Then I went to a poetry reading / Where I read poetry with 3 other poets / at McNally Jackson Bookstore in Manhattan / And wizard Keith Waldrop read poems past us all / But I hadn’t pumped in hours / And my breasts hurt so I asked / If I could pump in the employee bathroom / When I said what pump meant — from breasts — they looked at me blankly / When I tried to plug the pump into the outlet it didn’t work / The outlet in the bookstore wasn’t powerful enough / There wasn’t enough power / And I felt like a baby horse shaky / Today I read a conceptual poem about how to kill your wife / While breastfeeding at the back table of a sushi restaurant / With 3 friends drinking sake / I was holding my baby’s head in the crook of my elbow / But it got sweaty and he didn’t like it / While I was breastfeeding under one of those covers called a breastfriend / And he didn’t like being exiled or it was too hot in the crook / Not really friendly at all / So why cosmology, why the immaterial, and why the informational and the conceptual in an issue on CONSTRAINT? Microscopy is recalled: matters of scale in relation to text when closely observed become, like a Tardis, something of extra-spatial size and extra-temporal possibility. You are suddenly thrown forward into the Holocene, into your own time period again. After a hard day at work, you find someone’s wallet. You receive a text from a random number. It says: ‘You are possessed by a demon’. You delete the message and go shopping in the ‘spongey economy’ of the ‘nauseous twilight …’
Before having such questions
had to pretend not to have them, had
to seem another way.
One studies
the possibilities of being
normal, reasonable (reasonably)
for a long time – and why not.
Normal is: there are,
you know, places to sit, a place to sleep, friends,
food enough to cook and eat, generally.
But if the children die from germ-teeming water?
If their little guts turn inside out.
If the ocean surges with radiation.
If the world is dislodged from its own implausible grace.
If all the checks and balances are washed over
as if they never were,
If the things that break and give had once been labeled “strong,”
guaranteed, profitable – or at least “legal,”
if nobody could have possibly
imagined ...
if it is suddenly again and again unbearable
to see the house or tent or zone crashed down
to see this etching pain ...?
To not be able to assume a normalcy --- and then
have to ask:
how in consequence properly to be.
Don't assume that you will act that well
the way you often think you will:
thick waves of vomit splash around the moue – first a light mist loosening the shit-caked cheeks they wet – then, eyes pinched, still messing the glove, ass now heavy with grime bouncing to clench his lids against the waves coating the length of his frame and whether he runs with or is stopped by discharge, these the grimy bills heaving from this mouth as the vomit coats the contours mid-self trunk to hips: his fellow heaving caked bills in an arc; levitating now above the passersby, spraying each square in the face – stumbling through the vomit – fairly wading in it: holding the discharge back with trembling, screwed paw: dealing bills with such force his gaping breath, tumbling and roiling for beet, beet red pits, gaping for bills-coated paint an dirt despite both Linebaugh’s and Kocik’s claims, this Jubilee … The individual no longer has an alternative but to completely refuse the promoted and preached contemporary life. The only still free behavior is the noise and withdrawal, to never surrender to handling, socialization, and entertainment. The Bruitist Wall does not promise to repeatedly provide a direction and values with the lived existence. The opaque, dull and continuous noise allows a total phenomenologic reduction … The Bruitist Wall is a social challenge. … The refusal in the fold because any act even considered futurist, dada, situ or anarchist/straight edge is vain. The actionism of disrepair cannot face the dilapidation, with factitious recovery … In the … of the Bruitist Wall, cellular nothing, to become its shade – impassive murderer of oneself – The Bruitist Wall spreads its occult virtues, by hummings and the buzzes of its hermetic formulas … Then Rabbi Simeon said further: “… Three times a day they [the letters of the alphabet] fly un in the air and the Tetragram is visible for one hour and a half … ten systoles and diastoles slip by before we come within sight of the Gaseous Shore, The Pineal Tower with its uninterrupted blaze … It is this moment that the patagrapher must seize if she is to attach to her pataplasm the mediating lungs of solar systems, sardines, monerans, gemstones, and colloids. The kaleidographic field shall be the interior of a sphere of frozen mercury, a perfect sphere, the opposite of gods, to prevent the absorption of violet rays into the cryostat, but in this case it is the world that now and then goes cross-eyed.” Each herd is placed under the protection of a little fire-board, strictly for family use, which is carved into a vaguely anthropomorphic form. Over and above its basic purpose, the Chukchees regard it as a particularized expression of the Reindeer-Being: Bring me my gold / My serpent my rod / Pour hot gold into my teeth. There is something gorgeously Egyptian about him, maybe even trilobitic or tic-tac. If you want to know who we are, just read Tom Cohen and try to forget it, I said to the judge who had stolen my phone while I was asleep on the beach. Does that make any sense now in a preconceptual arrhythmia? What about the tender hook of a next level healing? The children kept saying ‘dead caterpillar’ and ‘it’s not meant to be funny.’ Gyre-
sized young animal
sob me out ‘on fleek’
a brown future of what
or luxurious bead
To what extent will it ever be possible to actually cognise this? Which might be the same as to ask, What do I do if I want to wear my eblex jetpack and still not be a hermeneutic traitor or an old deck of cards that’s been thru the rain on Houdini’s grave? A whole nation could bury its heartbreaks there and forget about them – the pictures? The pictures don’t prove anything. Once the Cobblestone has snuffed out its cyclone, The Sandman mimes into a lampshade. He’s a genius. All this you can have for free – the rest is priceless, like deep-space and vaseline. You respond and are thrown back in time to the Jurassic Period, alongside everyone who was with you in the street that night. You’re diagnosed with another incurable illness. You become a vampire and acknowledge it in an angry outburst. You meet someone at a support group. It is a dark and stormy night. No throbbing sea behind you / You go out into orality to purchase a pencil. “This is philosophical” and everyone, the darkened formerness or formlessness or formalness of something into something something something. Property of Massachusetts this fulsome garden: so get out! Start your life and again, with calm whirls of the thing! One day all of this will not coalesce — seriously, it’s been months and it’s bullshit to think of having to say it’s not that political or Hegel Wednesday or eating at Starbucks or being and “not much imagination!” said someone of me, to me, well, if one side of the dyad’s bad the other’s nothing to be had t’enjoy, if you understand my meaning like a bank where I got this candy and totally. By late summer, everyone on the riverbank was dead, / Not just the once living creatures, but the summer grass, the rusted bicycles, the summer grass, / Cars without doors or windows, the warped porn magazines, the summer grass, / Empty cans with food stuck inside and empty bottles full of muddy water, / Recently, on the bank, I noticed a kind of grass that multiplied conspicuously / It is about one meter high and stands like some kind of rice / It has ears / It is everywhere / It glimmers white in the dim evening light / Sticky liquid oozes from the ear / The dogs get sticky / The dogs smell terrible / Hey I’m itchy, so itchy, my younger brother cried, I told him not to scratch, but he did it anyway, the place he scratched soon turned into a blister, I didn’t scratch it that much, only a little, brother cried, but even if he only scratched a little, the place he scratched turned into a blister, all over his body were blisters, after they ruptured, they got inflamed and / I want to take him to a hot spring, Mother said I’ve heard of a hot spring good for your skin, if we’re going, why don’t we take our dead father and dead dog along to put in, so just left everything as it was, dirty dishes, old clothes, wet towels just as they were, then we carefully laid my wheezing brother on the rear seat, and we stuffed some other things in the car, my little sister, spare clothes, dead bodies, dogs, plastic bags, pillows, food and drink (even some flowerpots), so much stuff, and then we took off, as I stared at the road from the passenger seat, / Beyond this is the pure land, Mother said / The dog noticed the smell of the sea / It stuck its nose out the window, howling for the sea / We should’ve crossed a large bridge, Mother said / I forgot the name, but it’s a large bridge / There were big floods there late in the nineteenth century / And again in the mid-twentieth century / Lots of earth, sand, and drowned bodies … and all that dross bogus TREAT-BAG CULT VOID underworld of adorer followers in no space a BROken WINdow little man crushed instead of a SELF a bottle of WINdex blue spray WITH THE FINGER OF NO MAN extant in the AEROSOL YOUNIVERSE supposing every past action of yours and anyone’s trivial why were you alive wanting everything to gratify HALF and astound the other my I want ADORER TIC kicking in your BROken WINdow O ver and O ver a TICKing trick no treat the easy after the hard the painful the history after the math the reverb of the primal the inner the outer as my SHELF en LARGEs you can fit MORE BOOKS (serious) Hey, man, I know you! You’re a carpenter if I were you I’d be aSHAMED (where are my tools) I AM TRYING TO TELL YOU YOUR FACE CHANGED in the night 2.0 I reach out feel around in the dark later left elbow purple bruise lights out haunted not answering door no one CRAZY enough to risk appearing to feel my disease / It will get you and it’s never what you think it will be / It will get you and it’s never what you think / Then he shook his head at my idiocy and I smiled and reminded him that “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.” Or at least that’s what I’d like to say happened, but I can never think of the right quotes to use at the time and I was distracted because Ferris Mewler started chasing after my sleeves because he thought they were cat toys and he was hanging off the end of one while I tried to shake him loose, screaming: “MY DIREWOLF HAS BETRAYED ME” and then Victor just walked away.
[Note: Sources: Then I went … friendly at all: Sara Mumolo, “Top Places to Breastfeed”, in PEN American Center, “PEN Poetry Series: Sara Mumolo”, email rec’d 31 Oct 014 approx 8:25 AM PDT; Corey Wakeling, Jill Jones, “‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle’”, John Wilkinson, “Island of Love”, Timothy Yu, “Chinese Silence No. 40”, quoted in Wakeling’s “CONSTRAINT Editorial”, at Cordite 48; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Excerpts from Graphic Novella”, at Cordite 48; Michael Cross, “THE KATECHON (Lines 278-296)”, in Sundial; Romain Perrot, “Proclamation of the Bruitist Wall”, at Decimation Sociale; Rene Daumal, “Treatise on Patagrams”, in Pataphysical Essays (tr. Thomas Vosteen); Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (tr. Janet Lloyd); Ariana Reines, “Thursday”, text image embedded in “elanormcinerney: Ariana Reines | Thursday”, at Cassandra Gillig Dumb Poetry Blog, 30 Oct 014; Jonty Tiplady, “derrida.pdf — sample — derrida wears a backlace”, “Derrida.Pdf version : pocket mouse section : for the backlace to come”, at Trillionaires, 31 Oct 014; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on image of Houdini’s grave embedded in Allison Meier, “New York’s Most Unusual Halloween Ritual”, at Hyperallergic, 31 Oct 014; Louis Armand, “Unsanitary, or: The Candy-Coloured Clown”, at Cordite 48; Jill Jones, “‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle’”, at Cordite 48; Lisa Robertson, “Cinema of the Present”, at igittigittigitt, 31 Oct 014; “A theory of the lyric …”, “Dirge With Invective”, at [“IT’S TIME TO HOP TO THE BLUES.”], 31 Oct 014; Hiromi Itō, Wild Grass on the Riverbank (tr. Jeffrey Angles), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō: from Wild Grass on the Riverbank (just published)”, at Poems and Poetics, 31 Oct 014; Tom Clark, “Red State Scream Preview (A Period Haunting)”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 31 Oct 014; Jenny Lawson, “Happy Halloween from Game of Thrones. Sort of”, at The Bloggess, 31 Oct 014]