and on the table, a dictionary

2006-03-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

I thought I should offer some closure to this period of my life, in which there was this blog. Affection requires material, such as a conversation, to exist. The pressure of meeting turns sentences to phrases, phrases to words. Structure of import, impact, brevity's effect on language. Secrets charge the page, exercise's labyrinth wall. A game between I and me behind a sound wall. Joshua Tree handed over to unsecured wireless eyesights. Private tempo is a counter-assertion and is political. I love when my lover goes away then returns. Find me near my skin. Adoration cannot be harvested from solipsism. I cared very much how my name ranked in a Google search. They want to hit with a frequency of seven. Art return to sight, to thought. These ghost reactions. Please take my name off this screen. A logo is an owned name. Sight was first spotted in the desert. How can you write on the monitor if you appear(s) in such expansive letters? Rebus emerged from the flag. How much data does dissent require? Quiet, a landscape and a library. Three readers.

2006-03-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

musical

when writing
the background must be
dark, letters, white

a red-tailed hawk
its nose dive tempered
by buoyant chest
disaster in every
and training

and, if not, September
over and over again
to screech loudly
old friends' conceit that they know each other
old friends' conceit

along the edge
of the statement
laptop and even
similarly the poem

2006-03-01T15:45:00.000-08:00

foreground their eyes
who is not her
are not turning to trees
this communal eye

when the leaves move
her bellbottoms and my lapel
wind of your opening
gallery, galleria

the science of your leaving
annotations to your thought
the shade of your sight
your tree of arrows, many arrows

this gallery wind
this man’s red jacket

Vanbridge looks left
at the woman in the red jacket

note to self: simulate the passage of clouds

what is behind your eye has died
(epicenter of an apple hung)

this pen will empty of ink
you can walk on it
you can, you glass

you are closed, one root in the ground
the root now on opposite sides

if my head were a television
do I like this painting
whispered to

the register
wind on the eye
this wind lacking

in different stages
of identical progression

what you are given
the latest meaning of register

this communal eyebox
shudderless
with and without windows
without window frames

in left
our right
a bend minus the eye

there are no rats
but squeaking wharfs

can the light on the sky
the retina and noises and
bottles tied to trees

the noise of grammar
the road that is a splotch
having passed to pasture
customers

inside her jacket an imagined can light
inside this sentence Cezanne

2006-02-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

what drinks water

2006-02-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

you have been sitting there
for 300 years, all thumbs and eyes
and stuff
in stone

why taper I have forgotten this
the price for a ride

the sweatered dog
a sign for real

I gift you familiar battlements
that habit: your silhouette

halt in my hands
ay

300 years ensconced
visiting my rounds

your eyes are stone
and why

…

embers are not stones, but rocks
that appear to be

swinging parabolically
he says

if I were to beckon
which guard would come

KEEP OUT

I am writing to myself again

perhaps your lap will be
split by the frame

half of your ecstasy mine
and flattened

(and yet

pliable columns
driven through with chain

I is a grapheme
two benches facing a common

shush, shush
shush, shush
shush, shush

…

it equals itself
its remainder, that odd obstacle
isolit

that like that
except here

you will always be in stone
outlined in attention

who is to say
beckoning is any different

lambasting, the form
pages abutting

return
return

so to see yourself
slip away

and hear

2006-01-31T21:53:00.000-08:00

I deleted some extraneous words from tonight's State of the Union address. Here's what I found:

…war, shock, danger, suffering, victims, terrorists, terrorist, starvation, oppression, terrorists, terrorist, terror, captives, terror, pain, grave, fears, enemies, hatred, hatred, madness, destruction, nuclear, public water facilities, chemical weapons, surveillance maps, war, terror, hijacked, dangerous killers, methods of murder, outlaw regimes, ticking time bombs, terrorists, enemies, battlefield, terrorists, risk, terrorist, terrorist, terrorists, terrorists, training camps, regimes, chemical, biological, nuclear weapons, threatening, terror training camps, terrorist underworld, remote jungles, deserts, the centers of large cities, terrorist cells, hostages, terrorists plotting to bomb, weapons, terrorist camps, terrorist parasites, threaten, terror, face of terror, regimes, terror, threatening, weapons of mass destruction, regimes, regime, missiles, weapons of mass destruction, starving citizens, weapons, terror, hostility, terror, plotted, anthrax, nerve gas, nuclear weapons, regime, poison gas, murder, bodies of mothers, dead children, regime, regime, terrorist allies, evil, threaten, weapons of mass destruction, regimes, grave, danger, arms, terrorists, hatred, attack, blackmail, catastrophic, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, missile, sudden attack, dangers, peril, dangerous regimes, threaten, destructive weapons, war, terror, waged, terror camps, terror states, fight, fight, war, war, war, weapons, enemy, innocent lives, troops anywhere, weapons, defense, threat, attack, no longer protected, attack, bioterrorism, emergency, vaccines, anthrax, deadly diseases, bioterrorism, combat, illegal drugs, trained by al Qaeda, war, war, death, war, terrorism, enemies, fear, evil, evil, attacked, crisis, emergencies, danger, prison, evil, war, poverty, violence, oppressed, midnight knock, secret police, tyranny, threats, war, terror, danger, terror, evil, danger, enemies, suicide, murder, tyranny, death…

notes on some films that will show tonight

2006-01-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

Feeling uniquely today the jute between Chagall’s mule and star. Ginsberg’s half-buried angel. Off to shoot sky mixing into animals. All of this is in that line between branch and sky. Pulling images out of that horizonal space. With some exurbia mixed in.

This is, perhaps, a poorly wrought metaphor, but it will do: In reaching for a visual image, a hand outstretches from my hand and finds, diagonally across, some observation about poetry. Reach for one, find two. The mind delights in contrasts, and working in two mediums gives both forms a scaffolding (so you don't have to half-nelson fellow artists to see what you're doing).

Totally captivated by this idea –which I return to—that one of poetry’s functions is to find and experiment with logics, or why things connect to one another. All different kinds of rationales purported—personal, symbolism, surrealism, dada, cubism, etc. Why things are connected, which has everything to do with motivation.

The poetic line works within this context of close, meticulous attention, which is why it is well-suited for looking closely at why certain words connect to one another. Poetry is a laboratory for logics.

But here’s the difficulty: So much of a poem must be manufactured, which is taxing and the process is susceptible to blockages. (Found lines, yes, but they get so unwieldy and keep your portals shut on a day when you want all your egresses to be open.) So, the benefit of working with multiple logics is tempered, or challenged, by the need for manufacture.

Film and video, in contrast, supply images. There is the challenge of keeping extraneous details out of the frame. But, like a poetic line, a visual image forges a connection between disparate things. It makes a statement about why things are connected. Each image can present one or more logics. Framing is your diction.

Chance courses through the image either as a conceit or partnering logic. In exchange for that underlying basis for connection, and supply of images, time and space get torqued. A viewer knows, when watching film or video, that she is somewhere in a hall of mirrors, even if the image stream appears similar to her daily perception.

2006-01-23T12:19:00.000-08:00

Friends,

I've made this haunting short, single-image film. I tried, for two days, to get this image right. Going back and back and back and erecting all the required apparatuses to tweak the composition.

All you need to know is that I conceived of the film a while back, first, with multiple sinks, then multiple hands. I even wanted rectangles somewhere in the frame. But the constancy of the image makes your interpretations --and you have no choice but to have many-- the variables. It's an unsettling and humbling film. Here's a still image from it. My only concern is that the film's 5:30 run time is not enough. Moon light, rain, role of the artist, I just keep going. All of those interpretations leave and that leaving, the knowledge that you can't tie shit to shit, becomes beautiful and pervasive. Unsettling impermanence. Air between the animal's joints.

Will show this at the Blue Door on Thursday.

2006-01-12T13:36:00.000-08:00

2006-01-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

there you go
now I am completely vocal
among unmet clerics

the magnet the winter sun
the graphic of the ham see going

soil meaning paint
marginal arms of your vision

withheld again and Philistines and
you thought you were here for the ledge

but that bridge is a fine thought

2006-01-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

more than one of his
is made of we-- the permissions

of which parts
and where

effeminate the
shimmering
guttural eye

capital affection
looks like what?

strung pistons
& holding
something abstract

where is it amid
identical
books and stores

2006-01-06T20:17:00.000-08:00

RLI EUE REO

2006-01-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

(continued from yesterday)

toward objects and away from figures is the same

unique polarities are possible

a human can not fit through a mouse hole

a human is not a human

in a temporal sense is not a sense

the mind as muscle as finger

with seismographic tendencies

if I were to make a sense landscape

do not why is this can

the temperature of metal

the akinness of crevices

the novel writes itself in correspondences

document is also a verb

a gas can be contained in a container

you inherited a faulty box

it was the perfect gift

you is not a word but a commons

what is intimate is most social

to make proper a-the-this context

you don’t lose any beauty

that is in the transitions

might as well write math equations

a plus four when a is five is nine

an open door still has space in it

that space is measurable

but the space it connects to is not

2006-01-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

reflecting on my rambunctious ethics

why carry the memory of the body along

the body this is

the body is the body

two magnets, a crater

projected into a center of gravity

the center of gravity of the mind is in language

straining to make a word behave

paint being made of earth

thoughts have focal lengths which may be beyond the eye

a sentence is always running

why make this sentence run

water from a stone or anguish

crystallized if and only if ordered

alone each word has registers

two words are cacophonous

running over grass blinking

2006-01-03T13:23:00.000-08:00

film and window still. textured words of tape. a calligraphic book jacket.

2006-01-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

real moon, fake moon

2006-01-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

a gentleman and his hat in an elevator

any building may be classified
as a dwelling when a gentleman
and his hat in an elevator

the street has the character of a house
or not in the presence of such offenses

an assembly is usually so crowded
and in public buildings the left hand
which is why so many prefer canes

a more loyal citizen just might
for as long as he claims a spot
the atmosphere who wouldn’t
prefer a preface to a boiled fish!

the intentional cut

for one person to not look
not only directly is a breach
a cause of which can warrant

anyone whose eyes are wounded
or would open quick of memory

yet all too easily can fail
much attracted as this does
excuse but excuses explain
the intentional cut happily
is practically unknown

whether you are man or woman
I am very glad the breakup of

the victim embarrassed
to all who witness

a century ago it was not
unheard of in such a bad
place even young women
had to know of strangers

2006-01-02T09:28:00.000-08:00

When to Rise

grown as well as half
both rise and go forward
a man as well as a woman

be very much be older since
seven or eight— a woman

she may very well if he has
told her anything

would be in a worst kind
of thrilling but not of other
hopes to see it makes no

difference whether or not
you have been introduced

2006-01-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

end-of notes (close to an image)

lines air a concept an apple
lying on its side Chuck Close

tackle-tied weights except cut in half
bitten and food in your mouth
la la la la a philosopher

to scribe a score notes tied
to lines and visuals to fall down
the immense and immaculate ladder

half note quarter note eighth note
the whole world is flat
an illusion an allusion

still song strange
roads ghosts occupied
hardback dials creative uses for tack

sand death in the body registers
receded Chuck Close pushed
out of the way to make sand Chuck Close

what two words hold many
visual neighbors to do with Chuck Close
in and evening around

2005-12-21T11:29:00.000-08:00

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”

2005-12-18T21:38:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-15T08:09:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-11T17:55:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

After Maya Deren

in recognition
of the words

eye in a fogbank
obscured
by a red lantern

sight into reading
into sight

the chair
the chair of the board
bored through by cicadas

the military’s memory-- like ours
sight into reading into sight

after these shards
you can see them— the auras of figures
with identical gravities

WCW sifts letters from flower
forced breath from form

2.

air
when imagined
a breeze sifts through a church’s rafters

a cello could write as well as speak
were it not decapitated

lying in a field
of pylons

Persephone’s hell
is her divided mouth

her own symbolism
an island

her own breath
struggling against
the surrounding air

3.

I am not animated
but so meshed

the afternoon sun
is black and short
and surrounded by space

that space is
surrounded
by the sun

and into this loaded basement
refugees and emperors

freely trading
realm-rippling stories
of construction

how Hyco
always disappears

and drunks are able
to find the same door at night

by just leaning
on the fog

2005-11-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

perform this poem in a mirror

Maya drug herself across the table.
Maya used the camera as a tool.

Maya drug herself across the table.
Maya used her camera as a tool.

Maya drug herself across the table.
Maya used her camera, which is like other cameras, as a tool.

Maya spliced multiple scenes to make one scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya spliced footage from multiple scenes to make one scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya spliced footage and made one scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya made a scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya strided across multiple continents.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya’s foot stepped in multiple continents.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya’s foot transcended continents.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya’s foot transcended contents.

2005-11-21T08:09:00.000-08:00

On Reading Swensen, Stein and Jarnot

the space, the space to the ground when it is raining
or the first one
to discover the sliver scales
a table might be just might be because it steadies

a turtle is a covering, which I am, a covering
sipping ensconced a first wave
of light
a shaker rolls from here to there where it goes to where it leads

after this circle, before this circle, in this
the street lights were lit with an abrupt public announcement
speeches flickering over stones
and the hand and the instrument made their meeting

in the human city a city block and human animal
a garden’s reflection
penumbral then evaporative
over you over there and my affection

into the into rain and folded stairs
arching sharply
the sky crossing its human arms
nothing of no thing in and around an entrance

2005-11-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

To we who haunt incentives

where is the last prairie
and how may the Fuhrer make more
our records, the records
being so stacked
in a family’s home

not the white panel

but a disappointment
an earthly paradise found out to be
bloody

the golden rod of horses, of arborists

shading this tablet

John the Baptist
his baton and needle

being effectively stopped

his disappointment played out by ghosts
his translations weighed and converted

who sits around the pool in a headdress
mourning

where is this living prairie

2005-11-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

Just now, as I post all these meditations on violence, a fox ran in front of my window. When you hear screaming, but can't identify it, what visuals get laden with fear? What visuals get charged with your intuition, horrified at night, that the empire nation is built from exhaustion? All to avoid this thought: When there is violence anywhere, there is violence everywhere. Coursing, lover, they are bombing you. And when you bomb them, you are bombing you. Themyou: tyhoeum is our fabric.

These are trinkets, imperfect metaphors sought to match. Last night I blindfolded myself. It was night. I was on the porch and my eyes were closed. The canopy of wind and leaves lifted higher, which was insignificant. Which happened first, Prometheus, did your eyes go blind or did you have visions? To continue matching imperfections when all the words, and sights, are charged with promotions. I will continue to close my eyes. I will seek these bridge-like permutations.

2005-11-18T12:16:00.000-08:00

One afternoon when I was in Salem, VA, I went into an antique store. I perused the aisles and noticed some old photographs in a display case. I asked the proprietor if he had any more. He looked around the store, then at the front door. From beneath the cash register he revealed a stack of color photographs. "Crispy critters," he said, and handed the stack to me. I scrolled through the first few. An Iraqi man could be seen charred and hanging out a truck's window. Another one, and another one, of similar mutilation. Why do soldiers photograph the results of their acts of violence?

Today the woodstove's smoke has blown into the meadow. The wind either stopped or fell slightly, so the yellowed, cedar-smelling cloud is just hovering, still.

This is a picture of the hawk that killed one of my chickens today.

The smoke has also filled the neighboring woods and, the sun being angular because it is winter, has illuminated the trees' shadows among the forest. Walking by them earlier, I noticed patterns shifting like light as if seen through a slotted fence.

The hawk had eaten the chicken's liver, which was crystal-cranberry in color. The thing was only five weeks old. One of the other chickens, an Aruacana, was apparently attacked in the skirmish. It is wounded and cannot walk. I will probably have to kill it in the morning out of mercy.

2005-11-18T09:47:00.000-08:00

O’Connor

wounded, synovial
hanging laundry on the line
the scrim fear that emotions may continue indefinitely

he hit her with his bag
the barn is shaped like a collapsed hat
the layer I reach my hand through
is a public fountain in the Natural Science museum
in the basement, at the Food Court

the air between his joints: can it be wounded?
the regret that lasts, that stretches out like a sidewalk
the clamping springs of an excavation
there were 15 people on his back
now there are 13

limping, synovial
one pulls things out of a poem, one does not put them in
the motes around the deer’s head, lit and cold
the strung boy’s shoes tilting toward Wyoming

I have strung many things including lights
words are furrowed and implicated with echo
soldiers are entrenched: here, here and here

the pre-event, the deer’s inception
its penny framed in the social, that glass
crumpled behind one's ear

nodules are important, synovial
in front of the wall, someone typing
behind the deer a deteriorating barn

he called for someone because he had been freed from a gravity
he called for someone because the deer was collapsing
lines can be light when all they hold is paper

11 o’clock and this blue door and console
water tends to condense
she heard the voice of an evaporating scarecrow in the forest
she heard a voice which was familiar

2005-11-15T22:38:00.000-08:00

Being chased by the long-awaited tunnel. Two spheres, one stone. The light source coming from the technology in my hands.

2005-11-15T22:19:00.000-08:00

The ugly conch ear and fielded beard. The moon is perfect b/c it doesn't have to do anything. Good luck hearing light.

2005-11-15T22:10:00.000-08:00

The moon is a systemic hole. Here, you can see through the photograph. I am imagining my hand reaching through the darkness, touching its side, feeling through the cloud and halo. The moon is a smooth geometric chamber wherein there is only smooth nervous light.

2005-11-13T18:39:00.000-08:00

weathervane 2

not a cock, but a pig
smiling

it’s belly, stamped and bulbous
confuses the wind

its mid-riff
an entire family’s equilibrium

beyond the horizon
which it cannot see

an electric corpse of nothingness
a scarecrow, with its back to the wall
a theater curtain draped in velvet
the backing of all poems, of all scenes and nervousness

in the foreground, a barn
wherein later
a Bible salesman will steal the leg of a girl

wherein later
a wounded grandfather will cart his darling to a land sale

wherein later
the layered shingles of a Swiss creamery are made red

wherein later
I will photograph Mebane’s oldest tree
once from the lowest vantage point possible
(from the perspective of a cat carrier)
once again in front of a light box

The patina ridges of this metal swine, the Grand Canyon in Smithson’s body
is green and turquoise, that of a Soviet montage
or mutiny or hammock or teeth or drunk

his smile, that of a billboard
features not a pig, but a drawing of a pig
advertising the demise of referents, real pigs
conjured just before Salisbury and the truck stops emboldened there
with cheap gas

The ball bearings of this movement, of this pig, the shape of an ice skating rink
or washer, or washing machine disassembled

mount on top of multiple sheets of simple variegated tin. Long diagonals of M’s overlaid
stretching down to the waters
where baptisms will occur, where husbands will curse

this pig matching this weathervane, this rudder of a wreck
sails the aforementioned family through the doors
their satanic and marbled hooves
neither precise nor dancing

stepping over a golden barrel
a charmed chain of yesterday

an immobile pendant pig-shaped
Rocky Mount’s trophy necklace

2005-11-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

weathervane

the weathervane in question, how it sits
spun, spinning, mounted
in what air, what house, what barn or store
an arm coursing in sand, in sin
the justice of its resolve, a bellwether patinaed
blue and marbled, vinyl-sutured
father, upon this company our future may lay
hurricanes make the pines possible, the boxwoods go amok
perched like some red-throated lizard, some buzzsaw splitting the frame
straight through the wheat, the silo
perched there on top of the bird’s mind
ambient sounds through the valley
an American flag in a nativity scene.

The cock does not know direction
unless bells, bewarned of tokens and white cake
do not find the divot of her dimple
her mandibles, her candelabras open upon the house
an inverted chandelier, weather-soaked, a porous sack of potatoes
screaming through the foyer, children
waving their fingers at clouds, the hayloft, the long-range neighbors
meanwhile, nothing.
No wind, no currents. Jets occasionally pass in absolute silence
or they make the mere sound of a trailer hitch dropped
a chain released from the sea, drug out from the woods
ignorant and bloodied, drinking testosterone from a glass.

Child non-run, cropped and debonair, release
into your stillness, movement
a smoker’s lung animated, second-person
your second person
the barn now in the bird’s mind
in the writer’s mind, crumpled
fallen, animus mundi into the room
needing spiritus blown into the filter
exhaled into the death-life, the burgeoning patina
the gravel road to the neighbor’s home
paved in shadows, rocks and lines.

The weathervane in question, that is you
that is on you, that is this medieval roof
dancing on the head of a pin
your daughter does not point but paint
her house made of cloth squares
fragile and sagging, propped between chairs
the bird’s mind as it passes the stationary mold
compares ball joints to paths, mountings to shadows
ten thousand ellipses drawn just before it snows.

2005-11-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

Garden or abacus? What grows in business light. Mandalas and paragraphs.

2005-11-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

My father grew up in Roanoke. At five o'clock the Dr. Pepper sign would whistle.

2005-11-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

Has this song no feeling of business?

2005-11-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

Windowpane as linear film negative. Violence moves from one cell to the other.

2005-11-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

Negative cog tracks lit up like a movie star's mirror.

2005-11-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

"There is something about void and emptiness which I am personally very concerned with. I guess I can't get it out of my system. Just emptiness. Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world." Robert Barry, interview at Bradford Junior College, 1968.

2005-11-04T09:45:00.000-08:00

One night a luna moth flew inside my house and I took a picture of this movie ticket.

2005-11-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

A Motel’s Malfeasance

leaving the levee now: it is a desert
a wheat field lies in a movie house.

I am a beam of moths.

my torso, that enshrouded heart
that gate without occupation
I stand at the wedding table
my boots tucked beneath the antennae.

over there, a pilot is sitting on an ottoman
his eyelids do not shutter, and are not made of thread
he rolls his tongue ceaselessly.

there by the games he turns saliva into globes.
there by the games he strings tiny pieces of rhetoric.

2005-11-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

Abstract lines extend indefinitely. These lines create interlocked toposes and seem to keep going.

2005-11-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

The outside of one's body makes the interior possible. A stranger operates the machine.

2005-11-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

In this jacket terribly bright seams are showing.

The letter she placed inside the wall is visible as ever.

A vacationer is on vacation.

Filled with genes, a horse runs just the same.

The same man finds the same idea notable for a third day.

A line is said to be parallel if it is parallel to another line.

A quarter, lying on the street, is picked up by an orphan.

A flashlight beam can illuminate a tree branch if it is night and if it is too dark to see.

Amphibians can exist both in water and on land, assuming they were alive to begin with.

I breath the air.

All scales depend on weights.

cloud and pines

2005-11-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

2005-11-01T22:03:00.000-08:00

Il Duce’s last speech

In Lorretto Square, Clara
my arms reach yours
for coins, denarians, dirt-dirty
customers peering at customers
perusing faces
I noticed vision’s rules baring
a print raised, a glass in a toast
to shoulder the nation
you wrapped me in a cloth
swaddling, I was an organ
for a moment, ancient, a menagerie
even though there were
hungry mouths around.

As I told Brutus, one cannot help but think
of yesterday’s savings
the villa you remember
squatty, mushroomed, made up of crowds
it’s geometry, a colonnade among colonnades
cast off and hung from trusses.

Yet your love held me.
It could be said I lived and died for ideas.
Together, in the voluminous crypt, in the planning room
finding always the softest chair
where there would be no wind
where one could almost forget
about the criminals' persistent burrowing
their ramshackle and shoddy tunnels
damnable, made up of two-by-fours
set by their oversized and gruesome hands.

My empire has no weakness, Clara
even though it is surrounded by air
because the mob knows my face, Clara
they know who I am.

2005-11-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

To Daphne

Daphne, the cobbler will not come drink from your hands
will not come visit you, will not build his rations over your feet.

His horse is a piebald one, poured down a hillside, blackened
wrapped in fountains and sent beneath the service of

a cannon resembling an ancient stone phallus
drug onto the lawn.

We, the reaching branches, rotate once per day
in the purple thick light, perpendicular to

his bronze steed, that warm sum, why are you curled
into my hands again? 40 years ago, a cobbler

came to visit you and into his fountainous arms
he gave you his rations. He built them over your feet.

He opened up the trunk and spiraled into a globe
tied into rations, each being its own aspirant.

Daphne, to return isn’t easy. Jump over this ledge into
the yellow fabric book of Swinburne I have broken.

It is now taking form as my fur coat as
I was an enabler, a dervish, the honey

that moves through combs. Union soldiers
weep over these ports, they make their way

through towns. The concrete yard and hounds
that patrol it, the file cabinet’s metal beam

dropped, a cigarette, into an air conditioner.
I know I am speaking. A reporter is lost in violence

has forgotten his friends, has identified with the hill.
Daphne, please, my hands are not those of the cobbler.

I was not at the covered bridge that night.
I did not drop anything into the water.

2005-10-31T21:03:00.000-08:00

atonement

from 10 until 2, I have
this momentous fear

emblazoned, split
ushering off the table

wings attached to roads
attached to interstates

I want it to stop moving
yet its arms are still
hugging at the air

its yellow brown gel defying
my eight black bags

2005-10-31T21:00:00.001-08:00

Sunday morning at the library

missing
antecedents
hackneyed with lighter versions
of themselves
this last and ever
over an empire’s safety
the reaching
of his trident
15 of them
in antiquated paces

these faces are gifts
operating at the loose ends
I’m sure you survived
wielding down the road
sleep this size again: fists under water
and from this, historians
constantly checking the city
sleeping on the church

bound in Coptic measure
the push-pull
admission of a pear
or drunkard flailing cobblestones
my accent, the way poverty
encrusts a lady minor
down to God’s fighting
his long-awaited golden stilts

to the hospice without power

elders respirating
in tubes
why bring them out onto the ground
why humiliate their leglessness
for a few volunteers
to meddle with

such a pathetic watering
of a backgammon page
a dumpster
purge to puddle, that violence
their May lives

just the measure of
spools

your curious eyes brought forward
into dice museums
moaning in
apparent reprimand

referencing the census again
how they
pursue their best interests
say they found the smog songs in the tree hollows

even park in the garage for free
I know this knot under prominent suspicion

free radicals find it strange
whence they come
respirating the interior
of her tribal patterns, judging her peeling paint
itching knowledge
you know
because they never turn their lights off

alibi is still an album
one iota of a gate
made of
that is
what is fallen
above all else having ink
I cleverly have fuel

this already cryptic swimming hole
above our lives

the corollary: taking down false letters, falsetto

to look from the self portrait’s point of view

the hardest thing is to manufacture

to make sense of what you’re talking about

the erasure of ambitions, arcs, crests, erasures and globes

and so the lesson, the really open one
remitted not by an expert

with arrows crying in oversimplification
that the wreck must step away
from itself

its temporary employees not mess
with this organ deck
but evasions, broken and colored 80s chairs
not relying but leveled

history written from
a patient’s point of
view

fighting inside all those cells
their mutinies
abutting emphases

not in this but a strata, a state
wherein attention lies

neither tranquil nor permanent
entering itself
raving in the room

he is the central plumber
not escaping buildings
nor evaporating

but blocking out the jetty
in spiral choreographs

a how-to story destined through
crystalline boy sounds

mimicking pursuits
the latch left open

that is
what’s left
heartless yet old
and funded
into the derivative bridgegrooms of
the actual
extending toward your eyes
and real fingers
God-like in bulbs
momentary like the Mayflower

that’s what it looks like

selected bibliographers laughing
on a walk together
such curious cameras

making a medieval body in air
unobstructed

or at least at the right moment

since this lateral, then, is nothing— a breach

toward do not touch
but it is damp

of his pupils
of a pen’s fish
disintegrating
the chain-rope making it easier
for the umbrella unannounced
large language found still in air
itself

a narrative now learning from the words
to drop and
keep dropping

after the buzzards have gyrated
a song and dance well-done

flouting their buckets back to orbit
to self-use
colliding here

and all of a sudden, non-existent space
opens up
for imagination and attention to occupy

an endless stream, cords of winter
riding down with time

cold as air condensed
anything but feet walking
collar and beam

you and Cicero have it all
at the party

forceful barrels of his breath
chosen and lost
each stanza being fully his and your last room

2005-10-31T21:00:00.000-08:00

2005-10-31T20:57:00.000-08:00

gentle robbers

gentle robbers churning forward
reaching their hands in

blunt untrained surgeons

where is the last prairie
how may the Fuhrer make more
the records
being so stacked on a sea in a family’s house
newly painted

the camera sits, broken, in a closet
the boat sways, weighted, blank

not the white panel you work for
the façade bracketing your books

but a pending disappointment
a hunger of a regal stature, indentured
only to find that an earthly paradise

is bloody

and instead of turning headdress to tourniquet
sack to patch
a search for new rivers, real estate

conquest so cerebral that even common electrics
are purchasable

so I, this fugitive, surrounded by helicopters
of my own devising
may repudiate my family tree
those arborists
shading this tablet
a double needle, sharp
the cross-stitch
being effectively stopped: a baton
caught mid-pattern

suspended
at this very complicated midriff

when all the film plays
the details therein
appear fruit convertible
you know the translation, the sound
that will come

from the backroom may emerge, all of those ghosts

you are a ghost, more than ghost
living not and so this company you seek

being not material, but toward the haunted act

squeezed exactly like this— incentivized

2005-10-31T20:55:00.000-08:00

monologue for Charlotte

there are clouds
Colossus
into tiny
Eastlands and their icers
their pets

a red looped hat
a red loop
a red lou please I stole

Chinese plaster columns, sir
the creek that runs under Providence
what is its name?
the rock
the rocks

phonetically
that run through the subdivision

subdivisions, no as in a newspaper

no, as in a photograph
the sides of a Celtic vision, please excuse

my snagging of these monuments
purely bound by gardens
loved for their soft forms

it is simple: a hill has to be well-manicured
has to be downtrodden
onto one’s hard drive
to make pretty pine cones conical, profitable
forgotten prodigal

anyway
you know what I mean: a father

my father, he would drive on these signs
with lines going every-which-a-way

and we would just visit various offices

under about before within beneath and around

and these were the streets
and these were the signs

kind of an immersion
but you learn rather fast
to tether everything that’s peering at you

and, together, you have a hill
where there was none before

2005-10-31T20:12:00.000-08:00

2005-09-13T20:51:00.001-07:00

for T.J. (on the occasion of your premiere)

appraise compare conclude contrast criticize
critique defend describe discriminate evaluate
explain interpret justify relate support summarize
a water tower

the verticality
of which enables
more than one

thirst to hover

or so my father sang
the basin aswarm in feathers
a silver cataclysmic tone

how to wrench him now
from the mirrored pillory

and gently bait him back
from gesturer to gesture

until what is important gets chased.

to swim
and feed vessels
lying them on the blanket for perusal

is inhalation: simple as
a sun-defined stone
or the filtered
diagonal
shadows
that cross it.

2005-09-13T20:51:00.000-07:00

Before the vaguely criminal use of a bridge

Before the vaguely criminal use of a bridge
40 peripheries enforced: an orange shirt out of control
Embers set the neighbor’s yard on fire
And into a single perspective
a constitution descends the stairs

The photograph of a woven craft
confers the importance of photographing crafts

Cicada, open this ambition
I am frightened of firings
I am moved by cold pocket watches

Confounded by severances
machine ear and eye run as if across a field
Perpendicular, parallel, whisker box
blankets fastened with lynch and pin

Freedom to roll is not freedom to romp
Hence the moving indentions

2005-09-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

O’Hare

The plane’s fractured side sends orange through the air-- a glacier flirtatious and grim. Norfolk like a necklace dangles from her ankle. Sunlight streams through her cheek and mouth. When I create a war, I begin my research on the Web. She guides him to an opening whereupon he sees her words writing their own sentences. What would happen if insurgents took over an oil refinery in Nigeria? She places her hair in his brass hands and begins dancing.

Pandora does not deal in fragile vessels. The man in seat 10C –how should we say, an admirer-- would like to buy a drink. Athena graced with wisdom does not take commands. Rossetti prompts his subjects to act hysterical. I have built the armrest into a Lyistratan wall.

We sequester our generals, then have them associate with only those people playing roles. Red flags wrap her waist. I lean my head forward and rest it against a chair. She enters the restroom and draws red lines across her lips. I don’t like this job, she says. I want to quit.

II.

His plate rattles so he looks outside. (Note: let the wire mesh windows be the first signification of what this poem is about). She taps her fork against his glass. Your meal is out of context, she says, I mean, do you really envision animals? Most people have left their seats and have pressed their noses against glass. Within hardwood floors, joints fill with moths, descending stairways, white mansions.

I stand outside and put my hand in a stream. Crawdads are a kind of artillery, mounted with wire mesh windows. I traipse through the forest and scavenge an old mason jar. (Note: pace it as it appears.) Crawdads glide across the bed with light shoves from their legs. I try to get one into my container, so I can hold both up to the light.

Causation doesn’t hold the same sway as it used to, she says. He grabs a top hat from under his chair. Now for the seemingly miraculous replacement of one scene for another. She slaps her palm onto the edge of a towel. Sand falls just short of her plate.

2005-09-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

catalogy

beneath the breach, nothing evaporates

the taxidermist being so longwinded and difficult to cast
roars anxiously into a tunneled mouth

I left a hook in the line:
the fish are on strings

A comely vice
above a guilt-ridden floor
or remote collaboration

quick, engendered
fast by any pelican’s standard
is not what record said to arrival

but in such

only half of you will be thrown off

“Kind of like lead,” … “Or something
so axiomatic that even its negation is true”

2.

point of painted view, the difference
between scale and proportion

something huge, like grain approaching

one panel filled, traverse to animism
a mandrake homuncular

or horse child

commingling
amid a sheet of geological tools
tangibly foregrounded

like some great shawl in an etagere

3.

As soon as the footage ends
youth’s club meets curtain

another medic or mother unpublishable

the history of horsepower expelled in sight

a gallery for cameras

“Describe your emotion through the emotions of another”
The only thing I want is “for my worst case scenario to be better”

At the cusp, a generative sea floor—
or such treacherous rocketwater

4.

When beautiful duchess’s grandfather died,
she snuck into his closet
and stole his Styrofoam legs

even this

Her grandmother pierced butterflies
to make the table arrangements flap

lady, circus-crush this hammock
into metonym or obelisk
so filled with company

“Onset” promoted
“Offspring” unwrapped

angels baptized
before jaundice

ideas singe moments
and dice will flow where they will

5.

dusty harbor of strange sticks
are you earth or geologist?

From the basement, permits
to touch unpainted sculptures

didactic or otherwise cross-legged

an electrical outlet makes the bed possible

the moon looks so ridiculous again

6.

being subsumed, a cardiac quill
enters a chorus of beards

each thought contains a thousand ignorable vistas
and one California diner

what is operative is often
the static point of relation

a salt shaker, for instance

then all metal washers
seeping temperature into your hand

7.

Today in Topsail
“we hear them speak of danger”

like a familiar object’s analytic slimness

withdraw or lose the canister
proceed or be thrust before the biting

the earth makes tiles when we speak

our protagonist
whose chief characteristic is never to be used
taunts her incorrectness
taking pains to affix

a hidden yellow story

2005-09-13T20:47:00.001-07:00

black integer

black integer
shallow waves

undertows integral
and crowned

janitors comporting
husks of hands

floating
untethered

crows then
maypoles

lassoes and paper
thin joints

light now
tissue now

a junk horse
rebuilding

2005-09-13T20:47:00.000-07:00

parts of speech (revolting)

is a lobby
in a lobby

no one
but copper and half

police are frost
so that edgewise

as our best catwalk
or teeth fellowing

a monocle-made city

2.

S-hook
oh Amy

not left
but going

how they skirt Gibraltar

yawning asunder
a circular frame

profiteers in blue/red dresses

3.

a wooden chair
made boy-like

amid tape
accidental and pining

caesuras and
such blunt nets

2005-08-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

An Old Song

That gesture, giving, wave-like, events and names on the curl. Floating sun water. I can't stop tumbling forward. The momentum of water. The starry stony deep meditating on its warm hands. Lifted, a cabinet, a chest, on its side, dusting the roof of a school girl's jacket. White thorns cut my face. Tulip trees turn their ears to listen.

Beautiful duchess, spin air, sighs, flowered brambles, my knowledge of splintered water. "And from the depths, Odysseus..." Virgin spindles croak through the waving station. A pier. Your family, plastered on an alloy train, departs. My hands of sepia. Midas drenched in orchards.

A rope descends in such a way as to make the stage real. Ten thousand eyes on a plastic box. And inside this box, a tiny bit of sky formed into thighs.

When your hair meets dusk, I am a pin coming through a wooden box camera. Inside, a sheet of celluloid speaks to your ghosts. There is then, a wave machine, working. Vacationers retreat to baton down their locks. Wind gestures toward the sound. Leander’s out-stretched arm loves Hero’s lapping.

2005-08-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

permission is neither light nor heavy

poles across a promenade
the purchasing of a clock which ticks

I will turn this thought
into a landscape

open field
open field
open field
(but it is really an atoll)

the nearest building to Wittgenstein’s home
was reportedly 60 feet away

between the structures stood the following
four street corners
a curb
a gas lamp

stacked, a week’s worth of clothes weigh barely a pound

94 notes from theories and documents of contemporary art

2004-11-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

“demonstrating a freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude.” Alfred H. Barr

#1: art depends on a freedom more complex than the one referred to in political freedom. What is this freedom? How do we elucidate our limited definition?

“When you first saw a Cubist or Impressionistic picture there was this whole way of instructing the eyes on the subconscious. Dabs of color had to stand for real things; it was an abstraction of a guitar or hillside. The opposite is going on now. If you have bands of blue, green and pink, the mind doesn’t think sky, grass and flesh. These are colors and the question is what are they doing with themselves and each other…if one wants just that pure thing these associations get in the way.” Helen Frankenthaler

“One evening, passing a lighted window of a house, I was fascinated by red, blue and black shapes inside a room. But when I went up and looked in, I saw a red couch, a blue drape and a black table. The shapes had disappeared. I had to retreat to see them again. Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could real meaning of it be understood and felt.” Ellsworth Kelly

#2: words have various lives, one of which is its existence outside, or prior to, associations. Does this exist? Can something exist outside of its associations?

“What helps me is to realize my own disabilities and expose them.” Louise Bourgeois

#3: An art of rigorous, example-setting honesty

Bertrand Russell’s response to an animal protection society solicitation: “Entirely in agreement with you. But I am so involved in my campaign for the prohibition of atomic weapons that I cannot concern myself with anything else. And since a nuclear war would probably kill all animals, it seems to me that I am already fighting for your cause.”

#4: Art is similarly engaged: We work to make objectification, power-spurned across generalizations impossible. A delay.

“Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.” Anselm Kiefer

#5: the meaningless created by a proliferation of forms. How does this happen and is it necessarily so? How else does one usher in forms to make new decisions? Can’t events and act and other arts do this?

“For though these evocations might seem only the phantasmagorical figments of the artist’s inward vision they are, notwithstanding, the projections of latent forces; forces that may be active or inert, in part revealed, inchoate or still unfathomed, which we are unconsciously at grips with every day of our lives; in fact, that music of the sphere which underlies each man-made system and every law of nature it is within our power to discern.” Max Bill

#6: I include this quote because I am apt to forget a lot of the motivation behind geometric, mathematic or abstract art. Just as Pollock and Newman were interested in identifying primitive processes, myths and impulses, these characters, such as Max Bill, were interested in identifying the mathematic expectations and structures of vision (and expectations). I hate his art. It makes me cringe. But it must be identified as a compassionate project as well.

“Abstractions and references must be totally avoided. In our freedom of invention we must succeed in constructing a world that can be measured only in its own terms.” Piero Manzoni

#7: Constructing both a world for the art work and the tools to evaluate it. This is key: A world that makes only its own sense so, hopefully, the reader will understand that our system has within it its own means of evaluation.

“Tradition shows the artist what not to do.” Ad Reinhardt

#8: An absolutist expression of a common sentiment among many young visual artists. Break tradition to contribute something new to the dialogue. And your experiences are completely new, so why not concoct a new form as well?

“I think we realized that you didn’t have to assert yourself as a personality in order to be personally expressive. We felt that we could deal solely with esthetic issues, with the meaning of abstraction, without sacrificing individuality—or quality.” Kenneth Noland

#9: This stands as interesting in the context of my Ashbery reading. Is analysis and inquiry personal? We certainly think so when lodging a critique against those who claim objectivity. But does this inquiry into abstraction feel rewarding as much as something he would probably identify as indulgent?

“There’s something about color that is so abstract that it is difficult for it to function in conjunction with solid form.” Kenneth Noland, in response to why he doesn’t paint sculpture.

#10: The nature of color. Adapt this to poetry. Figure out how elements work, their effects. This, I think, it more valuable info than conceptualizations about self. Why do people always ask about the latter? I am much more interested in what Pollock thinks of the color black—how it works on the canvas, etc.

“The language artists use has to be the language of the subject: that is not the language of everyday life. The language we use in sculpture is the language of sculpture: that has to do with materials, shapes, intervals and so on. I am a sculptor: I try to form meaning out of bits of steel.” Anthony Caro

#11: For poetry, what is the language of poetry, as distinct from the language of communication. We know what words would be used to describe and inquire into this form –communication, signifier, message, etc—but is that the language of poetry? If not, what is it?

“People have asked me, ‘What does your sculpture mean?’ It is an expression of my feeling. The meaning in art is implicit, not explicit; and to require explanations suggests a real discomfort with the visual. I wish people would trust their feelings more when making or looking at art.” Anthony Caro

#12: So, poetry read as implicit meaning rather than explicit. What value, then, is an explicit interpretation of a poem. Or, what does a New Critical reading of the work offer us? Should the poem stand on its own feeling or implicit meaning? Are we trying to root this practice of meaning-making into society?

“They are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or echo each other, to support or oppose one another. The contacts, respectively boundaries, between them may vary from soft to hard touches, may mean pull and push besides clashes, but also embracing, intersecting, penetrating…

Such action, reaction, interaction –or interdependence—is sought in order to make obvious how colors influence and change each other: that the same color, for instance –with different groups or neighbors—looks different.” Josef Albers, The Color in My Paintings

#13: Beautiful social metaphor. He plays with how colors can relate, interact and change their inherency by what they are around.

“The changes in my recent work are developments of my earlier work. Those were concerned with the principles of repose and disturbance. In each of them a particular situation was stated visually. Certain elements within that situation remained constant. Others precipitated the destruction of themselves by themselves. Recurrently, as a result of the cyclic movement of repose, disturbance, and repose, the original situation was restated. This led me to a deeper involvement with the structure of contradiction and paradox in my more recent work. These relationships in visual terms concern such things as fast and slow movements, warm and cold color, focal and open space, repetition opposed to “event,” repetition as “event.” increase and decrease, static and active, black as opposed to white, greys as sequences harmonizing these polarities. My direction is continually conditioned by my responses to the particular work in progress at any moment. I am articulating the potentialities latent in the premise I have selected to work from. I believe that a work of art is essential distinguished by the transformation of the elements involved. Bridget Riley, Untitled Statement 1968

#14: A lot here. First, it makes me think of Chris’s Against Metaphor. Second, I like the fact that she starts with a premise and goes down, exploring the foundation of what she has locked in on exploring. Third, she learns all about methods while doing it. Fourth, the elements become transformed (in front of her, how?) as she works with them. How is writing repose? How is it disturbance?

“All that art is built on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like.” Donald Judd

#15: Ok, who is doing the discrediting. Some authoritative science? How about those narratives being constructed and empirical like those of any novelist? What’s interesting though is the degree to which these ideas foreshadow those of conceptual art and Kosuth. The move to get away from past forms. Judd definitely wanted to take art off of the wall, liberate it from the frame.

Could you be specific about how your own work reflects an anti-rationalistic point of view?
The parts are unrelational.
If there’s nothing to relate, then you can’t be rational about it because it’s just there?
Yes.
Then it’s almost an abdication of logical thinking.
I don’t have anything against using some sort of logic. That’s simple. But when you start relating parts, in the first place, you’re assuming you have a vague whole—the rectangle of the canvas—and definite parts, which is all screwed up, because you should have a definite whole and maybe no parts, or very few. The parts are always more important than the whole.
And you want the whole to be more important than the parts?
Yes. The whole’s it. The big program is to maintain the sense of the whole thing.

--Donald Judd

#16: How is it possible to get the whole and not the parts? Doesn’t the mind want to create a connection between whatever is present? (Rauschenberg) Oldenburg has been somewhat successful, however. His environmental sculptures hit at a large, concept level, even though they are made of parts. How is this possible in a poem, which consists of parts?

Furthermore, what would a poem look like if it tried to be a hologram? If it tried to convey the whole within each and every part?

“My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object.” Frank Stella

#17: The move toward seeing art as less a matter of associations and, instead, simple physical objects. This highlights the delightful confusion that most folks experience with contemporary art. Sometimes the objects seem to claim lofty aims, such as being expressions of laws of sight. While at other times, they claim to be merely what they are. As Ken has said, we, as artists, are supplying people with thought patterns with which they can make sense of the world. Hence, there is no contradiction to creating a multiplicity of forms.

“A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of the group of entities and references. The one thing overpowers the earlier painting. It also establishes the rectangle as a definite form: it is no longer a fairly neutral limit.” Donald Judd

#18: How do you create a poem in which the fact of its being “a poem” doesn’t overrule the contents? Or, rather, how do you redefine what poems do?

“The more parts a thing has, the more important order becomes, and finally order becomes more important than anything else.” Donald Judd

#19: Consider Rauschenberg. His paintings consist almost entirely of elements and he challenges the viewer to put them together. Indeed, order/interpretation are called for. Is Judd trying to bypass that process and convey an entire idea?

“This zero/neutral degree of form is ‘binding’ in the sense that the total absence of conflict eliminates all concealment (all mythification or secrecy) and consequently brings silence.”

#20: to achieve a statis in seeing, a quietude of the contentless. Something that matches the conceptual and minimally uses/taxes the eye.

“Art is the form that it takes. The form must unceasingly renew itself to insure the development of what we call new art. A change of form has so often led us to speak of a new art that one might think that inner meaning and form were/are linked together in the mind of the majority—artists and critics. Now, if we start from the assumption that new, ie “other,” art is in fact never more than the same thing in a new guise, the heart of the problem is exposed. To abandon the search for a new form at any price means trying to abandon the history of art as we know it: It means passing from the Mythical to the Historical, from the Illusion to the Real.” Daniel Buren

#21: Where’s his value judgment? I assume he is moving us toward a Marxist art practice. Which one is it, new ideas in new forms or old ideas in the guise of new clothes? X-apply Kosuth’s concern that people assume new materials mean new ideas, which it clearly doesn’t.

“What is being attempted, as we already understand, is the elimination of the imprint of form, together with the disappearance of form (of all forms). This involves the disappearance of ‘signature,’ of style, of recollection/derivation. A unique work (in the original sense), by virtue of its character, will be conserved. The imprint exists in a way, which is evident/insistent at the moment when it is, like form itself, a response to the problem or the demonstration of a subject or the representation of an attitude.” Daniel Buren

#22: Here again we see the defense of meta-art. It is personal, he argues, in the sense that it comes at a particular time and has ‘character.’ What are we identifying as important for an artist to ‘put into the art’? What gives it the sense of personal? Are figurative issues –banal, quotidian—likewise satisfied outside of art, making most art appear to be journal entries?

“Once the dwindling form/imprint/gesture has been rendered impotent/invisible, the proposition has/will have some chance to become dazzling.”

“Furthermore, being only its own subject matter, [the proposition]’s location is the proposition itself, which makes it possible to say paradoxically, the proposition in question “has no real location.” Daniel Buren

#23: Here is his thesis put succinctly: the goal of art is to get to the proposition. Art without location because it is, for lack of a better phrase, a math problem. Of course, this is impossible. The math problem read at noon is different from the one read a six p.m. Light on the page, etc.

“The rigidities of modern critical language and thought prevent a direct response to the eloquence of art when it is made by others…Mainstrean us the codification of ideas for the illumination of history and the teaching of the young.” Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer

#24: Perhaps the most articulate critique against mainstream narratives. Eloquence is a good word choice, loqua…

“Now that we are enraptured by geometry, geometric art has disappeared. There is no need for any more Mardens or Rymans to convince us of the essential beauty of the geometric field embodied in the television set’s glowing image. Today we have instead ‘figurative art’ to convince us that the old humanist body hasn’t disappeared (though it has). It is only now that geometric art has been discarded that it can begin to describe the deployment of the geometric.” Peter Halley

#25: I forgot how much this essay rocked my world. It’s Foucauldian in the sense that a totalizing force doesn’t need to flaunt its power. X-apply Dan Graham’s analysis on glass in architecture—“its architectural façade gives the impression of absolute openness.” The constant repetition of the figure convinces us that we are more than well-constituted boxes. What I like is that he’s lodging two critiques against two speakers—those in power and those confirming the power with complicit earnestness. There is a cynical undertone, of course. What seems adaptable to poetry is the question, does figurative poetry hide a deep human crisis that is going on right now? Is freedom (deeper than political freedom) under threat or a joke?

“Engels said that Aeschylus illustrated social struggles by means of discussing moral conflicts…” Renato Guttuso

#26: I’m adding this quote because I need constant reminder that conflicts really translate well on the page, even if they are buried deep in obscuration or analysis.

“We hear them speak of the danger in which modern man lives: the danger of losing his humanity and of becoming a thing amongst the things he produces.” Paul Tillich

#27: What does this mean in terms of communicating with objects? Installation? We certainly bear similarities to our objects d’ art: constituted and created and worn. Calling forth this identification is important, especially if it causes unease. At the same time, how can you explore this line of thinking without being a dualist? What is the difference between the body and the surrounding objects? What and how does one appeal to this humanity to which Tillich speaks?

“We know what squeezer Giacometti used to compress space: there is only one: distance. He puts distance within reach of your hand, he thrusts before your eyes a distant woman—and she remains distant, even when you touch her with your fingertips.” Jean-Paul Sartre

#28: Giacometti’s work is absolutely haunting and has the same desperation, franticness and analytical slimness of Arendt. There is little of looking at them without thinking about modern holocausts and nuclear winters and atomic social aftermaths. Human beings are fucking frail. Sartre really opens up the discussion, though, in looking at distance. We are all distant by circumstances. I find his sculptures better (indeed, more human) expressions of existentialism that Camus, Sartre or Kierkegaard’s work.

“In none of my sculptures since the war have I represented the eye precisely. I indicate the position of the eye. And I very often use a vertical line in place of the pupil. It’s the curve of the eyeball one sees. And it gives the impression of the gaze.” Alberto Giacometti

#29: X-apply Donne’s micro-marcocosmic eye (homology). Disassociate language from discourse.

“I think ideas are rather a weakened rung in the ladder of mental process: something like a landing where the mental processes become impoverished, like an outside crust caused by cooling… I aim rather to capture the thought at a point of its development prior to this landing of elaborated ideas.” Jean Dubuffet

#30: A great idea. I don’t particularly like his paintings, so I wonder how attractive theory and attractive art relate. Also, how viable is this idea of pre-thought? How could it be described with language, which by its very nature circumscribes and cuts off?

“Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.” Willem de Kooning

#31: Brilliant applicability!!! How to create poems that flash their denotative meaning like a hidden flash in a film—so pornographic such literalness.

“I believe that art is recording. I think it’s reporting. And I think in abstract art, as there’s no report, there’s nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There’s never any tension in it.” Francis Bacon

#32: Tension conveyed in distortion. I best like Lucian Freud’s depiction of him. Again, conflict and tension being central to the action.

“I think most people enter a painting by the theory that has been formed about it and not by what it is. Fashion suggests you should be moved by certain things and should not by others. This is the reason that even successful artists—and especially successful artists, you may say—have no idea whatever whether their work’s any good or not, and will never know.” Francis Bacon

#33: Evocative of Duchamp’s role of the spectator, but I think it has a greater significance. As I think about systems of evaluation –critiquing people’s ability to let Abu Gharib slip from concern, while Swift Boat Veterans for Truth can occupy multiple weeks of attention—we must see how systems beget their own structures of evaluations. It’s easier. How do we respond to art, and others, with a kind-of tabla rassa and openness? This is critical for poetry and for human existence now; so much effort is being put into constructing the precursors to meaning making—the context or angle at which you want someone to experience a particular kind of content. The lobby, more than the art. The introduction more than the book…

“I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative.” Francis Bacon

#34:I once wrote about the desire to compose figures unsuggestive of familiar human action. Like dance that is non-narrative but exploratory. Figures outside of a narrative—same thing? Are narrative habits and unnecessary? What is the relationship between narrative and context, when it comes to human forms and/or stories?

“As Delacroix said, ‘A painting or drawing is developed by first putting down something and then the superimposition of ever more definite statements.’ Romare Bearden

#35: I like the idea of layering. Say, for example, this could be adapted to poetry by inserting new lines of analysis way after the preceding lines were written. Would this create a layering effect?

“The late nineteenth century taught us that reality consists of constant change. As we move, the objects around us seem to change position; the world moves and things are constantly revealed in new aspects. Our visual experiences are usually cinematic sequences of not necessarily related views of details.” Philip Pearlstein

#36: This is the roving point of view that many surrealists tried to represent. What would a poem that attempted to represent this look like? In many ways, I think Stein did a decent job via reiteration: chair, chair chair my love: as if she were walking across the room toward Alice.

“What he actually sees is a fascinating kaleidoscope of forms; these forms, arranged in a particular position in space, constantly assume other dimensions, other contours, and reveal other surfaces with the breathing, twitching, muscular tensing and relaxation of the model, and with the slightest change in viewing position of the observer’s eyes. Each movement changes as well the way the form is revealed by light: the shadows, reflections and local colors are in constant flux. The relationship of the forms and colors of the figure to those of the background becomes mobile and tenuous. New sets of relationships constantly reveal themselves.”

#37: This is a continuation of Pearlstein’s thoughts about roving point of view, but a statement that reveals a quasi-social implication. Just as Josef Albers in The Colors in My Paintings eluded to a new way of seeing required my his color-relationships, Pearlstein seems to suggest that forms that accommodate or show parallax can usher in a more relative (visual) perspective. Such kindness, quiet, which probably effects, like, ten people.

“I don’t want handed down, traditional concepts to interfere with the content of my work.” Chuck Close.

#38: Here, again, we see an artist trying to get away from the categorization and language or art analysis. That kind of lexicon mediates a viewer’s experience of the piece. So NO HOMEWORK IN ART.

“If the surface information is consistent enough then the surface of the painting will disappear. Inconsistency draws attention to the surface itself and again interferes with the content of the work…The more important Abstract Expressionists never allow you to stop at the surface and look at the paint. Their painting marks always stacked up on some level to mean something else. Chuck Close.

#39: This makes me think of camping, a bend in the river beneath a waterfall, in Lisette’s new tent. Poorly snapped trees keeping us warm all night. This, again, is something Stella was trying to get at—the content, the concept above the details. I wonder how to reconcile this with the intuitive correctness of “showing the seams,” which is, for me, a Marxist point: show the labor so people don’t think these things are created miraculously.

“I am also more concerned with the process of transmitting information than in filling out a check list of the ingredients a portrait painting is suppose to contain. I too want to strip the viewer of the comfort of thinking that the traditional concepts of art he has been dragging around are automatically going to make him understand what art today is all about.” CC

#40: A vaguely hostile relationship, but interesting point of deliberate evasion. Where do the ideas that are ‘outside the tradition’ come from? Really, I think, it’s not a matter of where they come from but finding alternative valuations. The world is so full of everything, always, that it’s more a matter of attention and value than research and knowing.

“A painting shouldn’t depende on anything outside. It has to be a pure object and not have any kind of relationship to anything real—that would tend to take away from its purity and from the greatest achievement of all: being able to create something out of nothing.” Richard Estes

#41: The severance is what is notable: where and why a poem should not refer to anything: that it is an artifact, an original creation generated from some distinct act, not something in an ordinary stream of experience (had anyway).

“That’s the only possession an artist has—freedom to do whatever you can imagine.” Phillip Guston

#42: Not a formal point, but one about living as an artist amid rampant material desires.

“To feel and practice resistance is a prerequisite for the condition for an art that will last.” Jorg Immendorff

#43: I don’t particularly like his art—a little to limited in scope, explicitly political in a way that prompts walls more than openings. Nevertheless, a strong connection that I would like to add, on the flip side, to Chris’s statement about art practice transforming you as a citizen.

“Since the point of the images is to show all that which escapes conceptualization.” Magdalena Abakanowicz

#44: Why do we have art, as opposed to direct communication—to show the various inadequacies of our language and conceptualizations.

“When the Chinese have to say ‘chair’ they don’t say chair. The ideogram doesn’t depict a chair, but depicts a…I don’t know, maybe the bamboo. I mean, the bamboo in the morning is taken to become the chair somehow. What they look for is the situation of what they want to depict, and they find out a kind of analogical train of things which is going on, and they depict one of those things, and nobody really knows why they choose that one and not another one. So I do ideograms. The way I work is exactly like ideograms.” Francesco Clemente

#45: This is exactly what Standard was talking about when describing corollary logic—the attempt to access/effect the reader more (about a particular subject) by railing about/on a correlated scene. Chris’s red rectangle serves a similar purpose.

“[Rauschenberg] later explained that his pictures and combine paintings explored the ambiguous messages of ‘pre-formed, conventional, depersonalized, factual, exterior elements” drawn from everyday life, and that they ‘suggest the world rather than suggest the personality.’” Stiles on Rauschenberg

#46: As if I needed more reason to see Rauschenberg as a model. Here, people walk into a gallery expecting to be voyeuristically confronted with the exciting world of personality and, instead, have to confront the world in its detrital detail. How to do this with poems?

“The vehicle, or medium, need not transmit information (a message)—it can stand as a symbol for a message.” Richard Hamilton

#47: This is the band name phenomenon—the fact that the name, Arcade Fire, for instance, looks like it means something. As Johnny Walker said when thinking about his band’s name, ‘It can’t mean anything.’ So, these things look like they mean something. Locked boxes. Of what worth are they? They certainly get us excited—their impenetrability is arousing, but perhaps more like a commercial than a poem. It’s not that these statements have to be interpretable, in a conventional sense, but I like my lines to, at least, have the possiblity of meaning. Oftentimes, I go back and see, oh, that’s what I meant. Statements created for the sheer purposes of impenetrability are kind of jokes, in my estimation.

“Thus it becomes important to stress relations (as opposed to ‘free form’ where everything can be related to anything so that in principle nothing is related.)” Oyvind Fahlstrom

#48: Why the pejorative reaction to free form? Does anything can relate necessarily mean nothing is related? Or, in fact, does it mean everything is related? Relatable = related?

“All of these classifications are just restrictions—thus one tries to domesticate art, to make it available. And, in fact, art can only be available without restrictions of this kind.” Gerhard Richter.

#49: Again, citing Close and Abakanowicz’s instinct to evade categorization for the purposes of art. I believe someone later will say something to the effect of, the things that are acategorical are most interesting to me. The shooting between the systems of knowledge.

“Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely a coincidence that we can see stars with them as well” Gerhard Richter

#50: A beautiful idea in its converse: we see according to survival, so there must be a reason we can see stars.

“The boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere.” Jasper Johns

#51: The permeability of ourselves, represented in the visual. Lines are gases.

“Publicly a work becomes not just intention, but the way it is used.” Jasper Johns

#52: The subsequent function of the art –say, if it is turned into a bridge—partially defines what it is. There is immense possibility in exploring how poems can be tactile, useful, etc. How not only presentation but use affects the content. Such glorious possibilities if this is done like Warhol’s silk screens: how different hues affect the same image.

“You have the audience at a disadvantage [in film]. They can’t see or hear anything else. You have them under your control. You make them look and live an experience, go through a process, which is enormously difficult to do in other forms of activities.” Bruce Conner

#53: A film, shown in a theater, can be an all-encompassing experience. There is a power relationship there—for better or worse. You can dictate a lot. I would love to make a film that calls attention to the people sitting in the audience—that dawning sensation that they are living, breathing entities in a dark room. Perhaps get them to imagine/see capillaries in chairs in motion.

“The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel,” and “the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.” Andy Warhol

#54: Warhol’s notion that meaning evaporates under repetition has chilling implications when we consider the post-Fordian world of mass consumption. It was this emptiness, a logical conclusion, that he sought to elucidate.

“Not an empty signifiers, but a perpetual ghost with a perpetual presence…” Barbara Kruger

#55: Compare this to the idea of signifying a message, rather than being a message. What is ghost language. What elements of, say, government or commercial rhetoric does the collective conscious forget but need to know, in order to write different histories.

“At a certain point, the work takes over, is in activity beyond the detailed control of the artist, reaches a power, grace, momentum transcendence…which the artist could not achieve except through random activity.” Gustav Metzger

#56: I was fascinated with this quote some months ago and used it as an epigraph for a poem. I am learning, more and more, how true it is. The random activity is essential for breaking out of patterns of thoughts and language. Vocabulary, for instance, can change in fresh ways as a result of random activity. When choice sabotages, or predetermines, an outcome and leaves the writer writing something he or she already knew. If we assume Warhol’s concern regarding homogenetization is a real concern, what can choice do to subvert decision-making models that are not our own?

“What interested me was to put into iron sculpture a new, continuous, and live force. The result was in no way a graphic representation of a force, but the force itself…” Takis

#57: This was part a larger shift from reference to referent. The latter is necessarily preferable, and is no more real. References exist as energy, just as physical objects.

“The restlessness of a line: it wants to be a plane. The restlessness of a plane: it wants to be space.” Heinz Mack

#58: Do representations want to be something else, as in, inherently? What about colors on the spectrum?

“The complete integration of color and motion, whose continuous effects overcome the sadness of finality.” Heinz Mack

#59: A great fucking idea. How to affect the senses in such a way as to create a joy that a single sense, in isolation, can experience. Is there some joy experiencable only by converging sense data, or creating cyclical movements between color and motion?

“Any substantial body of work in art is an evolution of a private (emotive, subjective) yet somehow shared and accessible epistemology, or way of knowing. The artist’s task, his stock in trade, is sustaining a coherent and dynamic equilibrium while creating an evolutionary variety of forms. Art is the sine qua non (necessary condition) for developing informational contexts, or realms of discourse, through which discontinuous and novel synthesis integrates the hertofore unlinked. By breaking in fresh psychological or psychic space the artist, therefore, informs survival, which requires a constant ‘supply of uncommitted potentiality for change, i.e. flexibility.’” Frank Gillette

#60: Artistic practice as representative of flexibility and ability for adaptation. We can make sense out of the new, via juxtapositions. This values the process, irrespective of what generative content is being made.

“Since art provides the incentive to experience the unfamiliar, any event/object/concept utilizing contemporary communications technology as its medium is a priori a declarative statement, heuristic in spirit.” Frank Gillette

#61: Compare this to Kosuth’s warning about contemporary mediums hiding ancient ideas. Gillette seems to be arguing the opposite: any use of new technologies is a statement in and of itself, as well as a means of posing old problems in new ways.

“Video systems materialize the potential link between the artist and the planetary exoskeleton of communications systems, television, holography, protean computer networks, satellites, etc. Inasmuch as video is the first full materialization of this linkage principle, it exemplifies the proposition that art is environmental.” Frank Gillette

#62: I’m not so sure that I fully believe computer networks, et. al constitute the primary social environment. I tend to believe that it’s some enabling parasite. Nevertheless, Gillette seems to be arguing that video offers a personal in-road to this network. Of course, now, 30 years later, blogging and other interfaces are present.

“…since art becomes a record of a process and not the manipulation of passive materials. Within this view, the artist’s subjective-emotional state, ie, his hybrid forms of introspection, and the technology which conveys them constitute parallel continuums.” Frank Gillette

#63: I think of Bruce Nausbaum’s performances in which we watch him learn, or at least think about, physics, his body, etc. The recording of the event –that leads to insight—rather than the material that the artist works with to gain insight. Think about objects and investiture. Ann would hate this (she believes that objects are instilled with an artist’s labor). How does conceptual art deal with this? Is there a Marxist-labor critique of conceptual art? I guess we have to acknowledge that thoughts are energy and parts of labor. But the reference to insight—what is that as a gift? A thought? The record, as opposed to the material…

“The imposition of values derived from a perception of continuity, as history, upon the high variety and discontinuity of day-to-day living results in a distortion of our expenditure of flexibility and capacity to adapt. A corollary effect of the increasing use of video systems is the alteration of our apprehension of both the historical record and daily existence. Since video is a medium of real time, i.e., it transmits the temporal quality of the process being recorded, it alters our experience of our own memory, of history, and of daily life.

“This alteration is always idiosyncratic to the artist’s attitude, or orientation, toward his center of gravity as he steers the camera. The body sense in relation to its environment through technology is the impacted perception which that complex of eye/technology/environment is itself recording. Thus video is primarily an ecological medium.” FG

#64: A lot here. The first part mentions how video, by its ability to record temporal qualities of events can alter the way we remember things. Imperfections, long pauses. It can be used to go against the mind’s process of distillation or augment it (with cuts). Furthermore, the fact that the lens is separate from the eye means that our body can direct our perception. We can know a store from the perspective of our right foot, for example. Hence, we can trace/represent our body’s relation to the world.

“The central obstruction to the full acceptance of the video network as an artistic medium in its own right is the fear that somehow or other prime objects will be devalued and traditional hierarchies, some of which have been accorded the status of guiding myth, will be replaced.” FG

#65: That art could go completely conceptual. That the material world, defined in a traditional way, no longer holds the same value it once did.

“The entire phenomenon began to resemble less the material objects depicted and more the process of the mind that was moving them.” Bill Viola

#66: How Platonist. Also, structural. Does the material world serve as a sheaf for various mental and emotional forms? That there is, for example, the embodiment of fear?

“The viewer sees only one image at a time in the case of film and, more extreme, only the decay trace of a single moving point of light in video. In either case, the whole does not exist (except in a dormant state coiled up in the can or tape box), and therefore can only reside in the mind of the person who has seen it, to be periodically revived through their memory. Conceptual and physical movement becomes equal, experience becomes a language, and an odd sort of concreteness emerges from the highly abstract, metaphysical nature of the medium.” Bill Viola

#67: This is another amazing idea: the dematerialization of the media. One can do conceptual art from jail. There is this process of reconstruction. The actual art piece is a linear stream located only in the head of the viewer—played and replayed—who puts it together. This is hugely attractive, to me, because it models such a dispersion, a wide expanse of effectiveness.

“The word contemplation is derived from the ancient practice of divination where a templum is marked off in the sky by the crook of an augur to observe the passage of crows through a square.” BV

#68: Ah, the source of the cats on leashes steady camera.

“’Feedback,’ using Norbert Wiener’s definition, is ‘a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance,’ a learning process with the ability ‘to change the general method and pattern of performance.’ The present methods employed by QUBE limit feedback to the mere illusion of participation.” Peter D’Agostino

#69: I cited this, first, to remember Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and how his characters seemed to learn about the systems they were dropped in—as if a person dropped into dreamscape. But, second, the last part of this quote, which deals with fake participation could never be so relevant. How can one simulate a system that in name invites participation but actually is working on its own?

“The cathartic nature of speech and revelation brings a balance, assurance and occasional wholeness to the duplicitous subcurrents of the text. This series is based on fact, on reality. However, close-up shots on video make even the most honest and despairing episodes hint at fictitiousness.” Lynn Hershman

#70: This is important to consider as I embark on the project of fusing video and poetry—how the visual medium will undermine the certainty of the text.

“Thus an art apparently hostile and antithetical to mass culture, preserving craft values and arguing against ‘labor consciousness,’ in fact depended on its technologies: a seeming paradox worth keeping in mind. The camera and print technologies were perceived as neutral, tool-like machines to be subsumed under the superior understadings or an aesthetic elite.” LH

#71: An amazing fucking idea. What is preserved is the reference to the importance of crafts—not the crafts themselves. No wonder people are self-conscious when they take craft classes. They have been bombarded with the photographic representations and not the real objects of labor. What a discord, or disappointment. Perhaps I should take a picture of a woven basket with a clip underneath it reading, “The importance of a woven basket.”

“Marcuse traces the use of ‘culture’ by dominant elites to divert people’s attention from collective struggles to change human life and toward individualized effort to cultivate the soul like a garden, with the reward being pie in the sky—by and by—or more contemporaneously, ‘personal growth.’ Succinctly put, Marcuse shows the idea of culture in the West to be the defusing of social activity and the enforcement of passive acceptance. In the Western tradition, form was identified as the means to actually affect an audience.” LH

#73: Again, I go back to Kosuth, who argues form is the only way to influence and change minds conceptually. Do you think Marcuse is talking about content in a traditional sense? What kind of art would he make? I buy the argument, almost wholesale, that Western culture is actually a system of pacification. More now than ever. The same fucking radio songs, symphonies, tv plots, theater pieces. I can almost say I never saw radical art –or art that prompted me to act, socially, in conscience—until I sought it out.

“Cage and company taught a quietist attention to the vernacular of everyday life, an attention to perception and sensibility that was inclusive rather than exclusive but that made a radical closure when it came to divining the causes of what entered the perceptual field.

“Clearly, though, McLuhanism, like other familiar theories, offered artists the chance to shine in the reflected glory of the prepotent media and cash in on their power over others through formalized mimetic aestheticization.”

“To recapitulate, these histories seem to rely on the encompassable (pseudo-) transgressions of the institutions of both television and the museum, formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the ‘capabilities’ of the medium, as though these were God-given, a technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time, space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology; that is, a vocabulary out of old-fashioned discredited formalist moderism.”

“Nothing could better suit the consciousness industry than to have artists playing about its edges embroidering its forms and quite literally developing new strategies for ads and graphics.”

The history of the avant-gardes and their failure to make in-roads into the power of either the art institutions or the advancing technologies through these means suggests that these efforts cannot succeed.”

#74:A weighty and swift critique. Artists, quite simply, have been appropriated. The avant-garde is a rehashing of old terms and helps the commodity-centric power structures.

“…each person has a very proprietary feeling toward his own image. What happens to his image happens to him. In fact, when one person’s image overlaps another’s, there is a psychological sensation akin to touch.” Myron W. Kruger

#75: How fun to manipulate images. Perhaps a way to bring folks together? A public work that incorporates your image and the last visitor. We almost never get to see ourselves juxtaposed. So maybe full body shots and, then, position next to someone else’s image.

“’Only through myth and the structures it requires can we combine the necessary paradox of definition and ambiguity, of order and uncertainty, of the tangible and the infinite.’ Levi Strauss.

#76: That myth is simultaneously ambiguous and specific. What does it mean for narrative sequences to not be connected with cause and effect but be running, perhaps, adjacently?

“Networking supports endless redescription and recontextualization such that no language or visual code is final and no reality is ultimate.” Roy Ascott

#77: In the context of an awesome endorsement of networks and, specifically, how they aid and compliment the user. Here is the reasons why: you get upset, rattled and have to create new meanings all the time. Infinite potential for interaction.

“Totally invisible to our everyday unaided perception, for example, is the underlying fluidity of matter, the indeterminate dance of electrons, the ‘snap, crackle and pop’ of quanta, the tunneling of transportations, nonlocal and superluminal, that the new physics presents. It is these patterns of events, these new exhilarating metaphors of existence—nonlinear, uncertain, layered, and discontinuous—that the computer can describe.” R.A.

#78:Our tools make us, just as we make them. Computers explain to us how the world works; I am likewise suspicious that we are projecting a computer’s functioning on the universe, just as clockmakers in the Renaissance saw nature as a cyclical clock turned by God’s hand.

“The telematic process, like the technology that embodies it, is the product of a profound human desire for transcendence: to be out of body, out of mind, beyond language. Virtual space and dataspace constitute the domain , previously provided by myth and religion, where imagination, desire, and will can reengage the forces of space, time and matter in the battle for a new reality.” R.A.

#79: Again, a bit hyperbolic and totalizing. Nevertheless the connection –technology and religion —of a disembodied state (as somehow longingly sought for) is interesting.

“The environment becomes equally as important as the object, if not more so, because the object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of the environment no matter in what space, close or wide apart, open air or indoor.” Frederick Kiesler

#80: Shifting the frame a bit wider—the environment defines an object, just as a context to a statement.

“There is a difference between actual cubic feet of space and the additional space that the imagination supplies. One is measure, the other an awareness of the void—of our existence in this passing world…”

“An empty space has no visual dimension or significance. Scale and meaning enter when some thoughtful object or line is introduced. This is why sculptures, or rather sculptural objects, create space.” Isamu Noguchi

#81: Fucking genius idea. Poles, for example, of the same size, stretched out linearly, create a sense of depth. This can then translate to the existential experience of passing through our lives.

“Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception.” Robert Smithson

#82: I remember reading this quote and how it explained why I was so intrigued with those close-up shots of rust, peeling paint, etc. The textures, if you let yourself believe it, are huge. You can see yourself getting swallowed by a dent in your car.

“When the Little People get destroyed, people start to think. I’ve often sensed the feeling of loss about the brutalization of that fragile fantasy which is emblematic of the lives they themselves lead, that sense of ‘well, everytime you try to do something good or beautiful around here, it’s always destroyed.’ It awakens and politicizes that consciousness.” Charles Simonds

#83: Small acts that incite reactions. The smallness, the peering in close, facilitates this empathetic moment. Attention becomes delicate, disembodied from human scale. Our emotions remain attached to sight.

“The metaphor was that a promenade is a homeostatic mechanism, wherein a community confirms its well-being on a daily basis to each other: everybody sees each other walking. So it’s urban ecology. If you break up the homeostatic mechanism then you have an angry city. People can’t see each other. You break the community. When we invent a new promenade system, we invent a new homeostatic mechanism, by which people can see each other on a daily basis.” Helen Meyer Harrison and Newton Harrison

#84: Just as it is important for lovers to hear about their partners’ days, communities need to see signs of health. That is, the same people walking on multiple days, a confirmation that people live. In cars, etc., people can’t tell who’s who, so it could be completely consistent with the circumstances of plague, etc. How many times do people go to malls in order to see community? To see faces?

“Objectivity is gained by being once removed. As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to ‘see yourself see.’ This seeing, this plumbing, imbues space with consciousness.” James Turrell

#85: This is instructive just as a means to create another level of meaning—make the viewer see him or herself viewing. Just put something into the piece, visual or poem, that refers to the actual moment of attention.

“The more unobtrusive the work, the more the object seemed to assert its integrity.” Kristine Stiles

#86: This reminds me of Oldenberg’s cardboard pieces. The simpler and more familiar the act, the more the actual object comes through as worthy of being explored.

“Barry Le Va emphasized the impossibility of perceiving the difference between indeterminant and determinant placement, the accident and the intention, by carefully distributing various materials in an installation and also randomly scattering them. In this way, he set up a tension between the perception of chaos and the perception of arrangement in sculptural situations that appear visually similar.” KS

#87: So, for example, the recent poem I wrote which includes a sonnet scattered among the details.

“Duality of experience is not direct enough.” Robert Morris

#88: Here it is hidden: He presumes a multiplicity of being, but defines it negatively and claims, with the word ‘direct,’ that it is the true way of connection. Lots of layering within the quote (even though I agree).

“Rectangular groupings of any number imply potential extension; they do not seem to imply incompletion, no matter how few their number or whether they are distributed as discrete units in space or placed in physical contact with each other.” Rober Morris

#89: Rectangular, not square. How few boxes could I get away with creating?

“Surfaces under tension are anthropomorphic: they are under the stresses of work much as the body is in standing. Objects which do not project tensions state most clearly their separateness from the human. They are more clearly objects.” Robert Morris

#90: I think of Justin’s stacked bricks piece, in which the tower is leaning just enough to imply imminent collapse. The body is not static, so any piece that needs to invite imagination and empathy should imply movement. But, again, there are stereotypical movements which cast the piece into a secondary level of attention. Using, say, Serra’s list of verbs, or even verbs that are infrequently used, can imply the human in the most vivid way possible.

“I think that if a work is substantial, in terms of its context, then it does not embellish, decorate, or point to specific buildings, nor does it add on to a syntax that already exists. I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created in this sense.” Richard Serra

#91: Perhaps the best example of this would be Serra’s giant impeding wall. He made an art that had to be navigated around. No one could ignore it; hopefully, calling attention to the fact that most public sculpture can be overlooked. I once read a feminist critique of the work, in which the author connected this aesthetic with the masculine go-it-alone mindset. Compare this ideas, of contrdicting space, to the Kiesler’s idea that the environment is as important as the work.

“They wanted me to put flag poles on top of pylons. My retort to that was I couldn’t imagine putting a swastika, a flag or a symbol on top of a Brancusi or a Rodin.” RS

#92: Again, art requires a freedom that transcends the political. It is absurd to think about nation states when exploring the human. There is a level, a connection, deeper than the constitutions of time and space and circumstance. Right?

“Rene Dubos discusses the distortion of stimuli: we tend to symbolize stimuli and then react to the symbol rather than directly to the stimuli.” Bruce Nauman

#93: This is similar to the phenomenological notion that our perceptions are mediated and, hence, we respond the idea of our sensations, rather than our direct experience. I respond, for example, to the idea that I just burned the fuck out of my arm, on my woodstove door, way before I even feel the pain. The question is, what does this mean for art? If people are responding to art, as an idea, even before they see something, then how much are they really reacting to the work? This stands as a strong argument for why art should be acategorical, or not easily pegged into either art or a regular everyday experience. Hoax artists were trying to get this idea across. At the same time, there are strengths in perspectives. We have to 1) select the frame through which we want our viewers to experience our work 2) let them see that we are asking them to get into a particular headspace.

“What I’m trying to do now is to set up situations in which audiences have to use their minds to piece elements back together.” Barry Le Va

#94: This makes me think a lot about narrative as construction. Le Va offers signifiers –such as his piece with strewn paint and canvas on a floor, as if someone stripped an exhibit to shreds—that the viewer can then turn into an ordered story.

2004-11-13T21:15:00.000-08:00

Fake Cities:
A Mindful Stroll Through America’s New Commercial Space

The Streets at South Point is a retail universe fit into a city set—a facsimile of urban blocks complete with manhole covers, street signs, lamps, pedestrian crossings and brightly colored awnings. Developers say they modeled it on Durham, the closest city, with the additions of corbelled warehouse walls, painted ads and tobacco curing smoke stack. But it would be an idealized copy, at best: the actual city’s downtown includes closed motels, defunct factories and plywood windows warped by rain.
Unlike Durham, this fake city is both populated and profitable. Shoppers pass by open store doors, feeling the rolling waves of air conditioning. And no one seems to care about this greater phenomenon in which historic models stand in for historic cities that are, themselves, disintegrating. This city thrives on its citizens’ television logic, their suspension of disbelief, their excitement in knowing that they will soon be entertained and their nostalgia for a community life they’ve never known.

Susan and I arrived ten minutes ago. She is a professor at Duke University, who I asked to accompany me to the mall to discuss its machinations.
We enter and sit beside a fountain in which bronze statutes of children appear to be playing. “This statute,” I say, “represents freedom for people while they shop. It’s calming effect counteracts the anxiety that all these ads produce.”
“It cools people down from the heightened anxiety of shopping,” Susan replies.
“Right,” I agree. “Developers try to overwhelm shoppers so they will purchase products to return themselves to a sense of stability. But developers don’t want shoppers to leave, so they place these fountains throughout the mall.”
“That’s interesting,” Susan replies. “I suppose the incidental plants are also a way of cooling the red zone of shopping.”
“And they’re exotic,” I say. “They make this place feel like a fantasy land.”
We sit silent for a second and look around. I spot a man in a striped polo shirt photographing store fronts and point him out to Susan.
“Must be undercover surveillance,” she jokes.
A man in a matching shirt walks by.
“He’s dressed like that guy,” I say. “I wonder if they’re part of something…”

Susan and I leave the table and follow the man. He’s in his late thirties, has moussed blonde hair and a muscular gait.
“Excuse me,” Susan asks. “Are you part of this place?”
“No,” he replies, “I am on vacation. My friends and I came from South Africa.”
His name, as we find out later, is Gerhardt Jooste.
“Are you moving to Durham?” Susan inquires.
“No. We are just on a tour.”
“It’s odd that you would come to Durham. We’re not in the center of any map.”
“We’re taking a tour of shopping centers. We’ve been now to 19. We went to Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Diego, Atlanta and Raleigh-Durham. I’ll tell you, this is the best we’ve seen. We are quite surprised.”
Gerhardt looks toward his friend who has wandered off.
“Do you work in city planning?”
“No, we’ve got a property development company in South Africa.”
“You should go to downtown Durham. A lot of this mall was stylized on decorative aspects that they borrowed from there.”
“I must say, it is something other than your typical closed mall,” he says. “Look at the shop fronts and canopies!”
“Are you going to build malls like this when you get to South Africa?” I ask.
“We’ve been building malls,” he explains. “We’re doing smaller things about a third of this size called Value Malls. We noticed that we don’t really see the service oriented things, like food outlets, here. In South Africa, you’ll get a food retailer as an anchor in a shopping center.”
“Our older style malls always had a grocery store as one of the anchors,” Susan explains. “But more recently we don’t have them. Randall and I were theorizing that’s so shoppers are not faced with the grim reality of shopping to provide for their actual needs in the space where they’re supposed to be shopping for their fantasy life.”
“We were discussing this last night. What happens when people come to shop for fashion? They won’t go groceries? They make separate trips?”
“Those more ordinary needs are not going to be met in a mall like this. The service oriented, again, returns the person to the more daily life reality. A mall like this, even though it looks like a city street, is really meant to cue a more extravagant style of consumption.”
“But it’s all about convenience.”
“No, you’re still living with convenience.”
“We are looking for convenience. We are looking for a shopping experience.”
“No, this is a shopping experience. This is not convenience. Not a single daily life need would be met here.”
Gerhardt looks perplexed. “ But wouldn’t it be nice to have a shopping experience and an extension that is service oriented?”
“Yea, divided by a parking lot,” Susan replies.
We stroll toward the indoor mall’s entrance. Overhead, a mammoth slab of concrete serves to shield shoppers from rain; they pass into the front doors quickly.
“Don’t get into trouble,” I tell Gerhardt, reminding him that this city is private property. “The Visitor Courtesy Code says you can’t take photos inside.”
“I won’t,” he responds. “We’ve been thrown out about ten times. I think what we’ve seen outside is so nice.”

Susan and I walk inside. Map stands of rosewood veneer feature the engraved shapes of crop circles. We proceed into the central rotunda in which elevators crisscross the enormous space. People can be seen walking at every eye-level and in every direction. Sound projects and dies like noise around an indoor pool.
“We should stop by this store called Build-a-Bear,” I say.
“That’s where you make your teddy bear,” Susan asks.
I nod and we get on the escalator.
When we arrive at the store we notice a large mechanized bear wearing a thimble. It is rocking its head back and forth and appears to be captured in a cylindrical glass case. Beside it, a man is standing in a doorway. He has a buzz cut, khaki trousers, and name tag reading “Blair.” He is holding a teddy to his chest.
“How are you today,” he asks.
“Hi,” Susan and I reply in unison.
“Have you been to Build a Bear before?”
“Um, no,” we say.
“Well, we have a selection of about 30 different bears. They start at ten and go up to 25 dollars. You just pick them out of the bins. And basically you just circle around. We have a Hear Me section where you can check out little sound chips like this.”
Blair squeezes his bear. It emits a he-he-he laugh. He continues: “If you want, you can put one inside their paw. After that we have a Stuff Me section, where we actually stuff them. It’s really neat. You can stuff them, then go back to the corner where we have all kinds of clothes. Then there’s a letter on the computer. You fill that out and it prints a birth certificate. Finally, your animal goes home in a little cardboard box shaped like a house.”
“Wow,” I reply, astonished.
“Wowee,” Susan says. “We’re going to walk around and look at the process. This is amazing.”
The store is decorated like a kids version of a sewing shop. It is filled with oversized yellow, red and blue ratchets, gears and zippers. The company motto, “Where Best Friends Are Made,” wraps around the registers. I walk by the bins of teddy pelts and approach a line of shoppers. They are standing in front of the Stuff Me section.
A teenage boy watches Marianna, a Build a Bear employee, take his teddy and place it over a stainless steel cylinder resembling an exhaust pipe. White fluff shoots through a clear tube into the animal. Marianna wiggles the fur over the rim. The process makes the staccato sounds of a whip cream can. When she finishes, Marianna gestures toward the boy’s hand, which contains a red satin heart. “Rub the heart together,” she tells him. “Make a wish and give it a kiss.”
The boy brings it to his mouth, kisses it and hands it to Marianna. She places it inside the bear and passes it to another employee, Amanda, who sews up its back. I walk away and find Susan in the Dress Me section.
“Well, this is a popular store,” she says. “Now I see how they pay their rent. Look at these leathers. You can have your own little…”
“Bad ass bear,” I interrupt.
“Oh my gosh.”
“They go home in their own little house,” I say, pointing to the cardboard shacks the size of grocery bags.
“Well, I have lots I can say about that,” she says, starting toward the door.

Outside we pass through a stream of shoppers. Susan turns to me excitedly, “The idea of cross-species birthing, united with assembly line, and finished off with consumption-- buying the proper attire!”
I laugh. “What would Marx say about this?”
She thinks then nods. “Well, in Build a Bear, we’re purchasing the aura of production. Also the sense that making it is also birthing it is a mixing of genres. It’s fascinating that a child who will never work on an assembly line gets to experience what that might have been like. Yet, in fact, the stuff out of which the bear is built is probably made by real children in sweatshops somewhere.”

We leave Build a Bear and walk onto a bridgeway where three women are seated, quiet and staring, on a bench. We look over the safety rail at the lower level kiosks and stores. “When you stand here and look at the flow of people,” Susan says, “it’s almost as if each one of us in this environment becomes an item on an assembly line.”
I ask her to explain.
“Well, I’m still thinking about Build a Bear, where you really do participate in assembly line production. In there we are meant to produce, or at least assemble, a product. Here you are meant to assemble your consumption via all these images. I mean, look at this American Eagle.”
A poster hanging to our left depicts a woman crowd surfing. Her exposed belly is centrally framed while teems of shirtless boys hold her up.
“They devote a huge amount of window space to this large photo that sells the image of people having fun. If we looked at other photos, I think we would see they really are selling moods, experiences and qualities that are less tangible than clothes. It’s as if purchasing these clothes could make you have an array of feelings that you’re not now having.”
A Polynesian hut décor, to our right, frames large posters of teenagers in beach scenes. “It works with the mall,” I add. “If you want to get out of here, and you see a photo depicting freedom, you might purchase the product to substitute your leaving.”
Susan nods and we walk on. “Have you noticed that this mall is structured in a gradual bend,” I ask. “That it makes the shopper keep walking to find the end?”
“Yes. It’s an optical illusion.”
“And this whole arc is filled with bridges. It’s like we’re in a Mad Max and the Thunderdome living facility.”
Susan ponders then attempts an explanation: “In these enclosed malls, architecture connects with time. And it’s about forgetting it. Have you seen anything to remind you what time it is? This kind of architecture, which features a lot of bridgeway, reinforces the notion that you are in a state of suspension.”
“You know, the storefronts also confuse time and place,” I say. “Look how many types of historic architecture are represented. Doesn’t that look like a storefront from Florence?”
To our right, a shop features a canopied, old-world concrete façade. Charlestonian and Bauhaus styles, with hurricane dormers and rigid grids, adorn the adjacent stores.
Susan nods. “All connection to a real environment, all pretense of the down home, evaporates. Outside we might have had a Main Street—a kind of place that reminds us that once we shopped in an open air, urban environment. In here, these shops might have different logo labels at their entry ports, but the entire environment has imploded into a hyperspace of global merchandise.”
“What is hyperspace?”
“Well, where we are joined to the globalized network of production and consumption. Where we no longer have a demographic, or a sense of topography. Where we no longer have a here here. Where we could be anywhere.”

Susan and I walk toward an escalator and, beside it, a statute of a child with her hand outstretched toward the moving rails. She scares disembarking shoppers, who presumably turn to see only her grinning innocence. Riding down, Susan and I notice surveillance cameras hidden amid track lighting. We exit the escalator and walk into a yellow and white tile hallway connecting the mall to the bathrooms. At the end of the hallway, three windows look onto two men sitting at a curved desk. Above them a banner reads, The Office of Public Safety.
The men are looking at various screens. One depicts an officer talking to a disgruntled shopper in the parking lot. Another depicts people strolling through the mall. Three monitors show Susan and myself, from the back, looking through the window.
“Why would they have so many angled on the alleyway to the bathroom,” Susan wonders.
The man on the right rolls his chair in front of a screen, reaches for a joystick and pans the food court. He can magnify the image enough to see a single person chewing.
“Wow! He can pan. It’s a joystick. And zoom! Look at that!” I say.
“Right, I guess the place where people would mingle like a food court is where they really have people watching.”
After seeing an officer disappear behind an unmarked door, we leave the tile hallway. We walk outside, sit on a bench and face the mall.
“Well, the first thing I noticed is that down the alleyway to the shits is the security,” Susan says. “And all of a sudden another aspect of this place is revealed: There is a whole backside we’re not seeing. As in Disney World, you never see the work that keeps it going. You don’t see the cleaning. That’s all done at night, after the visitors have gone home. There’s this erasure of work. Yet it’s oddly manifested in the work of surveillance, which you’re allowed to see.”
“It’s intimidation,” I say. “The security confronts the inquiry of how this place works. The site for understanding your environment is tucked away like all the other sites of necessity—bathroom, food court, children’s area. Everything but consumptive fantasy has been put in the margins.”
Susan shifts in her seat and replies. “It’s like the South African said. He was basically asking, Where is real, daily life? Well, it’s in these corners and odd little manifestations like that. Otherwise, none of this is about real, daily life.”

story written in 2003, unpublished

2004-04-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

The West Virginia Town That Loved An Imposter

June Bug and I were milling in the floodlights of Gus’s store looking at his bike. The knobby tires were mud-caked and a license plate was bent over the handlebars, serving as a shelf. He lit a cigarette. “I got a call one night,” he said. “There were two Jewelry Nabbers sitting up at the BP.”
“Jewelry Nabbers?” I asked.
“You know, a bunch of people sitting in the gas station parking lot.”
He spoke, as he always does, as if he were also chewing ice. “It was probably a month ago. The scanner was like There are two Jewelry Nabbers sitting at the BP on Main Street. I was like, boom, I was there. It took, at max, a second. Man, I was there. I was like, boom, I was there.”
He acted out the experience of arriving and stopping on his bike. “Well, I didn’t see any cars. Turn around, and boom, there it was-- a van and a car. Some people were sitting there, chit chatting and carrying on.”
“What were they doing?”
“Sitting there talking. These girls came out of the van. I was like, Holy moly, uh uh uh. I never saw something funnier.”
He drew on his cigarette.
“We got another call, over here on Chicken Farm Road. There was a bunch of ‘em that was stabbing each other. I was there in two seconds. You got to go down a hill, down by my Cousin and Aunt’s house, across the creek and over the hill. And you can’t see nothing. It’s all dark. When I got to the blacktop, my whole bike was covered from the front to the back in mud, weeds, grass. I pedaled that bike so fast. Whoosh. I was there. Two Jewelry Nabbers were beating the hell out of each other. It was like, Cut the fight! Here comes the law! I was hitting the brakes, laid the bike down, started chasing one. The other one jumped in the car and took off. Didn’t have no back up. No nothing. 10-80 Valley Mart.”
“What’s 10-80?”
“10-80 means you’re clear. And those two Jewelry Nabbers were 10-80. That night, I was
tired, you know. I was up for four days, straight, no sleep, no eat, no nothing. Boy, when I got to the house, and I hit that couch, I was like thrown out. It was like, boom, I was out of it. That’s how dang tired I was. They were like, We need you right now! I was like, Sorry, man. Click. Turned the ringer off.”
Annie came out of the store and told Willie, A.K.A. June Bug, to come back inside. He tossed the cigarette down and we walked into the store. He started stocking coolers but looked ready for patrol. A gold plastic Whirlwind security badge was pinned on an orange shirt reading, Latch Key Summer 91. He had a BB gun, in a holster, on his right hip. Out of his back pocket hung a red and white striped package of Beech Nut Chew. He stopped working for a moment to adjust his dentures--filling their cavities with pink goo then popping them back into his mouth with the ease of tossing a handful of party nuts.
June Bug is disproportionately muscular, like a jockey with thick legs. When he walks he throws his feet out in front of him, as if he were kicking at the edges of leather chaps. He has a buzz cut and a tuft of coarse blonde hair on his chin. Dark circles ring around his brown eyes, which are usually blinkless and glossy. A jutting jaw protrudes from his otherwise flat face, making him look like he’s biting his bottom lip.
I could see, through the store window, a cyclist pulling into the lot. It was Eric, June Bug’s best friend, an amateur inventor who would be accompanying us on the patrol. I introduced myself and asked if he frequently went on trips with June Bug.
“As often as I can--” he said, “with all the safety precautions.” He took off his blue Bell helmet and revealed a folded napkin underneath. He was pear-shaped and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. A WWJD key chain dangled out of his pocket. “Willie knows why.”
June Bug walked outside. “Why is that?” I asked.
“I was hit by a car a few months ago,” he said.
“He came out of the Go-Mart and wasn’t paying attention,” June Bug said.
“Yea,” Eric said, solemnly.
“Boom!” June Bug recalled. “Ran right into him.”
“There was this woman, who was getting ready to pull out,” Eric explained.
“Eric!” June Bug hollered, reliving the experience. “And boom!”
“By the time I saw her, it was too late to put on my brakes. I was like, Ah!, and she daggone hit me, and my bike, right head-on. Bent the front rim and totaled the front part. I hobbled around the front of her hood. I had put two or three dents in it. Almost lost my glasses. My glasses fell off my face and on the road.”
Eric looked at both of us. “That’s why I’m pretty much now wearing a helmet and reflective vest,” he said. “I also have a headlight and taillight on my bike: so people will be able to see me.”
Annie walked out of the store. “Willie,” she said. “Lock the door for me. It’s midnight.”
June Bug did as he was told and the three of us got ready for the ride. We lined up–June Bug leading, me behind him and Eric taking up the rear. We pulled onto West Virginia State Road 34 and began June Bug’s patrol.

The Making of Plastic Badges

June Bug started his nightly rounds, a few years ago, after he found a church door unlocked. He called the Hurricane Police Department and waited until morning for an officer to arrive. When one did he called attention to the unlocked door. The cop concurred that it was a problem and promised to inform the owner. “A couple days later,” June Bug said, “I got the credit.”
Everyone on the Hurricane Police Department knows June Bug, who acquired the nickname for his propensity to flutter around, or travel far distances. Their first experience with him was when he, as a child, illegally boarded a stopped train. He rode to Charleston, 25 miles away, and was noticed by police officers there. The Charleston PD called the Hurricane PD and asked if they knew a kid named Willie Miller.
Around this time, the cops also noticed that he obsessively admired them. “When he was real little,” Officer Mike Mullins explained, “he’d come over and wash cars. You’d hear spraying, look and there’s Willie, washing the cruisers, even if you just had them washed. We’d just wait until he’d get done and give him a couple dollars.”
They are used to his good intentions and awry logic. “He’s not retarded,” Mullins said. “He’s just slow.”
Officers soon suspected that his family members were mismanaging his Social Services checks. So they took over his finances. When he became an adult, they found an apartment for him. Now they keep him supplied with bicycles, buy his groceries and let him relax at the station. “We’ve taken care of him for so long that he is part of our little family here,” said Mullins.
June Bug recognizes the degree to which the Hurricane PD has taken care of him. And, for better or worse, he fantasizes that he’s one of them. Mullins remembers a time when Willie was consistently getting hit by cars. The police gave him headlights, which he altered to look like police lights. “He took magic markers and painted the lenses blue and red,” he said. “If he thought a car was going too fast, he took the switch and turned it on and off fast enough that it made the lights blink.”
Because he had grown up believing he was a cop, residents of Hurricane, population 6,000, play along. “He has a little ticket book and tries to write people tickets,” his special education teacher from high school, Ms. Sandra McCormick, said. “We just laugh at it or say, ‘Ok, Willie, Give us a ticket.’”
Mullins believes that June Bug reciprocates his appreciation for the town through his patrols. He looks for buglars, broken windows and unlocked doors. As Mullins said, “He’s just trying to give back to Hurricane.”

Checking Doors

The first car to pass us on our patrol was a police cruiser. The driver dragged his light across the three midnight cyclists, focused on June Bug and drove on. From behind, I watched June Bug riding. He pumped his legs furiously, coasted, pumped furiously again, all the time throwing the weight of the BMX back and forth beneath him. He arched his back and rolled his shoulders forward. His white plastic seat was angled upwards like a launching shuttle, which, in conjunction with a pair of silver pegs on the front axles, allowed him to prop his feet up like a chopper-rider when cruising down a hill.
At the first stop, a Kawasaki dealership, June Bug aimed his bike straight for the door. He reached out his hand and yanked on the handle. He then leaned into a sharp curve and approached the next door. “This is what I do,” he said.
We proceeded into neighborhoods where June Bug flashed glances between each house. The area was serene: Only white birdbaths contrasted the night and green lawns. We then rode into downtown Hurricane to check a cable TV station and church. We stopped behind a big white bank to catch our breaths.
“You guys are a lot faster than me,” Eric said, pulling up.
“Well, Randall’s rode for a long time,” June Bug explained. “And me, I got used to it.”
“I’d have to have a motor on my bike just to keep up,” Eric said. He laughed nervously.
“I bet you could build one,” I said. “I don’t doubt it. You never know what the imagination will serve. We ought to show this guy the CB radio I built,” Eric said.
“Now’s not the time, Bubba.”
“What?” I asked.
“It’s just something I built from scratch,” he explained. “I took an ordinary CB radio, a DC fan assembly, two lead-acid batteries, a sheet of plywood, a military backpack frame and built a communication backpack out of it.”
I said I would love to see it. We got on our bikes and headed toward Eric’s house. On our way, we passed by a graveyard, down from which some trucks were working. The flood lights illuminated large piles of gravel. As we approached an intersection, a car was coming from the factory’s direction. June Bug was in the lead and crossed the road.
“Bubba, watch out!” he yelled back to Eric. Eric approached the intersection and stopped. The car went by at about ten miles per hour. Eric looked both ways, stood up on the pedals and proceeded across the intersection.
“That was a close one,” June Bug exclaimed. And Eric looked relieved.

Neighbors

Hurricane lies 25 miles west of Charleston and 35 miles from Ohio. It is a town mixed with storied streets, with names like Chicken Farm Road, and new subdivisions, with names like Harborland Estates. The area made national news twice in the last decade—once, when Andrew Jackson Whitakker Jr., a local construction worker, won the 314.9 million dollar PowerBall Lottery, and, again, when the neighboring town of Nitro produced a chemical that exploded and killed 300,000 in India.
It is located in Advantage Valley, a triangular space stretching between industrial cities in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio known for their mining and petrochemical industries. Most of the residents are employed in larger nearby cities, which gives Hurricane a distinctly residential feel.
State newspapers have paid attention to the area recently because Shawnee Hills, a five-county mental health facility, closed due to bankruptcy in 2001. All of the residents were shuffled to other smaller mental health facilities. As a result, the smaller service centers have had to shift from recreational services, such as job coaching, to residential health care. Every mentally challenged resident of West Virginia is entitled to 180 hours of job coaching. Yet, now, they must wait up to three months before they get assistance. Hence a lot more mentally challenged folks are living in small towns with little institutional guidance.
Hurricane, as a community, has accommodated its mentally challenged citizens. The folks at Gus’s store have given June Bug a job, which he can work at his own pace. His boss drives him to appointments and pays him for mopping the floors and stocking coolers. A local barbershop cuts June Bug’s hair for free. Pizza Plus lets him eat on a tab and calls Officer Mullins, who withdraws money from June Bug’s account, to pay it. “As soon as he gets in his core little area,” Mullins said, “he has all the help he’ll ever need.”
June Bug isn’t the only mentally challenged resident tended to by the town. A school bus picks up Billy and takes him to work as a Hurricane High School janitor. The bank cashes Ronny’s Captain D’s checks, even though he doesn’t always understand the amount. And grocery store attendants help him pay. “If Ronny wants to go in and get a gallon of milk,” Ms. McCormick says, “the attendants tell him to give them a five and they’ll give him back change…The community is very tolerant and accepting of them.”
A lot of the mentally challenged residents have routines which folks have come to expect. Billy goes by the fire department regularly, for example, and June Bug visits the police station. If these citizens break the routine, residents interpret it as cause for alarm. Rocky Saunders serves as an example. As McCormick said, “He has a routine that he goes to Al’s on certain days of the week and then he goes over to A to Z grocery store and gets his check cashed. And then he goes to the deli and gets food. If he doesn’t do that then Burgess, who works in the deli, she’ll call and say, ‘Hey I haven’t seen Rocky for a couple of weeks.’”
The patterns are complemented by fixations. “Even though they grow up,” McCormick says, “mentally, these kids get stuck between the ages of about five and 12. So they are like the young kids who still have that one thing they really like.”
Eric likes inventors. June Bug likes cops and bikers. Rocky loves Jeff Gordon. Billy likes firemen. Ronny likes truckers. And these fixations provide Hurricane residents with a way to relate to their mentally challenged neighbors. “People find out about it and they contribute to that,” McCormick said. “The kids just love it.”

Copy

When we arrived at his apartment, Eric opened the door to a long stairway with tire marks along the white walls. We heaved our bikes up and parked them inside. His apartment was sparsely filled—a kitchen table, a couch, a roll of paper towels on a counter. He had accented the space with a glow-in-the-dark bedspread, light-up Star Trek Enterprise poster and shelf cluttered with Back to the Future DeLoreans. I spotted a biker glove, perforated at the knuckles, stuck to his refrigerator. Penny-sized magnets were glued onto it. “What’s this?” I asked.
“An experiment of mine,” Eric said. “I’m trying to make a so-called magnetic glove. I have a theory for somehow being able to intensify the fields of all these magnets through a power source. And I want to be able to move metal objects from a few foot distance.”
June Bug, who had gone to sit at the kitchen table, was fiddling with a pizza cutter. Eric wiggled his hand into the glove and stretched it out in the direction of his friend. “I’d like to be able to see myself make that pizza cutter come towards me. I could just reach out my hand and it would go Ka-king!”
Eric put the glove down and we walked over to his prized invention: The Communication Pack. It was leaning against a windowed wall and was as he described: an army issue backpack frame attached to a large plywood board. Yellow sponge foam was added to protect a potential wearer’s back. Two batteries, two fans, two volt meters, a CB and antenna were fixed to the board with erector set mounting plates. It looked identical to a WWII Coordinate Caller’s Radiopack.
“All that, right there, took me roughly one month to build. I didn’t go by any book. I just played it by imagination,” he explained, proudly. “I understood how a CB works in a car, but the key to the project was I had to think, What’s the equivalent of a car battery?”
He pointed to two small black boxes. “So I got it running off two rechargeable lead-acid batteries. They’re an experimental power supply. The only current bug I have in it is that one of these batteries fluctuates; it doesn’t hold a charge.”
June Bug went over to the pack, picked up the microphone and said, “Anybody out there working in Hurricane tonight?”
“You have to turn it on,” Eric said. He began fiddling with the power supply.
“Anybody out there,” June Bug said again.
Eric then told the story of the pack’s debut, which was the occasion of his and June Bug’s meeting. “I was mainly out and about in the town of Hurricane,” he explained, “performing an experimental test run to see how far my pack could actually get on its own.”
He described walking into Gus’s while Willie and an attendant named Bethany were working. “Willie asked about the pack,” Eric said, “and Bethany thought it was real impressive.”
June Bug shook his head.
“She was impressed by it,” Eric emphasized.
“No, she wasn’t.”
Eric looked hurt.
“She said I could possibly get it patented.”
“Cause you were working on it?”
“I know it’s already been invented,” he said, “but not every invention will work the same.”

Quince and Budweiser

The store at the corner of 60 and 32 is known as “Gus’s.” It is located across the street from a junkyard more filled with space than cars. June Bug was sleeping behind it when Gus, the owner, discovered him and offered him a job. The new employee showed the owner his appreciation by calling him, thereafter, “Dad.” When Gus sold the store to Allen, the second owner kept June Bug on staff. June Bug transferred the paternal title to Allen.
Allen remembers the first time his employee used the title. June Bug, late one night, was riding back from St. Albans, 12 miles away, and lighting a cigarette on the side of the road. He was clipped by a speeding car. The EMTs called Allen. “Everyone was calling me at 2, 3 o’clock in the morning, saying, ‘Your son got hit.’ I woke up. I was like, ‘I don’t have a son.’” He figured it was June Bug and drove to the hospital.
Allen’s managerial style, anyway, is more fatherly than formal. June Bug has quit many times, mostly over women, and Allen always takes him back. “He calls you and says, ‘I quit. I ain’t coming no more.’ He likes the girls,” Allen explained, “and if one of the girls is being friendly to the customers, he gets jealous. He gets up and quits. I call him. He says, ‘No, no, I’m not coming back.’ Two or three days later, ‘Dad, I’m broke, can I come back?’ ‘Okay, Okay.’”
Marsha is one of these attendants who June Bug has quit over. She is 25 years old, has curly blonde hair and rides ATVs. She has an exasperated, flirtatious style with the customers. When June Bug works with Marsha, he entertains her with fantastic stories of love. “He plays to have like six or seven girlfriends,” Marsha said. “There was this one girl. She was in a wheelchair and Willie loved her to death.”
One time Marsha put up a sign on the front door that read, “Wanted: Girlfriend for Willie.” The customers thought this was hilarious because as much as Willie is known and taken care of by the community, he is also its comic relief.
Hence, June Bug stories abound. There was the time that he couldn’t figure out how to apply the brakes on a four-wheeler and rode through a wall of lattice. Witnesses say he created a cartoon-like outline of a head and shoulders. There was the time that he was riding to a call, chasing an ambulance, and ran into the vehicle’s back doors. Then there was the time when he requested a steak for his 29th birthday and, after ordering it, took an hour to chew through it. There was the time June Bug, claiming to be an FBI agent, frisked a stranger. There was the time Gus took him to Philadelphia and he told everyone he went to Lebanon.
There was also the time he was arrested after calling in a burglary. “I had a store in Barbersville,” Gus explained. “It just happened that the store got robbed. The alarm company called the cops and Willie called me from the payphone because he was there five or 10 minutes before it happened. I told Willie, ‘Okay, Stay outside and wait for the cops to get there.’
“Willie went in, from where they broke in, to see what they did. The cops pulled over and saw him in there. He’s not known there, like he is in Hurricane, so they pulled a gun on him and arrested him. Willie, I don’t know why, carries about 100 empty lighters in his pockets. When the cops arrested him, they had to frisk him. They pulled all the lighters out and lined them up. He was yelling, ‘Gus!’ I said, ‘Son, Son.’ He was crying. When the police emptied his pockets they knew he was not all together.”

Ascension

After leaving Eric’s house we rode into a neighborhood nearly tucked underneath Interstate 64. Large black masses of mountains struck up from the landscape. Eric and June Bug stopped in front of a house with a small bicycle leaning against a wall. I pulled up to hear Eric saying, “Willie, it’s up to you man. If you want to go to the knob, we’ll go to the knob.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” June Bug replied. “Take Randall up there. He’s never been.”
He started speaking in a serious tone. “You’re going to have to back us up, Eric. You’re the one with the headlight. Randall, he doesn’t have a light. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any form of reflection at all on his bike.”
They looked at my bike and disdainfully focused on a dusty orange sticker.
“I have one reflector, but it’s so dead it won’t work,” I said.
June Bug and Eric nodded and we took off toward the mountains.
“What is this place?” I asked June Bug.
“I call this the knob,” he explained.
“Does anything go on up here?” I asked.
“Nope. Just sit back and watch the view,” June Bug said. He stretched the last word out like a panorama. “This is where I come at night when I get pissed off, or I get mad, or I don’t get my way.”
I had heard of the site before, but under a different name-- Heaven Hill. Supposedly, from it’s summit, the lights of downtown Hurricane form a question mark.
When we passed under the highway, the road to the knob became severely steep and rutted like a washboard. We rode as far as we could and then dismounted. We began pushing our bikes. The woods to either side were intensely dark. June Bug’s scanner was blaring from his hip. We heard rustling behind us, the sound of tires on gravel. “Here comes a car!” June Bug yelled, with an air of crisis.
A lowered Chevrolet Camero passed us slow. June Bug stared into its tinted windows. “That’s the one that the cops are looking for,” he growled. It passed and we watched its lights drive slowly across the mountain top.

Ink and Water

June Bug’s patrols have resulted in three arrests. All of them occurred one night when some kids tried to steal a van from a transmission shop. The hoodlums got the vehicle started, but couldn’t get it in gear. Having gone this far, they pushed it out of the garage and into the road. Willie, on bike, spotted them. He started chasing the van, until it rolled onto a curb. The boys jumped out of the doors. June Bug chased them through alleyways and neighborhoods. Every time he passed a house he yelled, “Call 911 ! Officer needs backup!”
Someone heard his cries and reported the emergency. The dispatcher called Officer Mullins, who was on duty, and asked if he needed help. Mullins recalled the moment: “I was like, ‘It’s 3 o clock in Hurricane, where there’s nothing in the world going on, what are you talking about? I’m just driving around.’”
She told him that someone was in an alleyway yelling, “Call 911! Officer needs backup!” Mullins said, “Oh, Okay,” and took off. He saw Willie chasing the kids and caught up with them in a subdivision. He arrested the boys.
Despite this success, Mullins doesn’t ask June Bug to do anything police-related. He worries that he might stumble into a dangerous situation and get hurt. McCormick agrees and doesn’t think people supporting June Bug’s police fantasies is a good idea. She cites the fact that his fantasy exists only as long as people from Hurricane are involved. As soon as an outsider enters the picture, June Bug’s actions can look downright bizarre or threatening.
She cites the time June Bug almost got shot. It was 3 A.M., rainy, and a woman from out of state pulled into the Go-Mart to get gas. Willie didn’t recognize her and approached her window to write her a ticket.
When the woman went inside the Go-Mart, she said to an attendant, “I just saw this guy. He looked wild coming up on that bike. He pulled out a little plastic badge and was giving me a ticket. I was in fear for my life.”
The attendant consoled her that that was just Willie.
The woman replied, “I don’t care who he is, here, like this, in the middle of the night. He was real lucky I didn’t have my gun lying on the seat. If he had opened the door, I would have probably shot him.”
Although McCormick discourages people from playing along with June Bug, she doesn’t think Hurricane residents will change their behavior. “You try to educate them, that this is not a good idea,” she said, “but it’s hard to change people. They think they are doing him a favor.”

Foggy Vista

When we arrived at the summit, we stopped in a curve of worn dirt. Beer bottles and clothes were scattered amid clumps of grass. We leaned our bikes down, mud caking in the pedals, and looked at the darkened hills.
“When you cross the state line--” June Bug said, “Mountains, that’s all it is. There’s a tunnel. There’s this big old, huge river.”
He started telling a story about a time he lived in Florida. “I loved my job,” he said, full of sadness. “I loved my wife. I had it made. I came home one night and wasn’t into it. I said, ‘I’m going back to West Virginia.’”
Eric nodded and offered a story. “That’s the way it is with me and Barbara right now,” he
said. “I’m so heartbroke right now.”
We looked at him. “Me and her, we’re not even currently speaking, not even talking or
looking at one another. She’s a rehab student,” Eric explained. He works as a janitor at a nearby mental health institution. “I can’t really associate with rehab students. Kind of like company policy.”
“Policy rules,” June Bug lamented, as if it were another example of cosmic injustice.
“You ever see that movie, or show, on TV?” June Bug asked. “You go around a track, and race with everybody else in the mountains? Well, I did that.”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“I went on a hiking trip,” he said. “Furthest journey I ever took. I was probably about sixteen. Fell Heights. A pier. Mountains. I went hiking. You know people loading up their mountain bikes and going on hiking trips?”
June Bug scoped the horizon. “Man, you talk about a bike loaded down with crap,” he continued. “I had almost six tubes, four patches, clothes. Man, I had that bike loaded down and everything-- tires, intertubes, patches, headlights, bicycle pump. I had that thing loaded down with brake gear, brake cables, brake tubes.”
“Just about everything,” Eric interjected.
“I had --what are them clothes?-- a snow suit. I had that on. Hurricane PD stopped me. Huntington Police stopped me. Trio cops stopped me. They were like, ‘Where you headed?’ ‘I’m headed south. I’m going on my hiking journey.’ Man, you want to talk about being on top of the world? I was on top of it. There were women there, son, on mountain bikes.”

We straddled our bikes and started down the hill. All I could hear, besides the whooshing wind, was the rattling of bikes on the rutted dirt road. June Bug made it down first. I could hear Eric’s brakes squealing behind me. Without a light, I watched June Bug’s silouette level out and pass underneath the highway. When I got there, June Bug looked around.
“What did you think of that ride there, Randall?”
“It was nice,” I replied, invigorated.
Eric pulled up.
“It was a blast too, wasn’t it Bubba?” June Bug said.
Eric looked flushed.
“Son, you got to ride that bike,” June Bug said.
“I know,” Eric said. “I didn’t want to risk getting myself hurt.”
“Bubba, you got me to take care of you, and that’s the bottom line.”
“Oh, I know that,” he said, smiling and bashful.
We pulled our handlebars around again and started to ride into town. “Willie’s little knob,” June Bug said. “Every inch of it. That’s why we call it sweet home knob.”

2003-11-24T21:12:00.000-08:00

The following posts --here cataloged as November 2003-- were, in fact, written in 2003. They comprise my first, wet-behind-the-ears attempt at filling a chapbook. Just started to write poetry. Apologies. Tried to recreate Auden's In Time Of War.

2003-11-22T21:07:00.000-08:00

Dinner In Ashland

Lear lost no kingdom. Juliet grieved none.
Hamlet was slain by a plastic rapier. Quince
is on a ten month contract. Halleluiah,
we have arrived: bread is bread.
(And one day we will forget what fire looked like)

Club Flex

I.

The ancient supplication of a boot lick.
What no accouterments? Is this sex or revenge?
The king gets buzzed in a red leather chair.
Someone’s dyke Mom wears a choke chain collar,
her mid-day jeans bulge off her hips.

II.

He wears a flower headdress and feels my pleather.
I tell him, I purchased these at Biscuit King. They
were lying beside a physics book. I complimented
the proprietor on her Country Ham. I prance down
the runway through eyes more ravenous than spotlights.
Yes, I tell him, she is my husband.

III.

The blood is not real, but the bowie is. So is the man with
the corkscrew teetering through his septum. The buck toothed
bird is not strapped to anything. He pretends to be tied
just to hear the Sirens’ song.

IV.

Napoleon, who Specializes in Military Fantasy, stands above
a green laundry basket. She lifts out a gas mask,
cock ring and child’s toy.

V.

He bought that shirt somewhere that played music.
His eyes are eggshells. You pathetic bottom,
she says. He kicks the table post in loose leather shoes.

VI.

Two shoe horns clasp one another. Pandemonium’s axis. Atlas finds his lover. Biceps and forearms, a decagon folded.
A Rembrandt circular.

VII.

Pimply pink buttocks peek through a black leather window.
Adhesive on a post-it note.

VIII.

The man over the turntables jokes about toilet seat covers,
talks of the tractor beneath him. As he says, This is some kinky country.

A Bigot’s Boots

When I loaded the silver box
that you rented to drive South,
I did not know you would give me
boots, your old boots, brown
and marbled, in high gloss,
with rainbow stitched peacocks,
and flames rising from the soles.

I was pleased to pack your globe,
even took time to locate the Union
of Socialist Soviet Republics,
as you watched, sandbags stacked
beneath your gaze, glasses
of radar, bandage on your foot.

I remember how you laughed
at obituaries, how you ridiculed
compassion’s senility, how you
cheered the bottle tosser, and
ignored the child being pinned.
I invite holidays: you are framed
by the grave, now with one foot
proving my case.

But I have your boots—gifts,
ornate symbols of your past.
They leer like closeted demons.
I look and wonder if they have
banged on a White’s Only barstool,
or kicked the ass of the oddball
in the corner.

Do I burn these haunted, hateful
things? Should I consume your
prejudice in fire? Should I set my
flame to your racist pride?

Or do I let the peacock’s pink eye
remain open when I kiss my men?
Do I tap the soles to blues and
march heels to chants of peace?
Can your history, which is my own,
be cleansed by sage?

Boots are not the wearer, I know:
Just leather and string and wood.
Yet symbols are rare and chosen.
And now, needed. Tonight,
I reach for Sherman’s torch and
Atlanta flickers under my feet.

Medford Mill

He steers a blight down Crater Lake Highway,
past the Table Rocks, the glistening RV lots,
the yellow fields of star thistle, the thrift
shops. When the pumice approaches, he stops:
Arches of water, signs of smoke. Alarm
clocks beep underground. He starts
to douse his storied corpse; he keeps
a drowned boy dead by heaving air in spurts.
It smells of subdivisions, dog bedding.
A Mt. McLaughlin made of small squares,
surrounded by an oil sea, black machines,
black pyramidal piles of pine and Mulberry.
Behind this scene some cruel act lies:
An earth destroyed, and made tender as it dies.

2003-11-21T21:06:00.001-08:00

Sights from the Georgia Shore

Dear Lisette, I’m glad you drove.
These Southern high windows are wonderful.
A farmer strolls over furrowed fields,
and five drops pool under her water glass.

From a littoral point of view: a fish
wiggles and a mossy mountain laughs;
An anemone sees a ship motor past.
And at the ocean’s alluvium, a girl
sticks her red tongue into the wind
to taunt a rain drenched Man-O-Ray.

We took ten trips around that cul-de-sac,
going as fast as we could, round and round;
We set the phonograph at low, so slow,
that we could watch the tide from no place.

If I cared to find my pen, I’d praise Georgia.
No need to fake a trade: the pottery here is handmade.

So We May Be Here

I kiss the scorpion, gone gold, from aging.
Here, the yellow jackets threaten the hand-
icapped. Shards of bark. Purple gazing ball,
a mind rises through history’s geyser crack.
The falcon’s child drinks heavily
in some dingy port town. A slab of dry
wall stands erect on a green hillside,
carried out by who knows whom? When or why?

2003-11-21T21:06:00.000-08:00

On Falling in Love With You, I Should Not

I.

(I give you rope, scattered on a floor)
Under a blanket reading Rothko
(Fragments yield safe stories)
A Catholic business man rids himself of rice in a Venezuelan tent
(Future tense is expression of present feeling)
Your father gripped camera Harley handle bars; your mother’s house is full of frames
(There are no words here)
In that scene, you are no bigger than a black powder pistol

II.

(I agreed not to say)
My students banged their notebooks and were ghosts under your guidance
(In the railroad photo you are at least 30 feet away)
Hollow boulders? Snakes might as well grow from the ground
(I do not write stories)
Diner waitresses populate your childhood
(I am already working on your van
—it is brown and yellow to me—
to get you away from
these Mulberry trees)
He scaled cliffs to photograph the waterfall we retain in our skin
III.

(You kissed me and apologized
in a dream; a touch of warmth
with a shock within)
We flipped abandoned buildings like
river rocks

We rearranged illegal letters before the Lord, Amen

(I have a loft bed in Williamsburg)

Covered from rain in a warehouse dock, we saw perfect green and red cycle on the street

Did we really drive 60 miles to stay within the same light?

(Touch me while I am sleepingwhere meaning cannot be made)

2003-11-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

On the Abolishment of Marriage
for Barry

Welcome wheel, may we commit to be
happy axles --flat as gantry-- for the president
and his pontiffs to ride.

May we be in sight of one another and
celebrate the slow trickle of apartment homes
from your vagina, casters for the kitchen.

The planets, like our friends, move
in quadrilles. The lonely constellations
shoot arrows into nothing. Darling,

I’ve secured you like a bond. We have
an agreement: to remain hearth-side,
headed where we’re driven.

Letter to an Old Love

Your menstrual stains are mixed with paint,
Our sheets have become my drop cloths.
She loves the feeling of the cashmere you bought.
She borrows my sweaters constantly.
Candles cannot outlast the circles I make on her.
Her tongue speaks Russian and twitches
into my mouth like a snake’s tail,
pressing me up against a peeling door.

I think of you sometimes-- down the street,
moving across the hardwood floors. You enter
my memories as a corpse would, with skin cold as water.
Biting on a pillow’s end, I do not think of you.

XXXIII.

2003-11-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

XXXIII.

The white walls around me form a drain,
I sit, cubicle marrow, beside a window,
watching the sun click across the sky.
My gelatin bones twist in an ergonomic

chair, while my corneas remain a static size.
Everyone here is nagged by reluctance:
The same question dangles from their lips:
If I made all my decisions attentively,

how did I end up here, in this place I despise?
Yet this chair is base, a blackness falls at the
line of sight. And so they lie hands clasped,

eyes closed like pharaohs posing for a cast.
The coroner hears their grumbles, while
their confusions melt to wax.

XXXIV.

Yellow cracks in a burgundy vinyl purse,
vague thoughts on a globe, a woman’s
furrowed brow in the meat aisle: she battles
suited harpies from ripping away her rights.

Meanwhile, the manager adjusts his tie
in the television above the electric door.
A woman pushes a cart of ice cream
and mascara, toward check-out, where

I wonder if I am equal nourishment:
“And from these corporal nutriments perhaps,
our bodies may at last turn all to symbol.”

They load brown plastic bags into trunks,
turn keys, strap belts then roll themselves
away in their mirror shaped sarcophagi.

Diorama
for Carl Toth

Once I brought a shadow box to Mrs. Shoreman’s class:
an armada attached to an anchor, a simple photograph
of a family standing in the ocean.

My scene featured a son withholding a bird chested breath,
a daughter wavering on whether to hide or show two dimes,
a mother using her tongue to fawn some taste from the air,
a father grinning as the head of this absurd mallard.

In the corner, a cardboard embrasure hid among
cattails. Inside, it was wall to wall with bears.
I entitled my piece, Figure 80 Shows a Decoy Town
or, Dien Ben Fou. When my teacher asked me to explain,
I squirmed and said, “Sperm meets egg in water.”
Then I poured a glassful into the box. “We may
now see the undertow hit their brittle bronze legs.”

2003-11-18T21:04:00.000-08:00

XXIX.

America, you have given me your skeleton
key: I look like a president, and the bully
who wins. My body craves for what is right
I am blinded by greenbacks and green light.

Yet as long as you struggle for me,
my words have nothing to which to refer,
my mouth seals itself: there is nothing
to say at your party line-- observations

without premises; preferences without choices.
The concert is so loud, those standing
in the choir don’t realize they’re not,

and have never been, singing. America, I cherish
my discords with you, for they will be what I breath
when I bury your castes along with my greed.

XXX.

In the caves at Niaux, France, granite
bison stampede over cavernous plains
toward men who knick their igneous hides
with spears, shard their sides with stone.

In Dusseldorf, a man rushes to save
the damsel strapped to a movie screen’s
steel tracks. He rips the nylon, angering
the audience unjostled by the wail.

And here, foreign soldiers are put in one to three
glass jars of blood and ether. The closer
to reality they look, the less real they are.

In night vision, no one dies outside
the frame: Death occurs at conception. To
watch while blinkless is to not watch at all.

XXXI.

Republican National Convention. 2004

Wide Shot, Woman in Kitchen, Working
Over White Counters. Child runs in,
grabs green grapes, darts through door.
Announcer (V/O): In your home’s heart,

there has been a microscopic invasion,
a network of bacteria malicious and lurking
to strike you or a family member
at any moment. You might not even know.

Fortunately we have a Texan for this
Manichean match-up, who penetrates
the shadowy regions where germs live.

He even goes to those hard to reach areas,
to battle them on their own turf. He is an
exclusive chemical solution, perfectly concocted.

XXXII.

America, yours is a vicious wealth.
What of these banquet tables filled
with hands? What of these libations
which burn our lives on the hill?

The tycoon sees himself the pauper,
by citing the day he went hungry,
The audience finds this endearing
and says he has paid his spectral dues.

Increasingly, my dinner comes from
ringing pocket change from my neighbor’s neck,
from grafting new desires onto his head.

Is this what you intended? Must we deceive
one another in order to live?
Must we choose between bread and water?

2003-11-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

XXV.

Today even the cops are calm; trees
reflect in their helmets, while they
oversee a polite public march
Excuse Me quiet around the capital.

Here is an antique machine’s trial run,
atoms unaware of voice and bond.
Say “Citizenry” and envision ten years
of stadium speakers sounding like us.

The President, inside his house, dines
without concern, says he loves democracy.
He continues along with his course,

thinks nothing of citizens who knock and
go away. The difference, dear reader, between
request and demand is a readied red brick.

XXVI.

Walking through the mall, I spot uniformed
men and women in Banana Republic,
sorting supplies, and I think this war
is bought in tank tops, battleships

blown by sales of linen, televisions,
answering machines, boots, dog houses,
internet connections, all point to this
predicament: even banners of peace

are bought with dollars of war. Our weakness,
this slimming gluttony by which we live,
is the blue felt collection plate of a crusade.

So we walk with guilty purses, culpable
billfolds, murder made in simple transactions,
by generals unaware of their medal.

XXVII.

Here’s to that awkward age when you’ve seen
the street more than once, and sense yourself
annoyed by gravity, and how firmly all things
cling to the earth. Here’s to that fearful time

when circumstance falls like fencing, and you
feel, at destiny’s first sighting, a welling fight.
You long for upheaval, so strongly that
a revolution’s direct object is irrelevant.

There, then, lies a dangerous desire: to want
the world to do your work in metaphor.
You want to be astonished, beat fate,

be renewed by a new order. Alas,
a revolt born of boredom sends you
running naked into requested chaos.

XXVIII.

On my way to town, I pass these plastic
pods that all landed last night, gray fans
humming as if on rockets, convex dishes
making synchronized swivels toward the sky.

Exurbia revolves around its satellites,
its complex codes being beamed by
leaders with botaxed brows and box
lamps reflected at retina’s edge.

Through this lunar landscape, flags stick
beside well houses, from tree stumps,
on SUVs’ backgates: red and white

barcodes bought and displayed as parking passes.
When the music stops, all the chairs get cul-de-saced: Support this war or be a ghost of nations.

2003-11-17T21:03:00.000-08:00

XXI.

Is there a rain strong enough to wash away
Times Square, to fill that aquarium
of light with water, to douse that borealis
among buildings, to overrun that eddy

of electricity, to flood out those secret
aqueducts of commerce? Out of that square,
a beast’s breath sucks recruits through two glass
doors, exhales a draft sufficient to float

the world’s gun metal gray. Here, 400 miles
away, I yell for rain, even though I know
only a patient pulling of plugs will end

those lights, return stars to the city,
and blow away the colorful cold
front stationed there.

XXII.

Across Franklin Street, beside a letter box,
a counter-protestor mocks us, while
wearing a stars and stripes bikini.
Boys surround her, as if she is

their mascot: an anorexic lady liberty,
a picture at the center of a brick wall.
I think about the scene’s inception,
the moment they said, ‘Yes, we’ll

show those hooligans. We will rub vacation
and flesh in their faces.’ Her body is a thin
adjective: Her tit offers only its own image.

This is what we’re fighting for,
the boys say by patting her back,
hoping to win one war after another.

XXIII.

At a protest in Chapel Hill, a boy in black
blocades his parent’s blue-lit station wagon,
while lights swirl on a walking mob. He jeers
and taunts the chrome, behind, honking.

Rallied below well-dressed bottles,
the crowd circles in the intersection’s
center. The boy breaks out a flag no one
would hang, but perhaps put on a grave

or wave at a parade. It is stapled
to the edge of a brittle pine pole.
Old polyester glory, a symbol

for simple emphasis. (Words do not mean what
they once did). Camera men take position, the bottles lean in:
flag smoke smells of ignorance and freedom combined.

XXIV.

Last night in the bookstore, a peacenik
described torture in detail. The etc, he said.
And the audience, on seats edge,
listened aghast and left with renewed vigor

for their fight, and the swagger of a good
meal finished. What do you do when
condemnation is your red ticket inside?
when your enemy’s actions

become a nourishment of their own?
Violence cannot remain unsaid,
but what of a mind’s request to romp

among heinous detail? This landscape
offers exercise, but no health. All while a pathless mountain stands behind.

2003-11-17T21:02:00.000-08:00

XVII.

When the face collapses behind the countenance,
we are left with cities that cannot fold
like metal, like flesh. Spires stretch
across the earth, a glass monarchy

grows underground. Criticism is praise to
this monolith; its building back is open,
displaying an airy architecture of fear. Seamless
city of momentum, ambitious stalwart thrust

of a citizens’ pursuit of happiness certain
as place. I am a corpuscle who paces this
waterproofed earth, taking cross sections

flat as linoleum. My head is full of thoughts,
avalanching shards, the sound of future
footsteps on a found illiquid landscape.

XVIII.

It is a cold spring evening. I sit
Indian style in a leaning log cabin
and try to see dissent at the base
of my murky full cup. I read a book:

the story of a stowaway dressed
in a sailor’s suit, captaining his ship.
Rising, I kick the red carpet which
gets caught below my feet, trip over

a wrench suited for empire and ambition,
and get below my sheets. Breathing low,
I try to decipher between silence

and my home’s quiet. Where Li Po’s slow
brother sleeps, Nero rises. Last night’s clay
mug turns to gold, and my geographic chore.

XIX.

To the binds which yearn for peace, those cells
which crave not air but movement, in the way
that there is no object without space. Pockets
seem a diver’s weights and fire contained in head.

You envision a Midwest you’ve never seen,
while standing amid a village green halted
at doorsteps, ruled by the discriminating
logic of skin, the curious fear of wind.

To this, I say, burn the food in your cabinets,
take your sofa to the roadside at night.
Fasting and risk beget buoyancy when

our ship sinks due to the chandelier
no one noticed or needs. Minds rot in safety:
which means there is only one way out.

XX.

America, you breed small dreamers,
yet who can sleep under your setless sun?
You are a steady wind, a mangle’s gentle
current, drawing sensation and writing soft

roads. You send me into your paradox:
when you rescind my rights in order to save them,
when I thank you for helping me across your chasms,
when you protect me from the crimes you commit.

I do not know why visitors crowd to get
inside your empty vault. People here speak
as if your laws made their lips, as if your

expiration would mean their death. Do they not
see the cerulean sky forms a dome? Do they not
know there have been other houses in history?

2003-11-16T21:02:00.000-08:00

XIII.

Engrid lays her lights across the lawn,
then wraps them around wires to say
Merry X-mas Troops. Traffic whizzes
as she recalls Truman’s adage: A wife

is the nation’s spirit. Inside the house,
Fuji snakes on his spine for an absent
hand’s affection. A television shows I,
Claudius in poor reception: above a sink,

Lady MacBeth bathes two doves.
Engrid bends parapet-low to follow
a cord toward the house’s foundation.

A green-gold stitched sweater sneaks
below boxwoods. A smokeless signal
rises, as one woman’s plea to the past.

XIV.

How will the desert look under a new
neon moon? After Bush hits his blue
Kennebunkport ball through Hagia
Sophia Hole #8? After Eve sits in an

Applebees, smokes cigarettes, drives
a napkin across the table then leaves?
Samson has no need for Olive Garden;
The Israelites need no Golden Corral.

Since March brown palms of enraged
supplication spit and fan the laurelled
king who rides a nodding donkey into

Babylon, his pockets brimming with
golden calves and halogens perfected on his
own domesticated flock. Good luck.

XV.

For children of empire, the famed corner
never comes. Our revered fury goes to
the grave unprovoked, cellulite dreams
itself into a vigilant image.

Hands do not poke through the yard.
Objects bought to quench mismanaged desires
won’t be recalled. Nothing will smell of sweat,
having been sprayed with effortlessness.

Let even our buildings fall, and debt will
defiantly grow in Victory Gardens, evil
will quickly transfer its balance.

Resilience is to resilence the world’s
murmuring. We return, deaf oppressors,
unaware of the click of our own full tank.

XVI.

I toss my room’s contents at the dot matrix
teeth beaming outside my window, pearls
from a waterless ocean, sun on a weatherless
day, a smile which sends our train through

the grass. Within it’s gaps, cloth crowns,
replicated relics, exit signs, virtual tight
ropes: dreams which do not belong to the
dreamer, flat accidents waiting to happen.

Drivers swerve to better see the kibitzer
over traffic, that rented ideal of pleasure,
giddy as a soccer game with no goals.

The kids who mimic it implode on the
playground. Within every glance, pilotspat and kiss another enameled name.

2003-11-15T21:01:00.000-08:00

IX.

When Rush tweaked the antenna bolted
above his ear, his thoughts grew ubiquitous
as oxygen and snapped, flag sharp, over
the neighborhood. Kids ran to their rooms,

locked doors. Stars and stripes shot
out like fireworks. The neighbor’s grins
stay knotted like a stack of green hoses.
Walking down Thrasymacus Avenue, he carried two

gutter spillways as tableaus. A neighbor ducked
below a window and asked, “Is this the cost of nations:
so a supernova may land among whirligigs?”

Rush conjured the Kittyhawk’s aft and children
across the state grabbed for their throats,
suddenly feeling beleaguered by a new light.

X.

When the flag fell from the clothesline
and landed in freshly cut fescue piled
in gradiating green on the ground, an
actress entered the scene, apron and all,

bent down, and gave Old Glory a reverent
shaking. She repined it on the hyphenated line
running across the property, and hummed
a strange rhyme. The cinderblock shelter,

which swayed behind, balanced like a building
on taut black plastic. “Should we take it one more time
from the top?” she asked her neighbor,

who stopped raking. “I should be reproached
for my politics,” he said, and heaved
together another pile of humus and stars.

XI.

Two men stroll down a medina’s avenue
painting red sickles on empty building sides.
They carry a stencil with worn lines
which drips a dark hue by their feet.

Cylinders in hand, they recollect historic
surges of spite and their father, a refined
doctor who sought to staple the world’s shadows
together. “Remember when he combined

the shades of a man and a tree?” one asks.
“What a rough beast it made!” the other adds.
They chuckle and lift cans toward brick.

“No one lives there,” a passerby ventures to say.
“We know,” they reply, irritated, and
continue to fill the negative space red.

XII.

Revolt is a period piece-- black
buckles, lamplight, brown teeth jettisoned
in cockney sounds. Soldiers
lean bayonets against a log cabin’s wall,

then visit with face painted men. Because
my lines push imperial goods into water,
I am the dead pilgrim in an eighth grader’s
desk. Sam Adams sits captured on page two,

surrounded by calendars and brown
bottles. His portrait hangs in the capital,
amid the dusty blossoms of Bastille Day.

Rings of pine become textbooks,
or a booking room’s primrose glass.
True patriotism looks treasonous.

2003-11-14T21:01:00.000-08:00

V.

Father, your howl at hour three lead me
to ask why you sought that prying color,
those leather-loving stories of failure,
which were not fiction but lies, obvious

to glean. From the space between banister
rails, I thought of that high pitched wail which
was not you but your cells, freezing in pleasure,
under a wash of blue conical light.

Here I live-- in a country of baby elders.
How am I to respect the sagacity of your fires,
and the fallow fields you’ve bequeathed me?

The slow rise and swivel-shot of flycast wires?
This land is cold: Icarus stays below the trees;
Achillies never seeks himself over the sea.

VI.

Jesus never walked, he only hung,
on Golgotha, for thirty-odd years.
He never overturned money tables,
or appeared on-the-outs with Rome.

When moths gnawed into manuscripts,
his followers preached from palimpsets,
pyred inquiries, packed lacunas with plans.
What surprise is it now? Podiums in sand,

bombastic requests that welcome war, studded
doors that swing wide for rumors. Mustn’t there be
an early service? Tank tracks echo ahead of a late galloping.

Let us mourn: love’s language locked in their
stolid necropolis, their impossible sword
of peace, their bloodied baton of dogwood.

VII.

Yesterday I woke to hear the sound
of canes banging against battle maps,
derricks ambling toward an island,
in atlantic distance from five continents

in protest: out of earshot of a new
Leviathan’s screaming cells. Indolent
suitors of influence, geriatric warriors
wading through wrinkle dreams, waiting

to wrap and rattle the unsheathed silver
sabers of youth, envisioning impotence
without patina, sending sons to blast

a personal dark. Lear’s tantrum strikes the world.
Our daughters die for these errant elders’ envy,
their flesh made memorious, their fear of the field.

VIII.

At night, Siddhartha rushes back inside
castle walls well guarded against wind,
miscreant thoughts, his parents’ palace sins.
He falls to his duvet and turns the TV on:

“Run with no need for water,” an announcer says.
A recorded scene flashes: four thousand
albacore thrashing through dunes, with smile-sized
gasps, making desperate paths into elaborate patterns.

Outside his stone house, thick stocks of sugar
cane refuse to whistle or sway. They clamp,
root tough, into rich soil.

Siddhartha, curls into Maya’s folded affection,
sleeps under the castle’s cross beams, which are
splintered, like the king’s steepled fingers.

2003-11-13T21:00:00.000-08:00

I.

There is no Eucharist in Baghdad:
only bombs, infidels, heathen
libations and the reverse equation:
Bread in the road, wine in the street.

Here is the well you can’t exhume,
a spigot of unconjugated hate,
tomb-stacked souls and barrels,
late night revisions that fuel preachers

who follow the red elephant’s ordo,
trade war for embryos, ignore the tale
of how David got on Goliath’s bankroll.

Why should Plato care? The earth and sky
are intertwined like ivy. The weeds choke
the only ones who can hoe them down.

II.

Let us hasten justice so I may write
a death knell for this empire. Let us speak
of the afternoon on which we will kneel
beside a monument, lichened orange

and green, fading in granite disrepair.
Let us lean above our corporate past
and take a charcoal imprint of those
barons’ plan for us—endless rope and rock.

Rubbing an indention, our past
is negative space, sinking earth:
a valley of letters, curving its name.

Fading light catches the texture of
words, until pale paper perfectly holds
the moon: Let our history be our fable.

III.

When the king leaves, he hands you the crown
of an expired nation. You take the throne
in a power suit and manage grumbling others.
The old king rules you from a new distance.

The red tie cinches a newcomer’s neck,
the new hire finds his phone on mute,
By the time the marginal get fire
the ash smolders and wood is wet.

Power pools in history, water runs into
footsteps. The White House hands out
old coal and books. Sam, you’re right:

We have no use for their badges, their mansions
their hand-me down scepters, unless we
want to be new despots of an old nation.

IV.

There is no grain in the grist mill, yet
the oxen lumber and labor in circles,
to soften their bones, and pawl their debts.
What isn’t closed by their path? The sun

encircles the globe. Years and days round
themselves in December. How their sweat
pours forth, unfamiliar. Do their chalk-dry
skulls rain circle dreams too? The walls block

wind and exhale sorrow. Can I sneak in,
kick dust, agitate nostrils? Make the animals
pass through doors, sit on stars, ponder grass?

Let’s say yes. There they are now, in a field:
One leg too long, plowing the air with grins,
trying to forget a past life’s imperial cadence.

story written in 2002

2003-08-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

My Mother’s Goth Turn
Growing up, Halloween officially started when my sister and I gathered old clothes from the bottoms of our closets. We attached found shirts to pants with safety pins, filled the cavities with crumpled newspaper and posted these body doubles around the house. Sometimes we dangled them from nooses; Sometimes we made it look like they had been crushed beneath furniture. And on the holiday night, my mother, who masterminded this annual Williams House of Horrors, would cackle with delight as she walked the neighborhood children by what appeared to be us, dead.
My mother always had this dark side. As an actress, she performed best as a diva or murderer. That’s why it was no surprise when I left for college to discover that she had entered the Charlotte Goth scene. She started wearing a Pure Evil hat, listening to Sisters of Mercy and visiting clubs in black leather boustiers. In many ways, I could tell she missed us. She loved being around young people, especially the depressed teens who treated her like a mother. At the same time, she was happy to have us gone. With her last child out of the house, she began refamiliarizing herself with her sexuality. Nights in the clubs showed her just how much sexual prowess she could wield.
It was about a year into this phase that she and her friends complained that the Charlotte scene was for amateurs. They wanted to find a real Goth scene and their opportunity came when the International Gothic Convention, or the Convergence Festival, would be held in New York City. My mother invited me to go and I couldn’t resist.

That weekend, the official hotel of the Gothic world was The Warwick in Midtown. We went directly there to inquire about tickets. The revolving doors gave way to a waiting area with green couches and leather chairs. That afternoon a group of people were seated there—a plump man reading Atlas Shrugged, a man in a black suit, and a woman in a floppy purple hat and T-shirt which showed a black widow spider over the phrase, “We could mate but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Excuse me,” my Mom asked, “Are y’all here for Convergence?”
“Yes,” the guy in the dark suit said.
“Do you know if we can buy tickets?”
“You’ll have to talk to that man.”
We looked left as a chubby, balding guy walked toward the group. He wore a black shirt with “Corp Goth” written on it. He stopped beside us. My Mom put her hand softly on his back. “I hear you’re the person to talk to about tickets,” she said.
“No,” the large man replied, “that would be Clifford.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Dragon.”
“Well, Dragon,” she said, “Can I get tickets to tonight’s event? It’s at the Limelight, right?”
“Those plans fell through,” Dragon said, “The owners at the club decided they could make more money hosting a Rave party.”
The group appeared to be brooding.
“Has there been a change in plans?” my mother asked.
“We don’t have any yet,” Dragon said.
“A couple of us are going to another bar,” the suited man said.
“What bar?” I asked.
He opened a printed e-mail. “La Nouvelle Justina,” he said.
“Where’s that?” I asked. I got out my notebook. He showed me the page. I scanned the message for an address—1011 East Second Street. It said “Prodoms free.”
“What are Prodoms?” I asked.
He didn’t hear me.
“What are Prodoms?” my mother asked.
“Professional dominatrix,” the woman in the purple hat replied.
An awkward silence ensued: We didn’t know the lingo.
“I’m Elyse,” my mother said. She reached out to shake the hand of the suited man.
“Dwanye,” he said. He accompanied the greeting with a bow.
I reached across the table and introduced myself to the woman.
“Randy,” I said.
“Crystal Blue,” she said back. She bent her wrist as if I were going to kiss her hand.
My Mom reached out to the guy with Atlas Shrugged.
“Cassius,” he said.
“Well I guess we’ll see you guys tonight,” my Mom said. The group looked unexcited. We walked out to the busy Midtown street where my Mom reviewed her first impression. “I’m such a dork!” she yelled.

After we went to the Warwick, we made our way to our hotel. I laid on my bed and started reading Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, while my mother primped herself in the bathroom. She turned the corner in a black vinyl mini-skirt, tube top and bicycle chain necklace. She approached the end of my bed.
“What are you going to wear?” she asked.
I tilted my book down. I nodded at the clothes I had on—black shirt, tan pants and black leather shoes. “Just this,” I said.
“We’re going to have to paint your finger nails.”
She walked away and returned. She handed me a bottle of red nail polish.
I looked at the label and read it out loud: “It’s Revlon, and called Crème.”
“It’s the color of blood,” she said. I put the bottle down on the nearby night stand and went back to reading.
“We also need to spike your hair like little devil boy,” she said.
“Okay,” I said and put my book down. I got up, walked to my bag and started to remove items. My mother walked away and came back with a tiny, black T-shirt which donned the words, ‘Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.’
“Wear this,” she said.
I stripped off my shirt and put it on. The sleeves felt three inches long; I could feel the creases in my armpits. I followed her to the bathroom to put on make-up. I rummaged through her make-up pouch and found a dark, thick pencil. “Is this eye-liner?” I asked.
“Yea.”
“Would you put it on me?”
“Sure,” she said. I sat on the thin plastic toilet seat and looked up at the ceiling. My Mom drew the lines. When she was through, I looked in the mirror. One outline was tilted down, and one up, making me look sad and happy at the same time. My mother saw the asymmetry and, with a licked finger, evened them out. She pulled back, gave me a critical glance, and nodded. “There,” she said, and turned back around to apply her make-up. She leaned toward the mirror and flashed a devilish look.
“Ooh Scary,” she said.
We turned off the lights, took the elevator to the foyer and headed to the subway.

At La Nouvella Justina we met my mother’s Goth friends-- Ken and Jamison. Ken, the king of the Goth scene back home, carries himself in a chubby strut. He has a reputation for being kinky and liking large women. Jamison, his sidekick, has a young freckled face. The two of them excitedly described their hotel room, which they had decorated with Christmas lights-- just in case the party moved from the club back to their room.
Inside La Nouvella, tables lined the interior walls and a glass bar to the right featured S&M equipment like chains and whips. TVs showing S&M videos were fixed to the club’s upper walls. The bar was crowded with men in loose fitting ruffly clothes and women in cinched tops.
My Mother and I got drinks and made our way to a table where Crystal Blue and Dwayne were sitting. “Crystal,” I asked, “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” she said, and tilted her head like a preying mantis.
“What do you think of this place?” I asked.
“I like it just fine,” she said, and paused. “But I told my friends I would not go out unless I could see some cock tonight.”
“Have you been successful?” I asked.
She smiled. “A few men have promised to strip for me,” she said and looked at Dwayne.
He clenched and giggled.
“I bet they wouldn’t if they saw the shirt you were wearing earlier,” I said and took a sip of my Bass beer. She thought for a moment, leaned and whispered, “All you have to say is, ‘I want to kill you in a sensual way and do it very slowly,’ and they’ll do anything.”
“Yea?” I asked.
“A guy in a leather shirt has already agreed to strip for me.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“I have my ways, don’t I,” she said looking toward Dwayne.
He clenched and giggled.
I looked toward my Mom, who was sitting beside me, talking to a group of people with motorcycle helmets on their table. “They’re from Ohio,” she said. “Came down for the conference.”
“Oh,” I replied.
“Have another one,” she said and pointed to my drink.
Right then, a large man, maybe 35, with long stringy hair, wearing an army green T-shirt, made his way through a cluster of people and onto the stage. He pulled his shirt off over his head. A woman, wearing a black vinyl boustier, followed him up the stairs. She went to a corner and took a tiny whip out of a bag. She put the man’s wrists in cuffs hanging from two 2x4s nailed to the wall. She began whipping his back and buttocks. With his head down, all the audience could see was his hairy torso. My mother was staring, intrigued.

On the next morning, we woke late and decided to get brunch at a nearby café. The street in front of our hotel, Seventh Avenue, was bustling with a fair. We sat outside under a wall of ivy and beside a fountain. A group of young professionals sat nearby. We ordered food and discussed the previous evening.
“What did you think of last night?” I asked.
“I liked it,” she said, and continued in a rural drawl, “We don’t see much stuff like that in North Carolina.”
“What do you think is the attraction?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The pain. Some people like that.”
“Would you do it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Certainly not with Daddy. He wouldn’t understand.”
I nodded and cut into my omelet.
“But I don’t know if I would like it until I tried it, right?”
“I guess,” I said.
“What I really liked about it though was the performance—all those people looking at me,” she glowingly said.
“So you would do it in front of people?” I asked.
“It would be just like acting.”
“Almost,” I said.
“Well, the pain thing,” she replied.

That evening my Mother and I met Dwayne, Crystal Blue and Cassius at the Warwick hotel. We got taxies to the night’s party, which was at a club called the Limelight. The club occupies the space of an old stone church. When we entered we went up some creaky stairs where a man with permed blond hair was standing in a doorway. He was wearing a gold mesh shirt, with tattoos visible underneath, and was yelling at some people. My mom and I walked past him into a room. It was small, smoky and decorated with tiny boxed aliens. Geigeresque images of industrial sex scenes were illuminated from the rear, as if stainglass windows.
The crowd was decidedly ungoth. A man with gray hair walked by in a trench coat and high heels. A pack of young women stood around with tubes in their mouths. A man in black plastic outfit, wearing a spiked collar, picked up a microphone and yelled, “Welcome to Fetish night at the Geiger Room, sponsored by Gomorrah. Have fun you freaks!”

My mom and I made our way over to a table and sat down. She saw a doorway. “I’m going to go see what’s back there,” she said, and left.
I kept seated and watched a few people set up a workbench for an S&M show. A man walked in the door and toward me. He was apparently in his mid-thirties, had a clean shaven face around a thick goat-tee, was wearing a blue Old Navy shirt and carrying a gray duffel bag. He sat down beside me. We sat in silence and looked around. He said, “So are these people into S&D or what?”
“Excuse me,” I asked.
“I’ve been in the scene for a long time and I’ve never seen these people. Are they into S&D?”
“What’s S&D?”
“Submission and Domination.”
“Oh,” I said, apologetically. “Some guy announced that this is Fetish Night.”
“I almost couldn’t get in,” he said. “I guess its because I look normal. But I showed the guy my TESS membership card and said, ‘Look. I’ve been in this scene for ten years. I got my equipment in my bag. And I’m probably the kinkiest guy in the city.’ Then he let me in.”
“What’s TESS?” I asked, avoiding the topic of equipment.
“It’s the New York Sadomasochistic group.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m from North Carolina.”
“Ok, it’s like Talon down there.”
We both sat a moment and looked around. A girl got up behind two turntables and was spinning abrasive dance tunes. Periodically, the sound system would fail and the speakers would emit a painful screech.
“Russ,” he said and reached out his hand.
“Randy,” I replied, and shook it. “How long have you been into S&D?”
He thought for a moment. “Let’s just say I spanked my first girl when I was 19. I’m 31 now.”
I nodded, hoping to suggest, ‘That’s cool, like me.’
“Do you…” I asked, pausing to find the verb, “beat people or like to be beaten?”
“I’m a switch, so I’m both a submissive and a dominant.”
“Are you still into spanking?” I asked.
“Man, I’m into everything. I’ve been at it for so long, and moved through so many fetishes, I’m the kinkiest guy in the world.”
I nodded again.
“Like a few weekends ago,” he continued, “I did a cutting.”
“A what?”
“A cutting. It was in Washington, in this club that’s like a basement. This guy who was training was watching me while I took an inch chunk out of this girl’s ass. She fucking got off, man.”
He was silent for a second, but continued. “The club is like a 14,000 square foot dungeon with Rec. equipment everywhere.”
We sat together and looked around.
“Why are you into this kind of stuff?” I asked.
He seemed stumped. “I don’t know. I’ve always been into it.”
He thought some more, puffed up his chest and stretched his hands out like he was squaring up to something. “When I’m spanking a woman, and she’s getting off,” he said excitedly. He looked at me for camaraderie. “Uh!” he yelled.
We sat silent for a moment.
“What about you?” he asked.
“What?”
“What are you into?”
I shifted in my seat. I choose something safe. “Spanking,” I said.
He looked satisfied, but kept staring.
“And paddling,” I said.
“Paddling,” he replied, impressed. “That’s cool.”
“Are you a dominant or submissive?”
“A switch,” I replied.
“That’s cool.”
We both looked toward the crowd.
“People here are young,” he said.
“Yea,” I agreed.
“Not into fat girls,” he said.
I nodded over the music. He then asked, “Why did you get into it?”
“Well…you know,” I said, trying to make up something to say. “Sex is boring. And S&M is like a spice. You spice your dishes and they taste better.”
He was struck by the profundity.
My mother walked in and found the stranger and I sitting in the booth.
“This is Russ. He’s been in the scene for years.”
“Oh, nice to meet you,” my mother said.
“Is this your girlfriend?” Russ asked.
“No, just a friend from North Carolina.”
“That’s cool.”
“Are you ready to go back downstairs?” I asked my Mom in a hinting tone.
“Yes,” she said.
“Russ, it was nice to meet you,” I said, getting up from the booth.
“Nice to meet you too,” he said. As I walked toward the door, I looked back and saw that Russ had stalled my mother. He was whispering something in her ear. I saw her smile as she approached me.
“What did that guy say?” I asked.
“He’s going to a club called Paddles later,” she said. “He wanted to know if we wanted to go along.”

Walking downstairs we made our way to a dance room off the nave. The DJ was spinning The Cure and we maneuvered into the colored lights. My mother danced by weaving her hands into circular fluid motion in front of her. She moved from left and right, casting herself between beats.
I danced too, following her lead, wilting backwards and forwards, like a man cast under her spell. I am always struck, as if something beautiful is transpiring, when dancing with my mother. In a way, seeing her dance affirms that adulthood consists of delight, not just drabness. Dancing with her is also a way I celebrate her sexuality. Her adamant lesson about sexuality’s naturalness, delivered to me as a child, is reciprocated in the form of my support. It’s a lonely project to believe you are a sexy, maturing woman in America. And I want to help my Mom see herself in whatever way she wishes.
As she continued to swirl her hands in a mystic motion, framed by the cold concrete of the church walls, I appreciated too that she represented her darkness to me early. There is something freeing, as a kid, to believe that your mother could be your murderer. She played all of Grime’s characters equally well and, as a result, I was taught to be alert to and laugh at the dark underside of even the most innocent relationship.
We continued to dance this way until 3 A.M. at which time we hailed a taxi and made our way back to Midtown.

The next day was a crisp, cool Sunday. My mother and I woke late and went to the Guggenheim Museum. A jazz ensemble was setting up in the foyer. We perused the Frank Gehry exhibit, bought plates of tapas and sat at a small table in front of the stage.
“Are you ready to see the pictures?” I asked and pulled out a stack of photos I had taken during the weekend. My mother scanned the room and focused on two adolescent girls who were seated nearby. She discreetly took the picture folder and opened it up. She looked at the first one. “Wow, Randy,” she said.
She flipped through some more. Her face became shocked and delighted at every successive shuffle.
“Which one is your favorite?” I asked.
She went through the entire stack and pulled out one.
“This one,” she said. It depicted a young woman with short hair, propped on all fours. Her head is tilted up, mouth open in a pleasureful howl, while a man is scooted up behind, spanking her.
“You don’t know if she’s in pleasure or pain,” she said.
She put the pictures back in the envelope and handed them to me. She smiled as if she were getting away with something. The jazz band started to play, A Few of My Favorite Things.
“You’ve got to get me copies,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Oh, I found a painting I liked,” she said.
“Which one?” I asked.
“I’m going to see if I can get a print of it in the gift shop.”
“Which one is it?”
“Munch’s Vampire,” she said. In it, a woman is holding a man’s head to her chest. Her red hair is flowing down over him and, beyond his neck, the red strands have turned to blood.
“Yes?” I replied, and looked toward her for some kind of explanation.
“It’s like he’s acquiescing,” she explained. “She’s finally got him in her bosom and it’s a nurturing pose— soft, gentle and deadly.”

2002-11-13T21:23:00.000-08:00

My Mother’s Goth Turn Growing up, Halloween officially started when my sister and I gathered old clothes from the bottoms of our closets. We attached found shirts to pants with safety pins, filled the cavities with crumpled newspaper and posted these body doubles around the house. Sometimes we dangled them from nooses; Sometimes we made it look like they had been crushed beneath furniture. And on the holiday night, my mother, who masterminded this annual Williams House of Horrors, would cackle with delight as she walked the neighborhood children by what appeared to be us, dead. My mother always had this dark side. As an actress, she performed best as a diva or murderer. That’s why it was no surprise when I left for college to discover that she had entered the Charlotte Goth scene. She started wearing a Pure Evil hat, listening to Sisters of Mercy and visiting clubs in black leather boustiers. In many ways, I could tell she missed us. She loved being around young people, especially the depressed teens who treated her like a mother. At the same time, she was happy to have us gone. With her last child out of the house, she began refamiliarizing herself with her sexuality. Nights in the clubs showed her just how much sexual prowess she could wield. It was about a year into this phase that she and her friends complained that the Charlotte scene was for amateurs. They wanted to find a real Goth scene and their opportunity came when the International Gothic Convention, or the Convergence Festival, would be held in New York City. My mother invited me to go and I couldn’t resist. That weekend, the official hotel of the Gothic world was The Warwick in Midtown. We went directly there to inquire about tickets. The revolving doors gave way to a waiting area with green couches and leather chairs. That afternoon a group of people were seated there—a plump man reading Atlas Shrugged, a man in a black suit, and a woman in a floppy purple hat and T-shirt which showed a black widow spider over the phrase, “We could mate but then I’d have to kill you.” “Excuse me,” my Mom asked, “Are y’all here for Convergence?” “Yes,” the guy in the dark suit said. “Do you know if we can buy tickets?” “You’ll have to talk to that man.” We looked left as a chubby, balding guy walked toward the group. He wore a black shirt with “Corp Goth” written on it. He stopped beside us. My Mom put her hand softly on his back. “I hear you’re the person to talk to about tickets,” she said. “No,” the large man replied, “that would be Clifford.” “What’s your name?” she asked. “Dragon.” “Well, Dragon,” she said, “Can I get tickets to tonight’s event? It’s at the Limelight, right?” “Those plans fell through,” Dragon said, “The owners at the club decided they could make more money hosting a Rave party.” The group appeared to be brooding. “Has there been a change in plans?” my mother asked. “We don’t have any yet,” Dragon said. “A couple of us are going to another bar,” the suited man said. “What bar?” I asked. He opened a printed e-mail. “La Nouvelle Justina,” he said. “Where’s that?” I asked. I got out my notebook. He showed me the page. I scanned the message for an address—1011 East Second Street. It said “Prodoms free.” “What are Prodoms?” I asked. He didn’t hear me. “What are Prodoms?” my mother asked. “Professional dominatrix,” the woman in the purple hat replied. An awkward silence ensued: We didn’t know the lingo. “I’m Elyse,” my mother said. She reached out to shake the hand of the suited man. “Dwanye,” he said. He accompanied the greeting with a bow. I reached across the table and introduced myself to the woman. “Randy,” I said. “Crystal Blue,” she said back. She bent her wrist as if I were going to kiss her hand. My Mom reached out to the guy with Atlas Shrugged. “Cassius,” he said. “Well I guess we’ll see you guys tonight,” my Mom said. The group looked unexcited. We walked out to the busy Midtown street where my Mom reviewed her first impression. “I’m such a dork!” she yelled. After we went to the Warwick, we made our way to our hotel. I laid on my bed and started reading Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, while my mother primped herself in the bathroom. She turned the corner in a black vinyl mini-skirt, tube top and bicycle chain necklace. She approached the end of my bed. “What are you going to wear?” she asked. I tilted my book down. I nodded at the clothes I had on—black shirt, tan pants and black leather shoes. “Just this,” I said. “We’re going to have to paint your finger nails.” She walked away and returned. She handed me a bottle of red nail polish. I looked at the label and read it out loud: “It’s Revlon, and called Crème.” “It’s the color of blood,” she said. I put the bottle down on the nearby night stand and went back to reading. “We also need to spike your hair like little devil boy,” she said. “Okay,” I said and put my book down. I got up, walked to my bag and started to remove items. My mother walked away and came back with a tiny, black T-shirt which donned the words, ‘Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.’ “Wear this,” she said. I stripped off my shirt and put it on. The sleeves felt three inches long; I could feel the creases in my armpits. I followed her to the bathroom to put on make-up. I rummaged through her make-up pouch and found a dark, thick pencil. “Is this eye-liner?” I asked. “Yea.” “Would you put it on me?” “Sure,” she said. I sat on the thin plastic toilet seat and looked up at the ceiling. My Mom drew the lines. When she was through, I looked in the mirror. One outline was tilted down, and one up, making me look sad and happy at the same time. My mother saw the asymmetry and, with a licked finger, evened them out. She pulled back, gave me a critical glance, and nodded. “There,” she said, and turned back around to apply her make-up. She leaned toward the mirror and flashed a devilish look. “Ooh Scary,” she said. We turned off the lights, took the elevator to the foyer and headed to the subway. At La Nouvella Justina we met my mother’s Goth friends-- Ken and Jamison. Ken, the king of the Goth scene back home, carries himself in a chubby strut. He has a reputation for being kinky and liking large women. Jamison, his sidekick, has a young freckled face. The two of them excitedly described their hotel room, which they had decorated with Christmas lights-- just in case the party moved from the club back to their room. Inside La Nouvella, tables lined the interior walls and a glass bar to the right featured S&M equipment like chains and whips. TVs showing S&M videos were fixed to the club’s upper walls. The bar was crowded with men in loose fitting ruffly clothes and women in cinched tops. My Mother and I got drinks and made our way to a table where Crystal Blue and Dwayne were sitting. “Crystal,” I asked, “How are you doing?” “Fine,” she said, and tilted her head like a preying mantis. “What do you think of this place?” I asked. “I like it just fine,” she said, and paused. “But I told my friends I would not go out unless I could see some cock tonight.” “Have you been successful?” I asked. She smiled. “A few men have promised to strip for me,” she said and looked at Dwayne. He clenched and giggled. “I bet they wouldn’t if they saw the shirt you were wearing earlier,” I said and took a sip of my Bass beer. She thought for a moment, leaned and whispered, “All you have to say is, ‘I want to kill you in a sensual way and do it very slowly,’ and they’ll do anything.” “Yea?” I asked. “A guy in a leather shirt has already agreed to strip for me.” “That’s great,” I said. “I have my ways, don’t I,” she said looking toward Dwayne. He clenched and giggled. I looked toward my Mom, who was sitting beside me, talking to a group of people with motorcycle helmets on their table. “They’re from Ohio,” she said. “Came down for the conference.” “Oh,” I replied. “Have another one,” she said and pointed to my drink. Right then, a large man, maybe 35, with long stringy hair, wearing an army green T-shirt, made his way through a cluster of people and onto the stage. He pulled his shirt off over his head. A woman, wearing a black vinyl boustier, followed him up the stairs. She went to a corner and took a tiny whip out of a bag. She put the man’s wrists in cuffs hanging from two 2x4s nailed to the wall. She began whipping his back and buttocks. With his head down, all the audience could see was his hairy torso. My mother was staring, intrigued. On the next morning, we woke late and decided to get brunch at a nearby café. The street in front of our hotel, Seventh Avenue, was bustling with a fair. We sat outside under a wall of ivy and beside a fountain. A group of young professionals sat nearby. We ordered food and discussed the previous evening. “What did you think of last night?” I asked. “I liked it,” she said, and continued in a rural drawl, “We don’t see much stuff like that in North Carolina.” “What do you think is the attraction?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “The pain. Some people like that.” “Would you do it?” I asked. “I don’t know. Certainly not with Daddy. He wouldn’t understand.” I nodded and cut into my omelet. “But I don’t know if I would like it until I tried it, right?” “I guess,” I said. “What I really liked about it though was the performance—all those people looking at me,” she glowingly said. “So you would do it in front of people?” I asked. “It would be just like acting.” “Almost,” I said. “Well, the pain thing,” she replied. That evening my Mother and I met Dwayne, Crystal Blue and Cassius at the Warwick hotel. We got taxies to the night’s party, which was at a club called the Limelight. The club occupies the space of an old stone church. When we entered we went up some creaky stairs where a man with permed blond hair was standing in a doorway. He was wearing a gold mesh shirt, with tattoos visible underneath, and was yelling at some people. My mom and I walked past him into a room. It was small, smoky and decorated with tiny boxed aliens. Geigeresque images of industrial sex scenes were illuminated from the rear, as if stainglass windows. The crowd was decidedly ungoth. A man with gray hair walked by in a trench coat and high heels. A pack of young women stood around with tubes in their mouths. A man in black plastic outfit, wearing a spiked collar, picked up a microphone and yelled, “Welcome to Fetish night at the Geiger Room, sponsored by Gomorrah. Have fun you freaks!” My mom and I made our way over to a table and sat down. She saw a doorway. “I’m going to go see what’s back there,” she said, and left. I kept seated and watched a few people set up a workbench for an S&M show. A man walked in the door and toward me. He was apparently in his mid-thirties, had a clean shaven face around a thick goat-tee, was wearing a blue Old Navy shirt and carrying a gray duffel bag. He sat down beside me. We sat in silence and looked around. He said, “So are these people into S&D or what?” “Excuse me,” I asked. “I’ve been in the scene for a long time and I’ve never seen these people. Are they into S&D?” “What’s S&D?” “Submission and Domination.” “Oh,” I said, apologetically. “Some guy announced that this is Fetish Night.” “I almost couldn’t get in,” he said. “I guess its because I look normal. But I showed the guy my TESS membership card and said, ‘Look. I’ve been in this scene for ten years. I got my equipment in my bag. And I’m probably the kinkiest guy in the city.’ Then he let me in.” “What’s TESS?” I asked, avoiding the topic of equipment. “It’s the New York Sadomasochistic group.” “Oh,” I said. “I’m from North Carolina.” “Ok, it’s like Talon down there.” We both sat a moment and looked around. A girl got up behind two turntables and was spinning abrasive dance tunes. Periodically, the sound system would fail and the speakers would emit a painful screech. “Russ,” he said and reached out his hand. “Randy,” I replied, and shook it. “How long have you been into S&D?” He thought for a moment. “Let’s just say I spanked my first girl when I was 19. I’m 31 now.” I nodded, hoping to suggest, ‘That’s cool, like me.’ “Do you…” I asked, pausing to find the verb, “beat people or like to be beaten?” “I’m a switch, so I’m both a submissive and a dominant.” “Are you still into spanking?” I asked. “Man, I’m into everything. I’ve been at it for so long, and moved through so many fetishes, I’m the kinkiest guy in the world.” I nodded again. “Like a few weekends ago,” he continued, “I did a cutting.” “A what?” “A cutting. It was in Washington, in this club that’s like a basement. This guy who was training was watching me while I took an inch chunk out of this girl’s ass. She fucking got off, man.” He was silent for a second, but continued. “The club is like a 14,000 square foot dungeon with Rec. equipment everywhere.” We sat together and looked around. “Why are you into this kind of stuff?” I asked. He seemed stumped. “I don’t know. I’ve always been into it.” He thought some more, puffed up his chest and stretched his hands out like he was squaring up to something. “When I’m spanking a woman, and she’s getting off,” he said excitedly. He looked at me for camaraderie. “Uh!” he yelled. We sat silent for a moment. “What about you?” he asked. “What?” “What are you into?” I shifted in my seat. I choose something safe. “Spanking,” I said. He looked satisfied, but kept staring. “And paddling,” I said. “Paddling,” he replied, impressed. “That’s cool.” “Are you a dominant or submissive?” “A switch,” I replied. “That’s cool.” We both looked toward the crowd. “People here are young,” he said. “Yea,” I agreed. “Not into fat girls,” he said. I nodded over the music. He then asked, “Why did you get into it?” “Well…you know,” I said, trying to make up something to say. “Sex is boring. And S&M is like a spice. You spice your dishes and they taste better.” He was struck by the profundity. My mother walked in and found the stranger and I sitting in the booth. “This is Russ. He’s been in the scene for years.” “Oh, nice to meet you,” my mother said. “Is this your girlfriend?” Russ asked. “No, just a friend from North Carolina.” “That’s cool.” “Are you ready to go back downstairs?” I asked my Mom in a hinting tone. “Yes,” she said. “Russ, it was nice to meet you,” I said, getting up from the booth. “Nice to meet you too,” he said. As I walked toward the door, I looked back and saw that Russ had stalled my mother. He was whispering something in her ear. I saw her smile as she approached me. “What did that guy say?” I asked. “He’s going to a club called Paddles later,” she said. “He wanted to know if we wanted to go along.” Walking downstairs we made our way to a dance room off the nave. The DJ was spinning The Cure and we maneuvered into the colored lights. My mother danced by weaving her hands into circular fluid motion in front of her. She moved from left and right, casting herself between beats. I danced too, following her lead, wilting backwards and forwards, like a man cast under her spell. I am always struck, as if something beautiful is transpiring, when dancing with my mother. In a way, seeing her dance affirms that adulthood consists of delight, not just drabness. Dancing with her is also a way I celebrate her sexuality. Her adamant lesson about sexuality’s naturalness, delivered to me as a child, is reciprocated in the form of my support. It’s a lonely project to believe you are a sexy, maturing woman in America. And I want to help my Mom see herself in whatever way she wishes. As she continued to swirl her hands in a mystic motion, framed by the cold concrete of the church walls, I appreciated too that she represented her darkness to me early. There is something freeing, as a kid, to believe that your mother could be your murderer. She played all of Grime’s characters equally well and, as a result, I was taught to be alert to and laugh at the dark underside of even the most innocent relationship. We continued to dance this way until 3 A.M. at which time we hailed a taxi and made our way back to Midtown. The next day was a crisp, cool Sunday. My mother and I woke late and went to the Guggenheim Museum. A jazz ensemble was setting up in the foyer. We perused the Frank Gehry exhibit, bought plates of tapas and sat at a small table in front of the stage. “Are you ready to see the pictures?” I asked and pulled out a stack of photos I had taken during the weekend. My mother scanned the room and focused on two adolescent girls who were seated nearby. She discreetly took the picture folder and opened it up. She looked at the first one. “Wow, Randy,” she said. She flipped through some more. Her face became shocked and delighted at every successive shuffle. “Which one is your favorite?” I asked. She went through the entire stack and pulled out one. “This one,” she said. It depicted a young woman with short hair, propped on all fours. Her head is tilted up, mouth open in a pleasureful howl, while a man is scooted up behind, spanking her. “You don’t know if she’s in pleasure or pain,” she said. She put the pictures back in the envelope and handed them to me. She smiled as if she were getting away with something. The jazz band started to play, A Few of My Favorite Things. “You’ve got to get me copies,” she said. “Okay,” I said. “Oh, I found a painting I liked,” she said. “Which one?” I asked. “I’m going to see if I can get a print of it in the gift shop.” “Which one is it?” “Munch’s Vampire,” she said. In it, a woman is holding a man’s head to her chest. Her red hair is flowing down over him and, beyond his neck, the red strands have turned to blood. “Yes?” I replied, and looked toward her for some kind of explanation. “It’s like he’s acquiescing,” she explained. “She’s finally got him in her bosom and it’s a nurturing pose— soft, gentle and deadly.”

2001-11-13T21:45:00.000-08:00

Cole Swensen’s Goest, Or How To Paint A City
Review by Randall Williams

If you turn one of Cole Swensen’s poems on its side, the right margin appears to be a skyline. Phrases and articles rise from the left margin like helicopters. And alleys are created by the long building lines.
This notion, that the poem is both an image and auditory score, is important to Swensen’s work. In an interview with Raleigh-based poet Jon Thompson for Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, she states, “I’m thinking of the page as a visual object as well as a support for something audial. You can get the eye and the ear going at the same time, creating interference patterns and interesting tensions and co-operations.”
Swensen’s page drawings guide reader pronunciations as well through the text. “The graphic use of the page affects not only the visual,” she adds, “it affects timing, rhythm and stress. Emphasis can be orchestrated by placement, and ambiguity can be fine-tuned through line breaks.”
In her most recent collection Goest, published by Alice James Books in 2004, Swensen uses not only line breaks but page breaks to control the reader’s pace through the text. In “The Future of Sight,” for example, she starts with the thought, “We draped the stage in sheets / and nailed it into place. And put a lightbulb inside it / and said that it bloomed” only to delay the sentence’s completion until the top of the next page, “too soon.”
The effect is this is that speech is being stretched and reassembled. She gains the active, objective image of the light bulb exploding into white on the obscured stage. Then she adds commentary, within the same sentence, as if punctuating it with a subjective tone. A joint, or pivot, is created. And, at this awkward pace, every statement becomes odd.
Subjective and objective tones, occurring within the same sentence, also beg questions about a consistent speaker. Did the same person end the sentence who started it? For Swensen, the I is not a stable entity. “The I is the option for specific perspective, therefore, the option for the particular itself,” she tells Thompson. “And so, for me, it’s the option to enter. We enter the world through an I. I like to think of Is as sites that remain constant while we slip in and out of them.”
In Goest, many of the Is are figures living contemporaneously with various inventions, such as street lights, artificial ice and hydrometers. In each case, the characters live amid historic change and the poem asks how those inventions reverberate with the communities around them.
For the most part, though, Swensen seems committed to Gilles DeLuze’s notion that, “Life is not a personal thing,” which serves as the book’s epigraph. We travel, therefore, into deep observations of objects, never seeing too far beyond them, or their surrounding scenario, again like one’s experience walking in a city. “The base structure of both the city and the poem is the labyrinth,” Swensen writes in Identity Theory, a Web-based magazine of literature and culture. “In the city, it’s the physical plan. As in any maze, you can only see to the next corner, never around it.”
Other people appear in her cities, of course, and they take various forms. In her poem Others, Swensen catalogs some roles they play. “In the crowded subway, a stranger stands behind you with one hand firmly, warmly, on the small of your back,” she writes. And in another section she adds, “You walk into a house / in which several people are sitting in the dark / around a dinner table, eating, drinking, laughing.”
Throughout Goest, Swensen meditates on sight, always seeming to prefer meditations and glimpses, as opposed to statements of the apparent. Glimpses seem to be a method for her to leech time out of a narrative, and pack it into something more concentrated like a memory or painting. “Niepce’s first photograph, / which was the first photograph, / was of a scene of roofs so blurred they were often mistaken for sales. / Or people passing / on the other side of frosted glass,” she writes.
Swensen draws us toward the generative moment of seeing, which is momentarily represented when we see incorrectly. “There’s a set of identical twins who communicate through prime numbers, / and certain figures in medieval paintings whose extra fingers / can only be seen at a glance,” she writes.
The conjunction here works literally and is weak compared to the juxtaposition. Twins speaking in irreducibles are dream-like. Saints with extra fingers seem otherworldly. Both are similar because of what they are not: obvious.
Many of the poems in Goest, at first, seem impenetrably difficult. Speakers are irregular and it is poetry without self-assertion. The poems invite readers to see them first as objects then, upon closer attention, small worlds. “I love the idea that maybe a poem can have a surface tension, a strong surface tension, so that you almost bounce off of it in a way that I would hope is pleasurable,” she explains. “But then you can, with a gentle pressure, penetrate it in a way that reveals or gives the language a depth. It’s the experience of two dimensions collapsing into three that I’m after.”