[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]
enter select desire
in column, pivot,
exit column intact
it’s scientifically casual
it plants its crops
into longer & longer
biologies
it tries to measure this
stretch of road
for its innate stretchiness
//
when desire makes a promise
the column
swells with pride,
the children do indeed
resemble
(simply set down
your crops,
cup your hands,
to complete this puzzle)
[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]
no one comes here just to sit
no one reads in the back of the closet
without a light
no one gets their full bodies
through the trap door
no pleather resembles skin, one
hardens with age, one
thins its own ideas over time
busy street, too busy to know
yours was halfbody, less maybe
you’d put your hands against the
fishbowl and scream and
no one would hear you so you
skip it
skip back
leave the sound of you wailing
in the future
//
in the future
the whales are coming to
sound it back
sound it out
anyone can behold a parting water but
how thick the wall of the beast
hands free in the open ocean is the
deep secret in my shallow ended
animal era, flippering the bird
but the sky thins in a blink
but it does this for
any assurance or any shred
of access to light
any body can make a splash
in the dark
any page could be the one
any one but you
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
Translation of a poem by Yen Ai-lin
*
Faint Spark
*
A women without a mouth to speak
has a pair of shy
little shoulders.
Her limbs and clothes
reflect the conditions in her heart.
*
“Cold. Indifferent.
No one knows my timidity
comes from an excess of passion
not yet lit;
I’m waiting for that spark.”
Her tightly closed mouth
shurnk like a sphincter;
so small.
And her wooden body
Like sticks,
as if waiting for someone
to chop her into kindling.
*
**
*
隱隱燃
*
沒有嘴說話的女人
有一副很小、
很害羞的肩膀。
她的肢體和穿著
反映她心中的氣候
*
「冷。漠。
沒有人知道我的膽小
是因為過多的熱情
尚未燃點；
我等待那唯一的冒險」
她緊閉的嘴
縮得跟腹腔類動物一樣；
很小。
而漠然的身軀
木木的，
彷彿在等人
將她削成一塊易燃的 柴。
Opalescent octopus? Present.
Rainbow-flavored interdimensional
eidolon? Present. Show up and others
show up too. It’s no victory (No victor
believes in chance. -said N) though let’s fete it
regardless, it’s less projection more
a hatched convergence. EMU ENO EMO
Eidolon: 1) an idealized person or
thing or sorrow. Silver wormwood shimmers
outside the library with mysteries
of the alphabet. Eidolon: 2) spirit,
phantom, apparition, petals on a bough.
S contains tooth and bow and arrow.
Aim to the morning star in descent to
the underworld. The state may have a victim
compensation fund but does it also have
a release from victim consciousness
fund? J says dawn created the rooster.
past the brickyard geese sphinx gauntlet
tulip fins cut winter's lake face
they can read for given up on.
they don't like it fronting like you're
not too made for the loft heft shitting
the tulips' red heads haven't
yet while the rest florescence
perhaps we can hold for each other can
tuck hope for snug in the other
can now face & continuing
After Ron Padgett
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
No one driving that car.
Cleaning the La-de-da Institute
For your comforts I offer three conveniences
Put the man in manqué
and run in run away
To smile is not a social cue anyone understands
How many times have you Moby-Dicked
For how long!
Method acting is the wrong method
No face is clay
Naturally occurring silence like a geyser
Things to put away
hot flashes, tack on the floor, chest x-ray
Half done in the half down
A kingdom for your court cases
Consider the lap table
The letter
If every bottle was sold with its own ritual
you would know why you turn on the lamp
even though the room is filled with light
— for Benjamin Bourlier
Failed at form
Failed at normal
Failed at cultivating an extremely chewy porpoise aroma
Failed to create an online owl persona
Failed at becoming a whore of something
Failed at ironing while rappelling
Failed at rage
Failed at silence
Failed at sacrificing the orifice to a novice
Failed at spillage blinking
Failed at interactive retail think-tanking
Failed at maggot inventory
Failed at weekly overseas tree surgery
Failed to defend the Host against Christianity
Failed at stopping drinking
Failed at starting drinking
Failed at being all by desiring to be nothing
Failed, and failing, at being nothing (and, also: something)
Failed at texting STOP to opt out
Failed at sleeping outside in the buff
Failed at being born to preposterous ignorance
Failed at being heard hollering for solace
Failed at affairs I should’ve kept Masonic
Failed to recall the ROY G. BIV mnemonic
Failed at becoming the sublimated vapors of what had been solid a moment prior
Failed at becoming Richard Pryor
Failed at manufacturing nationalism
Failed at fighting immigration legislation
Failed at feeding the local “water sausages” (a.k.a. otters)
Failed at Mexican-ish fine dining with otters
Failed to determine whether this dining is just more irredeemable torment for otters
Failed the rhizome, the arborescent
Failed the criminal and the innocent
Failed to make the tacit speak in the place of saying
Failed to be the peace that surpasseth understanding
Failed to cancel my appointment for acupuncture
Failed to make full-time tenured professor
Failed to finish The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters
Failed rain, and all the weathers
Failed law
Failed awe
Failed despair
Failed air
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
The algorithm feeds me a disembodied hand pouring resin over a vase
and a sped-up video of how to make a backyard brick oven and how to make
a volcano candle that seeps pink wax. I tell him as slowly as I can that I
have nowhere to go with my depression. But I watch another hand mash
red and beige clay on a pottery wheel and spin it into amphora. I stew
over a mistake. How do I make it to 40? Will I survive the dull convex
of my aging face. A woman offers a tutorial on contouring, looks ridiculous
painted over. I read comments, a pancreatic venom that’s found language.
Another video spins into focus, this dress is my secret weapon. Iran counterattacks,
the G7s meet on a Sunday, Gazans brace, Israel razes. I swallow a bloody clot
and hate that I must always be an I. A snippet of poetry like a sharp pain
at my cheek like a dream that begins while reading a snippet of poetry,
the words ribboned into a distant subplot, distant subpleasure, another
of love’s alien urgency. I try to hold it together, a candle that once spilled
gladly into mold. I try to welcome myself anew to the world. I’m sorry.
Default to truth or denial default
When I feel him every few years it’s my brain ghost
A simple part of grief
Everyone was asked to clarify what they did
Pine needles in her hair
You can become smarter by smelling the sidewalk
or touching latin on the cloud
What they learned about faces from TV is wrong
Deep breaths in low-cut shirts
They sleep there
They fall down and sleep there
How would you describe a handle
A normal day day
A scared rabbit runs right out in front of me
rather than jumping in the bushes
No one can write a bible anymore
(meh)
a state of calm - illusion - held
just so between tension strata
being a variance it agrees
with itself* can trees long? can trees
grieve? that dude so sure competing
breeds - why is the world green? well
one reason is tigers and a
different reason is needs keep
perceiving strife where really sleeps
hunger & cohere repeating
*Heraclitus fragment lifted from a book about life in tide pools
that little smile
women give me
when exiting
the bathroom stall
I’m about to enter
what is it?
embarrassed
conspiratorial
magnanimous
or smug
it suggests
we’re sharing
a secret
a cigarette
or something
far more
intimate or
dangerous
than peeing
in the same
toilet
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
Broad buttercups
of the neighbor’s magnolia
from the new backyard, hello
nice to meet you
and how many springs lately
I’ve cursed those blooms:
the season when some
creatures decline
to ride the next turn
’round the sun.
As for me, I’m glad
I drove for hours
to meet my friend
to see my favorite band
up close on a small stage.
To see the dark blue lake
and the even bluer lake
and the terrace
filled with sunbathers
in sixty-five degrees.
I’m glad I took the tour
of other people’s memories.
He said here we are
walking around in it
the day everyone waits for
all winter
and I leaned against cool marble
in the shade
wondering: To say hello
or wave goodbye?
[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]
no memory of the dream but the dream remembers to squeeze your airway enough to wake you. no memory of giving the necklace back but some things not built to rot do. memory of strange permissions. memory draped in excess fabric. memory caked in dirt. memory of your body being thrown from the animal but the animal will do no harm. no memory of how many times the silver edge. no memory of how many sandy hairs on how many sandy heads, some more sandy than others. memory of the architecture of the scene but not the scene itself. memory of some of the many ways to put your hand on a jawbone. fog memory of how to make certain that jawbone moves. we don’t breathe into our mouths but we’re made to feel that way. we nod to systems as the systems undo us. we misread our fire bellies as fire in the throat. we swallow our flames, go ka-blooey. i once beheld the vast network of forest service roads from a dangerous vehicle. i excused myself into my shoulder injury, in whose socket i became one week sober. sobriety throbbed there. my heart raced in half-sleep. i woke exhausted and clear. i locate the animal but the animal will do no harm.
//
harm animal lives in the caves on the edge of your vision, miles past waking. for the two-day trip you pack four days of food and seven days of water. this is seeking’s math. this is a hunger for losing your way. there is no hunt on the itinerary. there is no weapon. your voices carry deep into the first evening, having left at dusk, and your blood comes early the next morning. every living thing must think you injured. you don’t even know where you make the blood go but it goes, goes far enough to scrounge another night so to ease your backs you eat every remaining bite, a ridiculous feast, you don’t even leave breakfast and you don’t wake hungry. there is nothing you’ve tied into the trees, there is no hole to bury your blood. only the deer came in the night, whose proof graze glass-eyed near the nylon of you, unbothered by zippers. before you hike down you hike up: pack you out, pull up your socks, dust off your elbows, spread your arms wide. the sun is coming up in tune with waking. the sun is coming down, both hammer and bell, to ring you red and nail you down dusty. you never meet the animal and you’ve secreted a weapon but no one is seeking damage.
— for Elisabeth Workman, after her “Occult Clouds Rhyme In My Galactic Mom”
(This is an older poem — full disclosure — but wanted to post *something* bc no time to write past few days)
1
A raptor in descent
sugars the sea change to poison
to stay alive in ardent gardens
pomped with bones and teeth.
2
Mood pages in a breeze moult
always in roam-time.
The bowl before the sensorium,
the glyphs before the lore
of mutant maws declared American:
the lost is cause; I in my bog.
3
But here with hands and no utensils,
the caveat is rats disguised as dogs.
In the beginning there was fennel, and laments,
a song about psychopomps.
In the hedge of what to wear tonight
is quelled Solange and Baubo.
4
I caul
I tangle
And when I angle
and you don’t answer
I slide my sequins down
ahead of sun.
5
In this egg skin of portals,
any idea will do:
benefits of blue glass,
fungi in the chant,
a science finale in which the living lie
dying of sun-bleached stones.
6
Nothing personal, but
my Orc is confused by your torpors
across the shifting dunes.
Let this incomprehensible flux eviscerate
earthly magnetism and chance,
the green bed of mid-morning.
7
You have no body yet are ready to secrete
the edge of banished feeling.
There is no elephant spraying
your lady silently with soap.
There is no freedom,
courtesy of mastodons in the grotto.
8
Again, don’t worry, everything’s under control.
In the short film I showed,
the metaxu of John the Baptist
was too profile, too cameo.
But the swan queen was my mother,
whom I thought I knew.
9
In the city of the sun,
glittering void vestments
wrote poems releasing the zoo
from resistance.
The limits of this freak way
formed figurines, strange nourishments.
10
A new sense in the form of glass
truffles distillations of my paralysis.
Forever young,
my already hemorrhaging heart
flings eyeballs
toward your cliff face.
11
For sport, I doubted your tannenbaum,
but gathered your spalled appellations
and released them to the sea.
Ugly feelings sometimes
go all the way back
to the first extension cord.
12
I am in a sense bionic
when I tap a minor succulence
to spray its ovum skyward;
its fishy viscera
is the sovereign flower
of a quivering metallic disk.
13
The delivery girl for Tony’s Pizza
put her finger in my thong.
So come musk, come ox,
come eon of sylvan aerie,
abject sentience by a vexed river,
more favorable lustrations.
leafy greens like chard are okay
reading poems to trees I left
wrist verse to produce a list
wander a supermarket in a city
I only sorta know forget
my list so exit with cookies
& mangoes later trees
were hungry I offer
a shrug felt bad about that too
still the black on black ensemble
is stunning among the park greenery
tweed blazer a flock of birds
that would soar then sit on the high wire
a dance without a floor
feedback in a cave the thing about thinking
living in a feedback loop
with a bad ear & open
mouth the path past
the skate park with the David
Bowie jams project until
the astral winks back
too many bodies problem
television glitches fails to
fall forward into memory’s
static we float a photograph
of a wedding with thumb smeared faces
painting outside then the rain
super nice to be not so close
I believed the poem would shift if I wrote alongside my sleeping cats,
the sun pinkening them, the serene animal of no ego.
I believed seasonal depression made the poems punch more, a soft suicide
like grass growing through gravel streets.
I believed the poet saw feelingly, her sense diametric to the institution,
the poem a deranged tear in a firmament fogged by dirty endowments.
I believed we could come to the summit of meaning, guided by Gloucester,
believed in the word crystalline only in the poem, that meaning, to exist, must leave us.
I believed I came up with the answer for poetry while stoned under a table,
the serene animal of no ego bearing always a god of vapor, then forgot.
I believed jealousy because it believed in me, a beautiful terrible feeding that is
the racket of poetry, the racket of enterprise, the speak speak speak of power.
I believed the Venn diagram of a cute shy girl and the cunty girl was a circle,
so I wrote a poem called Self-Portrait and deleted the poem called Self-Portrait.
I believed I could write a poem about exercise, the long muscles tensed
and working, the dazzling sky of our bodies, the equine breath of work.
I believed in the institution for many tax seasons, the money owed
and the money owed and the money owed and the money owed.
I believed the secret of the poem snakes through other people’s poems,
and meaning is a matter of finding its scent, kissing its wet earth.
I believed in no music, no encouragement, the days sealed shut.
Do you see the pelicans gliding overhead, arching in a single direction?
Now, poet, do you see?
