MESSAGE HOME
I won't be able to write from the grave
bread, butter, so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed
and the short northern nights.
afterfeathering obverse
insectivorous pusher–
We’re crepidona–
wholemeal halfwits in the bunker silo’s
frontal sinus palate polojama
or else
jumpsuit, yet
the sighting mirror
centerspan
clogs the thongs pumps welding
the refueling probe’s washing
counterweight to the cliff’s
pushbutton balaclava
fall up, orange in the grapeleaf, upper in the
lateral lobe
*
Flare Petals
plack the part
soap song & divide the parish, caulked
the regulars at the bar
take
user-assistance escapades inching in the furiously significant maze
a
separate opposite not-meet missing & impy rethreshed
meanies & their operas, nice
to the soisante-somethings and bulb included like a boresome disaggregate
if if if
star-cluster stereotype
if if if & a plantinaradiant poke
Oren Gates
He’s a pepperspray all hairy
Dips of the filth bleat them, go
over-boink, like a lariat
or a test– they fill them, those
nut-brained beamers, & then
they run the light right out–
we’ve packed for a pleading, lean, lost
road
trip.
w/ Snoopy, & that bird.
*
“Junior, stop making that face at the chickens.”
I am not of muck
rather the made of
EXTRA-MOISTENS
a percentage’s neck monk
reimbursement constellation–
errant
the grave, ghost, je me tourne
le monsrte technologique
sur l’ange de la to-come
like
carrot scraps
in quiet accordians of vanguard transvaluation
the blue penguin speaks
the blue penguin
cuts up his little pink passport with a little pink boxcutter
he thinks you’re weird
you think:
the married overcoming of incompetent underbecoming
soothes the bio-mist
a substrata
and superstructed morse-like lemon amor fati proviso
pilled like love
pilled with love
Shadows Are Our Friend
To discover the rabbit/duck requires a certain amount of light.
A rabbit can duck, & does, in the presence of predatory birds,
into shadow/ This does not help the rabbit if the bird is an owl.
Do owls ever feel happy? My guess is no.
This might be about a short-term relationship I had.
This might be about a short-term relationship I had
Shortly after my son missed a curve at midnight
on a full moon. There is some reason to believe
he was trying to miss a deer.
Dividend of the Social Opt Out
ACID
Blackie was met at the subway
advertising
wished for pumice sunny flags
WE GO DOWN WE GO DOWN
“Giant Grouper” said, in cold spray net tank
GREENS deep at me
fade corridors
tapped the wrong uncle & spoke intimately
in foetal lift of potty stalagmites, resting
hair pillows edges of dead batteries
the leak
Growth Mustard
earth vanity error: drainage , settle
cigarette balls on umber pools
the corners left to never return. . .
“call soon, I was underground”
Dearest Reader
He painted the mountain over and over again
from his place in the cave, agape
at the light, its absence, the mantled
skull with blue-tinted hollows, wren-
like bird plucking berries from the fire
her hair alight and so on
lemon grass in cafe in clear glass.
Dearest reader there were trees
formed of wire, broad entryways
beneath balconies beneath spires
youthful head come to rest in meadow
beside bend in gravel road, still
body of milky liquid
her hair alight and so on
successive halls, flowered carpets and doors
or the photograph of nothing but pigeons
and grackles by the shadow of a fountain.
excerpt from Four Lectures
My program is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its inundation. To read it and in reading, order it to read itself. Not a doctrine, but a public notice.
The city, which even before Baudelaire had been a ready-made collage or cutup of history, constantly remaking itself-a work of art, founded on an anthill. And every art grows out of the same collective desire which informs and compels the idea and reality of a city (Latin colligere, to tie together.) A district, or a ghetto, is a segmentation, an alternative version which both resists and embodies in a different fashion, that is with an opposing ideology, the original model. Hence, dialect and civil strife are alternating codes of the same phenomenon: the city does not hold together. Language, which also binds together and extends, including as it isolates, is a city also.
In such a metropolitan of history, in which the city is literally the mother, the greatest art is painting, if only by the sheer weight of the temporal. Without a city and its structures there would be no painting. The only thing precedent to painting is caves-the Gilgamesh is not as old as Lascaux.
The Greeks had painted sculpture and from the start all cultures have painted their deities. Today we have painted cities, painted conveyances, painted apartments, painted roads, painted people, even painted food. Is it not time for painted poetry as well?
A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition, every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation, every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of the parts, necessary to express the world.
Even the words and way of language itself will suffer the consequent deformity and reformation. The color beneath, which has been covered over, will begin to show through later, when what overcame it is questioned and scraped on, if not away.
from For More Lectures
Farewell to Innsbruck I say. I say leave me loathesome night and I
might lay down awhile beside the babbling brook. Death is the absence
of cloud on glass. Breath is the original dope. Then it all starts to complicate
with the introduction of the breast. It was something. Mother’s milk was addictive.
The things she had. It killed the pain. I felt home. It was the land of the bull.
I wish I hadn’t travelled that canal. I didn’t want to leave there. Now look where I am,
worn, marred, unmarried and still warm. And warned continually of the peril of still
drinking born spirits that make the number days to count their milky calendar.
Develop some indifference to pain. Better self love than neglect. And we should fear
the native might in art’s bosom, while not forgetting dear Falstaff died for Agincourt.
Me, I’m from Overlook Court, Bellaire Ohio. You can still write me there while I
court the A before the B before the C before the D. And A is an arduous angel
in the Shakespearean morn, through which I walk enveloped in this cloak to ruminate
the coming siege and try the spirits of my jannisaries. Camped with nervous dread we become as though jealous of contesseration, then make a little touch/to harry in the night.
Unmatchable mastiffs the color of nutmeg inkly thought as hot as ginger berries.
Happier men than she hold their manhood cheap. Sadder women than he value honest sex.
Vivienne Walker takes a fellow where he lives, Earnest Hare for instance.
Cramps. Generation. A county with a migraine problem, unemployed, editing the sciatica.
Put some water on. Listen to the noise. Who could know what was in the crates
Brahms just chucked in the Rhine? Well, you could always guess like a scholar,
preparing for his autopsy. Publish and Perish, in the magazine Reputations.
Or better exercise. Cut some kindling, make some kin and put the author thing down
to authorship. The authorities are at the door, we’ve got the context turned up too loud.
Our readers are the plaintiffs. Accomodation for a night. A person united will never be divided,
until they meet their autopsy. Self consciousness is always one of parts as well.
The jaw bone is the first to leave the skeleton. Libido leaves the veldt.
A word is the last thing any woman can say to a particular other. Rife gate
to the ruin run by the sun. Slow chapters. Sweet ball. My hat in your pocket.
Blind surrealist love is windowdust/ but do not change too fast the registration of the pelt nor of the pelting.
SR 10/22/90
from For More Lectures
Dilatory hair, sweetest flesh, dilapidated rose, another recherche mystagogue intent on silks and socks. Money talks, love walks, children long to go out
and play. It is necessary to remain able, to distinguish the difference between prolific and verbose. Verbs serve humans. Step into her bed and demand an index of last lines, or you won’t sign. Sweet tulips odorless, wild civility,
snow white hairs on me. As a child Picabia replaced the old masters in his house
with copies of his own, and sold the “originals” to finance his stamp collection.
Unadorned by a hardon, spindrift is all. Nice nieces, Writhing writing. Sick glory.
Rabid transit. We arrive in several canoes and have nothing but scorn for those
who do not allow things to be as complicated as they are. She looked gorgeous
in the latest synecdoche, but I was Helen’s man. The suicides will be he’s and she’s
who cannot love life doubtfully. Beards and sleeves, cows and poppies, my mind
is one with Caesar V, not to stray a meter from my poem. But I was kind of humping
that you would lie in these sheets. If I had not been born, another could be drinking this cup. On the hem of the lawn the babies are weaving their clearest saliva on looms of ivy and scum.
In the Alameda a woman walks over to a rose bush and picks a thorn. On her stone bench, sitting on an arm, she proceeds to clean her teeth. Dilapidated pose.
The Picts depicted themselves blue. Smart move. I will break your waves if you will watch my night. The night Kid Ory kicked the bucket, they wailed. I need a protege. Adorable whore, can you butle? I want my responsibility. I miss cacoons and gingermen, and when I handle them elsewhere, it is not the same. It’s a different kettle now of screams, drinking powder, slipping pants, mouthing off. But I see similarities I throw myself into an image. Art links letters. The pile-up figures. Conception
is not as wide as the world, nor deep as well, but Twill suffices. You fill it out.
Mens agitation. Used up preludes. Anemic double bills. Cat shit and dog puke.
God knows we love, but who? Before the stand-in is finished with one thing, you’re asking for another. Be your wax. His weltanschauung was beatup, but his syntax
was in intacking. Who is interested in the eventuality that little J A would come
to dominate the century the way big Ten did last. Now that the new B C was (a) P G. The general were fond of eating women. But that which exists through itself calls M E.
LYRIC
The Plush of a Negative Cat
Blackened fingers on the sterling rug
and you'll find frottage by the stump
it's Hans Dustin and too many other Hoffmans
all gaga or got lemon verbena mainly
imagine all this waiting on one tortured sickness
zoomer babies without the frame
the title the madness in a boobie's eyes
scusa? too much rosemary in the window
sparks from Saratoga the scriptures snowing
I'll never be able to read without turpentine
without stopping to dry my eyes
Saint Bartholomew and the Oobleck standing
hard by Barstow and still pushing
Blues for Alice
When you get in on a try you never learn it back
umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world
in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail
bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without
travail of the tale, the one you longing live
and singing burn
It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out
or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . .
and other riskier small day and fain would be
of the soap a sky dares
but we remand,
that we a clasp of the silence you and I, all of
tiny sphering rates back, I say to told wall, back
and back and leave my edge, and add an L
Night is so enclosed we’ll never turn its page
its eye, can be mine will be yours, to see all the people
the underneath livid reaching part and past of the lying buildings
the overreacher stops and starts, at in his head, in
in her rhythm
that knowledge is past all of us, so we flare and tap
and top it right up, constant engage and flap in on
keeping pace, our whelming rift, and soil and gleam
and give back the voice, like those eary dead
Step down off our whelm lessons and shortly fired
enter the bristle strum of Corrosion Kingdom
where the last comes by first ever ring, every
race through that tunnel of sun drop and pencil
in the margins of a flare, of higher wish than dare,
the stroked calmings of a line will spin and chime
in blue quicks of a dream blues, the chores
of those whispering gone crenulations
To meet a care is to dial redeem
and we limp in the time sound balms
so out of kilter is my name in the sun, and I win
in the moon and you sing in that other spelling of win
the way a blue is never singular
watercolor on paper by Edith Schloss
But It Says Nothing
THE CHINESE NOTEBOOK
1. Wayward, we weigh words. Nouns reward objects for meaning. The chair in the air is covered with hair. No part is in touch with the planet.
2. Each time I pass the garage of a certain yellow house, I am greeted with barking. The first time this occurred, an instinctive fear seemed to run through me. I have never been attacked. Yet I firmly believe that if I opened the door to the garage I should confront a dog.
3. Chesterfield, sofa, divan, couch—might these items refer to the same object? If so, are they separate conditions of a single word?
4. My mother as a child would call a potholder a “boppo,” the term becom- ing appropriated by the whole family, handed down now by my cousins to their own children. Is it a word? If it extends, eventually, into general usage, at what moment will it become one?
Language is, first of all, a political question.
I wrote this sentence with a ballpoint pen. If I had used another would it
have been a different sentence?
7. This is not philosophy, it’s poetry. And if I say so, then it becomes painting, music or sculpture, judged as such. If there are variables to consider, they are at least partly economic—the question of distribution, etc. Also differing critical tra- ditions. Could this be good Poetry, yet bad music? But yet I do not believe I would, except in jest, posit this as dance or urban planning.
8. This is not speech. I wrote it.
For Cliff SillimanIf the function of writing is to "express the world." My father withheld child support. forcing my mother to live with her parents. my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can't afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing "We shall not be moved." My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale's speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle. kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won't read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable1 though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the comer store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan's benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It's not easy if your audience doesn't identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in the lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord's control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships