The knocked-out tooth is swallowed down. Then it grows out of the stomach. We give it water to drink. The glove waves its hand out in the air; this gesture is like a tractor. No one believes it is a real tractor. This is a slow motion shot; this shot pushed the history of our Bent Neck Village back to the paleorosaic era. There are many legends about what happened that night. Rumors created refugees; a lot of villagers left. Our village reentered a period of glove worship; even the seas worshipped the glove. But there can only be one queen of Straight-Neck Village. What will happen now? We should enhance our technology to clone dinosaur eggs. The lights have not yet been ruined by flames, this is a matter of luck for us, but it’s already been twisted. The big insect lowers its head to chew grass. I used to want to be closer, now I want to be closer too, as in “closerness”, and to shoot cherry pits at taxi cabs, this is my refrigerator I won on
an American game show
once in awhile I find myself
looking forward instead of
looking forward instead of back
hearing all dreamers talk at
once sends me into
the lower organs
I type your
name on the computer
delete it type it again
different each time
before I met you my
favorite color was
green light
now I serve poetry to
serve you
now I am famished for peace
now I watch a 90 year old movie to
witness dead people talking singing
riding horses samsara
SAMSARA SAMSARA
Alice looked up the glass eye of the microscope and saw another eye
– a giant eye –
an almost human eye–
looking back down at
her. I mean, don’t forget that the alternate side of the street parking rules, if you do manage to drive into the city, will be suspended for the duration of the holiday, but you’ll still have to pay the meters. I mean, the echoes shall become autonomous; every piece of signage will come to mean something else. Sticker ads will seal off the fractures where the cities join with one another. Alice would feel a terrible itching inside her skull … it was as though a thousand termites were running hither and thither with telepathic messages. These changes in both appearance and behavior actually increase the chance that the shrimp will be seen and eaten by the birds – whom the scientists believe to be the parasite’s intended host. If the parasites manage to get the shrimp eaten, they will have achieved their ultimate goal of infecting the flamingos. If the results of this study are any indication, it could be that parasites are actually behind some animals’ group-forming behavior. We worked on writing, developmental orality and movement. We worked through the impasse of the afternoon until we arrived at an end point that felt like a musical score. Now all I can do is sit here in the hut to recover. In this charged air, which began to haunt me, more like, a demon was in the room laughing at me, just laughing and laughing and laughing at me, I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t stop having panic attacks. It was like all the stupid agony of my whole life came at once, like all the times I had ever worried for no reason, had put myself through so much stress, just to end up what, me, that’s all, I’m me again, everyday I wake up me, the Bodhidharma lines wouldn’t leave, “The truth is, there is nothing to find.” “To say he attains anything at all is to slander the Buddha. What could he possibly attain?” Just endlessly repeating, like a laughing demon, mocking me and all my ridiculous cares and worries, how I couldn’t let go and just let myself be a me and walk around as a me encountering others mes, everybody doing their me thing. I eventually lost it, I couldn’t talk anymore, I didn’t know what to say, because everything I knew how to say derived from trying to attain stupid things, it was like, I had to learn to talk again. I drove back to Vegas through the desert, I saw basically only Natives in the desert, it was like a dream, in the deepest sense. I couldn’t talk when I got back, I would just start crying if I started to talk, I think in the 50s they would have brought me to the mental ward and given me shock treatments, but I want to say I didn’t actually see a demon lol, I think if there are real demons they are probably weird inter-dimensional creatures and are of no concern to me. And the ocean parted in the middle emptying itself and the fish piled up in the night like dried up hills / And the open wound of the sea each moment deepened and the night was birthing inwards like a fish that swallows itself yes: / like fish swallowing themselves / / Like sea swells swallowing themselves when we were dragged by / the undertow we saw the country of planks come on top / of us … I want to say that while it is an Inferno, I also laughed quite a bit while writing it; I laughed at the image of Adam and Eve hitchhiking after they’d been thrown out of paradise. And while I’m not a big reader of comic books, I think that there is a sensibility that is pretty similar; the historical times are intermixed; there are the tourists on the highway to paradise, bombed out neighborhoods, there are scenarios that converge, and if I didn’t write it, I would probably like to draw it, to turn it into a comic book, but I think that its background is always dramatic. But that didn’t stop me from laughing a little: when the characters of Adam and Eve are mixed in with the bombings, the Japanese tourists who see Nagasaki and Hiroshima floating in the sky. People don’t laugh a lot when they read my writing. I think that I have a sense of humor which is post-mortem in reality, but the truth is I also laughed while creating this. But do not trust blindly in the automatic translation of this blog, amigous. But hey, it’s better than nothing. The meaning varies but little and ultimately, perhaps, the main message (if we can believe that there is one main message in what I say) is transmitted right? I can not tell in the case of Korean, but in the case of French, Italian and English left a trail of something. I do not know Arabic or Turkish but come on! In the feed this morning, cats. Selfies, shining like a fiery beacon, live stream of the Mission police station shutdown, the science of why stepping on legos makes you want to die, FUCK credit reportz, the woman who fell in love with a tree, a baby’s guide to sleep-training your parents, lotta feminista, Los Tigres del Norte are making gay norteño history, here comes the whole foods-ification of marijuana, more snow, fellowships, fire, new poems in new journals, new poems in old journals, new books, penpals and John Keene’s post on Thinking Its Presence: The Racial Imaginary Conference, UMT, Missoula. I just wanna throw my voice over there, I wanna send you. It’s a fucked up relief to say so after years of bumbling around in my dumb white female body talking about it with others, with great nuance! and complication! counting things or getting dressed and undressed in the middle of a conference paper, a befuddled jab somehow at this problem I think now, the whole tangled thing. And other knots in the tangle of domination. John Keene describes the “emotional discomfort, sometimes expressed in body language, as caution, or hesitation, or carefulness, in speaking and acting” of some white people at the conference in Missoula. But of course. And an ontology of the present is also a science-fictional operation, in which a cosmonaut lands on a planet full of sentient, intelligent, alien beings. He tries to understand their peculiar habits: for example, their philosophers are obsessed by numerology and the being of the one and the two, while their novelists write complex narratives about the impossibility of narrating anything; their politicians meanwhile, all drawn from the wealthiest classes, publicly debate the problem of making more money by reducing the spending of the poor. It is a world which does not require a Brechtian V-effect since it is already objectively estranged. The cosmonaut, stranded for an unforeseeable period on this planet owing to faulty technology (incomprehensibility of set theory or mathemes, ignorance of computer programmes or digitality, insensibility towards hip-hop, Twitter, or bitcoins), wonders how one could ever understand what is by definition radically other; until he meets a wise old alien economist who explains that not only are the races of the two planets related, but that this one is in fact simply a later stage of his own socio-economic system (capitalism), which he was brought up to think of in two stages, whereas he has here found a third one, both different and the same. Ah, he cries, now I finally understand: this is the dialectic! Now I can write my report!
[Note: Sources: Ma Lan, “They knocked my teeth out”, “I became a member” (tr. Charles A. Laughlin), at Circumference; Susie Timmons, “On the Daily Monument”, in “Four Poems by Susie Timmons”, at BOMB 26; CA Conrad, “I Loved Earth Years Ago”, at PEN America, 17 Apr 013; Alice looked up … telepathic messages: various, at aglimpseof 12; “Zombie Cognition: Parasites and Mind Control”, at Animal Cognition, 20 Mar 015; Bhanu Kapil, “Laura Ann Samuelson”, at I thought I was writing about an immigrant. I was writing about a monster, 23 Mar 015; JBR; Noah Cicero, quoted in Jon Cone, “The Same Universal Urgencies: An Interview With Noah Cicero About His Poetry Collection ‘Bipolar Cowboy’”, at A Cabinet of Ordinary Ferocities, 24 Mar 015; Raúl Zurita, “Cargo Ship Lebu Prison” (tr. Daniel Borzutsky), at Circumference, and as quoted in Daniel Borzutzky, “Today or a Million Years Ago: An Interview with Raúl Zurita”, at Harriet, 24 Mar 015; JBR; Dolores Dorantes, “Do not trust blindly in the automatic translation …”, at Dolores Dorantes, 24 Mar 015; Stephanie Young, “Diary by DB Guest Blogger Stephanie Young”, at Drunken Boat, 24 Mar 015; JBR; Fredric Jameson, “An ontology of the present …”, at Verso Books, 24 Mar 015]
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