now that the winter's over...

Ah, pulling out the old notebooks. This is reworked material from a line-a-day “poetic diary” from winter 2004-5.

1
Waiting for desire to show itself
to itself

Cleaving a sea of people playing chicken
four bodies high, balanced against the fence
it’s forbidden to cross… Fallujah hospital
smashed without image and a melody
constructed by dream from possibilities

Of all available choices, which?
Maybe one that isn’t yet possible

Highlander Center: 34 rocking chairs
thought as motion
while learning to organize a mission
statement: blue edge

Ft. Benning: chant their names
until the fence
words left
but not mystical, just curious
about “spirit”

Please hold while we transfer your complaint
to the Wrong Guy


2
The terror of penultimata
delays, amplifies, hypostasizes
points of intense & anxious motion
as dead endings, muchos colores
as grey natures morts. Eyes as lead
weights and measures are impossible
when it’s a question of ends: only I
can treat me as a means, or mean
(though nothing, especially meaning, is
“in-itself”)

The age of reason and the age
of implicit consent
A time to hire

Particulars miss each other
when they blink
at table
together


3
over pragmatic considerations
or a landscape

over which something was scheduled

the sun sets
the table

napalm again collapses time
and trains

—shut up!, I shout
at figures of nostalgia

Dear Diary, though you show no concern
for what holds us together,
I’d spend days in your arms, doing nothing
to avert the catastrophe.


4
What’s difficult
is to work down from the macro. In this sense,
the top of a hierarchy is the bottom, like a gene
organizing us for its benefit. Atoms coagulate
(“says you”) (“and you”) under the building codes,
but can we reconfigure those
from this vantage point?
Perhaps!


5
A familial hum
that already speaks of her
before meaning
it

I speak here of
—no, I don’t speak
—even less I than speech here
(should that be cut if it’s read aloud?
who’s asking?)—

A fissure in the side of something
can only mean one (other) thing
—and that only if habit should decide
to put it elsewhere:

the horizon where one becomes another
not “in time” but always
—parallel, one in the world and one
outside, one always just alongside the other—distinct

systems of division, or
on the other hand
always having just happened


6
Showing up is a category all its own
A mountain didn’t know it would split roads
like a day splits a year, a few hours
splits a day, the present

on a spit to roast
and come apart

into future & past

The conclusion in inclusion
steps out and back
to get a better look at the moths
gathered on the blanket

to perform one of the lost plays
(in translation)

On the other hand, there’s the stoic
choice not to let another suffer
in one’s own silence

versus an invitation to speak
that’s already broken it

Snow glows, softer than rhyme,
more like the harmonic spectrum,
swelling to fill a space
it first makes possible


7
Icing quickly
pavement contracts
or
loses out to cake
or “or”
as inclusion
and “respect”
as position
—gathered
around what’s
central
temporarily and by virtue
of the gathering

We walked on the lake
The blue light was blue
and things standing
out were next
to blue

That was night reflected
a palm cupped
to breathe, redden

Then I repeated the pointless
dream repeatedly
not figuring out what wasn’t there
to be figured

What is it that keeps saying
“I’m here”?

ISTS/NOW

a little agitprop poem

I M P E A C H
M P E R I A L
P E R I A L
E R I A L
R I A L
I A L
A L
L

some initial paragraphs

this is the start of something. a lot of beginnings on this blog, I hope.

Together we’re a typical man on a Sunday jaunt, even though separately or in France we’re hardly male and so disparate as to make even representation by analogy highly unlikely. This has little to do with our so-called genitals, which further distinguishes it from us. One of us wanted to do something useful just when the other was a sketch of possibilities, in need of suspension while the delicate connections were made. Practice, in any case, carved these borders with its doubled folds, and the result of us was the rehearsal of one thing accompanied by the re-enactment of something entirely else.

Who can tell what the deal is with “jaunt?” It doesn’t carry the desired sense of “away-ness.” With us it was like some “absence-only” program, carried on in stead of lunch—an anorexia of time; that’s the only way to say it. By which I mean “an anorexia of time.” Anyway, start with a decoy and the story can hide for awhile, maybe in the reader. As we like to uncover.

A typical response to the theater is “___________.” Typicality is a feature of most others. But not us, entering into activities in ignorance of what was said between us—utterly without influence. That’s because nakedness hides the typical mode of performing being-with-others. On stage, this became part of the new society.

poem

hey, fuck that!

(just honing my craft)

.

Everything in this will get developed further, but I felt it was interesting enough as a start.


1
We were designed for you by “the (s)elf.”
Who thought there must be a poem somewhere
in the little blob. Who, when you read that
as you paused in mid-cross and asked,
“Are you writing about me?,”
had to say “yes,” to hide the habit.

Streams of what streamed in to the offshore station
—who??

That shadowed organ by the tree leg here again.

Again as in memory,
a room the opposite of its acts. Our long
ones mean to whisper.

This was meant to be possible—we’ll see.

Canvassing the next.
Guarded to elapse.



2
nebulous
interesting
salt seeks


rapid terminations
for lick, I mean luck


spent a nub of sun
in the mud this day


cancelled


the people in the vilage
or, if you insist,

villagers disrobe
at profit


while where you come from
the poses have names

Abachi, Kuzi, as if from the East,
as if to hang from the ceiling


scattered time
bruise-wise

asked/answered
for


were
equal to their names: say Sadiq



3
SENTENCE

The head came off this morning.



4
SONG

The words are freezing in the hallway
repeat, repeat
The ones that I had meant to hear
repeat, repeat
The smell of mown grass
always mixed with gasoline

Yet the methods seem to have made some areas safer
repeat, repeat
There are times of day when the sea looks o.k.
repeat, repeat
We build on that and reduce a fiction
to a system of localized spinelessness.

Only those snails
that represent the many dead.
At this point,
an intervention into the way things were going
was abandoned.

PROS & CONS

crows in the pines
winter on/off

fear requires
a real wall

somewhere

from behind one
one told

his story

hidden
in verse

upon release
the work history could be read
with a magnifying glass

pre-rent

slow drip
marked time

birds didn’t

IMPROVISATION #etc.

                                  disturbs the longing for the place



          slide to the far light it's surprising


                               anthem for amplified members
generally surpasses

            acts of property usually distorted      are cracked

       catastrophicature behind most instances


                      the present by the abyss


                             complicit with the conversion

                  
                                so reminiscent


        (uninteresting aside)

    sounds are ghosts


          noiselessly bouncing



                                                popular and aristocratic

                                          status as bound up

                                strings at
                                                          akopday

                        fact the entire


                points a dainty                     oh, THAT again.

A WISCONSIN POEM

so docile the trend, a pill
untaken, stop them from murdering gays,

       "arcanum"
        made this pulse
        with deep historical resonance

a splatter of plant gut
into the opponent, so plough up the road,

        nevernomore gotta
        whole     'nother
        where they got it from
        nope  it's enough, yeah?

property of spine-chilling horror
gave us this tantric biscuit to suck on
Argos retreats!  It's that kind of thing

that makes us more meaty, a little
more crosseyed, and appreciably stylish
in the coiffure.

                  He says he's not going to stop them.
                  Who will drink of the scurfy tide
                  of propositional attitudes, voted
                  meaninglessly in like pate?

                 "Me! Me!"
                  cry the Bozoid thinkers
                  in the land of boneless ham,
                  rallying for the "downsize
                  me out and defend the sanctity" package.
               
                  It's electrostatic perm season! The apes
              abundant in four-thousand year hangover, an
              overdeveloped sense of danger rotting in the
              gene pool
                       Pulpy discourse fills
                   the space where frequencies
                   are worth millions
             
                                       Very, very often

tree w/sequin leaves, alternating
novelty and threat

shoes seem less hyped
w/closed ear

racist because fucking idiot
aha!  clunkety-

                   the age of fortunes
                   in parking, rattling pearls
                   in the cold, froth on the mouth
                   as imitation cattle

                   aroma b/c outsourced

                   Billy Collins in coitus on jacket?
                   They prefer this to the legality of the anus.
                   Figures.  Slush breaks up the light.
                   In Associated Bank, my name refers to $3.92,
                   I recognizes Bonaparte.  Popular liberal moms
                   push everyone named "Jackson" south amidst
                   malls.  Shadow the capital.

dumpy torpor calls in the season or the guard
neutral unless subsidized a crane in eliot
haircut endeavor eggs on news grasp eludes
meningitis comes slow if it comes to blows
amateur night at the carved species breast
theory of aspartame theory bombs at conference
haven't decided shrubs go back and forth ok?
laboratory signals ok crust ok view and now
washy-washy brings out the best in death

crab lake      water more shoes
isn't going to like     motoreconomics
very      enzyme occultation, nourishing
very small farmers squeaky monosyllables aim to

sham nudist arcs
                     toward questionable conclusions
earmarked
                     for waged demise
somebody explains:
                    "you're less than ten percent"
scattered their seeds
                     clung at sleeve
in season
                     with the prey
at hand
                     quiet for
once

LATE

(a strange little lyric scribbled after being up all night in San Diego)


Turns out
I share a birthday with Duncan’s mom
—a discovery made
two days
too late

Eight
is the cruellest time
to be awake—your job is finished
The Kinko’s song
cycle repeats

You haven’t seen the indifference of nature until you’ve been pegged in the forehead by a pigeon diving to follow its cohorts to the hot spot in the parking lot while you move to evade the suits beelining for the recycled air of their offices, oblivious as you stagger, catch your ass on a hydrant and just avoid tumbling into the street, winking under the trickle of blood and thinkng that your meter must have run out and you don’t have any insurance.

But what’s
nature?
you ask

(my lost, longed-
after and deeply
imperfect darling)

on the bus, the only place
you can’t see

the ad
in which

none of this occurs.

WE/ WITH/ OUT PLACE


UP ON

the wrong side

of the continent

the wrong side

of the baby

the trend in

home maker trends

IT NOT

being fair

unless they were marginal

it not

being the same complaint

in the other mouth

it not

being the mere presence

of a thing intruding

it not

not being

A WAY OUT

Flicked nipple. A

gasp. Memory operates

the tongue. Or is that

you? I, no or only

singular experiences. No

way.

The Obligatory Story

1
At nine o’clock, just as the sun was rising,
she crossed the threshold, head in her hands.
Whose head it was must remain a mystery.
The shaded garden had drawn her, like a caricature,
under the trees. Squirrels and crows screamed
at one another, limb from limb. Images
of arterial behavior were avoidable. A flag
got flat, rented a room, lived out her life
exactly as expected. What had seemed like
the lights of distant radio towers turned out
to be the inferno raging through the forest
on the other side of the mountains. Still,
the soft rock of San Diego. Three days of
rain in the discarded denouement—not everyone
can identify with that. A positivist posited;
an ironist ironed… until it adhered to the bumper.
It was certainly nine somewhere.


2
To tell a story would take architecture,
which means arches, laid in interlocking patterns across
or sinking into the marsh of a history.
There’s be some kind of innocence…
Anything bright enough would have been
in the past, the telephone almost a curse, partnership
a model of mines collapsing or driving shrapnel
into soon-to-be-Islamic bones unless it extends to,
or makes room for, at least the image
of limitless others. Without unanswerable questions,
the hero dies for the merely unanswered.
And that makes the sale, a telling tale
leaving radical skepticism horny
or challenging to the touch.


3
In the kitchen, Tex had a special agent
carve his chicken, before sending him off
to the sub-basement for a long, electric debriefing.
No-one analyzed the national transference,
gripped as we were within the newsy detail,
drowning in analogy like we liked it.
Peel away, peal away, o bells of the starry
specific locale, o decals of forgetting,
forgetting the hope left in thin deposits
beneath their shrunken flesh, their next flight
through the catacombs, the next bill,
coming due with the inevitability of hunger,
of the twitchy panther eating what it’s told.


4
How lovely to flee all these rooms,
to see the breeze as we hear
language, moving arms,
moving leaves.

(this one might be finished)

“Chigger bites”
comes naturally.

Must we remember “modes
of vibration?”

Honey, you’re micromanaging…

amtrak

“There’s no age limit on stickers”
In town, creeks bend back on themselves, under and out again.
Thus 3-D is science farce. Choose icons from:
letters, numbers, shapes credit cards
on your shirt or on your nametag.
“It looks like it’s raining out”
“It is!”
“You ordered it”
“I did?”

“That’s basically what it’s called.”

Hating the Beach

Lightning interests
the sleeker populace
of Green Fork
Junction. The sort of node
bereft of kinglier fish,
organized by fiduciary
interest elsewhere. interest elsewhere.
Even loosely translated
we’re hard to adapt, pockets
of Archimedean style. Stains
on the cuffs we’ll never
afford to clean. Idiot glow,
rose-stupid sky, where waters
run naked as a drunken schoolboy
in time with the homesick
blink,
its eye. it’s I.

FRAGMENTS OF THE FIRST POEM OF THE NEW YEAR

The cat I’ve lost
fortunately
does not exist.

Fortune,
where money
and fate meet

(to eat
me?)

Most of what there is
happens

Most of that
is in-between.

This is atypical, and probably also a mere draft.


A kind of cake that repels
Cicada song moving in waves
A thick rosewater syrup
Across ravines of sycamores
Crawling in crates belowdeck
According to some stochastic rule
Arriving behind glass
Above the peeling bark
Polished nightly
Locking into another pattern
Before the doors are locked
Cascading away out of earshot
By wage workers leaving the strip mall
To cluster at dusk by the river

You arrive on Route 101
A few blocks from the cramped house
From the affluent towns to the north
Where your folks live
For one seventy-five
With a garden full of squash
Since two bucks is too much on principle
Where feet swelled with beesting
Or 41 from the south
Turned out to be yours
For two twenty-five
And the new subdivision
Since two-fifty exceeds means
Means that sycamore, song have fallen away

98

Oh magical software
so indispensable
so fallible

please
do not show me
this wizard
again.

...

               chick peas, seeds,
               ginger
                    : I eat nouns
                      like air

          
(substantial at the ends
                       of the day, a window
               to look back from

                    
—some green
                                 (not artificial)
                              for once

                   and not again—nation
                  supplants its principles,

          
“change” from act
          to thing, an export

                   
     as want or
                    bombed-out haze

     

full of air is empty,
     but lungs
            crystallize,
           don’t refract

             
             words are corners
            or fenceposts




something is clear?  then
it can’t be seen.
             what’s known
     is noun, then gone

improvisation 5

every grip in the form of a stampede

     how do you drink her well
          
          on one condition of stapled knees

     our artifact is getting in the nero



amiculate isn’t
     
     we’ll not overstate huge fuss
     
          organs like wow

     tractorfilm napalms the hero



cannot whizz through a comment

     bad tropicalia in the sack

          vow to bottle and sell

     in the back of the night



where’s no-nose when you dream

     ok I got a frisk of it in julia

          who?

     yeah I think so too

CIRCUMFERENCE

1
Crazed by circumstance. Varied shades seen
on tree trunks, surfaces which could mean
anything, except that thinking of
someone clears an attitude with soundtrack;
in the world, silences follow disasters.
Politically, nearly anyone is a lack.
Nearly someone. Make eggs to fill in the
holes. Said things, which once forced
reorganization, now merely encircle a
situation. Crap. Can’t help but
respond to cuts in the landscape. The poem’s on
strike, scabs leap from credit cards, to staunch whose wound? Phone
to ridicule the insistence. All service is a
pustule in style. Justice got too complex
for our return policy… but what should you do, then?
Ask another question.

2
In this mud of images I thought I saw a deed
quantified or sparks good. Tried to bring
lungs on a window of some transfer; 21
enemies thank you. Commitment twists
pulsation, growths on the truth, or in
time. Information’s a green break in
south Texas. Amplify masterpieces’ legends;

focus mandibles. Plaster hurls gifts
at fields of broken home. Stained sequences
of chloride domains.
Cool. I hurt an eye. Mess with fish.
Lives in a phrase; on a liner note,


3
Between the hum of cicadas, the hum
of heat. this is not secondary, only
sandwiched by the unusually high
intensity of business as usual. think
on a dancer’s toes to see acceptance
as a hole. your hand, its sigh. where’s,
if a train makes the windows sing, the
connection? knowledge measured against
sudan, anticrastinate. toothy
is the parent which conveys,
pinched in its every repose. letters
which can’t quite outweigh


4
Grant drop, roaming cilia, for knots in the
cradle of thought, and I shouldn’t have to
reminisce that we need this retort by mourning.
It jumps from side to side, imitating the supervisor,
so we don’t have to cart our needs
all the way to the slightest detail to have
a good time. As long as you’re up and over. Voicelike,
your rings from the past, in a kind of bone-crunching
exterior improvement impossible to see from inside;
eggs on the installment plan (for blink standing out
housetrap, opening night, a racial, his observations,
her enumerations). Regard (maybe a bad idea) that
could mean a wasteland of quality, which is why
he didn’t want to cough up the risk
of debtorhood; somebody cut these loops! Nonetheless, the argument
triumphally bends the racetrack into a sphere.
Which is what you’d expect. “News this bleak
has just got to fit.” Archive encrusted with intention,
as if anybody needed it, anywhere else but quiet.
But that’s only what you’d expect: something
showing through, a fine texture of memory, frayed.


5
hundreds of silences move across a day’s space

overwhelming velocities of leaflets
rock the query

time of the racinated cube
half-dressed in the sense of half in uniform

preserved in gelatin, dazed
by the absolute, darling, endocrine smile

looks like curtains, fends or feeds
off don’t-hurt-me doo-dads

muscular contingency of a belabored spontaneity
work marks: pants, phones (lines

barely move in a wind) different
shadows on a landscape

what’s in the radio? change “flies”
to “north.” take up an income bracket,
creative liquefaction, the president
the result of generations of elaborate







field of static obscured by rain
the body furniture


something else got in there



This one was recently published in Mirage #4/Period(ical).