A branch can be a sentence. There is urgency in ideas.
I live in a debt growing country. Of how

the version-2 pressure is scents diffusing
the air has the outer sky above.

During the break we reached an agreement. Big
thick crazy quilts the sun buildings

marshaled over property wings,
the bubble places the blue “Great but I’ll just hold...” matter

a level over. Is the ‘new black’ of terraforming
not enough? — suggesting I send you some?

I put my finger on: Not really, she said out
ahead how I was supposed to know.

I’m addicted to carob.
This was the first time.

Coda

I’m always wrong
to prolong my appeal.

It’s a great country, just don’t get sick. Where
else can ballplayers call their mom Ai?

I have nothing to wear while breakneck tempos bed-hop through streets that lead to the slopes. Translation is a ski accident in waiting. An a-frame is supposed to be up next. The Norway spruce. Was that you?

I have nothing to wear tonight. Your nose looks finished beneath the stopper. A smell of Black Ops to see the look on all the faces and allay boredom. Not ours, theirs, along with ages of apprehension arrayed in dance movements. Unshiny, imperfect, not held in place — nothing you know is like these long phials of sulfuric fern. Fougères, the Germans say. (The name cards are all the same.) “We’re watched out for like a celebration over adding the bill up. We’re surprised you took us here.”

Hold to the truth behind your lie. That’s a paraphrase of the CIA mindset unraveled in Doug Liman’s Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson's memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, an allegory for our hyperexcited, distracted time when politics is a plastic art. Reorder events. Impugn motives. Leave something out. Practically speaking, who has the luxury of judgment? Bad behavior is taken in as, well, getting by. Or getting over. Getting retribution. And what is the harm? No one but the target cares and fact is no one will care for long. Even the targeted need to move on to get by. These are the pragmatics of a Pewter Age (several removes from silver or gold). The behavior in question is that of the George W. Bush administration outing Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer. Exposing Plame was a treasonous offense undertaken nonetheless to revenge and silence her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Wilson was targeted as an authoritative critic of the cooked intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s atomic weapons program, findings used to justify war with Iraq. The first half of Fair Game pounds the drums prior to the bombing of Baghdad, fast-forwarding an emotionally hooded Naomi Watts as Plame, wife, mother, and globe-trotting Agency manager in counter-proliferation, 2002 and 2003. After husband Sean Penn’s public outbursts, however, Watts is left running-in-place toward midcareer annihilation. The film’s second half follows the marriage more closely as it starts to fall apart. The passions externalized are the hard to see kind, ethical chiaroscuro, hesitations cum paranoia that give over to Watts’s rationalizations when facing Penn’s us-v.-them hysterics, two heads banging against one another, for sure, locked in mutual self-doubt and professional destruction orchestrated by all-out enemies. The battle line against a more resourceful adversary is whether to give in, move on — a position idealist Penn by nature recoils from and one Watts comes to oppose as well. Beyond the Wilsons’ dilemmas, the film fills in a narrative about how Plame’s outing compromised Iraqi nuclear scientists the US was pledged to rescue, a significant geopolitical aftereffect to Bush operatives’ treason. Before the White House turned up the heat, while Penn’s character presides over a nearly empty lecture hall, his anti-war conviction looks and feels narcissistic, small, ineffectual. But the formulation to the allegory goes like this, the government lied to wage war; this is the truth behind the multiple revisions, re-interpretations, and cherry-picked findings that gave license to killing and engendering more lies. The object when it comes to doing no harm, perhaps for another time, is to hold to the truth. Period.

[After a button is pushed]

After a button is pushed a model young theorist says hello, how are you, then reverses course. She heads upstairs to an installation in perfect solitude, surging toward marines with bats and poleaxes.

No, she didn’t. She’s indelible. Her eyeballs are all they need, not what they are. It’s a classic, botched, knife-in-the-back suicide. No, she didn’t.

What will they spell for lunch today? slender objective on a square obstacle? To follow instructions, slippers are warmed like leftovers; a rouged dog from the next room repairs to its separate bungalow.

The commissary is down in the sub-chambers, aimlessly glistening. I’m often holed up on the second level with the flamethrowers. There are major issues to have still (meaning my whole life). Before reaching a Kung-Fu high water, everything remains in hierarchical Finland that has worked through the general population.

A kimono has been entered, explaining sex without thinking, tongue in cheek.

A fragrance is found shaking our heads, wiping our brows.

The same stairs float, for good, if they could.

AFC picked up on this immediately almost two weeks ago, and I'm only getting to "Penetration" belatedly. It's off, ugly, racist, strategically off.

[After class]

After class Judith and me went back to bed and played it safe, collaborating on the manga hentai porno. I unbuttoned my supplies and pulled the first-day ‘turtle’ out and began to think of golf, wondering if I had enough saliva to give it even one full coat.

Later we went to the movies. I was wearing the shorter spring outfit again. I got it down to 56cms. Judith and me spent some time. We stayed in a nice hotel. I got dressed in my looser corset in the morning, stockings and heels, part of my mind still refusing to believe I was doing this. I woke up a bit grumpy from the death metal the night before. A breakfast at Starbucks and we were off, wandering downtown. But what makes someone ‘play golf’? What makes another man pour a sidecar somewhere ... the airport where we slept ’til around 4:30, brushed our teeth and headed to the other airport. Problem being, we were playing golf later that day and had blue jeans on.

Half an hour later all these painful moments were over, we realized: I cleaned up, got off and Judith and me left for the bus terminal (by the way, I got up as usual, exercised, waved to everybody and got dressed). Later we went to the seminar, made love, and then ate lunch. After lunch we got in the air, the pilot made great time and we landed, chopped and awed.

When we got home we were relieved. Afterwards we arrived at the links, got off the bus, then Judith and me got up, did the usual routine: bathroom, brush teeth, dressed and then slowly, very deliberately chewed off each other’s clothes. There were eight balls of steam, suspended in bacteria from our four hands that were Idylls-of-the-King clean. I was standing vertical. I was amazed that my insides didn’t fall out through the cargo-lock, knowing the air vortex, the balls, the game, and probably the season were lost.

[After syrup]

Pancakes hollow syrup;
these events seem headstrong,
immersed watching the light,
I know you. So we forget
Paul Broadnax and sidemen.

I know the down
Rx in the mouth,
the pro cloud podiatry
infantilized by a ‘yell’
banquette OK, OK:
OK.

[Après un héros]

Postulant qzJedx 18h66

Sur la ressemblance des films crissement plus loin une
vdFexq 02h60

Voyou, le 23 décembre, 0910

Jimmie voit char, Dérailler Fenton & Jennings Olives

Déclarateur 51, Laboureur Coincait la douceur échelle de l'État

Camps. Dupont Julio.

Je savais edifices le feraient fortement. Cuisses gazouillants.

«Il est assimilée
à marin ».

[After a Hero]

Postulating qzJedx 06:66 PM

On screeching movies likeness a farthest
vdFexq 2:60 AM

Thug, Dec 23, 0910

Jimmie beholds char, Derail Fenton & Jennings Olives

Declarator 51, Plower Jammed meekness Statewide

Camps. Dupont Julio.

I knew edifices’d sharply. Thighs warbling.

“It’s equated
to marin.”

[After a Precursor]

I left you off unleashed in time, leaving you at the blurb
on your extrication from hallucinatory landscape. You’re
still in danger within all the same networked venues,

the ones a macro-obscurantist spots: How do bricks
hang through the duration? (How is the easy-hard part.)
Rules write themselves for freshwater miners gone bats,

withered inside like canaries, asphyxiated or drowned
in bubbles from the water table. (Like my brothers
before, I got to now, personifying the meme in headset.)

In the past dead birds whitmanized the wayside, no-
thing on air. Nothing theoreticians blue-noted, jostling

deuterium. In Saigon or Youngstown, a new beginning,
a generic object looks transparent, emerging as Sleeping
Albert convening the frost belt. Buff leash unchanged.

Take an interest in opulence & stratagems bequeathing us our
sherbets, pot, oomphy fireside & mandatory inflows of feel-

ing great! Those brands are awesome denouncing oops, they’re
metering the troops to search counterfeiters & dig into bins.

Little wonder a spa goer’s Geigy final sectors look down
to harden corks up in the penthouse. A therapy

taken to far corners calculated in urban planning above
a new bowling alley, now vacant, scattered forever.

First I wore quadratic conditions in my smasher
area, spoke an argot cuttingly woodland. Marxian

yet morphine-ghosted by Thanksgiving's
bobwhites in the Appalachia hush... off

to getaways & then — second — a boutique
of collared, greening hospitality where Hellenic

banter might calm Kant’s havoc. Third, I’m spli-
ced as on a magnum while service precincts

rig sawtooth nakedness mauling the stubble
headland askew sundry wharves... so

doing sex here with a hen of steam, verdicts
are trifles beyond Krishna's preproduction

pouring kerosene to kindle tomography
for having brooked the Toscanini kind.

You never achieve status as a full pariah
even as Starsky and Amida exquisitely
handcraft cheesy retributions —
losers = worshippers of their detractors;

pathos = desperately seeking npo tax credits;
appropriating mauves; outsourced research;
hapless (though deceitful) green-face coloration;
dedication to ex-intimates. All these

personnel will have to be shifted or fired
but come to work anyway, achieving a seeming
bliss of the non-willed state, enlightened
ambiance like an argument lacking design

squeezed onto a breezeway, goat-gotten,
fighting among effluvia to endure.

There was a tongue in his ear driving noise
Into history of men in a line of duty. Glad
he's a fan. It's quantified.
The four-man cabin five flights down.

Opacity's a colossal how. How
do you pay for it? How is an epic life
colorless, sparkling yet dissected
as reflections of one’s self or angst

Slumped over in gaffes, so many
without pulse, how did he stand tall, pause
and brush his hair? Brush it back, men
like him looking up like flight risks say

“Exactly,” and in that miracle voice?
How do jobbed hoards of ass and clips
of soothing breath reach to enchain, knife
and subdue? How do you encounter

A faint breeze on zoom as you slip
his phone in your pocket — How against
your best effort is everything
on drugs as you go through the mail? How?

This is a quiet pace except for the plastic
containers hanging along the ship’s bow
and top sails maximized along the side.
24 hours we’ve had.

I polished the text and handed it in.

We used photographs for subject matter, like this of a garland arch by the abandoned tracks along the shuttered residences, with hetero gag men and a made woman, a vulcanized ambassadress to the gag foreground. We coax them to come across, waiting for all the trains.

Mahlerless, I find someone else, a thinly veiled version of me. The flow is persimmons even now. The mounting look and what we did are odd quirks and turns, a block party, informatics about neuroenhancers — a charitable sort, a higher up interested in robots, goes blind. Agoraphobia sets in, it’s less friendly with proliferating mordancy inflating while you inhale.

To keep up we don’t find a compromise. Vote often.

from August 5, 2009:

Lefties are feeling cornered (not to say conned) by Obama. He's a milquetoast. The economy and healthcare, don't-ask-don't-tell. The government looks terrible because it's doing many things halfway. Interior is presently enforcing anti-immigrant policies put in place by Bush 2. Guantanamo detainees are shifted from one [cell] to another. Obama plans to keep us charmed at towhhalls, baby step by baby step, but it's hard to stomach longterm, while his enemies' operatives ridicule him and his spokespeople with anger mongering. In a democracy you need to persuade and exercise power of governance. We haven't come that far that a majority just 'gets it' about the left's brains and style superiority. No matter who's in charge, government is a problem. Try renewing your driver's license at your local rmv (serving a neighborhood with an average median income), and you'll get it. People who drive are sweating their existence and don't have time for charm. They need directions to get them through the process. Now serving nothing at Window 11.

Part of the world works backwards facing the street, passing it... A science fiction flushed hollow, looking on outside it and still walking through adhering neatly to nothing, just passing, but also taking root ornamenting impurities of state.

Who are these? Staving muleta and the thatched kinfolk? ÷ Don't hold it in. Talk to your doctor.

As noted, there’re recipes for disaster. For subatomic beings, fluctuations are well understood. The carport is perched high above them, but how was I supposed to know? I put my finger there — this was the first time — “Great. I’ll just hold your lips. Down.” It was maybe a couple of weeks later I cried, “I feel like burning myself.” She poked at the remaining bubbles, not really, she said.

A thousand years ago this town was gored basalt, minerals seeped through phlox and salt marsh, more like plump meadowlands then. I wanted to suit the farmer or the farmhand along the shore, tossing his head as he stamped with one foot on the sand before he broke his baby toe, stubbing it. Next, on placemats of woven straw, eating salad, we both look up at a string of eucalyptus pods dangled from the rearview to discourage homesickness.

Everything belongs. The rest is stress related or foolishly unhinged.

There's no way now to prevent the zoo making a mistake blanketed by cloud and pointed in teary winds toward a scrim and drum rolls. A veil of ignorance rises to mete out democracy; its flatulence becomes my Ipad for which blues like ether in heaps of organization overlap consensus.

About those outbreaks of more virulent parsimonies, the depression on XM has a single coordinate everywhere, for the squirm of it, the advent, set alone.

Tomorrow, an awful catalyst takes on today. I feel a little ointment-ed by the unimaginable vengeance. Those who argue lose their hands.

I’m holding a transcript from an undistinguished gray keeper at the front.

Hi. It started again. You and they must have a connection to the same zip code where there’s this lights-out factory, an eyesore we dreamed up. There’s no agency inside, no intervention, only computers multiplying in dark, reduced to making more inventory, keeping the faith mining the richest veins, designing stalwart codes and disruptive innovation. Some assembly required from dawn to midday, they think: so many in-folding explosive arcs of competing constructs they flare up into an aqueous shimmer. Moving sands and your occipital lobe and its bandage, perhaps, constitute the Non-Group taking part in the phony ritual to outlast time. Yours and mine. There’s a flywheel effect, also, that turns the conversation over to science and greed, and the prototypes that mess up the visual cortex with paste-ins and the luxury goods that bind, ushering in an anti-life of grueling but quickened radiance they co-broke for enduring benefits.

Back to you.

It's been 35 years, and it's still news.

Like any yeoman of the cloth I write captions in robot clauses to overshare. And I negotiate cash for rapprochement. My views are not incompatible with yours, only I’m leisure-loving.

There has to be someone in charge.

(Hold on, I was conspicuously money-mad before I was handed this bag of sentences.)

Next, I was whisked in a hybrid to Boise State where there’s real culpability along with stardust and missiles to control. I made myself think... I let myself think... (It’s a coin flip.) Stagy dogs can be avoided while my Hail Mary rises higher.

Besides, to retrieve class struggle is no one’s baguette.

Porter, over here.

I mix shy and rabbity and squeak in biblical French. It’s just plain meaner.

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?

One can feel this mortal acquisition drinking hot coffee from a can and sticking to its roots’ metallic gleam, seething too, proportionate to the open space. The smoke gets shiny and you’re mortified with ozone.

The whole firebox is aglow. The yellow wallpaper is engaging.

The collapse of saying it better is.. no, it’s a folding cliché. My aim has changed. Sap is flowing to ruin parody.

What’s Lassie? Trash-rich.

I liked the primary grades more than my parents. In pilates, something waved breathing up. Blood and my arms apace.

For my doctoral research I followed bliss, the top two percent delusion that swells and swells. Despite the cameras, I prefer free, motorized speech voided and in divers dangers.

And I’m still here, the body’s purring put aside. (One dissipated the other.) But one continues to review the lab egg whites in their spare, bubbly zeal to wipe out ex-traitors and to outpace the apparatus (not properly issued to commentary).

No. Government is not that difficult. The background is a colorful PROCESS shot. Lethal-to-pale fellows lockstep for the scent of Labrador tea. And the gyrostats escape!

Are you sitting in the apparatus while listening there? wearing nothing but a motive for eagerness to do what we were afraid to be?

We DOLLY into a MEDIUM soft shapeless mass containing lurid subject matter. No, forget it, that's too risky. Not quite time.

Scary Movie was a date movie. A private-public bond like Klee and Ibsen.

“My regrets.” Switching phones, I look up to the crazy guy waiting to take me somewhere. Thinking is enormous but I practice until the call had gone out.

I’m sick of nice things.

Not running, walking rapidly, I cross the hall with the heat transfer ....

...come out the complex, take the campus walk ....

...go through a dedicated lot ....

...and into the Q7 in one STEADICAM SHOT.

I manufacture algorithmic spoons, tugboats and flyweights. I’m drunk on history, empathy, bounce.

Protection broken up by the security lamellas where a company like ours takes it inside the parturifacient facility.

I challenge myself every day. It’s what shakers do for a lifetime.

Now it’s daybreak — a few figures unclasp white headbands.

White on seraphic white.

Two more guys loiter with intent in the doorways. Both smile, but neither laugh. They’re wearing bluetooth up to their shoulders with panoptic properties extending their blood-pull orbit toward all rustles and rustlers.

Here comes my companion with his successor, an upgrade that’s on time.

Before I turn into another parabola of yours, you, I should take myself down and stay far away, crabbed and hesitant to set off the motion detector, about to fail. There were subtle indications you just want to cry, and it's not a bad smell, just sad or a slight lifting in the dimness when I wake up. Anyway, it all goes well. You and I will be taking off, though. One by one, I suppose. Reasons are weather related, the paleness this morning and a similar wash of fog coming back, lilac-dark in the air and offshore atmospheres yesterday and the day before. The winds exchanged directions, and I barely pertain, and why should I? What I have in mind is low on your list, even lower than that, off the list. It's contradictory to insist I’ve won in a runoff of longing and gratitude. Your taking time to sift through any, even the slightest, part of what I think is the spoils of coincident poses. I cherish your placing a tag on mine, yet I have said nothing, foundering and tongue-tied, handing our fortune over to the first letter of the alphabet where we live. You want back in, me too. It’s my off-centeredness alone that excuses your granting me permission to maintain a safe distance. I'll let you go then. I was hoping you would rhyme over me.

Leave the top 2 buttons undone. Fate
shouldn’t adapt what’s spindly or bang
it home. There’s something else, that’s
a distasteful impression of Mel Gibson
in red shoes. (Jewelry is difficult for
men.) A sick mind resists emotion solving
puzzles. Are you going to put that there?

Baby pickerel eat each other speaking
Japanese. Their parents want to defend
them but can’t. (They’re peach & violet.
There’s a richness to dealing thought-
fully.) I get all my ideas from social
studies, yet theatrical brainstorming
is more easy-to-sleep-w/-&-pulsate.

Instincts are mostly buried under cement, sunk talking to each other, eh? They were hard to get out of the wrinkled valise (I removed the tongue).

You know you look really psychic behind the wheel of a Malibu. Something better wants to start the engine (cherry red). Something to stop the snowman mid-grin.

It dawns on me I am covered with bacon reform. That’s why I went for consensus over these flamenco partitions (nurture, nature, frantic relaxation). I can’t say I laid you willingly. My data field comes up with blood vessels homogenized, preferring the woodpile to indoors duality, the big man.

There’s a container for every passion.
Mmmmmmmm immersive trance box, on loud
so the ambient workspace can hear it,
feel it in stages striking after dark.

You need smarter drywall too, to excite
ferns and moss growing inside every-
thing about the yield, blowing in news
of perpetual unitary joy...

Ounce by carbon resin ounce, a take-off
economy could be floatable within, once
regarded in wholeness, its contours
beeped forward w/ the news, smart enough

though meaner beyond its whereabouts,
I guess us.

“Dear Hightop,”

It saddens one to inform the boss

she’s not serious, never is. She makes

comparisons during sex and makes

love checking in — whilst I live
off the equity of a third faculty
where the future holds, the one promised
Hermes that took him over the edge.

The edge plus.

Odysseus shows up, impacted. He belongs
again.

So there’s a kettle of urgency after all,
just as there’s a force of light: bad-ass DNA
and much bigger stuff. The of of infinite
interest in feeling a kill.

Let’s run some #’s.

My capital is now redefined. I have a poem
in the money issue, since I’m into gambling
connections and catering to my client.

My client, plus I’m environmentally drunk.

I work as a temp, placing a put
on the periodic table, petite in stilettos.

Hit counts on the internet are the buzz, key metric of social capital and commercial potential. The web is our era's process field for integral, recursive, exponential spectacle through and through, something Mark Zukerberg understood, from the get-go, and put into phenomenal practice as recently as only six years ago when he co-founded Facebook. Among the pleasures in The Social Network, the film about the birthing of Facebook, released last week, is that we observe some of these busy-cool processes as they get sparked; we eavesdrop on contexts and physical instruments of visual analytics as they unfold in collective enterprise to generate maximal hits, not only the coding but, as Hollywood insists, the coke, the shared genius and group pathos of collaborative content-invention and -consumption. It’s an early 21st century comic morality play about Ivy League competition and joy (in double quotation marks): young, bright elitists integrating themselves within the speculative economy, the rich, in other words, getting much richer. Twenty-five billion is a round figure in dollars; that’s the current estimate of Zukerberg’s fortune. And while Jesse Eisenberg’s Zukerberg is a dick and a sad hollow man, the further into the film we go, the more we empathize with his reticence and business acumen, the lighter and nicer the guy seems packing all that joy and money. Justin Timberlake, not quite young anymore, looks the part of the heavy character, slightly less-than-Harvard material, Sean Parker, Bay Area entrepreneur (he founded Napster) who worms himself into the Facebook inner circle through his connections with venture capitalists, but who also drops out in disgrace because of his druggy habits. The film's starboy would be Andrew Garfield, shot repeatedly in glamor-implied profile, playing Eduardo Saverin, Zukerberg’s closest mate at Harvard, co-founder of Facebook, the old pal aggressively pushed out by the communal force of outside investors and Parker and, impassively, by Zukerberg. Women factor in The Social Network as nicely-coiffed accessories. The film kicks off with Rooney Mara playing BU undergrad Erica Albright itemizing Harvard sophomore Zukerberg’s social deficiencies. That’s fresh until Zukerberg shuts her down by voicing disbelief in Albright's need to study since she goes to BU. We don’t see much of Albright after that. Brenda Song plays Saverin’s troublesome girlfriend Christy Lee who seems almost fabulous when she sets fire to a scarf Saverin has just given her. But poof, the fire goes out and Lee disappears. The film comes to an abrupt conclusion at a point when Facebook is piling up big bucks. Before the closing credits we read that everyone who mattered wins, lawsuits resolved, money disbursed. We leave Zukerberg nearly the way we found him, alone with his exploding social network. Nevertheless, we can’t help but admire what he’s packing.

Conditions look drugged — wanting you (I do),
not out of calculation, began how far and vast
connivance liberates you to oppose the other facts.

Or plans change. Pandering to take a guess, I might
replace similes and what’s in a line or two,
dash off some bull to lose my footing (clop
blips) on the oily tarp, perplexed, taking it outside
a Rubik of a different, denatured octagonal gloom.

To outtake a thing is ample. The thing that’s crap
scrunching it up is everything for breakfast.

The pond plays Schubert for a boucle, searing,
puffy, relaxed, and succinct. Like our compact.

The sun is gray. Divided and confused, I
signed up for a summer of love. The pills are
sweet, their force takes me out of bounds,
it’s interludes on the double.

The system is not perfect. It’s an everybody
movement with that living unlocked smell.
I set the controls; the active ingredients are
not now, don’t. First thing in the morning.

Noonish. I have a profane vocabulary,
a little nervous forced into the secondary
but I’m ecstatic I’m 29. I’ve been blocking
myself but now it’s over. I’m directional.

My head weighs 10 pounds.
Hold my earrings.

I can write you, “Radiance comes in bushels, refreshed
from extract.” (It’s nighttime. We’ll check out what held
you with the other heptads.) “In each house a new name
burned,” a protracted surfeit for thought before the past
it got shiny on, after a polygamist’s tocsin teaches him
to move out & not come back depleted, tangled,
discontinuous imprint of the din implement; & over
we are, now were we don’t know or I don’t; I can’t fold
gives the idea, anything that’s made had waved
to them, protecting us like anything, a prologue or
in physical pain of taking them onboard, putting them
in mind of us affiliates, at last.

I’m a fan. I could write them.

Michael Gizzi, R.I.P.

Time runs out, taxonomies still
unexplained as it permits.

I’m always in trouble. Ours starts small,
small press univ. erratically lettered then
again in weathered deco, a bony font
for obfuscation dimmed by the lackey
overflow. I stayed in position, authentic;

I loved your altitude and your facts, but
we feared anti-humanists and divas if
what w/ whatnot and covert specialties
tightly wound at the nation’s tip, a tic;
I also squandered theories and forgot
I just stood there with nothing to give
back. This is where I came from, only
you’re right, money isn’t equal
to an opposite reaction. This is when

the rich kids in jackets stand up
without overextending triumph
over the stick image... the varmints!

Sex is peroration. Old English is dying.
Did you bring the good shit? We can see the signs.
Burning talent. Lonely or not, soft
as language, the new rote is bowed to nodules.

This emphasis is officially the lush,
appointed blur. You don’t say hello? Ellipses add up.

That leaves too little for a stop.
We face 10-to-life, a thicket of cloud and wind taking
it everywhere,
the next step in their training.

I’m bad at knowing when.
A younger lover is vital, not recreational.
We're addicted to sculpture, nothing else
drives us. Here’s an apple

for the teacher. (Everybody
does it.) It’s a straightforward proposal:

These are not drawings, only a few,
they’re cartoons and vice versa.
Another puzzle, more or less, a plan
without plot is banter and luscious slurs.

No response is cool. It’s the payoff, a
round that never was and never knew
the flea was left behind,
the vampires are all in.

“I promise we won’t bean you with a bag of nickels.” Waiter,
there’s a figment in my soup. The quartet’s on a mission; higher
     up, the soup’s part doodle/part association we can void
as a hoist to operate microspores by hand,
stacking thought like fluorescent tubes that meet
     over magnets. Tubes lit & disentanglements

     mean what is not said to pillory hindsight,
& saying what is not meant targeted to rubbernecks
     seen I guess as ambiguous in pastels —
their paternalism indulged through wisecracks, piano & voice,
                                   mercury
selenide drenched in saliva chug-chugged, crossing heights
not yet surrounded by shiny wax paper: Prayer in all directions.

Smile. Shall we? This zephyr & the tweezer-length trapezoid
               power the incriminated city, warm & cold &
no further down the dun hill operating with frinking genomes,
lattices, an industrial park at the corner sheeted in quick fire,
milled cement, plywood & dust, their buoyancy wiped away.

Private ideas, still hidden, gone native, & of fine voice.
               “A voice & nothing more.”

I write in my nature/head. Let’s hold a séance! Joy,
I snare us into the Dali-esque givens to starve a fever.
Seven rooms (usually) with clay-toned physiques
fighting the relative fight to operate on one another

— everybody under anesthetics, lunar waxing again
credited to chimera in a labyrinth. A foot of snow
From the window, the surf is luminous, rotating in
reverse as if mercurial marshes return, knowing

how to purify their offspring & manage forever
as lurches of nibbling torque adjust day into weeks
smothered w/ the sphinx, then weeks into clay/Joy
says we’re home free quanta taxiing in the brain.

A chestnut vendor stands holding out to her
his coat with the fired bullet in it, effluvia.

My position is reincarnation roughs it, because it’s safe to lounge at home without saying oh, wait we did this already.

Home is a test pattern where the class marshal escapes, holding on for a protracted nest egg, dropping cupcakes.

You may have noticed I’m on the side of gonzo, zest and the construction of meaning, and one very long eyebrow (wingspan), fuzzy and continuous with the present like last summer that had no purpose, just sheer falsetto.

This is a fugue for repackaged oomph.

I’m spry in my motives, and underhanded getting back to catch the slapdash that comes to mind. I long for something manipulated, whipsawed and less specific and this is how it works.

There’s a method to share. Society is like building blocks. When we make out I see cubism and social media touched or felt. It’s overrated, I whisper to myself, falling for the ingredients.

An illusive healing (the method) stitched to transparency (washes of shadow) and aspected by hedges, almost.

To go on we shoot back and shift subjects in compliance with bets we play by... bluegrass conflicting with breakfast and rubbery clouds, the proverbial irony.

We like to gamble, and like crustaceans we give in to forgetfulness, nothing to mend. Blinds drawn, the resultant streets fill with sang-froid and riches. The prospect ices.

All the lapses are angly in winter, no lie.

September has a preferred representational system. Floating too close, roofs blanketed in bathing suits and flyleaves, the waterfall declares amnesty.

September is being looked into. It just feels terrible.

One thing is its performance yesterday and the morning before that. After you wash off, you understand when to pause and leave it there in the reeds. You smell a rat. Its sensory predicates are pointless but you really care.

You’re not alone. There were some deleted utterances in the surface structure. The wind from the south is rambunctious.

What it represents may be playing tricks on us. You wake up and you’re vapid.

You want in? Try some eye accessing cues with your interlocutor looking to undress. A mindset carves out the rafters. What was seen trapped at the top? A noun for emphasis could be imagined. There’s a method to share.

Let’s go through the stream.

This is a Christian nation. You take the wheel. My name is Wink, officer. My sentences shimmer. While writing I caught up with mapping procedures for talking shit, hating it. I deserve this Hyundai.

You must have a sore throat, tea drinker.

We’re two faithless figures making a pass at the cosmos, and the next. Exploring integuments I reached what everyone’s looking for, uttering something in 3-D about form cum something cloud nine.

I hand it to you, there’s a badge flashed in mining spiritual homilies and off-color whackola for the evening drive.

The new persuasion rules with censors, erect. Centaurs, correct?

I can park you anywhere!

Gavel to gavel hours and hours turning the page. What we say converts to glass, personality and stunt making.

What we have to say is public discourse W. B. Yeats called the bestial floor.

Please, have your way, your fleet of stars, your options. Have your composite bracelets.

(This far from his breathing, is it safe to mention Yeats?) (Maybe not.)

Some of us are too polite to save the day. But not all of us will friend you now or any time.

It’s natural, all part of the wilderness.

The wilds...

As a news hound myself I appreciate Ron Silliman’s interest in memeticist Susan Blackmore’s TED video lecture as well as her Times blog entry, “The Third Replicator” and her response to critics. Like a lot of other PhDs who venture into sweeping pop generalities, Blackmore is a meta-Malthusian compiling a topical lexicon and broad reductions in philosophy of science (indeed these are the trend-grabbing stuff of memes from the media-academy) to sound quasi-alarms. For her, cultural activity is subject to informational analysis; it’s made of two things — memes, the second iteration of the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ and, more recently, of technology or techno-memes or what she calls ‘temes’ as the third iteration.

Genes are of course the first iteration of the algorithm whose mechanics require three elements, a) variation, b) selection, and, lastly, c) heredity or what Blackmore calls variously and slipperily: copying, imitating, replicating. Blackmore’s altered terms for heredity apply to her argument that begins borrowing (imitating) The Selfish Gene author Robert Dawkins and his formulation for meme = “that which is imitated.” The meme is illustrated by Blackmore in looser, nondistinctive instantiations = “songs, stories, habits, skills, technologies, scientific theories, bogus medical treatments, financial systems, organizations — everything that makes up human culture.” Broader still, a meme is “information that is copied.” Culture in other words is copied information copied. This is a prosaic if not entirely logical leap in Blackmore’s system that ushers in a more hysterical lexicon: following further, literally and almost slavishly, Dawkins’s gene-centered (that is, selfish) view of evolution, Blackmore sees ‘selfish information’ = the info is ‘selfish’ because it unwittingly allows itself to get copied (in this regard, why is it not unselfish? or just ready info??). Or for more narrativity: ‘when we began imitating we let loose the new creature, the replicator’ that which is ‘Pandora-like’ and ‘dangerous’ because it can be copied (what are the alternatives to getting copied? being ignored? destroyed? don’t these alternatives pose dangers, as well??).

I characterize Blackmore’s argument as both tautological and histrionic in application. She first insists we “stick” to Dawkins’s meme as that which is imitated, and she then loses not a little of the insight to be gained distinguishing among copying, imitating and creating. For instance, Blackmore allows, “Once our ancestors could imitate they created lots of memes that competed to use their brains for their own propagation.” It is unclear whether the competition is about propagating humans or memes, but that’s not the chief difficulty here. To paraphrase Blackmore’s sentence using at her insistence Dawkins’s definition: once humans could imitate that which is imitated they imitated [created??] lots of that which is imitated that competed... etc.

In “The Third Replicator” she supposes technology will soon take over: “Just as human meme machines spread over the planet, using up its resources and altering its ecosystems to suit their own needs, so the new teme machines will do the same, only faster.” This sounds smart until you un-meme yourself from the huge collectivity of noxious assumption and fatalism implicit in her received vocabulary and commonplace bêtes noires — human machines v. real machines screwing with ecosystems and planetary resources, faster, faster.

If we are stuck with (if we stick to) Dawkins’s meme and Blackmore’s more ambiguous teme, we’ll need to figure out (is figuring all about and only about memes and temes??) much more regarding variation and selection procedures within the algorithm that also attaches to heredity, copying, imitating, figuring out, and so forth. Evolutionary debate and competing constructs of cognition are two courses of study. Blackmore has sided with neural Darwinism, physicalism, and adaptationist schemes. Other philosophical views may pertain in unpacking processes we black-box as creation and imitation, much less copying.

I went into analysis alert. The regulars
bear shame? Faces change when they use
my words; plus or minus you’re so close,
for a glance we’re all about to bail out,
why are we even arguing!

Came a stage regular is a bore, found
the exchange wears down wanting,
gorged, let’s all stand around,
crawl and cover some ground.

What’s your problem? There’s
a stranger to pull thru. Hold on. I’ll put
on greenish “pallor enhancer.”

Sunken gardens with a fountain at each
corner, the color of bone. Rationed
compliments appear w/ secret ballots
that float into mathematics of situation

(sons), foam under rush-formatted steam
disappearing like factions of perplexity,
contextual effects (procedures) — more
fearless (less indiscernible) a cappella —

Have you a next will? Travel well. There
is product on the loose. The cubicle’s
in your head. (When I can’t sleep I can’t
dream.) Side effects could occur.

I saw you on television.
I saw your name written on a wall.

Untold on both sides, a grisly
under-rendered as future photo realism
or whatever you have up your sleeve
please find a way to get me that info.

You have passed the second-cousin
stage of wretchedness. You’re good
to go on & take up any theory
to sever one head from the vines.

Further out the descriptors pine
faintly peeling like spiders’ pant
legs descending into moaning
nonentities (the Ralph Vaughn

Williamses), still squinting tho
Within representation.

Justice with passion. Chains of seltzer
formed of mercury selenide. I told you it’s a bad idea.
Faith or momentum, barefoot & blue-belled, outdoors
the tubas are detouring into surf & compact surfaces

— praise & the opposite grow acrostic, slightly rife
within hours. I grab my pen and clamber over to
your tree where you’re holding on to eclipse sound-
tracks w/ pulleys over notes of civet & benzoin.

I’ll take the sherry Pepsi, & the sardines, thanks.
I’m sorry this happened. I was pumping gas
& going to say we’re all for one in suspension
making a scene like in martial arts, sparkling pen-

umbrae as in a polygamist ring barnstorming through
the hemisphere, yeast on the verge of appliance.

Abhorring vacuum, a jet gate opens to a drawing room,
where snow and sunlight close their distance. They
never saw it coming, old and new strung out on sectionals,
an untapped atmosphere of oblique pup scents and puckish

flair. Someday all this will be yours. Five hundred blocks
that lean socialist running with snappy dialog, steeped in
a plaited glow turning billows of tweets and casual reading
and living chronologically to under-simulate the senses.

My fly is open. I look thus tired and I forget big words
that suggest under whose thumb. The pink rattle
is a stretch of dark matter, and the glove puppet’s a trap
while bitter wind angles down shifting one thing at a time

into the present. Right, an icon is produced by something
heated, promoting sea plankton. Only television counts.

My screamiest teacher said it’s something no one coughs
so I made a chatter movie and filled the land-
scape w/ witty organists, treating the script
like a mixer of delirium layered between thruway
flies through the air, boom, poop, balling

postcards suspended from outspinning and
then pulled back in shots of isotope-as-suburb w/ agile
minds besotted almost, overconfident / overconstrained
by the rhythms of the ponies and gnats drowning in wet

cement poured by provocateurs that rotate the back
frames, tipping them in vast politico-riptides, imploring

anamnesis, addiction-resonant w/ their inner lives off
screen as eco-environmentalists carrying bobcats
into an icebox that.

Photograph untitled. Permafrost time-tested,
reduced. Sex come of age. A big pleasure long-
stood. Helium released. Populations drenched.
A circus loved or moaned. Sour cabbage

not eaten. Canoe returned. Genocidal maniacs
rested on the shady beach. Freehand fabricated.
Volatility weighed. Clumpy workhorse walked.
Plastic repatriated. Vibrato banshee-d.

Poison multi-tracked. The honey gatherers
misgrouped. The knack gotten, flipped. Brunch
taken at night. Brain-body experienced.
Exercises enlarged. Whiner designated.

Cookie looked for. Ears pinned back.
Your face written and scratched on.

Cynical realism burrowed, laid waste.
Marine animals entered. A reputation had.

Debunking agitated, reproached. Ride given.
Dogsleds seen, covered up. Havoc reeked.
Acrylic fiber overgrazed. A pig’s mouth
pierced. News performed, disappeared.

A tongue tied and mailed. Sherbet dolloped.
Ruthless tolerated. Flow boiled, hardboiled.
Counterpanes unelevated. Divination closured,
improved. The oasis filled with swill. So-

journers hung. Tableau sponged, spackled,
burst. Mangrove gripped in saliva. Anything
kicked, chug-chugged, immersed. Swimming
synchronized. The bellicose slunk back.

How can damaged goods be flight
risk saying “exactly” in a torso vice
that’s gone full circle. (I had no idea
about the fall-off.) Later

I gained because of despair,
getting close I saw I was a schmeer
of pie & I could do this — tight
fingers wrapped around Lalique

— bar lights, team eyes drinking
undressing snails for Jacobeans
to monetize on the surface
(a game for the uncanny-chic)

crayoning hearts & smiley faces
inspired by knee jerks & police.

What’s a shrinking phase
was mistaken for authentic or, worse,
aristocratic — the neck you’re stick with
soaked in a Mars invasion.

Thrown in reverse it’s behavioral economics
without hotshots to read the hoax.
Triangles & throats, emotionally wounded,
won’t wait. I’ll be right down.

Fumy quotations in the surf.
How did these happen? To revolt
is justified musical collision
playing at a junk ballad.

A shopping spree is a migratory pattern.
It gets disrupted but never lets up.

Alfred Starr Hamilton has been on poets' short lists for the balcony edge for 40 or more years, but he's undergoing "rediscovery." A stack of Hamilton's letters to the Montclair police is "the year’s least likely literary find." The letter excerpted in The Times reads like poetry. Anyway, for counters of endurable fame, it's another 15 minutes.

I have nothing to say about the poetry marathon three weeks ago. I showed up as the second to read and fled the scene after. So what do we know? In retrospect, we think it odd to organize or, rather, quasi-randomly assign eight-minute slots to so many loosely-to-totally unaligned characters who happen to live in Boston or New York (or, for a few, places between). The minutes I witnessed felt remote-controlled according to old-timey socialist customs. Remote in that I’ve never been on welfare but something redeeming was to emerge from the make-it-snappy, invisible sentiment.

But there were highlights for me. One is being handed Gold Star by Brendan Lorber whose everything is not invisible. The first poem begins, “I want to shine what do you do?”

It's instructive to be exact.

Voices in our heads are paranormal. They talk the talk about our bodies to the co-op wrapped in steam.

That said, the very time we get off the phone, the fog enclosure switches back. I don’t think like that. Don’t believe that, impetuously. That never happened.

I can’t tell you don’t care, I’m a weeping cherry on the inside.

Outside, a panel membrane floats me into the past, desiring change. I have something better to do than pump out to your grasp. A life with submerged artifacts takes traveling and feels like a party. I’m going to lose you if it kills me. I’m a co-founder.

How far is it to the casino, I'd like to know. It’s curtains for the prom fitting. The toys are asleep. Injecting their blood is just crazy but I was dwindling down the drain and would have gone off schedule.

I’m from costive stock. Count the lottery tickets.

Social progress is in a pickle, a horrible mess. It wins all the half-eaten take-out on the table. 40% of obdurate voters like you and me. And how long can you live folding, unused, perpetually minimalist verging on chance and circumstance? Who isn’t in one?

[Edit, from below] There's a mood taking a fall, whitening, configuring the take, “We found lovers wasting time, though redeemed by euphoria, swollen pinpoints in a story about takeoffs. We miss the good looking small-town drummers chanting in time or as John Waters writes, the upper-lower class women from a dark place on a hillside, covering the globe with their comic pedigree. The problem is, did they ever smoke pot? They're stress-busting purveyors of desolating surfeit, solar decathlons with nothing inside, turning their smiles up. Cue the highlights why space and time exist at all, made of wriggling strings. Speaking of the pure land, we have none. We swim in it.”

A technician of snappy flotsam writes, “I found my two lovers wasting time. I miss the small-town drummer, time, and as John Waters states, his upper-lower class woman in a dark place on a hillside, covering the globe with her comic pedigree. The problem is, did she ever smoke pot? She’s a stress-busting purveyor of desolating moods, a solar decathlon with nothing inside, turning her smile up. Cue the highlights why space and time exist at all, made of tiny wriggling strings. Speaking of pot, I have none. I swim in it.”

I have been 12 years old for a very long time.

Before I kill, yoga is fantastic.

The parabola intersects the World Trade Center that was. What’s mainstream? Gestures are precise. Bright eyes, sparkling motions, a huge lollipop.

Climbing down the outside there’s a new mainstream-underground that merits a visitor’s gaze — we — some of us — avoid it.

It’s hard to be objective, yet pressure is mounting. Mm-hmm. A big tone of political realignment is authentic now, at this hour of the hyper-ruffled whose mantra is too proud to admit the squalor juxtaposed by the obscene milieu. So let’s start with the rectangular coordinates, understand pleasures of the neck, chest, and eyes. That’s the first half.

Poetry culture is a quad divided.

We never come across it.

First authorized Flarf Anthology©.

I believe I can see into the future.
There is a civilizing process to space
entered into by spotting it first. It’s
a clear new world where character
offers liberation, supports you
from underneath. You
can go right in. They have an
open table. Everything is for sale.

The no-fantasies plan has 30 subscribers.
After ecstasy it’s taster’s choice,
A most civilized dichotomy, a long crème
De la crème boosting performance.

Music filters out at the crack of dawn
All the airports are just fine.
Day to day breathe utterances. We’re going
To be here as long as it takes.

Six weeks running, bankrolled by Bravo and producer Sarah Jessica Parker, art judges, art contestants, art lovers, everyone deserves this and maybe more. For six hours on air, now, with the exception of the Geico commercial narrator, there is no humane element, not even a fleeting, life-is-possibly-good moment on Work of Art. The collective, unachieved hauteur flaunts its wrinkly dogs as in a poetry marathon with trembling readers who walk up to the dais rustling dark pages stretched into transparent mop fiber and rolled back into overly prefixed, scavenged opacity again, from the inside out.

I’m brusque. It’s urgent.

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.

In descending order of indefensibility...

(a) Poetics is democracy.

Evasion in poetics, just as with prose, foregrounds style, motive, subjects for close attention.

(b) Paying attention is the field call to haunting the future. And the future notices who attends. But it does not impinge on the field. (See below.)

(c) Friendship is a job (like sloganeering) and, more elevated, craft (sign). To illustrate, job is to craft as field praxis to theory or astronomically kicking a sign. Don’t get me wrong I think free speech is cool and I’m for it and against impingement unless it hurts a friend. What’s it? There’s no work-around to the observer influencing the observed except later, much later.

Alarms aplenty. Time for shorthand reaction to today’s Times piece, “The Third Depression,” from Paul Krugman and Sunday Times op-eds by Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof, spilling over with second-tier hysteria: Cell phones as beacons of radiation and rad drivers of world conflict. In contrast, and also on Sunday, Frank Rich’s anti-hysteria and its discontents, another sort of alarm, that is, the no-drama of Obama’s dithering (research breaks in a crisis?) complemented by Obama observers’ ill attention that makes for the wrong spot checks (where is his anger? his emotion?) and an overall nowhere-to-go-so-forget-it perception of governance, in other words a vacuum (reminiscent of Carter-era malaise, without the cardigan).

Maureen Dowd builds a column, if not a case, spies hypothetical radiation in today’s droids and iphones, and looking forward, speculates, “nobody knew how dangerous it was to hold your phone right next to your head and chat away for hours.” iOS 4 leaking into my cranium — I’m hoping that’s not the case, loosely imagined first — while second, Nicholas Kristof explores the regrettable insight that technologies like telephony and its digital produce are sourced from ‘blood’ and ‘conflict minerals,’ tantalum and other rare materials controlled by juntas and gangs: “Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think ‘sleek,’ not ‘blood.’” Supply chains held up by “sadistic gunmen,” there’s an app for that.

Third, Frank Rich in “36 Hours that Shook Washington” goes for blood and conflict in governance, itemizing shortcomings to Afghanistan policies and presidential oversight. There’s a fossilized dithering to Obama and his deferential manner of governing that’s ignored by those who should know better, so slo- and even no-motion are reinforced and attenuated in a vacuum, allowing for admin spokesmen (like counterparts in previous admins) to cherry-pick stats to imply progress. Nobody (among the chattering classes) has cared that much about Afghanistan before McChrystal unraveled in Rolling Stone; nobody followed up on the admin’s misstatements about Afghan army and police quotas, for instance, such as those from Rahm Emanuel cited by Rich, because as Rich views it, “absolutely no one was paying attention.” There it goes again, that famous American attention span.

Today, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman sounds the loudest alarm, depression due to the resurgence of “the old time religion” in Europe and North America, namely making money hard to borrow, again, and balancing budgets not just in the U.S. but throughout the industrialized world, “imposing suffering on other people...unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.” Krugman’s is one of the first credible uses of the term ‘depression’ in op-eds to describe what’s been depicted in the news as an economic downturn or a dip followed by a jobless or legless recovery (possibly bringing on, to cite another journalistic euphemism, a ‘double-dip’). Fears of deflation, first, and depression, second, lead to injurious policies, like Ireland’s “savage” reduction in public spending and — here’s the kicker — with unintended, negative impact on international markets. Governmental austerity in Greece and Ireland is consumed as a symptom of the system sinking further. Krugman sees world traders and investors jumping ship.

No question, high-level dithering or slow poisoning by radiation is a blip on the screen of our collective attention disorder in the U.S. When the word depression enters the world’s conversation, however, nothing else will obsess us; our attention will have no where else to go.

On Poetics Michael Gottlieb remembers Peter Seaton:

One book, two books, three, maybe there were four, and then he was gone. He threw himself out of our world, not - at first - going altogether all that far. Off to Coliseum Books in Midtown Manhattan - where he worked for years and where quite apparently he made another life for himself; and made another life with a life partner who we also knew, at least for awhile. But then what happened?

He reappeared a few years later, read again at the Ear and was just as powerful as ever and it was as if he'd never left - which was a little troubling in a way because, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who thought so - enough years had gone by that it wasn't unreasonable to expect that things, he, his work, might be a bit different, but no. It was all the same.

Then he was gone, again. Read more.

These stats may be an aberration, yet deaths of relatively young poets are mounting this spring-summer. I am deeply saddened to hear of Peter Seaton’s passing. R.I.P.

To vocalize what’s sunk in, don’t worry or pierce your ears further, just because of me.

To repeat, I'm a plaintiff in the recent case against glamour. I'm being taken down. Something about my discrimination in music, which is chopped inside the box and unclarified, like lazy conversations over intellect v. emotion. That's another thing. I'm told nobody's talking to me. It's extremely funny, I've been sending out the lamest smiley faces, embracing the wrong diseases. I feel like Mrs. Meaty uninvited to the Worry Dance, revalidating my fears.

Maybe I'm just mis-digesting facts. Before heading to the gas chamber, an architectural classic, it's going to be 85 and sunny, after all. Oppressed, rejected, sure, I'm in there, but personality disorder is a binding element of hip dinner party kerfuffles and drooling, perverted dalliance. The miracle is, as the assemblies grow ragged, rock stars vibrate and pair off playing "Heck and Whatever."

In choosing what rubs me wrong or why I don’t want to be seen with you or an ode, can I eat something?

I chose ode and it’s an ode to summer, just getting to you. As marriages go it’s not all bad. I owe my bros an apology. (Not you.) My better half too. It’s just an exchange. Excuse me.

Summer!

Bromance trumps marriage. The proof is in the national interview. The house is packed. Gaining weight I preside over this commitment of ours. It’s beautiful to us. Like osso buco. There’s a term in physics or biology for attrition of affects, eyesore.

Everything I or should I say we sign on to is on second thought. Thanks for editing our books. Our first books. That’s how we met. Effortless, breezy we cut things up and got to you, second, after the firsts. We feel great. There’s a term in central Sicily for talking about Wanda in the Middle. We-are-so-tubby selling this coin. Vote us to preside over the exchange, some part of it, before we are stabbed into the back of the room.

It’s only a joke I didn’t have enough rising to the top after I screwed you. (Not Wanda.) You, just like family you’re the problem. You’re a failure. You alienate everyone you recommend for UC. I feel great.