R.I.P., Peter Orlovsky.
R.I.P., Louise Bourgeois.

Leslie Scalapino, R.I.P.

I know where I am going
gawky, rattling my cage.

I know where the caged bird sings.
I shop in Brooklyn.

Shy of seduction
I worry about the family.

Like Clint Eastwood I was shifty.
Once. What was that all about?

It’s 2020. Dada has won. Suddenly. There’s no Wall Street Journal. And it’s hot. A life listening to rock is the seed performance indicator for pot growers and for me and my casual nonacademic friends who fall back from confrontation. We like seeding before dressing. The dubby-drop is the wow a welled, ironic smile equates back when we had everything going for us near the Baby Dust Charter School, exposing every last Wiki ovulation date in our calendars. (Damien’s or Chucky’s seeds grow into a tree if you swallow Kali’s mist. Chucky’s a hot regular. Damien is a bottom sprouter who skips his seed walkthroughs sometimes.)

We’ve wound up in a Rhoda Maxwell clomid forum, no income but we don’t need cash when we got a one-pound seed popping out. That’s our praxis. I’m writing from that position. I am writing from the feminized Chias (with my regrets) who take up dork-asms and get demolished, loosely. Flamed sunrays secure their bikini resins then cross the floor of the wading pool. It’s a gluey sperm-friendly cervical mucus hue, like an old bag of maple seeds. Tomorrow we’ll find new ones, and a new rock that picks this up.

A tree in the wind.
How is it lit?

Tall with liquid arms;
another is hit and run.

They’re parts of the chad deity.
That’s what led you child rearing

to a showdown at the riverbed,
immersive. Impulsive.

It’s back to work.
Show’s over. You go ahead.

City center aria, a dwindling
sea brook, the best toadstools,

supreme Styrofoam
in pursuit of what follows.

Mind and body.
I was hoarse for a week.

Here’s an idea. Addiction is improvement over quasi-production of enormous chagrin. I think that’s the script and structure for the loss of a teardrop. We’re milquetoasts inside. Yet for all appearances nothing lurid is due at signing. Luscious hills, gleaming grains. The American Songbook has motors for this. Bukowski’s fall is a hissable warning, gone monochrome in uglified loveliness besieged by entertainment.

Have we ever done anything but tamper with the weather? Oh, who knows? You seem so fake-excited in the sprayed periphery, staying in balance inside a soft radical vapor of anathemic bigness. Is that the word?

Mid or large, our body fat is worth $60,000 a gallon. Nukers take responsibility. It feels like a palate cleansing (to them). Your hair is beautiful now, so much for redemptive infinity, you and your public are blotto-dreamy.

Embarrassment can be interesting; never vice-versa. Bog shoes come to mind. Filing oddly abstract word strings in my back pouch. G’day. Or a sobering up between courses. Between jewelry making and language learning. I failed at both so turned to landscape arch- and tin-work, keeping the breakers honest by the faltering dunes, bogs and cliff houses of cards. The surf came up and made everything a heavenly mess. The mechanics are all there. Scales, secrets, s.v.o. As for the shoes, people look at me funny. No arch support for me, thanks.

Alan Davies and I will be handing out Faux | Other titles at the small press book fair organized by the Segue Foundation 6-8 PM today, Thursday, at Zieher Smith Gallery, 516 W 20th, NYC. We'll be sharing a table with Segue / Roof.

(My mood is in erasure.) I’m an agitator but Neil Young on Skype is agitator in chief. (Elated I am.) Red, green, blue, that’s how things worked out. His comfort food backed up. Jonathan Demme, cool as a Boise-minute, I can see you! (Now.) “Dude,” he says, “I can see you.” There’s struggle to housesit too much information. (Eden. Foliage. Strangers.) Whoah, way too much, and beyond, they just crack me up; my head is cleared. (Have to go.) On. Up.

All attempts to grow God are disproportionate. [A misreading, not deliberate]

I’m on lockdown. New beliefs and old factoids, nothing much, attitudes struck, days in spirals, an undulating façade. I see endless tunnels, gadgets and lightning that interconnect the music while I wait. My fingers board the apologetic apparatus, some of it; it’s thumping on the screen. No room for unprecedented speaking of which feelings out of the world meetings within reach.

Don’t argue with the shipment.

Glee outshines pizza.

keep me out / of mind — Anselm Berrigan

Last call to save with the prepublication deal for Faux | Other titles.

Trace Peterson's account of the Tendencies event last Thursday is a good draft of what went down. In the q&a that followed Stacy's, CA's and my brief papers, I know a few of my claims for the influence of science on expository prose are fundamentally noncontroversial among historians of English composition, both its development and pedagogy. At crucial junctures the authorities who have lasting influence on rules of grammar and exposition have been scientists, best typified by the the Royal Society founded in the 17th century, charted by the crown, devoted to disciplining English prose to convey scientific methods and findings. I don't hate English as CA may have gathered from my truncated comments; I am ambivalent toward the science-y aspects of good prose style — brevity, for example. I follow the rules in my expository practice, but I can't say I subscribe to them without feeling these now-ingrained stylistics pulling me away from more discursive, more digressive, more potentially productive inchoate forms of thinking and writing in prose.

Poetry of course is another matter. A jumbo alternative.

Here’s the intro to a piece, parts of which I’ve rehearsed here, titled “Repeat after Me.” I’ll read this, along with CA Conrad and Stacy Szymaszek, for the Tendencies Series, curated by Tim Peterson, 6:30 this Thursday at CUNY Graduate Center 9100 (Skylight Room), 365 Fifth Ave., Manhattan.

A regular moment can become romantic. Gods v. Medusas. I drive my gods, dudes mostly, off a bridge on purpose. As a comedian I’m kind of open to prohibitive structuration. Take two texts, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gertrude Stein.

    If they were not pigeons what were they... If they were not pigeons on the grass alas what were
    they. He had heard of a third and he asked about it... (from Four Saints in Three Acts, Gertrude
    Stein)

Gertrude Stein is ours — she’s in my pocket and she’s mine over time. My wild Cricket.

The figurative is splitting at the seams. (I don’t know who you think they are.) I’ve been pretty well behaved as a gay. But but. My erections taught me swears. I let this sink in. Today thanks to Eve I put it together.

In a dialog on love I enact Eve and read Gertrude-Cricket. I am almost an outlaw. Social formations and roadkill are on the menu.

A life is charged for care.

Before the night is through I want to look at what Cricket said as lingo and allegory.

Forget verse. Cricket says we are physicists to inner antecedents, the deadpan Medusas. Medusa One is not about sex or figuration. She’s a nihilist in and out of societies and their formations. Do you work for a living? What a waste of time. As a stand-up I say everything is urgent. We have to reassign all the workers inside us. Cricket will forgive us in the future.

    It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time,
    composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition...

    No one thinks these things when they are making when they are creating what is the
    composition, naturally no one thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated
    has been made.

    Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us
    naturally. (from “Composition as Explanation,” G.S.)

The allegory goes to Cricket’s houses, lingo, cheapskate punks, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Notebook open, wallet shut. An Everly Brothers disc is still playing but it multiplied like a crisis in its own category. Irony-sincerity voted best....

Roadkill is on the menu.