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.

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

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

what drinks water

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

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

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.

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.