Where I go from here...

All is not lost! Everyone's wearing an expression on his face (or two): I see your potential though everything is speeding; don’t wait to be huge.

So. Get your share.

I killed for you.

Why’d you bother?

The Bronx (and Bronk) looked used up.

Sometimes it’s otherwise, conforming to a belief system to get forgotten, pinned to one’s alternative dish, rejecting criticism, keeping smart bombs under wraps, knocking the moment down with waves from a window, nods, and small talk while keeping everything poles apart.

We’re talkin’ unscripted, unpredictable! Struggling between comparative (and descriptive) vulnerability to vie for solitude, taking your hand to reshuffle, to suspend.

I go for the moody and unexpected.

The color of the spine goes ultimate, high and low, unlikely yet foreseeable.

So I put my name in every ghazal. Am I fit for the scenario? Are you and I? I ran out of balls rating you. I found so much of what you say emancipating but your data are hardly unadulterated. You’re driving me nuts.

I have a sentence for everything. This is a transition.

Some of you is more sound-oriented while translucence is flushed downhill. And there you go, retreating to that century-old middle ground where they still play vulgar innuendos to bag the new, addled priest wiggling his back end, half orchid, half gold, a toss-up.

Avast. It's Talk Like a Pirate Day, according to today's crossword. So this bears repeating. I remember [Joe Ceravolo] reading at a Wm. carlos Williams festival in rutherford. Daniel Halpern had the audience in stitches laughing at his numerous references to suburban lawn care products. Joe followed and actually read each of his poems twice “so you can better understand them” he said — he could have read each 10 times as the audience seemed totally tuned out.

-— Joel Lewis, posted to Poetics, Aug. 18, 2007

Obama is wearing thin ties again. He kind of snoozed.

But the gloves are off, Obama has started openly campaigning. Woe is us, Jon Stewart finds nothing to like in Obama’s American Jobs speech, a bucket of false promises and bleak outcomes, a parcel of a “campaign-driven economy.”

I wrote what I paste in below three years ago to this day in 2008, a little less than two months before we implausibly elected Obama to the presidency. It’s like yesterday now, only a century earlier, even as today marks one year and less than two months before we implausibly elect someone else to put Obama back in the future, as they say.

When it comes to his job performance, Obama is now McCain, the old boy laying it on thick; secessionist Rick Perry is a Sarah Palin, right down to swagger and huffiness; and I love this — Romney is Cindy McCain, 2011. Read everything with sympathy, please. Three years ago everything was fact-based but policy (Obama did not repeal tax breaks for the rich; Romney funded abortions in Mass.) and even party affiliation (Perry was a Kerry democrat) don’t need to be in fact material as we move forward within the uninterrupted campaign for the highest office.

[snip]

Both democrats and republicans, in particular, have succeeded in converting presidential politics into a vote on who has the better campaign backed up by the biggest, most brazen falsehoods. The best campaigner, the formula stipulates, is destined to be leader since political control is a perpetual campaign. The good-cop-bad-cop republican ticket is our latest sample. By contemporary standards it’s not only above-board but widely expected that an inexperienced candidate turn ingenuousness into a positive. Not a good old boy, Palin's a reformer. And if she snarls, so much the better. Given power, a feisty female who makes herself ‘average’ is a terrifyingly bad cop. When her old boy partner faces the media-elite women of The View and is told he’s lying about Obama’s record, McCain needs only to insist he’s not. And that’s it. He’s the good cop. For additional oomph Cindy McCain walks out in Oscar de la Renta to make her reinforcement cameo on The View. How many houses has Cindy got? That’s not part of the campaign, snaps Cindy. She’s a bad cop too [...] TV news analysts fill us in on the meta-levels of such processes — the horse-raciness, the perception game (so-called), demographics, strategies, tactics and execution — and they fill gaps, foreclosed-on neighborhood-wide gaps, in their first-order reporting, using and re-using loops of video material produced by competing entities from both campaigns. Issues are effectively snowed over by trivia and ruses that only huge capital can sustain. Just as gas and oil consortia attempt to calm us with deceptive portrayals of their token initiatives toward cleaner energy, democrats and, I emphasize, republicans continue to perjure themselves during this every-fourth-year trial for democracy, telling stories and pulling off tricks about what politics is doing to the American economy and to our freedoms.

[/snip]

My hesitance is weather related, I think, a paleness riding in this morning and a similar wash of fog, darkness in the air and offshore atmospheres yesterday and the day before.

The sky squeaks with common sense. Its pace is folding into dreams.

You need to work on you own war-is-imperative. I recommend blending in with nonpoets off and on, video vignette artists and others indistinguishable from scientists.

After work it’s useful to think of yourself as a human hose of illuminated octane, in radiant short sleeves and white thong. Or maybe not. Your heart is non-music-industry.

Solitude, confidences, you’ll learn times in the day, the plays and the jungle of paradigms.

Space between faces adds up what you say waiting, keeping your eyes busy on the platform.

It costs a fortune to get uninvolved.

The rock lyric roots for a singularity out ahead until there is no threshold. Materiality does not exist. No dissonance, no disruption. There are appearances, such as a vantage point that leaves us alone with our perverse incentives, shopping boundaries, reading biker comics, ibis fur. Others go dormant or run off with their ideas of a frontier in unboundedness, unraveling optics in baseline attitudes behind the dunes.

I keep saying that process blockage prompts tactical reanalysis. (The moral arguments are gnarly.) The vantage you enjoy leads to something or someone that’s opposite, blocking the view, requiring accommodation to our redefining a new status quo. Coin tossers regard this as perpetual, cyclical, a status rendering fluid obstructions as occasions of conflict, which means “not to love” (according to Wilhem and Baynes). But conflict is not merely evil if it sharpens ethical and esthetic focus on self-regard and, moving beyond, collegiality. This is the potential utility of enemies, a baseline annulled.

It’s unlikely the not-said expands underground.

Lightning over fog. Homology and prudence. Package and immolation. It won’t be serene. The instant comes around, triples our worth. No questions asked, we work the crowd for the same carbons in how this can be put together someday but not entirely.

There’s a lack of linnets and authentic wax.

And something came up. Initial elements are bled into a diachronic backtrack messing up my mouth, cherished ideals I thought I snail-mailed overseas were sent back in the screw-up, gleaming like a valentine oxide yet pay-as-you-go, immured in rust. Unlike Paradise Hall. Or the occasional warrant for no sleep, no solutions.

I see a dart has feathers and it flies.

There is then the example of the ordinary frog. Frogs lost teeth in the lower jaw at least 200 million years ago, but whoooa lower teeth reappeared in a marsupial tree frog species about 20 million years ago, another trifle.

My leaving office is a double into which I am thrown to off-center my impenitence about the filing system and what we don’t get, to know limits to affirm my retraction, winding into a reliance on hard work, pleasures, plans, and this most generalized, I guess, burningly turned back, watching the wax dim.