I

L

LYNN XU two LULLABIES

FALLIN

For Anton in Artaud

I DIE! I DISOBEY! I SHATTER

SO SLOWLY I LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS

EAT

Into your volcano your SHADOWMOUTH I drink myself

TOUCH MY LIFE

PLUNGE A STRAW INTO THE EARTH SUCK OUT YOUR IRISES

Life slips away

Like dust

The blush of childhood squeezes

From our mother tongue

So jealous so self-pitying

A bullet I had never seen

ANTON IN I HAVE SEEN YOUR BLOOD CAS

CADINGFROMOURTEMPLES

YOU COUNTLESS TIMES

I HAVE WALKED INSIDE YOUR DREAMS BEHIND YOUR EYES I STAB

CLIMB ONTO YOUR BALCONY

CRYOUTINYOURVOICE

For jack Spicer

What shadow

What follows

For whom

Is left?

Angel-

Move your feet!

CHUSPATO from Secession -translated from the Galician by Erin Moure

THIS I IS NOT A MURDERER

she writes the dreams of a woman who, under the appearance of another, exercises that profession, so that the life taken from her victims guarantees her own in the face of any emergency

"I don't know how to describe it, it takes time, you have to hunt them then sew them; they're small, field mice, dormice, they hang down to your navel-even as a small girl she had this obsession with stringing necklaces with soup stars, with macaroni, with pear or apple pips, even to the point of threading the rubies of the pomegranates; clearly they'd rot quickly-that's how it went in oniric zones: naked and with the necklace of dead mice on her breast. Then the sensation you have that it must be you who wears the necklace and the breath, yes, the breath of dormice ... "

They return, they are who they are; Aunt Aurora, Uncle Manolo and some of their progeny, all adult. They split open: their skulls and skeletons are visible through their clothes (wigs, necklines, ties, silts, organdy, muslin, baroque, curls) . They appear in a company of actors in the opera of Mana us

In its entryway, they return and are who they are: the dead of my paternal line, field labourers in funeral suits.

IT rains, the woman's hair is a maelstrom that spins clockwise or an umbrella with all the ribs broken. Someone shouts the name of Lenin three times, a woman cries 1 I disconsolately.

I SLEEP, what I see are Warburg's black doth-covered frames (Mnemosyne Atlas): Ghost Stories for the Very Adult and the engrams.

THE I THAT WRITES IS NOT THE I THAT REMEMBERS

back then, tea-drinking was rare, but my grandma used to serve it, her kitchen was in the village. Grandpa looked after the garden and nurtured pigs, great-grandmother kept scared rabbits and a nanny-goat I adored, it was hard for me not to share my lunch with the cats

The doors that separated the shed from the patio were sacred, from the open hallway we looked out at snow I mountain range, snow

Someone who was me taps on a typewriter, from the shed the voices of my uncles and mother rise

My father died that winter.

My breathing lives synchronized with Cosmos, in Cosmos there's hardly anyone. Sometimes, in the summer dusk, an adult waters the plants and Nemesis, after a long work day, arrives on the 7 p.m. tram

In the garden I am part of an extended family group, the majority don't live in disagreement with the Regime, Nemesis detests Franco with all her energy, Papa takes care of the roses and is also a Galician nationalist

When I'm nine, I'll have friends of my own, we'll be the squad that wreaks destruction at the highway construction cut-off; two of us are poets, one of them (guy) explains to the other (girl) that she shouldn't mix demonstrative adjectives in the various languages she knows, all Romance ones, that in Galician the formula is "estes" and if you use Castilian, "estos" is the correct form

In Cosmos there are also costume balls; at one of them the poet (guy) gives the poet (girl) a change purse with pink pearls and a golden clasp, then invites her to dance.

In Cosmos the sun goes down (sunsets).

To KNOW YOURSELF as part of a succession, position yourself in a computation

knights of the round table affluents of the Zambese stations on the TransSiberian Roman milestones there are two sets, what happened I what never happened; they're true, they're not

true, it never happened, it always happened; it's fiction, it'll never be fiction

it's real, it'll always be real: the father, the girl, the short-sleeved dress, summer, the Posio Gardens, the tailfan of the peacock, Egypt

it's real, it's not real, barbarous, protean and capture

we're in Luxor, on the stony avenue of Luxor-the palm-lined path in the Posio leads to Luxor- we're not in Luxor

THIS I IS NOT DEATH

the pain of death is my pain when light sections the eyelids the eyes, the voice we direct our gaze to the ABCs and the letters give us our voice back it is a touch you say, we say, you say the iconic band It's an eye a sonorous light or a voice of light for the effort of intelligence

a word can be abandoned, you can fail to explain that the year of your birth is a border because it separates the postwar hunger from a smaller hunger, as if we can fraction hunger

PHIL CORDELL! fromEDDEN

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LAURA SOLOMON Hunters & Gatherers

two beings once joined once apart

twice the solitude feel infinity

strikes again as one whispers into the ear of another

you are alone it's okay the magic has to breathe

beauty rows the boat and the bathtub never sinks

surely the safest sea to swim out into an electrical storm of this magnitude so I get back in

& try not to think about the future how it began a long time ago

maybe you've noticed I carry a Jot of keys to a Jot of doors I've moved away from

the metal resurfaces nonetheless especially in spring with its kite life coiled like a melody everyone knows

how it goes how it comes & goes how it comes again

what I mean is is your face what I mean I mean I don't know what your face means

yet what I do know & what I don't know

sometimes a slice of interesting in a pie of boring turns my head

into my soul my soul into exactly what you'd expect

a cooler full of organs stars, pistols abandoned lands

languages I used to speak in search of the miraculous me too

ocean view the one poised to re-upholster

everything where was I my love in another

love's arms no doubt playing doctor who in the dark on the rocks

you test me with tears & touch someone else's knee you want me & so them

& so do I it's all a part of the same examination

the monotony of doors we want

what we want & what else

whatever else we want & what else whatever else

we want & what else instead of wings a bird on each arm

are they strong enough to shovel the angels in the snow

I'm buried beneath where I am the winters are too warm & these letters

get wet with longing the problem is often the only thing that helps

is to be held & human love isn't always around unlike water

which is what we drink when we run out of everything else I am back in the bathtub

& reading aloud the words you once wrote to yourself seeping into mine

after all these years still attracted to sunlight still confusing myself with the speaker

unable to make sense of a mirror as if I were a leopard lost in a forest of what's that

who's there why won't you fight with me engage

eventually I take a nap

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in the motel towels wishing you were with me

or that I could remember the first time I cried over an onion

but that's not the point the point has always been that at a certain point

a point was chosen & with it a trajectory once you buy a ticket

you feel better you go out into the sun with your ticket it's yours & people notice

it's plain to see that you are a human being nothing alarming

mars your face now's your chance to win friends & wave your ticket

in the paintings ofGiotto the slightly startled figures point to where the birds once were

similarly my life at its basis seems a gradual accrual of hours of evidence

pointing out the existence of every instant within any one in particular

I mean I know heaven & hell are two sides of the same town I've seen the painting

of Amore & Psiche as intertwined as freedom & compulsion lately we have had such feelings

there's a price-tag on every moment's hesitation so that sooner or later

you are in debt & the debt piles up like gold gold you can't spend

because everyone else uses money let's make our own planet then everything from scratch or from a box

I want to live in the reservoir I want to live in a cave I want to set traps & fires & run

my fingers through your long, curly thoughts when you return from the hunt empty-handed, filthy covered in blood & feathers

I will draw a bath I will say the words I have cake for you instead of hold this wolf for me

my life is too big for me so I am always trying to give a part of it to you but I want something too

in return that is not love blah blah blah she said

& immediately regretted having taken refuge in the roar of the past tense

& the facelessness of the third person the toilet bowl sprouting flowers of humor

in the form of giant handcuffs do people change or do they only change

sometimes I think the reason I don't believe more in our narrative is because I am alive

actively taking passive part in a music that feels as if it were emanating from my own body

I forget about what's out there until the cosmos comes leaking in through a colander

& now the grass makes an interesting point now this sad cat poem

keeps popping up in my feed the constant reminders that even your own body will betray you

that it's merely a matter of time &space before infinity strikes again

& you love someone more than you can bear to comprehend

it's extremely complicated like a well-made salad or the math of a soap bubble

the universe always paying attention to itself enjoying its own existence it is is all it is

but too much to digest on one's own that a bathtub is not a boat

that a friend is not an ambulance that a door is not a house that you are alone it's okay

BHANUKAPIL Rough Sketches: India (Notebooks: May 2012)

1. Forest Notes

I am writing these words in a forest in North India. A crumbling pink wall is everywhere. A Mughal fort. My uncle says: "They were Eastern Europeans." The Mughals. I have a brief fantasy of a Prague cafe culture deep in the forest but when I look left there is just a blur of peacocks. The hologram of a peacock, that is, filled in by an emaciated sub-pink form. Ghost zoo. Where am I? The heaps of scrap materials and organic matter are weirdly geometric. As always I extend my life by trying to be a person in India. Here a person might BECOME not just through acts of descent or alliance (to read India through Grosz) but through the volume and scope of matter itself. I watch the gold and creamy earth at the peak of its seasonal death turn into forms that keep moving, ebb then open up. This third form of becoming happens at the level of matter in India: The earth and the heat dominate personality. There is no Bergson here. I am writing these words on a Swedish keyboard: aaoooooo;'i;'io.

2. Electrobion (2)

A solar eclipse at night is a triplicate darkness. The eyes closed in sleep (darkness 1). The late hour (darkness 2). And then: a shadow that can't be seen. This almost imperceptible block of violet and charcoal light passes over the space where the sun would be, like an aeroplane crossing the rectangular hutch on the roof of the art museum. In the morning, we dress in our worst clothes and go to the art museum though it's much too hot to do anything.

3. Autobiography of a Cyborg

I visited three police stations, was asked for a bribe, and received a tour of a jail cell. The blue, peeling wall with bites taken out of it will remain with me forever, just as everything does. Soon after I was born, I was suspended, inverted, from a louvre window in London above the street. I think this did something to my brain that has helped me become a writer. To remember everything that happened and has not happened yet. Here in the land of Shiva­Buddha, even trauma has a zero point, a place so burnished and fundamentally indented that you could just lean into it and it would not hurt. There is a mirror inside trauma.

Today I was not traumatized. I was just a person going from police station to police station in a light trance. The heat. At one point, the Himalayas appeared at the end of the street, much as the Rockies do at the end of my own street in Colorado, one of the reasons perhaps that I live where I do (in the U.S.) And so, eventually, I drove down that street.

There, in a mountain atmosphere, I drank cold coffee from a tall glass stained with milk foam.

Siberian hummingbirds (so black, so pavanine) danced their beaks into the hibiscus above my head.

A monkey tugged at my dupatta, which had drooped to the ground.

In the evening, I went to the Shiva temple to pour milk, water and flowers over a black stone. The silver cobra shimmered as the water split its hood.

I am confused.

I am confused about nature.

In India I see things become reabsorbed in "the instant of their differentiation "(Jrigaray), but perhaps if things were slowed down even more, Irigaray's increment would present itself for real.

Like a prince taking the first step out of his palace.

A short drive away are the palace gardens where the Pand-ava brothers rested.

To get here from Delhi, we came through the shit holes of various agro-industrial cities and small towns. r

.... •• ••

nly, I glanced up and saw a gold chariot on a m~ssive gate. Kurukshetra, site of the etg'-een battles in the Bhaghavad Gita. I recalled, as a girl, being Jed from each to each by a

e ali scholar, a friend of my father's, wnCJ told me stories I ne r read or heard again, the • ts of ~'n raJ epic that nrer make it into the book.

news, I am le~rning every day atwut the anti-corruption movement. I am learning Jon !aye effects and imbalances of a col nia ¥~ministration, implemented by

ed by contemporary dignitaries and officials who, in my uncle Ravi's worse, so much

And everyone is waiting.

Everyone is waiting for something to happen.

The Ana here is Ana Hazare.

I make a silueta beneath the lemon tree, filling it with jasmine flowers, the new white flowers of the lemon tree itself and flickering, oily hemp (earthenware) lamps.

The thunder and lightning are seams.

I don't know why I write. I came here to channel Kapil Muni, my ancestor, for a section of Ban. But there are no words. I thought I would hear words. Instead, new colors come through. One is a crimson, sea-dawn color. Who is it for? It is for Amber DiPietra in San Francisco, but after I have written to her, transmitting the color, I see the color again and it has nothing to do with me. It was for her and now it is for itself, continuing the healing in a way that is not about the channeled text at all.

4. Mountain Notes

Massive geometrical blue shapes. The Himalayas shimmer up the streets then down them like rain. At night, I could stare for ages at the fluorescent pink tube light above the banana stall. Instead, I dream. Two nights ago I dreamed that my father was dying on a small city bus in London . He begged me to stay with him until he died and I said that of course I would. At the same time, a boy I knew when I was young, now a man, was also dying, also in England, and asked me to stay with him until he died. I said yes. At the same time that the two men were dying, in different times and I was sitting with them, telling them about the light in their bodies and the light in the air and the light, the light ... at the same time, in the dream, I fell asleep again. This duplicate sleep perhaps resembled the way, in India, on days when the temperature reaches 110 degrees, as it has today, a person could fall asleep on their 2666 or their Becoming Undone like a person collapsing into language and thought. As if language and thought were beds of kusa grass next to a river in South Dakota.

Then I fell asleep in my dream. In this second, embedded dream there was a gold coin buried in the earth of the house in India that my father bought when he was younger than I am now. My father indicated the presence of the gold coin with a gesture. And I followed that gesture through time and space until I was there in the garden and a gold coin, coppery and pink and gold and gleaming and thick, rose up out of the ground. When I opened my palm, it was there in my palm.

Did my father die? Did the boy die?

Yes, they died. Or are dying now. In the evening, after the dream, after waking up, after eating a mango, showering, practicing my yoga on a faded, threadbare Persian rug spread with a bed-sheet, after leaving the house, after drinking cold coffee, after reading a comic book re-telling of the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, I decided to stop at the Shiva temple before going home. As I do every day, I bought a garland of marigolds and took it in to the

,-

special part of the temple where the silver cobra is and the black stone and the nandi.. To make an offering. The dark banyan tree tied with red and gold cloths, with flickering lamps in its roots and the statue of the Goddess Kali, her massive red tongue daubed with sandalwood powder, flows all around this chamber in the night.

I kneeled, at night, finding my place next to the hollow in the floor of the chamber. And there, on the black stone, the lingam, where I have only ever seen flowers or milk or mint leaves or kusa grass or sandalwood or fire (dhoop) or water streaming down from the silver cobra above it: there: balanced: I saw a five rupee coin. The coin in my dream.

5. Plaza Notes

In the art museum next door, I attended an exhibition of ghost animal, demon and angel­human Mughal miniatures. From the windows, I kept looking at the Corbusean plaza. I saw a baby Jesus in a yellow dress, an "angel on a composite animal" (inside.) And outside: a concrete landscape of outsize abstract symbols, derived from theorems, decaying and water­stained in the sun.

Chandigarh is a post-Partition city, built as a new capital after the trauma of the short war.

"Gold was polished with a tiger's claw," I read (inside.) Inside, there were mermaids, the Buddha's footprint indented with geometric flowers and reverse swastikas. There was a terracotta fragment of a hand holding a rotted wreath. Outside, there was a sky the color of butter.

As I write these words, early in the morning, the maid's son has come to wash the floors as she (the maid) has a fever this morning. He is twelve. The same age as my son.

These are some facts. I can't swallow my tea. Last night, I went to a Mother Goddess ritual (puja) in the Shiva temple. A mendicant in an intensely violet sari and turquoise blouse, her hair in dreadlocks, took a central position on the green baize mat next to the fire (cobra) pit.

Everything is folded here. Think more about what a fold is. Think more about color, geometry and the circulation of symbols in an architecture without end.

6. Architecture and Psychosis (2)

Yesterday, in the Chandigarh Architecture Museum, an homage to Le Corbusier complete with faded originals of his correspondence with Nehru, I saw (in an out of the way corner) this fantastic thing, the Hyperbolic-Paraboloid Dome of Assembly:

I thought immediately of the Wertheim coral reef that is crocheted in the hyperbolic plane. I asked Margaret Wertheim about schizophrenia and the brain, during a crochet workshop centered upon reef production at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. A conclusion: the topology of the schizophrenic brain is hyperbolic. I am simplifying the conversation, but

it is remarkable to me that here in India I have found a third iteration of the term. Architecture and psychosis.

The museum makes me ecstatic.

I spent long summers in this city as a child, a Corbusean city block in which "the endless rhythms of balconies and louvres on its long facade are punctuated by asymmetry ... geometry ... the texturique." (Le Corbusier's planning notes.)

Corbusean fragments from letters (to Nehru, then the prime minister of India) and from other planning materials, blueprints or sketches. I wrote them down in my notebook, squinting in some cases to read the red or blue ink that had almost faded from view:

"I communicate this to you without any comments."

"My wish? Is that no reduction should be made concerning the Architect's office and especially not without beheadings!"

"It was a battle of space, fought within the mind. Arithmetic, texturique, geometries: it would all be there when the whole was finished . For the moment, oxen, cows and goats, driven by peasants, crossed the sun scorched fields."

"Monuments: a) Open Hand, b) Tower of Shadows, c) Geometrical Wall, d) Martyr's memorial."

"The modular gives two series of harmonious dimensions based on the human body."

"The Edict of Chandigarh: a brief set of instructions for posterity."

Excellent sub-title for Ban or any other novel written by myself or another person: "a brief set of instructions for posterity."

I saw the tapestry designed and woven by Le Corbusier for the Capitol building, replete with lightning bolt, cobra and inverted red triangle: symbols oftantra.

How the post-war city is spatialized, augmented and designed against the fold: an idea that collapses by 1992, at the point that weather systems corrode the concrete forms or blemish them, making the edict's harmony or comedic tone an anachronism without end.

Le Cor busier wasn't thinking.

About the water.

Or the ravaging heat.

7. The Corpse

On a day when a photograph of the corpses of Syrian children are shown on the front page of the Hindustan Times, in a country where media images from wars are not censored as they are in the U.S., a photograph also appears of a local girl whose face (mouth and ears) have been burned with acid, thrown in her face by a gang of boys ("Eve-teasers"). On this day, an ordinary day, I took a walk. The night-blooming jasmine had fallen to the street. I walked over those blossoms. And it was there, on a street corner, at the heart of a monstrous vortex of industrialists, heavily pregnant housewives, dogs breathing their last breath on a small heap of tri-poly plastic bags in all colors of the rainbow but mostly red, white or yellow, and Sikh gentlemen in tribal clothing, their vibrant blue scarves wrapped around their waists and striking, pristine, against the white cotton of their pajama leggings ruched above the ankles: that I saw it. A corpse.

Every since I was a child, visiting India on the long trips with their stopovers in Baghdad or Moscow or St. Petersburg, shivering outside the airports while my father went to look for tea or roasted corn on the cob, or a taxi to a cheap hotel, I have been ...

No, I was not. I am trying to say that each time I am here, in India, I see someone who is dead and they are dead before my eyes and it is usually a very poor person, a very very poor person, and everyone walks by or else I glimpse the corpse from the back of a scooter, speeding from the bus station to the house of another uncle, someone who will give up on me as a woman or someone related to them by blood in the very instant that my father, their brother, dies.

I have been trying to read India through Grosz. To annotate the clockwise and anti -clockwise movements of maternal or planetary matter. However, a corpse is an abyss of sound. Nobody hears the corpse calling out. I can find nothing in Grosz to substitute for this sound, the inverse of all possible sound.

Some facts stop the hallucination in its tracks. Are cures.

I thought, should I stop someone? The industrialists were walking from their cars to the dairy to get their morning milk. I could hear their car doors slamming over and over again. Eventually, someone else saw what I saw and that person called out-to whom?-and a great crowd swarmed past the spot where I stood, staring at a body undone.

A sheen or cloth, with teeth.

8. Belluchi at Midnight

Pind Belluchi that is, a haveli-style rest stop with a cafe serving samosas, ice-creams and drinks from a machine. I drink my tea at midnight in a fake Italian courtyard, surrounded by fake sculptures of Greek deities as tall as houses.

In the early morning, on the outskirts of Delhi, there's the Metro, ghostly at this hour.

Returning to Delhi from the sub-Himalayan geometries, I'm elated to slip into a place as vast and mutant as this.

Shimmering, dirty, polluted, violent and sleek city.

Glancing left, I see a giant golden Buddha. The Buddha says: "What are you doing with your life?"

Glancing right, I see the Yamuna. The chemicals in it give off a faint green light.

Glancing left, I see a baby sitting upright, perfectly calm and awake in a sea of writhing, near­dormant bodies trying to sleep on a strip of concrete beneath a flyover.

I think of my baby.

In the morning, an uncle tells me the story of a fire in the chemical plant he worked at for a few years, run by a Dutch company. Two Sikh boys of 23 went to drink tea, having switched

on the burners without realizing that the excess fuel had been let off into the surrounding dry grass the night before. It was winter. They said: "Chullao. We'll switch the burners on then go and have a cup of tea." In seconds they were surrounded by flames. They jumped into an open drain. One boy of 23, who had two young children, died in my uncle's arms on the hospital balcony. The compensation awarded to the families of the two boys by the Dutch company: 1.5 lakh rupees. Two thousand dollars or so. Although the manual for the plant's operation said that only electrical burners should be used to heat the chemical materials, the corrupt Indian manager had used open flame burners, pocketing the extra money with the knowledge of his corrupt Dutch bosses, with whom he shared the profit.

The drive to Delhi was filled with tiny agro-industrial fires and skies the color of grass: chilly silvery-green grass.

Life in the U.S. with its real babies and literary babies and babies not yet born and monster babies and babies who speak and compose Bach-style melodies from birth seems very far away.

9. Notes From the Last Day

Arrive, depart. Driving through the forest at 4 a.m. on the outskirts of Delhi, I see small groups of well-dressed people on a vigorous walk. Some of them are housewives, their dupattas knotted behind their backs or off to the side, so that their arms can swing free . They are wearing printed cotton, asymmetrical batiks. Some of them are carrying long sticks, as are the young men who jog past the women and are wearing sporting outfits: white vests and shorts, the occasional Puma tracksuit. I ask the taxi driver what's going on. He says: "Madam, they are BJP." BJP: the Hindu nationalist movement and political party. "They are going to the stadium." It turns out that these one hundred or so people that we pass are going (striding/running) to a stadium built for the recent Commonwealth Games. There, explains the taxi driver, they sing the National Anthem and other patriotic songs aloud, followed by several rounds of calisthenics. Why the sticks? "They are on patrol, madam."

Okay. Alright.

Back in the Green Gardens enclave, a gated community where I drink rose tulsi tea and read Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Dandicat in one sitting, there is, on the day I arrive, an infestation of "one hundred monkeys." I'm struck by the roughly parallel number. The monkeys arrive in a massive, feral gang and decimate the unripe lemon crop in about thirty­five minutes, jumping from house to house with great, confident and insolent leaps. The houses lose their fruit but are well protected behind barbed wire and sheets of steel over the balconies. I go onto the balcony with my Dandicat. It is like being in a prison. Behind the house where I am staying is a bread factory, its metal sheeting walls blocking out the sky. The green belt adjacent to the upscale residential community has been sold off to an agro­industrialist by a corrupt "builder." I think suddenly about Boulder, my life there, teaching poetry and fiction. I try to have a thought about it, Colorado, but the sensorimotor sequence is stalled and I return to my book, as if I am preparing for a class. However, this is not a book I would teach, as it is luxurious, identity-based, a quick read.

Laura Mullen writes from Paris and sends a photograph of a photograph of a "trashy" engagement ring, of the sort she will sit in, bunches of them, at &Now. I am so interested in writers who perform their work in durational, sustained ways. It is hard and weird. I think of when I met Laura, in 1995, and how we lay by a riverbank one day, in Fort Collins, on Cinqo de Mayo, painting with watercolors in little art books with grainy blank paper. Afterwards, we drank tequila next to a fountain in a courtyard tiled in aqua blue.

As the aeroplane flies over London, coasting up the Thames estuary then veering left and north, I look down and see the Southall water tower and the golden, ballon-shaped minarets of the Sikh gurdwara. I look down as we fly over and there, close enough to touch, is the setting of Ban. I describe the creamy clouds in my notebook, how they emit dark silver beams of light. I analyze my glimpse ofthe asphalt.

Many hours later, I open the window and below me, inches away, is Greenland. I see white mountains slashed with black vertical marks. I try to connect with Greenland. I place one hand on my chest and one hand of the chest of Greenland, ignoring the plastic barrier between us.

By morning, just as a pale green light splits and bursts over the arms and faces of the people driving to work, I am home.

KARENA YOUTZ from The R.D. Book

HOME LIBRARY

Father, I vow upon your grave, your many books to continue towards reality. as a poet

pulls consciousness to the fertile eye and solitary breast

a motherchild motherchild undivides

the music of the dark singers roams through stones of earth as plate pressures The song of earth

wakes in caves at deepest closeness Nearness

of the singers' tongues which have been formed for song never to taste or spit

never to drink or speak or kiss Their non-hunger non-thirst fills like rivers their clarities

yes multiple as perceived

Teach butterflies to read skimming pastures of}une flowers

but also by the eye's oneness I do want to want to

make a poem for human labor at the whole elegant folding up

of the seed or embryo as it extends, lost to the iota's

constant regeneration I see the garden has begun to grow and many plots were prepared to tend the reading of poets by poets who might continue to offer the matrix guardianship of song, constellation Who might begin

at the droplet-value of language

a word for the song Offer the protection of the poem

by its existence The poem becomes the coming world Citizens of true fairness by justice have presented the ideal of egalite

none forbidden none diminished none harmed or harming Even the world which creaked to break us could not be disregarded/ discarded With the world included

within us we leave the world

By the poem brought to being I feel my body dissolve

My lip curls in predator shapes I hear my growl and feel the teeth bare as if an animal against

another animal Okay predator we will feed you

like the war machine is supplicated

and father

millions of young men and civilians for its death feast

begins to justly contemplum from every side in the poem but

I think he's wrong, The poem of a soldier is written by a soldier.

Why do you believe you can conscript them to your poem?

my adored imperialist the capital of all thought content all perspectives points of view

erased into your own

myth of speakers and icons, don't you see father

that your right to speech is too much? j j j j /But your shelf does not hold enough

l

ROBERT DUNCAN

R.D. says a real poet could write forever as he inscribes direct/ intact the akashic record by hand

onto speech, the billions of daily hourly moment events Father

you choose to set the largest task

Projective streets, hoodlums, Pegasus, all myth-cloaked!

That is alright to say Fighting myself I fight you Fighting my own

dominion your ideas dominate so

I love you Many poets have entered infinite territory

staked by you Every field leads to the tree if we live

By the field's unnavigable or direction less expanse we develop

our own ordering by procedure of being: on-foot procession

to the center to hold hands around skipping and falling with no interpretation or sign

the poet writes forever beyond requirement---

the ashes have collapsed---in the realities all is available so give what is asked.

No audience does, but the poem requests me for ourself in information's union

like a mother-to-be asks for the child. Vision becomes singular

and open the one turning of all the shapes upon the wheel

slow enough to turn away

from the world shrugged as it is the extra, unimagined shapes

off our backs My shadow eclipses perfectly what I will never see though might project oppositely

by its darkness Down in the country-side apparition cows in pastures or

shit-fields the grass slicked into mud-dirt not covered up except by rare weed trees

for the lick of shade the one lick all summer day White cows and brown bulls in

a molasses dance but slower Injury fills the earth It's just a fact

you will never be separate from The wish not to speak

as if to connect were to acknowledge disjunction painful enough that a few writers plot nonsense

into non-universal structures as tidy or messy abstract hidings I get it I under-

ground why no one wishes to could not what are we

allowed to verbally claim? Our own · witnessing in the dimension of one person? not a universal

mouthpiece but father you placed yourself where you belong as writer-reader-speaker

of the cosm/ all Among poet-field permit now

the entire eternity of time and infinite space each poet enters alone/ together For one to speak is for the speech of all

in oracular singularity of union for the cultural vision or story

was once possible

LEOPOLDINE CORE two poems

SAVE YOUR LOVE

Jet's admit we made a mistake what is success if you're standing on a dunghill of cowardice. i'm tired of reasoning with a monster someone who is different day by day. whatever happened yesterday is so over dissolved fucking done a monster is a creature of the present. this is why i am afraid to sleep at night. everything is being erased when a monster sleeps. i am afraid of the morning because it is only sky the same dessert we are strangers or you are strange to me someone eating in the shade. i'm ashamed of how easy it is to know me i'm so familiar naked all the time my same legs my ass

i am such a weird little girl for wanting to live in your light picketing in the heat like an ant i wanted to save your Jove so i was talking to the tables the chairs the gold doorknob i was asking them what should I do? since they knew i was also saying goodbye i would never see them again goodbye and their sameness touched me songs like fifty white pills kicking in and i slept alone with my mind to the tune of red hamburger meat and crows and the end of the world.

ICONS

frighten someone

. you're peeling twenty years off them

you're shooting right to

the monkey

the child

the great lie of abuse

that you were never hurt enough

not unless you were dead

decked till you

saw

fizzing white

stars

the world gets

as small as the

hand

the world gets

as small

as one song

with eyes

and a hand

one statue head

in the fern

of your day

of your day

who said

spitting flowers

i could kill you

i could kill you

ifi wanted to

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BRENDA IIJIMA from Untimely Death is Driven Out Beyond the Horizon

THE RED PHASE: Oh timely citizen who is about to open

that door, this is a moving image. Don't become a victim by

succumbing to perjury. On this mountain the trees

adjudicate truth value and there is color assigned to meanings. The father figures wear skimpy underwear, g­

strings really, that are made of virtual fabric appearing like

reptile skin. We live in the age of culpability, the red

phase. Sex is this all-so-easily affected. No one is exempt

(though some do create this illusion through denial and

economic tricks) . In this human world the mental body

lives its terror. The void of the lake is impassive and

unavailable except conceptually. Mirrors always stare

at the individual, the funny exterior vision we place so

much importance on, groom and torture. Mighty

whirring birds that are mechanical and drop bombs over

civilians in far off regions, they mimic dragonflies, they

mimic dawn. It is an intermediate state though it is

called war and elsewhere, normativity. We must

approach the blood-drinking deities, it is imminent-there

is no escape clause. The thirteenth day is ravaging,

dense and this thickness makes us feel bolder. Your body is

a dark purple color now and shiny. This is not the

expressionistic phase where you challenge society and

fight for your rights . This is the face-to-face phase and

the animal heads of relatives lick your body from head to

toe in adoration. Mother of clear light but muted when

the body is inseparable from time. If you come from

North Adams you are made of ancient rock mineral that

dinosaurs crawled over with agility and raised their young

here. The lake above the cranium is filled with fish that

drink the blood of fathers . The brain makes everything

feel like a dream, don't you feel this? It is sacred to bathe

in the lake but nearly impossible-you'd have to scale the

mountain successfully, but it is an illusion and even then,

the going is tough. What grows there is impermanent,

illusionary and cuts the skin so that most bleed to death

before they get anywhere near the lake.

CONTAMINATION:

In this scenario death was the decided goal, expenditure in the form of

bodies and capital (being been, surplus work of bodies) shipped easily to

and from the sovereign brain, wrapped in the flags of nations

low level raw and loose how to scream in a poem

emotions are a series of actions-her cunt comes home like a Homeric hero,

comes home from a body-politic, centered again, back in the groin

.. . The life of an eagle ...

contaminated, actively contaminating

consequences

We've been here, before,

Seat of culture (strange terminology)

I don't mean to fixate on war,

To seek meanings out forensically reversing the regurgitation motif

Wounds glowed as if lit by neon

Sarcophagi, skeletons, death vulgar, why would it be considered vulgar

to view the slain body?

Decapitation is a symbolic form of killing that I understand. The murderer

has to hold the victim in his arms and perform a physical gesture in

proximity of the body recognizing transitional states. Least distant form of

killing. Physically challenging, no technology intervenes, hold me tightly

There's no forum for this, no discussion, only images

CODE SENSOR: INCENDIARIES

Radiating out from the body energy

fields her hands her eyes your eyes evaporation

dynamism how food is assimilated into the body jno separation, cells

Glorifying the body dance moves in a zone

Gestures radiate out of language

Suggest energy I stood deep in the night, in the

forest

understand darkness alone crawling, wet leaves

unknown distance, density dark

Space is dark

Dense

Dark becomes stage set, blank stage superimpose upon, angels

Angels, desire and need for,

Messenger between worlds

Monotheism is crushing, crushing the world into one world, unidirectional

Monocrops, our guts are becoming unidirectional,

honey bees are dying because of monocrops

Light travels, what of dark? Dark isn't stasis

The dark expanding universe, universes

The heart of the problem problem heart organ

Clashing with three-dimensional realness, an everyday experiential

perspective

Take away the problem and you have, you don't have Possession Problems, light Energy expenditure, stuff of

ancient creatures, burning up fossil fuel

Clever as dying, no words for the animals

Not natural, biocide

Biotic overwhelming seeing with hands

THE BLACK PHASE: Entreated to dismantle the status of

individuality for corporations the gathering bodies in the

profane power now park filled with chrysanthemums

down by Wall Street began to chant. They chanted and

encamped. They encamped and marched. They marched

and rallied. They rallied and strategized. They strategized

and contacted. They contacted and communicated. They

communicated and practiced forms of caring. What was

becoming of this specific world was what they wandered

onto. In a paranoid, surveillant, war mongering, school-to

industrial prison complex pock marked by racism, sexism,

classism, heedless ecological impact, the empire projection

was the anathema to any sort of continuation. Many in the

population wore cynicism raincoats to protect themselves

from the radioactive shock effects and mediated sound bite fallout. These are loving people! Their raincoats, a.

plaintive protective measure exposing delicate

vulnerabilities. A love affair arose of pulsating bodies

combining in formation. It drew throngs and troubled the

slack jaw logics of consumerism and value-driven wax

mannequinism-for when you become too real (like the

individual status of a corporation) you become super real

and threaten the premise of life which is simply real. You

overwhelm reality with subprime suction, fracking,

genetically engineered obsoletes and deep sea excavations.

You disturb the flow with borders and gates. You harness

and employ, dismiss and occupy. The you trickles down or

wells up into pustules. By the flowers to call on

dismantling. America as a form. Litany as primary energy.

And far more subtle in distinction is the beckoning of flowers. Megaphone flowers . These people are flowers.

DOTDEVOTA from Black Writing

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CORINACOPP from The Flatbed

That's called Napalm and

Pudding, painted on ·the wall,

Born in and lived for

Many years as a portrait of

A girl looking as if she were alive,

<<Every year she came back,

for eight yrs, And beneath the

granite slab, death lingered on and

on.>> And repurpose it to

feel a part of it, another angle, through

the bay window from the garden:

That poor injured soul, on the eighth year,

She did not come back. And she never

Came back again.>>

Walking arrogant from Target, sight­

Seeing and conversation, I

Slumped at her way of describing

Something e.g., I saw to my left a

Flutter of certain damaged liasons,

WINGS

Rather, of benefit brown,

and it was a bird slowly dying

Against the anguished brick and

Ecstatic ground that seemed suddenly

To have met there all along.

Not to relate it for the purposes of

Elevating my personal experience

To anything symbolic for incidental

Or even destitute to emotion was

Heart mine, art mine and that's­

That's-have mercy, am I living for it?

Or barely? And should I stomp the bird

To death? It was dying gradually

With its eyes on me & 311

never entered my mind. Could 311

have saved this trope from its OH, 311

I only called you to tell on people.

Where's a shoe-box

when a small animal shows itself to

be a private being, hm?

«The dropping of the daylight,

«The bough of cherries,

<<Broke in the orchard for her

<<Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

When e'er I passed her; but who passed

without Much the same smile? This grew; I

gave commands; Then all smiles stopped

together. There she stands

As if alive. Will't please you rise?>>

I'll guess at your resolve, it is about

Behavior. Might you unplug every

spasm each

day No matter to machinic

Speak, but hell, no matter the non­

Knowledge I live in baked Hyperion

Fear of. That hairdryer organized

Nothing toward my drinking per­

fume in telling it was your deus ex

careful watch. We police ourselves,

called revision.

Are you silently singing

while I talk, said the doctor

to her Husband, Then

later to her patient

about lying to Her husband,

<<Sure I can speak

Like a politician sexual­

ly deceiving a row of

leaves sort of hemmed to

bushes and thundering

at our heels sort of

shadow roses

shadow, cremated a­

gainst a desire to inflate

an Awful thing to

do with a Star-like-you mo­

ment took time out

.... sweeps for the Brits

visiting him in work

scene; during sex scene

We all fell down I

swear he fell lazily, I

fell similarly it was on

a foreign earth be-

tween roses and shadows,

my shadow sparse

of leaf and guarantour

of a humiliated bou­

quet incompatible

yet formally appointed>>

Then she gave him

An update.

<<Sure I can I got

a high waist in water

belittling a national

deep focus <<To have a

strong local station you've

got to have access to

the things that are going

on in the rest of the country

and in the rest of the world

so the audience tunes over

and is willing to stay with

you.>> Is this big enough

to be made up of itself

yet, I thought.

<<That man knows all about the

curiously mingled sense of identification

and alienation felt when you can see

yourself die>>

Only in an, enormous,

Grosgrain interior inevit­

Ably The Knack, the movie,

Cramped the play

With its banal set of film

Gimmicks constituting

Liberation for which I

Should be grateful,

Cue: Do you ever think

Of me? Why do you not write?

Why do you not start?

Is he ... prompt?

Shakespeare freed me from Brecht

Come, thick fabric, into a conception

Un-Rolex your Felician

letter, <<In a

Word, he wrote, it was an

establishment

Of purifying the theater so it is unreal in

A manner proper to them; my friendship

With you is permitted dissent

Trying to acquire what dogged figure

Got killed, in her late 20s she

Accessed a memory and in mock­

Adoration wrote so entertainingly

Of _call me_ I think it was.

It followed hard upon .

Don't call me. I don't need per­

Mission to live, like some

People do. Maybe I do but

Don't call me. I am not a

Strong a brilliant

green is all I can say,

A brilliant green.

I am not saying ... Hi-fi radio

Bandaged to her waist, all corsets

Hooked by Hermes and Lee Miller.

Fore mounting her horse to flash

Past the high-rises and in all the

Wet streets, not a one to be found,

Not even Where 's

Mommy Now? All children in­

Side the house of constant voting,

Tiny ivory ovaries + pecks

True and correct to their

Ambitions so far, perfect, see

Spoilt. justice is a woman

Detective. See invade.

<<Clearly Not "I," nor "Your,"

nor yet "Love.">> Showy, see

Darling, with julie Christie

sweat. A division in thinking

We Love is not a

Ridiculous upswing in the end,

<<I am opposed to bringing everything

onto a social level.>>

<<More at home in the American art scene

and the German theater scene than would

be. in the American theater

scene .... [American artists] are building a bit

on the foundation of the Vienna Actionism,

so to speak ... except that the Viennese were

so dead serious ... while the Americans shit

on everything>>

But to make 'em laugh, take your­

Self for night, isn't

That a wonder, now, to milk

The ram, to translate nailed own

Inutility into light as air, to always

Use something to designate

Time passing, to wait for

The word manger, to get dressed

Like I'm 70, to start with <<a problem>>

Someone <<could have>>

<<!like to talk about obsessions>>

<<Good taste = personal taste>>

<<I'm surrounded by heroes!>>

I wish I treated them well,

scratch Their heads for

them as they

Watch judi think

She's in a fix

in A Kind of Alaska, having

slept for thirty Years

and can't find the

Public TV nor do I presume

Anything is all right to do

••

UNICAZURN Poems & Prose with anagrams _and translations from the German by Yanara Friedland

SUR LE TAPIS DES PAUMES ET LEUR SOU RIR E

This is how all is, of the ice's magenta- your dream This is how all thaws, of this journey -trace after trace -Sense the quiet sourire of the mother- of- pearL Lips of terror of satin- Ursus- owl- egg.

(from a poem by Henri Michaux, Ermonville 1957)

SUR LE TAPIS DES PAUMES ET LEUR SOURIRE

I see lost rust sap us. Err reed palm! I read trust us, sleep! Palm seers Must I see red star leap up? Must I see Pele drape rust?

(Providence 2012)

from THE MAN IN JASMINE

In the sixth year of her life a dream guides her behind the large mirror, its mahogany frame on the wall of her room. This mirror becomes an open door through which she steps to get to a long poplar lined avenue that leads in a straight line to a small house. The door to this house is open. She goes inside. She meets no one. She stands in front of a table. On this table lies a small white- card. When she takes the card into her hand, to read the name on it, she awakens. The impression of this dream is so powerful that she gets up and pushes the mirror to the side. She finds the wall but no door. Filled with an inexplicable loneliness she goes to the room of her mother, to-if it were possible-return to the place she came from, and to see nothing more. A mountain of lackluster flesh, which encloses the unclean spirit of this woman, moves on to the child, and she flees forever from the mother, the woman, the spider! She is deeply hurt. Then suddenly, and for the first time the vision appears: The Man in Jasmine! Eternal consolation! With a sigh of relief she seats herself across from him and regards him. He is paralyzed. What luck! He never leaves the armchair in his garden, where the jasmine blossoms even in winter. He becomes the image of love. These blue eyes are more beautiful than any eyes she has known. And she marries him. This is her first, her greatest secret.

UNKAS DER LETZTE MOHIKANER

Unika's heroes murdered- scratch in cold earth- listen! Thank it M -Manitou, the cold executioner of the dream of noble Aztecs. KO-HIR­KUNAS-KIMHONA, last of the earth. SUN A, the red eagle limps. KEZ-ME, the circling cold fury. THU-MA, stone heart and ALKAE murdered. Unkas the last of the Mohicans talks to me. Listen to him: Cold, sick, old is the mouth, o heart in earth's ore. Unkas, Thokane, noble tomahawk of kin - Zuern -the last moon -he sank. (Hakirer)

(lie de Re, spring 1964)

from THE MAN IN JASMINE

Suddenly, there appears on the night's sky in front of her open window a white airfield, like a large photograph. But no! It is a moving scene. It is as if a film was played in the sky. People cross the airfield and enter the plane. And out of the blue she sees him, the way she saw him the first time when she was a child-but upright and in his arms she herself-at the age of six when she married him. Full of wonder she watches them both move into the airplane, and watches how this plane flies into the sky and disappears. The sky is black again, nothing can be seen. Ping! -Ping! -Ping! -Ping!

She waits. The image of a terrible loneliness shows itself to her. A basement with bottles and everything is white. Amidst the bottles the head of her son, slanted to the side. A white marble head with white curls that fall in baroque form over his face. He has hanged himself. With all of her willpower she tries to help the dying to a fast death. She remains strangely unaffected by this sight. Her only preoccupation is her hope that he is not suffering. Finally, his head sinks down and his eyes close gone.

The next morning, over breakfast, she reads a note in the newspaper, Le Monde "the young Abbe Christian ... was found in the forest...hanged." As if this man was her own son, whose death she had seen the night before, she writes a letter to the boarding school in Germany, where her son lives. She writes it in form of an anagram that she finds in the sentence: You would have pulled your eyes out ... This sentence she found in Galater 4, Verse 15.

She sends the letter, which resembles a grave inscription, immediately. It is the first of many crazy messages that she would send.

Later she learns that the father deeply concerned, after hearing of the letter, traveled directly to the boarding school to find his son alive, of course.

DIE WUNDERVOLLE STUNDE

In dust and soil become and become dust of your bride and send again the winter. Build You of the wanderer's idea. You colorful hour, the wonderful were you, the plateau. Round became the evening and traveled. Winds of a thousand Brothers .

(Paris, 29, rue Jacob, November 1964)

THE WONDERFUL HOUR

Honor her flute U. Wound her left hour Our tower fun led H to here. Run fowl, H.D. howled fur. Ten hour UFO wunder hero

(Providence 2012)

from NOTES ON LAST CRISIS

"Ziirn also fell sick from the mythical poverty of her times."

In Sainte Anne a woman who lies in a bed next to hers is tied up in an erotic delirium. This sick woman is neither young nor beautiful, has no teeth. She is nothing but obscene. She is gaunt and sweaty and does not stop giving herself to an imagined partner.

This woman resembles in her posture (during moments of lust) exactly that Cephalopoden BeHmer so often drew: A woman that consists merely of head and abdomen. Arms are replaced by legs. That is, she has no arms. Even the stretched out tongue of BeHmer's Cephalopoden, its outrage, is not absent in this sick woman. The woman finally grows still, until her last breath deadly exhausted. A young man appears and sits down beside her. He kisses and caresses her. He says: "Don't be afraid mother, we will not leave you." She opens her eyes, but does not recognfze her son. He stays for another half hour and watches his mother sleep. He leaves in silence.

It is quiet in the dormitory. She gets up and asks a nurse for a cigarette. She goes back to bed and smokes. There are no more worries; she is at the end of her journey.

DANS TA LUMIERE, DANS TON AMPLEUR, DANS TON HORREUR

Only the dead couple is encircled by endless poppies. Eagle out of their dreams proclaim into ancient land. 0 northern star in sand, dream reddened hall- hundreds of trombones ablaze.

(Ermonville, 1957-59)

LOUISIANA LIGHTSEY L ve

I want to know when we loved and what it was and how many thousands of years ago it happened

was I alive then

Jet's go back to it Go/Come far back

First we saw the First Ancestor rise two legged like a burn discover fire and draw testimonies of whatever it was in caves and make the first tools

OH MY GOD THAT'S BORING

ok Jet's skip ahead/back

The First Descendent followed the path of evolution and the twolegged started gesturing and meaning we started saying stuff and Changing Our Way of Life it was Jess boring

Then Jove came out of its portal to a world where the most beautiful things in the universe were dying and giving birth to even more beautiful things

the Earth was one with everything and in Paz someone young thought about loving right and almost did but Life was not easy we had problems with members of the clan we became Sick and Tired some went looking for their deceased parents with the belief they would find them alive shocked and curious beliefs came into them and they really discovered they had problems on Earth

in a trance Holy Ones came to see that life would suck

chosen geniuses offered the beauty of loving right but all those wh·o no longer wanted it followed Suffering instead it was easier to put into words

serenity is somehow meaningless when there's stuff to be owned the body's potential weightlessness compared to a fistful of hair a diamond against a grain same size same shape but one is a whole and the other a piece we never made the right choice

THIS IS SO DEPRESSING

ok so then they took the huge piece of land the river that surrounded her and made it their own how they did that I'll never know

but like that made it better we felt good about having names to pass on to our children and about owning things that stuck around

The centuries passed the profane began to sign in the dreams of those who did not listen they all slowly and surely discovered why loving sucks

and now they are we here in today the radiant light of the afternoon sun breathing through the window Why don't you just celebrate your life_ Why don't you god damn love it right_

Today I invite a look out the window into the most beautiful sunlight ever to hit Earth's surface and rediscover the world around me wow THERE IS SO MUCH TO HATE

people who don't hate it are fake anyone who thinks they love right are kidding themselves

those who don't think the sunlight is so beautiful they could die are blind or else complaining about being blind the eye tends to look without seeing anyway so just love shitty forever and shut up about it

Wait let's think about what there is for us to love when we look out of the window-

there's a Young Woman Walking Quickly while talking on her cell phone and looking at a clock her every second

a Mother Sitting In A Small Bank Plaza celebrating the new life she holds in her arms

a Young Couple Entwined enjoying the illusion of the first bad love curiously watching their shadow become single in the sloughing rays

a Man With A Face of Bitterness pretends not to watch and keeps walking uphill with his heavy load

AGH IT'S SUCH A MOVIE I want it when it was really real before archetypes came to pin back the velvet curtain before the Earth was just a rock to stand on

escape/stay with me now in the illusion let's get deep into it make it breakfast after fucking it all night

it's fertile see how it pervades every thing like sun light it loves how we lie and shake to see truth peek out in moments of weakness

it loves right

BUT BAD LOVE IS SOOO GOOD why_

one of the effects of bad love is that you don't have to feel it the tender sentiment of exquisite numbness of infinite blankness and the primary substance of the Body of Bad Love is absence which is a good thing

we like not being around we like scar tis:;ue_ice_drink new mooooooooooooooooon the holes

We never loved it wasn't anything it never happened

WAIT THERE WAS THIS ONE TIME

It was really freaky I was lying in a bed after having been loved badly v ery badly

I felt aloof, anesthetized, apathetic, asleep, benumbed, comatose, dead, detached, disinterested, frozen, immobilized, incurious, indifferent, insensate, insensible, insentient, lethargic, listless, numbed, paralyzed, phlegmatic, remote, senseless, stupefied, stuporous, torpid, unconcerned, unconscious, uncurious, unfeeling

my bad lover had fallen asleep and was oblivious to the Soul That Keeps Searching For Another I saw myself from above and realized that I was having one of those Out Of Body Experiences that you see on tv I was like sun light and suddenly

I felt so so alive, awake, aware, conscious, open, perceptive, receptive, sensitive, sentient, softhearted, knowing, sensatory, touchy, touchy feely, tuned in

and even though I felt so strange I saw I was worried for the lover cuz if he woke up and I was not in my present body he would think I had died and be annoyed and I realized that no one has ever loved right and so the wrongness must be admitted the tries in the dark_the salve of dating_the elusion it all keeps us from breaking into infinite gorgeous pieces which the sun would sear in an instance and fritter away

That's kind of what I was thinking above myself and my lover's self that night fully aware of the illusion of our bodies mistakes

you have to grab onto the nightmare of love with even mental tentacles or else you will be taken from it and your busy body will be left alone awash in that evil sunlight recounting the infinite things it fucked up and literally clawing at the air because a heart doesn't work when the soul isn't there

Nowadays we are all born bad lovers we come to Earth to make more bad love than First Ancestor could ever imagine and that is our right BECAUSE IT'S A BEAUTIFUL TIME TO DO IT

nothing is necessary anymore everything is permitted we live in a ghost's paradise so fuck the sun I mean literally put your dick up in that shit

lay the rays_get the light off_make it come in your eye OPEN THE CURTAINS AND DON'T STAND BACK

There are so many things we could love and so many ways we could do it

But I hope we stay the same and don't change I know we won't

THANK YOU EVERYONE REALLY

life would just be too complicated if we loved right

Be numb_stay in the body_plod along hate the sunlight spread bad love thicken the illusion be just one amongst many don't shine see how the dark stone feels heavy enjoy Every Moment That It Makes Life Bearable

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LUCAS DE LIMA seven poems

dead children reach for the horse splattering the sky with his bolting limbs flutter skin-cemented path cord of tiny hands so the horse may wind back down dead bald children babies again born on the flank of the horse he skitters off a cloud having bit his master on the face no pegasus having also died as an orphan he is my daughter i am his daughter i fall to the ground face-first encircled in horse bones flesh cannot coil around just like that a wind in the doorway i confess to the hot brown cock of the trampled horse blood of the earth all over my race

i had a daughter curly-haired pony she left rainbows in her wake leaping off a cliff my rider fell down & i went with him my daughter beat her pony head against the cliff wall moth upon a flame

billowing into the house i lost sight of my pony daughter writhing on the floor mute trees called to me every day a new marlboro man on my back smoking up a storm like a lumberjack we blew up struck by the thunderbolt in that sky v;=~riegated with my daughter's blood with my daughter's blood

on the rear of the stallion a man not her father touched her they rode bareback wild dogs watched my mother undressed on the neighing stallion i stroke carving a black vulture out of that hidebound body fumbling toward the child my mother was man whose eyeballs shine brain slop like an amniotic sac we eat we claw and eat starting with the man's asscrack

blackest of hearts

precipice of my youth

scepter inside my anus

fissure in the pink sky

shit of the rider

root of the horse

the little ones bray

the cock of black beauty up my rosebud

the moon splits the barn

our sword of horse and rider

unsheathed by beams

of homunculi

deflowering my ribcage

nose-diving off a cliff thru

my breastplate

silvery glint of entrails parting

please bow to the arrow in my colon

on the lip of the gorge my horse ate me dreams and babies went down his throat inflamed his belly both of us cursed scraps of my meat coating his guts i could still think i braided myself into an umbilical cord tied to a bomb

i launched the horse off the lip of the gorge into the mouth of a buffalo stampede my knot of birth whipping him within supermanly buffalo crushing him without the flight of his meat envy of birds chunks flung at buzzards knocked the bitches out then our mixed meat zeroed down to a stalk of grass grown in the horse's skeletal frame acid rain scalded us made us recall our wounds folds the rump of the horse valley i'd dipped my cock in to root myself in dew we slept until the sun stepped on us crunching our stalk in the looping of ground meat ground horse hole rays fill in as they shoot up clouds

i grant myself a falling black star because

the colt is my aborted baby

blocking the streets

angel i bite in descent with the star

angel with a hollow base for a throat

to hammer the star into

mother night belting my face

SANDRA DOLLER from Memory of the Prose Machine

She's a white girl

but I'm living with a white girl.

She's a white girl

well I'm living with a white girl.

-X

Children are both full of lumine and ill. In my experience, the child you were is the one you kill. Take

this icky kiddie before I drop her. Jog on top of me like that, like boot camp. Jump. Jump. Children are

glowy like. that. Take the philosopher with the honey thumb and a walk to the home by the side of the

roadkill road. Take her and sponge her down ofthe sounds like one more minute up there. I said, it

sounds like one more tourniquet. Barry?

You may be a boy

You look like a girl

You're always wearing skintight pants

And boys wear pants

But in your skin tight pants

You look like a girl

You may be.a boy

You look like a girl

Are you a boy?

Or are you a girl?

-The Barbarians

What kind of questions is this, are these? Someone stole my notebook and wrote "Pooty West

Virginia." I didn't write that. Though I can accept Pooty West Virginia as my own. Own thought. Own

child. Is that normal? On Craigslist there's an ad "looking for Normal Human to share house." There's

always that ad. That's the seek. The demand is never maxed for Normal Human. So, no. Because

poetry is something pre-demand or supra-demand or ex-demando-facto. Poet does not fulfill demand

like order. The poet demands. The Maria Callas in every room.

Poor little critter on the road,

Where were you trying to go?

Life's got a bucketfull of woes for

The poor little critter on the road, oh

Poor little critter on the road

-The Knitters

Funny you should ask. I almost tried to compare machines and machinic and mechanic. But I didn't.

What do machines make of me? Lost dog lost dog lost dog. !like making, the word make, to make of a

word what it makes of me, to make in the mouth the sound it makes of the letters, to make it with the

word make, that's what I make of that, I make it with make, make maki rolls, make of the machine a

machiner, the maker of the machine is a machinic, making machinations to keep the job, making the

"m" out of two separate mounds of ink, separate but joined, made together, made to make up. There.

I'm an engineer.

I know mother nature

Has a sense of humor

I can tell

When I lookatyou.

-The Dirtbombs

This is my most political poem. I think I'll send it to Politico. Talking about political poetry is the same

as being political. Poetical. I'm so poetial I'm political. I'm so of the people I'm for the people. I'm so

peopled I'm in you. Hi. I'm Pepper. This is my political poetry. Does political poetry accept donations?

Will I still live on the train? Listen to the dervish up there, he's eating it up. The dervish, the organic

Weetabix. The stairs. This is the poem we all aspire to, admit it, the .one that climbs the stairs. Admit

it, political poem at the gym. I thought about reading my most political poem to you while I was

writing it. I thought about drafting a bill. I thought I was right so I wrote. I thought I had something to

say but I'd already said it. I thought about you saying it for me. I thought about you. I thought about

me. I thought about you and me.

Hanging out in 100 B,

Watching Get Smart on TV

Thinking about you

And me

And you and me

-The Ram ones

What American poet living now isn't a great one? lsn 't greater than the sum, than the sun? Isn't Emily

and Walt and their children? Isn't Wallace and William and Mina and Gertrude and Langston and

Zora and Sylvia and John and George and Larine and Louis and and and the trees? What American

poet is living now? What American is living? What American is great? What is the difference between

a question mark and an exclamation point. Mommy? Bhanu? What are "they doing over there? What

are they making? Why do they hold their hands like that? Why do they do that with their mouths?

Once I had a jacket like that but I gave it away. It was given to me. I gave it. Once I saw a boy fix a

dock. Once in the middle of the room. Once I taped my mouth shut. For you. Flickered. Once I was

handy with a hammer. One time I sucked my own toe. One time in the river. One time I saw my

husband there, on the 33rd floor, in the elevator. One time I said that. I said that.

Don't worry,

Don't worry, don't worry

Kyoko,kyoko,kyok~kyok~kyoko,

Don't, don't, don't worry, Kyoko.

Mum's only looking for her hand in the snow,

Mum's only looking for her hand in the snow.

-Yoko Ono

SOPHIE PODOLSKI from THE COUNTRY WHERE EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED translated from the French by Joseph Kaplan & Paul Legault

regardless of what these evil people said, she was named Chantal - you already know why - there ain't any more Coca-Cola - it looks like there was a dead cat in this cooler­and when you light the newspaper with a match during our fishing trip - the smoke makes its upwardly melting wax - I expect to see a little scripture that reads: I have worked fifty years in the match factory (CAUTION: always FLIP cardboard flap) the soldiers are never brave - or coquetteish - or reckless and brave - the emperors are all cretins - they have the desired - they have their unborn little war - they are Dicus - then watch, little insect - It's gay - that you are a true thing - and easily so - that you deal them their cyclothimics or sedatives - like Librium - or the great VITAMIN Amphetamines- Captagon- The then- The same dunce loosening away at his moment - Him and the pathological liar of himself with his books in his office - his records put away into their Ebony drawers - two of them -in their chartreuse folders - embossed: the first: My Pathology- the other (smaller and hugely smaller than the width of its thickness) - The shoe that I've locked in a crystal cage to be adored - she is my only platonic lover -sleep within your love of beer and say - looking at whatever is you - I love - I adore you - you are mine - and say nothing to you of how - you are far more than where you will never walk - I'm his protege - the ephemeral song of the nymphomaniac is effeminate: Don't call me NO DON'T CALL ME NO ONE NEVER, DON'T CALL ME - I'M A Supreme - I'm a smoke but also a jailer standing up drunk with a power begotten of pride - the Louvre and other shit and I walk amidst this alcohol - Speed - Acid - Opium -Mescalin - Cocaine - Xanax- require us - Shalom - Shalom -And I did I did I do - the beasts dogear books for me -because 1 can't read - even in prison I write - I'll have the buckwheat or the Salisbury steak - I know that the cultural revolution won't happen within these factory-grounds - in this lack of impact that you describe - sir - the family theater actor is ready for his close-up - here we are - with

our thirsting for the colors that increase our thirst -longing to ourself- the hallucinator - has neither a temple nor fun around the house - the light-architect is brilliant and designed a pupillary enlargement that's about to take place - Sexified machine - sex deifies itself - Neil Young must have a repertoire of pretty amazing groupies - the birds' - intimidated boo - boo - boo - boo - goes the enchanting nightingale bird-prophet in the feeling of a good thing to come - courtesy is dead and murder has to be quiet- as a Ming dynasty- today- I really like Mexican pop music when its both languorous and audible - and when it weighs a ton -Sunshine, thank you- She said as much - my way is my life - the only life is a love-life - all right - man -and a music-life too - things like that - It takes him -actually getting off the stage - you think I behave badly -when you're driving- Berek steals your plans and you can't really flip me - fire - fire - chilis - balanced trial - Soviet scientist -aerial tour of France - swordfighting champion -Florinne has a sore throat and is a little nervous in her forgotten dungeon-pit - the stairs all lead back to places that look like they're alive - I'm crazy but not as crazily as the way Sousa vows to put the words you put away back -my mother-happiness is right at your fingertips - what pleasure I take in this book - I'm all sweaty - like a special round star - all's already right with me - strangely - you attract yourself to me -you free you - with a single, round chip - your lips' roundnesses - are all right with me -without you baby - around you - let me be high - on sunshine - baby please come back - all the day let me be high - and getting better all the time - people say she is crazy- but she is lazy too - I can just do now - go now- no now - a little more - then that's life - He thinks he only smokes joints all the time -a little one before bed - it's nice - it's like wearing a nightcap - in a waterbed - or in that hat right now- pink as sugar melting in a chicken coop - find a hen tie - pull to enter- like a chicken in a trance- the mind games' emotional excrement - is about to be the harbinger of spring - as you look out there - cromda - cromda -Rapallo - never again will we ride in an elevator - we take the stars- I like the chitlin getting drunk inside of their sun -though I'm flat and don't hover- though I know how to - I need something to wear- but there's nothing in the trunk­look what I found - this is really magnetic - it spins me -more colors should be electric - an orange lamp flashes in the mirror - She sleeps under the covers - dressed in orange

GILLIAN CONOLEY & HENRI MICHAUX from Four Hundred Men on the Cross

F. 0 U R HUNDRED M E N ON THE CROSS

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Four Hundred Men on the Cross -o ·c;::. -r

Diary of a Draughtsman -\--::5 ("

Fragments ()

(drawings made in 1953) '"""" ~

I can't always z.

I put the cross in place first. (' i-'

1.. ometimes, it's ~~::1 have to draw before everything else, stretch him out in the middle of the sky, but stretehed and stretched, the way ma.n:s suffering stretches. "' &\'

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This one's a person forgotten on a cross. People lost him there.

That one's a Flying Man, who was stopped, abruptly stopped. '· luR ~ ..,.--""' . "' ~JJ ...... ) o;f.',..r .) l L .) • •

And that one is a kind of long midge pinned to a cross that goes up and up forever, from w~uld, in any case, b¢' completely impossible, completely pointless to talk to ,Y'V v a_....,- •

men.

This one's another insect. Doesn't count. Even on the cross, could an insect save the human race?

L~' i'< • -(-Jf ~- • Nillnber 42, a rtltfian.

Number 51, duck, a real quacking on the cross.

[53] Christ perhaps, the fir~t to appear on the cross, but furious at being thererl Onthe_. solid wood, he makes h~:t efforts to free his arms, his hands (as...thou.gh-str.dp?eu~~p) aie. '-broad and nervous and look ready to eseape;::over'i:he.erossbeam. Christ or parachutist~

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(54) Don't try to get any hope from this one. His expression: Death for nothing, it just aggravates the fault. ~c v~u<:-0' [4.-< 'ft"r 1

( 60) Intense, intense, so intense that he turned to flames. He looks bound to consume the cross. By fire if necessary, ~ecides to L ' f'

· "get out of this"

# a .~ o-v... fl< 1\J o1NA Unquestionable: Neither side

\Vants the passion. They are n~alking. They don't believe in redemption through the cross. Don't envisage it. r~ ..

- ~ 0 0

UNITED WITH HIMSELF, surrounded by Images of Himself on the cross, finding all!neaningfullife in Himself, through Himself, with Himself, in preference to all other beings on earth, but that was long ago, that was in the serious years of my life,

in my adolescence ... What a difference, now! But the idea had occurred to me,

[base idea] to hold on to the man, to whom I was once

bound by passion and faith, in drawing. That was the plan. Shabby resurrection! How far I had wandered from

Him, so far that I could no longer represent him* (his meaning, his mission, the oblation granted), now I knew and could not have known better

in any other way.

* Maybe I should try Buddha, more recent in me , and alive, less rejected than the man of Calvary.

( I \

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24

FOUR

,-

HENRI MICHAUX

M E N

ON 1HE

c R 0 s s

HUNDRED

NINEfEEN FIFTY SIX

HENRI MICHAUX

QUATRE CENTS H 0 M M E s

EN

c R 0 I X

MIL NEUF CENT

CINQ!JANTE SIX

] ournal d'un dessinateur

FRAGMENTS

(DESSINS ENTREPRIS 'EN 1953)

JE NE PEUX PAS TOUJOURS

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PARFOIS C'EST L'HOMME qu'il faut a etendre avant - tout, etendre en plein ciel, mais etendre, etendre, comme s'etend la peine des hommes.

UNI A LUI, entoure des images de Lui en croix, trou­vant toute vie profonde en Lui, par Lui, avec Lui, prefera­blement a tout autre etre au monde, mais ccla il y a longtemps, c'etait dans les annees graves de rna vie, dans mon adolescence ... . A present, quelle difference! Mais l'idee m'etait venue, [idee basse] de retenir par le dessin a Celui a qui j'avais ete lie autrefois par l'ardeur e,t la foi. Tel etait le projet.

Minable resurreCl:ion! A quel point je m'etais eloigne de Lui, eloigne a ne plus pouvoir me le representer• (son sens, sa mission, }'oblation consentie) je ' le savais a present et n'aurais pu mieux le savoir d'une autre Ja~on.

• J e devrais essayer le Bouddha peut-etre, plus recent en moi, et sinon vivant, moins exdu que l'homme du Calvaire •.

I CAN NOT ALWAYS

SOMETIMES IT'S THE MAN I have to draw before everything else, stretch him out in the middle of the sky, stretch and stretch, the way man's suffering stretches.

UNITED WITH HIM, surrounded by images of Him on the cross, finding all meaningful life in Him, through Him, with Him, in pre­ference to all other beings on earth, but that

. was long ago, that was in the serious years of my life, in my adolescence ...

What a difference now! But the idea had occurred to me [base idea] to hold on to the Man to whom I was once bound by passion and faith, in drawing. That was the plan.

Shabby resurrection! How far had I wandered from Him, so far that I could no longer represent him* (his meaning, his mission, the oblation granted), now I knew and could not have known better in any other way.

* Ma y b e I s hould try Buddha, mor e rec e nt in m e, and if not alive , then less excluded than the man of Calvary .

JOHN NIEKRASZ from Belacq

"I have no clue how this shit got here he said I have free range to make anything but I didn't hear news for over one week the machines here don't take my card I am left with $20 but they say the bank in the capital will forward

good well let me know if you need help

I joke I will collect

so I heard Haswer died from Esquey wearing a turban saying 'I'm dead'_ a way to learn about the worlds goings

I am looking to open a motorshop with a friend, but if money don't come I will have to leave

maybe one of us can bring your tools

I am planting trees, finding scorpions

for once in a relationship I have the upper hand

no desires to go, except when feeling sick

this scorpion I got on a string leash

yes being sick that way makes home warm"

you didn't come here to tell me to be quiet, you came here to tell me now that I'm quiet

We drew toward it there were people helping a boy to breathe

his body seemed a tent its guests emptying their glasses into the grass

lamps on their stands crepe-work from branches

ear-colored buds

Ask do the eyes have loins

this is where, spread over the dancefloor

yes, chosen for size and weight I mean to send back

torn membrane, each was hesitant to stay the image

where the thumb comes to rest of course it is an easy weight, in time it will be easy

my arms as men beset

to stand beneath the weight of stammers

win obedience in a thirty-year howl

instructions to blow smoke over our shoulders

they will mark weighted time on the railing outside your room

attire, idle ear, show him where the tobacco draws to your window

on our way, step well

below the gate, a gall of water

he seemed exhausted to have grown cold and the cold must eat

no one rolls into the fire in his sleep

knees nearly clutching his throat

there are mites on anything a feather touches there are children who have already mastered my art

a book with a boat on its back cover he follows my speech, one can put a child, even a baby into a boat

"no go I am not poor I saw your name on it

too poor for a taxi, so

there is food because you have family but to find work or money you can't

does it make you think of your family?

who? depend on the ease of the road?

give me an s one before give me an s two before

I mated too easily with this place

one type of invasion but at home they ask too much and they ask stupidly

land here is really cheap in the forest even less disease we could still get land

I rode in an open truck coming to town this time leaving the fresh air way behind

I just sent $950 to pay bills, otherwise I haven't fallen into the open deep gutter yet finish the debt then feel free to come

yeah I am good even in the dark dark night at spotting things in the road they wake me up too much one day neighbor's rooster ventured into our yard, we chased it, me, the German, and his two live-ins, it was like in the movie throwing rocks at it and all, finally we caught it, made it drink water as a symbolic peace, then pulled the feathers

from its throat, cut it, convulsing for some minutes we poured blood over the railroad tie shrine for pounding a shrine for instrument making yes

yes

the shrine likes a drink, too love her for the music but take the money I have a good friend and that's all I call him favorite name so far greeting somebody is a hassle but very nice

I'll check on your garden when I go home thanks

Tell your father I hang his nature pictures on my wall in my room it creates, sincerely, some peace in my life a stork and a lily pad pond the love well I forget that remember

good

I am laughing and everyone here looks"

Hair tied back so tightly it shapes the eyes look at me through your bracelet it hurts to take the bracelet off

had a shortened stride from stooping and you could, if you wished, overtake such a man because you thought him old But I'm not in this thing to play interlocutor trying to be old so he can turn back whenever I ask it

"a room for men who want a room away from wives and mothers

going to equip it with a shotgun but it is too long so I might have to equip it with a sawed off shotgun"

Uncover functional translations by physically damaging an object [wave, wave, wave], or nearly that thrill in accordion-like movement

referenced by The Official:

The Gunman's Set of Psycho-Muscular Memories by Gris Eau Walker

Rhythmic "False Bottoms" in Modern Solos for Drum Set by Bien Riaz

Benefactor by Juan Cuba Gaviotas

Transgressive Extension: The Subversion of Anticipated Points of Closure in Contemporary Choreography by Nil Felbeck

The SINE of the Tihai Lecture by Pandit Lacchu Maharaj

(crack ears)

breaking rhythmic contract with the listener, for the masculine constant is a brittle and misplaced target, pull its badge, no score

The Theater and Its Double by Anton in Artaud, who tells us "ifthere is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames."

I am after I am after a summons to row a shovel through the prehensile shit-fog that is our enemy

I haven't been there no one is dressed like this my chipped glass thrown into a bucket full of glass

a helmet on the wall says

I made no offer letting go of my coat, had not enough for even a farewell

so, washed my beard and went to our room the sound of folding blankets

The man whose house we're watching has a small collection of distressed leather bags

Rickets ricketry and they are pulled_

and they are pulled pulled __ langorously, now __ and they are propaganda dancers returned to no __ propaganda_ Marseilles hot in nineteen forty propaganda four __ behind this rotted panel a rotting vine

It is difficult to walk quietly inside a stranger's house.

find a coil of rust in my hair-my how my hair has grown graspable.

MaHa Ma Ha Ha Gra Gra x2

I can see some of the plasters are not real what should be a bluff of fused fontanelles is only a curtain with a chain in its bottom hem

I don't believe I am beautiful here I do not believe my son is beautiful he's jealous of me I was sentenced to jail jail jail

cloud of absolute emperor always to sweep out grandfather father old man term of endearment for a child

cobwebs rounds for magazine minus coming at us new hairline gold leaf neckline begets flat hat or territory collar earnbolish contact on scritch grease decorated expert acts out a knife in his cummerbund

an intricate version of surveillance here, the slit arm is extended and the face is turned away several of us begin hemming the branch closed while one snips open the remainder

"It was too early to drink the mowers throwing chafflets into the air and into the mowers' air intakes"

split from drum to man, passed, man to harmonium, man to sheer yellow sheet behind the listeners

keep the watch face toward your hip

move the baby as if it is saluting

click

(_

ANCIENTS

The images from Henri Michaux's Quatre Centes Hommes en Croix are from Oeuvres completes II (Editions Gallimard, 2001). A selection of Gillian Conoley's Michaux texts will be published by City Lights as Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux (City Lights Pocket Poets' Series, #61, forthcoming Fall 2014). The film stills throughout are from Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon; they were photographed by Michael Earl Craig off his computer in Livingston, Montana. Some parts of Sandra Doller's Memory of the Prose Machine were featured also on Tarpaulin Sky, under the title Leave Your Body Behind: tarpaulinsky.com/2013/04/sandra-doller. For more about Yanara Friedland's work with Unica Ziirn, consult the Spring 2013 issue of Denver Quarterly (Volume 47, Number 3). The schematics were composed by Matthew Henriksen during the making of his book, Ordinary Sun (Black Ocean, 2011). Brenda lijima's poems are from Untimely Death Driven Out Beyond the Horizon, forthcoming from 1913 Press. Erin Moure's translation from Secession by Chus Pato (Zat-So 2012) appears here by permission of Chus Pato, from the original Secesi6n in Galician (Vigo: Galaxia, 2009). Lynn Xu's "Lullabies" are in her collection of poems, Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013; omnidawn.comjxu). The cover photograph is of Sano and Midori

· Shimada, brothers, taken by their father, also named Midori Shimada, in the early 1950s, New Jersey. Ancients is a photocopied reproduction of a stack of paper assembled, in part, as a descendant of Muthafucka, an irregular, locationless journal of the arts, edited by Mitch Taylor. Visit records-ancients-matters.tumblr.com