Book Making
25) witnessing foreplay, bashful and terse, stand watch over a moon susceptible to spontaneous take off
24) urinating blood a symphonic triumph of the kidneys and bladder
23) growing comfortable growing comfortable in the comfort of latent comforts
22) so many and so few mistook an industry for their livelihood, that industry for anything other than a placebo
21) sewing afternoons until the gutter was in the gutter, my spine as loose as marionette strings. (i said ho hum a few times until it was a song; later, a man whose soul one could–and really, i mean this–one could smell, said, unlike any garment district of which I am aware: thank you. it was the quietest voice one never really heard)
20) parting shots broken glass and a hoarseness. (how the timid wake)
19) calm is often sudden, often during mid-afternoon, often just in time
18) the zeitgeist of the poetics of folding, its aftermath: exhausted, we made love slowly in a living room, sunny day. mitosis at nine frames per second, nine stitches per hour
17) learning that the french do have a sense of humor, realizing the punch line comes first. thechicken loudly proclaimed: because there was no exit, and besides, barthes was cruising the ave at dangerously high speeds
16) for you this datum: lust, an erratum, punctum sans bottum
15) learning to trust your olfactory glands in a sub-way
14) lipograms demand attention; liposuction demands detention
13) getting lost in my driveway. getting lost in your driveway. get lost, you would have said. something in the way i was driving told you it wasn't even worth it
12) first inklings of a new theatre: roller skates, clown glasses, double room
11) breathe before a crowd; the body's fickle mendacity when friends await
the first, halting utterance
10) enjoying dualism despite its utter falsity
9) walking amsterdam in the high 100s for the first time in a year. the refuse of a city, even the stickiest anonymous urine, may, under the right conditions, cause heartache
8) ready for a fight, looking for a fight, spoiling for a fight with sheets and cover
7) turning to anorexia; under the assumed name hunger strike it is pleasant at first, pleasant at last, not so pleasant in the middle
6) the bookstore calls and says they are out of useful knowledge. do you have anything useless in stock? i ask (stein)
5) tentatively prying open possibles; they are marbles, i have no hammer today
4) why books? i asked. (asked 26 times and after each the air replied with a single letter in the anglo alphabet. promptly exchanged the lot for a dozen pictograms—good deal considering the dearth of my consonants)
3) placing blame on categories again
2) watching magicians from the periphery, throwing change in a bucket that disappears when he wears it
1) willfully mistranslating the world on a whim. escapism is a term that means nothing, not even itself
To Jabes
Left with an upper-case Y.
Left with an upper-case X.
Casts anchor down and moves to explore the wreck.
The words are all intents and purposes.
The words are fiber panoptic cables.
X came for the view of catastrophe.
Y's shadow veneers the ropes.
The wreck is not a ship.
Ships have obscured the wreck.
"X will not be revised."
"Y will not be revived."
Beyond the purview of the old stories (love, travel, death):
The dash and line.
To abandon entirely the chain.
The boathouse with its risks.
The absolute book.
The sea of the book.
The amorphous spine.
The atrophic signature.
The gutter.
The book.
The sea.
The gutter and the ropes.
Power-Point Non-Closural Pick-Pocket Rocket-Packed Euphamism Generator
This is going to be a New America. The man sitting next to me on the plane looks like Vladmir Putin. While I was gone, billboards were posted at every highway exit. They told me to say something if I see something. They said: If you see something, say something. I said I saw something between March and April. I told everyone I knew. Then I started telling strangers. The strangers said I was muttering to an epiself and called the authorities. The authorities corrected the strangers: we do not have the authority, they said. I mistook this as a theoretical claim. We do not have ourselves. Maybe they were suffering from a sudden and unexplainable Cartesianism. Or maybe it was explainable and not sudden at all. (This is a question of actionable intelligence.)
My uncle says it's aliens sending directives through radio intercept. Are they from Los Angeles, I asked. And why radio. Isn't that old school. Isn't that just so earth. When I was a boy my uncle's face made me unhappy. This brother of my father, his blood mine, his face went clown in under three years. Lips responding to something inaudible, eyes protruding impatiently, their power that of prehensile hands learning to reach in preparation for strangling, stabbing, setting of a rash timer. He is recruiting himself. He will kill someone some day. (I will never meet that person.)
Now all communiqués are non-closural. The duck has been reading. Did Spicer or Duncan make the syllabus. Our POTUS has declared a state of poetic emergency. Code orange on all recursive gestures, lines that may break a page or a sappy heart. God help the gnoets and the flarfists–they will be the first to go. The gnoets and the flarfists are making god my friend says. She has never been spammed. Might word of our minor transgressions been leaked to the nearly circular office. That appointed gatekeeper of research hospital syntax. It was him I know it. An NIE in 5-paragraph form. Tactical recommendation: as the enemy adapts, we must adapt. Make promises that comfort but do not comfort. Weaponized power point will sing to us for many years. Will my hometown become a captive audience meeting. If yes, we will snicker while we shudder. There is no we. The silliest emotion is guilt peppered with pride. (I say uncle, seriously, tickled in the wrong kind of way.)
Reading Instructions
1) Get on a plane to New York City.
2) Sit next to a man who looks like Vladmir Putin.
3) Become suspicious of suspicion, even the word "suspicion" (or any of its derivations).
4) Get an uncle who cf. above.
5) Or rent an uncle suchlike, invent one, discover this particular sort of uncle as one usually has this sort of uncle.
6) At approximately nine hundred hours on February 4th, 2008 begin suspecting that you really are being hunted, that what you've been reading in Common Dreams and/or The Tangent really is true, that The Huffington Post, The Nation, even (for God's sake, who reads it?) The Monthly Review are neo-con fronts, embeds for a future holocaust. Note that Common Dreams nor The Tangent has ever explicitly said this.
7) At approximately ten hundred hours on February 4th, 2008 begin suspecting that non-closural poetic forms (cf. Language Poetry) bare too close a resemblance to neo-con and neo-liberal talking point raps, tip sheets/scare tactics for developing effective union-busting captive audience meetings with rabblerousing employees, not to mention professional school (business, economics, etc.) power point presentations on various economic models, studies, predictive calculations, rational AND irrational choice theories. Now begin the terrifying (or fun, depending on disposition) downward spiral into your own question begging about who is embedded, where the embeds are, which end is up, who you can trust, what the fuck you are doing, whether you yourself are embedded and where, I could go on but I won't.
Cabaret
The vendor is coming. Xs
are placed on every door
but his. The vendor
is sluggish, his legs super
highways for manipulated
red sails to charter on. The vendor
trucks along every cobbled
path left on earth, hoping
wheels will catch something
other than stone. The vendor
wrenches his neck skyward
and talks to the window
with rocks. The vendor
throws sentences that track
a limning soon after departure.
The vendor has a spare knee
and lodges it in his mouth
so that years from now
he will walk well—
the price is the appearance
of leprosy, the impossibility
of anything lasting beyond
the great and wrathful day
of awe.
-David Michael Wolach
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