Charcoal by Carole Brémaud

SELF-PORTRAIT: expressing more directly, a theory, partly in a dream, in the Light of Asia Minor,
appears plausible. Virgil must have remembered stirring unreality, as I view the starry skylight thru
a partial window view, like a black-faced partygoer. Too much sanction-talk, Mexico’s bleeding. Me to Art: Let's establish a nuclear consortium, just call me Comedy and Tragedy. Cut this room into me, out of me, send the searchlight to check for uranium in my basement; you’ll only find Irony, iron and peculiar paradoxes. You won’t find a Lens Culture with retro demographics. But, you might.

Sometimes you just want to break the law of gravity, or liquidate the eggs at breakfast, after realizing that you have got it all backwards. Every thing that you can imagine, is incorrect, falsified, incomplete. I realized earlier that gravity is nothing more than theory, & I proved it by jumping off of a skyscraper, while my gimp-legged assistant, whoever that may be, raged like a Demotivator; rage of which was so achingly horrendous that it sounded as if he had hammered his thumb, or the kind of rage where one thinks twice before facing a powerfully destructive political & media machine, or fighting an impersonal war with a water gun, or what Van Gogh felt that he was to himself. The flask is full. I have learned to fly. People don't believe me but it was difficult for people to believe that Tiger Woods would cheat on his wife too. Often the subtext of anything is like switching the lights on in a dark room & learning that things have been misplaced, or re-arranged, & suddenly, at that moment,  you think of Einstein’s theory . . . how there is no limit to human stupidity.

John Webster: “Beaufort: When I studied there, I had so fantastical a brain, that like a Phelphare, frighted in winter by a Birding-piece, I could settle no where; here and there a little of every several Art, and away.”

I’ve kept this iridescent beetle out of the sunlight for too long. It’s time that I place it back into the sunlight, let it shimmer in my emerald eyes, let the night fold a rainbow into a pillow, let me sleep through the color-spectrum as if awake with new instinct. Speaking of: Rachmaninoff, lying on his psychiatrist’s couch, as the doctor repeated, “You are a great composer; you will write a wonderful piano concerto. You are a great composer...” over and over until the chronically-depressed Serge decided he was ready to try composing again.

My tongue is stuck in my lungs, what is left to say, like a president—I feel sorry for Less, especially when More has more. To the wise: these words are not enough.

Fibbed ribs
adlib-drip
of the snipped
faucet where
the cat switches
on the hot water
in the bathtub

The other evening, watched a child squirm its way out of trouble (the way a garbage truck squeaks its way out of a cul-de-sac) by pouting and whining. 

An unfinished story that I wrote some moons ago:

The yellow emporer was worshipped by all of the village, until everyone saw him get slain in a war film with American-style exploration. Thus, the yellow emporer was not worshipped any longer, but he felt like a lone hero or a lone ranger & he remained at home as a hermit the remainder of his days, lingering as a shadow of his former self that he felt was a bitter blow to all of the world.

*

Miserable ice next to a furnace. Miserable water within a sewer. Miserable sewer-stench not as miserable as the person catching whiffs of it. Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”

We meet surprised outside of a home like the habitat of a killer-beehive right outside the door, like the disappearance of a breakaway, we are like a major country without bicycle repairs. We are the eye-fatigue in a practice crash, everything reminds me of you and must we salute a crowd or shall we talk with our eyes? I am getting further and further away from the accents of tongues. Deliberate mystery like modern thinking more obsessed with the virtual world. A rare masterpiece is in the novel, evolves into a lazy animal. Unspoken rules depend on value, maybe citing the mountains; blood spewing from their historic penetrations.

Being a Christian is not a belief in a certain type of moral thinking or morality; it is not living according to a certain type of ethical behavior; nor is it following a particular religious group or philosophy. A Christian is one who has received from the Father a revelation of who Christ is and has received His Life into their spirit.

Every living Jew is evidence that the God of the Bible exists and that He keeps His Word.

Words don't allow me to sleep as I would if I didn't keep connecting them within this galaxy of my brain, the heart more-so filled with it.

A poem:

The Object of Flattery
assumes a figurative sense—

the feeling of fabric, let’s say,
on one’s naked body in a cold,

dark room (goosebumps and
moonlight) illicitly thought of

as ‘proper’ to be without another
body represented, so that the

Thought turns around an ample
amount of sufficient ideas,

which therefore suggests a disguise,
in pun, to the room in which

the fabric rests upon the body
of one whole living kinship;

pincushions of an active sense
of imagination; the brain, like

a bee’s entrance into a nest,
the blade of a tongue, a suddenness

of a decision as if pondering which
aromatic soap to “try” next.

Aromatic money-spending
spanking the globe. I once wore

clocks, or watches, until I realized
that I only need a watch

to watch me at night while I sleep,
ticking me into a dream, tics

in the fluttery chest,—the idea that
a watch is worn as if to suggest

that one has just come from the outside.

*

It is all a coin-flip concept, to reject another person's insistence that a flyswatter flies through the air like a flying saucer, or that a cookie mustn't be eaten. I had Chinese food yesterday. I sank through the grub like the Titanic. A hurricane is heading towards the direction of the wreckage. “I don't see why they don't try to pull it up.” Softened metal underneath oceans. A bitter city buried there, stones of emptiness. Earlier, a small lizard with a gray upper-half and iridescent tail slipped my eye, bye-bye, underneath a narrow crevice of the porch. Somewhere on a rowdy beach, Bach’s Air on a G String plays wildly.

Avant-garde music, the sounds of certain pianists playing their instruments as if with torn ACLs. I'm iconographically identifying the re-found senses of my ever-silken childhood. Three blind mice, three blind mice...

*

Edmond Jabes: “WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.”

The first line of Kafka’s diary: “The bystanders stiffen when the train goes past.” My heart loosens with this quote.

Laura Carter said, “[I’m] waiting for the City of Atlanta to self-implode.” I responded: Thinking of Hejinian: “the way things went along, as characteristic and definitive as a person’s gait or way of drinking from a cup, the termination of which is what death brings about”—I think every city is bound for self-implosion. Even Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood had a discerning target on it! Every city should crumble in hindsight; granted, most of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are becoming ghost-town-like; The World Bank yanks the money in places that are disaster-prone. Enormous mansions over there are empty, houses that long for an ego or three. Ice the size of Bermuda breaking off into these oceans. People should begin taking swimming lessons if they cannot swim. Atlanta, and every other city, will soon have limited repertoires.

There was a lot of weirdness happening in the year that I was born, 1982. A dog exploded in the film, The Thing, Seven people died in Chicago from poisoned Tylenol, Ingrid Bergman & Henry Fonda died, although that is not as weird as one may think. The first artificial heart transplant took place. The Clash released “Rock the Casbah,” nuclear issues & world peace were still being discussed by the United Nations General Assembly, yet, mostly importantly, I was born & here I am waving goodbye at the years gone by, like a flutterbye sky in my eye.

Dr. Suess: “Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age.”

My left arm is definitely not right.

Fuyuko Matsui, Eternal Almighty Medicine for Perfect Happiness

Like a clumsy piano, so does thought glow:

My thin aired room, by Yamamoto Kansuke (more Here)

Often times, feeling as if people’re only speaking to me as if to be expecting mistakes within my speech, which thus makes me slightly anxious. “For the record,” if there be a record in the flash of my bubbling, or bubble’d, existence: On 9-11, I likely had a meal of the following: chicken-and-rice, green beans, meatloaf and buttered biscuits. Everyone seemed to appear like blanks, like tossed salads of the world existing as humanity, and at the post office that morning, I sent out a package, of which I’m uncertain to who/m, or of what it consisted of.

Nimble tame humor, let the doubt remain too violent for the cut of a thumb, papercut proportioned orphan’d stoppage of gravity. I seek to speak what in detail what is maintained as awkward. Frog-leaped the fence too pretty for apartment complex neighborhood folks to enliven themselves at my falling duration. Mental-mensurations, leg asleep again, hair matted down, tickle it back to normalcy.

It’s never a boring day. I deflect things outward like Debbie Gibson who got lost in someone’s eyes,
except that when I get lost I cling to the sustained unindividuated mechanical tardies of distracted thumping. I think the cage is rattling. Shortcuts in the evening. Stitch out the isolated. My slender sleep is needed before a retrospective returns, becomes a Postman & delivers another strange repeated crashing.

The next soap opera could perhaps be called, “As The World Bank Turns, So Does Your Money.”—I’m rethinking the validity of democracy when a great deal of the populace appears abysmally ignorant about this horrendous president. Democracy is based on the concept of an informed citizenry making rational judgements about elections. If the citizenry is not well-informed, “democracy” is no more than a popularity contest and an advertising campaign.

*

Stop time, stop the image just before it congeals to the film-strip, just stop everything. We’re shinier than any sunshine state, lumped all in it.

*

 “There was an error in this gadget”—where’s the Inspector?—because, quite frankly, on that long departed note, I’ve been overly-pondering the peculiarities surrounding that of the Roald Dahl-hosted 1961 fantasy/science-fiction television series, “Way Out,” which was a program that was way ahead of its time and was seminal for the early development of horror and science fiction on television. A recent dvd has come out titled, “Way Out DVD TV Roald Dahl Lost Episodes” which features, so they say, the “only 5 episodes known to exist.” I find this to be a pale mistake, particularly in relation to the “lost” part of it—nothing is as lost as a lost puppy, perhaps, but in this scenario, I cannot come to find that there are truly any “lost episodes” of Way Out (there were only 14 episodes altogether, so that would mean that 9 of them are floating about in the ether?—or so they’ll have one believe, perhaps), and here is why:

The Paley Center for Media (located in NY and LA) have the episodes “in full,” as I learned several years ago, and CBS owns the copyrights to the shows, so it’s rather baffling to me why they’ve not released all of the spine-tingling episodes as a set of collector’s dvds, especially considering the fact that there’re fans out there, in abundances, that’re keeping their twinkly little fingers crossed that they do, indeed, release them at some point or another. With that said, the topic came up the other night when I was on the telephone with my dear uncle; I searched and found this particular “lost dvd” and was quite delighted to see that it was available. However, confusion mounted.

If the dvd is advertising the 5 episodes as “lost episodes,” then how does that explain the Paley Center for Media having all of the episodes? If they were “lost,” one would merely think that NO ONE would have them anywhere, period. Yet this dvd comes out and states that there are “lost episodes”? Perhaps it’s just me? or does it seem fishy, dishy, wishy, squishy?

This is what the dvd says:

“In 1961, There was a science fiction anthology that aired on Friday Nights right before The Twilight Zone. Way Out was hosted by Roald Dahl and offered bizarre plays with twist endings. Only 14 episodes were broadcast" And THEN: “This dvd features the only 5 episodes known to exist.”

If those are “the only 5 episodes known to exist,” then how does that explain the Paley Center for Media for having them? Perhaps it merely means that those 5 episodes are the only episodes that have been ‘leaked’ onto a particular video format? I cannot think of anything otherwise that would be a rebuttal towards this reasoning, so until I find out differently, I suppose I may have to get this 5-episode dvd anyhow to at least view what I can while the gettin’`s goin’ good.

The supposed “lost episodes” on the dvd are the following:

Death Wish—#9 (aired 6/9/61)
Dissolve To Black—#8 (aired 6/2/61)
I Heard You Calling Me—#5 (aired 5/5/61)
The Croaker—#6 (aired 5/12/61)
William & Mary—#1 (aired 3/31/61)

*

Thomas Carlyle: “See deeply enough, and you see musically.” Or: See deeply enough and you will suddenly obtain X-ray vision.

Thomas De Witt Talmage: “Help me explain a tear. A chemist will tell you that it is made up of salt and lime and other component parts; but he misses the chief ingredients-the acid of a soured life, the viperine sting of a bitter memory, the fragments of a broken heart. I will tell you what a tear is: it is agony in solution.” ‘But I suggest to you that there is more to tears than sadness, sorrow, regret, and pain. Tears can be a release from stress and anxiety, a vent for frustration, a safety valve for overpowering emotions. Tears can be the most sincere expression of compassion and love. And just as raindrops wash the smoke, smog, and impurities from the atmosphere, so tears can wash away the stains of bitterness and disappointment from our souls.’

Name your next male cat, Catullus.

Catullus: “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have made up many thousands, we will confuse our counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor any malicious person blight them with evil eye, when he knows that our kisses are so many.”

Samuel Adams: “A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”

*

Every breath you take is connected to an email account.

The opening of Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” sounds much like Robert Fripp’s “Remorse of Conscience.”—observance #178, or probably not.

When Hector Berlioz learned that his fiance’, Marie-Felicite-Denise Moke, intended to marry another gent, Berlioz planned on surprising her at a party. The idea was to dress up as a nun to get in. A great idea turned sour, however, when he left his disguise in the carriage.

Gave up the ghost’s sleight-of-hand. A convex mirror & eyesight, what of this mystique, this genuine gladness, my two ears confess more than a tongue! A torque. A dialogical indirect idea, as if Thought were three-dimensional. Why does one assume that a particular event is nothing more than a rare coincidence? Some of the best things are broken, battered, a coffin lid, don’t translate with a closed mind. Like greed, accuracy is a presence, mere thoughts. Humanly intimate spaces, an improvisatory necessity, yoked each day together for bulk of roomy accidental motion. Y’know, Facebook is a Tragedy. Emerson said that perception has a destiny. My ‘status’ is never up-to-date. Each second is a sampler, a sudden moment never stripped of emotion like two battering rams’ horns clashing like two angry strangers meeting at a phone booth late one night, impatient & fragile.


The wind is picking up picking
up leaves tossing them
around the thunder is beating
on the sky again
lightning is its theater
the computer hums & hums
like an electric heater

by Gordon Matta-Clark

Confiance (l926) by Marguerite Burnat-Provins

A peculiar set of experiences from 2004 engulfed me. One evening I walked into my uncle’s room and, not long afterwards, noticed that he was wearing a light green handkerchief around his left wrist. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and just thought it was my uncle “just being my uncle,” and so I didn’t ask. However, each time I would visit, he would always have this light green handkerchief around his left wrist, so of course I could not help but to wonder why, and so I asked, “I’ve noticed the handkerchief around your wrist there; what for?" and he responded, “...because my wrist has been talking to me.” I said, “...what does it say?” and he said, “...it just talks to me.” And I said, “Oh, okay. [pause] So, what exactly are some of the things that your wrist tells you?” and he said, “Oh, you know, it just talks to me often, and so I put the handkerchief over it to keep it quiet.” He wore the handkerchief for a few weeks as I recalled, and then one day I noticed that he had taken it off.

Walked this landscape, wondering if it were an old coffee ground, this blues, this jazz, in my ear,—where is the banana peel? Or perhaps this was a nudist camp, or a famous rock ‘n’ boogey jam-blast, fire of pearl bright white guitar, the bandleader was perhaps a woman that tossed trash cans everywhere. Let me speak where I am speaking co-composingly, as if a layer of dew where in my throat, rainstorms are ahead, mutual metric and pallid sky, some days more simple than others—where’s the magician? The only true weapon-of-mass-destruction is hatred; from that one can build into it what one pleases. Delicate ruins, we walked on eggshells, just knowing that this may have been the final time that we saw one another—no need for handshakes and high fives; we’re now wasps on windowpanes, sunshine brass-burn, merging ballad of clear vinyl throat-sweat.

All I want for Christmas is a yellow submarine for two.

This Could Be A Thought or A Story:

Weather channel music, or supercharged background music, reminds me of being in a grocery store and hearing grocery store jazz playing, and that can be a phrase or a term, but the music always tends to excel at making me feel uniquely engaged nearly more-so than a developing crunchy groove with a touch of big beat. Earlier the cat was lying on a pile of dirty clothes in the hallway, the tungsten light spread from the living room grew more bright as I walked towards the living room and entered into the kitchen where water had been strewn on the floor via one of the cats that has a fascination with moving water and so she flicks it out of the water bowl and onto the floor. So long! I think to myself after pouring more water into the bowl. I feel compelled to speak a type of Asian, but I don’t know any of the languages. If you think surrealism is touching over this story, or thought, then this story, or thought, must come to an apparent end very soon. I was excited to begin writing about the misconceptions of self-taught strange people, but these themes brought me towards other flaps in the subject at the front of my lobes. Music isn’t the topic, nor is anything else. Crime is on the rise. I want to stand near a Chartres rose window and plunge deep into thought, or story, of course. Voltaire’s “Candide” raises questions, wounds the mind; I love romantic stories, but this seems to have a monstrous wrath. My ‘wit’ must be lacking, but alas I will not be stripped of dignity. Some things bend out of the way of Touch. I took off my glasses today to specifically touch the thin skin of my eyelids (when closed, light plays on the backs of them). Some people either have ¼ cup of delight or it is completely full. I mowed the lawn today. I wore a surgeon’s mask to keep my nasal passages and esophagus relieved. The last time I mowed this heaping grass, the next-door-neighbor Richard, who has a shiny bald head and a thick grey goatee, was in his front yard smoking a cigarette and looking around at the sky, then back down at the ground, a toke or two, inhale, exhale, and then back up at the trees, then looking over at me, then a quick wave my way while holding his arm in the air as high as it would rise. His other arm was hanging down. I waved back, enjoying this moment of social sustenance.

Like an oater outfoxing a railroad, I’ve outfoxed the frustrated fowler. Sometimes nature's chorus is only that which points to the phenomenon of a voice. I’ve learned, in art, that if it comes to a point where it feels correct, then walk away. Wrote this a few weeks ago, one late night:

I am looking out of a window & tipping the candle sideways. I have examined closely a blue-ring octopus, but tonight is no different than any other night: the moon’s pretty face espionage is a matrix or a perseverance of some irreversible eclipse that I am reporting soul-abroad, & my guardian angel discusses with me the mixed-media of daylight-skies, God’s eternal “premiere” never losing its edge. The sun, tomorrow, will be my rope-and-pulley tendon, a beautiful voice, or perhaps some Indonesian Bamboo Orchestra. I hear a motorcycle engine in the distance, the night’s funeral blues, with vivid eyelids (in my estimation)—the moon, now barely visible. I spin a nest of paper towel shreds around my fingers, this is a similar concept for a flying lotus, except that I stand still like mechanical behemoths. My wings are alive with you. A soft wind, a gradual force from somewhere & whatever was behind me seemed like a mouth. Most people tend to ‘look’ for the best. Well, I ‘expect’ the best. If no one ever comes to understand why I do these things, and if no one comes to want to understand them, then that is perfectly fine, for as long as I am happy, and as long as I am creating art, along with God’s supreme companionship, this is all that I will ever need. Most of the time, certain artists begin to rely on an audience to satisfy their desire for creating their art, versus creating art for their own enjoyment. It is when “status” and “ego” and “selfish desire” gets in the way is when things can go from “fun” to downright “unenjoyable,” for why should we concern ourselves with what others think?

Imagery is never really “complete” after a photograph has been made.

Hiccup at the end of everything, except one thing—

Interviewer: You didn’t go to art school, did you?

Francis Bacon: No, thank God. I would have been taught all of those techniques that I don’t want to know. I want to find my own technique, because if you’re trying to do something that is rather different and new, you can’t use the old techniques which have already been used. You make your own technique.

Interviewer: So, how did you learn? How did you learn to make your own technique doing it?

Francis Bacon: Trial and error. I just, um . . . trying to do it. That’s all.

Yes, that’s all. “Butter me better,” said the bread. What’re people really expecting? The Interviewer perhaps pauses and then says, “Behind the rubble is a loaf of bread pondered by a group of children.” I say, “Mental Titanic.” Eating your thoughts will keep you full. But, only temporary. Do not be deceived, like how Fu Manchu never had a mustache.


Thomas Disch: “Distance seduces the rational mind, just as closeness seduces the irrational.” Or, “...to the whales, with their slow metabolisms, humans appear speeded-up...jerky, spastic, desperately flapping.” (Susanne Antonetta)—Lack of responding to a disaster is reminiscent of a weapon. Kaufmann once said, “Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without reason are mad.”

Many are puffier than Puffendorf, playing Hangman, we’re all hanging in the balance. Something at sea, where the fig bends, meaning Meaning memory, aid, daybreak—real-life beings, begins, spiritual alchemy. O my, I sipped the last swig of coffee, granules at the bottom, I had them between my teeth. Gnats sting the tongue when bitten into (accidentally, of course—they can enter the mouth when running); tongue-spark soars air of plane descended behind me (a memory) as I shot hoops in my neighborhood as a teenager, in retrospect, possible autobiographical criteria. Retina. Needed a place to hide. Nothing was so quiet, youth of the ageless ones, now my bearded face itches & the wind blows wilder than before & the window seems to have a heartbeat. I learned today that stars are considered angels in symbolism, today I dissolved where memory left off, leaping over my own initials. My heart is in this, like an ornament that hangs on a tree where you look at yourself, using it as a mirror, hovering in that space, it speaks clearly, like a deep-seeded vowel with an attosecond, to collect pictures and cry, the energy in a tear can smear even the most Solitaire like the interior of an abandoned castle.

This is all “spoken word” without the “movement”—what a photograph is. Just keep your ears open.

*

There is nothing more vicious than the commonly expressed desire of parents in merely moderate circumstances to give their children what are ordinarily spoken of as “opportunities.” “We wish our daughters to have every opportunity—the best opportunities,” they say, meaning an equal chance with richer girls of qualifying themselves for attracting wealthy men and of placing themselves in their way. In reality opportunities for what?—of being utterly miserable for the rest of their lives unless they marry out of their own class.—Arthur Train (from “The Goldfish”)

*

Closeness of anonymity, being recognized as if from passages of Ovid. Sit down with me, in-between this theatre, let’s distance ourselves like pyramids, let us remind ourselves who we are, who we are not, what we will become—the spinner & the web. I am a generous shift in the mapping of forests. The first volume of my rhetoric offers no sounds but travels through the physical phrase of meter, rhythm, rhyme, or answering &/or erasing falsitruths (a ‘sic’ in every narrative). Take care of yourself, dear poet, they are calling poetry a science with buckled knees, we swing our swords like musketeers. My diary is breathing its last word. In a nutshell, I am lifted by absence. Word-trafficking for a new vocal dictionary where language is pre-ordered before history is history. Is not. Beaches erode. Before we speak again, we must negotiate a plan, eggroll-wrapped, tasty but perhaps with a drawn-out rant, a “bumping” speaker, a Rapidshare. I enter out of the entrance into the night where feminism is everywhere. I have mistaken my hands for Memory. You’re right behind my eyelids when I close them, electrifyingly.

Ah, touché, touché, touché.

Chaïm Soutine, l918 Self-Portrait

Reflections & Riffs

Portrait of Modest Mussorgsky, by Ilya Repin
(painted in the hospital from March 2–5, 1881,
only a few days before the composer’s death)

“Moment by moment things arise and pass away. Moment by moment we encounter what is not self.”

Every ‘tale’ has a remarkable forecast—natural reactions of wonder. Mathematical thickness of some instantaneous trickery and we’re often back to square one, we silly quacks! I draw a breath from misty mornings, gaining velocities are the splendid sighs of nature’s first light—to all, perhaps? yes, o yes, we but shiver and fall away, like some brilliant arch of continuous unmoving. But “life goes on” and every vapor in the wind merges into resolved conversational endings. In this life, everything ends, except for God. On the heels of this verse comes yet another thought: How to convey images between the mental and the physical. An example of this may be thought of as the words on the pages inside of books as hollow piping, where thought had once existed. Words merely acting as decor. That would be the Physical. The Mental is the subterranean—a reflection of self, or experience, like the reflective eyes of nocturnal creatures.

“I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer....this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts.” (Laughlin, The Personal Eye 14)


My perception of the world, like an orb, exists within the Theatre of The Sensational Visual Transmitter. Bending paths of lightning on Circumference’s infinity. O, speak to me through this thunderstorm, react with the lightning; I am mounted on your deck, I will confirm your words through the thunder.


Wallace Stevens: “...gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch.”


Opening my e-‘male’ every morning as I wake, often tossing myself into a Ring a Ring o’ Roses. “For a limited time only.” My balance is fattened with the agenda of an architect. I need a storage case for multiple explanations. Seeing the light of my face in your face’s light; the oscillation between song, between the mind, the way it hesitates. One moment I am editing pictures, and then the next moment I am looking out of the window, remembering the bird that landed on the window after all of that silence, and was chirping at a high pitch; a naturely flute--clung to this wowscape, scrape me out of these walls, paint me into the song of the bird. Moment succeeds moment and each is complete in itself. Valéry: “Animals, who do nothing uselessly, refuse to comtemplate death.” Perfect.

Speaking of animals. One must consider the “strange company” of the eccentric Lord Bridgewater (known as Francis Egerton), who astonished Paris by giving dinner parties for dogs—the dogs were the guests, dressed as men and women. He was a supporter of natural theology. The French were not surprised by any means that the milord living in Paris was unusually fond of animals, as they, somehow, expected such bizarre conduct of an Englishman. However, they raised their eyebrows quite frequently in the case of Mr. Egerton when they heard that he gave dinner parties for dogs dressed in the height of fashion, even down to fancy miniature shoes! Strangely, Mr. Egerton kept partridges and pigeons with clipped wings in his garden to shoot because of his failing eyesight. Strangely, this odd nobleman was an extremely learned scholar (gotta love the self-education!—Ray Bradbury: “I never went to college. I went to the library”), a connoisseur and patron of the arts, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He was the donor of the important Egerton Manuscripts to the British Museum. However, this was the eccentric who wore each pair of his shoes only once and then had them arranged in rows so that he could measure the passing of time. And to return a book he had borrowed, he would send a sumptuous carriage attended by four liveried footmen. He never married, and with his death in 1829, the title became extinct.

Francis Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater

-

Renoir and Mallarmé

At what point would dialogue with a particular person feel like sharp grammatical errors? And typically “error” is often equated with philosophical disquisition, but few monsters know of this. Take Stan Brakhage: “Primarily I write to exhaust language on a given subject, to drive the mind beyond words, so that I can begin, and begin again and again where words-leave-off, veer their references into vision, each verbal connective synapse, to effect that my mind’s eye have full sway so that I can commence my work . . . (also, Theodor Adorno: “What changes in people, what becomes alien to the point of unrecognizability and returns as in a musical repeat, are the images into which we transpose them. Proust knows that there are no human beings in themselves beyond this world of images; that the individual is an abstraction...”). Growing up as a relatively isolated child, I was immersed in films a lot (as well as being made-up as early as 8 years old [not much has changed]), which I think has something to do with my “style”; I feel emotionally unsettled by many things. Once you find out ‘who you are’ as a photographer, stay with it. But, never limit yourself. Anti-art wasn’t, and isn’t, Dadaism, of course not, because true Anti-art is limiting oneself.

Overall, the ego devours itself. The body attached to this ego is cut off, like an umbilical cord, and disregarded. (thirudan pidipattavudan thiru thiru ena muzithaan — “This sentence describes how a thief, when caught, would look and express his mood in his eyes.”)


from Maurice Blanchot: the refusal of philosophy By Gerald L. Bruns:

Imagine language not as a system for framing representations, nor as a native tongue, nor the expressiveness of a spirit--possibly it not even a vocabulary of any sort but is only something disclosed in writing: for example, the alphabet, but also the page on which letters appear. These letters of the alphabet are foundational: Mallarmé thinks of them as the origin of language. Language at all events is in some sense internal to the space of writing itself.

What appears on the page is not something that was merely invisible otherwise and is now suddenly summoned to show itself; that is, there is no sense to be made of a language existing independently of the alphabet. In fact, concepts of the visible and the invisible have only an uncertain application here, where writing is external to phenomena. In a certain sense writing is outside the whole idea of something appearing. Writing is incommensurable with revelation of any sort; writing is on the side of disappearance. This is, so to speak, Mallarmé’s Copernican revolution.

Mallarmé introduces the concept of ecriture into poetics, without however making l’ecriture the term of art it will later become. Poetry is the site or space of ecriture, where ecriture is more event than mark. It is the blank page on which nothing is to be seen, the white space that occurs as such in the appearance of letters. Poetry is made of letters, but only in virtue of the spaces between or around them. Mallarmé came to think of poetry as typographical composition, a total book, a book which is not anything except itself: paper, ink, leaves folded and bound together, letters of the alphabet sounding and resounding musically or of themselves according to every possible combination and permutation of relations. The space of poetry is outside anything we would recognize as semantic space. It is not so much a space that contains as one that disperses, the way Un coup de des disperses its letters. It is surface rather than volume. This does not mean that poetry is meaningless, only that meaning, for example naming something, is no longer anything productive.

*

Lawrence Durrell: “If you write bad French you end up with bad French. Whereas in English you can make any number of grammatical errors and still retain control, so that mistakes (whether or not they are deliberate) turn into gems. Take Conrad: his mistakes had such a beauty about them that the English ended by imitating them. A French poet needs a lot more temerity before he sets about destroying the grammar. When Rimbaud writes ‘Je est un autre’ he is deliberately attempting to break down logical structure; as a result he is thought of as a phenomenon.”

*

This ditty, written months ago: It is open sesame season in my heart. What lures these bobbers from my inward nexus, solar plexus plucked out, the weight of concrete, root canal of utter unintuition? What of this harrowing shriek that flourishes? My heart wearing its soldier’s garb moves forth with boldness, though plops into the mud & listens to bullets that do not pardon with wholly unprecedented interruption, that of which averts so awful a catastrophe. But at a juncture like the present, how can I not find ludicrous the actions of which give me the knee? I have been swept off of my speech, listening in monochrome, thinking in golden locks. Our fairytale began with pressure to the coal of initiation; a diamond had appeared, eyes as wide as Czech factory workers. There were instances where I could have slept inside of your touch, a snore beneath the forefinger, my neck on the car seat, half asleep, but you were asleep all along even when awake. I knew not of these abcesses within your mind. Nothing startles my bones any longer, green-brown weepy tendrils curling & creeping. Upmost-pouting dimples the cheeks, beaver beaks & cleats of athletes. How do you feel, dear reader; is this nothing more than a bore to the pores of your flesh or your freshly-worn iris (inside of you, a storm)? An Understudy turned potential Poem? Strange how one loses love, or perhaps never had love from the start. I dive into an unclear pool. I rise up above the waters, flying out as a dove that prowls the imperative air of tomorrow. I have made room for the undertow. Perhaps I could have delicately touched your cuticles & begged you to remain as my dear friend? Incomprehensible hoedowns, meltdowns, a tear slowed down before touching cheeks. So long, all of our sheer glances. So long, so long, so long.

per japs a pan

::

Iceħand

::

m or ph e us

::

computer monitaur

::

o RANGE


Gettin’ all vishhhual.


Pynchon: “when the recurrent momentum of things / completes itself nothing has an ending”

Sunset-snuffe’d in a swooping dash. Day-by-day, night-by-night, the “green earthen pots” of the open-breasted sky is a highway towards new plants, vines, dew-filled fillings. I am compounded, but for what? God is always near; inside, inside, inside of me; ‘God-shaped’ spot within me, filled, filled, filled. The future, in arrear; a contrast of the unshapable thought. Don’t sleep on your organs. Don’t leave your organs sitting in the hallway later. Nevermind urgency, uninterrupted configurative affectionate confection. Tonight I realized that the white beard of Ed Baker looks much better than Santa’s ever will; modern-day Tolstoy. We’re all walking around as one enormous data-thing for a Data-based world that is bent on data’ing us (“dating”) ‘til we are controlled completely, and definite indications are “in store” as we speak. A ‘Global Bank Tax’ in 2011? Looking more and more likely, sending us towards a one-world political/economical government. The Bible predicted that this would occur 2,000 years ago, and lookie, lookie!

from The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature by Wyndham Lewis:

Miss Stein announces her time-doctrine in character, as it were. She gives you an ‘explanation,’ and illustrations, side by side; but the explanation is done in the same way as the examples that follow it. A further ‘explanation’ would be required of the ‘explanation,’ and so on. And in that little, perhaps unregarded, fact, we have, I believe, one of the clues to this writer’s mind. It tells us that her mind is a sham, to some extent.

In doing her explanation of her compositions in the same manner as her compositions (examples of which she gives), she is definitely making-believe that it is impossible for her to write in any other way. She is making a claim, in fact, that suggest a lack of candour on her part; and she is making it with an air of exaggerated candour. Supposing that the following line represented a
typical composition of yours :—

FugfuggFFF-fewg:fugfug-Fug-fugue-ffffffuuuuuuG

Supposing, having become celebrated for that, you responded to a desire on the part of the public to know what you were driving at. Then the public would be justified in estimating your sincerity of a higher order if you sat down and tried to ‘explain’ according to the canons of plain speech (no doubt employed by you in ordering your dinner, or telling the neighbouring newsagent to send you the Herald, Tribune, or Daily Express every morning), your verbal experiments, than if you affected to be unable to use that kind of speech at all.

We must all have a narrator, no? The shrubs illuminate the actions which take place in the garden. Mirroring ones soul. More ammo than Rambo. Figures, we are, figured, it figures, combined like sand, combined to fabricate glass, combined to distort categorical commonplace. I stand before you, as uncommon as senses, my nose itches, I am unstable like a somnambulist who is uninterruptible beyond report, a treatise, a prospectus for the imbecile that perhaps unspools himself from struggling to assume the worst. Combinatory figures, gap-mouth’d—pleasure & relict, the gainly italic. A complete Nothing is always in motion. An arched orchard within.

“What had my face to offer / but reflexes of earth . . .” is, I believe, what Hilda Dolittle once wrote, but I could be mistaken.

Overheard: “Hey, is that beard your first?”

The other night, my uncle said: “You know ... if I were to flip my heel upside-down and sit it on top of my head, I would look like Frankenstein, because it’s rather flat.” Later, while taking photographs of himself with a cell phone (while still on the phone with me, of course), he said: “...all I need is a mirror ... but perhaps that'll change my mind about photographing myself.”

I always think of ‘x’ as an attachment to outer space. No other letter comes close to making me feel this way. Odd obstructions of immovability—it’s like having a gravity deficiency. Perhaps I just need to be launched through space to obtain a lighter “structure”? Chasing disappearance; moving to the right of the room when the room is to your left. Like Maurice Blanchot: “Keep watch over absent meaning” . . . just like that.

It is almost as if Picasso created peacocks. I’ve said this before, in a poem. It’s worth repeating, worth rementioning, worth re-re-re-everything’ing. Like Wittgenstein: “When one does not force oneself to express the inexpressible, nothing is lost and the inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in that which is expressed.”

There is the Poe-esque notion that if you have the right theory, then the masterpieces will appear automatically. The theoretical body, a mixture of postmodern fantasies, canceling the strange symmetries or form & destiny are shown the atrocity of violation & the grotesque. While observations tend to replace schemata interpretations, less has been said about erotic acts inside the body (mind). God cannot be “tamed” no more than a natural metamorphosis. All text functions as a schematized replica of emancipatory gesture. Robotomies. Perhaps there’s wedding rice still stuck in certain people’s ears after all these years.

Imagine every photograph morphing into zombies and eating as many cameras as possible.

My throat is like a vocabulary airport: words going to and fro.

Adolph Loos by Oskar Kokoschka

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

Tossed Amongst Branchless Trees:

Beckmann, Self-portrait with red scarf, 1917

Errorists join me! We will start “Mal-Quota”—an organization for error extremists. Eclectic eccentrics, I think of small-town peoples. From The eclectic magazine of foreign literature, science, and art, Volume 33 by Harry Houdini Collection (Library of Congress), John Davis Batch: “Oh wavering and new-fangled multitude!” he continues. “Is it not a wonder to consider the inconstant mutability of this uncertain worH! The common people always desiring alterations and novelties of things for the strangeness of the case; which often turneth them to small profit and commodity . . . What hath succeeded all wise men doth know, and the common sort of them hath felt. Therefore, to grudge or wonder at it surely were but fohy; to study a redress, I see noi how it can be holpen, for the inclination and natural disposition of Englishmen is and hath always been to desire alteration of officers.” Then, “How perennial is the English character!”

Music eats. Music eats me. I have been eaten by music. Erik Satie must’ve sat a lot; Phil Jackson sitting on a “rising chair” on the sidelines—this type of sitting? In Satie’s Memoirs of An Amnesiac, he explains, in strange detail, his “working habits” (jeu d’esprit) titled, THE MUSICIAN’S DAY:

“An artist must organize his life. / Here is the exact timetable of my daily activities: / Get up: 7:18 A.M.; be inspired 10:23 to 11:47 A.M. I take / lunch at 12:11 P.M. and / leave the table at 12:14 P.M. / Healthy horse-riding, out in the grounds: 1:19 to 2:53 P.M. / More inspiration: 3:12 to 4:07 P.M. / Various activities (fencing, reflection, / immobility, visits, / contemplation, swimming, etc. . . .) 4:21 to 6:47 P.M. / Dinner is served at 7:16 and ends at 7:20 P.M. Then comes / symphonic readings, out loud: 8:09 to 9:59 P.M. / I go to bed regularly at 10:37 P.M. Once a week (on Tues- / days) I wake up with a start at 3:19 A.M. / I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, scraped bones; fat / from dead animals; veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in / white water; fruit mold, rice, turnips; camphorated black / puddings, things like pasta, cheese (white), cotton salad / and certain fish (without skins). / I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with fuchsia juice. / I have a good appetite, but never talk while eating, for fear / of strangling myself. / I breathe carefully (a little at a time). I very rarely dance. / When I walk, I hold my sides and look rigidly behind me. / Serious in appearance, if I laugh it is not on purpose. I / always apologize it nicely. / My sleep is / deep, but I keep one eye open. My bed is / round, with a hole cut out to let my head through. Once / every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another. / I have long subscribed to a fashion magazine. I wear a / white bonnet, white stockings and white waistcoat. / My doctor has always told me to smoke. Part of his advice / runs: ‘Smoke away, my dear chap. If you don’t someone / else will.’”

All of this coming from the great minimalist. Minimalism, like Beauty, is only “skin deep.”

Relying on government is like relying on technology. Dishonest computers & ill-filled oil spills, wizened, wiseless & blown to wherewithal. I find more reliability in a sewing machine, the bubblegum that I pop that echoes stickily in a hallway, a spiral-bound notebook full of scribbles, a fading flashlight, a split rubberband, John Lee Hooker's post-war blues, &c.

The Whole comes apart in a possible progress. I want to dine in due time without thinking of eating rhymes as a food source for good times, in the meantime, Sviatoslav Richter plays the piano, sounding so fine. Don DeLillo: “My voice isn’t part of my body. It’s what comes out of my body when I speak. It’s the air which by some miracle we are able to shape into the sounds we wish to make.” Just like that.

—

I would have probably laughed at Mahler had he screamed at me like he would his musicians. I would’ve kept playing the tune; he would’ve needed me, he would have missed me had he kicked me out of the symphony.

I’m a comma that is hooked next to your imposing punctuation. My vowels hide behind tonsil towels, like bowels hiding behind hours.

—

From The Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fmvell Buxton:

“One of my neighbours is a very ill-tempered man; he tries to vex me, and has built a great place for swine close to my walk. So, when I go out, I hear, first grunt, grunt, squeak, squeak; but this does me no harm. I am always in good humour. Sometimes to amuse myself I give a beggar a guinea. He thinks it is a mistake, and for fear I should find it out, off he runs as hard as he can. I advise you to give a beggar a guinea sometimes, it is very amusing. The daughters are very pleasing. The second son is a mighty hunter, and his father lets him buy any horses he likes. He lately applied to the Emperor of Morocco for a first-rate Arab horse. The Emperor sent him a magnificent one; but he died as he landed in England. The poor youth said very feelingly, that was the greatest misfortune he ever had suffered; and I felt strong sympathy with him. I forgot to say, that soon after Mr. Rothschild came to England, Bonaparte invaded Germany. ‘The Prince of Hesse Cassel,’ said Rothschild, ‘gave my father his money; there was no time to be lost; he sent it to me. I had 600,000/. arrive unexpectedly by the post; and I put it to such good use, that the Prince made me a present of all his wine and his linen.’”

Such texts, whoa’d and slow’d down. “Sl-sl-slow down!” Certain texts make me feel coo-coo-cuckoo'd by the companion of fretting. My throat had a miscarriage! Words are stuck! My tongue has steeped, apparently kneaded like claygunk. Recently, I wrote a poem titled, “Love Stakes Me”:

Within the shadows of my mind, there,
with marching feet & chanting rhyme,
are the long-legged haunts of Loves fled
in extraordinary melodies of time, an air

unfastened by memory’s reeling—drenched
& restless like noisy quarrels clenched.
I pause, unlike hours, flattering love’s despair
with a grateful heart; my mind’s vocalist defined.

Influenced by W.B. Yeats, I wrote this in solitude while (I think) eating sandwiches. Also, at the same time (not influenced by Yeats), I overly-pondered:

I sit here
& ponder

a better poem,
a better

dream for a better
poem.

The ants that are
crawling

upon the white wall
in front of me

near the hole
in the wall

near the door
knob’s lock;

They are the poem;
this poem.

This-this-this is not
a poem.

I thought: “axed you a question while I waxed poetic sessions, no answers and no confessions.” Hmm, why am I starving? “I just ate.” The other day, a seventy-five year old man spoke to me of what they called he sd The Old Army. He was a partaker of it. He sd that back then they could kick you In the g. maximus & get away with it. Back then they owned you completely. I thought later that it was perhaps like a shadow following the body & now the times have changed. Times are changing like posters on walls. Idols & icons torn away. Replaced with newer ones before & after the quinceaños. Smoking-gun evidence. Military-disarray & fruit punch laws. Thus the body at this point leaving its shadow behind or it is the shadow leaving its body behind? Either way it springs for safety & drips like oil, like secrets unfolding in a diary entry & then there was a conversation of a conversation about anger: He sd, What is the point of getting angry? Getting mad is much worse than the problem.

Lately, I have felt shifted away from all humanity. The sounds of my Arctic, a silent monster, a roaming of unity, an attraction of latitude, perhaps. I have to experience the excitement of a dynamic landscape: the flora, the fauna, the heart and what is not there; a Plato ratio.

Brunelleschi would have awe’d over the architectural domes in my heart.

The camera continues to try and maintain supremacy. I cut it off worse than a one-liner or a two-timer. Constabel: “I always sit till I see some living thing; because if such appears, it is sure to be appropriate to the place.” Inappropriateness would have certainly been to merely shut one’s eyes and imagine living things? The sense in this? Nearly absurd. Beautifully. It could be like a “folk saying.”


؟؟؟؟؟

Adamitically Frumpled.

The photographer Walker Evans, in a 1974 Polaroid portrait shot by John Benson

Stanzes/Stances

Head of Dr. Bauer (Kopf Dr. Bauer) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Hieronymus sd that the face is the mirror of the mind, and the eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. “Whenever we see someone we like, our pupils grow larger. It is almost as if our eyes are trying to see as much of this person as possible. This is an involuntary and uncontrollable physiological response.” My tongue is an Aesop fable. Life, to some, is deemed Shack. My life gives the whole expanse under heaven. We all appear in orange vests. We prevent anything from becoming a scene. A clepsydra ticks in my ear after taking a shower. As a hint, I drown backwardness into full growth like an object that is cast in plaster. The “forward march” of the ground is created like an armature that was not intended for arms. Michael McClure’s answer to the question, “What is the role of the poet in our society?”: “The same as any other artist – to maintain the thoroughfares, to maintain the pathways of the imagination in a society that would close down the pathways of the imagination. We all find social functions, also. We’ll be environmentally inclined, or biologically inclined, or socially committed. But what we do as artists is to maintain free pathways for the imagination.”Worth to note, too, is Paul Merchant: “Poetry gives most pleasure / when only generally / & not perfectly understood.” I should also say, who needs a Poetic License? just take all documents to your local meat grinder and nibble nicely on your money where the Latin texts are and dip your feet where the shark-fin rubs beneath your soles. Lay the foundation so that the eye can sustain the error and paralyze the air, like to fillet today or to mar tomorrow.

I study hands in paintings and watch film after film. I shake in a muted lovejoy picking out the flutters from my heart, releasing them as dovesongs, plough-soils of the soul, watching them as they return again like boomerangs, diving back into the familiar pooling air of my symphonic chest. Earlier, I observed the front part of the ant’s body that was stuck in a small sticky liquid. It tugged and tugged, pulled and pulled; attempting to escape the trap. It was unsuccessful. Eventually the ant pulled itself apart, completely in half, the lower-half of the body, lethargic; the upper-half still moving. I softly blowed on it, sadly, and the antennas moved wildly.

One lives in such an environment, perhaps in the modern world versus the classical traditions of the past, where we do not let the right lobe of the brain know what the left lobe thinketh. The truth is, Americans are terrified. Terrified on the inside, being that we are more afraid of ourselves than ever before. The galloping corruption produced by a meaningless routine of production, distribution, and consumption, as well as governmental crackdowns and finger-wagging has all but become the overall perspective, but it looks as though the wheel has begun to shift ever so slightly. Earlier: Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, sonnets and sunsets . . . re-arranged certain words in Shakespeare's Sonnet 33 to make it this: Full glorious morning with patient eye, kissing with heavenly alchemy of celestial face.

Where is the snowfall, like an important guest that never arrives. We are horse, we are animal, we are simple yet our words have physiological effects when the tongue taps into language, buries itself deep into bodies, the way a small child could be anywhere, the way dry balconies crumble unexpectedly, and I contemplate where you go when you cry, and I contemplate everything like why titles were given to seas and oceans. Love must be filled slowly over time, and not like the steadfast-flutterings of a bird, or fancying one’s limbs of Greek dances in a drunken pub full of chimps that feel that they have the answer to every question. Coadjutoring mouths, encounters with time like weathered barns, the way fireflies rise from the thick grass. We are all sparks upon yearly-stints, or stilts, as if it is a farce to have pre-registered bodies, the way attention is given to spaces between legs; the lack of moral gifting. Hold back the wall, reprint my utterance, summery-steam rising from roads, that kind of utterance, faint whiff of breathable words, everyone within their nests, this is life, stabilized through meditation, flappable herrings in the river, the echoing of psychedelia. I am a needy bird. Is this a proper feeling? Your tiny legs, the spurs in your throat make my bones feel perplexed--muscles attached boil like soapsuds. Your language has me “free falling.” I peer out into the world, everyone scrambling as if this were the French Revolution, as if Hitler had been spotted, found, was still alive at 110 years old, his fingers rotting, but his eyes still fiery, his throat clucking like a wild rooster, and the spot where his moustache once was, now hollowed out. I am steaming like a boat on your river. Putting aside these thoughts would be like being surrounding by Nothingness, existing in private hands. Club soda and fine fabrics. Leave birthdays alone. Overlap me with hearty tracing.

*

June Wayne (once known as the “Joan of Art”) says that “artists make art and women make babies, but the use of the word CREATE to describe both processes is confusing.”

*

Rumi: “We are out of our cages with our wings spread, yet we do not lift off.” I just glided back to earth and proved this quote wrong.


Supine Spine.

A kind of bomb diggidy.


If “death’s shadow is white,” what is darker than that?

*

Kurt Schwitters: “A door may happen to fall shut, but this is not by chance. It is a conscious experience of the door, the door, the door, the door.”

*

Jabès: “To fall silent in turn, with the / hope of dissolving in to it.”

*

I remember the way the curtains fell on your arm, the way a sugar cube could have been spoiled in a cloud of water. The cup is empty now. You snapped it like a Snapple, a snapping turtle. You drank it wildly as if needing stamina to remain.

I live temperately in the meagre parse of a back and forth elsewhere. Ah, we twentieth century children, the New Futurists, nevermind the robots. I just want to make Nothing light up my cauldron, or the piano through which complexity develops its tired codes of musical heartbeats in the gassed or glassy chest. This is a self-interview. No poem ever totalizes what I want to express. Tiresomeness, this is poetry, reductions & counter-critical inward-dissipances that whiffs at every blazing fastball, sounds like a cobbled-togetherness of generous lips; bypassed, not seen at all. Now that my Language is abstract, must I write memoirs at such a youthful age? Buzz-kill analysis & observation, as if I need sheer longevity to secure wisdom. What is spookier than writers, than sharpening a pencil, than the way one's adam's apple looks when one is humming a beat. If only this beard could bend. My head often swims in a kind of silver perch; my nostrils stroke my breath like impatience at a traffic light. My mind plays back every detail of every second of my existence, often simultaneously; makes my face itch.

Hocus focus. Foxus on e`ry word, blank and you well misc it. The way I miss my head in the morning when I do not look in the mirror. I only brush my teeth with light these days, your light, the corridors of youth. Who has conceived the ingenious idea of calling here from Florida, California, Connecticut and Los Angeles? Even the wind must find a way to reconnect with itself after the birds have pushed it astray. Birds text one another from nests in trees; their song is vibrant, more brilliant than ours. I walk outside with you in thought, where I hold you in my mind, where you follow me wherever I go, where I repeat your name, our conversations. It is the way certain plants make you chirp certain words. Your face is in my horizon. There is a building off in the distance, a red flag waves in the wind. Your face is a blue sea upon my mountainous land. I see you in the tiny white waves that foam. Your face is in the green lawn, an energetic fawn. Your face is in the maps of the world, in the veins of every field and yet am I merely a fantasy walking robotically amidst your expanding mind? The light on walls in ethereal stripes tries my patience. The way things look in dreams.

*

Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, 1817): “genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement.”

*

E. Pound: “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things . . .”

*

What are people willing to do that is out of their Comfort Zone? Surveillance of the heart, always: there must always be a form of control. Interruption is needed to take photographs. A polyrythmic pamphlet, a pedigree of combos. Do not ever force yourself into apprehension and regret over simplicity and force of diction. Turn your whole subsequent existence into a vast tangled harvest of Imbalanced Consideration where theory, terminology, inclusions, aversions and illusions and nonsense and portability of resistance and detail (inobscure or not) are accurately furnished. Do not do these things merely to receive feedback, however, but more-so in being able to specify the unspecifiable; to be able to stick the straw into the supervisional mind to detect Rarified mentalities of calculations, thoughts, ponderances, where elliptical (illusional, perhaps: detailed or undetailed) meaninglessness (if you can focus on it) becomes an alteration of the senses. Allow energy to be transferred via reception of the new self-portrait. Instinct plays a role in animal life, yet has a penchant for abstraction within humanity. If it can be grasped, does that mean it is false? If what cannot be false is permanently real, being that it remains sustained in thought, is there an abyss where truth gives way to void? Where is the escape hatch? A burden in the accidental womb that feeds the unintentional fetus? This presentation is not for comparing male and female, nor is this a presentation at all. I simply value communication with myself. The Why of a writing session is sometimes obscure to itself.

Just say whatever needs to be said.

‘q’ <— a letter with horns.

Margarita Bofiliou, Mixed Technique

THINK of the ending FIRST

The Poet Max Herrmann by George Grosz

I always think of the ending first, and then the beginning last; a gap in the tooth Of. After a while, thought becomes like star-fossils. The Talmud: “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.” I have learned not to alienate myself from learning, because the exclusions of the precisions of Interest is a downfall, particularly when one ponders a type of false, complex “fate” that is within disassociation. Everything is as distinct as some historic diary.

Thought goes through the skull; the ears tingle. Foucault: “People know what they do, most people even know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what they do does.” With the admission of an unfriendly United States, the rights of the rebels are apparently to aid the pirates on every sea. Distance and time appear to have eyes that are inexpressibly horrible. Conspicuous amongst a glossy radiance, the worst advantage is the thriving, stirring, energetic body that pretends to run errands for “the better of our nation.” The power of charm, the power of foolery, stations itself.

—

Trochilick motions. The way a bird flies by the window, seeing it with the peripheral.

—

As for Word against Desire? My soul touches upon nerves and I am inward at present as much as my life draws a curtain across from it, as fast as principal points that come to pass, that are for the every day of which to be trusted. Every day to have what is most astonishing, a subject in the world so eloquent, to sharpen misery in this life can be avoided; to remind you of specimens, of singularity, of the light that other previous opinions said as much that was odd and childish, but a notion to spring out of the way of thinking in which one will see nothing that one has not placed, or weighed, in ones own light. The exact invisible friction from balance will have gravitation like a stranger’s nose with equal confidence in all places concerning it. Now to add: if any thing differed from description, this is the perfect beauty; sweet air of the heavens!—what splendid vibrations in regions of the heart! The brain being little more than a whisper, like looking into pupils, to come to immediate contact, to be quieted more suddenly.

Observed: A woman wearing a pink hoodie walks a brown dog around the neighborhood. An elderly man gets out of a silver car that had parked down the street, closing the door slowly, his hand staying in the same position for a few moments without moving a blazing muscle as if listening intently, or thinking about the times when his girly-girl girlfriend would blow sweet everything's to him from out of the reflecting window. Where is she now. I think of the joists in his frail joints, time not giving a diddly-squat as he walked up the green hill with a woman that was wearing purple pants reminding me of manzanita trees.

Hatred shrinks everything. Or blows it up to the size of a pinhole, that enormously-tiny. The heart, when aching, turns flips in the chest, the stomach reacts by mimicking; the mind tries to comprehend the visual of these movements but there are no visuals nor words available for such emotions.

Came across this wondrous poem by Mazen Kerbaj, titled, DON’T FEED THE ARTIST:

What is an artist’s status in society? Is he a half-god, a parasite, an
exhibitionist or a circus freak?

What kind of relation does he have to his viewers and non-viewers?
Do his pictures need to be seen for them to exist?

Is creating a work of art like a boxing fight? Who emerges the winner? Who
is the judge? What is the ring?

At an exhibition, is it the artist or the work of art exhibiting
himself/herself/itself the most? To whom are they exhibiting themselves?
When and where does an exhibition begin? And when does it end?

Far from answering such questions, Mazen Kerbaj tries at least to ask them.
For ten days he will shut himself inside a glass cage (exhibiting himself)
to work. As soon as any picture is finished, it will be hung on the walls of
the cage, allowing the viewers to follow step-by-step the evolution of the
exhibit.
On the final evening (during the preview/taking down) the exhibition can
finally begin, and finish.

—

Susan Christie sung something like, “His life’s like cotton-candy and an illusion not much there.” Paraphrasing the paraphrasables. The color chocolate enhances concentration. History is more than a “record.” Is History behind itself?

As if saying “if you know what I mean” changes the entire meaning of a sentence.

I love to look at young people and imagine how they will look when they are old.

—

Law streams out to strive for steadiness, we touch it without temperature in the body. 98.6 degrees, like a corresponding instrument of the soul. Why do my wings tuck themselves out of view? What is outside of How? Do not move! You are being watched! You will be on CNN. You will be a flare from a bomb. You will be universally-driven to a Brand New Fundamental Tomorrow. Today is clicking itself away, like the scratching-sound on the window late at night; you grab the gun, you wait, you observe more than waiting.

When I Think, it is like parrot-chatter. I enter from the side of a building which is really the front. Looks are deceiving. I am smothered in your Llanguage, your Lloveliness, propelled and inflated like a triumphant hippo, starry old skies always remain, clawed out the black of the sky, left it flashing with bright white, like the power of childhood, and then childhood, like a bolt, dissolves into another universe, seemingly reinforced by the other universes surrounding us. Life, shadowed by memory, the terrain of, indeed, the multiplied cosmos.

Should I encounter a house to adopt or to adapt, to resemble or to collect the seeds of the scene and scatter them into The Now? Chicken-clawed out of everything, raised my hand, you slap at it. Operate into me, drift into me like a fog, between our words which are femtoseconds apart rather than attoseconds. It’s not a language we speak when we speak.

The sleeping giant sleeps merely to dream of being as basic as Matter. Who were the sleeping giant’s parents? He may never know the answer to that question, or it is a secret; but no secret to me, because I know, but I will never tell. No matter what you think of or what answer you expel, it will be incorrect, incorrect, incorrect. Errorerrorerror. Wider than pupils, bright in Bright.

—

The “tide” of The Beach Boys is being calmed by Michael Jackson's “moon” walking. Was.

—

Goethe: “Unless the eye contained the substance of the sun how could we ever look on the light?”

—

Wordsworth: “. . .In my thoughts, There was a darkness, call it solitude / Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes / Of hourly objects, images of trees; / Of sea or sky, no colours of green field; / But huge and mighty Forms.”

—

Often times certain art burns me up worse than a pyrotechnician’s miscue. A possible tornado came through during my early childhood; the way I held the guitar, what snatched me away from history? I became an alien to this world, collecting strange devices out of pure curiosity, I was phenomenally distracted, immersed in unclear boundaries, floating in ambiguous space with incomprehensible questions tugging at my throat. I typically answer myself with a soft, whispering voice and often the words are unknown, partially inaudible like dream-speech. Abstract words are stunningly truthful and they make me sleepy.

Dreams dripping from my ears. I don not find great moods, they find me, and then I examine their possibilities and bend them into my own reality. Who is tracking our Internet activities? The poet and the poet’s poet’s friend’s dog. Ginsberg once remarked that there is no Beat Generation, that it was all a journalistic hex.

Whatever it takes to levitate. I won the coin toss, but you can go first.

I am too Numerical for a Tongue.

The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg (1839): [From Here: “Spitzweg depicts a writer living out the familiar image of the starving artist in wretched conditions in a small room in an attic. The painting contains many significant images. The poet writes while huddling under his bedcovers and wearing a tattered coat and nightcap. The writer has been burning some of his own work – most likely volumes I and II since volumes III and IV remain in bundles on the floor. The fire in the room has obviously gone out since the poet rests his hat on the cold stovepipe and no live coals are visible in the stove. Indeed this cold stove is the darkest part of the picture and symbolizes the writer’s sorry state of affairs.”]