Us & We Talks With
by Dave Wright
Includes: I&B-Logs, Delta Wave Deism, & The Numbers, The Twitter Report, and The Triptych Conspiracy
*this is the sister of “I & B-Logs” (undone) “U & We-Talks” poems, adopted poems, adopted forms Reading poetry On the internet Is no harder than
Reading Poetry
Any place else Just remember to separate Its plain of action from Its peripheral views.
on Say for instance you Are reading a love poem From a book on your desk,
the
Under that book Old copies of Time Magazine Top open to an ad for cosmetics, not sure You can make out the outer edges Of a rouge brush, cheek, and thigh behind the book Under Time There is an East European playbill, which Suggests it comes from under the top Of the love poem, a bright canary playbill Indifferent riddled with embellishments Eye-catching more than likely in any light Because the theatre picked canary yellow. Under stacks a variety of lengths Extended just beyond the yellow of the playbill Peaks of light/water/gas bills Official, rigid, Busy red in official public works Legal envelopes & returns for each payment, Under that, perhaps a draft of another poem or two, a bank statement, a photograph or any number of material txt
internet
(Never mind that it’s East European)
The poem is framed By page first, page by book— Book by stack of flat and urgent materials, Stack by desk, stack by walls stack by many urgent things on walls
and so on.
They’ve been in that space too long, Started those drafts over a year ago; Read Time several times before The love poem Already taken back by embellishments I’ve been Around the director’s maybe-Latvian name several times before with similar effect Against yellow canary card stock (materials primed for big-theatre distractions) See? No peripherals invading into poem for love, We separate them from the flattened plains of view, Or they separate us, from action on the fringe. 2. We on Web mingle:
the scrolling banners The flickering neon pop-ups, the drop-downs, the scroll-outs, The instant chats, Tabs, control bars, sub-screens, [there] secondary windows, Official reminders, Retail polls, Spam, cookies system updates inboxes etc. these fringe materials together with the poem into one field of action is action You see where I’m going with this? The loss of action focus, the poem is action. Action!. Act focus! Read on the Web as much Atop the desk, or more, or out in the busy of the world these things don’t distract us, Or they do And we’re not reading a love poem
nothing to see here nothing to see here nothing to see here nothing to see here nothing to see here nothing to see here nothing
this stuff is M I
L ESa way
*Worried that My Poems Won’t Survive Any Number of Disasters I’m writing an Epic poem war with love, In fact— I’m thinking of titling it Just that: A Poem— War with love I’m thinking of calling it Just that, I’m writing An Epic Poem war with Love. In fact * I guess that’s to say old poets had the same Worries as new House fires With no prompt emergency response Floods With no scuba gear Archives With no chemical preservation Manic rage With no chemical-script relief Furious Defecit Lover’s Attention With no tires to cut new poets face the possibility of deletion & the impending fear of corruption In the system file new poets face new possibilities new worries On top of all these, like the old poets
* In Response to an Afternoon Class. A poem is just a poem It isn’t a water balloon; it isn’t a racket ball; isn’t a spare tire If your plane happens to crash into a body of water a poem will not keep you afloat; I say a poem will not keep you from drowning Nor will it hold your hair back when you’re sick, not even pay for your dinner. A poem won’t buy you nice things. Poems are cheap Poems overcharge for labor A Poem won’t wire you money From another town, It won’t hold your hand; They can’t shave necks Poems don’t have fingers They don’t wear rings; They don’t eat, sleep, drink, or die They aren’t living in flesh; A poem doesn’t take up space like paper If you bend a poem it won’t break They don’t bend; a poem doesn’t have pieces You can’t divide one, subtract from it Or add to it A poem isn’t poetry— never what it’s not supposed to be, Never has been what isn’t a poem, and won’t be. If you pour a poem into a strainer Nothing will be filtered And nothing will pass through; Poems don’t heat up or burn out. A poem won’t boil water. Poems won’t be distracted. A poem isn’t lost, A poem has nowhere to go; They don’t take trips A poem isn’t a mansion
Or an automobile, A poem doesn’t use maps They don’t follow directions They don’t head one way But all ways A poem is just, A poem is, just a poem A poem is Much More Than what it’s not.
This is not a poem about dying; but anticipation * What anticipates death more than dirt? A Poem Sidles along the early ledge of a skyscraper And waits on Death to arrive at the office. What anticipates death more Than dirt? A Poem Breaks down intentionally on desolate highways And waits on Death to chance by with a wrench. What anticipates death more than dirt? A Poem. Openly admits its guilt before action And waits on Death at the scene of the crime What anticipates death more than dirt? A Poem Anticipates a name to refuse it And waits for Death to become a poem.
Poetry shakes faces off.
On My Way to Work Are we getting cold in here? We, Frigid devices: we few ripped from birth Half our words tempered to dig Through our vital organs for Buried letters of the alphabet We spend half our lives in half-lights With a shovel app and some kind of receptacle— Unearthing spines & guts and gullies Turning out fool’s gold, and Take up the lost art of eAlchemy. More than likely the world’s greatest reactions Live comfortably on a few instinctive genes Of a species other than our own. My guess is a grey squirrel; have you seen them in the road? Otherwise, The other half we spend like house cats to claw through & exact revenge on a sofa, I mean stretch out and perfect it with revenge Where’s the squirrel when we need something without revenge To stalk our hereditary traits and impulses that double cross the medium, the written modes, And purr like a fresh orange smashed On a crushed velvet dance floor On a road! What does an orange on a crushed dance floor mean For a malnourished wrinkle of animal Membrane mingling with cat hair? What does any of that verbiage mean? Not a thing as far as I can tell This is just a first draft... I’m trying to say a few, final words About the squirrel I hit early This morning on my way to work.
Delta Wave Deism1 When does energy finish in its proper form? Just after breathing, or elsewhere beyond? Excuse the scientist and the poet, Excuse the nun and thief, The heretic and lunatic— the priest, Please excuse us. 1.
There was a time when time did not exist.
Time. N.- A singular event— no sender or receiver, Past, present, future— a three-act comedy we call time— Absurdists with birthday hats and lab coats. There is only energy— only “occurred” and “in the motion of occurrence” All within a single event, “Time.” In the way of absolute space, where no motion exists Energy remains— there is only energy. Where is the evidence In the notion of tales of existence— cyclic spirals in words? Where do we rest in constant motion Freely falling and preaching a definite In our existence of chance, Constant gyres of falling? Man falls upon earth falling within a galaxy Falling through a universe falling. A gift, perhaps: The illusion of certainty, Propping us up on a great arrangement of words Keeping the illusion intact with proactive progression, A proactive nightmare explosion in the face of man-made philosophies. The power of thought where the poet lands his words exists only in energy. There is only energy. The energy doesn’t die with a falling top hitting the ground— But continues living then in the ground,
Same of the illusion words create, together crammed 1
The Belief that God created all the Earth and everything thereof. Then he created mankind and abandoned them both— assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena—and giving no supernatural revelation, only the energy to exist.
Or pulled at the ends apart on paper or thought. The end result derives out of itself alone, not in the process Of building itself an end result. And out of itself alone Does this process too exist. One in the same, only variant by perception. One certainty: The presence of energy in both. There is only energy. 2. So
what constitutes a sufficient base To balance the antique vase That is the origins of sensual energy?
Dealing with the 5 senses. Sensual. Are there five energies? Or one energy of five forms— or perhaps more? Senses: Shadows, shells of tools for harnessing and processing energy, Maintaining a set of standards on which to base an archetype of balance (An equal intake and creation of energy void of a particular moral standard— For which there are many, globally) In our existence. So what? Where do we store this idea of energy in 10% of the last, greatest wilderness on Earth—The human imagination? Complete genius. A definite. Where do we find a place To lay this notion down when we only wake our minds for minutes a day? Where will we land? Where will we land when we scale the next wall slowing progression— Epoch of the human imagination, a breaking through? In the interest, for now: There is only energy. To breathe is to live (in the physical sense), creating and using energy. To live is to doubt. After energy, there is only doubt. To doubt is to expel energy. Energy in human element: Element of our Identity, a figure fixed; yet, When combined with itself creates a slight shift in appearance While leaving itself unchanged, A twenty sided die with only one number, Always arriving at a certainty: Our certainty now: There is only energy.
Let’s pretend for a moment Just a bit, then we’ll get back to the task at hand. Let’s envision a world where poetry is nationally sanctioned As America’s favorite team sport, perhaps even edging baseball out As its pastime— and there are Forty-one teams in the league. Representing the lower forty-eight. Rhode Island is too small to have its own, sanctioned poetry team So the founders of the league grouped the tiny state with Massachusetts & Connecticut to form the Tri-State Dactyls, A formidable competitor year in & year out. (4-time PaperTeXt’ s EPIC BOWL Champs) There weren’t enough poets in North & South Dakota During the formative years of the league for each to have its own team, So they too were grouped, forming Dakota Rhymes. Subsequently, the Carolinas were grouped accordingly, The Carolina Diction So, it be only natural the Virginias were known as An Appalachian Ode And since we are pretending, we will go on assuming that Texas refused to participate. For one reason or another It never has, and won’t, not in a million years, had a team. The rest did. So, there it was, the PPLA (Everyone agreed to avoid making the league’s name overly wordy) Professional Poetry League of America (land of the giants) each with a skill: some quick on end stops Some tough when it comes to last-minute enjambments, and the line breaks Some work out of the sestet approach, others prefer more trochaic strategies Some more organic in their shifts and formations, others more rigid & methodic But all have their beloved team mascots that wear proudly big foam heads And taunt the opposing crowd, “Trochees Suck! Trochees Suck! Trochees Suck!” The fans laugh & cry, get drunk and fall, complain about the officials, and demand instant replays. Deep down everyone wants to be a Poet in the PPLA. Matches are won and lost. Divisions conquered. Championships slipped away. And when the season is over the poets Will mend their bodies & minds in their million dollar mansions, pull out their freshest suits, and take a limo to dinner And America will slip into a medium, seasonal depression at work when it hits them And they’ll talk at the water cooler about how many days are left Until the first pre-season match-up airs that fall: PPLA in PT HDTV. Religiously. I know…
I can’t imagine it either.
The Numbers, a web assembly #14 Miraculous gallows, Star-struck lunar ocean, Slight shown diplomacy, All moments Mesh together Under the tenacity of spring With an Open voice Lost in musty rugs And funeral precessions,
#17 Another taking of coconut dreams Must submit Their application Into our realm of Corkscrew obsession “It, they, have so much Personality” You don’t say.
Perceptions Change to shifts In worm jumpsuits And laundry burns. #15 Costume death, The guise, Little grey orchestra Wailing hysterical in slope rants, Never level— #16 Child horse of creation, Briar fists fly With time’s Three act play on words Grow to Make more words To make more words. Is anyone Left to cry down The hall, well lit Cigarette end Smoking dim room In Carnal excitement? These countesses make Fish float.
Percussion thunder Wakes time so Match stick Maids dream of Heaven And misplace fear for Diamond rings. #18 Is your thinking done again? Have you soiled your Words? Magic light bulb Anticipation Build tension In frightened solar roses Power to stop An uprising, The clock’s room Counted your money, It’s time to fail. #19 The current issue Is just that: Mixed Local motions, Manic martinis, A mixed array
Of sea life Supporting An unbroken sun dial “That’s it, Yeah we lived Saturday” Painted the world gone In glasses Of merlot, peace Sleeps easy In morning light #20 The sword party began In yesterday’s museum— Ripped flag staffs, Sun beaten Sunday diner reservations, Easy gone people’s speech— There is no denying The incongruity of Saving tomorrow #21 Thirsty bleak numbers Are always Round, Fall so short Of mirrors bleeding—
This is the year Of meadow’s laughter, We always lose The marching sight Called a misplaced wind. You faked tomorrow on piano chords Stacked eight feet Lower Than the reclining Madness. #23 Pull your hair down Faint conductor stain, Speak volumes on river construction Murderous River children only exist To mock the circus And spyglass Brilliant sun catastrophes. #24 Absent
Can’t you see the Repetition soft Anchor weight, Pressed down steerage class. Is anyone left To bleed with Night symptoms? #22 False video image, Shoe laced teeth, Grinding metal filing cabinet Keeping Time softly lit,
Bird institution, Home-sick grass stains Breath in north artic paradise For Lovely slow lacerations In a soiled Lung epitaph, The graveyard gala Mingled in Victorian recollection— The art system Fashions rules for Boardwalk prophets “make a mince On scientific oceans And naked Tree communities”
Relic charts, Sand castle deviance, Florescent mania Envies The serenity of Tile floors. #25 Phenomenal igloo Construction Baffles The House of Lords, Ivory coated castles And meticulous Fence-post magicians, “Little devil” The concept of time Must be a sin, Fools us into thinking Everything begins. You don’t say a word On the income gapped Canyons In polar bear soup Or Unholy Cotton envy— Shed verbal mold on Raped-razor Religion And congregations Of a zoo council #26 Utopian-tongue Prospered poet mentions A turtle savior And minds His world in Cave dwellings #27 Venus birth
In water, Where do I stand Before mountains fall? Marble frozen city Forever Art Collectors day trip “No running” The pool bleeds Youth servants Sprout brown Hail storms— The brewmaster’s game Spells orange Trees Against Mediterranean Acid-free paper, Ancient scrolls and sea shells, Masts Fashion best in wine Conceptions While pewter cone Solutions make off To elephant parades— Sliding marriage rock Backwinded In an avalanche’s dream “I see only right away And never Just after” Caked-pile-ice-chest Makeup, Fake surrendering In the red square’s Chest of drawers
The Triptych Conspiracy: An Authoritative Account An excerpt from The Art of Religion By R. A. Peckham Ph. D.
… And there was conspiracy, oh there was. One no different than the other two, Though casting the illusions of variation. (And this particular triptych no different than the rest)— Legs and arms as others’ legs And arms outstretched, stranded Stitched between a single radiant lenses Refraction on the eye of the scientist . Conspiracy all repeating The Technicolor overtones, a triple movement, a new form! At one point, The center a fixed position All images appearing as one paint On the gallery wall of glass: 1. One Woman and One Child: A faint blue dress illuminate— delicate Fair angel face where highlights collide A baby child amongst rocks And clovered meadows in ancient light, Child unharmed The Rock Lady and Child at center Thin canvas of the theatre, stage flats. 2. The Night of Fire, the left Canvas: A series of lights merging, a festival of fire The narration of subtle nuance In theory no different from the center.
There is no difference. In my studies I find no difference. 3. Of the third lies the conspiracy: Another lady of low brow smirk, Fixture in a proper pose, a secret. She held a secret, One number ratio divine Linking the other two (and the rest) Completing the triptych. And there was great conspiracy, oh there was. Unmoving under foreign eyes, Divine intervening in the corner of human thought. Thought is energy. It was only thought that leads the conspiracy, So it must be: The Rock Lady and Child, Ratio Divine where highlights collide Indifferent, but taking the center. And there was conspiracy, oh there was conspiracy.
clearly, unmaking words: meaning (learning the ropes) If you had asked me had I said something, I might have replied… I told you, and in turn You said to me, once, That I mentioned I felt Neither of what we said, So are we, then, now, freer From what we tell? The sliding doors open We pass through, interminably Permeating like bits of biological information Wafting through the hull of a cell wall, Toward a place where we may be deciphered, Housed for future distribution: the air cuts us that way, the air cuts us like that— cuts everyone the same, humid like hanged drying leathers parched or frigid like a faster moving waterway, _____________ Faster either way it lays open layers of skin And spills liquids normally faster Kept inside a body, inside a body These things are housed in calcium And by radiation we see them On hanged hospital monitors Delirious, how outrageous We see them. by radiation these things, Our bones, brittle the integrity Some of our human structures, a stature Aware if divide in halves and to see those halves The first time won’t know They aren’t whole, not pieces but Categories themselves, the possibilities: Extra real links between spaces of time The places we brace our brittle bones By radiation to see them We share some words: To begin I told you, and again
You turned to me and began to tell What it wasn’t, what they weren’t, What you didn’t see, How you don’t know A thing so admit it first, Everything else is possibility We can’t hold against you The possibilities you list, ‘it could have been this Or that, or something else’ Are you freer now for having gotten What it wasn’t they had off your chest? ______________ The question here is identity, and the root Of words so vague they double For cheese cloth, screen doors, or another leaking ‘thing’ Of your possibilities, another off the hook Suggestion, the question here Is who’s who and what’s to tell(any word) isn’t For the biological mother and father tongue to sling, They know just that, and exercise as such in transient forms— The question here is what a word is and isn’t Passing through the membranes of animals. The question here is the vibration of words never stop, never die, Never make meaning make meaning, or make meaning To mean something like a symbol of a romantic idea, a turn signal maybe, The dictionary is so laughable and yet it has laugh at (and) us but can’t hear us laughing back, Tricks us into cooing and cawing our meaning out of meaning, out thin air. And has laughing Just like that like that: and lightning (another word) like that ______________ No repetition, lulls, just new vibration, And if happen to collide, They then may— In some reverent form another— mean something Somewhere The resulting wave finds a place to be deciphered, Repackaged, bundled, stored, and eventually released We will say what we think we say, we may think The idea comes from what we said, But if we think it so it’s so—
But are we the same NOW:HERE For having repackaged a movement, Stretched a wave-length, Bent the amplitude of little sound Having Asked “did you say something?”: I told you that So that you may have a freer word, in turn You said to me, once, That I mentioned I felt Neither of what we said, So are we, then—now, freer From what we tell, Or just vibrating?
I’m over it
______________
Twitter Report Dear Reader, bear with me here, as I digress for a moment: Twitter
Free social networking tool. Micro-blog. Allows users to send and read messages known as “tweets.” Text-based posts of 140 characters or less. Character being defined as 1 type space. Example tweet in brackets [R E D.] is six characters long. R being the first, space the next, E the third, etc. Not counting brackets as part of the tweet. Each user has a followers network, and a follow network. Users are allowed to make their page of tweets as public, or as private as they choose. A user could block all followers; no one could see the profile except the owner of the profile. Or be viewable by all twitter account holders.
*IMPORTANT FEATURE: Like blogs and other board-style web postings, Twitter reads in reverse chronology when read from top to bottom. As a user tweets and others tweet back, a dialogue is created from the bottom up. However, when logging into the site at first, the user is at the top of an ongoing conversation, a conversation they may or may not have already been part of. The nature of the platform/user philosophy behind this sort of web-chat format allows inter-user communication to occur in regular chronology as it would in everyday, real-time conversations that are re-read top to bottom. This due to the “post-reaction-post-reaction” format. Tweets and re-tweets can happen like rapid-fire communication, each user tweeting several times per minute in response to other tweets, or a topic totally new. Or they can take place over the course of several days, with just a few sparse tweets from each user— making the conversation spread thinly between thick groves of unrelated tweets that have happened between the two account holders, and their followers/followed. Here is a conversation that takes place in a relatively short amount of time: (read from top down/reverse chrono) “Fine! Be that way!” –clara123 7:14pm “I’m leaving then.” –john316.5 7:12pm “Oh, get over yourself— I can’t stand you sometimes!” –clara123 7:09pm “clara123 & john316.5 r being soooooosoo reedunkulous!” –jimbob9696 7:08pm “Whatever, Bush’s mess is stilling looming.” –john316.5 7:07pm “Obama.” –clara123 7:04pm “Who you think got us into this mess.” –john316.5 7:01pm (now read from bottom up/real chrono) For the regular user, conversation happens naturally in real-time. When read from top to bottom by a bystander in hindsight, the conversation text itself, linguistically, is informed only by itself (the illusion of otherwise is created by format alone); it (the statement) doesn’t rely on its position in the whole text to achieve its meaning.
The closer the tweets are in time, the easier it is for a reader to recognize the quick, methodic pattern, and begin to construct a story, albeit a back-story from collected fragments, of what will come. So, it becomes easier to predict where the conversation started, and see how it will change over time. Like we may know, or have strong inclinations toward knowing, that a film that begins with a scene of a man and a woman signing divorce papers— followed by a scene of the two arguing in the master bedroom— followed by the two at dinner in uncomfortable silence— followed then by the birth of their unplanned, second child— followed by their first child’s birth— followed by their first date, (this film) may very well end with them meeting as young lovers on a beach, for the very first time ever, as the sun is setting, and new love is in mingling shadows on the sand. While that first scene, the end we think we know, may be in fierce, hot colors, we may see— or think we see— the ending in old black & white (but imagine the colors of a tropical sun set). Never mind that though. Either way, I’m not necessarily interested in the reverse chronology of the whole love affair. And I’m not necessarily interested in using Twitter, as a social communication tool. Although others are great for keeping up with old friends. I am interested in using it as a personal model of composition, a format example used to address the concepts and perceptions of narrative past, present, and future— working toward a narrative that has none of those restraints, but is at once informed by them. (Given the 140 character limit, the site itself will only prove useful in noting the natural patterns of narrative that are created out of this format of communication. In that, I seriously doubt that any good writing will come directly from it. Although, poem sequencing might be interesting under its, Twitter’s, constraints). When read top down: Creates a dynamic, definite series of immediate premonitions, A record of verbal, exact reactions to things yet said. Allows each to become the moment of entry into the narrative Allows each tweet to be its own pinnacle text as the reader moves down the page By becoming in the temporal world of the reader, the past when they have moved on. But in user-time, the tweeters’ time, which the text is composed in, and in which it informs itself under the philosophy of— as the reader moves Down the page, as each passing tweet is becoming past in temporal reality, The tweets themselves are becoming the future, informed by the past, One of two reasons composing seriously within twitter is overly binding— Reactionary premonitions of premonitions reacting: the future Works its way, moment after moment, toward a past it has no previous knowledge of. A future unknowing of it’s past, or the notion of past at all, Is no different than a past predicting the future. Simultaneously pushing the reader forward and backward in time, At once past and future cross into the other And this is exactly the case, but…
Where is the present located between these strangers passing? At the ever-shifting point of origin, point of entry— ?