"A Series of Ad Hoc Permutations, or RUBY Love-Songs" by Joshua Ware

Page 1

Scantily Clad Press, 2009



#!/usr/bin/ruby –w ################################################ ############################### # The following program assisted (i.e. did NOT generate) in the creation of these permutations. # Furthermore, the permutations herein attempt to, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “translate, # transverse, reverse, and return to” the relationship between human creativity and # computational processes in order to complicate their “coexistence and competition in a # perpetual field of interaction”; they are non-dialectical creations that attempt to establish an # alternate plane of immanence, wherein the reductive-contemporarydialectical dialogue with # regard to computational processes and human creativity can shift to and flourish within the # framework of the multiplicity and an operative violence: the chaosmos. # ################################################ ############################## w = Array.new


x = Array.new for y in 0..41 File.open("Ware#{y+1}.txt", "r") do |z| w[y] = z.readlines() x[y] = y end end while true puts() for y in 0..13 z = x[rand(x.size)] puts(w[z][y]) end sleep(3) end



Ad Hoc Permutation 1 Methane skulks through a space framing the picturesque: a cagey absence. She was told that legends resonate, hum high-pitched tones. Afterward, her weight teetered before footfalls and a white-tide baptized release release in a drowning pool. As for the hub of humankind, limbs heft cigarette ash and forgotten referents heavenward: a better way to seek closure.


Ad Hoc Permutation 2 Molten teardrops varnish the coffee table, the phonograph must be replaced with lasers. Moored in rip tide, white tide now crimson purl. Comfortable fantasies splash and foam: coastline breakers. Shadows cripple her twilight and give time a slight reprieve; with handshakes and cobwebbed yarns, they hum folklore and fables. Her body is skeptical of my motivations.


Ad Hoc Permutation 3 She paints the city with a widening aperture, breathes and releases me. Burning-skin chills frozen breakers sliced from the whelp’s empty cry.

Slide away through the foreground, she says, the conditions are finally desirable. We deliver life at a slumbered-pace, calling, calling, while conifers suffocate somewhere between synthesizer breath and what came before. Direction, direction; again, again; she magnets me to my portrait.


Ad Hoc Permutation 4 08) “There is no such thing as a…there is no such thing as a…” In an effort to replicate legends that singe neon signs, she cries away young ones never remembered. I am driftwood: an ephemeral music. Or I and I and I: an inside made of cigarette ash. She looks beyond sight, she resonates.


Ad Hoc Permutation 5 Tell my family I am spliced from the past with empty fingertips. Little toes, little toes creep to corners with a tin foil pipe. During the drought her rain forgets breakdowns and bounds through a new American landscape. Consider space as a song colliding through binary bodies.


Ad Hoc Permutation 6 As if she could slice computer screens from treetops, a digital gossamer and a paint-by-number country, the sound of her dreams awakes distended. She regards herself as an echo washed with lipstick-stained cigarette butts and hurricane antecedents cast across memory and found upon the strand. The sound of things, sometimes, is all that matters. The shape of things, sometimes, is all that matters.


Ad Hoc Permutation 7 With a swelling mistaken for fullness, she opens herself to the parlor. Rivulets of water swallow adagios. Rather than music, dreams. What is silence? Who knows silence? A forgetfulness. She knows what silence is: brittle fingers winter wallow in drunken footfalls, drinking them from the ocean. An answer entwines in thought, a song bleeds through her body. A space once meant for canopied beds will swallow our harmonies whole.


Ad Hoc Permutations 8 She channels thoughts through slumber: arterial, distributive, contained. Pacing, pacing a sleeping heart moored in rip tide, the white-tide now a crimson purl, puddles erupt in watery flames. And so she sings:

I had bodies, lots of bodies, moving, moving, continually adrift. I ate the ghost lost in contours.


Ad Hoc Permutation 9 Methane skulks between the space of thought and slumber, paces a rhythm of her sleeping heart: a constant stream of Virginia echoing white-curdle tide.

How long have I slept? Magnetism hollows baby-boomers, encloses them in candy-coated measurements.

Too late, too late.


Ad Hoc Permutation 10 China carries water-baskets to my mother in a candy-coated tenement. "an experiment, a repetition" China carries water-baskets to my mother in a candy-coated tenement. The land of Sheba melds with Virginia, chasing one another into a neo-Gothic Revival. Gables stare hollow-eyed into theory. Chase the echo, the echo repeats:

Until I die there will be sounds.


Ad Hoc Permutation 11 02) Her diaphragm, overlapped, catches light inside leaves lifts eighty tons of ornate lattice work and draws intricate shadows with a tin foil pipe. Breakdown becomes, entrenches classic form. Computer screens become amplifiers and collapse binary waterfalls, even for the vanished and words left behind: letters gone adrift where cathodes collided and the city does not sing.


Ad Hoc Permutation 12 Her stretch marks consider space: landscape within windows. And from the parlor, adagios carry water-baskets to her echo, echo.

I and I and I: time signatures.


Ad Hoc Permutation 13 If my whelp’s temperament had been a breath and released me into mother’s silken lining, she would have awoken to flesh from wood. Instead, she awakes, reduces, then expands: a smiling reminder trapped in time that everything becomes compact.

Fathoms below a sea change, a sea quake. Ivory purl dances for the moon, shines pale, liquid and fluid. The anechoic chamber remains without while the echo goes chasing, goes chasing. 14) And the wind turns into an emblem.


Ad Hoc Permutation 14 The shape of things lingers in the parlor. An echo, faint, reflects back in railheads built from white-tide and roses. Crescent-shaped paint-drops circle her penciled-hand, residue and mapped memories. Shadows grasp, gasp, engineer themselves into obsolescence: blue collars and rusted beds. Common freight breaks open space with nothing to say.


Ad Hoc Permutation 15 If every object hums for capital down brambled sidewalks you are you: Quasimodoed

toiling, toiling.

An ephemeral music crosses her.

A sound accomplishes nothing, she says. Somewhere between the honky-tonk and her body cigarette ash sings.

As if it is a continuation of luster: a dream-hue: that hum above, that hum above.


Ad Hoc Permutation 16 As if she could slice syrup with her tongue, down the depths a drowning pool. Little teeth gnaw at bedposts, the mechanics of treetops.

Without them, life would not last out an instant, says the city.


Ad Hoc Permutation 17 The ghost a memory, your face your body scented with fresh cut air is all that matters. Or to unfound a nation, an obelisk packaged with common freight, helpless between parlor games and hallucinations. Breakdown becomes, entrenches classic form. As if it is a continuation of luster: a dream-hue: that hum above, that hum above.


Ad Hoc Permutation 18 Some experiments alter thought, or it was the thought that thought her possible: these little matters leveling importance into floorboards and daydreams. Eyelids took slow kisses. Whistles. Wishes. A logic untouched and alone, buoyed. 10) She dilates. She contracts. She whistles. She echoes. 12) She writes anagrams and listens for a message in white noise. Around her neck, light stains her skin, echoes.


Ad Hoc Permutation 19 Walden was a symbol: foreign fissures, a voice of lightening, cigarette ash, a cagey absence. What was neutral splashed and foamed: coastline breakers. Or her Cambridge breath undoes red entwined with blue and blue entwined with red.

As if it is a continuation of luster: a dream-hue: that hum above, that hum above.

I am a crematorium.


Ad Hoc Permutation 20 She unwinds strands of twine doubled around Parisian thoroughfares. Methane syrups her tongue into an ornate lattice-work that sings intricate shadows of jagged hips, phantom limbs, and dyslexic names. An industry for the camera is not an industry of song, but a half-way point where her lips burnish, wrinkle, and sweeten. She knows the shape of things. She knows what silence is:



Joshua Ware lives in Lincoln, NE. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, most recently in Caketrain, Dislocate, Laurel Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, New American Writing, Packingtown Review, and Phoebe. He is the co-author of I, NE: Iterations of the Junco (Small Fires Press, 2009) and the author of the forthcoming chapbook Excavations (Further Adventures Press, 2009).


Cover by Jad Fair

Scantily Clad Press, 2009


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