From Pasha Noise: life and contacts

Survival of the glibbest;
avant-garde terrorists
refusing to be so named;
my potluck dreams adorn
a trailer park, yes
a "post-Arcadian" blankness;
waiting for the ripped
facade, the squeal of saving face
in feinting quatrains
to come ribboning down;
satellites of youth deference
abound, we feel so
bold among the cancer lovers,
but I’m finally learning to write
again, among the baobabs and sands.

Spring is here, and Hopkins is in the air

As with every year since Hopkins poems have been published, new pastiches of his work take to the air like dandelion fuzz to both procreate with other flowers and bother our nostrils. My own Hopkins period ended quite sometime ago -- the fruits of this brief flirtation with the closeted Jesuit are contained in the recently republished (or should we say, resurrected?) Gulf. This is the most successful one, and seems a fitting commentary on this blog and my views on literary "debate" -- or shall we say "grand-standing" -- which I've been both suspicious of and susceptible to since well before my thirties fat. Those of you in the know will recognize the title of this poem as that used by the poet Edward Taylor for his famous -- and very excellent! -- series of poems, written as preparations for his sermons. In fact, the Preparatory Meditations might be America's first "serial poem," and indeed it's best -- a sort of Cantos in embryo.

(And who would have thought you could buy the Preparatory Meditations at Wal-mart? Ah... they must have thought they were Preparatory MediCAtions.)

Preparatory Meditation

Here moment’s moments’ ague
       like ash doth fly
   temperaments
                    (inward spiraling fashion)
                         to the pit
      speechifying no reconciliation with
            New England’s perfidy.
    The boss
of All all
forgets:
           idleness a pitched & parched Winnebago gone
        (& wheel carburetor spark plug) gravewards, wind’s
                    toy
            no ballast.
                  The season’s seasoned savior savors
               nothing like record’s recourse or
                                        pushy preacher’s discourse
                                    pyramiding
                  (peach fuzz) framed
                                              intimately (matted)
                                        lore’s lozenge
                                     in cerebratory time, tuned
                                          weakly.
Weekly
       (arguing stiffly) we
   gambol gambling premise or
                                            promise
                                                            to laxity.

We Make

We make fecal jokes. We make jokes out of time. We make noises that humiliate us in front of our neighbors. We make trees stand together to form paper. We make obvious jokes. We make clouds stand still for the photograph. We make babies out of food. We make self-propagating programs that we call “worms.” We make coffee. We make self-governing groups of people that we call “teams.” We make impressions on our skin, permanent or semi-permanent. We make tents. We make cigarettes. We make cheese. We make earrings out of shells. We make plastic body parts out of our ability to melt things. We make unlikely drinks. We make fantastic jokes. We make movable parts that are in motion to the metrics of the seas. We make sunglasses to stare at the sun. We make moustaches. We make wallets out of skin. We make shoes out of skin. We make coats out of skin, being bashful about our own skin, and insecure in general. We make virtues out of our vulnerabilities. We make concepts. We make plans. We make bags, we fill them with stolen items. We make movies that we call “popular” or “classics,” occasionally “popular classics” We make burrows like hedgehogs and name them “A,” “C” and “6.” We make hotels and never sleep in them. We make “printers” and never write on them. We make televisions and never appear on them, nor do we televise anything. We make cigarettes (did I mention that already?). We make cars but can’t drive them to Germany. We make planes but most of us don’t fly them. We make bookshelves and write books, also. We make kimchi, not quite as quickly as we make hot dogs, but we do. We make unique phrases out of old, already used ones. We make jellies, ones you can eat and ones that burn. We make soap. We make dirt, but not on purpose. We make plans, and as we ruin them, we make “progress.” We make inscrutable jokes. We make constitutions out of what were once just communal fixations. We make myths out of the most ordinary individuals. We make certainties out of an incubating cloud of doubts. We make starlets out of the most ordinary, female material. We make “plays.” We make lists. We make steam out of tormenting water with heat. We make sauces out of corrupting the aforementioned water. We make industries out of water, also. We make flesh, even when we’re sleeping. We make “arrangements,” sometimes in the home, sometimes in the park. We make parks out of trees that could have better been used for paper. We make odors (this is also usually involuntary). We make jokes about them. We make religions out of fear, but also the ability to make things too complex. We make noises out of air, even when it has its own noise. We make sentences. We make divorces. We make slam. We make hard. We make gerunds, and sometimes they make gerunds but sometimes they can’t make proper “gerunds.” We make hearsay out of information. We make “journeys” out of “trips.” We make “jokes” as byproducts of undiagnosed misanthropy. We make “essays’ out of classroom notes. We make memories, or so I have heard. We make more flesh just listening to this, and just typing. We make music out of noise. We make “novels” out of our communal self-regard, and despite their name, they are often not “novel” at all. We make “leaders” out of self-proclaimed “leaders.” We make “healers” out of those with a talent for the scalpel (they are also sadists). We make cuts in the salami (but not with scalpels). We make family events and serve the salami. We make riddles out of platitudes. We make crossword puzzles out of history’s ungoverned proliferation, when it falls into language. We make guitars out of trees. We make rhythms out of watches (and hitting guitars). We make thoughts out of insomnia. We make “Trojan horses” out of comfortable elements in the landscape. We make light out of sulfur, usually in the process of desiring heat. We make blankets out of cotton, out of sheep, or just anything that lives, and has leaves, or skins. We make noises that silence the audience. We make shovels, we make art. We make jokes to punctuate the bad news. We make good news out of bad news in an effort to avoid new orthodoxies. We make high ceilings in central post offices in an effort to supplant old religions. We make mirrors that are hundreds of floors high. We make “skylines.” We make “waistlines” (again, in our sleep). We make “skylines,” thus, yes, but again, most of us don’t make them. We make cities at the intersections of rivers. We make lists of money, often more elegantly than lines of poetry. We make saliva when we talk, somehow anticipating food. We make food out of talk. We make three spellings out of words that sound the same, “through,” “threw” and “thru” for instance. We make insecure people out of wisely impassive people. We make “writers” out of people with no ability to do anything else. We make “havoc” out of places of pristine, sublime and evocative stasis. We make perverts out of huggable, avuncular people. We make “crimes” out of situations that are unremarkable. We make colas out of chemicals (and commercials). We make women out of men, and men out of misprisions of women. We make grammars that are “correct” to deem other grammars “incorrect.” We make mores, and if you don’t stick by them, in order to save you some humiliation, we make “originality,” and in special instances, we adopt the category” sui generis,” in order to put you in there and leave it all fashionably, disarmingly inscrutable. We make magazines that arrive with the frequency of waves. We make quiet out of unread magazines. We make “stories’ out of half-heard “tales.” We make laws out of fear. We make number sequences, like the fibonacci, out of -- oh, I don’t know. We make animals out of water, some of which look like us. We make platelets in our marrows. We make synapses in our wombs. We make fetal (or fecal) jokes out of this prehistoric memory. We make “territories” out of triangulations marked by spots of urine. We make remarks of unintended kindness out of undernourished witticisms. We make art out of bankruptcy. We make gurus out of the unhealthy propagators of “charisma.” We make politics out of unsorted data. We make weather reports that are never true. We make sheets of paper. We make numbers. We make cold people out of dead people. We make cold people out of our own never visited relatives. We make prophecies, when really we should be making observations. We make anticipations of biological finality when we fail to make use of flesh, air, and time. We make music that could soothe the soul, but often softens the wallet. We make music that humiliates us before our neighbors. We make texts that are easy to memorize, and texts that are difficult to recommend to parents. We make poems that sound like other poems. We make stanzas, we make glue, we make treachery out of trust, we make codas out of what were once highly anticipated, fresh beginnings.

Skid (state of the union)

what they rearrange
in grease-stick pollack marks
litigious fervor
basso profundo
accent of lariats
instant professional commentary
integrates
the weave unbroken
my suburban chatelaine
safe in a constitutional reich
maturing unblemished
in a corner

we want instructions
to replace such
love
as lives are made of
four whims collapse into two
to list retrograde
juggernaut the contract
—the canny smoke like hairlips
pretty on demand
in the salsa of tableaux
receding in a history
curated with the same icy tools

to evoke
beards warrant identification
though metal be blind
salty demeanor
strays are enumerated
until the percentage towers
then lists
deemed a false eyelash
to demand such
love as exists in cubic form
when the code of hatred respires
on a piece a paper

GATT Freedom

[I was enjoying returning to working on this blog until I started getting hit with so much comment-box spam that it's gotten quite miserable. So there are no longer comments boxes on the stories until I can figure out what to do -- the upgrade to 2.661 promises to stem some of this tide, but I have yet to see proof (just upgraded ten minutes ago).

The following little poem is something I wrote for my class, "Jai-lai for Autocrats", based on an assignment I had given -- you can see the assigment if you click "read more" below. Just a sketch, but I think it bears some relationship to Pound's "The Psychological Hour," one of his lesser poems, for what that's worth.]

GATT Freedom

Mailbomb: I had a mug of coffee sitting on my desk.
Mantis: I reached out my hand and picked up the mug.
Market: I had several pieces of paper in front of me.

Reaction:
I suddenly began to hate the Specialist
      wild and white choreography unleashed
on a semiotics-ignorant public—
            None of them love you.
            Happiness is a new idea.

The fine young artificial
      proto-mullets are so natural
brazen vessels, buttery-soft.
      I continued to sit there for a while.
It was a terrifying and grotesque sight,
             but the Specialist continued:
              “Say, did you sleep with Francoise?”

            None of them love you.
            Happiness is a new idea.

Playboy: The lace on one of my shoes was undone.
Plutonium: I depressed the switch on the side of the kettle.
Plutonium: I continued to sit there for a while.

Pseudonyms:
“Just as the film was about to start, Guy-Ernest Debord would climb on stage to say a few words by way of introduction. He’d say simply: ‘There’s no film. Cinema is dead. There can’t be film any more. If you want, let’s have a discussion’.”

Data-haven,
      the counterfeit siblings
(William Gates)
      covert video:

so natural
      I’m no longer self-conscious
using my hand
      when the convulsions had subsided.

Buddhistic and bland
      (Journey to the Moon)
in the cafes
      of Saint-Germain-des-Pres!

their revolts become
      conformisms. Twenty-one
years: at that age,
      one is capable of all acts of civil life.

      I continued to be apathetic with my activities.

ASSIGNMENT:
Base a sonnet (or a poem if you want) on one (or more) of the following:

"DEATH IN WINNIPEG" (excerpt)
http://www.arras.net/weblog/000850.html

"The fine young artificial brothers, looking warm and cozy beneath period-perfect wigs, are power-chording unplugged guitars and lip-synching to "Crazy Horses," one of the Osmonds' zestiest sorties into Mormon rock. These early-'70s proto-mullets are so natural I'm no longer self-conscious about my own new toupee, which I'm debuting on this occasion. Clad in buttery-soft, fringed white kid leather with matching macramé belts and white platform boots, the five counterfeit siblings retrace to perfection the famously wild and white choreography unleashed on a semiotics-ignorant public almost 30 years ago. These osmonoid performers are really caught up in the song's feral rhythms, rudely beating on brazen vessels, bellowing like stags, and harmonizing like horny barbers: "What a show, there they go, smokin' up the sky-y-y-y-y-y—yeah!!! Crazy horses, all got riders, and they're you and I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I—I!!!" When the number is over, I forget myself and—this is inexcusable for a supposed filmmaker—applaud wildly, actually ruining the take, because the cameras are still running, and the sparse audience in the scene is supposed to be apathetic. Sheepishly, I promise to stopper my fervor. Fortunately, the next take is the keeper."

THE DULLEST BLOG IN THE WORLD
http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/

(follow the link)

"A VOICE THROUGH A CLOUD" (excerpt)
http://alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au/BLP/websites/LOUTTIT%20WEBSITE/excerpts.HTM

One day a specialist was in the ward, examining a patient, when the patient fell down in front of him in a fit. The patient was a fat middle-aged man; he shrieked and trembled and rolled on the floor, as if he were wallowing in mud. It was a terrifying and grotesque sight, but the specialist watched it with a smile on his face. He neither raised the patient up nor prevented him from cutting his head on the corner of the bedside locker.
When at last the convulsions had subsided and the patient, with blood on his face, looked up bewildered, the specialist's smile grew even more Buddhistic and bland and he said in a fluting voice, so that other people should hear, 'Well, I must say there's one improvement this week - you're falling so much more gracefully!'
He gave a light little well-bred laugh, which at once raised up in my mind a picture of some woman with enormous bust measurement, swathed in strainingly tight red velvet. He seemed delighted with his own urbane, unsentimental wit, and I felt that at that moment he would have used the words 'heartless elegance' about himself. He seemed really to be living for a moment in his own conception of an eighteenth-century French marquise in her brilliant salon.
I suddenly began to hate the specialist for his clownish show of vanity and facetiousness. I hated him so much that my face began to burn. I felt insulted and outraged; I wanted to have the specialist publicly beaten in front of all the staring patients. I imagined his black pin-striped trousers being taken down, and his squeals of shame and pain ringing through the ward.

SPOOK WORDS
http://www.arras.net/weblog/000115.html

"The 300 words that would most attract the government's attention were they to be used online..." (follow link above)

"HOWLINGS IN FAVOR OF DE SADE" (screenplay)
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/90

Voice 1 The film by Guy-Ernest Debord, Howlings in favour of Sade...

Voice 2 Howlings in favour of Sade is dedicated to Gil J Wolman

Voice 3 Article 115. When a person shall have ceased to appear at his
place of abode or home address for four years, and about whom
there has been no news whatsoever, the interested parties
shall be able to petition the lower court in order that his
or her absence be declared.

Voice 1 Love is only worthwhile in a pre-revolutionary period.

Voice 2 None of them love you, you liar! Art begins, grows and
disappears because frustrated men bypass the world of official
expression and the festivals of its poverty.

Voice 4 (young girl) Say, did you sleep with Francoise?

Voice 1 What a time! Memorandum for a history of the cinima:
1902 - Journey to the Moon.
1920 - The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
1924 - Entr'acte.
1926 - Battleship Potemkin.
1928 - Un Chien Andalou.
1931 - City Lights
1951 - Birth of Guy-Ernest Debord.
1952 - The Anti-concept.--Howlings in favour of Sade.

Voice 5 "Just as the film was about to start, Guy-Ernest Debord would
climb on stage to say a few words by way of introduction.
He'd say simply: 'There's no film. Cinema is dead. There can't
be film any more. If you want, let's have a discussion'."

Voice 3 Article 516. All property is either movable or immovable.

Voice 2 In order never to be alone again.

Voice 1 She is ugliness and beauty. She is like everything that we love
today.

Voice 2 The art of the future will be the overturning of situations or
nothing.

Voice 3 In the cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Pres!

Voice 1 You know, I like you very much.

Voice 3 An important Lettrist commando made up of some thirty members,
all donning the filthy uniform that is their only really
origional trademark, turned up at the Croisette with the firm
desire of indulging in some scandal capable of drawing
attention to themselves.

Voice 1 Happiness is a new idea in Europe.

Voice 5 "I only know about the actions of men, but in my eyes men are
transposed, one for the other. In the final analysis, works
alone differentiate us."

Voice 1 And their revolts became conformisms.

Voice 3 Article 488. The age of majority is fixed at twenty-one years;
at that age one is capable of all acts of civil life.

Quiet

It's so quiet I can hear the Kurds.

Baubles & Dingleberries

Erotism rhymes w/
Margaret                 every fashion Sunday
corrections
made to the pronunciation
of Laotians: blue, purple,         green
aggravations of government that
        portend future dates
w/ vanity
        — I can’t ignore the punctuation
of gentlemen who wait         in the station shouting blanks
this war
        will never end — she’s lost two         sons already to the
mob w/ auto-
matic pleats who never         had the nerve
to ask for a second helping of                 physical comedy, & never spoke of
        the after-spirits of tastes

It’s very
nice
we are almost
at the top of
the
sequence of stars
there is a lively
one gone AWOL
to Minnesota
where several poets have died
but only a few
of them
were named Jack Canopy
umbrellas are
my favorite things to chastise
a dog with
on sloping lapwings
when the skyline
is toward the east & the hemlines
— don’t let me say that joke again I am
almost in love
w/ the privilege
that brings your shy legs
to me
in the simulacral Hamptons
the shattered
wrists of your economy
wondering how this idiot
got here clearly holding his breath
— for ardor

I would say that
we are almost                 tired of
Christmas
growing old when
the galaxies were invented
we didn’t mind them,                 too         
but that was
the day Alexander
Pope         
found a heap of orphans
in the pathways under his heart
garden                in the alternate pleurisies of late-
night television         
        rendered opaque
by artless close-captioning         — thus, we love
anyway,
never tiring of the prism
of snaking letters         at the head of every
sentiment — every song that goes
        on stage unrehearsed
w/ battering applause
from the paupers' rows
                        somehow rendering it all back

The
        revolution of the middle
class will not be
televised
but preserved on Caucasian
disks for         millennia in several
hundred 96-page books         
        of limp
poetry w/
titles right out of
Christian songbooks circa
1975         Australia we pledge
allegiance to the
        drag of tired instincts w/
victuals served up         each night
by bombers’
wives in ashtrays        an entire
calendar’s worth of
        metered doses and, of                 course, poetry
advice columns
w/ assurances         of sought votes
        in over-
confidence         — I failed to be annoyed, yes,
nearly forgot                 
        to cough when
the pollen entered the nostril        — when the policeman entertained         
thoughts of annual events         for elected         
suicides         & there were
wallets beneath every basket case

They say you had
an idea my arthritic
double that brings it
all back to you
buried beneath the austerity
suggesting a charity
— once or twice
is almost a career “choking”
(in medieval Los Angeles
they used to call it) fail
one last time the fireworks
could bystand quite
innocently and watch one
in collusion w/ mediocrity
a cultish, ritual necessity
— so slow you are
paralyzed and hiding here
tracks of the lime sky fluxus night

That was a way to         start a poem
in 1963         we barely knew         
how to use words then — when
the traveler
        stopped,
he learned how to spell “egges” and “shoppe”
in the local style         w/ a
        Cossack for a backdrop
trying to market         the good word of         
God
like a Williamsburg Elmar Gantry         but this time         
        w/ promises         of increased penetration, um,                 
the market type         
        to ambient salsa music         
— in
the offices of all
the rural bodegas         she took a nap         
dreaming of floating Africa         
                                as if it were never there

Who could I love if my
youth was this                 
violence throat
hands pishy         
pishy nights green blue
windowsill best         
friend’s Catholic         
sister the
Grapones, all
of them         palsied for my blood
or brood
        — nationalism’s shotgun
temper         
        looking for another
mind in last year’s                 immigrant         
crew                 
                — a
friend from a different era
in a galaxy far far away, said
he preferred my Jean-Paul Satre style                 to my
greasy Johnny
                Depp         — I agree
but for the taint of my pleasure

        & the salt of my wandering eye on this book

Italics 2

Drinking the wine: marrying the incredible. | Pausing before words, inhaling: anticipating commotion. | Taking the wrench to technology: curbing the linear. | Bathing, paring, shaving: detoxifying. | Exploring the real estate of the block: inveigling the dogs. | Loving by brush of the cheek: evading the secular. | Futzing with the stocks, rolling with the hunches: the quizzical mine. | Pissing: watching. | Making controversy on the blog: stemming literary conversion. | The laughs get better, the writing: worse. | Running away to Canada, running away to Patagonia: syllables. | Chuckling in Cathedrals: instantiating echoes. | With an eye on the ball: with a hand on the clutch. | Feeling fancy when ordering in German: debasing the European. | Knee shakes, rhythmically: manic. | Korean soup-eater sips loudly: her comforting music. | Glass backboard after youth smashing basketball against flaccid metal one: failure. | I cough: sub-comic material. | The job was filled: the statistic was digitized. | Argument settled, friendship adhered: check paid. | Touching with two hands, when one was never enough: discovery of sympathy. | As able, as husband: and wife. | We know the news when we refuse the headlines: disciplined scanning. | On a fecund plateau against the short shrift of Senators: writing. | Of the dope: after the anxiety. | Naughty movie business: middle-aged voyeurism. | No longer: fingering the watch-chain. | No longer: sinking behind make-up. | No longer: such tender knees. | I mean: it must be. | Retiring every ten years to the country: levelling out. | Chaucer got it: James didn’t. | Wanting the throat to be Chinese: getting Sicilian. | Lorca got it: Dali didn’t. | Wanting a show: wallowing in trauma. | In the ribbons of morning, feeling the touch of a hand: existential measure. | Speaking softly: hardly speaking. | Garbling the vowels: burping. | New airport screening rules: new sentience in the database. | Revisiting photographs: deep-freezing the enigmas. | The clatter of seashells, the walking stick: a turquoise memory.

Poem

Poem in Love with Myself

Poem that Takes an Hour to Upload

Poem of Forgotten Evenings

Poem of Coroners

          sound of axes
                    and African retribution
          I've pretended not to know you long enough
                                                                              Africa
                    and I pretend
                    standing at this bus stop
                    in a coat
                    that resembles my father's
                    the bank father.
          Long slender line reminds me that it's nearly Christmas.

Italics

Sort of: being there, or being awake. | These emissions: counter-examples of honesty. | Trying: being in the type. | When a figure named Wenderoth conspires: writing. | A calculated instance (among distrust): lost in Europe. | We thought it was Dutch: it was Flemish. | As in: where to go next. | Running out of drink, then: where is the fountain. | Trying: to angle the light. | Grossly spiritual, she takes a number: she is waiting. | Productive backslide: thinking back to terms. | I am here: you are there. | How many times have you been there: and I’ve choked. | A sliver of counter-honesty: spicy discussion. | Nonetheless, remembering: remembering. | The crowd was fucked: fucked. | Bouncing a ball: waiting for the next line. | Moment by the moment, the web was built: falters. | Later:  taking a test. | That writer who wrote of love and fame: that writer who died. | Production ceased: of course. | Making noises with the pen: scratch, tap. | And when she turns to me: forgetting amnesty. | The life gets better, but the writing: worse. | Dialing up: tuning (getting) out. | Indecision is insufferable: then, the rain. | When the masculine forecloses: athletic poem. | A drop: then, sound. | Trying: negotiating a wave. | Thinking it was Cage, knowing finally: Eno. | Pacing back and forth, smoking, fidgeting: behavior. | Cars on the highway: moving forth into adventure. | When it bleeds: satire. | Scanning the crowd for the familiar: faces. | Two words together that make a dull story: theory. | Crying: public address. | Anticipating:  public demonstrations. | When the polls close: catharsis of the new naive. | On the streets, garbage, dust: sediment. | I think: I have invented. | Blowing the nose into an ashtray: improbable dissent. | The pathology of getting it wrong: dada. | Tryng to circulate among nuance: flexing the Jamesian. | And when the table cleared, and the conversation ceased: my family. | Birds warble: morning. | Cheap jokes and laughing gas: community. | The image profoundly dithers: the site is ugly. | When the chips are finally counted: pragmatism. | No longer: puppet of stars. | No longer: victim of the contiguous. | No longer: angling to be a stable critic. | After a failure of short-term memory: renew the streets. | Every temp its turn: every type its torque.

Howlings in Favor of Tulsa

Well, I still have my De Kooning to aspire to (jerk)
— with a cursed lorgnette — no real rudder
philosophy. I can have all those features (impaled on a stake,
runner up in the gubernatorial campaign

in NYC) — blending in when the volume control
of all their heads
is tipped toward ten.
Some of this screaming from Tan Dun seems to reflect

this impassiveness, cathartic but recorded,
so I can imagine this tempestuous
ritual is also something being listened to by Bob
Mould, in Cleveland — insensate.

For your pleasure: try the Mount Rushmore posture
for any longer than 15 years, and see if
the revelation of narcissism is something that suits
Devandra any more

than it suits
you — true details
deflect, the untrue are absorbed
— natch.

We were impressed by his Frank O’Hara imitations
on the plane, though it sounded like French soufflé
fed through a Kaos box — and given
an “Asian mom” perm.
“I never seen this room looking so good.”

AAA:
Another American Artist
in 200 cubits or less marks shadows
with copper-wire pigeon toes, the “not-me” syndrome
(“not-me shadows, not me asylum!”)

and revisits the Star Wars trash compacter scene
by suggesting Olive Oil’s
knees are stronger than
iron — and were first imagined by Alfred Hitchcock
skimming through Clayton Eshlemen’s palindrome bin.

“My little idea is in pieces until I finish this work.”
My idea
is in parts. I’d take up a samovar
and play whist there with the Marx
Brothers while everyone and I

My idea is a heart in the basement
UNTER DEM LINOLEUM
“p-thuck! p-thuck! p-thuck!” (a purring sound)
(echoes of Philip Guston) other terrestrial hauntings

decaptivated by Fisher-Price
joys,
now that the idea of the flood has subsided.
Is this what it’s like
            to sleep in a pile

of corpses?
I woke up because my dentures were dirty
and all the thinking was like 1975.
She was there. So was

she. And she was there. We called her
Flexible Mitten.
The pose of the “pulse in Soho” makes my
hair follicles screech, but that’s before

I was disabused
of the inevitability
(houses made of Saran Wrap)
— of the inevitability of death.

I can’t say I feel much better now.

When they had that hinge joint installed
in the putter, I was the star
of a TV series that took place
in the Bronx

but was secretly filmed
in Toronto — why’d they do that?
As the days grow longer
I become emphatic 7.

A little melancholy,

a little tragedy,
a little Zoloft

adds to a man’s character.
A little heart-cutting strings means

that your cosmopolitan Tourette’s
hasn’t entirely alienated you from those

who might love
you.

It’s like a famous rapper’s style
that’s somehow mellowed in the plastic

wrap
but is good snuggling music.

I just cooked three different
dishes of the “white trash”

variety,
like Uh-ma used to make.

I’ll bring them to work, I’ll mix them all up,
I’ll be richly contented.

He learned the seven Gracias
in the Countess Second’s
flat. The reality principle changed the face
of religious discipline: tossed up girls

with Aquinas buttocks.
Afterwards,
spilled Cosmos made patterns
of roses in the pool. Raoul Vaneigem

ended up on one of those Iraqi playing cards.
To be free,
and ice skating! Marvel of the furry
caterpillar scooting across

fragrant, come-and-get-em lawns.
We are saddened.
Communist floes icened
his face. Our country pays Puritanism

to heave out doubt.
We are the floridas of Tulsa,
but we are the cavities of the Future!

Love's Labor

[Here's a Christmas poem I distributed -- or attempted to distribute -- in lieu of gifts 12 or so years ago when I was broke and America was waging war on Iraq. Nothing much has changed, so I guess it's still relevant. I was reading a lot of Auden at the time as you can probably tell. There's also a touch of misanthropy (I tried to save it with the saccharine final lines) which held me back from actually making copies for my relatives, so no one's actually seen this poem except my old school chum Thomas Crofts. Happy Xmas!]

IF this Christmas you feel
nothing but unique gall
at ceremonies which seem
the indecipherable sum
to a human mathematic:
the human mind is stuck
in Thought’s thorns and pricks
--might as well get him socks!

If through winter’s mist
shouts the routine Must
and pleasures for the kids
don’t taunt experienced heads
like color for a sister’s
nightgown, or dear brother’s
difficult taste in hats
or brand-names for the aunts

If for the special racket
you finger the vacant pocket
swear one time you had it
now some bureaucrat’s got it
to finance a mutual war
--if in department store
your spiteful credit card
whispers what you most feared

If you have marked dissent
of a conscience sorely bent
by measures you have taken
to service each guest wine
--though not wine for a king
the mind now fully swung
to conclude the season’s ill
with a long, long-distance call

--Then, presuppose a pass
a lucky, explored course
between the gift of chance
and awkward social science
--a poem is what you mean:
the riddle of deliberate man
whether object or good dead
is solved by the schemer’s word.

Fluxus Night (more doodles)

Untitled

Four Improvisations

Things a little too light to ever revise or publish, but too "together" to take apart and use elsewhere. But I like them — and they are dedicated to Jordan Davis, the indefatigable!

Four Improvisations

I want to know more about that murder, yes.
Give me another hour of coverage, ok,
this morning isn't plural enough
and besides, I plan on sleeping all day —

I want to eradicate the baloney of my mind,
this is the quickest way to the treasure. I'm going to dream
over their hands
as they are moving.
Sleeping in news repose.

*

That small digital woman
in the expert photograph,
she's a fortune for those of us
at the editor's desk
especially me,
who keeps disappearing
in the text, replacing
the letters with em-dashes
and acting all
superior about it — she pulls me back
and soon I am writing
some marketable crap
about headaches, Pat Cash,
and the Secret Service.
What do I know? The poems
appear in a little yellow book.
She shows up
at the launch party, and signs her name.

*

Someone was fat and happy.
         (I've learned to write
on the marble.)
Does it pay to care about things?
        One could be precocious
and start a Day Op,
(first, we'd have to know what that is
and stop caring about being lonely)
        — did you forget her conversation
so quickly, because
you were drunk for days afterwards?
        Hopping on tiny leather springs.

*

I found cheeks in my blow dryer.
But it's only the sincerity
of the voice that matters.
It's only the pitch and temper
of the voice that matters.

I found a thong in my television tubes. That time,
it was getting kind of crazy.

I found a plural in my
days on earth.
Please translate this misery
into several languages.
Take a quarter with you
in case you need to call.
There are better ways of passing
for a 9th Army tyke than whistling.

When it rains: wheelchairs.
I met Jim Jarmuch last night.
He looked kind of like
my brother, or could have been.
I found
delirious amounts of affection
for my mother in my last paycheck.

Sonnet: On Literary Criticism

Vanished! all traces of the motherfucker…
(words inspired by Lawrence Raab)
here, in a spiral-bound notebook, or there
on vacation with the glossy Ken Knabb.
Vision is reeling again, but it’s air-conditioned
and stamped with various approvals
(the kind with legs — “blurbed” — as is the fashion)
“These are assays that will prove no vowel
ephemeral…”
                     — indeed, they are the hive’s own eggs!
hermaphroditic before hatching, alive
not yet given to boasting, or yet a “good eye.”
— These words seem portents, and yet will not peg.

I suggest: one doesn’t spell the “life of the mind”
in colors too stark, or with words too kind.

Miniature (Orkney Lyric)

My mother with the half moon eyes
(oh! she's had a bit to drink,
her eyes are usually minus signs).

The Warped Floor's Grievance

Chance. Chair on the slant
magnifying a penchant
for fractious, gambling behavior
before it leaves, forever.

[Warped floor: hence, a person of no wealth. He's had to put a rug down to keep his desk chair from rolling away as he typed. This poem is especially prized because he seems to enjoy it.]

From a Notebook

Having written that biography of sex
and known the ones you were interested in
— the lights casting shadows on Graham Street
any hour of the day, but especially night
with the bus stops, grotesqueries of newscasters
in advertising light — pretending to be married.

Of the handful of sensations collected,
placing some value on those justly deferred.

Getting With It

Seems like:
it's easy,
centered just.
It's
also easy
to remain in L.A.
It's
easy to be
here.
It's easy
to humiliate
a friend.

Neocon Quatrain

The blight of A____ was upon the land,
the patterns long forgotten,
and poems one could understand
from Chaucer "down" to Auden.

Skid 29

drift
that can’t be the cosmopolitan style
we’ve rehearsed lax maxims
vaudevilled into luxury
samples
heirlooms of mere strobe patterns
vital to the chromosome
what’s keeping the posture up
is the sausage of karl marx
proviso
you study here
and keep reading

group dieting for change
which stops
mark pollacks it for three books
cady lettermans it for twelve
stops
i view keen distances from my youth
in monopolied south america
flat as the expanse of schwarmerei los angeles
is the sea montezuma didn't bid on
the diarist
was smitten the croat jumped ship
rhythmless inflation was propitiously induced

for speech
was confined to smile tones
what’s vital turning blue
and sundry lyrical hues
“my pancreas will be true to you”
i know such croons from the dispatches of youth
trespassing
into static noblesse oblige
venom was carcanetted out of the library
several thousand velveeta miles            away
health of the nation
depending on this moneyed abstraction

The Window Ordered To Be Made

[Following is a poem that is not "flarf" but uses some of the techniques of it during the last long stanza -- i.e. Google searches, in this case, based on a paragraph from Rimbaud's "Season in Hell."

I somehow think I exhausted my interest in writing "flarf" several years ago when I started mashing texts with computer programs and then trying to have them make some "sense," giving myself rules such only allowing myself to change the punctuation.

I don't mean to sound snotty, but I can't get too excited by the hectic energy and quick-paced and irreverent imagery of much of the "flarf" issue of Combo which I just received in the mail.

A lot of those poems - even the very impressive tour de force introductory quatrains of editor Mike Magee - would be much improved if the writers just slowed down a hair and let their effects take hold before racing to the next item on the agenda (or the search results).

The pace of a quick wit is always interesting, but when this pace is augmented by a machine, it's more of a sign of wit to slow down and deny the computer its electric celerity, the circuit board its easy capacity to forget (if that doesn't sound too Yoda-like).

David Larsen's poems - which are not obviously "flarf" as far as I know - stuck out this way, as they were careful with their tones, letting some things explode and others merely echo across his sequence. (I don't have the issue on hand to comment more deeply on this.)

But I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon about something that is obviously intended to be pure fun - and I did, after all, play Mozart - not Salieri - in Gary Sullivan's flarf play, which was the hight point of my year as an actor. So saying there are "too many notes" is probably ironic.

I guess I think the Google poem or "flarf" or whatever has some potential if you get past the easier pleasures of mainlining chaotic text into verse forms. And of course, as an anecdote to hyper-formalist practices and the more preening forms of lyricism, it's welcome.

A companion to the "flarf" issue might be the issues of Arras 5 that I posted recently, called "Riddled Argots." I still have to write the intro to that! Probably the best "all natural" flarf that immediately comes to mind is the opening of John Ashbery's "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" -- that mean old cartoonist!

For the most part, the following is a poem from my own notes. It originally appeared last year in the Asian American Journal of Columbia University, co-edited by my friend Andrew Maerkle.]

The Window Ordered To Be Made

To hospitalize the ones we love most
(Beginning an election and ending a corpse)
To take that money

I’m going to start on election day
(I’m basing this prayer on Citizen Kane)
I’m going to start
Asking the world if I’m straight
At a balloon lunge event, where lightness is fitness

Here (he shoved the aphrodisiac)
“Be in code!”
The Amish getting squeamish
(The net privileges
Transcendental moss)
This essay is addressed to the audience
As I caught the misunderstanding of “fantail rout”

As I caught
That au courant
Autocrat hit the sky

So, talk through these sour depressions
And immigration counseling
We decided: we are a pair of absurdities
(I’m waiting for Scottish air)
Everyone thought you were beautiful
Now, to deliver the urban landscapes
Seems only normal: upsets, lapses, hosannas, bananas…

I am a happy
Victim of intelligence
(Robots picked up Willa at the airport)
“He probably went the wrong way with his eyes on”

Comedy?
Gene Wilder’s an expert

These are like
Dropping off the guys off somewhere
(Bakunin’s temp hair is limp)
The anonymity of the “I” on the web page
Remembers graduation
And the Chinese years symbolized by animals
Worthy of reading
If only for the erotica category
However badly spellt
By thirteen-year-old Petey Birdsong
(Within his mirrors of catoptromancy, etc. etc.)
Thirteen-year-old Petey Birdsong
(The rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Unbelievably endowed to play these sages
(Behind him, the walls were spread with the human body)
Thinking

Starting a Gore
And ending a wimp
 
 
 
                                       bluish
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Can burn this
                                       with this kind of information
                                       available to panic

Very Light and Sweet

[Another poem I don't expect to ever publish... sort of in the "New Door" vein, if only because I was just as distracted on the day I wrote this.]

I am working on a painting. I don’t want to seem unhealthy to you. Every day the painting grows taller; I am smoking a lot less now. I can barely see anything else, and the only sound is the cream-colored traffic outside. Now, was that thinking?

I am expecting your phone call. It grows on me, this feeling of love and dread. I could return to the painting, of course; of that, I have to remind myself. Because the painting is a lot of work, I am reminded that I often feel tired in certain situations. Maybe not this one, but other times. Perhaps also this one, but were that to be the case I wouldn’t have to be “reminded” of anything. But reminded I am, and have forgotten that you are about to call.

The painting depicts... well, it is gray. It has a red ellipse somewhere in the lower left-hand corner, like the spot on Jupiter. I think a bit of that spot on Jupiter, how I would describe it — the painting, I mean — were there to have been no spot on Jupiter. It’s so exhausting to be original.

I own a televisions set, too. It is dark right now, because it is not on. I can’t paint with these sorts of distractions, though know others can, and do; and even want to, that’s part of the “life.” "Cultured" distractions. The things of the world. But as my mind is on that spot on Jupiter, which, I suppose, they don’t show frequently on TV, I rarely have the set on when painting. It would be too – too distracting. And as I am trying not to think of your call, and trying to think of my painting, probably an easy thing to do (when you think about it), nonetheless the television is off, keeping the “things of the world” and the “life” at bay. This is a cozy situation. But, indeed, it makes me nervous.

I’d like to be healthy. But, now, I have these sores in my mouth. They are purplish, though you can‘t really see them, as they are inside the mouth. Not on the lips, or on the skin, but inside. Imagine them, then.

When I am done with this painting, I will call you at once to remind you about it, and about them, and me.

Skid 14 (revised)

[Trying to revise some skids... this one didn't quite make it beyond being a light, negative jingle. "Dark swans of trespass" is a line from one of the Ern Malley "hoax" poems.]

i’m on a staple diet
of “can’t be blamed”
nothing is
unnatural erosion

all the cuticle colors
blent into 2.3 milliseconds
tenure-track pluto
moons the universe

"gets those guys a quicker
national anthem"
in one 90-minute take
from a handycam on david

letterman’s forehead
--cell phones off
deviating from the script
alive, not surviving
on the weakening antarctic shelf

as a cast of a thousand
emperor brand penguins
as if senile lepidopterists
leapt

curious, frank
as improvised carbon dating
“dark swans of trespass”
on a secular, voided landscape

They're Putting a New Door In

Another symptom of my moral decline appears in the present issue of Boston Review. I.e. a new poem: They're Putting a New Door In. This already appeared in a tiny chapbook published by derek beaulieu's housepress in Canada that nobody saw but which was cool.

Locutions des Pierrots, X

I've only made about 3 successful translations of anything in my life, one from Rimbaud (Seven Year Old Poets, in Angry Penguins), one from Virgil, and one from Jules Laforgue, the 19th French poet who died at 27 and was influential on Pound and Eliot. Here's the French, followed by my "version" -- more in the "love" theme mentioned earlier, but obviously of a different tenor.

Que loin l'âme type
Qui m'a dit adieu
Parce que mes yeux
Manquaient de principes !

Elle, en ce moment,
Elle, si pain tendre,
Oh ! peut-être engendre
Quelque garnement.

Car on l'a unie
Avec un monsieur,
Ce qu'il y a de mieux,
Mais pauvre en génie.

Oh, that model soul
bade me her adieu
because my eyes… too?
      lacked principle.

She, such tender bread
(now a Wonder loaf)
…typical! gives birth
      to one more brat.

For, married, she is
always with a guy
who is a nice guy,
      hence his genius.

The New Stanza

Here's a rough draft for a poem... actually, it's one poem in a sequence, all of which follow a certain stanza pattern that I'll let you figure out (keep your eye on the semi-colons). This is, again, a rough draft, basically a first draft -- it gets quite clogged at the end, and the opening line is kind of a clinker, and I'm distrustful of the rhetorical conceit in the middle, etc. etc. It's from the same file the shory from below is taken. Some of the lines might carry over to the next in your browser... sorry. By the way, the new Radiohead album is great.

Not assured of the hedonist’s rapture, or the safety of guiding ropes;
he has a normal name otherwise, nothing to suggest television,
drinks too much perhaps, is over-studied for literary conflagration;
the list, otherwise, grew blurry, once including: “syncresis,” “allotropes,”
“Marxism” (also, “Leninism,” “Stalinism”) and “individualist”
for contrast, also “humanism,” “realism” (vs. “social realism”), madly “Darwinist”;
in Vancouver, these are just the names of punk rock bands, all
pant-legs to rumbles, prismatic (where stateside they would be “dualists”),
paragrammatic, encoding the revolution by frobbing syntactical
dials, forgetting, before the moderns, we claimed Bliss Carmen for “ourselves”;
Williams would have loved him, as likely Pound, Zukofsky, and Marianne
Moore, his neighbor, but for us he’s Ashbery-meets-Gibson (William, not Mel),
Philip K. Dick channeling Spicerian Lenny Bruce through old coffee radio of
insomniac Chomskyite nites, perfectionist, though perhaps no Gautier (Theophile)
in form—a world without embellishment, sans vorpal swords, only contacts.

Short poem

The shortest, most sentimental thing I've ever written, which I just discovered in an old word file...

And we reach
for the last
thing available
and what is
available is love.

That could almost be on Nick Piombino's blog... well, I'll resist the urge to delete it because I've already deleted it from the word file whence it sprang... sprang rhythm, get it?... not to mention a certain affection for the double "is"s in the last two lines, which force a reread -- c'mon, be honest, you read it twice, right? Just to get a better sense of the cadence? Gotcha.

10ers

[Here are test runs of a verse form I've been playing with for a few years. A few of these appeared in a David Bowie tribute that Kevin Killian (or someone else whose name I can't remember) edited last year. I'm working on a less mystifying version of poems in this stanza form (which I won't describe, but it has to do with the indents) called What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers.]

Smooth green world
                                    permitting axis grinding
      neath a star
                               bulbous and mirrored
truth ache, comedy
                              of replicants deferring
            ovoid, efficacious
                                         maxy sheen
the love lost between selves
                                       in crackling plastic
                    what one observed
                                          through the rain
is a runner chasing countdowns
                                                sadly forgotten
      but for the gorgeous
                                      challenge of it all
invisible -- insidious
                                     connecting for vagrancy
            the jawbone isolate
                                            amidst streaming quarks

Using dem types of woids
                                          to muscle support
      is history
                           gracelessly, the pedestrian surrenders
difficult brilliances
                                  the instinctual sham-o-meter, that
            any given night
                                 gives reason to pay the rent, that
reason, lost
                       pump fist over the castrates
                  from behind the gleam of armor
                                                       defecated by choice
republic -— these thoughts fancy across the water
                                                               of talk
      the vandal in career
                                      blemishes the tubeways suspiciously, courage-
ously, morphs the museums
                                         where the discourse fairly sucks, sucks
            sucks discordant channels
                                                       from the popery that will not smell it

The infallible bloke
                                   deft with a lime
      or a meter
                           barrage, twice times the second
wind fixture, gravity
                                cultural mushrooms
            corrects the materials
                                          in it
video heirlooms, the inauspicious
                                               slanting out sideways
                  one of the great english voices
                                                       cut
up, three stories
                                  robert wyatt
      hum, incredibly danceable
                                             now, to the new knowledge
accrued with friendship
                                      such self-referential grease
            provokes the dim readership
                                               blatantly, by twisting thumbs

This, finally, my book
                                of philosophy
      recollections, discrougements, lex
                                                often reading circus
for humid terms
                                 suspended in the wild percentage, moving
            like cloud spots, frictions
                                             of leg against leg
the music
                this frantically the look
                  of seemingly improper moments, for the
                                                           book
protects, and then there' s abundance
                                                    to elevate
      the mundane, to its
                                       synaesthetic upper station
where white funk makes its play, for
                                                 emotion, pleasure, pain, simple
            it seems — to the roving challenger
                                                          bored, quite frankly, of this

My adolescent skin gives me a bad voice
                                                    in the office
          among the lazy
                                  in determined activity
rhyme after rhyme after rhyme, no
                                              poetry
            as the fans are flakes
                                    and the texts, half-baked
corduroy -- what pill has gotten in here
                                                       to
                      clean?
                              carpets auspicious as a brainwash, lux
causing sneezes
                                perfumorama debilitating lapdogs increases, yeah
      that’s right —- policy
                                     damns the underarm
and the underrated
                                   in the cubicles and mail jaws
            branding the chaos of the menial’s pines
                                                                quite consequential

So Brian Eno
                          fuck-a dis, fuck—a dat, sometimes
    thoughtful people are confined
                                                  to wheelchairs
in memory
                    for the seven reasons punk died
            plastered to the freeway
                                         again, anonymous
with a seventy gallon haircut
                                        sometimes bras make sense
                  hippie pennies contract
                                              amidst the big sur cataracts
dungareed dudes with digeridoos
                                             values every other muscle
      pure
               snowflake -- and that’s where the pastoral begins
the satire
                offends, in case this ambiance is protective
            it ain’t —- such somonex
                                               clues us in on the big arrears

You are so casual
                                   in the fuzz box, of
      autumn
                        slants of light curtains
over deli materials, knoblauch, the smokes
                                                       occurring
            so humanly, persists
                                         this stifling warmth
that, shading the eyes from this sun, the
                                                        family
                   is auspicious
                                      rents in the stratosphere
it's so possible to elevate
                                        one's mind beyond the conditions
         one struggles in a wealth of wait
                                                productively managing the interior, who
complains (this is worth forgetting) is
                                                   thrown in
             the circle -- stones are projected
                                                   venemously at the jolly roger

How it's going to talk
                                    one out of her covert
      operation, tag-to-tag
                                      survival
in the mesh of vicinities, bar code
                                           of
            beer bombs, a
                                   ball room, such
across that heat is
                                     africa, crust
                   of issues, she
                                        asks
and performs the marxist plug, in
                                            toto, samoleans
         are god, and the windows
                                              under it, show unto
deaths, fields of destructions, pax
                                              cassandra
             asks about the poem
                                          too overrun with humor

If the smoker takes one step back and observes
                                                        the shape of paint on squares
      barely able to perceive the emotional complex, for the
                                                              rigors of
this reticulous democracy, and the
                                            nerve net is glowing
            apprehensively at first but then continues
                                                          this growing
of the werk on the werk in the indelible cellars
                                                       of culture        
                  that would be a chapter
                                          one would want to review further, this
gridwork, pile-on, path through the
                                             forest -- paved out by yellow flares,
      pylons, incredibly undeterred
                                             by fear, insecurity, love, loathing hate
a cartographer's wet dream, who has
                                               just returned from europe
            clutching, from the drama of organic life
                                                             the sense of civility, civic pride

Firsts and Lasts

[The following poems were based on the first and last lines on pages of an issue of Pom Pom, a magazine premised on reusing lines and poems from previous issues for new work. The page numbers refer to those from which the lines are taken -- I think the issue is online at their site. Anyway, they were rejected. They are trivial, indeed, and a bit college-humorish, but I'd always liked National Lampoon as a kid.]

GO NOW

You have been named Synonymous
So dance like a monkey.

[45, 48]

THE PROBLEM IS ALWAYS TIMING

Watching the farmers collect their wheat and not saying a word since last Christmas
I promise to sodomize her upon request while shoving the money of rich bastards in my ears.

[54, 51, 9]

POEM (for Carol Mirakove)

For my sister Carol
Lying.

[36, 37]

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

Ended
During a movie.

[25]

JUST LIKE YOU SAID, KEVIN

Things were better in 1603.
Those of us who slept with Racine couldn’t poke a lick of French and were sure better lippers for it.

[60, 38, 46]

A LITTLE GREEN MARTIAN

To grease the wheels of steel
He made some joke about how A Streetcar Named Desire was written about him.

[9, 47, 50]

AT THE EDGE OF WILDERNESS

Sean’s boobs.
What would you do, just lay there and let it happen?

[54, 17, 55]

COSMIC SNIGGLY

Are you sometimes completely unable to enter the spirit of things?
I promise to sodomize her upon request while shoving the money of rich bastards in my ears.

[37, 59, 9]

TU FU A.K.A. TOMMY PUSS

Some poets are always jerking off.
Did you look for it
      with a lantern?

[52, 56, 59]

OF FIRE

Some mornings your hair is on
fire.
      My Jesus was Kathy Acker.

[57, 60]

Classic Snuff Pieces

[Here's a poem that recently appeared in the third issue of Pom Pom. I revised it today, it's a thousand times better, but I thank them for running the earlier version -- of course! Pom Pom is interesting -- it's premised on the idea that each new issue is mostly revisions of poems/lines from the previous issues -- you can download .pdfs of the first two issues on the site, and if you have any innovative ideas on how to rewrite/revise, then submit!]

Classic Snuff Pieces

Getting ready to have been
made to have felt
very awkward. Do you
        mind if I sit on your leg?
Despair, confusion,
all those things
express themselves without words. Well,
you know the miracle.
        To leave me
at home with my humanist musics
when I am humming, taking up themes
(the heavens pay attention to me)
                couldn’t
I have the money first? Then
dialogue? I want
        justice in the cards, in chance, but
only after lots of money.

                Matriarchal sunnuvabitch type.
And they enjoy it
and call me Bob.

*

                                Classic
Snuff Pieces of Japan.
        The first ones
to come up with a clear thought, yesss. Kind of
jazzed up for the end.

*

Sometimes, I don’t know
what I’m doing. I thought,
perhaps, that wasn’t her name
        because
it rhymed. But
the seasons are fevered.
        These days
                we call it
Australian Rules Summer: the grossest reveries, a
plague on both noses, eye
link
        black. Is anyone
playing as honestly as I?
Standing around in this
mesh of instincts
(but I wasn’t the first one to think of it).
        I would have been happy to have been
teased by you.
                                As it were.

largely unphysical

largely unphysical
questions remained
in the blond curtain

fluxions of cement
we've had enough with
and there, gesturing

with indrawn talons
fair, antiquated form
of farcery circumvented

rushing lingo intrudes
loneliness will make it cohere
a stand against vengeance

that's largely speculative
my ordered, ordered princes

Short Poem Ending with the Teeth of Jack Nicholson

i’m
“off”
words
i’m
on

*

seeking
help
for

(in
terrible
space)

suspended
by five
alarms

*

in

attention-
surplus
disorder

*

“bloatocracy”
is not a neologism

(it's a fad)

*

heeeere's geeoorgie!!!

Blogs, by Marianne Moore

[Just another stupid reflection on blogs, created for the Buffalo Poetics List which seems to be having a big toho bohu about blogs (again).]

            I too, dislike them: there are things that are important beyond all
                                                                                                this fiddle.
                   Reading them, however, with a perfect contempt for them,
                                                                                                one discovers that there is in
                         them after all, a place for the maudlin.
                   Minds that can't grasp an imaginary turd, findings
                        that make the eyes dilate, hair
                              on neglected parts of the body, these things
                                                      are important not because a

            blogger's high sounding "interpretation" can be put upon them,
                                                                                                but because they are
                   free. When they become so mundane as to become ad hominem
                         well, the same thing may be said for
                                    -- well, some of us, that we
                        "do not criticize what we
                              don't understand": the bat held upside down in quest of
                                                      some balls, the balls

            eating elephants, elephants putsching, a wild horse taking a
                        tireless wolf under a tree (now that's
                  unusual, yet the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
                        that takes a flea under a tree is a base-
                              ball fan, a statistician -- oops, I think I was blogging...
                  again)
                              -- nor is it valid to discriminate against
                                                      "business documents and

            school-books": all these "phenomena" are important (if secondary).
                                                                                                One must make
                  a distinction: when dragged into prominence by half-bloggers,
                        the result is not blogging, but "writing" -- nor till
                  the bloggers among us, "hyperventilators of
                              criticism," above insolence and triviality and
                                                      a loyal fan base, can

            present for public indigestion, revolutionary values with
                        real poets in them, shall we have
                  um, them. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
                        the raw material of blogs in all their obtuse, necrophiliac,
                                                                                                pretentious
                              grace, and that which is on the other hand
                        genuine, then you are interested in blogging.
                                                      I suggest you try www.blogspot.com.

Skid 28

situation standby
as the sump moans
i’ve got
myself
in my pocket
though hit “resend”
4573 times
just to get settled
just to get convinced
(having
one
of those "café bustello moments"

that solidifies opinions
that tests piss)
largely occluded
visions of lake scenery
matters of personal import, such as
shoulder blades
hanging there like a calder
(we relax
into blue eyes, into
learning
leaning into the wheel
when national motivation is winnowing, as

oprah’s
geiger
counter
clicks, as the cat…)
the latex concoctions of “the stylist”
as he ribbons by
the wharves
the fraught air of the controversialist
blooming in seven boroughs
toss up palpable, if impressionist, digits
in time,
the dust of satisfactory explosions

Two poems from my underwear drawer

Document 1

Is this what it’s like to sleep
in a pile of corpses?
(Poetry is an afterthought.)
I woke up because my dentures were dirty
and all the thinking was like 1975.
She was there. So was she.
And she was there. We called her Gullible Madness.

The pose of the “pulse in Soho”
makes my hair follicles breathe
but that’s before I was disabused
of the inevitability
(houses made of Saran Wrap)
of the inevitability of death.
I can’t say I feel much better now.

When they had that hinge joint installed in the putter
I was the star of a TV series
that took place in Cleveland, but was secretly filmed
in Toronto – why’d they do that?
As the days grow longer, I become an emphatic 7.

Bohemian Birdsong

A little melancholy, a little tragedy, a little Zoloft
adds to a man’s character.
Here are the poems of Frank Lima
rewritten for you, since I can’t afford his book, Inventory (selected poems).
A little heart cutting strings
means that your cosmopolitan tourette’s hasn’t entirely alienated you
from those who might love
you. It’s like a famous rapper’s style
that’s somehow mellowed in the plastic wrap, but is good snuggling music.
I just cooked three different dishes of the “white trash”
variety, like Mom used to make.
I’ll bring them to work, I’ll mix them all up, I’ll be richly contented.

Skid 27

typing dynamic
instructions to someone
just over
hearing when
plucky charm
and redolent odor
keep it alive
(aforementioned color)
we'd tap out
two notes then one
until she verified
she

remembered
coasts of seville
came here to live with
knocker
of tennis ball
with schedules
because of these ideas
on marble surfaces
bless you
counselor
ego teapot
(we have two of them

swimming now
grown
toothless and wise
vegetables in fact
will talk it over)
on law chests
animated
calling it right
"no bleeding on the
yellow sweating"
(the wit)
starts or hedges

Skid 26

don’t got no chalk
sleeping on the lamb, bringing
sting cotton
to palermo, first time
they snug and yet welted
that way
breeze nozzled odors
let’s you down on turf
like soh monkeys
huddled in sayonaraland, listen
to the yurts outside
the hotel, listen to her breathe

people nap and people sleep
i think it’s the same thing
mixing dugouts with skyscrapers
i think it’s the same thing
telling pies to the television pews
i think it’s the same thing
wondering what’s up with dirigibles
i think it’s the same thing
people call and then umpires call
i think it’s the same thing
the “shaggy set” and the “grunge set”
i think it’s the same thing

nothing much matters, deezo
skipping on rusty toe thimbles
preaching development arrest
to the perverse, shiny mortals
let the tie down the crinoline down
blue in the face at birth, and red
in the face much later, burping birth
over a shoulder of oiled carpal tunnel
down meredith street in naive ass park
it’s a type of calorie they don’t have just elsewhere
blending in finally, not feeling the mark, and belching
sun shitting over rose-colored, suggestive arbors

Skid 25

marking things on clipboards
are the kids
vague, i am, suspicious
choreographers lack moxie
the splint of
dawn seriously undermines it
a certain kitsch obtains
token pastures
derange the three windows
i'm above that
screaming in hoop skirts
marking things on old clipboards

what to do about the failed
go right attitude now
punctual as a placebo
(i was going to say placenta) why
abbreviations
are the mannerism of today
instead of writing, graffito
and shorter
less encrypted goodbyes
(who cares about rituals of mourning)
words attain their cots
with a prescient, de rigeur modesty

problems with design
will lead the peasant dictator
to alternate plans
submitted by spam junkies
"mothers to the neighborhood"
they have "fabulism first"
tattooed to their lapels
other distractions include translucent hands
like ladies' hands
they bust each other up about this
is the previous trope any less
maverick, after all i've said, ripe with analysis?

Skid 24

are you protesting
social glue
blown out of social air
across the river
the avuncular complex
gleams
gelatin smiles
portentous, "balancing act"
roosevelt island floats
in pursed lips
as bees' squares
are marked by dashes, columns

as you out
not of
this line
drop into bathos
alarm
are you
speed in diameter
to
hear resist
pleading case
a
boat, and albatross

fa la la, emotional compass
devolved (class
hatred)
goat-bearded boys slide across
monosyllables vetted
by paul virilio
with (university) wit they're
wheeling overhead
"vengeance belongs to god
i'm just here to play tennis" (serena
williams)
but can't deliver us from safety

Skid 23

blue citizens conform
to green animal wishes
above yellow flutes
roll the red, anonymous pastures
of the chartreuse-tinted sky
we drink black fire
from it, lavender smoke
emanating from the pink tails
on the violet
cyclone fish, their beige eyes
inspired by visions of paisley intestines
filled with puffy, lithe cucumbers

in argentina, where they smoke
apple juice by the bushel
in porcelain cars
imported through a straw urethra
from the dominant superpower (vietnam)
listening to haitian speeches
by danish war criminals
on the combo air conditioner/radio
made of refurbished, petrified elephant dung
laughing in hoarse tones
at the slips of cartesian grammar
that erupt from the photogenic, sad doctoral student

a geographer of gertrude stein
awash in maps of orcs
piecing together middle english vocables
from neck-operated chimps
lumped in grant’s tomb
they had been baked while he was suffering
just prior to being born
in a rush of lascivious paranoia
other commentators on stein think this wasn’t important
neither lust nor sleep frenzy impacted
the role furry, breast-eating edibles played
on the writing of "in youth is pleasure," or of “hotel lautreamont”

Skid 22

in the beginning
stranger types
would congress here
vellum and gold
turgid remarks
were easy glory
they couldn’t spell
but foundational lies
barely suffered
marking a trend
in coterie dynamics
all that stops in the

much softer focus
afforded by distance
precious connects
were broadened fitfully
into outer boroughs
of the city
fated for dimmer lines
but charisma
flowed like cheap wine
the argots flowed
to the stadium planners
like helicopters, or doves

through a tube sock
or biopic or epic
that mated free sense
to wealthy barons
weather devolved
into the groping of clouds
but not in the open
hanging gardens
of kodachrome stock
ventures forgotten
but enticed to remembrance
by spiced cow hearts

Skid 21

very like its ignorance
kid torched the air
passable semblance of rhyme
alike to fury
canticle abstractness
for a millennium of kicks
alice relax
able but unwilling
thrush, massachusetts farmhouses
as loops or rolls
gravity defends
with a protestant pride

you'd want to commit
for the sake of sanguinity
obvious
to the feral ransacker
there was a book behind it
degrading support
green levels split for two reds
in michael's vestpocket
peach kills
greek orthodox news
delight in the seasons
packaged for nome export

ullulate nether equanimity
satellite dishes
on the sprawling gorse
six toes was not an animal
akin to lichen
talentless, denuded of commitment
being beige and fog
fishwifing
on the slivers of big screen
touching down in dry gulch
paused
to fund medium-sized glands

Poem Formerly Known as "Terrorism"

[Here's one that came out in a little chapbook in Canada. Most of you in the US haven't seen it.]

The feng shui was glistening.
(This helps me to avoid the air of polemic.)
I am like you
At ten.
Might that be your swimming?
Medically, in a division game
(“Squid” revealed to be floating cheese)
A low-res boyfriend
(He talked about them like they were hotrods)
Two
In a decade
Who could scan the headlines, but who could say
Who’d laugh.
Go rent a video on it.

“Capture”
The track ball.
You are gorgeous
In information silence.
We are in a “wracked” dominion.
(I trust
The slow writer.)

“Green tortoise-shell glasses” is not an adequate response.

“Islamabad” is not an adequate response.

So that      I could have a switch
In blue motion.
Visitors: a talcum blonde, Jihad versus
McWorld
(To relate to the anecdote:
It is just struggling to find a form
To our kids.)
So I motion:
The Pentagon, symbol of our erotic hope.

How much are we really paying attention to ourselves?

In quiet times, like these
Censored apparitions
(Our fog there)
I’m hurt like Rocky
(Time to replace something
In 1939). Is it my gallant?
In 1939.
There she is      doing that Munch thing again.
Sad, anemic eyes
Coming to take the piss      out of you.

“Spontaneous creation”
Their own sort
Of sound poetry.
(You wasting            you time.)
Anyone who has ear glasses
Amid Third World Revolution
Renewals.
His famous Mom.
(These weren’t opposites            somewhere.)
Mary had a jab.
Like hell you didn’t know.

IwyuriuCu ‘0 oiu woiuC uaf wX oide l’Tu
Ewyuwau rdnn       Cutud.u oide
Lwuyb nuo yu euu
DX t’aLo ln’h rdoi ou
EdTa’ne
‘
Sdob ‘af ‘nouC oiu yue’Tu do twao’dauec
When does the world open up and become true?

This functioning       as a numchuck
Pug pouring filth
(Ping chocolate)
Rendezvous      of course.
Maine: I heard it myself, now thinking this.
Pedantic.
Showering with all his glee
(“Last call for the Devonshire armpit!”)
On the grounds of
Tables.
Repopulated Paris
(“They won’t understand this.”)
Catholic dances.

Paris, henceforth, will want to be repopulated.

Versus the hurricane.

A wasted effort            you have said nothing.
Jack Nicholson
Relaxes
In disco tempo
Thursday morning
Begins to create live sets.
From the ego-sphinx, Matrix-like, you jump.

Hanging.

All the computers whisper: acqui, acqui.
They didn’t hand out
Spinach.
(I’m going to remind them.)
Twelve easy precipices
Going out
Cold solids      (we’re stuck with his company
Now).
(Talk whizzes by like hands
Pushing the computer.)
I fresh toothen up      bucky balls      graffiti on “lunge.”

– The Blue Upset.
– Upset in Blue.
– A deep and fascinating
Distrust
Section in Synthetic Scots.
And after that: the shopping.

One doesn’t “sense” a personality
A dial of Genet’s girls
The adult.
Conic section            avant-gardists
How many people
Live life at
Glibbest
(You said that
Benny Hill.)            Just the same
Field of glory.      Thighs of the apple tree.

Ritual
Natural expressions.
Wildcarpets.            (Novel or criticism
Same thing.)
Beneath the razor.
Beneath your hands.
69

Twenty seconds later:
Isolated mountain
Singing fits
A noticeable humor in the climate
Off the roof
In which your loves circulate
Greek.
Everything is useful!
Against this genius!
I met her at the United Artists      Theater on Broadway

People with nice teeth being perfectly superficial

In “patois”

To save money.

Skid 20

all that class
invested in a shrimp recipe
plastic drink stirrers
headed by marine
figurines
in a karoake bar
prime-timed by zagat's
hurts to know
what every vice tailor knows
winter's five o'clock
spreads word of the sanctions
against illiterate pleasure

day one
storm
"it was beautiful"
(i'm pulling this from a nick
drake tune, but
it sounds eerie, here)
the endless, colored waste
"now we rise,
we are everywhere"
as parachutes descend
griot radios tuned
to pensive cell phone users

and refried
uncle ben's
slam into the sea
"the only person left
on the island
was me" (devendra
banhart)
shoreside born like a gulf
in the flue of a house
bearded with sod in farting new
jersey, the force
of a new, god-like activity

Skid 19

i’m in
a russia
all
thongs considered
but bloom
instead
in
face of
dangerfield
and cantonese
keds
(these are

fumes
of my flavanoid
things)
songs of
viral
torques
allow through
polygamous
pistil
forced
punt exposures
(the moose so

message
loose
but jogging)
"us
military spams
iraq"
the creeps
and gobblers
horrorshop
bibles
nettled
in frisked paucity

Skid 18

they liked the lower east
paragraphs
spotted myths
of cabs on dope roles
we will insist
before tv
casts the whole era
rebuilding my entry
in black jeans
privates ransacked
for colors of suspicion
like a legendary rock and roll queen

who happens to fable
plans to reflect
what matters is decency
of course, in church
it’s math
balance one serial
with enlightenment rhetoric
and murmur stop
theory of sun blemishes
packaged
for disposal at first sign
of the paradigm’s fucked lucidity

for instance, wystan hugh auden
‘s platonic pomp
lysergic reactions
in doilies
endeavored to protest what
to the curatorial ear
reeked of
aggrandizing mischief
threw several of these parties
standard quarters
pandered to the voyeurs
as they do now, on survivor islands

Skid 17

is a word
primed for lecture
phallus
roman complex
(hence) replication
anon
allure through
network
with dog names
names have dogs
and dogs have names, so
do

i
in a recent post
pithy candy
lusts of
fantasy braids
“pearls that were”
long poem
long poem
long poem
long poem
four of them
endeavored in rows

(with obligatory
caesura)
(bourdieu)
a
lyre seethes
taxis purse it
(percy bysse)
bisquick retort
aches
“keep the dog far
that's friend”
but thwarts the pace

Skid 16

i'm a korean
can't you see that i'm a korean?
i'm a korean
walrus
can't you see that i'm a korean walrus?
can't you see that i'm ambling in your shade
thoughtfully reciting
hawthorne
to the
japanese
scottish terriers
and the swedish igneous rocks?

take me to your hungarian hospitals
right there on the borders of westchester and the bronx!
plug me up with serbian gauze
and clean my teeth with catalonian floss,
i'm ready!
i'll eat somalian meatballs provided they can find some
here in ronkonkama, new canada
standing beside the burundian bruce springsteen impersonator
and the little irish guy who thinks he's m jackson
in the union square station (in ny)
oh make me your heterosexual israeli walt whitman!
oh promote my ideas, like a paraplegic, lichtensteinian karl marx,

please!
and when the troubles are over
there will be pieces of water
hanging from my scandinavian beard
clouding my danish lorgnette
tasting of english wine
just squeezed from the iron curtain
(we’ll have the colombian
multimedia dehumidifier to thank for that)
though i'm not sure our latin
kabul university-educated tour guide
"vergil" is quite getting the american accent

Skid 15

we've avoided the essay
struggle does come
with the homology of lunch
and weekend ethics
purple sky barely breaks
through ceiling
she pauses before the screen
while deciding
her confusion is too total
randomness too alive
for a nation in whiplash theater
of plugged-in teenagers

the shoreline overloaded
with swans with signs
pasted to lapels
hovering above the commas
largesse could be a wind
too, verbally abused
with insensitive rejoinders
to fragrant, parisian attitudes
making chalk of bones
last one rotten is a perfect egg
my wincing uncle said
before shattering the wicker chair

standing on empty
proposals for the new school
built of methane gas
imported soft drinks, imported
were never quite remembered
footfalls in the carpeted hallway
untrusted and remiss
gatherings in public forests
punctuated by illiterate sobs
pulsing from big cities
we’ll never get there anyway, this way
who last folded this damn thing?

Skid 14

nothing
(i'm on a staple diet)
nothing is
(can't be blamed)
erosion
(all the cuticle colors
blent) 2.3 milliseconds
tenure-track pluto mooned
universe
gets them
quicker
national anthem

in a single 90-minute take
from a handy cam
on david letterman's forehead
relax
cell phones off
deviating from the script
alive
not surviving
on the weakening antarctic shelf
with a cast of
several thousand emperor brand penguins
as if febrile lepidopterists

leapt
(i'm on board)
curious, frank
as carbon dating
to frederick the great
(prior to the simoom forecast)
cough
(luke sanity)
cough again
curious, warm fixtures
"dark swans of trespass"
on a secular, avoided landscape

Skid 13

as elevator lips leaves
there are cuts in the world
can't say i'm troubled
we've got lent to contend with
the strange dais disappearing
other governors' budgets
protective myths
like the one about the lavender day camp
there, once we've attached the bunjee chord
to the cow's left ear
the farming community will vote labor
curses, shouts in the hallway

rouse him from a taiwanese dream
that of the rooster and the stone wall
belittling little people
ha ha try the fallen apples
dark coffee perks
stained glass window perks for the catholics
draw the mumfords to seattle
where they uninstall windows 95
from their pet tarantula
which proceeds to write a serial novel
based on the travails of the norwegian luge team
famous for their chocolates and widows

and limitless sex appeal
that doesn't translate well
into this language of stars and rabies
julianne moore played the heiress
oscar winner ralph fiennes played elevator lips
the camera couldn't find
the actor playing the cloud of dust
in the opening scenes of the man who fell to earth
too bad, that story is quite interesting
sweet words pass from mantis hips
in the art school just north of noam chomsky's hometown
of international falls, minnesota, blithely

Skid 12

who cares what buddha said
the boredoms rock
all the japanese are like that
they burp
into purple cellophane
to preserve carbon dioxide
no wonder john zorn brought over
yamatsuka
to prop up naked city
the city was nakeder for it
the syntax
a "vendetta fringe," benson said

and agrees
i can barely think
moth balls in the head
wings in the sink
stereo now
shades of telemachus
no, shades of "crimson and clover"
starring malcolm mcdowell
as claudius
rimbaud archangel
filmed by gus van sant
no, filmed by guy madden, yes

it's 12:19
so i go get toilet trained
with the new "whipple method"
it takes twenty years
of therapy
that's all covered
movement pretty fucking slow
like digital premise
the japanese are pragmatic
wear stereo pampers and fred flintstone bones
in the nose
record the album

Skid 11

clips o'er the impossible
boddhisattva embryo
white collar toyotas
she infjected plastic soy rolls
icelandic bandwago band
clunk ship hospitial towels
david de gascoyne's
fissures ulton's loolly brut
roamntic new ordure
flanks by hemo-roman salutes
frutes de la rune'z ump
an ultra-gash xxxmas (shit)

to compliment
the nude vgrant is that a word?
takne ny skyline blown
life but left my lover out
in the urn, it rained
bakings made'v lover's rump
luffter o'er plsh spirits
hegels marupsiial imposslbe
lint in kanoodie's drano closet
argenot's film flam noir
with riddms frm bion byron
tum tums from the argot's cursh

it's almost smairt
it's olma spukking
diplomitisch wints're east
attahk ov usa+ soldered 'nsisters
to hlum mammers 2s t' fart
uvver dems unter dems
plissing sidreal's costco chirtz
mp3s jpgs canon't fodder
links r mumpless t-tching oddrs
hughe macridmia's hlaws
spolish sedmints wince blau wince
whtiman cinna (fakkir) fairt ni mair!

Skid 10

i've had letters
stick to chalk
we require it
pen kneads a diplomat
pronouncing the "e"s
with a gimlet eye
balancing a plug
maneuvers her charms
into film
letters stick to chalk
malarie gets depressive
but high marks for candor

to have come
all the way here
and be addressed
cowardly
never looked straight at
"subversive switzerland"
was the new bestseller
but purple balls
was an international trend
cheap digital cameras
you swing from the hips
(i don't believe i've taken my pills

this morning
hence the visionary
interlude) a prelude
to the lines about
ancient lots
korean mums
she coughs her phonemes
to stringent beats
flights to canada
ricochet to alaska
yes, give them a population
of quarrelsome poets

Skid 9

easy as some pies
relate to the retaining wall
correct
spies in mogadishu
excess
this to do with your bladder
wandering
through fortress cities
books on
the force of the code
everybody said you were beautiful
but failed to mean it

purple spot
on the sawtooth
shark in the hologram
(pensive incisions)
quickly
fear upbraids
but that's before latinate
little atlas
crime festers in piazzas
go there anyway
walking genet
on a diamond leash

as if
featured codas
clans
fall on the vorpal sword
everybody said it was beautiful
beginning to write it
storm
outrageous
colors too progressive
add "cocktail"
to the end of it, soon
you have ageless debauch

Skid 8

this bennie goodmean toon
piercing my ear
(on hold with hip
waiting for a shortly advocate)
advances me three minutes
into dotage
with a polystyrene bathing cap
and other fall fashions right
out of "grey
gardens"
i'm being thanked now for holding
but not for the fateful edits

that "blend together your lives and mine," no
"i wire up your fingers
and chase you right out of
my bra" i think
that's natalie merchant at the other
end (hardly my advocate
but she's been known to speak up for the whole
african continent
and that's just through her pretty, multitasking press agent)
i forgot to do anything interesting on new year's
eve, for thrice in my life, except of
course, read phil rizzuto’s poetry aloud with an aristocratic, "python-esque"

lisp,
reconfigure the supreme court
to supply me with a lifetime’s cold soda, pizza, etc.
maybe a girlfriend, etc.
i've always wanted to see my face on mt. rushmore, etc.
use fewer internal rhymes, etc.
we're getting nowhere, but with you
it's ok
because "you" in this case is my favorite album
in 1981, paradise theater by styx
"tonight's the night we make listerine"
and though you're not my advocate, you sound like you really care

Skid 7

calender-
wise
pull men
from shoulders
and
sell
market prices
in blood
languishing
"natural
rights"
in my confusion

the paper reads to me like a fog
drifting over a plain
repellent with detail (they
say
as if masterminding a tsunami
were less savage than
dying)
my clothes cut the kenneth cole way
such that seduction
parts like
the red sea hypnotized subway crowds
one of those digital "matrix-like" moments that

makes one feel
bourgeois
(bloomberg
should tax them
too,
should tax me
for writing these poems that
aren't so difficult
to read
but put a family through grad school
with three left-wing tenure track positions
substantially filled

Skid 6

an arrow
your teeth
gulls
magic formulas
(california)
philip glass music
edith bunker
she sad
we cope
then there is
another pink distress
in the crouton

"gone to crouton"
humming
a big city
of scars
nothing to loathe
about it, now
crawling on glass
but the feudal norms
of life
pull up, smoke
lambast government
though attentively persist

(you're
here
now
remembering
whereas
yesterday
no taxed language)
henry
kissinger (shea
stadium)
buy new york
before chile erupts

Skid 5

like a goat to
water, or
a field to pasture
be i a moisture
blue as
puke, mellow
as coke,
sweet as listerine
in church
ruining the code,
soft and tasty as a centuries' old
leather

shoe
that's enough
we keep parking the car in greenland
claiming to be in oregon for
the first time
all the great ideas having been started
in 1922, but never
completed (except by the mormons,
the five-finger typists, the screen actors' guild, and the enviable
japanese)
jack nicholson's new film kind of sucks, don't see it
unless you see it with your sister, and it's the last time you've seen her

for several
years
which is, of course, special
do it
do
and eat your shoe
herzog, hero
to several hundred bearded nyu film school nerds
who couldn't tell a
rimbaud
from a leonardo di caprio, oh
or understood the benefits of the mineola track star model (see below), nor do

Skid 4

utter lack of
memory
simplicity
herbert comes out of the piano
i call my stereo
on sunday
when william carlos williams'
shoes fit his two left feet
and he thought about that problem all day
long (pound)
declining to write
for fear of getting lost in abstraction

or
pop
like the sound of
toast
or
john belushi's
egg zit (animal house)
how
wonderful the 21st century can
be,
an anorexia
becoming the formal eating habit in the

west
wing
it's so fashionable to be upset
it's difficult to miss
the mark
stand soiled in the optimism (disney)
i missed out on dancing
with jenelle last night
for fear of my shoes falling
off
a poet with foresight
optimizing his mind for disco

Skid 3

favorite remarks
recorded in
the soup
maintaining speech
as a measure
of reality, beside which
all our poems
don't mean much
well, that was
some attitude she pulled
returning her
values to the aether

a
trailer
park
milk heads
flame each other
in
blank
verse
there, the
"formal tradition"
"american" emotions don't cling
to

well,
according to one r
silliman
in a blog entry
better left misread
than
forgotten
when dylan thomas erupts
into toads
of skin
the dionysian element
fakes several countries' ids

Skid 2

i guess it's
ok
i wouldn't have it
any other
way
shaboygan
was nonsense
trope
no other tomorrow
could love
like a mother could love
his meaty

wall-eyed face
laundromats
customs irregular
speech slurred
with a quarter
soapy from playing
in the half room
with children
twice his iq and half
his quotable age
vagrants of williamsburg
stumble with epileptic

charm
avoiding
old
sublimes
sun on
thumb of
scorsese's jesus
as he smokes
dust
it's ok, an italian
restaurant will still be named
after him

Skid(s) 1

[Silly thing I did today as I worked on starting a new blog which y'alls will hear about shortly.]

more than this
once upon a blister
in gimme slacks
softer than a pulse
business
to rent
unconscious
of love
humming, and then
we get arrested
we count the beats
lamenting that we hear

*

scattereye O!
lungshot O!
pleasant pheasant O!
chinese student O!
in my
blooms
playing with legos
making knee socks for toads
O shylock!
O shenandoah!
O hebrew muffins!
O ghosts of herman melville's ghost!

*

a nullity avoids
false prospects
arbors of deceit
this orangina farm
lisps
hollywood prospects
cameron blowing irish
mahoneyism
as we fake cash
and day's elation
pregnant, floats a solitude
past the hokey office

I HAD THAT IDEA

[Here's the kind of poem you write when you are sitting at your desk at work, thinking about war, trying to be a good Situationist but ending up somewhere between wistful magical realism and dreaming if dim Guadelahara. Or maybe Frank O'Hara, or Rimbaud in Harar. In any case, this poem is hereby dedicated to my blog, Bloggity Blog, who didn't appear to enjoy my previous Beefheartish offering.]

I had that idea, too.
Write the life but according
to principles not usually associated
with life, such as...

And shut off all
auto-correct features.

There is the sound of straining
from the other room. That was the one
vacated by the terrorists. They were brothers
from a little village in Italy. It is now
occupied by an opera singer
with chronic constipation.

Same thing. Taking the pleasure
out of your work. I had serious reservations
about my own writing before I started
this. This talking.

Sometimes it is just
the hands hanging from twin flagpoles
emanating from my breasts. I could shine them,
wax them, spit on them, but they
don’t write,
just hold out for the rest of the day
until I couldn’t brag of them any
longer – usually by mid-afternoon, say 3 pm.
I’d drink more coffee then, check my emails,
play some on-line Yahoo! games, like backgammon.
My flagpoles not buckling in the wind.

My flags empty of wind.
My hands dangling there like flags.

UNCOMMENT

[I haven't been at my work desk all weekend, and haven't had anything obviously significant to post, and yet in an effort to maintain a line of communication... a poem I've been working on that might be of interest to those of you who have ever curated a reading series. I actually had a great time introducing Bruce Andrews and Drew Milne this weekend, but this piece -- which was started more than a year ago -- seems to have found some new relevance now that I'm back in the driver seat again.]

UNCOMMENT

Apollinaire,
argue with,
art binary breakdown
— but enough to derail,
— but I’m in a rush.

Chance,
come into play,
comes out of his/her mouth,
concentration on the words on the table.

Consider my very private
constant movement,
Debord —
I am the system,
I can’t say
I am not,
if only slightly.

I walk into a room.
I would do it in improvised locations.
I’ll spare the examples.
I’ve wanted to create a paragraph
walking a lobster,
walking into a room.
It’s not that I’m uncomfortable
meeting people
perhaps at odd moments of the month and week,
perhaps on purpose.

Nuances
of the bureaucratic —
of written text into the real-time
"on schedule,"
one among many.
— Perhaps "dictator" is better?
— Perhaps, a series of paragraphs?

The bodily/abstract (
The public/private (
The troubles,
The written stuff
— there is a page of wasted prose.
There is no exact.

Well,
what else happens at a reading?
When the time seems right (

You become the “boy,” and those who have nurtured private opinions of your essential servility suddenly come forth with demands —
through thick or thin,
to be gazed at as a single artwork —
not to mention potentially transform thinking in fashions that writing itself could not alone do —
they are just demands —
they are mostly petty,
(think of Bourdieu)
which is to say that the most loyal curators will never be taken too seriously as poets.

A “gentleman,” but really a slave) —
a certain looseness,
as did the behavior of Rimbaud,
as he/she does,
a poet’s actions in public (
a series hanging in space at the same time.

Can one say “being” of the work that you have produced,
— determined warrior-poet who has attempted to inflict on me the natural aspect of the superiority of his views but who has not
become part of the record? —
becomes animated for me?
And when they have just produced some tremendous work that I am sure will change everything,
even organizing —
even the use of proper names —
ever so slightly —
for instance,
for the possible in what,
for what —
for whom decisions have a sort of finality —
I somehow think this is all meaningful.

I think it is discussing this particular strand of my behavior
— I try to shave at least in the week prior to the reading —
— I have just completed a two-month run as the “curator” —
— even approached mastery of the social rules such that such a challenge could even be humored past the first move,
in fact.

And if it weren’t so much work —
and only with poets I am most excited about,
and quite alone
— and so, for that reason I will “curate” only infrequently.

Promises:
quasi-elitist self-training as a poet
— setting the parameters,
since it is then,
so much more revealing in my writing,
syntax even —
talker —
that a particular aspect of poetry
that begin with this sentence
that is lacking in the creation of a “schedule”
— not to mention my own social distractions
of cultural capital,
will be my expression of revolutionary will,
writer,
yes.

All of the vicissitudes (
and I promised to myself that spontaneity,
accidentally or purposely ignore,
actually enjoy the microphone,
(inchoate as it seems)
including reviewer —
interpretation —
issues of mutual respect —
— it is the French who have most theorized how the agent in the field
invariably makes an impression on Nerval’s works (
Playing in a super-literary fashion invariably changes not only what has been written

but the trap of filling a role —
—

But then I am reminded that this form of politics smacks.
But what is to be written?
by chance (
etc.

These run up against these more fluid inclinations of mine,
(this is a key word here)
this visibility is good —
though I have sought to master it by pulling some of the strings —
— that you take orders,
— that you are perfectly polite (
the “iron hot,” if that doesn’t sound ridiculous.

And I would have thought I’d have gone out of my way to avoid the “public” as much as possible,
and though I have no terribly urgent thoughts on the matter,
how many idiotic challenges have I faced from a headstrong
I am not just in the system.
I am political just when I said that being political is the natural next step past being an aesthete.
?
In which I can most suitably begin a sentence:
— Three-dimensional world are often thwarted by a haughty attitude toward the rules themselves...

To read in private —
whom I might chance to meet?

— more so now than in the headier days of life/
— that which one is intended.

That you behave in fashions that suit your role?
These opportunities for continuing the discourse,
(why can’t I spell that? —
agreed-upon term for this role in the poetry community,
— but it doesn’t have the prestige of that figure in the visual arts.
— But it somehow becomes a determinant in the reception.

Calling All Aesthetic Philosophers

Here's a poem I wrote in the following manner (or something like this -- it was actually several months ago, so some of the following details may be incorrect):

1) I took the entirely of Kenneth Goldsmith's book called Soliloquy -- it can be found at ubu.com -- and put it into Word. Goldsmith's book was written by recording everything that he said for an entire week and transcribing it. He originally presented it in a gallery context in NY -- the walls were printed with the entire text -- at which point he lost many friends quite quickly.

2) I ran the Word "auto-summarizer" on the text, which reduced the text to its most "important" elements. In basic AI, this means that the program picked up on the phrases repeated the most and preserved them. I had done this with Kenny's text earlier, and it produced a string of "yeah, yeah, uh huh, yeah..." etc., because after all most of what we say is a bunch of grunt words like this.

3) I ran the resulting text through an online translation program. It was translated into French, then from French into German, then from German into Italian, and from Italian back into English. Each language left its mark on the text, though in the end I was left with pretty much English.

4) I broke the poem into lines, stanzas, and even section breaks. I attended to an "ambient" aesthetics, knowing that for the most part I would not be presenting the most high voltage literary experience but that periodically an eruption would occur, and I had to frame and accentuate it. I didn't change a word.

So, the question is, is this "just language poetry" or is it at the service of some new idea we've been chucking around called "digital poetics"? Your opinions on this question are requested, and matter. (I'm serious -- I want to know whether it's worthy of appearing in my next book or does it end up as one of those projects lost to cyberia...)

BUOA NIGHT OF CHERYL

I. Page of right.

Page of right? Page of
right. Sink. Page of right? Paris.

Page of right.
Sink.
Cheryl. Enough. Uh,

completely with the scheisse.
Page of right? Huh?

Sink. Sink of the sink. It
that it goes to
that one to
think
in order to go
that it, uh, case in sleep? Cheryl

thanks.
Remembered?
Little
a small Juste.

Cheryl. It disturbs appreciate
an interesting type. If we are it
situates to you in
the city center. Sink. Sink.
Over, uh, it is the inner
part, that it
is small yakking. The famous Hebrew, uh...

In great part.
Huh.
Man of the OH
—I appreciate this type.

Thankses.
Uh, for four. Cheryl.

This type is
large. This type
is completely large.

I realize like uh, I know them.
They are of right. Remembered? Cheryl?
I, uh, has uh
the new facts and
bagel. Huh
d ‘uh. They are Moscow

to go too much towards the bottom.

I will feed
myself.
Thankses. Saying this Cher
that at all I have read this book.

They
read five books to you
that they will not never
read. Ampere-hour, I will
read it. Thankses. Page of right.

II. A Lot

A lot in all the
case, uh, knows
them. Uh,
not. Page of right.
People not law.

People not law.

III. 6000 we spend.

Bruce. HE
Bruce, highly. Sink.
Uh, has happened
the night. Uh, calmly
for an other
artist. Cheryl. Cheryl.
Little heel of Marantz little heel,
that it is firm

in more with the work group.

Huh?

Cheryl.

Uh, appreciate periods.
Which thing?
Hello
standard. They are remembered
of Cheryl,
right of the heel? I
have seen Tom, page of
right of the right page.
Sink of the sink of the sink.

Heels of Droite?
Sink.

Us they are not any are here are not every
multiculturalism possible
here of the acknowledgment
of the delivery to the
right. They have lacked in
great part, uh, begun from
the art that yesterday
evening. We speak... Thankses. Sink.

Bruce Andrew.
It will not happen.

Page
of right. Sink.

Page of right.
Marjorie.

Marjorie has said that gone to that one,
that gone equally in a such way.
A beautiful type. Substance de Nizza
di Nizza, huh? Sink. Sink. Sink of the sink of the sink.

Page of right. Corrected, that tomorrow you will
see. Sink.
Sink. They are of right. HE.
Sad type.

I will explain the luppolo to you.

Ampareheure, thankses. Huh d‘
uh. Cheryl.
They are modification to continue.

It is good Uh like ewww
along, how much
time, andante to
you? The approval so as
to the uh, it has
them leaves sees you. Hmmmm.

They are way to go to these dogs. How much time to go it?

IV. Well-being of the dogs.

A small uniform water?
Interesting HE,
ice-skates, man. Thankses. Sink.

Therefore if it even small track necessity
to these dogs
a serious way. Sink.
Neapolitanisch, enough.

The EC, that mine
comes from the bet. It bet.

Girl of the ** of temporizzazione of ** of it
the girl of the ** of temporizzazione of ** of the

mine of it the mine of
the bet of it mine of the
bet of it mine. Paris. Paris
Equal
De OF it mine. Sink. Sink.
Types of it mine of the types of it mine.

Poor girl, page of
right? Huh d ‘uh.
Digitare from Nizza? Right

of the Vcr. de Nizza?
It
my
sink of bet. Sink. Pleasant graceful, huh?

H»E Cheryl

I ‘ sig.

C ‘ my bets.
Paris. Paris.

Page of right. Here the
ampareheure, cause is a
Juste here.
Uh, like ‘ acces of the
tanks of coloring? Sink. In great part. Sink? Uh

task that is...

Job...

Page of right. Page of right. Page of right.

Huh. Huh d ‘ Uh.

To spray outside, why taken to sure not not even one hour you

and, to the uh and, uh, in order to

learn the line of the HTML. The right page

not not good it. Page of right? Ouais of ouais of ouais of Ouais, huh of uh. Huh d ‘ Uh. Huh d ‘ Uh. Huh d ‘ Uh. Huh d ‘ Uh. Huh d ‘ Uh. Huh d ‘ Uh. Page of right. Page of right. Sink? I will make that one.

If I work, I become paid.

H». Muff from the other substance. Sink. Page of right. Here the man fills
up them. To feel itself. Ampere-hour, page of right, Cheryl. Page of right.
Huh? Cheryl?

Buoa night of Cheryl.