May 2011
16 posts
3 tags
50. Eating, Nebraska
-after Jon Volkmer I saw a grain elevator go up in my sleep.
Farmhands smoking ghost weed chuckling
In the wings and firelight, flipping each other off
All night. The farmer props himself up on his elbows
And says to his wife I’ve been thinking about
An affair with something dangerous,
Like a hurricane, or an aspect of evolution,
Or a flautist 16 years younger than I am. He thinks about sex...
April 2011
61 posts
3 tags
49. Hyperdub Party 2011
I heard over the ether that dub step was dead.
I heard the thin voice of dub step speak
From beyond the grave. In my laboratory I fiddled around with knobs and stripped wires
Soaked in alcohol. The jars conduct electricity. In the dark several interested academics convene
To analyze the pitch and flow of small magnetic
Pulses across the fabric of the parlor room. In the dark several academics...
4 tags
48. Author Interviewed by Lao Tzu, 4
Q: Can you love the people and govern the state
Without resorting to action? The sage cries out “Oh
That’s my fossil, it tickles!”
The pinky finger of the state
Applies pressure at the base of his spine. “It tickles so much! It puts me
under a spell!” In school I loved
The people so much I wept
Under the bed until morning
With a room-mate stroking
My hair and going shh, shh. I bought every...
5 tags
47. Author Interviewed by Lao Tzu, 3
Q: Can you polish your mysterious mirror
And leave no blemish?
Missed Connection:
We found five pounds of glass
In a canvas grocery bag
With the name of your charity
Stitched across the front. In each chunk a tiny picture
Of a myriad creature
With a thumbprint (yours?)
Smeared across the middle distance.
4 tags
46. Author Interviewed by Lao Tzu, 2
Q: In concentrating your breath can you become as supple
As a babe? The Way as a way to split infinitives.
In an undergraduate symposium infinity
Splits and a baby emerges from the lectern.
It holds forth on Hegel. In a small bare room
Dignified by two standing lamps
And a boom mic the sage
Drops his robe and locks his foot
Behind the brown notch
In his neck. His arms
Bend down and branch
Into...
4 tags
45. Author Interviewed by Lao Tzu, 1
Q: When carrying on your head your perplexed bodily
Soul can you embrace in your arms the One
And not let go? I embraced in my arms the One and it bit
My shoulder. Ouch.
I carried on my head my perplexed bodily
Soul. It was generally a waste of time,
Nobody thought it was cute or funny. I spent a good deal of time shuffling
My feet in the general direction
Of a vast white light.
I will...
3 tags
44.
The albatross as a traveling light, as
A dromological imperative.
The torch bearer bore in some torches
So I could see what your face was like.
I wasn’t impressed. Next please.
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43. I Took A Nap Against My Own Three Hands
The last sort of aleatoric sort of crummy tweetmix thing.
—-
I’m not lying. Everything we’ve seen and done
Has made me throw up so far. Your body,
At rest, stays small and human. High school architectures blinded for life, grim looks
At the hem. Some might have called that an omen. I don’t want strong, healthy babies
To compete with me, who preys
On all things like a ghost
From...
5 tags
42. Hailed As 'The Fun Gang'
Same deal here.
—
The irony of the gendered body—so all this talk of arms and trumpets
Shooting out of the hand and flaccid skirt.
The sine qua non, the patterns on the wings. One responsibility was to administer a nightly massage as an auteur
And suddenly realize you’ve seen something by him before. I used to have some kind of personal issue
With the guns in this crummy town.
Everybody...
5 tags
41. All Art Is Good But Stops Abruptly In The...
The first of several quasi-aleatoric poems derived using tweetmix.me, a seeded pool of material, and a minimal but existent amount of editorial discretion.
—
I too am infinite but I’m in this episode . Look out doctor
modernism is shuffling towards you with death on the rocking chair. Going so far as to say ‘nay’ to ‘Jock Jams vol. 4’
For the ultimate orgasm. You can’t roll a joint on an...
3 tags
40. Glib Theological Retort
Angel descend
In licensed hoodie
Over unlicensed
t-shirt of Bart Simpson
peeing on Allah Yes this was the angel
We asked for. Angel have you ever
Had sex with a 16 year old
In a cave? Angel,
Have you ever had sex
With a 17 year old gymnast
On the wings of a biplane
Spiraling down
Towards an occult
Circle signifying
The planet Neptune
And everything on fire?
Angel have you ever fallen off a...
3 tags
39. The Myriad Creatures
I was strolling around and realized that because I started writing poems so late I basically skipped that phase of writing very sentimental lines about the moon. I don’t think I’ve ever used it in that way, so I felt like trying, and being sort of hackneyed and naive for fun.
——
Let the Buddhas stop eroding when they may.
Let in the tortured grammars of older forces. ...
6 tags
38. It Was Known On the Internet That Poly Styrene...
an imitation done badly, in a hurry. Incidentally I wasn’t ever a particularly humungous fan of X-Ray Spex. I once dated a girl who didn’t like “Germ Free Adolescents” and I thought that was really weird. Like I’d even just mention it and her upper lip would curl. Well ok.
—-
It is the point in history at which
Whenever someone dies we all immediately
...
3 tags
37. What All I (The Author) Am Actually Doing
At this second I’m pretty sure
My girlfriend is sleeping next to an anchor. I’m strolling in the dark against wind
And rotating with increasing speed I’m turning my bones and organs
Into jewels through centrifugal force. I’m making a miracle happen. In the dark
The blue wan light of your iphone scares me. You appear to be going around clock-wise
And we meet twice. You may be a kind of beam Or...
5 tags
36. Found Poem: Thought Balloons of Bigfoot, Datum...
You won’t find any bigger than I am
I am 11 ft. tall
I was here FIRST. I am real
I don’t want to be bothered. Don’t pick on me little man
Let me eat your pig or your dog
I am black and very dark
I will see you first and I’ll watch you from a bush
Throw me a fish!
3 tags
35. Monticello Ice House
“Well you know they used to believe flies
came out of dead meat; and that hair swept up
in a pile would become birds.” If an insect flies into your eye
It becomes the insect. You see the way
The insect does. The insect
comes in through a grate on the wall. This is America
and we can hunt a bigfoot.
We are free to hunt a bigfoot.
We are at liberty to hunt
or discuss a bigfoot to the...
5 tags
34. Sex Cauldron?? I Thought They Closed That...
This poem draws on Deleuze & Guattari’s ‘The Anti-Oedipus’ so if you’re all like, whoa, why even mention light shooting out of an anus, that’s why. Daniel Paul Schreber reference.
-
The desired machine
will start itself and stop itself, will fuel itself and fuck itself. -Timothy Donnelly, “Sonata Ex Machina” Guy smoking outside against the glass...
I Just Noticed
that I’m over the 30 mark for the poem-a-day thing, gosh, that went by quick. This was weird for me because usually I’m very bashful about displaying work a) outside of like an established collaborative or academic framework b) that isn’t vetted by editors and like, actually published c) shy of at least two or three drafts. So I’m surprised that anybody even bothered to...
4 tags
33. Supplemental Dreams of Descartes III: History...
21.
Doubtful that Descartes actually
Built a robot
Or could move the dead. He had sex with the maid
On top of the only furniture he had
Besides his bed and a book-case,
A low pine dresser with a candle on it.
Descartes came, he got depressed,
He seemed really out of sorts. I don’t know what his problem was. A tidy man. He thought, here I am
Asleep in my own filth. He did his own laundry,...
4 tags
32. Supplemental Dreams of Descartes II: Yes......
10.
It was a poem. The first line was: Yes… and no…. The interlocutor unrecognized. 11.
He opened the book at random
And read
What way in life shall I follow?
He struggled to get his coat on
And hurry out into the snow. 12.
It was a machine to create meaning.
He used his tongue, his lips, his palate
To modulate meaning. In front of the mirror
He did a little dance, lifting up his knees
As high...
5 tags
31. Found Poem: Amazon.com Review of 'The Social...
A very odd book.
I don’t see how
someone like Rousseau
could write a book
with ‘social’ in the title. The woman lived alone
on the island
for over 16 years. She is clearly disturbed.
4 tags
30. Supplementary Dreams of Descartes, I: His...
1.
Woke up sudden with smart skin. 2.
To make the math haunt her. 3.
Hungry for [actual] food
A slow start, but you believe in momentum
Despite itself 4.
How to read the poem without opening the book:
read through the lines of the hand
read through the arrangement of cards
read through the medium of electricity
read through the entrails of animals
read through the guidance...
4 tags
29. Augustine in the Garden
At Cassisiacum, standing erect as rows of poplars
In mid-morning light planning dinner for eight
Quiet, With three lines by Porphyry on the brain.
3 tags
28. Feast of St. Appollonia
On the wall chart from the floor I move my indicating rod over
The frowning cartoon man denoting ‘intense physical pain’
Weird eruptations (but of course beyond the purview of language)
The mouth, The collarbone, The gums, and so on,
With the proviso ‘it isn’t just a language game if it’s your
Fucking oral decalcification trauma’ (The miracle of St. Athelstan, whose bones scraped
The sides of...
3 tags
27. Physician Repeating 'Yuck, Yuck, Yuck'
words and phrases derived partially from twitter, 4/17/11
Are you a hardcore kid? If so I have this tweet for you
I forget where I put it. A child no older than four
Yelling like crazy in the boot-blacking factory. The doctor licks the first page of the chart and says
I was pretty soft myself, very tender, always eager to please
Stepping out of his wet clothes and into a surgical fiasco. ...
3 tags
26.
We’re holding a tribute to this weird machine
That destroyed poetry in 1999 and quit dungeons & dragons
To go ponder deeply on girls’ breasts and vaginas. The small round lights across its body flash
Red and darker red in unison when we speak
Of Frank O’Hara or Ashbery or Koch. We pour Champagne down the funnel at the top
Of its boxy neck, or the thing we agree
To call it’s neck, and it...
3 tags
25. Speech of Christ, After Death, From the...
-derived from the titular chapter in Jean Paul Richter’s ‘Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces’ (translation 1845). This is about as close to language poetry as I’ll ever get maybe because I don’t like reading it very much but I guess I wanted to try something along these lines because I was reading Charles Bernstein earlier.)
Far advanced as (deep read)
Professors: the...
4 tags
24. Fragment of Libel at the Bottom of a Well
Aristotle Aristotle
says
the girls are finer
in Macedon
the wine tastes
better the trees
bend down
in supplication
to men who seek
after definitions
of things
little bells
on his slippers
his beard
waxed sharp
and black as
objects fallen upon
in the garden at
night and black
as names
in dictionaries
Re. 22
No idea why Greek words are underlined and hyperlinked to an online dictionary. I didn’t do it. But handy I guess. Thanks Tumblr for making learning fun.
4 tags
23. Deface the Currency
the task I performed
with heavy chisel I played
a dog’s trick Strike
for you will find no wood
hard enough
4 tags
22. Twelve Lives of Socrates
Socrates 1: Textbook sidebar on Alcibiades
Spooned beneath bearskin, unaroused, like a sister
Or aunt. Clean shaven. Flabby legs. Socrates 2: Alcibiades? I hardly knew ‘im!
But seriously, I just flew in from Delium and boy
Are my arms tired, are my arms geometric figures
Limned in crystal, boy are my arms a tongue
Laid out on stone with the word arms, and boy
Are ὅπλον are...
I wasn’t anywhere near my computer yesterday so who cares. Poem upcoming.
5 tags
21. Flying Saucer Panic 1972
I’m not into this poem, and it’s late, but man I just wasn’t getting anywhere. Well, here’s a perfunctory offering for the 14th I guess. Sorry mom. Sorry dad. Sorry god.
—-
Wilmington local taking aim at hawks,
Breaking laws, stubbing out cigars
With his bare feet in dead grass for no reason. In a Ford Taurus carefully tearing
Words out of newspapers, chewing...
Little Citations for 'Markedness Model'
if you were curious:
Part 2 incorporates I think one line from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis.’
Part 3 incorporates another line of Ovid, and quotes the ’Hebban olla vogala’ fragment of Old Dutch in, uh, full. Additional language taken from a literary manifesto by Aleksei Kruchenyk, mental transcripts as reported by Jeffrey Sconce, and a comment by...
4 tags
20. Markedness Model, 3
12.
Draft two: the concrete queering of the DX sea, the meaning of which I don’t really know or understand. Put your hand into this magic bag and see what other phrases emerge. His glossolalia, his cathode hand, symbols jiggered into pieces and out of them again. The hyperlink “Green Language” redirected to “Language_of_the_Birds#Alchemy.” A grammar of puns and homophony, a syntax used for...
4 tags
19. Markedness Model, 2
6.
A record of variations in the myth of Philomela. Or in a less charitable mode, discrepancies, errors. Or Philomel for ease of meter. In the painting by Rubens everything happens at once. Again, the purpose not to impart a narrative. Not a continuity of events or anything. Ovid was a fact-checker, he did his duty. Swallows are the ones without tongues.
7.
A record of variations in the myth of...
4 tags
18. Markedness Model, 1
1.
For the sake of kicking things off the protagonist a man in a blue Donegal suit-jacket with the bottom button unbuttoned. A live bird under one arm. Oh let’s say a chicken. Or. A songbird, a little Carolina wren, dazed or stunned by a sharp blow to the head, folded up in a handkerchief and pocketed.
2.
The location is a precipice. Think Casper David Friedrich. This is a figure without...
4 tags
17.
On an updrift, Herr Doktorr, on an updrift, carried across the street, the line of spruces, the steep incline of spruces, the clay banks and the creek, the precipice off of which children topple monoliths, involuntary mouthfuls of sandy water and the magic of a young concussion and rose-colored spittle on a checkered collar Herr Doktorr, the magic of a bird-like shape, or a bird with the likeness...
3 tags
16. Poem Because of Reading Pascal
From a hypothetical movie you learn that nothing is pathetic
If it’s loved by somebody or something else. Observing
A pale tan rabbit on a lawn resolving into the shape of a leaf.
It tips over. Do you think it’s annoying
When someone describes the veins of a stone
As ‘intricate’ or the network of veins in the body
Or a design of knots as ‘intricate?’
Does it say anything at all? Like we don’t all...
5 tags
15. Five Dumb Illiterates Reading Lao Tzu In The...
1.
Useless, sixteen field agents
napping in brown grass
spilling Bud Light into the soil
at the top of a hill overlooking
the Norristown Transportation Center. Which beer eagerly lapped up
by ants, rare beetles, wasps,
sparrows, earthworms, drunk
mammals with customized collars,
and babies
with precocious anxieties. Sad songs about baseball running up
each tender daffodil like shitty flags. ...
3 tags
14.
In a painting by Frans Hals a man dangles
His gold watch in one hand, like, oh, this thing?
A burgher, a burgher, my god, a man of hot shit. Above him on one side Jesus hangs on the cross,
And on the other a younger Jesus, crepitus, dour,
Wallows in stiff rolls of leg-fat and heavenly light. An El Greco with an eye condition and all around
Soggy pink Renoir soft-core shots with Vaseline...
5 tags
13. poem on 'philosophical investigations'
Hi! I am a proposition
Situated in the palm of your hand, looking up.
I may fluctuate between variables. I stick
To your teeth though, in general
The way a ghost would stick. For reference, picture me.
For reference picture me as
A thick rope of matter emerging
From an aperture of the body.
I’m a language manifested in the form
Of fluids and viscosity, here to help you
Fear death and shake the...
I guess by way of citation #12 incorporates a line from John Adams’ Nixon in China and #11 builds around a tweet by Lil B on 11/16/2010 ok thanks xoxoxo
4 tags
12. more on mao
Mao: I’m in love with any Suicide Girl who likes Boris Vian,
taking off her clothes in the middle of the woods
for no reason taking off her clothes
in the middle of the day and folding
the corner of the page
hypothetically Jiang Qing: I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung.
Each tooth trembles in its moorings
when I kick my feet into the air, presenting
for the first time on network television
the...
4 tags
11. (a weird looking animal with glasses looks up)
-after Lil B and sees the sun in eclipse
(hey bro)
the tortoise shell, the shell reptile
lenses, it smears its face against glass
when the waiters turn their backs. (your a bitch bro) hey, whoa, hey
hold on—
whoa, hey, hey—
and sees the sun in parallax.
(the nerd walks out the room
and becomes homeless) hydroplaning toyota over wood,
the tight growl of turned soil immanent
in the...
3 tags
10.
The incredible thing about jellyfish
About all jellyfish is: The incredible thing about jellyfish organizing
Themselves into stacks and becoming geometrical.
The idea of a bell arrived at by consensus,
Billions and billions of times, in a saline solution
Without a brain or a quivering jellylip.
Reading books about the principles of sea jelly—
the ontology of—
(the achieve...
9. Five Fragments On Paul Virilio
1. So, I’m sorry, I ordered this book about urns
And I’ve got to go away, to read about urns.
I need to go now. I’m sorry.
I need to go become an urn.
2. Literally a detached head
on top of a sperm cell, a comet groaning towards earth
to die. Gonna carve a giant QR code on the moon
Gonna sell Crystal Pepsi to NASA.
Gonna be more attractive than at least two people on the...
5 tags
8. The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among...
Chairman Mao comes down the stairs
Drunk
On a little coconut rum in a plastic cup
With Darth Vader on the side, barely,
And he says
He’s in love with a girl who says she loves Boris Vian
But doesn’t fuck like a girl who loves Boris Vian.
You know he’s just dropped twelve bucks
On another month of Suicide Girls
And doesn’t know what he’s saying
And you feel bad for him
But he’s...
7.
Embarrassed by a banner ad
for “newteenwaterboarding.com”
in front of strangers
in a small cube-shaped room
with glass walls.
Good-looking people
you don’t know yet
make cautious sounds
and leave silently.
The list of all known protocols
for things the body does you wish
the body wouldn’t do.
And no idea
how that thing got there,
A list of all known warnings and prohibitions
on a water-damaged...
6. Tasteless Jokes About Myrtle Corbin
1.
The four legged girl of Texas,
Due not to a parasitic twin
But to a condition called dipygus
Resulting in two complete bodies.
Two pelvises, two slim interior legs
Striped to the calves in wool.
And above that petticoats
Cut short for easy display
To side-show audiences.
We read in Gould and Pyle’s
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine
That ‘micturation and defacation occur
At different...
