oh, and remember when I quoted Márton’s one glass of water poem? I changed it a little, here’s the unedited version,
THE LAST ELLIPSIS
The Hungarian government has drafted new laws to criminalise those who help irregular migrants seeking asylum.
1 glass of water = 1 year
1⁄2 glass of water = 1⁄2 year
.
.
.
I omitted mention of Hungary because this kind of thing is happening pretty much everywhere as nationalism, fascism and xenophobia return to power in full and vicious force, but I restore it here because within the past week, Italy turned away a ship with 600 migrants on board, the US separated small children from their families as ICE took them into detention, with that Trumpist shitbag Cory Lewandowski publicly responding “womp womp” (an expression usually restricted to minor irritations such as, say when you are pumping gas and the little latch on the pump doesn’t work) to learning that the incarcerated children include a 10-year-old with Down Syndrome, and, perhaps most importantly, because Hungary actually did pass a law which quote imposes jail terms on anybody seen to be aiding undocumented immigrants unquote even though, as Márton tells me, “There are no refugees in Hungary at all.”
Won’t somebody
Won’t somebody
Won’t somebody please tell me what’s going on
Somebody
Somebody
Won't somebody tell me please what’s going on
Looking around
And I can’t understand
I truly can’t. But as Lew Welch put it, don’t ask why what, ask what’s what. So, I will begin again, this time with
- life=voyage: Aristotle’s definition of time as a “middle-point” (“mezzo”)
- mythic binaries in a visionary landscape
- the universe governed by love: “divine love” (“l’amor divino”) caused the stars to move in the moment of creation (verses 39-40)
- la lupa as the embodiment of negative desire, cupiditas
- “Nel mezzo” as the extraordinary meeting-point of cultural imbrication—
- to the traditional glosses which include Isaiah 38:10 and Horace’s Ars Poetica, I add: 1) the existential mezzo, from Aristotle’s definition of time as a “kind of middle-point” in the Physics (cited by Dante in the Convivio) and 2) the ethical mezzo, from Aristotle’s definition of virtue as the mean (cited by Dante in the canzone Le dolci rime and later in the Convivio)
etc, which is to say
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series as Gertrude Stein put it. The process in this sense is one of elaborating on pervious material,
Along
At
Half over
Half way along
Halfway along
Halfway on
Halfway through
Half-way upon
and so forth, tho I am nowhere near halfway along. This is an iteration in the metaphorical sense of the algebraic equation, as well as in Jacob Edmond’s sense of the term. But the iterations also operate on a meta-level, that is, the level of the time-bound teleology of an individual process, a life, an age, or the cosmos. Bergvall is sensitive to this iterative level, as is revealed in an amendment she made to a 2003 version of ‘Via’; the piece was originally presented at a festival in 2002 in sonic form — the 47 translations, plus a 48th ‘variation’ of the fluctuating fractals in the recorded voice. The translations were taken from the British Library archives, dating until May 2000, exactly 700 years after Dante's journey began: “In the summer 2003, I copied out a 48th translation in English of Dante’s tercet for a first printed version of the text. It appeared in CHAIN’s “Transluccinacion” issue (Fall 2003) [...] This late addition broke the rule of the task [...] I subsequently removed it.” And so we can infinitely repeat. Can they and do they. It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different. By this I mean this. The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Etc. So I went to see the Vanessa Winship retrospective at the Barbican because her photos explore notions of borders, land, memory, desire and history quote unquote, as Cody-Rose Clevidence notes, “... we are ill equipped to bear the throes of our own mental, social, and emotional neural chemistry, our consciousness is a cruel trick the universe has played on the world slash ourselves. I was feeling all that and also I was falling in love with the woods I found myself in,” the kind of wilderness that overtakes abandoned parking lots. I mean, there is this hike in Point Reyes that is about 12 miles round trip. The first couple hours are very uphill. When you get to the highest point, you see the distant ocean and walk in its direction. The ocean is actually a painting, or an image projected on a screen. You’ve seen this before, flipping through the channels, but this time it’s different. This walking towards the ocean takes hours. The ocean isn’t real, but you get closer and closer to its image the more you walk. Suddenly, you smell the salt water. The air is damp and the sweat dripping down your lower back and between your breasts now almost gives you a shiver. In fifteen minutes your feet will be on the sand and it will burn you. When you get to the beach you take off all of your clothes in a frenzy and hop in the cold water. There is some weird guy in the distance looking in your direction but you don’t care. You dry yourself out in the sun and have a feast. Probably you have also brought wine. You are alone now. The tide isn’t coming up for awhile so you will nap here. This didn’t set in until moments after the fucking. I laid on my back to gather myself, but I couldn’t get gathered. I experienced intense tunnel vision but the tunnel was wide; really, it took up my entire loft. I had died inside this tunnel. I was dead, we were dead. My lover needed to talk me back into the space by naming all the real objects in the room. “Do you see your plant hanging from the skylight?” for example. Eventually, we left my loft and went for a walk, then ate gluten free banana bread smothered in butter. The next day, on three hours of sleep, I went to teach high school kids about Somatic Poetics. I was worried that my body was oozing fluids in front of the kids but really I was leaking energy. There isn’t even one fucking refugee in fucking Hungary and the HAD to pass that fucking law.
Then he’d extend a fist, and tell me
“daily bread!”
We went on
like this for hours.
But I chose “ball of light,” and then
he went with “daily bread,” and so
the game became inert, and we sat down
to eat the bread, which, in the end, had
a baby in it, like a king cake.
Then the bats flew in. I couldn’t even
tell if they were real, but we fought them
our open hands waving in the air ...
water that pacifies by calling every blade of grass by name ...
childhood name ...
It’s the shortest river...
And if something has not yet been said
it’s that the punishment timer
flickers in spurts of light
-–
-–
-–
-–
The first is ruin.
The second is death.
The second is the dead.
THE SECOND IS THE DEAD TO COME.
The past is thick, and the present thin:
Entes… Entes…
GHOSTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTRAIN
And references to space — the sky, galaxies, the universe — physics and science — in particular radiation (Fukushima, black cones), measurement, intuitionist mathematics, jazz (Misha Mengelberg, Eric Dolphy, Han Bennink, the Mystic Horn Society, later known as Molimo m’Atet), Berta Cáceres, Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, our own journey through life, grief (Pushkin grieving for Beauty, the Hondurans for Berta, Eileen for Achilles, who was a bodhisattva of a dog), an illustration of an elephant superimposed over a graph revealing changes in real income whose curve happens to coincide with that of the shape of that elephant. By the way, the First Lady made a surprise visit to a concentration camp where some of those detained immigrant children her husband had separated from their parents were held while wearing a jacket bearing the message “I DON'T REALLY CARE DO U?” on the back. I can’t make this shit up, I really can’t. Then
A mattress factory explodes
Then the ticking is noticed
This is called
To rip my heart out
And my lungs along with it
From dead rock stuck on backdrop
As one might get if
The full moon howled at
This is the spitball
Resembles the ruined halls
For-the-duration
And are you there listening
That’s what I have to trust
Deep enough to dr—swim in
Would recall high disjunction to
Explode :
And so the band plays on.
Pardon
My French. Covered in
Blood. Excuse me. Screaming
Took the place of moaning.
Everyone was singing the same song,
And it wasn’t in my dreams
It was like being told
I’m harboring a fatal disease,
But more so, much
And yet not at all, much
Better. Much
worse.
Send your blank checks
C/o Søren Kierkegaard,
101 The Deli; Walnut Creek.
Yes, a dead lion feeds bees.
They sit there
Ordering the $3.99 breakfast
At three in the afternoon
(That terrible three in the afternoon)
Yet the line at the DMV keeps shuffling
Toward
Explode the car.
What a weird version of
Aninomal Faram.
‘Yes, it goes on but you stop.’
Burned out,
Drained,
(Not that you...)
When
You visit the well
To find it sucking
Sand, you may still be
Conscious. What then?
The scene at the makeshift encampment along the railroad tracks abutting the ICE facility was a communal and jovial one when I visited, akin to that of an incredibly woke music festival taking place in the Mad Max universe. People setting up new tents on Wednesday made jokes with other protesters, who welcomed them to the “neighborhood.” Kids frolicked about with parents in tow to hand out granola bars. A team with flashlights kept traffic flowing away from the swelling crowd that listened to speakers lit by a nearby candlelit vigil. A Spanish-language info tent had been erected to advise families who had appointments with ICE. There were even wooden cabinets someone had dragged from home and stocked neatly with first aid supplies and leftist literature. An excited, nervous energy permeated the camp, which is organized into sections that included a front desk of sorts complete with a map and a concierge directing newcomers, a first aid area, a family/kids area, and a improvised food court stocked with fruits, salads, coffee, dry goods, and enough pizza to feed a platoon — all of it donated by well-wishers, with more arriving every few hours. Port-a-potties, tents, and blankets have all been donated as well. Local ice cream purveyors 50 Licks dropped by twice in the scorching midday heat offering free scoops for all in attendance and promising to return. And the best part, the very best part? ICE had to suspend operations. I asked Tommy once who would work for ICE. He said, people who failed the test to become cops. I thought that was impossible, given their general stupidity. But I guess not. I mean, if The Crystal Text by Craig Dworkin is a pyrotechnic lyric cut of The Crystal Text by Crystal Coolidge, itself a discursive record of thought with quartz as the meditative center, then The Next Crystal Text by Melissa Mack is all of these things and everything the others left out. The labor that conveys minerals from under the ground into the realm of jewelry, everything that labor touches, its mystification in the glossy folds of display cases. What clings to a crystal, what else it might be or mean, and how a person under pressure approaches such questions. Do you remember Marilyn Minter’s painting “Dirty Heel”? A foot muddy and wet about to slip off a jeweled six-inch heel. Flesh glistening in muck. Sky’s the limit!
We see what the crystal’s electrons reject
the rejected emits
in other words
pendaloque-cut emeralds have become one more emblem of the world-end.
Then I heard Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro for chorus and American gamelan at the Berkeley Art Museum. And then I heard Suzanne Stein’s Tout Va Bien ... There’s this in there: If cumulative behavior defines the construction, and that construction’s accretionary (aleatory) behaviors are its manifest tactics and actions, a building, or a body,
this broke part you rope to
scrape you all outside still
when you
when you
when you
...
...
We encountered sudden weavings in the patterns of latitude and longitude
We encountered the Vélo
We encountered inflated bones
We encountered plants that make noise
Plants that move
Lovers’ flowers
their petals elliptical eyes and throbbing cartoon hearts
bunched alternately in the mouths of up-thrust snakes slash stems
...
...
I don’t know, it’s late, I’m wasted
let’s have blood soup for breakfast
the best heirlooms are small,
sharp, aggressive, & almost sickening
wearing one should damage us
...
...
You’re in a suit of foam
...
...
which meowed during ‘water music’
or the one for crumpling paper
or Monica Scott's ‘(h)ear age: C,’ I forget.
Then I read Eleni Stecopoulos’s Daphnephoria. Also David Brazil’s verse translation of Paul’s letter to the Romans, which contains the funniest translation of God’s promise to Abraham to make nations of his offspring, I made you dad of many goys. Then I read the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali in divers translations. Second verse: yogas-citta-vrtti-nirodhah: yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness. I can’t begin to say here, because I’m still figuring it out, but there is a connection between yoga practice and
And then my brothers and I made a fire outside and the year turned
How can I excerpt? The quartz fashions a nappe around its axis. The crystal taches quickly from the friction. The rock is a fraction of some other stone. Nitrides mask the etchants. The crystal was embedded. The roche once was rached. Each face is false — irregular, inconstant. The rock is just. The rose aches. The cusp is hastate in its jut. A ridge knaps from the back of the neck, where it tapers to a wedge. The quartzes gestate as they hutch. Accretions seek the furthest edge. The stone is asleep, but not for long.
The eggs went cold.
We were clicking through photos of a lost Mongolian tribe on the internet on our laptop after work. We had clicked on the click-bait headline “lost Mongolian tribe” and were looking at a photo of a girl clutching a baby reindeer like a stuffed animal, bathing it in a lake. We were considering the symbiotic relationship of the lost Mongolian tribe to reindeer, while looking at a photograph of a human baby asleep propped on a furry flank. We were thinking about anthropology, and about the paradox of the observed observer, and wondering how a Mongolian tribe can be lost if it has already been found by the observed observer, who has lost her glass eye and is now crawling on the ground feeling for it. We were imagining anthropologists observing our own behavior, noting down our symbiotic relationship to our laptop, noting down the number of clicks we expend on click-bait hoping to satisfy our nostalgia for symbiotic relationships with animals we’ve never had, noting down our nostalgia. So, like videos marked “rare” that are uploaded to the entire internet, that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s a motherfucker, don’t you know, the death drive Freud describes is actually a desire to feel as alive as possible, one problem with manmade anything is that it prides itself on seedlessness, from watermelons to grapes to dwarf oranges, you know what I’m saying, we nudge the clock a little closer to midnight by inducing systemic inflammation in ourselves, in our cells and arteries which do not tend to thrive on barren synthetic light, barren fruit, barren lusterless grass fed to traumatized mostly nonhuman animals. Now imagine a time lapse of black seeds reentering all of the spaces left empty by their mistreatment and by industrial GMO lifestyles, all of their sites of original and inevitable belonging, all of the bodies the black seeds produced only to be expelled like enfants terribles from their own creations, being invaded, reawakened with the truth of their existence, compelled to give up their deaths, confronted with consequences of synthetic intimacy and having to feel whole again, to enjoy the sensual and crave the feel. Black seeds and the volatile oil they produce, Black Seed Oil or Nigella Sativa, were discovered in King Tut’s tomb with a note reading “this’ll cure what ails you.” I take a spoonful every morning as the sun goes up in flames, sprinkle the seeds themselves on legumes or avocados as the sun goes down. Which is why I’ve said before that “visual writing” gives the complete (completed?) logos. Textual writing, on the other hand, gives something else. Is it simply infinity? Is it incompleteness? It is interesting to think of something evolving toward an atomic “trace,” an “act gratuit,” a wisp of smoke, a letter of a Phoenician alphabet, an archeological artifact, “the God particle,” without syntax, intent, meaning or — as Derrida says, any “For where, when and to whom.” Upon leaving the exhibit, there’s nowhere to go. Though barely able to afford the price of admission, we dutifully purchase gift shop mementos. We bump into people I mean literally bump into them as if we can’t read them, which way they are facing, which way they plan to go, on the way out. Out, we greet butterflies, Mastodons from our youth. We push through a strange little-used door, back into the parking garage, The Parking Garage Scroll. The Street Signs Scroll. Everything has this same legible illegibility. There is a curtain, then a hand. “Now clearly she walks horizontally in both directions at once.” This fan continues to unfold, “Form follows fragrance — breaking in strands, following arcs and concavities ...” Here, nothing invisible stays that way for long. However, a loss of form does not mean formlessness — it just requires instead a change of perception, a lateral valence. To this end, Browne wonders, “If departure from form indicates a collapse in the landscape which once supplied locations for meeting, where is that hemisphere beyond the senses” permitting internal perambulations, as though the “indivisible center” contained within the “hollow” body had come unhinged behind the breastplate, that “first true bone to be born ... surrounding the turreted trees through which she travels.” Out of the 64 squares on the page, then, there are six images: line 2, square 3 has someone (not Edgar Winter) playing a handheld, shoulder-strap synthesizer; line 2, square 7 has the registered trademark symbol; line 4, square 7 has the aforementioned rutabaga; line 5, square 4 has the slashed O; line 7, square 2 has a close-up fragment of an abstract painting, or a minimalist abstract landscape, or a child’s imitation of some tendencies found in Paul Klee (see my inside right forearm tattoo); line 7, square 7 has the "”Tube” part of the YouTube logo.
heritage
ple
d
g
e
shoulder-strap synth app
&/or
crowd
moreish registered trademark symbol
weather
linkrot
haruspex slashed O tooth paste (slashed o for the second o in tooth)
eclectic
AK-47
mine minimalist childlike Klee-esque landscape talent
whole
routine
cyborg tube okapi
pride
The okapi, also known as the forest giraffe, congolese giraffe or zebra giraffe, is an artiodactyl mammal native to the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. Okapi are creatures that appear in The Lion King universe. OK. So let’s begin again (and again), this time in the upper left corner, and read the first line from left to right, Kara Walker asking
“Does history die if you intentionally repeat it?”
Looking into the camera, Alejandra Pablos says: “If you are seeing this I just got detained by ICE.” “If you are seeing this,” she coordinates for me, “I just got detained by ICE.” The moment of witness, of watching rebounds Alejandra Pablos into an i-just-got-detained infinitum, a feedback loop ...
You are seeing me, but I am not here.
Following a regularly scheduled check-in with ICE as part of her probationary status, Pablos is / was unexpectedly taken into custody. Pablos’s call to see [“If you are seeing this ...”] is also elaborated in Amanda Russhell Wallace’s Field | House, which layers footage of Bree Newsome’s removal of the Confederate flag, images of Dylan Roof, Jesse Washington’s lynching and the face of one of the spectators ... The eye is doused. Saturation also operates on the level of spectatorship: how much are you willing to witness or, better, (for) how long are you willing to witness, to be doused. “I need you to fight for me,” says Alejandra Pablos, “as I’m fighting inside, you please fight outside,” for instance from the stolen Pina and Tohono O’odham lands upon which the Eloy Detention Center is built. Which brings me back to the camel, its goofy appearance but dignified lope. Now put the camel on a pedestal and ask yourself: what’s a camel doing on a pedestal?
“We count as far as we can count …
We deliver the mail …
We contemplate time-reversal invariants …
We find things to say …
We are amazed …”
“And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?” William James asks in The Principles of Psychology. Perhaps that’s why “New York City” begins with the line “Derailed vigilantism ectoblastic wannabe linseed oil.” That is disputable, but it is true that it is at the moment at which it loses its footing it takes on such a powerful accent (here and in De Profundis). So much gets away, as worse things come faster and faster. I don’t think I have strayed from the topic. In that sense it is entirely untranslatable. So it will not be surprising that Yip is not interested in the stereotypically Chinese features of poetry: moons, drinking, gauze curtains and so on. By incorporating English into his poetics, the “indigenous” is given a different, artificial voice. The slippery language of his poetry demonstrates that modernist techniques of verbal layering and oblique reference alongside the traditional Chinese techniques of figurative distance and subjective alienation are nearly the same techniques, but yield surprising effects. From “Beijing: August”:
... The Transnational Commerce
Shadows over shadows over shadows of ghosts
Closes in and tightens in rings
A thousand, ten thousand pounds of memory
…
A young poet crippled by reality
Is about to speak only to
Find his throat
Stuffed with balls and balls
Of crumpled paper written all over with his poems
So when the NYT opinion page writer Roger Cohen makes a special effort to justify the genocidal war being waged in Yemen, I think it deserves some mention, don’t you? Brief reminder: Yemen over the past year has suffered around a million cases of cholera. And as the Saudis have been blocking Yemeni ports for the past two years, it is estimated that 50,000 kids died from starvation there last year. You wanna quick rundown, go to Wikipedia. Go fast, cause in the age of net non-neutrality, it will probably be hard to find stuff like this about countries rich enough to stamp it out. So what does Cohen say about those 50,000 children? Nothing, really. He spends his time in a Saudi mall, staring in the window of Victoria’s Secret, noting how here the mannequins are toned down a bit and how the sexy underthings are too, the palette restricted to muted pastels, and how awesome it is, in spite of that, that women can drive to shopping now. Then he’s visiting Mohammed al-Tuwaijri, the economy minister, to find out how the new dictator operates. “He told me he’d met six times with the crown prince [aka M.B.S.] the previous week. M.B.S. fires rat-tat-tat questions at him: What do you need from me? What do you think of that crowd-management software for the hajj ...? How do we make things happen? One meeting took place at 4am [he finds that awesome, too] Things are happening, all right. A new Jeddah airport opened last month. The Riyadh subway will begin operation next year. Saudi Aramco, the state-run oil giant, is to be partly privatized. Ground has just been broken near Riyadh on a vast, multibillion-dollar ‘entertainment city’ that will include a Six Flags ... Stadiums are being retrofitted to accommodate women. A new bankruptcy law — ‘We had no bankruptcy law! We need to protect investors!’ — was adopted. ‘Saudization’ is the buzzword denoting the drive to tackle 34 percent youth unemployment by training Saudis to replace foreigners [is this beginning to sound familiar yet? Foreigners taking ‘our’ jobs? No wonder Trump and Cohen have their heads up M.B.S.’s awesome sauce ass] ... ‘We are shocking the system,’ Tuwaijri told me. Shock’s a word you hear a lot ... [It should sound familiar, if you’ve read of even heard of The Shock Doctrine. Oh, and by the way, remember Victoria’s Secret, forget feminism] The progressive empowerment of women is ... an economic necessity. Families can no longer live on one salary ... It’s all ‘Vision 2030,’ the new crown prince slash dictator’s slogan, and K.P.I.s (key performance indicators) on a forced march to a less oil-dependent country of mass tourism, empowered [meaning, apparently, mall clerk and mall rat] women [in sexy underwear, of course], renewable energy [laugh], theme parks and the rest ... This is the Saudi Arabia the crown prince sought to sell during a three-week American roadshow that ended in April. From Trump to Richard Branson, from Jeff Bezos to Oprah Winfrey, he peddled his message of reinvention and urged American investors to join the party. Can he pull off the rebranding? ... ‘M.B.S. does not pretend to be a liberal, and he has the full coercive power of the state behind him,’ Ali Shihabi, a Saudi author, told me ... Dozens of pro-democracy activists were rounded up in September.” Etc, etc etc. Yemen? What Yemen? It gets a mention then a shrug. So
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it.
I detest the flunkies of order ...
Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug ...
Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin,
Page not found. Daily CO2, June 21, 2018: 411.17 ppm. Ergo, reading is often adapt archaic with indulge to prevent content, however gerund humoring 3rd person proportions, they thought the body noun was infectious spirits vanished, plural or comic, a state or brand of funny by anger shoes in Wisconsin street claim forthcoming belief-tracking horror spider eyes are traditionally resistant to bacterial nightmare crystals 9 billion light-years from our invisible swarm of holes. Debilitating multi-state memories infect your amazing brain! Page 187 page 1: Obviously, nothing at all should appear here. Page 3: Here, everything begins.
page xxiv: Here the author’s version is itself just a version representing a kind of “and/and” pattern. Page 102:
Life is given to us humans for a moment.
Go and do as many good things as you can.
The delta is divided by concentric markers.
How newly meandering, a spark of potato in a spark of canoe.
Scribbled code, aleph-basalt, arachnid caliper.
Page 87: Behold again, the nightingale, thankfully speedway epoxy, in the shadow of a bell anymore tarot indefensible sphincter, unhitched the payroll, here the poet has established with poems, in the late University, essays as pure as soup.
Alert gas sags for the blanket annex.
An alphabet harbors sinuous legumes.
You can no longer use it positively or negatively — you just can’t. Make it new, make it up, make America great again. Make America up again. He quotes Prigov: “Live where living is impossible: ...” [That ellipsis is important.] The dog down the street finally quit barking. The dog down the street is barking again.
when I was translating the poems
of charles bukowski
I was convinced that I was writing
the best poetry then being written in russian
He says he has nothing in common with Bukowski, that he translated him “in a voice that wasn't his voice.” I would like to see a couple of those poems translated back into English by someone who isn't familiar with Bukowski’s work. Therefore, walking a mile in the shoes of another reinvented wheel, observations in flames, fiercely transcendent. Nor working, since the audio reborn, generates the union of tricycle coat-rack resplendently “aesthetic politics” — adapts during narrative orbiting — hiatus: choices: dismissal: motivations: paradoxical: nexus. Semicolons rattle (raffle); the poem entitled BIG RUBBER COCK begins
I saw it every day on the way to school.
I know that’s not the best way
to start a poem,
but there’s nothing I can do about it
There are splotches and smears of black tempera on my faded yellow t-shirt. Take a shower. Change your shirt.
these cocks were everywhere,
they weren’t even manufactured here,
they were imported from America,
which didn’t know their true value,
no one knew their true value,
The fucking dog is still barking. Nekrasov has a visual poem which consists of a blank page with a period in the lower right corner. We look at it, we read it, and there is nothing there.
Anti
Anti
Antelope
True or false: The ass is the antiface
False: The ass is the holy trinity.
Two cheeks and a crack.
I read that in a little pamphlet
in the 1970s
when I worked at Black Sparrow Press.
the wind blows
all night
the dog barks
the wind blows*
*the country calls
(page 124)
The asphalt roadway: teams of harnessed humans, human carriages. Procession of human carriages. The street that runs through houses. World of particular secret affinities: palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, champagne bottles, prostheses, old letter-writing manuals, “Carboniferous Landscapes” and the tissue in tumors. For, as the voice of the truly beloved awakens in his heart an answering voice which he has never before heard in himself, the words which she speaks awaken in him thoughts of the new, much more hidden ego that reveals to him her image, while the touch of her hand awakens Maurice Renard, who has told how inhabitants of a distant planet come to study the flora and fauna indigenous to the lower depths of the atmosphere — in other words, to the surface of the earth. These interplanetary travelers see in human beings the equivalent of tiny deep-sea fish-that is to say, beings who live at the bottom of a sea. We no more feel the pressure of the atmosphere than fish feel that of the water; this in no way alters the fact that both sets of creatures reside on an ocean floor. The street itself is thereby manifest as well-worn interior. “Post No Bills.” A factory of 5,000 workers for weddings and banquets. Attire for bride and groom. Birdseed in the fixative pans of a photographer's darkroom. Mme. de Consolis, Ballet Mistress. Lessons, Classes, Routines. Mme. de Zalma, Fortuneteller. Railroad station: yes / church: yes / Church and railroad station: yes / Tune / Perspective / Dialetical reversal (commodity-type): yes.
And this shall be our theme:
the demonstration,
revelation,
and account
of how things were put in shadow
brought to light by the Maker,
Modeler,
Bearer,
Begetter, names of Hunahpu Possum,
Hunahpu Coyote,
Great White Peccary,
Coatl
Resplendent Plumed Serpent,
Heart of the Lake,
Heart of the Sea,
Plate Shaper,
Bowl Shaper, as they are called, also named,
also described as the Midwife,
Matchmaker,
Xpiyacoc,
Xmucane, names of the Defender,
Protector,
twice a Midwife,
twice a Matchmaker, as is said in the words of K’iche’.
They accounted for everything
and did it, too, with a clear state of mind
in clear words.
We shall write about this now amid the preaching of God,
in Christendom now.
We shall reveal it out because there is no longer a way to see the Council Book,
a way to see the light from beside the sea
the story of our shadows,
a way to see the dawn of life, as it is called.
There is the original book
and ancient writing,
but he hidden in the face of the reader,
interpreter,
it takes a long performance
US oil & gas methane emissions 60 percent higher than estimated. This undercut the case that gas offers substantial climate advantage over coal. Which is to say that, first off, it feels like a woodpecker is drilling holes into your head while you have an ice cream headache and also you’re paying for it to happen to you. And your head is in a vice and have you have tape on your face and protective earplugs on and your eyes are blinking involuntarily in a small convulsion and it looks like you’re winking at the doctor, nurse, and the medical students watching you, and then you have to tell them that you are not trying to seduce them but you say it way too loud because you have earplugs in and anyhow what I should ha e said is that the doctor told me that before we start he needs to find out “where my thumb lives” and I was like, “Are you sure you’re a real doctor because my thumb lives on my hand and it’s really obvious” but turns out they have to find them my brain, the doctor told me that in order to find the parts of the brain where they need to hit me with magnets they need to find the homunculus first and then work backward and I thought it was a trick because I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons and I am perfectly aware that a homunculus is a flying telepathic monster made of blood magic but the doctor was like, “Jesus, no, that’s horrifying. It’s this.” And then he showed me an image of the worst sex toy ever which is way more horrifying than the telepathic winged blood monster but apparently there are different parts of your body that are affected when you get magnet-punched in the brain-pan and to make sure they’re in the right spot they make you hold your thumb up like a hitchhiker and they keep magnet-punching your noggin until your thumb falls. Anyway, here are the things that I found out about TMS: My brain is not at all symmetrical which I thought was weird but then the doctor was like, “Well, your face isn’t symmetrical so why would your brain be symmetrical?” and that makes sense but it’s also a little insulting because basically I think he just said that I’m ugly even on the inside. It super hurt the first day but everyone assured me that I’d quickly get used to being pummeled in the skull and they were totally right and also this feels like a pretty good metaphor for 2018 in general. If it hurts a lot they might be on a nerve and if you tell them they can move it a little and then it only hurts a little. SCIENCE! They literally put my head in a vice to do this but if you have a good imagination it almost looks like a fancy fascinator for a futuristic royal space wedding and I think if I keep doing it long enough I’ll develop a magneto-like super power, which would be nice to help find my keys or change the channel without a remote. Every day they do 20 minutes with one pulse per second on my right side, and then on the left side of my brain they do 20 minutes with LOTS of pulses for 5 seconds followed by 10 second breaks, during each of which I hear mangled snippets from what must be one of Brian Ang’s totality cantos, eee gee
Made armed libidinal foregoing material gnostic stranglehold sketch turn
Consequence
Everything added
[...]
Analytic gravitational shadow commandments trained arbitrary conscious pantheon universe mountains
[...]
Trivial determinant preoccupation theory circle fruit
[...]
Corollary touchstone praxis thousandths
[...]
Adoption coup textile construction painting historian mutations
Demographic sublime manner camera extinction compliance facticity situation
object
[...]
Advance same secure economic charismatic pattern vanitas brain set
[...]
Solar conceptual reformer spiralled separation example
Relationship
Riots compendium before enemy scriptures
BUT THEN THE VOICE CHANGED, AND I HEARD
It’s the Unbelievable — yes, the Unbelievable — it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.
[...]
This christ I’m talking about was a Magician who fought with Demons in the desert, using a cane as his weapon. And a trace of his blood remained imprinted on that cane. That trace disappears when you wipe it away with water, but then it comes back.
Tarot books were simple in those days. Commonly they would describe the card, oddly repeating what you could see with your own eyes, though with subtle points that seemed to open the way to a greater story, like Eden Gray’s ‘In a state of dejection, a woman and child are ferried across the water to a calm shore.’ Who are these people? Why are they dejected? What waits for them on that ‘calm shore’? So if the readings intrigued me, something else excited me more. One afternoon Russ and I went through the cards, one by one, ignoring the book now and just playing with the pictures. We were looking at the ten of Pentacles, and especially the white-haired man in his coat of many colours. He looks like a beggar, I thought, but clearly he is much more. And no one see him, only the dogs. Odysseus! I thought. The old man is Odysseus, returned home after 20 years. And you know how much I love me my b-movies, my d & z grade movies too. And how I’ve gotten into the habit of reading and writing with the TV on. Carrie Fisher said she wrote her novels & screenplays with the TV on too. Who am I to disagree with a great icon? Tonite it’s Tremors [1990]. I love this film. I own the whole series. The first time I saw this movie it was the theater with a supersmart woman. I apologize because I’ve forgotten your name, tho I remember everything else about you. My brain is having an age malfunction. But you were a good friend to me at that time. Maybe it’s an accident that this movie happens to be on tonight. Who cares. & yet, this movie is on TV tonight, how perfect, tonight, the hottest night so far this year.
[Note: Sources: JBR (with a little help from aldahuda's comment at Reddit, Al Jazeera, and Márton Koppany, email rec’d 21 Jun 018, approx. 2:32am PDT)); Culture, “Dirty Tricks”, at ELYRICS; JBR; Lew Welch, memory quote; JBR; “Myth Meets History, Isaiah Meets Aristotle”, and Dante, Inferno, at Digital Dante; Sophie Fetokaki, “Via”, at Academia.edu; JBR; MACK Newsletter, “Vanessa Winship And Time Folds”, email rec’d 21 Jun 018, approx. 5:16am PDT; JBR; blurb for Cody-Rose Clevidence, “Flung Throne”, at SPD; JBR; Ivy Johnson, quoted in Rebecca Samuelson, “Ivy Johnson on Inhabiting a State Outside Your Body”, at LITSEEN, 14 Jul 016; JBR; Heather Green, “How The Little Bear Reflected Light / After Liliana Ursu”, and Tristan Tzara, “Villians” (tr. Heather Green), at Blackbox Manifold 14; JBR; Neil Ledbetter, “Comprehending Mortality by John Bloomberg-Rissman And Eileen R. Tabios”, “If They Hadn’t Worn White Hoods, 8 Million Would Have Shown Up In The Photographs by John Bloomberg-Rissman And Eileen R. Tabios”, each of which is to published in upcoming issues of Galatea Resurrects; JBR, and “Did Melania Trump Wear This Jacket When Visiting Children Separated from Their Families?”, at Snopes (their answer, with photos and confirmation from her staff, is yes); David Bromige, “Ten Poems from As In T as in Tether”, at Jacket 22; Donovan Farley, “The Protesters Who Shut Down an ICE Facility Are Just Getting Started”, at Vice, 21 Jun 018; JBR; various blurbs for Melissa Mack, The Next Crystal Text, at Timeless Infinite Light; Michel Cross, Suzanne Stein, Tout Va Bien, Stacy Doris, Fledge: A Phenomenology of Spirit, Li Yawei, “We” (tr. Jami Proctor Xu), George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous”, Craig Dworkin, The Crystal Text (After Clark Coolidge), quoted in Cross’s “2012 Disinhibitions: Melissa Mack”, at The Disinhibitor, 25 Jan 013, China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris, and Brent Cunningham, “The Faraway (Les Effarés)”, at Cordite 51; Donna Stonecipher, “The Ruins of Nostalgia 2”, at The Spectacle 5; JBR; Harmony Holiday, “An Artist’s Guide to Herbs: Black Seed”, at BOMB, 22 Jun 018; JBR; Tom Hibbard, TRANSCENDENT TOPOLOGIES: Structuralism and Visual Writing, at Galatea Resurrects, Jun 018; Kylan Rice, and Laynie Browne, quotd in Rice’s “Roseate, Points of Gold by Laynie Browne”, at Galatea Resurrects, Jun 018; Jim Leftwich, and Mark Young, quoted in Leftwich’s “‘Polymer Codex’ by Mark Young”, at Galatea Resurrects, Jun 018; Jennif(f)er Tamayo, “AS OF___ growing between inside///& outside — timings\\\,”, at contemptorary, 25 May 018; John Olson and Anne Tardos, quoted in Olson’s “Elsewhere is here: A review of ‘The Camel’s “, at Jacket2, 20 Jun 018; <Nathanaël, quoted in Tatum Howey, “There Is No Capital I: In Conversation with Nathanaël”, at Lemonhound 3.0, 22 Jun 018; Roger Gathman, “the NYT in the ‘I DONT CARE. DO U?’ era, Yemen atrocity edition”, at Limited, Inc., 22 Jun 018; Nathanaël, quoted in Tatum Howey, “There Is No Capital I: In Conversation with Nathanaël”, at Lemonhound 3.0, 22 Jun 018; Matt Turner, “Arrivals and Departures: Poems, Memoir, and Chronology, Wai-lim Yip Hong Kong: Musical Stone Publishing, 2017. 378 pages”, at Seedings 5; Roger Gathman, “the NYT in the ‘I DONT CARE. DO U?’ era, Yemen atrocity edition”, at Limited, Inc., 22 Jun 018; JBR; Roger Cohen, “The Prince Who Would Remake the World”, at The New York Times, 21 Jun 018 (the bracketed interspersions are mine); JBR; Aimé Césaire, “NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND ... by AIME CESAIRE translated by Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith for reading on Desolo Luna Vox Theatrum”, at KBOO; “Daily CO2”, at Daily CO2; Jim Leftwich, “Books by Lev Rubinstein, Kirill Medvedev, and Vsevolod Nekrasov”, at Galatea Resurrects, April 018 (image by Vanessa Winship; there are a few lines interpolated by JBR); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (trs. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin); And this ... performance: The Popol Vuh (tr. Dennis Tedlock), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Toward a Poetry & Poetics of the Americas (11): from The Popol Vuh (Mayan)”, at Poems and Poetics, 21 Jun 018; “US oil & gas methane emissions 60 percent higher than estimated”, at Science Daily, 21 Jun 018; JBR; Jenny Lawson, “It’s like trepanation but not at all”, at The Bloggess, 22 Jun 018; JBR; Brian Ang, “from The Totality Cantos [15I+50H]”, at Cordite 53.1 (hat tips Donna Fleischer, Tom Marshall); JBR; Antonin Artaud, Artaud 1937 Apocalypse – Letters from Ireland by Antonin Artaud (tr. Stephen Barber), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Please welcome to the world … Artaud 1937 Apocalypse – Letters from Ireland by Antonin Artaud”, at DC’s, 23 Jun 018; Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom; Richard Lopez, “you know how i love me the b movies. ...”, at Really Bad Movies, 22 Jun 018]
Migdalia Lugo, 44, (left) her nieces (center), and her husband (right).
Philip Allen, TITLE TK
TRUE