A few words on process. It was nice meeting your ideas. I was reminded a poem is science fiction or it is not. I just try to be simultaneous.

Sometimes a partner in writing can be deliberately passive-aggressive. I’m kidding. I’m being sarcastic.

In this one my partner is an ashtray and the cowboys are spying on some other cowboys. Practice makes perfect.

And in this one I was the skinny kid in lipstick wearing maroon cords on the way to a writing class at Presbyterian Culvert, Reformed, in between a gang of college business majors with bow ties and another gang of art school fools in black shirts and vests, and it was like, “How did I want to get beat up today, smacked with calculators or acrylic spray?”

In Throne of Blood — if you’ve seen it, you won’t forget — the tall growth of Cobweb Forest is sawed down to new purpose, camouflage for an avenging army on the march. The sad image is threshing fir and pine needles that shield warriors advancing to unseat a despot flummoxed by presentiment. Ontologically, a wild deed like writing a poem is complemented by an autocracy of attitude toward its occasion; they combine as in coitus, serratedly. Standing by and looking on — face it, I’m prone to passive aggression — stunted, I limp off scowling to the dull deforested haze of profuse misses in experience and lightness of touch.

I understand the cloud. We’re disassociated.

I have nothing to transact, so there’s no friendship.

How is it coming out shiny but then fallen with grey streaks?

Huh? Is it the fire? Up in sparks there glows

fire stomping the peerless thistles. That is

the moon is made of lard. It’s indispensable for smearing light

that travels down to Earth in a tiered package like buffalo.

I grew up reading Gogol in my backyard. I used to feel locked outside in his “overcoat,” the tartan one I thought was apotheosis (resisting it), befouling my neighbors’ youngest hearts and minds, collating all the splinters into a pile and resetting the fire by myself (in my head). Fortunately, my energy could be made smart. And it is. Like the wind slapping children’s ears to spread sunshine down under the lake or offside on the beach.

Then Gogol and I came back for Halloween, like a flesh-eating virus attacking college grads and crooners citing alcohol. We never forget and do not forgive; our moms have always been supportive. Viruses are like that. The wind too. Boo is emphatic. Shivers of a sigh, I made messes all over to suit a creative purpose, balancing running aground without a word, the first one, and getting lost and then explaining the gorilla mask as a prior condition. Then there’s settling down to become a little more humane, hacking skin off the dead.

Gogol, Nikolay Gogol, with a master’s degree in these matters, says the landmass of gut feeling, sane behavior, and noncriminal discourse, like mine, teeters on the grotesque tattoo of a human skull. I can’t turn that down. I can’t mean just what my language means. I’m a nutbrain; and that’s a tradeoff, my trade. In the din nihilism shuts the door 24/7 on indisputable birdsong. It’s a good thing. The door from nihilism leads to the rescue of children and all it contains, all I could have told you.

There’s something I haven’t told you, Durante degli Alighieri. I’m passionate about what’s right in front of me.

We’re in scandalous terrain like donuts that could send you home, hungering for vibe trays and signature seacoasts.

The toothbrush, abandoned and chosen. I’m forgetting about it.

Achilles, Augustino, I’m speaking on your behalf, sipping tonic of fear impressions.

Shoulder to shoulder, our emotions subside into idiot access and the purity of blindness.

I’ve been on a rewrite binge; there’s a hydrangea boat and it’s sinking. This is the office. Welcome. I’m rewriting about it, not just doing something. The place is grotty; our staff assistant is a propped-up construct, a moral valet to instrumentation, dirt colored. Come, Earth, hold my hammer.

I taper the next stage with new visually inevitable things and select for gameness. A deep-seated specialist would work with genres and forms and play something interdisciplinary; I see beyond those scars. Um, ok, yes, ma’am. I’ve misspelled the signs.

I got a procedure to make it better, something, something and sham wildflowers, a few with a weird, obscure bounce, and fuchsia spurge past the obverse of our opponents’ goalpost. I’m doing only one thing at one time on a crazed errand stream to a structualist’s degree, as well as a serener surface.

I have not fulfilled the norms set by stop action. (Politics and the dignity of appearances don’t mix.) Nothing personal, I cry when it becomes fashionable. I credit everything on the surface without a message. But now

I'll trade you as my hands are too scared of rejection. I’m breaking off with you among summoned spoils we’re scheduled to garner. It’s looking like this is the rag century after all, and the worst part is our time has come, introverts.

I wear counterfeits and feel fake. I bet,
hey! Open the curtains. Let's steal the show.

I learned a comic needs a vertical monkey bar
and stage time, a star range that's speckled,

plenty of tenderness to smolder in pastels.
Best of all what I do works for you! In brief

I want a life that permeates philosophy,
divvying up rain, benching the mnemonics

but I’m not someone I usually hang out with.
My outer layers make me muddled.

Enough sarcasm, I’ll try different things to knock down.
In a heartbeat I do yesterday over and pick someone else.

Huge and floating, a beautiful menace from outer space.

I’ve been noticing this stuff when the weather cooperates round your wrist.

Let’s pare this down.


You’re an everyman that’s happy as in somehow scraping by,

One shoulder hitched higher, naming names but allegorizing what happens.

It’s nothing personal.


What’s progress? Your name, weeks after.

I can’t live without it (it = a ticking whirlpool).

En route to the dogs, the apocalypse within, the pastoral in a hurry.

Dear John,

They’ve taken to the streets. Walking in sheer.

Hustling all the time, awesome!

This is in response to the inscrutable commerce-vector coursing through pop concepts, bringing unique comforts to support our position in the food chains, which is in dispute. Our position.

I adhere to the same late-filing rule as you. Am a keeper of years.

Art is theft all right. I’m almost a novice enthusiast. (Didn’t know I was in the running, a total surprise.)

As I was saying, my memoir could begin around 2000, celebrating a gaping yawn in praxis (goodwill and dynamics). This is our yawn, college-bred, localized — concentrated in 5 or 6 cities with exurbs, getaways and summer haunts — long in the making, one I’ve been party to. Party is one word. It felt so good to close down a wide sector of the imagination, the critical ethos, and move nowhere collectively, a function of a huge leftist aggregation corporate takedown. In the workaround circus the year two-thousand is an egg-hatching moment: Kairos, and from there I can move forward and back to connect the times with the ideas and people that encompass my naïve expertise.

Then I shall break down and cry.

My problems, based on an unremitting infancy, began decades before 2000. When I first came to New York, for instance, my agenda was oversimplified to practice poetry and make love to poets sleeping with killers. I started a long poem of denial. Two or three poems, and I grabbed as much sex as I could and then didn’t but fell in love with two or three ex-poets and found their dearth qualitatively posthuman, and that’s why I am alive today. Tomorrow I’ll file again thinking about those I forgot to lose.

Saving face clinging to chains.