pli
selon pli
all the way
to
the horizon …
far/slash/not-
so-
far, surf’s
up, no respect
for
persons …
the sound of
many
atoms the
color of drums …
the
sun which
goes crazy instead
of
down … a
dictionary arranged not
alphabetically
but from
heaven to earth …
from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 63 / on styroform floatation devices /
foaming frothy and bombastic? / slang in /
neon wild / Lou Reed /
blue note brass frog burps /
many of you have read vasari’s lives of the artists it is a very funny and loveable book and in it three times he tells a story there is a road and a child sitting by the roadside drawing on a stone and each time it happens that a famous man some great artist is traveling on this road well he passes by the little boy and by chance observes what the child is drawing it happens to be a perfect circle a tête d’otage two eyes
in
each eye.
A nose. A
mouth.
1.
The wind blows your hat off
And your head off, too
2.
Sometimes I’m a being who sleeps
And sometimes someone having a conversation with someone
3.
We have been washed by the primary substance
It has fallen onto our war
4.
Here people are accustomed to the laughter that begins at dawn
The intricate ways of which are just like fear, that natural phenomenon
5.
Doesn’t this piss you off
This numb drop that slowly bleeds like the hole in my cheek or the stone that holds up the world?
6.
The shadow whip-cracks the entire town
“Ask an obvious question, get any obvious answer” or so the saying says, or so the saying does
7.
The midnight sun is larger than the bridge
That is large enough to carry astonishment across an abyss
8.
The sea erases
The letter appears
9.
The crowd exterminated in the doorways still wants to know what we want to know
Demands that we come down and talk
10.
I put my warm ear to the brokenness, an echo rises
I hold my money out to the man with the knife
11.
You nail yourself to the earth with a nail's compassion
To stop believing in reality. To begin believing in it
A green
sky behind my
head.
( ). ( ).
The centre of
town
awakes lentement.
Les cars which
cross
the streets
at speed show
that
people still
live by fear
of
the bombardments.
But all is
held
as if
the war were
a
history that
we were told
when
we were
children. A green
sky
to match
my green glasses.
Anyone,
she said,
had become her
favorite
pronoun. That
was how I
remembered
it. How
a senseless rock
suddenly
had eyes,
the stupid world
looking
at you,
it made a
claim,
had the
prior claim, had
been
there longer,
was not anything
like
you, except
in the eyes,
so
long boys,
it said, I’m
on
my way
to California. The
molten
metal cooled
and was beaten
into
brittle rattles,
while the little
children
prattled to
the kitten and
the
rattlesnake battled
with a turtle.
O
onion, you
make us cry
sin
afligornos.
You are clear
as
a planet
and destined to
shine.
I don’t
think it can’t.
Seven
seven seven.
I don’t think
it
can’t. Seven
seven seven. Seven
seven
seven. We’re
only in love’s
straits /
All hope
we’ll get thru
this
with exactitude
and dignity, we
don’t,
but with
bravery we shuttle,
and return. Next day take the oak leaf from the book and bite a chunk off and keep it in your mouth. Find a recording of wolves howling from natural recordings, or even a recording you made yourself of friends howling. But if you make the recording, direct your friends to a Rallying Howl, then a Defensive Howl; let them decide what that means. Listen to the recording on headphones and go outside chewing your leaf, keeping the book on you, in a bag, under your arm, between your ass cheeks, it’s up to you. Walk where there are people, walk where you can find THE MOST people. Keep chewing with the howling while studying faces and arms, studying how they move with one another, move around one another. Take notes, take as many notes as you can. When you’re tired of chewing your leaf move it between your teeth and gums, but don’t spit, swallow, don’t spit. Remember that this leaf has been soaked in the book while you were dreaming. This isn’t about appropriating text, it's about text absorption:
a
bottle of
warping formula.
Lift
the hazard.
Tune down by
fifths.
Lucretius warns:
‘Better the swan’s
brief
song than
the cry of
cranes /
Spread by
the south wind
through
the clouds
on high,’ (twice),
so
that any
return to what
you
thought was
home has already,
well,
_____________________________ (try saying that out loud)
opening any small orifice or enclosure of the self – be it ear or mouth or tightly clenched fist, asshole,
In sweetness
In solitude
The peace of chaff
A spice
Fetching potential
To ascertain
Of death
Wasting against a
batch
In bliss
To grow
A right of orchards
At a sudden color
What are we to make of this window, banners, discourses, men, the waking
ears, like immortal fields?
What are we to make of this drawer, like a round angel?
What are we to make of this face, ticked as fear?
Must we be a record?
May we be a cup?
Must we be a great line of poetry?
(“Everything in the world to do. I must be lying already. And the sacred is
sacred.”)
Is this red then, this celestial strife?
Is that wilderness then, that amber hurry?
Is that air then, that young old old?
What did our hair do until it picked us?
What did our throat do before it heard us?
What did our hand do until it suited us?
What did our rib do before it defeated us?
What did our finger do before it heard us?
What did our face do until it thought us?
What are we to make of this brow, newer than a winter?
What are we to make of this verb, astonished as a friend?
What are we to make of this ecstasy, our arms simple with news?
What are we to make of this bough, newer than an ecstasy?
When I say “bless” I mean a cat blesses the shaft of light that enters a room by sleeping in it.
Passing near the black hole
in a civil war ahead of the traffic
“hiding jokes in mud bricks” and “listening watching waiting”
I would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant.
Stick a tester in it.
Is it ready?
A?
B?
C?
D?
E?
F?
G?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The passive ornate—of temperature—is half-stone—is delta—tone measure—of
crystal—ruby lost—a toilet mechanism—sounds like—whistle—or
where
to just reside—
The passage is wide
open
to the solar
system.
It’s vowel time now and
the jury sweeps by in a cause and effect maneuver –
imagine all the filth of time
the bones that have been crushed in machines by machines or become
machines …
Cupids and Bacchus
Have given me carpet burns …
Someone was silent, and we wonder whose voice it had been.
A. indefinite / relative / relative
B. indefinite / personal / personal
C. definite / personal / personal
D. indefinite / personal / personal …
… the UN Convention against Torture and the US revisions of and exceptions to that convention, a dictionary of non-lethal weapons terms and references, the report reviewing Department of Defense detention operations, technical works on game theory and strategy, declassified White House memos, transcripts from animated video games, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Split the lark,” the song “The Big Rock Candy Mountains,” and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” …
icons
& the toxic halos
licked
all over like a stamp, my every garbage at
the actual border,
making it, making it over, taking up the slack.
The bottle broke in your bag & you're
getting flammable, very flammable.
No special name.
Your name here.
wwww lllluuu kkkhhhaaa.
An equivalent stretch of sand
or an equivalent stretch of sand
a definition of sand
the hair on your balls or if you’re too busy for balls
the tears like elves
Shiva Elijah Delphi achara Bruna leche flan Lama Vegas tidal volta destitute Alma then to write, in chalk, the final result, on the slate flagstones of the park,
Faint carvings base the moon, moonfaced seashell, cottontail, wind. loose pyjama
ship’sprow, little empire, little amusement drawer, the no-it’s-not banquet, the
carousel’spull. no, we are not accidents
of long ago, the tongues made
of tiny little tongues, call monsters to the walls.
When you sleep you miss / the courtesy service dream
where there was first aid
but no Inspector, an
Out of Office AutoReply: If you drop the weapon maybe. --------- -------------------. A
look on the child’s face as if running through a trashy jungle with her tiny broken penis out. That’s
true, you could hang your hat on the wind, and when you opened your mouth it was like True or false: I LIKED THOSE PEOPLE, EVEN THE MOST HATEFUL AMONG THEM. This
is not the “Oh!” of Eureka! but the “O” of a
vocative. But the thing
that worries me most
is that even in this neighborhood
if you wave to someone
they don’t wave back
…
What are they thinking?
Are they scared?
Scared of
waving people? An
acre of soil might contain 130 pounds each of algae and protozoa, 890 lbs. of insects, nearly 900 pounds of earthworms and about 2,000 pounds each of bacteria and fungi as well as … mega processes … the soil is charged I say, with iron, so you might have tasted its slightly bloody meat flavor. ‘Thought
is in the mouth’ wrote Tristan Tzara. There’s Leonardo’s dream, one he dreamt when an infant and recorded in his notebooks and which is recounted by Freud in his ‘psychobiography’ of the artist. A bird – a kite – flies in through the window, into the bedroom where he Leonardo sleeping, and it thrusts its tail into his mouth. Otherness of ‘I’, sky bursting in on him through the medium of this bird. Is this consciousness, as if it were something out there? Flight bursts into a room and is trapped here. Leonardo’s dream – you could interpret it as something exciting; mouth-flights, flights
of, flights of, flights of, flights of, prayers that leave tears in their objects of devotion, loosening, overlapping, frbrloping [huh?] an intimate proximity other
than. The same thing applies to the other who enlightens us, notably through desire, as is the case for the
sun, the “forming
blank”: if you want to know what you look like stick your face in the blind mirror and feel the mirror with your
face. Is there water in water? “Once you try to embrace an absolute geometric circle the naked loss stays with you like a picture echoing.” Here’s
a “funny story”: When I was alive I would type like this the three fingers of the right hand
and the two of the left or hold a pear thus or
take the skin off a cucumber with a device in the right hand and the pleasure
of the [illegible]
flesh “what feeds me to ashes” “it’s a little scraped up and it has a lot of” the tree collects moisture in this case rain sweat blood urine stinging eyes open she------random not random from the closest
[…]
------of an age to------
opening eyes------from
[…]
fur yanked off
But how might one consider
these works? I want to
begin with the photograph opposite.
On the left a torn
scrap of orange foam sits
upon a slanted strip of
wood, a smoking cigarette at
its end, the wood lying
across the cut upturned base
of a plastic bottle (that
was previously used to store
paintbrushes, it would seem) which
in turn is angled upon
the shaft of a hammer
the metal head now acting
like a pair of splayed
feet. In the middle a
russet pear has been placed
upside down in the neck
of a cardboard tube, a
bottle-top for its crown,
while rusted metal tubing sweeps
down, a strip of wire
hooked to its end, across
which is stretched a paint-
stained yellow rubber glove. To
the right, the metal tube
rests on the toe of
a dusty blue shoe that
stands back on its heel,
another lit cigarette here held
nonchalantly in its laces, as
if on a bottom lip
in consequence, of affinity, through proximity
one November I began to glow. Blank space peopled with empty shapes
gold pailletes of stars to die for
“lyric valuables” shot thru with the square hole of [I don’t know] in the center of each video still
“ … bite your own teeth … ”
glimmer of oh
_____________________________ (try saying that out loud)
opening any small orifice or enclosure of the self – be it ear or mouth or tightly clenched fist, asshole.
OK. in consequence, of affinity, through proximity
one November I began to glow. Blank space peopled with empty shapes
gold pailletes of stars to die for
“lyric valuables” shot thru with the square hole of [I don’t know] in the center of each video still
“ … bite your own teeth … ”
glimmer of oh …
between
roses and
shadows … the same
story
the crow
told me … the
only one I know …
pli
selon pli …
fold upon fold …
[Note: Two of the inserted bits from Autopoiesis (XXXV, 2.11) are for Jen Hofer. Sources: Harry Gilonis, “mountain divide”, “fragrant temples”, “chinese sonnet”, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed. Jeff Hilson); Rosmarie Waldrop, “Steps in Integration”, “Evening Sun”, in American Hybrid (eds. Cole Swensen and David St John); anonymous, “An Anecdoted Topography Of [Eleni Sikelianos’] The California Poem”, at onedit; anonymous, “On Ryan Gallagher’s Plum Smash and Other Flashbulbs”, at onedit; David Antin, “remembering [/] recording [/] representing”, in talking at the boundaries; JBR, “Otages (Coda)”, in Otages; JBR, “Autopoiesis XXXV”; Beverly Dahlen, A Reading, “Two”, “Five”; Lyn Hejinian, My Life in the Nineties; Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Onion” (tr unknown); Geof Huth, “And Water for Thirst”, 49 Pentecosts, n. 7, in Visual [/] Verbal [/] Vocal; Bernadette Mayer, “To Admiral Scott About Space”, in Scarlet Tanager; CA Conrad, “(Somatic) Poetry Exercises TWO: Oakenwolf”, at mark(s); Elizabeth Robinson, “As Betokening”, in Harrow; Robert Sheppard, The Anti-Orpheus: a notebook; Jean Vengua, “Home”, in Prau; JBR, Autopoiesis 2.7, 2.9, 2.10, 2.11, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons (ed. Nicholas Serota); Grateful Dead, “Uncle John’s Band”]
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