Wednesday, December 21, 2005

the ladies who pour

the ladies who pour
are always especially
and are always chosen
sometimes after an hour

it does not matter
that a guest is going
is rightly going

if the visitor says “weak”
for chocolate or about the
table or two of the beauty
does not know very likely
that guests by courtesy alone

sugar adds cream or lemon
upon where frightened the
very strong chocolates though
it seems one pouring should smile
and always answer “certainly”

Sunday, December 18, 2005

here's how they got the taxonomist drunk

caught on fire anyway
by any other name
for the five a cerebral
score, each section
a wasp balanced

caught on fire anyway
by any other name
for the five a charcoal
score, each section
a wasp balanced

comma on fire anyway
by any other name
for the five a charcoal
score, each section
a wasp balanced

comma on five anyway
by any other name
for the fire a cerebral
score, each section
a wasp balanced

Thursday, December 15, 2005

during the ice storm

how strange
to find a songbird
covered in ice

how strange
of an image
to be here

how strange
for my toes
to feel frozen
while I write

how strange
to wander
in memory

how strange
to imagine
the bird’s song
echoing in a bucket

how strange
for the woods
to be so soaked

how strange
to imagine
riflery practice
at the old still

how strange
to notice it
had a missing eye

how strange
to notice that
I have two eyes

how strange
that a rifle
issues a report

how strange that
guns and birds
make song

sadness is persistent
and therefore
ignorable

the sitar’s horizon note
is mortal

I am wetting my hair

silence is ignorable
and therefore persistent

the party is just beyond
the drive

I am not Irish, nor is a spider

imagination turned to a hammer
looks like this

finally, tack

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

sight/site

an investigation into rebate
finds more than we do for
your hotel cash anonymity
business detainees pulled
$1500 Real Estate Opinions
evidence my skin condition
overnight before credit was
due starved to Leisure of un
healthy phenomenon facilities
nails a Dimension receives a
$349 evidence on 170 month
account and Post medical
classifieds directly from
Washington Company

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

cyborgs works like fire

if this is the mode then build
a floating crag somewhere
the decision, yes, to fill
this crag with fins--
all the world’s literature has
been written on fins

lassoes with one’s eyes closed
you have always seen the ellipses
prose rhythms offer a story
this is so recycled-- give it
to someone else

the water’s proportions ever
a misanthrope in a junk store
or tenured alien removed, it
could be said they “marshaled it out”
onto an ontological King’s throne

make amends tutelage, Ponce
De Leon lies lit from below
a fire requires air which is how
you get machines

Each morning I try to clean my mental filter before writing by meditating (which makes my fears recede from my breath) and writing a one-page stream of consciousness piece (an example cut and pasted below).

As I make the transition from using poetry as a poorly disguised acting gig --wherein I wear the cloak of transcendent meditation in order to garner attention-- to something that dawdles in inquiry, each morning's stream of consciousness piece allows me grandstand and enjoy slippages. The lines are almost purely horizontal and, now, I see, use the sentence to document the connection between two disparate image/thoughts. I usually begin in one place, then end in another. There are no periods because the energy must keep moving.

Once I get this shit down, and after I meditate, I'm ready to write and actually focus on the idea at hand. A functional gravity returns to sight (as opposed to being thrown off by black holes) and I'm able to follow the rhythms and conceptual reverberations of a word.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
scrim appliances of jackknife knowledge the sun shade is rutted like the memory of how to think, the constable pushes his hand through the forgotten fame of his youth for breakfast, for coffee a neighbor might as well be frost the pushing animatronic choicelessness of digital monies, the blast of a stump of a tuning note of a day without coffee, without news, the leap frog attempt to move from one angle to another, one fear to another, compounding the daytime with frantic hecticness, writing from which area from the brain, which overlook, lost and reverent, slim scrim standing point overlooking Linville falls, the world open on my desktop, the reference of the world in its dire vividity acorns and okra, asparagus and down, the pine cones are miniature hornets nests, the sun is a hornets nest of sensation, of a coach eroded in rejection, of a Buddhist seating mat stretched out like taffy between time tables and chemical compositions documenting the transitions the relations between the wrestling team and its employees, all elves, all cordoned, a green chair might be lit with light, might be atrocious, might be frozen in the hay, but when luck comes around there is only vocabulary and we seek the words to match it, all of my best lines are stolen, proprietary, unfortunate momentums of collapsing sea dogs, of piercing language and cars with delicate descents into the Hades of promise, of the car garage and all the things that flow together seamlessly, the bump in between the flights evoke and old girlfriend who walked, the path of an ivy vine up a tree mimics that of water which runs down it, a photocopier knows the principals behind reverse, behind hippie students and one-armed duels, when I sung good night Irene, expression just might be this, might just be this, the illusion of thought in order to lock down time and attention, the putting on of the veil of transcendence, of the portal useful, in order to secure sight, if others are invisible we are invisible too, if others are the focus of sight then many more exist in the privation of sight, the justified oligarical shimmy sham of arrested New Zealand youths, the lit sky of aftereffect returned no rebate gravel, the the of the of the, I once walked, I once walked in Oregon, and into the rhyme scene burgoid sap sap nilly wash a curved needle working not at the sky but at the memory of the sky at the slipping vertebra of an ajar door falling over of the wind in this cavern, of this position which from all but anything can be seen, Jesus Christs, bit torrent downloads, hawks in perfect flight, mega-char buck stores with enough coupons to choke a mouse, what lives in a hole, what eats its own breakfast, what echoes and sends the arithmetic soaring like a saint in flight for his butter pecan cakes, I am the eroding root of no particular tree, I am the emotional aftermath of self, the brown coursing tree hollow and the cosmic skies with it, represent Allen Ginsberg's best years, those moments of lucidity, before the clouds took over the motel and ran it with persistent sacrilege, bit bite bitten a unit, the heart contracts, the heart contracts with light, the heart contracts with light in order to refinance its home, bum bum, the white stick curves upwards like the Andes, the Andes are a mountain range in my backyard, my backyard, uh oh, is a picnic table during war time in which we may discuss how many young are being sent away, the criminal in the pillow case, the promise of idolatry, the multiple lights sources that return not redundant but in new contexts to rise empty like a scarecrow in the morning, like an icon searching for meat, the slippage is the patient twisting of awry nomenclatures, of Amy's nomenclature and a dance class in which Jolie Holland eats at the lunch buffet, here we are on TV again, here the TV is on us again, here I am again, here I is again, in Chicago in the "rules," in the experience bearing itself for the purposes of distinction and all the mess of knowing I was born from you, self was born from other, and all the writings on soap backs may make your name clearer, may make the sentence slower in order to accommodate a frame cut off, the right margin, the right rail of forgetfulness, the train which rides along and into a tunnel, and into between because of Europe, the place, not, the place, Of course mimicry might be enough to help the transition, the clown's foot drawn over and over again in order to avoid gravity and all premises of self-congratulatory brouhaha, of the rutted image left over again on a plate on the bombastic cleaning cycle and momentary defeat of mind's attempt to make distinctions to see into the text in order to find tiredness, expressed, and pondered, the site of which rips the language form from the tile wall wherein coffee is made to order by and for patriarchs, this of course is enough is fair wisdow purchasable by only the open register of a repeated instrument left in Fes, left in geography, left in an orienting and tangible effect of solid ground, the screen loses its nature and all that there is then is the wondering imagery of energy making its way, a packhorse heaving, across the desert, the horizontal thrust like a wind when you want it, the keeping and trying on of clothes, the keeping and trying on of clothes, the redundant virtue of ancient Greeks such as Pliny who saw Pompeii get overrun in ash in 79 A.D., the dog frozen on his choke chain collar is all of us dreaming simultaneously, the promise to get out of Pompeii when it is simply momentum, wind of times that blows harder here and there still, sometimes the lie makes more for a canopy, a parachute dropped in the bowl, the soup needing sour stirring like music, like Mozart of chauvinistic beautiful writers coursing forward, imagining that they are 20 and not themselves, all of these fantasies moving across the sky like letters, like notes from soldiers, like soldiers in the periphery

Sunday, December 11, 2005

a white great horned owl
and its definition

the papier-mâché scrim
of a wren’s nest

a catacomb
left
for a saint

a Polaroid camera
in a carpeted kitchen—footage from a contest

my cousin who is a Navy man

a papier-mâché wrestler

II.

seen from a roof
the tarmac slides
down a hill

the wrestler’s face
is superimposed
on a corn field

his portrait hung
in a forest

III.

his legs were those of animals
his legs were chosen

pink spindly pencils
found in a middle school

chosen and indelibly used
by the hearth

this mansion
of water and wrestlers

IV.

four chairs and a frightened wrestler

childhood burns away
the taxonomical score to be
discovered two-dimensional

like sight

the passive reflection
of not walking
glint-like, expandable commas
poems by other names

V.

ceilings laced
in charcoal

with signs of fingers
pulled across a dancer's runway

the ceiling fan is a starburst

the starburst
matches

a heron

or second old note on
blue paper

VI.

Yesterday I found two birds
dead in the forest

stiff little aestheticized beasts

feathers plastered on leaves

the mansions and catacombs
ready for flight

I will put these mayonnaise-based dishes

into the refrigerator

I saw the deceased birds
with my bifurcated vision

VII.

Melville was prescient
about America’s crises
200 years ago
taxonomical shortcomings
descriptions mistaken as understanding

I hear a good line
then it enters the crowd

like a tired bird
entering the forest

VIII.

Reaching in, a comma
may be expanded

a book may be opened
two hands and the cerebral cortex
stretch out in a scroll

my eyes, seen from a profile
imagined from another perspective

like dawning cataracts

I see these tomes
writing as if I can also remember
how I walk

Thursday, December 01, 2005

crosshatch 1: Smithson and Saxapahaw

clothes are adrift in an antediluvian ocean
the eye is hanging on the line

the moon courses crimson through closed eyelids
blood is cold and illuminates the circuitry of white branches

white paint chips bleed in scarlet streaks
the Great Salt Lake covers an oil-saturated foundation

spirals are open, and stones clamp onto the denim
the pockets and clothespins extend out as a jetty

the ranger lifts himself toward the house
shirts and underwear the color of tomato soup

I imagine him off-screen dissipating into breeze
music sits above the black spiral of his creation