PROSPECTUS FOR A STAGE
Š Jared Schickling 2013 Versions of these poems first appeared in 1913, Altered Scale, Sous les PavÊs, SpringGun, and We Are So Happy to Know Something.
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Prospectus for a Stage Jared Schickling
little red leaves textile series
Prospectus for a stage, Westward a Desert, Mother Hens “In conclusion, then, there is no God, but a profound nothing: ponds and streams. And this nothingness must appear to us like a god—as if we were gods. If there could be no death, no exit, only change, it would follow, no birth—humans fear this—what we’ve been exploring here—we pretend we don’t see it ahead, compounding our problem back there (legend has it that if you meet your doppleganger, you die). Therefore, and this is the point I wish to make, as this nothingness must nurture what is—because it had not existed otherwise—language, terra firma, and not confusion, should guide our thinking. We’ve seen tonight how we are charged with our own care and, just so, being blessed is a choice. There is nothing fixed or essential in adopting this premise (it’s a choice), the fear of which is no different than fearing eternity— this is merely an obstacle. Ponds and streams.” 0002
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Onramp; they passed under the green go arrow of a green light, turning left. He reclines upholstered seats, hair and crumbs, sighing gentle sighs. Words; a different language all together. They successfully merge into the bleak motionless dusk of the zone. Squared blocks of inhabited or vacant (static) ducts, the intestinal rooftops’ (backward) straw exhaust, stairwells as few of them ever reach this gravel refracted like dust in atmospheres lighting the craggy peaks groaning this time, this inflamed egg’s shadow in the valley of drought silhouetted; a motion passed over the teeth. Mouth-breather. A radio that remembers.
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A physical presence. The pietĂ . If you ask any organisms with or without a central nervous system capable of having registered their conversation, they will all indicate, in one way or another, their lack of care beyond little more than self or group gratifications, while the whole of this being seems remarkably two dimensional, when seen from above, given over to its succeeding generation: city lights. Experience, those “emotional centers,â€? is important, and all there is worth living for, perhaps, this is true; but I speak here of the outcomes; purposes. That that would dislodge it from this simple (though by no means simplistic) notion must be one who lives a life of neither consequence nor value to the greater reason and quality of things. A thing dead already, though it eats and breathes and enjoys itself, though possibly not. The mountainside of ponderosa went up and, whether prepared or not, was prepared for a 0004
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great conflagration which, one day, would ruin all it “had” built without knowing or expecting it, a painful shower (one can only assume) to finally hatch the predestinated, biologically programmed, though by no means guaranteed, seeds of the future it otherwise had to disperse to the diets of sparrows and rabbits Torched. And so it seemed at the times I have scribbled this, incidentally, in back of a book by Thoreau, and it is worthwhile to consider, without any quibbling, grating reaching “after fact or reason,” that nature of a “human” experience, for a man may say with the regularity of his bowels that he was motivated by what is commonly understood 0005
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to be a “greater good.” I am using this masculine form, but from what I have seen, the feminine was little different in this respect. In fact, if my wife was any indication, a woman is better at this than any man like me could ever hope to be; as the Red Queen, she is responsible for protecting our genetic imperfection, to include her seductive parts. My wife I should add was the most perfect example of that reason why certain animals commit themselves to monogamy and things even less completely understood like a conclusive start of pursuits, with sentiments crucial to nature’s future being arriving. This was how I loved her. On my dry erase board she’s a mess.
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E. T. (Ralph)(Henry it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place in Maine, Heideggerian, yr Hegel, Alethe), “I eat fiddleheads with webs after cleaning them” Court Jesters hypothesized. If left untouched by civilizing hands, and saws, a deciduous mountain forest this far north will come to settle in its constant feature lest meteors whatever, what is not “evergreen” will vanish To the extent that it goes untouched, unseen by us, this pristine forest will come to feature a correspondingly reduced tendency towards Which is strange, because order wants to fall apart the more of these tendencies—agreeable or not, left alone to, the more complex form of order—giving 0007
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it—the more something is needed to sustain it except here seems neither is this open system the event horizon, perpetual motion will be invented here
a tampered forest, She Was however the loose one with sunlight shining on them who are it. Detritus accumulating to the extent it’s tampered, more or less 0008
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under this re-growth in the clearing (what entered) now wantonly beneath them, a shadow selects for the tall, here, a pine or fir. The fern uncurling is old stuff. . ideal places to camp, eventually, on a mossy bed of its needles strides unimpeded— white . . clammy soft-parts, hordes, teaching the sheltered meadhall of the squirrel nuts
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Who invented the cold storage of desire translating Alfred the Great. “That morning they bear you out, having clothed themselves the night before, they have to divide all your stuff, which has accumulated around what’s left before everything else’s habits . They sort your category into piles, dreaming. Over the hills and farthest away— strange—they’ll hang your biggest portion, then the seconds, the thirds, and so forth, clues in the form of riddles, until it’s gone, as they arrive home, so that the least will have been nearest to the places where the dead were. Then they race, on your oldest horses, to carry the goods that they find, before strange things can carry them off. The horses have been dear to you, beautiful and thin (“taut muscle leave shadow over painted hair”): with each generation it occurred at a cheaper, more 0010
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bloated price, as each must many times make the paths that represent or perform the tossing of you that morning. With stringy muscles you liked proving, to yourself, that something could come from the tips of your fingers —a swift horse was dear in this country. When he is all spent, or all gone, he is finally buried. Usually they find all his ( ) and fast, after that absurd length of time he’s left hanging around the place, as if someone had trouble living with the real world but occasionally, sometimes, forever and ever, there are those among him who are patient, who then follow his disappearing paths, in search of the first of his portions. But those among him who left it and, mind you, never return (not actually), shared a secret: That as they left all that stuff, bags of it, along the roads and pathways, some of it, some of 0011
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his special parts, they’d keep for later, a spot deeper in, suspending it from limbs, maybe burn it, like the others, not exactly removed. The doohickeys and gadgets—this is also the fate of his horse.”
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ON SENSITIVE BRUTALITY (4 Noble Truths) after Robert Creely “Suffering is life: “community” &/or normalized “decency” should never, under any circumstances, have been trusted, in the forest. Certainly, the human agents behind this mask would be well intentioned. But this outsider, being probably causative, is not what speaks to me, or even them, here. “Attached to desire: Nature’s experiment in bandying about such endless talk as “radical alterity” never could, never did, leave any actual alternative, it’s dead, in forms of 0013
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the things bearing the fruit, entirely grafted [redact, talk], heritable seed persisting through it, gave the only absolute liberation. “When desire ceases: Can things fail to repeat and, thus, succeed? One of the many, my “fate” was not even any terminal “fatality.” “To be born” was yr curse: Any brazen or corrupt conceiving of “yourself ” in which “you” was completely unnecessary must necessarily persist. For you can’t really extricate from what is. To see this, love, would be torture. 0014
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On wise compassion. Hello, welcome! There’s nothing where you are! My perceptual offspring! Your hands will assist you! Your feet, as it currently stands are useless!
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Taiji in spring. How long it’d lived by its den. Not seeing it—it not seeing it. Hell, it must have been great. Bringing fire in my eyes and stretching the skin around them, good golly—I am now open, selfaware.
Of supreme polarity. China’s mark, Taiji, or the Te, in a Japanese village in “The Cove” of reversal (a documentary) was the way, of the Tao, around that corner, sea turns red. It poured each season from a dolphin, soup, over the camera like a movie out of sight like famously pornographic creatures—“Private Space,” as the name they’d give one of him, for the only English he ever spoke (“Tradition,” trans.)
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held a camera. In Taiji. Taping we louts with the cameras. Was cool even, western but, allied as a samurai, traditional, town’s problem, lotus of his own lurid jouissance—some Italian uplifted it with his Spanish films—harmonica, railroad, deserts, foreign people an American aiming, pointed by watches, with the “tip[s] of the spear”—one is smiling “No Problem”—
The beam. exploded out, a tiny hole now. Zero observable now, (not here, around the corner) in Taiji, where they kissed and thanked, a joke, old posters of Flipper, for the business1 , and the changed coach 1. we’ll sell these to the public and slaughter the rest.
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who watched, was traumatized now. The walled rooms its own explosion! on our scale, it’s you later industry, within five seasons, earth wobbling round its axis—the graphicized fibonacci of these tree rings no longer need distinction (or feedback, like ripples), the quadrant of one Mayan day-glyph approached it, the long arc curving by ninety degrees times four and flux, a Mayan did make its interpretive grins. Sharing green squirts of hand sanitizer, with liberty like a skinned structure it could swallow, and be opened, with cellophane, made MRSA.
Of the longhouse. At the tip of the spear.
Jared Schickling’s books of poetry include t&u& lash your nipples to a post history is gorgeous (BlazeVox, 2011) and The Pink (2012). A book of essays, The Paranoid Reader: 2006-2012, was published this year (Furniture Press). He is an editor at Delete Press, eccolingusitics, and Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture. He lives in Lockport, NY.
This little red leaves textile edition was lovingly sewn by Dawn Pendergast in Houston, TX.