The Clem 2

The Clem 1

eclogue

in order to reciprocate

we were talking about concrete

details

an urban setting

history in the present

(he was shot for appearing just

so)

respond to each line

with a new image

oatmeal

butterflies

the problem with

trash

in the city

musical quality

of poems

about garbage

political demonstrations

give something back

when even words

sounding through spaces

keep us in relation

Ed Roberson from City Eclogue

Height and Deep Song


Pulled by the full disaster's view of thrown
upward to the look-out's level
crying

from that ledge the song of what it comes
down to
but unable to jump strapped in

with the wonder the words can come up with
stripped in the scramble of birth spill--
the speechless

cover binding
the know this
on the spine

the body arrives screaming written
all over it

what breath is
then writing

more of

each hot fuss pink kills

the lyric tangled goodbye

she wrote crisp turning

trees in wind step

in time instrumental montage

speeding a beat bodies float in sync

outside of

the abstract quality of

clear paper sliding across sand

a display of chaos

wind screeching across years

of misunderstood

she curls half underneath the covers

and I think

trains passing through the dark

sound less violent

fading instead

like images without photos

that disappear over distance

the imagined

the almost

the near

potential

an arc of voice

carried distant fades

splashing shades sing along

roaring flames

a coral touch

of leaf

crumbling under

constructed words sculpted

into shapes sleeping

unsent

only as close as parallel

lines on the horizon

from Daily Tao Tuesday, 29 September, 2009 :: 41

Thus it is said:
The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest art seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.

butterflies fall like stars

oatmeal, or the truth

stolen

crack an egg, sharpen it

carry bells and twist them

into glimmering silence

pocket, sleep, imagine

the sky burning

a breathing miasma

of crows

inflated, starving

catching individual seconds

lost and floating

against every passing

inclination

it becomes apparent
that in times
turned
keep twisting to the
apparently
move further with each
reverting to
keep breathing
a defense strategy
repeats
slow down that
even now freshly
slow
a new packaging
covers the same
try the other side
what matters
twist
release everything
always in retrospect
from the inside
apparently
still
stretch
scared
face the other way
unable to hold to

insist upon

each word representing

or at least spelled

accordingly

stand aside

patiently

encouraging

until each syntactical error

is acknowledged

cannot take back characters

sent across wires

first hold each thought

it is best

to linger

with a pencil

outline

each word

like skin remembered

before having met

manage this communication via

sense, a shiver of skin

tasting a future

imaginary

a motor hums, hands lightly touch

the back of

settling toward this

possible

turning over a list

clarification

or suggested intention

always before an encounter

of mismanaged

faith

afterward, as the jeans hang

a strategy of

visualizing

what is your motivation

would be prudent

to assume

or communicate in virtual

time

hanging

a strategy of enclosed spaces

hum relieves shaking

toward the image

denim, faded, impossible to

see the fog of recall

hanging around shoulders

thighs

impossible to see before

or after

the distance

from that

to this

from DailyTao.org

Thursday, 10 September, 2009 :: 22

If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.

The Master, by residing in the Tao,
sets an example for all beings.
Because he doesn't display himself,
people can see his light.
Because he has nothing to prove,
people can trust his words.
Because he doesn't know who he is,
people recognize themselves in him.
Because he has no goal in mind,
everything he does succeeds.

When the ancient Masters said,
"If you want to be given everything, give everything up,"
they weren't using empty phrases.
Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself.

highlight the hours in layers
time it
from one category to another
you were never listening
nod
hum
mismatched lyrics
each space a specific
bells
reminders
pages of detail in order
to arrive
at exactly this

days
events
a wish, underlined
no longer worthwhile to hear
single notes
in correspondence

instead
schedule
the rest
of

the only thing moving

1.
blind manifest of
waste(ing) verbena
(scent seeps steep)
you curve above an
inflection
blind wither(ing)
speed covers red
or scaly
(a steep scent)
(the nape of)
blackbird over verbena
(whistling) hard ball
on parade
seeps


2.

hardball she called over verbena
a scaly inflection withers
red, blind, steep
the nape an angle
a blackbird a curve
on parade

cover over under a splash of green each day is new but what did you notice previously is what he said after confessing to metallic noise a skip through the park fashion design the messy details shatter each instant always turning over don’t forget what happened yesterday but do leave it behind as useful but no longer real an impression of having come so far a pink sky behind industrial jobs and pollution turning this chance into temporary use the pain to an advantage images captured sentiments fill senses the weed that flowers by chance

DailyTao.org, The Book of The Way, Day by Day

Tuesday, 1 September, 2009 :: 13


Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don't see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.



Translation by Stephen Mitchell.
Site © Copyright 2003-5 Glen Sanford.
All Rights Reserved.

traveling sideways each unexpected disintegrating on the wind a variety of textures at this moment the process of—grains of wood long and fine spread across indiscernible movement the feel of time slowed this empty space of a single note lingering—a skin irritation a humming appliance an eyelash falls without warning this lesson (in)stilled no test no outcome—taste this permanent timeless circle frozen stop here—rest

fluted lyrics a day in rain flickering as if. as if announced, invited, or the entertainment swallows any serious discussion of rain or the correct calibration of. the correct calibration of nonsense, humor, desperation having intended to continue in an affair long awaited and yet, ever so gently. ever so gently a brush, silence the wandering or wayward ever on to something more poignant or flattering what could never be this or otherwise. this or otherwise he tried to articulate without agreeing to drink first, so clever or unannounced, a generic unfulfilled wish or constant repeating car tires through rain at street level, one last hope. one last hope negotiated over mundane sci-fi and casual brushing, after each syllable placed or replaced with personal expression, the sound of your eyelashes, fluttering, intoxicated.

Daily Tao

DailyTao.org
The Book of The Way, Day by Day
Friday, 28 August, 2009 :: 9


Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.



Translation by Stephen Mitchell.
Site © Copyright 2003-5 Glen Sanford.
All Rights Reserved.

act/abstract

Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible
--Frank O’Hara


circling around the finding is the part of (dis)grace, what is left in clutter or shredded notions of past ignited in present tense each word shaved off like curls of soap, carved wood ornaments, one stray hair after another. the intention of falling rock or (grace) hartigan’s colors swept into place among a social mess of history and the inevitable, each line feeling canvas on skin, each stroke trusting and failing simultaneously, collage parts into a new whole, spacing expressions of the everyday, among art or emotion, moving stillness parallel to any destination.

pieces of reflection leading blue lines scattered stories only remembered in photos, an old farm, buildings now long gone, a single moment still and content captured before the storm before waves washing over distort everything underneath. having heard your voice in my head, resonating, hold each string for a moment longer listening to each note, a voice mingling the various sounds, sweet and floating, or the rhythms of a drum in sync, in my chest, an african drum beat in 3s, weaving waking the start of something. pieces mingling, scattering, finding new form, parts of moments captured, a smile, a touch, before this distance only leftovers, left, what always remained under, washing over, lines scatter delirious and blue water meets sky at the endless horizon. where once imagined scented ideas sent on the wind, this still collapse.

at the instant of x

Brutes abstract not.

--John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding


the way that I can put each number
against the cool of your skin
lingering above
cotton

the ratio matching nature
greek symbols across the sidewalk
like hopscotch for theorists
explaining each dimension
of yard grass limb

stretching over moments
from the very first
when you stood, brown corduroy
and i listed the mathematics
of inclination

8:20

after thought
an image
scented

where have you been, i'm looking

foward, around a constellation of minutes
that may or not
exist

yesterday

between the lines

i am running and think: if only, yes, this single drop of.

pacing the day. heavy under grey.

a placard reads: falter and save your ink.

what becomes difficult to read.

i want to say: please stop by every day.

write this into your schedule.

add: a trigger of lemon-scented products reminds me of you

and floss, flossing mint-flavored.

walking in the street. sitting.

out of ink, postage, shifting intent.

wanting to add: even in that case, it could be like this.

wanting to decide to paint lines on any court.

memo

these slender pieces
of
molecule
molecule
drip
gravity holds us together

his body was filled
with the chemicals that make up flame retardant

your black saturn
so shiny and new
forgive me

the plums i didn’t eat for lunch
not sweet
fresh from the farm

have we not (don’t say evolved, don’t say adapted)
been selected for this
all along
particulates
of a symphony for example (the one repeated/repeatable refrain)

can you hum the entire movement?

an ode
to an old
acquaintance

we swallow
and breathe
in a dangerously close space

proximity of red tiles
a recording device
lines on a road
separate me (green subaru)
from

from Odes

by me


8.
No more than subtext my/your own text under every word only words falling waiting characters casting letters under your breath above my words over under (knowing something waits under forgets to take) on the opposite of wondering the opposite forgetting, a springboard, no, sill of the flower pot. Placing one letter after another placing one letter after another placing each side by side (cleverly you thought but not this quickly may I remind you) if the pace precedes (I am) each character drifting into singular space taking shape.

Lorine Niedecker

from The Granite Pail


In the great snowfall before the bomb
colored yule tree lights
windows, the only glow for contemplation
along this road

I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else.

I was Blondie
I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists
down by Larry the Lug,
I'd never get anywhere
because I'd never had suction,
pull, you know, favor, drag,
well-oiled protection.

I heard their rehashed radio barbs--
more barbarous among hirelings
as higher-ups grow more corrupt.
But what vitality! The women hold jobs--
clean house, cook, raise children, bowl
and go to church.

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

Lorine Niedecker

from The Granite Pail


I knew a clean man
but he was not for me.
Now I sew green aprons
over covered seats. He

wades the muddy water fishing,
falls in, dries his last pay-check
in the sun, smooths it out
in Leaves of Grass. He's
the one for me.

from The Wisdom of No Escape

by Pema Chodron


In Taoism there's a famous saying that goes, "The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao." Another way you could say that, although I've never seen it translated this way, is, "As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else." The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.


Holding on to beliefs limits our experiences of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems. To put it simply, using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.


"When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" means that when you see that you're grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it's called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.


Seeing when you justify yourself and when you blame others is not a reason to criticize yourself, but actually an opportunity to recognize what all people do and how it imprisons us in a very limited perspective of this world. It's a chance to see that you're holding on to your interpretation of reality; it allows you to reflect that that's all it is--nothing more, nothing less: just your interpretation of reality.

Disclosures

by Michael Palmer


1
Beneath the writing on the wall
is the writing it was designed

to obscure. The two together
form a third kind


2
There is no writing
on the wall's other side

Perhaps this lack
constitutes a fourth kind


3
Some of the writing on the wall
will be designated as truth

some as art


4
It is said to represent a mirror
of everyday life in its time


5
"Fabius Naso
talks through his asshole
and shits out his mouth"
for example


6
"Foute les Arabes"
for example


7
Certain words and images
or parts of images

have been chipped away
These often turn up for sale

at sidewalk stalls
before the walls

of other cities


8
I too have an image for sale
It's the image of a poem

and is to be found
on the reverse of this sheet

from The Wisdom of No Escape

by Pema Chodron


Our life's work is to use what we have been given to wake up. If there were two people who were exactly the same--same body, same speech, same mind, same mother, same father, same house, same food, everything the same--one of them could use what he has to wake up and the other could use it to become more resentful, bitter, and sour. It doesn't matter what you're given, whether it's physical deformity or enormous wealth or poverty, beauty or ugliness, mental stability or mental instability, life in the middle of a madhouse or life in the middle of a peaceful, silent desert. Whatever you're given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That's the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already--your body, your speech, your mind?

Here's something that's very helpful to know about now. The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us. The more sensitive we become to this, the more we realize that when we start getting angry or denigrating ourselves or craving things in a way that makes us feel miserable, we begin to shut down, shut out, as if we were sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon but we had put a big black bag over our heads.


Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you're blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you. Then those same demons will appear as friendly, warmhearted companions on the path.

Prelude

by Michael Palmer


The limit of the song is this
prelude to a journey to
the outer islands, the generative
sentence, waltz project, forms,
qualities, suns, moons, rings,
an inside-outside then
an outside-inside shaped
with her colored clays. The days
yet propose themselves
as self-evident, everything there
everything here
and you are reading
in a way natural to theatre
a set of instructions
that alters itself automatically
as you proceed west
from death to friendliness, the two
topics upon which you are allowed
to meditate
under the first broad drops
of rain. The planes
will be piloted by ancestors
who have come back to life.
Why the delay.

Thinking about Socrates

"Perhaps someone might say, “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you."


Apology: The Examined Life

Because of his political associations with an earlier regime, the Athenian democracy put Socrates on trial, charging him with undermining state religion and corrupting young people. The speech he offered in his own defense, as reported in Plato's Apologhma (Apology), provides us with many reminders of the central features of Socrates's approach to philosophy and its relation to practical life.


Ironic Modesty:
Explaining his mission as a philosopher, Socrates reports an oracular message telling him that "No one is wiser than you." (Apology 21a) He then proceeds through a series of ironic descriptions of his efforts to disprove the oracle by conversing with notable Athenians who must surely be wiser. In each case, however, Socrates concludes that he has a kind of wisdom that each of them lacks: namely, an open awareness of his own ignorance.

Questioning Habit:
The goal of Socratic interrogation, then, is to help individuals to achieve genuine self-knowledge, even if it often turns out to be negative in character. As his cross-examination of Meletus shows, Socrates means to turn the methods of the Sophists inside-out, using logical nit-picking to expose (rather than to create) illusions about reality. If the method rarely succeeds with interlocutors, it can nevertheless be effectively internalized as a dialectical mode of reasoning in an effort to understand everything.

Devotion to Truth:
Even after he has been convicted by the jury, Socrates declines to abandon his pursuit of the truth in all matters. Refusing to accept exile from Athens or a commitment to silence as his penalty, he maintains that public discussion of the great issues of life and virtue is a necessary part of any valuable human life. "The unexamined life is not worth living." (Apology 38a) Socrates would rather die than give up philosophy, and the jury seems happy to grant him that wish.

Dispassionate Reason:
Even when the jury has sentenced him to death, Socrates calmly delivers his final public words, a speculation about what the future holds. Disclaiming any certainty about the fate of a human being after death, he nevertheless expresses a continued confidence in the power of reason, which he has exhibited (while the jury has not). Who really wins will remain unclear.

Plato's dramatic picture of a man willing to face death rather than abandoning his commitment to philosophical inquiry offers up Socrates as a model for all future philosophers. Perhaps few of us are presented with the same stark choice between philosophy and death, but all of us are daily faced with opportunities to decide between convenient conventionality and our devotion to truth and reason. How we choose determines whether we, like Socrates, deserve to call our lives philosophical.

from philosophypages.com

more Pema Chodron

from When Things Fall Apart

Having read this on more than one occasion, still, one always learns again and anew, upon going back, listening, reading again, about oneself, about the world, about presence.

Chodron:

What makes maitri (loving-kindness) such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart.

The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves. Yet it's never too late or too early to practice loving-kindness. It's as if we had a terminal disease but might live for quite a while. Not knowing how much time we have left, we might begin to think it was important to make friends with ourselves and others in the remaining hours, months, or years.
It is said that we can't attain enlightenment, let alone feel contentment and joy, without seeing who we are and what we do, without seeing our patterns and our habits. This is called maitri--developing loving-kindness and an unconditional friendship with ourselves.

Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away.
We do the big escape: we act out, say something, slam a door, hit someone, or throw a pot as a way of not facing what's happening in our hearts. Or we shove the feelings under and somehow deaden the pain. We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds.

All over the world, people are so caught in running that they forget to take advantage of the beauty around them. We become so accustomed to speeding ahead that we rob ourselves of joy.

from When Things Fall Apart

by Pema Chodron

In the teachings of Buddhism, we hear about egolessness. It sounds difficult to grasp: what are they talking about, anyway? When the teachings are about neurosis, however, we feel right at home. That's something we really understand. But egolessness? When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully--which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress--a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises--the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it's not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness. It's when all our usual schemes fall apart. Reaching our limit is like finding a doorway to sanity and the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle or a punishment.


We might think, as we become more open, that it's going to take bigger catastrophes for us to reach our limit. The interesting thing is that, as we open more and more, it's the big ones that wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard. However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.


"This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it's always with us" is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what's going on--that's the teaching right there. We can be with what's happening and not dissociate.

Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

berlin wall 2009

history spaced across moments suspended
or a movement of color
shading every emotion
lines drawn across
tie together the complications
how one human can hurt another
how many destroy millions
sontag says this is what humans are capable of
and we see it, study the images
of brutality

transformed here
a material space both of history
and a living present, changing

away from popular tourist destinations
just this structure
along the water
next to a bridge



new artists paint over history
never forget
keep moving in every direction

this is what humans are capable of
new lines drawn
in color
paint a composition of chords
translates
hopeful

Music in Berlin

She was playing in the plaza outside the national library, and near the memorial to the nazi book burning that happened in 1933. The memorial is basically a window on the ground, that you can walk on, and through which you can look down and see a room full of empty bookshelves.

Germany

Went to Dachau
the other day:

We went together as a group: Americans, Germans, Romanians. We have been meeting and sharing discussions of culture, theory, mobility, politics for a week. And today we walked around quietly and thought about history. History in the present. The past brushed against the grain of contemporary knowing, questioning, feeling, trying to understand.

Arriving by train, the town of Dachau is a little outside of Munich, and is a beautiful little Bavarian German "suburban" town. It is spring so everything is green. Flowers. By afternoon the sun was out and everything seemed clean and quaint. Apparently, when the concentration camp was liberated, the local townspeople were brought in to see just how much violence and destruction was caused there. The film image shows onlookers turn away in disgust when they see the pile of corpses, in various states of decompose, in the crematorium; the bodies in the last months before the liberation were piled up, or buried in mass graves, because there wasn't enough coal to run the cremation fires.

We think how strange to live in this town, with this memorial site right in the middle.

From the train to the bus and we are left off in what seems like a lovely park. Trees. A little river. The stone road continues on into more residential areas. We walk through the memorial site, on the path lined with trees, and then through the gate that opens into the prisoner area. The roll call area. The barracks area. The "maintenance" building that once housed the baths, and where prisoners were hung up by their wrists from the ceiling as punishment or just for torture, now serves as the museum. History explained in texts and displays. Artifacts and photos.



Walk down the gravel road past the former barracks' foundations, pass the religious monuments, erected for reflection from a variety of denominations, and across the bridge into the crematorium area. The small original building and the larger, assembly line style buildings are set among trees and pathways lead out into a small woods that reminded me of the paths one might take for reflection and meditation at a retreat center. But here, instead, one now reflects on the graves marked for the thousands who died, were cremated, and buried en masse.

The experience is obviously strange and difficult. Intense and quietly meditative. History in memorial. Signs and paths and museum displays show us history on site. Site non site of trying, still, to make sense of. It seems strange to eat lunch in the cafeteria after, head back tired, eventually moving into the conversations that locate, help some of us think further, or at least, think present, in the context of.

from The Transformation by Juliana Spahr

“Flora and fauna grow next to and around each other without names. Human add the annotation. They catalogue the flora and fauna, divide them up, chart their connections and variations, eventually name them, and as they do this they read into them their own stories” (13).

“Huehue is the name of a climber native to the islands. Haole is the word that is used to describe some of them in this story, people who arrive from somewhere else. In the world of plants it is also used to describe a particularly noxious and invasive species” (14).

The politics of the island were more complicated than the boths of the beauty of the island. The politics were not really built around boths but instead around the one or the other. The politics were something else altogether. They were a part of the island that bit into them and those around them with bladelike, piercing mouthparts that stabbed through the skin and then injected a saliva that teemed with digestive enzymes, viruses, and anticoagulants. This bite often left behind an annoying itch, a reminder that things were not both the one and the other, could not be both the one and the other because both made no sense because there could not be both colonialism and sovereignty. (39)

The expansion did not happen overnight and one could point to how the local languages and the languages that were often created by the arrival of the expansionist language, the pidgins, and creoles, the burrowing languages, the negotiated languages refused to go away as evidence of how the expansionist language might not be as good at expansion as one might think. (95)

The gray matter at the back of their brain told them to move to the islands in the Atlantic because the islands were known for their perversions and various sexualities and they wanted to live someplace known for its perversions and various sexualities. The gray matter at the back of the brain wanted to move to the place that self identified as a place of complicated sexuality, a place for people who liked to be getting in and out of various beds in various different ways. A place that celebrated different beds and different ways of bedding down and around. The islands in the Atlantic, were full of perversions of all sorts and the stories told about the people of the islands had all genders in all the different combinations, even the ones beyond the two that so defined their culture at this moment. They liked this. They liked it that the islands in the Atlantic to which they moved were so famous for their perversions, so famous that televangelists mentioned them often as the root of all evil. (123)

Susan Sontag

from Regarding the Pain of Others

Ch 5

“That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins…Photographs tend to transform, whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful—or terrifying, or unbearable, or quite bearable—as it is not in real life” (76).

“Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art” (76).

Ch 6

“One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them…” (95).

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated” (101).

Ch 8

“To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others” (114).

“The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget” (115).

“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking” (115).

Judith Butler

from Undoing Gender

“If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility” (3).

“As a result, the “I” that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them. This is not easy because the “I” becomes, to a certain extent unknowable, threatened with unviability, with becoming undone altogether, when it no longer incorporates the norm in such a way that makes this “I” fully recognizable” (3).

“I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation” (4).

Butler responds to the question of the usefulness of “increasing possibilities for gender” that “possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those for whom they very issue of survival is most urgent” (29).

a poem for the day by Frank O'Hara

A STEP AWAY FROM THEM (1956)


It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
                               On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
                Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
          There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
                A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.


[1956]

from Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider

from "Poetry is not a Luxury"

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead--while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

review of begin with may

See Michelle's review of my begin with may: a series of moments:

Michelle Naka Pierce: no use in a centre

from Tender Buttons by G. Stein

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.


NOTHING ELEGANT.

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.


A RED HAT.

A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

a little stein thought for the day

winter wonder

the symbol of the shoe

"In Libya, he was given an award for courage."

Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero

from Lisa Jarnot's poem Whole Hog

after Barrett Watten and for Thomas


1.
The pig is complete.
Barns demand limits.

2.
Pigs fall down to create drama.
The materials are hoof.

3.
Daylight accumulates in work yards.
Farm hands substitute for suns.

...

44.
Flora stand up to fauna.
Science gives features to the world.

45.
Another tractor is invented.
They sniff it like a dog in heat.

46.
Plows fit into a perspective.
Photos of piglets cover the earth.

Laura Riding

"The World and I"

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
as perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each - exactly where
Exactly as I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

from Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me be Lonely


Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time. There is no innovating loss. It was never invented, it happened as something physical, something physically experienced. It is not something an "I" discusses socially. Though Myung Mu Kim did say that the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social space. She did say it was okay to cramp, to clog, to fold over at the gut, to have to put hand to flesh, to have to hold the pain, and then to translate it here. She did say, in so many words, that what alerts, alters.

moving through

after listening to Renee Gladman talk about narrative and writing fiction


nearness and the difficulty of arriving
placement
deferral

She intended to follow the lines on pavement
broken, faded, yet leading, or potential,
marking first the potential--and then
later realized--journey.

spatialize
miscommunicate
the space of the city bears the weight

Around one corner, and then another, the simple
whiteness of the line, like a shadow, not determined,
constructed and fading, nearly transparent, directive yet
diminishing toward total possibility.

a state of mind
something is not the way it might be

One block, a building so tall, blocking the sky.
One block, the smell of fried beef.
Each block making it difficult to remember having once
eaten. Another corner, wind whipping round like an
urban hurricane, covering her skin with layers
of grit, particles scratch out her eyes.

who are you, aren't you?
white space
slowness
reasonates

Having wandered off the line, what cannot always be
followed, what can no longer direct, orientate, circulate, each
corner marks the affect associated with each experience,
a coffee, cut of the wind, she sees them through the window,
imagines their mouths saying words in Portuguese, she
responds, the wind blowing away every language that she tries.

evoke
simultaneous
intention (unintentional)

Try this word in German. Listen in French. In Arabic the
subtitles linger for much longer than one expects--a short,
concise translation for so much language. The lines change,
move into the streets, no longer painted but built into the
structure, graph of bricks meeting curved lines in concrete.
The traffic ceasing to determine the pedestrian nature
of this city (scape).

conceptual, material, exercise

This, she decides, may be a continuous journey. Not of a day,
but of many days. Not of a language, but of the mingling of
words, vocabularies swirled like hot milk with caramel. Not of
a lined path but of paths textured with flavors, sweet for summer,
rich for understanding, acquaintance, the rewriting of history.

from Lipstick Jihad: a memoir of growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

"What I wanted to explain...was that we had a moral obligation to care when awful things happened to people around us. That by treating beatings, lashings, or checkpoint arrests as common place--ordinary, like going to the ATM--we were becoming dehumanized to the sickness around us. A heightened threshold of suffering was necessary for getting through the day, but mentally, we had to retain some sort of perspective. Of how a functional government should behave. Of what was unacceptable. Otherwise, we would become like those blase reformists, who would look you in the eye, and say: "Look at how much progress we've made... See! I'm wearing short-sleeves...Could I have work short-sleeves ten years ago?...No!...What are you whining about human rights for? ...Aren't we better than the Taliban? Than the Saudis?" Yes, there would always be some junked, lost country we would be superior to, but that wasn't a proper ambition, was it?" (217)

"I had taken the first steps assured in myself, intent on discovering Iran, and I had eventually found that Iran, like the Simorgh, was elusive, that it defied being known. Its moods changed mercurially by the day, and even its past was a contested battle. Though with each day there I accumulated as many questions as answers, like those steadfast birds, something kept me honed on course, a belief in the obscured value of the destination. The knowledge had been unfurling in me slowly since the day Agha Joon's funeral--that the search for home, for Iran, had taken me not to a place but back to myself" (245).

story

her hands the color of mediterranean olives oiled smooth young, nails jutting out of clear skin no lines no scratches no scars rich like changing tones of day

as she paints each move of the wrist fingers choreographed against the sound of color the brush circling sure hesitant marking every note across the page

sits, against a backdrop of anger and history thinking purple sketching lyric creating lines reaching out toward every horizon

how does she, one wonders, compose each line as if set to music without tone, coming together in the realm of present fragments turned whole, continuous

turning toward breathing deeply woven with layers of incarnation imagined possibilities in each shadow from the time before and into

space, or the shape of a mango

a 20 (or so) line poem

the sound of fall cutting through, chainsaw against orange leaf
each grain layered like little chinese dragons
at the new year

the taste of buttered wine at lunch
smelling sweet like grapes pressed firm

chittering distant or the mosquito in my ear
scratched, to the bone
a piece of golden green, refracted, shadows shifting against each changed light

the clever taste of single voices, shimmering clear
not each grain but the particular flakes of wild, golden, rustling
a moving away from the understood glow
maneuver of an autumn

feel this, pig lipstick
the painting, disturbed by sound, broken, echoed
"that one"
the red wheelbarrow of hilarity

falling rocks scrape the insides of intuition
taste the root vegetables, one flavor at a time
chandelier

we will march toward the tree line and circle flowers made of teflon
each leaf laughing against blue
troubled wonder

the flavor of a shade
spliced on the wind

Obama Rally Detroit fall 08

Photos 1

Wall, by Don Brower

Lights, by Don Brower

Stones, by Don Brower

Photos 2

Lines, by Don Brower

Color lines on rock, by Jill Darling

Fountain, by Jill Darling

Leaves 1, by Jill Darling

Leaves 2, by Jill Darling

Kristin Prevallet

from [I, Afterlife] [Essay in Mourning Time]


The elegiac burden is the poem expressing, through the form it takes on the page, the broken minds which have shaped it. The poem is a state of both mind and landscape, and because it is not mappable, is capable of articulating a person's spatial distance. The poem, scratched out on the surface of the page, scratches then at the surface of the world "outside" of the poem. The success of this is articulating something difficult; perhaps even articulating something so well and so persuasively that readers are inspired to seek clarity in their relationship to loss, disappointment, or fear. The sadness of this is the difficulty of knowing that what the poem knows--or rather how it knows--will probably not change the world. And yet, people die every day from the lack of poetry in faith. In doubting the possibility of a tidy afterlife, I have come to compose a fragmented system of believing. I call this poetry.

words overhea(r)d

good meat good oil and salt
wine and the odoriferous
midwestern
idea of water
what looks like screaming, a rattle, a glass
wilting
going nowhere
a suite of statistics
screech
survey study reverse scene

walls hold sound
reside invite interior utter imitate
a response
rejects
the instant
pixel

health/cares

after Sandy Tolbert


the treachery of argument a migration of carnations how will this murky adherence siphon each molecule, a proud migration tilted toward gravity, an unheard acoustic shift frames the artifact.

We digress, deviate.

The surface of erasure is porous, a hybrid vocation scanning the syllabic properties of discord.

Hear text.

Mark a location.

Fracture.

In every case verbs (voice) multiply, the sound of height a clarity of mixed images.

Palin, Poet

from Slate

"Small Mayors"

You know,
Small mayors,
Mayors of small towns—
Quote, unquote—
They're on the front lines.


"On the Bailout"

Ultimately,
What the bailout does
Is help those who are concerned
About the health care reform
That is needed
To help shore up our economy,
Helping the—
It's got to be all about job creation, too.

Shoring up our economy
And putting it back on the right track.
So health care reform
And reducing taxes
And reining in spending
Has got to accompany tax reductions
And tax relief for Americans.
And trade.

We've got to see trade
As opportunity
Not as a competitive, scary thing.
But one in five jobs
Being created in the trade sector today,
We've got to look at that
As more opportunity.
All those things.

Gloria Steinem on Sarah Palin

Click here to read the whole story: Palin: Wrong Woman, Wrong Message

from the article:

"Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

"But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

...
"So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

"Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

"Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

"And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

"This could be huge."

Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd died recently. Here: Reginald Shepherd's blog his blog lives on, and continues, with his voice.

here's a couple of Shepherd poems:

from one of my own favorite of Shepherd's poems:

Geology of Water
for Maureen Seaton


The sea grows old in it.
--Marianne Moore


1.
Striated tides draw their lines
in the sand, leave them behind
in retreat. Warm layers on the colder
to blind indigo, strata of temperature
and color down to bedrock
settling, plates shifting in their cobalt sleep
to nudge the continents apart.
The sea grew old in me, the blood
as salt and turbulent, as unpacific.

2.
There's someone who foundered there
and lost his way: he's in above his head,
out of his depth, he's been concealed
beneath his representability or gulf
stream. If I bend closer I can hear him
drown, a man made out of water
whose words arise like bubbles
to the surface: something survives
in every carbonaceous molecule, every

3.
intermittent spindrift's punctuation.
Fossils compacted in the bluff's rush hour
say things change, but never for the better:
they've stairstepped four geologic eras just to stay
in place. Their smashed catastrophe theory confirms
some things aren't worth surviving. Evolution
croons its single song, come out of the sea,
my love, to me, and never adds, and drown
knee-deep in air.

..
6.
It's true: the sea grew old here, and here
it left its will to live, a testament
to what it couldn't take back, couldn't help
but keep. It drank itself and sank for good.
Wash that sea in me and wring it clean,
ocean to ocean till there's no water left.



Lens

Where the blue meets blue, where sky
meets the sky. Behind the white which hides
behind disbanded clouds, high humidity
at higher temperatures, holding it in, precipitation
imminent, but not today. We'll meet there. You
whom I have lied to, you to whom I've told
the truth, some version of turning
light. You can't be seen
through mere transparency, no
scene: something hidden in the here, unavailable
to sight. Blue into white and what becomes of it,
where silence becomes summer, there where summer
wouldn't wait. You were waiting, air
full of unfallen rain. You say this, you say that, nothing
I understand: I hold light in one hand, a prism
or this unrequited reticence, your
onehow, anywhen, all elegy and distance, and away.
And still say come this way again, tomorrow or the day
before, once then, where last,
or any time at all. Fire, lamp and lantern,
wander me, scattering glass.

from Spring and All by Wm. Carlos Williams

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--

whither? It ends--

But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry--

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
and steel roses--

The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses

If is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting

from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates spaces

"...that 'beauty' is related not to 'loveliness' but to a state in which reality plays a part"

--Wllm Carlos Williams, from Spring and All

After having finished the qualifying exam, having passed, moved beyond, moving forward...suddenly september turns toward fall, toward each escape blinking along a continuum, sparkling, plastic, rest.

m, in multiples

at which
faded faded
inquiry response
into solid parameters
fading
over
a fantastic geometry
curled
in a wave of salt
and translation

m, this letter silently
returns a concrete image
(each scene you depict)
(the sound of vision)
listen, to the particles of light
motion a naturalist textbook

the green-blue rainbow
turned in on itself

exercise for today


On my tongue memories of foul snowflakes, in the rain, hair a twisted tangle of oatmeal and butterflies. I tolerate balloons and butterflies in lieu of phone communication or the education of birds, disintegration of every winning lottery ticket. Don’t fake this egg. The axe, my teeth, sharpen safety and watermelon over a meal of marginalia. The mushrooms have grown distant this year. The miasma encircles, lingers, travels far to hold the pieces apart. If you were only as large as a pea, we would have lost your shoes altogether, the leaf a structure of redemption and shelter, your tail flailing for want of a protective cape.

“The poem is the record of the body”

--D.A. Powell

The nuts and bolts of expression

after Mark Levine


henri
your soda your skullcap
fear, unzipping confetti
a parade, spoiling, bleached
an electric quill, a robe, a statue
(a single alp?)

cobblestones and dirt spiral away from plaster
pose held, like a 10 syllable disease
graphite, cardboard, coal all lie flat
on canvas

rings around a grove of thistles
forgetting the machine, uranium, fallout
and the copper voices

the falling vase signals chronic geometry
an acacia dying alone near the marsh

gravel surrounding a nest of resin and clay
under the willow the circuit, magnetic, ceasing

toward

do what you will to organize, plan, predict, claim space and texture as your own-- we will all, each in ways green or scattered across / among consider the lyric, the sense of sound and interior vision, piles over words, a quality of moving music-- of which genre placed multiply factors organized around each green formica coffee flavor-- catch the contents of your stomach before anxiety spills over, reach inside the deep idea or a notion of grey jettisons over each strand of disturbed carpet, justifies its own reckless element-- place, please, words together get words use others' get a dictionary replace text determine a new language-- choose-- translate for/toward a new politic a new season/sense

each

Serena knew G before the catastrophe before the trauma that affected them all. Small and wise, her scent like blueberry lavender lingered before and after her arrival and departure. G before the trauma, she used to say, had curls flowing around her face, skin the flavor of sweet ice in summer. G, once upon a time, painted life-size canvases with her toes, using every color in the spectrum, and then some.

Barth always sang. He wondered about G, and never believed Serena's stories about the hair, but he wanted to believe that once upon a time, G also sang. Lyric pastoral stories put to music. So lovely. So perfect. Barth sang his own part of conversations, and otherwise spoke little, it seemed, as a way to maintain a space, a no-place away from the spoken world. He thought about this for a while apparently, until finally encountering the post-catastophe G, whose entire spacial presence confirmed his notion. And he only sang more.

On a particular afternoon, Barth hummed, G sighed, and Serena recorded each detail of the lawn, on which they sat, in front of the house where no one lived. The long folding blades of grass tickled their calves. The color of the house faded with each note that Barth found to express. Serena asked G if she would decide to paint again soon. G turned toward the old tree at the far end of the yard, turned back toward Serena who watched the face with no expression for only an instant before G got up from the grass, and walked straight into the house whose door pushed back with no more than a gentle groan.

exercise

Those normal clouds, this common air, participate in and are the cause of a surging resistance.--C. Harryman, Gardener of Stars

Trailing along, she bends grass, slithers through weeds, walks over dirt humming change. Pale and unmoving, lemon-scented air past her ears, through eyes, she decides not to become one unknown and trampled, but to march solid, quell fear, and create a determined identity. Each shaded step rings across a spectrum of silent language. Each layer, a body of texture and promise.

strain(ed)

aching individual spokes
sizzle around summer
stakes settled in
unmoving minutes

of shade sparkled
kids on foot
watching bikes

fallen under dirty skin
dust clenching
strokes
the back of a knee

unaided waiting
in dismay
optic nerves
clenched
strive, arch

a new poem on Rewords, after JKD, after Sean S...

flip

if you pick up one penny every 3 minutes
over an hour
you may as well work a job

20/hour

who earns this much
in a day life

20 pennies
pieces
memories

every 3 minutes every footfall gravel step
heads up

karma
or design
works through

each overturned copper
possibility

see Rewords for something... seething...

serious commentary... on the Zohan

Although A.O. Scott gives You Don't Mess with the Zohan a decent review, upon some reflection, the film seems more geared for audiences of the Idiocracy(not the audience that views the film...but the America that the film depicts). At first I though, oh yes, a politically serious-through-stupid-humor film for the mainstream that could, through its pop culture status, have some positive consequences for getting information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out into the generic American public ear. But I wonder if this is both too optimistic an assumption of the viewer as well as of the politics of the film itself. The political-commentary-narrative in the film runs through the long-standing conflict with little background info and a lot of "inside" jokes (even in the Detroit metro area, which claims one of the largest Middle Eastern populations outside of the Middle East, many people don't know what hummus is; one character comments that the conflict has been going on for 2000 years now so it should be over soon...) and basically ends in an all-too-Hollywood generic climax of conflict between the two groups (on American soil, the Israelis and Palestinians have businesses across from each other on the same road, the big white-man developers set fires to the businesses to "fuel" hate between the groups); upon realizing the truth hate turns to love and hugs via the clearly announced realization that anyone who looks Middle Eastern is discriminated against by mainstream (white) America. Not unlike in Crash (though admittedly in a much more ridiculous way), we get the message that we shouldn't hate each other because of skin color but that we should all just get along.

And so, do we take it for what it's worth? Sandler clearly has some personal interest in the politics of the issue, and how many people can an Adam Sandler film reach and potentially "affect" with its politics? Or is it not too late to still consider ourselves a small step up the clever ladder from the Idiocracy mainstream and do mess with the Zohan by demanding he give us more: more substance, more creativity, more that goes beyond the same old crotch and sex jokes and still laugh and be held interested.

“I was to conduct an inventory, he says,” the man clearly tilting a little to the left side of near understanding. A boat passed, quietly and loaded with layers of colored boxes, like a steel rainbow of fruit flavors. Each color representing a particular type of potential luck or good energy as it passed across the water moved further from solid ground. Counting each color, starting over once, twice, a final time getting through the collection in its entirety, he scribbled in his book and mumbled the prayers that he claimed accompanied each fortuitously shaded square. We watched together, the details melting into what we imagined to have been pure possibility, floating away from foundation, spreading on the air.

try unequal-librium on Rewords

Raucous #1

after reading some Kevin Young poems

the streets are curtains
skin chalk
dead hurt

whether pockets season or
stretch gin

acrylic drawers repeal
hurt skin
pigeons
a flat moon

frame vinyl, bop black
scrawl captivates the blaring
light
dead sheets painted

feminist critique anyone?

I witnessed this for real in Louisville...walking down the street suddenly there were millions of pre-teen girls swarming in anticipation of a Jonas Brothers event of some kind...

a new poem on rewords: after after a train passing

the only explanation

I did it because the light was leaning heavy over the horizon at a particular moment of humidity and sweat. The air was like butterscotch candy freshly licked, wet, sticky then spit out -- it's scent clinging to my skin. A constant crackling echoed across the lawn like heat breaking into pieces, firecrackers across the sky.

She leaped across the fence as if we were related, and came at me fast and furious, until I couldn't recognize her at all anymore. The leaves shimmered violently against the wall and it was only then that I felt every detail of my former life as a vision in front of me. And although she had encouraged me to take the trail to the left, it is true, she never promised the appropriate, or even desirable, outcome of my travels. In retrospect, I would have preferred to accumulate enough financial stability to have avoided the entire incident altogether.

I did it because at that moment, standing over the pool table, each striped ball angled in an awkward direction, I knew there would be no hope of ever winning or losing another game. I did it because his breath, against my back, salty and fresh, like the ocean, charged with electricity and the scent of lime.

recall that there was a moment
visual
of taste and sensation (bile basil mint)
(re)constructed via detail (figurative analogy)
a story not told
without characters
the design of violence on the surface of a shirt
a rainbow pierced by hail
atomic or over-fed synchronic events
seen at an angle
on the surface of a wing passing unnoticed
over the face of every ticking second

minimal ink satisfaction light
inside anxious
precise every syllable use
following each argument relation
encounter comma
effect not affect
completion or the inauguration
of juxtaposition
a single selection making
one's point on a page
under obtuse sentences period
a post-selective construction

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over the space of wood topped shimmers of thought
a grey paper lined with scratched unknown unanswered
today is not the day to (insert action verb here)
though one must recall the accumulation of seconds
in a lifetime
many days of coincidence march
or linger

one must recall every exposed desire laid out on naked concrete wondering around pieces of language never quite aimed in any direction, never quite passing the required levels of professional status. i am of two minds, each shaded in another color depending on weather, history, and the pursuit of any possible syntactic strategy

as each crystalized moment...no, each hard penny...or, the wet concrete soothes the fingernail of understanding (not understanding...something like paper covered balloons) ...you get the idea, which at least the words linger, wade through the drops of a monday, at or because of distance i can only link to the idea, virtually, not even an idea...no, a black-covered paper-back, inside of which, each line of which, pasted into my mind (visual-like, but closer to crude animation). between the drops i wonder how to kill the lyric...squirrell...digging away planting poems of roses in the sweet mud. imitating lines of sense and logical awareness. a posted letter arrives only in time for...spring.

reflected back or into

at this moment, instantly
dirt dug deep into a gap absence holed out from the land (land is dirt) from the earth (the whole planet, no just this space outside the window, floor to ceiling window, outside of which a big hole, before that there was some concrete sidewalk and grass and something else maybe that doesn't matter now b/c it doesn't exist... does it matter in memory whether there was a bench or a garbage can or who walked here and when once?). two holes, really, large and small, the former remains of or the potential for. a reconstruction in dreaming stages. in spring at least this dirt like mud or soft, spongy, saturate-able, with or without light applied appropriately.

a series of red-covered texts lines the walls opposite the inside of the large window and, i imagine, filled with the ideas for the construction of whole worlds (earths) of possible pieces of space (in dirt form).

poem on rewords

see a poem here today, march 10:
REWORDS BLOG