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FCF 109

My favorite thing in this poem, and I think it’s extremely special, is a phrase that’s stayed in my head since I first read it, and which often comes to mind when I walk out the door each morning. It serves to remind me of the wonders I hope to encounter in the world, or even act as a kind of talismanic chant that might evoke such things.

ecstatic buckets of daytime

and that phrase is something else. It’s rapture, the rapture of day-energy, caught in words! That phrase gives me giddy joy. Thank you, Mel Nichols, for this line! [I dreamt about you last night] The fragment / image seems all the more glorious given that it’s sandwiched between an emphasizing interjection (“indeed”) and [the extraordinarily

perfect]
“in the
ellipsoidal notorious some.”

Green
shores appear;
we assume our

names, ...
Green is
green, according to

Husserl.
“She hears
the loud bells.”

"Green
is or":
if you would

like
to fill
another prescription please

press
1. the golden
mountain. "man with

five
hands". Fark
Yaraları. Scars of

Différance.
Jerk the
verbs, word honey.

Adequation
and identification,
with mediation as

their
means, but
towards what We're

running
a business
here. If it’s

9:45,
I’d think
it’s after midnight.

In
1998, a
silver-assed monkey

touched
me and
changed my round

square.
There was
a telly in

there,
as well,
but with its

own
content. I
stared at it

longer
than I
might because it

seemed
that Suzanne
Somers was in

the
video. Could
that be? Is

she
fresh enough
still? I could

be
wrong, it
could have been

a
pure nobody.
The Starlings, so

I
believe, imitate
death here in

the
theatre. And
sweeping them again

from
the aisles,
their legs of

branch,
hardened, yes,
but wingèd, Lord,

had
you not
made them to

fly
above the
earth, in the

open
firmament of
Heaven, pure coding?

I
like to
read because it

kills
me. I live
in the figurative

world.
Everything has
an almost brownish

clarity.
Who wanted
feet in the

first
place? How
did the arrow

fall
down the
chimney? & there

we
were, by
the gas station

on
the eve
of it could

be
world war
III, our arms

filter
thinning what
senses ‘eerie is

the
right word
for it’ (CNN)

100
BOOTS go
to the supermarket,

100
BOOTS visit
a cemetery, 100

BOOTS
ride a
roller coaster … and

I never wrote but to say that I had never done anything, could never do anything and that in doing something I was doing nothing. My entire work was built and could only be built on this nothingness            on this carnage, this fray of extinguished fires, of crystals and slaughter; one does nothing, one says nothing           I don’t know why it should be precisely here that my steps take me, here that I almost always go without specific purpose and without anything determining it other than this obscure clue: namely that

it

(?)

will

happen here

“It
should be
fun / Let’s go,

leave
the dishes,
get dressed / I’m

dying,
On a
night so
murky and blue

it’s
criticism.” Its
accent was bad,

bad
like the
puke of / 15

Dr
Peppers / With
the sort of

vapor
foreshortening that
makes / A squirrel

face
into a
walrus face/ As

I
write we
are 9 years

into
this ridiculous
war. … All, the buried ones included
      and without forgetting the dead ones, he specified

      as an across-this-world's-swarming-and-whirling-large-
      flat-floor-walking,
                    specifying shadow

      as a snowy rain
      a-flooding with butterfly- and certain kind of bread-formed
                           words

      with cities, objects with their aftermarket, pots, flowers
      on window sills, with carpets shelves light-spots measure-
          sticks houses
                  concepts

      containing partly acoustic music, partly that from the turn
          of the century,

shrinking as we grow

hemmed-
in by
something in the

water
or something
coming over the

water,
wind through
the horn, a

series
of notes,
scoring what won’t

echo.
Fuckin’ A.
The farmer who

yet
sees stars
catches their elderly.

IN
THIS WORLD
the problems seep

into
me. When
the home team

loses
some men
turn off their

televisions
and beat
their wives. The

bad
news recombines
in the dreamlike

way
it often
does in poems,

only
this time,
to borrow Freud's

terminology,
the day
residues are instantly

familiar
and nearly
intact: “Spider silk

in
the milk
of goats,” “Refusing

to
acknowledge / the
legitimacy of the

mudslide,”
There was
simply nothing to

identify
with or
imitate. The whole pop-
ulation became a networked jumpiness, a distributed neuronal network
registering en masse shifts in the nation’s global state of discom-
fiture                          in rhythm with leaps.

Uninflate ”nose” at one end, then knot off the wattle: as the meaning continues into the wee wee, the freak stays in the picture

everything will be f-f-fine

Bowl
Of Air
and Shivers: a

cat
in heat
passes and the

[motion-
detecting] crime-
prevention light flips

on,
illumines the
driveway … the light’s

an
old court
gamelan, gong deeply

resonant,
ancient woman
plays … You are

magic!
You expand /
You are ever

crumbling /
You are
arenot a maniac …

[Note: Sources: a bunch of stuff. Another b’day poem. This is not just for me; it’s also a b’day poem for Richard Lopez. Steven Fama, reviewing Mel Nichols’ Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon, and Nichols herself, at the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, 22 Nov 09 (Dear Ms Nichols, tho we have never met, forgive me: I dreamt about you last night or the night before, no shit. I was utterly in love); Google search results (Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations green); Google search results (Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations golden mountain); Bruce Andrews, “Please Please Did”, in Designated Heartbeat; Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (tr. Susan Hanson) (thanks, Anny!); Angela Genusa, “Empire Trust Company”, “After the Rapture” (Hey Anglela, long time no etc; good to have you back!); Allen Bramhall, “The Mall”, at Tributary, 26 Nov 09; John A Scott, Sonnets: Theatre of the Dead Starling, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed. Jeff Hilson); Mary Ruefle, “Impresario”, “Go Verbatim”, “Minor Ninth Chord”, “Naked Ladies”, “Where Letters Go”, in American Hybrid (eds. Cole Swensen and David St John); Jam Ismail, “Casa Blanca 1991”, in Language for a New Century (eds. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar); Howard N Fox, “Waiting in the Wings: Desire and Destiny in the Art of Eleanor Antin”, in Eleanor Antin (ed. Howard N Fox); Antonin Artaud, and André Breton, as quoted in Blanchot; Brandon Downing, “László”, “Forrest Gump “, “Phantasm (1979)”, in Dark Brandon; Levi Lehto, “Snowfall”, “Ananke: A Pantoum”, in Lake Onega and Other Poems, as quoted in Michael Peverett’s review, at Intercapillary Space; Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, Snow Sensitive Skin; Catherine Wagner, “The Argument”, as quoted in Johannes Göransson’s review of her My New Job, at Exoskeleton, 24 Nov 09; Crg (!) Hill, “Quickly followed by catbird, the wren, the wood choir”, at Crg Hill’s Poetry Scorecard; Michael McClure, “62”, in Touching the Edge; Anne Waldman, “An Aside on Karma”, “Steps of a Bodhisattva”, in Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble; Jordan Davis, reviewing Kevin Davies’ The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, and Davies himself, at The Nation, 4 Feb 09; Brian Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”, at Brian Massumi.com; Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan, “Fleshy Red Thing”, Nada Gordon, “Ted & Kit” (where she quotes Ted Greenwald), at ululations, 23 & 27 Nov 09; Eugene Gloria, in Chang/Handal/Shankar; Tada Chimako, “Haiku”, in Chang/Handal/Shankar]

FCF 108

Aber
haben ancient
bahben he-ah-buh, he-ah-buh,

you
need to
know what that

means.
We may
relate with pleasures

and
[quote] “pleasures”
because we’re We’re

in
the midst
of an explosion

and
think it’s
just everyday life.

Mon
tortilla ferocity
laminated klieg        Mittwoch

deuce
dapple        nepotism
rábbit-page        alleluia.

We
are those
lifeforms. Linkedy link.

Con-
tented lifespace.
Lilly of the

conju-
rer. I can’t
believe it either.

Well,
but blue
places dance and

stroke.
Be light
light that. Think

of
it as
a watery wave

force.
Whoever hears
plaster dry listens

best.
Or listens
last. Or, as

Nada
Gordon makes
Alli Warren sing,

Gold Dirt

out of several secretions
nectar
come bursting through the ground
secret swelling

in gaping engagement

must be made more moist
with spore sacs and sac fruits

and we were all like
plugging the whole

lactating

all gummy in the mouth

breathing and peopled cupping

we wipe each other off

waxing real hard

pussywillows whip in the wind

I lick around the perimeter and then I lick under

insert two fingers to bring breath
the flooding comes
donk for days

I lay my button down on naked ladies

if this is decadence

I had something special on
for pants

big breathy icons

and fruity knockers

I held it in my mouth

but
this illness
(which is however

not
a real
illness, but a

complex
and exceedingly
rare natural phenomenon),

just
as each
caterpillar’s head is

blinded
and left
black, its torso

thinned
by a
veritable explosion from

which
the symmetrical
wings flare up,

is
simply onomatopoeia
without mimesis, perhaps,

I
want to
believe it makes

a
difference / our
crowding together like

this /
pooling our
burden of neurological

disaster /
secret symbols
and laying on

of
hands. It’s already morning
even though I can still feel the tight insistence
of my eyelids.

And chipmunk-cheeked

and out-of-cash and damp
and burning calories,
a long day ahead
and a long long night
and a day, a mammal lifeform
ordered by our bulging ears,

the cat sits down
this poem writes
itself again

and one bears witness to a destruction of the field which, thus, becomes extremely blurred to the extent that everything from this time on can coexist, and on the other hand, everything crumbles into splotches of what’s important – real time cut with elastic – let’s recall how interested we were in the contest between two whirligigs,

O sleepless data glaze glazed
drool echo echo then not

this poem begins to

writes and writes
itself again

everything I touch turns
to flesh and

that’s right

flesh and.

The starry night to stare at.

The sandwich-eating Shadow.

flesh and.

The
spaces in
between your fingers

shift
throughout the
day and almost

disappear
in webs.
The great ball

of
crystal – who
can’t lift it?

Good
when a
branch scrapes the

roof
of your
shed. ‘Où vont

les
chiens ?’ That’s
right. I do

have
a gag
reflex. Or is

this
a Rancièrean
assertion that there’s

an
aesthetic dimension
INHERENT in any

radical
emancipatory politics?
“When Freud says

that
the obsessive,
on the cultural

level,
yields the
religious and that

what
is hysterical
yields art … there

is
a difference
between what makes

things
move and
what stops them …”

Le
nom du
père (le non

du
père) trickles
Rome’s thin prose

yet
we’ll move
the deeper part

ellipsis
into every
ellipsis falls a

dialectic. It would therefore be prudent to distinguish such providential outcomes as History affords us from Utopia itself as the opposite of our history as a whole. Returning to earlier speculations about a spatial dialectic, we may argue that in that sense Utopia is no longer in time, just as with the end of the voyages of discovery and the exploration of the globe it disappeared from geographical space as such. Utopia as the absolute negation of that fully-realized Absolute which our own system has attained cannot now be imagined as lying ahead of us in historical time as an evolutionary or even a revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it cannot be imagined at all; and one needs the languages and figurations of physics – the conceptions of closed worlds and a multiplicity of unconnected yet simultaneous universes – in order to convey what might be the ontology of this now so seemingly empty and abstract idea. Yet it is not to be grasped in the logic of religious transcendence either, as some other world before or after this one, or beyond it. It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world – better to say the alternate world, our alternate world – as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world

suddenly
break into
this one, we

are
reminded that
Cartoon prawns and

crabs
go into
Eurotunnel singing along

with
zydeco music.
Redwoods fall. 57

million
something tons
ice just melted

in
the Antarctic.
Our fortunes are

in
the stars,
truly, since brokers

are
using astrology
in the stockmarket.

Anywhere
near blank
rage I veer,

oblivial.
Blank rage
isn’t very useful.

It
is the
name for an

X
whose V
does not view

the
surface of
a lake but

the
mirror on
a wall, where

U
and you
become a tautonym,

a
kra haa
car-eek kee-arr kay-rrr,

kip
kip kip
kow-kow-kow, ga-ga, let

the
party-goers
go in the

grass
and fuck
in the night,

no
good (nor bad) will
come of it.

no
possible good (nor bad)
can come of

it.
one’s picture
of the keeper

at
the gates
is straight from

the
movies.
Like that dude

in
the Kafka
parable: Clyde Robert

from
The Wizard of

Oz.
What we
need are SPIMES.

If
we had
SPIMES, we’d maybe

only
have melted
56,000,000 tons. Ublopia

or
Otivion. Holy
Perplex! & Sanity

surreal
as Hell.
It’s not all

O pioneer alpha evolve zero.

What the word on an image track inherently defines is the nature of a fact-image confusion           history becomes that landscape whose sewage rises to events in one thick vertical           the semantic becomes a territorial presence

…you’re carried high into gray sky coughs and splutters leaping from your throat and thighs you materialize at any time by back-formation……

like monkeys smile when they’re afraid

                       somewhere between the prairie and the ocean

             we are 8 o’clock years old

the
miraculous hat
falls off / the

top
rung of
a ladder appears

at
the window /
in exile Andromache’s

handmaid
builds a
miniature Troy: tinfoil

glitter
superglue toothpicks.
O how undone

now
as I
push to notate

the
whole: GRAPHIC
BUSH-FIRE NARRATIVES.

Bind
the straw
with flesh … the

impossible
parting of
face and mask.

[Note: Poem for my 59th birthday. Sources: more stuff I picked up or was gifted with in London, and stuff that’s been posted on blogs I read since 22 Oct 09, the day we flew to Rome, and stuff from the shelves that center this project (!), as well as and. Autopoiesis CLI, which just popped open, for some reason; Nada Gordon writes: “I started to write my thoughts on Alli Warren's new chapbook, Well-Meaning White Girl, and I realized that I was picking out the dirty parts as I read. Here, then, are the dirty parts, pretending to be a new poem”, at ululations, 9 Nov 09; Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic); Francis Ponge, “The Butterfly” in Unfinished Ode to Mud (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic); Stan Apps, “Onomatopoeia Without Mimesis”, at Freewill Applicator, 22 Nov 09; Angela Gardner, Views of the Hudson, 26; Adell Joan-Elies, “Any Morning” (tr. D Sam Abrams), at Poetica.net; Stan Apps, “I Managed to Think About It”, at Poetica.net; Aaron Tieger, “10/19/05”, in Anxiety Chant; Jean-Marie Gleize, and Charles Baudelaire, as quoted by Gleize, “Où vont les chiens?” (tr. Louise Højgaard Marcussen & Lasse Gammelgaard), at Sibila.com; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “On the Upper Layers of the Atmosphere” [on Alexei Parshchikov] (tr. Genya Turovskaya), at Sibila.com; Emily Critchley, “Andrea’s Reading”, in Who handles one over the backlash; David Kennedy, “Momentary Ode”, in MY Atrocity; Alan Bernheimer, “Carapace”, as quoted by Ron Silliman, in a review of Bernheimer’s The Spoonlight Institute, at Silliman’s Blog, 18 Nov 09; Geof Huth, “Preview of the Most Recent Yesterday”, at dbqp, 22 Nov 09; Peter Hughes, “Lakes”, in Physical Geography; Ezra Pound, The Cantos, 116; Maurice Scully, “Self-Portrait as Oddity”, in Work; Slavoj Zizek, afterword to Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (tr. Gabriel Rockhill); Hélène Cixous, as quoted in Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History; Lisa Robertson, “Virgil’s Bastard Daughters Sing”, in Debbie: An Epic; Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic; Tony Lopez, “Assembly Point D” in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed. Jeff Hilson); Christian Bök, Veils”, “W”, in Eunoia (upgraded edition); Eleni Sikelianos, California Poem, in American Hybrid (eds. Cole Swensen and David St John); Beverly Dahlen, A Reading, 16; Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (tip o’ the cap to Sam); Ronald Johnson, “ARK 43, Lot’s Pillar III”, “ARK 72, Arches VI”, in ARK; Steve McCaffery, “Apriopriopriapus: Prefatory Notes on Stein & The Language Hygiene Program”, in Seven Pages Missing Volume Two; Paul Violi, “Moving”, “Loose Ends”, in Waterworks; Yevgeny Antinov/Eleanor Antin, The Man Without a World; Reginald Shepherd, “The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall”, in Swensen/St John; Gavin Selerie, “Soundings”, in Hilson; Laurie Duggan, “East, 6 (1939)”, in Hilson; John A Scott, “Thatching” and “Two Performances 1 Edith Piaf & Hancock”, in Hilson]

1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' update.

Now that I'm back from the Publishers Fair, where the anthology was well received, and even bought by total strangers (!), I'm getting ready to send out copies to those who have sent me checks, etc. Would those of you who haven't let me know whether you want a copy but who DO find themselves wanting one please let me know? It'll make ordering shipping etc a bit less labor-intensive the more order I have on hand ...

BUT. That's not why I write. I write to tell you that the project continues to live. Rupert Loydell, who teaches in an English university, writes me that he's used the anthology in a class, and his students are generating new views. He's sending me two of them, with maybe more to come.

I told him I would post them at the Girl Singing web site (which I hope you've all had a chance to visit).

I'm writing

1) to tell you about this;

2) to ask those of you who are willing to, to publicize it;

3) so that we can let the world know that anyone inspired to create a new view and send it to me at j at johnbr dot com will have their view posted just as I will post the views created by Rupert's students.

At the very least, I hope you are all glad to know that not only did we have fun, but there are people out there making USE of what we did.

FCF 107

Kant didn’t
get Descartes, Hegel

didn’t
get Kant,
Heidegger misread everyone …

surely
neither of
us have understood

the
other. Still,
on top of

the
loaf will
go a twisty

that
reminds me
of a by

the
Philadelphia Wireman.
O Mr Mars$,

Viviangirl,
play me
a tune, make

everybody
feel happy …
what better name

for
this “place”
than the Museum

of
Everything? You
are not sure

there
where you
hover above yourself

(         )
(         ) (         )
(         ) (         ) (         )

(         ) (         ) (         )
(         ) (         )
(         )

stay
there. The
last page of

Meatphysics
reads: ✂”✂3%
3t’ÿ✂ ✂ … radiating outwards

along
sore roads
and parched highways

detonating
from The
Capital City of

the
World, marked
goodness flowing free

from
capital loins.
A sign of

the
human mineralization
of the world.

The
human mastication
of rock. … seedcode

blowing
inside the
andever …________________ ÿ________________ ÿ___________

___
a holocaust of words has no end

The Innkeeper, clad in sequined dinner jacket,

plays the S A W

                the author of Christ was an Adman
                he isn’t afraid of innovation in his hotel [snip]

a little chocolate

                                                that never leaves the premises

under
pressure, my
hands sometimes balloon

to
the size
of small waterbombs.

Something
finally did
burst, birds were

coming
back from
the dead. They

were
too slow
to fly, lumbering

towards
their victims
chirping “braaaaaaaaaains …” I

told
everyone I
built my robot

wife
for sex
but late at

night
when we’re
alone we mostly

play
TIN SNOUT.
TEN THATS. Scaldey

Will.
Soarsaway:
Drakestuff & so

that:
& thus:
Patient Larded Bitter

Carmines,
Mimosa, Clauses
to Memory, Words

to
Chant                      as.reasons.for.dots.in.the.text:
(prone into and

out
of – congruent
relations equal the

hierarchy
of mediations/
urelments) ignorance of

this
fact is
responsible for many

badly
distorted perspectives.
Are we off?

To
where? We
could visit Homunculus

in
the Sea
of Galilee. But …

Okay
then, to
Egypt. To Cairo.

What’s
in Cairo?
I don’t know …

Gnomes …
Peer Gynt …
[curtain] The author

builds
a forest
with each stick.

On
moors the
dark is spangled

furze.
Ooorrrrrz urs
rrz. We are

first
green and
then grey and

then
incredula, the
children asleep in

our
houses with
totally unjustified absolute

trust.
You are
not sure, r

u?
of living
imperfectly as not

to
irritate the
gods … A Matchstick

blind
rolls up
and Down on

a
String Arrangement.
It looks at

a
Tin and
goes “UGH!” A

pit
crazed Glass
Captivating fluid Skylines.

You
see, Meatphysics
ends, a new

text
begins … “ … measured
in square hours …”

The
a priori
is only revealed

at
the uh …
like winter … Ahhh,

winter.
The time
of apple pies

and
green hair,
glay qew, Berlusconi

doling
out greasy
jewelry to showgirls,

his
hands slippery
with fake tan.

[Note: Sources: A sonnet-plus’s worth of stuff from Italy and England. And. Alain Badiou, in Badiou & Zizek, Philosophy in the Present; Mars$ is a guy we met outside the Museum of Everything, where they had a room full of Henry Dargers; play me … happy: Traffic, “Mr Fantasy”; Thomas A Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places; Jake Chapman, Meatphysics; Christine Kennedy, “The Mansions Hotel”, in Nineteen Nights in San Francisco; Caroline Bergvall, “Croup”, in Cropper; Emily Horne and Joey Comeau, a softer world: truth and beauty bombs; Maggie O’Sullivan, Unofficial Word, From the Handbook of That & Furriery, in Body of Work; Tony Trehy, “Arriving at the Same Place at the Same Time”, in Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective; Chus Pato, m-Talá (tr. Erin Moure); Denise Riley, “Letters From Palmer”, in Selected Poems; Lisa Samuels, “It’s all good”, in Tomorrowland; Alan Baker, “The Conditions”, in The World Seen from the Air; Juan Gelman, “lament for gallagher bentham”, in The Poems of Sidney West (trs. Katherine M Hedeen and Victor Rodriguez Núñez); cris cheek, squat, in part: short life housing; N Tomalin and R Hall, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, as quoted in Geoffrey C Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences; Rebecca Loudon, “Today it's 15 degrees or something in my office …”, at < href="http://radishking.blogspot.com/"> Radish King, 17 Nov 09; Peter Inman, Ocker, as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets; Christopher Taylor, “A Life in Writing: Wu Ming”, at Guardian Online, 14 Nov 09]

FCF 106

Beheated.
Struck by
bolt of lighting.

The
truth the
cell is strictly

a
nostalgic thing
for me now,

sugar
raised revved
posthumous sensible space

cancels
before impossible
speed under canon

limelit
to ample
zero hush. Tourguides

hold
high their
halfmoons sock monkeys

speak
wirelessly. Of
course it’s time

to
mutate always
è tempo di

mutare
sempre. This
is the tune

but
there are
no words. The

words
are only
speculation. They seek

and
cannot find
the meaning of

the
music. At
a cross roads,

sits
the player.
No drum, no

umbrella,
even though
it’s raining. The

face
singed at
the top of

the
body. My
days are eaten

slowly.
I sit
on the fluorescent

seat.
All the
interface instabilities noted

earlier
are only
exacerbated by the

complexities
of interactivity.
The signifying chains

are
ab so
lute ly crazy.

When
it sank
it thundered, the

tires
are balding,
exhaust is rust.

         a red feather signifies ejaculation –

         (Solace is in the mail
          but there’s no technology to deliver it.)

You. They. I.

We.

Press
the key
you wish to

define
now. Later,
outside, you/they/we/I can

say
the slosh.
They/you/I/we’ll eat candybars

together
play basketball
& speak of

space-
burning satellites.
You, they, I.

It’s
time to
dive into the

Starry Grab.

For
the dance
and the architecture.

weave
among incidents.
The lights the

lights
the lonely
lovely          fucking          lights

the
big dogs
of Firenze and

the
noise. We
knew Sparky was

under
the engine,
the way a

system
builds around
refusal of a

system,
as a
stateless man lives

under
a bridge.
Supersize that, document

this.
Host and
hostage stir. The

floppy
disk is
programmed to destroy

the
text as
soon as it

is
read. Which
is funny. Who’s

got
a system
that can handle

floppy
disks? Are
people woman? Who

calls
you / on
a sun shirt

sleeves
down his
ecstasy The hair

you
are / becoming?
Mmmm printed like

a
Mapplethorpe don’t
stand there like

a
rosebush curl
of violin. What

is
memory but
an attribute of

negligence?
       - the axle
       - in synch with

        - the

        - cathedral and
        - the marketplace - dying
        - moments, welcome intrusions …

a
slice of
lemon in the

water –
Let there
be lamps – a

dampness
pumps from
the tightened fist

of
a cold
contraption – a severed

hand.
Caravaggio Medusa.
“You’ve made an

old
mistake”, said
A, suspiring. The

agents
lit the
lamp. “Okay, you

recall
treatments of
‘being’ and ‘nothingness’,

and
‘I was
envious of fair

realism.’”
OK. The
United States’ Most

Wanted
painting is
a large-scale

landscape
with deer
standing in a

lake
under a
blue sky with

George
Washington looking
on. One must

go
beyond logic
in order to

experience
what is
large in something.

1.

Uh………………………………………………

…………………………………………………

…………………………………………………

…………………uh……………………………

…………………………………………………

…………………………………………………

……uh…………………………………………

…………………………………………………

…………………………uh……………………

…………………………………………………

………………um……………………………

…………………………………………………

…………………………………………………

………uh………………………………………

2.

I don’t know, of an ocean or in this

case, both in conscious life and elsewhere, I

don’t see it end, it might be any length.

“But only that which has no history can

be defined.” It’s possible to cross out

one ocean and replace it by anoth-

er, un-explained. To give this a context,

I’m writing below sea-level (not), but

I don’t know what time it is (not) and

I don’t speak the language (not – well, maybe).

Now, spritz shapes [sic] rise transcendent in a

gesture that refuses to display an-

y goal or aim: “We have none.” From Was Here:

THIS. This picture shows one such radiant.

3.

I am. We are. That’s enough. Now we have

to start, as the actual unfucking

snow-green coastline stands still and we, the pas-

ty faces lathering the windows like

drawings from the Prinzhorn collection, the

unbearable lightness of being-not-

being, float by. The Master Signifi-

er’s salt and wet and the color of slate.

It’s all there: the art, the illness, toujours

la ballerina assolutissi-

ma, dancing in the waves. Kenna-whit ken-

na-whit, like a little bird, sitting on

a branch and … all by itself the cursor

moves … I/LOVE/REAL/LIFE … in neon letters …

4.

Now
an awkwardness
always signifies something …

as
do chickens
rendered inebriated by

chunks
of bread
soaked in whiskey,

a
walker walking
along a moving

stairway,
in a
truck with see-

through
sides. I
do not have

a
perspective on
my own body

the
way I
perceive other bodies.

In
a world
of all noise,

it’ll
be tonight.
Another three rounds

of
rope, higher
up, do not

merely
frame her
breasts, but cut

deep.
And these
bookmark-sized pages

say
things like
“here comes a

pop-
up / yellow
silt” or “I

flow
in two
directions / radiation up,”

a dropper full of marrow                         a dropper full of sea

                            from a planet of mostly seas.

“I
am like
you in most

ways,”
she tells
us. “My introductory

paragraph
comes at
the beginning and

I
have muscle
fat and a

skeleton
that keeps
me from collapsing

into
suet. But
my real skeleton

is
made of
scars; a web

that
traverses me
in (        ) dimensions.

I
am most
myself in the

gaps.”
We have
twenty minutes to

wait
at the
site where Barbie ™

signs
autographs. HOWEVER,
AS YOU MAY

HAVE
INTUITED, I
HAVE YET TO

TURN
INTO AN
INVISIBLE TELEKINETIC CHAMPION

OF
JUSTICE. Artemis
interrupts this celebratory

dance.
In Codex
Artaud III there

is
a figure
holding a banner

with
a head
on it … In

The
Acrobat (1990)
the figures are

dispersed
across seven
vertical panels to

create
a centrifugal
movement composed of

two
alternating images –
a female gymnast

performing
a backward
flip taken from

the
pose of an
Egyptian acrobat on

the
temple at
Carnak, and a

pre-
Columbian carving
of a crouching

skeleton.
I wish
I had my

Lorenzo
Chiesa with
me. Now “imagine a city colonized by its own economy
where power is diffuse but highly centralized

wrapped as smooth as a vinyl texture map

The class structure and day-to-day business are highly ergonomic

They rely on easy listening surveillance
nothing more threatening –
(        ) (        ) (        ) –
than a beep from a remote

The weather and the architecture offer no immediate threat
no sense of rifle sights aimed by lunatics at innocents

In fact
(        ) (        ) (        )
there is nothing more than the risk of a bad sunburn or an occasional mudslide

We can drive or navigate its “streets” without getting crushed by biker assassins from a Japanese animé

You do not jack up sour memories like shooting with dirty needles here

Everyone loves to talk digital and sleep near the warmth or their monitors

Snap
to Grid.”
You can’t choose

your
illusion[s].
Bleed
Beheated.
Strucken by
bolt of bad lighting.

The
truth the
cell is strictly

a
nostalgic thing
for me now,

sugar
raised revved
posthumous sensible space

cancels
before impossible
speed under canon

limelit
to ample
zero hush. Tourguides

hold
high their
halfmoons sock monkeys

speak
wirelessly. Of
course it’s time

to
mutate always
è tempo di

mutare
sempre. This
is the tune

but
there are
no words. The

words
are only
speculation. They seek

and
cannot find
the meaning of

the
music. At
a cross roads,

sits
the player.
No drum, no

umbrella,
even though
it’s raining. The

face
singed at
the top of

the
body. My
days are eaten

slowly.
I sit
on the fluorescent

seat.
All the
interface instabilities noted

earlier
are only
exacerbated by the

complexities
of interactivity.
The signifying chains

are
ab so
lute ly crazy.

When
it sank
it thundered, the

tires
are balding,
exhaust is rust.

           a red feather signifies ejaculation –

we
have no
guns, our deefenses

are
out of
order, so we

retreat,
but we
will return to

place
a loaf
of bread upon

this
spot, so
we won’t be

forgotten.”

[Note: Sources: FCF 106 fragment [sources: Jacques Derrida, as quoted in Declan McGonagle, “The Classical Trace”, in Jon Bird, Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real; Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (trs. Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland); Jon Bird, “Survey: Dancing to a Different Tune”, in Jon Bird, Jo Anna Isaak, Sylvère Lotringer, Nancy Spero; JBR, comment appended to Ernesto Priego, “The Age of Simplicity”, at Never Neutral, 19 Oct 09; quote from a poem that’s been incorporated into Nancy Spero, The Ballad of Marie Sanders / Voices: Jewish Women in Time, 1993, as seen in Bird/Isaak/Lotringer; Sylvère Lotringer, “Focus: Explicit material”, in Bird/Isaak/ Lotringer; Anne Boyer, quoting Lynn Behrendt (while reviewing her Luminous Flux and Ann Lauterbach’s Or to begin again), in “'13. Tiny distinctions appear among luminosities’ or ‘perform parthopoeia on what used to be your gallows’”, and “14. ‘oh mute promise of bunnies overpopulating the sod’”, at Books of Poetry, 18 Oct 09; Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl, as quoted by George Landow (sample includes a little Landow-bit), “Hypertext as Collage Writing”, in The Digital Dialectic (ed. Peter Lunenfeld); Brenda Laurel, “Musings on Amusement in America”, in Lunenfeld; Peter Lunenfeld, USER: Infotechnodemo; Nancy Spero, interview with JoAnna Isaak, and Isaak herself, in Bird/Isaak/Lotringer; Norman M Klein, preface to Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures; Guns’n Roses. i.m. Nancy Spero]. And: English language pamphlet from the Roman church Santa Barbara dei Librari; the rest of this is built of bits taken A-Z from Nuova Poesia Americana: New York (a cura di Luigi Ballerini, Gialuca Rizzo e Paul Vangelisti). And. Bruce Andrews, “Primum Mobile 10”; Amiri Baraka, “A Poem for Willie Best”; Bill Berkson, “Russian New Year”, “Ivesiana”; Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid (not Ballerini etc) (One must … large in something is Lunenfeld quoting Gaston Bachelard); Charles Bernstein, “Internal Loss Control”, “Catabolism”, “Residual Rubbernecking”; Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (not Ballerini etc); Anselm Berrigan, “The Cultual Revolution”, “‘To what end is what we’ve got …’”; Ted Berrigan, Sonnets, I; Paul Blackburn, “Brooklyn Narcissus”; Brian Blanchfield, “Thirteen Point Three Three”, “If the Blank Outcome in Dominoes Adds a Seventh Side to Dice”; Joseph Ceravolo, “White Fish in Reeds”; Jordan Davis, “The Tourist and the Tsarist”, “A Fancy Bear”; Ray DiPalma, “Paving the River”, from Caper; Timothy Donnelly, “Accidental Species”; Barbara Guest, “An Emphasis Falls on Reality”; sonnets from the Alaska trip (texts etc. at hand aboard the cruise ship Infinity, May 08, found on this laptop): 1.: simulacrum (first typed simulacum – shoulda left it?) of my mind and soul fuck in Disenchantment Bay (aka The Sublime) (cf. Duino 1) (cf. Jennifer Moxley: Nothing matters that is not made to matter, and in this indiscriminate climate … nothing can be made to matter (“The Best American Poetry”, in Nineteen Lines (ed. Lytle Shaw). Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel, in Nineteen Lines; 2.: all stuff from Nineteen Lines. Dan Farrell, The Inkblot Record; Bernadette Mayer, Spring Journal, 2000; Carla Harryman, The Words After Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre; Lewis Warsh,”Mt Tremper Variations”; Marcella Durand, “Machine into Water 23”; Jeff Derksen, But Could I Make a Living From It; Barrett Watten, Bad History (actual typo is sprit); Emily McVarish, Was Here; John Ashbery, “Alone, I”. “Out on de rolling sea” (Joseph Spence); 3.: Texts etc. at hand aboard the cruise ship Infinity. Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia (tr. Anthony A Nassar); Brian Kim Stefans, “A Poem of Attitudes”, in Nineteen Lines; Lacan via Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes; Bob Flanagan, The Pain Journal; Robert Pincus Witten, back cover blurb for Eleanor Antin, Being Antinova; Geraldine Monk, “Ava Va Va”, in Escafield Hangings; Ross Sinclair, I Love Real Life, 1998. Rome-Assisi-Firenze-Venezia]