And yet, I refer to my interactions with flowers, for example, as “singular intimacies,” where my goal is not hyper scrutiny with a macro lens, but a depiction of micro sensuality; who is it? It’s me (takes off goggles / puts on goggles) eyes stinging from excess fumes from the top of the water I can’t see a thing. I can’t see any thing. This is what a tar ball tastes like. “There have been pounds and pounds of decomposed flesh tons of suffering” “HOU HOU HOU HOU HOU” “The woman who “prefers waves to the sea” has addressed a message to the poet: “change the world or go home!” Aren’t we fortunate, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that this book allows us to make our own way with the narrative position of the post- or trans-mortem “I” as a response to our own experiences of injustice? In response I received a long inky letter filled with the precise tone of green or blue and the full effect of their complementarities. Thus I put my whole body into the codes. May people of the future decipher these runes, this sanctum: the smell of rotting fruit; this escarpment: the bewilderment of days; this house: the paragraphs of weather. The lake felt ancient, yet regenerated in every instant, the tenderized lung of a much larger organism – “and I become water, friend of water” “That’s what we are: beings made through the contact of water with stone, of a chilly sunset with pure geometry” … the way a cat is a cat: human before all else. I too have thought the traffic light beautiful, I too … But now the heretofore crushed and humiliated, “the wretched of the earth,” were rising and reclaiming their rightful place in all creation. We chatted briefly in this most dramatic of settings and then the two of them turned and vanished into the quiet mystery. Although its name is derived from the Miwok word meaning “coast mountain,” we don’t have records of the tribe’s rituals involving the peak. Torments dream us as we answer with bliss made of flames and fires and “there is a particular emotion created by days” “Inner stirrings made to capture the first signs of atmospheric changes” This molecular intelligence makes me giddy. But the use of this rime – In this … / The Eclipse … which paused the arrival of the place of the eclipse, was also an accent on it, because “Poets”, Etel once wrote me, “are great realists (even when they see angels, if they do, as Rilke does).” Straight from the heart (from the character for Heart-Mind that possibly exists in Chinese (?)), a transformative / ‘rocklike’ / unrepentantly ‘naïve’ & ‘downhome-perceptive’ / playfully ‘logical’ / sternly educated / fully knowledgeable / ‘simple-steady’ Socrates-like person who goes about her work (painting, too!) & (without giving up on this Earth) teaches (in her writing, & by ‘personal example’) Embodied Intelligence & Fairness In All Matters, while passionately advocating for certain causes in which she believes (like the Rights of Multiple Kinds of Beings / Almost Anybody on Earth to Be Alive) … Anyway, as she received death threats, she left the country. “It smelled of jasmines and orange blossoms, and you could look at the sea from almost any street.” What (à la Bhanu’s wonderful questionnaires) do you eat before teaching? A cup of hours, of salt, flowers, darkness, iodine. Or, as Adnan puts it, “the thread of this century is made of wire.” You feel constructive and can’t do anything about it. Like I’d never felt my arm before, made of hair, skin, tissue, bone … I remember talking with Pauline Oliveros after a performance she gave at Woodland Pattern, her accordion bellows still holding a long tone somewhere in my inner ear. She, too, was more interested in asking questions than being asked. So I am sitting in the grass. I hear a microwave from the house. Someone setting the time. Then changing their mind. Little song of beeps. The bees come to visit the hydrangeas. They’re a loopy lopsided equation that actually works out, that is the foundation of the universe. The bees decide to visit me. I try to stay still so they can visit properly. & am returned to my body, the squishy cantaloupe depths, the memory of when I was a kid, the days of excitement over the phrase centrifugal force. I think it was my #1 phrase for a week. I started telling people that was where babies came from. Am I wrong? Who would say that to me then? Come here. Come over here and see what the bird’s nest is doing. There are these small eggs, all of these small eggs, none of them cracked yet, but the big bird’s away. I told you it might go. I mean, I’m compelled to quote from Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch repeatedly as a form of rehabilitating dubious historical accounts that have been buried subcutaneously — Solar energy is attracted to the rock. Squam rock is an immense boulder. César Vallejo is dead (of a strange disease). I heard him say, “one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just isn’t sustainable” and it was true and it was good and everyone wrote it down and I took credit for it. Not really. If these storage methods are followed, blotter should last for many years. How can this be if the dismembered, burned and slashed cannot speak? It is a collection of planks, that is, jagged samples of bone shards, splinters of barrack and tangles of wire, low tremolos of shrieks lingering, blood streams, body-sticks, warehouse and camp whispered love journals before the liminoid – “There were millions of planets being born there” – first you die and then you die more. Your head is sitting there, tilted sideways. You twist it hard to pull it out by the roots, and dirt crumbles off your neck. Your head blinks as if to say, “Whatever, whatever.” Horses come down from the sky and pick at the tufts of grass growing from the spot your head was. You carry your head back to the car and drive home. On the way, your head says, “I jog every morning, and I’m always willing to do overtime. Forty years? And that will never mean? What happened in the last forty years because people run in droves to the black lady? ‘Imagine if we believe,’ say those who suspect the plot. Sure you can, but they talk.” Now, as Willacy County faces a gaping hole in its budget, $128 million in debt still owed on Tent City, and the loss of its largest employer, I’d come to find out whether the prison that was supposed to be the county’s economic salvation would end up being its undoing.
light coming into clouds above shadowed
ridge, two birds slanting toward branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
Two boxes of Barbaric Vast & Wild arrived today. What a thing. Charles says, “it moves in leaps and bounds, like Nijinsky on peyote.” Like we are so powerful that even space junk orbiting the earth disintegrates. “Let me whistle a ditty for you from out of these refurbished catheters,” whispers the city. At least you’d be awake for the disease. “I can’t read my own handwriting.” In real life, I’m fatter than the internet, I’m waxing, my rope is at the end of me. I’m saying: You can amp up that toxic foreplay all you want, the biomarkers are the same and people have been animals for a while now. Whoever’s been sleeping in the back shed has the whole story.
[Note: JBR; Elizabeth Bryant, “The Subjective Autumn Field”, at Dusie 17 (The Ecopoethos Issue); Megan Burns, “[‘Oil may come and go at any time and it may not be visible’ Sign at Gulf Shores, Alabama (4.17.11)]”, at Dusie 17 (The Ecopoethos Issue); everyone in Homage to Etel Adnan (edited by Lindsey Boldt, Steve Dickison & Samanth Giles), meaning Ammiel Alcalay, Jen Benka, David Buuck, Norma Cole, Steve Dickison, Thom Donovan, Sharon Doubiago, Simone Fattal, Robert Grenier, Benjamin Hollander, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Stephen Motika, Nancy J. Peters, Csaba Polony, Megan Pruiett, Brandon Shimoda, Roger Snell, Cole Swensen, Stacy Szymaszek, Lynne Tillman, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Anne Waldman, in (more or less) reverse order; Susie Timmons, “You feel constructive …”, in Superior Packets; JBR; Chen Chen, “Little Song”, at Dusie 17 (The Ecopoethos Issue); Camille T Dungy, “The Way We Carry On”, at Dusie 17 (The Ecopoethos Issue); Brenda Iijima “HYPER ESSAY: PSYCHOGEOLOGY”, at Dusie 17 (The Ecopoethos Issue); Conor Kelly, “AFTER VALLEJO (Theme and variations)”, at Cleaver 9; David W Pritchard, “The Crisis of Funding in the Arts”, at [“IT’S TIME TO HOP TO THE BLUES.”], 31 Mar 015; JBR; Rod Smith, “Poem”, in Touché; Juan Felipe Herrera, and Raúl Zurita, as quoted in Herrera’s blurb for Zurita’s The Country of Planks / El País de Tablas, at Action Books; Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, “Your Head”, at Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, 30 Mar 015; JBR; Franco Bifo Berardi, “In the cockpit w/ Franco Bifo Berardi” (tr. Google), at —synthetic_zero, 31 Mar 015; Daniel Tyx, “Goodbye to Tent City”, at Texas Observer, 26 Mar 015; Stephen Ratcliffe, “3.31”, at Temporality, 31 Mar 015; JBR (Barbaric Vast & Wild = Poems for the Millennium 5, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and me); Charles Bernstein, back cover blurb for Barbaric Vast & Wild); JBR; Nikki Wallschlaeger “Sonnet (33)”, “Sonnet (35)”, at Dusie 17 (The Ecopoethos Issue); Michael Sikkema, “Solving The Earthship”, at Dusie 17 (The Ecopoethos Issue)]
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