Back again. (Best of 3.)

On the other hand.

Try some.

A good warrior lends me generations of love.

So I’m in debt. It’s everyone’s creepy fault. Even a tremor of you.

We’re going around in concepts. There’s a big, strange pulling apart shmooshing the semiotics of escape. So lets bring things together, kilt wearer. Look me in the eye. Or when my story gets told you’ll be on the wrong end of it. Prepare to turn earth-nasty.

I’m just commenting. Your touch reaches a point at which time management is unleashed. But there’s something else fantastic, piquant, against the grain, a piece of karate with top notes.

NY-Boston poets, mostly, are putting on a Boston Marathon this Friday, 7:00 p.m.-10:00 p.m.; Saturday, 12 noon-10:00 p.m.; Sunday, 12 noon-5:00 p.m. Friday it's at Pierre Menard Gallery, 10 Arrow St., Harvard Sq.; Saturday and Sunday at Outpost 186, 186 1/2 Hampshire St., Inman Sq. Everyone gets eight minutes. Friday I'll go second. I'll read "Poem with Hannah," starting at 7:08 or so.

Because always I thought was possible

a quaff-off voice kept us happy.

My partner and a friend came home with a guy

they met at a bar. I was asleep but joined them

while I got my feet clean in flavors

and the balcony’s floor, so it happened again.

Can’t see a broken bottle on the street and not pick it

I really wanted to lose consciousness, can I ever?

Let me in, I loaned it, I think.

Once there was vitality in diffusion and a crutch like levitation. Levitation got modulated. Modulated is like coming out to play, sampling the masked hostility and indecisiveness of our environment and backing it up with inexact beats and multiplying sounds from what we were doing before the procedural took hold.

Crimson scaffolding hovered in the interim, instantly recognized as identity. Identity and hardened m.o.’s, identical then evaporated. We invented from silences, lies, and feral senses of the cornered in a soulless piano season. We were/are resigned and re-acclimated to generations of processed shock of the simple, the safe-zone simple, where infectious pop is authenticated, highlighting weak spots.

Wherein a smirk presses on — mass culture destroyed, life-changing sex.

The movie in which I am about to speak is modulated. I carry cash and deal with the cops but I’m no killer. Lack instinct. A musty dynamics. More than musty it’s foul.

Movies are a visual medium. The first word is without words. How can it be effortless if I tell you what I’m doing? A friendly warning, pal, you’re too self-conscious.

Show us your papers, fly!

Just in case we are impressionable enough still to think a particular subgroup of hardened poets alone-together owns outrage and satire by mining the internet, meme-ist and culture columnist Rob Walker’s piece on the ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) net phenomenon, “When Funny Goes Viral,” fills us in on the lovely sophomoric impulses that are ubiquitous in English-language culture, among others. Walker sees ROFL belonging to a slew of us of college-age and a generation older or (gee) older, even “marketers” (aka conceptualists), and that’s “because it turns out that some people are taking the pop-material dimension of ROFL seriously by building businesses around it.” (Businesses include Cheez Doodles and art careers.) Anyway, other than the easy-come-&-go notoriety the Web offers its ‘users,’ there’s a meta-scrim of awareness in the collective irony and humor, awareness that the perpetrators of processes and procedures toward the premise “everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously” are missing something, that is, missing bits of themselves and the facticity of their own agency. (Huh?) Walker captures the length and unrestrained reefer madness of the ROLF zeitgeist:

Sometimes the pointless-seeming jokes that spring from the Web seem to be calling a bluff and showing a truth: This is what egalitarian cultural production really looks like, this is what having unbounded spaces really entails, this is what anybody-can-be-famous means, this is how the hunger for “moar” gets sated, this is what’s burbling in the hive mind’s id. But the real point is that to pretend otherwise isn’t denying the Internet — it’s denying reality. In some cases, then, maybe the payoff of ROFL isn’t just the pleasure of laughter, though that surely happens. Trickster expression, intentional or otherwise, doesn’t propose a solution but jolts you to confront some question that you might prefer to have avoided. Like what, exactly, am I laughing at?

Ourselves, among others.

[4] Even without puppy Scorpio
is in my knee, cheeky, exotic —

ease is the law,
an audible ink

I’m moving to the top
shelf, blue and tan of course I’ll

stuff in cameo-
passive, lengthy

plastic hard to handle — plaaastic —
an overcooked ear, Madonna or a rose

onrush of thickened weather on my face.
At some point I had to approach the pile;

well I can’t help that
hound below the sound

the purple aggressive, the double sink;
nice I saw

deeper on the other side
puppies after puppy.

[Poem with Hannah] Halloween restores my faith.

Clouds're in slacks by the apparatus (touching my two elbows behind my back) for undressing gravity. It gets to be a habit they can’t keep up. But the police are still baffled. They go on a breather

Escalating disappearances

where any guess takes gravity outside the house aesthetic smoking clouds.

To put it together, the yews wear hand-me-downs making what’s inside disappear with our bed in it the last day we ate. Together and beyond

then they subside again, turning bright green.

It's spooky rhyme but it wasn’t my first

choice; the machine flunked me —


uncontrolled,

I have a shoulder blade to reign

undisciplined, conspicuous, out-fed;

it’s hard to sew on a fate puppet

glittering of sneeze; (overhead comments)

the biding row-fill taken an octave

in effect yelled red stipends.

Spent the weekend in Austin deeply depressed. I was charmed at first and then lulled into dissonance gazing at sheer limestone foothills with humid vistas and can-do vegetation softening a bustling politico academic subtopia awash in petrodollars. The petrodollar, we know, is the currency feckless leaders proffer, enlisting youth to leave home to fight terrorism abroad while depleting national coffers Stateside. Our leaders in turn subject to industrial paymasters who pay no taxes and now lecture via GOP talking points against big federal deficits. But I digress.

Lulled I was by Austin’s nexus of fifty-thousand students, more than half on summer break, musicians and their fans by the tens of thousands, and thousands of IT developers — big numbers hard at work to “keep Austin weird,” that is, earnestly within the program, tilling a patch of Bush Country where humanism has a chance. But, to digress further, Texas is a tightrope for gamblers and winners who can quickly lose perspective, people too big for their britches grandma, the poet, used to say. I see the Lone Star as a spigot of petro-capitalism that gushes one way. And in another way Austin is a minor concession (release valve) in a much larger, darker stratagem. There's no escape. All the parts of Texas I flew over swarm with recent and new development and corporate-homespun-right-wing prosperity drawn from the hugest government co-option imaginable (no taxes for big oil, remember). Our leaders stay on top of the gush and have nowhere else to go, keeping watch and making weird war in the Mid-East to counter terror and protect petroleum resources. This is not the Bushes’ fault, alone; it’s been dogma for more than a few decades; and it continues.

Still thinking too broadly of oil, terror, entrapment, and what’s genuinely weird this morning, I was rifling through Bernadette Mayer’s 1998 Another Smashed Pinecone, a late acquisition I got from Lewis Warsh last month in NY, and found Mayer's prophetic focus on the World Trade Center weird enough, a fiery gloss on geopolitics. It’s in four pages of free verse titled “Leaders Are Hanging in Outlines from the Clotheslines.” I'll snip pieces together, starting with the first stanza, and close with the last two.

I’m hungry, I’m at the top of
the World Trade Center towers
on the “roof” of one of them
something anything has gotten me here
and now I’m supposed to get down
by climbing down the outside of the building
its sheer cliffs and so it’s fear
that makes me remain here

[…] I dreamed I wished the leaders
were hung in outlines
from the clotheslines

[…] & power of being a mother only leads
to the top of the World Trade Center towers
as far as I can see
which is very scary
since there’s no doubt
there’s not even a fire escape
& though we all deal
like gamblers with
things like elevators
everybody still knows it’s safer
to be on the ground floors
where you can see more
though in a city the light
might be cut off

I don’t wanna walk the tightrope
between the twin towers ever
I’d get too scared of falling over
& then down & then to die immediately

I don’t even look out from
the 17th story windows
of my lover’s parents’ apartment in manhattan
it makes me feel like I wanna
see what it feels like to fly
right outta there

[…] The clotheslines were a way
where I grew up
at least for the women who
observed them in the daytime
to keep people in some perspective
& always remember
that a person is a person
with male or female prerogatives & habits
living in a world that requires
this constant laundering
mostly of everyone’s underthings
laughably

& oh those giant shirts
that flew in the air —
what was the matter with the men
never home
who must’ve worn them!

The mind, it’s been overstated, is a beautiful tool of late capitalism (the unwitting cause).

An idea occurring. A glimmer of prolific aroma.

Capitalism stands at the curb, grilled in place, waiting, eyes unblinking.

Hey we all have the same goals, forgery the game. (Or one could seek documentation, semblance, something.)

From now on the mind is Switzerland, ok? Two eyes belong to everyone, leave now.

Capitalism thus gives up the dude ranch, akin to the rustic factory, a way west to prey on the orderly. This is the high line the slug runs out on, leaving us a little dizzy.

I was wondering what the ... ho, the slug race is going digital.

The mind just kind of sits there. It wants to be best friends. It’s saved us some burgers.

Brightness gushes out, but collisions of treasure take a fall; signage is on the lam. Living ballet is euphoria-through-vintage-process and comprises my critique. What happened? Diagramming conditions of spatial jitters and others’ sentences, I am anonymous either way. Thank you, cohorts, for yer cartoons and commissioned videos shrieking with what I keep buried. Your scrabble gives in to wander offshoot. Spiraling ramps. My vows grump over their integrity. Up to here only fragments of Camus are activated on my planet of problems. Staying home illustrates the fall.

I drive a Steinbeck but dream of a Camus.

It sounds like you know the feeling but you’re not getting it. I hate myself for hurting you but D was the one.

The guys ad lib macho challenges on their way to the forest. How did they get in there? (You want to read my mind, enjoy.)

I miss you doesn’t change anything. I want you to be happy but on time for signing the release pledge, availing yourself of patterned backgrounds that look like recorded versions of cunning and mirrored parsimony canceling out a hiked love triangle set amidst fetishes.

Our alienation has been popularly accepted. For effect sprigs are picking up and the driftwood is epigrammatic, the upside unrelated, pale, immaculate. I’ll cut D off like magnets. Marry me.

I’m not about to let you starve.

(Shifting back to friends mode...)

One thought after the Fourth. The great good arts reproduce like bigger and better weather. As my shiny hot buttons have it, if poetry were as fresh and vital as banjo music or savant idiocy, there would be more brilliantly disinterested players and many more but only passing rivalries (not the ones etched in stone and tended by stone masons); smarter code-ists would rule the roosts; Christian Bök would have cuter friends.