Author: Jared White

I stick my nose out into the universe
A basalt on the waters like a floating island
Of language where fear was a redoubt of
Don’t be fooled by last night
I hear equally what I don’t understand
Facts are me at the robots table
Where the warp and the woof
Go perpendicular then upside down
Seeking advice but getting
Only actionable information
Intelligence is too expensive
The savvy dear if you want a thing
First thing to do is already possess it
Assume a position, any position
Describing a nightmare
You shouldn’t be ashamed of having it
But only having been scared of the having
While the having was happened
And you were sleeping in a sulk
And people were fleeing for their lives
Does scarcity inspire you?
The organs you see
In the magic books of my childhood
Are human hands painted and carefully posed
Impersonating animals or an orchestra
With cymbals affixed to the thumb and ring finger
A tiny tuxedo has been daubed on
The paint must have been applied by the other hand
The book is called something like Handimals
But that’s not quite it
When the Internet can’t help me
I look at the dirt and the satellites surveil only hair
I keep thinking home is my refuge
Page 4500
Whole truth half rhyme
Rendering half of a circle
Why so serious about the other half
Spin your arms in the shoulder socket
Loosely, looser, almost there!
There is no partly upside down

Can you speak louder than you think?
The length of your ear is exactly
The same as the length of your nose
Or a line drawn between the dots of your eyes

I can only look at one part of your face at once
I can look you in the eyes or the mouth
It’s up to you
Replacing worship with wonder everywhere

So then warship, wander?
I feel my way towards an order
I am what my body can do

Rapturous sunbeam interruption
Mauled by quick brown fox
The peace ship sails at dawn

A more permanent now is on temporary hiatus

When it returns you may have lost patience

Waiting for a word that rhymes with the unnameable

Even then it refuses to do what it means

You never expected such a conversationalist

To join the conversation

You thought the rhythms would announce themselves

Like a fanfare of gibbons

The fires you lit were more for light than warmth

But these were the dark blue hot ones

Not the bright red tall ones

Blazing in the braziers

That was what they were made of

And if you held out your hands to their foreheads

And peeled the fingernails back

Saying “get along or be late to the world”

You’d see there were no bodies under the armory blankets

And the damp trays from the refectory dishwashers

You’ve given yourself away always with a squeak of a door

That you would break if you tried to repair it

So you carry the story like a bag of air

Not enough, the magicians announce

We can do better even if it’s already good enough

Do you believe them? Does it matter if you do?

Weaving, grieving
All the letters
On top of each other
Is it sexy or just heavy
Watching people
Holding hands and holding people
Watching hands
I’m looking for a smell I remember
Grasses that let the field recover
Rye and red clover
I would the whole meadow
But the seeds don’t take on the hills
Does salt do that to skin?
I’d listen to you talk forever
But when the action arrives
Ideas of music too high to hear
Colors just beyond cellular
What feelings can I feel
When I just stop
Blinking, breathing
The cockatrice and the basilisk
Stare each other down
How much yes
Can I feed to the fire
Verbs at absolute zero
Stacked into a moon gate
Gargoyles smiling in the woods

* Thanks Elisabeth for the cockatrix inspiration this morning!

Would you rather be eaten
By an alligator or a crocodile?
Being a mister
Woods bathing but in water
Or at least near to water
The hale churn ionizes the oxygen
Some principle of reality
You will never master
A dirt soap cleans your palms
You wring your shoulders and teeth
Hearing music shut the eyes
Peace to the optic nerve
An endless conversation on impermanence
Veering so close to the body politic
It would catch fire if it weren’t made of mud
It needs guidance not policing
To work on the edge of despair
Molding new shorn lambswool into felted lambs
The ribbon tied around your neck
For keeping your head on and your mouth open
Do you long to change its color
Steal the cookie from the cookie jar
Then put the cookie back so no one knows
Because who knows anything? The knowledge
Only exists while you know it
Even in your periphery the idea already blurs
A dot where a space is now
The hungry eat and the full can watch
The x is for collaboration

Remember the catbird seat?
Word buffer
Saint of atheists
Growing vegetable candies
From dream facts
In collegial collages
Summarized:
Do you prefer hidden depths
Or hidden shoals
Have a good day
And a good life
Or at least a day
And a life
Why not both
Have both!
Tomorrow’s poem today
The stagehands’ star
Celebrates international holidays
Under tolerant despotic regimes
Let us now sing
The na of the sha na na
No nah I’m good thanks
Walking the boulevards
This grit is fine
Causes only subatomic erosion
Anything invisible is more dangerous
Inhaling ammonia, planting nasturtiums
Derifling the petals, not as hoped for
Deoxidation – do you remember free radicals?
About to do my calisthenics
On a shelf of pitcher plants
If you knew I wouldn’t believe you
So told one by one only truth
Paintings and poems
Read better when they rise to meet you
Winged or hinged but
Writer, are you delegating
To the readers again
The mammal, corvine, lizard, crustacean & arachnid readers
Basket weavers
Are spitting yellow at dawn
Where did you go
Little engine that cooed

Some words
Have too much to say
That’s not what
Saying’s for

Better to mean
What you don’t intend
Than not mean what
You thought you did

Interpretation
Is stolen valor
Politics of emotions
What turns your head

Or turns on I’m working
Excavating unnatural
Materials of global consumption
Only under local conditions

When the construction resumes
Consoled by consoles
Counseled by councils or
Consumed by consummations

Not a garden but a mine
The canceling canto
Made for the benefit of the doubt
A patronage in a castle

On a long weekend
By the cliffs
The waves are speaking
Can I learn new words

For longer than the time it takes
To say them
Subventions sound geological
Like earthquakes or pyroclastic flows

How elastic
Can these feelings get
First code
Then transcription commences

Or in another model
Transcription comes first
Asserting its right to survive
Out there on its own

With legs dangling over the drain
As the osprey flies
With a fish in its talons
Swarmed by blackbirds

The pond has a hole in it
Where the water flows out
That’s how you know
It’s not really a pond

There’s no poetry section in this poem
Only hope contradicted by experience
When a nose bleeds it’s not usually an injury
A feeling that hasn’t been named yet
After you feel it can you provide a report
How it was not what what it was not
How allergic are you to the moment
If you’re too alert you may miss it
The surging water where the fish spawn under waterfalls
Like you they are off limits
They own their own autonomy
They do not dream their name is a word for catching them
And thus began the noodle wars
Growl writing while across the room talking poetry
Someone makes the airplane plummeting gesture
It’s true and I still don’t believe it
Living in an intentional typo library
Typo is short for typographical error
Do any other words abbreviate away mistakes

Mars is there for you right now
Feeling for you Mars feelings
Indifference bordering on distraction
Everywhere else the rain rains on reality
While in the sky sunny and windy
The poem is another conversation
Drowned out by propane fires
Heating the hot air balloons
Trying to keep up
I can’t be associated with that, I think
But if I always said what I thought…
Each period of the ellipsis
Is made of ellipses, silence that signifies
Not done yet so don’t interrupt
Hot air balloons could be fine on Venus, maybe
If I live long enough to join you there
But when I exhaust the subjunctive what then?
Learn another language like a grapefruit
That can be peeled in chunks
Or sliced with a special grapefruit knife
So each morsel spoons itself out gracefully
All the effort is hidden in preparation
And there’s juice in pith too but it doesn’t taste as good
Does your body agree?
Whenever it begins to bend
Its reticulated vertebrae in this general direction
The basilisk’s attentions are all immanence
I turn my back and watch the eels

Are stripes

False etymology
Seeding ground, ceding ground
Going fast the longer way

What makes the world, and so on?

I keep erasing the cuteness
No button for round lines
Having a thought or a memory of thinking
Erased again!
Can I say you in a poem ever?

When I meet the first time a stranger, stranger than what?
Units or un-its
Were you saying “I did” or “idea-ed”?

The untied knots, the uneyed nots
Waiting for tomorrow energy
Days without thoughts like dreams without interpretations
Fourteen questions
Notes on lawn

I forgot the forget-me-nots again!
Is it time to plant the giant noble spinach?

That isn’t an I
Only a lower case l

Not how to, just to
Updating you with what it’s like
Until I tell finally you what it is

First in a series of one
An essay on the trite

Red spring returns
With a billion dollar pencil
The endless breeze
Tickling the hair

An electromagnetic universe
With secret humans
Alive in puppet shells

The interferometer splays
The light into
An array of parallels

If I solve the mystery
No more mystery
Now only the marvel
Of execution

From here on out
Polynomial time

Retracting the palinode
The ode was right all along

Take this moment
and print it on plywood
with your face cut out
Now go around the back
and put your face in the hole
so I can take your picture

All these intentions
dashed
by the edges
of letters

A sh only sounds like shhh
until you run out of breath
hit the poetry wall
and on the eighth day?

Feelings aren’t in art
like people aren’t in history
You too are living
in someone else’s past
a person with your name
beseeches you

It’s not an experiment
if you don’t have a theory
how it will turn out
but you can let the theory go
without prejudice
or sentiment
as a fossil forms
in the cavity
the idea left behind

How interesting
can interesting
times be?

When a pattern
doesn’t emerge
improvisation
must be the routine
boring a hole
in thin air
and so what?
What if
the unexpected
never arrives?
Can you live
knowing you are alive?

I think
you may like
what you try

when the voice of listening
quiets

Runic

Bubbles adhere
so there is no inner
boundary between them

approximately crystalline

Does that help your mind understand your body?

There’s a brain part like a wig
and then a cloud
for thinking
or a blimp for speech

mysteries

that hovered
so long here
waiting for you
to make your way beneath it

Run and hide now
If the shadow
doesn’t follow
it is because
you’ve always
been the shadow

It’s only your feet
on the ground
that get stepped on

Exuberance, exhaustion, exuberance
Monsters
Are plausible
Since the world is so big
The more you learn the more you might learn
Books on fire don’t burn too fast to read
As groundlings groundle
A meteor falls to earth and changes its name
A curtain of gravity flutters downstage
Getting tired of humanoid aliens
And thinkable thoughts
A thread of panic twangs
I know how to handle these moments
I am a comfort
I bring with me a rhythm
Turning down the analog
To dream of abandoned signatures
Is the ground opening up or grinding over itself
Improbable is another way to say not impossible

I didn’t know what you meant until I heard you say it
Then the cloud in your lungs cleared to blue
Sky of the hollow earth
To make the miracle mundane
Or mundane miracles
It sounds profound, quotidian quotation
But it’s only the t-shirt under the sweatshirt
With the mock collar
I had some plan for
Davy Jones’s Locker
What I’d keep in it
And how I’d keep it dry underwater
How long it would stay sturdy and strong
Undergoing “inspiration”
There’s not only breath there
But the smell of breakfast, saliva spray, kiss memory
Germinal demiurge
Hugs from a giant
Not drenched, but fairly damp utopias
You never overhear podcasts or books on tape
When I used to ride the subway
Ten minutes and the thought returned
In swim trunks
Optional
The brazenness of history!
What is your life about?

Ars gratis artis
Sounds like art for free
Or at least some small gratuity
In a country where tipping is optional
My limits objectively assessed
Sort me from my passions
With a silver sieve
It would have been better to use cheesecloth
Sift obsessively the beetle larvae
The junior versions don’t have demons
Only soul devourers
Outraged when you say what you want
The pendulum that swings back down
Arcs dispassionately on
It can’t care less
About language let alone throat
Only neck for a soul transplant to drip down into
The sky vessel
Deep enough to make an exploding heart
Then explode
Your hope is my broken promise
A duration in which I pass
Between one eye and the other
While these gestures go unseen
They are their own reward
I collect experience in scallop shells
Hold the umbrella
Over the upward facing open mouth
Do my efforts exist
For how they make me feel
Or how they will make me remember feeling?
Usually I write until I ask a question
And decide what sort of grammar it demands
If I am as patient as a melody
The elevator free-falls so I buckle myself to the floor
Depending on the giant spring at the bottom
While a seagull stalls on the wind
Part time carnivore
I am already staggering out among you
Inventorying my skeleton
Getting a haircut
Moon music

The bronze dial

ticks backwards

seconds,

ie, almost firsts

It’s not

a competition says the winner

Tomorrow

is already today

Fielding a team

of implication experts

I watch a person say hello

Trusting my indecision

At some point

in every footstep

the body has to fall

Ancient fake antiquities

like rare counterfeits

are now just treasures

thrilled to arrive

at the end of the game

I’ll give you something

but do you consent

to receive gifts

Can you enjoy

what improves you

Can you improve

upon enjoyment

or is enjoyment

peak experience

Either/or?

-Yes

Neither/nor?

-Yes

Maybe?

-Perhaps

Perhaps?

-Maybe

First sighting of your downstairs face
You work by feel alone
Then backfill dirty explanation

Barely reading the labels
Investigating the factory
How many voices can you listen to simultaneously?

I whisper into a megaphone
Some air

In the door
Under the sea

Residue of a permanent brain change
Cc’ing the marketplace

A verbal contract
That written down invalidates itself
Not the right words
But at least the wrong words in the right order

Conversation reaches max so fast
Brown rainbow
Who is your mind?
Does the rain in Spain fall mainly on one biome?

Watching the clouds wing over Gibraltar
Eventually the stakeout must go home
Another agent is needed so when one tail is made
Another can edge in from the camouflage

What you have to watch out for
The wild u’s in heavy traffic
The black star timeline

To predict the unpredictable
It’s more a problem of memory than imagination
I promise you you’ve been here before

Best day to plant a tree
A hundred years ago
Today is always next best

That joke came punchline first
Who taught you to take comfort in the truth?
Do you drink desalinated tears?

I peel back some skin in search of text

But never mind, it’s only flesh

Signifying flesh

While mulling a ban on lab grown meat

Each word needs only one syllable 

and you can fill in the rest “I see where you are going with this”

“I’m going to stop you there”

Exiled at home

Keeping an empty inbox since 19**

Wink wink whisk whisk

What is the sound of an asterisk

One of the founders, emeritus

When in Rome

Like you’ve actually been to Rome

And you know what actual Romans actually do

On the Palatine wall after hours

There are fossils and graffiti

Bones, shells, tusks

Let me know when you’ve sorted

The alphabet on the refrigerator in the dark

If you speak my name aloud

Three times in the mirror

I’m listening

In a booth under the stairs

With an evolutionary predisposition to baby wails

And fingernails on blackboard

I’ve been learning to replace my silence lessons

With a standard distribution

It gets easier till it gets harder

And then when the edifice tumbles

Will it be ruin or accident

Archeologists meet cute