POST 200: A CONFOUNDING ASSORTMENT

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.