Scantily Clad Press, 2009
Cover by Scott Inguito
Yeah. Eyes Are Hard Blind them with your bling, if you please; under your calming sweat, a hat that’s privileging privilege for the sheer veneer of your paper head. Your face is falling off, the charm wears like leaned-on wainscoting. It was famous in my vision; I was beguiled. I thought, we can accomplish what the whole human race already built in a day, we who had been used up by our own ripeness, we who are happy to help everyone bear fruit. If you start to think like a fallen creature, with your splendid record of philanthropy, I’ll have to find another you to love.
for Scott Inguito
For all the Bear Creeks in California I found twenty-five dollars in a plastic film canister, can there be plastic canisters? Oaks with very tough and oily leaves. What rises when the water recedes: the skeleton of a bicycle and pieces of five gallon buckets (they were throwing them in when it got so cold that the water froze. I walked by, and people were on dates! Couples throwing five gallon buckets on the ice, together). Divorce. Fuck it. Yeah. Ten year-olds smoking pot at the reservoir What was I looking for, what are you looking at, indecipherable cat calls. Indecipherable children. You don’t know how it feels to be you.
for Scott Inguito
The Black Sparrow Speaking through an interpreter it sounded like the bird was eating ham-flavored oatmeal was the sound, it’s obvious antecedents. The wind in my headphones. “Are you excited?” “No.” What can’t the internet democratize and embarrass, anti-depress? The Internet: So no one will ever have to have a Blue Period ever again; You, face-haired thing, included. You red-shouldered thing, blue in the sun.
for Scott Inguito
Their House Opposes Death Men and their death poems. Why would they write like that? It’s cold outside. It’s raining men. Kids are still off-limits. Easy, rigorous, and tired of hearing about the war. Does he know anyone who’s alive? All prices have gone away. A white raisinette on a toothpick. The old Ezra Pound in a gondola. A body scant from waiting. It was a house people were still living in, and it was bored. “I oppose death and you don’t die, yet, somehow, we can’t agree; the process of inclusion is my enemy because it opposes me, and you. You’re still here, alive and bloody, just like the day you were born.”
for Scott Inguito
A Masque of Reason AMERICA! Your puns are the worst. Your puns should be illegal. You should feel guilty every time somebody mentions the fat dude from Subway when they hear that Scott Inguito’s first name is Scott. Imagination is about as fun as middle school. You can’t help it, can you?
for Scott Inguito
Forest Therese Which days are the last days? O the new, when will you be all the forest that my books used to be? Don’t look back— I feel things, and things are gilded: I’m dying of my opinion, I whine I, pine, I want my name to hang from the window, tenement laundry of me, I want to have been advertised, have some copse named, have one identified – Sam Waterston, the forest never tires, and it never tires of you.
for Scott Inguito
Blurb Metaphors In Scott Inguito’s wild and generous contagious raucous vacuum – I lean on you, dear, the hair shirt doesn’t follow his terrorizing soliloquies the white horse, the azure wall! Dogs, remember? Truly the real, black flies the real horse flies, the sameness big trees and all, runnels. These poems are they portraits are these night pots, are that deadpan in them, he sounds like someone else you, perhaps, you, as if described. My wife thinks I’m nuts, handling all this comfort, and Scott Inguito made remarks, he gave the poets my name; I want to use grief these poems say as if to ask, doomed to the exclamation points at the end of the tunnel. You oratory, you cover, you teacher, pull of your period, you propose a sacrifice, Nervous? These poems teach us to read YouYouYouYouYouYouYou.
for Scott Inguito
Among the Catalogue Essayists 1. In a dream of wind flexing the muscle and that lost-in-the-weeds look. 2. That flower’s a blue dick. That’s a foxtail. He looks so hungry. 3. Cull, cull, cull. How young you are you and your weed whacker.
for Scott Inguito
In the Shape of In the shape of Schenectady, blemishy, the consistency of beef tallow, is is warmer than coming summer-noon’s rumor of presidential candidates’ humpings of last week’s ideal. Supposed it torrential, you you. You. The Great Grey Heron gathers sticks at Stowe Lake, stows you in treetops. You. It. It. You. Baby heron eat It eat you, you. It you it you it you. It youityouityoutiyou. Apricot pit it you, crushed under boot it you boot it you boot you boot you you arrow apricot smear you leather boot you, you torrential you, suppose it torrential you very.
for Scott Inguito
Subjectivity U.S.A. I read scripture at open mike. How impossibly mine, you. All one hears is blood, youth. Oh, there’s a bell, yes, it’s a bell. Yes yes. To keep you in the mind, against a poor idea of you— of course it is your head, in my hands and you, always shaking your hair at the sun. They shake, your hands, your mind and head in them. Life is a dream of them. everybody something you, united states of them.
for Scott Inguito
It Could Eat the Earth If I had a hammer, a tear-stained spruce The world wouldn’t thaw itself. the mountain wouldn’t ask why there is evil. Wouldn’t you ask the mountain?
for Scott Inguito
Bird Abatement Good as a friend. Hosed down. Hosed-down U.S.A. I concentrate on the book cliff swallows kestrel, the book says “…is not a modality of essence” a mite on my knee, a hair
talks to me in this font amongst them, get real frantic all this bric-a-brac, the University plays along a meadow. The meadow holds no truck. Implacable, unminded. Mind the unintelligent Mind the uninteresting. Mind is a mistake of regions alike, all this you blossoming among the font-like flowers, among the hair-like songs. The swallows immigrate and nest. Hie! Hie! they return. You have built a beautiful building for them, hose them off, off, sweetly they don’t respond. They say “thank you” with their little chirps. You used up your lovely years. You’re hosed.
for Scott Inguito
George Hat-Beard You used God. God felt as used as gold feels. Gold is pissed. Gold pointed its finger at Pablo Neruda: “You fucker! Nice refrigerator!” Stalinist you. Martin Amis guest stars as you. I want you to you want you. You are the walrus. Your fat keeps you warm against God’s wet earth. You religious rat bastard! You should take a hint from Jack Spicer. The Pope sends a message to the corpse of you via his big stupid hat. He reminds me of a villain I once knew. He didn’t like to wear pants either.
for Scott Inguito
Bomb Whatever You night-terrors scare you control, as you and he you went their death there wept you
for Scott Inguito
The Unblemished Buttock (Look at my Leisure) Sweet-you bejugged maiden of the polished nail: Scratched me Sweetyou man-packaged bulbous chunk of Real; The Real is You and You is Real (this bit sung to “I Am the Fat-bottomed Walrus”) the real Real You, the You Real come together over the over— gendered You, but but for You, talon-tanned tickled gluteous atonality at bottom you, you all bottom you.
for Scott Inguito
An Illustration A large cow in the middle of texas. One tears at a map of texas. One is crying out for explanations. A map holds them in colors forgotten by meaningful pockets, khaki slacks, the gold buttons of that terrifying and standard blazer. Reverberant starlings imitating skylarks near the sunroof with sounds, without maps, with sounds unfamiliar as motorcycles imitating birdsong without any of that friendly annihilation without any of that screeching too much. When you pray, God picks up the White Courtesy Phone and pages you. His Capri pants flutter restlessly, a wind sculpted by the big terminal at DFW. O your people!
for Scott Inguito
Hide a Little Animal Face in the Hair of the Human You steeped yourself in madness prehistory found you muttering among pages, their “yes, you.� Reverberant human voices, in the finality of their abatement, these specifications all this trial and eros, all these congealings. In your pocket a little cow dung, in your pocket a head made only of its snood. You got your pockets. Opinion vs. Ardor. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Thou bird, roil, writhe. Who is madness?
for Scott Inguito
Lilt Really really really empty—; Hello! green friend would you like to attend? Reticent as morning, one falls away away and back into the drolleries of stealing one’s neighbor’s electricity of lunging at a judge with a knife in either hand of having one’s jaw wired shut. What’d you say to me? Daytime television. Incredible, how it spells out my individual. You’re nobody’s daimon now.
for Scott Inguito
The Emergence The rose leaves produce an oily substance to fight off an infestation of tiny little white bugs. My ears move gently to end the wind. And you, you’re under cloudy skies. The mockingbird flies like crepe paper. A pair of gardening shears. Another seed from that obnoxious tree lands in my water bottle, lands in me. Shrikes in the twenty-nine mile an hour headwind fly like insane crepe paper. Today is Jesus’ 34th birthday. You think you’re so fabulous, crouching next to the broccoli. I must be the last poet on earth, and you must be the last historian on earth for whom the sound of a train is a constant background to our daily goings-on. The local newspaper has at least one new murder every day. Today I was riding my bike, and a bus from the County Jail drove past. You couldn’t see into the tinted windows behind the bars. The window on the back said “Career Opportunities” and listed a phone number. Houses are cheap, and life is a dream of them.
My mom always said I’d get a job at the fancy prison. You just look at me. Just at me. Only at me. No Future! Thirty one years ago they said that. I was like Jesus before he started cutting wood. I was like Longinus when he resigned from his job at the county jail. “You would be good at that,” said the scrub jay, “That’s a good job for you.”
for Scott Inguito
Decoration of American Kestrel and Cliff Swallow Give old blue eyes a lick How is it you have researched have lost and remembered How much is it with thee? The swallow was upside down in the kestrel's claw upside down. Splay of a left wing the right one tucked under. The love of comrades. You don’t need to be a laboratory. When you are far away enough from the pollutions of light rules are good roads are good it’s a blessing to know where you are Freedom isn’t free. 2.4 million in jail. In the cottonwood seeds, in the fifth month in the life in your skin.
for Scott Inguito
Mother Dandruff Has Arrived Making us friendly with blue us friendly with the fibrous husk of the banana-so-full-of-water The two liter bottle of Pepsi wants to sell me something as though a citizen. One raisin left in the cereal bowl. You are a collection. You are thereby illuminated. You are uncut with your crutches have read “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.� When we grow up, you are going to be ultra-dominant. A gaping hole is torn in the armadillo and whoever is awfully sorry, melting from an intolerable wholeness You turn on the air conditioner and the air is right where you want it.
for Scott Inguito
The Sorrowful Catalog I have lost all my entries I have lost all my plates I have lost all my essays I have loved my gallerist I have lost all my body parts I have horded enticements The overgrown rose flummoxed me what’s going on in this more-than-country I could hear it in your voice: your name is Scott.
for Scott Inguito
Jared Stanley is from California. His chapbooks include The Outer Bay (Trafficker Press) and In Fortune, w/Lauren Levin and Catherine Theis (Dusie). His first full length book, Book Made of Forest, will be published by Salt Publishing in 2009. With Lauren, he edits the magazine Mrs. Maybe.