For National Poetry Month, I've been writing a poem a day. I just discovered Maureen Thorson's public call for poets to participate in National Poetry Writing Month, and decided to start posting what I write here. I'm still in the process of typing up and back-dating the results thus far, and the rest should be up soon.

We are in an attitude of reflection, in a soft rain.
Cars move throughout the city in lines, following the red light flashing
up on the tower. Today the smokestacks seem brave. We
are in the news, poised to extinguish a direction when bloodroot pushes
up from the softened ground. Now we are encircling the narrator, closing
in, sorting ourselves out from the vortex that fails to acheive us at its
culmination.

THE ERASE


the brighter the thinner
   the dearer the closer
the colder the richer
           the older the sadder
the dryer the paler
        the coarser the straighter
the harder the clearer
              the newer the blander
the longer the slower
            the later the lighter
                   the darker the dimmer
the shorter the better
             the nobler the loner
                   the sharper the trimmer
the braver the butcher
               the larger the lower
                   the wetter the slicker
the heavier the tanner
                the hungrier the furrier
                            the bolder the tamer
the starker the slacker
                 the higher the number
                             the whiter the blinder
the finer the bluer
                 the cheaper the cleaner
                              the fuller the crisper
the closer the fainter
                       the younger the goner
                                       the plainer the faker
the dumber the damper
                the louder the speaker    the deafer the voter
the solider the soldier   the faster the fetter       the stiffer the boner
the queerer the manner   the deader the debtor     the stiller the hammer
the quicker the scraper   the farther the summer    the poorer the farmer
the sicker the larder        the vaster the former    the taller the ladder
the softer the shoulder   the wider the river          the blanker the latter
the nearer the answer   the sail or the drum or the
     bomb or the drive or the fly
     or the bank or the deal or
     the freeze or the boat or the
     time or the bleed or the wave
             or the sand or the work or the wreck  the elect    the rule     the talk     the shift
                     the tear     the drop    the hit      the heat
                     the mark   the mast    the moth  the dream  
               the crack   the loose   the drift    the fit

BODES


around the well bodies
circled peering

                 birds
      pulsed and pearled
      their budding song


to suffer this 
in place, awaiting


water
             behooves
                                 horses

         furled in stay



     *


              unbit
    and
                         burst

                         abide


      *



tibet

tarry, carrier

            then fly,
  portend


             while we
             border,
               perdure

ill in tolerance the west
circles as time stuck
stockpiles a conic stand:

               high olympus
heads off home


        *



Olympus is a big canonical dick that spurts out 
medals (and occasional cantos) celebrating the 
deeds of singular and heroic individuals. Believed 
to be contracted by excessive handling of these 
medals in the course of their exchange for new 
and Chinese Orange Counties, overseas development, 
oil fields and advertising dollars, Olympism is a 
condition in which this dick sprouts from the public 
foreheads of Snopeses as they invoke their gods 
against the CNN syndrome, where gore-spattered 
photographs render us incapable of distinguishing 
between politics (the intermarriages of these gods) 
and elementary realism (the desire to keep our blood 
inside our bodies). “You can buy them critters if you 
want to,” he said, “but me, I’d just as soon buy a tiger 
or a rattlesnake. And if a Snopes offered me either 
one of them, I would be afraid to touch it for fear it 
would turn out to be a painted dog or a piece of 
garden hose when I went up to take possession of it.” 
At five o’clock the Texan will have crumpled the third 
paper carton and dropped it to the earth beneath him, 
and all but two of the deadly ponies will have been sold 
for sums ranging from three dollars to six hundred 
million dollars. We are between, abiding, waiting to 
discover with whom we will have turned out in droves 
to identify. A masked chorus fills the screen for hours 
with the introduction to song. 

in the yard a punning kiss
line of cars repeating back
forming in the wave affair
a bow tie of sorts and seethes
and springs untouched by drop
by drop

(Another word-per-minute attempt:)


now a sentence: stretch artfully
this neck, bottle, cupped pause
wherein a few astonishments are
cradled, held at bay while wetly
we wait, exuding anticipations not
precisely put, rather placed, set
in motion early to carry
songs once fixed in passing
cars over into that between
which holds chance to be
against beams (silence here, stuck
with beams) that aren't but
want to be about, turning
from the shape of a
thought into the things that
come to light: street, cup,
birch, secret, flock, still holding
it in abeyance that it
may abide, that thought suspended
while blue--hare's breath--slips
you crisply into one white
blank, a place at table
where it becomes clear that
these decisions will lead nowhere
but you'll make them anyway,
to keep in practice. Lines
like lids decide.

(This was written at the rate of one word per minute, for as long as I can stand it. It's a very irritating exercise--you can't do much besides watch the stopwatch, and a minute isn't long enough to stop thinking about the word you just wrote and the one to come next).

already five forming, stop. bilge
marmalade molecule begins to lengthen
shades grinding mop to map
threshold spills dissolve squirrel paws
on spite--attractive gluten-wreathed
hand sticks to stage mug
weak minute chips away ache
napping? unllikely ryan departs moong
bulb mulls per broom scrape
glints beep polyphone birdwhistle delivery
glare? extender distractions slow fifty
screws illumine warmup freshets trademark
wristicuffs roy hendrixes assent pause.

THE 6th

Every impulse travels,
plucked. Oh, Mahler,
we're fucked.

The memory was solid,
fluid, singing,
individual--until
it was remembered.

Now only a wisp gradually coming to being through thicker
and sentimental representations. The hair on the gut.

How did we end up with Hillary?
How did he get an English horn?
An answer or two
just as faraway at Just as far away as
mornMourn.

Bells out of tune, thanks and the wind.
Once this idyll could be sung.

I think
today

softens it

gets it on the way

wingra marsh
birdless I
consider nearly
starving
but
too late
for cattails
and
at least
today I
think
for
anything part
way save
these leaves
the shade
ugly old
gold wishes
it was
go
the whole
mile my
heart no
roots but
all the way
to the ground

APOLOGY TO THE NEWS (an improvisation and very rough draft)

It's sad what stays and what's unsaid.
The unsaid sings and we with mouths
closed away and far from home (the context
where it would have meant)

They say it plain, we cannot recognize. Because, they say it plain,
of money tied. The past is said, and unsaid. Effect is Armenians.

Verizon said, without court order, turned over and over. What fun
to be direct. To thicken skin in word The weather comes again
To hurt and lovely long I took the lamppost for the moon.

The modernist impulse: is it simply rage become a civilization
stretching back three thousand years? And only after the fact?
The fact as bell we drool on 'til the tone no longer sounds
through human waves that lap us as we drown?

Our region the reality of error
Washes up, three lakes
Hot Midwesterners grope along their shores
Hot tendons in the autumn night
Tracing this town in messages that ring
Up the hill, the hill, the hill,
One wished
To join them at the trampoline
But saw their coldness as a theme
Their flesh mere syntax draped in bars
(Good old mahogany, brass rail,
grilled onions
or impish satisfaction came to fill
a space for lives that nights alone of course
they say so openly:

Take anything that we can give
Because you need it, need or freeze
Keep your pumps and open wide

The gap no metaphor can fill
with headphones on to block out final pleas
today I slept while engines tore the trees
between starvation and the blogging class:
he took the broken pent-a-meter
and shoved it up his ass

I have more or less abandoned this blog. Feel free to look around, though. There are some haphazard fragments for which I feel some fondness.

GRETEL IRVING

now gets
a Google hit

keep

the alternate ending

so much so clear
in ambiguities

keeping distance

could be gardened
kept in kind

no

(keeping it for
themselves)

_

WE’VE GOT SOME BIG RABBITS HERE!
Those aren’t rabbits, they’re highly profitable defense systems.
THE SUN IS AT AN ANGLE
to the attitudes admittedly spawned by committee
spanned as a day’s paid back
and forth! Let’s stop plucking that thing
and get to the spareness of matter

twelve times before the inseam tore
into the base

                          lobopoly
                    acteur 2 regrips to take stock

Absolute swat

for in the end, it is the analytic product

                         Hayden
                             vs.
                           Haydn
  

IS

what I'm looking for
TRUTH ?

NOT if
Not If

-

Enormous rings around the moon.
ENORMOUS is a bell.
ADDRESS changes form.
Down in the elevated GARDENS
you.
AGREEMENT of symbology means he
gets to cut your hand five times (two).

Speak in a low voice from sunrise to
sunset. Factor in the object’s
objection. Subject address to
change. Fry with glue and dispose.

Shadow puppets on the moon.

-

The history of a metaphor breaks down.

Morning, a leading up or running out
where the just-risen
(indistinguishable
from the worn-down)
forget the possibility of silence
(without preposition).

(without preposession)

“Am I too big?”
asks the box.

A metaphor rots.
History decays.

I can hear the helicopter in my teeth.

Post-production produces a post

then another

lining up to mark the limit  

from "Opening Sentences III"

I.
Something like a curtain evoked fluttering
on a hill.
Therefore the, that, or this.
Every time it went up.
I wanted to see it again and again,
but for the set to change each time.
That was in I.
Phil verifiably, Aesop intentionally.
Clumsy. Gentle. No-one.
Respia, quick. Cora, late.
No catalog for the catalogued things.

II.
And?
No.

please enter a title

country leg

     ownin’ down

april in chicago (bits)

Gray quotation, I mean
quotidian, passed on
in the dark. Elements
of the overheard. The address
does not exist.

Thin Swedish coffee? I collapse.
In neutral lies.
Will the end (pig and lambs
*

the idea that the orchestra
it was just like "voomp!"
and empty
the Ask Larry Show
we run it and run
I lick my own arm
(it's rough and roughly literary)and fall asleep in the mid
basically a controller
for jerks

grasses bend
looking still

*

scabrous again

love for

then the dampers slid off, add resonance in the room
a musical offering, rejected

*

siren in the break
it’s where you put your art

good choice of squirm
ironic
rainsmell

oops,
combination

a draft
welcome

*

Three things you
in the rain are the shit
become a story in my spoon
driving some away muse

*

given that the moon is in the door the spring
such profusion of errors is love worth
a temporary transition out bear with this
and a half investigation tumbled our life
I would pocket you beneath the willows
were you not so good at taking care of yourself
my not my my never-retracted above the loop
slim dependable, many-voiced and thirst

*

the song unending
what a horrible idea
moths investigate the blue lanes
where spine gives in to regard
the men with their conceits in tow
unbalanced the way a joke returns

whose woods these are I think I
—no.

*

retuned
a reflection
to flit vs.
place of stand
thought place

mock here
in back ground
*

no nipples
enter the fray
it always starts there

he disappears
like a stain

---

turned the dial past that spring

stub toe, curse, trail off, miff

*

YON.
Chicago is periods.
skimmed, scattered
this reported
abaft, anon
a mouse
or rather hedgehog
in a hand
another touched
a pawn
or rather
peon, moved
it there
or here.

*

Jetty is dog

whittle it down
a frosted clock
paid training
in time
it ain’t

he felt the blood
ears

(improvisation, march 30th 2006, 5:52 a.m.)


shock of dawn

in hair of the dog


celibacy west

fries the hope

in awe


of

or

over


long-time

chemical

decay


then I remembered to take out the trash



of illinois side

factories



d u desert


a cluster

deferred


Laos


and the big crow
went straight
for the window

an eye
that had twitched
all day


bigger than fucking lost


noose in the portfolio


paid a visit to the


gosh he could have had

a kiss


and instead this

improvisation

interrupted



by the acceleration of the economy, essential to our defense against the threat of the west, east, wherever


like it or

drool on yourself

for a change


jogger, it’s

early, we’ve crossed


and should hold

hands to enlist ourselves


in this end

of the war-

torn

dawn


reads

sephulchral

waste

burn it

for property

‘s

meant to

and meant to

be gone


the source. the bank. the whole

project of

fuck lack

lives

in

here


draft

it

soon

and

sack

that

win


Don’t win!!!



.

A chapbook of my sequence A Screening (of the first twenty-five refugees as filmed by V. and assistants after the wrong target got hit) has been published by Shoestring Press.

Ok, so Shoestring Press is me, when I have enough money to go to the copy shop--but let's make that our little secret. It's a nice-looking book, though. To order, write to shoestringpress@yahoo.com, or send me six bucks.

I'm happy to have forced myself to stop editing it.

Is there an echo between these two blogs?

Scale: Suite: section

The beginning of the opening section of a project I’ve been making notes on for ages.

Inside-out.
No muse
could illuminate
the chasm between
this sequence
and pandemic concurrence
—the latter,
lack-vomiting profusion,
a hard cast
of process,
the former more a thing
crying out (that’s
progress) to be let in,
made thought
again, the longing
for the impossible
without which not
a finger moves
—between poor BB’s
reedy voice (tape
running just too fast)
and leaving the kitchen
to absent oneself
from what must be
said, between
the presence
of Wahid in Nablus prison
and mine, to him.
Saying it all
petrifies becoming;
we’ll do without
the voice that bans
embrace without contact,
that supresses
the molehill’s excess
against Sierras
(the nothingness seen
in the sycamore
outshouting that nothing’s
lack),
the privacy of the molecular
against the rare light
seducing things
into display
and a short sentence with high contrast.
Dog poops out
small country.

Together a new kind of next? Qualities are problematic. A simple idea can be enlarged. Bulldozed grove. First let’s establish the facts. OK. Also Emilia (Marion), Lin (Beijing), Sam (Guantanamo), Abu Grahib. Invisible in Mercator. Does the ocular metaphor map? Scent of pineapple no longer fixes location. Fifty-foot pillbug still no problem. Millions of tiny shoes. Like wind to torn kites. Alps sighted. 1/3 sandwich. Scale of fission? Divided kingdom. A fourteen incher. The Malacca Strait. The taste buds. The sound judges. The Marshall Plans. Versus Central Park. Kitchen. Pacific Rim Job. Plates shift. A green eye comes into view. Against a uniform blue sky it catches glimpses of things swimming on the lens, standing in for the migrations of peoples through Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor between the seventh and second centuries B.C., circulations even sight can’t avoid, when we are scribes recording the meanings of colors or erotic comportments, or methodically forgetting everything with the aid of phrasebooks, extended privates and loud song.

Like the butcher in the capitol, thumb on all scales: “too obvious to be a smooth snake,” speaking of containment. “But what would the container be like?” (the contralto, incredulous). “One wants a machine to catch excess, feed it, let it go. Most of an idea can fit into some sentence, or set. Like the Pacific Ocean,
which ‘we’ west
coasters call
‘holistic.’ Still the skin’s
the organ least oft forgot
or remembered, where memory’s
act and not state. That’s like nothing
or pure possibility,
the figure
of the outline between. All the void separating planets can’t be miles (they live on surfaces, which explains the Little Grand Canyon). In order to really read the book she’d have to imagine a world without him in it, then forget that act. But that would have to include his dog (now deceased), his shoes, his investments in electronics, the social cohesions impossible without him—how many traces could the text tolerate without atrophy? Would the green of his iris need to be removed from the trees? Only another can be in a world like a gem in a box. Anything in this one is true and” deciduous. She puts on her glasses.

There's a poem by me in the new Moria. I like the color scheme.

In Season

(one last poem from the old notebooks, heavily edited)

1
We must stringently assemble
and protect in our discourse these frivolous,
subtle, seemingly trivial nuances,
which make each decisive difference
and also see each difference
from the opposite side
where it might not seem so decisive
or as different as are different eyes
opened wide to distinguish words and light

Next time, a quandary of instinct.



2
Last time was marked
“two tables over”
where there are no victims
except in their absence

In season
Trees articulate what’s near
or behind
Abuse of or is
a category that recurs

Abgrund, where the indifference of stones
opens a space for connections
a surface tension
on which floats
the submerged preworld

and which an I could only burst
but the void at the center joins
in language
as representative of this body, “bruised”

which today can only think of fucking
a distinct interior relatedness
while there are decisions to be made
and spread over the surface of
“a week” (a category
returning weekly, weakly)

Unnoticed playing into or out
one’s own hands
Time’s measured in order
to introduce unintended repetition
and consistency
into the field of habit
and change

just as language carves out the difference
between space and time, being and becoming,
memory, presence, anticipation

But that’s not all—in fact it’s impossible
to cover!
Shit!

The book, I think, is having a depressive effect on the table
The effect, thinks the table, is part of me

This Season

(another from the '04-'05 "diary." I like putting this up--it's absolutely not "the latest thing.")

1
Writing simply in order to forget
that trick facts play, becoming arguments
but things here aren’t hidden, but marked
“hidden,” or “marked”—to give you the idea
“Ladder” or “latter”: to imagine alternative situations
of lack, a microscopy of what there is
in the name, “unknown person, 24 years old”

PRESENTE—the body and the self are distinct
in being tuned differently, or timed
as in Chekhov the crisis sits for months w/o collapse
in a way impossible today

by which I mean today, any day
you can’t remember
or see coming
through the window
of prediction
whose mirror, deferral, seems the mark
of humanity (its asset, its doom)

In the present we’re called upon as animals
—which lack doom and “the present”
—as do Afghani dead, still
uncited by “either side”
(quotes embrace with embittered
practicality)


2
before the telephone
was the nightmare
of the disembodied voice

which seemed, if anything, possessed

of excessive physicality

featuring Jennifer Something dash Something
a crack in nothing

well, I’ve rarely been so insulted
by a withdrawing figure

or by a fried chicken
I never chose

(I didn’t mean to say, “a candidate”)


3
Storms in Indonesia
produce helplessness elsewhere
as a sign of privilege—

the inability to help
versus the inability to help
oneself

At this point there’s a high contrast
with just about everything

which is desirable but blinding
or binding
on a poetic sense, or any other sense

(acutely hearing a tension in the room
or the intuition that a pinch on another smarts

until the equilibrium is restored
by Maxwell’s Demon, famous in bowler hat
or by the miracle of distraction

when it comes but once
unlike the dump truck, repiling
the tumbledown

this season

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).