Sunday, December 31, 2006

strange poem & picture of radishes


niether sow nor reap nor plenty

the summer season is a pretty ring time.
there are bugs on the wind and petals on the ground.
there is a rushing brook ruched against the rocks.
great strapping lads are putting bricks in walks,
and across the way the parlormaids giggle to see their dreamy muscles work.

you may say that my reality's stronger than that one above
which could be featured in any oily clothy medium:
girls in an ecstasy of swinging on a canvas
or something to do with a cow as the girls in clogs milk and flirt on toile.
there are babies with yards and yards of filmy fabrics and a guy leaning on a gate.

and because i'm underground i symbolize something deeper, right,
the ecstasy of dark and wordless things. "things," right, not, like,
rocks or stones or possibly worms or dead voles, or slimy ass cabbage
that's fallen fallow in a field and gotten turned under, because that's just not
my domain: it's not wordless, silent, the romance of the rich and unforgiving dark.

dang nabbit, people i want something more: a featured role on your walls
and chairbacks. i want to take some pages in your magazines over. i want to leaf,
sprout, and talk about something, anything really--qvc or coinmaster, the funky
smell comin' off charon, that priceless look on sisyphus' face every time he loses the rock,
dating, annie hall... where i'm putting my line breaks, even. check
this one out, for instance.
yeah. i break where i please. and i'll do it

again. it's just i don't get why i always have to be the wordless center,
undepicted, undepictable, un...well, chose your word, slap an "un" on it,
and you've described the wordless center of the word you just used, no?
it's that thing like in derrida (i've heard this by vague description) where the thing
is separated into two but one gets more than the other like man vs. woman or light vs. dark,
the "un"-word vs. the word itself and down here it's frankly the "un" that gets more
play. and i want a few words of my own because all the shades do is wander the asphodel like they were still alive--i'm tired of being so centered all the time, guys, i want to diffuse, take some of the pressure off...vicks vapo-rub me in language. crust me up like a pork chop. i wanna talk!

before persephone's return
and the long dense winter
like a jewel
held in the hand
until warmed through.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

taleia

my friend told me that the reason cats yowl is that male cats have spikes on their penises

some days you just don't
want to do that to yourself.

this is what i came up with when i searched for "binaca"

Friday, December 29, 2006

me write pretty some day

carl sandburg confuses the hell out of me. for one thing, i'm not sure i'm spelling his name right. wait, i checked, yes i am. thank god for the sopping up of that bit of indeterminacy. let me revise: everything but the spelling of carl sandburg's name confuses the hell out of me. every once in a while he'll write something and i'll be like, dang, guy! write it again, bright angel! or maybe that's not precisely true.

there are, like the freeway of my love, two separate means of approaching poems that my reading brain works with. the first is saturation; the second is balance. now the fact that sandburg's lines have no balance to my ear, or possibly my understanding, is interesting because they are so saturate. up until chicago poems, i'd always kind of assumed that balance and saturation went hand in hand (which was materially aided by the fact that i hadn't, ahrem, discovered that the term "balance," which i swear to god i just started using as i'm using it right now, was supposed to be a component of "saturation," until approximately, time-wise, the second at which i began this paragraph). but sandburg muddies his lines with everything and the kitchen sink--i mean, i swear to god, it's all in there. there's "it" at the most unpropitious spot possible; there's a wierdly vague word like "tides" in a place where the object has already been so described as to need no further clarification; he throws in "all" all the time... sucked i less, i'd actually get out my slender dover publication and take a crack at specificity, but, as shakespeare says, "time and the elements tumpty-tum," hence onward and a rousing upward. (and by the way, for someone who's set my face against dichotomies i seem to discover a lot of them. i guess they're like paring knives--useful for stuff upon occasion. lazy occasion).

so that throws off the balance, which seems to rest in a strange place between meaning and sound--i mean, with a word like "all," the habits of its usage in language, the place in which it usually sits, the context in which it usually stands in for something else in a certain type of poetry universally eschewed by all my parts, in short, in its accoutrements or possibly its genre, i suppose one could say that one hears all of these parts, bits, and baggages when he or she reads the word in a certain place in a line, and one makes certain assumptions and draws certain conclusions, to wit a reaction such as, aw man, sandburg, you dumbass, what'd you put that there for? it ain't cleanly, in short. it's like eating meat on a dairy plate. it's like eating pork loin on a dairy plate. it's all the wierder because he's got sonorities aplenty, and sonorities are where i thought that the saturation resided.

and it's not that his poems aren't saturate. that's the wierdest part, the part, i suppose, that i don't get. i mean, eliot had all his bits and pieces (pun really not intended), but they were incised into a line that could clean-cut plate glass. whereas reconciling sandburg's topic with his line, his line with his sonority, is an exercise in postmodernism that those people who killed themselves in time for hale-bopp would be proud of. it's a broken saturation, in short. it doesn't function as a unit. but pile all the pieces on top of one another and they achieve a something, a nature--the way we think the world would look if time didn't exist, just piece after piece, distinct, brilliant, and able to be swallowed like athena in zeus, zeus-rock in chronos.

in short, it's based on a premise that i find kinda alien...but there are times at which it works, and the whole structure of the poem bursts on me like a rainbow, jizzing. usually the reds whack hardest.

infantilus

not to be wildly original, but it's like banging my head against a wall--i lose patience--i doubt i ever had much patience...

i keep making this joke to myself about the spiritual center of whatever i happen to be doing: taking the guard petals off a rose, or making some bizarre arrangement, or, you know, getting dressed, but it seems to me that, a., i don't know shit from poetry, that if someone smeared shit onto the web and then found a way for it to be fired directly into your toilet i might say, hey, that's poetry, cuz the author said it was, and b., nobody wants to help me with it. it's possible, entirely so, that i'd shun their help if they did attempt it--that is, i hope i'd be strong enough to do so. but the desire for validation is so strong that i might pull a niedecker and...
what, end up being my favorite poet ever?

it just feels like i'm making nothing out of nothing, which ought to be super simple but instead gets caught somewhere in theseus' local habitation and a name--shakespeare at least sees the poetic "process" (okay, in my case, that's a serious laugh) as a linear one.

fledgling, unfocused, super-stupid, and not knowing where to go for help. i'm like a pregnant '50's teenager. send me to bahama and stick a coat hanger up my uterus.

made up people

les roses et ses perduages*

there is a pejorative sweetness to it,
valerie,
that one night in tampa
where my world became your oyster.

it expresses itself in trophic sadness, however,
that i've forgotten, and can only recall
banging my forehead against the shell.



*i don't speak much french

Thursday, December 28, 2006

duckback





lover, you

in the frost of midseason
with your hands in your pockets,
a veritable frission of doubt, yellow,
images as lakes, little false starts like shots--

like one of those forties songs sung
by a lady with hair like dark wax--a nexus of light in the eye
and a smile that never gave it more than half of
a chance...we had a good run, lover, you
lover, you
lover, you

in the rushes where moses used to go,
oh,
in the rushes where moses used to go.

but it beats like when you press
fingers to your eyelids.

it's a low and moaning call. my hands smell strange to me.
where'd water roll if a duck had no back? sing
the yellow deep in behind you,
in the frost of midseason
with your hands in your pockets.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

fragment


simulacrum

soft the morn.
faint the sound of wind against cloud.
gray the stain of the light on the carpet in the bedroom.

waxen the love, translu-
cent like a consumptive.
noted and again noted love's resem-
blance to that figure in the carpet,
stained by the gray light.

tiny dancer


quick poem

damasked clay: each
fingerprint by
each fingerprint--

the imprint of excess.
molecule by molecule
and each so tiny and differing

letter by letter.
syllable by sybilant.
small-marrowed tiny dancer,

hold me.


is everyone here drunk but me?

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

i have no idea




curs't pilgrimage!

band-aided on
the roasted table runt, there were
as well shelves in the closet. it was
a happy thought.

white and red scalloped mesh
crusted inspirited thistle chunk over
left-ass field. it was the slow unwind,
the slow red and white and so unyield.

it was yesterday in the afternoon. left
of yesterday, anyway, and sidewalked about
the jaded impaler, the impious abegnator.
imprimator. shuck scatchle and balor.

argyle the beloved country, argyle argyle.
upon the ribs a swift tattoo
and once more for the open
road. yeft left and tireless.


another song

one rubber band is better than three,
virginia, i said. open your arms to me.

one leather toy is better than two,
virginia, i said. let me open my arms to you.

one there can be, i said. there can be one.
that corps morcelee is a fable. but you laughed
and ran into the sun. and i still see you there,
an outline on the run.
and it's crap.

Sunday, December 17, 2006


i saw mommy kissing santa claus
underneath the mistletoe last night,
and i guess that freud was right,
because why else would i want to shoot on sight
that fat bastard in his suit of red and white?

you're welcome! and another little tidbit:


carolingian

that remus of the underworld
in his jockstrap. thus the remains of
a poppy-seeded muffin, topless.

a kind of seismic undertow. a lost
clause, a wrongheaded spark of
common termagent: cratch, slump, bitch.

and she was its living center, it cracked and mouldless about her--
there was no other way
to take it but on the inside,

pinked, withered, not stale but ill,
without even the sop of a wandering
dock, a port of call, sans taste, sans everything--

negus.
negutiens.
te negitor domino.

Friday, December 15, 2006

just like grandma

carol

the poinsettias are rolling about a thousand deep at work. it is exhausting let me tell you. also they lactate from broken stems, white beady tears.

i am exhausted. i don't want to do much. i don't even really want to sit in the same room as me.

jesus died for sins but firstly had to get born.

soft tack sock rack.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

more, more, i'm still not satisfied


the third term in proust is i think the known object--the object as a whole. the first term is the most obvious conclusion one can draw; the second term is the other conclusion which logically can be drawn out from the first conclusion, and looks like its opposite usually. the third term is...what? usually the point at which proust, after having confused the object's face by presenting these two logical, but negating, but coexisting possibilities, pulls out the article of explanation or information that brings the whole thing together--somewhat. in short, proust, for all that indeterminacy, the mutable object, the mutable subject, the hardly-incontravertable (spelling!) physical world, is like one of those mathematicians who finds out the equations of things like ferns, a la thomasina: he believes that there is an equation which can get one to the center of every conjunction of happening or feeling or moment-of-physical-being, and he's willing to draw everything in the known universe into his equation provided that it will give him the answer.

seeing, however, as how i haven't yet begun the third book, and i think i started noticing the third term only in the second book, this probably isn't the end of proust's vast structural conspiracy... if said conspiracy exists. but the guy wrote so much so well that it's basically one's duty to give him credit for as great a quantity of stuff as possible. or it could be me. i came to peace with one small part of crazy charles olson's aesthetic (it was the one small part i at all understood) and ever since i've been on dichotomies like roosevelt on trusts. except not really. i just wanted to write that, pretty much.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

modernist i


12. that ram-headed clay-pusher

herteubise, i

the day the earth

nut brown and hot pants.

rats in the

acquainted with the

below the rocks and

hey down a