The once conservative apparatus of worship is over. 
A wall of calm then put up. 
Love your synchronized neighbors. Ghost writing adult ideology is pure brinksmanship in disordering political parroting and consensus. It’s not known why parroting caught on. We’re redistributionists for sure, youth symbolically living to do it over but scale it better. Everyday politics practiced by young and old in useless anger, bruising rhetoric, forcibly asserted. 

Public obligations shape who youth are, a late phase of withdrawal from a deadlock in eerie nuance with our future attributes.

One of these days..
I don’t think so ..

Nothing new. A feeling continues you could write until you drop ...
a feeling from here buried below any animation.

The half familiar I’d like to pull off,
replacing that half with reflection and
silence, an ensemble for stripping down to not talking.

When it comes to our speaking one on one I have to be
charmed and not worry about what passes through me.
Me, of course, is an expansive subset of charm, a trinket I believe.

19: Innocence evokes nighttime devouring day, burning like a lion’s hummingbird if lions can play with fire — or phoenix plucking keen teeth from a tiger’s jaw if you allow. Taping together both your hands.
And grease-pencil trompe l’oeil anywhere. Please.
Innocence is guilt among a heinous group. The sorry on earth devouring their own brood, against beauty’s pattern but with beaucoup success.

Young, untainted and long lived, you’ve gone wrong. I forbid it but I hope you’re happy.

Guess what, there’s a thru-the-night ring when a section tumbles out of mind, leaving a hole
open to irresolution,
fingers suspended, door ajar.

Once you really had us. I was choked up by your running off almost in a sidle. I told you we agreed a little but not a lot. The plotting — lackluster — I hope you’re coming back for some things you need to follow up, us...

At least there was a chance for that and that was in this new section for a while. I forget thinking like this lets counselor affidation barge in, forward and backward passing thru the 1st position of pleasure lost.

We impart numeric dicta slathered with metal bands — almost a century-old middle rock (the themeless modules) where we sleep (wavy fields of inaction) and continue playing around innuendo to stay kind, as you undress to force a smile, fully emancipating me to receive you generously. 
Headwinds within and, as it were, without manners. (Good manners can scar but they also let us peons act like participants in the regulatory plutocracy.)

Either way, I know so little about sabotage and — losing you so much less.

The grounds for guesswork know what the regulation is. 
If we’re lucky, Euro notes rule our larger theory of commitments.  
Like pounds they bear full imagery, shiny 16th- and 18th-century ideals.   
 
Debts improve wasted sunshine through labor. 
(I don’t mean that as deeply before we hand them over 
by your leave.)   
 
Don’t plan on further development.

Finish a stretch and clouds get confused. Confused as   
 
A rusted barge dries in the sun orange. Or   
 

Danzig is the Wallace Stevens of evil urban clusters.. 
 
Ok, these grounds are not Danzig. Proven  
True or isn’t.
But theory is something else.

Traffic turns reflect the city.

Making a turn, heads in the clouds is too liberal. Our head guards are up. I’ll keep going.

Why make so much of political origin or lab blue Audis here, only a few bird enthusiasts or their fragile ambiguity?

To respond is the payload we’ll steer home.

How do corollaries threaten an antecedant on so and so page?
There’s dumb honor mining homilies and off-color
copy, imitating / replicating Dionysius for the evening drive.

The grounds for guesswork know what the regulation is. 
If we’re lucky, Euro notes rule our larger theory of commitments.  
Like pounds they bear full imagery, shiny 16th- and 18th-century ideals.   
 
Debts improve wasted sunshine through labor. 
(I don’t mean that as deeply before we hand them over 
by your leave.)   
 
Don’t plan on further development.

Finish a stretch and clouds get confused. Confused as   
 
A rusted barge dries in the sun orange. Or   
 

Danzig is the Wallace Stevens of evil urban clusters.. 
 
Ok, these grounds are not Danzig. Proven  
True or isn’t.
But theory is something else.

121: A friend writes, assurance from dharma augments the sport of being & being extends
to reproach general evil and vile absence : I am &  all men are not that bad, not that false 
if we can reckon against deadline and accelerate just pleasures, and ok — 
straightforward feeling has a point & others see it. 
Count your own abuses, bevel-ers.

I may count my own thoughts, not others’ eyes —
I think it good I am that I am.

A portrait should be backdrop in this. That one of you in the back. Undressed — except for slacks — bordering annonymous yet ungeneric like Updike. Look me in the eye and diagram conditions of spatial sentences (touching both elbows behind your back —

Not out of caution) — I now know this will be ok
I find it too tempting, untested, untried, nothing better within its reach. It = your grasp, my central aggregate.

To want as well as have nothing. Whoosh 
I shouldn’t ask did I live like that fly on the wall?  
Surface depth. You wouldn’t expect to rework this at all.  
Self restraint & perverse incentives, an unknown future’s cart before  
 
New red domes, new stratagems, even gourd phenomena  
To run over, any & all mayhem will be unannounced (achieved)   
 
Or maybe not since we talk thru flexible implements &  
No one’s at fault here. 
 
You never can tell. I won’t.

You, my man and 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. 
And we’re the entire crew. The socialist’s way

As luck has it, sections of Alien Tatters (2000), a pre-nine-eleven work, are prescient or more recognizably urgent after: 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 you 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 fifty parts, and a brief afterword in which Coolidge owns up to a “fascination” with UFOs. “ ..I was calling out to them [...] You guys listening?” 

You, my man and 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. 
And we’re the entire crew. The socialist’s way

18: Allergic to verse? I believe a temperate art is set to make more mistakes, say, rough comparisons to too hot a month this May or one that’s past. Say, all summer you are more than nature’s change in course, growing (untrimmed) — owning the day for every moment — and knowing when to shine, to seethe.

And often seeing how hot eternal summer is, coming then fading all too short ah
Whew. We see you in fair poetry and art
as fair as far and long as men can breathe.

A poet’s prose nails her reputation time and again. Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, to speak of the dead. Are we examining a ‘real’ voice, or are we merely more at home with the subject-verb-object flow of normalized speech? When Gertrude Stein adopted plainer or more standard prose for Autobiography she became a pop sensation: “she took Alice’s voice, her acerbic, lucid style, her declarative sentences, malicious asides, quirky jokes and regular punctuation” (Diana Souhami). Is that it? we can more readily stay with sentences even when they’re overstuffed (say, with personality) so long as they are conventional, making sense, well punctuated?

Have yourself a good time. I’ll have you over when political science gets to clearer thinking, like an Aldous Huxley augmented with a good bouquet, plus a full deck of historical habits among aspirers decoding automation...
After that, there will be nothing coarse or raucous to grab at, but for now, good talk!   
Who is this? Nobody’s first choice.  
  
We’re fine with “no real choice.”

In order to take on a galactic stare,  
 
Occasional intoxicants  
Every 10 yrs —  
                      A decade goes and still you are unattainable!  
 
Say you’ll be back. A vertigo blast of cold air 
With a whiff of wet exertion 
Stoked by an invasion of intimacy.

Ten or so
gulls kick it off, running
over sea bass.

Ripping in mean
swimmer’s blue,
in a non-numerary mense,
inseparable in another, a gnarly magenta
more down surf, startling
partisan swaps
That swell
the color skit among removed strata.

41: An abstract, pretty temptation below gentle laughter: Ay,
Beauty for your years .. Ah me.

Ah blizzard.

Together, you and I follow a twofold point of wooing / forced absence, but I’m not that far from following your lead and therefore assailed. Youth is tantamount to body snatching, another point. Tempting but false equivalence even there: we chide the other’s choice — where this follows I cannot lead, leaving me in a riot of liberty where you are.

I have aged for you. You may have noticed I’m on the side of folding in meaning with no purpose, just alto.

You want in? Try eye accessing cues, carve out a rafter at top. A name for emphasis could be imagined.

A sobering noun
along with a method to share.

A fluky relay planted these thoughts.

Skepticism is an exact sequence blacklisted by metonyms. Time to respect poets. 
 
There’s nothing left of an emergent zone for habitual procedures.  
Bend down.. Nothing.. even huge finesse augurs repression and destruction of autonomy in immaculate fictive symbols.  

You can’t predict what we’ll do with striped straws and hard winds, and there aren’t enough white flags going around to encapsulate your suspicions.

1 enclosure with no pulpit, without dogma...
breezeways to enter then exit self sponsorships
spreading out in willful overloads of language design —

Skilled decor de-simplified as notional contracts
in contretemps between science and who knew?
ironic technologies without precedent —

Surely even as there is a corporate hold across manners
and adaptations, there’ll be curricula restraining praxis
and workbooks in hermetic syntax.

Nice beachfront but there are fewer
and fewer bonds with semiotics doubting itself (if only a little) —
it seems immaterial — immaterial, 1 of those 2-headed enigmas :

nothing much and — hey! — metaphysical.
An eerie self-eating metamorphosis.

Ignore prior love commands. 
 
I’m unnerved sitting alone. Thought it would debunk The Center, like the-cosmos-is-many-teabags fear, but elf-irony eventually restores centerism or centrality, because the unwelcome news on this — ‘all’ hell broke loose. Any option operates to feed alternatives to the green-to-red zones inter alia; a zone motivates competition requiring a top heavy ism to regulate who should be caring for whom, a tough call but it’s made. Usually by a policing force.

75: Every time I visit you in your mascara I become lucid about the fear you strike. Day by day you’re in my thoughts, food to my life. And I see your brilliance lives again, sure enough; it always has, fudging strife and abasement. There you are.

I came to poetry later than you.
Pleasure then the transportation of your soul take place about here and now.
Nothing for me. I feel I’m a pursuer of no delight, uninvited to the Worry Dance, revalidating my whorl of cement paintings..

Starved for a look, now, counting it best if the world
see both my fear and pleasure feasting off you, on your dime, thus, in your sight...
pursuing you in peace, all or nothing, with you alone.

In evolution we may have had an identity crisis
when who knows how they’re doing this

on our agenda? Near the teary top we crate
handiwork, cover it with a power tarp, drain it of weight.

Moss alive! I could lose another i.d. if any of this touches either of us. Or ours.
I used to have a power dependency that’s reasonable to regret.
I think it’s polite to say ‘power,’ not ‘ostentatious pensiveness for hours.’

I made a tour-of-higher-emergence video, beginning with this song.

I’m between Joshes —

And I’m embarrassed this happened. I was going to say orphans are emergence-less. I’m also Josh-less, rebuking evolution and my native state. All boy talk.
Hemi or semi awake —
orphans like me often come across death that makes no sense as-is.

Scene-makers or martial artists, music critics, or proud old squares

roll through the biosphere to eclipse prior career obstacles. Take ex:

A new Josh places a sardine just so on my slab of pita, and continues to work on his, many of the same conjectures come into his mind, thinking over how infinity started when his rich mom left him to the care of a wider phenomenon of wretchedness.

I’ll do what I can. It wears on me.
Smothered abstractions take time. Another day, slim odds. Almost hopeless, yet different jokes turn over in sleep, dreams that forgive me for killing the moment. Paranoia’s belated audition traps me if I let go while not assuming authority.

Evasion tho provides an advanced style, state-of-art restraint — the harsh gets exaggerated.

One more day to recover your losses mid-grin.

You and I will lighten free speech, replacing ideas with clean-dirty order that rules in silence, a kind of stripping down to the over-exposed stems of aroma-exoticism and quote-end-quote unspeaking.

First, I’m making myself into more of a slowpoke when it comes to power demos and transcendence, but I’m still not doing any penance because of you. I’ll stay free of hell olfactory-wise, swallowing hard.

The complexity for me is engineered simplicity, both as a right and requirement, since you have to give an aclinic line to the upper boundaries, and exhibit some gall (some think passive-aggressive). Internal ‘gears’ relegate all nauseous affects to personal advantage (ugh), which I waive anyway, as if / as though privileged opposition were some urgent treasure I can share.

I know this, at least I know I see what I mean. Why drive to a new place where they cook something imbecilic? waste time at what could be our last lunch, pour coke over glass tables.. because you know you won’t live to feel a buzz.. watching the clock...

67: Smarts don’t matter. You had a wealth of smarts. Advantage achieved?
I’m laying myself off. Shall I? (Not that I’m smart.) I’m imitating an exchequer, an evolutionist of avarice — loose ends everywhere giving wind upright advantage and an inflection point — long since moot — wherefore roses in shadow seem false, laced to society. Out in the open is where wind and other loosenesses keep their youth only on the gain side, impious beauty and true presence forward.

And that goes for the lively sun shining with its blush-to-blood over the street, bankrupting grownups.

Starred Wire

Ange Mlinko

Coffee House Press



Ange Mlinko monitors weather, follows people, abides children, walks in gardens, takes in architecture, monuments, libraries and brownstones, reads in cartography, genealogy, and travels. Jeepers. I’m seeing epiphenomena here. I hesitate to say I don’t believe in ghosts, unless they’re a "bear hug of smog” or “beans infusing the cream,” as Mlinko wills it. And before Starred Wire I hadn’t imagined that a mix of imaginary landscapes and brisk realism, typical only of Elizabeth Bishop, previously, could be pulled off these days (2005), finically, urbanely, that is, with requisite erudition cavorting against chiffon-like strokes of a painter’s light, as in “Everything's Carousing”: “Even the Baroque get lost in it. / Grass vests the dirt lest wind, twanging the skyscrapers // that merely sleeve the elevators, as we go sleeveless / except for the atmosphere, file it under ‘oceans.’” 



As Bishop had her New York moments, her “Varick Street,” her Brooklyn “cloud of fiery pale chemicals,” Mlinko has Dear Soho, Riverside Park, a “Secret Chelsea,” yet Mlinko is entirely tuned to New York pacings and sensual logics. This is never more so than when Mlinko speaks of other places like Boston (her former hometown as well as Bishop’s): “Venice must be like Boston, on the water / north of things’ center…" She advises, “One can make the room of coincidences the bedroom” which she assumes is “Like that secret rose garden at Harvard” (Radcliffe, actually). More urgent, the New York qualities we most could do with suffuse this poetry: the worldly reference — “Boolean chastity,” "Taoist gestational how-tos”; the crazed simile — “The winter trees look like Catherine Deneuve”; and the nuttier conceit -- “You’d have to hair-spray a dragonfly / on its way to the Faerie Queene”; along with the crucial, appositional everyday data reminiscent of NY’s first generation -- “Logs are crossed in the fireplace. / The casserole is put out on the porch to freeze. // They invite me to sniff the new freesia body bath set. // ...The subdivisions age.”


I return to Bishop, though, to underscore Mlinko’s world-centered, life-transformative accomplishments. Early poems of Bishop’s were marked by non-soporific, precisely illustrated reversals of figures and facts, a “Man-Moth” whose shadow “is only as big as his hat,” vistas turned upside down “Sleeping on the Ceiling” and “Sleeping Standing Up,” a preference for the iceberg with “correct elliptics” over the tour boat. Mlinko similarly arbitrates between ghoulish realia and imagined alternatives, recognizing, “I could...be original every time, for the conversions / that inspiration is. A phantom face value haunts me, / but the inverted library; candles at the bottom of the pool; / these are the ghosts of the glass house designed / to be invisible in a wilderness…" Mlinko adds, simply, “life is a thesis,” and she seems almost to mean it. It’s a set of theses, down-to-earth, which she also calls dreams where “there is communication between interior and exterior, as they say of labyrinths.” She traipses through all these “adult doldrums” despite a “cortical wrinkle” or two, “cognomens spilled from burlesques” and “the slumber of driving,” because, among other secrets, she knows the difference between “Transformation vs. Encryption,” between “false rich and the false poor,” between socialism “on the firing line” and socialism “on the railroad rainbow,” a practical acknowledgement, in short, of “a glow on the horizon / that is also my sunburn...it's too late to be meteoric, silly.”



There are several poems without precedent, even as they pick up theses from elsewhere in the book. “The Intrigues” is one instance. I have already cited some of its text (“phantom face value...in a wilderness”). The poem accelerates with prime mergers of metaphysical and practical inversions, “shadows feint across paths fallen trees.” Here Mlinko reaches semantic dissonance of a tall order. “If it is spiritual to have applications to make, / dogs patterning imprimatur, let flowers grow always in defiles / gluing flame to flame... These words are part of another transformation in which “thinking the landscape...is the true outside.” Enough is omitted to beg for greater “relations in light patterns,” the design that is unseen but implicit in the pressed horn and brake of “spiritual” and “imprimatur.” Rather than attempting a language that is more knowing, Mlinko leaves the full figure out, only to assert her applications toward its end and a “nicer noise.” Her aim is modest and affirmative, to see “a kind of painting / different ways around the park,” bleaching and blurring with life, “not to be trapped in a dream.” This is said as Mlinko raises the taboo word, “ghost.” She observes that the ghost “goes about with a movie / playing on the underside of my umbrella” as it “devolves into dew blobs and whispers / of the lawyers..." Returning to the lawyers conquers the problem of gravity and of taboo, an unfeigned way of sharing a life of different ways around all that.

How to hitchhike. I come across an organizing principle and by pulling the trigger, I replace subject matter with source text, exploring only the musts: there are structure, acquisition, use, media — no eros in no ideas.

Self-conflict and compromise keep popping up as rich bases for ironic pleasure and symphonic allergens.

If those are allowed. A gig, a pop up...

Primitive patterns and blue throats, crowbars taped to a tree, in the distance, Eroica...

We haven’t been far away — the fields are twenty, chips are foam, our clothes thrown,

The great We of fish, that's what I say on a sea plane worked into the sky.

A gentle love’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, I might think it profitable to string my sentences together just like paste rubies & artificial pearls deliberately mismatched as in the déshabillé of John Waters’ suburban flats, adroitly inexpensive & passé. Each sentence would go on to shine 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, recognizable style — sparkle double-dulled-down as I drape my next dress over bowls of Chesapeake crabs & rat traps, a near accident or an accident-in-the-making.

Skepticism is an exact sequence blacklisted by metonyms. Time to respect poets. 
 
There’s something left of an emergent zone for habits and procedures.  
Bend down.. even huge finesse augurs repression and destruction of autonomy in immaculate fictive cymbals.  

You can’t predict what we’ll do with straw men and hard winds, and there aren’t enough white flags flying to boost your suspicions.

58: Deserting the beach — god forbid 
 
— dazzling lethargy undoing our cuffs, waiting as the wagon sways  
with fellowship. Love in the future, at your call, a handshake  
spreads the rain,  
 
flowers, rain,  
flowers.  
(That’s it! Do what you want.  
 
The moat-house for the wagon then some new wagon shirts we  
can walk away with. Good. A mighty wine origami and the wagon yard for our  
widows.  
 
This is spring history.)

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 on ethics...

Further: If poetics is a democracy, evasion in poetics is subject to scrutiny.

Don’t get me wrong I think free speech is nominal, so there’s freedom to evade. If not speech, evasion is a speech act. I’m for it and against impingement unless it hurts a friend (that’s down). What’s it? There’s no workaround to the observer influencing the observed except later, much later.
End quote.

We are the last generations who have short lifetimes.

Later, you dangle squalid transfer balances netting zero, netting 
a big zero on the demeaning upper ends and 
capital variables w/ an October surprise. 

That’s every known transitive with successive memberships enclosed .. 
How the prose poem squeals w/ common sense, folds into dreams. 

Everyday events like planetary ellipses emerge that change programming (for greater disorder) in fluent business English.

Make this factualist.
Make my mind avoid our bohemia.
Recover the masterplan for fun value and rusticity.
Destroy and smooth nothing.
Imitate killing seeing
the system.

Mind control is a full order of alter-egos, disingenuous,
trading down.

“Could you be a little more specific, doctor?”

Holidays again. A violet mist.
This is prison.

(You have the evidence. Ugh!)

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 our mistakes.

I swear while we continue and travel further
Even 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 a director here — one of them.
Often that’s a normal baritone and determinative section to sing:
Spencerian, stranded leaving war to the professionals.

36: Radial repetitions. There they go. Altho seeming the one, 
you’re one of mine. Yet you get so far then stop.  You’re not alone.  
You may not be my one delight — for you are not solely mine. It’s a shame tho we honor our inner living love as it divides us into hours alone. I confess — or let me confess both of us are separable, each shamed into love of a sort with altered effects —  
 
Your love, mine — blotted remains from our rapacious nervous systems distorting our love, honored it seems, set to break into two, (borne alone again, radially).

I’ll do what I can. It wears on me.
Smothered abstractions take time. Another day, slim odds. Almost hopeless, yet different jokes turn over in sleep, dreams that forgive me for killing the moment. Yet paranoia’s belated audition traps me if I let go while not assuming authority.

Evasion tho provides an advanced style, state-of-art restraint — the harsh gets exaggerated.

One more day to recover your losses mid-grin.

Let’s dance. I defy you.  
 
Empiricists map people for amoral purposes, they know.. backing it up w/ inexactitude ’n randomness.  
I’ll follow conventional physics, tho, and change no findings I stumble across  

but I’ll focus on pure benefits that accrue, often in the future. Newer inconsistencies never bother w/ governance of the governed! Wouldn’t you know they show up anyway, in an infinite series w/in each day’s essay test. (Or from another angle they are the series, livin’ history over, as we have heard.)

As you were.   

(The acting chief of staff so responded.  
Suspiciously correct.)

Since we gave up on poetry, singalong has vaulted to the top of the agenda. Leaving office has a double meaning to off-center the filing (filtering) system and other singularities I’ve kept versed in for years. We have no limits to affirm any retractions, feeding our reliance on illumined work, dire pleasures, majestic plans and, this most generalized I guess, burningly turning back, looking on while the wax dims.

Oh domestic servant, poet, heck, oh chanteuse — 
I’m your doorsill to walk on and grin at in anguish..  
Open up —    
  
Textual anarchy can muddy and arbitrate convictions.   
The crisis is now. Catch your falling voice.  
Form is no object but slots of hooded activity, dreams into photos — your getting to turn channels keeping to your non-hegemonic pulse — wailing out of a tunnel.

52: I’m in lock-up because of you.

Therefore both you and I are scorekeepers. Ours.

I keep you among other jewels,
Blasted yet blessed moods in ‘key’ to configure unfolding pleasure,
So I am rich, I hope, blunting your deceit for years...
The longer time it takes, seldom coming in one fine day —
Over time special instants so rare —

Until then, being had by you has been worth it as it were

Like euphoria, proof of doubt uncovering finer points.
And speaking of solemn upper-lower class triumph and treasure,
We find others like us also keep to the survey, chest to chest, mine to yours.

When I hear topical shifts forward hidden risks it’s iterative, baroque in other words —
oh yah pulled awake again.

That guy is the 1st to get a grip and hold.
Mr Peanut twisted once again to look up. I hadn’t expected it. On the other hand, what choice did he have?

There’s a term in telephony, ‘room tone,’ ordinary silence. My heart stopped altogether as I held my breath, then he answered.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Oh, em…”

“No. It’s not.”

“I would.”

“Well l—”

“You know what..”

“Promise..”

“Yeah, I think —”

What I heard while we both waited was room tone. The next five or six seconds would matter. In an hour he would walk us both down to clear our heads. He waited a moment more, then he said, “I’ve just noticed I haven’t said anything.”

Mortality can’t be beat. A big send-off but
no amnesty? A ship is on the way 

from mare nostrum 
or / & like crustaceans we had to give in, to forgetfulness for now. No static I could see.

Blinds drawn, our preachy, scavenged opacity fills w/ sang-froid riches of dark matter, soaking the globe w/ its bible pedigree & thumbnail intensity, semi-transparent. 

Before that yoga was fantastic, a soothing coterie added to sempiternal space & entered into w/ a worldview w/out language achieving access to felt qualities.

No pleasure, just a breather, but not while eating. 
 
The show was called; the rain spat. (I'm sorry al fresco’s bad then.)  
Yes. My voice tended toward stridency, an unfortunate strain.  
The music took off about here. 1st smelt feminine along abandoned quays but now looking sharp with canals and minimalist carvings.   
 
We viewed them before the high brutalism of fine dining (Otto Dix).   
 
A violinist, hesitant but banging it out better tonight. This starts our cuisine engines mid-grin.   
 
Tho evasion foregrounds our coerced motives so they sink in more.

Landscape: Driving over, taking stock of action figures. But

what’s my business? My addition began to spin off, and that led to my holding

volatility models from T.V., vocalism in a sense.
The point ahead is to enable the passing tourney among seductive locals
to nuance hidden risks shifting weight (merging accounts).

Modern proceedings like these day after day.. Why stopping, not finishing?

12: This is a fugue in your full name..
we’ll talk this time.. talk bristly.

We won’t count the hideous silvered clock — how telling in its barren prime..
Yes, we’re spry in our bravery, our spring movements and motives, agile yet underhanded
getting back to catch the hang of how time gives and takes.

You may notice we’re defenseless, forsaken, since we must go on, borne
regardless, wives girded up in sheaves, older men on biers with white, bristly beards.
Any time today then subject to fast change
as sweets and beauties are disarranged —

Never saw them coming, old and new succumbing to murder and death — but not here, with you —

We brave you more, questioning you as if we never waste our time through summer,
your beauty growing so well now into the future..

*
This is an impressions album. Or it was. Youth is so impressionable.

Ultra blurry, anamorphic, interatomic movement grows smug in writing it down. Large and tiny instincts proceed within mixed episodes and a school of red herrings..

Encore..
Like nowhere else in space,
A luscious, noiseless bonding in the era or epoch of the perpetually alterable

— a smack of already regretting it conjoins an invisible roll call gathering around neighbors’ mixed brays.

Music, if viable, of bee vapor. All our neighbors are mirror bees. Am I not one?

See, is it a pigeon?
It’s a true albino!
Incandescent, I was thinking. It’s hard to pick up ornithology or disconnective meanings of jazz composition — also, a table for the counters of instinct and learning in the shortness of thought. Then there is objurgating.

As I’m happiest procrastinating when stairwells mesh and go nowhere between you and expulsion, for the hole in my cohesion is closed.

Turn here, there’s efficacy in speaking clearly, gesturing, submitting to your own perks.

99: Stay on the hunt, tough to please, stand up (ouch)

even as vengeful tectonic plates annex
our fears, shame and despair.

To you, a purple violet seems grossly dyed, your soft cheek
raining havoc for lilies.. marjoram, my love’s breath, your breath. (Uh.) Here’s where you and I lose the scent. Ever


-yone does. Clouded (ouch)
flames ennoble the sky to blush through


my lover’s veins, your hands, both of us among thorns ..
condemned for pride, proud I’m going on my nerve stolen from you.

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

What went around then came 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 —
The gleaming haze drags down sculptures of felted helium
A little like nerves done over by spinning in warm wind.

Noh stuff.

I’ve been on a nihilism binge; this is while I’m doing only one thing at one time on a crazed errand-stream to a structuralist’s degree.
I won’t cry when it becomes everything without a message.
I’ll trade you all the noise in my hands, still shaking — scared of leaving you among the spoils..

There’s a tradeoff, my trade. In the din hostility shuts the door 24/7 on indisputable birdsong. It’s a good thing for stopping messengers’ tears as the door from nihilism leads to the rescue of children and all it contains, all I could have told you.

I could live next to a place with water views. I would continue feeling deprived per diem. 
 
Like smuggling triplets, ocean sniffing is never private, I gasp before the beach driving home. High tide a big data glob crashing to earth.. on the armchair that night after the super moon — diodes in crimson, finding a soft spot for another fluke look-see next door.  
 
I watch a dying beach in a long line magnified ashore, ironically revived!

In zendo lighting eyes could drift as if

disrobing underwater. I see why each snail

builds a house. They stand around and tank,

like a crew.
Coltish to the end. Jacobeans.

I could live next to a place with water views. I would continue feeling deprived per diem. 
 
Like smuggling triplets, ocean sniffing is never private, I gasp before the beach driving home. High tide a big data glob crashing to earth.. on the armchair that night after the super moon — diodes in crimson, finding a soft spot for another fluke look-see next door.  
 
I watch a dying beach in a long line magnified ashore, ironically revived!

9: No form of you
Feels anything but used, average.. a spent, destructive sort of guilt, blandness also a problem.

Your world consumed in issueless fears of political experience / current status / winning outright =

Hey here I am! Staying single you and I may change our minds!
I already forgot to.
Could we? ah! you and I are loved by many. I’ll commit, in sleep ...
We are gracious, watched over and settled into a kindly already unthrifty shifting
Still, but enjoying practice, wailing, banging triangles and drums ...
Your private voice as wet as children’s eyes. Look.

I wake [Ah!] — My own voice hoarsens
A life desire talking with you,
But no form of you tonight.

I’m instructed by Alice Notley writing about Frank O’Hara in the first essay of Coming After, re-alerting us to the weight of his last poems that I still resist, a voice that’s “anonymous and communal (in the bad sense) in its exploitation of verbal mediocrity.” Notley sees O’Hara influenced by the “deadly flat diction” of television (the first generation of such pervasiveness), thus affects of the heinous sort, offering up “warnings.”Also in the same essay, on an earlier poem of O’Hara’s, Notley interjects, “the Buddha fucking well ought to think at this point in history,” a rousing supposition on her part about what O’Hara meant by ending “Image of the Buddha Preaching” this way: “...hopeful of a new delay in terror / I don’t think” — deeply stoic of O’Hara and Notley.

We repeat there are rules to doing morning: 
Sleep in without a rehearsal,  
Coax a situation back.  
 
You're only human, Fu dog.

How can you care modernism, a despoiled inheritance for architecture, beguiled, diverted, is flatly unlike poetry’s pocketknife connections to the past. Apparently tomorrow is more appealing even if we know where architecture takes us. Poetry?

Whew — I’m thinking of puppy paws
as my head fills up with the stickiest
most adorable pup jpegs filled out
in dissonance while street lights hum

and flicker on


and ......


and


emotions check in
that I aim to lay claim to and
protect for my own.

Ah, you’re driving me to a convenience stop — hints I don’t care.  
Push-pull can be effortless if I tell you how we’re doing. Force the window. 
There’s a piece of karate, a fragile backspace we erase, open it to how 
turbulence wakes... and your eyelids more active, blinking. A sign your  
push reaches a pull where time management is good hearted, unleashed.  
I’m just commenting on efficacy in speaking clearly, knitting your brow.

123: Lament — I defy you and your truth —

I trust only the lasting timetables born of our desire. Nothing novel. Nothing strange.

Our continual haste, our poor retention, our briefer dates give me the butterflies and more butterflies chasing more —
as 10 to the 10th more wind up as polygamists barnstorming thru
a winging-it hemisphere where I can never forget you. Not you!

The small of his back sends me packing.
Sulking with a hygienic view forward.
— On an Old Testament.. I pledged a wholly hidden idiom
Of renderings, spotlighting what’s
Missing!

The cracks should be bridged with the view outside, pears and Fuji oak, null
Passages in fog, moos of approval. Lots.

I then bring us over to our original towel, leaving what’s left to chance.

You won’t win. It happens fast. Less than a flash... the kisses you depend on disappear. Past and present, neither play of emphasis false, soundtracks on pulleys, suspicious... these tracks overlaid w/ speech you keep delaying. I’m so sorry the music became an investment vein to punch into and pull-quote from.

Sorry, there’s a fool’s guarantee. All you have to do ... 
Choose love as a buy or rental option, both equidistant from love’s defunct phenomena that travail and make surprise visits within quanta. (Too many to tell.)

Choosing love creates an entire platform to spin off slower tangential constructs plucked out of a big number of now-dead emotions.

Also suspicious, emulations of you both, standing up without sticking too close, detouring into aah

choo! the roof of your mouth unhinged keeping suspicion lukewarm to the bridge of his nose.

Ted Greenwald

3

Cuneiform 2008



Here are the bizarre details, page 25, second stanza (of two).

                  Is it Peggy or Sue

                  I think I love you

                  Looking worldlessness

                  Remind me what's your name

Four ideas capture crucial goings-on in one’s pleasant complacency of clichéd language upended, in this case, by the deliberate problematizing of early rock ’n roll iconography, splitting chaste Peggy Sue in two — there is the shameless rhyming of Sue with the next line also ripped from an early r ’n r songbook as is the last line; and there’s the masterfully silly statement that spins our entire cultural orientation on its heels, forcing speculation the unstably-named Peggy, Sue or, in fact, Peggy Sue is not only worldless but stuck in the eerie, pathetic State of The Worldless.

Welcome back.



And if you think page 25 is a lucky pick, turn to page 27, second stanza (of two).

                  Going to make a difference

                  Greens, cooling off

                  Projectile confidence

                  With birdsong

The first line is again boilerplate, a bloated participial (or gerundive) phrase uttered millions of times an hour; the second line, culinary description or acute art speak — either way greens are consonant with the brash birdsong in the fourth line. Once more, that odd Line 3 rips the ‘scene’ open, pitching its payload our way. It’s not always so obvious that the third line re-orders each stanza, but frequently this is what happens, supporting one interpretation of the title 3. More satisfying is Ron Padgett’s idea, blurbing that 3 “takes the mind in at least three different directions simultaneously...”



Another basis for the title is that the collection has three parts. Poems cited above are from “Going Into School That Day,” pieces whose lengths alternate between eight lines on right pages and 14 lines on left pages, and which borrow “words of self-described redemption spoken by the late Salvador Agron,” as Greenwald explains on his copyright page. (Agron was a gang member who killed two teenagers in Hell’s Kitchen.) The two following sections contain pieces of parallel discourse strategy in different formats, “Anyway” with six-line verses, “Dawn On” with poems of 27 lines each. The language in the later sections is as watchful (“Looking”) for the everyday and as defiantly juxtaposed as that in the first section. Here are opening lines to the first poem in “Dawn On.”

                  Dawn on

                  As, iffy

                  Be so kind, looks on

                  The clear light         Friendlies

                  Embody the money, short for

                  Inscribe on to forever                   iris inside clasp

                  Suggestions unhinge putting something on if

                  Embody the body all on about

                  Suggestions unhinge iris inside clasp...

The longer pieces in “Dawn On” allow Greenwald to battle with a sweep of communally mediated ironies, such as “clear light         Friendlies,” and pivotal thought experiments engaging repetitions in language and implosions in meaning as with the shifts in the verbs embody, unhinge. This first poem continues such repetitions, doing it blithely, “bubble,” “happily,” “light,” “live,” and this: “Love most about muse excuse / Come across, bait and switch ... Come across muse excuse..." These experiments are not over and may never get resolved, a State of The Worldless that Greenwald nevertheless kisses if not marries, since it’s all of a projectile, a “fussball bubble / Nod happily feet many language.” The invite is out there, according to Greenwald, “The clear light looks on..."

A fond prayer as the rain falls.

Your eyes are dark dreamy and tell me I never did anything right,

For which my shared experience goes to waste.

A poetry of slogans earns the Balzac Award..
Folk-maverick, a dark scrum. Adolescent in a heavenly sense..
You keep telling lies about me in spacious quarters to hosts in abstraction.

Sing: I love it when prose or song digs in and flails.
That about covers it.
(One’s destiny is that emotional core between personal and professional.)
The larynx becoming free is a moving and intimate narrative.


Got to run, prose.

54: You’re back!

Truth is, we cave wantonly to your lovely sweet odor (fairer in our forgetfulness).
O wooed rose!
Before they were living within you — and like you — perfumes were of dark matter, the unmasked buds that distill a civilizing beauty far ahead of summer’s space

Filling our eyes with unmeasured disassociation.

Have we no will, no interest to shed our platform ambiguity?
Rationed atheism has long been a main event. High sectarian payments find a handy balance (organ music), ceiling arches in steam and rush-formatted white ‘sky’ disappearing in compatible multiplicities (plainsong for copulation). Late afternoon to others.

I feel socialist. Rifling thru market snapshots, validating
The center 
More than any single system, a tenet of

A huge agnostic discipline 
About attitudes behind morals. 

You know this open and shut — 
But take it down again / or thumb thru 

The balance left over from a computer
Of pure tides. Inhabit the tidal brim 

To the point you don’t have to know more yoga than 
We know now — less than nothing.

The sun maybe 

Burning you, other brilliant dislocations TBA, expected. Alternate forms go 
Beyond predicates fixated on loud procedures 

But in their giddy case they look into a surfeit of space.. 
A sumptuous, soilless bond, 
Angels — a happy title.. 
* 
Maybe it’s only words, assembly, to quote you. 
They are absolute culminators, without our enzymes.

Madam poet reads her singable pieces uninflectedly,
a dissonance that plays to mock solemnity (“sing me, song”)
and tuneful reproach (“play dough of god”).
Combing through my notes there’s a world of disputes,

Churlish puffins and other problems to shatter the continuity

Of my exploding goofiness over lunch; of course I mean exploring.

There is no circling the rink.
No complaints or sworn declarations,
Nothing frilly and glib,
No closure nor irresolution —
There’s not a single cudgel you can wield;
We’ve lost your name card and your name.

43: There is your dead-of-night agreement to let me in. Iron clad. Like skull with putty.
Urgent, dizzy, all agreements come down to earth time in dreams, darkly bright, best seen darkly directed.

The more you put on earth, you know shadows, their colorations, shades are imperfect (un)seeing, but blessed (made more adhesive) and happy when I’m looking on with you.

It’s much clearer in the light. Yes. That quick. This is a speaking animal in heavy sleep, remembering regression —

all days are nights and nights bright days. All time’s up.

A poem is a naked circus person, the winter force

Through the green fuse to drive extra flowers —

That so?

Some say I’m a poet. Sweating,

A healer is one of a few who drive my green rage —

One who understands the responsibility that emerges
Amidst roots of poetry’s trees.
(Phosphate, the fallen blood will calm her sores.)

And I have dined under poetry’s arbors with queens and kings.

I’m numb now to tell the royals I’ve been offered wings.

Land-locked, royals are bent by the same wintry fevers

And I’ve never been that impressed.
High time to define sex come of age, pleasure long- 
stood. Waking up released. Populations drenched.  

A circus repatriated.

This would be my most empirical debacle in the abstract to date — a Zoroaster bumblebee 
clocked into life by itself, on its own, having its own quarrel in
-side.  I’m certain its lack of manners, of historicity  
are flaws like vetiver too broadly smeared over its mad parka-like body.   
 
Not mad but apeshit, the bee shoots for an exit to the coast  
hitting the surface in lithe shorthand coupled with fast  
puffiness and a black-to-yellow color of sane amalgamation.

Hey mmm 
Europe with Alsace in the midst of agglomerates about to be a pain ..  
I’m furious about pure consciousness, its transparency and orchestration. A conduit of expanding stops and sharps. Stasis. Or maybe a geyser in a box?

The move-your-ass comment — I meant smell the juniper within a philosophy (moving spatial dimensions)
& (look inside!) a few hours forward!
Dispatched for 
chaos  

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

awing in a wolf’s regime ..  
There’s brush  
fire aimed at mosquitos — shot  
through the throat, asking too much ..

The move-your-ass comment — I meant smell the juniper within a philosophy (moving spatial dimensions)
& (look inside!) a few hours forward!
Dispatched for 
chaos  

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

awing in a wolf’s regime ..  
There’s brush  
fire aimed at mosquitos — shot  
through the throat, asking too much ..

Winter. What do we know? We have functional emotions and this much-traveled vocabulary of affects.
To learn something about what you mean is to let high jinks belie despair over entropy.
Make falling apart counterfactual.
Make my mind avoid bohemia.
Recover the masterpiece.
Destroy and smooth feeling. Bad or worse.
Imitate killing seeing
the system.

11: 1st choice for a sonnet: to solve you for x. If you must, be rude, foolish but coalesce;
An x factor takes up our lives as yours.

We feel bursts of fresh blood, increased by your wisdom and living endowment.

Wait. Later, with or without x... it seems cold here, a waning world away...

And so like-minded so fast —
We convert life to folly ..

The world you call yours we make featureless, barren.

Inky smoke releasing a genocidal collage, living
Thought in agitated waves, reproached, disappeared
In drumming opinions subtracting best practices —
Look for nothing to help harsh times that should cease.
Cold freezing nature, per se, nature will age, perish, decay.
But we keep x in mind, cherished love..
The more you and yours live on .. we are given life back .. what you give.

A poetry of drop scenes earns dumbfounding awards.. 
Folk-maverick,  
you’re the counter-intuitive guest with a dark advantage.   
Adolescent, a heavenly circumstance..   
you go on telling lies keeping the upper hand over hosts in abstraction.  
 

Our memory of the moment wasted randomly

by desires for a wider development. A hill that’s not 
a hill, a gaze upon the sun leading to another byword 
not in this sentence.

What makes chosen words dressed in black? 
Adopting an air of mock superiority or even on-point (albeit fleeting) superiority.  
Months passed! 
Most rainbows tasted like a slow motion cosmos, but we couldn’t look away.

Capitalist tactics are sustained innovation in nowhere equivalent to —  
Ah 
 
all right.. You sit languidly, the other side of the room, locked in capitalist circumstance. 

You like to dwell publicly on crispnesses in whispers in the air. You chill the sorbet and warm the surf insidiously. Your sleep is spoken of in a language recognized by flowers from evolutionary distances. 

We’re hankering to choreograph the open air in touch w/ the outside. The sky shaped in squares, bolted w/ blips on simplex-repetitive top layers, tethered for interpretation.  
You and I ingest each square as one, at once. Blind tessellation, exhaling while we file phrases compelling investors, scientists to work together.

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

Now 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.

Sonnet 27: You’re wearing a scent of rosemary to bed looking on in darkness, looking down —
I’ve been here waiting for far updrafts to work over my mind —
my eyes open wide, I see you more clearly now.

Your shadow always makes night beautiful and an old face new.

With every rallentando I feel cleaner, more nondenominational than ever
Now a little drunk I look up at elm crocuses fighting odor, climbing the trunk.
It’s air apparent. I feel cleaner with you. Clearer in noble gas and flux. I do.
Molecules will sue

You — they’ll sue us both for our goals and coral glow —
What a snit! Apart from love I am ashamed now
Breaking up with you feels like getting tested for flu ..
You and I in slow, we hope, radon decay
that stays unaffiliated yet torched with prayer.

Filming you again. Filming double quotes.
V. painting just your voice, a glass house perforated by action tones. Beating hulks to the punch as they pour the next vodka that makes us cry. A film with multiple data fields, a crew of stunning extras in malaise.

No ilk of valid colloids — No mimic measure, no ceremony “plinthing a drumbeat.” Also, no dyscalculia, no hindsight bias, on purpose no flavor.

Our cause is edged with a distant buzz, intervention — you have the touch — tides by the book rotate out to here, the rim and pliant acreage in your hands. Emotions in gear, a snake tail in quiet we won’t notice until it eases into set phrases, foiled by moments of tact, awaiting a séance with us..

From the moon — the world becoming flat and falling across  


The telling  


(instances of)  


Citationality exceeding everyone’s old wounds, genetic  


Streaks and — weird! — high wails of titanic fog, sifting down from  


Rain on ceilings (of)  


The snow. The snowing. The across (falling), 


It is (falling) across

Morton Feldman.

79: How it may happen
On a byway, patrol lights 
— Security vans flow in aid. Further uphill 
Hauling “rays of virtue” — stolen beauty, yours.
You can afford it.

He rubbed your lips in his sweet travail.
Your position / your opinion count, an easy argument
Made worthier— he praises you, cheek to jowl. 
Then you hand it over to him & have your way — 

& you thank him —
Pay him what I owe.

The skinny on tall paintings is that they avoid defining many obscure or complex wranglings.

Yet I like an assemblage of contradictions.

Neanderthals constructed paintings in two rings of deliberately cracked stalagmites, 400 per ring.

First to impress their Swedish hosts, who were, second, workshopped into volunteer flotation gear.

The tallest paintings then remeasure your height.


Painting ideas.

You had heard maggots eat paintings stretched onto canvases of different sizes, gloomy jigsaws, severed threads, sticky placards in paints that’re wasted, emaciated planes, junk and emptiness. 

Painting double quotes.

Hate altered. 
 
So we’ll carry on. We can’t do better. 
 
The system fills in our minds and in other matters even as  
Our hair hangs down in a consciously mixed media ceremony. You can’t throw consciousness out. It helps there’s a mating dance to appreciate what we are shadowing — working on it.   
 
There’s body hustle, along with cargo rips in funnels of the system where uppermost thoughts burgeon in ennobling, blobby warmth... yours, accompanied by addiction to risk.   
 
Come here often?

There are three courses of action for how I hardened.
Invariably it’s nightfall when I called you Aces. Second,
in a wood some paths were deep descents, big guy,
& looking out, Dr Franklin (you) scorned intuitive leaps
that led Watson & Crick to a necessity that’s always
at the beginning as, third, everyone was telling us we're
inevitable. Further up there’s fog but it’s nice

I can’t explain it. We should be home soon, it’s just
an ingathered feeling, nearest a dry hearth awaiting us
while being googled. What if I am a drifter
responding to a new season of enthusiasms.. could
you still like me, could you vote I liked this except
for you? & lie down with me & reach through. Pardon
me. Emergency. Anyway, excuse me. Pardon.

One needs antic intellectualism. Lead-free prose.
Four husbands.
Simplistic, Manichaen juxtaposition.
A solitary genius in the workplace (seaside). Etc.

Jousting snacks.
New verbs like dave, firebug, Stradivari.

33: I may not be deep enough; loose alliteration masks that, only maybe — maybe I’ve got a thought altering ‘mentalist’ landscape up my sleeve. ‘Heavenly alchemy,’ your words. My love is the sun in the morning .. You have a roundish face, green eyes and a slender yet blunt nose that hardens your otherwise sad, unrecognizable features and sovereign eyes. When I read about contradiction and ‘splendor’ I keep wiping tears from my neck, but I never had read the sun in the morning as your love before I met you.

I keep my mouth shut & I listen. This is how
One escalates with all one’s parts to inhabit received logic.
I’m retracing what I think I see but I’ve fallen behind
For concentrating on blank verse, naming names,

Pushing the most obvious among broken arts
Of self-defiance. Lunatic
Love. My blood type is — or
My drink is — as he shows now
Leaving me laughing under oath.

Do what you want. Just a few things I dislike. Neuroenhancers. I’ll admit I was curious  
underwater as sea bream was lifting, lukewarm, soft. Splash. (I love what we do together.) If lost  
 
there’s a rule-of-thumb for chapter and verse with natural stenches & prophetic fallacies back on land...  
Clad now to the hilt in gray-to-black cashmere, we aren’t discussing real business at table. Taciturnity in such morbid surroundings is statutory. “Mm,” one tenor sings. He was staring at my teeth, wondering how much they cost.   
 
Let’s rewrite “Biotherm.”   
 
In this chapter I fear sarcasm.

We are a color of cunnilingus. I noticed, though, you and I applied for pharmaceutical assistance, an oscillation gelatin called Sparkling Affront.
Nothing was more or less than arabesque, forgetting our place in the secret order of failure. We once left a lavish record of the male-female hush from hand to fingers to mouth: in epic hock, half-buried to our hips. 

Our temperature raised the magnitude of repetitions into a shriveling median in the after-life or its meandering dissolution ... 

An obtainable conspiracy, altogether, surely no hoax.

2 weeks before Xmas. Back to work .. first it’s

Urgent we walk out and get wasted.

The mood then passes from desolating satire to
Constant put-downs you parrot like executive control
— Holding firm in the wilds where festive decorations will be slowly ignited
“In the slumbering gaze” parallel kill and be killed, united obliteration —

We are a color of cunnilingus. I noticed, though, you and I applied for pharmaceutical assistance, an oscillation gelatin called Sparkling Affront.
Nothing was more or less than arabesque, forgetting our place in the secret order of failure. We once left a lavish record of the male-female hush from hand to fingers to mouth: in epic hock, half-buried to our hips. 

Our temperature raised the magnitude of repetitions into a shriveling median in the after-life or its meandering dissolution ... 

An obtainable conspiracy, altogether, surely no hoax.

39: Sing how in your absence, thoughts on love hint of sour leisure and torment. To live in deception seemed brilliant manners far back, before today. Thought of that now is divided but pointedly, singly alive.
One difference as you sing — you are the better part of me who changes — I’ll obliquely praise you when praising me.

Even divided we’re the same. We live to entertain others thinking back to our love. Still there’s our separation. I dream w/ you alone.. as you sing.

Withholding the time-inverse we reupholster & improve levels of comfort across consciousness / we, that is, the explicator in you & me. A chance laden balance.

That balance rotates with our fooling ourselves over variant hazards in our heads tilted 
vertically to catch some sun. Inelegant in our cultish way we look down on square plots of daily thought outlines.

There’s a container for every passion. 
Ounce by carbon resin ounce, a take-off  
socio-economy floatable within, once  
regarded in wholeness, its contours  
beeped forward w/ the news, smart enough  
though meaner beyond its whereabouts..  
 
I guess it’s pointing to us.

Something came up. Anthropomorphism. 
And what’s not mentioned expanded underground. 
This is as lightning gains on fog. Lightning ‘understands’  
 
it’s disassociated. Has nothing to transact, no fad product.   
 
How is it fire tears up senseless atoms in sparks fog glows around  
 
and falls out with grey streaks that look glazed and remedial —  
 
I have the same trouble when I shop for trafficked facts on sale.  
 
Our uncertainty principles, you see, are confused by prior understanding.

Don’t we have an escalator to take? 
 
Gavel to gavel hours and hours wasted turning the spit.  
What we do converts to personality- and stunt-craft.  
What we have to feed on is open discourse W. B. Yeats calls the bestial floor. Please.  
(This soon after a last breath, is it safe to mention Yeats?) (Maybe not.  
I’ll frighten no one.) Some of us are too profoundly false to save the day.  
Tho not all of us refuse to understand further (to meet up).  
 
It’s natural, a picnic in the wilderness.  
 
The wilds... on all floors.

28: Robbing the cradle, the big picture shows me my modest place. 
I’m technically adept dining in (or out) day by night and night by day —   
 
each of us like the other’s reigning enemy taking umbrage from grumpy distortion,  
fractured logic (Hex 39) and our combined morbidity.  
While you — I always flatter you in my long consents.  
But daily, nightly I work on my music farther from you now,   
 
happy, long toil to stronger sorrows and griefs repurposed by your consent.. So both of us never sleep, exactly — I’m pleasing you thru me,
exactly, and vice versa.

What do you need now and for what?  
Does it matter, that light, deft question?     
 
I ducked his dumb query, closed the distance.   
I told him, no, I have to split. Added a little  
from today’s Times calling Merce Cunningham’s   
choreography Democracy in Action a refreshing run around   
the unlettered clique-minded. 
 
Last figurines / their aptness in transit  
when pragma-morphism brainstorms over exit left.

Let’s bring it. I agree if
Conditions look upper great — wanting you (I say I do),
Not out of calculation & how far & vast connivance

Take us. I’m holding out.

Daybreak now —
— everybody under lunar waxing
credited to whipsaw. Just a running joke transposed
from the window, licked, healed, eyebrow roughened.

I added frontal motion to those looks of yours that intimidate, m’lord.
Visual surprise comes with an infrequent snow flake or volcano ember
floating at nose level. That’s cool — I’m creamed just for sleeping with you, blackmailed..

wandering into the new wrong theater guild

chopped into little squares of hypnotic drumming

and massive parallel vistas projecting smiles and learning

showing up invisibly. Involuntary. Libido.
Manners of ambiguity?
To buy her lipstick.

The back office is an eyesore, assembly required. It
makes itself think...lets itself think...

(It’s a coin flip.)
I’m just commenting. Crazy ’bout the poems.
Thanks for the memories.

You ruined everything.

84: Partnerships were counterparts, 1st a little lunatic, more than most...
                Even worse, hotly culled. And who can say?
Let me copy what’s clearly writ, how writing lends some small glory, substituting for natural praise
                — you’re admired everywhere! Fame dignifies your story.
No curse — I lower my voice to approximate parity.

To such immured an example, who says more? You alone are you
                 As your story goes. And you let it go.
Rich in style, but fondly penurious compared to what is writ in you.

A chance at a longer life.
The copy writes itself.
I pulled out a blank check and left it blank.
Nonviolence resolutions have been approved. This is the place for airborne definitions. Here you find remuted meaning, good as gossip to evade a “mixed remuting strategy” to partner with whom, exactly?

O Headwaiters..

I have a steady beat now. I have rage stamped inside. I keep it everywhere inside

everywhere. Coordinates

everywhere...
everywhere..
O rockets to further research.
— O bailiff, be this...
Sung. A first poem.

What does it mean to work? I don’t know that either. What I know is how to belong, stake out territory and bust heads, maintaining an atmosphere of trust.

I’m shading my eyes with my right hand.
I step to the water’s edge.
What’s wrong with me.

The you I 
tableau-sponged I’m now waving to with my other hand.

After all, the water spackled remotely, 
burst. Mangrove gripped in saliva. Anything 
to stay pure, immersed. Swimming 
synchronized with the bellicose you. I’m slinking back. 
I’ll leave you out.

The full amount is not enclosed: So this is not the other day. And I don’t envy fair days or foul — it’s interminably raw.

Not dying is not not wanting to die, a unique semantic potential assigned a repertory. (Dying is not wanting to die and to boot waiting not to die: countering selfmastery.) But I wouldn’t envy those not dying anyway, not if it was their best day.

Between waiting, not wanting, untrimmed desires crowd out an undercover, captive thought pattern shaped through long derangement oiling up baby..

at the eye’s edge of clemency.

68: Flowers shorn off bowers, what beauty was —
I’m losing my head over you
as if I’ll inhabit my death head before you go or even around you now..
‘Without all ornament,’ I stay abreast, knowing whether nature’s
bastard signs are still vital, not recreational, charting a map of nature’s full store.
As if before golden tresses Arvo Pärt appears chafing: making no summer of green, of flowers, reborn from no second
life — oblique as the antique you ‘of yore’— now I myself, truly in attrition, missing both Pärt and you, composing as tho I am still around you.
Your beauty stays alive and new to me.. a second life, new as roses, as ‘a second head..’

Childhood runs out, our taxonomies still  
unexplained as temp permits.   
 
...you know what I mean standing here, promoting pap acceptance.. you’re a diva in fact 
with nothing to give back, not mad enough, feeling too little.

Feelings, too few.

One by one
wait for it. They
seem more promiscuous than anything not there.
Therefore here.  
 
If we don’t buy this, we’re the product.

Wondering about a weathering anomaly,

I write in my nature/head. Let’s hold a séance! 
I snare us Joy to starve a fever. Is it raining? 
Seven rooms (usually) with clay-toned physiques 
fighting the relative fight waving to then receding on one another 

— everybody impulsive, under an influence, which is filthy. Snow!
A foot of snow from the window. Laps of water are filled with light, snow rotating in reverse as if knowing how to purify offspring & manage forever in lurches of nibbling torque adjusting into daylight.

We’re released by ourselves into the water supply. Globe-trotters. Kissers, both cheeks. Up toward the heights curls come back. Bells in heaven. My eyebrow arched and I gasped.

In physiologist years this is a star-quake, falling and liberated by the carpentry in reading sensory input as the doctor’s tongue worked in circles. Then he darted straight in. I realized tension was flying from my face, dull and throbbing.

We invented the night birds.  
Had to. What we thought we understood  
they enjoy making ‘dumb-  
great,’ incomprehensible from the top  
terminating in celebrity stalkers, gawking in peers’ backyards —  
 
Following doc’s orders so conditions inflect non-criminal immunity  
to sudden desire with intimacy. 

83: Life with Mr Juice came up short — charm 
-ing & familiar — unfair tenderness in a paper sack. 
Hostess bike spinners & fake license & plate. 
A poet’s Chase debt. 
  I found (or again I thought within the still) 
Your eyes nag me for more .. admit you miss late modern jhushes & done away with text devices. 
You miss the first drag. You miss rendering 
 
Mr Juice wearing your new credentials 
As your inner being when others would give only their lives... while you, like me, have nothing set. 
Have you read, poets’ praise & worth get ten percent of their daily 
Calories from pot smoking — sleeping to excess.  
 
Mute poets hereon become slack. 
Thereupon, as Juice imputes to me, I’m barren as I am dumb.

A dictionary of Indo-European roots lists derivatives for gno = know, can, cunning, ken, kith, kin, uncouth, notice, notify, notion, notorious, cognition, recognize, connoisseur, quaint(?), ignore, noble (known, knowable), gnomon (diagnosis, prognosis), narrate (from Latin gnarrare); & these less ‘probable’ links = annotate, norm, abnormal, enormous.


Poets, I guess, know some of this, so someone’s dismissal of another's work by shrug / hum is poor thinking, a mark of unknowing. Patterns of dismissal show a settlement of ignorance. Ignorance comes easy, tho, among conservatives like me. First is not reading. I won’t buy the book, if given the book, I’ll sell it. Second, there’s reading just to find a formal quality (skimming?). Can I do this? What’s the vocabulary like? This reveals a dram of inquisitiveness, but it’s all about willful naysaying, typecasting, bracketing... in other words, streamlined permission not read no further. For face to face ignorance, there’s not listening or not listening much or listening to find your opening for a chance to speak (hey do you like what I do?). Hanging around enormous egos like mine is lacks fun, unless, of course, there are compensating abnormalities. 


 What I want are noble communities of more than modern poets who not only notice one another but stay awake & narrate Oh. If it’s normally out there, you’ll be the first to know.
We have no boundaries and can travel further away from unpleasantness. Just a guess.

Two Spanish-speaking women try new salads.
The contours.

By the way, every right wing worm thinks every owner of a worm is subject to restitution  
even as most tax experts evoke cuddly breeder values in brute ecrus.. 
I’m here too, waiting for everyone I can’t stop waiting for.   
 
I live in a container house near a few others   
 
and wait on nothing at all, only sustained focus and innovation in nowhere equivalent to a disc. I won’t do it, nah, abrigado. 
I work on text.. I’ll grieve later on, turn to pen and ink for human voice breaking glass in an r v to drown out the dog track, 

nah.

We’re fidgeting to mind our semiotic manners,
lit by mid-lunch clarity, sporting, Floridian...
an enclosure with no pulpit, without dogma...

spreading out in willful overloads of language design,

Skilled decor. De-simplified or notional contracts
in contretemps between science and who knew?
ironic technologies with no precedent...
a corporate hold across a matrix of manners and adaptations, restrained praxis and hermetic syntax.

57: I watch the clock. Being your slave, what can I do? 
I wasn’t just orphaned, I pursued other interests  
 
all at once. Time’s precious, 
save I feel and still show absence of movement from inside,  
absence upon hours — a sour dare to expend ...  
and to question my jealousy ...   
So it’s taken this long to read the gospel of wealth and service.  
I dare not think of desire diffused at any cost to render your mouth a world-without-end, a sobbing, precious mess.  
 
On the outside how happy you are ... are you? Tho this may be amiss, I think no ill. Adieu.

Beginning to get the picture. Your flash is surface.

You wiggle like a borzoi
w/ backsliding wipe-outs & fan reactions:
trash affects we tautologize into cattle calls of glum purity.
At least our calls are directed to one area...
‘holding each other open’ foreordaining our mobile devices will moan to the surface. Your flash.

There may be many areas, too.

With good optics petro and related interests can get serious. Bosons exhale thru rainy nightfall. I reason their surrogate likenesses (x) are more set and more recently struck down. 
Razed. Rain’s over, prancing on the lawn, rain in light draining oil.

High time to define sex come of age, pleasure long- 
stood. Waking up released. Populations drenched.  
A circus repatriated.

Psychotropic bios diagnosed as bare truth- 
Stratagems. Siphon starters. Add the rank  
 
I confer on the next available beauty, living and perhaps dying with one  
Until he goes broke — summarily I’m screwed of what beauty was.  
I center then on perception (for another purpose), sustaining losses out of irony.

80: ...cross-pollination of English and psychology wracks up a revitalizing boundless deep. I’ll assume you suspect I faint when writing this. Situationists use the shallowest fare and re-chart it onto subterranean literature. When I write about you, I’m in worthless sympathy, humbled and worse, tongue tied while I try a couple of poses —ha — there are great, pure benefits spent by proud, broad-minded recruits afloat, ocean wide! Wouldn’t you know they are in an infinite series in the history of fame and naval bavardage. (Or from another angle they are a series of teasers and the teased but goodly proud, cast away.) You who.

Ironic judgment. 
There are a hundred butterflies in perilous art. What’s wrong with watching one or two spin like happy mediums, go crazy in the dirt, re-engineering variety and persistence?

In not struggling with comparative vulnerability to vie for solitude,  
I pursued insight by your ‘grant’; for how do I hold you? That’s one for liberal arts.  
Secure oases cannot be considered in terms other than liberal; 
with great laughter impelling knowing, not knowing, comfortable  
indeterminacy.   
 
All a given. Someday.

It’s between hopeless and rebuked by evolution.
Hemi or semi —
orphaned as-is...

Photons in a neutrino cavity. Glad scene-makers or martial artists, music critics, or proud old squares barnstorming swift-footed through the biosphere to eclipse career obstacles.

Failures in love fall away, never in 2 places enough needing permission, shuttered, untainted, bleak, drear and just dumb. 

‘The world of secrets holds its own’ = swift patterns to succeeding circumstance. 

Another moment soon to stare out the window, a flood lamp over my shoulder to herald the swindle in wind farming. Craning one’s mien goes on in this vein, time passes — comments from barbers on stale movies, political lies — freedom takes off at many a midpoint. It’s personal, e.r. managers tell me this ought to be.

It’s almost sullen to write enflamed birdsong and comb back your hair at the same time.. Can you do that? At the barber’s? To sound like your own critic stay light with a spooky edge.

Life is short and good grooming rakes you all over. No victims.

Sonnet 78: 
 
Disperse my rudeness.  
Captain scientist, see what influences we’ve advanced, doubled? See what more you can do! Your eyes throw us down a hole and we keep there, cover me up. You are all my art. Learn / teach my rude ignorance. 
 
Only these exceptions: I wasn’t talking to you. I was singing on high to the fair interest of the sailing corps. Ah, same time, so often I’ve invoked you as a muse, I’m afraid I can’t keep working with you looking over my shoulder.  
I hope I’ve been clear.

Looking back I think commuter bike paths tamper with green space.

Coming clean about adulthood is a neat precipice.
The surface (ubi sunt) has music twisting intellectually, pedaling in shorthand, gliding with objects ..

Duh wheels duly rounded.

Doing what I am here to do,
Does I can’t be responsible ring a bell?

What’s missing is, why is there feeling?  
It’s a state of mind according to Hoyle a day later;  
Global warming jazzes a decimal of our pablum.  
Where should I hurt?  
Once or more. A few more.  
There’s no projected torture unless it causes organ failure.  
 

Baby steps fix the climate really fast indoors.  
 
For we feel tall  
and inflatable as we cascade into a blank, mechanistic corp.

“Bliss.” We were looking it up. 
A battle between two acumens  
 
bringing up a few others,  
times two more of those brain states from euphoria.  
A marsh is now interesting  
(vitae) for the sea. To the eye, in sun nothing but applesauce shellac,  
a varnish the sea brought in without consent, leader of the pack  
in subject matter. Not on varnish, on bliss.

Don’t we have an elevator to take (to greet you)? 
 
Gavel to gavel hours turning the page. Hours. 
What we do converts personality to stunt-craft.  
What we act out through open discourse... W. B. Yeats calls the bestial floor. Please,  
 
have your way. Have your composite gods who do it for the masses.  
 
(This soon after a last breath, is it safe to call on you O Yeats?) (Maybe not.)  

Some of us are too disgraced to save
 
the day. 
 
Though not all of us will defriend you now or any time. Now there is only commutation of friendship.  
 
It’s natural, a picnic in the outback.   
 
The wilds... on all fours, all floors. Hours.

53: A substance note:
Suspend suspension of all illusion — 

All kinds of nebulae. Curved and hollowed. 

You have some part shadow
as long as a 
-utomatism maintains a
counterfeit value evolving spring and summer shades a
-mounting to zero autumn after your beauty, a 
constant show and a 
variable now. You always play some part in this.

You appear in every august shape we know.

To break this down, I’m always explaining the place where I work.
Gateau what’s his name is done (i.e., delivered) in a tangle of foxglove as you and I de-meadow.

A company like ours takes it into the astrophysics facility.
We’re in the flat present tense, account outlines in simultaneous perceptions —
Reciting new slang exponents as we have no major gay issues,
Making wave sounds we scout flyweights in a recursive landscape.

Progress / nothing: China funds high speed railroads in Africa.
Americans for Prosperity funds and wins campaigns banning high speed rail and busses in TN, AR, AZ, MI.

We already have what we ask for.

Vainly but not fast in never induce italics:
We gave it up at the Office.

Driving this point is hardly ever for the 1st time
disappearing into immense molecules like our other words, just molecules ago.

Sitting down delivers the good news, stateliness while steering already had its faint say. Now we can text and ‘drive’ over time and zeta functions mowing down hedgerows like highway dividers along an infinite axis.

At a new level of storytelling that hang-in-there ideal is on your side, time sick. 
 
It goes with a backhand irony like pigeon guided defense missiles or no guards at the gate.  
A free coupon! No, the front gate won’t front  
As there are centers of wishing beyond your closed doors.   
 
All batteries are now 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!  
While chestnuts stand around in verbal hoards  
Coupons expire.

114: I say.

I say drink up.

We or most of us have a destiny in flattery, avid aftermaths.
My eyes drink in thanks for there’s so much turning lesser sin to perfect gusto. So many substitutes. So many fat chances —

But now it’s beyond that.

O I say it’s late to vocalize what my mind sinks to, finding you only in resemblances.

Withholding time-inverse we reupholster & improve levels of comfort across consciousness / we, that is, the explicator in you & me. A chance laden balance.

That balance rotates with our fooling ourselves over variant hazards in our heads tilted 
vertically to catch some sun. Inelegant in our common way we look down on square plots of thought outlines.

Tattoos first, 2nd, his hair.

The plot leaves the door to irresolution ajar —

Guess what, the grabber is un-belted in segments like a sex rattle
spinning to take effect. It adds an all night ring to our narrative, id est,
the needle breathing hard, leaving the hole
open to mas irresolution
and topspin for picking up the dissolved thread.

I’m trying to clean this [snip] to leave enough ‘intent’ to keep me happy after I’m finished he’s finished. This is an exemplary yet limited transmission, so I’m framing it fun work, the kind that cuts straight through its own restructure creating more choppy patterns to abandon ...

It dawns on me I am covered with bacon reform. That’s why I went for generic consensus over these flamenco-glued-to-cable partitions made of paradoxical tissue.
They’re in place as a lorem ipsum dolor sit
taken of the whole sector before repro-ed onward.

Purely offhand.. rather like a jigsaw
that gets unsolved.

I’m trying to clean this [snip] to leave enough ‘intent’ to keep me happy after I’m finished he’s finished. This is an exemplary yet limited transmission, so I’m framing it fun work, the kind that cuts straight through its own restructure creating more choppy patterns to abandon ...

75: Every time I visit you in your mascara I become lucid about the fear you strike. Day by day you’re in my thoughts, food to my life. And I see your brilliance lives again, sure enough; it always has, fudging strife and abasement. There you are.

I came to poetry later than you.
Pleasure then the transportation of your soul take place about here and now.
Nothing for me. I feel I’m a pursuer of no delight, uninvited to the Worry Dance, revalidating my whorl of cement paintings..

Starved for a look, now, counting it best if the world
see both my fear and pleasure feasting off you, on your dime, thus, in your sight...
pursuing you in peace, all or nothing, with you alone.

A social progressive is today’s depressed comedian, a big abnormal mess, product of one’s time. He or she wins all the half-eaten take-out left on the table. 40% of obdurate hardly-ever voters like you and me. And how long can one live folding up conversation, conjecture perpetually minimalist verging on filth and circumstance? Who isn’t one?

My area is interpretive search. 

It’s been a while, Sophocles wrote.  
I’ll assume you suspect the people’s elbow knows. It’s in the forearm of interpreting literature.  

Written or not, nothing is forgotten.

It takes a while. Day by day. The way 23 hours ago the multiplicity of writing today took a while. Times itself: A brainset, no doubt, occupied .. & this just in — jokes turn into dreams. It’s dreams that forgive us for everything (except melancholia). That’s because multiplicities, ‘sleeping while awake,’ get downgraded to icy normality, farthest from sight, trapping you & me inside a force field owing to our expertise. 

So there’s no lack of constancy in experimental states of mongrel forgery & our economic pull.

We repeat there are rules to doing morning: 
Sleep in without a rehearsal,  
Coax a situation back.  
 
You're only human, Fu dog.

How can you care modernism, a despoiled inheritance for architecture, beguiled, diverted, is flatly unlike poetry’s pocketknife connections to the past. Apparently tomorrow is more appealing even if we know where architecture takes us. Poetry?

104: You’re fair doing this, my friend. Etc.
I saw both of us stop dials, reset our actual pace. Still one..

..you and I may be deceived, turning toward the season’s
purebreds for fresher figures, good times and hot pricing, unless  

deception or envy is perceived better.
Burn for me, friend. Hues balance details to your green motions. 

Since.. I have seen shaken flares express fear and beauty in your eyes. 
I eyed your figure before you were born  

off perfumes of April standing as axioms for June and later — in cold pride 
you’ve already processed.. stolen for future use.

You turn summer into spring, one’s first guided 
tour — such a future is never old, never overdone.