Inky musculature evokes nighttime and a quantum hummingbird. Tape both of my hands together. And grease-pencil trompe l'oeil on my forehead. Please.

Innocence is guilt. Yeah, blandness is a problem. No luck is too popular. Understanding what’s perfect we fear exclusion slathered with near-imperatives for rationales while the night refounds paradox as a creaked-out immensity, too mediocre to reformulate.

Everything dark is brute-accented imparting how our inflated logic dialogs with others, working three dimensions into a formless clot of mist.

I hope you’re happy.

I used to believe all the grossular and pine boxes that hold the night would open up to the horizon of a former life, a life stocked with the coloration of air like Shakespearean quarters foot-lighted with bouquet. Superangels strummed harps to sound the alert, lithe, w/ spooky edge. There used to be a flare for what noses should do, a full deck of going for the stretch and preen in a premonition, the one about other dimensions that (plan the predestined) blind patch — de-biased out of sample — the good of an experience / current status average win-loss.

The unequal in luck floated ashore.

There’s a cool oral tradition that’s like trail mix, so rhetorically honey-sealed and narratively palatable anyone with a few years of advanced English can have in.

It’s kinda clear that jumps in tone are staged to signify irony and distance about food prep and galley stainless.

The gestalt is to look urbanely offhand and sound normal. Do hang on.

The scribes are the first to note who’s hankering after whom. Gorgons are wrapped up like bargain hunters in boas, constantly slurping bouillabaisse smacked with vipers. It must be an omen or something. Or to put this another way, Labels don’t work outside among the diamondbacks. If you don’t believe me ask them.

In the change up scene everything is repurposed into conceptual deflation. Psychiatric disorders are now as commonly diagnosed as parallel discourse strategy.

A Cabin in the Launch

Witless v. gutless. It’s not to be.

Politics and the dignity of appearances don’t mix. (The financial pacs industry is just noticing.) Nothing personal, this is the sustained concussion version for charity... I also give in involuntarily for what’s not available, a cabin in the launch for recondite sentiments, for the boink of whinnying for pleasure. Or I cry when it becomes fashionable. I credit everything from the engine without a message.

I live in Hung Oaks.

I’m writing about it, not just doing something. I taper the next new visually inevitable thing and select for gameness. A deep-seated specialist would work with genres and play something interdisciplinary but I see beyond impertinence and scars. Um, ok, yes. I’ve misspelled the signs. I got a procedure to make it better — sham wildflowers, a few with a weird bounce and a fuchsia spurge past the goalpost. I’m on an errand stream to earn a structualist’s degree on time, a serener surface.

It’s a sorry concentrate: Until one went broke one was indebted.

Now an international scale opposes the light in my body. It’s scary loud at first, and yet there are comic possibilities as dreams seem to centralize.

I came to my senses breaking separate to put up a lava tint. So what if I say prompted the assembly made of torn Gillette letters and small decimals?

It’s hard to tack a center onto perception whetted by ideation! The mutts of childhood regenerate, there’s a nose and a tail, don’t fix them. Try to look better.

In the din nihilism shuts the door 24/7 on indisputable birdsong. It’s a good thing. That door leads to the rescue of children and all it contains, all I could have told you.

Seven Versions

Just a few things I dislike. Neuroenhancers. I’ll admit I was curious. A guy interested in robots, the narrator, urinates on flowers, grabbing my shoulder. Rusts himself in.

Voice mail happens. A man’s voice. Handsome, calm, also nervous. (Protecting dignity threatens it. Everyone knows that.) Our swift powers have never been better aligned.

We have functional emotions & this much-traveled vocab of affects. There’s a hint of falsetto. Shields up. I just missed the last place you look. Stay with me. Never stop exploring. Turn here.

The sea bream lifts, lukewarm, soft. Splash. Preaching to the tenor choir, I love what we do together.

Pigeon fathers pattern heaven where detachment is trimmed. Swimming there uproots the bright series, brocaded & then stiffened into sympathetic parody staving a muleta for thatched kinfolk.

So there’s a rule-of-thumb with natural stenches & hidden dimensions in the landscape, ultra altered like ranch dressing.

Small islands serve as hideouts. Tall men are restless in the rain. Excellent. We shall conquer, read over the presentation, juggle heads. You’ll need a new camping saw & hood scoop.

Why was this week’s contest insisted upon from side to side? What bud are we?

The short answer is a teenager’s you can scream open and enjoy.

Brain damage is in the eyes. More bounce for the retina to unscrew the internal hysteria pouring up but embarrassing, rocking like a party, like losing both death and life, dropping your rags, breaking water gushing down over my heels.

Steal Princess & Rogue’s Whip. You look how I feel.

No plan is perfect.

Between grief and nothing I do nothing wearing a torn shirt as an escort.

Dream within limits. What do we do here at times? I deal in ex-ghosts feeling dizzy. We tease out opinions on redeeming encores or nutty enterprises. We’re not so interested in dreams. But once in a while we can’t help it, like this morning we woke from a flash of such gruesome practicality we became distressed talking to painted traces and vapor. I was looking for performance glamor in a sports-transition store. There was no deeper pretext or tortured prelude. I walked into this pleasant, really dark place decimated in lights. The lights were out. But I was in there casually shopping along with others. It was a showroom for Under Armor where mannequins, staff, and customers match up in comfortable, form-fitting shirts and sweats and some in jackets pulled a quarter inch back, almost off their collarbone, not to flex but to suggest upper body development. These are steadfast figures and outlines but nothing shows. We have eyes and the mannequins don’t move. That kind of carefully lunatic geopolitical stow and store. That was what I was thinking as I picked out five pairs of socks. A pointillist grey pair, two pair in enlarged, graduated chocolate pixels, and a couple of pairs in ink, one with a hint of an inkier digital plaid-ish under. Everything was going to blend with other clothes. (So what was the point to a sphere of flowerets and blood?) The total came to under $200. The wind always kicks back allowing us to translate sleep into discrete transparent overlays of desire, textured fantasy, aimless expectation. We call this shopping.

Waiting for Hillary.

Landscape takes out the flowers.

But it’s my doing, making money hard to borrow. Clenching-tight, I’m on a distorted guilt trip, shafted by the viability of conquering death with abundance.

There’s no work-around to the observer influencing the observed mire except later, much later sprigs pick up and the driftwood gets epigrammatic, the upside unrelated, pale, immaculate.

The sky foregrounds all that is style, the worms’ motive, subjects for close attention.

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

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.

I remember bling.

I had one uncle who foretold the weather, intelligent and excitable. In any lake country there’s an old future that’s discontinuous, stage name of Nothing Simmering No One.

Triumph is creepy. Time here to move. The chef is childish, a waiter wields the stone rattle that he hides like buttergrass in plain sight. End of story.

I would like to see the dissolved thread to narrative, the needle and my as it were point.

This idea dawns as I back into the slurry, plump and downy evanescing into fluff. The slurry rises above affixes and gardenias. It’s here. Helium released — thrown in reverse in spring and then in autumn — trees light up again, everything’s on the table.

I believe in the healing power of unhealthy options. Percussive isolation. Resentment buried in a colossal physique. Orpheus, the spontaneous,

beats through the dinosaur theme park. Don’t care, I only lie about what I believe is right, clinging to both

like lying without a theory of purpose or the gift of agency to promote my case, so masking my vanity becomes the challenge

I forget what you sound like

as fizzy, hideous notes soak into the beach that hangs around for the escape clause (always the last place you look!)

Outside the Landscape

The evaluations are in.

The landscape is smoking hot. The mood passes from desolating satire to marsh-puissance returning as the meadow variety of nibbling torque. Justice, liberty and rule of law (liberty with caution) ...

For team members, justice is made to look calculated. It’s easier to have a set of consonants in your throat than to work through hundreds of clay-toned physiques that rule with no sound.

By caution as usual we mean caution to the core.

The political surface is blood sport, fun and games, what some call discourse to action. Caution preserves the constructs protecting access to the core. The equation can be reduced to politicians = mascots.

There’s a low threshold for unlimited space and transfers.

It’s better when I wake up I’ve landed.

Volumes in the sun sound great. I started at the top, the left knee was just there, then a few rain forest elements incised to form solid bands connected to now or a minute from now. Also, it’s easy, suddenly, to have fitter children to soften the grid. We can see up through the valley. The police are going wild in the next lane, so I was arrested asking myself, how can I sleep better and not get caught.

Taking chances put us in this lissome interpretive state (illicit birth). Function varies widely. The Governor’s lilac becomes zest. I usually fall asleep before the plane takes off.

That was at the start. I know that.

After aging it’s fodder beets, as miniscule and exciting as a freshly poured sidewalk.

In design every utterance is for sale. I’m delighted in my forties and fifties, and after, I’m intensely relaxed, everything exposed like muggy air filled with puzzling results you can pin on like tendrils.

To qualify what happens to the climate and delay what it’s about you need smarts, exemplary filtering and interpenetration among the important guys running this. Or just one guy.

I’m reading Jean Cocteau again, watching Butterfield 8. Richard Howard translates Cocteau, Unknown and betrayed, that is a poet’s fate, the and italicized. There’s another slant to male deadpan, social conditioning in both its range of agency and its lexical tactics. The partisan schema could be subsumed by take-downs, targets stuffed with inflammables, straw men (text), clustered pellets (biodata), etc., whose immolation compels male gut pleasure. The instant take-out. You can’t have deadpan without it.

Climate is a tacit partner with space. Weather is done. Look in the mirror. White on the map of el Norte is ashing snow, augmented by prophecy’s radiation. The seasons are morally exigent, shivering in a synthetic silk-festooned service center (formerly a weigh station), not coming back any time soon. It’s new weather either side of a sit-around for embers that make fresh tracks learning to combine. So there’s one more weather slot to restage. Also there’s a sweep of heavy and inked lads. They look seriously under-schooled, still, you would like to think one is innocuous. Dumb and innocent, the future! There’s a tattoo for that pulpiness, sure. Promote your event.

Scars are luxury goods. But none of this mattered at the time.

It was his hair.

Modesty is unimpressive. So forms of address change the ideology.

In this construct I’m a physicist painting junk and emptiness. Painting double quotes. I’m a neo-accepter of things, making and being particles of objective misnomers. Eating and breathing them, too, as the Tide-clean rhetoric of space/time burgeons in vibrating blobs and officially sanctioned conjecture. Ergo rising, the evolution of disquiet is cutthroat, a huge family of affixes and addictions to risk.

This knowledge effect brings on cloud equivalents that prosper on a narrow isthmus, watching the seasons float in willpower. I never understood insinuation. I never misunderstood it, either, a civilized divide. You can go right in. They have an open table.

There Is No Personality

Going back, favoring the objective,
sun up, Fra Angelico,

boy-girl, you’re a mess.
I’m going to grab you.

Shall I mark you as another ambition
in the incident layers

of highly varied chroma
guessing the wrong concision or hue

handed through fog sorting the dots’
congeries of texture?

I turned and asked again.
(It felt unwise.)

It is what it isn’t.

Poem for Matvei Yankelevich
was written on an early computer,
he thought it's written on the first computer
even before the
word computer or word processor was adopted for
that which Matvei was writing on to respond
to the poem,

which was not actually a poem but
a thought experiment that took place
first in the mind of its writer,
slapping Helen over the internet
that hasn’t been thought of much less
invented yet.

The computer without a name (so far)
the one that may be the first or for
sure a prototype
metallic patchwork soldered
with tubes and distinguished by
a green glow above in its porthole,
not a porthole actually but there was
no easy word to come up with for
screen back in the day,

still the computer was up
and running like men on deck or a fox force
and the process figures it out,
tries many ways of using the alphabet
rather than numbers to fill the porthole
with letters and many idea plants.

Last Saturday at the Boston Poetry Marathon I spoke briefly about three poets with local roots, Billy Barnum, the late Donald Quatrale, and Rene Ricard. I called all three Boston Flashes: agitated, pleasurable, radiant fairies, “distinguishable by having no dominance over poetics except a poetics en passant...distracted. Here but not here. Flashes.” Etc.

I’ll write a little bit about Quatrale and Barnum later, while I start here where my talk finished, Rene Ricard. Since my interest with Ricard was to read four poems from Rene Ricard 1979-1980 (DIA, 1979), my intro remarks are minimal.

Rene Ricard is too famous to catalog. (Not really. There’s just no time to contextualize his big biodata.) From Acushnet, MA Ricard came to Boston as a teenager and fell in with John Wieners, then moved to New York. The self-inflicted sobriquet “a living legend” is deserved, rising and falling, an optimum star in Andy Warhol’s Kitchen and Chelsea Girls, Artforum critic and New York Times op-ed essayist, East Side artist, New York poet. But he came back to Boston often to spend time with Wieners, and it was Wieners who showed Ricard when to write about love. (As aftermath.)

I read four poems: “HEY LOUIE WHERE YOU BEEN?” “‘I’m Going Now, Okay?’” “A Boy and His Dog,” and an untitled piece that starts with the word “Love:” in the left margin and continues as indented free verse:

I did the homework but flunked
the exam.       The light lays on the bed.
I lay on the bed.       I get under the covers.
Light lays on the blanket.       I get
no sleep. Light lays heavily on me.
Things are not always deeply felt.
Meanings bubble up before
sleep and, fairy gifts, vanish at the
grasp, like finding money in the
street in a dream or being re-
united in a dream and
seeing you was like finding
money in the street.       Then seeing you
again like fairy gifts that vanish
at the grasp.       Five o’clock in the morning.
The street.       The luncheonette.
Now I stay away from the bad
neighborhoods where I lived.
The bad blocks of the heart.
Things are no longer deeply felt
as I ascend the grand staircase
of indifference.       Discarded party favors
lay on the floor below.
They were my feelings.
I have a headache.
All these feelings like the remains
of an orgy in the morning light
cigarettes in half-empty glasses
The afternoon.       The light.
The bed. The tearing away.       The heart.
The leg falls asleep and goes numb.

Clad to the hilt in gray-to-black cashmere, we aren’t discussing our real business at table. Taciturnity in such morbid surroundings is statutory. “Mm,” the dolt says. He was staring at my clogs, wondering how much they cost.

Let’s rewrite “Biotherm.”

In this chapter I fear the sarcasm.
Sex is a sardonic comfort with a sober edge. My Bologna,
you’re leaking a take-off economy against your highlighted blush.

Smoke circles your face. Homonyms assimilate.
Admit it, you miss smoking. You miss Joe Camel.
He imagines you wearing undergarments in his reflection.

You miss the first drag. The smoke takes you in its stride.
Your eyes inside are all red. Bologna.
I’ve just noticed you haven’t said anything.

Man, she is weird.
So I urge the tobacco board (I’m bad at focusing)...
...so much crap in my head, your under-the-tongue spray

Can never bite. Except at night. There are newer urgencies
when management would feel desperate
so exposed it’d feign ignorance, aimlessly...

Then struck the lightning rod emits a light and after that a chemical substance that recuses itself for a second and returns as cognitive coloration that’s small matter.

An ephemeral sign of intention or “gesture,” like the hushed, hard-edged dolt in mysticism, can only resemble or be in the manner of -esque, Stevensesque, hardly ever belong to, be part of Stevensian.

We had stumbled upon a larger issue. “Think about it,” I’m laughing again. “Some of those dolts were hot.” I learned enough to give you capsule updates. And there was something else: I wanted to share Biotherm with you.

For exploring hooks stick to the sentence.

Taking out the trash is understood as extra
sensory anger, sometimes a polite form of the hole-
in-the-universe, with a beaker installed & promising

Storyline prototypes, battle scars, vanity, thrills, fish, sky
dogs, paint, & intercourse in conditions that surround our desire
to adapt a range of compliments for insurgents to bind heartache.

Staring in the mirror, that’s how to hang names that don’t balance until you think away the best part:

Time’s up. I have to guide this crone back to her tapestry, a big girl with a visual cortex attending what’s neat in the future, and she finds me attractive! I don’t know when I slept, referring to that earlier point she and I worked out together. There were dimensions an hour ago enabling two events in a plot we’re party to. Tenebrae, we said. Let’s return to these olfactory sketches, in which the cosmos is unexplained, parts one and two. Incandescent, then, our ardor comes back to choke the first hook, a rocket sidelined by a braided chord worn as a necklace, a burning space distinguished by the interval contained.

Software permeates our touch. Always has.

Where should I hurt?
Show me a locket grant once.

Once and be done. A few more

fix the climate fast with lots of glass and a shining brand
like my nickel-coated marionette whose defiance is offensive.

But you feel tall and

inflatable as you cascade into a blank, mechanistic corp.

Heavenly and new in our touching and holding the moment, surrounding it with illusions of taking off in a whisper, quiet and respectful in the nick of it.

Everyday nudity that earned us surface tension has balls that just turn. And that's how we fasten the starry messenger to move around objects. It’s always a swing reunion in the ritual state of expanses-in-time where there’s a whole new side to nuts and bolts, narrow and hollow in the center, along with a vacuum and wheels. 100% our touch.

I’ve got a memory of memories in the bedroom where we sleep all night with eyes open and keep a couple diaries chastened by our agenda in a stoned vein.

I don’t like Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Hustling all the time is awesome! And also timeless like burning in hell, too big to fail. (But this is July. So we remember slush.)

I can’t live without taking charge light years from now.

I got a yoga fungus. It’s progressive and it shows nicely round your wrist — let me guess. Not so fast, I woof you. What’s progress? Your name weeks after.

What about Lars?

We didn't kill him.

                                  — The Thing (2011)

Inside it’s gray. Divided & confused, I signed
up for a remodel of love. The pills are there,
there’s a container for every passion on loud
so the ambient workspace can hear it,
feel it in stages striking overnight.

We need smarter drywall too, to excite
ferns and moss growing other side, every-
thing about the yield blowing in its whereabouts
news of perpetual unitary joy...

The one for you, today’s furniture w/ firepower
to prelude our ideals, descending in scale
ounce by carbon resin ounce, a take-off
in force that puts us residents out of bounds. It’s
back to work then. Show’s over. You go ahead.

A poem is a picture. I'm holding a Shrek glass of water as the arfs define bird properties, degraded after sunset, shaken to a grin brink like oops.

A picture like hydrangea in labor (staging nightmares) — in labor we chose our parents; this is a tenet of Hindu verse.

It’s with a picture I hold you for conniving to carpet silence.

In this picture I’m emotionally shot with depth as a thespian-rapper rounding off contrasting demands of flimsy seriality and sequence, conquering death with abundance.

I'm a day late. In choosing what rubs me wrong or why I don’t want to be seen with you or apologize for an ode, can I eat something?

I repeat.

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!

Thanks for the memories.

You ruined my life.

                                  — She's the One

I met her on a ferris wheel. (Most peacekeepers are female-shaped.)

In the beginning I was angry purchasing my first balance-ledger. But I learned my lesson.

Once there was vitality in diffusion and a crutch like levitation. Levitation got modulated. Modulated is like drummers and saxophonists who are women 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 they were doing before the lesson took hold.

Sexual scaffolding hovers in the interim, instantly recognized as identity. Identity and hardened m.o.’s then evaporated. We invented them from silences, lies and a feral sense of feeling cornered in a soulless piano practice session. Enough of these, and men as well as women are resigned and re-acclimated to generations of processed shock of the simple — the safe-zone simple, where infectious pop is authenticated, highlighting some weak spots.

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

That would be the solid thunk in no progress.

The film in which we’re about to echo is crowded without words.

The machine I never saw before flunked me —

A glimmer of prolific aroma.

Calm down. There’s a piece of karate with top notes to erase. There’s something else fantastic, piquant, active against the grain. Your touch reaches a point at which time management is unleashed.

But I’m just commenting.

I drive a Steinbeck but long for a Camus. Look me in the eye. Diagramming conditions of spatial jitters and others’ sentences, you’re anonymous either way.

So lets bring things together, kilt wearer.

There’s a big, strange pulling apart shmooshing the semiotics of escape.

We’re going around in “concepts” that save face.

How can it be effortless if I tell you what I’m doing?

So I’m in debt. It’s everyone’s creepy fault.

Clouds're in slacks by the appliance (touching both 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 our 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.

North American Taoism is a quad divided.
We never come across it.

Yet a parabola intersects its pedigree that was.
Gestures are precise. Bright eyes,

sparkling motions. Climbing down the outside
there’s a new quad mainstream-underground

— we — some of us — avoid it. It’s hardly objective,
but a big tantric realignment is authentic now,

the hyper-rufflers juxtaposed by the advanced milieu.
So let’s start with the rectangular coordinates,

understand pleasures the eyes, neck and chest.
There. Got it.

You may have noticed I write to your head,

Flash my badge. Home is test patterns,
7 rooms (usually) with clay-toned physiques
fighting the relative fight for sheer falsetto

— everybody under anesthetics, lunar waxing
credited to a whipsaw. A foot of sleet
from the window, the surf comes to mind in
reverse as if it were one long eyebrow, roughened

Like your wingspan & oh, wait we did this already.

I’m on the side of fuzzy & discontinuous oooomphs
nibbling torque adjusting zest into gonzo —
I’m spry on my motives

Holding out to you
my coat with the fired bullet in it, effluvia.

Conditions look gray — wanting you (I do),
not out of calculation, & how far & vast connivance
liberates us to oppose the other ingredients.

Or plans change. Pandering to guess, we might
replace active similes & what’s in a line or two,
set off controls to lose my footing (clop directional
blips) on the oily tarp, perplexed, taking it outside
a Rubik of profane, denatured octagonal gloom.

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

The pond plays Schubert like a bouclé, searing,
puffy, relaxed, succinct. Hold my earrings.

I’m drunk on history, empathy, bounce. I’m sick of nice things. Now it’s daybreak —

For my doctoral research I followed joy, the top two percent of delusion that swell and swell. I also prefer free, motorized speech that’s dissipated but purring put aside.

Government is not that difficult. I’m reviewing the lab egg whites in their spare, bubbly zeal to outpace the apparatus (not properly issued to commentary), a colorful PROCESS shot. Bliss was the verb. Scary Movie was a date flick. A private-public bond like Klee and Ibsen wearing bluetooth up to their shoulders, smiling but neither laugh.

“My regrets.” Switching phones, I look up to the crazy guys waiting to take me to the parturifacient facility.

There were other, subtler indications you just wanted to cry, and it's not such a bad smell, it’s just sad with 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 it barely pertains, and why should I? What I have in mind is low on your list, even lower than that, it’s off the list. So 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. That’s what poetry does. I cherish your placing a tag on mine, yet I have said nothing, foundering and tongue-tied, handing our fortune over to that first letter of the alphabet where you lived. You want back in, me too. It’s my off-centeredness alone that excuses maintaining a safe distance. I'll let you go then. I was hoping you would rhyme over me.

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

The back office is its eyesore, assembly required. It
makes itself think...lets itself think... (It’s a coin flip.)

All personnel, yes, everyone has to be shifted or fired
yet we come to work anyway due to the flywheel effect
that turns colloquy over to science and greed.

My views are compatible with yours, that’s the idea, only
I’m leisure-loving. It’s that easy so I’m leaving you
a saddle in your extrication from hallucinatory delirium

tho you’re still at the front, vulnerable in all good faith
that ushers in anti-radiance and the prototypes that mess
up the visual cortex with paste-ins and luxury goods.

I’m not anxious unlike its first aircraft that drift in there.
How did they hang through the duration (how is the easy-
hard part) multiplying in dark, making more inventory?

The back office is its eyesore, assembly required. It
makes itself think...lets itself think... (It’s a coin flip.)

First I wore quadratic status in my smasher
area, spoke Marxian argot, fighting amid effluvia

yet morphine-ghosted, Starsky’s tongue in my ear
& all the bobwhites in the Appalachia hush... off

we whiz to getaways & then — second — noise
of collared, greening hospitality where Hellenic

banter might calm the tax credit havoc.

                                                       Third, I’m
worshiping on a magnum while service precincts

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

pouring kerosene to kindle tomography, the bliss of
ex-ambience for having brooked the Toscanini kind.

Everything belongs. The rest is stress related.

Her eyeballs are all they need, not what they are. It’s a classic knife-in-the-back suicide.

Part of the world faces the street to whoosh by... looking outside and still walking through it adhering neatly to nothing, a science-fiction flushed hollow just passing, but also taking root, ornamenting impurities of state.

The carport is perched high above subatomic beings. We use photographs for subject matter, like this of a garland arched over people who are sweating their existence.

I polish the text and hand it in.

Conceptual strategies are at the top of the poetry game. There you go again. Tax and spend. Death panels. Toxic algorithms infuse ideology and organize perception. Political samples predict behavior.

Play along or sue.
You guys go ahead.

I’m going to take my inside voice and ...and turn around and walk away.

Outdoors I pledge you a wholly hidden idiom of renderings, highlighting themes out-of-focus, left to twist in the hot leafy acreage.

Pears and Fuji oak, null passages in fog. (The cracks should be bridged with glass fiber.)

Like conceptualisms and other forms of mild poetry, poll-taking is largely implemented rhetorical solutions.

I’m always wrong
to prolong my appeal.

So a redraft: Bafflement is tentative, one mountain clinic after all of the above. Herding cocktails, we sleep with a relationship. Rough seas but you’ve been in the field long enough, you know how we leverage the social graph to miss you. How long have you planted thoughts without a gender balance?

See this pigeon? He’s a true antihero. Incandescent.
And it’s hard to get foreign sports equipment
or the meaning of structure, a table for the couturiers,
along with the varmints in the shortness of thought
indexing suspicion and objurgating.

There’s efficacy in speaking clearly, gesturing, knitting your own brow.
I’m happiest procrastinating. When stairwells mesh to go nowhere,
           tiny, hidden wriggling strings
between you and expulsion, the hole is closed. Turn here.

Like all of the above and the rubber suits going in and out of buildings, climbing stairs, you’re one hundred percent normal running up debt to keep devotees heartbroken.

Music up.

I promised you a ham for painting bombast.

There’s transactional friendship, and it’s a job (like sloganeering) and, more elevated, craft (making a sign for consciousness to observe). To illustrate, job is to craft as sport is to theoretically or astronomically kicking a sign. Don’t get me wrong, unattempted sound is cool and we’re for it and against any impingement unless it hurts the transaction. What’s it? There’s no work-around to the observer influencing the observed except later, much later.

Let’s conquer death with abundance.

Evasion foregrounds style and motives.

Prerejection rhymes with the future, which is inside earnest emotion.

Reading Delmore Schwartz repeatedly gives me head.

We or most of us have a destiny, after all. But it’s after-hours.

To vocalize what’s sunk in, I don’t worry or pierce my ears further. My job is moving the mouse.

There’s a term in physics and biology for attrition of affects, eyesore.

And there’s a struggle to housesit too much information. Human body fat is worth $60,000 a gallon.

This is the good gold.

A life is charged for care. Roadkill is on the menu.

Now my head is cleared. (Have to go.)

I’m a coffee head, hustling all the time, awesome! But let’s pare it down.

Have we ever done anything but tamper with the weather? Oh, who knows? Oh, Ladytron. You seem so fake-excited in the sprayed periphery, staying in balance inside a soft radical vapor of anathemic bigness, loosely demolished.

It’s time to talk Ladytron, which is a tragedy.

Ladytron is carrying my notes to bounce back to her pals. Come here, Lady, tha s !

I can’t make her work.

Something’s missing. Cabs are scarce at this hour I guess.

I’m in no hurry.

There are three pleasure substitutes. Here’s one, an itch to borrow sentences to raise one’s consciousness. Another is filaments like The tide itemizes all bets.

The frayed honeymoon is third and last, and it’s normative, blushing with its lil song of guts and neurons dead in the bottle. (Drive safely.)

After a honeymoon deflections accrue. There’s the animal that needs you.

Right about here we want some clarity about motives and chance shadows spidered to the satellite reception. (I fucked up our settings.)

I’m craving the show that must go on.

I’m expecting something.

I’m Aldo.

No, you are.

We’re a special team. We’re circumspect and we leave the reno there, the construction seems depressed, pinched, slightly, giving voice to raindrops in long silence we back out of.

What about cleverness and famine?

High table was kind to you while you take loggerheads. What do you say go? You pass over weak words, smack two reasons to try, the new — soon after it’s chèvre oxide with the grit of understatement.

The shower we move.

The faster you die.

Who is climbing this steaming, herded frontier?

You start along those lines dreaming in a wandered-in complex. You’ve been warned to stay inside.

You dream while awake and think it through for the audience that follows you into little squares of hypnotic drumming. In one direction the focus is lost. You grow accustomed, so to speak. Hey hey my my. You look around then you’re there and not there, of course, but you bring in a harmless grass snake to crawl up the exposed back of a dead friend you’re thinking about. There’s someone else moving forward along the shore’s torn distance in midges, vellums, tiny Gillette letters and smaller decimals. The sun is shining, nipping, filing matter, spinning, capturing the dress casual of your meaning it but not being tempted. You can exit the dream at any point or add features in a non-European language the second person, the “someone else,” understands. Or you can stay on and have the dream appear in English as an entire practice, one obsessive habit flattened into sponge-festering symmetry. Chills emerge when a third person, a total stranger, raises his corona showing up empty handed, invisible in the wind. You’re giving him head citations. And then you thought, that’s what’s wrong.

Inundated with liberty from the camphor, perusing low interest loans. I talk thus in a low register. To effect a communion my face sports two layers of sleep relief. Shady aftermath interscope.

Thus the world carries on in a Buddhist prison theater filled with dogs and consequences mirroring exponentially our wildest ambitions to blur what’s real and yield authority. And to think a way out I guess I know our ability to influence conversation is remarkable. And many pass admirably, throwing stones.

A voice with a message sounds handsome, calm, also nervous. In the same call he reverses his prerogatives, that is, the voice does. I’ll table the difference.

The message is mixed but our swift powers have never been better aligned.

Together across the call center that serves as a hideout, learning the ropes, scraps and parts of rope.

I know this sounds lame — you and I annulled our thingness with a few hand-waves and felt pretty rapt, the way we inspire open, emotional austerity, rubbing eye cream in under our eyes, admiring buzzwords but no ideas.

No fins of infinity. Nope.

Pigeons pattern heaven where detachment is trimmed.

We have no major issues. I’m the one who hoards history, buying and piling stuff out in the garage, keeping nanowires and foreign minerals wound like elastics.

We can pick each other up like a bowl that’s really a vase. Let’s sit then let the sunset pitch its foam. Smoky dogs can turn brown tracking vans in drizzle, tarnished from sight, playing against a stack of storm windows, with a composure for light a translator can’t reach.

This is for you now.

Twenty-three hours ago the idea of writing took time. Dozens of spices. A mind occupied, just so.

I wasn’t orphaned, I decided to pursue other interests.

It’s another day I do not hope. Almost the same as hopeless, jokes turn into dreams. It’s dreams that forgive us for everything or almost everything except paranoia’s belated redemption. That’s because ideas, when they’re ‘awake,’ get downgraded to an icy mindset, trapping you and me inside a force field owing to our expertise.

So there’s no dead end.

Everything is definitely going on. The body is loaded with symbolism for all seasons. Your name comes up on my snaggletooth, aching in baby blue blather, calmly accruing intimacy to belie despair over entropy, a quiet start, zero gravity.

Am I in some experimental state of forgery? No, I live in a red state. And how do I maintain the balance sheets and my resolute informality? I keep my reckoning far away for most of my youth.

Stay with me.

We grabbed the narrator; we couldn’t rule him out, staying blithe in the win column, an aluminum, tenebrae-filled kind of guy draped in potatoland dirt color, echoes of prosthetic fantasy, perhaps, yet eco-conscious and looking cool responding to our frantic calls.

All experience is correct.

But what is identity?

Preaching to tenors, he loves what we do together to let off steam. He’s a fop.

The fop is a French invention, an essentialist’s incarnation. It’s now an English thing, Le Smoking for surfing, dressing on the left.

Beach safety — wow, everything has that just-did-it-for-creation smell. The Buddha Machine is on low, marking Tramp Lapping My Skull. Pointless stupid madness. The double v above his eyes means very-very dunkel. (I’m not.)

So this lack of media polish is transparent as ranch dressing refabricked in aromas of polycarbonate. Like a surfboard.

And gang murders are cut in half. (I’m not going out in that.)

And the guy interested in robots, the narrator, urinates, grabbing my shoulder. Rusts all over himself.

Failure is ironic.

Some opt for poetry, rattled by Vogue: “Cloven, we are incorporate...”

(Very good, Geoff...)

As noted in the last century, there’s rustic prep for a painter style and muddled cool. We come from someone, calmed by his fear we were of a kind he was to others. But I’m backing away from Hill’s patrimony, his sounding-it-out tools.

Did he check the oil?

Very good. Very goo.
I mean actually knocking the chanters
off, throwing knives, wrecking them
from the inside, slicing things up!

Geoff, you gave me hiccups back when. Now my senses are restored. The unoccupied mind is long overdue.

And I’m back in my vertigo seat, now, reading and writing my disciplined boilerplate, my marble thought structure swarming with pleasant memories. That’s how the paints sail.

The hot ones get fat. There’s too much junk in triangles. (The conductor knows everything.)

That’s how I got to live alone anticipating mind control as disingenuous. As my own job creator I got a full canoe of alter-ego, asides, and decorative indeterminacy.

Love memorials are cool underground or from out of town.

Trade bow rotten, soon I am old self miss relation.

The smitten dissipate. I’m a fan but not a friend.

Becoming free it’s too late to beg. I reference the primary season. In the battle between the sexes? The rich won.

~~

I used to have a powder dependency. I think it’s just polite to say ‘powder’ instead of ‘poo.’

~~

Once there was a mantra logjam I was of two minds grounded in a common cold. Or one who remained outside the big tent, a globalized illegible. (All discourse is indirect.) Yet I’m germ-spurned, something I said about you, Mr. Kerchoo.

(The big tent is a jerk off. Concentricities and touchstones are a powder trap. They navigate within a self-contained, almost ostentatious pensiveness.)

As one voter you fail to mushroom. But I’m hellbent in two, discovering ignored wisdom on human terms. So I need oversight.

There’s a glow in my argumentation, like an avalanche. Or, in other words, I’m wintry but fun and explosive. Like a vending machine.

I’m also a leftist deep in my head. I see consensus as influenza.

Davey Jones, R.I.P.

Larry Kearney rhymes all with skull, internally. P Inman’s

Echelon hairnet shifts mighty putty, thumb-nailed into

An agreement to let us in, beset by red-tide warnings

Hot, dizzy, it all comes down on earth, thirsting for blood

Incapacitating split beach personalities

Calibrated most by the ruckus-like paeans to sew

Azaleas to male-pattern seduction technology / outreach

Where all the jazz wears off. (They’re both good.)

Squeals and sequels. We came with what we saw, and we sank together like paste rubies and artificial pearls — deliberately mismatched. Highways empty. Logic hardly in motion. Scenery written for the biggest down to the smallest, abstracted birches as a trick of flight, a specialty. And there’s a ring around the tips ignited by deep compatibility.

When we rehearsed it made no difference what we believe. The soul is a hypothesis to mottle or engage the hierarchal breath, but this is not what sort of emerged where we were thrown off by the scent.

None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair. And vibrating skins, battery powered.

Lithe sea air migrated a few more feet as a reminder, a gift. It’s OK and fresh when it comes to some pebbles of light, the open future idling to cut up the outside, drive it back to a crawl and meaning that travels.

Every year I pull out a valentine. This could be the flash.

Yet eclecticism is too aloof, too torpid an entity to fill the distance between rarity and parental control.

Avant forces surround us like those evidence-based rivalries draining the chill from the banquet.

An individual is simply outwitted by hegemonic tidal waves that value performance before competence.

Like you, I am spoken (rather than speak) in a large-scale dialectic between the collective and their parodic chat.

Not sure where I ‘stand’ vis a vis avantism, cultural hegemony, the eclectic, and the like. Having at such big, elusive ideas comes over as a self-as-whipping-post tactic that invites ridicule and instant downgrade as a serious analyst. So that’s cool. Especially if you see yourself as some Figure of Marat — you who do it and are done in by it. On my scale of the espirit to avantism, craft subordinates the topical regard for political categories or any other geo-social units of analysis. Not that that kind of units or categories cannot be applied to avant production, but the application is often prosaic and tertiary. And, again, without reference to specific production or even to argumentative or theoretical points, avant political discussions can feel like imitative prequels, dramaturgical sketches toward better thinking, sooner or later or, often, richer ideas retrieved from earlier positions (dramas) that flow forward to and from today in February.

Comfort is business in Motel Six. I find much that is interesting about unzipping wet opium, in a series of slippery disputes with ill-defined noise.

Handwriting my text, the first point is to describe laughing it off, replacing today / tomorrow with glass and silence, a kind of stripping down to the ashen stem cell of relatively unspeaking.

Altho intuition and initiative are abstracts, I connect on a deeper level with charity, a nonprofit.

Cool favors percolate but I’ll also swerve in on you. You are not so remote so I rate you very favorably 10, no, really; off the scale, 10 or more.

Mixed up like utter gloss, our release from goals is a miracle, duly noted. Dully put. To stay awesome, pointless attitudes are buried below the gestalt-like air we dissipate.

Body-snatching in other words, the second point is we have to join something, our lives are directionless.

We talk about what they say in the commercials.

And [...there is no outside [...] only what’s already here [what I breathe] inside, which is perpetually immature, disgusting, repulsive...] [and]

I see the wind smudging the porch.

Allow me, will you? Allow me my battlefront with you to show an accidental tactic or two that don’t matter, made iconic as we circumvent exchange elements, retaking spatial morality for irreversible transport, arms folded, chewing gum, flying thru a full equinox, giving chance agency position for change.

How about cheesy time lapses? That’s another point I'm totally cool with.

And I like the color green very much. Especially its movement within trapezoids and photons...

bX-pumzzs ... incantations for seething in keen fidelity, a gazing furl trying to sparkle together, no vision, no dash, no longer having to know.

Cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood breast cancer screening, the Susan G. Komen Foundation reverses the presumption of innocence. One congressman has initiated an investigation of Planned Parenthood, and that triggers a new grants-making policy by Komen to deny Planned Parenthood financial support because it is now under scrutiny. The new policy is a pretext, one Komen board member claims, to allow it to drop Planned Parenthood.

Up to now, women’s cancer screening has been free of police-state ideology. One influential voice, in this case the voice of one congressman-attack-dog on the hunt, justifies an apolitical nonprofit to switch sides, finding Planned Parenthood guilty until proven otherwise. Fair-minded advocates for breast cancer screening should rebuke Komen’s decision and the politics it belies.

The trees are full of policemen — Filip Marinovich

Surely I have ideals and uncoded momentum, boa intact.

Rain twisting, “tensile lines.” So I wave back, s’up? We’re at the prelims of collapse, I suppose.

But am on the outs with grief and the innards of English. I’m breathing without commodity or form, structurally overboard; I i.d. with your facts; you’re in my fellow league, my bravado, and I can’t go on without a pizza dough-boy amble, a fountain of us-ness — a movie (duh) from the ground up ramped by a theory of growth in heliportation.

The stars’ Aida is accreting.

Mike Kelley, R.I.P.

Don Cornelius, R.I.P.

Variations cost a lot in Marxist base alignments and bike gear.

Variation or vacation. Tone deaf or dead.

I can’t tell anyone except you I’ve misplaced my stencil and my Prince Phillip paintbrush & palette.

The ballast is in season. My peers make movies and fast food.

So there’s no poetry but in California. That’s since the love dataset appreciates and values only the blessed as the parcels it celebrates in distortions of consciousness, in every word, and all syllables performing as in one spin of the ‘compass’ between you and the others trained in your language.

That reminds me this is a new piece from the workshop. It just keeps getting bigger. A simple turn of the ignition, what's the big deal? A journey within the 5th element, a pathless scrubland back in the bend in time when you’re reading the data in an identical manner & you derive the same message (sorry, there’s another gap) as sugar consumption skyrockets, looking for something to do with a degree in hypostatization.

Nearly hurling was an adventure. That’s when Larry Cucumber met his match in the perseverance maze. Patti was trying to spook him with big hanging wolf eyes. It’s affordable theater. Her shirt was on inside out, on the tugboat to the Keys.

Hand-me-downs are not deconstruction.

So this is an edit. Rent v. purchase. Own v. release.

Color had risen to his cheeks. “I want us to be in charge.”

For a moment I stared at the door. Seconds later I was reconnected.

Would you like to ask questions or can I diagram the problem?

I came here dying for sublime play like the first time, and it’s entirely because it's unexpected he had his languid hands up in the air, made eyeglasses with his fingers, meaning he was ready.

Free days are an ellipsis, what goes around comes gasping, the more irregular the breathing — looks like he’s breathing! A spoon worm lives inside the womb, a male redback dies inside the reproductive tract! somersaulting into his mates' fangs just to get eaten while copulating!

D is still a little wiped. So is D-2. D-3 is frowning, ready to be seen. D-2 is blabbing. D is a little fucked up too. “Just starting one.” “Cool.” The thing now is not to get fucked up too often.

It's what she said.

The traitor’s bags are packed.

Mustache color or toxic gloom?

Architecturally, you’re my business.

Talent and beauty come to power in their own right, but it's difficult to conceive of them taking anything like their ‘full effect’ without an attachment to addictive capital.

It’s important to remember Lacan was reading Lacan in the first grade.

An unnamed aroma, an olive swelter to feel the tap from mañana, the idea of sex is to shoot your own apples — that’s as close as you have to lush, too-ennobling pulse.

And it’s brave to think about high art favorably, even tho it bothers some to think that anything high can be programmed. Some have a fiercely vandal-like impression of reality. One large egg yolk, 1/2 cup sugar, 3/4 cup Marsala. A solitary genius.

What kind of man lives off oil from the ground?

How was it to record the soundtrack for a sequel that still hasn’t been made? You and the other investors might get offended.

You want an open marriage.

I am thrown into an absolute — take a wild guess. Piles of cash stuffed inside holes carved out of the Earth, stacking up against one another with such speed they reflect the world as it is, advancing toward convenience stops and arbitrary stretches I don’t care about.

Oh my god — I just remembered I can fly.

Well, most of the “songs” are literal, based on trying to sit down and go [starting to sing] “Baby, you’re still wearing your headset.”

Such Gothic dislocations are unexpected at the gym site. Is it documentary or fiction?

The air of inevitability around the code of which you speak has been shattered. It’s inauthentic in the first mustache sense.

I kiss the air. This.

And it’s not clear you and I want to answer any more questions that require specific, distinctive thought like that I think of a welding head, until my spinal column heats up, thinking of you.

Dennis Cooper reads from The Marbled Swarm in an interview with Michael Silverblatt for NPR’s Bookworm. Silverblatt reveres Cooper’s newest narrator as a ‘gourmet cannibal’ whose affect / effect is to use language to hide objects, a use that operates as ‘a sleeve or a condom you put over language so you are protected from what’s being said.’ The title The Marbled Swarm in one sense refers to a family’s complex idiolect “spoken at a taxing pace” and in another it underpins a fundamental substitution for an indefinable reality, through which “...one’s speech becomes an entity...” (Additional Bookworm interviews with Peter Gizzi, W.S. Merwin, Ann Beattie, and others onsite in the sidebar.)

Sex is immediate, overwhelming, terse and decisive. A thousand and one nights. Little river hotglass. The poke boats. George Balanchine.

Bellwethers and fey bloodhounds are the sub-jazz. Suicide in the instant is a big wheel.

Barter is potential order in another wedding gown. Then this is now. A domain for reptiles and their suppliers. Fat lips, usually wet. Brainy ellipsis to a turn.

It was becoming day for the night. (Couples are not the perk here.) Calvin, Stephen, John. We did one thing in complete metonymy. Everything bristled.

At times coming to tatters the town is crawling with pet shops that are erotic and circumspect. (I’m just beginning to explore them.) Their symbolism weighs in as a shortcut: The future of the past is directional.

I need me. It’s a lovely trade.

This is my deciding moment. As a consequence doors open, and I’m auto-electrocuted.

And that’s good, because I sneaked rather than snuck across the catalysts. (It’s what I’m good at while I’m wearing hand-shadow pajamas.)

All thus was in the meantime. So you detect I’m pretending to be an asshole, at your behest, intimidating death.

This is one moment with one momentum to change any episode into dissipation until every exchange comes down to a piece of work and only a style prevails. The resolve to go from there is that all our jobs be weaponized.

When I read you I thought something is pouring out like disco supplementation. Sun passeth zenith. Your house is close plywood boards in Creeps Meadow.

The journey home feels made up so I can live by myself without being alone. Like that trip to Vegas.

Re-reading you I sense loose projectiles “got thrown” into doo (implicative space). And then the microwaving began, humorless and crazily unironic.

I read you and people moved away, making it vacant.

Once again it’s that time of the month to explain the cosmos, parts one and two. On top of that there are dimensions then enabling infinite events in a plot we’re party to, multiple choice.

First question of the year, true or false. Is it its gaze or its maleness?

The more you put your finger on it it’s a retrospective that you and I may now never attain.

So you never know there’s an animal that needs you.

And I should know.

Someday the male coloration returns as a she-container with tinctures or inaudible signs from a long history of decision making, preparing us for more adhesive behavior, more speech and extra sensory anger.

Yes. It’s a speaking animal that needs you, remember — and

Time’s up.

I have to guide this crone back to reality, a big girl with a visual cortex attending what’s neat in the future, and she finds me attractive! I don’t know when I slept (I’m referring to that earlier point she and I worked this out together).

We won’t sideswipe any maples and pines. My role is to fill them in, lengthening their insipid menace while coddling the wetlands. I like zoning.

If I had a camera with retouch I’d subsist in our attrition to find and weed out pleasure. And if I added notes to video I’d capture the “you” and “me” of this and any unclenched feelings I have composing footage I can’t pinpoint, a shore in blues and stock blacks pitched way up with infectious provisos, integers-to-be, and no part to fix.

One should know these rules before obeying them.

In times like today the past is brought down to our senses. It adds frost to the snow.

Our objectives are to yield fast access to obscure but just-so references and make learning ongoing and theoretical. One learns grasses by heart by having frequent successful experiences.

I’m no model, I just look like one. (Helen Vendler)

As you advance, there are four photographs from which to plagiarize a response, while the materials become more complex, building on what’s been said.

Is that all you're having for dinner?

You need a clearer message. There’s no humor

in discretion. The wind in your hair makes us sick.

We provide all the hip lingo right on screen. And when you come to a three-syllable word you don’t know, you can just look down and see the one-syllable translation of it.

The flower’s name is hooded.

I’m sorry there are blunt geometric forms,

confusion of the spheres, signing in ...

but we have to trust you on this matter. One apiece.

For us, learning about how to learn is important, because it’s a skill one needs when one finally decides to step away from the ring.

A guest ambush suffuses the grasses’ curls; there’s no one now,

my bad-faith sportswriter.

Yes, fool, you sick typist-

follower glowing with lava for brains shimmering ...

hot and cool scrims of mist and water balloons floating over a swimming pool, views down hallways into stairs cut apart and fronted with music waking in hazy brightness without a clue how we got here.

I’d be lying if I said we aren’t criminals.

Space is noncommittal (not nothing)

if you don’t inhabit what you’re saying, shhhh ...

Thanks, Geof, for the first words of Xmas, entered at 2:00 AM. Santa says let him know when he’s on the ground.

                    

I believe we fall to nature so ketchuppy-and-pink that a discreet preeminence in beauty, wit and fashion is established.

I blame the mucous.

I’m flipping out, whoa. A white screen shot. Complete white-out, soft jazz, then lower right, your lips moving up and down, talking design.

Changed my mind. No one can help me to switch landmass.

To set me up is to hit the meaning of being a musician. And it’s clear whose side you’re actually on, landlord.

It’s all been a I-hate-speech act, unfolding calculus to take our little doodles and flesh them out on a frozen earring. And why not?

Well, something above and in us is part doodle and part stockade.

Whatever the ism, this is no way to bear our para-sarcasm — with sidebars. And a tulle underbelly? We’re too busy to remember how it starts — A muddled cool from so many drugs the craftmatics forget to breathe... What you said is part of it. And now my life is made slaphappy-proof to diffuse your feel me up.

Heya, this it or no?

a dream of immense sadness peers through me / as if I were an action poem that couldn’t write

Estheticism is enlarging. Diagnosis is a mystery.

This is a formlet of propositions. Like digital vinyl or handshake painting. Or prayer warriors that are relatively non-contagious.

Then I stumble over this “highbrow posturing” and “chin-stroking art crowd.” Nate Harrison chronicles how the Winstons’ original drum sequence, the Amen Break, from the 1960s has been copied over decades, sampled by 80s hip hoppers, and those samples diced and re-arranged by jungle-djs in the early 90s. By the late 90s dicing / re-arranging might be pushed to extremes, undanceable “fetishisizations” for chin-strokers — Harrison cites Squarepusher, for instance.

I wish you didn’t invite tradespeople over to the house.

Well, you know, I was a fan, for a few weeks, of Squarepusher. (Working in Japan at the time I lost chunks of my pretense-detector. You begin to lose a lot of your native cultural faculties when you live abroad, you even peel off what you thought were built-in parts of your language!) Well, well, closer still is that chin-stroking highbrow posturing. Could that be what I do now, even some of the time? The easier-than-ever synthesis of language overload, the current poetics climate I live in — if you will — does that parallel the extreme, undanceable re-appropriations of the Amen Break? If so, am I so other-directed not to know better? Can I stand up on my own? How small will I get?

Pulling the cord, a cadet steps out of his flight suit and runs bare-ass to the megaphone on the pitcher’s mound. Why, it’s a poet! Right off the guy breaks into a badly chosen sonnet and sestina. The crowd that half-fills the stadium is booing, boozy, lunging, some blowing kisses in the poet’s direction.

The narrative arc remakes itself while the bionic glove is a godsend. The half moon is proud to be garish.

The self, yourself, is fascinating, perhaps to squelch a tautology of greening photons, nominals and actionable conditions that seem certain when hidden in how far you are beaten into their projections.

Self-thief of tables and contents, school love, navy birth and feeling bad about the brief, purest gleam seethed with keen, rank fidelity, a gazing furl trying to gnarl sparkle to figure life together with no vision or dash — no longer having to know.

Your history, ok sunsets standing in the waves like swimmers in spandex smelling of pleasure. Jennifer Moxley’s “arc of grace, a mystical exit from the trap / of birth chance and bloodlines, call it talent / or perhaps obedience: mostly we are poor.”

My area is interpretive search.

You’re always not talking. I get your point (approbation without the tedium of argument).

Ready for some talent management? You’re a smart guy so act like a fan. Keep up your city theme through the wee hours, eat on a budget of $5 a day.

And this is what you can tell me later, every rock lyric has it right. Lasting obstruction is a sure bet process and process reception are not going the right way, rather the way of lovers and colleagues, or of sworn animae and a conflicted self.

Process blockage prompts me to piss and take up tactical reanalysis. (The moral arguments can get gnarly.) The vantage you enjoy leads to something or, more likely, someone opposite blocking your view, redefining a new status quo. Coin tossers regard this as perpetual, rendering fluid obstructions as conflict, which means a noun that acts like a verb, “not to love” (according to Wilhem and Baynes). But conflict is more than just evil if it sharpens ethical focus on esthetic desire, self-regard, and collegiality, as well as the potential utility of enemies.

I do my best and worst work and still get picked on — not in a great way.

How has my first book changed my life? I got stuck on yoga so I put that in. Yet how cool is it when you don’t have a plush isle or anything left to your solutions, beading, ruche, rickrack, or fringe? What if what I write can’t react or be acted on? (Monologues of burning lightning, noiseless migration, honey refusing natural flame.) Sorry, my aural pheromone is too diverse for stopping sex before I undertake image-free philanthropy.

The week will have then proceeded — I’d have to say faith-based notch by notch, snippy, half-baked. What’s relational? I stick in a little yoga. Then I run after you a complete idiot. I’ll have dropped 12 pounds and restructured the deal.

Lines from kari edwards: “...mercury poisoning / abandoned to loading docks / door prize / all well meaning / track homes.” Feel like watching the second half first.

I'm elegant and round. I can't snicker. You can, though.

I'm offline. So I turn blue when I heat up. I blast up by myself when you leave for work. And when you come home I produce a mental readout of how long it will take for you to reach for the newest temperature and humidity and so on.

I can't snicker I'm elegant and round with a mirror finish.

To recap some reading: Astronomical and infinitesimal times-spaces are compelling problems. The cool work that defines knowledge construction is to find, explain and reform problem sets. Optimism is required (a) to keep everything open for reform; (b) to understand we are beginning the work and, as a species in confronting infinity, we will always be in the beginning.

Ted Enslin, R.I.P.

My style is no style. (Louise Brooks)

I flubbed a sacrifice to appear tough. (Each moment was electrocuted with pleasure.)

My time is for my removal waffle and sproat interpretation.

Birds cover their nests, beavers their dams.

People fear us because we have a glorious set.

We sometimes need fresh lexicon in the mind-body problem, words to determine their own behavior, items like primality and cuboidal, glints of jazz that’s trending this way.

I feel a lull in motives. Interforce rondure.

I put a recalled toy in my mouth. (Eric Dolphy)

The jungle is quiet... too quiet. (Theseus)

The apocalypse ignites downtown and up, combustion and dust spores filling canyons between skyscrapers, your honor. People take shelter in a convenience store, then race down into the subway, running with the rats. Asinine language (you can’t call it dialog). Ugly apartments. Life-draining clothes. Absolute rubbish. Highly recommended.

Keep the secrets of simplicity to float free.

These are the volatility models I read on T.V., vocalism in a sense. Hidden risks shift weight resulting in an even slimmer recovery.

I can assure you it’s all in my mind as far as it goes, thin air, the hashtags, and blooodwork and all — here they go, like sunflowers trapped in movement. The biggest ones are inexistence, leftovers, the color of dreams, an addiction to too many things.

Much, many things, is a go, a game on to the world to infer everything would work out about you, about now.

We’re the only nation that flies into hurricanes. (D.A. Levy)

All or nothing, counselor.

This bears a repeat. Women around Marie Antoinette were textually modern, respectable Europeans: They dressed not merely for success, but also survival. They avoided bosses and careers that were intellectually focused. They peered back and soaked up the city.

I’m my own boss.

People believe in miracles. I have no boss. I work for myself. There are bosses out there. Still. Sure. Savages, quick, with their own designs. Yet it’s the bosses inside I turn my thoughts to, the psycho-analogs that stick to you: nonverbal monitors of sensory and motor operations standing up to see the repaired wall unit, hearing you read new, wiry copy, tasting brie, walking home in idle suspense, smelling something burning, then falling asleep. When you listen closely they’re administrating social filters meddling and nudging closer to your verbal core, editing your prose, keeping everything tidy; above that, less of an allover presence, there’s one or more crisis managers descended from a rich family of what Freudians describe as superegos mostly whizzing silently on automatic, now and then shaking a finger up in the brain and mumbling something half-received and half-worked-out for the moment — be warned — there are tribal warlords above us superegos, and their thoughts will be even more fleeting, harder to perceive, fossilized — cast down on all of us like paste rubies and artificial pearls that are deliberately mismatched, almost!

I work for myself.

Any sentence from these warlords shines in gloom as the ends won’t quite match up with the beginnings, each bandage dulled into a thought containing falsehood but contextualized by the faintly plausible, as if draped over a bowl of fish hooks, a near accident or an accident-in-the-making. You might desire to push personal data into the narrative, your opinion on having sex as a linear signature (of sorts) or the death of a home appliance, for instance, so whatever sparkle is passed down achieves the same (but no higher) level of emotional force as boilerplate taken from a corporate manual or website. This produces a scrubbed textual surface rinsed with the sobriety typical of social-democratic utterance, open to interpretation as Euro-ambience. The arbitrated décor of your short text can then be looked after over its time.

More research reports what’s in my mind.
Why not reflect it in the text?

Courage is an art.
I hope you’re happy.

I used to believe all the grossular and pine boxes
that promise sex could open up to the horizon of a former life —

a life stacked with the coloration of air
as in an Elizabethan absence with coarse bouquet.

There’s a flare for what noses should be,
a full deck (augmentation) of historical fantasy.

We should see there are lots of tulle and making amends,
going for the stretch and preen in the premonition

figuring out room and board that transforms the way I text,
hands free, with a glance. You lost me at should.

Poetry on the style page (where it belongs).

I don’t think enough poets sustain what it takes to write. I’m speaking for myself and a ragged conception of cohorts, anyone who has been recently alive, over the age of 18, say. The word ‘sustain’ is interesting. The work and the works have to add up — especially in the beginning and the middle parts of writing. You intend to compose and you stick with it and enjoin more ideas as you stumble across and through them. The intent explodes (one of millions of verbs) into a problem set of texts and consequences.

You can’t leave it there. This has been argued ad infinitum. A tree falls whether there’s a human agent in the woods, but the sound of the fall will be disputed when there is no one listening or reading the text of the tree’s descent.

(A thought I’ll put aside is that a poem is the sonic record of felling trees.)

A text proposes it be listened and paid attention to. That’s putting it lightly. Publication and performance. Meta-commentary. Media madness. Gossip and fame. These are the consequences and subject-headers of compositional being and death, the consequences in the cart that writing pulls along if we can say the text is in charge of it all and it’s in the lead.

The text is self-conscious in postmodern times, better so I’ll insist to stay in charge. A common outcome, however, is that a text’s consequences are fore-grounded in a poet’s identity and her intents, conflated with audience, exploited media, reputation, and so forth. It’s all to the good, superficially, temporally, and that’s certainly a problem when one’s success precedes the poem.

So a critical first question for any text is, can we start over.