The IPCC just dropped its new report. Simply put: The laws of the physical universe say that we can keep global warming to 1.50 C above pre-industrial levels, a goal which will still seriously fuck things up, but at the rate we spew shit, we’ve only got a dozen years. What’ll it take? Cutting emissions by half before 2030, and going carbon-neutral no more than twenty years later. ROFL FML etc. Since only two countries, Morocco and The Gambia, are actually doing anything even half close to real, that ain’t gonna happen. Period. What is? 3-40 hotter by century’s end. Thank you for flying Holocene Airlines. I hope you’ve enjoyed the flight. Please be careful when opening the overhead bins, as objects may have shifted. We’ll be staying with the trouble for a long time now, no doubt about it. Sorry, kids. But the point is it was a very funky place. We’d be sitting on the floor. There were never any glasses. I remember drinking wine out of an egg poacher! Dollar a gallon wine! You had to be serious to be there in the first place. “Is it a poem, or is it not?” “Oh, no it’s not. So we don’t have to pick it apart.” “I’m going to tell you something about the line. I’ll tell you next time.” And he never did tell me about the line! I never understood what it was ... like about which positions to take when doing meditation and how to breathe and what to do with your hands. “Yes, yes, that’s right,” says the Dalai Lama. Since robots had brought them together in the first place they said having one officiate at their wedding was a natural choice. Sensors suggested a reinforced glass window was smashed at 6:50am. What happens when strangers meet?
Meetings.
We all
Know what happens.
Locate
Your question.
Did you draw
The
Map on
Soap because when
It
Dissolves we
Won’t have any
Of
These stupid
Borders? Right. Yes.
No
Way. Nothing.
Nothing. A small
Number
Of words
Are stretched over
A
Long duration.
Do you want
To
Say anything
Else? Every cage
Had
A light
Bulb lying at
The
Bottom. Do
You want to
Say
Anything else?
The glass infant.
Never
Mind. We
All know what
Happens.
Did you
Draw the map
On
Soap because
Of concentration camps?
Do
You want
To say anything
Else?
A computerized
Device dimmed the
Lights.
On off
On off off
On
In a
Quick random sequence.
We live through it the way aphids traverse a rose. You will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil. Bish bash bosh. Off the ricta. No bliss more blatant than, clearly beaten by the stars, trying to underline a verb in a text without any: aaaa aaaaa aaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaah aaaaaaauugh aaaaaagh aaaaaahhhhh aaaaaaugh aaaaagh aaaaah. “Garcia Lorca stole poetry from this drinking fountain” (Robert Duncan, Caesar’s Gate). “Content never equals meaning.” Meaning = “frame lock”. A carpenter plays a xylophone with two hammers. A Marxist makes use of a burning palace for his “sensible reading lamp.” These are love poems — written by everyone to no one in particular. In a two-dimensional house the stairs are drawn of chalk. In a large room, in a very large room, with very large language in a large room; suppose it’s a clear day, and this is a very large room with very large language, as a conditional persistence of the room; unable to think of a thing without insisting this is a room that is large, obeying some secret imitation of a large room, in the momentum of large language, that is an imitation of a large room, as an imperative without a departure, with is a given, that is a word given, given in a word, much closer than we think, thinking in terms of a familiarity, that could be a proximity of familiar, and or a haunting familiar in close proximity, anticipating a future, anticipating a potential possible, the advent of the eventual. In the Liber de Ascendi et Descendi, one lie after another, informing you a bit about the translation process. The author, an author, asks, smittenly, “Are not dead birds mushmouth color, turning in this wind in rotation?” And then it was dark. As we scrambled for the car, it became apparent to me we had not brought a designated driver. It was my Rambler, but as I took the wheel it seemed to break off in my hands. I didn’t tell anybody this; instead, I translated: We’re going to have to wait here a couple of hours while the battery re-charges. Nobody challenged me. It was a perfect translation. Leave it in the ground. Adios, Busy Signal. O little beep beep beep. O. So long nothing about you means anything anymore. “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” The Mumbai Highgrove Stud Racing Syndicate owns [or owned] a horse named Spinoza. Alas, The Bleeding Skin ...
Knowing that, I taped small flashlights to my shoulders and wore a thin, colored shirt on top of them. I was glowing in the dark. Hello. Then I half-filled a large bucket with sand. Outside in the dark of the New Moon, I slowly removed thin layers of sand from the surface, one, layer, at, a, time. Poor, old, tired, horse. Please.
Everywhere they are shooting people.
People people people people.
I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere.
So what? Big deal.
This is a poem about a horse that got tired.
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
This is a poem that tells the story,
which is the story.
I don’t know.
Are you happy, sad, not happy.
The flood bubbled around my lungs and made all my blood soggy but I was lucky — a wolf came over and ate me. A ranch hand found me coddled by wolves, let wolves live, clasped by the rear he reared me on the ranch, extending the borders of his working day so it knew no bounds. Fortunate rancher, he did not know I would be the king of anatomically-camel ranch hands, endorsed by Vulcan to I forgot as soon as he told me which is to say that micro-dosing possesses an intricate poetics that sings, trips, and almost redeems the regimes that inspire it. There’s a sense of almostness that haunts everything now, which suggests a higher sensitivity to differences between frequencies, even deep in the mines. There are some who say this mushroom is the gateway to all esoteric knowledge, that if you megadose psilocybin and read the hieroglyphs they are a movie, which reminds me of what Tom said back in the day. What if that goes for everything? Before dusk, the superheroes come out. They wear backpacks or they push hand-trucks full of unrecognizable equipment down the sidewalk. The middle of the street is dotted with oversized martini glasses and giant shoes. Two hundred miles of flood tunnels run like veins our feet. Much of the city’s homeless population takes shelter in them and, whenever it rains, inevitably, someone drowns, and becomes a pallid, flame-headed mermaid who arcs up out of her own pyre to leap into the Ganges, to be carried downstream by the pink dolphins. Received at the delta by new animals, a whale, the body drifts, propped on the back of wetness, to a sleek, an open space like a gazing bowl or glass, mid-ocean, where the lightning collects in a caul of residual plastics and bulbs of kelp. Ghazali sighs. “I had a friend too, once. Deon Rizk.” Her eyes flicker across some invisible datascape. “Our cops didn’t kill him.” “Not your cops. Your apps. Google Fitness showed Dee running 15K four times a week. Google Fitness showed him doing thirty chin-ups at a stretch. Google fucking Fitness showed reflexes and fast-twitch muscle response consistent with a middleweight practitioner of Mixed Martial Arts. Oh, and apparently Google Assistant overheard him expressing anti-police sentiments, which was enough to disable his privacy settings under the ATA. So poor little Officer Neukamp feared for her life. Murdered Dee because he was — how’d she put it — assuming an aggressive posture. Didn’t even bother trotting out I thought his phone was a gun.” Hancock doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. If I were in your shoes, I’d be pissed too.” Ghazali snorts. “What I wouldn’t have done,” Hancock continues, “is wait three years, then beat some random stranger to a pulp.” “He works for Google.” “Which makes him personally responsible for —” “He knew what side he was choosing.” That face. That stupid fucking Travis face. That stupid Google baseball cap. Oh, he chose sides all right. Guy signs up to work for the spooks and the suits and fucking ICE-9, you don’t let him walk because he’s only the janitor. That rage. “I see what you did there,” Hancock murmurs, and Ghazali almost responds before he realizes that she isn’t talking to him; she’s talking to her tablet, to the little coruscating false-color silhouette writhing there. Gamium data. She’s talking to something in his brain. But now she sets the tablet aside and meets his eyes. “And I’m sorry, but I still don’t buy it. That level of anger, that— fury— our algos are too good to have missed it. You’re not even a Quayside resident, you’re a third-order downstream variable and they still knew what you were going to order off that truck before you even thought about eating out.” “They fucked up the satay,” Ghalazi reminds her. “And they shouldn’t have. That’s exactly my point. Any more than they should have let a human pressure cooker walk up to one of our people on a public street and hammer him into a coma. If you were going to go berserker you would have done it three years ago, and you didn’t. These things do not come out of nowhere, Marius. They are predictable.” There’s an intensity behind the smartspec eyeshine, an — anger, at any reality with the temerity to defy expectation ... Something thumps against the window. Ghazali turns, glimpses a small dark blur plastered for just an instant on the other side of the frosted glass. “Bird.” Hancock says. “Don’t worry about it.” “Bird?” “The polarizing mesh messes with their magnetic sense or something. When we blank the windows.” “Your ecofriendly miracle windows kill birds.” She shrugs. “We’ve got half a dozen drones on collection duty. Send the bodies to FLAP for barcoding. Nothing gets wasted.”
It’s a season of mutations
A characteristics of most nonmetallic solids
Of a DNA molecule
Of a fixed asset
A charred glyph and no answers
Autopsy cladding
An arts council as a pet?
Postcolonial reason through a monstrous lens
A glory starfield, bewilderment, bone marrow
Bees, bitterness, blasphemy so heartfelt, its wings broken
Make my cake
yellow orange circle of sun above shoulder of ridge
lines of pelicans flapping across windblown channel
petromonster stomachs stomachs flesh filters gyres stomachs sympathy sympathy gyres gyres gyres gyres gyres nylon-riots Smirky Brineshrimpdirect Smokesmash Understones riskmetrics vicodin Mintymix skyrim slingbox Libelula photobiographies Regretsy Whimsicle fuckery grooveshark invincibles Regalessia writhings tomatometer danglesauce did you know there’s a camera that can shoot ten trillion frames per second? No shit. I want to make a one second book. And have lulu print it. They have a max of 740 pages so we’re talking 13.5 billion volumes. That would be worth doing. That would be good. If immense beauty answers me or not, I don’t care. My life is the fact that realism was used up while I ordered a salad. Piss drops over the dawn. And they say, still? Because they’ve forgotten. Because it’s no longer an event. Is this supposed to be the Hudson River? Can I stay with you? The people are running. I am wading through the water. Here. This is where the destruction happened. Suddenly I am dizzy because I’m not where I think I am. They point to an estuary near a Great Lake. How did I get here? How do I not know where I am? I called many people asking if I could stay with them. Later there is a group of boys standing outside all wearing tie-dye shirts because it is their “uniform.” God. Where to begin? I wrote to his agent or whoever handles his press asking if I could interview him for ___ magazine and never heard back. But my thoughts just fall more and more apart the deeper I slide into delta brainwaves. For my next email I will write about the Malady and trying to understand the fate of a planet through the fate of a diseased body that doesn’t know it’s diseased. While cleaning her mother, Cixous sees a hideous boil beneath her mother’s arm. This is not the disenchantment of the world that anyone was much expecting. God’s last hiding place was as a cycle, a system, a homeostasis, one that might wobble and bump, but now it chats in static. What is a sign of what? I don’t know, I tell her. I don’t know. The what returns. The problem of what returns. It extends from the paved avenue to a barren plot. An electricity tower protrudes from the horizon. A man in the shade and another in the sun. Both wear grey dress pants and colorful but faded soccer jerseys. The one wearing dress shoes stomps his feet. The other wears crocs. The tip of his left foot dips into the sun. The lyrics agitate the listeners. They turn to the girl. She is tracing a circle around herself in the dirt with a stick. It leaves a faint white mark. Like dry skin scraped off. Presses the tip down in the middle of the ring. It’s normal, then, if what’s hurting is hard to put your finger on:
“You are not sick, you are injured—
you ache for the rest of life”
But this blue ache is nothing like that defensive crusting-over of the organism that Freud called anxiety. On the contrary, “you take in things you don’t want all the time.” Affects arrive, postmarked by an event. The real problem is that once an affect’s in, it’s exceedingly difficult to demonstrate that it ever came from outside the subject. Sianne Ngai calls this the “blur between subjective and objective enunciation.” The subject now becomes an echo chamber in which the precise affective frequencies constituting the timbre of an event are iteratively amplified: “The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that?” There is only the impossible theory of there being just one theory (the theory, for example, of trierasure). The problem with the end of the world as the only thing that happens and as that which happens as the only end of the world that could ever happen even though it can never be is that it never happens. That which can be the only thing that counts is also prohibited in that very saying and so the listener of ‘Nikes’ cannot be spaced out of it or placed. Tell these basic insisters what it is that is or isn’t the end of the world? The ‘let you guys prophecy’ and the ‘rain glitter’ and the ‘astro’ and the ‘only human’ and the ‘amber rose’ and the fucking over of the future perfect proleptic anterior and the future perfect extinct together and at first (‘living so the last night feels like a past life’) mean that I barbarbarbarbar, I barbarbarbarbar without meaning to, necessarily, inevitably, fatally, like someone eating, drinking or walking and just because; I can’t speak, I can’t speak; I learned to barbarbarbarbar as a nebula, the universal sophisms, the cosmic, subterranean, dynamic, dynamic laws govern me, my natural, polyphonic barbarbarbarbar opens up, opens out, the vast, subconscious, tragic, mathematical, funereal beauty guides my strides in the dark light; I barbarbarbarbar across the ages as if in a great deformed dream of pus, tears and somber fogs bearing axioms from infinity, “stars, YOU ARE stars, oh! OMG ...” you howl and add up to enormous, enormous, enormously enormous woes, they smile, they cry, they smile, they spit at the vile sky or spew serpents from their mouths, they work, they work the same as people or birds, they dignify the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the mineral kingdom, whose polyhedral, multiple, simultaneous being is in the five-hundred geographic horizons; in October they bloom, joyful, round, resounding, and they bear rural fruit in early May and June or in late August, they ripen year-round and fornevermore, fornevermore; and well, and well, and well, what’s the use, what’s the use, fabulous, fabulous, hush, hush-hush, hush-hush, hush-hush, monumentally panting –– procreating and digesting, digesting and procreating, eating, drinking, walking, births by telephone, deaths by telephone, marriages by telephone, all the epic, all of it by telephone, the stanza begins with an old man sitting in the shadow of a tomb, and the first image is of doves that, in a literal reading of the line are shedding like congojas, a noun form of the verb congojar meaning anguish or dismay. To settle an argument about the meaning of a word, I would sometimes type it into Google and look at the images to see if there was some kind of coherence to the accrual there, a type of divination. The images that come up for “congojar” are of people crying or in the fetal position. The word’s root is the Catalan congoixa, which is where the etymological road goes cold. We wandered around the abstraction of anguish, tried every other analog of the word until we returned to the metaphorical basis of the line: the dove shedding its feathers like tears. The poem returns over and over to the earth’s surface — there’s lots of scratching and scraping — ergo, the old man “clawed,” he “scored,” he “marked.” And other adventures in vocabulary. And people who became warehouse workers and people who never sleep. I’m sure today has a date or something.
Magic I know and dialectics.
Just write the prescription ok.
I have conversations with the dead.
music, for chrissake
you take a solo
“they took a stick and beat me”
This is for those who never made it.
For those in the centre of the earth.
Who cracked apart in the holding cell.
Things only got worse.
The breeze was like a gag-reflex.
No-one would tell us where the cells began and where they ended.
No-one would say what word meant ‘open’, and what word ‘closed’. And then ghosts come at us. And so here I am in a horrible state not dressed yet, working away at the thing that occupies every minute of my entire life, being told by my financial ombudsman (I don’t know what that is but anyway) I look at social media where loads of gorgeous people are doing their absolute best to accommodate people who are like me, or a bit like me, or not at all like me, I don’t know what this is. But then the Judge dismissed all charges, ruling that the prosecution had not presented sufficient evidence that the Valve Turners had done damage to the Enbridge pipeline. Emily, Annette and Ben even had the bolt cutters returned to them by the Sheriff’s office. But of course all this stopped them from talking about the climate emergency, so feelings were a little bit mixed. Drawing on Su’s work in Northern Thailand with an NGO that supports Burmese refugees, the poem is organized into eleven sections, each titled after Thai words starting with jai, which signifies the ‘mind’ as well as the ‘heart.’
“enter heart,”
“wake heart,”
“dread heart,”
“strange heart.”
Su writes of refugees who “walk farther each week,” in this ritual I carried a
small piece of celestite
in my left hand with
9 blades of grass. And
in my right a Babypod,
which purports to fix the
average vagina’s lack of a
sound system. At times, this
calls for the treatment of
vast slabs of text. At
times we circle asteroids with
a strange anticipation. And the birds, too, a separate organ,
sweeping up,
a curve like a paper cut,
got rich in the trees.
They escorted the birds in carriages
drawn by swans. It was
here they disembarked the backyard
of a sickly city. One
done up as a chase
sequence involving a mysterious booming
sound, a side-scrolling pig’s
head, and a lucky number
seven, and featuring an extended
cameo by the brain structure
primarily responsible for coordinating stress
response in humans and other
animals. “The conclusion is theoretically
wrong. But before that, in
the run-up to it,
on the road to hell
with the first door that
exits from a pipe protruding
upwards in the vicinity of
the third door leading onwards
observing as we move via
‘the travellator’ a psychedelic ‘pinprick
that is also a tear
or a gash or hole
or rent or cut in
a field or backdrop or
sheet’” consumed by fire to
become “a foam stressball.” So
PREPARE TO GET SPRAYED APART
HEADLESS AT THE EGRESS POINT
THROWN INTO THE VERY FIRE
BORDERLINE FROZEN / RATTLING CANS OF
BLEACH / HIGH SPEED FLECKED UP
LET THEM EAT BANANA PEELS.
Speaking of Francis von
Helmont, his baby food included
a “Tree of Life” herbal
supplement distilled from the cedars
of Lebanon. Adam, who later
in Genesis names the animals,
is therefore being divinely inspired
to name the animals with
their real names, and not
with randomly invented words. So
I recommend applying videos of
hedgehogs taking baths as needed,
and also reminding yourself that
sitting in a circle never kept anyone dry, and neither does a roof with holes or a pile of paper with snowflakes printed in orange. And beige, not grey like most people think, but new buildings are appearing all the time. Where did that picture go? The sea and the ah and the chah that sounded like breathing. Pigeons are pecking at a puddle on the road. Things happen in bars or hospitals or playgrounds. But these real spaces don’t keep a cloud from bursting open and spilling out children. Or jokes from turning into men. It’s a mask that might’ve gone slightly rotten on one side, where maybe a small growth has begun to form. But Miss Birdy stops me. “No, no,” she says. She softly wags a finger at my boy. “That’s not your mouse. That’s no one’s mouse.” Her voice slows. “That mouse.” Miss Birdy coughs. “That mouse,” she says, “is alone in this world, and barely ...” Miss Birdy stops. “What was that?” she asks. “What was what?” I say. “That sound,” says Miss Birdy. “I don’t know,” I say. “What did it sound like?” “It was a sound that sounded like a sound,” says Miss Birdy. “Like a sound a sound would make. Never mind. Where was I?” “You were with the mouse.” “Oh, the mouse! Do you know him?” “No,” I say. “Unless you mean ...” “Neither do I,” says Miss Birdy. “And this is my point. That mouse ...” If an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock — for if she hasn’t, she will only know about being shocked inescapably. But if she has been inescapably shocked before, and she is put in the conditions where she was inescapably shocked before, she will behave as if being shocked, mostly. Her misery doesn’t require acts. Her misery requires conditions. If an animal is inescapably shocked once, and then the second time she is dragged across the electrified grid to some non-shocking space, she will be happier than if she isn’t dragged across the electrified grid. The next time she is shocked, she will be happier because she will know there is a place that isn’t an electrified grid. She will be happier because rather than just being dragged onto an electrified grid by a human who then hurts her, the human can then drag her off of it. If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. Eventually all arousal will feel like shock. She will not be steady, though, in her self-supply of analgesic. She will not always be able to dwell in science, as much as she now believes she loves it. And where is the edge of the electrified grid?
[Note: Sources: JBR; Joanne Kyger, quoted in Vincent Katz, “All This Every Day: Thoughts on Joanne Kyger”, at Harriet, 15 Nov 017; JBR, In the House of the Hangman, No Sounds of My Own Making, Flux, Clot & Froth; image: anon, in Tess McNulty, “Physical Books, Digital Lives”, at Public Books, 11 Oct 018; CA Conrad, “Fending off the Night”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 11 Oct 018; Robert Creeley, “Please”, at All These Weirdos, 22 Jul 010 (except for So what? Big deal, which is from Buckaroo Banzai); Brandon Brown, Wondrous Things I Have Seen, at All These Weirdos, 3 Jul 010; JBR; Harmony Holiday, “An Artist’s Guide to Herbs: Psilocybin”, at BOMB, 5 Oct 018; Jamison Crabtree, “Ch'oe Sŭng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yŏn-ju, Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women, Zephyr Press, 2006”, at Diagram 15.5 (thanks, Colin); JBR; Bhanu Kapil, entre-Ban; Peter Watts, “Step Function”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 15 Oct 018; Anne Gorrick, “A Table Filled with Interest”, at EOAGH 9; Stephen Ratcliffe, “10.15”, at Temporality, 15 Oct 018; Eileen Tabios, blurb for Orchid Tierney, Ocean Plastic, quoted in Tabios’s “Busily Blurbing”, at Eileen Verbs Books, 16 Oct 016; Anne Gorrick, quoted in “Fluent in Play :: a conversation with Anne Gorrick”, at The Operating System, 8 Aug 018; JBR; Confuse Your Hunger (ed. Jonty Tiplady); Jackie Wang, “The Destroyed Bridge”, in Confuse Your Hunger (ed. Jonty Tiplady); McKenzie Wark, “What Returns”, in Confuse Your Hunger (ed. Jonty Tiplady); Elisa Taber, “A Bracelet”, at Entropy, 17 Oct 018; Andrea Long Chu, “Study in Blue: trauma, affect, event”, at Women and Performance 27.3; Jonty Tiplady, “Nikes: Angelism and Bierasure in Frank Ocean”; Pablo de Rokha, “Ballad of Pablo de Rokha”, “Yankeeland”, in Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry (ed. and tr. Urayoán Noel); Carmen Giménez Smith, “The Victorious Battles Are Withered Wounds: Translating Pablo de Rokha”, at Harriet, 7 Nov 013; Sean Bonney, Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou, at Gods of the Plague, 17 Oct 018; Verity Spott, “Last Manifesto (?)”, at Two Torn Halves, 18 Oct 018; Steve Liptay via ActionNetwork.org, “This Is a Climate Emergency”, email rec’d 19 Oct 018, approx. 8:06am PDT; Sahar Romani, and Celina Su, quoted in Romani’s “Ordinary State: Celina Su’s ‘Landia’”, at Entropy, 19 Oct 018; JBR, “In the House and Out of the House #1”, at https://www.johnbr.com/zeitgeist_spam/2016/06/in-the-house-and-out-of-the-house-.html ZS, 2 Jun 016 (the original source note to which reads: Sources: CA Conrad; Jenny Saul; Roland Boer; Cole Swensen; Jack Kimball; Takahashi Mutsuo (tr. Jeffrey Angles); Materials blurb for Danny Hayward’s Pragmatic Sanction, Hayward himself, and Yamuph Piklé’s review of same; Justin Katko; Je Wilson; Jenny Lawson); Tessa Berring and Kathrine Sowerby, “The Cat Lover”, at 3:AM Magazine, 28 Jun 018; Sabrina Orah Mark, Anne Boyer, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “5 books I read recently & loved: Sabrina Orah Mark Wild Milk, Jamie Iredell The Fat Kid, Anne Boyer A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Shane Jesse Christmass Yeezus in Furs, Anne Serre The Governesses”, at DC’s, 20 Oct 018]
