BIL LD IN G S S
Part 1. Pip Helix
Oxbone for Mark Wallace
In the future no one will be in the future. The sky’s form above a plow‐tined ground. No matter what you say or how you say it. Carve smoke or rock, delicate birds’ bones. Work hard to retire to your vocabulary. My idiom no more a gag, sputum spat out. If in digging one gets a sense of returning. If i n l a y e r s one g e t s a sense of a history. If in naming one gets a whiff of a dead god. If in fucking one gets a reprieve, a kind stay. If in blood the stain of stasis, of Olson’s polis. If in a hangover, quick cog of an abdegnation. If in movement there’s an illusory significance. If an atrophied synapse equals de facto sphinter.
If fortran, cobol, cabal, rune or calendar stone. If technology serves to anesthetize insatiaty. If verbs are all verbs & so the nouns are verbs. If mitochondria had a memory, or forgot us. If fertile, reaped, rotten each harvest an artifice. If pendulum knew what debt it owed to gravity. These plumbed walls & this grounded electricity. These antecedents and this rank & rigid corpse. These stratic allusions & this epoch’s translation. These pages’ dogears & this dream’s elucidation. She told me time’s river has such orphan oxbows. She told me you are rock & river’s flow around it. She told me walking is the metrics of topology. She told me speaking is the memory of tempo.
Charming For Fred Lee Lewis
It is not this, some sense of coming adrift, a light ahead, lit up, it could turn, and the question then becomes: Is it best to coast or to put the throttle down? It is also not, anyway can’t imagine it is, could be, that this so marked time houses our habits and marks with the reach of our
footfalls the trodden ways in lawns, the scouted cliff edge & down below, where time stops, a swell of sea no mirror for the sky’s slow light. And in it so a small shift, some responsibility to what we’d call us before, not that a former self as much as an other then coffee in plastic cups
and through the window over the sink one spies the neighbors them‐ selves not what they were yester‐ day, monsters but token, not flags of coun‐ tries set in stone but the craters where distant objects fell, themselves adrift and so far from home to be as this that returns etc.
How Hard You Have to Hit It For Eddie Skarbek
Hem if aught. Grill shit paste. Ill crap caught. Mir broke falls. Red cast gaze. Rare stunt stall. Crux chink sum. Toy flick shunt. Pot stoke lung. Holp shot dead. None exit cunt. Crete lign’d led. Glew mutts cut. Rad chicks daft. Stet stilt strut.
Heck just sprint. Grant welp raft. Licht art’s glint. Cull blunt sulk. Hark guns loft. Couch sag bulk. Spun drive fact. Hewn hang oft. Own snot crack. Wald rims bunk. It strung fought. Earn from gunk. White brim silt. Weed strewn lot. Blood’s just tilt.
Cooked Allegiance For Joji Santos
What happened in names. What is funny to the child. He held briefly in his hand. Scooped neck, gold flaked. To poison what she’d said. Ballpeen their consonants. Mist breathed in then out. Ground swallowing sound. How to grow rust, mildew. The weight we add, she is. Yet smothered in a callous. The men shorn, skin’s gone. Or what gone is, is going, go. The way the joke clouds out. Child’s nouns flaking away. Heart of bone, blood both. That & her hand held cold. Hollow halls, wall of wood. Gently robed in a tonguing. It follows one’ld get sick of. It seems we would regret it. I remember something lit. Bottled camphor, he stung. Settee, the clawed channel. Blown out a wilder kenning. So to see’s to send out sight. Years to come, ideas to feel. Scoping some scale, ahead. One might carbon date air. Echolocate the punchlines. That, and the mark’d ropes. Drippingly reeled to spools. Mud the only sense of time. But she, hers, the way its was.
Ill Dash Ill For Jeffrey Limerick
Ill‐lit carafes, what I wanted to use you for is for the next 35 seconds. A id a ego – fogg’d anachronimic, botched appendectomy, spitstain. The raft itself is time – broke spokes throwing the wheel from true. Gent strife, ache cong – the relative starlight, skysighting silhouettes. Nine behind the crafted – what would have come to begin to be. What’s in it to cough up – namby‐pamby grotesqueries unadorned. Bride’s eyes white in turn – it’s how we get things done round here. Blogged among the bootstrap log – a shifted wrist to see a surgeon. Eradiated sunlight, lead moon cape – grad credit versus in‐service. Tropes of turtles caught in hoops of bone – the muck is mostly mud. The emotion w/ no name became unbearable – too little, too, to lift. What it is to attempt we do when there’s no hope – add slit to dash. Cool extorque strains this rifled hammer, gnurled spike – fakir plow. Toronto via Albuquerque, parenthetically routed through the cow‐sill.
Time Some Sentences For Jessica Lindahl
But typing congeals the clocktick, these days off. Tight‐cupped spoons of calendar’s nested loops. You can tell the counterfeit ones easier than that. Lank rays sunsplit through glass time a slow molt. Glacier what once was course sand in hourglass. Its inverse deserts we chart by incremental mote. My fucking wrist hurts, the band pinches the hair. Constellations below horizon lines mean I’m late. The second hand’s sweep smooth, it doesn’t jerk. Escutcheon or balustrade or economical whimsy. Time the ticks by the time the ticks haven’t has it. When a mind kindles a history inhabit the ghosts. Loon growl, refracted arachnid, annealed menisci
Nothing Outside Of For Fleur Burkett
outside the library a clock outside the clock some singing outside the school a electrical engineer outside the engineer is horticulture outside the courthouse a bandstand outside the bandstand a man stands to fix the blue fountain outside outside the hospital is dreaming outside the dreaming a man whose shovel in hand gravestone, gravel yard, gavels at his feet outside the factory the lunar penumbra outside the lunar penumbra announcements pasted to cinderblock announcing only the font the words they are ornamental. outside the prison a gleaming lexus outside the lexus a merkin unshorn outside the starbucks an ashtray outside & outside this ashtray’s a memory of money outside of money outside the church is another church outside this church a back spasm outside the back spasm squats a alley junkie stick in arm outside it all a red wall there’s nothing outside of.
Topic of your choice For Doug Shugarts
Because of geometry, skirt chase into parking meter. Because of dug out earth crumb, morsel or kernel calcified in aortal chunnel, heart‐broken. Evaluate a significant exper‐ ience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you. Chum ceases to calculate recompense, instead levels barrel of sawed‐ off shit‐grin. These are the pickup trucks of our lies, the flexfuel monickers with which wind wrestles us from bed each of us by each. Clock tick, white crow, carnivorous birds light on Wall Street to scare the strawmen off. Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence. What worries me is not the threat of reprisal but the reprisal of theatre. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence. These fields bear more harvest when seen from the plane’s tilt.
One thousand three hundred feet up and humming. My great uncle wore no coonskin. Drank Iron City from a pull–top. Lived in aluminum buildings. Skillet rust killed him before the shakes. A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity of the college. Demonstrated the importance of diversity to. Because of excrement solipsism fingers can’t fuck the buttons. Because of the colon syntax can’t commit to the period. A glutton for zeugma. Beer funnels before breakfast. This chasm aches to be filled. Weed‐filled berm’s ditches backhoe‐dug, roadgrader to smooth the macadam. Because when the backarch tactic of forcep logic beckons, hint you’ll puke and then puke anyway. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence. Gratuity this gift.
Plural Erection Caesura For Chris Shithouse Her head. I spent the summer wasted, the sky wan. Her two fists. Somnia in yellow‐bruised cheekbone. Delimited loops, gerrymandering these circuitboards. Jew on Jew action. A bloke spoke of broken smoke. Microwave’s beep. Pizza snacks are done. Careful! Deflated opossums, paint this rural byway your red! Unpacked language, its unspooling teleos a wet dew. These were airplanes, these were shipyard cartons. Plasticine waterbottle, seams grouted with dry cum. Prefrontal catechresis. I am against not this but that. This elocution of ladders. Culverts lead‐lined & lithe. I meant to what I intend. Groping fingers of signs. Ask for what’s been granted, permission is a praxis. Both rugnap and threadcount. Bare breasts & moon. What landscape is to capacity, snowglobe is to glue. Astigma on both your eyeballs! I did this I did that. Our mother of irascible fingering, shrouding a felatio. Taps out clogs in bamboo shoots, rainsticks, urethra. Then Barry came over with a six pack, & hot wings. Hiroshima’s belligerence a cloak we don, & warmth. From the apartment’s window’s how town could see. She sitting her skin skimming light from cindercone. Here’s where the sample of your drum beat begins. Tides within these animals make the moon rise bluer.
im in ur pome injammin yr seezura For Christopher Copenhaver i decided to put an i in decoded i decided i put tainted evidence is that’s apostrophic hiccough there is centrifugal force because I say there is hell is violet rust is grammatic tense is pressure valance riffle’s as horse bucks its paraplegic tilt where fences were houses the sidewalk’s stone equal me, my tone’s my rotating potentiometer dramaturgy the boat’s float, owned by a throne reduced time to market’s sweet smell the bluegill we swore dour afternoons prototyping mockups selling joint requirements development sessions an international organization for standardization scaling the mountain means some manner of the experience is recorded & articulated & measured to me skiffle always implied fighting and dancing what’s wrong with posing a rhetorical question? that this could be so is in itself that this could be hewn grown threw grin’s thresh wear warn ballet crack seal slurps the drink undoes all the done to your underwear taste versus saying what you are your underwear taste reveals your hidden desire your underwear taste like old salt & vinegar chips your underwear taste your skin, they breath it in to say I have done is what we’ve been decoding i for if in a dream we can misunderstand ourselves and so you said harkens or belies but meant whip my idea along the periphery of an ellipse in space
We ther
For Jen Marquette
Building this we feed on you call it grazing but its weedin g out hunger. Rust b lossom s under the zinc coat until spliffs the rot the underca rriage, chassis of grass. I can tell how much you love yr job.
It’s the speed at which you throttle your auto. Plumb the decahe dral emanci pation, bob the dashed line highwa ys to replace the flying buttress es, staunch polyga mist with quasi‐ militia.
Waether For Jen Marquette
Band‐ aid, and a fat jesus ziptied to a cell tower disguise d under civil ordinan ce to look like a cross. Heroes worship ping again under arc lights coning prophet ic grooms, bred to be read. Where we’re.
Where we were. Commit to your dreams. Panthe on of margina l headwa ggers. A rug to kneel shaking what tires us most is clogged synapse . Transac t hesitati on. Engend er ambigui ty. Reveal.
What I Am Saying to You I Am Saying to You For Jennifer Lundberg Look forward to the coming future. Find surprise in sudden discoveries. Seek your yearning need to desire. Learn to practice absorbing ideas. Get a feel for the touch of sensing. Concentrate on attending to focus. Listen to hear the sounds of sound. Quit dropping the ball on giving up. Commit to dedicating yourself 100%. Consider pondering thoughtfulness. Regret the misgivings of 2nd guesses. Attempt to try to continually persevere. Be sensitive to your innate intuition. Waste all your careless squandering. Open yourself to dynamic malleability. Question your suspicion of skepticism. Remember to be conscious of thought. Be willing to surrender to submission. Fight against struggling to resist this.
Wæther
For Jen Marquette
The interstit ial vacuum of borderi nk. Building that we feed further, what we’d call concom itant erosion, small sacrifice s burned brands and biletic repulse. Gag reflex as a kind of savvy.
Electrol ytic convers ion, stigmat a a copyrig ht against collusio n a gravity electric a propert y disown ed. If you build it they will come to you, but not because of you or what you’ve done.
Stunt Schmuck For Chris Moot Stunt, schmuck. Curate the orient. Orientate the Tate. Do something done, The fork faucet spigot Crouch. Fork the forking, Road hard and runway wet. Cautionary elixirs The cattle call the cowboy The cradle crowd crowed. A belief in.
ather W For Jen Marquette
The building arises itself, builds itself, is its own idea, and you then the perfect necessit y of the building that wants to exist through you and you through it. Building thus we feed on, but building what’s been.
Building us, a brick abutme nt jutting into identity , what once I knew as physical teleos, a broken dream made whole through my agency acted upon by weathe r’s history whethe r it’s history or not.
Dove Above a Striking Print Plane For Scott McInerney
If you start with the reds the next is the reds. If you strum by brushing the strings will mute. If you turn to face her sound your ears will bleed. If you scotch tape then the crazy glue’s drunk. If growing old you remember your self anew. If your new self resists refusal destroys its self. If your gums bleed then you have forgotten me. If a broken spinal cord collapses your kidneys. If food is what we call whatever it is I gnaw on. If flowers smell you they will metastasize dirt. If home has what a heart is it is a refrigerator. If you feed the fishes you bite upon air’s teeth. If the piano tunes to piano tunes, the radio is. If in setting the sun I have spoken of a suicide. If all those women were women I would know. If in knowing that then I would also know how. If coffee collapses, then this lite beer unravels. If cornea must admit to a retina that it’s a liar. If striations in the shale layer believe in ghosts. If too many stars start lining the darkening sky. If the dogs running the streets are cobblestone. If technically speaking one were to less & more. If we hear bats then what we hear is our brains. If a little left over makes morsels into the meals. If horror if coming if heavily petting if spooning. If in high school the shape of spitshine on glass. If eardrum explosion transmits any sound it’s a. If cartilage levers a bonesplint then blood is a b. If to count the joint twitch grooms you to lethal. If in bothering the electricity is heating its tumor. If knocking we dove drove the pin in, metal upon. If cold fusion comes warp wrap and rot ledge cot. If someone from somewhere is something we are. If beautiful can hum drank spooge sense shifts. If just in aligning we felt the plates shift a horizon. If linkage transmits kinetic fidelity, spent dawn. If hullshear breech back the scorched plaintiff. If we drove a highway mile it’s holocaust math. If in so doing we ourselves blink one wet eyeball.
Honest Plausibility For ellie horowitz This is a space (in between of) here is no longer a worn‐in where splinter drums or eject fucked tongues undone in void a roiling water is not not water what a water is for her for you what placid water is is my crux justified within margins to two halves have no tangent, water meets root, or it reaches roots the blur of what would have us well intersects no access point but cattle prod, feldspar, edict dedicated circuit against saids I said this before and I will say alone in an antechamber lit up above the exoskeletal assholes an honest I never meant to lyric the didactic plausibility of pose.
This Poem is About Being Paranoid For GFH
Process straight days of a circumlocution a circling free form tongue, no nav system beaming down the most current topography. This is a poem about drugs about the risk of intention willing heart attack, willed aneurysm of neology, will the rest come just so easy? Barbaric harm, grit in teeth the moment the muscles remember how to shape a sound, synaptic flickering assert a smaller sound now. The shifting geology of the corrupted sphere, I meant, flooded with saliva, throat closes. Seismic groping in the hard‐pack crust of self. Compass us with instruments too old to measure this new universe & its machinations. Imagine tuning the guitar w/ a hand that dissolves strings. Imagine a border skirmish the moment we speak, one breath in and the other out or: four lungs trying to tune bellows for speaking songs. How does one let the state of the thing become the thing itself? How does the ground return the sea, let go of air, learn its breath?
Some of This Is Not Related (song lyric) Some of the suction has blown out of the vacuum Some of the skin is rubbed away from the shin Some of the function flown away from the fray Some of the tension I teased out of your brow Some of the time I’m sitting in stations Some of these days I’m holier than whole Some of the sun eclipsed by the sky Some of their words speak another mouth’s spit One of these days the calendar is fallen One of the doors will wither the room in One of my enemies will bite off his heel One of the ways in which I never will bleed Half of the whole we made from a well Half of this tongue or lung or this gut Half of the time I know what it’s called Half of the father and half of the woods Part of the place for placing the hand Part of this chart to compass the span Part of the hair against the white of the scalp Part of the two where the staircase had been Once of the welts that tomorrow could bring Once of the whiles spent flushed & bereft Once of the eyes too tired to knead Once of the halves that tug on my wrist One of the birds that pecks in the pan One of the firsts I remember you said One of those things that happens to men One of your wills that watches & waits Most of the time I’m foreign to crowds Most of the meal made up of the plate Most of this speak I speak only to you Most of the least of the worse of the two Part of the wreck washed up on the beach Part of the speech erased by the teeth Part of your age is an era of grace Part of my purpose no place for a seed Once of the room’s the hand come undone Once of an is that has no present tense form Once of the twain twinned in the brown eyes Once of traced nails down the hide of an arm Most of this day will be spent in the mines Most of their hearts have been washed of their minds Most of almost or the least of at least Most of what I had remembered was bliss Half of my head is spoken by you Half of my bed is broken in two Half of the whole is nothing at all Half of what holes that puncture my skull
Part 2. Ill Dash Ill
A. Introduction (1) For what does compulsion actually ask? For capacity rather than some vocabulary; gravity instead of girth. The obsession of field depth, of what is chosen by focus. Forced by inelegant stutter. Where the tongue meat feels the cheek bone. (2) Insanity searches for love, sex invents god, & hearth invites the cold of unlit kindling. Matter requires a mind. Time instructs death’s sunsets to build tones from notes. (3) What a river wants is not just time but some record. Watershed fills the hills, reservoir of last year’s weather, the wilting way the hours tick in glassy‐eyed deer, rabbit, otter. (4) What draws the eye with what drowns the nouns what what is the mechanism that swallows the vowels. (5) In the ocean that is time one wants womb, or wound current around the wet, the thunk, that weight of water that sinks like sounded drownings. (6) What want wants is is. (7) Where where goes is gone. (8) Why why was is was. B. Enormity vs. Barbarism (That space others the others. Charred clot as ink’s trace. The sky’s selfishness.)
Q.: What has thinking about the placed redrawn in places? Q.: Where has the thought about landscape become pwned? Q.: Does attention to history’s unfolding destroy historicity? Q.: Do uninterrupted events repel narrative teleology? A.: Sadness elicits a specific resistance. The mechanism that folds is writing. A.: Joy elicits a general acceptance. The entropy that unfolds is forgetting. A.: By what boundary does an era define itself as unified? Grammatical tensing. A.: Blue, for example, against the edge of tonal juncture. Refraction or mediation.
Sound the Backward Shell
What sound there is for outside the water, or the assurance that words purr against the ceiling when all else falls to silent decay, a reverberation in a room in a town in a day of a year of a life. What capacity anything has – ribcage, hippocampus, the clocktick of its mirror, the keyboard – what use falls from use against the constant‐breaking waves to sound the sand’s depth, & we sound the sand’s flow. Counting time with words always silences the tongue jaundiced loops of second hands unwinding the want while doors close in other rooms, animals scratch and windows bend with the day’s bent, flowing slowly home. Sheets of glazed questions, food left on plates waits. Stolen away from everything but history, or the verbs that pretended a future into being, defied in waves immersed in these new thieves: time, agency, heart. When the waves rip back from beach, a blood thickens to cords that tether all motion to time. Gloss the sky the way eyes dilate from retrograde amnesia. This is procedural memory, but there’s no process, only halves.
When Present is Past’s Bridge (Where Was was a Perfect Horizon) Where was is when we talk about our own is. Where we is when we remember our alone. Where is was when we knew nothing of our be. Where we was some nothing of the once separate shapes. What is we when beside rivers shape is us. What was is when hours make wakes in shapes. What wakes us when without us we sleep shapeless. What was wakes is laps that wet what skin’s lakes. How us was bridged by some water running under. How was shapes an arc between horizons of us. How is becomes the place between the shapes. How we is what is us, not me, me, not us, ours. Who us is what ink dries a page black togethered. Who we was before water swept I and I but not under. Who ours becomes some shared sense of lapped river. Who is was under ocean’s pressure, force down to now. When we is shaped a river by bridged shoreline slips. When us is unstilled in the caught between water & skies. When was is above, in watered memory above a silt floor. When is moves the stillness toward a deeper held shape. When together is what once no us was.
The Circled Sum 1. There is no elocution of grace, to estimate tonnage in port, the cartons that cannot contain what weight of claims, grasped by claws we’ve tamed & yet: guess my name (it comes to you in dreams). 2. There is a ratio that governs love, calculated formula derived from nights spent groping what folds hold a hope, fingering the string’s notes until, chorded, undertones form a fifth, & sing? 3. There is no margin awaiting our etching, but only its typeface resurrected, eclipsing the sound of what we drowned when, next to rivers’ rocks the ground will not allow shallow laps to wet our in‐turned feet. 4. There is word’s incision in time, its flesh split where distance bleeds, no tongue can staunch the flow & so it stains the snow, the black frozen ground grows some new inversion below, where only we can breathe.
Ports Rend Half the Halfs 1. First, the drops in wind, then the boughs of trees. Next comes summing, the peculiar weight of some numbers. A branch cracks, or the snap of surface tension versus structural integrity. Like working the same menial job, a new boss every couple years, the days circling in. Next a sense of coherence, the streetlights blinking out as one drives under. It’s the high beams, but another voice urges: One has to wonder. Then the ebb tide sucks back from the beach. We know the names now. 2. Second is stitching. It’s Ehud’s left hand again. What’s expected is the gray retreat, or wind. To study teeth, marriage & children. 3. Third, grown inward until the tops of trees sway a language. Limbs to twine the moving‐through, bare by November and slow to sap. What do airplanes cost, stitchers of distance, painting indifference across the sky? It’s cabin pressure that robs us of our lovers, that submerges veins near bones. What do windows claim, opening wide what won’t come in? We wear our clothes out with habits then the skin thins too. 4. Ports rend the halfs. Plural stripped of possession. What’s unexpected is the voice wind gives to trees. The sap doesn’t freeze but waits for taps.
Day of the Tortoise “Relied on light to mark the days so stones remake their shape” curve the light to harmony some smoke settling on memory’s water & then her water, gently like a hand on a hot forehead, rough cheek covers the jawbone, cement piling to keep the beach from washing away. It arrives boxed, holes for air but also the February sun angles in, calculating a new year: dappled time. Feed him, but what? and consider the new year’s day a day of firsts: Los Campesinos, or Chet Baker? Breathless, or Jean de Florette?
(I’d use baby romaine)
And also: pronunciations, practicing new names on the lips and tongue, in the air and against walls. The snow reflects dense waves refracted by clouds and softer sun the way we talk on phones, or type against dismay & distance If a turtle built a clock it would be of bones or tallied sunstreaks, but we only have black books, or ink or ticket stubs in file cabinets.
Longitude on Bodies Other Than Earth 1. Not to think outside one’s vocabulary, Not to blind the only eyes, muffle the ears, Not to map the routes one’s worn in the wood, Or the grass, the polished stone of stations. Not to sleep the dark, to wake birds with gunshot, Not to fuck the mountain or crumple with trembling In a bed of maps, cartographic lineage, meridian of pillow. 2. Not to know what her bare breast means, his weight, Not the creaking boat as the ocean warps its rigging, Not to have held the blood, lithosphere’s plates in ellipsis, Or some smaller bodies impossible to measure. Not astrolabe or quadrant or a measure from moon, Not a handspan or hairsbreadth or solidus to slash In the space between the halves that no longer have had. 3. Not to swallow the gags that roil some of the tongue’s silt Not a rift broke over the swift plane of grammar, words’ mimicry Not repeating but instead every moment its now original murmur Or gasp, some sudden speech unspoken by language but its body. Not noun or known, not veil or cloister, no vehicle to shuttle the stuttering Not a capacity but its inverse as mitigation, an empty hope In the way what words say when the tissue commits to bone. 4. Not blank but black, the fulcrum & pinion seized, the ocean frozen Not hoved in, splinter of summer remembered in dreams Not masked not opaque not sawn not severed but fused Or brazed by some other’s heat in the small space behind knees Not this microphone, not this page, not the sans serif font Not the drink you still taste when your tongue slides over teeth In the breath you force from your lungs when you’ve remembered her breath.
Inaugural Poem for Beth Murphy to Sing The weight of hair, or slight currents within the air. The color of frost on glass, and its architecture of cracks. The growl of hunger, or thirst, and the way skin slackens in rest. And the softer skin of wrists, neck’s nape, or telephone static on your lips. The pulse of heaves, what goes when the coatstrings leave. The creak of stairs, latches on days, through ports to outer air. The kisses of car floors, stripped of history, wonder what mouths are for. The traces of touch in winter months, fingernailed skin gone white with distant sun. The dog out in the harbor, the sentences dance in your tangles. The crooked walls poorly masked, the bronzed months that won’t be still. The cup of water wherever it sits, a rim marked by cracking lips. The tapped out words without air, without sound, that want verbs but no nouns. The still rooms and dryrot chairs, furniture for falling into other’s care. The stasis, to search alive for some skin the still person can breathe better in. The form a face takes when spent, exhausted by love or sex or contentment. The range of birds’ flight, what eyes can’t do but memory might.
Effluvial bootstrapping, or mapping the modes of what’s worth the wording 1. It carts its own motion, maintains its ephemerality. It discourages surrendering one’s will, one’s persistence, one’s obdurate refusal to reinvest the self with self. It smells like the oil. It smells like the electric. It seems to have gone, its shit still scattered around the station. Its bell peels. 2. It argues against locution, spits stain into the air, texts the dismal news at midnight, or a quarter after. It is for all intents and purposes, it is ours, it is wept, it is what. It was what. Its amp goes to nine, transforms sound to ohms, short circuits transformers, smolders and is damp to touch. 3. It demands its own demise, in fact, destroys the only means by which it can do itself harm, declaws itself with rotting teeth. It travels its well‐trod circuit, chain dragging dust over yesterday’s footfalls. It erases its faulty memory with ghost pains of shorn limbs it’s yet to lose. 4. It’s not a dog. In the gravel road it’s the smolder of refuse, the ribcage’s contortions. What it once held in it now holds out. What it once painted in tentative strokes and dabs. What soliloquies it spoke, what age its untuned engine, what ails its days, makes lungs gurgle & rasp. 5. It parses verbs to shift the sense of comic timing. It rehearses its gestures in shadowplays of curtains. It composes suicide notes in Starbucks, or meter for the baristas to sing in the musical version of its day. It is gimp, it is isotope. It is aerodyne. It is radio relay. It is gyroscope’s swirl.
Convergent (destructive) boundaries for Alfred Wegener
It must turn its body against the torsion of mud and sift existence from the mechanical grave To forego the trope that turns the soul in waning moon and unnavigable seas It must bile below through its maze of caves all prepositions enough to sustain a sort of being And when the sky presses down, dive again into the jagged net of rocks to fossilize these small acts. It must map the shifting ground of history with clawscrapes, making molehills of mountains tremble commensurate with the minor tremors no politic but entropy, no logic but buckle & compress It must, so does, & no compass confused by magnetite or meteor, by seismic density drawing the world down again rises blind and burns against, gropes to name the thing it is until in sight the shapes emerge, & he, sorry to’ve seen, dies. <chorus> “We were once on a beach, and sand made off with sand. We were once on a sidewalk, broken glass embedded in asphalt. We were once under blankets, under ceilings, under cold front chewing destiny without interest, broken bodies mired in time. Give back to the crater the impact that made it. Give back to the fault line the compression of time. Give back to the body its expansion of earth Give back to the trenches this mountain of dirt.” </chorus>
Burn Yr PT Cruisr Pattern is not movement so much as bile infected regalia, paneling the walls of our heart. Direct your attention kindly. Besides, there is comfort in clubbing the parent seals, too. All of this we knew before the pamphleteering campaign all of it somehow part of our cultural inheritance that I could even love you is proof of mitrochondrial DNA bacterial infection as semaphore, as simple arrhythmia. Then let’s posit a stipulation, an analogy between the slats of our love: Veronica and Jughead versus George & Mary, picture the boat there, tide sucking it beneath bridges and so far out to a sunburnt sea. Ten years is not a landform, but time is geographic. The Indians wait behind trees with crampons and nunchucks and insist on stage‐whispering our future. They know how to threaten, they know the prairies we’ve burnt. There are tangles, hypoxic bodies bleached white by the water of clocks, the gale‐swept Mohenjo‐daro & bricks of bone, its rictus taut with what teeth the tourists left unplucked, drifts of cigarette butts. We are technicians of tautology. We are typists. We are mechanisms of autarky in the malls of America. We are grown weary of objective manifestation while others eat lunch, sitting in chairs that creak or wobble. I guess, one could say, that it falls upon you, who alone cast the spotlight of your affection on the callused flesh of the body politik, so dim and withered in anemic winter sun, to forgive.
Shuttle To train the express among backyard rubbish to that childhood oz of bootleather & skyscraper. To cycle these spindles on fractured Reading Prong into a desiccated tuft of an older America. & to shotgun & attend the radiodial while the long green tunnel of Pennsylvania drains away. To sleep the seatcracks with ears plugged by noise, a child suspended between that & that one. To push goofyfoot, a griptape physics that tactics the abandoned plazas with urethane & truck metal. & to amble jerked rhythm of this broken body, broken strings tying up broken skin on broke bones. To pulse and glide on some system of recollected energies, exit to cloverleaf toward a crumpling. To be carried away by another’s hands, where weightless doubt goes in the softer shaded days. & to dream the broke of air, window enough, mingle a shape of whole where one are, or two was. To simply be moved within, some terrain of foreign exigency, some weather in the dark trees. To write the self into another shade shape, wording what is not into something that for a while is.
Half Impressions of Others The littlest kid spits out stones I thought were teeth, but when caught in palm, dense pressed & hard pits of vowels, I discovered no. What weight bears down on dirt below dirt. The Welsh will apprise themselves of suffering long after the last fly has dropped into the Rhymney. Drawn water to drown one down in. What pressure to sink, what resists a body & makes it float. The toll collector’s job is not collection of tolls. Another task more ancient, barely understood, but even in repetition it draws the hours to the height of stars, builds castles of the smallest gestures, slanted accretion of pathos, a parade of faces in motion that looks finally like memories of childhood, what smell of air in the air, what sound heard in sleep. The Ethiopes grieve calamity with gray tears, swerve the moped so as not to hit the holes. Her stocking muddy and torn, mufflers to melt the gray away. What torsion against inertia. The elderly huddled in chrome centuries’ drift, only those well‐rubbed words inside, lining the pockets. What builds trusses for one’s claim to having had lived. What steadies the narrative into the calcium of history. What air fills lungs to voice the ghosts and make them weigh.
So Tense the Wells of Willing You You believe that it could have always been of, or that now when it’s happening before what could never have been been. You believe, too, that will it will it to have been happening since the very first being was about to have been going to become something important, something having had never been being what it was already, at the beginning. You have seen already seeing what was not about to having had seen. The sights had been having becoming where they were already going to become. Now that it was happening, you were sure that having had never before had having seen it, you will go to, you are going to, will have gone to see the sight of having never had been able to see. You were not willing to have been a has been. You were what was always having been becoming in the having had been what was expected of what you once were going to become. You haven’t had some becoming, but were never yet about to will a becoming, to begin to become what was the willingness to always already be the willingness to was. You of the been and not the is, you of the were and not the was, you of the will and not the having been being, you of the about to become and not what was going to having never having had been becoming, you of the will never have been about to come into being and not the is just now being the will have not been able to be about to now be. You were able to at once be of, when once the what was willing to have been you was something about to be able to become what is no longer you. What was left of the became you was once what you were always willing to be able to have been going to have been being all along, unable to be willing to be a has been, but being unable to be. You were what is the been having not been. You are the is in the becoming the was never having been seeing. You and the was were always a were, always an about to become. Were you to be anything but what you are, were you being another being but without having had been that being but for the about to become it is what you already are. You and the being you have become are what the becoming was already, were it to have become some being about to become instead of going to be about to be. Is that you were never willing to be anything but what you already were, and now that you were always what you were going to be, you understand what it is you have never yet become. You will never have been about to become the being you believe yourself to be about to become. You will always have been becoming about to have been a has been. You have not yet been that being that being always seemed the about to become an is in the going to become again, and in this is another are, another you have never known to be.
Decompression Syndrome From the floor of now the murk of some sediment, dark opacity of being beneath above. From the surface up seems an up. From the of, though the from is below, the up is an of. From the history the stratospheric immersion of the now is now of the past, a belowing. Of this below is the now, buried in the present to drift under past’s weight, which waits. Of the waiting is recollection of what weight the past presses into the now passed below. Of the forms, the verbs help weight our words, to know what once was said is speaking now. The surface a line no bridge can bridge, or the meniscus between past and no time to tell. The surface has no weight, is the end of the past, beyond which waits what is not tensed. The strata we swim in, remembered pressures bends the blood, crushes lungs’ forgotting. Above the sediment silted remembered forms, the course of currents and flow of knowing. Above as such no navigation but the up and up, or back to back, seeks a surface once known. Above brought close by knowing the current memory, the course way in which we come from. Bottomed out in present perfect, is willing and is sinking still into the sediment of thinkinging. Bottom fish or bottom flesh below the pressing thought thunk, the still pressing memory sunk. Bottomed beneath exponential pressure, memory’s tongue with which to talk to remembering. Water is not blue but black, eyes not blue but gray, memory not membered but tense shifting. Water is not wet but eroded, stone not stone but silt, slow molt of surface to float up to past. Water meant what eroded, takes time and courses its tense, builds pressure to press it down. Below now is now, above now was what comes back in dreamed currency, sucked to surface. Below membered, below bodied, below tense that knows no perfect no participle no infinitive. Below black is white where water will run as the thinking goes forever under, pressed by tense. And this time that forces upon the body a form, upon the thought a clotting, the bends of was. And a tense was what it always was, without weight of passing time, a conjugated compression.
On or about air Orange stairwell, what white walls, white films of what unshuttered frieze, riffled river’s water under gaunt iron, some city to sense the snow against or for. The muscles that talk to, or remember when one could talk to him. I have spent some time thinking about this, expenses unaccounted for in my memories of him. What a burden a room can be when there’s no room for a metonym. In miniature, scope the sensory horizons for semblance of disjoint thought. A girl I love, black against a white wall. What could walk the circuit, blown knees’ electricity skirting the will to speak some kindness, so familiar for so long with such words’ internal machine making one a one. Steeper incline of dislocalized persona: one ceased being one for him, like the smell of burnt wood words the small of wet news paper for plasters & golems & ghost yous. I misheard you. These pictures projected on walls, slideshow screens what still gray waters will course against foundering hours between yesterday one and tomorrow one. I misheard heat as heart, the conduit frozen against or beneath or for the plumb syncopation no heart to heat the air to fill the room to fuel the lungs that unfurl the one who’s the only what I want.
Illuminated Aluminum (In the novel, in its words, where the fricatives plow the plosives, & want no yellow metric, no nar‐ rator’s name destroys the aural with aporic anxiety, with an air.)
You didn’t expect the fullness of winter. You didn’t know about the sky. Without leaves, the trees rake clouds and empty the wind. A spire shook out its roiling dust. You didn’t know how much sky. You don’t want protection anymore.
The blades against the tiny hairs, the soft sound of sluicing words. Unclasped, & the skin blank‐mapped by wintered postures. A leaf settles on your tongue, dissolves to remind you: Those buds are these buds. I wanted, maybe, to reverse the seasons. To run tongue to bark, seek sap in cracked wood.
You ate in houses, the furniture of thoughts to rest the words upon. Knew vocabulary as bleats form‐fitted to jerks of motion, stasis, then finally sleep. Pretend to long enough then, then too long. A word imagined suddenly ties the tongue. When you wake, you have spoken into the pillow, still wet with saliva, tiny letters blood red.
A dreamt bell still rings loud enough to wake you. On the street, voices shuddered just so: You can draw the cheeks that make such sounds. Skin of paper, air of molars, calloused by absence. This winter the windows flow slowly through time, molten passers‐by wave but to someone else.
(Somewhat surrendered to blue, he said but meant yellow pot smoke to suck deprived hermeneutic of the metallic filter coughing scraped of meaning, & smoked that too.) Waking to clocks, walking to clocks, the drilled movement of electricity, a bed of maps. Your body wintered in blankets, waiting for the moment when the color comes on. & my body never was a vessel. It carries itself in a Möbius strip, characteristic zero. Winter restores something of the topography, the yawns and groans. I have given up on of. Participles only bring me down. Polyhedral combinatorics, or waiting in line to receive whatever it is everyone wants badly enough to wait in a line. I had never given up on winter, only forgotten what it asks: You seek shelter in silent gesture. You sniff your way through memory. You absorb impurities into your bloodstream. What stavings against reminders. That place – there, and there – where homing on some scent or click train, divining one’s way through it is what we do, is to be done. The clock does not care what color or what weight the day brings, confident it simply will and has always and will always continue. On trestles that once shuttled a cargo, now cross‐correlation rusts a static gesture, growth where once was empty movement alone. I forgot to say: Now a Spring comes with thunderstorms, deep rattler in unglazed windowsash and slow concussive bursts that seem to want to buckle the house we buckle, and emptily hope.
(My mass market is your drug dealer’s overstock. My Latin teacher is your practiced necessity. My regrets are your elegant parries and feints.)
This is why people build churches. Harping a resistance by spelling a word. Answering percussives with a voice. There is no equivalent to lightning. Perhaps your hair, still wet, or the imprint of your body on its bed. But if the words remember the thunder, they last only as long as lightning, return to rest at zero state.
You when the will to move is centrifugal, or the familiar path of habit don’t mind the settling of a body’s surrender, the stiff grasp of tendons which both feel and can feel, nerves deliver the news and make the news eyes, a mouth for both of us, for you, and the man grasped below can see and is sight itself, & opaque
You wanted shelter, where busking some glance at slippery crowds flown or trucked from, bused or bruised by the long journey across borders super‐ impositions, data‐driven demarcations, the first‐down line of scrimmage no one else can see and so you alone measure what progress against air still filling with smoke or turning to dust The trees, we say, gain their buds as we say good‐bye fall into step with sidewalk cracks break records, women openly weeping from their car doors ajar, seatbelt buzzer or radiostatic eclipsing sobs, I guess, or what might be low songs learned long ago from nannies with accents I realize I want to go back, finish the food I’d left on the table, lap up the water I spilled, to rest
(Pablo Picasso’s Riviera is your police cruiser. Great Neck Long Island is your trilled birdsong. Scaffolded pulp crows are your drab grace notes.)
what stands still what blinks at you from scaffolding but below the buildings the ground you toe with skeptical hesitance, suspect is mud, loam grown liquid with the tremors and so won’t walk further, simply stand both hands splayed, both feet turned outward what words can I say to you? when you walk again it will be on forgotten song. This is the key, the scale to construct melody, the tempo preprogrammed. When the sky disappears, & leaves suck the light away, your skin will find it again, and what damage a long winter did goes, what dark yoke the weight lifts, you can fuck and drink and sleep again. From now on the humming becomes easy. I would build a frame and stretch the canvas the cancer remembered the same way one laughs at children but not with them, little scourge so unhappily matched to the world’s devices drawn along by nothing at all but fear and anxious clutching at other’s looks. But you, you are done with it.
(We once waited for mailmen. We filled our necks full, I erect‐ ed a church steeple in my throat. This reprogramming of grammatical funneling to keep the stomach full.)
Part 3.
Catastrophe replicates and amplifies itself asexually and self‐adaptively in different time zones. The collateral damage of catastrophe knows no boundary in time. A fault tolerant domain. Shanxing Wang
P r e s e n t Tension
One
You are sleeping, it is 6:40 AM, deleting the crescent pressed into flesh from fingernail or pillowcrease. About birdsong, about teeth‐ chatter. About methods of contraception, bleary‐eyed behind sunblind wind‐shield. About heredity, strut like your father but you can’t shake his bones, can’t unmake a semblance. We choose what accent, but are born to a language.
Two
I would not mind having had said: “you are the last thing I was thinking of.” To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. I wouldn’t have even minded: “Let’s drive the car until the wheels come off.” To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Awakened, the mind restores a fullness that it doesn’t need when dreaming. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. The weight of all these people, what’s required of a face, of the eye, a smile. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Solitary, the mind seems to wither into mindlessness, the need of resistance. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy.
Three
We’re chosen by time even when we wear the watches, set the clocks. We drive these roads, not looking between trees for traces, bits of possibility that swirl inside the syllables. Moments of clarity counterweight the dreams’ excavations, fossilized & forgotten dialogue pressed between layers of days. About the context in which I said. About the corners in which the bodies’ pressure rearranges the compass, where new norths pull.
Four
Colloquial masks in which, to turn the sound down, one needs the remote. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. But what at once reminds the self away from self, one needs a local control. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Habitual remembering is as mindless as forgetting; the telepathic technology. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Reaction to disjuncture, a nervous system, is what’s wrong with automation. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Too much caffeine in the bloodstream. Too much chatter in open channels. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy.
Five
what vessel or carriage, wheels already having come off &, with time the moving forward not thing moved that matters &, time does not move but stills beneath eternal creep of blood, the mitochondrial foothold, ageless fingernails dig ageless rock, trilobitic understanding of what the fuck am I doing, & just when the fuck will it end, & it will never end, the wheels having come off, & axle scraping against ground, nothing’s left but cargo, moving, & the way it should be.
Six What puzzles ask is not teleos but for tactics to predict & resist the strategy. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. The predicted evolution of the stale‐fish, of the lien air, or the crooked grind. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Ceramic bearings, a compass of efficiency, the heat that’s fueled by friction. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Polysyndeton and pleurisy, or a new chiasmic itch the sentence can’t scratch. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. The dry skin in spots, lips that crack, and the slow refraction of a body’s will. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy.
Seven
Just what it was you thought of then. Just what it is I meant now. Knowing fully the need for apology itself destroys the legitimacy of any apology. Just knowing the future is the sound of the mechanism of the future. It builds inside of what builds it, compiling itself from the data of need, from the urge to aggregate. Memory is organism, its permeable cellular walls and spooling redundancies masquerading as present tension, the muscle of thinking in time. Delineation as clocking the play‐by‐ play, waiting for the sound wave to mirror the moment. You can’t recuperate the pressure of sound waves, as in: the denser air is only denser than the memory of air, itself as nebulous as the missing self. When you give yourself to destiny, there is the same tension in the present, but it is only a remembered tension. When you will tell yourself this story, skin and its scars become the only narrator. When you fill the calendar, the lines look like nests where we hatch the memory of birds.
Eight The way the wave inverts as it slows, semblance of cities that know no time. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Blood smile. Drift code. Boot flood. Born ready. Stilled thoughts. Felt time. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. What the spear fisher knows of phase velocity is written already in movement. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. What the surface tension knows of a cup’s capacity is written in its meniscus. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. We walked together, her arm in mine, through the cold, lower east side wind. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy.
Nine About the silence we fill imagining an other’s voice, the poorly‐chosen font inveighs intention, a timorous lust, these tentative declarations that question that what was going to be will still be going to be.
Ten Brutality at the border reinforces our charmless resuscitation of an ancient id. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. In the deep end of the public pool, one learns to read culture’s sudden shifts. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Clothing is optional, as in desertion is retirement, or ineluctability is eroticism. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. How to keep one’s dick hard, when the mind softened by time admits a flaw. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Soldiers massed in temperate angst against little boys’ memories of mothers. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy.
Eleven
scraping the sheen of sunlight from our eyes, the animals cautiously approach the side of the bed and glare. They study the mechanics of religion from the outside in – faith is knowing breath when contentment is the inverse capacity. To lay ear to rib, checkmate stasis the way a body pins its equivalent shape and searches out the spaces where the bones touch, forces out breath in shapes colorcoded by dark branches of forgetting, recollecting, despairing the drunken reel away from what a body once was. Sliver the latticed girders, rigid bridge’s resistance to the river’s pull. Silent birds are what we could have thought but never let our voices form feathers, just wet sheaves against the shattered windows that haven’t yet fallen from their frames.
Twelve Jurors and jailers, the principal and the chief financial officer, cradle & a coffin. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Punk rock played in high def seven point one surround, a ground lift for static. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. Do you remember me, what I was then? Do you remember us, what we were? To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. The whiling away of hours amid cinderblock, the games one’s habit still wants. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy. The electric current dreams of resistance, capacitors that couple these circuits. To maintain mindfulness, one’s attention must perforce adopt oblique strategy.
Thirteen
It is 7:04, you are sleeping, dreaming I am writing lights in a ahum white room, fluorescent with expectation: It will rain, the buried room will fill with people, and under comforts, noise will be voices another noise that that softly the cleft that connects them.
Eight Lines on Hunger Artists and their Homes (published in Onedit, September 2009) 1. track the careful haze 2. blind draught the metal clip 3. soft then hard then softer swell 4. the this and the that then the this 5. like some luck but again the dip of resist 6. trust the clasp to hold what weight would rend it 7. the airplane is a snowblower, down the roustabout 8. every seam the snail’s stitch, scrotal distortion of torpor 1. the despair of the phrenologist 2. abject blister that resists irradiation 3. parachute pants against the fierce winter wind 4. stoked smoke plus memorized air duct syncopation 5. what drugs can’t tell you the misery of withdrawal will 6. ill‐spent spit, or tongues untied in rigor mortis, or trilobite 7. half halved into quarters into clots, coagulate particles imprecise 8. the dripping faucet’s plots form the parabola of a sleepless algebra 1. she sang of slatternly wallowing 2. he slit some clover, beshat the blankets 3. what forever keeps the curtain drawn against it 4. if arms encircle a waist, if tongue untie the tender buttons 5. cemented‐shut eyes, a retinue of distortable prophesies leavened 6. with what yeasty memory, what filigreed woodwinds blown against the blight 7. when she speaks the stars blur the heart comes unstuck the strings ring with rust 8. clasped in thighs or stung with sweat or swelled with a blood someone else laid claim
When What You’re Doing is To Reify Shadows Cast in Remembered Light (published in Onedit, September 2009) One order plows the page to order. Water drops’ lensing the seen order. Forged bell cracks sound the spliced clapper the muffled reverberation. Against time, the heart crawls cold tracks in the snow. Furrows the spent time. In volume expands a space for verbs: to fuck, to calm, to hope, to reify, to growl. To collapse vocabulary you find the footprints where she had walked, and walk. To restore the veil on the pixilated days that came before & ask: before what? An ascent of syntax, a shaping of tongue and bowing of jawbone, a new clap. Measured breaths, cheeks’ tension recalibrated against remembered voice. What makes a body a body is the air it displaces, volume against the known world. What makes a body its own body is another’s hands unveiling its proper heft. What makes a sentence, what makes a sound, after language falls to spoke dust. What talks against the wind is not breath but the urge to have been about to say. Kite a word against wing; shattered vowels on unreeling string, wind against wound. Wind winds the words away, maps discursive the patter of no bell’s peel. Bleed before the cells’ immolation of the carriage that bears them. The blood that has born them since before they were cells and had a guise to form. Softness attributed to light filtered by both “early morning” and “cumulonimbus.” Everything you thought you knew as the inverse of the will to name it. The screen resolution as articulation of practical banter, of graceful light. Belled crumbs, the drops of faucets, the glow of somnambulistic reprieve. I will fight this sleep with another kind of sleep, purify the sky to mask its heat. I will grow grace from flecks of paint, the frayed cuffs of suitcoat, the spoon of soup. I will begin at the beginning, where words line pockets, before cracks break bells. And the dongs that shape the walls of cities, and cells that flame the smoke of cells. And winds that while the skies away, no voice but that voice which’s what? The voice against the limning of a life, to look back at what mirrored us to be.
Thanks giving (published in Onedit, September 2009) What this thinking in broken is sitting at tables that give no heat it spent itself out, a candle of broken wax hearth of collapsing stone shoulders that dread the shrug What this wishing was, or were subjunctive state of memory a scorched hand that recalls a texture the low rise sun of undone flesh the shallow misery of distance here’s forensic cacophony: cinderblock walls muffle voice bind hands to backs, can’t touch flesh or cloth or Belarus mane so full of stairwell’s muted light here’s deliberate image wood of some other home sheets of some other bed the anchor and the ebb tide depth that binds the blind to sight
The Here of in the Home (published in Onedit, September 2009) for Emma Bee
The metal tips of its coma. The cleverness of the comma. The furniture of soldered wires. The churning of sexual worries. The crooner after his crisis. The sutured focus of its iris. The pronouncing gazetteer’s blues. The outsourced levees, what the waters could do. The here in the home of nowhere’s gone. The beading glare of your nomenclatured tongue. The cultural insignificance of whetted disdain. The galling highway barriers that keep the animals strange. The funeral of television. The losing altitude proposition. The first person shooter apology blog. The frequently asked questions of mixed breed dogs. The piano forte minus its suspension. The annual torture of biased intentions. The period at the end of my sentence. The dreary weather of what I meant. The record executive’s small decisions. The placard’s text at intersections. The gerunds that refuse to mean anything. The pairings whose moans denigrate my singing. The stairs and where to climb until. The daring stand coopted by your clientele. The licked railings of atrophied municipalities. The contrailed skies vacuumed of my reality. The red eyed polaroids weeping for us. The derailed oil polymers unstuffed. The varicose haircuts of holys sons. The perilous career of forging punks.
Without Methodology the Bludgeon’s a Punchline Reduce diet to one ingredient per meal. Splurge on dapper hats, but wear one’s shoes to flapping strips of plastic. Disinterested along the lines of: telephone games in dappling sunlight are dreams waiting to fulfill the potential of the waking world again. The word “bleat” appears seven different places in one day. Underneath the tiny crystal telephone is someone trying to dial you. Derive a system by which you can predict the next action movie title. Haggle with the dictionary, in spite of a perfect metrical scan. We leak a little into the past as will presses flesh into the present. The tiny hairs seem to throb with pain, many minute pains. Walk patterns into the scope of your drift. Wear holes where imagined scratching silences. A boundary expanding is what the future must feel like to anyone else, but not to me. Perturb the quiet train car with worrying song lyrics. Find receipts for objects, brand names you don’t recognize. Blow out the mouth without a sound. A scar from some unknown injury, knuckle contusions. You said, are saying right now the thing you think is never accessible to the predicting mind. Grope with numb hands the tiny tools of conversation. Objects vibrate with their own resonant frequency, but too loudly. Fill buckets too full to carry, capacity too great for surface strength. But I say the predicting mind and memory share a common wall, glasses pressed against its surface, muffled discussions – can’t tell if someone was laughing or crying in pain, then vast silences that hum with imagined recriminations or apologies. Aped phaticisms. Field a pop fly, but eyes cannot track, lose focus, shudder, dilate. The shoe is untied. The shoes are untied. So’s the tie.
For Filling the Air Full for ellie
For filling the air full pressured the other’s pull into seat’s weight the broke bodies, the half hearts & some still shells – husks – quiet tongues to bob in wakes of what her words can make. For shuddering the skin so in poised dispensation the noises that rise not from throat or lung but from what comes before she speaks, the plane or prism or the shape her heart takes. For softening the still sounds into small hands that halt a room’s breath, holding each attentive heart right here right there with gentle gestures, until her eyes reach from white to let us breath and weep and sigh.
Shit upon racks (for Anselm) [to be published in At Large winter (?) 2009] Circle the year with unstrung veins, the length blood goes to know the body it feeds. Circle the day’s quiet sun, gradations of shadow that slowly paint the corners black. Circle in exhaled words you’d say, blown out of some chasm where they cracked. Circled rooms’ worn walls where the body presses its flesh, & how easy to retrace it. Can you worship loss, the way pitted cement sloughed off reveals cement, hollow where she can shelter? I will not dream of you anymore, only because I will never sleep but instead let ceiling fan utter the words it reels from my throat. A small space in the mouth for water, another for leaves, stuffed to absorb sound against the rattling panels that look like wood but are skin. A small sprig, for mirrors to absorb or the grasp of hands, small servos too that short and thus clutch nothing. Memory is metal on metal. Objects always flicker, tin sounds that divide the consonants, trouble the glass, grind my name against its vowels, etch it against the drum and the strings, the resonance of time along the fret of space. In the yard a scar left from a child’s fall. In the air the sound of first figs that rot. In the end we are only alone, repose of rivers our hunting fathers forded, wet feet foundering in the mud of new countries. I am a dead man, how by brother I come to know how shoes get tied, how head bruises inside. And by lights burned out seen slow through screen, grunt first then learn aria for other lips to chew & spit, to thirst. Fuck you, though, for the clean air you breathed into then drew back out, & inside the sick scent of tomorrow. How by crow I turn to dark squawk, by stomach I come to claw’s ghost, by shit I come to broke fist, by hair I come to clogged head, and then, by tooth I come to no truth.
Pretension You pretended the rain meant that you pretended that blood grew thick when you pretended the bed retained a shape in which you pretended still to lie when you pretended the mail might hold something you pretended would last forever against the end you pretended never would come until you pretended nothing but that you pretended the rain meant that you pretended today was the past day when you pretended to want him who you pretended was yours because you pretended to know what you pretended to do when you pretended to do anything you pretended to do, even if you pretended to pretend this would allow something you pretended to want, when you pretended only so long, and when you pretended to end it all, one had to wonder what you pretended & what you had actually done.
Chin up triptych of on earth or of against hearth or under our heart & of hurt’s first verse. of above this dirt or where we’re most lost in thirst’s first haunt of some sinking want. of what’s once water when fire’s embered choke against oven smoke or lost ones alone to wane. or this returning cold against such still stain over the other’s moving away in her shape’s brief stay. of what once was of bronzed & papered walls, retainer of what history now burned with fire or settled as dust. of some other empty against another who fills her, of the way warmth goes between bodies, one come cold, a long gone hold. of on Earth for so long but now gone through fire to air’s height not becoming color but of cold white. of once dropped song or to put the kettle on, small shape’s shift under skin of pulse beneath slight wrist. of final things within that disappear from sight, & of forged shapes cooled & still rupture, something of steel supposed to maintain a might.
Erosion What worth it is, to be young and have some breath in your lung, some new moon blackening part of the sky so no words come. Trickle the thought that tomorrow is brittle – a thing like shattered glass but held in bare hands, a stillness there, catching a bird falling asleep. I have in my possession cruelty, plus careful rendering, a complaining memory, the nagging weight of missing limbs. I have in my house no windows or doors, or hearth but the small sounds children make in their sleep – bone‐stretch & tooth‐grind, as dreams make use of a day’s delicate gestures. I have in my house a dull ache that splinters history from future, or agency from the weather, as much to know eye color as it is to know my name. You’ve seen children hold mirrors to mirrors, trying to find the end of it – and want to tell them, there is no end except the eye’s weakness to see, but also hope the kid turns to say, there it is, right there, and points. Words come instead, are garments tongues wear when want compels, but words mirror nothing, are just grunts or sighs, the muscles’ grope against the slide of time, and useless. Instead, think of fingertips undoing the delicate buttons that keep us clothed, or the still water at river’s edge, like blank pages that want a pen’s ink, and let settle the stones, erosion the final argument every mountain knows.
Drifts What apostrophe could possess you? I listened to your poems and remembered: Or else shall we end, I heard, not and. This talking is not talking but stasis, the stillness of rock under the grey roots of grey trees, branches against grey clouds. I fought against it, in sleep, and I woke up against it, pinned and not fully functioning. Lids a scrim, the brain a blank, mouth dry. Where one wants to be is on fire, or out but with a memory of fire, of standing still in a crowd of those whose love you know. What one wants is what one cannot say, those horses’ hooves beating just beyond the bend, the dust hanging in the air.
If the reach of a body’s pull matches mass a force against trajectory and longing the dust settles back on the road again. When what words we use for memory talk of only ghosts, and the mouth’s vowels wipe away the footprints, think of me in whatever form such a thing exists which is to say it doesn’t, should we end with silent smiles, spun out into space? The remove is insufficient, the gravity a cloying nag that makes the voice shake when finally we are able to make some sounds. Will those words back to meaning, & take what still sounds pepper the silent rooms to temper this mute morning, so tired in the blue drifts.
These Are What Were These are what were elements but are now accidents. These are what were typos but are now telepathies. These are what were rattlesnake guns but are now drum machines. These are what were hieroglyphs but are now interest rates. These are what were microfiche but are now ballistics. These are what were nanotechnologies but are now grease ports. These are what were coke ovens but are now feral igloos. These are what were forceps but are now Bad Advice. These are what were ticket stubs but are now blank stares. These are what were helicopter rotors but are now reminiscences. These are what were powder kegs but are now entropy. These are what were nachos but are now the color of settled smoke. These are what were shrill bird calls but are now ellipses. These are what were podium glitches but are now the sentry’s gate. These are what were fiber optics but are now cardboard mailers. These are what were billfolds but are now davenports. These are what were verbs but are now a plea. These are what were wristwatches but are now bungee cords. These are what were guillotines but are now dogma. These are what were graceless but are now a showstopper. These are what were scapegoats but are now scare tactics.
Cavalier Attitude Put‐On Bored, plus also have cold and the air “sniffs me with its wet nose.” Watch cars bisect the window’s hexagon. Elevator’s buttons blink the floors by. Study science to dispel the hairs that nest the head. Boil the tea from the water, & lick what fortunes it told from mug’s bottom. This is how I spent the day, except for five minutes I cannot account for and the eight minutes it took to write a poem for you that then I threw away with several pieces of junk mail I read with such hope, such hope. Trade circumference for the intersection of tangents. Multiply the radius by the inverse of how long it took to draw. Space exists between these places but not for lips, tongues, methodical instruments to test the wind with. Ceiling water drips with two hours’ weight to measure the volume of what’s passed while the present forms and form and will keep forming. With such small sounds the ears repel the air, and we hear what it is to hear nothing when nothing won’t come.
Translation Work “We should insist while there is still time.” (Jack Gilbert)
Translate the drain’s gurgle, the soft hiss in throats of gutters, echoing standpipes in forgotten buildings too old to demolish. Translate the taut kitestring as pianowire, a television cable strung between houses, a neighborhood harp drunk drivers pluck. Translate the resonant frequency of lane marker, dashes reflect our headlights onto car ceiling & eye corner, then windshield wipers synchronize. Translate the flicker of fluorescent tubes which light the quiet with ill‐ease, & then tick metallic wasps into carpet’s worn nap. Translate the blown nose, expectorated patterns in tissue signify fortunes only the pure‐of‐heart can read, translate this, too. Translate lines that have creased the face, phonemic gray hairs & the skin‐tag sprigs & the mottled splotches of death we find. Translate the sighs and gasps, the silence that crumples & falls in the space between chest & chest, or neck & cheek, or us & us. Translate the ticks and gongs of clocks that spoil the silence between ticks and gongs, that knit together & keep us so far apart. Translate the clucks of chickens in books, barks of dogs in heat ducts, parrot’s squawk through drywall, tortoise scratch, cat purr. Translate the slowly shed skin of winter that, when the days warm, lies at the foot of the bed, where clothes pile so shapeless.
Men The rib was plucked for its many uses – as a battering ram, as a flagpole, as the oar to row the boat home. But of all its uses, the rib is terrible at protecting the chest cavity, a small space where curled animals sleep. When the lung collapses, the blood is sudden, is black against the white walls of longing, where wondering lives, or had lived. The blunt weight, & the smell of nitrogen or cedar, of all dreams once forgot then suddenly speaking, calling us out. As the air goes, the blood becomes quick & pure. It’s the weight of it, though, that slowly brings the animals around, to consume their host. In this way men become some other form, ashes of desire, the fine dust of need that lies in shadow around the furniture when, after many years, it is carried from a house once a home, now itself empty cavity. Then men no longer strut but walk with the stiff cadence of a body that forgot what the body’s for.
Inter‐Water Width Calculation The Atlantic Ocean is 388 times wider than the Hudson River. The Hudson River is 16 times wider than the Bronx River. The Bronx River is 4 times wider than the Mahwah River. The Mahwah River is barely wider than the Little Mahoning Creek. The Little Mahoning Creek is as wide as 2 swimming pools. A swimming pool is as wide as 14 bathtubs. A bathtub can hold 42 gallons of water, unless displaced by bodies. A body’s water is what gives it weight, but what feels a pull. A pull is what lifts a body from a larger body’s gravity. The gravity of a body’s center of mass seems as if it is concentrated, but is not the same as a geographic center. The geographic center has nothing to do with heart. The center of mass may be displaced to enhance the body’s behavior. Inertial frames of two bodies may overlap, the centers colliding. The collision of centers of mass destroys the perimeter. The perimeter belies the body, and redefines what it is. What it is is a body of water, less than air but responsive to light, quick to react to external stimulus, to sprout antennae, to invent new ways in which to absorb energy from its environment which is water, and air, and the light that sets its eyes aglow.
Ordre des Lettres It isn’t the circling, the soft descent of syllables, what changes in the air between sealing a letter and its movement, opening to a new world. What wants to breath that air in – a geode cracked after millennia, capsulate distant pure past when the world swooned for itself. What the breath can’t hold against time it holds as a remembered when, some beat the heart once knew, a rhythm it can no longer find & so goes, to speak its words within silent capsules wishing for no more air to tell the time.
Definitions Against The Decay of Urban Music Culture 1. Selfless means to put the window sash to sill. 2. Morbid means to blow the crows to bits, or remember the melody but not the words. 3. Belligerent means the brittleness of flowers’ frozen dew against the frost‐etched glaze. 4. Aghast means the methodology of prayer, the pedagogy of charity, the epistemology of code enforcement. 5. Elusive means granting license to necessity, like coveting thy neighbor, or being inspired by lush orchestration, or becoming hungry. 6. Gratitude is monotony. 7. Exteriority is thinking about doing something but then not doing it. 8. Cantankerous is the chink in the armor and the chilblain we scratch with well‐gnawed, futile toe‐ nails. 9. Poetry is bloodbathing the cul‐de‐sac against the actuarial property values, or spelling in tongues. 10. Integrity is sewer tripe. You always find it the last place you look. 11. Philology is millennial malaise, that sense that you came downstairs for a reason, and then forgot where the stairs were, or that there even were stairs, and that the phone ringing has something to do with death. 12. Micromanagement means pitting your left hand against the right, or misremembering which serial killer committed which serial killing. 13. Hiccoughs means you are going to receive a letter that will open new doors of opportunity, but that you will lose sight of short‐term goals, and your health will be of concern to those who know you well. 14. Orchestration means orgasm. 15. Elocution means serif the conversation with sexual innuendo. 16. Half‐assing it means bringing one’s endemic nativity to the fore, genderblending as histrionic dementia, incurring moral debt against the probability of longevity. 17. Cavity search means certainty stretch. 18. Longitude means drawling the articulators ‘til the catapault’s taut. 19. Latitude means expelling the spirants from the mouth’s damp gloom. 20. Confession means conspiring to comply without any sense of a coming undone.
The First Electrolic Gregory said, when he could say anything at all again, that far from us lies that thing we want more than any other thing. I said, what if that thing is not a thing but it is a time when things were more than what they are now and yet gravity was less, birds slower in the trees, the sunlight a syrup that clung to skin that I could drown in? Those things, he said, are they not the things you want? The imperceptible shift in a word’s use begins with someone’s lisp, a slip of tongues in a broken throat. Then the word is liquid ink and so the world is finally liquid too. Those things, he said, they seem like things wet by water, but a thing wet by water is the water and is the moment before the droplet destroys itself, changes itself into not the skin but what’s in between the skin and the bones of things in a world that it can never say it knew, & so know it now. Those things, I said, also lie a long ways away, water evaporating from some far off plain where other people’s houses squat, the shifting smoke of chimneys smelling like nothing.
Heart Entire You people who break wonder what it was that broke you instead of what it is to be a you that now isn’t one but two. You soldiers who fall down and die spill some weight into the brown air that, while you were here, wasn’t and now that you’re gone will remain there. You women who love one man but need another to still claim to live must get used to taking some warmth away from the stove’s capacity to finally give. You men who spend a moonless life asleep next to a woman who made herself into a wife alone must know that even these words are tools mislaid. You people who broke alone against the slow curve of time still blink at the low‐slung sun believe somehow that you’ll be fine.
Clocked In You can never be but when against the subject’s sigh you begin to, or feel like you’re about to, without having any inkling of already having been about to be. No more poems of or even poems for, but instead a poem that, a poem which and perhaps poems against which these days hemorrhaging their place to trace only their shadows. And then the clock returns sprung and wound with echoes of previous ticks & a subsequent tock still hanging in ears until the walls cave, no reference point we can tell time by.
The Second Electrolic (a sonnet) 1. To do a thing doesn’t mean understand it. 2. That a thing can be done means only that one has already imagined it’s finished. 3. There is wonder in not doing the thing you feel you’ve got to do. 4. Doing nothing means the imagination’s silence is made of stone, and meant to erode. 5. There are two types of movement, that which is pushed and that which is led. 6. What to do when the wind’s gone? The decks need swabbed to bloat the timber or the ship sinks. 7. Things happen when will erodes a stone. 8. Will impels when the stones grow heavy. 9. The quality of one’s will is an effect of one’s stasis. 10. The alive person uses language to erode the stones, to build the will into an engine. 11. The voice can both be absorbed and reflected by the surface it affects. 12. To understand a thing is to turn that thing against everything else. 13. Use gives rise to emotional attachment because one’s skin rubs smooth or becomes calloused. 14. A sunset is not a thing at all, but an opened window is.
Describe your Comfort Level with Varied Anxiety‐Producing Sensory Stimuli Some surfaces slick with columbine, ground down nasturtium. Imperceptible parabola of Rorschach to get the limbs loose. Grout nests entwined with milkweed, eyedropper, hemostat. Wet‐nurse choking from phlegm, seizing from discordant riffle. De facto caboose synonymous with intelligence quotient data. Circumscribe the lazy geometry of a newly burned‐down town. The trouble with gas grilling versus the burn unit lunch counter. Her recollection morose, yet pleasingly‐dressed and well‐coifed. Grateful for the noose, but dissatisfied by rope’s chafing texture. A small stain spread across the front of his pants, a vast blurring. Reconnaissance of illusory dichotomy in the strawman’s mirror. Drear, or murk, plot out a margin to one’s turgid implacability. Double‐clutched truck’s downshift, driveshaft pistoning pressure. Unclasped, her bra’s hooks find finger’s blood will not coagulate.
Some Shoes how a poet makes money is he decides what’s money. shifts the vocalization to the vehicle: a spoon, say, silk. musette, an idioplasm, itself the iteration of itself. gruff talk’s naumachy the sinking of ships narcotic beyond skirt of sewer‐swell where lie nascent chapped lips & a toothless maw & gape of gums talking time’s talk. the nation mourns, its feathers barbed pincers drawn, sense wrenched from pinhold, from old men coughing in rooms, from morticians’ scalpels arrayed in a chrome valediction. from pine sol, barbiturates, loose flags of skin at halfstaff. we’ll warp our waft from its seasons. this and that, that and that, and all of it not what would wants how a poet makes money’s money. could be a broken crux the levee broken by boxcutter and by history? & this brilliant necronomy viral tremor against a grafted illumination an aluminum script the ore a fluid and not to be cooled no not ever hands on the tractor jacks’ plug in port, ones & ohs with cables extruded carrier current economy 1 and one, 0, 1. 1 and zero and one. gentle wind, something blue and torpid, writhing like a like, as goddamnit I want it to be the what. & before, there was no before, but now there will be an after that becomes what before was now. was not now. I after all is all there is. the the is the. the 1 is the 0. the was is and so will if so would be.
The Manner in Which Memory is Mostly a Dog Behind a White Picket Fence Running Real Fast deciding forfeiture, an infrastructure wrought by blood as broth, when it had been had always been & grass & air & septic discharge & trees oh yeah there are trees that mumble me drunken violence, him statue, him gargoyle, him talisman, him cross. grant then what will fucking or knife in stomach grant him his ships and his ships’ ships and his proxy a crown his scalps & earstrings & hearts pulsed of blood sceptered in death screw’d thru with a polity of transmission, & a broadcast arrow. were it not for the hellos were it not for the schism were it safe for the sound were it asked of us once were it children born up were it suns drawn down were it causal were it derived were it ritual blood were we receiving rather than transferring dictum. be here now be here. fall down slow fall down. reach for my hand reach for. shut the fuck up shut the fuck. tell me what tell me. come on please come on. grovel on your knees grovel on. remember to remember me to those you meet remember me.
Blitzkrieg Bog hey! you ten million millionaires’ millions I cannot feel which way the wind blows housing this spent weather is a matchstick! glory of dog sounds, wonder of charm’s teeth how the gazetteer can alphabetize with flush hands swollen flesh bereft gone numb blind. watering the grass in the rain with water of columns of air spun of strands of gas yesterday an oceanic biologist discovered the remains of a giant squid floating off the coast of Santa Cruz, deflated & limp. cats are terrorists, dogs the UN, & birds are technology, short circuited in floodplain. the shouts of children, brooding umbrella police, olson twins polis pronounced porous, also pool as plow, and the hun‐ dred thousand pets with microchips who still long to run free.
For M. That black had had its cracked reasons. That while had been such still time glazed. That ask hadn’t had its time to gel.
At the End of the End September 18, 2009
At the end of the end, when the slower trope we turn in talking? You’d smash glass as a morning mitzvah. I am the floor, and what’s wet then sharp and will make both bleed. At the end of the end, what’s flow and what static, summed current with no capacitor stoned tongues to measure one’s weather with. Blinder by knowing the blows come from corners and around spun catastrophes. At the end of the end, a French sense for soothing, a shed shape that stills eyes & then the slip: this shape’s a relic, ghost of was, bought with borrowed hope and blown alive with nothing wind. At the end of the end of the sun, the shape loses definition, penumbral and blistered, some dog to clone what shaped the sky. At the end of the end of the moon, the song is every song, sung in tones that imitate music but only crow or bark accordingly. At the end of the end in the rain, the shape lives in convex reproduction, exposures against pulsed plurals, gains its weight in soaking through. These are drops plus current that engender the river’s run.
Awl Sept. 8, 2009
Awl’s rot, blinking awash what fluids molder. Flushed bloat with the dope drowned bluish in September. Hip’s broke, clavicular distension muttering savagries & gloom. What shirt’s that you’re wearing against the slow death of your body? Paint whatever makes you feel better some color not imaginative enough to name. Walk among hung shadows lopped off legs trembling syllables of sense. What’s under fingernails but pain? What’s in woods that will not want to kill? If it makes you feel better: this razor, this motel room closet, this 500 milligrams of saxitoxin. Boat roams the tributaries, scotch mist maneuvers, the slow perambulations of a finger on the areola. Gross ton, fraction’s bliss while somewhere her tongue’s limp, protecting language blips. Transformer hum, capacitors’ crackle belongs to the entropic maundering of memorized rendezvous. I’m doubt, which weather are you? I’m broke, the form consumes its function to bleach the wallet to bone. Summed gradations against perplexed data maps, & turn, bereaved, back toward the teeth won’t talk. How are you, in the woolen transit between a lover and some other, and when will ever I see your hair again?
Horistocracy Sept. 11, 2009
Worsening conditions dream of worsening their conditions. Blossoming futures forget their shriveled histories. And the succor of autumn rinses Spring of its sewers. Along the country roads the bombs drop their loads. Along the railroad tracks we repel the mortar attacks. And in bed at night we learn our children perished in their flight. If the comet comes near we’ll discover how poorly we prepared. If the tides begin to rise, sandbag the city hall, tie balloons around your neck. If the crater smokes, long walks in dark valleys for ailing grandmothers. Funeral’s function against the blank white wall of forgetting it all. Paraffin mask of the last living example of a now‐gone species. Seeds stored against forgetting, until everyone forgets what seeds are. Dreams grant permission to misread the expression on the cop’s face. Remember how she sounded when you played her voice on the answering machine. Soldier’s kit washed up on the beach still bleating her name, so far away, the claim.
Hows But Not Whats September 21, 2009
How to stop bleeding, he’d asked, bleeding. How the lepers crouch among leaves that had either fallen or were fallen. How to scruff the head of a small child lovingly with regard to his temperament. How to know the right words. How to slow the train without warping its track. How to believe in such as such, or those who tell him it is what it is. How we hello each other nightly. How wondering gets one nowhere but certainty is the ticket to riches. How scars multiply tissue texture or deposit rich minerals subcutaneously. How Presidents die, catching colds from golden doorknobs. How the cyst spools its charms among the nestling genes of decay. How, far from a lover, the body turns to face some distant remembered relation. How pangs disrupt the sentence, & then you can’t go on, forget what you were going to say.
Love Poem August 24, 2009
This is what’s now going to happen. This is what now has happened. This is not though what just happened. This is no longer going to happen. Something else is. This is never going to happen. This is what just happened, but I missed it, having looked out the window. This is happening. This was never going to not happen. This is still happening. This was always what was meant to happen. This will happen. This will have been happening. This is what would have happened anyway, whether I looked out the window or not. This won’t happen until this stops not happening. This is what wouldn’t have happened if I’d not looked out the window. This was never not going to happen. This will be what was happening when I looked out the window. This was happening when this was not happening. This will be able to happen only when I look out of the window. This will happen.
“What Reflects Against a Dimension (Twos)” for Leah
What string of stares the swallow holds; I chew but then the nothing never resists. It sits among the branches of my stomach’s heat, and I think “ill” and I think “quell” and the soft lining of memory and the hole in the middle of this experience. You see people all the time who have no echo. We’re waiting for some sign of sun to dry the mildew. I’d wanted to use that as a metaphor, but it works so well as a literality. When I was a teacher, I learned the students’ names quickly. I feared they might change before I learned their names, and then I’d have to start all over. In the interest of containment, I would fain apologize. In the street, the small body of a fox lay prone, its eyes looking into the on‐coming commuters’ headlights, though it was dead. My head‐ lights disappeared from its and my view at the same instant. When I was a teacher, I developed intricately detailed rubrics with which I graded my students’ writing. I ad‐ hered very closely to the rubric, but it took such a long time to grade, to check every facet of their writing, that by the time I returned the paper, the students had all changed. They no longer made the same mistakes I had corrected; some had changed their names; some had had gender change operations. Almost all had dyed or cut their hair. One student removed a Celtic cross tattoo from his left forearm and gotten a black sleeve tattoo on his right. I made a comment, but he couldn’t explain a reason for this change.
Wire of planes
Time tilts the black plane not like the fine lines drawn topographic, wires to puppet us a future – but that sudden swayground of water, then waves that cement about the feet that feel a pull. What it means is that – what what means is what? – you can never know the shape intersections meant to make & how blood forms strings between the bodies, thin then thick & then thin again when the plane rights to level, walls plumb. This is not about a telephone – what transmits between screens minus the chaff caught in the mesh minus the silence stilled by the static – this is not about unraveled strands if flowing is the cataract’s foil stunted sight to make the ears aware and finding some new way to balance there.
Don’t Subject the Verb to Heard Don’t map the blown. Don’t infiltrate the id. Don’t break the grass. Don’t rope the clumsy. Don’t regret the hairshirt. Don’t navigate the jury‐rig. Don’t rosy‐finger the spine. Don’t shell out for incipience. Don’t crenellate the field mice. Don’t delineate the Rotary Club. Don’t what the remember‐whens. Don’t thank the grounder to second. Don’t type the gendered axle bushings. Don’t economize the elocution of disparity. Don’t comma the rich ventricular bloodflow. Don’t boundary the faith‐based potluck dinner. Don’t qwerty the girl who left the party too early. Don’t stitch the flesh (except at the hands’ edges). Don’t contaminate dreams with alternating current. Don’t suicide the lusty gentrification of your childhood. Don’t reneg the load bearing capacity of aluminum roof‐trusses. Don’t smolder the industrial cleaners that coat these agenda items. Don’t glower the yearning love that collapses a courtier. Don’t hiccough the stomach’s tenacity in wartime. Don’t print queue the semi‐automatic rifle’s bore. Don’t glaze the creep & crawl of dilettantism. Don’t seek the secondary‐circuit’s schematic. Don’t kaleidoscope the left‐turn‐only lane. Don’t circular saw the executive functions. Don’t scope the dead‐ringer’s bellclapper. Don’t lobotomize the failure to thrive. Don’t Powerpoint the orange dawn. Don’t left‐justify the landed gentry. Don’t generous the inexplicable. Don’t flower the effluvial muck. Don’t finger the crimped cable. Don’t harangue the pluperfect. Don’t write the hollow plains. Don’t suspend the coagulate. Don’t amuck the funicular. Don’t itch the glass. Don’t I the cleft.