10/31/16

Make this factualist.
Make my mind avoid bohemia.
Recover the masterpiece.

Destroy and smooth nothing.
Imitate killing seeing
the system.
Beginning to get the picture.

You taste of star anise ‘launching’ the OS in fertility: the borzoi w/ backsliding wipe-outs & their aftermath:
trash-flashes you tautologize into cattle calls for wineskins of glugging purity.
At least you’re in the area...
‘holding each other open’ ordaining our mobile devices to
moan to the surface.

There may be many surfaces, too.
Midnight dining, rambling
like deer in bed, shiny
children of smoke, you know how —

No jitters, the heart rapped
anytime by the sound in flame of passive groans
uttered to affirm fajita in snatches —
opera and shush.


Secrets of satire want to float free
Finding an informatics of doors opening (bassoon music) and structured
Multiplicities (other instruments for non-ageist sex).
Are you healthy enough for perfection in a gridded environment?
A stencil of our dialog frames many others while class struggle gets more and more slippery.
Or peach-dreamy, subverting history, waxing satirical, the poster said democracy.

Those organized under a strong gesture triumph.

10/30/16

Political direction gets cluttered with secrecy.

Sometimes your thought wanders from the epicurean, no?
No shit, you’re epic. How about me?
I drove off the roof and am now on foot.


ref.: James Comey
Should we have
a message?

We’re talking to what must
be figurative breakpoints with fate and fate’s consignments. Example.

Just kidding
Empty messages remember nothing of detached
sensory esotericists.

Vault-loads of cash tho grant fame and no literal disapproval.
We have
a message.

A politic paranoia recommended for staying cool and stable in an
emotional tri-level.
Robbing the cradle: The big picture shows me my modest place.
I’m technically adept dining in (or out).
A few voters took umbrage from grumpy distortion,
fractured logic (Hex 39) and their own morbidity.
While you —

You picked up the check. That’s swell, looting prestige,
the nether handle to misapplied figures, images,
exactly what the cradle requests; the place rocks. The jam on
toast is persimmon, steamy
as our bodies beep.
A kimono’s being, explaining subtopics tongue and cheek...
shaking hands before the interview, wiping our brows.
To keep up we won’t find a compromise so we’ll vote now, often.

10/29/16

The coding is simple, your Fearsome.
Your voice is full of loot, “walking Genet
on a diamond leash.”

..jackhammers, levelling the river view ahead of an airport runway paving machine..


ref.: LaGuardia
All sides redeem sporting
fire at dawn,

Sluggers are the hobgoblins.

No denying denial

— right-handers do more with a
ball bereft of
outsitters’ blurs in rotation
data,
cheek to jowl. Righties are whom
sporting inconsistencies demolish

so scenes to their similes are
open.

Lefties too, solo

Dualists
shocked at their own fire
& swing.


Frame:
Socialist by nature, cashing in analytics,
Not sure discourse product pertains. A shrine of axioms certifies wealth and income
Consultancy, honing the reader into two dimensions on the surface.

Looking toward emptiness, embrace it for goodness sakes
But reading the usual way subverts expectations.
We’re dealing particles of thought paying homage
To paying homage, finding a subject,
Finding how nature moves discourse from oversight.

10/28/16

Entanglement: As a nonpractitioner attempting authenticity in speech,
Study Freud or any of the evolutionary researchers of the Arctic.

Stick with insoluble nonfiction you’ll stay awake after only 5 half-days
Blindfolded. (This might be our guarantee.)

Such brilliant dislocations a\we\re expected; it goes
Beyond, there are dark, unknown predicates fixated (again) on pollinating the news

But in their case it’s sung to see into a protracted surfeit of space,
A sumptuous, soilless sound. They’re real actors, not people.

Their young have gained on the older, those that could,

Externalizing an antiquity beyond their years —

Levels go down or soar depending on
Outer linear order.

These are statements of facts
And those of law.


ref.: ryegrass and phlox

The light (you’re sensing)
failed everyone before
too on edge off boyhood incense

income bulking from your dad’s
hold (financial), your move
to become walled-in ..

check it out — flights
of gleamed birds in the rough,
enough!

Enough is not idiomatic enough in dad years.
Too much room freshener of day to day estimating:
still, seeming reasonable as subterfuge supplants an old license
requiring the big top to hold off,
dig in
Edens of inquiry into no word yet

how infancy by law prevents coincidence in love.

10/27/16

Dispatched for
chaos

yet
subjects of desire in another sense, an echo
understanding from Q’s & A’s in visible
October light
Minimalist
and suddenly just theory

awing in a wolf’s regime,

There’s brush
fire toward mosquitos — shot
through the throat, asking too much


All nature repairs to a cryonics lab that’s been reopened. Just for a second.
I reconnect to highlights and the mimicking hidden force of gravity. You guys go ahead.
I’m going to drive on, Kia-like; that’s the best stunt.

Gilbert Ryle asks, “might not every action or reaction be a piece of shamming?”

10/26/16

Max Planck fellows run off with radical research incentives for a frontier in unboundedness.
Organizations in a small package, tethered particle immolation. The dignity of boson disappearances.

With little or no motive, the sky foregrounds all their styles, taking them all in.
To paraphrase ... you can’t predict
How or even what you’ll be taking from your background;

MoMA in the original shifted genealogy,
Different periods of shifts changing contexts for us;
We were both wearing black Lacoste.

When you got up your voice was

Vibrating w/ a head cold, falling
Flat in dust in 4 dimensional motes.

Vibrating = Sturm und Drang,
Dust controls anger / how minds are wed.
Mr Pancake-for-a-Face questions, what’s being a pill as a verb?

Dreamily subsisting


Halfway into a loose state
Staying loose. The verb cuts you and your lineage off.



Now it’s later, good news tho
Since your mission is to balk and listen,

Not empower blithe and highly egotistical batboy girl men.
Two good words, highly too.
One pleasure then is borrowing sentences
To raise the rent.

Itemizing all bets, a swimming
Plateau = not finding hotter places to write off.

Dissonant sports metaphors are for gullible allies, hon.
And I’ve had it with my thigh, the one you lift.

10/25/16

His haiku was stiff: full, bel canto, with a slight

Vocal member of the Illinois Cultural
Studies group carrying a sawed off

Shotgun.
The program is this preview. Just to start.. a great performer is set free to make more mistakes. You see your points, all of them.

Whew


Thanks for being there. Next
beside poems, who picks my music ’n prose? She’s a far out snob.
Our area is interpretive search.
(Want to read our minds?) Symmetry among unequal strains.

No that’s not right.

Yamaguchi feels self criticism got way over-modulated becoming 2nd rate, poor argot sampling hostility.

Masked or not, Yamaguchi steals from me.. ..easy to cite in tones stressing processed shock of inexactitude,

flipping out highlighting weak spots, freedom, surroundings.

10/24/16

Hey Siri (British female).
Up with proportionality, southpaw.
She spake plainly for a big hearted killer-
Darling. Morning

Reminding me once
Only your own revels meet you halfway, morning blurring promises in
An aftermath of the hiatus, letting your adages cool.

Is this a document or did I make it up?
Frozen water on Mars is the smoking gun.

Another question. Smelling coffee gasses a decimal of
Where should I hurt?

Once and be done.
Decor change:
I’m always explaining the place where I wake up.
Gateau what’s his name is done (delivered) in a tangle of foxglove as you and I de-meadow.
I sleep where I work. A company like ours takes it into the physics facility.
We’re in the flat present tense, multiple account outlines in simultaneous perception

Reciting new slang exponents to snag and support
Two syllables of love while we scout flyweights in the recursive landscape.
Decor:
I lost my nonfaith in the underground
I should be writing this down.
I try not to be serious.
Duly of course not sounded,
I’m writing for one reason alone, to sound an alarm (an annunciator panel light);
the rust fabric of walls about to be torn down; the danger of falling temperatures; they did —
Side streets extend to hourly weather; to the power grid;
Razed, rain’s over, its light flow an oily example.

Extends thru night rain. I reason the surrogacy of any example (x) is the serious and newer down.
More anguish walking over to a panel on reasoning and not writing anything down, an experience
in its emptied refraction dancing on a taillight for syntactical beings (in a sentence) on a muddy
sidewalk.

10/23/16

Don’t take it.
That ordered a way of not answering the phone.. poof.. ..
A command lost.
I’m bipolar from the past. You know. What?

Just like putting the call off ..
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.
That’s how unclear the past becomes.
Cry of a coach potato!

In the case of this potato, finding slices of us over our opus,
is

(a) awesome, it’s soi-disant on a blather scale

(b) I’m hardly embarrassed or concerned how the poet is framed a tool of parataxis.. juxtaposition.. tinnitus ..

(z) still.. let’s skip a few layers, ready?



Cri d’un entraîneur de pomme de terre!

Dans le cas de cette pomme de terre, même si on trouve des tranches de nous tout au long de nos opus —

non, tout sans blague ce n’est pas
(a) impressionnant! Le patineur est soi-disant sur une échelle pour « blather » ou des étoiles, peu importe ..

(b) mais lâchement, je ne suis presque gêné, je ne me soucie guère la façon dont le poète est formulée, est parlé comme un outil pour juxtaposition, parataxe, tintement ..

(z) .. encore pourrions-nous sauter quelques couches, ainsi en quelques secondes ou pas, prêt ou pas, allons-y-en patinage?

10/22/16

Prayer behooves you, it often says. Prayer for those who talk shite no longer pray. I hope you are happy. Don’t be sad. Grab a good one.
That’s an outline.
Try no poetics put in coma.. mature impact..
This is a change election.
Gothic ps texted to sub-office.
Pardon me while I disband our friendship. .

(Restoring your feeling is one of my hobbies.)
It’s a difficult style..

We’re both harder to explain now. A head-on view..
The sonnet box reads I am who?

Don’t worry I’m a doctor.
The coast is never clear, fat boy ..
Something inside snaps.. Try leasing cars ….
Meta-delivery. Ooooooops.

I’ll snare myself..

I wouldn’t dream of it.
Peace, justice, ecology, all uplifting.
That’s not to say there’ll be any food.

But there’s no sponsor tie-in currently




— 4 plastic badges for now and pa-

Per sacks. Imitation spinner features, it’s
Just theres the royal we (a pain) in game theory to pla
Y. This may be an insight
Bringing us closer to following your advice.
Now you’re giving me the finger. Technically, we’re not there yet.

10/21/16

You, my man, woman,
Pastoral you and all it initiates take humane power in socialist space. It’s rare.
Home base, hierarchal Finland: say it’s working through the population.
We’re the entire crew. The socialist’s way.
I hear Carol Breakdown is hard to get.

Takes substance and breadth, not at this end;
The going price paid is any / all of your audacious desire

(a rare cigarette case, may I)? Reversed decisions rotating surf, mercurial quanta
Shift, soft, whispered, could occur. You’ll want circles and circuits redressing
The boat’s cortex attention to holding out to
Say when. Pulse, how did you say when? There’s reform, learning windows..
A new level of storytelling nationwide.
Often there’s a new plot — those words we had and didn’t have were consequences. The milieu has been bad. Bad is good, since we know enmeshed values constitute our pit bullhood.

But I take no liberties writing you now, bubble footed in dark briefs. I have a dream of fair housing: Free-range light and dark in the clerestory to our lair… Some of us are going there after work. Would you like to come?


We go out with babes among cosmoi.
Pigeons pattern heaven where detachment is cut back,

Reminding us of a few contingencies we picked up off trays,
Bright boomerangs that tantalize in the feasible, wanting nothing and showing
What go around and come around, left to their own desires and systems.

And some of these babes are both dead and alive. Chew on that, Hobbes.

10/20/16

Starting at the bottom of the pack, the fun strata, the face is inside a very powerful camouflage (instructing us to use it). That’s what I heard.

God bless you. Someone’s sneezed


We’re in public transport space, an elevator or the hallway. We think
Mining empirical data has a bigger future than blasphemy, many floors

To overhear, appropriate then evoke tall, slim formulae, aggrieving but wha...
Ways women around Marie Antoinette became modern: Oh, many. They were early risers. They dressed not merely for success, for career survival. They avoided work that was intellectually focused. They peered back and soaked up the landscape. They were gossips. Bless them.

10/19/16

The hollow inside is mixed up, the survey said

overlapping symbols’re happening way out in the ocean.

Your ocean. Your flamenco in transition.

Our faith and consequences.


A violet mist. This is prison.

(You have the evidence.)

Losers = worshippers of their detractors.
Heaven is in our hearts with an egg drop of credos and documents, from which large scale dull instruments get tossed.

We drink to your mistakes.

10/18/16

I swear even as you continue and travel further
As soiled oceans rewild deserts
All our props are dextrose contingent.
Or I was wondering about invention of the planets, sympathizing
With a numbers guru also the director — one of them.
Often that’s a normal baritone and determinative section to sing.
Making love is war. It’s not just money:
I’m afraid it’s a Little

Dipper: Emma, You’re handsome!

Hold on?
..membranes are functional! It’s an open

Darwinian algorithm to back more
nano-proposals, dragging human


footbinding into the light,

present day fireflies earning more in sandbars
speaking their minds to hollow
the new & smoky fabric of kites:

& trees droop silly
looking up, they’re Spencerian: stranded
leaving war to the professionals.

10/17/16

They’re probably wild Speen to Pinehurst
A perfect Bose wave, 100 percent juice —
The dead never see us.

These things we depend on ..
A rhetoric gone terribly right, and so
We draw together

If we’re to make a life together
They disappear, not changing our company,
All that pulls us apart.

When it’s just the two of us, paired, oh
Clearly the thing to do is institute a policy
Filling speech balloons like Supermen ..

10/16/16

Exquisitely handcrafted

meditation retributions..
As luck has it, sections of Alien Tatters (2000), a pre-nine-eleven work, are prescient or more recognizably urgent afterward: Then the top comes off of terror. You age. All the same pictures in everyone’s possible. They stir up the common in search, not to find but to wait. Images are waiting. Sentences are narrowing. Clark Coolidge tapers and tightens sentences to embrace “self-hung trouble” — “I know it looks like I’m not sure of anything,” not sure of monkeyman and his music / poetry that “kept turning me, the one with the three reasons sealed in a pod.” As luck has three reasons or meanings, when Coolidge observes, “..don’t want to see Abe lit...” does Coolidge include one possible meaning spurning the modernist Japanese novel? it would seem so, “House is brain, remember.” How do like your dimensions? “What are your answers, pendulums?” Paragraphs of sentences. Sentences of captions to the late skyward paintings of Phillip Guston’s: [...]I’ve doffed my alarming with plugs and caps, And this’ll water your eyes. I don’t see saucers, I see servants. Or By that time the tower was broadcasting nothing but shrapnel. How could you bow down? But how does meat dream? Notice how they tend to keep the cows toward the center? [...] Five expansive pieces, the longest, the title poem in 50 parts, and a brief afterword in which Coolidge owns up to a “fascination” with UFOs. “ ..I was calling out to them [...] You guys listening?”

10/15/16

Mind and body worship is vicarious before conforming to a belief system.
I’m too ugly to be molested. It’s true.
But I like meeting new people and having life changing sex
That would be the interior storm window into no progress.
Hoarse for weeks.


Like nowhere else in one place,
A luscious, noiseless bonding in the very era or epoch of the perpetually alterable
— a stream of gasses embossing / conjoining an invisible roll call gathering around neighbors’ brays.
All our neighbors are mirror bees. Music up. Am I not one?

10/14/16




Lassitude let me see history is still standing a little
Psycho with a laser within
The horseshoe Renaissance broken open
Lay before my head cold rumbling..

A run on
Sentence

Myrmidons at their high columnar booming tide
Kept there. Were there.

Dawn in the language of dunes
Lounged a soba color;

Doctors collapsing, sank
Into rectangles —

You know what I think?
Damn sumbitches

10/13/16

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. 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.




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

Boiling sad together.
Not pretty but there in print & 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 changing in the dark

Chez nobody who’s stayed home,
slowed down to fill in the pace,

Prelude to singing along alone
in an original anger to confuse.
The local is inside you, sang Pete Seeger, Bob Creeley
when I tossed my head and rode
one foot, pawing the ground before a gallop.
As for my consultant, he shook
the bed, broke his baby toe, stubbing it
So much as ‘the way things were’ stay the same that one day.


Next, I spoke of how we ‘always’ have dinner
on placemats of woven straw, eating salad or a side.
A string of eucalyptus pods by the window to discharge
flies. Afraid of the beers.
It is possible to get homesick locally. Of course.
Once there was a saying — no clue — to have this out-of-horse experience.
Spoken or not, we are more alike, so that we are bound together,
we come from the same place.

10/12/16

My friend ran away with his silent partner
who stole my identity. I'm trying
to look at it from my point of view.
The current balance resumes its teachings. Can-
dles out, pie for the asking, grace
to be white boats opposing payment due.
On Easter Island


Our thoughts at this point raise magnitudes of meandering dissolution,
having left a lavish record of the male hush-from-hand-to-fingers-to-mouth.
I enjoyed it when my innocence sawed into us,
even though sheeted in asterisks.

Later we got dressed for golf, and congregated in the face with peers.

10/11/16

I promised you a ham for painting bombast, yonder. 

That would be deep indoors at your place and mine. I’ll have you over when life and death crack the lobes of automation... After that, there’ll be everything standing in rain to grab at.
[Part Two of Two]

Tonal and narrative twists animate For Love in evidence of how Creeley follows William Carlos Williams’ directive to “think with the poem.” In “The Whip” a narrator talks of two women, one “my love . . . a feather, a flat // sleeping thing,” the other

above us on
the roof [a] woman

I also loved[.]


The reader might assume the second woman is prescience or memory of an intuition, and if so, the first — “a feather” — more a composite of mind than substance. Surprisingly, the woman on the roof whom

. . . I

also loved, had
addressed myself to in

a fit she
returned.




“Feather” and “on the roof” may serve as signs of the ethereal, but emotional qualities in the misgivings Creeley conveys prosodically bring them down to earth. Shortness of breath, stressful hesitations at line endings (“I”; “had”; “in”) are purposeful. Creeley relates in correspondence that the woman on the roof “is a real person, really up there (at 52 Spring Street, NYC)” and thus she has really “returned,” as the poem argues. She registers (making a racket upstairs?) as a material part of the narrator’s “night turning in bed.” The first woman is a real person, too, who wakes:

Ugh,
she said beside me, she put

her hand on
my back[.]


A year before For Love appeared, Creeley noted elsewhere: “The local is not a place but a place in a given man . . . brought by love to give witness to in his own mind” [First Person, No 1, 1960 (cited in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, 1989)]. Poem after poem Creeley brings the reader close to him, into his local place. Yet he speaks responsibly for America’s 1960s generation and for many others as well when he observes in “The Kind of Act of” there’s “no more giving in / when there is no more sin.” For Love earned immediate and sustained popularity because Creeley’s place is familiar to a culture that engages inclusive experience and graceful romance. The poem “Song” starts:

What I took in my hands
grew in weight, You must
understand it
was not obscene.

Creeley will never seem more doctrinaire, nor sound more like his New England ancestors, nor strike a more devout pose for the cause of living “in a prayer” so unpuritanical. He disclosed in an interview soon after the release of For Love he does not choose subject matter, never “setting out to write a poem literally about something,” but finds “articulation of emotions in the actual writing” [“Linda W. Wagner: A Colloquy with Robert Creeley” in Robert Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971” edited by Donald Allen, 1973, Four Seasons Foundation, Bolinas, CA]. Creeley’s strategy is unembarrassed and fearless: forces of nature brought to breath, not by giving in to them, but with emotions to give, and poems to think with, to live.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry, The Twentieth Century (2001)

10/10/16

Our bodies are made for each other.
It’s astonishing. Did you hear back
.. I’m changing my mind for a living you’ve changed.
So relax thine form here.
No cheap shots. Nope. The perverted best plunge..
How I occupied your emotional life, the highest in Japan.
The guardian part made this a better world with a splash
Of blood on my shirt. It’s for you, Jack.
Robert Creeley’s poems are exceptional in their impassioned concision, unpretentious but highly focused lexicon, and offbeat cadences. These characteristics are apparent in work collected in his first trade edition, For Love: Poems 1950-1960. Issued in 1962, the volume was circulated nationally, instantly and widely acclaimed, the poetry judged as ‘spare and tender’ by Allen Ginsberg and as a ‘plea for the heart, for the return of, into the work of language’ by Charles Olson. For Love was nominated for the American (now National) Book Award and has been Creeley’s bestseller, in print in various editions for decades.

The poems, composed during a tumultuous period in which Creeley divorced his first wife and remarried, speak to intuitions developed falling in and out of particular exigencies of love, “warmth of a night perhaps, the misdirected intention come right,” as Creeley writes in his preface. The majority of pieces consist of couplets and quatrains of sometimes breathtaking brevity addressing what Creeley sees as marital confusion and isolation. The work is gathered in chronological sections of decreasing durations: 1950-1955; 1956-1958; 1959-1960. Some titles of poems — "The Wife,” “The Bed,” “A Marriage” and the ironically rhymed sing-song “Ballad of the Despairing Husband” — forecast the scale of intimacy.

The opening of “Ballad” makes plain what is at stake: “My wife and I lived all alone, / contention was our only bone.” Still, “Ballad” contains another bone. The third quatrain, as originally written and as it appeared earlier in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, begins: “Oh come home soon, I write to her. / Go fuck yourself, is her answer.” For the first edition of For Love publisher Charles Scribner, Jr., insisted the word fuck be replaced by the more respectable screw. Donald Hutter, Creeley’s editor, unable to persuade Charles Scribner, Jr., “of the acceptability of any vernacular in a meritorious book of the sixties” recalls this incident with “a swell of frustration” [from a memoir dated by Hutter as August 1987]. Fuck as first inscribed was restored in later editions.



Intriguing events led to the publishing of For Love, Scribner’s first one-author book of poetry since 1954. The writer Michael Rumaker, Creeley’s colleague from Black Mountain College, had a selection of his stories featured in Scribner’s short story series, and he in turn recommended Creeley to the publisher. As a result, two years before For Love, Scribner anthologized prose by Creeley in Short Story 3. Scribner then asked to see a new book-length manuscript. Counter to Creeley’s initial intent — a decade’s worth of verse (most of which had been the basis for Creeley’s M.A. thesis at the University of New Mexico and previously published by small presses) was reconstituted as the hugely successful For Love. In correspondence Creeley explained:

“I was trying to connect with James Laughlin’s New Directions — he had said he would be interested in a new collection of poems. . . . to satisfy Scribner’s legal provision (that they get first look at what new manuscript I might have) and to clear the decks for going to ND, I made a book of all I’d written and gave it to them to look at, presuming that they would turn it down. They didn’t.” [correspondence from Robert Creeley to Jack Kimball, 2000].

[Part One of Two]

10/9/16

Can I call you privately into the moment
Or will you be going
Public for sympathy you gave up?

Didn’t raised eyebrows happen months ago?
Let’s put it away, it’s seasonal
Lady, we’re not bad hunters..

Grasses falling leaves and lust,
An incandescent unsettling,
Just look;

You have no real uncles
No pills no angst no
Great surprises — much of what counts

Is the next raw footage
That seizes space
The beak of the finch

Then the whole finch hop
Over where it plants its self.. no
Fear in nature.. some disgust

10/8/16





Speaker one. Two. Here I am on autobio. I work for myself.

My worker is a centipede.
I aspire to such simple random thought
I’m quick to postulate I’m an
evergreen seed
-ling aboard a slow poke riding to work — worker and work all aboard molecules snared
in a semantic thicket —

I’m sorry for such shoddy reasoning and growth. Sorry pieces
 of blue and orange foam and Plexiglas 
got glued together.. ugh, it registers.. The model boxwood
 hastily assembled last 
night, turning in bed. Sorry hours
 earlier I ordered radical simplifications 
to the 100 legs at headquarters. Sorry my most importantrole now is always or never undoing things. Sorry there wasn’t time to make a more polished 
address on our expanding global network of sex.



What happened out there?
I had a run-in w/ Hoyle in a clown costume
Holding a butter knife
I ran the dull blade across her arm —
A white room and a party coming on
A spelling bee among friends
And I was standing by a few new ones
Under a large gilt-framed mirror
On the other side, Hoyle
Don’t you hate it when anyone puns w/ gilt?
My hairpiece tilted slightly forward
As I made advances — Hoyle was there
In front of the fireplace decorated for the bee
We were drinking whisky
No joy, no sense of purpose or not?
We’re trying to decide How one spells the due a devil’s given,
What precise shade of yellow for the tail
Would be close to something
The setting sun turned our drinks
To. The drinks are to remind you of whisky
— I closed my eyes brief-
Ly and could see the gilt again
Then looked up into the shining surface
(I remember a mirror thereabouts, too)



Hoyle in a green dress leaned
In a hetero-inclusive manner
Against the far wall,
Perhaps not far enough, as
She seemed distracted —
Distracted, a word bringing pressure
On the fingers of my right hand
Fidgeting w/ her necklace
Which at that moment I coveted more than — sing it, babe
Are you trying to interfere w/ my..
And she was staring in the mirror —
Distracted by moi? No, looking
Not at me but past me, into a space
— a slit of space
That might be filled by someone nice
A successful televangelist no doubt
Yet to arrive there, on an invisible journey...
Journey, my roughshod term for predation and warfare
Which could lead directly to calmer views in the mirror..
This was years ago, according to Hoyle,
When lambent moonlight was the mirror of choice
And tho I have forgotten you
The mystery, high test places, and every desire of that young heart
And where I went next and who and where we all are now,
I still can’t forget the running moment of looking up
In the dictionary being loved
And seeing you in a green dress stare past me
An instrument of obscurantism, shifting
Into a place I could only imagine
Grabbing a microphone as you fled alluvially
— each time there’s a pang
Bursting eardrums.. a curse!
As if I were stepping out w/ you
W/in eternal blasts of song facsimiles
From the depths of mirrors
Where spotify still rocks
Thru an arid white room, breathless and eager
I am up for another whisky
Only to discover so late
Hey, I can do this!

10/7/16

With Agenda Melt (2004), Kenward Elmslie observed his 75th birthday by giving us his 36th publication, 16 poems and 7 excerpts from older libretti, cover and a few abstract, flattened two-dimensional drawings by Trevor Winkfield. The affect is very much of a reprieve, beginning with layout, how the texts float, fake-nervous and truly-independent, alongside Winkfield’s altogether low-key drawings, a now-classic format reminiscent of earlier collaborations between Elmslie and others, most notably Joe Brainard.

The poems reintroduce familiar lexical items, Vegas, ‘hula-hula,’ kitsch, hissy fit. Again and again they dwell on fractured past events, as “details fall into place, but I have to strain to piece them together correctly.” The second couplet of the title poem is one example. “Casp’s a start-up tub-thumper 401 (k) whistelblower snitch. / Hardball nay-sayer same year as Kissinger, Harvard nifty-fifty.” The compressed lingo is trademark, but the backward glance, the persistent, deeply focused attention to discordances long ago, is a new direction. Likewise, anxiety over solitude (“management camaraderie”) and lack of reminiscence (“Feel sealed off this day of memorylessness”) are un-ironic, revealing a rapaciousness of imagination satisfied, it seems, by writing concretely, to start, through paranoia and memory. “Memo / Start a journal.” The superordinate name Joe and the phrase “I remember” recur here in absolute and profound tribute to Brainard: what a boring month January is, I Remember .. sez you / Sez I to you ..I need plenty.

Weaponizing against lost lives and opportunities, his final recourse is this gift of poems whose affect is that of reprieval: Elmslie admits, “a hidden agenda. Survival ploy ... an anonymous black hole earthling gizmos / scrutinize in micro-detail, as I hurtling, / spend the day curled up in bed."
Winter afternoons. Mise en cologne. An antidepressant made me spritz it.
A.M. sun with a rose pickax angles over apartments so its light bisects
The documentary northern row of
Dark shacks diagonal the grand house.. Carl

Next door wants to know if you took his duck tape
That was sudden — Carl, no! and a chill equipoise
For a year; it would be helpful if a 1st effect of
His words weren’t “J’accuse” — It’s been weeks
Harshly formal by day, brusque in their authority.

And these lights let you know when the battery
Is obsolete. Beginning at evening they’d go a blue
— It’s such nice work, if you have any
With its schema proliferating
A question of .. you can say

I’m still not finished with it, Carl, you pay.
We call soliloquy anti-theoretical
Since there’s no one else speaking.

10/6/16

Onset waves beat their descriptions prompting fish next to want alums.
Out of breath, nearly within sight, in humble slacks, huffing at the mouth,

Sister Fish wishes a poem had nobody cared. A collapsible bottle of one

With no message, just a name.


This proverbially is from decades ere 3-D printing:
“To let yourself whisper through fracas takes a kind of aplomb, an achievement needing practice, a cookout with overview. Among classes of poets: waifs & strays & some lucky ones orphaned to an alien ethnicity, completely busted, out of place, in the wrong skin. (Welcome, rookies!)

At teaching intersections they come together for untangling snarls in their alien presence. If they nearly die for the gravy, they’ll show us their wounds, love notes imitating fury.”

10/5/16

Your slightly shabby rooms are elegant.

There’s a scent of acacia and soft frangipani, but that’s not your story.

You are a triumph.

You love skiing but you also play chess.

You come as you are prepared, in control as your influence multiplies.

You’re a particularly effective imposter.

We've got to get you some better notepads.
Good-bye everything.

Venus was alluding not to the Warhol of Village Wedding, nor the Breugel of Bouvard y Peruchet nor the Caravaggio of Dictionary of Received Ideas, but to the whole of Flaubert with these distinctive features: (a) an orientation — introducing De Palma’s every motive to repetition; (b) a rising action — a co-quest; (c) a climax — a serious complication but never with a resonance (or movement); (d) a big fall — the quest is martyred to some lewd object or, worse, an idea (e) a never-ending Venus De Brian.
In Slavic rhapsodies, a truly socialist government is not that hot.
Wearing nothing but pilates for motives, eager too,

Mixing shy and rabbity, squeaking in biblical
French — it’s just plain meaner. And we negotiate cash for rapprochement.



Once you’re set it costs a lot to get uninvolved.
The commissary is down in the sub-chambers. I meant
(Hold on, I was handed this bag of sentences.)
I have no regrets the I-origin-bullet-point is in earshot.
It’s already installed

Keeping your posture simple on the corner of statue and all space.
It beats wall art doling out yarrow pills to make you lie.

I am still there.
My views are not incompatible with yours.

Only there has to be a redo for whom we failed completely, openly.

10/4/16

Passport:

There is no absolute diva in me.
Just Power Events, long buried within
stewardship & deity symbols
until all of us (The What-If Losers) get to take up
residence at the commercial registry for happiness — taking rumba lessons from master-
slaves or Duran Dorian Grey, the earl.
Imp to ump ..
You’re on every page you go unmentioned.
There aren’t enough shortcuts to go around ..

My soul’s on break, thinking in a style of incompletion (Otto Dix),
Obsequious, sharpened,

Few motifs — the wash of light gets exaggerated.
I need you and wonder on (language).

: A new music took off about here
To encapsulate your suspicions ..
..

I like it, unlikely there’s more or less.
And some things you need to repeat.

(I forget now what you sound like.)

10/3/16

Barret Watten’s Frame — “A chain link fence around a vacant lot filled with/ trash. As if a _____ were inside them ..// A beam of sunlight refracted by a prism/ makes a display.// Until language is only relation-and we are/ being spoken in a dream.”
Trash is egghead poetics, here boiled down beneath a lot better trash that has a value P (portent) inside, spoken to sotto voce and to stipulate processed conditions to make up — practice making perfect sleep time.

Transition, Day Three. Disabused of crayons to create a hint of scalability.
First step. Leaking or semi-announcing utopic content, replacing the sleep we witness on the escalator.

Anyway, go to the next line.
This is no joke happening in my face. They call you girls. We are. Calling you skinhead meantime because of a themeless pudding for tonal platitude, surly Ramone of Ramones .. ...

Get off any inkling of your high horse. We are free — still — to say what they/we think, but their recipes, or ours, are hardly unadulterated, perfused with empathetic spices and accents from leftist modernism.
And so to bed. You know, Napoleon slumbered through wish fulfillment. Chong, as well.
Bedlam: the two century-old middle ground where we tend to live and continue playing on vulgar innuendoes to remain kind — you undress to force a smile, fully emancipating anti-heroes like me to feel obliged to receive you generously.

Moons from amazing both of you or all three of us maintain in position, otherwise.

10/2/16

Color and Its Antecedents (2004) shows Brenda Iijima slaying me as we enter a nappy demimonde of procedural ambiguity. This lame proposition is nothing Brenda would intimate. She doesn’t need to, since she already knows how much better a good guffaw is; humor is quicker than lofty argument — and better still, Brenda rouses us to laugh until we won’t stop. Painter, poet, she understands such things not as a propositional design, but as an enterprising, exhibitionist pattern: our species’ disgracefully pragmatic hostility toward cogent argument exemplified by my often never having to flesh out a sentence, much less an idea, of my own.. Strands of others’ erotic conflations, therefore, as well as their unfinished apologias, their run-on judgments and half-views are “maneuvered, turned, replaced” to bring down the “unconditional architecture” of “red associated aesthetically with animal flesh.” I cannot speak to Brenda’s occult paraphrasings — Francis Ponge’s “BROWN LIES,” Miyazawa Kenji’s “Turquoise / adrenaline,” Jack Spicer’s “lemons” — but there is surely enough here that is “Groomed by the pen" to drain the half-awake of their unearned logic and liberties. Pinning wine-stained sensualities from Li Po to a war chant from one Charlie Crowchief is another occasion of procedural pandemonium, as are Brenda’s final caveats: “A drab, colorless situation is punitive to poetry. Originate necklaces of color.”


To be unmarried
Where the sky went:

A bright debate — where eager heartbeats bore in, grateful prenuptials stampede out,

Drawing youthful bounds along dark areas of propaganda

And owing to your interest... this won’t constitute a sacrament.
Or only one of many as noted by a 3rd party.
Misogamy’s terms are to settle down through the evening. Your proud examples
Gain longterm advantage spreading the plan. Imprisoning no refinement.

10/1/16

VISTING A LEPER COLONY

BLUE LAWS
OVER-AND-UNDER

SORRY, UM, SORRY


Throughout Swoon Noir (2007), Bruce Andrews goes for the don’t-forget-I’m-forcing-you-to-slip-on-my-banana-peels every fourth or fifth line (he’s not going to leave anyone guessing, anyone behind). At times the sarcasm is phoneme to phoneme (ry, um), and surely line by line (blue laws @ a leper colony, just imagine!). “flameproof” is one of four sections with what look like single-page comedic inserts. Page 51, in the middle, starts: “END IT HERE.” Page 41 starts with nothing like a title: “Friendship as the end-value, sex as the price.” Twelve lines later, the last line of Page 41: “...thematic kitten, with a whip.” That’s humourous and cohesive or ‘thematic,’ even, for a poem that goes “Bouncy bouncy” with “Plum strokes” that sound out “Doop, / doop, doop, doop.” In “flameproof” and throughout there are only a few particulars (Retro Think) of an Andrews’ boyhood — DeGaulle, McNamara, 1966, Kodachrome, 70’s standup — to rub up against a dateless “Whoop and holler cause outlast effect.” But Bruce will include past items or move forward to have us end it here, “Overloading claws — velvet paintings grown up,” the intake of the sleepers’ logic, as if to “Paraphrase midreading craftmatic bed.” Then, “retrieval” and “misplaced dallying,” along with “simulated sentimentalism,” are among a box of hankie drops deployed in his “pleased solidarity” in “gibberish suspicion to courage / That’s a wrap ploy” or better known as “The] smack of this.” Only a handful of contemporaries jig language like a smack of this, starting with Kenward Elmslie, Bruce’s senior by 20 years. A phrase like “eyelash poppers” might have been whiffed up from Elmsie’s polisci sex romp Agenda Melt, but now these fresh amyl vapors emit from Bruce:
fund the knife, commandeer eyelash poppers

flaunt
pronto
winking
rocket
fangs
askant
shirk
readier
to
ostracize
loonie
plasmatic
planar
laugh-in
tit
diffusers
In “PUCKERED” we could find ourselves fawning over Bruce as one heckuva “Psycho-sister” who reads “high-handedness” in the “facts” of language, “not idealities.” When Bruce discovers “sectional norms,” “Faith as disaster,” and shouts “Caritas — restir the gravity,” I think it’s safe to argue he’s blasting both facts and ideals, choosing the higher handedness of language and its “re-veining” processes. It’s an all-points para-sarcasm with sidebar scamming played out by a few obvious “swindlers” to keep each of us motivated, laughing, and oh, yes: Downright un-American / What matter to the idea if indiv survives
Within Dahlia’s Iris (2003) Leslie Scalapino mines Tibetan lore from Treasure Discoveries (sectarian detective stories about current obstacles set up in a prior life). The novella is a prime specimen of meta-narratiion: writing film noir before staging it within a set of lifetimes that, for me, achieve moments (movements) of past and future resounding through present time. (“Ashcroft petitions justices for secrecy in deportations.”) Like Dogen’s view of mortality, Dahlia’s Iris engages death before it may (not) have happened, requiring scenes and coincidental backdrops be replayed, special terms like ‘waves’ recur as if on a mission (“repetition...of events will make a crack, will crack realism”), personnel shifted and some fired so when they come to work anyway, they achieve a seeming bliss (“the boy is a crushed rose on the cement”) of a non-willed state (“the high waves of grass flickering in color where one will be...”). Non-willed conciousness nonetheless participates in even-tempered theoretical interchange of matrices connecting Stein’s continuous present, for instance, to Walter Benjamin’s nostalgia for the now passé interiority of an observer-as-flaneur — as well as Kathy Acker’s view of absolute present as pain emptied through plagiarism. Dahlia’s Iris also maintains high humor as ironic appropriation in which story lines from favored movies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Blade Runner) have been researched and repurposed to trick us into seeing the self-compliance as well as transience of visual evidence. The exchanges here most ironically cross time frames and rocky California hills with twisting plains of narration that remonstrate against mortality’s solid bottom, why “inside the muffled trussed adult in the swaddling clothes grows mean as institutional behavior... Speaking at all is understood only as anger.”
Desire set pass’s depth
once making it shattered again into love arts —

guzzling bottled water before you came to mind, then effectively passing
thru the park, streets,
I roll now to hold you holding that moment

I kissed a cat. Once.

Once out of death
I wrote on otherness when down (“I’ve stopped looking”) otherness came.

What’s the worst that can happen? Love’s twenty times its own weight,
enclitic in almost meaning.