By evanescent light / ether / light from an electric lamp / an extra light / / Light from a student-lamp / sapphire light / a shimmer / smoking-lamp light / / Ordinary light / orgone lumination / light from a lamp burning olive oil / opal light / / Old light and owl-light / may be opal light / in the small / orifice / where old light / & the will-o’-the-wisp / make no announcement of waning / light / / but with direct directions / & the winking light of the will-o’-the-wisp's accoutrements / & lilac light / a delightful phenomenon / a delightful phenomenon of lucence & lucidity / / Is it old light? / The oldest in the whole world. / Why do you speak in such a manner? / He throws white roses / from a white vase into a white waste- / basket placed / at a challenging distance from the chair. / Wd that require a kind of incandescence? / Not in daylight. / Wd anda-oil suffice? / If the lamp were new enough. / But what might be the effect / of nova light? / / It would be a modifier. / / Wd it modify a word? / Also I seem to start dropping punctuation / My need for punctuation lessens like some people’s need for sleep / My need for sleep lessens too but later I fall on my face / OK. Reading the piece was so liberating, as I realized that I too don’t really like hot beverages, and I vowed to introduce baths into my morning ablutions and drink iced coffee exclusively. My bath is about ten minutes long or so, and I stare at the wall or ceiling, occasionally drawing my legs up and out of the water and stretching them along the facing plaster. Or I lift my back from the bottom of the tub so that the water which rushes into the space my back had occupied is newly hot. Yesterday morning I watched a cockroach glide along the trim, under a bad patch job over a kinky clump of mold. I had never realized how graceful cockroaches can be. Maybe this particular one was a “morning person.” In any case, as I started to tell you earlier, among other things, I wanted to return transcription to its roots in somatic practice, to bring my body into contact with the linguistic remains of extraordinary rendition and state-sponsored death, like a scribe reproducing Torah, or a monk laboring over illuminated books, unable to restrain himself from spilling into the text. I wondered how my writing prosthetic of nerve & bone would metabolize such language in an effort to perceive my body’s relation to a detainee’s occulted figure? And how might that effort make palpable the militarization that has captured all our social relations? The report entered the public sphere, together with a cache of related materials, by way of the ACLU’s recourse to the Freedom of Information Act, and is among the documents that I accessed while working on a book called Music for Porn for which I’d been seeking evidentiary language to denote the bodies of fallen U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. At that time, I decided not to use any of the language from these Gitmo reports in my soldier poems, afraid that I’d somehow be betraying a fundamental difference, equating the non-equatable, reducing irreducible bodies to the common denominator of stately reportage, bodies made fungible by search engine despite the fact that any meaningful fidelity to this constraint could only be impossible given the functional nomenclature of such reports, the way a curious expression quickly belies a cliché preassembled phrase convenient for the setter of moveable type linguistic version of the readymade, a common place. For example, his “unremarkable genitalia,” semantic residue of the waste his body has become autonomous product of security marks the gulf between clinical expression and radical sensation, occulted specificity and familiar designation, rupture of word and world. To the tune of: Violin. Double Bass. Flute. Harp. Tambourine. Kazoo. Rain Wand. A man who cries. Two man who weeps. A rumbling belly. The dog’s stomach rumbling also. I’ll fuck play bingolotto. Heut ist mein tag. Heut ist mein tag. Heut ist mein tag. Heut ist mein tag. You wake up with that bittersweet feeling that we should be kind to people ... In a funny german accent. On a funny German accent. I wish. Sweetheart. I wish. Sweetheart. I wish ... It was a total freak accident. Full everything. It is so easy to become such that costs money. Rather than serve them. Type woman. Wish I was one of those guy. Who earned money. As might. Who had menstruation and became pregnant. I wish I was a guy. I wish. Sweetheart. On the funny German accent. I know of no one who is an adult. Get the urge to Falling down around town now. Crazy pregnant woman with a balloon and a water pistol, handbags, makeup and hair, a rat, a career, tough accent, designer of silly clothes, chest, hysterical, talking with wallpaper, can not move, totally. (The funny German accent) Imagine a person who is bad at life. Run ten laps around a stick now. All I wanted was a hurricane wear my little legs left right left. Drive the car to Boden and ride the water slide. Become a pirate. But I’m too tired to even. And yet. I went to Emily Dickinson’s house with my friend Susie Timmons. I scraped dirt from the foot of huge trees in the backyard into a little pot. When I returned to Philadelphia I didn’t shower for three days, then rubbed Emily’s dirt all over my flesh. At the top and bottom of the ride I would show photographs of myself to strangers and ask, “EXCUSE ME, have you seen this person?” Sometimes there was confusion, “ISN’T THAT YOU?” I would reply, “Have you seen this person?” “Excuse me, EXCUSE ME ...” At each security camera I paused, looked into the camera, DIRECTLY IN THERE and stuck my tongue inside a flower. Flicked it in and out, in and out, flicking, licking, suckling blossoms. A rent-a-cop asked “What the fuck are YOU DOING?” I replied, “I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!!
[Note: Sources: JBR; Jackson Mac Low, “9 Light Poems”, at Grist; Brandon Brown, “Krewella, Live For The Night”, at Ashbery Home School; JBR; Rob Halpern, “Note on Common Place”, at Elderly 7; Stina Kajaso, “Heut is nicht men tag”, at SONOFDAD, 25 Dec 014; JBR; CA Conrad, “Anoint Thyself”, “M.I.A. Escalator”, “Security Cameras and Flowers Dreaming the Elevation Allegiance”, in 3 (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals & Resulting Poems, at Headlands]
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