FCF 102

We should not be surprised. For it is through misunderstanding that the unconscious lets us glimpse a little of the real. And therein lies the purpose of analysis, which is to replace the misunderstanding inherited from our ancestors with another,

the
         one
                   created
by

a
burning glass;
a watery sphere;

orgasm
is essentially
a narrative,

road
becomes so
instantly metonymy, it

sings
when tires
grind over it,

hoping
to build
a house, part

snow,
part victory,
ice and sun

balancing
the untrained
shafts, part sheet

music,
part dust,
sings often – parts

open,
flake, break
open, let go,

but
this forgetting,
is it not

constitutive,
rather than
accidental? Wouldn’t it

be
nice to
be able to

say
something like
I find three

muddy
stones, I
roll over and

my
color falls
off, (“as if

the
weapons were
moving // entirely in

the
wrong direction”)
(“horses laugh // and

clouds
put on
their aprons”)???

Red
sky, lumpy
balloonlike objects. Sperm?

A
pooltable covered
by a tablecloth,

or
a flatroofed
gazeboey outbuilding. Ground

or
wroughtiron fence.
Plants with roots?

More
sperm? Blue
wash. Red mountains.

Horizon.
Never collapse
the gap between

phenomenal
reality and
the messianic Other,

since
this leads
to an impossible

situation
of opposing
aporias. There are

really
only two
choices at this

point:
the creative
effervescence of funkentelechy,

or
the viral
dread of the

placebo
syndrome: eat
up all the

rocks
and trees,
and be eaten.

Choose
both. You’re
the new nomad

of
intelligent noisists,
you mass of

thrum,
playing on
the keyboard of

samplified
bloodflow. Take
this diagram. Men

die
of. You
should lie down

now
and remember
the forest, for

it
is disappearing –
no, the truth

is
gone now.
The dove sang

who
whoo [verb
illegible]. You will

suffer
from diarrhea
for a while

then
die on
a sunny day,

but
it will
rain on the

day
of yr
funeral. It will/you will/it will.

Beloveds,
how can
we understand it

at
all? They
are we here

and
on the
desire and the

hour
they are
we here taken

to
traverse completely
sufficiently in the

hope
or in
the desire and

in
the hour
they are we

here.
The composer
and the audience

wear
blindfolds. In
fear we lay

longitudinal.
How do
you make a

dumbball?
Spend fifteen
hours tossing a

lump
of wet
concrete back and

forth
between your
hands, a
sort of one thing standing

in for another
something like

like heartbreak, exhaustion, being broke, or drunk, or trying to hold onto Mother

is it turtle soup again?

; in these Hellenistic rem¬nants we hear the echoes of Blind Willie Johnson’s apologetics and Bessie Smith’s epistemology of love

—singing, Mother

is it turtle soup again?

yield, and then Ssssshh, and then

yield, and then Ssssshh, and then

yield, and then Ssssshh, and then

We are deceived at every level by our behavior. You are grammar and the city is syntax. This home-grown veggie has the brilliant, vulgar, infinite, intimate, alluring vivacity of the real. If you search for meaning that can be summarized, you will find multiple meanings, all of them capable of confounding any summary by proposing its own opposite, its own doppelganger, its own disguise, its own cohort. ("fleet of heart"). And every here word is true—in harsh light—unheimlich—("the time it takes / to wash the fire from your face") brandishes the whip. The psyche rises

as
a mist
from things that

are
wet like
a whiskey radio

in
a Tupperware
cup. Pinkness purses

its,
in * adoring
you do I

divide
you * double ?
smoke * smiles out

upwards
from your
life’s lips leaving

suggestions
of sidereal
serpents are three

ways
to begin.
The horns impressed

us,
and the
drums suggested a

permanent
delay. We
felt like [         ]-orists

but
even partial
words are searchable

now.
“Work hard,
play hard” has

been
the over-
eager motto of

a
generation in
training for…what?—

drawing
hearts in
cappuccino foam or … Maybe we had it all wrong. Maybe it’s all exterior. Maybe certain hierarchies fall when everything—found and unfound—gets in. Maybe not as things, but as “as octopus / on the porch snow / still now a comma / a ticket a timetable.” Or maybe “We are going to get serious [page break] about project management / we are going to spend a lot of money on project / management software to prove it.” Maybe we are.

That
our pleasure
is our labor

only
makes our
symptoms more manageable.

But
not by
us. Lips are

rain
leaking in
after a fast,

“little
deflated splashes
of color on

the
floor.” But
the cycle continues:

and
the cycle
continues: I have

muscles,
I can
breathe the grass

as
it comes
through the dirt,

in a human being, desires lose their mooring in biology, they are operative only insofar as they are inscribed within the horizon of Being sustained by language; however, in order for this transposition from the immediate biological reality of the body to the symbolic space to take place, it has to live a mark of torture in the body in the guise of its mutilation.

This
brin [text
breaks off] behind,

hands
dart twines
fructify [bare] (so

long,
skydivers) bark
and shake, savor

the
sense of
gibbons swinging tree

to
tree. We
have not occupied

this
building for
no reason. We

intend
to employ
this tactic until

it
becomes generalized.
Just as significantly,

we
have made
no demands. “May

your
eyes go
to the sun,

your
life’s breath
to the wind.

Go
to the
sky or earth,

as
is your
nature; or go

to
the waters
if that is

your
fate. Take
root in the

plants
with your
limbs.” How could

these
wet souls
not love seeing

through
the specular
glass? This pink

pad’s
no stationery
tool—it’s the

house
Jayne Mansfield
lived in. I

just
knew it
had something grand

in
it! Lychees
maybe, because they

look
like squishy
eyeballs, yet taste like

perfume,
or a
Looney Tune pineal gland.

From the purple ceiling
hangs a naked bulb, he yanks on its chain and
the purple brightens
to weave in high theory with the embar-
rassingly intimate and grotesque. Elves
walk with us. Dinosaur is female there-
fore a prostitute. I can see her cunt.
And a
rhinestone,
which has
forever dented my

forehead.

[Note: Sources: books in my briefcase, books in my office, and poets on Ron Silliman’s 1 Oct 09 new acquisitions list. And. Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The real, the symbolic and the imaginary (tr. Devra Beck Simiu); Norma Cole and Michael Palmer, A Library Book, in Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (ed. Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, David Trinidad); Sheila Murphy, Pure Mental Breath, in Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (eds. Leonard Schwartz, Joseph Donahue, and Edward Foster); Peter Gizzi, “Etudes, Evidences”, as quoted in Cole Swensen, “Peter Gizzi’s City: The Political Quotidian”, in American Poetry of the 21st Century: The New Poetics (eds. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell); Joan Larkin, “Jewish Cemetery, West Roxbury”, in The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (eds. Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz); Camille Roy, “2 Pure Girls”, in Myles/Kotz; Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, The Meditations, as quoted in Elizabeth A Frost’s blurb; ekphrastic vision of Judith Wolfson’s The Meditations cover art; Andrea Hurst (paraphrasing Zižek), in Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis; Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society; critical comments, and description of a photo, at Francisco López.net; Frances Presley, “take this diagram”, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed. Jeff Hilson); Susan Stewart, “The Forest”, “Awaken”, in American Hybrid (eds. Cole Swensen and David St John); Maurice Scully, “Sonnet (‘when I follow the pattern of scratches on the’)”, “Sonnet (‘From your previous life you have brought’)”, in Hilson; Juliana Spahr, “December 8, 2002”, “New World Sonnet” in Swensen/St John; Geraldine Monk, Ghosts & Other Sonnets, in Hilson; Karen Tsujimoto, “Being In The World”, in The Way Things Are: The Art of David Ireland; Joel Betrridge, “As We Would Say”, at http://jacketmagazine.com/22/bettr.html Jacket 22; like heartbreak … love: blurb for Joel Bettridge, Presocratic Blues, at chax press; Mark Bibbins, “Continuity”, as quoted by John Gallagher, at Nothing To Say & Saying It; Gillian Conoly, “Profane Halo”, at Jacket 16; I went thru 3 Google result screens looking for something by Jacque Vaught Brogan who I think might be Jacqueline Vaught Brogan either way I found nothing; blurbs by Doug Lang and Cole Swensen, for Cathy Eisenhower’s Clearing Without Reversal, at Aerial Magazine/Edge Books; Gillian Jerome, “Apiary of Underclothes”, at Geist; I went thru 3 Google result screens looking for something by Florence Kindel who Google thinks might be Florence Kendall I don’t think so I found nothing; Nicholas Manning, “Love Poems 464”, “Love Poem 465”, “Love Poem 466”, at Eleksographia 2; Chris Nealon, “Dolores”, “Greek Fire”, at Reading Between A&B; “Communiqué from an Absent Future”, at we want everything: critical theory and content from the nascent ucsc occupation movement, 24 Sept 09; Robert Fitterman, blurb for Mel Nichols, Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon, at Aerial/Edge; Mel Nichols, “Day Poem”, at Aerial/Edge; Bin Ramke, and Marjorie Perloff, in Perloff’s blurb for Ramke’s Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems, at Omnidawn; Catie Rosemurgy, “Twelve and Listening to the Stones”, at Graywolf Press; Slavoj Zizek, “Why Lacan Is Not a Heideggerian”, at Lacanian Ink 32; Matina L Stamatakis, “Fluent”, at Moria Poetry; Matthew Thorborn, “Woken Each Morning By the Glad Laughter of Birds”, at Waywiser Press; Michelle Taransky, “Barn Burning”, at La Petite Zine; Rg Veda 19.13.3, as quoted in Gananath Obeysekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth; Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, “Tenebrae”, in Duhamel/Seaton/Trinidad; JBR, Autopoiesis CLV (which is an episode of Dancing With the Stars, featuring Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian)]

Comments

[Ed Baker]

was looking through some of my "stuff'.... to pick something for to read at my very-first-ever public reading.. I get 7 mins! heck 68 years old and I am reduced
to
seven minuetttes!

anyway decided on either first section out of G OO DNIGHT or something out of
Neighbors (book5) then I found my 2007 piece:
DE:SIRE IS

so

what to do what to do?

then

magicalliy I read your this! this is by far to my ear/mind/sight you at "the top of your 'game'"

so
will send you my for a read my

De:sire is which I got (I think) as an odt which I can make into a pdf and send it pdq... if I got your ad-dress ..

Your FCF 102 tear-riffick! hang in/on.