When the city clocks chime the approaching midnight of the old order, poetry cannot be the song of a bird, the intoxication of the summer sun; it is a mouth spewing out blood, a crater overflowing with lava in which the Pompeii of luxury and piracy will perish.
— Karel Teige
AFTER THE RAIN
Clinked the porcelain tide
The bright world doesn't like to be so clarified
Nothing glamored the way
No mortal eye water nor wind whose
Illusions were falling in groups forming
Terraformed eyes
Regrouped & roved overdetermined & underexamined
Landforms
They were islands of comfort in a sea of blood
Where our monocular bathysphere—trailing
Umbilical distance line to
Unbiblical depths—
Throws up violet light onto
Violate, thrown-up
Lifeforms
Unfathomed this postdiluvian glitsh
Which sonar forces to say "polo"
We go home
Over the foam as
Solid things dissolve
& vapors ape substantiality
Paradoxically the sky was clear &
Headed sent a prophetically bloodeagled homuncular
& five snapped fingers dredge the sky
20 YEARS
Some thing, like a storm
Invisible & loud
Swept the routes of their footprints
Left a patterned clatter of loosed change on its way
The century roar is a desert carrying too much away
While the orthopedists of individuality dissimulate
The “decorative” creativity of their chiropraxy
Pass thru the doors of prescription where
Imperatives float up to join
The must in the rafters
This age which has only the pleasures
of others
Auguries the close of the wound
The closeness
Of its sound
Much more obscure miraculous weapons modernize
their formulas
Renewing the old models en bloc
The graph bends back on itself
Plotting a simultaneity of
My years & yr years & years
Paradise
Tossed down the stairs & with it
Magical thinking that autopsied angels
to discover
The lift within the wing
Or precisely when the suicide is born
within the child
A slice of life
& another slice—death
By a thousand slices
A blink of the geologic eye
Aweight with number erudition & personalities
I await the sleight of hand that renders me
immeasurably joyful
But I'll end up kicking that can all the way down
a road that ends at the house of my executor
In the great serenade of things will ours be
the most cancelled passage?
& posterity retain our case
But not our names?
BOUTIQUE FOR WHALES
Vivifying
Graffitas
Up in lights on receptors’ marquee
A new way to pay old debts
A new color for plastic
New latex balloon flesh
Cure for lues blague, blues plague
A case of ataraxia—
(You oughta have that looked at)
No more than a manner of
Putting lipstick on this particular pig
Awaiting Doctor Vessel
Dreaming Lady Dramamine
Fearing what they call an “eighth” surgery
I am dissected, they are curious
To know what I’ve been eating
Where’re my geysers, where’re yr eyes
Where’re orgone-eaters, thetan meters
Where’re microplastics infiltrating genomes
Where’re staph bugs tromping on heart valves
Where’re intravenous proton pump inhibitors
Where’re mechanical siphons choking on pond scum
Where’re puddles of thawing meat
Where’re vicissitudes of viscera, miserable visage
Where’re middle-class miasma
Where’re consumers consuming consumables
Where’re raptors w/ throats in their feet
Where’re parakeets drowning in septic fluid
Where’re reefs of epoxied dreamworks
Where’re chrysalis pistons of smoking creosote
Rarer meteoroidian carsmash tunes
Error of tachycardic parvenus
Give me the infinite like a flower for my hands
They cannot even say why they cluster together so
Spill blood & then actual blood
Feed on the carcass while pretending to feed it
*
In the general pandemonium
In the amount of purchase
I savored reproachfully the rapturous chance
To resume of metal feast
In silent roast it thru
Pouring the treasure a hundredfold
Into diamond here made one
Plumbing abyssopelagic depths of the bargain bin
How gorgeous to be gorged on weeping offal
In an unbroken series of swollen organs
Fed to swell organs for food for
Tyros with tyre swings between their ears
& the digestive system of a rat—
Caustic oceans
Passing balls of rot along—
Their empurpled blowholes should spurt
Marvelous hemoglobic
Mayonnaise curtains, cataracts
My beauty, sleeping pools
A noble-rotten wine that curls the lip
Like a pop song
The hook is easy to swallow but
Difficult to eject
While the songs of comfort are so muffled…
Those songs you so hang on were signposted
At the dawn of first yawning appurtenance
Glugs gas to coarsen his chords
Nerve strings in D
Pendantly swaying
Mane of the ganglia
His flute’s melody a sound for sore neurons
I tell you that a broken machine is equally terrifying
It is the same chasm of emptiness
Like life in decomposition
Like a beached whale
This artless art of reaching failure
AT REDUCED PRICE
Flabby, insipid flesh reproducing with
the help of typographical microbes.
—Tristan Tzara
Many & many more
Marching agate ergates going
Somewhere between pearl & nonpareil
For $10 a line
Pulsing, pushing, publishing
Into the future
Or out to pasture
(pasteurized)
No one expects their heroes to come so dear
Or be so cheap
-ly profited by
Tho they only do what we could expect—
Orate with great enthusiasm & little effort
Indeed the offer
Is received like an order to schoolchildren when
a lesson has been canceled
To flee the school en masse
Words come & I am their bumbling customer
Obeying, paid
Denotation by donation
Thru critics’ cretic criterion
I become cretinous chitinous Crichton
Lignifying my lineated lineage
Where recto is righteous &
Vice verso
By the letter
Letter by letter
I am two syllables or four
Walking around & talking or laid on the shelf
Another damned thick, square book, eh Mr. Gibbon?
Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Gibbon?
Those whose mouths are full of words
Have nothing else between their teeth
As they devour the poems I hear them
Hit the pits of their stomachs with a click
Much ink is spilled & then actual ink
They are awed not by technical capacity
But the composition that calls for it
You may not use words as you see fit
As if you owned them
While you hide behind the rubric of ‘fair use’…
A fee will be charged
He’s got away with words
She is his pamphlet essence out of date
Illumination of this beautiful publication
Which has no precedent in the land of the dollar
Heretofore unrepublished
Annals? No; rather
Denials—
Send the books to the bughouses & the people
To be pulped
THOUGHT IS NOT A PRETTY PUDDLE
The room is a mess. Furniture & overturned things are everywhere. On one end there is a fan dancer. The withering clatter of a military band roars from the other. In the midst of all this someone is trying to think.
—Raymond Williams
Just when I thought this hydrocephalic milieu of
Emptiness was at the end of its patience
They violate this material & it is only a body—
It does not have the principle of its movement in itself
A spike is driven into the heart of context
A flate blade hews any shoot that reaches too far
& a cold grey-green death creeps out towards the extremities
Of connotation
Hereafter
What is nameable is malleable:
Making do with yr alphabet of 25
(A few roots short of an etymology)
You perform a wanton slide to semirelated wordform
Yielding yr classicly-damaged comprehension but
Fielding expertly the question
Avoiding animadversion
So nobody notices
(A thought drafty)
An incoherent premise has been inserted like a board
Is it then so easy to renounce
The original signification of words?
Is it truly possible to resign oneself to the practice of creation
Only in the wings of a theater whose stage is empty?
It is a systematic cacophany
Not bright enough to know
It is so far jamming &
Drowning the important signals.
—You used to think you heard heavenly musics
Thru vised tendons
Visions’ tensions tended
To tender psychosurgical surfaces
At cross-televisual purposes
A cluster of brain cells the ghost of an epiphanic love
Hypostatized in a maze of stairs to this offense
An endless decay with basins where yr life fell
Into stars of yr love streamed down sacraments
Shimmering where underground among
The clockwork in the halfcloth
An apoplectic presque vu
Was a vortex whose eye is yr eye
The still water reflecting back to you
Yr resectioned faithlessness
The head worn to a pathetic ventifact
Jeering, cracking
The jars of intelligentsia
A SIEVE FULL OF WATER
How could I know sorrow
Miraculous lilac surmise
You’d have to have a heart for that
What Frank O’Hara Antoni Gaudi Tom Clark &
Roland Barthes have in common
Their vital goo forced thru cracks in the asphalt
Like preserves whose time-limit for consumption has long since elapsed
And on these of water spread
There weighed marble quays
The eye alone & green converged
The silence of away
All the limbs’ veins slowly crushed together
Face a rictus of rhetoric
Each bark introducing a new crinkle in the neurons
They’ll have wrung pearls of brackish fluid from my slit throat &
In this will be the truth at last
The truth I kept for myself
& even from myself
PRALINES OF SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
“People who are clinging are never eager
To share their branch nor do they look kindly
On anyone who insists it’s rotten wood”
Barking up a tree at least
But kick the world break yr foot
We don’t give an electronic damn what
Postsecular god you serve
In the shrinking space between novelty & cliché
Johns-&-Marys youth has been benumbed for years
Under the pretext of awakening sensibility
They are unmoored from a condition
That requires no recognition but the beating of a drum
& millions of decorticated crabs barely there to listen
Colonnades instead eat you up
Shaded tell the worms
Where vain as essence saved
Marvel at my rotted loves
From bloodletting spiral outward
Yr flakes of skin will finally outlast you
Chewing up moths & coughing up dust
In an apology for Christian love
We’ll all live in caves again before the sun explodes
If even on some terra nova
And no horizon up afresh
To light such drawing breath
A lesson learned twice
Even the ultimate advent of freedom
Cannot redeem those who died in pain
The buildings stop breathing
The horse that Nietzsche fell upon
I swear I own a bone from it
FIGHTING PHANTOMS WITH RAKES
I brood over the gravesite knee-deep
in brackish backwater whistling
Along with the car alarms
Ever, never so nonplussed
Feeling the glance of this
lance off my ribs
Strange nameless beings enthrall me
An amputee re-membered by Rosemarie
Smoke coiling in the throat like some
Oesophagal revenant
A GPS gypsy dis-located by Surgery
Heart still palpitating, an
Ex-vivo artifact
A belly slick of their urns &
Swollen with gulfs
Flies kept humming nor moon appeared
Waiting for the monotony
Prepare yr skeleton for air
There’s no two ways
A furry mold is growing unchecked
in the capillaries
Of loving possibility
The veins of my eyes
Exploding in green neon filaments as
I watch myself saw off
Every last limb of a tree that bleeds
bugs & fungus that go off & fuck
A creature-thing, unrecognizable
The bones picked clean
These diurnal frail & undiademed grub
Need not know what goes on beyond the pail
*
Let's finish this sucker
See how many hits it takes till he's licked
In yr fenceposts you could live
a century or more &
You’ll die tonight in a heap of unrung bells
Still speaking as if indigence came
in one shade only
I'm sure he had the best of intentions
You know the road to Hell is paved with such things
You know the Lord set my enemies against me
With their necks towards me
We know something they don't &
I'll tell you next time when I've had the chance
To brush up on what it was
We stupid unruly & hale of Gordium
Need no knot but to which Alex's thrust is no avail
(First poems from a sequence in progress)
