Spouting against the ceiling—ambivalence:

Portrait of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok by Konstantin Andreevic Somov

I cut up the air to see if I can find a word-pocket hiding somewhere. Flare for the dogmatic.

Even a riddle has a chimney pot. Girouettes, narrators of the environment. I am trying to improve. My feet ache. She circulates around me like a violent bipolar animal, what am I the bat, unblinded by blank stares, squared air in the enemy’s fair lair, what am I the bait. Her voice trumpets the air to seeming madness. My tongue is stuck in my lungs, what is left to say, like a president—a thick specific ocean like Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo or just his face alone, an opera, an oreo, a vampire-fang. When you are budding through, I peel my face back and reveal a non-fictional tirade; face of bossy sculpture, too new to be haunted. You remind me of the perfect companion for a molded lobster salad with tuna sashimi. The sun is shining brightly on the right side of my face through the window. Everything we say replaces sound. I feel more enhanced than a rigorous horizon. Perhaps I am like the Marquis de Puysegar who, in 1784, had been mesmerized by Victor, a young shepherd who fell into a deep sleeping trance. “I wonder why he did not convulse and contort” he must have wondered.

Backtrack: five years ago: I stood on Ponce de Leon staring at pigeons. I looked at them, imagining what they would feed from if everyone’s crumbs disappeared. If only this soil could speak! It just spoke. I am an alien leaking privacy. I have become persuaded, your dotted-lines should be painted. I have become the anatomy of the Pre/post practice of being notoriously open to manipulation. My patriotism is filigreed. It is like making vines into sling-shots. The next scene is a tremble. The camera moves in on the expressionless United States Military; the same with the United States Government, why capitalize it, why does breakfast make a good memory—why can’t they just eat their words, remembering to flush the mushroom-cloud down our throats. Fair fox-skin betwixt the mighty wind of their drawn machines, known as bait—a.k.a.: saults & helmet-like shapes upon the faceless. The camera moves in on what the system feeds from. Emotion of wild boars, daggers & Con-Air ruts, grunts, reforming the past, bringing to life feeble lives, stirrups, unarmed targets. We could hear a sound at the depths of every hollow heart singing through the treetops of every household, as common as harmonious instruments. I could pocket the arctic, spread eagle & become as nearly obsolete as a screen-saver.

Th’other evenin’: “Who dresses you?" she asked. “Me” I responded. (laughter)— “I love your glasses, your frames, oh, I just love your glasses.” The sun is in my eyes, even at night. Dexter Gordon’s “Willow Weep For Me” plays in my ears & I become like a flower because flowers never die—they weep themselves to sleep after a time, then return later. “Thank you for listening to me . . . & to be so young, too” she said, with a puzzled yet fascinated look upon her composition. Her daughters hold in angst & anger towards this woman; I tried not to blink too much, held back tears, as she told me that her children do not speak to her. “Their father is great in their eyes” she said, “. . . he can do no wrong, but they would stand here & tell you that I was a good mother.” She put emphasis on “was.” Her ex-husband had merry-go-rounds of women, always calling the house—she divorced him. Later, I overheard a little girl: “Don’t speak to the mannequin! Don’t speak to the dirty mannequin!”—How oddly-fitting.

—

Alice Notley: “each poet’s poetry is, or should be, its own world; you cross borders, you get to know it, you read it being there, not bringing a lot of baggage from outside it, and it works. Poetry’s supposed to be lived in, not assessed.”

—

Thought: when ‘writing’ became ‘typing’ but still called ‘writing.’ “I wrote you a letter via email.” “I wrote you a letter on the computer and printed it out.” “Write me an email, okay?” “Will you write me?” “Write me a text message.” No, no, no.

the image
gazes back at us—

an unremitting
visual experience.

We’re all taxi drivers by nature, jumping in a burst of beetle, stripped by it all, to opt for something tried-and-true, tired & blue, to say that the world was just what we had talked around; arm-to-arm, the scent of bread crust in the air—to make an impression without feeling uncomfortable. Is not this what we are really after? Pronto. Ready? Mars is so close. You, not so close. Blessed are the door-to-door. I feel sorry for Less, especially when More has more. To the wise: these words are not enough.

—

What does a poet have to be
aware of? Desire of love
began with the first heart
-beat. I switch to decaf
to see if I could slow it down
ju
s
t l
ik
e t
h
is
but Speed returns
immediately following
the deciphering.

—

From now on I will report, you decide. If you are going to stone me, stone me in Estonia. Do not lose faith in insignificance of expression. Despair leads to forecasting. This is about you & your brain, not he or her. This is about alveolar consonants that unlock listening from the standpoint of exasperation, or the breakfast that will be eaten in the morning with your gray-speckled or silver-haired mother, unable to get a word in.

Possible “vraisemblances”: The stepsisters did not ever realize that Cinderella had a Masters Degree in Psychology. King Lear was square; a professional entertainer, perhaps a spin doctor. Four-inch gash. Pietro Metastasio secretly influenced Led Zepp to reunite. Poetry-boosters for everyone. Frankenstein reading Gertrude Stein with a bottle of red sea wine and a serious case of mental-decline. Dandy and fine as candy.—What can you obtain from nothing? a set of wings where dreams flush out the scenes in your poetic reality. My reality has a hook. I am clipped to the end of your postscript. My adam’s apple contemplates Adam’s apple this Eve-ning. Just call my butt a wise“crack”—

Forget three wishes, Obama listens and receives a million kisses from those that dismiss us as rotten fishes. The ‘rights’ of the terrorists may as well come with fine china and expensive dishes; they’re carelessly individuous and hungry and finding us delicious. Chomp-chomp-chomp.

William Carlos Williams: ‘Nothing is beyond poetry’

Slaughtered nerves and my long scrawny self, my face staring at this monitor as if words are pores snuggled to my cheeks or our enthralled electric bodies filled by finger’d letters, abusing literature, or re-using it, or none of the above . . . mere wading through texts as if digesting Aunt Jemima. You always say something better; buttery kissing-chords of soul-speech, where do you starve the most? Appetite for minimized convenience. Reading words is like listening to whispers. I yammer all over the place, to crack . . . to disappear. I should stay silent, let these words, these thoughts, fish for me in their fury.

O'Hara: "if ² / you are going to put your life into / poetry, make sure you stay low, walk slow, / and lay the fly right along the velocity // changes." --I think that the same could be sd for Art, as well—.

VARIOUS ARTISTS:

Stephen Raw

Sára Saudková

Diane Fenster

Joachim Knill

Laurie Lipton

Elliot Erwitt

Keith Carter

Sissel Myklebust

Czech and Slovak Staged Photographs

To think that every space is a possible photograph not yet captured by the vacuum of a camera, and then to realize that every space is already a photograph that has been captured by the camera of the mind.

I have the stretch-munchies, sloppy with change, crippled money, lettuce and all.

Sth.—

ííTparticu-lär; wordarchitecture shouldn’ t be so beautiful.

Steindruck von Walter Gramatté