The big thief of American poetry?
Dickinson speaking: I never win, she says. Except evening.
Management would feel mortified showing themselves,
So exposed they’d feign ignorance, wander aimlessly
Taking off (in their heads, at least) for better moments
Until new urgencies emerge
Or life capital to breed more catches on.

Man, she is weird. Is there room in the room
For further origins, cribbage boards? A friend’s long ‘a’
As in umbrella? Let’s rewrite Biotherm, she says.
I fear her sarcasm.
Composition for her is sardonic comfort with a sober edge.
Mgmt leaked this against her wishes.

A pervert is attacking my persona.

Showing my cards I leave the change,
while my lover & friend leads me to a postmodern workshop,
a sure bet ad infinitum.
He smiles with an expression that never doubts my bluffing knowhow & innocence
... I keep raising — the mind’s oceanfront, a replenisher, bringing it all back.

Darling. Morning. Hey Siri
Many of the liberal arts seem tall,

Inflatable as we cascade into a big-hearted corp.

Adding adages to research that says
Frozen water on Mars is the smoking gun.

A dress. Dresses.

Now she's spilling bourbon over my a-line, all thumbs to keep our game up & running. Likewise I'll write about it. As poet-jewel thief wearing a dress, you might think it profitable to string her sentences together like paste rubies & artificial pearls deliberately mismatched, like John Waters’ suburbs, adroitly passé. Each sentence shines in gloom as ends won't match up with beginnings, not quite, each sparkle dulled into an afterthought containing falsehoods but cinched by faintly plausible style — sparkle doubled down, my other dress draped over bowls of Chesapeake crabs & fish hooks, a near accident or an accident-in-the-making. She might desire to push a personal datum into the narrative, like me, or your notion of having sex as linear as the death of a family member..
It went belts from there.

Stop waving that grape juice.
Language is tired. Your eyes filled with manpower.
Your hair’s on the brink.

The mind just calculates sitting there. It wants to be best friends. It’s saved us a burger.
An idea of glimmers, aroma:
The apparatus out back, grilled in place, waiting —

Simple enough picking up a pen
. . . land and the lives on it have data functions, similarly

synthetic appropriation by composition, the vigil and force applied putting
some form of youth

into a piece, since landscape does not come by itself, regardless of beauty —
the river bank played by

metaphors and substitutions of the time — more informal,
it’s taking dictation, thinking after doing the math.

I’ve tried my hand at cinematography, finally. What are the chances of two films in one year.. I’ll lighten what’s complex, replacing ad libs with clean and dirty systems, also silence, a kind of stripping down to the glass system of not reading your poems. I’m making my next film into more of a slowpoke essay when it comes to transcendence. The problem is engineered simplicity, both as affectation and requirement.

Looking into the camera, I go clubbing, shopping, and I like standing outside various consulates.

I’ll let you know how that fares.

A light is produced by heated argument.
How the cosmos is unexplained, parts one and two. In the first, taxonomies are set in weathered deco, dimly lit by the affiliated overflow while astronomers stand there from a famous university with nothing to give back. It’s a downtown-to-Washington-on-to-nowhere, a very mean place to get to, all right — erratically stencilled with tweezers-length trapezoids at its austere outer rings.

Taxonomy, to get back to the cosmos, stands tiptoe atop shoulders of ascending ideas, forgetting the raw laborers below lined up on broken mosaics, necks pounding from overtime.

In the mental part, covert specialists use tightly wound diversions to gain advantage for incriminating thoughts, the goal of which is to pillory hindsight. They march with different cause-ists and solons halfway; paternalism indulged through wisecracks. But most of the others, humanists, are reformed as divas and idiots in the minority and they take the bullets; why?

We'll be right back.

“Stutterers stutter trying not to stutter.”
We’re the only nation that flies into hurricanes. (DA Levy)
Hearts skip a beat, that’s a symptom.
Selfimage cairnheaded affidation — I beg your pardon.

Ola Academy —
It’s a big screen with a smallish but coming role. No security or scalability, improvising anyway with few in the backdrop, a circular ambiguity that hangs over the ‘film’ business.

Ghost anthems rise, fall. We’re dragged to their outdoor awards ceremony tho, moist, asleep.

My own moments up for review leave us unseen. My gratitude, clouds of sleeping film lovers in waiting — for quickening what I mean and waiting on more running on shore in Henleys! And I want to note the Academy encouraged me to try wind surfing in black and white zinc mesh and differential probability.

In between, this tendency of ours must decide what blank is. Could I redefine it as a pleasant restraint moving onto zealotry to diagram your happiness? Or conceive of a spatial paradox with enough scholarship transference, taunting the authentic equipoise of a kiss..

Sonnets under command are familiar splashes of watercolorist anesthesia: Take my place being places (an event in tropes) —

Meantime, ping. We’re here for discovery then inflection in lap pools of condensed matter from excursions through the aquatic world.
The named oceans are dated,
Pouting, getting better! When they come to — there’ll be perorations re-framing rainwater within fairer scents almost rimming sunlight in suspension, ripped off

Amputated chutes:

Grape vines burst out, nonlackluster. Though I love grime, Camille’s guilt-making — her carrying me through, unphased: She does this to deplete me of hope.

1st choice for a sonnet is to solve for x. Be funny and coalesce.

Dear multiple choices from eternity: Send a message I can wolf down. Convey a sense of urgency that’s superfluous. Then put Camille off.

Celebrity stalkers are in the grips of mistaken identity, immune to sudden desire with intimacy. What have they got to lose?

Bags and bags of money paid to reflection in infinite battle with consciousness.

China’s philosophers are not unique carrying on traditions the Massasoit transmit.

I’m going over Clark Coolidge’s Space (1970), a hardcover like-new copy given to me by a young poet from Worcester who came to a Cambridge reading by Michael Carr and Bruce Andrews a few years ago; the poet from Worcester just handed it to me. Jasper Johns cover. Harper & Row publishers. Almost fifty years ago — Harper & Row — Coolidge — hardcover. in / than / end // // look / an / mess. How about these titles. “Echo & Mildew”; “Milk on the Lob”; “Soda Gong”; “The Image Furnace, under Brine.”

We’re always writing where the living talk to the dead, boasting of their willingness to compromise.

We are The We Are So Sorry
Thesis Study Group — writing in
Extremely quick intervals (about a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) and short distances (about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a half inch) — just as dad, quantum flux, drives through space-time — delimiting terrestrial ideas of up/down, day/night, before/after, you know the rest.

Cinema likenesses are profuse or would be if we probed more IRA Nippon mirror jewels.

That’s why a good film treatment is a terrific poem.

Usually. I did not like the smell in the brain sketch.

Was that yours?

Are you sitting in the sentence
listening ? wearing nothing but
eagerness for a motive to
hear what we were afraid to be?

It’s easy, too uniform now.
Once back in the day the fair-minded had complex appetites,
when pragma-morphism brainstormed over innocence
—

in the larger context there was no recidivism to fashion.
Dante nibbled fast, in very mumbled tones... under a huge, ampersand-shade of grace.

There was a terrific wine list — and that made for twists,
drinking perfusions, he had at strangers shedding their platform shoes.

The prose poem has changed due to English.
One presumes elements are strung together out of desperation and a deeply ingrained exposition to demark the unknown, much as technology funds science.



The technology of capital. How did Auden begin? Green song of ourselves...

From Iraq, Africa, Brazil to Hiroshima, back in Syria, graphic measures of tragi-comedic obliteration.

All this time Buddha and Buddhists are different things.

Knower and the known in physics, all branches, all matter — an open-miked state of big joy, electrons.

They’ll have us over when life and death crack some heads of automation...

At a new level of storytelling that hang-in-there spunk nationwide is on your side.

It goes with a backhand irony like a pigeon guided missile or guard at the gate.
The front gate won’t front
As there are centers of wishing beyond closed doors.

All batteries are charged (that’s the feeling). I’m pouring
Molasses over my track pants ‘stitched’ with microfiber — I’m about to walk the spiral and more!
Chestnuts stand around in jobbed hoards.
Coupons expire.

Sway your head. That means dance.

Don’t hold it in. Talk to your doctor.
Read this. I did.
It’s half in libretto.

Try something cartoonish. I’m whirling around, pens and markers in hand in roughly 4 minute stints. Learning something about what I mean, high jinks soar belying despair over entropy, a quiet smoke, zero gravity!

Variation:
Small islands serve as hideouts. Safety regulators are restless. Excellent. We shall conquer childhood, read over the presentation, juggle a few heads. You’ll need a new camping saw and hood scoop. I’ll invade your space then leave later, lately.

Later Lately
Ted Greenwald
Cuneiform, 2015

There are procedures for mourning. There are a slew of them.
I can’t say these things. These same things. Page one, no one, page 11.

I may continue to be pressed on cardboard.
It almost makes me say all aboard. Then it “goes.”

One’s soul is on break, in a style of incompletion (Otto Bismarck),
Obsequious, sharpened anomalies & bait :

: A new music took off about here.
We slow up together.

We are one species
Meaning many wishes at one time all over time :
2 out of 20 come around.

Back when we’re on our own
as our only bard put it, his face

Boiling sad together.
Not pretty but there in print: played around

A back to romance pile up. Rhythms about envy, fugue-sonata
moods — for all time rigged

To a full practice in one truce or august matter; lone
autumns & springs mutating in dark

Chez no one who stayed home,
played and slowed down to furnish the pace,

Prelude to singing along alone
Bohemian in his own anger to confuse.



Retour lorsque nous sommes sur notre propre,
comme le seul barde de notre époque, il l’a dit, un visage

.. ébullition triste tout ensemble.
Pas très joli mais il est en version imprimée et autour

Un retour à romance jusqu’au tas en espièglerie. Rythmes environ envie, la fugue-sonate
avec humeurs de tous les temps qui sont truquées

A une pratique complète concernant une trêve ou une question énorme.. où
les saisons d’automne, aux printemps, tous solitaires, sont en mutation dans l’obscurité.

— absolument personne — personne ne reste à la maison
on est ralenti, à fournir le rythme —

Un prélude à chanter seul
dans le cadre de la colère d’origine afin de confondre tout.

I’ll take it.
That way of answering the phone has passed.

A command loss.
I’m bipolar. You know. What?

We can make a poem go mute.
If it doesn’t speak, we don’t have to pay it as much.

A world-less deaf-mute.

Affordable Noh. That’s us w/ big hanging wolf eyes. We’re a match in perseverance, trying to spook breathing pedagogy when we meet, somersaulting in /

What goes around then comes gasping, the more irregular the verb:

At fight camp all you bring are wet marks over your shirt — there you go — cadet-ed!

Inductions to your other habits ..

Gleaming haze drags down sculptures of felted helium..

A little like nerves done over by spinning in warm wind.

Noh stuff.

The drill of local news, temperature, hours of indebtedness, mayhem, a fascinating stack of known challenges — locale reduced to the economy, co-rejecting isms not centric. Both influence perception, both engage what leftists and the right make up as sources. Nothing in between. Nothing to uphold. More below.
It’s simple / the invention of worship is over..
so much over: the topic is civility, imparting numeric dicta slathered across century-old middle ground, the themeless module (where we sleep) and fields of action (where we continue playing around vulgar innuendo to stay kind, as you undress to force a smile) fully emancipating me to feel obliged to receive you generously.

We are free — still — to say what some think — but their recipes, or ours, are perfused with given theory. Trees in place, defiantly miscellaneous, thanks to a compliant Leitkultur, treeways on a berm, backdrop to the ideal civil democratic union with permissions built on headwinds —

yet with as it were or without manners. Good manners can scar others but they also let us peons act like participants in marking time as tho subscribers to the regulatory plutocracy.
Either way, I know so little about the state and the state so much less — these are the facts slaughtered by memory.

A wild or perhaps even a good guess as to what readers crave is a byproduct of becoming a decent reader. One writer rarely reads alone, and that’s part of the saga of collectivity and simultaneity. She and others pick up similar texts, comparable projects; snowballs start flying. When a writer thinks in public about what she is reading, she’s taking aim and will be aimed at in turn, pro and con. This is one yarn, hardly superfluous, of opinion acclimatization.

The signature concern is the reader’s experience. This concern is peculiarly self-fascinated, another point; that so many writers simultaneously figure out readers’ expectations within multiple selves, functioning in extra literary contexts, estranged politics, cultural de-/re-construction, academic-corporate performance theory and the like.

Eileen Myles is central to making sense of these multiple elements often living her own habits and pleasures in the present tense, exposing her ‘other’ for what she is to her readers.

More off-center: Nicole Brossard tames her otherness and the other-directedness that she (writer) and (s)he (reader) share.

Reading Myles you are immersed in her momentary, empathetic presence. When reading Brossard you want implicitly to inquire into her brazen iconoclasm. It would be abetting deeper juxtaposition to bracket one’s enjoyment just to explore the ordinarily unknown. How does Brossard know? How does she improvise? How do you account for a received notion “being in the present”? Even better.


on levait la tête on aimait les petits arbres
derrière le fer forgé du cinquième étage
personne ne tombait jamais
plus bas que notre habitude de la vie

[taking pleasure in these trees, looking up
through the 5th floor wrought iron
nobody ever falls lower than
this, what we make our habit in life]

The narrator who claims personne ne tombait jamais speaks for anyone who wants and takes pleasure with no palpable fear of falling.

While translating freely is not always the fairest compliment a writer may pay another, it is one entry for finding points of empathy (How does she improvise?) as well as beginning to appreciate Brossard’s command of what she suggests here (How does she know?). And in four short lines we stumble across habitude. It is a writer’s answer, Brossard’s answer for now, to be in and of the present.

Just a scent — of freezing water and sunlight, of loss, of untitled confusion — underlies twisted (Have beaten) and dropped topic headers (are brute). Higher, I think, goes the max explorer.



Hyper-manly references are scooped up from one segment of the sensate scale; motivated by an ambivert more than sexual need Joe Ceravolo insists one follow along his line of reasoning (Supply it flowing out). That’s enforced by repetition at the end, "in this rice Spring." Syntactical Photoshop gives the visual imagination warm rice, in grief, and slushy leftovers of physical demands, audacious desire (Supply me) and inconceivable, hoped-for spectacle (because there is in this rice Spring).

Spectacle, desire — points of origin even slush ought not do without. When we find these, we know we’re closing in.

The sea bream lifts, lukewarm, soft. Splash. Preaching to the tenor choir, I love what we do together.

As adhesive behavior, speech is streaked w/ extra
sensory blather, a polite form of the hole-
in-the-universe. Blather ornot

                      the hole is a sometime power brimming w/ prototypes.

Storylines, battle scars, vanity, thrills, sky
dogs, gesso & sloppy intercorse under conditions that surround ourdesire
to laugh down compliments from insurgents binding heartbreak.

Ambiguity has lasting power and a flood of phone calls offering ‘relationships.’

I’m like everyone else who grew up refusing novels, a nutshell of a wonk glaring, boasting bragging rights over inexact outcomes, packing up old times I don’t like, crayoning smiley faces, pledging boundless love nonjudgmentally.

Of course I did time as a stealth pathologist performing autopsies on “live people.” Subjects were mostly strung out on sofa sectionals — big, jaunty shapes who swaddled their inner pooch / pooches — yes I’ll love you better —

I’d say I am a pervert approaching you as a woman / who is a man thinking she’s he of the pulverized dots — I duck their punch however and close the distance. Nothing more.

Aren’t we supposed to feed the bad dogs? Yes but summer, winter?
Minutes after the work is filed, dozens stand in line for a treat,
free rein over the sentence.

Kisses. Advances in the war zone of acceptance.

There are no more communities yet, we can rubber any room —

On the bright side looking out you can see the streaks in the glass that’s tired
           Oh baby I’ll be right over.

War is unjust when there is only one side to wage it.
Gleaned from what war is, I’m an angel investor in spontaneity.

This is strictly deliriously business, self-realized adventure
losing daily battles avec the dead!

That’s how it looked or read.
What time do you get off work in poetry?

Should have put my thoughts in
restarting together before starting ..

Heaving below
informality becomes a synthetic effort...

I have a new work permit.
The place has been wiped clean: Au
revoir perk. I made an inappropriate shoe choice. Au revoir!

Neither dead or alive, the windmill has a request,

“to express things ... as they are when you see them without remembering having looked at them.” It’s an infinite standard for feeding your vocabulary until climax.



Look around, what’s background?
Barely perceptible lightning over fog. Homology and prudence. Package v immolation. The expressed instant comes around, triples our worth. No questions asked, we work the lower teeth for the same carbons to put this together literally but not entirely.
The windmill is a textual refuge.
Meanwhile something came up.

I might happily have lived in another state
Standing in neoplatonic darkness. / A white bike
To follow the path out /

A green thumb trying to paint and cover
Dabs of white titanium that oscillate
Blurring the root truth up to an hour —

Inky smoke releasing a genocidal collage, like
Thought in waves agitated, reproached, disappeared
In drumming opinions and best practices —

Since giving up on poetry poetry has vaulted to the top of our agenda. Leaving office has a double meaning to off-center the filing system and other singularities I’ve kept new for years. We have no limits to affirm any retractions, feeding our reliance on illumined work, pleasures, plans and, this most generalized I guess, burningly turned back, watching the wax dim.

Pavel, the most cinched at the waist of the trio, interrupts Murf while Zoubok jumps into a collaged kitten mural of plastic numerals joined by static hanging threads in back.

First up, an acrobat for the moods Pavel evokes in my mind. A watercolorist also comes to mind for enhanced abandonment during and after pressing flowers.

Ouch! buckets of rain have come and gone away. Someone has cut the grass, that greeny, wettish smell is everywhere. Hay. Optimism.
Remember to slam the parentheses behind you
) bang and ) bang and ) ) double bang
(to be on the safe side).

— James Schuyler

Opposition — that other guy with Verlaine,
2 birdbrains, explicit about nothing or nothing much; yes/ja / no/nein?



Ok, they were willful, stayed in control — a thousand bees were stinging our feet —
Wanting as well as having nothing — shhhhhh.. I can’t
.. I shouldn’t ask did I live like that fly on the wall?
— since we polished the text, handed it in, don’t expect me after all.

We descend from loudness. Take Pound (please). Most poets today speak far more softly, more tepidly than he, one of our last accomplished loudmouths.

The utter being of Ezra Pound is dead, mannerisms, biases and all while we, living descendants, equipped with new rules, re-arrange the family tree, cutting him off entirely. Some of us put him far out on a sprig off a fallen limb, hanging precariously. If you can call it that. Some have other ideas. Poetics by decade, with its anthology winners and losers, is a humanist blood sport, after all, subject to emotional habits. What matters in evolution is how to place a poet’s opus within a coherent, phylogenic order. Each classified by adaptation passed on to descendants. [Sample inquiry: Who follows O’Hara? That is, who puts O’Hara into practice?] The field for poetics and compositional evolution is, as it has been, each one’s work and all other work around it and, of course, ‘after’ it. Work in our time includes more than one poet’s composition, but each one’s words make everything her composition.

Oxbridge (for now)

Unilateralists: complex gangly, mostly mute yet histrionic, anticruel
-ish. Curricular adjustments. They apologize for the inconvenience.
Tons of special forces in silhouette .. we’ll ..
Near the top filling in with capacitance-assistants, managerial sweepers,
Theorists of a visual world culture wholly populated by posturing.

Breakfast past midnight is smokin’ yet a lost cause. Like The Inferno and Nerves and every shined wonder since, I have nil to learn engineering the tide of speech desire.

The sky can be celebrated. Sorts.



Why make so much of fragmentary blue in here and there an owlet or purple hairstreak?

Landscape:
Pull-driven, time loiters, no overhead, summer cushions by doorways, both smile —
I challenge myself every day. It’s what shakers do in daybreak — a few figures unclasp white headbands.
White on seraphic white.
Here’s your companion with his successor, a comrade just in time.

I’d like to thank the Academy.

Goliath, Duchamps, Sinatra!

Japanese adaptation:
Robots embrace the free market, she announced in a penetrating tone,

a pale mist of drifting nothing. Blameless, free of anguish for the moment.
She picked that up from them.. ..wolves running through snow melting into wolves..

I’m writing in a fraught cycle of perpetual panic.

The set director had called for vinyl yellow corn husks outside the french doors in the blue room where we proceed with surgery to remove fat.


Not yours, happily. But close enough.

The screenwriter wants to stay chic simple, s/he develops the fat — tints it solar. Then changes fat to windows.

And the surgery is successive! The windows break down, riv vu.

Can’t tell you what happened Thursday but I know I slept because I had a whole mattress to lie on.
The mime sequence where I speak is spoofy. More, there is a modulator with a board of moderation. I carry cash and deal with the cops but I’m no killer. Lack instinct. Sir.

Many instincts interact with musty dynamics eventually. More than musty, foul as in apres-euphoria.

A dancing lawman gets more attention now as the light bulb dims quickly o’er

my tablet, and I couldn’t use scissors, either.



I kept hammering a poem is a cat meow ten times and then more.

Mercury is wow! pensive, coming back, back... no..

You’re saying no to billing days first, no to virulent, callow graphemes, stance covers for a copyist. Cut the trad crocus, low opinions and bloodied mesh. No aplomb in nature, please. No chiastic haunts. And no golf property for now.
You put a question mark after feeling genreless, it becomes a pick-up line.

There is no personality, so why beat anyone up? We can read back over found work but never go back to walk the innocent-seeming turret and loggia built by another’s labor, overlooking our exciting first day together...

Body copy! groovy with olfactory consequences:
When he blinks, living lightning. What do I smell? Here we are,

putting in words with more nostalgia than perception, juked algorithms coasting through long views.

And some of this unisex fragrance is half-insane, chiming mad as manmade quakes plummet.

So. Ghosts roam changing directions with panicked ants. That scent

Rakish note, my mixed medium ..

The exact second you insert the first-person, a moral freedom can and will drill five feet down and under the ground, a strafed, natural spectacle falling into coherence, something you never saw and you neverwill, you existentialist freak.

Here’s my favorite.

Baking is a big puzzlement of natural selection. The audience rises.

(The audience is artisans rising, impetuous, some from costive stock, unflappably happy, even brusque.)

Somewhere I float in. I’m late for the prom fitting, weeping inside. Funny place

for a dance, Mr Baker.

Another Marxist-self irony: I’m back to being myself.
A kid wants to triumph.

My well being depends on weather and the power grid.
Don’t worry. I’m a doctor.

Marxist-self irony:
I’m a neo-accepter of making and being particles of subjective misnomers.
Eating and breathing them too.

The air is sawed off, doing better. We were dangerous, once.
Smooth rhetoric is transparent. It’s too late to make it sparse.

Even our restraint is purely wishy for its own sake.

A private-public distinction
no longer limits enormous outcomes.

Besides giving birth
I write on my agenda.



I manufacture algorithmic spoons, tugboats and flyweights.
For lunch I drink up history, empathy, bounce.

My protectors are brokered by a security alliance like yours,
taking it inside the parturifacient facility.