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.