A rewrite for W.B. on Halloween after Sandy

I see your potential; don’t wait to be huge. Time is temporary.. eternity

Later, it’s not much. Get your share, knocking the moment down with small talk, unscripted, unpredictable. Form is a hampering.

Sometimes it’s otherwise, conforming to a belief system to get forgotten.

Where I go from here... struggling between comparative (and descriptive) vulnerability to vie for solitude, taking your hand to suspend kinds of illusions —

Nebulae. Curved and hollowed.

The Bronx (and Bronk) looked used up.

Our 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. We feel it though. Its pace is folding into dreams.

If we pray for protection you need to work on your own war-is-imperative.

There is a want that hinges out: Lightning over fog. Homology and prudence. Package and immolation. Or if I could believe in a world 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.

Experience in impulsive concealment is physics outdoors evolving pretexts that are out of shape, parts of an abolished riddle, a time gauge to another punishing final, a squalid compound of jewels for continuity as it were, the trademark of both natural and technical production, meaning a value or a variable either way.

For our dual cosmos self-inflates as a product injector smitten with cultural exertion, just like a weather bomb wearing favored colors, pebble and pale, lucent grays.

Each stone then is a cloud inside, unable to be judged while giving away to access in a haystack, the multiverse, which looks most imprisoned now.

Dorothea Lasky
Thunderbird
Wave Books
2012

“You speak of one reality

I speak of the another” since you sport a destiny like foam

And I got caught in the scheme of two assholes

But I was too far in their scheme to see my way out of it

So all I did was wait:

A manifold vacuum [i]n that both relate to Buddhism:

To aggregate is to achieve. Afterward a file will result.

I am sick of academics or businesspeople telling poets

There’s deficiency of thought, of ideas. All the same, this is the second point.

And what cold hand will I grasp your heart with

— this is the worst point (“Move me around”). Let me give you a hand.

I am the horse people should bet on

I am the person who will likely save you from fire

I am the person who is black smoke

And blows black smoke in your eyes

I am the squeaky noise at night

Like the oboe in I. Got. You. “Tear up this paper,”

Adorno says plain speech is a fair shake at fame.

When you put your money down

We can start over in the middle but it’s really the beginning.

The rules commit us to collaborating [w]hich turns to anger

Over language. I’ve always been mad about something else.

Everything is trauma (“I exist”). Everything takes away from the center

[S]o caught up in sheep choc-a-bloc in white fields via rule-governed mechanics.

Surely alter egos bear no responsibility for foundering within the social paradox of violence.

Who to tell no one cares when no one cares

So the others doesn’t count. The others resonating — a prism on top of which you can point to the horizon that’s both magnified and askew. Doesn’t count.

I would still be me though

And I would not let you catch me

For your dinner — with all the pivots discovered and invented:

I would disappear

Until I became the antichrist — something we ate,

Something we are left with.

You're a mess, honey.

                                  — Touch of Evil (1958)

Three readings at Harvard that should be SRO.

Wednesday, October 17, 6 pm:
Mary Jo Bang and Jennifer Scappettone
Woodberry Poetry Room
Lamont Library, Room 330

Monday, October 29, 6 pm:
Charles Bernstein and Christian Bok
Edison-Newman Room, Houghton Library

Wednesday, November 7, 5 pm:
John Koethe
Woodberry Poetry Room
Lamont Library, Room 330

Rats in ’84. Pyrric chaos now.

It’s either one long numero or buckets of sequence.

I forget something else but won’t forget

mercy’s repeated efforts lengthen pleasure.

A gyrating breakfast is only description w/ depth

subsumed as they say in the trade off

or on, in and out. ‘Off’ is the ‘on’s eye feigning

to wait for all possibilities to soften the surface w/

clouds as dense as free-tailed bats.

Something came up. And what’s not said expands underground. This is unlikely

as lightning winning over fog. Lightning understands it’s disassociated. Has

nothing to transact, so no product. How is it fire? Up in sparks it glows

and falls out with grey streaks that look glazed or remedial past

the exercise and expense within its detail just like the moon made of lard,

indispensable for smearing light into a tiered package of delicious snakes.

For Columbus Day

Deep dish or alla breve? Equity or neurons? These databases center sobriety on the ground and keep looking up.

g = l. Everything I note here is integrated.

I’m driven to reach my market. Driven to sketch sweet totems that “look pretty close” with my eyes closed.

And with that, I could use your language without a lexicon.

Or the lexicon is turning out everything shy of an outboard length more (or less) infinite and infinitesimal.

I wish you had been here to get on.

Memes are talk, the walk, persons in the environment trudging,

though below 8%, unemployment among heads of households and subsequent foreclosures are the largest causes of forcing one in four children into poverty.

We’ve forgotten how to make things. It began with the airlines. Their only product is service that dissolves midair w/ infinite conjecture, casual panic, unbolted chairs. It’s like when Francis Poulenc got into libido trouble, and like Napoleon he slumbered through fulfillment, undressed to force a smile.

Beautiful red shoulder blades, his gainsaying oomph...

something squeezes pure structure into shadows that are numb to exclamation.

The finalists quit joking. General practitioners stepped up but their work got converted to an industry with little or no honor system. That’s when the mathematicians were unmoored.

Affection is vicarious info. Vicarious is not strong enough. Inner and outer merge in our skulls, which can be broken down, yet a lost cause. Connections we lose in reality are scarifying. Partnerships were constructs, first a little lunatic, sometimes febrilly culled. And like my peers who make their searches more social, I’m involved with a darker pool. We’ve slathered each other with near-imperatives about our fears of the excluded. So there’s nothing else? I can’t tell, because I wouldn’t know.

When instrumentalists and the poor struck their alliance back at the start, I thought this is no way to begin although their ultimatums were rephrased and moral aspirations became footloose and empirically incontestable as Seven Bagatelles.

A single clomp can change the course of a lifetime.

There is a nothing. Yet nothing is forbidden.

Or a burst of daft tone substitutes for info.

I lower your voice to approximate the closest approximate parity.

Somewhere, what’s a sociopath?

The truth is a manifold vacuum. We’re feathery.

Shorthand abstractions like these comprise unforgettable elements to our touching and holding the moment, surrounding it with illusions of taking off speechless for totems unknown, spinning or spun, quiet out of control.

And that’s how we fasten the starry messenger to move around objects.

100% our touch.