Am I able to say I would like to carry you to that
oblique lake overseas, where we can still imagine
“the early 19th Century twilight,” and from the
trestle see how a self-determining logic in the

form of rationally organized matter—the luster of
metal, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun,
a smile—becomes conscious, self-conscious, through us;
a freedom emptied out into that time we were

rambling to and fro like the rivers, and the dust
blanketed inscriptions on pulp condoned from trees
planted with the depths and heights of the human
heart as such? Yet how can we picture abstractions

that we can not live in alone, but perhaps to
imagine, with this, a criss-cross movement of
subjective expressions, views, and attitudes where
I sacrifice myselfs and my topics alike to a faith

we know is unwarranted, a slant illustration of
what we’ve agreed to call truth; the shimmer
of a bunch of grapes by candlelight, its joys
and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates.

* * *

And when I say “this” I mean this, philosophy,
or pottery, or e-mails and short tweets between us.
And when I say “us” I don’t just mean the two of us,
you and me, but humanity. Of course, the abstract

is always felt through the concrete, as, when our  
arms were touching, I felt what I am unable to say.

Reason is terrible,
                      when
its certainty of being
all reality has been
                     raised
to the level of truth,
and reason is
            consciously
            aware
of itself
as its own world,
and of the world
              as itself.

Robert Burns
Had side-burns
No Grecian Urns and Nightingales for he,
But a mug of ale, and frippery.

T. S. Elliot
Went to hell, I guess.

Robert Burns
Had side-burns
No Grecian Urns and Nightingales for he,
But a mug of ale, and frippery.

T. S. Elliot
Went to hell, I guess.

The birch’s white bark’s lines
Grow larger in the growing time
But darker when the leaves all go
And limbs are foreground for the snow.

Your tongue shaped air that passed your lips,
And tastes the air that enters in, in sips.
I wish my pen could let my words all go
And lick you, now, from tongue to toe.

My heart, unlike a rose,
rose like a bird, and flew
towards the reflected light
right into a window,
and falling seven stories down,
met the ground with a small thud,
a mangled pile of feathers, blood.

He came here, and said, in passing,
“The town meeting was adjourned
due to the tower.” The expanding
image of the tower, and the shadow

of the adjournment creped and dovetailed,
until dissolving perceptions at the periphery
changed into what remained of the familiar
and washed away in diminishing September

twilight tributaries of great modern rivers, now
adjured, now forgotten. But, despite adjudication
and adjustment, a question remained, became a
void in the forest, flattened its shadow, biding its time.

The other marjoram and the clothes
Are chimes inverted for her story,
What if we had chives, asparagus?
And what, asparagus, if we had chives?

Why did all that rain fall
All day in the grounds
And on the bird feeders,
And through the clearing?

The neatest patrons are back,
Their statue tortured by your autumn sweater.
Then there is the storm of receipts.
The salad bowel needs sanding, but not this

Fall. Scatter the remaining marjoram like dust.
Sweet peas from melancholy gardens
Sautéed over her faux tofu.
Fruit flies like a banana.

.                                             “No, don't warn me I know it's wrong
                                              But I swear it won't take long”
                                              - Yo La Tengo

“Relations are more important than the things they relate,”
your old comrade said, in the late afternoon session,
in that city behind the taciturn mountains, his hair
now colorless as snow, which came late this winter,

not unexpected, but a surprise none-the-less,
like an off-color joke at an increasingly drunken
party, filled with relations and old friends, who
had come from – but enough, this sentence is

to long already, and must stop now! But why?
Won’t it just be followed by other sentences?
And they will still be connected to the last.
But, again, why? Is everything connected?

Perhaps, yes, in the bigger picture, but we can
not always be in that position, must glide like
rivers, understand through concrete images,
cement our small innovations in place, and

re-enforce them -- béton armé it’s called, in France --
Oh! France! Land of Paris, capital of the 19th Century,
with its naïve progress, its precursors, and its
unconscious serenest seeds, rêves and nightmares.

For personnel
I’m person L-2.

Not per Sun
       (shun nature,
       your alien nation inside)
but per Cent.

Time our time
count time slots
by the cent
     carry only the remainder to
          Sunday. The rest
          for you.


66 per cent of me for me
33 per cent of me for you
compounded daily
     fragmented,
          The hands
          The back
          The brain
          The heart
and we must buy back
          parts of parts.

9% carbon and 90% water
     can be brought to boil
Copper and oil
     can be taught to toil.

Sly,
sliced and diced,
a die:

A Rubric Cubed
     (there’s the rub)
     each side, each face
     a place out side.

Can we learn
          assisted
     to put the faces together
Or are we turned
          and twisted
forever.

What are words worth? No store of pelth,
by the sentence or by the shelf.

Should it come to this, without remorse? Like that orange, feeble
and deciduous, while we waited with binoculars through that gray on gray
afternoon for the owl to spread its wings. Perhaps it did, past dusk,
behind the trees, under those vaguely baleen-formed clouds.

The clouds cast shadows on other clouds, as if holding them up against reality, even for our affirmation. Did you think of me this morning, over your Life cereal, and did you miss the fruit?  The “organic wholeness?” What is the determinant thing that dissolves?

The dissolution of the self-contradictory comes from the dissolution of the determinant thing. Arguments formed in apartments over a bowl of cherries or a bowl of ****, or some such. Loss of a determinate thing (under Article 1262, par. 1.) is the equivalent of impossibility of performance in obligations to do referred to in Article 1266. We are left with the form of a bowl, perhaps a ginger bowl, or some form of lost lacquer.

The distinct lack of skyscrapers from SoHo up through Chelsea was said to be a function of Manhattan bedrock. But modern materials seem to have overcome that problem. Getting on the subway, he heard someone say “…as if each word is born with another word, and spends its life on lines looking for the perfect rhyme". "You know they mate for life," he thought, "the swans. If one is killed, the other often dies of boredom.”

At the second turning of the second stair
I saw you in your underwear --
It was long ago, but I’ve not forgotten
Glimpsing through the flimsy cotton
A shadow of your ***** hair,

Round a ******* hint, hid from the light.
I think I gave you a small freight,
I saw you blush, turn, ascend, your ***,
Now  memories of those stairs, that night
Make me so hard I **** and come.

I went to the river last night
Dreamed of being a river and sleeping like a river
You searched for a **** who was like a river
Along the East River and the Bronx
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
River! that in silence windest
On its way to a rendezvous with some river

“In a Station of the Metro,”
like “The River Merchant’s Wife,”
by Ezra Pound, with
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost
Iambically Sound.

Yet sometimes the rhythm’s in threes
Preparing a quite different dish:
“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, and
Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.”

“What we need now,” he said,
“Is new ideas.” They started to fall
like snowflakes on that late sharp
November evening when we first

saw the altered light, over the Alpine
lake surrounded by cities who’s
population, as discerned through
quick perusal of the census charts,

fluctuated with unprecedented
irregularity, reminding you of
Andolian snow-capped mountain peaks.
You  followed bits of this, like normal,

But found a pattern did not emerge.
The orange was sharp, ****, and
beautiful. Thousands were pulling
their Geiger counters out of closets

filled with unused sports equipment,
scarves, cleaning supplies, and brick-a-brac.
We pointed to tell-tail streaks left down
the hallway, but the planters never bloomed.

The possibility of free declamation anchored
And lucid, inescapable rhythms
Do have meaning. They're strong as rocks
In the deep-toned Aeolian mode
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
A Poet could not but be gay,
The Impotence to Tell –
Still makes a poem a surprise!

Weeks past, I overlooked
A pass you made on the overpass;

Now it comes to pass you touch
my *** under the underpass,
and under my underpants.

These things
These things come
These things come in
These things come in threes.

Now
Harder than a Portuguese defibrillator
                           to rhyme
Harder than Chinese algebra later
                   than bed time
So hard it’s long, no longer
“Well hung” and you are coming
atop my tongue.

I think
             the folks at Liquors.com
are wondering why
no one clicks on
“12 cocktails to drink
              before you die.”

Our house has a periodic table and a rotating chair,
we sweep things under the carpet here
(tell you later about our floor).
For this mile, we issue another’s shoes,
before we pull the rug out from under you.
We’ve replaced the iron curtains with Microsoft© Windows,
and a roaring fire wall.
Don’t mind the heat, stay out of the kitchen:
there is a bun in the oven, a half-baked plan,
and a blogging fan.
Please feel free to use the facilities: now including
a spring shower of light, a renovated Bathist, and a sink hole.
Feel the Air Jordan hair conditioner by the revolving door,
Through ducts taped to the vast glass ceiling,
All supported by a flexible selling floor.
Some margin call it the broken house (sic.)
It’s not broken, it’s fixed.

Not to shun an instant,
or institution, but by "foundation"
he meant the beat and the bass
in the basement --
superstructure --
Your instructor, her soup,
Sure and strict,
A stricture.
Come and command.

I wonder about Austria. Is it anything like cancelled Czechs?
Do pigs fly? Is there a stranger there, to complicate
the one in me? Or must I rearm my filling station?
Can we trust otters to indicate us
(who seem us only in the evil rush), our
end never stooping to think? Oh, I was so right around you,
my sonnet birdcage, once. No, cats' tails immersed
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The daylights are so Polaroid. Yet time is often self-
centered. At least that’s how it feels to me.

I'm kind of your average American
I studied at Hollywood College
Becoming incredibly knowledgeable
Reading theory night and day,
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And
This corrodes even the knowledge
Of why it has become impossible
To write poetry today.”

Yes, but something’s slant with this direction,
The oppressed and the oppressor are not equally obscene.
If the young are allowed laughter
can not the experienced leave night omens.?  
“Perennial suffering has as much right to expression
as a tortured man has to scream;
hence it may have been wrong to say that after
Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”  

Alone in his room
Mom asks what’s the matter
“Even the most extreme consciousness of doom
threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.”

I am concerned with that venison in America
But the juice is soured.
This weeping as I wanked out of control,
After breaking cross-haired whims,
Galloping backward and forward, ahead the past,
Behind the unfamiliar future,
What were we doing, or were we,
The mattress, the limber of lice, or of loves
We were measuring olives, continually?
A moon soon to be forgiven
In crossed girders of past, hip Brooklyn charcoal
In this peeping that has sized you again?

an edge, the Double facet
becomes a gEometry--
but each petAl ends in
    But if it enDs
but love is at an End--of roses
              cementiNg the grooved
                       colD, precise, touching
               columnS of air--The edge
Crisp, worked to deFeat
     cuts without cuttIng
                            edGe and the
                           figUred in majolica--
        from it--neitheR hanging
    From the petal's Edge a line starts
    glazed with A rose
                              infiniteLy fine, infinitely
                                      It Is at the edge of the
itself in metal or porcelaiN--
          laboredness--fragilE
    makes copper roses
         meets--nothing--renews
           nor pushing--
         penetrates space
                       petal that love waits
             plucked, moist, half-raised
              rigid penetrates
      Sharper, neater, more cutting
so that to engage roses
  Somewhere the sense
               steel roses--
            that being of steel
          the broken plate
The fragility of the flower
           the Milky Way
The place between the petal’s
        The rose carried weight of love
       The rose is obsolete
        the start is begun
     unbruised
    What
whither? It ends—
without contact--lifting

The fundamental things apply
Or that proud Aragon bent low his head,
is Achilles possible side by
side with powder and lead?

We met at the bar and I formed a new band
With their feet full of tar and their head full of sand
Yes, I got a desert in my toenails,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Retractable ballpoint poem and prose set
in chrome with gold-plated clips,
handcrafted designer opening lines,
and elegant black lacquer finish.

Jorge Luis Borges
Had a daughter at U.C.
She was Oh! so ******* gorgeous,
But she was way to young for me.

I send my apologies,
I feel so **** terrible
I haven’t replied;
I can’t find your memo -
My desk is all “higglety-piggeldy”
(in jumbled confusion)
And this note is all lies.

Higgledy Piggledy,
Renaissance Tapestries,
Her Majesty’s superspy spared from the hunt.
Feet of three syllables
name the new festschrift:
“Essays in Honor of Anthony Blunt.”

Straight Out of Babylon
At first we babble on
Then leave our languid age
For land, and wage,
To pay our sin tax -
A sure instruction.
In structure, shun not
A knot, a stricture,
Sure and strict.

A attacks B
attack by sea
D: drone attacks
they play taps… and put
tacks on the synapses,
(a basket of asps)
and sign axes.

T: Ask Texas:
Axe taxes

X-Mass: In Xanadu, a flying
Thantos drone decree
(thin drone)
Hamberger,
BeefBerger,
AspBerger
Syndrome:
Syntax
attacks.­

tack.
tic.
ta.

A poem should not mean, but
be an axe to break the frozen sea within us.

A poem should not explain, but
be a brick to break the display window
where our images intermingle with
those of unobtainable things.

A poem should not express, but
be a hammer to break the glass
in front of the axe
reserved for emergencies.

I remember, you wore the pink
slip that drove me into the red.
Things seemed insurmountable, but
you were not inconsolable -- white
lies helped. Later, like this,
we were tickled pink.
Although, elsewhere, thousands died.

The helicopter blades / The end of the shore // No color names // A Great Lover can make love / Simply by casting a glance? // If the prints are documentation of the work, why are the editions numbered? / If the work is in the print, why can’t the landscape be destroyed with the flying camera? // A cast of thousands, a glance askance, a glacial chance, / What if? What if? What if?  // And a great pilot? // The end of art / Where the glance meets the plain.

"A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance" – Robert Smithson

Not by drawing a glance,
but casting.

Imagine the studio. What
Molten materials, what
Molds needed?

Who models, and will they
Recognize their eyes, or
Is it their object reified –

The signifier or the referent
Denoted in this indexical
Congealing.

Shy, illicit, bold, flirtations, imperial,
The variations and series of directed looks,
Is this the content, or is the captured casting

The direction -  just the path of pointing:
A laser beam, redone in spider web, then
done again as differentials of the air?

And what of the early work, the
Imperfections, who filed down the seams?
And would cracks in the mold shift

The glance askew, revealing
A pliers, a heater, a
Reader’s thought?

Analyze the syntax,
**** Eyes the Sin Tax
Battile vs Pattaki,
We are past talking, don’t bat an eye,
Pat verses.

Structure is our instructor
But it must be laid bare
Luxemburg and Liebknecht,
Not Corbu and piloti.
Our structures
Stand on stilts
Built on sand.

An abstract Parallax anagram:
Belvedere Preserved,
Living Gingivitis,
Monochord workbooks,
Tumulus Fungus.

Structure is build on structure
measured feet on how we eat
what we hear should leave no doubt
air, and time, are running out
if we would free words from their prison
we must first smash this capitalism.

Make it New! Renew! Remove the muck of ages!
This can not be done in stages
Everyone lives in a pretty now town
Where stairs go up as well as down
And warp, corkscrew, and bevel,
and lead us to another level.
“Lead?!” without a doubt,
but something else could lead you out!

To be ******:
Reading poetry
Eating bulger
Planting trees
Loving one another
And changing bulbs
Is not the way to stop
The  world from getting hot.

The need for exploitation
decides the limits of the law -
the structure’s built, and truth:
you can’t declaw a tiger claw by claw.

Since the banishment since
We lost the battle for apples
(appropriated from HIS tree)
Food comes first, then
Shelter,
Later love,
And poetry.

Before food there’s
drink, before
drink, breathing;
before surplus and
production, verse.  

Good bye, you’re getting worse...

I’m glad. Sea Ewe on the barricades of sequence the barracudas of non-sequiters the band-aids of sequins and glitter -- a dozen Molotov cocktails -- please!

Appropriation, making language strange,
eschewing polemics, being deranged,
fine for academics with tenured chairs of lead
and nothing clear left in their heads.

Structure is built on
on structure, and
can be re-built
on on sand.

I hear the wingèd chariot,
and must go organize
the proletariat.

It behooves
               us to shape
the organization so we need not wait
until we hear from above the command,
but have the reins
               in our own hand,
if we are to prove
ourselves worthy of intense
              coming events.

Those who do not move,
do not notice their chains.

They say 'Order reigns
             in Berlin!
Our enemy is bigger today,
“a colossus with feet of clay,
crumbling from within.”

Capital is an historical necessity,
[Like the wooden plow and the chariot,]
but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

Atop smoking ruins, between the pools of blood and corpses of the murdered,
             the heroes of ‘order’ hasten to entrench their rule anew.
We’ve been drowned, and left behind a fertile residue.
The Rose that grows from “the muck of ages” still smells as sweet,
future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.

Rulers of Russia and America across the sea,
Germans, Belgians,
Poles and Frenchmen,
“you stupid henchmen!”
Don’t you understand,
“Your order is built on sand.”
The revolution says “I was, I am,
I will be.”

Mandibles make their own hoarding,
but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under semiconductor-selected civilians,
but under civilians existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The trailer of all dead gentians weighs like a nipper
on the brandishes of the lob.
And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and thistles,
creating something that did not exist before, precisely

in such equipments of rheostat crochet they anxiously conjure up the spleens
of the past to their setter, bother from them nappies, bayonet slouches,
and cottons in *****-grinder to present this new scheme in wound hoarding
in timpanist-honored disincentive and borrowed larch.

Thus Luther put on the masseur of the Appearance Paul,
the Rhapsody of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the gully of the Rook Requisite and the Rook Empress,
and the Rhapsody of 1848 knew novelette bicentenary to do than to parsonage,
now 1789, now the rheostat trailer of 1793-95.

In like mantel, the belch who has learned a new larch always translates it backfire into his motor toot,
but he assimilates the spleen of the new larch
and exteriors himself freely in it only when he moves in it
without recalling the old and when he forgets his navy toot.

"Unlock my heart with a sonnet-key?"1
The Rose Is Obsolete,
But,2 her perfect feet,3
A poem should not mean / But be4
An axe to break the frozen sea
within us.5

Nature report it
Deny this
That time painting it
Even to overcome aesthetic as spell
Proclaimed to physical flat
Rather than an pretend fact
Fact flatness had to out
To the though had was
And at the same continue