single462 asked: are u a girl
an open dialogue about gender
I Read: “S16I16X16T16E16E16N16S16I16X16T16E16E16N16S16I16X16T16E16E16N16S16I16SIXTEEN” Hannah Weiner
The point is that you’re not clairvoyant,
you’re sitting at a dinner table
just saying stuff for no reason.
The avenue of retreat should remain closed off.
Certain death (I’m looking smug) for your men
and your worthless horses.
Cleaning up, I found so many books about
dismemberment I barely knew where to begin.
I started from the beginning, with fountains of blood.
I read them shooting out from social food.
I read someone was “in the family way.”
I saw the sophists and the cheaters drawing levers.
Firstly, I shall attempt to adequately historicize
all of the phenomenon documented herein. I saw
the body pushing forth from medicine.
That’s why it remains personal. Our Hannah Weiner,
emerging already with her hands in the paper-mill.
Nobody’s paying you talk about that.
I Read: “The Charles Mingus CAT-alog For Toilet Training Your Cat,” Charles Mingus
Here’s a poem about how I live in Fishtown but not for much longer, among pests and vermin.
I sat around for a bunch of minutes thinking
whether or not to treat this little pamphlet as a book
until, imagining what Bruce Boone would do,
I said fuck it, Charles Mingus just taught me
how to make a cat accidentally learn
to flush a toilet, if this isn’t a book,
then what has my entire life been for,
if this isn’t poetry. When the time comes
you cannot put sand in a toilet.
You can move a cardboard box around
a tiny house to make a cat learn to follow
the smell of waste, it already desires to conceal
the sight of its shit when you get it, that’s something
cats are automatically supposed to do.
Mingus says: his main thing
is to cover up. He named his cat “Nightlife.”
Last night I left the kitchen light on
because a mouse ran onto my foot.
Sure, I freaked out a little.
Cut a small slit in the cardboard
of your ceiling to let mice drip through,
one by one or in a steady stream,
like Christ’s blood signified
for the Kaufmann crucifixion.
Rat shit on the kitchen counter!
No wonder you lost your appetite.
No wonder I used the same K-cup
three times and put dirty cicadas
in my mouth for novel fortune.
Put a cat beneath to cover up.
Take a walk to clean the wounded paw
of a neighborhood cat which died
when a truck ran over its legs,
but recurs in varying cat-form
around the neighborhood,
two million bastard cats
or prodigies,
Cat (the person)
wandered around outside
and spotted it, we
put some milk out,
Mingus would have
brought it home
to learn to piss
like humans piss,
that is, in closed doors,
its main thing to cover up,
become a ghost-cat with fur
trapped in the insulation
so that even without existing
I lurch around the house sneezing.
He said cut down the sides
to make it want to jump up.
He said be careful that when the box
is removed it doesn’t just jump
into the toilet. Keep an eye on the cat.
Walking around at night,
it’s easy to become concerned
that every cat you see
is dead or wounded,
but it’s ok, they’re mostly sleeping
even underneath trucks,
even fucking or fighting,
even wandering around
in total skeleton mode
outside the beer garden,
leading rat ghosts to the underworld.
I think I said all cats look the same.
I think somebody said that’s racist.
Ok so only most cats look the same.
They’re all functionally the same cat.
Yeah, ok, whatever. Sure.
I’m ok with an orange cat eating roses
near a guy always smoking the same cigar.
Nightlife said he’d give a cat a sign,
the sign will be that life is awesome.
I read that on a website once,
that doesn’t update anymore.
Anonymous asked: you are my favorite tumblr writer. you may seriously be one of my favorite writers ever. who are you why do you write so well do you have books ahhhh well anyway keep it up because you're awesome
Thanks. I don’t have any books and I’m not that invested in actively publishing except in really small press zines and projects by people I know. I might enter some first book competitions this summer since my Master’s Thesis is book-length and I don’t know what else I’d do with it other than use it as a paperweight. If I ever somehow have a book Tumblr will be among the first to know though, after my fiancee, my enemies, and Facebook.
I Read: “Vertigo,” Charles Barr
Do you think this picture of Midge
as Carlotta Valdes is the weirdest part
of the entire movie? I do.
Enter one Starbucks, exit another,
I’m not sure how somebody got here,
dangling from a roof with fingers,
and transitions through editing to
material continuity, a body contiguous
with itself instead of parceled out
over the course of several hours.
Did you think Kim Novac
looked like that girl on Game of Thrones?
I did. I made a montage of Jimmy Stewart
kissing unconvincingly on mechanisms.
Drive this beautiful car up and down hills.
Buy this redwood forest for your sweet new GF.
I was offended. I disclosed all.
Put David Niven from his threshold,
let his body be a parachute to motion and speed.
After sound, the tactile miracle was replaced
by the visual. I liked spooky healing at a distance.
I dyed my hair blonde to attract Joe Brainard,
and curled everything into a tight loop which
could be bent in such a fashion.
The main character is always horny for counterfeits.
It’s considered raunchy to paint glasses
and a dull nose on a masterpiece.
Make a dweeb on a step-ladder
fold up his desire and forget it
in his breast pocket.
Nobody cared about the bra-inventing lady—
not even the authors—
so she walked out of the movie forever
to listen to Mozart all by her own damn self.
Later, I watched it three more times,
and I thought about Ralph Waldo Emerson
digging up his dead wife to look at her,
and after that not caring anymore.
I visited Ellen’s tomb.
I opened up the coffin.
And after that, representative men.
I would walk among the dry bones.
Buy me the same shoes and I can also
be a relic! Any temporal body
can close the circuit.
The orbit of the letter stutters
when people don’t keep their stories straight.
Hence no post-mark.
Jimmy Stewart received it by hand.
As usual, I was murdered by the intercession
of mysterious nuns. As usual,
the quarry is invoked when we squeeze
into the heads of our retired detectives.
I Read: “Beast Book,” Michael Gessner
What if I went to the Renaissance Faire
and came back stupid.
What if I said poetry was an open mouth,
while standing slack-jawed myself,
drooling on my frolicsome tabard,
chewin’ the cud, covered in pit-sweat?
I know none of these poets are rich
so why do they keep going out to dinner
in their poems. What if I went on forever about
poached salmon and, uh, Triscuits and cabernet (??)
even though you know as well as I do
that tomorrow I’m going to eat Superfresh
oatmeal and nothing else, possibly gaze
at some bread, puke on a .pdf cause I can.
Skipping out on Chipotle to bro out
with the beast gang, looking at beast pics,
illuminating my clique’s main manuscripts—
To have all these pictures of fucked up prodigies
and to do nothing with them? Damn dude.
The body could be a weird mass emerging from a hole
covered in eyes and wiggling.
Dream about a body with some value, you guys,
worth making in the margins of a costly Summa,
leave it grotesque and bogus in the dirt,
where you found it, sink an arrow in it,
dare you to put your mouth on it.
Double dare you to put your mouth on it.
It said “open and empty like the great hunger”
but in beast mode I don’t f**ggin’ care about greatness.
I’ll feel like an open excess with gills and snout
if I feel like voiding pores towards venom and miracle.
I thought this crummy book was supposed to be a Book of Wonders.
I don’t even know if I want to be Catholic anymore
after a drowned dove of a party like this.
You sat down and made me listen to every single color
a door could possibly be.
Then you made me shake hands
with your disgusting son.
You had deviled eggs on a pewter platter.
I ate one and was all like whate~ver—
and did not accept your Diet Fresca
in a skull-shaped goblet—
I kept zoning out and looking at the tapestry
of the beaver gnawing its own balls off,
copied from the Aberdeen Bestiary,
and sought to imitate its gesture of spite.
Hey, you know Isidore of Seville
died like that, right? No? Well,
I don’t know man, I’ll tell you some other time.
I Read: “America Bewitched,” Owen Davies
You came to my house and strok’d your beard
I was sick all the time you seeming friend and sly enemy
you jobbed me I will say
depart from me I KNOW you not
I will sell the judgement and pay the doctor bill
cast them until hell and
give them the dirty horse laugh being German
and stabbing one another on bridges
this being the general fabric of the local history
the bell don’t make please bump
being shooting some other old body through
quilt hung up over cabin hole nothing done so fine
but what it will appear in the daytime
In the name of God/ You should take your
I had a fairly good time actually
looking over these and over facts
I Read: “Your Name Is You,” Edwin Fussell
1.
One white classics expert
playing at the beach.
He puts a little bone in his pail.
He’s throwing up immensely.
This is the second dude this year
I’ve heard compare a human vagina
to an anemone—the animal I think—
the polyp with stingers
how weird and if the flower
how weird also.
The Catholic Side of Henry James.
the anemone grappling his fat throat.
I didn’t like this book because the guy
didn’t drown. He just kept talking
about the beach and his young girlfriends.
His girlfriends are one huge nervous system
heaving across the bottom of the ocean.
I’m tired of his attitude.
I sunk his little fishing boat with eye beams.
2.
I liked the book better
when the white classicist became depressed
he became terrified
he said “dead babies” many times
over the course of a dozen babies
he was frightened of Jesus
it was very metaphysical
he called a section Purgatory
he called a section American Sailboat
he described the hazy qualities of “The Box”
and near the end Jesus destroyed The Box
and the white classicist escaped.
He spurned his family.
What if Tamura Ryuichi was boring
and his horror was a cup of milk
sitting on my windowsill.
What if he had bad grey hair
and I didn’t like him.
Let’s unbutton our top buttons
and smoke cigars like men in 1975
who write poems about their wives’
vaginas under the ocean and know
almost everything about Homer.
He knew the Greek words.
He knew the secret symbols.
He made poems like this: “I see this,
I think about this, I see that.”
He went to hell and his body was soft.
Both him and Dorothea Lasky
talking about blood with huge gestures,
thirty years apart, more or less,
one was the anemone,
one was the cephalophore,
one was a single polyp,
one was suspended in the cavity.
I apologized to both of them.
I only cannibalized one though.
I Read: “AWE,” Dorothea Lasky
So you hate it when Dorothea Lasky sprays lasers in your eyes
but all of a sudden you love it when CAConrad sprays a mysterious elixir in your mouth?
You just love it when mosquitoes explode with your blood?
You just love spraying your blood into the quote-unquote “qlippoth” of a bug-body?
What? Maybe you’d like it better if you read it in a book?
Nothing about your thesis makes sense to me.
I’m dead with my posse and I don’t understand, like,
your words or your ideas.
You’re bugging me. I mean, you’re “bugging” me.
My tongue is now a thick black fruit
with a consistency inside my mouth
which is currently a certain dry gorge
with night-wolves breeding in it. I’m the most famous ghost
you ever slept with. I like a bit of laser in my sarcophagus.
I love this book. I died from loving too much.
I choked on a beautiful new book.
I died cause I was hung
upside down from a lawn-chair
that cost an amount
I struggled with gravity than I died
gravity sprayed into and out of me
but all of a sudden its not ok for Dorothea Lasky
to spray gravity into and out of me?
Talk about entitlement.
Talk about an apotropaic insignia
Talk about gravure
(I’m having a fight with you)
I Read: “Sorting Facts, Or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker,” Susan Howe
One time I got Chris Marker and Chris Burden confused.
Which one is crawling through broken glass to get at you.
I got Plutarch and Petrarch confused.
I ordered Pliny the Elder and they brought me Love Stout.
One time I got teratoma and Charles Olson confused.
I made a mark and felt eschatologically Jewish,
in the fashion of my ancestors.
I felt an anagram constrict around a certain body.
I could go for some more proscriptive mandates from poets.
If a broken piece of bone severs the artery that’s it,
I heard some people saying in the kitchen,
if anybody here has been misdiagnosed
it’s Susan Howe, the interior of the spine,
this interior part migrating into the myelin sheath
which holds the actual core. You destroy that.
Streaming Game of Thrones we got to a lag
I said this is an homage to La Jetee
it wasn’t that funny.
It’s virtually a miracle.
I’m feeling Soviet
so roll footage of the mourning women,
switch out my edit-eyes
for dark glass ones.
If documentary is all about
freaking out and crying,
then call this bent-can
a silver star-shaped Miyata.
If documentary is about wrecking time,
then I’m the document,
I’m the guard-rail on the bike path,
I’m assigning five stars on GoodReads
to prove to history I was there.
