Where I go from here...

All is not lost! Everyone's wearing an expression on his face (or two): I see your potential though everything is speeding; don’t wait to be huge.

So. Get your share.

I killed for you.

Why’d you bother?

The Bronx (and Bronk) looked used up.

Sometimes it’s otherwise, conforming to a belief system to get forgotten, pinned to one’s alternative dish, rejecting criticism, keeping smart bombs under wraps, knocking the moment down with waves from a window, nods, and small talk while keeping everything poles apart.

We’re talkin’ unscripted, unpredictable! Struggling between comparative (and descriptive) vulnerability to vie for solitude, taking your hand to reshuffle, to suspend.

I go for the moody and unexpected.

The color of the spine goes ultimate, high and low, unlikely yet foreseeable.

So I put my name in every ghazal. Am I fit for the scenario? Are you and I? I ran out of balls rating you. I found so much of what you say emancipating but your data are hardly unadulterated. You’re driving me nuts.

I have a sentence for everything. This is a transition.

Some of you is more sound-oriented while translucence is flushed downhill. And there you go, retreating to that century-old middle ground where they still play vulgar innuendos to bag the new, addled priest wiggling his back end, half orchid, half gold, a toss-up.

Avast. It's Talk Like a Pirate Day, according to today's crossword. So this bears repeating. I remember [Joe Ceravolo] reading at a Wm. carlos Williams festival in rutherford. Daniel Halpern had the audience in stitches laughing at his numerous references to suburban lawn care products. Joe followed and actually read each of his poems twice “so you can better understand them” he said — he could have read each 10 times as the audience seemed totally tuned out.

-— Joel Lewis, posted to Poetics, Aug. 18, 2007

Obama is wearing thin ties again. He kind of snoozed.

But the gloves are off, Obama has started openly campaigning. Woe is us, Jon Stewart finds nothing to like in Obama’s American Jobs speech, a bucket of false promises and bleak outcomes, a parcel of a “campaign-driven economy.”

I wrote what I paste in below three years ago to this day in 2008, a little less than two months before we implausibly elected Obama to the presidency. It’s like yesterday now, only a century earlier, even as today marks one year and less than two months before we implausibly elect someone else to put Obama back in the future, as they say.

When it comes to his job performance, Obama is now McCain, the old boy laying it on thick; secessionist Rick Perry is a Sarah Palin, right down to swagger and huffiness; and I love this — Romney is Cindy McCain, 2011. Read everything with sympathy, please. Three years ago everything was fact-based but policy (Obama did not repeal tax breaks for the rich; Romney funded abortions in Mass.) and even party affiliation (Perry was a Kerry democrat) don’t need to be in fact material as we move forward within the uninterrupted campaign for the highest office.

[snip]

Both democrats and republicans, in particular, have succeeded in converting presidential politics into a vote on who has the better campaign backed up by the biggest, most brazen falsehoods. The best campaigner, the formula stipulates, is destined to be leader since political control is a perpetual campaign. The good-cop-bad-cop republican ticket is our latest sample. By contemporary standards it’s not only above-board but widely expected that an inexperienced candidate turn ingenuousness into a positive. Not a good old boy, Palin's a reformer. And if she snarls, so much the better. Given power, a feisty female who makes herself ‘average’ is a terrifyingly bad cop. When her old boy partner faces the media-elite women of The View and is told he’s lying about Obama’s record, McCain needs only to insist he’s not. And that’s it. He’s the good cop. For additional oomph Cindy McCain walks out in Oscar de la Renta to make her reinforcement cameo on The View. How many houses has Cindy got? That’s not part of the campaign, snaps Cindy. She’s a bad cop too [...] TV news analysts fill us in on the meta-levels of such processes — the horse-raciness, the perception game (so-called), demographics, strategies, tactics and execution — and they fill gaps, foreclosed-on neighborhood-wide gaps, in their first-order reporting, using and re-using loops of video material produced by competing entities from both campaigns. Issues are effectively snowed over by trivia and ruses that only huge capital can sustain. Just as gas and oil consortia attempt to calm us with deceptive portrayals of their token initiatives toward cleaner energy, democrats and, I emphasize, republicans continue to perjure themselves during this every-fourth-year trial for democracy, telling stories and pulling off tricks about what politics is doing to the American economy and to our freedoms.

[/snip]

My 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. Its pace is folding into dreams.

You need to work on you own war-is-imperative. I recommend blending in with nonpoets off and on, video vignette artists and others indistinguishable from scientists.

After work it’s useful to think of yourself as a human hose of illuminated octane, in radiant short sleeves and white thong. Or maybe not. Your heart is non-music-industry.

Solitude, confidences, you’ll learn times in the day, the plays and the jungle of paradigms.

Space between faces adds up what you say waiting, keeping your eyes busy on the platform.

It costs a fortune to get uninvolved.

The rock lyric roots for a singularity out ahead until there is no threshold. Materiality does not exist. No dissonance, no disruption. There are appearances, such as a vantage point that leaves us alone with our perverse incentives, shopping boundaries, reading biker comics, ibis fur. Others go dormant or run off with their ideas of a frontier in unboundedness, unraveling optics in baseline attitudes behind the dunes.

I keep saying that process blockage prompts tactical reanalysis. (The moral arguments are gnarly.) The vantage you enjoy leads to something or someone that’s opposite, blocking the view, requiring accommodation to our redefining a new status quo. Coin tossers regard this as perpetual, cyclical, a status rendering fluid obstructions as occasions of conflict, which means “not to love” (according to Wilhem and Baynes). But conflict is not merely evil if it sharpens ethical and esthetic focus on self-regard and, moving beyond, collegiality. This is the potential utility of enemies, a baseline annulled.

It’s unlikely the not-said expands underground.

Lightning over fog. Homology and prudence. Package and immolation. 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.

And something came up. Initial elements are bled into a diachronic backtrack messing up my mouth, cherished ideals I thought I snail-mailed overseas were sent back in the screw-up, gleaming like a valentine oxide yet pay-as-you-go, immured in rust. Unlike Paradise Hall. Or the occasional warrant for no sleep, no solutions.

I see a dart has feathers and it flies.

There is then the example of the ordinary frog. Frogs lost teeth in the lower jaw at least 200 million years ago, but whoooa lower teeth reappeared in a marsupial tree frog species about 20 million years ago, another trifle.

My leaving office is a double into which I am thrown to off-center my impenitence about the filing system and what we don’t get, to know limits to affirm my retraction, winding into a reliance on hard work, pleasures, plans, and this most generalized, I guess, burningly turned back, watching the wax dim.

My neighbor Al Capp created L’il Abner out of vitriol and some German revenge exorcised by the French in their distantiation mode. It was after the wars sliced them in two.

The chorus is plural. It’s the end of aging, moods are out. Order in chaos. Be one with it.

I have a tiny eye on them and I’m holding to their path, rescuing no one. However soft or firm, the drills at the end of the continent put up more shelves. And now an aspect of our fiction is told on. We have no perverse incentive to be mindless of taking chances, since we talked a lot about allegory, too much, really, and too often we drank to the madness of it’s all over between numbers and how angry they get and how it makes us crazy for the late poetry of X.

Onze mouthing off to dix.

No future presents new phenomena. Pain, that’s a blood type we put on for show. You want me to reconcile the semiology for you? Type in Zigeunerliebe as the hydrangeas split, elegantly disruptive, i.e.

There is a history to our misfortune. You can’t find actuality in a void (plateau) of the crescendo, the will to splat (Zeus’s disguise).

What’s the point? tho, unless they’re in social-politics?

We can feel it, silver-blue lamé (void) but I wasn’t too sure (hydrangeas like it this way) swallowing their methods for months and years going up in ideology and any kind of style. Whatever futures is.

To aggregate is to achieve. Afterward a file will result. Then a deficiency of thought, of ideas. All the same, this is the second point.

Adorno says plain speech is a fair shake at fame.

Like the oboe in I. Got. You. Am.

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

I’ve always been mad about the point. So the others doesn’t count. (I’ve always been secular.)

Surely alter egos bear no responsibility for foundering within the social paradox of violence. The rules commit us. Yet this is the worst case, damaged surplus. Let me give you a hand.

g = l. Everything I note here is integrated. These databases center on content while something sober on the ground keeps looking up. I like my fruit to get by on appearances.

I take you in to go beyond intoxication, to guard the masses.

August begins to spin. There, I know it. I’m imprisoned to reach my market.

Thank multiple histories to suspend my arms and keep your profane circumstance pushing into the room. It’s silly like when a ladybug evolves, a pretext that’s out of shape, part of a riddle, a gauge toward or for another punishing final, a jewel as it were, the trademark of both natural and technical production, meaning to be either way.

Finally, I leave for finishing school. I’m wearing khakis and a red T-shirt and my new backpack is stuffed with graphs. I want more than a group-regulated ethos for the manufacture of comedy and verse. Why is there no music emanating from the garden-facing rooms? The archives keepers must be so sick of themselves! I’ve been reading Cliff Notes for Le Morte d’Arthur, which I finished in one night with the help of two pitchers of martinis. Also reading Mina Loy who abandoned three kids in Italy to take up egg crate sculpting in New York. Top that Cari, Jemi, what’s-your-name. Mina-mou... which is Greek. This is my homage. I’ll have what she was having, realizing her dream performance in “Fidelio.” That’s how I found myself, without a helmet; I’m a yet hater. Well, I say. Studying the history of human height and esthetic prestige is hopeless. This one graph took me nine minutes.

So, with regard to static and its ovoid, stasis, in a compulsive battle over tv’s ultimate smiley face, it’s not just who smiled first that counts, but also wherever and however. Frown-inducing accusations have been flying in the heat — between a loose start-up of random singletons and duos representing traditional (some would say ‘mossy’ and ‘old old-hat’) friends and opportunists of desire between or among poets v. some well-organized language-auditing communities (detractors call them ‘thought-camp fellowships’) with any number of members (‘the imprisoned’) — over the defeat of stasis and triumph of happiness to supersede scandal and exploitation.

I, for one, have extreme difficulty in separating out external compulsion from the experience of desire. Nothing remains but the smell of night herbs crushed in the enormity of literature’s sneering apparatus.

The archives are at risk.

We’re on tv a lot. It’s a general condition, but hushed up. On tv I have a family resemblance / remembrance problem with some poets I encounter. This is because we’ve been brought up in visual culture. And since it’s being archived, there are poets who affect me in new ways I will never let them in on or admit to, but those ways are tied up with off-the-page and off-screen emotions that I see or project into an encounter, and, notable (notable on a paranoid scale, that is), I get it they are viewing me in similar ways. What I’ve just outlined is not déjà vu but my conjecture is these affects draw from a pool of experiences first lived within a family and through childhood, thanks to taping for later viewing by hundreds of thousands if not millions, over and over. That many hits.

First reading H.D. (in high school) set my fingers tingling (not my spine, tho). Reading Donne and breaking down how conceits interlocked parts of the argument fired something up in my brain that I experienced physically, but I don’t remember which body parts, precisely. (Again, this was high school. I bet it was pixification added to all the brainwork studying Latin and German and maybe the attendant headaches. I was more involved with Keats before college, but his poetry was dreamy concretion, to me, and I don’t think I “felt” his words so much as “saw” them and me in them. The visual over feeling. At this point, embarrassing to admit, I wanted to be an amalgam of Keats and Donne. Girl, was I anxious.) First time I felt a poem through my skin was over a quarter century ago, listening to Kenward Elmslie read for the first time. Boom boom up and down the limbic whatnot. I still feel it, watching tv.

Then you know static develops heads of steam. I’m leaving you, quitting the craft. Or I’m joining it. Someone might be intrigued. Could be when I U-hauled myself from Waban, Massachusetts to a first-floor flat, site unseen, in the so-called poets’ building on E. 12th, I recognized the blocks of 12th from 2nd Ave. to Ave. A, even though I had never gone near them before, and, again, could hardly gather how vital they would be in advance of seeing them, walking them. The neighborhood, with its packets of sunshine and surprising greenery, and that building were altogether familiar in some leaping-generations way; could be I had been here as an early 20th century immigrant or perhaps as a visitor years before that. My first night at E. 12th everything was in place as though I had been decamped for weeks or longer. Tub in the kitchen, finessed, a foyer, walled in packed bookshelves, a studio workroom off the foyer filled with files of graphics and drafts, a large emptied bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows, large, no curtains, just windows and walls with decades of paint peeled and peeling. My bedroom is perfect as-is, a futon, a sprig of damp pine in a ceramic bowl, one or two books in-process. I knew the poets in the building, a few were famous, many pre-famous, so that's not a shock. It will all be familiar backdrop in a new craft.

A friend says she is leaving the craft, giving up on poetry. His is a cri de folbores of the ante-cease category that warrants oiving in gem posts compared in foor rveseve.

’Moves‘

Five years later I’m talking to a great poet, maybe for the first or second time. I’ve read her work. I’ve heard her read. I know some of her affinities, some of the poets she hangs with, her background, her stuff. None of this is quite déjà vu. It seems rational that with a little prep you can achieve more intimacy with someone you’re just trying to know. If you want. And, of course, you’re helped by the other, the other’s writing, I mean, since poetry is one splendid medium for self-introductions of a stagy, framed sort. No, what I am about to say is ...I want to put here and it’s not entirely rational ...there is almost a blushing-waif zeit-atmospheric, but certainly a range of collective empathy (psychosis?) with a potentially or partially vulnerable social manner that, together with your own empathy and vulnerability, will put you both way beyond resemblances / remembrances; you’re talking fast and can’t help rolling your eyes in the same, forward direction, even before you have an intention. Wham! This happens a lot, and because I don’t let it happen to me often with non-poets, I’ve privileged the condition, even though it’s a problem when a person of bad faith, say someone like me who’s done this a lot and has the ‘moves’ down, misapplies the moves and the language for motives beyond the immediate speech act.

dbqp squeezes more sense out of a text-context solution or co-construction. And it's nicely illustrated, as usual.

There’s the plug-in of time travel to calisthenics. If you feel like sex, be sure to wake me up.

Resonating — a prism on top of which you can point to the horizon that’s both magnified and askew. If you admit you rejoice in tricky intersections you’ll be taking sides. I told them I’d prefer not to watch from the grandstand and de-harvest illusions of atmospheric slop. So I note what happens. Walking away burns more calories. Better to get a friend or two to write for you, pretending they are you, falling mute, covering your lips with my gloved thumb.

I should be collaborating, writing this down.

I’m seated in my studio, dressed in ashram Goth.

Government dotted with its joke mirrored hot pants.

What are resonators for but to effect command of stuff we’re uncertain or we don’t want to get that serious about? There’s nothing but an eyeblush of material to seem a desperate measure, and it is, in reckless hands, yet for a type of silent partner like me there’s depth to surface and undespairing perceptions (like reading a dab) of what won’t be contained. If you’re the anamorphic type, you can pick a curatorial spot in the vicinity of information and be seen as well as seem on top (of it). Breathing life, we sell hundreds of these, o Swami, nothing to discredit nor disbelieve.

[A Modest Revision]

I suffer from shaving in a symbolic realm.

A head transplant brings on the knowledge affect where cloud equivalents prosper on a narrow isthmus, watching the seasons float in willpower. I never understood insinuation. I never misunderstood it, either, a civilized divide teasing my attitude into an admonitory tableau sponged with saliva.

All the algorithms are just fine. You can go right in. They have an open table.

Titles cost.