts
one’s skin to sun’s
simmering orbit

GROSS EXAGGERATIONS: PART 2

2008-09-07T10:35:00.000-04:00

the music of the body. As such, I still wake
molecular, determined to encounter each
wondrous unfoldment of doing in the parade
from here to there, endangering greed or suffused
by the unwieldy structure of dream that yields to
no autonomy save the interdependent
whole. Every dream has its own nightmare and yet
these children will not be wolves. We are wood people
where the kings speak in oblivion. This silly
hat was given to me by a great woman. Cold
and blood-warm we steel ourselves against the headlines

starting not with the universe, but the duty
to enumerate the universe’s utter
complexity, crashing the windows in rank waves
of seeing, taking the streets with both our ears warped
by fleeing machinery, our nostrils duly
plumbed by each passing hormonal swoop. I finger
a car’s insect-speckled fender and know a stray
will soon be stalking here its incidental break-
fast or merely by the jogger’s sweat-stained brand name
Lycra I better know the neighborhood’s shift toward
an ever-blanchening whiteness. Waking inside
the molecular of my own making, already

not where I was, and moving further in the gaze
gone fetid between the trees.

GROSS EXAGGERATIONS: PART I

2008-08-15T11:54:00.001-04:00

And then to wake molecular in the fetid
gaze merger of trees, I wrest my wearisome ear
from the window’s distant thunder. A woman walks
this town on death’s whooshing blade. I don’t seem to know
Her. The rain begins and everyone else begins
acting like children. It makes me feel Antarctic
to stand in between so much electricity
but I swore I would never be afraid to leave
the bed. Thought-buzz, air-split, pain-spark, throat-fire, waking
molecular in the fetid gaze merger now
neon by day. It was my birthday weekend’s dead
celebrities: men whose anvil voices led them

to a rupture of blood. But I was not feeling
ungood. My cat had taken to sleeping behind
the television. The newspaper contusions
slipped yellow and festive into a new conjure
song for those who would remain animals in spite
of wealth. To wake molecular, to dust the trees
with eye-blear, to stand incarcerated only
by virtue of one’s heart, which spurned all metaphor
to beat on, to bruise, to wake in the rhythm of
a body turning force in the trees’ fetid gaze.
A rupture of blood in the air. A blindness caught
in the leaves. A manner in which to obviate

the sex of dying. The streets weren’t easy. Blinking
wasn’t easy. To know one would forever lurch
forward, oblique, wasn’t easy. Looking out from
a moving target without violating some
body near constantly wasn’t easy. It was
wonderful. Waking molecular in a crash
of sense, not worrisome for the fragments or each
simmering affect shook loose from the dumb-mirror
that had been paid to stand where we could point with ease.
No! No standing, no shooting, no sinking, never
another coaxed boat of sense to moor in time’s mud.
Only this nerve-cape, only another flung veer

for the seer to follow. To look we must grow
weary of looking. The cat does not avert her
eyes. When I was a child I understood how
not to breathe. Now that I’m a man I find myself
taut at each swerve, unable to liquid sideways
to solidly slosh where a miracle might pass.
But as the trees in the leaves wave my mass also
finds a break here and there in its impossibly
convoluted curtain. A slit through which to slip
new, feral, punctured—everything now necessary
in the fetid gaze mergers, the blood rupturing,
the earth not unfriendly in spite of our terrors.

But I know what you would say: out there are people
trying to kill me. As if our lives were but scenes
from The Red Circle or The Samurai, something
with Alain Delon. All of which is true, but death
remains the thing we do not dying. And besides
there are people inside trying to kill you too.
As if your life were a scene from Opening Night,
which it is, as Gena Rowlands inhabits each
of us, or we inhabit her, the flesh of our
reversibility aching through the fake wall
of language. And yet the iterable returns
like sunlight, a weightless expression already

in the act of being said again. So let us
slip together into the contradictions which
pool at our feet, knowing how little knowing can
help, its addled hand groping at the darknesses
that abound here. No here, then nowhere. The reasons
to go on lodged whimsically in the trees’ Y
shaped arms, in their fetid gaze, in the merger we
make simply waking unto sense, waking anew
to ourselves molecular, joisting the air even
in a farce of stillness. My love, your face goes on
parade then, its wiry bouquet of forms morphing
at each symphonic turn. I hand you an answer

my love, always yes. Our eyes sunk into the flit
our hands make roping in the sun’s twittering twine.
We retune like molecules, waking anew now
in the fetid batting of each leaf’s unfurling
eyelash. Like archers who have forsaken targets
we let the world hit us. We who no longer see
allow sight to pour forth like a lewd font upon
the trees’ untaintable flesh. So if I see red
it is only because I love the uncertain
neck her hair curtains or the jellyfishing pulses
that bring her mouth into flush. We suffer only
from abundance. Lack is the lie that has served

to sever the few from the human. I’m going
out for milk, laundry, the bakery’s bludgeoning
air, the crossing-guard’s bored loiter, the cars’ violent
arrival and retreat. Breathing in-out, a bell
for conquering absence, a machine for killing
its own cells. Breathing out-in or conspiring
with trees and dogs and horseflies simply by virtue
of surviving. Killing, conspiring, simply
conquering, bludgeoning, and suffused with the mind
of lost tribes. Well, fuck the mind, and bring all those lost
tribes back for rememberment. Aborigines
deemed agriculture a menace to the glory

of the earth and clothes merely a means to strangle
the music of the body.

THE BEGINNING OF THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF LITTLE MISS FUNNY BUTTONS

2008-08-10T16:24:00.000-04:00

Little Miss Funny Buttons or MFB
That’s what her dad and I call her
The littlest fourth in our family
In addition to me, dad, and Walter

She earned her nickname just last year
Though it seems like she’s had it forever
And the story about it is very dear
Our strange adventure together

One more thing you’ll come to know
Is a singular creature named Squibbons
Who loved to steal both thread and bows
Or any small fragment of ribbon

It started last summer behind the house
Where our daughter Olivia played
We lived in the middle of bird and mouse
On a ranch my grandfather made

Now Olivia wasn’t the kind of girl
Who stayed out of trouble for long
If I dressed her all in white like a pearl
By night she was green from the lawn

So it wasn’t strange to see her tracks
Color the floors brown and muddy
But soon a combination of facts
Became quite a curious study

One afternoon as the shadows grew
Olivia entered the kitchen
Wearing a dress I bought her new
But missing a delicate smidgeon.

“Olivia!” I said with surprise
“Where is your fourth fancy button?”
And under a set of confused little eyes
She said, “Mom, I haven’t done nothing

I went to the trees in the back of the yard
Where the branches make everything shady
And found a spot where the dirt wasn’t hard…”
“You napped in the dirt young lady!”

“Well, first I covered the ground with leaves
So my new dress wouldn’t get dirty…”
“And then let me guess, some forest thieves
Stole the button, like field mice or birdies.”

That’s how it was, day after day
Olivia’s buttons would vanish
Whenever she went to the backyard to play
And her stories were growing outlandish

The last straw was a red velvet dress
That matched Olivia’s hair
One night at dinner she sadly confessed
It was had disappeared into thin air

Until, finally, I needed to know
Who the button-thief actually was
I dressed in green from head to toe
And crept like a quiet thing does

What I saw that day was Olivia signaling
Around the dark mouth of a cave
All of the sudden, a creature was wriggling
To the edge of the shadows she made.

Even within Olivia’s cover
The creature appeared to glow
It squeaked out a word that sounded like mother
And Olivia replied, “I know.”

“The truth is I think you should meet
Mom, stop trying to hide!”
The cheeks on my face turned red as rare meat
Embarrassed that I’d been out-spied

“She looks just like my Christmas tree
Your strangely monochrome mom,”
Said Squibbons with obvious glee
As he climbed into MFB’s palm

“Do you think it’s time we showed her in?”
She asked with a little girl shrug
He answered with a curious grin
And gave her ring finger a hug

So I slowly stepped out from the bush
Behind which I had been hiding
And Olivia gave me a gentle push
Into the cave without lighting

Lights there weren’t, but we could see
As plainly as if it were day
For Squibbons just so happened to be
A glowworm lighting the way

I had to stoop low for the cave was small
Though it seemed to go on forever
At last we came to a booming hall
With a little bed made out of feathers

I could see Olivia had been here before
By the drawings all colored with chalk
One was of Squibbons with buttons galore
And on this she gave a strange knock

When I heard it echo I knew at once
Something inside it must hide
The secret I’d been tracking for months
Was revealed as the wall opened wide

What was behind it you’d never guess
A scraggly tree covered in charms!
With a very familiar red velvet dress
That was cut and draped in its arms

Every button that had disappeared
Could be found on this wonderful tree
And even if it seems a little weird
I couldn’t help filling with glee

It sparkled and shined in the wormy glow
And we all laughed at the riddle
That only our family has come to know
Though you now stand in the middle

We hope you will keep our secret alive
And remember to button your tree
We’ll see you again next time you arrive
At the adventures of MFB

NEW SEVENS

2008-07-16T11:40:00.000-04:00

After the rain the
birds tentative. A stray
car here there
like white squall. What
is home in
this city of erupting
knees? This city of dancing?

Wake neck
stiff full less
from dreaming than from
stubbly bits of song.
Where did we go
only just a moment
ago? Now here.

The whirling ceiling
fan jerks
the cerebellum into pulse
like a wet bell
whose tongue sets
off little forks
of white electric dance.

POST 200: A CONFOUNDING ASSORTMENT

2008-06-19T08:58:00.001-04:00

AS SKULLS TEAR BY

Another heavy
metal morning
A worm one
enters the abscess
of the city in
(or the excess)
as skulls tear by
I can’t breathe
as little as
I’d like
but love
your black cable
wire window bouquet
and love this bloody
nose anti-war paint
punctuating the streets
to go silver
and revise
another heavy
metal morning taut
in the fetid
gaze merger of trees

LOOKING SEXY FOR PEACE
for Erica Svec

These paper roses
seep black
from the swollen elbow
of her ceiling as John
smirks through
curly detergent
stillness, dear friends
forever crowding
out lack only
to fill it with a new
and indefatigable lightness
looking dangerous
or sexy for peace
as quaint Buds sprout
in the plastic black
where our hands meet
or suffering nightlife
we charge victorious
into the blue char
of summer, subnormally
wrecked with petals
sleeping over

SNAPSHOT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

First
nowhere,
now
here.

SIXING

Squint
Sequin
Secant
Second

Beckon
Bedeck
Bedlam
Meddle

Middle
Milder
Wilted
Walden

GRASSROOTS

Assholes continue to amass
Poking a dim axis
Of symptoms into happy hour

But it is I who
Judge, dear Friedrich
Winnowing grace

While the jukebox cycles
To submerge chatter
With its middling solemnity

Let me speak plainly: fuck
Less from shame, dear
Asshole mash, you menace well

Short of honor and no
I won’t speak
As plain as I should

Know better, the ceiling
Gorgeous with tin, the organic
Strawberries staining

The TV personality sipping gin past
Ethics, a new hole
In the heart I use for purchase

Curious about wealth
In a violent way
Unsettling each scotoma

The magazines wince
Into commute
But for now going nowhere

As the city chains
Further so
As to foster its uninter-

Ruptedness into our bustling
Cache of asym-
Metrical longing, gross

Billows rising
From the mouth’s open
Awe where we lope

Like a never before
Played song played by brilliant if
Untrustable musicians

Staring absent or
Restringing their hapless
Instruments into line

The jukebox breaking
Into Pixies, the bar
Cat sniffing at one scuffed

Shoe after another, rubbing
Up against nothing and for fuck’s
Sake it’s already half-past

Eight, we should
Be at church, Elaine Equi
Is telling our fortunes

PART FIVE

2008-06-12T18:58:00.001-04:00

In a way, I had been preparing for the last couple hours for years. When I say, “we were not set,” I am speaking from an idea of the possibilities that I had been nurturing for some time already. It was as if I had been preparing a kind of hearth, a nest where the possibilities might shortly reside. At first this nest building consisted of word collection. Certain words stood out to me with an uncanny resonance. Disequilibrium was the first and would prove to be the most ornate. The others that followed—veer, oblique, provisional, amid, etc.—seemed almost like sequins that flashed and danced upon disequilibrium’s turning form. Or, further, I think it may have been these words that gave disequilibrium form. As these words accrued and the form of disequilibrium emerged, it became easier to recognize the implications it proffered. We were not set. A balance was not struck. The movement was not linear. The understanding had nothing to do with stability. Or, in more affirmative terms: everything was already veering into the improvised performance of the real. But perhaps that sounds too vague. This is the problem with language. We have developed it to express definite content. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. Ask yourself: “Am I already moving?” Ask yourself: “How many layers of ambiguity exist between this movement and myself?” Ask yourself: “How can I see myself if I am a moving target?” Answer yourself: “What is the use of an arrow if it is always moving?”

Yes, sometimes in the midst of becoming something else, a process that inundated us over the last couple of hours, the answer to a question was a further question. Answers, after all, in the Platonic world we had been thrust into since birth, only worked to shield truth by gilding it. And now how far we’ve managed to stray again from the body! It’s as if we are repeatedly drawn back down into the medium of our discontent. In the dying words of an alcoholic poet: My vocabulary did this to me. So, then, more questions. How is it we became so sure life was lacking? That there was another life preferable to the one given us? Does it not begin with the misperception of an alternative? Or, perhaps, a denial of perception altogether? Is it merely a trick of language? The imagination’s great betrayal? And now who is being melodramatic? Obviously we need to return to the actual events of the last couple hours. At some point after the shaking of the hands, or during, but after we had entered the experience of our own shaking and become it, we became visited by voices. Language, no, but voices all the same, and this is what kept us free from the nonsense above. They began as gusts. One small, deep, guttural gust after another, rising from somewhere central within the shaking of the body. At first they were simply expulsions, like a withered bag wheezing its last pocket of stale air. But soon they evolved from gusts into grunts. Or more likely the grunt was added to the gust. The vibrations of the body seemed to be pulling forth a new capacity, hitherto forgotten in the miasmic swamp of unmediated expression. Gust, grunt, glory. Gustgruntglory.

PART FOUR

2008-06-03T19:02:00.001-04:00

Contrary to love, one might have expected the last couple hours to crescendo with a blood wash, a bouquet of limbs. And to the degree that we were pulled, ecstatic, past the horizon of the body, its practical violence did become an immediate, throttling aspect of our experience. Another of the things a body does is destroy itself. Or, at least, parts of itself, maintaining a certain resilient sum with which to proceed. The cells, the bones, the neurons—all of it under constant threat of overhaul. Let’s take the bones. There is an age when some sequence in the cell DNA tells it to stop refurbishing the integrity of the bone structure. Until that time, tiny proteins spend all their lives destroying the bones so that other tiny proteins can build them anew. This process fully refurbishes the bones every dozen years or so. Teenage bones, until the end, don’t exist. So, suffused as we were in the non-totalizable unity of the body, these sorts of processes did not go unnoted. But far from spelling out a sort of terror, they seemed to exist as a disproof of peace. An affirmation if you will. The violence of the body affirmed the body as a place to go on living. And as for the violence we’d become used to—the newspaper apocalypse, each morning returning to herald the depravities of abundance, of disparity and riot—this was conspicuously absent. It was as if the world had ceased to enable the archetypes of human drama. There was no revenge, no redemption, no plethora of reactive forces engulfing the now. Nor was there any feedback imagery, no involuntary ticcing of war or the daily, almost domestic carnage we’d come to know. Once, and only once, I was visited by an image that was plainly disturbing. The image of a dog, splayed, entrails rent across the soiled asphalt of the highway’s shoulder. Then the lyrics of a song: “To be red tendon dog, blood breathing by the side of the highway.” And of course it was beautiful.

In addition to these sudden song memories, what could be heard in the last couple hours was legion. True to Cage’s word, the ostensibly inviolate silence of our contemplation contained within it a great aural wealth. But where Cage had made it seem abstract, conceptual, this new flaunting of silence was the very essence of physicality. Suddenly the shudder was sounding. The shudder that we was announcing itself, or ourselves, in oscillating sonic tides that rose and retreated in consonance with the body’s unending revelation. How obvious, we thought without thinking, sound is touch. To vibrate, to sing. The body is a music, an unruly symphonic mass from larynx to synapse. The mess of the body—sloshing, zapping, choking, warping, unfurling, lapping, etc.—creates an aural field that fills and colonizes the air that allows its passage. It also reminded me of drinking—the undeniable intoxication, the gleeful loosening of self and loss of stability. There was the mysterious confluence, that feeling of throat and liquid undulating together, the substance indecipherable from the mode of its delivery. So it was: drinking in and spilling out: the same.

To quiver was to sing and to sing was to imbibe, torquing the last couple hours into a kind of spontaneous bacchanal. But would that have been evident to a casual observer? Having been an unmitigated participant, it’s not a question I could answer. And what might be meant by casual observation anyhow? Causal is more like it. All that time we spent gutting the wreckage of our world so as to see more. That was the problem with seeing. It filled things, created things, changed things and everything appeared casual. Appeared. Seeing reaped and harvested, carving deeper into the illimitable surface of things without touching them at all. The more I learned about seeing the more I saw that cause was effect. It’s like that old worn phrase: seeing is believing. It really is! But not one and then the other: both, simultaneously. And as cause piled up on cause we casually looked the other way or looked directly at it and did not see. If someone “objective” had been there at the end to watch us, he would have been wholly oblivious to what transpired. If someone “objective” had existed, that is. It all depended on the cult of separation, severing the real from our perception because we had been told it was insufficient. Severing each being from every other so as to isolate some convenient truth.

Unfortunately, language is also a technology of convenience, and thus far my account of the last couple hours has struggled between a desire to express things in terms of an experiential real and my inability to fully escape the realm of conceptual abstraction. The latter intrudes and impedes by dint of learned and, perhaps, neurologically embedded habit. But that’s where the last couple hours approached a kind of suturing magnificence. They constituted a situation. We became situated. The place-taking of site returned to us at the intimate circumference of our own bodies. And in being sited, situated, we were not set. It was as if a spotlight had been turned on. And we were in the exact spot where it had been pointed, patient, waiting. It was the sensation of performing, but with the added realization that the performance had been going on for quite some time. Already performing, then, in the spotlight of being situated, conceptual abstractions seemed to flake away. Qualities like warm, loud, wet, rough; these ceased to exist apart from the particular physicality of things. Where before they had drifted separate, unhinged, ready like transparencies to be laid atop the blank slate of the objective world, they were returned to the objects themselves. The notions of objectivity, separation, isolation, severance, definition; all these fell away like a dark game whose rules have been exposed. Or: we ceased telling a bad joke.

PART THREE (for Kendra on her birthday)

2008-05-24T02:00:00.002-04:00

Recalling the last couple hours is similar to waking, as is any attempt at memory. One wakes and remembers or remembers and wakes. The horizon between perception and consciousness shifts to accommodate these states, phenomenologically disclosing the worlds of present and past. Simply standing in a room, focusing one’s eyes on the small, quavering movements of one’s hand, the world of the present is continually disclosed. It is as if one has opened some sort of portal, a radius of activity wherein the world is performed to us. Except, in the last couple hours, this portal that we opened merely through the efforts of our own erratic perception, revealed to us an aspect of ourselves, already performing, in the travail of the hand. We woke to our hands. And once we began waking, it was difficult to stop. The intrusions of memory helped assuage us, but they were, conversely, difficult to hold on to. For instance, within the shaking a moment of the past would open. Something seemingly inane. A collection of words. Having been a poet, often the words that came to me were my own. If you consider memory as an act of perception this quirk loses some of its hubris, though I can’t say I wasn’t aware of some lingering embarrassment. Moment’s wing broke. Those are the three words that came to me. It was both the title of a poem and its last line. A sort of drug-influenced poem from my early twenties. If I profess little self-awareness within the actual events of the last couple hours, this small memory alone would seem to contradict me. So it is with the mind, even in the thrall of revelation it is convulsing with possible thought, self-commentary and game.

If anything seemed game-like in the last couple hours, it didn’t in any way contradict the seriousness of our endeavors. The idea of a game is a little like the idea of a joke. For years I had been completely preoccupied by my incapacity to answer the question, “What is a joke?” The possibility of a joke is activated by any number of subtle maneuvers in perspective. Part of the joke seems to be one’s intention of framing it as such. Same with games. Having been yoked for nearly a decade barreling my way through the subterranean commute of millions, I knew getting to work was a kind of game. As was work itself, not to mention showering or making coffee or waving to the woman behind the counter at the diner from the sidewalk outside as I hurried past. Seen objectively, an act that has become difficult if not nauseating, all limitations imposed on the body, when combined with some degree of repetition, constitute a game. And that’s the problem with objectivity—I can immediately identify a slew of exceptions to what I have only just hypothesized. All of this is beside the point, except of course to the degree that my divergences have themselves constituted a kind of game. The important thing is that gaming is something one does with the body. It is a way of expressing what it is a body can be said to do in the world. If it was serious enough for Spinoza it should be serious enough for us. And trust me, I know plenty of jokes about Spinoza. Perhaps the question, “What is a joke?” is the same as the question, “What is a body?” Certainly the humor of existence, its cloying absurdity, is rarely lost on anyone for long. And so games could be said to function as a countermeasure for the joke of the body. And so back to laughter.

In the last couple hours the laughter that was shaking that was the act of becoming oneself through becoming one’s hands did not stop. Like an object put to motion in an ideal, frictionless world, there was no opposing force to counteract the initial inertia of the shaking once it began. I use this example because it couldn’t be more wrong. Part of becoming the shaking that was one’s hands was relinquishing any and all remnants of the ideal that malingered by habit or convenience. And friction existed not as a force, but as all force. Friction was the engine of the real. It was friction alone that allowed the body to veer and zag, to refract and carom. This is why shaking was laughing. Moving included a necessary element of surprise. What was done was never known before the moment of its doing. The only inexorable force was coincidence: one body overlapping another. So it wasn’t an object traveling ceaselessly in one direction, it was the exact opposite: one body detouring inexorably through the surprise of its coincidence with other bodies. That is why I love you. And love, before, had been such a mystery. And it was still, but not an impenetrable mystery, an inexhaustible one. The very word love was itself, to quote Merleau-Ponty, “the surface of an inexhaustible depth.” Perhaps this was one of the mistakes about love before, that it might be without friction, or that it could travel in a single direction. As with any phenomenological enquiry, of which love was surely an example, it came down to attention. How closely is it that one looks at the coincidence of bodies? How well can one disclose the phenomenal aftermath of his or her collision with her or him. As with the revelation of our hands, its inexhaustible nature makes for a terribly exhausting undertaking.

For that reason, the last couple of hours were lovely. That is, they were characterized by love. I laugh and I love you. The Chinese and I love you. The last malingering ideals eviscerated and I love you. Which is one of the reasons, perhaps, that my lapses into thought so often consisted of you. One in particular kept recurring. The paradox is that it took place in a location where I know you have never been. It was daylight, just. The house was still cold and the grass in the backyard was arching with beads of dew. I tiptoed through the lawn, never looking down. It was my conviction that the several pinecones in the untrimmed lawn were only avoidable if one did not try to avoid them. So I looked forward, fixing my gaze on some middle distance between the far alleyway and myself, and emptied my mind of pinecones. My ankles were becoming very wet and the smell of the garden was growing heavier, but I was not stepping on any pinecones. Though this walk to the garden only took an average of seven or eight steps, when it recurred to me during the last couple hours it sometimes seemed like the length of an avenue, and I was so deeply engrossed by the process that imagining the end of the walk could never take enough precedent to actually end it. And all the while I thought of you. It occurs to me that even then, when I was only a young boy, crossing the lawn to eat snap peas and cherry tomatoes before the others had woken, I thought of you. Assuming you feel the same way, this shouldn’t seem at all improbable. Which, if we are to return to the notion of friction, would be perfectly acceptable even if it were so. Of course these things are improbable. Why else would we be here? Of course the pinecones are moving in accordance with your effort not to make an effort not step on them. Why else would they be there? That is why I love you.

PART TWO

2008-05-16T18:47:00.001-04:00

I am using words like “beginning” and “last” and “hours,” but it may have occurred to you already that these concepts, even during the last couple hours, were vague at best. Not that our concept of time had been crisp beforehand, but there had been some collective understanding, however provisional. In the last couple hours, time, or the unnamable duration that was now describing the event, was suffused with a sort of drainage, a lessness. Yes, a lessness; as with the color that emerges from the drainage of a darker color that preceded it. The phenomenon that stood in for time was suffused by a lessness that recolored each successive movement of the event. This is my hand was not so much a thought as it was a sinking into the actuality of experience. I am my hand was not a consequent thought, but a further sinking into this actuality. I am shaking was both a continuation of this movement and a paradoxical veer toward levity. If one is shaking, I mean if one’s being consists in shaking, then how is one to remain a man? Why is I not a slow light, an eccentric form of laughter, a current of fortuitous noise? With the introduction of this ambiguous multiplicity, something about time began to dissolve. Whereas once time consisted solely in direction and number, it was suddenly contiguous with color and texture, and the separations of existence were slowly merging into some vibrant contagion.

That this insistence on merging was characteristic of the last couple hours was somewhat ironic. I had wished to be synesthetic for as long as I could remember. I had sat in some isolated place, at the edge of a lake or in the bureaucratic recess of some building, and attempted, always without success, to cross-pollinate my own sensory inputs. I suppose the desire had originally come from my fascination with Alexander Scriabin, the Russian Symbolist composer. Scriabin was a prodigious synesthete who was composing an Armageddon-piece entitled Mysterium when he died. It was to last seven days and climax with the end of the world. Or, not the end of the world exactly, but an end of mankind, and the replacement of our species with a verdant proliferation of higher beings. But now, I fear, I’m confounding my tangent on synesthesia with eschatology. Which is, I suppose, what was ironic about my sudden sensory overlap. There’s nothing like getting what you want when you no longer possess the capacity for desire. At least not desire in the acquisitive sense. That was perhaps the greatest gift of the last couple hours. It was no longer possible to desire anything for one was desire. But here I am definitely jumping ahead of myself. As Scriabin did. In his maniacal rush to compose the Mysterium, Scriabin forsook certain domestic necessities, or else undertook them with such headlong fury as to render them fatal. He died from an infected shaving nick.

Where were we during the last couple hours? That seems like a fair question. Even the Mysterium was intended to “take place” at the foot of the Himalayas. Where were we? Were we at home? But what would that mean? Relative designations, such as home, had largely fallen afield. Whose home? Which home? What aspect of home or how deeply embedded within said aspect? To be frank, these answers no longer seem within grasp, though the questions spring up effortlessly. Like excess skin they had long ago been gobbled up by some microscopic horde. The only immediate value of where one could point toward was the body. The only point was the origin. All other locales would need to be earned, and none before the reckoning of the body had reached at least the shell of the body, which had for so long been mistaken for the entirety. For years the body had existed as a sort of room, one among or inside many. It was a horizon. Inside there were rooms and outside there were rooms. None of which seemed to penetrate the others, though they did contain or inhabit. A line from a poem drifts in: Is there room in the room you room in? We placed ourselves in rooms, spent most of our inefficiently earned capital on them, their furnishings, the abstraction of their value. We placed rooms within ourselves, ideas and acquisitions of culture that ostensibly added up to a self. The body existed at the horizon of each, like a mirror reflecting identity back and forth, creating a whirlpool effect, the black and white alternating on a barber’s pole.

Thus the first revelation of the last couple hours was twofold. There is the body and there is the shocking bondage that is the interdependence of the body. This is what finally obliterated all the rooms. When we became the hand we became the shaking of the hand, which was inseparable from the muscles buttressing the back, which were themselves inseparable from the blood coursing and the impulses firing and the sweat that pooled unbidden upon the brow’s stricken strand. That’s where we were, each of us, stalled sojourning at the origin. With the dissolution of time, our where returned to us at the point our what demanded. So many years had been spent prostheticizing the body, extending it, augmenting it. The body that was a shell became a surface for which attachments could be fashioned. All this began, of course, by asserting that the body itself was a prosthetic of the mind. Where am I? I am blood. What am I? I am shaking. So the answers were not fled, they were simply endless. Where am I? I am falling. What am I? I am hand. I am red. Where am I? I am Chinese. I am kissed. I am scarred. Though it did not feel like labor, this new sense of the body, its being inextricable, simultaneously shrunk the world and expanded the possibilities of experience, pulsing in and out in throbs. Pulse in: the body is a cage. Pulse out: everything is singing. Pulse in: I will die without every necessary part. Pulse out: there is no end to the complexity. What was wagered in the humiliation of returning to the body was won when it was discovered, finally, that the body was enough.

IN THE LAST COUPLE HOURS

2008-05-04T19:31:00.000-04:00

In the last couple hours, we did whatever felt most obvious. The idea of producing an idea, much less the correct one, seemed to us an act of intolerable gluttony. We at least understood that much. Production was consumption, making was taking. The nature necessary for such distinction we had long found lacking. When I say obvious, I don’t mean smoking cigarettes or fucking desperately. I don’t even mean fucking tenderly, though that would have been nice. The obvious we had in mind did not required a mind at all. Or, rather, it required a kind of no-mind. Not that these inaccuracies are lost on me. The obvious was purely, or at least to the degree that we were capable, corporeal. So, yes, the mind was involved, but its blithering tyranny had been subsumed into more apt tasks: folding, lobing, collecting and distributing electricity. We looked at our hands and we became their shaking. We felt ourselves contradict, subsumed into the cross movements of recoil and plunge, and soon we were adrift in the new hopelessness, a sort of cloud frilled with hope and bounded only by the vagueness or specificity of the moment.

When I say the last couple hours, I don’t mean to suggest that we counted them. The truth is…well, that is beside the point. When I say the last couple hours, I mean to point toward a certain topography of being. There is no way to know how long those two hours took. But I was telling you about our hands. This is how we initiated the new hopelessness. Our hands shook and we became it. The only thing I can relate it to is walking, or, the process of realizing that walking is only and ever a protracted fall. You are moving over the sidewalk, percussed visually by the regular perpendicular lines, and you say to yourself, “I am falling.” Perhaps you slow down. This helps. You are now falling slower. The abstract balance you were just seconds ago maintaining through movement dissolves and you are left with a miraculous disequilibrium, a shifting from one trajectory of disaster to the next, utterly fluid, proficient. Often this is when one stops altogether. The initial realization that one’s walk is more accurately a fall inevitably leads to, I hope you won’t think this an overstatement, the epiphany that even standing you are not still, or, you are still, in fact, falling. Not that facts are any less beside the point than truth.

So, the beginning of the last couple hours was spent looking at the shaking our hands were and feeling like one who has come to a halt and yet realizes that he or she is not halted at all. That was, at least, the beginning of the beginning. Which, I suppose, be the beginning of many beginnings. A vibration that simultaneously holds and is held. A pattern of veers that bring us into the microcosm of being, that field from which we’ve been so long absent. Of course, lesser thoughts invariably penetrate. At the beginning of the beginning of the last couple hours, I was intermittently shocked out of the vibration of my hands by a feeling of being elsewhere. I would like to say this elsewhere was a cosmic destination, but it was not. Every so often, a designation I realize is unhelpful and vague, I suddenly felt like I was waiting outside a restaurant. Not just any restaurant, but a Chinese restaurant. The kind one may find in a Woody Allen movie. I was with Ivan and we were waiting for our table, standing beneath an awning that stretched to the curb. I was looking forward to a beer, scallion pancakes, shredded chicken and tea. Cars drove by quickly, preceded and trailed by the desperate sound of their rush. Ivan and I held hands. Occasionally, he bent his neck sideways and kissed my hair.

If I was to say that the last couple hours weren’t haunted by countless of these intrusions, I would be missing something dire. Something I should have learned. Not that these episodes contained any particular significance, but…well…I’m sure we’ll get around to how the last couple hours served as an education. I was actually a little relieved by the Chinese scenario. The act of being the shaking that was one’s hands was extremely laborious in a peculiar way. The shaking itself was, obviously, there before the being of the shaking, so it didn’t count as labor, but the realization, the constant waking into the moment, verged on insufferable. When I was my hands shaking I was revelation. Smally perhaps, but it occurs to me that even this first small revelation could be equal to the last, not that there is such a thing. When revelation comes, or when one becomes revelation, its size is beside the point. It is always huge. One always feels like an animal. In time, it becomes clear that one doesn’t merely feel like an animal. If it wasn’t for the Chinese scenario, I don’t know if I could have perpetuated the revelation. The electricity, the transfer, the hold of the current, it all felt like opening into a fire. Of course, the Chinese scenario, its feedback spark, was another part of the revelation, but I didn’t understand that at first.

ON SONG

2008-04-13T20:37:00.000-04:00

In the voice
of the face

is the crease
of the soul

unfolding

ξ

In “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2,” he sings: When we break, we wait for our miracle—God is a place we will wait for the rest of our lives. When the girl with the green hair plays a cover of this song on the Internet, she averts her eyes at this moment. When the song continues, it has changed. It has become an apology. An apology for someone who must leave. The purpose of a song is to say I am here. Perhaps the act of stating that one is here is only a preamble to apologizing for the moment when one must leave. Perhaps that is why in Aboriginal philosophy one does not leave, one only and always returns. Not to mention Nietzsche. The Anti-Transcendence School. Face it: there is no home in the sky. You can only return to here.

ξ

Through the plastic
pane of the airplane’s
window I wear
the planet

with my eyes
the kidney bean blue
of each swimming
pool hatched

landscape that
denatures itself in
order only
to leak at each simple

abutment a patch
here or there
sampling the rest
that arrives silently

like a throttled half-note
the trick
is to wait until everyone is
asleep and try on

their shapes

ξ

In ancient Finnish societies, the only means of entertainment were the songs of the great singers. At gatherings, people would form a circle at the middle of which sat two singers, their knees touching to form a platform for their elbows, which in turn supported their clasped hands. There was a lead singer and a sort of echo singer. Both singers were responsible for extemporaneously reinventing the great stories of the Kaleva district. The lead singer would begin each line and the echo singer would spontaneously compose a variation on that line. In this way, the two singers would go back and forth, hand in hand, improvising new flourishes to a very old story under the constraints of a highly structured rhythmic scheme. Back and forth: pulling different words out of the same cup, acknowledging the presence of ancient days within the surprise of the moment, repeating and returning as a way to move forward. If the intensity of the composition became feverish enough, the singers would rise and lurch around some, their hands still clasped together. This was the only form of ancient Finnish dance.

ξ

“To counterfeit is DEATH”
says Benjamin Franklin

“Success is the lowest art”
says Anselm Berrigan

while Jean-Michel Basquiat
spray paints GOLD WOOD

on the enormous American
car

AN OLD SONG

2008-03-29T16:40:00.000-04:00

for Ed

Charming our notice
A gaping shoe listens
The universe piqued
By objects in reverse

Merciful cumquat
Gutted by a thumb
Milady loves another
She used to love none

Under the gangplank
Angered by fortune
Lace-lipped penitents
Settle for a cur

Sentiments are heavy
Marsh-drowned youth
Rank and disheveled
In the outfield at dawn

Ukulele lately
To strum in a bathtub
Battered by a strobe
Shutters through sun

Clad in a pantsuit
Saturn rising slowly
Fat guys in malls
Trying on hats

Merciful stovetop
Tugboat torch song
Every Mississippi
The day starts o’er

A grapefruit split
By margarita teeth
Part of me wonders
Another part sleeps

FURTHER HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

2008-03-19T16:22:00.001-04:00

We wake late

Like all

Sojourners

Into the already

Deepening fray

A country at war

With ideas

Which induce it

To explode

Those

That would do

The same

We wake late

Like all

Sojourners

Dislocated

By history

And devoid

Of land, of what

Can we call

The root

Of this waking?

The body beside us?

The rent waiting

To be paid?

The work to be done

In the district

We can’t afford

To live, to where

Would this waking

Allege us

And who deem

Us the bearer

Of the where

And how

Could we really

Say it was ours?

ξ

Again awoken

By the exterminator

His ear punched

By a diamond

My hair jutting

Tangential

To what thought

Seems to course

And return

The axons that

Writhe and conduct

These figures

Into their dim

Recognitions

The fire the myelin

Yields into form

As the silent waves

Of shock shake

Sleep from thought

Flinging amiss

Or caught in the traffic

Of expectation

Which is itself a form

Of belief, often

I have brought my hand

To my face only

To find briars of hair

And what man

Doesn’t but constantly

Find himself

A beast?

FURTHEST HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

2008-03-05T20:31:00.003-05:00

The eyes open

Amid a dash

Of percepts

And the terrifying

Deduction that

Things have verily gone

On without you

The neck more

Crowded with hair

A mouse desiccated

In its gluey end

The cars have all moved

To the near

Side of the street

Hugging the trash

And rain has glazed

Into bubbled plates

On the freezing ground

You can hear

A car startle

Into empty alarm

As often we might

In this trauma of days

Not dying

Unlike the kitchen’s racket

Which soothes one

Into pattern, into sense

As the coffee sputters

In its particular

Way, day-old, reheated

Turning the heart

Over with its promise of

velocity, lift, loquacious

Recommitment

To the dreams that

Have only half

Left us and so desire

Their hypnopompic revisit

Before the body

Is appropriately clothed

Or the mind

Which is nonetheless

The body is itself

Swaddled into its habit

Of traffic and passage

The light like

A scaffold

Hinting the cathedral

That is Brooklyn noon

While the toaster smokes

And the cat sings

Like a skittering quail

It is time I think

To wake my love

Who sleeps late

Under the doused lighght

In a torn T-shirt

Warm like a stone

Or a hood or

The sound of Bettye

Swann’s voice

When she begins

“Then You Can

Tell Me Goodbye”

ON SONG

2008-02-20T09:28:00.000-05:00

The first thing you must know is that you are already singing.

ξ

The horizon of the ear
eclipses the wall

today a sawing shot
through with green buds

tapping hoods
I haven’t spoken

for hours. The horizon of
the eye is a half-sphere

where our there suffers
no obstruction

Here, here
is all that

there is, this wind
embracing, instructing

the lack
of anything we might call

separate

ξ

There are clusters of cells in my brain that fire each time I encounter certain loved ones, tastes, color arrangements, repeated advertisements, and of course, songs. The brain attaches a degree of emotional significance to these encounters, as if one cluster was raised in topographic relation to the others, a sort of bar graph of consequence. I hear your voice and I raise. The front gate clangs in my head, releasing a map of affect. In Cotard’s syndrome, these clusters are razed to the point that the person believes he or she is dead. In the experience of many epileptics, the opposite is the case: everything has the utmost significance, every word a clue from God.

ξ

If the world is a seizure
the aura is tone

and I suppose it is
given

to us to
flux again

through the advent
of song, going

tremulous
in acknowledgement

of the already
harmonious

or discordant surge
we curve

just singing

EVEN FURTHER HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

2008-02-12T09:06:00.000-05:00

Which isn’t to say

That one doesn’t

Wake all day

Just as an honest man

Is always in trouble

The headlines dull

The head while

Eviscerating

The heart, the hand

Draped idiotically

Like a flag over the eyes

Sense redirected

To more immediate peril

Toes turning blue

As the radiator limps

Into its wintry duty

Its indolent waves

Pushing the calendar

Like a wing from the wall

The starlings are fled

The cat is fed

The Carter Family

Pleads Meet me

In the moonlight

Alone, punctured, interloping

Atoms to sustain

Our perceptual escapade

With no hope

Of escape, of winter

I have had enough

When suddenly you arrive

From the overslept bed

Coursing

Within your envelope

Of heat, of course

I love you

As the church bells

Announce the hour

9 o’clock

In their flurry

Of dongs

FURTHER HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

2008-02-06T20:17:00.000-05:00

Having made it this far

Harshly coloring

The air with scrapes

Of sound

Or trembling

In the electrons

Like color

The milk has run out

And the coffee

Chimes acidly

Ferrying us

From this catch

Of moment

To the next

For fear

That we are

Mutely doing it

On our own

A thought intolerable

A morning hot

With lemon water

Empty brown

Bottles crowding

The kitchen, the cat

Secretly frenzied

As the invisible strings

Of breeze animate

The spare

Limbs’ leaves

Across the retarred street

Only a human could need

Something so

Redundant

As an answer

Looking skyward

To the stars that exploded

To compose us

Inconsolable settlers

Of a land we

Know less and less

Now and again

The starlings crowd

Like seeds atop

The gutted bough

As the radiators

Begin their spitting song

Splitting the air

For warmth, for love

This sound of you

Breathing in

The dusty bedroom

As outside a stray

Cat laps bugs

From the speckled grill

Of a minivan

The various forms

Sustenance takes

Breaking the mind

Into wonder

And resolve

FOOL’S GOLD

2008-01-26T17:29:00.001-05:00

The sun is setting. There is nothing new. Dust on your hands. Hawk in the air. The sun is setting. This is something old. Grass between your lips. Meat on the road. The sun is setting. It forms an emotion. A shape in mind. Dark on the hills. The sun is setting. Eyes squinting in thought. Cars afar humming low. The radio broken still. The sun is setting. You walk inside it. Nobody is watching you. This will not end.

The past, they say, is under our feet. It is what holds us up. That is why we cannot get to it again. The future, on the other hand, is always within reach. See that old sign out there? What you see of that sign is the presence of this moment. What you don’t see of that sign—its hidden back, the contour of a bullet hole, minor erosions from the wind—that is the future. All you have to do is get there. Any moment.

There are layers of looking here: out, across, in. A vast beauty seems to rest on the edge of intimate dilapidation. That mountain explains nothing. This dead thing in the gravel fascinates mute. We don’t ask a mountain to explain itself. When the objects here rust, we don’t think it unfitting. When the woman on the bed turns to face the drawn motel curtain, we understand the landscape. It moves again.

What is it that brought you here? Who is it that left you here? How is it that you came to be familiar with these parts? Sun cuts down the fissure’s blond weft. Could it be told why the people here don’t leave? Kneel in this hard dirt so you can smell its traveling. Are these parts a whole of some kind? We came this way to get to somewhere else. The Coke machine is on the outside. I come here whenever I pass through.

There must have been a voice out here. Someone across the untouched contours. Likely it was a song. How does one fill a space like this? Certainly not with thought. One can think into these hills for more years than they can live and the wind will still carry it looser than sand. But now there are roads here and places to eat, to fill up. But that’s just us. The only thing that gets full here is the moon, or these ashtrays.

THE HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS OF MAPLE STREET

2008-01-19T12:53:00.001-05:00

A red curtain

Of hair

Parted by air

A yellow lighght overlooking

The white bed black

Cat lingering like flora

And the muscular promise

That inhabits

One’s daily collision

With exteriority

The successive

Moment’s horizon

Radial, glittering, already

Talking it out

As these cells divide

Myriad, queasy, suffusing

The body with chatter

The bedspread sun

The boy surges through

Into the fingers that

Terminate in a man

Mitigating darkness

Or reveling from nerve

To bone, to know

One has only to move

As the palpitations continue

Caressing a wreck

Of resurfacing affect

Reggaeton in a sudden

Street level throb

The airplanes lately

Bothersome

Like a miracle

That keeps heaving

Its gasoline feedback

Sonata for late

Millennia or all

These nihilists

On parade yet

Just to wake

On Maple

Is to be pervaded

By a slow slow

Reverence

And even the birds

Harvesting bones

On Nostrand

Squawk and dodge

To the rooftops

With simple glee

Church bells turning

The streets on

Or resetting one’s ear

To the difference

Between the shower

With and without

Its dampening body

To dampen the slack

Water radio static

The daysong streets

Wrenching arias

To arise commonly

In this liquid poison

Air we deem

American spirit

Knuckles split

By a dancing praise

“For Reverend Green”

And the revelations

Of friendship

This collective thud

Against the nothing

That forever

Bares its straw teeth

Against the obviousness

Of wonder

Which dutifully waits

For sense

To arrive, to blare

Here is easy

As is this

Obscene shrinking

Into wealth or

A circumspect success

When there is sun

Sustaining the earth

Amid its unthinkable

Threat, heat, there

Is only a song

To be sung by friends

Beginning again

In the middle

Having just woke

A shape in the process

Of becoming

Something even

More unknown

As the fire trucks

Rumble past

And another airplane

Hoarsely roars

Its yawed acknowledgment

Of America

Her swimming

Pools and patchwork

Farm geometry

A kettle awhistle

In the kitchen

Where a woman

You love makes

Breakfast nude

And a fine red hair

Grows on her arms

Which crack an egg or

Pour the milk

State changes everywhere

In this glowing penumbra

Of abundance and melt

Take a second

Look into the of

That is the air

Around you

And tell me

It isn’t enough

from THE HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS OF MAPLE STREET

2008-01-15T21:32:00.001-05:00

A curtain of hair

Parted by air

A yellow lighght overlooking

The white bed black

Cat lingering like flora

And the muscular promise

That inhabits

One’s daily collision

With exteriority

Each moment’s horizon

Radial, glittering, already

Talking it out

As the cells divide

Myriad, queasy, suffusing

The body with chatter

The bedspread sun

The boy surges

Into the fingers

Which terminate a man

Mitigating darkness

Or reveling from nerve

To bone, to know

One has only to move

As the palpitations continue

Caressing a wreck

Of resurfacing affect

Reggaeton in a sudden

Street level throb

The airplanes lately

Bothersome

Like a miracle

That keeps surging

Its gasoline feedback

Sonata for late

Millennia or nihilists

On parade

Just to wake

On Maple

Street is to

Be pervaded

By slow, slow

Reverence

And even the birds

Harvesting bones

On Nostrand

Squawk and dodge

To the rooftops

With simple glee

Church bells turning

The streets on

Or resetting one’s ear

To the difference

Between the shower

With and without

Its dampening body

To dampen the slack

Water radio static

SEVEN MORE MISTAKES

2007-12-28T10:39:00.000-05:00

XXXI.

Dumb moon
still talking
through green
sea foam
tonight

XXXII.

And yet, as one sometimes says, this is the strange part. “The People” were out in heavy coats and prattled in the hushed tones of precarious intimacy. Their children either shot ahead or lagged behind, but never quite fell into step. I crossed the seams in the sidewalk like a starling harvesting song. “The People” were feeling free, laden as they were with merchandise of various sorts, having finally transfigured all their drab hours into tag-bearing loads. And yet, I was surely one of “The People,” was I not? I was. And song rushed through the lobes of my brain like tinsel through a bough. Even the purposeful steps of “The People” were torn apart and stored in haphazard chunks for future use as dance. I was harvesting “The People.” And even that word, People, became utterly strange. A traffic of recycled limbs. Pe. Op. Le. Pp. Ol. Ee. Because this was the strange part: I was not a starling at all; I was rapt. And the fiendish luxury of that rapture did not separate me from “The People.” It was the trap. The trap that kept me in step.

A Variation

Sometimes the lack of
the forearms of
the hyena trainer is
the act

the circus a locus
of phantom labor
or a table from
which we gorge

the hyperbolic then
the ambiguous, which
in the end is all
that holds us together

XXXIV.

wake
make love
make coffee
shake the birds

out
sprout new thought
shout dreadful things
quote a cinematographer

“You’ve got light. You needn’t feel alone.”

Sven Nykvist, Light Keeps Me Company

XXXV.

I’m a joke too like a horse burns down
or the jellyfish forms of black plastic bags
I’m a fish too like a joke burns down
or the jelly horse forms of black plastic bags
I’m a fish too like a horse blacks form
Or the jelly joke bags of down plastic burns
I’m a form too like a fish burns black
Or the jelly down bags of joke plastic horse
I’m a horse bag like a joke burns black
Or the jelly form downs of fish plastic too
I’m a fish horse like a burn forms too
Or the jelly joke bags of down plastic black
I’m a black joke like a fish burns form
Or the jelly horse down of too plastic bags
I’m a joke too like a horse burns down
Or the jellyfish forms of black plastic bags

XXXVI.

In the voice
of the face

is the crease
of the soul

unfolding

XXXVII.

Part of today is
taking the bus
facing the face
that is yours
behind those curious
and key-scarred
frames, dumb, totally
rapt or detached
the advertising that
persists like a fog
made of skin
evacuated into
razory planes
your very own face
pushed over the streets
happy to arrive
decades late
to the perfect song
voiced by ghost
today the snow
that is our hearts
flutters and love
will truly tear us apart

INSTRUCTIONS OF THE CALENDAR

2007-12-15T12:08:00.000-05:00

September

There is a star in the sky.
Look at the star.
Don’t take your eyes off the star.
Set.

October

Shining. An aptitude
for spook-noting. Though
nothing may be in
the room, that should not lead
one to believe
that nothing is vacant.
Let your spook
sense shine. Cooperate
with whatever lingers within
the nothing that
isn’t.

November

Leave your coven silently.
Do not explain love
to a cloud of atoms. Recover
only what proves lost.
Write a novel whose protagonist
is named President Stove.
He reclines in a dilapidated grove of oranges.
Your ship is hove-to and needs
your attendance. If no shovel is handy
an arm will do. Never hover
over the “truth”
of anything. See the plover’s brittle
grace? A dove will
never improve your life. Never leave your head
in the oven and never let the devil
remove your shoes.

December

Take an hour
to walk across
the bedroom
of a stranger.

Watch the massive
garment of the river
unravel itself bare.

Erase the letters
of your name
from the Book
of Revelation.

Now know how slowly
one must love you.

INSTRUCTIONS OF THE CALENDAR

2007-12-08T16:46:00.000-05:00

May

Keep one eye engrossed
in the rapid landscape

these city sidewalks make.
Count keys, dried drops

of blood, solitary buttons
soiled gloves, and pennies

with tails facing skyward.
Every time you see tails

look up for a full minute.

June

Find African American teenagers.
Put their pants on backwards.
Make millions of dollars.

Or, alternatively:

Find a good-looking white teenager.
Make sure his pants fall down.
Make millions of dollars.

Coda:

The instructions of this month
are only feasible if you live
in the early 1990’s.

July

Visit Brooklyn.
Drive counterclockwise
around Grand Army Plaza
on your way to the Brooklyn Museum.
Pay exactly fifty-six cents for your admission.
Ascend to the fifth floor.
Walk clockwise
around the American Identities exhibit
on your way to Larry Rivers’ painting July.
Notice the large woman repeating
herself in the scene.
Her name was Berdie and she was his
mother-in-law. I once knew
a woman named Birdie
who was ninety-something years old.
Her teeth would fall out
while we talked. She was a ballet dancer.
July is a kind of backward
choreography. It traces the heat
and gesture that constitute the intimate
traffic of our bodies.
Do something twice, altering it
slightly the second time.
Leave Brooklyn.

August

There is a beautiful wind animating
your organs tonight, the squish
and slip of valves
pulsing anew in the dusk of its elastic
architecture. There is
finally some way to understand
the body from inside. Consider how
much has until
now gone unaccounted for, the machines
of interiority aspasm night
after endless night. Open yourself
to yourself. Write
a self-portrait that is not
a metaphor.

INSTRUCTIONS OF THE CALENDAR

2007-12-02T22:49:00.000-05:00

January

Get a really long extension cord.
Connect it to a hair dryer.
Melt a hole in the snow the size of your body.
Lay down in the hole for several hours.
Think about what it feels like
to be old snow.

February

There are several protuberances

on the male body: twenty
digits, four limbs, two ears

one nose and one penis.

The female body has twenty-nine.
Jump, jump, jump, jump.

And while you’re jumping
consider that you contain

within you the possibility for either body.

March

You are inevitably passing
from one fraction
of your life to another. For instance
I am just now
leaving…well, I guess
I don’t know, but I think
my point is still valid?
Anyways, while entering each
new fraction you should allow
its strange, angular dimensions
to suffuse you with
a hiccupping yellow light.
It’s okay to laugh
if that’s how it feels.

April

Throw chair through
window. Sit on it.

Give abbreviated reading
of poems by the current

Poet Laureate. Run.

TEN MORE MISTAKES

2007-11-27T10:03:00.000-05:00

XXI.

Don’t stop
not ever

XXII.

One needs a tense attention
net to trap the obvious

It is given
to us to

field the mistakes
God isn’t

dead, God is mistaken—let
us mistake the spirits

differently

XXIII.

A blackbird’s song made the muscles
near my eye contract

Her body across
the apartment swung

one way
and another

Tug spine
Tug eye

She is mine and I
can’t stop looking at her

but does looking twin
or thin the world?

Moon on
water like a feedback
skull. All I have

ever wanted is here. There
is no there is
no no substitute

Spirit Breath in Red Shift

ee I a a ieiae ae i ae
e ai i ii, euay, iee aaeue
o e ay o ee i ie eeae
I i oe Aeia oio iui ai i ue
a oe o ae aae a o ea
I. e ee oo o Ae, a, o e, Ae
i a oie, a iaeai i e ai, i
eay i a ie, eay o e, I eae
ou i, e, a
e aao i ei ie o o ia o
ey ea ao ao, a e a oi
I ooi a e iiy aeie oa, & ei
o ou ae ou a I e ee, oi
ae u, oi uie, eeyi
oe, ie, ue o e, oey, aiae-
ei, a oii o ae,
U i e ai, ii, ui ee o i, o
oe a ee eoe?
o a aiay a oy, eiou i ouoy a oa
eye eeai e ie ii a
& oey i. o a ey i, ieee, o a
oi o ae o o, aeei io ie-ae o,
o u, & o u oe ieey a ee e ou iaie
o o o. o a aie o o ey i eei
I ou ee & ee i eae ao ui e o ai
io e i ai e ie u o & o eae
o eae & o i ee eae e, o o e, o oii
o ee o ui eae eaee i i
Oy ou ua o & ea oi. o, o i
ee a o, "aioia eai", u o, I o o a
I a. e i I ie? I i ee ie, I i ie
o e, & I i ee o aay, & ou i ee eae o e
o a aay & oy a o, eie i a, ii
o ie oy o a
I oy oou, & I a a o e, & I i a o i
ou i
I ae io ou ie o ae i & i i o & o oi
i ee ae
a, a a a
Aoe & oe, uay ae, eeee
I i oy io e a
e o uiou o o ou oue

XXV.

Soon no one
will know that

Mohawk was
the name of

a people. The
word Indian

is already wrong

XXVI.

(An ear is as large as a mountain)

“Mere fact of music shows you are.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

XXV.

According to Zen masters, one
may achieve greatness
in the form

of Shoshaku jushaku, one
mistake following
upon the next

To write a mistake-ist poem, one
has only to keep an eye
on the fluid

disaster unfolding

XXVI.

Canary nothing
on pulses
of tone

or apples
left on
like streetlamps

On, in, an
easy candor
with which to ruin

need—come
home, this is
the loveliest rhyme

XXVII.

“Things don’t get better, they just get.”

Ron Padgett, How to Be Perfect

XXVIII.

Do not churn merely
a horde of accumulations
nor turn purple
for fear
of living amid. The woman
in the bed opening
her eyes is opening
her eyes. The apocalypse
sings. Is here. Is
singing how very here
it is. But this song is only the here
of the apocalypse. I am only
talking with yellow
praise, praise
for each sleeping reticulation
of peril. Against a word
that would rehearse
Over the woods
and through the river. Do not breathe
unless it is through the river

XXIX.

It is common for one to believe that the force of the mistake is directed toward escape. This is not so. It might be, of course, if escape were truly possible. But instead, we enter ourselves only where we lack each and every possibility for escape. There is no gap, no fissure to slip into. Mistakes are planted actions. That they leap into the unknown has nothing to do with leaving the earth or entering some kind of void. Mistakes take place in a shifting landscape, but with absolute faith in the marvel of landing. Or crashing, which is another kind of marvelous landing. All our movements, even standing, are momentary recoveries in the protracted crash of our lives. To stumble into mistake is to take place and never an escape.

XXX.

Sometimes leaving
the opera is the opera

like misreading lines
into a skewed grace

she staged “a wave
offering” and hoped

to commandeer “another
formal pornography”

TEN MORE MISTAKES

2007-11-16T18:28:00.000-05:00

XI.

Stake out famous
buildings. Lateness may

entail earliness
just as the lack here

may shelter
grave abundances

Mysteries of the Organism
are sexy. All

is gravel and break
the maze

XII.

“It is always time to start over. However modestly.”

Anselm Hollo, Caws and Causeries

XIII.

At day the glass
plays its lightsong
on the wood

There is nothing less
apt than
humorlessness

The poet may live on the edge
of a lake or
along radii of smog

and drift
like a neon
hush

XIV.

Never retreat
into the future
for want
of courage

XV.

Today is wholly
composed of close-ups
indefinite fragments
swelling out
of frame—the eye
of the girl
suddenly an eye of
a girl, the lashes
closing on their black bulb
only to open
once more with the inexorable
movement of a thresher
sifting tints, form

The grain of the wall
welts into a harrowing blanch
of topographic routes

The fruit flies whip
and stall, torpid with the inanities
of youth and age

at once

The toe looms
The sunlight drapes encaustic
The penis curls into

an old mine still threaded
with blue-green ore

XVI.

“I will never find a way to say how much I love American close-ups.”

Jean Epstein, “The Magnification”

XVII.

The sky’s trick is one of remaining impossibly aloof

Just to wake is to be pervaded by a kind of reverence

What scotoma is it here that welds us seamlessly to life?

XVIII.

You can build a house
in the preserved corpse
of an idea
that takes place
ceaselessly and without
blood, bacteria, corruption

a house for frictionless
clamor, sliding
desires unsoaked
by light
or kept like a jewel shell
under the unfogging

breath of time
but I wouldn’t

XIX.

Split I say
Split your thought-

encrusted boat
for more dazzling

matter: “Enchantment today
is the only discipline”

Albert Flynn DeSilver, Letters to Early Street

XX.

Is the apology part
of the dead people?

Is the apple’s rot
not a rat’s joy?

Everyone has been wrong
about the sun

he is so
not thought

he is no
he at all

Her rays are not lines but fat
splay, an endless finger

upon the already blistering
skin of everything and everything

tries to get her together
Our little vain invasions

HOW TO WRITE A MISTAKE-IST POEM

2007-11-10T13:04:00.000-05:00

We demand to see more because of our experimental mentality, because of our desire for a more exact poetry…because we need to make new mistakes.
—Jean Epstein

I wanted to invent a new film. If I had to give this style a name, I'd call it a "mistake-ist" art form.
—Harmony Korine

I.

Disband all
relics of the eye

Let this bird outside
your window be
a hole in your poem that
refuses explanation

a swerving refusal, a veer
so as to see slips
in the horizon’s wall

The city of the sky has no past
The whorl at the tip
of the finger is a little wind

The wind does not doubt
the mistakes it brings into being

A mountain does not explain
It is like a magazine

whose ads have been abandoned
by the models whose
redundancy went unheeded

It is not hard to write a mistake-ist poem
It is hard to be alive

II.

watch
wash
watch
wash
watch
wash
watch
wash

III.

Do not yet let
the rich inculcate you so
thoroughly. The of
that is the air

is arm enough

IV.

First we must thank
the trees. The streetlamps

fizz and swoon. Bugs
clipped by the now

growing emergency. Hello
helicopter. Goof-blur

Goodbyes. Incorporate
the machine’s desire

by breaking the machine
Goodbye hello incorporate

V.

Do not disbelieve the birds
Notice the leaf’s bored twirl

Look out at the world as if it were
a telephone you

hadn’t expected to be
buzzing in your fluttery hand

Then again, your hand
is always fluttery and buzzing

VI.

The mouse in
the cupboard in
the kitchen wiggles

his tail through
the closed hinge
the the the his the

VII.

Wait
Not now
Hold it
Not just yet
Just about
Almost

The important thing
is that you not

hesitate

but learn
to occupy air
to feed it impossible

ideas: we
are put on
earth a little
space that we

may learn to bear
the beams of love

Now

VIII.

Switched from William to Blind Blake
from “Holy Thursday”
to “Panther Squall Blues”
a gift from Ed
the recording bathed in static
as if it were the secret voice of air
set loose by time
to laugh uncontrollably
at our dim attempts
to love right
the mistake is holy
to love right
the mistake is yet holy

IX.

“One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color

X.

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks

This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing
and yet I would

not be so
easy. That man that
is my father
We know only

what might
be made to sing
through mishap
tonight

SOME REMARKS ON SONG

2007-11-04T11:12:00.000-05:00

Singing reciprocates the advent of us in the world. To sing is to create an event of Being; a becoming forth that is no mere echo, but verily a response. Being is a conversation the universe has with itself. When one engages the world by way of song, she takes up the other side of that conversation, transforming Being’s soliloquy into a dialogue. To my mind, this is rooted in a harmonics of need. There is a need for the world to be acknowledged, for a response to return to the world’s appeal to itself through itself. As Derrida wrote: “I felt the necessity for a chorus.” It is a chorus of desire and wonder, the primordial wonder of presence, of the presencing that is brought forth by sense. And this is why song is always phenomenological: it is an acknowledgment born from perception and a response borne by it. It is a resonant naming, a halo to illuminate the givenness of each moment simply by calling attention to it. It is this call, this further appeal in song that returns, as the universe’s light is shown and showers back upon us, perpetuating the wonder that is becoming forth. To bear witness in this way is also to situate oneself, to find placement. When the I acknowledges the world through song, it takes place amid the plenum, its own sense separating and joining simultaneously in the way of Merleau-Ponty’s reversible flesh.

When I speak of presence and the wonder of its continual reprisal in the world, I approach another term, a crucial term for the exploration of song: disclosure. Song is the expression of the disclosure of the world to the singer and then a further disclosure of the world back to itself. Song opens, concomitant to a physical openness of the body and of the mouth, as indeed the world does, opening forth “that which does” or “those which do.” It is an activity that illuminates the active, an opening that rejuvenates the open. Disclosure also has the valence of secrecy, which intimately textures Being in its mysterious and indeterminate wonder. Song brings us closer to what Bataille calls “the intolerable secret of being.” It is the passing of a secret into the realm of the real, the texture of the real grazing against the real itself, just as the words and notes produced by man drag and catch in his own throat to create his appeal and acknowledgment. It is given to us to sing. It is one thing, in the words of a Spinoza, which a body can verily do. The call opens toward response. It is our responsibility to sing the world back to itself. There is no truth, but there are innumerable answers, the song being one of the answers particular to humans, an act ontologically given to us to do. An act of need that returns to us from the desire of the world.

GREETINGS FROM THE OUTBACK

2007-10-27T12:43:00.000-04:00

You know it’s fall
when the acorns fall
into your lap
or pummel passersby
in a light wind
coffee almost cold
children screaming
as their nannies
make call after call
on cell phones
leaves parading in shrivels
of pluvial scratch
and coloring the asphalt
with triangles of vein
the Aboriginal people
of Australia tell
the same story of
the same vector of
earth for millennia
just to make sure
it continues to exist
while we here in
urban America pay
so much and so
rarely our own
attentions to what
bustling strips
compose these afternoons
the ducks upright
and flapping like lungs
the skyscrapers grey
and tapering dumbly
I am in love
with the acorn
in spite of the bruise
it put into my skull

FRANZ KLINE

2007-10-19T19:30:00.000-04:00

Friday filthy with beard
Donning an affluent stoop
Baking slightly
And unceremoniously rifled
By September’s dim wind
We’re on break
The construction workers and I
The absurdity unsettling
As cabs glide past
An austere September wind
Scarfing the uptown rich
Or is it scarving
How bored the terraces
Seem with no one
Testing their garlanded weight
The trees starving bare
As fire trucks
Blast east red and swollen
With their generous din
Man finally
Ascending from the knee
We hope and love
The effort of grace
Returning from want
To a harmonics of need
Our breath pale
Like September wind
Over the taut white
Whittling bones
He painted this work
On a window shade
And died with his heart
Starkly blown
Today I feel like a mark
Made by strangers
As we pass over
Our city and property
Is senseless

TOWARD A VOCABULARY OF THE REAL

2007-09-27T19:04:00.001-04:00

Act
Affect
Affirm
Air
Already
Ambiguity
Amid
Attention
Becoming
Body
Coincide
Consequent
Continuous
Contradiction
Corporeal
Depth
Difference
Disclosure
Disequilibrium
Dynamic
Erupt
Excess
Experience
Friction
Happening
Heat
Improvise
Indeterminate
Interpenetrate
Intersubjective
Intimate
Invisible
Involve
Jerk
Joy
Local
Multiplicity
Mutual
Necessary
Oblique
Of
Open
Participatory
Perform
Permeable
Phenomenal
Place
Presence
Provisional
Pulse
Queer
Recommence
Rhythm
Simultaneous
Situation
Slip
Spontaneous
Texture
Uncanny
Unpredictable
Veer
Web
Weft
Wet

THE LIGHTNING FIELD DIARY

2007-09-21T19:19:00.000-04:00

1

Approaching Quemado
Rossellini’s crow
roosts atop
his pile of coal

(or better)

A Marxist crow
on the side
of the road

on a pile of coal
on the way
to Quemado

2

Empty theatre but
for table
tennis table, immaculate
floors, strewn
corpses filling the sills

3

Locals’ Disdain

4

Desert hail hailing
us forward

(rain arriving
coffee percolating)

K sulks as the storm
blows us off

5

Desert sea
birds peep

A cottontail
poses and darts

assails the camera
leaving green

eggs in its wake

6

A tremor in the poles
communicating some geologic
code to us

Some voices are so
deep they leave
us feeling like a moment

of breeze

7

The queen drags
her bulbous
globe through
the needle’s shadow

8

According to Walter De Maria: Isolation is the subject of land art.

According to Jakob von Uexküll: The umwelt is a composite of biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal.

9

What is the song appropriate to the umwelt of the human? It is important to think without thinking. To play without the expectation of joy. If possible, to joy flush against the uncounted strum. There are no words in the ground. Tourism is sin. There is, finally, an ethical response to standing.

10

Her red hair
has grown
more red
unhurried

A black beetle
nudging
the toe
of her boot

11

According to Walter De Maria: The invisible is real.

According to Elizabeth Grosz: Living beings are vibratory: vibration is their mode of differentiation, the way they enhance and enjoy both the macroscopic cosmic and the microscopic atomic forces of the earth itself.

12

All of the sudden
All of the sudden

Or, perhaps
it is the landscape that
plays us

13

A heron risks being
impaled on
the dusky points

14

There is something
to be found here
that was lost
elsewhere I think alarming
butterflies from
the brush clomping
stupidly

15

Military plane overhead
mud seeming
to bubble in the near
distance

Closer it alters
to tens
upon thousands of tiny
fingernail-size horseshoe

crab-like creatures
scrambling carapace
over carapace
in some frenzied birth

It occurs
to me that lightning
may have relit
the beginnings

of a new universe inside
the old one

16

Sunset tops
the blackened tips
like pencils

newly hewn
K never
more beautiful

bottle in hand
smile light
hare ducking

beneath the porch
earth wet with shadow
poles disappearing

17

Or, perhaps, the
visible isn’t

18

K and I fight
over sheets dream
strangely wake
in the predawn crush
giddy with stillness

19

Prairie dog jaw

half of it

like an ornament

for the stones

20

The triops have gone
under, no
more bubbles, one

awake on
its cape of
a back

21

Still there
is “danger in

veering
toward
abolition”

22

The shadow
of my crotch
now fifty
feet away

23

Landscape Acupuncture

24

Beetles wrestling
with the remains
of a fig

A dim figure plotted
amid the poles

himself a compound
of: receipts
percepts, excerpts

BEGINNING AMID

2007-09-12T23:32:00.000-04:00

Ending with a line from Anselm Hollo

Beginning amid
A series of thrusts unknowingly
This little self, a wet knot
tying the landscape
into radii
We wake again amid
the complications
of joy, pray
without our sense of it
to stay radical

enough

to embrace the breadth of what
we will not know
so as to move
a temporary instrument
the world wakes

through

Daily banal miracle
wailing amid
horses or disconcerting
the chaos into form
No, not
that, I hope
you do not think you
can deprive this coarse world
of its murderers
Art is no more free
or lacking
in complicity than physics

though

each being remains busy dreaming
of heat
knees thrust
obscenely even in repose
It is beautiful
strange
to watch the film bubble
and flame amid
these old odd frames
The body collectors
asleep finally
as the trees wreathed
in sour rot
loose themselves and return
to light, to let
sonic awkwardness
punch breath-holes in thought

GREENER SUDDENLY

2007-09-11T19:07:00.001-04:00

Greener suddenly
the truncated ring
of the church
7:15 pm
meaning always desperate
let’s leave it
to the desperate
let’s repatriate
the hollow blood vibrations
ever retuning
as the world swerves
muscular fits of the soon dead
ever returning
to the ecstasy of the start
greener suddenly
as the moon bereft wriggling sings
its absent worm song
a car in the leafy streets below
hugging the wet walls
with its curdling bass
the bike lane
littered with tiny yellow flowers
my cat in the window
her eyes
greener suddenly
it should be terrifying to love you
coming home from the doctor
an honest man is always in trouble
making soup
Bruce Springsteen
opening mail
but it isn’t

OROPENDOLA

2007-09-05T16:24:00.000-04:00

with Kendra and incorporating Why Birds Sing? and The Wanderer

The woods came a charming noise
Too long and brown too
Too poor to pay for
Our food and drink we pluck
The red-flecked stars
With flood-black eyes
Very few birds ever learn to sing
Women watching from every window
Dream of swimming down
Jug, jug, jug, jug
The wet and dry finally left confused
Galuk, galuk, the gray
Goose plows
Through ridge and furrow where cloud is ground
To rain and nearly
Devotional in its aspects
Young, womanly, the breeze shrinks
Enter the severing field of light
She is strange avian this
Woman never repeating
The lines of her song

WILD CHERRY

2007-08-23T12:49:00.000-04:00

This ain’t no regular Pepsi, friend
It’s Wild Cherry
And a dour woman practices
Her violin nearby
I inhabit the tree’s shade

Because my face is in recovery
From beers on the boardwalk
At Coney Island
Sun like a whip
We saw the pendulous

Nest of some greeny
Parrots there
Choking the electric transom
And invaded by sparrows

Foreign women walk by with
Shopping bags
Or run by in sports bras
Birds dip and shiver

In a pile of fine dust
Amid the cobblestone
A taxi screeches

Men with cigars seem ubiquitous
Coloring the air
One way to live is to write

The gist of what’s happening
So to know it

Today I loathe
Meaning and think only

In quale and burst

The dogs don’t smile
But they appear to

My very own sister approaches
Talking on the phone

With our parents
Who are in New Mexico
Overfeeding hummingbirds

The same thing
(Sugar water)
Acidly coursing my stomach

The woman with the violin now
Taking furious notes
With her free, claw-like hand
My sister’s talk

Slow and melodious
Because that’s what’s
Happening
My pen running

Out of ink
Dusk approaching sly
An elderly woman
In an orange wig
Warbling some senile aria

Oh no she spies
Me writing about her
The obvious, lazy disdain
Sing if you can sing she says
And I’m cowed again

SNOW LIKE FROZEN LIGHT

2007-08-23T12:29:00.000-04:00

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks.
This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing.
I am not so
easy. Love like
an unassailable
soil. But at least
not timid
with hate. That
man that
is my father.
We know only
what might be made
to sing
through mishap.

HOLY THURSDAY

2007-08-11T10:26:00.002-04:00

It is Thursday and I just
Read Blake’s “Holy Thursday”
A song of the poor
And of the sun’s relativity
But he is wrong
Because the sun is not
A metaphor
A song of the sun
Is continuously sung
Do the poor sing it?
Yes, they do
The poor sing of the sweet
Torpor of the sun
Moving like an ancient woman
Over the horrible silence
Of the land
What do we deserve
From the air?
It shuttles tirelessly
These hot notes
It is even less
A metaphor than the sun
First a metaphor, then the eyes
Close contentedly
And what has been lost
Drags in the melody
Of the ancient woman’s ragged
Dress, who is also not a metaphor
What has been lost
Is too easily
Found to be believed
And the poor stare directly
Into Thursday’s air
Like nothing
And everything at once

HOLY THURSDAY REPRISE

2007-08-11T10:26:00.001-04:00

Switched from William to Blind Blake
“Panther Squall Blues”
A gift from Ed
To complement Willies
McTell and Johnson
The recording bathed in static
As if it were the secret voice of air
Set loose by time
A song about frantic love
I know the long dead
Laugh uncontrollably at our attempts
To love right
2:57
You write from work
With a barely restrained panic
Born not of love
But assuaged by it
“The sun, the warmth, the grass and your hands”
Fifteen hours fifty-eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds
Into the day
A great wind gathering
A wind that manifests while at the same time
Remaining invisible
Like the great gathering love
Which waits for you
Laughing uncontrollably

ON THE TORPOR OF NONVIOLENCE

2007-08-09T12:20:00.000-04:00

I’m done with innocence
William Blake’s that is
Read the first half of his songs
This afternoon and now
Sit sweating while the cat sleeps
This is what it feels like
To be old snow, says Colin
As the mere effort of existence
Peels away from one like a bathing suit
Turning inside out
Eyes salty
Listening to Public Enemy
A tornado in Brooklyn
And a cockroach on the wall
The size of the mouse in the cupboard
The cat won’t kill
Startling awake on the sill
Only to yawn
Blake’s lamb's post-millennium skew
Angels dehydrated
In the air-conditioning

WAYRRULL

2007-08-07T17:51:00.000-04:00

The big bang is an initial step. The first step taken in existence. Or, more likely, the first step after a long period of stillness, or inert intensity. Which is probably why that first step was so large and unwieldy. Whenever one takes a step there is an imbalance. This imbalance, what I call disequilibrium, is what insures that existence endures. It is only possible for things to happen in the first step of disequilibrium. And even if that first step was huge and distant and only abstractly perceptible, it still steps. The first disequilibrium, what the Aboriginals call Wayrrull, or “the thrust behind things,” is present in each consequent step, each pulse of disequilibrium that continues to this day. One way to picture it is to think of concentric rings. The big bang is the outer ring and each movement in the world taken by each thing is a new ring. We are tempted to say “directly at the center,” but how could this be? With so many loci of movement, so many steps simultaneously taken, how could there be a single center? Disequilibrium is about dance, collective. The first step is followed and interpenetrated by innumerable steps; each connected, each necessary, each unpredictable.

ALL THE SNOW IN HOLLYWOOD

2007-08-06T17:10:00.001-04:00

Tall and wild, like
a sunflower peering
over some bleached
fence. But today
stuck on a bus
beside a woman not
reading Absalom, Absalom!
All ride it sits
there, a beautiful
old edition, unopened.
In my lap, Susan
Cataldo never closes
and the words singe
will remain here heard
like Atsuko Tanaka’s
electric dress is seen
returning something
of me to myself, tall
and wild, an ibis
but something more
drably American. This
bus will leave me
in Washington unless
it’s headed to Philly
which I fear for
at least an hour.
Worse, I fear the deep
sadnesses of girlhood
which suffuse the ones
I love even as they turn
into women. But fear
to me, tall and wild
and boyish still, though
nearly thirty, it is only
a moment of holding
my breath and gone
on the wild, translucent
air that commends us
to move impossibly fast
through it and then
into the very future.
It does not scare me
that I have to dance
to get around the TV
couch, dresser, doorway
in our suddenly tiny
apartment. Only another
week and we will
inherit the ceiling
fan. Chinese ice
coffee hurtles through
my brain. The bus
now far from Philly
thank god. If I were
a philosopher, I would
say Singing is a means
to group identification
but I know better.
A song is a button
we press when we
want to thank god
even if we never have
believed in him or her
or it or all the snow
in Hollywood.

A FINE RED HAIR GROWS ON HER ARM

2007-07-30T10:57:00.000-04:00

A dancing bend begins at her wrist
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A jug of hope is paced in her skip
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A faint of dust escapes to her ear
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A sudden emptily taps at her air
And a fine red hair grows on her arm

A POEM FOR JULIANA

2007-07-27T17:42:00.000-04:00

Begin again as
we must. Never
against but
a movement
toward all
else. Do not
believe the things
they tell you
about time. You
are just now
beginning again.
You are just
this place
becoming
ours. One hour
or day, one
month or year.
Only the dead
will really know.
Who are they?
Songless ones.
Who are you
Juliana? A color
an odor a texture
a light and soon
a singer of good
news. Hello.

A CENTO FOR SOLIPSISTS

2007-07-25T10:32:00.001-04:00

after Creeley and Williams

You tree
The element in which they live
Your lovely hands
Scattered, aslant
Wandering among the chimneys
For no clear reason
You tell me that I love myself
The night the cold the solitude
The dishonest mailman
It is all a rhythm
At the small end of an illness
Quiet as is proper for such places
My days are burning
My love is a boat
As real as thinking
And yet one arrives somehow
A big bearheaded woman
All her charms
Hart Crane
The plastic surgeon who has
A tally of forces, consequent
Or me wanting another man’s
Sad advice
That profound cleft
Without other cost than breath
You tree
The element in which they live
Your frosty hands
At the brink of winter
Long over whatever edge
They call me and I go
Still too young
For no clear reason
Pink as a dawn in Galilee
I feel the caress of my own fingers
Or with a rush
You send me your poems.

A Mini-Noelle for Kendra

2007-07-22T14:22:00.000-04:00

7

Midnight, beery, Halloween, Kendra
sidestepping men. It is not
necessary to disguise
neglected things. It is not laughing if it
is never not laughing, a disguise the mouth
makes, a red dust

of sound. I wanted to kiss
Kendra, but she was
the one calling. Winter
low, a vibration
the birds avoided. Cinema
made of animals repeating this
new terror only

deep enough to see. It
was the kind of mistake
for fishermen, Kendra, a loss
of weather-worry that
brought us together. We watched
a girl die in a bouquet
of snakeskin. What do you

say to a girl like that? Do
you ask a landscape to explain
itself? Everything is a detour for girls
like Kendra: the twitter
and twitch of debris, a warp
that rescues
the mouth until a girl

can only use it to utter
verbs. And what is not, in
the end, an act of
thought. I took this girl
named Kendra dancing and never
once lost my mind. Does love
proceed from men

or from trees? Remember
how we explained wind by embracing
the animal that slept
in our house? Every tooth
could be a jewel
every time the word Kendra was spoken
could be a bell breaking

into peal. Listen, there
is nothing wrong with birds. No
disguise will teach
the children the value
of happiness. This is my room
of real laughter, it echoes Kendra Kendra
Kendra against a little hammer.