FUTUREPROSE
Partly a response to part of a letter
Words go forth from one's own person and exert their influence on men. Deeds are borne close at hand and become visible far away. Words and deeds are the hinge and bowspring of the superior man.
The I Ching
At start, you call recall the newer name you shared the forward motive a clinging shot was shadowed-in or named alert movies a shore and fault the same as this, a newer line is perhaps his own time renewing the air below your arms the same as this again against the room or pasture, the same cabins clouded short your own sky was there or past, I built it with my own hands, this paragraph a house and garden singing in the wind another newer name is recognized before you start to speak, aha! and goes on, sailing interior spaces are all mapped out, you just began another entire cycle, here, and bent slowly around her eye, would say, who, and listen, to a name.
Signatory response, the name you give the dance is slowly falling here, the light filling the room, returning, angling from the gray chasm you met at other years, years, eyes, hands, plunged into her sharp shots flooding sense, exposed moons full and new the time is still this practiced, ongoing intensity without pause, the on-rush of metabolic charges call the name of the thing the same as the thing itself indistinguishable or perhaps undistinguished is easy enough; we took the tree out onto the deck into the rain, amputated plant the plastic shiny pieces of short streamers, near the end of one time and entering into another the very types of things are less types than things, and the things of the heart are echoes of acts made inside these loops of chance, the tapes recorded and mixed one-on-one his indian name is more a chant than a song and one-on-one is the isolated closeted forearm bending here or there the scratch of black lines on pale green paper to remind you that something happened before typing.
Quick, no, the loom. Ah, the weft or clamor, the open spoon, his red hands twitching spasms nervously retarded moons are twittering gray ears flashing numbness the innocence of years retained hours are the closer parallels of speech and action, glyph and spasm, you nattered all day long under the tree, asking him, "Do you know what the hell I'm up to?" and he said, "Well, no," and they stayed friends another three years, him drifting into a fine madness and the other into fundamentalist, tight-pitched letters some of them answered, the couple in the next car, saying, him, to her, "I've got the parking sticker," and her, saying to, to, well, saying, uh, "Praise the lord," not, I would think, just frivolous, like, gee this is a great burger and, praise the lord for this good burger, ah, yes, I praise God for this really great hamburger, or piece of celery, as, hearing Doctor Fever's testimony not without absence or designs on the ceiling floor, a house filled with clear water, chairs and tables floating here and there, it took a second to see.
Well, anyway, you go on over it, through the gloom a mist or musk or muck or mark or nark or closer resembling tenets the meaning of which obscured, and rambling patterns the lines along the table white lines are also conceptual progressions from unconsciousness to energy the very block of the paragraph is this, this solid motive, thing, inherent in space, composed easily of words werdz, the conglomerate stuff of sensation, and feeling around inside it, or her, stiff middle finger creeping through and into, dimensions of mysterious inner space, and gasping lights, life's, as plural stances mark the shadow's shorter angles speaking smoother arrows clear the harder shores have vaulted through the forehead splatter of hungover day-after webs and fantasies of power the ego flattened into obedience by the sledge of action, working one's self into oblivion or obedience, why else do they drink so much, these humanoid Californicators, these dry faced empty-eyed clones, drabs, these others I love so much.
Well, I stopped awhile, stopped at movies, the fags singing fat hairy chests, bathing suits stuffed with tissue paper, a room full of silicone implantable disks flapping on their hooks and shelves, the locked door at the end of the hall, childish memories of false things; well, then, the very attitude which results in concepts becoming things, this, this, uh, static visual identification of light removes, restores, recalls, renews, results, the open door is always open, even though the handwriting is not so very legible, I can hear the blue tube booming songs into the next room, rheum, he said, did you say rheum, yes I said rheum what did you think I said, and the clerk staring dumbfaced, the ongoing copying of attention has this facade of belief which slows the flow of identity if you go too fast to be remembered, I'd say the noise is too fast, just below the perceptual level, to cling or call the sense of the music is not cluttered so much as mixed.
The rest as rests or stops. Stops. And in the inner city, consciousness departs from fixed states as fast as this becalms the eye, the head stuttering to catch up is not so much a criticism or a problem so much as how it is between seeing and thinking slow fixed states her voice in the morning calling back and forth from his her to her his a matched set or pairs or fruit in the bowl, the set and hinge of words floating forward between deeds and acts distinguished either by power or value in the ascending set of image and state, Montanoid cowboy spurts of anger the empty head the floating platform the continental shelf loaded with tins of fish a contradiction of storage and appetite his fingers clutch the brown bag full of brown bags full of weeds the smoke or lunge his coughing inattentive lingering episodes were ridiculed before and after but in between the hot point of attitude a mathematical episode (again) resumes this, uh, insignificant postures flaming out, as in "no motor is clean enough!"
I mean, you can read this anytime you want if you want and if you don't it's still there, as unattached feelings dominate the parade is just now starting to come in from the other room his short-haired wisps and angles are set here and there around the room the same the same the same; as in twenty years' time no alteration the forward rush no "technological decisions," if I was reading this aloud how would you take notes since the observation of the program is not so much a matter of copying down the outline as in copying the shape of the moment is not so much a lack of shape as the shape of shape itself meaning to continue on down the line continuous progressive prose is the sound a cat makes when you stroke its throat with no apostrophe between the last two letters in the short word makes a four letter word out of a three letter word there is not really any cause for alarm between protecting your own precious space (encouraging it) and floating mad and free into the cosmos.
As if or other, outer, rooms this colder planet a plant aside to confuse the issue is not the point but rather to empty the mind of realistic fantasies in order to (order) (to) provoke the more attentive faculties into a perception of the truth which is simple enough as far as it goes, which is far enough to be far out, but there are really some other things to consider as such not to belabor my own interference here, which I insist on, only for the sake of argument, but it takes awhile to attain the unattainable, ho ho, and once climbed, the mountain shatters, he flies out over that immense vista so huge so grandiose, to see from the top of this rise it took about ten minutes to drive up it, we walked up over the lip of the ridge and could see, well, about seventy miles out over the so called Salton Sea (a joke name) the eroded dried-up landscape out in about a two-hundred degree face even the image was larger than our perception of it, we fell into seeing.
I mean, listen, dildo-head, this is the straight stuff, the real thing, don't you get tired of being lied to, the fictive bulge in his pants more an evasion of the actual, a lapse into dream-time, sleeper's waltz, is the present moment less a moment than a monument to voice or is there any voice at all your own mumbling repetitive formalities are spelled out already, like alright le's go, and then, flash the quick shaling forward packs it in, and into movies calm the short repose would tense the iron gesture less than flags the brothers in the air you spoke too soon to be believed if the core and angle emblematic imprint ongoing chasm the slice or wedge as is and after pronouns locate areas of the brain's inhabitation language as structured barks exploding air in throat sung spasmic lip-tuned face-bent eye-focused bleeps and chatters the song is rising from the heart's liars are all poets between what is said and the airplanes exploding on the ground there is nothing really to be afraid of between the bacon and the eggs remind you how the horses fall the sky his musical realm is still untouched the future looks like this present moment still unfolded like what lives between her legs is too much a poem to be remembered always different beginnings after solitude and silence is not so much love as all of it combining into the presence of your life including feelings too large to be described between kindness and the indulgent preparations for great campaigns into unexplored realms of the already undiscovered area of your back pocket where bits of lint finally ball up in your fingers not unlike the collections in your navel occasionally dug out and examined and flicked into the wastebasket well look up out of this attentive insistent and vocal clamoring after speech itself to call her into morning's meaning meeting the one and only self is one and mated-out to say you are and not no longer no-one sailing lines between her eyes a spot and marker moving movie up.
Somewhere near the middle of something, surely no "twilight of consciousness," but the dark, the night, I was distinctly moving amplifiers and speakers and wires around a house, the house, my house; well, there were two amplifiers, really, a new one had come in. It appeared, suddenly, that there was finally enough equipment to rig each room out, speakers spliced in-line, headsets, the whole spread of gear was tucked into closets, assumed into the walls the way you can come in the door with six bags from the grocery and have the house simply devour all of it invisibly into the shelves and closets and rooms.
And the high aluminum ladder up twenty-five feet to the tiny, high windows with mud on the steps, carrying up step by step in one hand the five quart bucket containing an inch-and-a-half of thin, dark oak stain, brush down into it ["Tom!" he says], rag tucked into the belt, white clothes patched with plastic filler, bits of paint and stain.
So the focus of the day is the morning hours. Just as we were speaking of children and the kinds of love-feelings one has for them, different feelings for different children, depending, she said, on the state of mind with which one first greeted the child, and my youngest, to whom I gave the bottle, nursed, my feeling for him maternal as I had mothered him that first year of his life and nearly the last of my marriage. Gives me the opposite of my relations with my own mother, who didn't nurse me; I mean, she fathered me while my brother, older, got my father.
Dream-recall, the work-recall derived from the dream and a piece of yesterday's conversation all looped around in the one-two-three of the distance from sleep or the milestones of consciousness which is (or are) thought or the real; or, more to the point, the composition of consciousness is these recall flash-points which are not so much, uh, unconscious as spontaneous.
Or is it that quick at all? Really, he says, it is a foundation of real on unreal, according to, uh, popular speculation. But I don't want a lecture, it's early and I rolled around all night with nothing much to say, nothing much to bother me, the thick emplacement of idea and image more a starting point the career of which evasive and distant and permanent; the preoccupation of which moving from side to back to the other side, the patient drift of the dark hours climbing the walls next to the window beside her, catching a hand in the half-sleeped middle of this darkness, it is the assurance that the dark sky comes into the light with a recognizable human voice passing through the air inside my body, the passionate juices in stomach line and chant waiting for the morning's coins resolve the moon's fuller propositions at the start of the year, the start of the project, enterprise, it is said, you move along in incremental steps, like a description, or like a move up the line and into the air, it is something like this ever-increasing, additive collative of incremental repetitions, the patina of image and energy and memory, the human factor is this reflective shadow-storage of latent half-life energies, "Why, yes, your latency," he says to himself, like milk or paint, rolling the walls with plastic milk, or are we all water soluble particles in exchange with the, uh, passions and fruits of labor, is there any pleasure at all which is not also partly serious, or a series of consequences implied by the actions preceding them not so much as a causality or synchronicity of events as an increasing description of what is going on at all, the colors on the walls are all varieties of the pure white light which becomes off-white, semi-white, partly-light and somewhat tight; or too easily, the thought that is the paragraph and the structure of the sentences which are the paragraph, a monument in time to the tactics of continuing on through the mists of early morning repose after coffee the two cigarettes and his red truck about a mile away still cold, he calls it this, and goes on after the autobiographical mode goes flat.
Angular distances comply outward the calm position of forces internal reliances distinct arcs of possibility describe active force aligned between actual descriptions, differently categorized samenesses recall the forward emptiness the same as what precedes the motive on the floors, walls, windows, the pile of boards in the corner, the guy who just quit and the other two who didn't, well we all came back from lunch one day, the four of us hanging around the job with no bosses around, well the tall thin one whipped out this bag of white stuff, a grand's worth at least, and the other's joint all gone, he chopped cut four good lines with his plastic driver's license on the shiny top of a paint can and we all sniffed it up with my five dollar bill, and we yakked it up for ten or fifteen energetic minutes and then they left, about one-thirty, to hide out in various parts of the project and I went upstairs into the front bedroom where the six doors were, leaning up against a wall, and I sanded them, put on the undercoat which, really, sagged and ran here and there, he didn't know why.
"Pointillist diffusions!" And contact, and the beginning of the letter, went on into diffuse influx and, data, the act, charge, an intuition that process writing is a cool act, a swift run at the whole element of it and I am reminded of Lawrence, who would simply do the whole thing over rather than revise, and there is something to look at, there, in concept, that the act is swift, uh, quick hot shots are adolescent longing, diffuse and precise. Well. This.
In making the act perfect, it is rather the summoning of energies which tells the words how to move-remove into less than indistinct acts. I suppose the quickest shot is the most accurate, and it is rather the state that tells than the execution of it, it is more the whole distance inured into a precise definition of what is there, if it is there at all, as in Olson's "play of the mind!" Well, no, there is more to say than the, uh, criticism, I suppose, I'd give this simple image from the tube, here.
This beef, this hardy guy, this meat thing at the weight-lifting competition, got ready to bring his somewhere between two- and three-hundred pounds up to the bar to lift about a thousand pounds of dead weight up, jerk, flip and swing, he gets ready to do it, and here's the camera eye, the mirror-tube green-blue glow, well, the moving picture is also a mirror, of course, shifting points of sameness, but, really, the point is The Berserker, the raging self induced madness and extension of energy into flowing blood and ecstasy; anyway, there's this bar with all the round weights on it, and the guy coming up, tights, blue shirt, his fat red face jowling, shaking, his eyes just a little out of focus, he is staggering, pumped-out on adrenalin, going "Aahhh!" totally topped-out for the lift, and heroically heavily he grope gropes for the bar and whump, whale, whole, he grabs it and thrusts it slowly up. Really, I saw it. He pumps it up and thrusts it up. And gets there, whang, a new world's record. No. That's not it.
The whole concept of controlled excess is that the trance rehearsal, is that mundane-unconscious, revived-monotonous moment in the midst of which the matter breaks loose from that which it is. The outburst is not no lingering episode wherein the monster (eg., yr Dragon, homuncular demon) flails around; no, it is more the surviving routine rehearsal of future acts renewed within the precious present monument, "hostage to the moment," he says this over and over, or again and again, the peripheries are defined outside the act itself and the evidence that something took place at all is just in the line, you find the conceptual realm enlightened by the absence of truth, that the flash of the progress indicates the cosmic in its distances not so much in the intensity of the episode as in the reality of the structure and pattern of the sentences, in control, not in its lack or absence; it is like the fear of letting go that the man holds back.
No, kick it out.
No, Kick it out, he leaves the door ajar. It is in rhythm, post and tome. It is the song itself. I mean, don't be too serious, it is there like having too much hung onto too much.
"Perfect your thoughts, find refuge in them!" Now that's simple enough when you tell it to a nine-year-old when he's bummed out, but the act of the poem, however wild and crazy, is no less an evasion than the poem is a thing unto itself. Fuck the poem, really, I could care less, I'm going on into tomorrow. I could write a thousand poems, I have already, what counts is how you're doing in the panoply of presences, how the digger dives forward into foreign angles said unsaid silences call the day another arc of light, and your better, calls the singles sigh a lie or at least the menu for forgiveness, I passed them down from here to there and said I'll mix you into it, too, the critique of the moment is less event than charge, really, it does.
Well it depends on how much you write, and if you write all the time pushing the avant-garde intense worship of "the new", then how can you possibly reinvent the language, there are no other barriers really to behold, and the perfect gesture becomes like this, he holds the pen and ink and slowly moves his arm swoop or swoosh around the page a perfect circle took three seconds, took one second to execute, was it criticized, was it done too fast, did it mar the page with its evenness, that's more to the point, that if something is quick or spontaneous it is less than perfect, but that if the whole genre is, uh, rehearsed, really, I've been there before, then the matter is there, inside the act itself, a Mattel monument to the lore of the mood, I mean, if it's right then it's fast, and no patience or solitude would make it better, no, the more you do it the more you focus into the intensity of the flow and the more of it flows the smoother you get, try it, you'll like it.
More the angle of the distance than the repose of special circumstances. Painting remembers, but the individual acts of heroism don't counter the particular force of articles, how "the" reduces actual measurement to a specifically categorical distance. "The" is snobbish, the "the" of the. Oh well, relax them outer, spinning off, you say, disdain for conversation is neither silence nor retreat, a fine madness easing out, he leaves them in the wake on water skis, pulling the surf toward some distinction abandoned in examples, the floating platforms are stanzas in the dark as abstractions leaning geometrically forward are less than photographic illusions of the phenomenological enterprise of popularized mysticism is no evasion of formality but rather the content itself in description the reeling fortress uncomplaining doubt at futures passed possessed compression the denser lines are equalled into passion, description, her kiss across the air, the morning's movies sharply told, no dope suppressing dreams the eloquent darkened silence full of words.
Awake, he seems to carry more familiar tunes as, into older styles, from two or three hundred years away, Euphues, and the great Hydriotaphia, intense in their detachment no mere anomalous decorations but rather more mental precursors to, to the even flow of time away from death to the greater inclusion into into, the cosmic process looming larger into view, into acts and deeds around the merely smaller globe, you say, I've been here all along the decade's glove and shire, her loops determined quickly says, away to showers forward lines are lingering attitudes they let or leapt among these alien angers, rough untaught people the sincerity of whom cannot be questioned, even the more barbaric of them, as modernism defines the escape from history as "direct experience", this religious frenzy detached from the quest for power lower down inside the, uh, body politic, the prostate in his room and roommate a lady with a long middle finger saying "here" and "this" no mere mix of intelligence and amusement more purposeful than the rest.
The rest rests. Or is it cause perhaps escapes the loom of history, this hinge of fate, the deeper millenarianism they sell to keep the masses masses, the individual talent names them manifestos in the darkness of these empty imitations of formula filled with (lleno de), then, all gone. All gone. Only this "us", wandering around the cultural gloom at the end of the period with nothing operative but the sensory apparatus. Deprivation by collapse and the attendant hallucinations, false starts, opening and closing doors, anxious obedience to ancient cult-styles of memory-loss, induced agglomerations of solitary functioning, deviate-worship as a sentence, explorer-mutants, the avoidance of the calm repose of orderly law, an evening alone with her vibrator, "Hello, there, new batteries," and lights a candle, puts on the old records and wonders, where hath love fled. Ah, you are so smart, but don't confuse truth with the smartass punk, a tense illusion is better than graffiti, or is it -- you speed along the day.
You asked for all this by implication and silence, you heaved aside the years of wandering, no inn receives the stranger shining in the dark, manipulative excess the open forms of hieroglyphic resonances, the indian form of hyphenated, additive measurement accumulates to power the vision from the mountains wandering whiteman given into madness returns restored and different cues are kernels stripped-out, no costumes call the day an air or tune, the day is the light's lesson in less imperial terms, you might restore doubt its permanence the tactical contrary writing his sentences backwards no run-on content delivers the avant garde into its newer, more formal resonances to declare the full moon a patchier flow of energy between them stuttering outside the door, the children on the greyhound, goodbye, children, and take their gifts across the continent in convenient packages, sandwiches, oranges, provisions for the psychic journey home into the mountains of retreat, the encampment on the edge of the meadow.
Along the way, pure presence overrides the names he gives to movements within the sphere of action, it depends on how much you have to say, the volume of the disturbance is a measure of cubic sentiments, meters on the wall, the gray concrete flatness of the greater dreaming pressure, the thrust forward from the hips, pale pole rising, into the air all night dreaming with a hard-on for life, these gentler coils need no derivation from the heart you'd leave them all alone long enough to ease the pressure from more musical elements inside the categorical denial of order, the names and dates are entering slowly split inside or out, a pair and center co-existing matters herd them into groups and patterns, light lingers lightly on the bare horizon you left them long ago returning the seed is sprouted here the flower there the fruit no fag but wears his macho cloth the first peg by the door is set afire, I hope your cards and letters going forth, going out, going on into it spells the colors blue and green and red.
In the ether other room they are dancing back and forth. It is like this once in a while, no matter who comes and who follows, is it merely an attitude toward the self? In the ethereal presence they come and go, subscribers to emotion, the bottom line is this, between religiosity, spiritualism and the mystical we find kinds of poetry, not all of them adding up together into the cosmic, really; then, we get them thus, that the religious determines attitudes toward form while the wholly spiritual is an attitude toward feeling just as the mystical is its content, while the cosmic is this all-inclusive moment of expansion. Too clean, but nonetheless we find Crowley filling in the extreme between prose style and the poem. A detriment, perhaps, to the intellectual determinations on the one hand and, again, polarities of passion, ecstasy, feeling and sensation, the same quartet of divisions laid-out on hand or beyond the paler fires paling out, he smoothes his songs into the seasons of the mind, the content of it is a declaration.
But the angle of penetration is a category, too, where he lies between her legs are wrapped around and holding tight, looser lines find her ankles waving over your back, kicking in between gasps and the message, between Oh! and Ah!, the distinctions of the finer times between her eyes, a spot and mark, a movie says, yes, your baby face and body are no archetypes of the phenomenal world, you are these sentient warriors riding the prose motorcycle, the factions rising and falling between currency and trust, well how can you tell anyway, eyes blurred-out and fathomed, an initiation of language states penetrating the ethereal mode, she waved a kiss hello and after, call me in the dark or let the rest go by, around, and out and down, the solid floor is simply tiles laid in sand the wholesome attitude no more an excuse for writing than the name of this, uh, piece, he came up the stairs ahead of me, this far removed cliche of my cousin, deep within appearances, you glow.
They glow out as deprived states recall the fall, as the same message over and over again results in no job at all between lives a newer emergence has called the day, "forward" meets them down along the highway roving to and fro I met you in between lives the nature of which is not so much to take me away as to drive the car along the empty tracks no other bothers to do the same intense irregular works don't come easily beyond the preparative dissonances you set them down you sent them down into world history the gossip of the planet, worrying about microwaves your own pacemaker brain might go out, as soul transplants would keep them inside the sphere of action, like doing homework, pushing it out with ease or eases, the names we give to things, you met them easily enough they made you the, uh, resident something and calmed the others down around the fence with no-where to go at all.
But I met them going out, your own coils removed, and when he said he had cried over the reading, I believed it as still I do, black scratch on pale green paper, an offering of differences is large enough to mean they've made them danglers to and fro she is lifting the skirt onto "no underpants!" though I'd call him less than perfect, there is yet a more familial re-creation which exists to serve the separations as equally painful or disturbing, the trucks barreling down the line are not so much evaded as proscribed into the sphere of action, here, just now as we try to remember the mundane voice tells you now and then her face is clear there before you no mere fantasy but a message from the biological highway--a fathom faster out as no-name is good enough, "I'll see You in the paper," she said, the city in question only a few hours away, even though the tone of voice an entirely hostile manner, matter, you lose the lines and scrawl across the page.
Well, I'd buy it, even more than one, yellow slots, flat cylinders, hands across the way, and waving, there is this tendency to work when exhausted, to let the eyes go flat and dull, to make it known, you are, as the specific corners are made of wood and sheetrock and distance, splat! his arm goes automatic to declare the panic arrived, ants scurrying after wheat; no, really it is all about heat or the heated calm perfume another memory-man says "declare," I want my seasons left open, you spread wide I plunged on in, you ought to be satisfactory at least until the first storm and make these movies more profunct than his sponsor, anyway who is the center, here, and whose unfinished business meets them now and then a perfect root upraised and thus, the direction of travel is certainly here no handrail around the corner you said goodbye.
Passion and simplicity declare finalities the mood elevated her lines intense gatherings recall your own motives are here and there to seem no tumult his feathers falling, words chosen without haste, with regular and what might seem to be an automatic precision, the page unwinding meditation, layers of brain activity hooked up to the arm, the rise and fall of energy, "associative flux", and the moon just now passing from full into its declination and renewal.
A forward prologue to something else, the declarative stance, holding firm, it says, stories of hard work in the paper, I guess you'd say the mark arrives in order to be opened-up, and I'd say this, too, you met too soon for life, and no disturbance calls the arcs around you still electric currents focused on these pictures deeper coils sailed within the sphere of action is precise, a target, an emblem of regard I find it difficult to leave alone a wonder at the senses in their vast array no eloquent hedges riding the fast line through the night.
Your own opening, and not to, uh, just sit on it; he pauses by the door, this passageway into the other world, having gone through once, he pauses, turns, comes back, thinking and speaking at the same time. Really, it is an unusual set of circumstances, the collapse of will, stretched to the breaking point and then breaking, I could care less, really, I saved my own ass, let them sustain this perpetual barbaric intensity and ignorant prejudiced modernism, a set of blinders guided by fear of the known; but no, it doesn't work, and it is no superior condescension that draws him back, nor the illusion of a "higher obligatory duty." Really, it is this, uh, more acceptable quest for power, modified by the goals it favors, which shores cut the conduit tunnel of transmission, this catalytic kind of energizing the first colleagues seemed to pick up on twenty years ago. Living in the present he seems to feel the actuality of the years recede, no it is the same day, in which to grow stronger.
I mean, just in terms of the kinds of feelings derived from this end of the pen, the real enemies, the true power-freaks are the total abstractionists. True, they are there in the geometric realm of "the matter", but a constant production of generalistic, emphatic prose style is the hard-edged voice push-pushing those attitudes that one is right and has a position to defend. Mysto-macho. Being in the middle is perhaps more confusing, but the view is, while more complex, in some way more complete. There is more to see. Lightning comes between us, a bolt shot forward in conclusion not at all inconclusive but, at lunch, a little hungry for not having eaten breakfast at all for three days in a row, and besides that, being an inveterate liar. In fact, all my art-power friends are a little right-wing in their quest for freedom. Better by far to practice both wings at once, tying the hemispheres together, the stereo music of pure flight, this soaring, dipping and weaving in and out. . . .
It is the body's poem down along the light you are going faster now that the lines are drawn. Certainly you didn't draw them; going along, minding your own business, pushing away various kinds of conceptual fags, and there it is, not so much a blind spot as an attitude toward the seed and the egg, the mirror and the door, planes of attention and styles of achievement, successions of emotion, energy and quietude, the measured pace of breath in its regularity of displacement and occupation, this flood of life an indistinct but persuasive pattern fitting event and distance into an active perspective of the accumulation of detail and the practice of poetry as silence. Well, the day goes on, your foot falls asleep at work you ignore the wall and gaze at the surface, painting windows with both hands at the same time, it is time, time to do it and time enough to do it, to get back in bed for the morning's human being to have those strokes and passions out.
Quickly, no reversal, the stuttering chimp flows across the airspace his bags of gold in dull brown canvas unobtrusive fears are quelled between the morning's slow-quick shots released against her red lines glowing flesh intense moment released from the top of the head back down into the lower centers, and those old guys with semen oozing from their pores may be the sole inhabitants of the cosmic schizophrenia, but I don't think they had any fun and they certainly didn't have any families nor any mundane life, the grace of making love to your lady, of driving to work in the morning with the Goldberg variations on the FM and the easy taste of espresso in your mouth, a smoke behind you, the gray light now lightening into its proper length, with something useful in mind, you crawled back and forth the numb fingers shook between cold layers going forward into the present, yes, here.
“. . . looking at it differently, and seeing more connections. This is the way it is with poetry anyway, and esp. if run together in an epochal manner. Anyway it's lots of fun, writing lots of letters to old friends around this time of year, and writing a few poems and stories, and playing some piano pieces by Brahms and Schumann that I played when I was 14, which is a kick, because it comes back into you suddenly, sliding across those proprioceptive fibers. I like to go buzzy-and-out on a piece from that long ago, and I hear it differently now, knowing that the lyrical is more than I experienced then. All that stuff, those piano lessons and pieces trained my feelings. I saw that there was a range to emotion, different kinds of sadness, melancholia, disconsolateness, as well as other pastoral, domestic, folk, martial, spiritual, etc. modes. That composers were very different in what they wrote for the piano (and other instruments: voices, strings, et al) --and poetry was akin to/in all this, I found out little by little. It all seems obvious now, but just remembering the German name for In Memoriam (Errinerung)--a piece Schumann wrote the day that Mendelssohn died--so stoked me that I rushed downtown to buy it, flashing all the way. Lots of reindeer, and therefore I had personally a very good remembering of things past. . . . “
At start and simpler, lines portray times, times as seasons and the simpler rhythms of the trance as it barrels off the double thump of the heart's blood-pumping life-spasms; the poetic triggering of fantasy patterns in relation to the rhythm; and the whine of consciousness against voice (contra de), the whine of the violin.
Voice against voice (voca a voca), dialog of self, monologue at repetitions, held along the image the song projects, the old flashlight against the white wall, thumb into Mickey Mouse foreplay, her shirt is still wet from the day before yesterday, the ascending parallel states, estates, the sign and the seen, thing and state, opposed toward the light, tropistic man, man, "this trope, man," he puts it, I mean, really there's no hurry to it, bland blind foothold on the senses' climbing light again (Again!). You are not no longer longing, lounging-out in that deadly, alcoholic northern cowboy town; and true, the nerds have won the first round; but we are the geeks.
Twaddle-out, sing-along substance, the oud-drone coming softly induced longing, the thing becomes plain, planer fouling the time's tone drones along the trail he furthers forward-up, along the high trails winding the heart's waves forward foreign signs collapse your own song was claimed reclaimed cleaner she dances long sighs fly forward card-locks, pinching thighs the ease of it gasping calm permission giving out the man's way lets her come against his mouth, light fills the tongue forever sung, as farther lines exchange this secret says, you are, man'd at charge her lighted lips are glowing centers en regard, you followed the signs down the way, down the coast past waving sunsets the pacific glare too intense to say, again; and down the years tumbled at strength the demons' calm forgotten skies are shoaled along the way another name revives your longer hosts a brilliance moving boulders with your shoulders, they skin-out the ending of the page, stopped a mile ahead, returning to this, to here, to now, to now.
Out it goes, and back it comes, correlate center and strong design the polar attributes are defined in the mood of attention you call "regard," a side-wise glance sudden tantra-leap, Aiee-yah! Kung-fu stroke at the hole in the rhythm of the recall-flow, a thrust through the repetition of the line he wavers the shine of attention through the glance hits the target, draws, withdraws quickly no injury, and information to examine, the instrument slides to a rest, the song ends, you wait.
They are coming forward at the edges of the song reminisce the holy-man becomes them in the motive of the song click-clicking of tongues in alternation the snare-drum and the bass tam-tam marking signs the body swaying pole at center straining upward, a three-measure solidification of presence, yes, they are in-circle, swaying and singing the chant of the song of presence, Sufi song the holy man at the center calling the day a celebration of who is there in the center of the circle, you are, you are !
Finally, when the different layers and levels of intermission and intercession are achieved, at the end of the song the basic three measure motif worked, restated and re-introduced in the final collision the uneven snare of the drum's staccato repetitions and the wave-sounds of the three voice-lines commit one to presence, and that's the song.
There is no other.
Epiderm.
The rest is a passage in the afternoon, when the light itself covers the landscapes' variety, discloses it, defines the color with the eye's trope to seeing, to vision, itself to itself in the presence of presence, the variety of the moment included in its variety and its unity in the person underhand, underhanded and then overland, you waited in the wings to do your dance, well, then, do your dance, it's your turn, and out you go, a-won, a-too, a-choo-choo, I think I can I think I can, the hand slips easily across the waves, waving, down the tube, into his curling shot, the wave breaking down and into the left, tough enough to make you forget that it's your moment, and you just, just go on into circumstance itself, the proof is in the pudding, a-won, a-too, the old buck and wing, Lennie Tristano Leon Russell piano-eyes you are alone along the long way down into the end, the soft white water, stepping off the board, onto the sand, for a Beck's.
Passing out again at the side of the highway, passing out slowly passing in in tune, they are at least singing in tune, in a tune he can't recognize the dreaming slowly turns from what is there at all there you are again against the wall the forward lines are lingering on tight against her sliding out as if, as if, hell, and gives it out like that is good really good the honest singularities do add up together the gray light under the flame bulb resting arms have sailed together, and the other dreamer sings, "Return," and does, is easy enough to be a man once you've decided, and let fate air her disturbances into true speech the other way around besides the muscle's arm's hand's gesturing, scribing hook-up vis-a-vis the old eye-mind hook-up, word to mind to the grace of the printed page, the taste for styles, and as a style is also a behavior, one longs for being in the powers of the words the feelings they give the heart's body throbbing for meaning the song driving on into her. . . you sail the longer lines arriving. . . .
Or the roofer's truly calm repose at full throat she hollers back into the blues the open door is always open into true feeling he scalds the ducks their nerdy floats and spasms interjerked the flailing wedge; the gray light calls you home his heart's and flowers, the gray distance rides you out in the old red pick-up, actually prying those boards off the building with our hands, a little furtively, of course, my kids playing around us all day long, driving back to Arlee to unload our load of boards, summer and. . .beer and the wide Montana hills in Bill's old red Dodge, is that crisp enough to bring you out into the open, into the high moonlight, full on the summer meadow bringing the ground into intense unreal silvery relief, staring at the turf with Dick out in the meadow, you are along the hallway carrying photographs the spaced-out distance says you are the prototype of light, his easier angles are hooked-up, driving on across the frightened night-time sky once, twice, three times, traveled out, dark towns and dusty roads the curiosity about the old world ends right here at the table and in the voice, listen.
The big ones count down in less ascending numbers, the day you called away from the pay phone calling rise on rise you are the dreamer's arm is flung across the light lightly rooming airs recall old Bob ended up living the writer's life with Mary to support him, a little looney aren't we all, just, where do you decide to place yourself, she said yesterday, in the, uh, art history of it where do you pick it up and where do you not say, ok, this is where we all got off back there where the forward line ended, and this is where you get back on and this is how you do it, is not only just a little presumptuous as if to say recall, a monologue or none at all, it's all the same line carving the duller airs down from the calm promontories deeper on into description the prose motorcycle calls you on further on responding signs sigh supper slows you down I'd run a mile a day if I didn't paint houses, a little honest work the nattering voice recalls the day before yesterday was, uh, just a little weird, like all the others, maintaining the straight line of thought. . . .
And down and down and down, in these changing times, the quieter spaces resume the interlocking sets from all the way along stored-up flashes of ancient snapshots from childhood and youth occasionally invade the visual-mental field, like the surface of your desk somewhere back in, perhaps, the first grade, pop, there it is one day at work, flip flopping in and out as you go around the room, rolling the walls of the empty, partly-finished, new house; unheated work, slapping the roller into the bucket and up onto the walls, and something in the light and the geometry of the room, the absurdity of the situation and the location, makes this ancient piece of visual flotsam pop into the recall-sorter of the consciousness screening-facade function, and mind goes, uh, like, sort; ready, set; sort. No response. Back to work, float and sing. Flip. What's that mean? Sort. No response. Repeat. Flip, flip. Reject. And so it goes. Three years later the same image flips in. There is no hidden message. There isn't anything written on the papers. Rather, they are a pattern of red, white and blue and the wood of the desk-top.
You are the forward signs receiving out the straight scoop is hot enough, the further signs recall this to no-one else is soon enough too soon to wait too late the rest goes by too soon life's lingering shapes gain in definition no saline lingering fashions for the other side of paradise is singularly enough like this one here to be acceptable, in face, resemblable, if you get the drift, to be the same in face the same is good enough to be the one that it is already the same one here already there the one was there before and after, going. . . .
The final angles peruse the distance; the finer angles presume that distance is, uh, what is traveled rather than a moment of location, let's see, he murmurs, if I am here, then, uh, mumble, then it's, uh, there, that's how far, I, um, the muttering map of concensus defines language as the applicable social locator, just as the mystical poets are so specific about pronouns, psychic acupuncture motives in space within the frame of the poem, the Eye and Yew of it, no transmitter is singular enough to skip all of it.
Embodying the symbol, he decries flattery as mere fluttering of purpose, no repose at all but the singularity of purpose is permitted, then, to communicate, to contact. Writing is a harmless indoor sport I said, and she said there's a lot of harmless indoor sports and threw her arms around my neck and gave me the big hello and said I'm sick I'm going to bed here take a bunch of vitamin C and I did and she did and I sat down to start writing and then I started writing and then I got to this point right here where I am writing this very mark that I am making right now ahead of me taking me ahead of myself looking out ahead into the next word coming three words ahead of me are the words that I am making right now pushing forward into the air arrowing flame shot high arc wavering lines the energy shot anticipatory rush and fever the higher angles of thicker memories receding airforms wavering lines the mirror sees your nose quivering around the straw your eyes do not look back they always focus right in there on the point where the straw and the white line meet. Passaged in, or into the rest resting-out. You are. The rest goes by in bewildering array, and in no more distance than that do I try to stay out of the way and watch my plants grow, as it were, inner gardening.
. . I mean, how does it look, after all, when you come up for air long enough to run to the store for some beer, there are the geometries of maintenance to assume, duties, as it were, to get the beer and take back the empties; he said, and why did they do it, why did the Soviets just go into Afghanistan, because there was no one to stop them, because we're too wimpy; yeah, he said, since the fall of Vietnam; yeah, he said, and the whole world knows it, I tell you won't recognize it a year from now, and mark this date January fifth, nineteen eighty. Yeah, he thought, I don't know who the next president will be but I think we'll all know who the last one was. Well, we all went back to work and Ken gave his old testament sermon, like our conversation on the hinge of fate, and after dinner tonight the radio intones some fear and trembling, obscuring the beautiful music of this afternoon.
Emblem and chain, the great chain upward linking strangers in the dance you called them all together once again and turning-out, finishing up with the looser flourishes an indication of interviews one might have taken for lunch or after the pressure pressing on, the roads turned aside have flatter platforms for driving, the harmless indoor sports are slowly turning hours, reminders, rhythms at the flood, the moment of the passing-through, the stations of attention, the net or the grid, the mask and the transformations themselves, detail upon detail the archeological digs, as subsequent as enlightenment can be, your tailing outer sails review the calm insistence of your name against the wall at midnight does it good, the longer signs are also running good, beyond doubt the angry tailings falling away, neither remote nor passing, the other days before are all gone backwards children to still say belong again the other times are far away still and more remote than newer, livelier spoils of pickles in the jar for dinner, and six good ones, to celebrate!
The lesson of it drives you down into the center of the event, leaves you there to season, lost at sea, down the tubes, avert the overt. At the easier stations, you might rest, invisible olympics in the soul's retreat, pay attention to the unconscious self-adjusting mechanisms, he mumbles, as some of Haydn's tight-assed stuff comes on the radio, the effect of the whole ensemble color is so muted as to be the old toy clock, gracelessly mechanical. Ah, Mozart anywhere is usually, at least, lyrical in the music of it; the marks on the teak table in high relief this morning, Monday morning and going back to work, sandwich and coffee, and a doobie for the daytime hours stretch away across today's hide-out painterly abstractions the white circle on the white wall of the white floored white room got all the sun there was to get, but she wasn't there long enough to get her tail wet; the coffee in the cup, the coins on the book say, today we are at peace in all our on-going programs.
It is the purpose of the contact that comes into question, eh? Not that the defenses aren't there already enacted perpetual tension of, of being alive at all, and while contact is not so alien, nor useless, it does come into question. Rather, the focus of the quality of what it is as it is happening is distance enough to check the quality of the content, to respond in kind, I guess, the surface of the underground substance, Easter Island faces on the rocks on the ground where they hadn't been cut out yet, I leaned over the fence to say hello, and why, and having satisfied that curiosity, we go on about why be neighborly at all, beyond convention or necessity, the music from the other room continues the dance of presence, you are across the waters calm erect a man against no other on along the way and waving out, the glue not quite dry enough to hold, only yesterday natters on the voice you left alone to talk-on, right-on, high piling eagle-turns wheeling angles beat them out, it is in the eye, really, turns the heart.
THE WORLD CARBOHYDRATE BOMB
AND THE EPIDEMIC DEATH
YAWN
And though your very flesh and blood
Be what your Eagle eats and drinks,
You'll praise him for the best of birds,
Not knowing what the Eagle thinks.
Edward Arlington Robinson, Cassandra
At least this much. He stirred around in the ashes of the fireplace. "Exhaustion!" In this cheerful state, the layers of the cake were spread too thin, and no one around the deck watching the morning's lighter hues illuminate or expose the workings of what lay beneath the city's walls, beneath the flooring of the houses, the barely remembered isolation in the mountains, long ago letters from the present outward, apologia, the men in long black robes for ceremonies of naming, the boys in the living room and Howard the Duck wondering how in one brief period three unrelated persons call him by his name. . . no, it was not so much something, uh, mysterious, nor was the appearance of it any surprise, even, it was just the day itself in which to begin the longer arches bending slowly forward from the waist, the ashes in the fire showing the coals covering them. . . .
The only flak there was, spreading throughout the group, a new difficulty in perceiving the extent of the, uh, narrowing tunneling reduction of the, uh, field of attention down to this, seeing in the course of an entire day perhaps only a single gesture; the hand, then, coming up from below and slowly turning over, palm out, the fingers slowly fanning around, graceful almost, offering up, a finishing nail, and he watched that, too, around the corner another guy on hands and knees in the corner, they were, just bent, that was it, like in "get bent, dude," and even the slow laughter at lunch, the other guy monotoning about himself, now isn't that the final reduction of the evidence down to nits and fathoms, what I have to say is this, and the self-talk playing around the need to be directed more outward, hands on hips, the fire starting slow, smoldering, wandering what the hell this is all about.
I mean, with no disposition toward the present other than, just to do it, the power of the gesture was something like the ashes on the fire, covering the heat inside with this grey skin of ash, and the slow kak-spume of the pump going fum fum, wheesh, skew, wheeze, the two of them sort of wandering around inside the empty partly finished house, the twenty foot ceiling in the living room, the windows covered with white and brown and green paper and pale white masking tape, the red hose from the sprayer winding around the corner, yanking spasmic contortions, the other guy, with this soft, cloth flying-hat with earflaps and chinstrap, white clothes, brown shoes, the gun in hand, the undersea plant waving in the smoky gloom of the interior, electric bulbs pulsing heat and light, the diver in his helmet and lifeline, spraying white paint on the bare sheetrock walls the white textured spots and bumps shining.
Anyway, as the day went on, the tendency to speak less and use those rather flamboyant gestures from the spasmic past became more apparent. They paused over speech, tape in hand, the other started, the wave of one hand and then, not silence exactly but the presence of the word obliterated by the need for visual support. I can see those words, coaxed out with a shrug or bump of the body, a dancelike evocation of speech in its perfect flow of approximation, even the smaller details surrounded by something quieter or more still than even silence, action penetrated with pressure, filled; a filled silence perfumed the room, made it interesting.
There is ground zero. Not really an intellectual posture, but rather warming up to the complication of speech itself, leaning across the table, watching her eyes out of the side of your own, something was going down and downhill fast, a cheerful smile. In the midst of not remembering anything at all, they said the same things together, more like "I don't know," being the completion of thought like, wha, you're not quite clear enough to resemble these things together the same distance across the waving lines are also plants beneath the waves are soon enough to be realized, you are the words themselves reduced to fractions of the seconds they wove across the light's days and arrow's seconds in between the focus of attention beyond what was said before the rest, complete, the hunt, the other warriors battling invisibly in the face of what must seem unutterable tensions, not so much competition as the desperate rush toward completion slowed down, heels dug into the dirt their clothes and walls hedged tight into defensive formations, this was the community of interference; they were dug into the hillside to render helpless all that followed was resembling this, uh, intrusion.
What passed for crossing was a more elemental discussion or what passed for communication in the face of fierce personal divisions, the ability to go only so far and then something like a fight or struggle took place, like, well, what do you mean, and the hoses coiling around and up the stairwell, jerking whooshing sound of, the buckets by the front door, filled with and in the air, a flying response to the day's necessities hurried-out or released, perhaps too late to make any difference at all. Really, they hardly ever spoke any more except to pass in the hall some friendly commentary on the music on the radio falling, the radio is falling, the freedom fighters said, hurry please, the radio is falling, and then the quiet hiss of undemanding white noise surrounding silence with the stuff of its intrusion, they hid out in these various stations along the way, the cosmic bus stop, a shelter of redwood and plexiglass with a bench across the back and the cold air blowing in.
Pause. Another certainty in caution you said the parallel waves in motion cauterize the lighted layers falling; and here your own eyes are larger lessons pausing parallel lines the creation of the absolute is tired enough to revolve around her names, slighted, resolute screaming located just a little too far back in the nose to do any good, a small spoon you stick up standing up back in the nasal airway, a shooter for sure at the end of a cold day with nothing particular in mind a rather disappointing discovery to find that I shouldn't be writing this at all, is it perhaps the empty discipline or another head-shot opportunity to think about power and the resolute course of action which leads one beyond the creative reserves, perhaps too much manipulation is more like self-thought than any reason you might have the continuing on the waves of air you ride along the nearer distances, beyond readiness, then, the call for Doctor Freud with his little spoon. . . .
So it's hanging around the open meadow with nothing in mind. I go back. Even to simply check up on people now and then, intercut your own life doubled back again another chance to see that no mistakes were made today and yet still the calm airs descend: Thus. I think the theory is that the further out you go the more there is to see and the harder it is to get back; of course the idea is to get back dancing grinning through the teeth of it another day you said too much too soon to plug in to these eloquent fireplaces smooth or smothered, the movie says practice, the mob is cheering without thought the pen beginning to run dry, I have this quiet thought perhaps it's boring to permit the argument to go the whole distance, interior spaces designed like recording whale movements across uncharted regions snorting and whistling strange melodies, let's see him bring a whale on stage and sing-along together, music in the afternoon and not much else.
It's too soon to tell, maybe a nap perhaps you'd spell my hours longer than today, the message of light is the slow perusal of doubt is too much automatic pilot the color is slightly less than blue and red mixed together are facets of the war against the cold air return, painted black so it will appear to be absent, through the grate into the void of tape-recorded sounds the shore-line caught here and sentenced slowly the arrows make their sharp paths easier to call profound heat the baseboard tucked into colder shots have moved along the cold air stuttering arcs mellow sabers colder still your toes broken off it seems too full to say revolve the sooner said a new resolve is clarity itself the movie healing showers the spaces inside filling in the colors of the day, sharp shores your own movie said again too literal and too close to freak out, as relations with the inferior man prove to no one that speech is possible within your own arcs retreating similes the movie tonight, sent cut, a claim against time, a whole bunch of stuff, sincere motives calling out like an attitude or a set of claims monitored angles disregard your, uh, estate, the mammals crossed-over looking younger than today's messages; a wall to go behind waiting times have set them out like the children they are, to get it up to an acceptable level for notices not to be received at home beyond doubt you culled the production level is what it is, a series of innate twitches or calmer passions arriving soon, in the mailbox another reluctant stranger turning blue under the wings, in the pits, where it smells, you sniff around in total slowness the eloquent stranger singes her lips too soon to say aloft and sudden waiting lines waving arrows repeating the cloistered regions of thought have marked "Remit" and turning out, folded markers meet you in the forms the chosen ones you said that now and then is soon enough to be revealed, and dinner waiting to be cooked and eaten, soon enough.
It is too distracting. The bomb falling, calorie counters everywhere registering to the max, and the yawn itself, the person underway stretches to the fullest, gives a great and thorough yawn, arms out to their limit, muscles tense, and then, flash, they're gone, crumpled in a heap on the ground. Meanwhile, the bomb is falling, approaching zero, the threat of totally covering everything in the cosmos with about a three-eighths inch thick layer of white fat. Ice-nine, my ass, this is serious, the sun with this thin layer of fat just, just isn't as warm: and wristwatches and hearts as well, penises too, covered with a thin layer of fat. Pin-up posters. Everything. And the yawn. How it happened no one remembers, encased as we are. The landscape has become a bumpy surface on which a yawn-spasm occasionally punctuates the flat white-lighted gloom. Even the food is covered, every brussel sprout, every canned chicken, the end of the world, yawning and fat. . . .
Reduction of the present absolutes is also without humor, only the challenge of the additives you mentioned. It is too serious to be ignored, like a plea from a dying man, take this to my baby. I accept the tone, the style of your dying request, but really, why not ask for more, I am listening, just before the spasm hits and you just seize up.
The play of the air along the fibers of your skin, the delicate sensation of voice among your peers, there is no silence too perfect not to be imitated, rolling along without a metaphor in the world, it is all immediacy and geometry and pure, direct experience of the one in the one in the same, he mumbles to her in bed, his tongue still wet with her; I tell you, I'm different. Oh yeh, I know that, she laughs; and he jumps up in the bed, on the bed, rather, and looks a little strangely down at her, "No, I'm different,” he says musingly. He gets down, turning abstractedly on the rug, "I'm new," he says more loudly. "I'm me!"
Well, it was funnier the first time. The bus by the corner just overturned and torn open by the space-craft's little things in there after the people, fleas descending from their model-T orange disk to devour the humans in the school-bus like opening a tin of sardines and taking only the eyes. Well, so much for sci-fi, it's this slim intention of the external devices to demonstrate that futurism, like the old chinoiserie, exposes the same old world populated by the same old humans, and yourself, he says, less personal than thought itself, retreating through the mists with not a hell of a lot to say, ah ken drahve a nale, ah ken fel a tree, the rest goes on, the dreary history of Superman's exploits on the frontiers of chance, wrestling alligators in man suits in his own red-yellow-blue jumpsuit, breaking for commercials, drilling for oil on the weekends, moonlighting, hoping to bring his whole family down from the space-ship, shopping the specials and always looking for a bargain.
Really, the heroic in the cloak of the mundane. Forget Bach on the headphones, it is too late for requests. It's time to get up, to look in the mirror for the new day, your own richness a pallor on the streambed, a newer, tougher commerce for the ladies in the heavens, white mist on the FM obscuring the cute flute muse, too early for Rock and Roll, and besides, your ears are so full of wax you can hardly hear a thing, dark-orange globs of wax buried in there, ah yes, it's tough to be alive, mute expressive dangers unyielding positions clamoring for reward, it's me, I'm new, I'm different, can't you see, running out into the frosty empty street, hands in the air. It is silent.
Tomorrow is soon enough you say, the Ambassador to Earth from this huge rotating ball in the sky, this spherical floating show, yes, the Ambassador has stopped at a phone booth to call his wife about the radio station, they must play more Bach, that's all there is to it.
Making it perhaps less intense than the other games you could imagine, the game an inch or two away, gazing at the chip in the formica. "Well, the whole top will have to be replaced." The way around cracked bowls is not to use them, museum pieces that they are, we're going after the big one, the top of the line. It is a squad of potters outside the museum, going on in the darkness to get the Great Pot! In the early morning silence they creep into the museum and steal the Great Pot for their own wooden church. Sepulchre and standard, the wooden horses crumbling, tumbling cookies in the box, your own impersonal spasms an inch or two away from the surface, flying the glider from grey area to white area, examining the grain for a recognizable lump, "Yes, it's Tri-X," he reports, as the foggers come in behind him, flying low, spraying the entire surface with RapidFix, the huge photo of the earth balloons out into an almost natural fullness, a resemblance, a reality just the same, the photograph lives.
Or perhaps there is just too much down-hill not to be left un-raced. Consider that. There is thought and there is time and there is the familiar ya-ya, coiling deep within the psyche, the unholy multifaceted incorrigible ya-ya, the nattering tongue refusing solace, the other way around, get to the point!
The point of this warning to you is less surprise than content. That is it, the conditions are permanent and distracting. If they tried to get an Army together everyone would refuse. And the only reason they don't invade is that there's nothing here to want but acres and geeks, millions of them. Who wants that? All they want is our gold and our secrets, our, uh, technics. So much for world domination, the plaques and shields of the Carbon Monoxide Club attest to the truth that at least half the world is addicted to carbon monoxide in its least interesting form, every morning, sucking off the exhaust pipe, really, it is just too much.
There are survivors, however. The lovers inhabit their own sphere of influence, Southern Malaysia, I think, where Arthur C. Clarke has fled for safety after the ominous success of his, uh, oeuvre, he has spoken to us and then left, isn't that a little prophetic, huh? You don't see him there on the Johnny Carson Show, yukking it up in the late night hours, "Oh, well, when I said 'end of the world' I didn't mean today, it's not for a couple of weeks." and life goes on, fucking in the elevators and so on, compulsive finalities obscured, sentences wound and unwound on the fishing reel, lines cast out, hooks placed, the fresh bait (Fame! Money!) hung there, "Bring out the new writers," and they shuffle out into the stage-light, they line-up, the pay-off, he slips into town once every eighteen months with a brown package he drops at the Greyhound for his agent to pick up in the men's room, a best seller in a plain brown wrapper left in the third stall from the left; send the money to me in gold.
It is that. The familiar counters of speech are thrown about the landscape like fried liver, Anastasia's diamonds, those parallel lines that go from eye to eye across the vast uncharted regions the energy charging rush after rush the body electric was put aside as altered signs move the lines about a foot apart you are inside the music seeming strangely perfect to the moment, to the Wacko Universe, she said this morning, after the story of Gacy's trial came up and how Harriet was going to the Guyana movie, full of excitement, she loved the book. After Wacko, Texas; all of it too much to be believed, inside the radio station, spinning around the electric colors of the tubes themselves, no pacemakers or other electronic life support devices allowed in here, no need to broadcast the last gasp of some stranger locked in the bathroom, the microwave rock and roll shorting out his heart, argh, the mind goes swimming up into the light and out, flying freer sorts of shadows move the daylight further on along the way.
Another one, says, start, the caution in the airways waving lines collapse the inner lines are more than easily the longer times are laid behind the muscles in the darker hours at waving signs collapsed arrows ringing into the airways slow receding lines the singalong archers slowly calling home. . . .
Old cauliflower ears, calmly loading his trucks. The doors are open into his heart. In monochrome dualism, the series calls retreat the diminishing tactic of the more forlorn species, no dominant strains pursue the academic linen into these sharper poles of receded music, the solo of the code in rhythmic clues no foal at charge her singular arcs retreated presence knowing silence marks your own colors' hours repeated moons are blue and yellow as this or that, you are among these senses weaving out, the calm repeated sentences hold you out a day or two, the newer movies leaning out after autobiography, after silence, after secrets, after caring, even, for any of it.
But the doorway's darker outer shapes prevail into morning, into movement, how you sailed the silent seas into the morning, the old pipes weaving silence after the rest goes by, her song is a slower mood the stroke of silence her words flowing dance over dance, hold, you are no pressure leaving the floor her mane is waving snowy lines across time no chasm familiar striding arks are loaded here and now the breast of the wave, the pole and charter, magnanimous presence in the boredom of the calm affair of life a tactile moment of conscience is what life is all about finding the right word for it, no one sees beyond the dirt floor the payoff in between songs, in the fraction of the transition from one integer to the next, the whole scheme of life exists in the space of the leap from one frame to the next and it is no joke to be spaced out, it is no relief and no consequence and it is sometimes, just, how it is; but there is all the rest going on after that, going on all the time going on anyway going on. . . .
It's the aside that does you in. The hand cupped, line delivered, "off-hand" he calls her down, it is love's lines lingering names, it is too full, it is too much. Really, the fullness of the heart is real enough to be believed. Pure skill never won the game, it says; there are no flippant smartass moods where the heart is concerned. Beginning beyond the rescue, the reclamation of time separates autobiography from the cosmos. How did they become so entwined? Passions postures bending over in the centerfold nerd the common ground is no distaste for the present, is only the news that travels fast, love is, "no longings of the heart left unturned," she wrote me, left this message on the table where I write this: "He speak me fine!" Make a movie out of that, the collage presence names participation no mystique, but the bare bones filling-in the doubts erased in other senses, you mark these lines are not turned around from beginning to end the daylight hours grow in fathoms, in densities, in progression.
Witness, you say, the hours falling into more remote positions, your layers not so partisan as, just, declared in "passionate hedgerows," not so much barriers as a revision of sensibility which allows consciousness its realm of leakage, of exposure, not so much about chance or the mysteries as a reinforcement, a justification of the mundane which contains a pressure-warp, a hole-in-the-wall for light to enter, or escape. What else is new? Between the Tragic and the Wacko, where? There is today again, the twelve-mile parking lot to work, improbable houses on hills equal to them. He makes the hill with ease, skirting the patches of ice in "no sweat." The punk resists determination, lots of less is better than not enough enough. But the retreating platforms call life's woes the real between moments of perception, life's angular dust returns payment in the enclosed, it goes on, into, the her of it, you might suppose no denominations unjust or still, the pre-perceived is the vision come to perfection, to release, it is there.
Below the island forest, jingling sounds along the path. Fitting in the evocative and the incensed names we give to each other, the moments between work and falling have culled back Bach and laser shows the same air breathing in and out, the smooth unbroken flow in time the less remote positions underscored in flat repose the corners of the picture are glued down for the sake of the hours en retard a postulate recalls that conscious acts are the emblems of the flow of life within, not the causal forces we drive across intimidating voices calling out: The obedient waves have us fleeing north at the first sign of a draft, a wind, a blood-hot wind, the giant stalking in our midst, grabbing at boys, picking them up in huge calloused hands, crushing them, squeezing them like dishtowels after dinner, their blood falling, gathering, filling the barrels to drive the cars, driving cars on the blood of youth, pale fires do their elder's bidding, and the war of face continues to embarrass life.
Between neighbors, a day before light reminding you the power of the dark is waning, repeating, calling and dying out. Vigilance and the vigil: readiness and patience leavened perhaps by something new, by being noticed, identified. Although, we see, just turning on the television doesn't make it go away, the calm even voices from Teheran alter the situation very little, we might get a box of heads in the mail, stuffed shrunken beings: that's the old way out of difficulty. And with "too many" people in the world, the argument goes, the more barbaric customs revive, flourish; what is a man to do, become invisible, retreat, hide his sons under flat stones, mature them into something surviving the dull weight of the world, some passion and anger and tension filling them with reality and action, the way obscured by doubt is still the same as what was once before called the magic of the hours, repeating stillness declares your own drama valid, familiar and important, geek-noise, a fluttering of leaves before the microphone.
More quietly than a melodious interlude on the telephone, it is remarkable the interference the description causes between what it is and the thing described, reality obscured by its own character, warps of perceptible tension, innate causation, the games of which leave them late at night in bed, hands across the light, their familiar names become the things they are beyond description, just, uh, taking care of each other is no paraplegic romance, it is more the companionate concern for life's depletion and solitude, it is the conversation after dinner resembling a joint of playful dialog going up in smoke small gasps retain the lung's own capacity impermeable membrane osmotic passageway the column of the body's meat where soul retains its words are clear enough between trance-states and the will, just working your ass off is good enough, but not the whole ball game, some very good people are kind of dumb, whatever that means, all sorts of disturbances relate the message down the line, old men, fight your own battles, the small villages resist, the prisoners escape to another world, your own.
Calling down the acres of description, you are the main event. Watch this centering angular passageway the less descriptive portions recall the trail and make the way a clarity or an attitude. The thermos is empty. No more coffee. Grey light has replaced this morning's darkness, getting the paper from the yellow plastic tube stapled to the mailbox, a novel in your top drawer hanging around waiting for the postage to New York, I have my own names spread-eagled here and there a long way back into the adventures of memory one discovers suddenly as the very composition of your own history not so much revealed as, just, the accumulated weight between thought and action, between watching and seeing, his hands growing gnarled and wrinkled, a zither concerto wandering out of the radio, there are the sleeper's voices rousing sounds permit awakened noises yawning for coffee and the passion of the night before, this residue of ease perpetual signatories the names of which, the names of which, awakened longer terms have fluttered down, boasting of nothing, going along, going into, going together.
Or are there seekers left unturned, the private episode generates no foundations bulging with money the eloquent stranger retiring into the shadows, get this, no easier looms in which wove the shadows easing back a texture of light a pattern for the wind's eases mark the world explored or witnessed, and if man feels collectively unnatural or out of place, what then, how to call them back within the sphere of action, some independent broadcaster voicing out of the air the pictures in the box on the shelf waning or fading, culled out, remote, interior and storyless examples of the limits of the forms themselves, revitalized by the pressure of events into something carrying the weight of the problem itself out beyond understandable limits for whoever puts it all together comes up with another master-collage, variations of nouns registering this end-of-the-period collapse and order not so much a revival of the classical as a last gasp attempt at retrieving the memory of a time of the planet's being where the boundaries were perceived, anyway, when it was new.
There is something to that. A letter goes on along its sentences overturning the preceding, advancing, defeating, improving, growing more precise, completing, falling away, signing off: Her tears have gone away, inexplicable morning sadness retiring, returning to another sign drawn along the waving arms, the mobs scattering, running, turning loose, it is letters and the movements of large numbers of people which persuade us that something indeed is, uh, happening out there the soup lines recall us into "not enough of too much for too many with too little is no solution to enough for some; and none for many is less than no solution to what to do with what is there!"
Prose is like that, turgid, self contained. Poetry spreads out. Genre-styles, the epoch en retard, the transitory sentence, and the vision changes from Thompson's Hounds of Hell (a blasphemy, even through graduate school) to the new seasons of light. Trial by implication, I told her, speaking of the late Rev. Jim Jones, not to be confused with anyone else, ever. But that's another matter entirely; matter, then, the going-on-into-it of thought and action. I mean you to read this on-going line all the way along, the program is there and not invisible at all.
Out back they are along the way listening. You passed off from left to right, no other bothers to do the same, inequities of the night, his nightsong down between her thighs a spot and movie, the listing distances call you back and forth, the dreamer's distance from song to song the rote process dildos in to hold attention down beyond light, beyond the answering slowness from side to side. . . .
The handwriting large enough to tell the others that the motives themselves are writ large, and his old teacher's disappointment is conveyed over the long haul, over the long run no smoothing outers call the sail this mooning after thought itself; as, here I am, hooked up to the radio, watching the automatic pen crank it out, the rush against the rhythms in the slow unfolding space of production writing, holding automatic process-writing up against the content itself, the content infused in within the process mating down to down, the secret is there in reflex, the proprioceptive linked into the analytical mode of deep thrust, or "deep throat mysticism," that is, without barfing; no, the program is there, the prose-speech model is no confusion spelling along the heights, "at the height's summit," slowing down considerately the forlorn monument, or calling on the phone, another holding pattern yields no yanking postern his humiliated adverbs, the writer's true realm, arguing over parts of speech.
Whatever works, is the formula in all its variations, whatever gets you through the night, a far cry from the old latitude of right living, self control and so forth. Out of the mentality of limitation do we begin with smaller gardens hoping not so much to strike it rich as to have enough, a weird song floating forward the day's typing exchanges flow the mooning forward says, "You are," and smoothing on you say hello and then goodbye, easier fluctuations mark presence the name of the game, bringing up a pause for gas the other day, where, after the fiver was slid through the window-opening the late, insincere Oregonoid reflex was thrown out as we drove away, "Hava gooden."
No, friend, it is not so much a self in search of situation, which is fiction, but voice in search of material, which is prose, or essai, trying to figure out what it is that you're writing into, toward, the repose of purpose is no interference along the way, but a sign to be observed, an indication having something to do with sameness.
All the lines are out. The lateral drift of centuries carries out the distances of thought, where the regard of this, uh, alternity, is a throwback state, the officers at large in the moon-shot motorcycle of polaroid-keepsake papers fluttering down the unnamed landscape no return but go ahead, the wild goose fluttering about the shores are estuaries within which stories find a similarity to thought and speech, woven similitudes evoked in the quest for material which discovers life beneath the layers of information no sequences persuade the mists to leave their particular estate to enter into a visionary lassitude carrying information into the sphere of action, he calls them back into view, resting in between days the forests reduced to matchbooks, sustained oxidation the movie matters less than the book itself, an invoice book makes a bad movie and bad movies are what we have learned to expect so how can you blame the reviewer for going in the first place?
It is still morning again, the hours have shifted day to day the singular songs are, uh, out of date. He wanted this voice to break into character and event and situation. The solo voice is too boring, it is untrue, even, that we live alone these solitary stations of being in the world, it argues, there is an essential distortion in this solitary speech you practice. It makes me want to write, she said.
True, a scattering of distances sustains the light-field into photographs of nothing in particular, the scanning devices result in a new sense of composition, and where the old styles have failed to remain occupying, as she put it years ago, then the newer fragmentations of the mandala-bull's eye within rectangle with crossed diagonals, that's the target of the frame, within which the forces center or distort, equations of balance in no-movement or potential and latent imbalances of energy.
So there is frame, voice and matter to this quest for event. Event itself is the recognizable entity, uh, that "something is happening, yes, something is certainly happening", which is always true, but in the cosmic realm, in any realm at all, you'd find something happening, though it's occasionally too much or not at all, but then there is also the recognition that it is or is not happening apart from the happening itself. Yes, solipsist, it is there anyway, after you go to sleep or whatever; when the tree falls in the forest there is a loud noise, a rending and falling and crashing of branches, an agony of defeat, yes, gravity is the enemy, pulling stomachs down over belts, making old people bend and grow smaller, yes, gravity is the problem apart from the event itself, and the event is no absolute, we have this perceptible realm to consider, where the eye is the ruler and the distances its subject.
A slow ascent. Noise. Freezing rain likely. The grace of morning hours recalls the plan of action, movement in all directions at the same time, you cross over innumerable boundaries until the plateau is reached, an indifference to the workings of the support system, a vision in which the parts do not relate at all, a finality which is not political at all and so the familiar faith in process does not hold, and the pure warp of pressure and tension are played out, surfed, as it were, making notes on various pieces of paper, stuffing them in your pocket, a slip of attention which collects the slow drift of circumstance accumulates to facts, the near-miss of action is no degree of sameness but this piling up of events to, to being; conferences and the laborious repetition of difficulty which is not perpetual but which involves the homework over conversation, incomplete sentences which collide over events, reports, the tactile sensation of doing something well, well, uh, well enough to get by, to get somewhere, to get in or get out. Fashions fortunes falling lines review the mists no eloquent traders showing down below aloft the further fortunes lines below the surface has you near or far away the closest focus unremitting light attending the warp and shine you are among the nearer signs eclipsed the perfect pattern unresponding closet-waves the plumes exploding hours the forces faces in the mist of less familiar hours the boys the air around your body closing, Capt. America calling, down the hours' days as chapters in the movie mating muting in between the measure who you are exposed wires culled alert the roses showering in as light the foam along your lies no shattering forms the prose of speech the eagle in his realm the tighter circles smoke within your music mating tones the ring of truth is also the soft metallic skin, your ears blown out afar and smoothing in as shut as dense, dense, incredibly dense, no shutters flaming shorts the sound in more association the fairer sex a yum in me the floors are weaving slim the score some sudden warps are caving in. The foal at charge your laden smocks a foreign hour the columns' nouns possessed, uh, possessive songs the voice allowance in integrity the rhythm bursting foam and flowing through his bag of tricks the eases wrapt, wrapt bereft and stone the wobblier natives strung along intact into the airs this forest names your dark glasses a motive for a novel breathing in and out the shine a line intense or outer sings the names are various shining entities who say deliver as this or that no moon at all on the darker boogie the automatic plasm flood and park you get this elemental shine no showers shores fixed short of the other days you left alone her softer claims the village by the sea with intersecting lives you smoothed in and took the prize a less obscure version of the shooting match the slow examples pushed out alone the song intense regret no singular consumer has these waves alloyed integral linear slope smoking hours in terms at least closer to the border to jump either way the friends are songs we've learned, again you are here, these rote spasms before dinner cull-out her eyes' ears the popular mode made out into the fucking the wet spot the center of her being "oh" and "ah" is song enuf the fortunes buried underneath speech the more invisible post office station old men covering their lives inept presence the mask of failure a suffocating lens pretends to keep you clear of the cannibal though nonetheless his appetite secretive spins the forces foreign wares are kept the same as sound's noises call you back inert substance meets you down again the smooth claims are light again against the room the rentals on the wall or off against the loom enchained no roses eagles in the air you have them yet the popular song intense regret the passing off of holding on you let them hear the secret wall is broken open left between beseems and doubt, the more hysterical groans are still a sentence full of pauses learning what is done still the same as this enduring model of the heavens, in decree in sense or other, swimming along with my father, the light arousal a trope-integer names you somewhere between Charlie Ventura and Gerry Mulligan no simple illusionist fantasy that calls you ("that!") down again, that blue bottle sailing salient tones translucent hours airs touch you in inner inner forces posing air the calliope column-man his piano harmonies the rougher airs say, record, a loop along Miss Wimp now named simply Pooti comes in sneaking along and runs hiding into the area outside the field of vision as you come up from where you've been the years you left behind grew dim and this song in your ears becomes a triumphant strut of power ululating touch and tone the tongue on the reed the body's breath palliating alternating roughness the arrow's edge; the line is this long sentence preceding the time you get to here, to hear the truth that comes out at the end of the sentence, that you are here, that you have understood where you have been and that you have endured the silence and the music and that you are going on. . . .
It is the moment and it is not. We are hostage to the moment, armoring action to self the slower messages recoil from doubt along the longer lines of tactic and mood one does not attack but finds the lower regions a welcome air returning in the midst of this season of uncertain goals the formal wisps do not exactly satisfy the rest their own dramatic evolutions within the sphere of action, the invisible plates, feathers, masks, weapons, readiness to observe the truth enacted willing hearts and mines they crawl collapsed, not bothering to speak at all the choices are there, to speak out those angles of the view unchanged not seen perhaps the sureness of the hours a maintained presence underwater conferences along the weeders and chokers in their own uniforms a hidden weed is strange enough to be recalled the normal lines are strong enough a bypass, a woods, a nature said beyond the terms allowed for action in the mists the falling rain and snow more native gasps the bacon in its rows and packages, oink under plastic, the questions are always the same in "what to do," a childish question perhaps but there nonetheless asking about the way to whatever else is there the wishful thing a path as well as not; in not moving away from the alert state of readiness does the mask and armor lean one out into the maze-mist, how dust rising in thin columns from "the most livable city" in the clouds beyond the realms of others, from the cloud heights beckon this in nothing new to be derived from the former circumstances the revolution somehow revolting enough to hide from that, too, the arms and weapons in the closet have not lost their edge, the samurai practice of the wandering stranger, priest-monk-warrior in this land of duck-interspersed family units, units, have you, and the regular distances not so much untraveled as unproductive illusions of success, would simply get up on the ladder, brush and bucket, considering, "addressing the wall," he stops to look around the house for something new, a crack, a pock, a zit on the white speckly stuff they spray onto the pressed white chalky substitute for plaster a substitute for the double, two-and-a-half-foot thick adobe walls of the ranch, a foot of airspace between them; the white speckles of, uh, stuff, to cover with another layer of liquid vinyl-acrylic lustre which comes in five gallon buckets' brush in hand he addresses the wall, the genius of the ages loops his arm around invisible spaced-out light columns erect against the morning, standing on the top of the two-step ladder, conducting this mass of gestures before him, this latent group of individual spots, visual sounds, they snap to their own attentive receptive readiness, their own willingness to receive the paint, the wall is ready in its own diverse crowded space, the maze of situations cracks, stains, bumps, cues and strangers, booby-traps and sailing lines, the open doorway.
The solo voice retains its brilliance unadorned noises, Casal's Bach's single line winding through the wires, earphones into presence, the illusion of sound pin-pointed in the center of the forehead; between the sinuses, each strums this oversized Uke, the bow and master self-absorbed communion armoring the man in his distances at work and working-out the Fate described by circumstance you are the eloquent hedge the rows against the fence, ears up and wiggling, running along inside the fence to look at his hair, the Turkish schoolchildren made it all quite uneasy another movie shot against the quest for status, for experience, for strange circumstances one doesn't have to go very far at all, perhaps up to the store past burning bushes, the slow pattern of the cello strains across the sound waves, years, the same language interspersed and personal, you meander more directly in a straight line, right off the page into the texts of the ancient warriors calling out inside memory, the real. Or morning by-passed by its content, a continent of associations makes the voice a shale among these caverns tossed salad in among the croutons, white stuff, Kraft, it says; the solo voice or lack of personage means that you're happy out there in the ether, Merv wrote right back, wondering whether there are any teaching jobs around here, ha ha, didn't I ask that one, too, the answer an obvious calm incensed by smells no anger in attacking those who need to be defeated by life is the bitter lesson in working your ass off, to stay in the center of one's, uh, people not possessed but the ego's calm retreat into love and work and the finer hours of cleaning up after them, doing the dishes automatically in the suburban kitchen, the dispose-all stuffed with inert matter, oh, Annette, whisper it to me "Skippie Peanut Budder," ah, such innocence.
But the less-real matters in its absence more than suggestive the way of action is not so much doing nothing as in making that an assertion of one's right to do something at all, they all seem to fly at it, past the trope for light, moth-like incandescence of caring too much for the passionate advance, nor in leaving behind the reasons for doing anything at all do they flutter up brief angles in the mists too soon immersed even to be forgotten is no disaster if life has been lived truly made a simpler and more manageable thing, the voices patterns in the air you hear Cabala noises the zed of, mask and drum they draw the dancers into play, into focus, into dream no more holding back, you say, running into it again no straight line between the quest and what is sought the knives are dulled by a strange neglect, it is true again that the mood of the moment is certainly no indication of the way or around or into, there is just this talking about it, and talking, about it, about, it.
No reductionist nonsense satisfies the ear, you own deposits made against next week's work, you shifted out of gear again, and rolling down-grade fashions wearing thin the numbers in order, in sequences drawn lots of numbers coalesced, gathered, flowed-in and holding, the finger in the dike you can't even remember her name, the colors green and yellow and red, passion declares its limits here and there in the incompleteness of the fantasies perceived received noises declare that curiosity is the best indicator that something has been left aside, that there is another state perhaps in which to see to seem at sea, they call out in the darkness, and you address the wall with the same directness a mob or perhaps a million souls out there, watching the world balloon on the lighted silver square, twisting the knobs, the dials insurgent visions image the way of the wave breaking on the shore, breaking down and falling in, the day's shores breaking in the wind, the seas alert and strange homecoming your arcs are weaving lives against doubt turned aside or foreign names at ports-of-call the day's fantasies arrive in terms turned to art perhaps these seasons growing old or new, their voices favors fashioned forward the music is no trance delusion but the hot line out drawing you forward, into it resumed again after thought an afterthought unseasonal notices draw these air-driven manifestos into the corner, where the roller goes in from either side and slop down the screen the thick white substance is your vocabulary of single signs, monochrome surface into cubic geometry of the space of the walls without windows, the light which comes off the surface itself, the walls themselves another situation entirely these white murals which fill the eye potentiating sighs at the flow of light or life's lingering episodes a singular thrust into the wind of her, into love, into silence, even, the tactics become more than plain, and plain enough to call resuming hours the distance itself, not "to term," exactly, but perhaps driven along and shorter, more clever than just the other day when the hand was not exactly steady enough, it is still your own movie and yet it is also real enough to be also real at the same time, calling out to fill the space; listen, fill the space your own tunes are whistled in the wind no feathers falling from those high invisible battles in the upper atmosphere the orphans calling out, "Wait!" and sailing lines across the mirror charge you up internal noises reflect the anchor on the chain no metaphor for the rhetorical presence you imagine dramatically as "your life". There is working and being and the usefulness of being able to see it at all is a questionable distance reflections in the face of circumstance hold you to a middle path among the rocks and reasons for being any other way at all with those who love you love them too, and calm exchange powders the air with questions from the other room no nonsense in the work at hand.
The angular distance yields to something present in the names at shore responding hours are no disturbance in polite discourse the reason for calling at all, singing, uh, "Happy Birthday to you," into the telephone crying out how good it is to be the same in all men and seasons the same things held before you anticipating nothing but being ready to do the rest to call back again you are the reasons and the flow ahead the rest is soon enough to make the hours descend.
I sit back. I say hello. I say goodbye. I am here.
LES TEMPS DU TEMPS
. . .if you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat.
LARDO AND THE FANGETTES
In the matter of aspirations or intent you are quite specific about staying at home, doing business without giving thought to consequences. It is easy enough to do what you have to do, if it is this and not that. In the time after time itself, no moment wrestles furtive futures away from what is said, and if the servant is not discreet he loses his life, though you stake that life on following your will. Or is there some distance between choice and silence? Risking what is established here to go where; to meet one's fate is some calm presence still, making out what is spoken as something new or less than rare, the motives for doubt erased in half a second, no generation's upset longing meets the work an hour away the repeating free-flow of the line from subject to meeting, with no objects intervening, the bits and pieces collect reflection out of, what, disuse or fervor, no complaining dialects ream your cute fantasies back to the rainy day outside, the personal rift. But then all the promises made in good will are perhaps just that, meditations on a stone, sucked in the mouth under the tongue and then spit out; from wanting nothing to caring less and less for the wanting itself even when it is for nothing, although where you are time itself, the heart beating and all that, resonance, you might believe yourself the sharper focus is no journal thrown out to the biding wolves in angles unrepeating denseness calls repetition no game in the eye's heights, as "what for" the echoing stillness in familiar tones a caution expressing the danger of the times themselves it is better to be invisible than anything else, as life's roles recall the tales told by those who have them out to share, no, it is no false caution disguising the ego's lies are beaten down in gentleness; as, seeking what is such as sought and finding what is found l'objet trouve familiar tactic that surprise inheres in rushing ahead past caution past reflection, into the future-past already churning away from the specific, categorical known. Nothing neither light nor unrelieved, a stillness to the moment outstrips caution, or, rather lulls the active pursuant senses into action and display, and the inevitable conflict with the shadow-play of what is real, you say, with what is wholly real delimits progress from the personal into this so-called sphere of action, or the danger of moving into the spectral drama from the solitude or safety of the room. The room and the chair are where it all takes place. There is no hurry, there is no time, and in the time of time itself, there is some stretching-in encountering the solidity of the ongoing argument which has itself over the years become the leitmotif of action in restraint, "controlled excess," as for whom interred, your graver speeches reserved for the newspaper, no peeking or sentient gasps recall that power defeats, that your own plan develops out of the work and that that too dissolves to presence, staying the same, dulling the weapons of the self in this soft combat without the promise of success that promises nothing.
Calling out from the thicket. You don't believe it yourself. There is that line developed over the lies you tell yourself about ambition, l'arriviste. Some cute chinoiserie of the soul's behavior, the pseudo-camera flailing away from frame to frame, staying the same or staying home, it is no matter to anyone who minds the store but claiming rougher songs for others means the lines are gone, the darker ages recall that the earlier agonies exploded the European population some cannibalistic cultural roots were, are, left behind in their own examples, or would you pass behind history as a symptom of the passage itself becoming too rooted in the dramatic mirroring reflection of this, this tension-after-the-fact is no reminder at all the foreigners invading the television set, little people in there battling on the material conscience of the global battle, how could you miss it, sport-hunting of men and the trophies the heart wears for poetry, even, an infection of others and opposites meaning that nothing at all offers this triumphant glowering beast its numbers rising forward, flowering columns.
His return in hiding. Attention deflected from the so-called real into, into le temps du temps, "the time of the time," is too literal, perhaps, counting the four-four measures of the solo, four and sixteen and the overtones of color on the white wall breaking up, she's breaking up, we can make him better, the cosmic/comic alliance also a draw play leaving the quarter no gate but pursuit, the greyhound deceived by the, uh, rabbit is old hat for sure; how about watching the sunset, no recluse but the giving out of measures with form itself in the personal realm is no retreat but less anxious lines drawn-out and meeting around behind the others means no disturbances too slight to go unrecorded, the present life is too fragile to be disturbed by success in the outer realms is foregone. She cries over that, over this. Is love enough or is there love enough? The hours. Safety clauses in the contract. Or, what is important enough to become important is also important enough to be left alone, well that's your problem, you say, muttering on over coffee and black scratch on yellow paper, reclining.
What is set, though, the athletic discovery of time is self against set, self in set and the set itself, the court, the game which becomes nothing, rien de chose, or nothing in no thing; the years were hoses, powered carts, the wired-up beams in cardboard circuits, the courts, yes, the courts. Though you say that this is still enough (however you choose to read it), it is, it is still and it is enough. But the disguise is something penetrating, recalled, as it were from something settling out, which is clear enough to be light, the light is presence, the time is some revolving platform, ark and beam, your familiar colors are these wooden gaps and pressures lined-out in the manual of transmission, uh, "give", and going on is there again, going on in this rather cautious assault you don't remember when, is perhaps the name of being human, you are that, where they haul your nets around the image growing thin, animal distances eruptive gestures the meetings in the air have this quality of target and game. And the mask. You forgot to shave again, you fluttered down, alight. Going unnoticed is no bravery in the face of it. Withholding light no sin against the self, no pursuit of empty angles taking the place of conscience-stricken polarities of this secret life becomes an icon of retreat, as, is it worth it? You measure the piles themselves are gold and silver meets the day's collapse some integrity of the will is a tug of war against the ego's wail for recognition, finding the right word for it, collapse of will, integrity itself the failing quantity his letters go unanswered, and the stamps have gotten more expensive as the glue becomes more offensive. A cute retreat spells anger from the self's will to action, the warrior's berserk glimmer of unthinking advancement across these walls are drawn-out voices calling down the angles of the room, pictures on the wall are this nomenclature you mentioned back there somewhere, heart and throng, "what do you want?" Across the day, smaller fortunes than your own rising and falling, I don't usually let anyone at all know what I'm up to, I'm up to nothing at all is the answer, leave me alone, the rest is this unanswering unswerving silence.
The day goes across in dealing with it, a sensory array in light and sound complete with children going off the deep end, you too were caught up in the sweep and clamor of the past restrictions against these curiosities of the heart; you met them here and there, the evolutions of the spirit mark the hours out and down, a cull of framework, an image latent in the interstices of thought are less unprovoked than automatic. A total disregard for danger is not some clutch of overlooking patterns nor head-in-sand carefulness, my old-maid aunt grown fat. Why sell it, by weight or distance? By time or motive? Is it kept away from the heat of fortune or just a calculated hedge against the cynicism of the age direct and prosperous lines across the mirror interrupt the reflective mode, and driving on across the page you cause reflection to interrupt again precursors to rescue, the house on the hill, insane babble and moan from the cannibals of the lowlands, fresh out of salt, looking for a fix, hard enough to say and hard enough to see, but there it is, in the drawer, typed out, finished, replete presence.
Nothing cautionary, you know; a fact of life. He goes hunting for life, and catches it through a combination of cleverness, good luck, and fate, and then lets it go, impressed perhaps by the size of it, frightened by the nature of the trophy and the quality of the hunt, and decides in the end to return to the village and hoe his row. Candide. This is the only one of all possible worlds, and the songs themselves go on over it, a passion of intense becoming reminds you of the energies gone beyond their time are not solos in the night no funnier elbows thrown in the heat of the battle call them outer sails the wind's retreat from island calm attention says "this" and the left-handers organizing trivia contests for red headed wigs you left on the car seat, in the bus station, in the time capsule, over the rainbow, a gold of pot, his lazier friends have money in the bank, as long as the banks last, and then it is picking rocks and tending the plants in their secluded distances ten feet tall or taller still the phone is not ringing is a statement of fact, undeniable presence, and the mask.
I mean, his own disturbances have quality enough to occupy the rest of the day. Interruptions have the air of movement, as if movement itself were motive enough to change the quality of the attention which identifies them in the first place, altering the nature of the game from pursuit to something new which makes it plain or clear that nothing new is going on but the slip and fall of notice, regard, the postures of use and the distances of change are not disruptive, are not reclusive, are not the matter of the quest but the emanations of the tactics themselves, and he who hunts the restless quest usually finds it the prey of time, and the garden grown from weeds to forests, alone ungathered substance marks the trail a lot, away, a pile of stones the nature of which is time itself unrelieved layering of illusion, distance, sentence; all perfection precludes this state of being at rest within movement, collative, persistent, eruptive, but that's all. The poem is over there, a roll of thunder, a dancer on the moon, flailing photographs.
A man ought to maintain reserve, be it in solitude or in the turmoil of the world, for there too he can hide himself so well that no one knows him.
The sequence is in the hiding one, there the figure rests between the realer realms than not at all; what calls falling into the play itself, you are not so much a part of history or even history at all; after all, history has ended, and we read events as medium, and call the hours falling on the radio a newer hum for anyone to read aloud between sentences, the day's unending silence something recalled the here and there you met them in the hallways some persistence named you sullen, hot, a newer substance extradited along the topics of the dance, meeting always the newer meetings named aloud, again, along.
That's good enough for the present moment, an extradition of the past in old jazz modes, jass, the loose lip stringing out the turnings, an avalanche, a rough ride was slipp't aside her flower out against the tide's weaving edge, the figures, there.
As if you meant anything new was calling down the years are new, too, a shape you'd hardly recognize as gasps or gaps, in control, en retard, or against time, contra de the wraps' design his fooler substance ahead, gazing ahead, peering into the gloom you delved again the horses in the mist were left there newer now what scores them furtive clamor in the midst of now, you are that, or this maneuver that calls them down, falling as it were (were), the sentence coiling down along your own hours at heap or sudden, now, never newer than before what calls at harp and sudden, move these newer movies calling or calling where the prose sentence gives divine substance the hours calling swift now sooner hears her songs along your loops enchained or golden hours looped along the walls waving words have substance in the heart's woes weeping voices sudden sullen "Pooti has my check", the inside joke calls the model's prostate reference a tide behind your own warps woofed closer in betimes the light in the evening comes across the water rippling tides interlace time.
Or in between, as, what you have to say sustains the evening's hours now that time's interruptions have met them swiftly excess creeping long alone or meeting the movie's excessive executions in parking lots, in the dark hour carway's headlights beaming gleams a young man culls them out as words or powers the dreaming mean is this lighter substance weaving lines among his colors, drawers are pulling unfulfilled among his hours went calling; I never want to see this shit again, I said, even too soon to be believed no naps for the weighty, you heard them downers went along some shores weaving in between the overt substance this clear flow of time between us has the hours pointed realms discover the more remote pressures collapsed substances remove what goes over for lunch is quite enough to cull them outer forces; you only hear about it when it's a problem; a cool, frosty white square on the white square-tiled kitchen sink, painting lines around your dining room made the difference between time and color, small lullaby went moving down again in slower depths the easier letting go casts doubt, "about," an adaptation.
And what was there, after all, another newer name projected forward into it, or into the names of noises cared, declared, no newer practitioners in these insubstantial ages, darkening death-glooms call you more humane than the camera, the child clinging to life, skin and bones, the saying goes, your own body quietly skims the quiet of its sustenance, the moment itself a subject for examination, taking the time out to look at it, or even what you find as something new is not so much another substance as time itself removing to the distance you chase across the day is something calling in the here and now was met at distance newer hours recall the day no interruptions drove you mad, madder than the rest, unwinding substances are not so much moot as points themselves, to keep them mixed between hours points recalling the map no hours in practice the memory cues fly against chance no movies said the doorway is not so much open as not quite closed, the formal hours are merely sixty minutes against the room the rain falling gray skies' hours newly smoothed to hear about it less and less they chide them roofed or sudden times terms turning, or are they loosely smoothed, her hair falling between brushes they leapt against them tidy or green, today at charge or sudden, they calm these movies mooning down the bumps in the building private airs seeming smooth and sudden at the same time booming forward I called you back and forth to talk too much between songs, Souffle' Rambeau was what you called it, downer now than smooth your hours mixed and smooth in the textural realm, doors opening and closing you went across the moon, or made the radio open its grappling intentional rasps no motive attend your mergers floating hears them souther psalm would have them spelled at comedy or the very partition of memory into the less studied of postures reclining, waiting, you are another time I went across them now and then, the cats calling the dust doubts nothing, a bare green term for cults, a cutting edge, his nose sniffing up into the air coming around the distances wounding time her substance said singular terms forget them now and then, a tide breaking down these mountainy walls of light.
Again, down they went, into it, making them here and there you are, loading out from boom to quack the remote portraits clustered upwards into the attic, dandelion portraits in my brother's hallway, now in the attic, I imagine you inside the coffee cup with the small-screen television blaring out whatever passes for someone new you met them smooth days passing on from what is there at all in the moment itself towards a category of reflection or repetition, you were nothing new between halations the pressure of logic, or a new pen. Pen-pals across the waving, teeming skies, wherever they left you now and then a lonely hour receding closures paid them out, another movie claiming independence to shout sudden striding triumphs left them even a little undone, in love with, you said, challenging everything that was left among your sailing lines, newer crackers felt them hover around the ceiling lines were foreign substances, motives, the day itself, cranking the Canadian dime into the parking meter across from the police station and then leaving with the keys still in the truck, no, no thoughts of going anywhere at all, it is coming this way rather loudly.
But the quality of it is not so much surprising as something you'd recall of other times, two in one, one on one, three on two, and so forth; in straight-line prose, it is more the disposition of overtones itself (the disposition, that is) which suggests the parallels of attention which call the mixing of events into play as much as the combinations of instruments, "playing" against each other (Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman), were they there at all?
The dying out of familiar defenses, cultural systems of digression, display, the sudden thrust of the communicative intent; all leaves you lost in the unfamiliar pressure of the real. Speech binds, the image unfolds from time to time, catching up within understanding, the pop of ears from the flight descending mountains, photos from the airplane window as unnoticed markers collide in presence, the story in the window meaning the way an advertisement does, you are lying down over there while the Debussy poems unwind in the earshot glimmering of the light within your less formal meetings, intuitions as they are of the unmoving triangulations of time.
Coasting forward meets you in among the natives restless hours revive love's inhabitants, their own closeness these stalls of fortune, fortunate prayer a reverenced altitude redeems them from the here and now of path-floods, doors sliding from here, as such, as time's terms, how you set them up to relive the unapproachable moment is less silent than procreative, less a shudder than a spasm; you meet the darkness suddenly unprepared for the hole in the wall; you love her, too, and play around the afternoon, calling out at the ceiling for the lighted squares suspended throughout she leans against you smoothly given, the program repeating certain words too often to go among them now or not at all, a gasp, a wooden tongue.
A push ahead, or over the hallways wearing down another room and matter, the flat climbing vines are fuchsia colored planters remaining hidden behind the adobe walls, thorn trees mounting rough hewn stairways, and worrying about nothing nor asking for too much to call escape and rescue the clauses of the moment, the pattern is reminiscent.
Or, incomplete sentences mark your own furor no victim of the king's realm; it is still there, hidden in the silence of the age's indifference, ignorant half-mutes deprived of their humane-ness by the inefficiency of the modes of transit, it is not so much the fantasy of, uh, projection as the sense of body states which needs to be established, the state of flight is both retreat and soaring, and they are different, though you suppose the master presenting them both; and though the city has fallen into disregard, still it gives its people what passed at one time for an interpretation of the realm of the good.
And still they come aboard over the side, making what is a bad game even worse, and to find cartoons about it, those airy puff-dolls in unredeemed largeness, doesn't do justice to the cruelty they enjoy, the nattering voices cull the silences from something intrusive into prose-substance, and one final kick in the butt suffices to prove that no-one is home in the houses of the open-hearted, it is the dark hour homeward climbing, spirits sucked back into the maelstrom of life's lingering, hesitating thrust after vision.
Still, you are the sum of these disparations, and as voice itself reminds the ear that it exists, you say, "it," and go on after dinner into the slouching reminiscences they left apart a larger score than this primitive angulation of our own rarified purchase, an unphenomenal glowering departing futures pressing forward the rummage of the elephant is no hesitating surge, but the calm hiss of rain on plexi-curved fiction charging out ahead of the distinctness you mellowed nurtured presences, all that going to waste, and jingle-bells-Shostakovitch returns the speakers to life, no money in the bank shuffling forward, laughing ahead of the game neon-lighted wheels spin, their gap-toothed unshaven reminiscences of this beast of childhood a flattering maze for the singing voices, checked-out and sudden, fiery colors banging out no lectures heal the air around the nucleus has falling arches, overfed and mute, your protagonist jogging twenty-five miles a day, there's just too much to say to stop, and rushing along, the trails ease-out and stop, pause, rest.
The relaxing hours go on, indifferent fates intertwined beyond the warfare planing into your wisps of the more flagrant explorations. Where you go is not described as easily remembered what goes beyond the arm's arc in the air what seems unseen bellows firing the straight line across the ditch, into the meadow coalescing frames of reference, eye-shot and colorful, another declining epoch catching those who are in the net, dolphin-spasms, men in strange garb with masks and short wooden clubs, out there after the dolphins or the baby seals or the Galapagos turtle or the rest of them, macho sport-fucking, nature-rape, voyeuristic death-high, priests of the ecstasy-rage freak-cult, the black heart of disguised righteousness, and all that stuff, avoided, perhaps, in defense of what retains invisibility as a way, waving visits in your old sox on the floor, even the spelling book has some question marks scattered around the deck some sperm wiggling a star-trek unfamiliar gog of pointed ears' anti-spasm of the hero's fart, the goalie's mask and ice blades' wooden stick.
It all revolves around the bull's eye, a mandala of attention and muscular control the forgotten origins, or maybe not so much that as made more acceptable in the absence of raw materials: after all, where do you get another head for the soccer games when there's perhaps two or three hundred of them going on at any minute, the old warrior stance giving way to today's nineteen percent and tomorrow's twenty five, all of it eclipsed soon and suddenly by nothing at all; yes, perhaps it is that old "nothing at all" that is so unsettling at the end of the games, a familiar enough observation, but translated into dollars, are they really the invisible cells of the material grimace?
The piano motive expressed, the scratches on the record transmitted over the FM airwaves, even the dryer's static field invades the television set, his story of climbing the high power poles, sitting up there among the crackling fusing popping wires, suffused in energy, the field of power surrounding the wires in a circular, invisible tunnel.
Unrepentant mists, whatever spoils the worst, your names were even so, eagle, dove, ram, the old penitent vocabulary of disguise and pattern, or the latent attributes the same as rock and roll heart beats beyond the mountains cruising altitudes the mountains far below the emphysemic statue doubled over into no regret but too late frozen in stone, match in cupped hands against the wind, and on the beach no other reams her head against the wall, a boom-boom daylight lounge against the inert stasis their floors littered with match heads and pubic hair, balls of it blown into the corners with the dandruff. . . .
Nothing just runs out, but the inattentive glare is no hypocritic oath the losers take to heart that, uh, what is real is also real, or that the opposite is also true enough, and in either case a year's subscription is not enough to make your case for tax exempt status has been reviewed by the circumstances under which said examination was requested, to be found absolute, or at least totally without merit, at least under the circumstances.
But the size of things is no limit to their perception, that is, variable, after all, according to the degree of attention given it, a thing becomes large or small in relation to the space it occupies inside that oh so very sacred present moment, the worship of which entails the fear of history, the ego of the present, the snobbish smartass aggrandizement of life into some perspective of size and establishment, a gargantuan spectacle of pressure, a mythology of perception encouraged by the fear of time, of the numerical step by step progression from birth to death, whatever that means, the flowering of the heart's epace begins to wear down the continually accelerating spin of feedback columns, the self-conscious enlargement of some sort of psychic spleen, ah, the return of the old medicine, at least beyond valium addiction into some permanence of carpentry as a hobby once the trees are gone, stacks of plastic two by fours, sheetrock and screwguns replace the trees as fur, old houses on wheels, the slow-moving Galapagos trailers winding across the seas on the decks of the supertankers, Mayflower.
No extras on the mark, you finished out where the rest went down again, the waterbed went somewhere else, just floated out of view tomorrow or the day before; you went through the wall unscathed comic-strip adventures have the air of waiting around, "the worst part of being a rock is being a rock!" But as the noise from the other room subsides, you get what you want, the sunlight ringing true enough to make the wheat grow higher, a doorway opened or closed, the futile gasps are this escaping of air renewing the fortress, as if the old books were illustrated psalms of something continual and redemptive, not Ozma's adventures on the Ivory Coast, another frigate scratching the bottom of the bay in search of cheap labor, why you don't even have to feed them, and the newer models don't break down for at least six months, lots of kids, they fuck like bunnies, haw haw, and hitch the old belt up, why let's go hunt a few in the briar patch while it's still light; no-one said anything about that this year, are you listening, as the spare loop rewinds unnerving hours as voices in the mist, your own rings ringing.
In the bells as favors, passage into something long suppressed, floating in from the radio or the years as catches (back there somewhere), is such an innovative mood the unrehearsed motive climbing the walls again, you are some such or other, no folding boats propelled soft waves against the shore, inflatable surfboards the plastic shoes grip the edge, his toes curled overall the waves themselves are indications of the field or the realm in context regarded rebuilt sojourns revive the queen her underground houses released the hostage into the darkness no money your own angles reamed afloat, calling through last year's darkness accumulated and then let go, let across the sound of wooden wheels on the macadam surface white-painted stripes are here and now the easier names across the flood, the bridges paved aside from this you have no change to spare a fool's flow is undisturbed to move along this straight line folding the lines again the shoes worn out, stacked up in the hall and no reflection makes the abstractions wordless entities are moving rugs and furniture around the house again, today.
Or open beers the sun coming around the windows for the dust on the table a smoother surprise is thus, yo vengo, the bursts alert spasms the calculated recording of the high-times passion from somewhere new this bridge across the gallery space, heavier doors in this arrangement of resemblance, grain of wood, xerox lines through the dark areas of the image, louder music than you'd care to hear, but again in these strumming wilderness ethics of survival and stasis the trim lines follow the cigarette smoke curling upwards, the white ceiling moving from beige to tan to a darker brown reminiscence of the bar downtown, the boat hung from hooks in the ceiling, white and brown tobacco stains in the air's evening hurrying on to say release or relapse, or look it up in the old book; well then, he never called to say you have a job tomorrow at the crack of light moving ladders around the house, jamming the feet of the ladder into the mud, going up to paint the windows the wrong color, or are errors falsehoods against the claims you make for accuracy to lend them sullen mates the cows are wandering in or sailing down the line today, outer.
Or the curling lines rescinded motive, claim, pressure or substances the radio offers for perusal, they call this outline the mystery of the substance, a collection of attributes amounting to the whole dream-faction rising up in the darkness to remind you, uh, here and this retain their power even as verbs reuniting the parts of the body into play, play her out and come again and again into the moment of pure relief, that's the kindness of the motive, a smaller scherzo, there's the brass rekindling the actions themselves marked like philosophical discourse, as direct as direct experience itself, or a mellower lecture on the stillness of the native's restless dance, parentheses dominated by what they contain, rude scratch and murmur an evocative and personal touch releases, uh, perusal and format, the quicker communications flash across the doorway opening outer forward back and forth a vibrator at the darker rush, a velvet frog croaking sudden rush of light the middle, in the middle of the moon's passage; there's all the counters of the underlegend arranged on a spinning Tibetan prayer wheel, well, spin it.
Here's the news: tie-ins, access, another guy snuffed in a bus, rises and falls, publicity for the gang, the word "Bahguhtah!" Contract ratified and so on, but the sitar gleams across potentiation, quicker lines cast around whiffs as changes pontifical ruminance, the stranger willowing along the trails around the house, willing perhaps as innocent recall is this sentence along the walls who cares, what comes is there, spilling over the dam not unstructured postcards are mailed from various places around the world, responses to architecture translated into the erotic mode, leaves as feelings, the black ink spells and charms, blood of the soul's dragon, assertive beyond control, leaning back into a gentler restraint to keep from flying away totally disrupted solo voices nattering on together heave the waves away to surfer dogs the bark and sniff of formula responses, or books read in forgotten hallways; what I have to say to you is what I have to say to you. Popcorn chakra the drumhead drone the pure conscious music is going on synaptic burst of gunfire triggering thoughts as they come between light and day.
But stops occasionally, a beer on the table. Functional diagrams a triggering device at play the instant opening out to time at time, a double tension reviews the words themselves as catches, small boats, holding a syllable in the glottal-stopped position, giving over every chance made possible positions in the dark the whole energy driven into work, or worked out like a footnote on the telephone bill to say he's not at home today, for your spring housepainting, give us a call, the mailbox has ceased to function properly, for all that comes are those window envelopes, windowshades rising to reveal the isinglass address, or an old woodstove for a thousand dollars, cheap wine in gallon bottles, juicers lined up for a nine o'clock feeding, even the beer goes down ok, and you set up these open boxes along the edge of the back porch and let the frogs go, and just as you thought, some jump into the boxes and some jump over them; no, that's not really a good frog trap, first you have to put them in the center of the space; perhaps the thing to do is dig a trench around the house, a moat, to catch frogs.
Hexagrams scattering around. Quite simply, a bowl handed through the open window, twenty-nine in the fourth, going to forty five.
The doubling of effects always leads to overtones.
The scale of the fortress unimaginable distance upward scaling walls as high as that: he opens the can of schmoos, dura-tex acrylic syrup, laughs to himself, out loud, why they look like canned pears, plunges a fork into one and pops it into his mouth.
Nothing more often, into the sea singing-wet, all points open on the compass, success in small matters, or the reduction of this into turgid components, down at the lido, the exhausting moments between the light and her eye-borne sentences unspoke flashed across the kitchen room an eye away, a soft glance deep singing at departure for the day's haunts hunting, no there's no one home today, the black scratch on pale green paper hums the FM song, Chuckee's in Love.
Your fortune's folded flags are flowing fluttered runs of sounds, the arm is loose enough to spell the words right the first time out, a kind of suppression of the sense of risks taken, roads not taken, the sour grapes of life submerged so many alcoholic friends and salutations down the tubes emotional disasters the commonplaces of the spirit one mood one moment of solace in the fluttering tide of what has passed for love between me and thee the tenderest excursions still cautious flowering at two or three in the morning you come across the day's shopping carts and wooden skateboards interrupt the flow of feeling slow returning exploration of the instant pre-recorded intersections the names of which the names of which recall you doubter in the mists of plenty, hours in reflection spur the wanderer forward into, through, via song, the song sung lulls the fears subsiding, humming in the dark, breath-voiced self-sung holding back the darker episodes as thoughts drifting to and fro in the ether of perception sometimes stick and hold and build into hexagrams and tetrahedrons spilling upward mounting flame.
The page of the day continuing linear modes the bare skip of rhythm electric unwinding from the speaker's slight vibrating diaphragm, a reverse duplicate of the ear that hears no robot poet sitting in his room today they let the old computer scan the inferential rheums of phrases coded into memory banks, Berg-like scans of duplicate parallel form-patterns, numbered out from, uh, left to right; your own body glowing coals beneath thought, the centers of the body reminding each other of the harmonics from the time of time, le temps du temps more a poem than a perception the other way around of course consciousness welcomes these tributaries flowing in and out of action, he rises in the midst of those whom he is, is of, and what pertains is there to hold, danger and the invisibilities of the imaginary reality, it's time to get another haircut, I caught you barking at the moon last night, you'd better relax, the little men in white coats are coming to get you, my dear, relax and sing, there's enough potatoes to last at least a week, fried, boiled, baked, lumped and pasty.
The same as. Relief mode tangible sensation, you float back and down into your body-rooted senses, welcome, at first, and then swimming along together, the day before the rest hit thirty miles an hour uphill in bear feet, woof woof, a seminar on cult phenomena doesn't surprise me, the cooler noises move among the advertisements on the air, a material reminder of the flux of the veneer saying give it up, the blue skies slowly returning your body a newer memory across the room the slower days and nights, another humility expressed in song no fantasies subsist from the morning's moving hours, no reckless pushing-ahead without the others bunched into a group, the torches burning overhead, and show you're really there, it is not some unconvincing wide-eyed testimonial which is at stake, but the graduaI unwinding of the knot of syntax, of what started out as bullets of words and has now described the paragraph and the line itself has finally gotten interested in what lies beyond the peripheries of the image-followed curiosity from the linear into the outer cosmic totality and back.
Which is slightly more than song, but only slightly, and the carrying is no smooth and singular hustle, it carries the athletic into not fear or dread or horror, they are such easy and immediate versions of the heart-rending totality, and involve short quick bursts of, uh, released, usually, I suppose, ending . . . . But the enlarging sense, exploding love-rush from the bull's eye out is equally available and universally experienced adolescent fusing moments remembered and recreated; the work of memory is that retrieval of what is good and self-grown pasting together of word and thing and work, you drift these amazing driveways like the newsman's Vee-dub coiling down the five-AM street, sliding the paper into the yellow plastic tube stapled just below the arms, into your rib-cage shuh-kunk, it hurts at first but you'll get used to it; the envelopes of seeds on the shelf are also ready to plant, and no-job today means you've got the sun coming in the window, time to bring coleus into the scene and make the bedroom perfect, flowering, serene.
No hurry in the after-seasons from the West Coast, no hearing problems, after all, it's the reminder that counts, the sound of the air moving around inside the house, a gallon of paint somewhere out in the shed, the off-color of which is some prismatic disturbance along the white-striped highway, slower signs going along with what you have to say is equally slow in coming along no virtue in coming on too fast, you say, the truer signs are recognized as not too bad to be allowed, or followed, rote monuments to the perceived, schedules for lunch-time endorsements, fathoms off the wall and flowering, crisp and red and round and crunch-tipped sudden rush of juice is what an apple is how could you write about it beyond that; or name the agonies entirely constipated for ten minutes in home remedies they say collapse your movies native's hours in reflection say the rest are other hours again to smooth or stop against the light a frame or substance in the radio, phlogiston, a primary essence which always catches on fire, the alchemist's presto-log, six for a dollar, today your hours streaming past.
At the ford or passing, the thorough lines recall and flatter, a retreat into the house in which one lives, and there one encounters one's mate, also in retreat. And then a matching of wits, or a muting of bodies, picked up in the air with your wrists hurting, no-one responds to that as if nothing were happening at all, you'd pursue them down throughout the demeanors which provide the active model, cruising along the radio says the clean energy fuels of intense regret is the lessened substance, spelled right, I think, enough for the scanners to punch into the scientific fiction of stream-of-consciousness writing, it is easier by far to side-step a direct, straight-ahead punch from the self-demon of the poem than it is to take it, roll out and come back hard. Of course there is the Bobby Riggs of it, but that's not the point, you can always win with evasive aggression, even in conversation (even!), the icier lamps no baby sailing, straightened out, "guys like me" the song goes, a wimp-thrust asking for more, a voice on the radio, singing.
Or something larger than memory, this first draft is quick enough, or thick enough to relax them from the first indications on through the fires, just plugging in the fragments of the ten or twelve concurrent streams and letting them all talk to each other is the way out of it; uh, just taping the patterns is a map-work, even as the vocabulary shrinks, the natural ingenuity of the fragments has them link and combine, the forward lisps of which or what remembers across the distances weaving lines remember enough to claim the rest are friends and others, costumes in the mist no monument showers-out the mirrors streaming, they said the motive showering out and straining vegetables four heads for a dollar and straining forward through yesterday's Guy de Maupassant elevated chances made hot in German camera styles, the wandering eye which goes just a little too far has this reminiscence of energy which is not hot and still very fin de siecle erotic, a man crying over the death of a friend is not complete enough to ease the atmosphere of silence, of absence.
Luster in the framework of what is said, spilling forth hum-drum repetitions of higher ratings, the occupying forces are not invaders but rather a representative of the parallel rhythms they made these hours fall or spill, and witnessing the same disturbance is not this shot of restitution, or peace, or grace, or both, or the One changing into the Other, contrary reflections make the warnings something you've heard before, "a warrior in the service of his prince," and all that, uh, arrived from the computations of the sentences as they evolved down from the grade school diagrams into another game, as, stop, step down, do you want to quit, but you hear it when you heal it with.
Life among the pronouns, named as personal substance marks them on along from coast to coast we love to dance, where the moment went disco madness, the ghost tribes called it eclectic spasms, made modern by electricity, we are the world's art form, even though it returns with its rifles and protoplasm, we dance.
And another dance makes the music a matter of praise close down where the essay starts, the prose patter meets his usual inflections the silence of the hours is amazed to hear the speaker booming, it was never quite like that before, the groove a tubing saint his molecules are out to lunch the day they greased her shots, no wobbling hands to say hello, Hiroshima Mon Amour with my mother; he says, "Portland!"
Your own pineapple spears floating strangely foolish markers peopled purple hairs along the spine identifies the invader, you got to corner them and rip their clothes off, and if they got purple hairs up and down the spine they're not human; and the guy is out there in front cutting up the tree branches interrupting the calm flow of anything else you might imagine who they are finishing up the lines out are met along the hour's spasms repeating vocabularies indicate the presence of another frame of reference, of something in translation, the flood lines moving.
Quiet hours return inside the fathoms unbending airs return too far away unrecognized no double spasms rolling back and forth away, you are the same to me as this or that, unbent hours somehow less than sixty and more than what is felt increasing turns less carefully rehearsed than "how you've lived" an off-hand sentence in a letter from an old friend reminds you that you've lived at all, or that it's been one way or another comparable to the passage of time or its reflection in the heart away from objects placed in the way waving tentacles, antenna, the thin stripe of purple hair more a warning than a sign, but certainly a pelt of some sort, like a scalp-trophy, a zit on the chin, a small indifferent characteristic or mark which calls your visitors a coincidence from the house down the street you painted a sort of chartreuse lime-green spectacle, a Victorian wooden cabinet without drawers or shutters, the front porch peeling away in less sensitive rows or angles, hustling every window for what it's worth is less than you'd imagine, the others cruising by on the way to work, four wheel drive.
But the smooth line into conclusion makes the movement faster or slower, and makes it change along the hesitating armament of taste and dinner, another list in the catalog of, uh, going on to the conclusion, pushing ahead, slamming the door to his empty room, door slammers and toilet-seat bangers, books on the table, fists against the wall, pouf! and it's gone again, emotion expressed in the throw of a rock the lightning glances, voices of the throng the forgotten graces nix your favorite cousins calling across the continent slow dancing eases the risk away from your heart's woes named related gathering of trophies, pelts, smocks, parts of bodies stretched out, spaced-out in a foregathering of the evening hours repeat a claim against the human counterparts, parts arranged on the counter like the third day without food, preparation for a long cold winter or the violin smoothing your ear a heart away and waiting, no distance from the message to the moon and the moon itself, typing out these letters left inside the day to lark your footspun wooden casks are waiting.
Newer lines recall the moment in the days you left behind, walking across the fields and walkways, a mist and fog the day you got these gifts a family in their chairs to smile or swoop the careful scratch is interesting the only teacher you ever had, and wait for the catch-up to make the climate more attainable functions described the same as memory-circuits folded open the coat upon the wall, a notation of idiom which carries repertoire a duo of father and daughter scratch together the painter in his studio has a score sheet on the wall, ten aliens today, seven the day before, and government bounties in the amount of seven-hundred fifty dollars, the difficult texts are such because they only encompass aspects of the old, which makes the age a minor one by all accounts, less than the age which contains it, the old "failure of nerve" which erodes the passive generators, eludes the formal spasms of retreat into a useless whimpering of loss and self pity. Anyway, it doesn't work anymore, and the survivors are identified by their nameplates and reflective psycho-generators, dayglow.
Really, you thought I was kidding about this. There's no one left to punch your eyelids out forsaking everything for the achievement of the hour, potato salad for lunch and an overdose of mayonnaise to recommend you to the freshman English program, Remedial Being, tuning forks and electrodes, cattle prods and chocolate covered Milk Bones, here boy, good behavior, a toss, an arc in the sunlight as the small boneshaped biscuit heaves through the air into his open mouth, woof-woof, tail wagging, the electrodes and adhesive tape scattered around the padded cell; waiting, noises from the other side of the planet where the quieter refugees beckon out who passes for anything else in the brown-bag silence where the roof is broken open to free concerts at noon, coffee and tea provided, Irish music bellowing out from dance to dance they stay alert by chemical means or lean over to say goodbye as the train pulls out onto track three, smoke and steam and noise clicka-clicka, pucka-pucka, brown suit, grey suit, shoes against the wall, the old days drawn against five lemons for a dollar.
But the weavers claim the threads in blue or white, you might remind them to get jobs and go across the quieter days to stretch and spin, a fool is soon enough the passing days in blue and white, or doors slamming along the hallway mating hours smoothed among the strangers in your mists, eased off into ambiguity, subscribing into equipage the bright yellow tractors parked beside your household making headway from ten years ago is the natural inertia you thought too heavy to even begin, birds boosted into flight, kids everywhere enough to mark them less and less door slammers in the afternoon no pressing passages left unmarked with the doors spray painted blue and red enamel, a run or two wherever you choose to look, out of small holes dripping down the side of a cloudy day replacing this morning's sunlit hours across the table moving slower than not at all, they held firm and rolled up and down the inverted half-dome, newer signs than what was left undone too soon to be replaced with salami and cheese sandwiches, no, talking over the phone is not enough, I know that.
Once in awhile they rest. The moon looms.
Easy terms turn, ferns beneath you weighty houses smoother now and then the story begins, unstructured monuments are not possible, or would this hourglassed flat body recover the quick shot sooner than you'd care to guess, danger and distance and risk to love's enemies notwithstanding, the doom of the comic book, or other legendary wisps were sent away and staying in his room too much, the wisp of evening staying out too far, of the pit yawning indifferent distances you went all the way down into the beautiful valley the glowing hermaphroditic creatures dressed in their fur skins, no food allowed today until the floor dries, the lists and lists of adjectives have been submitted to the council, I suppose, like ancient dried loogies on the floor, the wet wax drying on the floor in puddles, his arms crossed in anger, his shots going high and wide, you dive under the table and push away; is too easy a story to be believed: rather, the cold gleam subsides, and the unexpressed feelings warp out at seventy hectares per, the meters flashing out.
M. J. Ooley, 135 South East Seventy Ninth. Zink Floyd. Easy there, the yellow book is covering the floor flooding light-out, his smooth movies crept awry, and choruses wimped at southern substances recognizing the outer islands as places where life is hardest wrought the penitential platforms hazard unperfection around the clock you forget to ask them haughty hours recorded sons and lovers the hard road is straight ahead in the fooler gaps, pushing toward conclusions you thought that you'd forgotten the automatic pen-lite batteries the short skinny kind, four for three dollars, you forget to ask against the walls yellowed-out moon-movies recall the cone-shaped associations, the random flatterers in obtuse, strange costumes, thin pencil-beams of sight penetrating thirty-foot thick concrete walls, you failed to mention the letters you got last, they were too full to be believed, I can believe anything, or is the patriarchal gleam too strong to leave alone, the open door is still an open door, again.
Finished-out, the colors gray and red are the filial prose entities, and the figure rests, here, inside the diagram or trope, the evanescent flood of power recalls the stranger from the farm, a distant relative culling hourglass figures the remote distance between fantasy and the bank that serves you well, why not rebound from the facts of life, quick wisp of the flat of the hand across blank paper, or the compulsive energy of the potato peeler, these are the alien realms, those purple striped bastards, they don't even fuck, you just go in there in the morning and there's two of 'em, I tell ya they're smarter'n us, they gotta be stopped; now, you get one in the corner and rip their clothes off, and if there's a little thin stripe of purple hair, I mean it's bright, running down either side of the vertebrae, like two thin little parallel lines, why then there's an alien, an' I say we kill 'em, they're smarter'n us, and that's bad, why they jus take over and have everything and that ain't right, what's ours is ours and that's enough, ya gotta watch for aliens.
The faster you go, the closer run your tides along the chalkier cliffs a dreamscape hanging on for dear life, you mentioned this, that the monologue was hardly something anyone would recognize, or his professional landscape as if something he should apologize for, the brown rice still steaming underneath the cactus collection blooming out there on the back porch, still stabs of fortune dismissing the road on the way back, not stopping for anything, really, the handwriting nonetheless legible, though the clarity of the substance is somehow usually diminished beyond the risks you take in the future-game prevalence of doubt or the recognition that the wasps are really mating this time, he left the angles angling down in these transparent droves across the frozen landscape, any angry guy upstairs is rhythm enough to release the hostages beyond Rhenquist's support for the three-time loser role, you watch them sit on it until the passive sacrifice becomes apparent, the bureaucratic violence which involves a lot of people getting very intense and then not doing anything, that's the un-war, the un-bomb falling on the un-people.
The stale motive clamors on. Dropped on his head, a matter of fact substance, another drying line repeals the foreign amnesty of flattery streaming arousal of the gamier realms, sputtering of substance itself into the field of action; thought, perhaps, becomes action, and the old man dances beyond the cleverer distances, the voyages, space, the final frontier, but just another day decorates the remaining mysteries their own forgiveness, the more salient features of the mask an interruption in the calmness of the surface, it is perhaps enameled, lacquered, shined-up to reveal no flaws inherent distance, the mask on the mask is no redundant elocution, it is a statement of fact flattering the stairway up the hill into the bushes as a kind of image for the mysterious, there is the drama itself, wherein the good master is threatened.
Turning after light repeals the sentence, names the floating places more than soon enough. Holds. Fervor names them hourglass figurines, the sense of taste, the raptures of innocence, you'd hold around the clock more foreign tongues, or plaid shirts the panoply of which is words glossed overall and fuming plenty. The birds in the crags float willfully along the upper air currents without variety, your arms waving weakly on the plain below, shunting upward swinging terms renewal or appetite would flavor the less abstracted ideas in pushing on, pushing through, a looser name for the terms you give forgiveness, to make sure, and thrown out alongside the road is the more immediate of claims reduced in "dension" to say the more linear attributes are not so easily won but say these contradictions in the heart are woes, perhaps, but certainly clear enough to be refreshing, like clarity or a nooner in the midst of harder times. The phone or airplane slinging out these dustier realms at play the strum of silence growing sideways into more organic forms the cleverer substance adaptive elegance sustains the perfect flow of unstated glottal stops, the throat's catch's tongue going clack clack in the back of your mouth the taste buds, salivary glands underneath the tongue behind the front teeth squirting waterlike juices, a grasshopper tongue-squirt, besides oil, and the tobacco-mood, the famous mix-up, the vote-gatherers leaving them out in the cold with no-one else around, a smooth slide out along today's beginnings soon enough to meet the terms of papers due and finished, the hallways close and empty, and no-telling when they'll be released; and besides that a breakthrough threw the window out, with complaints against the city, opening the door to gunfire combating the terrorists alone, and even later, it holds them entirely responsible for the easier tune-in a sketch perhaps the string-plucks going at the slower pace of programming decisions paired off the same time as the less impersonal statements made along the slower reaches of the concert, we have certainly crossed the line the heights of it unused insubstantial nomenclature the web the scan the screen the pattern of crossover delights and the continuing identification of locus and stem; is not so much universally uninterrupted as going in on through the light rain darker gray of cloud-sky a seam across the middle, a parting shop with more slowing down and picking up speed across the slow descent of attention throughout the doors and windows painted alternating colors ignoring the slow slide across the moon, the afternoon of the avenues in defeat calling the random geometries of communication-perception are less stated as energy-transfers with love between the slices of bread to make meaning a palatable reference to the less unstated points of view over the right shoulder singing out the mayonnaise on your facing lines is called another doubt supreme substance, LA Lady, on the highway singing foreign losers crowding forward against the statistical percentages you remember another loose line weaving slowly back and forth a dancer's line for hours forgetting the stops and senses leafs leaves leaving the arms are bowers in your mists at center streaming out the lady in the blue uniform resists your argument, the coldness inhabiting public discourse who's got a chance anyway, the slaves solidified by the survival need for contact, as rapid rain falling across the window-frame, where the base is recent or established, no future in waiting around with these inert substances forming the monologue of your own partition, where one-liners stretch out into thought itself the pure essence of the run-on sentence drifting in and out of self-consciousness, from process to medium to images of similarity and difference, the computer instanter flux his "play of the mind" less a touchstone now than earlier days admitted how you are, or the more remote mornings as quickly as the steady march of the music interim pressure going along under the arched touching tops of trees and plants grown huge, the hot acid rains marking the spot where it once occurred, before he strangled on his own shit, before love fled to the safety of relative obscurity in the museum of personal psycho-styles, and you wait for the next day to begin against the towering tides the rhythmic flux of intention, of wrapping, of the package itself made into "no joke," and circles in half circles is the knot in the tabletop speed-illumined, heightened perception in the rapid flow of motion across the static point of perception, how the coalescing points review the categories themselves, or are you still waiting around to see what happens, spying on yourself to see what you do when the chips are down as if distrusting the automatic adjustments made on the inside which ensure survival, the energy flows attacking distinct and solitary isolations the names of which repeat the calling hours at cross and pattern moving symphonic utterances the lighter hues have cracked throughout the moving stillness faster on to waiting stations lean released notices his plant crumpled into the mud with impolite angry calls late at night, you shine it on for the moving hours danger, perhaps, yes, danger perhaps in the easier references to immediacy are reminders in the mist of circumstance the dirty jokes were ringing telephones off the wall and heaving boxes from the demands of the time, you said that again, the warning shots crossed yr bow. . . .
In whatever quarter found, the name assistance gives you at three-ten this morning, while Shakespeare expanding from the center of actual achievements, ne'-ne-ne'-ne-ne-ne'-ne'-ne'-ne' is what he just said, gray rain-fall, my neighbor lobbing mortar rounds through the picture window, hillbilly-visquine masking-taped cracks spiderwebbing slow lines in two inch tape, dishes sailing smooth arcs the slower rooms of which white-painted walls are the norm, the woodwork is set in the twenty-first century at great expense you are the name of these less dramatic monuments to bedmaking and feces, the day before spring fever sets in, the very moment even where it happened, dynamite liberation (transliteration) the particle pea-pod snaps at the base of the spine, after the robot movie, the spliced-in circuitry of the life-clone wigging and sparking, "He's the bomb", she said, cameras whirring through strange names rolling upwards, ah, your moonlit stranger circumstances, your floating platforms curling the hours down and downer down the cold point of calm reflection stops before the great ascent up the line and mooning five page sets in the elocutionary mode reflecting the improper mode, about a sixty percent chance, his favorite voice retailing sentiment is the stronger of the choices, sentience in reflection as anyone alone no creepy meetings in Palo Alto coffeehouses a seamy light between your own sighs found out the loner way is the fury spent in listening to the body's spasms waves and spasms paralleling your own meditations in the present unwinding hours unrepentant modes repeat the motives for recall are the flowering species of reception named by poetry into the stations of attention for two or three minutes at a time, "to reach in the falling rain, mama", going the same as this season lighted spheres falling across the screen of the imaginary movie, the wish-delight of pure belief, unseasoned faith in being true, no cynicism to ease the pain, you said that, tapping-in, as it were, and the visible monologue says, go on, and fire the fall, the undertoad reciting the quick shots are your cards and letters imitating scorn or envy or distrust not present, but pure panic culls retreat from your coins today, today the crossing over into birthdays, into the new cycle why not start equinoctial selection, your grasshopper frog leap marks the Olympics a bag of tricks playing out stored up fantasies, as one and two and three are numbers written on the page filling the space of two or three lines on the pad, the clouds are solid gray platforms in the distance a slow day is tiring enough to do nothing but sit around writing all day the slight cramps in the hand your own stiffness in the elbow, hand muscles stop the flow of blood sometimes your hand going to sleep tingling sensation in the fingers, dropping the cool athletic muscular flow of what you are doing, with the perceptions which go to make up the content of what you are actually writing about is the so-called hinge and bowstring of the phenomenological fallacy, if you will, a little like the ultimate dead-end logical positivism came up against, Korzybski's end, summary, rather. What goes on beyond that is the hissing pipes, air escaping along with the heat, the old Chicago apartment from high-school days, flash and stand under another name, and the hiding one, vaulted in the caldron, nested-bird this fledgling life has a year, now, baby, and is described by what we do to each other, and how often, I suppose, he said, chuckling as the sun went across the table and then diminished, the trails along the woods are this among the heating drums and demons stark assurance mollifies the beer-drinker's dilemma of one after the other is the character of the argument by example, it is there by example, sheepdog barking herder impulsing the random paging patterns sail the easier seas in floating surfer platforms your own wedgies spray painted purple and white, stacked in the corner for the artifact museum, and outside to do a few pushups, you went more slowly across yesterday's assignment with the cool even flow of the phenomenological expertise poem'd out for flow or form with the straight line lacking, this hinge of fate, the very Phoenix-moment it goes down you let the pen run straight and true the syntax is the image of the moment is not so radical at all, is really the only way to fly, and the boom-boom rock and roll clatter fuses Mozart and the moment, so take a break, and go flat across this open space another day is running wild to say the painter's brushes were left behind, fold and flow, the red-rockier days are images of the continent ecological thrust of time into the camera's floating passages, you smoothed, the warning synapses call for regular breathing, an address with no house to go with it and no return address a quick scam to bring you back into the real world saying perpetual motion is no alternative to no motion at all, as speeding along the fence is perhaps a fifty-dollar job slip and slide of his fingers easing up and down between noises in the silent milliseconds of the record, you hear his fingers squeak over the strings of his guitar, your earphones flying through the pick and choose of the noise in the center of your head, parallel intrusions of Baby le Strange, running dry at sixty, you get a page or two, and then the day want dark, your Niji went dry and you did, too, and went to get a beer and look for another pen today there is this and there is what follows, and what you think about it, I suppose, the meals are planned out already, and too many cigarettes to be believed.
The newer movies muting indifference is the call and shell of newer movies the contracts of which, or the congress of which has the boats as floating lines, you even push a little at the black cat steaming indifferent episodes where the sun-rush vitamin C infusion has you on the back porch works that way up the driveway following your arm in slower gaps a tide or driveway waving away too long the pictures on the wall were hard pressed to say stop and hold the ongoing term of energy a rush or flattery you said the higher estates are cloudy or new, moved across the floor flooding repose the day of the night of the day of the night your calm hours proceed chance occurrences no room for that speaking homilies forced, forded, a light line from the flesh to the mood of demonstration the old feeling a smooth line tetrahedron plastic pillowing-out, and not forever distracted in either unconsciousness or distraction, as noises palliate the frame of reference the plan at all the offensive rush is more fever than allowance, the dry bird springs no poplar bearing fruit the shiny allowances read from left to write the proper lines are not disturbances but the disturbed properties from which, from which the spaces underhand are tightened into the corner of the last space edging out into the corner of the line you see the colors of completion always blue and red and the smooth ease of movement and skip the next air retrieving the inadequacy of the total commitment, but such observations make you come up short, it is better kept a secret than published like the news, drawing attention from the couplet itself to the thrusts of movement that carry the angular distances uncaring attributes the twang of the guitar a solo voice recognizes the word only after the first four letters and guessing on the fourth, as if writing too much to be believed is the same as having any sort of estimate at all about yourself, it's really the layer of attention underneath the constant flood you mentioned going beneath the frozen wastes he said resemble the quicker shapes are the falling hours entranced against a mountain sharply shaping approval as a substitute non-suit the smarter refuges are a skip of poster, reflection and stillness weaving out the end of the page a photograph you said resembled someone you once knew coming down hard and leaving the prosecution of the present for something like another argument you started the other day and backed off from the words were contained inside the pushing discipline of the basic attitude made visible over the phone with not much to discuss I mean the arcs to intersect and create points of light, the huckster duplicates a role followed by the life itself a trickster a man half-way between polarities where neither inexperience nor repetition have either carried their assertions out from the seventh or the eighth canned platform the sunny day submerged like hail or the frequent flashes of the chlorine content of certain waters you remember from certain days as waves waving the caw and claw of the guitar's approach to space the time within time an echoing overtone continuing buildup of the cement blocks another newer life the conclusion of which means you are the same as yesterday in the coincidences the hand makes arms into armies quicker than the short flash of logic meeting quick hours' renewal in the format marking time you spoke redemptive experiments the slipped imperfect registers relocating officers into some of these canyons a formal designation looped-out of furniture polish another country in tangerine vows marking down another direction in the panoply of four or five directions from the center of the compass a sentence or two, the concrete roads were laid out for the squeamish munchkins they left behind his English voices whipped potatoes in the bowl they met the hours astir-bestrid the slip and flame you left behind the cardboard voices faltering sensations no loss of memory was too many to be counted wherever the bus ride caused the tension between what was called basic or requisite energy, an almost measurable quantity the force of which went by as fast as the time required, an intersection of facts you plugged into at the moment of the radio his hot-sheet in flames too fast to go beyond the hours' rockets foaming in the oranges with no gas to spare, with number ten in the funnier hours with no one under eighteen feet tall off the floor with the partial continuities more like the vocabulary the blues of which call for a pause in about ten minutes, the self conscious lyrics forming on your lips distended fragments of the other lives not crossed or woven out in the chances of the focus of the lighter speeds revive the flow of water from the connectives outer foils resume the wholler starts at fashion unrecorded shapes resume the older harmonies repeated sustenance in the library the toaster clicking away the receding brilliance a fart or spasm in relief the race up the hill coming into focus, the orange ball on the pillar slowly turning the odd gods worshipped in the peculiar life led to lead to this window by this courtyard spinning lines retire to slow effect in filling the space is work enough beyond half the distance traveled in the click-click efforts of someone else to tide you over the top and sliding out the door on all fours, it was unrehearsed play, after all, and the opportunity to do it that was taken, or spoken, or made a fleeting glimpse in your own heritage the hook open and open, the bare sandhills with roads up them, landing sites with flashing lights, and the tape recorded sensors moving across the field of action, the dragon and the man in calm embrace the floor flossing lines along the mirror, long white lines of fine white powder that do this or that to the old metabolism, cocaine nostalgia a little like chocolate nostalgia or peanut butter nostalgia; they are sharp sentences but more finely drawn than the real thing (nostalgia for nostalgia) is only a doubled out slip of time into the retrograde mode, as if "soon enough" is the name of the game in the less indifferent intensities four from one is minus three, though the active principles are undeclared sentences the hearts and flowers the arrow in the target his rooms are bare white sheetrock the speckled walls are surface intensity drawn or withdrawn into a mere specific presence, a platonism of perceptual realms, the sitar of language roaming across the drone you slept away insouciant lectures of regret with food stamps off the wall no porno queen a dog's bark bark of one after the other is not erotic, you say, the blatant blaring blues band a smoother eloping forest in the afternoon, moving music to the junkie, do the junkie, showers in the afternoon and more to follow down the slighter hands of fight, the formal sound of recognition, or a pun half-way to the center of the diagram, well, I might be wasting my time, the cute wasps of visiting angels cull the demon outer sustenance hears your houses willing hours defeat the mother duck her quack quack soap and chatter seals the rotating disk no quicker shops you have a few things left, chocolate-pudding moments with the fuchsias outside the window were your own moments when not much mattered beyond the half that remains your own fantasy, going by the hours in twenty five or thirty minutes from the end of the day drink or two you spoke specific hours my own kind of music, his flower a form of light display the snaps and tingling substance hitting the sides of the barrel, an assignment of the calisthenic school of prose stylists, Reichian aesthetes, the mode and splatter of the white stuff that looks like finishing rinse, or the other way around is no mere whore to chance, but the attributes of the ancient modes offered with the proviso of high fidelity boxes spinning your favorite diversion as seriously as if you'd gone too far to say hello or stop, and take a ride out to the outer limits their own recommendations for picnics a guy with his hair as wet as you could imagine them less noisily hours the retarded monks are still singing the claw-bone hand-swipe forced aside his easier realms are still too far out even to be measured, well, really, it was too easy to make the other side a welcome hour of unrecorded history, the video tape recorder somehow slipped off-reel, his quilts stapled to the walls of his house, a few pot plants removed from the driveway and yanked out by the greedy hordes they went inside the fence and ate everything while even years later he heard the other guy, his partner, reviewing poems on NPR, the floor mat of the revolution, no slips or spasms from Susan's nasal twangs, the hump is passed, the wail of the last set is a part-way flourish reminding you of a portrait our mother had made the year before you graduated from college, the photographer's smile.
Any unfamiliar lesson carves the air with something like the unreflected glow in your cheeks another pasty gleam of light intense regret unwinding the huge stairway is still the best place in town to get a parking ticket, do you have something left between the itch and the spasm of delight wandering through your front door, his floral patterns a page away into the easier costumes left alongside the wall, recording, recording what is there a life enough to make his brother relax, that is if he felt at all responsible, the whole thing goes all the way back with the more intense images predictable, or at least worked out, no, it is the sense of privacy that becomes interesting it is the sense of being there that is part of its attribute which makes privacy into, uh, presence.
Still, you wait around once in awhile. You kick back, you let the other day, uh, just push into focus and let you know that half a day was not quite enough for a happening movie, there's a kind of movie this goes with, scanning the bushes, house walls, cats in motion, the swoop of light across the more indifferent solitudes, or would you name anything the substance of the formation of this edition of the collected essences of the master thereof; no, he stays the sailing line bereft of presence, a pressure off the wall your own unresponding letters were a measure of something left behind, or would you call at all, would the air travel from out to out, would the names of light be different from someone trusted and dependable, the good old self that trudges on, choosing the good, this prestigious being you call the other-in-the-one, the other side of light retailing presence to go on across the typewriter ignoring the Handy-Andy of poetic discord, while the hum of electric motors makes you less and less a saxophone in the phone booth the only place you could find to practice the scherzos, arpeggios and louder lines, the music stand in front of the window, baggies on the wall and suffering, no less than ten pounds of iron stapled to your shoes, the tips pointed, the whales wailing, the iron maiden smelting, the frozen waffles flown from side to side he let them go.
CHRIST IN TUNA
The pause before memory restores sight to the vision of the aftermath, it is the condition of the pause before action marks the unredeemed pressures from left to right a cartoon or monument to the same; where the dirt roads follow angular traceries, the hand's muscle tolls-out from cookies under the bridge, messages in the plasm are transmitted across vast distances in the twinkling of the twinkling itself of an eye or mirror, feedback circuitry intense glowing robot noises the roll-rolling habitat of the newer settlers not so much aliens as more like the settlers than the residents themselves the same as what is there in front of them uncritical stance the name of which containment or enlargement nonetheless a lecture in the wilderness with the texts repeated lines have the face of evening his intense poetry coming to town, like, "What I have to say is in the poems," buried, obscured, made silent, perhaps, the silent scream of the less obscure messages repeated from the cortical layers triggering thought, causing thought, controlling the flow of attention, two straight lines, lines not touching slowly moving diggers their round holes dot the plane and simpler egos thriving lines repeat the songs are woven tapestries the colors of which exhaust simplicity too soon recognized on the street stopped and spoken, the day's errands listed over bad checks and the need for bread reminds the birds they're going dry among the hours disturbed lines recall the forceful style of speech mixing description and pleasure the longest speeches somehow superfluous enough to go half-way before lunch is soon enough to say the marching numbers are one by one recollections, as, one, and then the half, to two at three leaning into fifteen or thirty by the end of time collapsing half-way across the distance, anyway, the poems in descending chronologies reveal the structure of the digression itself has this up and down sliding motion another shoe and sock leaning over the table's noises swept back behind your back restores the light-poles immense metallic weeds slowly oxidizing earth-fruit your own eyes peeling back and forth the straight fall pealing hours have the ring of truth as fast as you read this the rote moons caving into calculations made at split second intervals watching the gray hours make the climb out of light or into spring this new rush of plasm earth-shot and warm, a flow forcing features flatter formed the natives restless in their day to day remonstrance through the observation itself called a quick shot from the hip retards the categorical qualities as equations, less hesitating than numbers themselves the specific mists have density, like steam coming up off the wet wood this morning, the curve of light unbroken shadows call the noises centers of light also newer names the last day of the week before anything comes toward you easing into play the sooner spoke than staying the same is right enough to make the proper trails a useful entity, a forged wish, a trailing platform made of ducks spread out across the line, approaching set and unit at the same time moving concentration pretty far along the southern beaches laid back and memory, you told those stories again we all laughed the same way that persistence records the qualities of the details, as much as practice does for the gesture, makes it go on over the repetitions made of habit or intention or the quick shots released for more active vocabularies in "what works," not so much a cacophony of mixed signals but an indecision from Don Concert playing his records today in the midst of it penetrating angles rubbing the dirt off the table top with the underside of his forearm as it slides line by line back and forth, the curtains open to this vista of garage and carport and bicycles and boys and the details themselves recognizable data from the specificity of the location, there is nothing hidden today is soon enough to make a running start into it, going the way the day does, singing his song into the microphone, electric impulses beeping red light flash and Easter spasm propelled the days before the rising arising in you spoken lines the calligraphic precision, no peppers in the chicken tonight, as the tasty Catalonian settles down to demonstrate the printed word carries the picture home by the same technology with familiar music recalling you from somewhere beyond distinction the categories hold close enough to cause effect, and match the opposition to its mating hours rescinded measures run them dry along the streeter wisps heaved into play the waiting stations call them ours and theirs or not at all the distance from one pole to another is rather a uniform substance than a numerical equivalent for waiting around with your hands in your pockets, counting from one to there and back again is not elapsed time but displaced nothingness, filling the void and stretching it out rather than sitting on the bench with nothing happening at all they're all the same line lingering on along the substances themselves like horses grazing over lawn clippings, galloping across the dichondera carpet, honking out huge divots of edible flooring, pasture and sign, eating with your neck bent down to the ground is no way to treat your corn flakes are too far gone to be believed, the longest one-note ride was somebody or other's twelve day chorus during the jazzathon of immature consequences, the authorities with their hot hands propelled the reigning queens to go on into the new words bravely, like a stranger looking for the bathroom light switch, smoothing every square inch of wallpaper to find the chrome square plate with the slot in the middle, push into it, zap! a flash, a quarter to nothing is going down the first aisle to stop between the days and left afar apart the worms are hiding from you, their underground brown swiss cheese reminds you that the moles, ferrets and other friends of the fur-covered toilet seat are still harmonic by nature, a manatee bulk, the schmoo within the sphere of action, and milking the dollars out of them one by one hitting the ground the wooden nickels good enough for kindling and cheaper by far than the green painted (grassy look) wooden shingles, the way we criticize them for their brightly painted log cabins and adobe huts, pastels of green and pink and yellow-hued natural objects we find unnatural and "ugly", driving our tangerine, hot blue Fords and Chevies down around the town square promenade at evening, expressed by touch-tuning, the meteoric gasps fly heavenly arcs of photocopy materialism, review and clatter the lawsuits hardly broken from the news newsworthy enough to tinkle out further into the static present, digging down deeper more deeply says nothing but that the shovel is strong and the hole deep enough to crawl into, exploring the tunnels the moles have left; "drink me" makes you smaller, the cutsie drug songs like construction jokes, "I'll rock your sheets," with no laughter behind the mask is serious enough to call success a day or two away or not at all nothing new to seem seen the harsh scratch and nick of fingernails popping out the deck of cards, a quarter behind each hand against the camera clicking louder now than ten minutes ago you left them widely scattered moods and tempos unsustained but thrust out among them wide eyed restless strangers milling around the legends of the age: contact, sport, release, the whole panoply of buzz words indicating the century winding down, "she's breaking up, she's breaking up," is nothing new you've surely seen it before, but slowed down movies are more curious while saying the same in more time, is not so much a slowness of motion itself, any motion is motion, it's the time it takes to stay where you were as an indication of the same space elongated, stretched-out, overture and psalm, where they coil the stronger ropes from left to right, or color the noise louder more loudly scattering moods and presences linked up, hooked up, smoothing not so light, perhaps, another marker stopped at the measuring tides rising tides relating the more formal essences recording lines along the sand increasing the width of the banner-line and headway too scrupulous to hold back so long without exploding the hot-house light bulbs are gathered into boxes, rows denying arrangement you parsed out the larger hostesses were waiting in line, were passing out ham and cheese sandwiches, no, it is not all the same or even passing the same way, there is the distinctness of the region characteristics you forgot to mention them over the rest finding the proper balance into harness the pipes are frozen open, pure tunnels of ice, chlorophyll ice on PVC arteries, the houses growing smaller as the inhabitants grow larger, a cash outlay would be soon enough welcome not to think about it at all, waiting around to hear which way the wind blows despite his warnings the same beast seems to have invaded him, the old self-conscious eyeball staring out of a face that could be anyone's, no, it is not so much uniqueness makes the difference but the same line followed out into something new, accretions of similitude clustering like conceptual molecules, into elementary forms, spilled out or curved around quickly, the eyes drop over the side and hold onto disturbances moving more quickly than vision permits, what goes on between presences presents the same line arguing forces start from what is there and trying it out speaks well for those who give it a whirl soon enough to get the results they're looking for is the proof of the puddings simply enough stated to wear down the opposition the easier complaints than your own message to the outer world billowing in intense as anything, hosing the mud off the car, washing it out as if something strange had happened an almost furtive haste describing the sweep of the arm across the distance you felt too great to be revealed, how far is far enough, anyway, as if having something to say makes the difference between haste and action, the differences themselves are slightly anterior realms, moving across the porch to say hello in the evening the food slowly cooking down into a tasty thick paste to scatter around the table, onto the plates with noodles and a tossed green salad, where the time is now enough to be going out the day's rainshots more words than wordy, but the old station wagon covered with dirt, held together by dirt, still, part tree and part blood, hybrid life-forms, idea and organic matter fused by the catalyst of technics makes natural process a more inclusive dogma than what had previously passed for animate or inanimate; surely the robot is the androgynous life machine, cloned, perhaps by man's imitation of nature but nonetheless an organic part of the whole, even when you think he's not looking or when you tear his glasses off does he reveal that being a machine, like good old Gerald McBoing-Boing, who didn't work unless he was plugged in, into monkey-studies and rat mazes, the clinical psychologist testing for archetypes in rats, I guess by showing them movies or reading from Jung and then testing for survival, whoever skips the poisoned wheat at lunch could be assumed to have learned from the reading, well what if we play a tape or use flashcards then we could check for media, personally I think that the rats like pictures with captions, but still, some of them go for the wheat anyway, perhaps they're dumb or too sensitive to tell the difference between poisoned wheat and a good thought, well, we figured that good thoughts win out, but it's still to early to tell in this systems approach to the problem of consciousness, I'll write a paper on The Problem of Problem and read it to them and try the poisoned wheat gambit, if we lose them all we'll just have to scrap the project, tuning in to the diagrams at regular intervals, casing out the doorways with shims made from cedar shakes, the nails split them almost as they go in and you have to putty out the nips and gouges the hammer-marks lose the hours quicker than shit, and if you're not careful the painted surfaces, too, elongate and spin the vertigo wobble of high blood-pressure warps of the perceptible realm going too fast to be recorded wasting your time over nothing is more a testament to curiosity than an indifference to quality, after all, there's all sorts of nothing and to take a choice is less important than just submerging in the evanescent magnitudes of pure space, and Cosmic Comics comes out again, with the adventures of photons mingled in with nucleic warfare, the celebrations of feast days and the wandering sitar music makes them cry too soon against the colors red and blue and white, ah yes, give me the old red blue and white, don't shoot till you see the blue of her thighs glowing against the red grass hillsides, the Martian anthem is a wordless cluster of dials and gauges where they meant that no one is permitted behind the cyclone fences because that's where they're chalking in the cosmic football field, light in the torches for the procession and if you think this is as flat as a pancake you might judge the distance between your eyes as one finger or two, but nonetheless a visitor from our last job would probably come at night to ask for his fifty bucks when you're entirely out of luck with nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and pork roast in sight for the next few days you hear them hollering out that now is soon enough to stop for the rest aching with fatigue too small to know how hard he was working to keep up with the big guys you love them all as long as they stay cool and then yesterday is soon enough to grow up you leave the air around the house like an invisible moat the red lights flashing off and on, it's Christmas now and the day your birthday went by so quick you forget to look under the pillow the farther reaches are close enough to wait for evening to claim attention in forgiveness the muscles moving quicker now than photographs along the white painted wall, titled, "Total One", "Total Two," and so forth, a sharp lesson is quick enough retained to hold back a little on the mashed potatoes, the quicker gaps are soon enough filled in, spackled in, puttied in, painted over after all I'll never see you again, old friend, spray paint and hot bushes flaming in the court yard, some unfinished business back there in the land of loose ends, you'd pass passion purple flowers leaning back and forth no easier to go without stopping than to stop without going, the number of hamburgers is astounding, piled end to end on top of each other the perimeter of the nation ten for every man woman and child, the great wall of hamburger and we have the nerve to criticize the ants for the way they treat their aphids, really, who noticed it first, them or us, and when aphids die do they go to heaven or are the more singular histories not yet written as you slide down hill into the heat and pressure of the moment gliding by for lunch is tuna fish and sweet pickles, canned and jarred, really, another jarring note and we'll all go to pieces with the message of it exploding wandering going on repeating and coming back again to work it out to flail it out the wanderer's host is the welcome wagon of the feet, your shoes are wooden platforms with new buildings more like holes in the ground in dreams when huge explosions have torn away parts of mountains, what I'd like to know is why did I shoot you in the chest last night, I don't mind tearing out the front wall and making the living room larger to allow the space to grow, but the motive for the shot, what, no argument no desire for it, the music fading in and out, bells in the air, a slight touch reminds you that the music is real and complex, that noise is the journey and a devious shot in the middle of the night ("Now it's going to hurt," you said) is a collage in the radio, that the music is real enough to go on all day and hold them back and forth the gray skies laden or sullen, art history revolving in the repetitive arguments that bring the realer real to store the charges lighter hues the mood and sentence makes the ballet a debut of silent sounds, appraised the reputation thoroughly interrupted forgiving moods are elephantine skippers you caught on too late to make any difference, your hand seizing up into the claw posture, you might practice with rubber rods, bending and squeezing lumps of clay to ease the muscular tension of the names you left behind in fifty minutes, the skin on the back of your hand wrinkling pastiche flaming slowing down to rest, to take a break or break down entirely a uniform hum intercepting the breakdown of the moment where the lights fill in blank spaces, unrepentant minutes are these hours in regard, laying off the ducks when the river's dry, the songs you left on the tape remove the sense of sameness from the identical sandwiches some with mayonnaise and some without, the entire collection, all of it bears more resemblance to itself that holds attention than to the open green wood-painted doorway the rest resisting coils, form, categories, the car resting beside the valley, backing down the hill into a cliff, the road passing overhead, a spread-out canvas with these waving parallel lines interwoven sweaters with textural recollections arched across the formal elements coming together into a roomier wait than no-ticket at all to receive the formal airs repeating, you just wait at the cold point where no airs retrieve your message in a bottle, scope and clamor of the unrelenting ducks, hovering in the air currents over your back yard with nothing better to do than gawk at you lying naked to soak up a few rays, lying out there on the cement a weed or two around your nose in a book for no reason at all but to read everything, there's still enough to go around the stream becomes a river to the ocean of consciousness, oceanic return rerun of light the sandy roads covered with reflector buttons hum-bumping over the center line you hear them wimp-wimp solid arrows longing with nothing to say is the main message left stuffed under your door is soon enough to catch the smartass punk in his lies are familiar enough to stop these roaming peasants their own rooms are cleaned up, piled in the corner in black plastic bags, the flames from the old library shooting up the chimney, shooting it up with mortar fire the parts of speech are also figures enlarged abstractions mute the sovereignty of the moment its particular view vindicated by the purpose of the whole its holy airs rely, they shatter famous lines around these pizzicato floral arrangements, your own hard line evokes the new theme song announcing the weather if indeed there are limitations to the arrival of the truckers not immediately known, passes closed, occurrences of a weather nature excised from the total flow as if such separation carried negligence into another formal declaration, "refusing to bow to the passions of the moment," the tin cans empty, a six-pack of empty cans is enough to justify the cautious epigrams left on the sides of buildings as paint cans exploded around connectives such as "such as" and all the rest resting in ten million businesses, that the roads are paved with federal funds in April no news is good news, again the moon-shots have this quality of presence in the beer-glass, water filling the clothes inside the frozen moment, still-shots healing over old wounds wounding the quick instruments where demonstrators like the food served, they left the room, his presidency left the courts for amnesty charging cruelty as something dipped into the ocean harmlessly meeting today with the president you went to foreign soils to see if it was any different, or leaving the old songs on acoustical instruments without judgments sliding along in the nomenclature of "genius", the new relations described in accidental pursuits the framework of the content is fairly obvious, so why bother to read every single word an opportunity to tune in or tune out but you don't do either one for very long, but wait, the song rumbles into a second chorus, and the automatic is just a little less controlled than the associative or are these sleepy fictions less real than the real itself, it is too easy to push behind your screens and wagons, voices singing in the darkness call the unison a strange quality of forgetfulness or evocation, salivating over a photograph, simpler explanations bearing down on it a continental shelf with books across the front, titles of papers read in small smoky rooms, hermeneutics and scatology, the biological peripheries of silent speech, the French toast burning in these airways pealing back and forth these easier rows are not concrete at all, her bellflower clarity marks the endless line not boring not fitful, not even named beyond the doubts raised by the mode in the first place, at least you can trust fiction to be faithful to the limits of illusion itself, that it not intrude too far or with too much force into the turf of the reality-freaks; there it is, a battle of cosmic dimensions between the Reals and the Unreals, your envelopes arrive in the mail, your wrist swollen from three days constantly nattering push of the flowing black lines with half a page suddenly there before you knew it, going back over the old territory to make sure you didn't leave anything out of date, off-caste, behind terms, over the top, into the gray mists glowering distances taller than the other, hesitant romantic nonsense syllables, they hang together with adhesive stillness, cluster and boom of not even stopping long enough to count the ways I love thee, surely all the rest are numbered-out to hold the daily ration down to one or two, you might even paint the handrail pink and white striped candy-cane pressure to be real enough for the opening itself an unredeemed coupon left at the back of the book, filing cabinets on fire from the inside, too hot to be encountered but recognizably loose in the muscular sense as directives from the alien party pour into the message center, this is all of it foolish enough to be the real thing, if a thing is real at all, the rote measure of the arm swooping across our own mountains heaving up from the seismic geological solitude that reminds us that we are at the end of the line, and whatever follows will be less than this induced explosion of life forms narrowing the numbers and kinds of things the planetary inhabitation coming quick to say, you are, and left among the mailing envelopes like something flattened out and left behind, a forgotten tribute to the salient angles thrusting forward movies clear the air with choking ammonia fumes, painting your own white line across the combination of noises mixing into a single fathomic measurement allowing your own perceptions to call along the newer waves waving hands and arms, the meat of the body has an arrival to enhance your own partitions erected, split and sentenced without your own memory interfering too loudly to be recognized the same things keep coming up again and again the halfway markers slower seasoned fools hear the squeaky child his own volume control is loud enough to be a cause for silence out of control is soon enough the clauses forgotten circumstances looming out the easier paths not taken forget the rest you mentioned calls conversation into play the vegetables achieve their rising stance the turgid channels flushed with light, the forceps bending back and forth, his feet against her butt, trying to pull the calf out, in his overalls and cowboy boots there are now enough mysteries to be resolved by one single expatriation of doubt, a symbolic cargo-cult of graduation robes the nostalgia for intelligence the wispier natives exhibition the weekends only lonely when the well goes dry the singsong lilt of hair-dye in bottom-tubes a malevolent fortitude of unrestricted chances holding on he calls the handjob of the hour a flattery, le poseur within the field of observation as these tingling sensations tell you the body is not enough, beyond simply enjoying what you do, it's confusing to have it come out different each time no more unreflecting flattery the spring rush equalling the bread on the shelf for its sliced, wrapped, rather "stored-up" quality of eternal youth, limited by the nitrates, by the familiar song in an unfamiliar language, it's really "Good Night Irene," as something with new lyrics, originally a revolutionary marching song, the ants of the world sharpening their pincers, filling their poison-sacs, doing micro-war dances in the anthill (they must have floodlights), with anyway one or two or three or more recalling the blue and the gray, the head on the pole, the motives you held aside a summary of cutting beards or a feather for lunch, pterodactyl spine, the marrow of which is highly reminiscent of mushroom head-cheese, and served with a brilliantine mist of punctured olive soup and salad going over the sillier overtones into the old jazz they have on the air, you ought to wear ear muffs, you can probably get some at Sears or K-Mart with a little FM radio built into the hearing, micro-stereo, the blank eyes blending with the slowly slow mounting vagabond his blues riff melting in this meld of cheese and bacon sandwich, hold the mustard, shake-shake, your own jazz solos bounding up the hamburger line to these purer realms on-going chance the abstract and sardonic world of Richard Twardzyk remembering Bud Powell remembered in Thelonius Monk, whose audible continuities, his ex-drummer a flatly youthful Scientologist clear, well he had the bucks before that old sale of indulgences it was called, anyway, down there in Santa Monica holed up, writing the third unpublished novel a rather Boll-like fantasy of a truth-delivered dwarf, maybe more like Lagervist, but that's too obvious for the evocative force of the image itself; the only other figure of interest an old friend, "Dirty" we called him, just out with some sweat-shop activist-porno hype on, uh, the ancient history of sexual psycho-types, but that's ok when nobody's doing anything anyhow...
The zinging paraphrase of left-handed fragments, you call the rarities simpler experiments a coincidence, a habit, a pattern of reception winding down throughout an expanded version of an hour's work, hitting high cancelling chords with the right hand, the left going a bump across the lateral jumps, sing along ditto, the motives' meters in the Vinegar-bass-like thrust of the voices line rum-a-tum high-hat hits the three-four rim-shot tinkling down in odd lengths, really, it's the oddness of the length of the splits that has you wondering what it's all about in the slower registers a mellowing of sound not self-indulgent but covering it up, it is these two finger solos going into off-chords against time that has his signature, then rum-tum bat-wing's up the linear marks to celebrate completion in a boogie-woogie solitude that is a dance and a retreat into the math of chord and time that calls it "modern," no review in the metrics of the categorical enterprise, and even the salty after taste in the wine glass has no measure after the second or third glass, I leave the promo space-filler to the fictive sense, it is after all only an organic psycho space you have to fill either by putting the book down to stop and fuck or let the writer slip one in on (in) you, it is only filling the vacuum left by the present-ness-exhausting reality that fiction itself inures by means of mode, a kundalini art-style, fiction removes self from presence to the same the degree as it gets into it, and the first thing up is the Hostess ding-dong, you let them hang around so long they thought it was either a neighborhood center or a half-way house, with the visiting heads of state (sic) named and numbered in the slide rule that Pogo figured out, you put some marks on the ground and then you run along, like, from first base to second base only to leap into the air and come down on your right-hand side, leg extended, low flat arc, and just slide along the ground, as if trying to steal second base, into a long hook slide toward the furthest line, which comes up "cloudy weather," and that's the slide rule by which the weather is predicted; I got your jazz mode an untranslated similarity from back there, it was really a Polish tango you heard, and down to the last set, Art Tatum, Jimmy Guiffre, Terry Gibbs; sight growing dim over these latent vegetables rescind the volume of the hour an unmentionable reality in comic relief, no it was not all black beauty and white mentality, jazz is a little better than that, it is the poem in sound, radical and fresh, where they both should have been yet be, to avoid the cliches of modernism, let them back into the vocabulary of the moment, cavalcade avalanche of the easy imitators lining down from five to four, a sudden splash of the unforgiving insistence your radical movies closing down after that, after all, after birth, afternoon, the rooter combos fluctuating I remember April the loose insistence on letting go is flesh and crumble, you'd die without it, heap and stone the up and down of theme-insistence his old wool shirt hanging on the wall a newer movie clears the air around your body a dream or framework pushing buttons from the undeniably unusual sound of music crossing the back gate of the area, off the base and sneaking into town, the guys across the street, hands in pockets, talking like that, they call the rest the retrograde presence the midst or in the midst of which your own senses recognize anything as the very angle by which you tie things into place no more exhausting than work itself you might as well not think about it but leave them hiding into the courtyard bleeding all over the place, Star-Trek fantasies of the characters always being the same even though the situation of the stories wasn't; suppose you did, and left the others off-the-wall and gleaming, an unobtrusive presence that says the rest is music in rehearsal, en retard or smoother, a light lingering over continued expanding definition which makes it more than automatic, which makes it cumulative, not adhesive, the mailbox is this tube of metal, bent over, open at either end, their own sensibilities a barking growling magnanimity unrecognized ringing in the other room an interruption of the mental sort recalls the familiarity of surprise concluded in further laps a future prose in fast clips as "just one of those things", restores the light aloft to posterior relief, the mode of fashion is the urban gorilla ook-ooking through the Safeway, holding all of the bananas hostage to the moment, making them bananas anyway, there's a play at the zoo anyway, when Turco is better anyway, why do they ooh and aah over Ferlinghetti, is he such a nomenclature as to envision the volume of deceit just to make trouble, the visitors come too often to be believed, anti-draft logging activities, the moon reviewed by astronauts, walking on your back, let's try a check from another bank this time you'd hear the squeaks and clatters from your shoulder, from your elbow, from your forearm, the muscles protesting, water on the elbow, sleeper's hand, writer's knee, the foot in the chops, the cosmic blow job is also Gabriel's horn of plenty, yuk-yuk, the old-gold folded back and forth says this is it, baby, this is your new roof beckoning pig-wraps on the rag and yelling out, unplugging radios to put them away, and leave the toffers coughing, the coffers topping, tops cough, cops topping off, the noon-movie clings like peaches in the can eleven at night you matched potatoes smiling could be the same as this life together is long and temporal and that's the rub, the absolute made temporal, worth less and worth more, the bread sticks leaning out is food for thought he seizes in on two on one. They seem a scale is woven woods, and tired enough to release the whole trip is softer waves leaving horses smoothed among astounding science-fiction woolen wraps gathering a sense a silence or data your own colors of the white waves leaving spent hours cool relief the sooner crashes peering soups the rote presence pushing out to spoil them houses scatter forces forming lines poetic discourse is not surreal they are anti-thetical, the double's image and the empty pack of cigarettes are not the same, rolling off-course into professional realms, surely the tradition is there and well established, one doesn't just work alone forever, "never to know", it went, with the closed air-spaces puffing out the window a fifty-pager if you had the inertia to rush through another four hours slowing down with age, aha, the old kicker meeting you at the end of the hallway, I reserve the descriptions of doorways for my later years, "Doorways I Have Seen", a memory of exercise and habit, on the day you get your letter, there have been a few, as two on one recedes to two in none, the final flim-flam is set to case, cased to eaves, fleshed-out, a smile and favor, your own Hercules an unidentified adjective, filial and obtuse makes it long enough to be reminded that the Hoosier forces cling to centers moving back and forth your thirtieth page is also last and first, the force begins right here at the calm conclusion of half-again is soon enough your own motives less a glacier than the scattered room delighting in the forceful waves intended fashion wailing out to flush across the distance weaving calm progression has it step by step, the sun slips out beyond perception, his electric chainsaw grinding quietly up the hill you left them quite alone the third time around was caution itself the unexpressed continuity with the silkscreened T-shirts in the rhythmic discord of the days, exhaustive simplicities recorded discourse he claims the red tire-pump as perhaps his own invasion from the moon, established turf-patterns clutch against the silent repetitions the body's heartbeat returning centerfold in the biological yearbook, a heart pumping heart-rending blood-form and star-shooter, no one remembers yesterday beyond the paler accusations the blood carries history into the nerve endings, into the red pulsing center conversational and precise, how you are the norm and center following. . . .
YOU CAN'T STEAL FROM A THIEF
...to strengthen what is right in a fool is a holy task.
You forget along the way that the way is there at all, or even that there is a way; the more subtle appositions reclaim attention from doubt itself, and the active principles as events declare the forward push of imagination into images where choices are made are either external or internal facts. Who is he, anyway, coming along the trail in the midafternoon glow, a repetition of the facts themselves has the thunder rolling out of somewhere with nothing in mind resembling the roll of the empty stomach, high-handed or eloquent, it is all the same, nutrient and full, the air itself a name for the wind to play in as if forgotten arcs resemble this, uh, scientific vision of charts and graphs, intersecting and interstitial, the diesel Peugeot clatters into motion across the street, a gray day with rain interrupting the day before yesterday sunny and complete again.
On other days, the cabinets would be ready for staining, or the belt sander humming over the dry-rot siding, busting your back over twenty dollars an hour is worth it, but the brown trim-paint drips off the brush, hitting the dry wood siding again and again, your brush heeling up in the sudden springtime eighty degree's sunshine moving quicker than you ought, or to, but the sentences themselves a forgotten inquest into movement which suggests that the present moment is part recluse and part music, that the hours are not so swift, after all, and that the ground you cover, recover, upholster as it were, fragments of a suggestiveness which revives the more linear attributes of contemplation, traveling the various ends of the earth in a wooden boat, caique of yellow bottoms, Krylon spray cans floating in the harbor, surely the mosquitoes are hatching this very moment the voice at the other end of the line reminds you of the graces of speech inside the body coiling syntax and energy without the benefit of sunlight.
But the seasons call you out into the moment, about fifty pickups lined up at the dump at one time, at least at the time we were there, spaced-out on last night's action, "Damn the potatoes, full speed ahead" had them all laughing; anyway we threw the steaks on and went out the back door where the rough bare oak tongue-and-groove siding lies un-nailed on his deck joists, a flood light behind you indicates the green lawned carpet of a rather trapezoidal back yard, an evergreen like a Christmas tree throws a long shadow out there you stand beside it to give two long shadows their own play while all you see is this tree in highlighted relief; high all right, you move to place your shadow on top of the tree, in line as it were (or was) in-tense (or, don't get tense), both of them combined, stretching out there into the darkness, the steaks sizzling under the aluminum cover, catching fire, finally, you throw wine on them, the bottle coming to hand quickly enough.
Long enough to see better, you trade off one line for another, simply going on with it is enough to remember other lines which also went parallel incursions from thought to experience and back again the lighter hues had call'd too soon to be revealed, as soon as you called I said, yes, that's enough for me to call out a darkness driven back and forth, a moon or shutter green on white, the daffodils and narcissus in the back yard call you down again and again, the cactus on the table beside them skirting the thin line of friendliness where even your own disciplines occasionally wear thinner yet the front edge has darkness in front of it and a headache behind, throwing it back and forth too soon to be believed the paint job back and forth the brush and roller fill the cracks drying and smoothing out no glossy substances leaking from the knots and spasms, culled at last the pure explorers heed the day another smoother line declares your fortunes falling out, the coins hit the table, bounce and spin out.
The slow focus of attention somewhere in the chest's center, the muscles on either side of the spine tense and "reach up," an insignificant response channeling the beat of the heart from spreading out through the top of it, through the idea into something's nothing, he falls back into the work itself which is work enough to be occupying, another ten AM cold one sitting on the table behind the coleus, in the shade, the table top a garden full of seed thoughts suddenly the clouds obscure the shadow on the page and leave again, the visual plane receding and thrusting forward; there is enough to do, there is plenty enough to do, as if obligation itself were a name or a morality, as if getting started was the main problem, a procession of decorative phrases which weave themselves through choice to essay, and no obscure underlinings to get used to, a pause, a skip, another newer geometry with its tropes and fathoms; it is all too simple to become even complicated let alone a problem, let's make like a bakery truck and haul buns, don't let your banana peel, don't let your meat loaf.
This is it, the hot point of contact and recognition, as if the ether bore you up into physical definitions, the wind slapping the door in the shed off the carport into the siding, bump bump; OK, the associative realm is the monologue, thought unwinding, and as you look down the street, there are the trees, and way down there, a set of legs from the waist down going up to a house; yes, there is the stream of conscience which makes the choices available and the line of associations which makes it all become personal, but the will to do it is involved in, uh, having the time, as we say, making time out to be something at all available, possible even, a formula, a patter of feet on the wall, not the ceiling, my God they're running the wall, carving fishtails across the bare sheetrock, radical handplants, wheelies, pure fervor, and the music on the radio reminds you that the volcano has gotten quieter, has slowed down to almost nothing at all, and the hot point sustains, arrives in the sunny moonlight, it is words and words, the name of the objective senses.
Welcome to the First National Classical Music Sex Quiz. You turn the crank, Old Boz Scaggs hitting it out on top of the rhythm-count, Lido Shuffle, uh-one, uh-one, and so forth. Quick shots deny. The long run decides, the sleepier rooms belong. At formula and serial, a repetitive instance of continuity, repeat and change. Shift. Clatter-clusters force forward, one-in-one the daylight movies have you gone and gone, arms akimbo, akimbo, yes! He skates like a duck, arms flap and flatter, have the flowers forgotten their looser intensities? Is the moon-child this benign instance? There is room enough today to deliver the magic hours un, recorded triumphs of beer on beer, ah, the pyramid-power sharpening razor-blades overnight, as if there were secrets or shortcuts; send a dollar, send twenty, send more, you might get everything you want for nothing, you might get it all without any tears, without having to steal it yourself, a borrowed pen and pencil set, investments and fantasias, the french horns rising in the background. He tears his clothes off and runs away.
Possessions and the possessed. Possessiveness. Dynamic enthusiasm of the teamwork itself. Obsessions of delivery, of completion. Retirement and money. The loner angle bifurcating into pure essences of delight, the morning moving through elocutions or daylight dreams, a quickie in the phone-booth has you moving away from fantasies of objects (squares, cubes, boxes, packages, units, projects, cosmic quadrangles, entities), giving way from the material plane into the other, the other what, an attribute or absence, he lays the color down and then comes across actions, actives, bending back or backing away, the motives are complete, there is no negation, no reversal, the organic flow of light accumulates, the tree blossoms disintegrate in the wind and blow horizontally across the face of the window, flat anti-gravity lines of white specks, dandruff in the air, perceptible, the easier moonies have had their say, it's the re-programmers you want to watch out for, but we are getting the job done today after dinner, a family meeting about turf, prioritized.
Are you complete? Yes or no. I have this score sheet handy, the ends of your fingers are missing. Too much typing, they've worn down. A box of silkscreens in the mail means no problems today. Even the commercial enterprises are not without questions, successful as they might be, I'm happiest when we're both laughing without any feeling of avoiding what is real in order to amuse ourselves, a quacking of delight is sincere enough not to be an escape or a fantasy of being someone else; being anyone at all is suspect enough, better to be than to be anything at all, no stops or hesitancies along this thin line of being yourself, a recombinant illusion of process and exchange, it is the more mental realms which teach you that though the shift from thought to action demands that a friendlier approach would be more sincere, it is really letting them know who you are that is so difficult, and without going into it, Meher Baba's silent sermons, I mean, really, what is that, now, really.
Tiny, clear prism, droplets dot the glass. It yields, finally, to truth. There are no stories to tell about the truth at all. No one knows it better, it knows itself. There are areas to inhabit, movements into and out of, the participating in and of states of participation is no doubled-out mirror metaphor for something really simpler than the decorative words about or the evasive descriptions of and for; the really simple diagrams are always one-on-one, I meet you in the morning, and diving in and letting go leaves you tearful over long-ago wanting which is not the same at all, it is this today and this again tomorrow, it is all so beautiful, how can it be yours or mine, I give it all to you again, love's lovers in the morning call the flowers out again to be witness to the moment, gathering tides and seasons, the syllables' music is not the names of others but our own pride and sentence falling off and growing silent, dim, respectful motives call the messengers home from foreign soils not forlorn but giving way to beauty.
This is about me, really. Any day we are here to say the same, I love you now and now, we are one-on-one. We are the same and we are not the same. Constantly moving into self, into history, into each other and out again, moving home and moving away, moving again and again, bodies fuse and mix, it is love's blooming flowers of the heart's mix and fathom takes us through the lines to somewhere else, the old difficulty moves into acceptance of the way you give yourself to who you are is what makes the difference underneath the flesh and blood of it, is it and we spell the day at moonlit hours unhesitating hands doing the world's work with us mounting flames enlarge no movie means the same as words are different things, things they are not, powers or forces mounting swift or sudden, the crux, this is the crux of it, center of the target, hot point of recognition, the same and different, giving out across the slight gasps indifferent sensations flood and flow the center of the hour.
This is about you, really, the you of me, we go across, recombine, grow old and eloquent, find forever in between then and now; the conveniences of doubt are too disruptive to be real between the sentence and the trial, the paragraph or the book itself. It is yours, really, the here and now, the one-on-one, at close and closer sounds soar the heart's soul weaving out and away, taking you out and away, giving these themes and utterances the moon's movie new enough not to stop or gasp across these footnotes climbing upward modes recall the fall and then again the sun renews you further futures forward into the music moving clean and free to hold them true enough the rat-tat-tat of the snare drum beneath the pines, below the arms, along the ground beneath you falling away and climbing on no purer songs retain the flavor of the heart's own woes and fathoms shining lines become you further signing on behind or over, all along the times and times, the glow of sudden signs is higher still, the room and mood along the highway claiming out at something here and now a point or line is climbing time and time again the movement of the whole is still arriving lines behind and signed alert to sail these finer times your eye and sudden spines across the shining blinds and rhymes, gone together into something else is beauty enough enfolded mimes you said the same the day before was soon enough to be removed your own accumulating rooms were ceilings and windows and chairs and walls and colors in the sun, the white of white is still resplendent hours too cool to be removed but going on along the line is one-on-one, a slow chasm building futures further on than the accumulating present eye to eye the candles glowing forms the wall aside for light to play across the chatter of the drum a dance below the loom and frame you said ahead is further on to go below the line more base than term or turn the score and set to one or two or more the flames are heated up and upper shorn below slow and further a shine and single set to term the same is shouting out to friends and others joining in along the colors off the wall and sending on the sharper tines are healing song or stem the news as roofs and sudden, sent behind the signs to set these angles plain and woolen, pressed aside for clearer songs the pines are weaving hind and pline, aside, perhaps, no sign too soon to be believed would clear the air along your thigh is smooth between these folds as catches in the pressure from the left or right, let, then, outer-out and then the name you leave forgetting nothing in the you of thought becomes the heart's trails weaving lines across the day or sent too long below the air retrieved the older days recall the forward leaning stuff finds you clinging hard and fast together means a way not swept forgotten over all this time is still enough to be still, at the rest and center smoothed out and running up against him sent along to wait and hold, the movement of movement says return the way you were, as circumstance, as lunch, as the typewriter nailed to the wall, sudden.
The air below the earth glows faster, it says this: surfing along the poetic disturbances, the solid forms are less relieved than sudden, the quieter times are close enough to becalm the rest in lyrical turns for the better, the sides of the body, the flesh resides in what is real, you move too slow to stop, and do, or do not; you call across the others to be the same, to arrive today in what is now and stall afar too soon to be real, or held, or not at all, but say the same is now enough or all, as love's, and mark the slower hours have kept them back and forth the walls are not the same at all, your mews and kittens stay at milk your own frames stalled forbidden to the spin and claim no outer spoils for dinner on the moon is set to tables spread, full, fuller signs than times aligned the fuller wasps too soon among their times than not at all, held, smooth, the oaks and shades are falling, falling, down to down and time, against the pressure in the mind you are among the song no plume or center coiling on he spoke these long and short, the days were opened up at last and still begun, forward now than not they sent you out to speak at larger rooms than sailed before the sun, a closer formulation spoke them set and set again, symphony or parable the sum and substance not so very far away at all resumes the silence of the day a catalog between your days and nights were all along and waving, here and there the room and presence uttered outer wails the quieter joys were lists and segments removed to hold and send, arrived in strings and ballasts, the concerto of the day he sent them back and down; was still, and moving into presence, into information, the day the words arrived, you held them in and spoke. It stopped, and paused. The golfers won the purse: airplanes defied gravity: the larger forms were cleared away, and forgetting everything, the truth was spoken, and soon enough to be relieved at all, you stayed, you slept.
* * *
It was the day before something happened. Or it was the day after something happened. Or maybe the day itself. At attitude, at the deeper layers, presented itself. A perusal of forms not so very evident as manifest, a demonstration or pressure detailed in the conjunction of life and thought; a tension in the stylistic flow of tactics and strategies: a change of vocabulary, of station and syntax, of paragraphing, of choice and elocution. I mean some of this is true and some of it is not, but none of it is lies, it is all in the same tonality. Here is the radio full of music, and some of the singers are singing their own music and some of them are singing somebody else's songs, but their sincerity is not usually in question, not to me anyway, it's more in the nature of the evidence, of the contents that a style becomes apparent, I mean, if you stop bothering yourself over whether or not you are telling the truth, then you can examine the kinds of statements you are making.
On such a day, it was the day before or the day after, or perhaps the day itself that there was a shift from, uh, the metaphorical to the facet, the very facet itself. Faceted prose. Not multi or omni or sort of, but faceted, like, riveted; which might indicate an evolution or a decision or even an unwilling growth, a mushroom in the heart, it all bears witness, it all becomes, evidence. In the dream of the night before he was holding up two pages of typed prose, this sort of stuff, and one page was all equal lines, continuous stuff, and the other one was a paragraph ending in a break, then a one-liner and then some dialog and then the beginning of a new paragraph; and what came into question was the relative value of each in comparison, which said more, perhaps in relation to the visual space, it's hard to say, none of the words was legible, it was clear, legible electric typing on clean white paper, page facsimiles; but the point was when manifestations of honesty or legitimacy were not so much put aside, for how can you, but viewed as extraneous to the point being made; no, rather, it is the exhaustion of the idea itself as far as expression is concerned, and then a willful continuation of energy, beyond completion, as it were, which shows a break in the stylistic lag, the limitations of an attitude (which is what style is) which shows that a specific line has warped itself through itself, and lost the essence of the pornographic, which is incompleteness. Completeness itself, then, is static. Whole but static. And surely the, uh, creative takes an attitude out beyond itself, but what I'm talking about is taking itself through itself and then to itself without returning, just getting further than there, getting beyond beyond which is more than there. Like removing love from love and leaving more there than love was to begin (or end) with, within which love is more-than, but still is. We don't usually question these things, and why not.
So wrapped up are we in questions of sincerity and honesty, or lying and trust, which are really questions of value, that we fail to look at the implications of the values themselves, at least as far as content is concerned, and the matter of, if it can be stated, what a content should contain. The usual attitude, I suppose, is that a thing is either empty or full or overflowing, and especially that if it is overflowing, then the container was not large enough; all of which is pretty materialistic. The surrealistic attitude is not too far from Donne's metaphysics, two opposing forces "roughly conjoined," fused, in order to create more than the sum of, either, as two plus two equals five or ten, and then bye-bye Hiroshima. The other, from the lower depths, is "four pounds of shit in a three pound bag." But what I'm giving out is this single line of development or experience by means of which, perhaps by extension, perhaps by exhaustion, perhaps by energy, by means of which the original concept is altered, transcended, modified and made the same but more.
And that is the cosmic. It is it and then again it is it and more than it is and still it is itself. A reverberation and a charge which is more than evolved or witnessed or created or obscured or even caused; it is in the realm of is-ness, nothing fancy or unusual, just more-than. How can love be more than love and not reject love itself, almost egotistically, a chronic alteration of perfection which eradicates that which it seeks to improve, a contemplation which loses the curiosity and innocence it seeks to perpetuate, as in "greatness exhausts itself and causes the return of emptiness," a great cyclical dynamism, or looking for the shortcut to the perpetual motion machine. There is a sort of despair involved, and there is a sort of pushing against the walls. It's a bitter pill to swallow, the song says, I think I'll chew it first. By means of which (he says, as if he did it himself) the real becomes realer. The same loses its perceptible quality, as-such, and once again becomes the same as itself.
The cosmic is the frame inside the frame, but they are of equal size and are superimposed. Of course I remember sitting in the barber chair in Mexicali in 1969, getting a cheap haircut, sitting in the second chair back from the window on the street, the first chair was empty, and on either side was a mirror wall in which the person was sitting in the chair was sitting in the chair was the person sitting in the chair was sitting in the chair, but you know how barbers are, they don't let you turn your head either to one side or the other, you just sit there, looking out of the window, over the top of the empty chair in front of you while the guy clip-clips, and you can't look into the blank eye of the infinite series, you just sit there with bugs crawling up and down your neck staring out onto the Mexican street where no-one passes to look back at you, a tantalizing prospect of being, especially when it's really the cheap haircut that got you there.
Well, it's partly selfish and partly selfless, and at either extreme each resembles the other enough that you lose the difference. There is a kind of expansive relaxation where one finds himself back where he was but not in the same place, it is new and not new at the same time, I suppose you might imagine parallel simultaneities in which the same movie is shown to the same audience, or the same audience watching both movies at the same time, but really, what movie, there's the deception. The disappointing thing about movies is that there aren't any movies at all, and you realize that particularly when you go the second time. The day the Eagle landed on the moon I was in Benton Harbor putting the second engine in my old fifty-four Ford panel, the first one we put in there had turned out not to be any good, so we went back to put another one in (the first one had blown on the road), it was really the third one, and the fiftyish black preacher who ran the junkyard with his son Art said, "There's nobody up there at all," and I didn't understand.
It's as contrary as making the pure state of calm indifference the goal of the pursuit of intensity, of drugs and madness and the extremes of the emotional game, there's the lying. Exhaustion, perhaps, but not calm. Self begets self. The pursuit of self begets, what, not self but pursuit. Practice begets further practice. The calm arrives, like Vincent's In the Arriving, you'll have to ask about that one, I told him I'd bring it up. The point being something about the quest for being, for the beloved, for the perfect high, or the rush or the roof or the sky or for biology or for anything. On the other side of the blind-game, for so it is, there is the wimpy fatalism of the skinny mystical vegetarian losers, the bearded ones, oh well, there is, just, doing and being, all to all, cranking back a notch or two and letting it all ride, pushing for all you're worth, ah, then, give it all you've got, brother, the train is coming in. And so, too, in love, there is the you of you, the me of you, the me in you, the you in me, and so forth, there is a long list of equations worked out not so much from intention or from lying, as it were, nor even from innocence nor the experiences which we sometimes describe as the tragic loss of innocence, nor even the tyranny of perfection, of god-states, nor the limitations of scientism (toe-bone connecka to the foot-bone); there is today with the rain falling now and then, and the window envelopes coming in the mail, and the boat out there, upside down and propped up, its bottom freshly-painted canary yellow deck paint, your first day at work, the monumental silences falling at the edges of the body, jazz on the earphones, everything so surprising and new that nothing really is surprising or new, the finite planet imploding toward the sameness of the revelation itself in no surprises anywhere and no complacency granting the terrifying presence of presence itself, holding on with all fours and watching the rain drip from the edge of the carport.
* * *
The fanfare of the day is nutrient, is light, we are photo-tropic cells, undulating intelligences thriving in the harmonious soup penetrating throughout this music of odors and saps in the continuous feeding of each other, leaning back and forth the unconscious dancers forming left and right encircling centers unrevolved wheels of the prayer and substance removing the physical distances upreaching fortresses of the body's solitudes in words called forth the trance and mask and drum over-reaching the names themselves, portent, spire, regime, plenitude, excess and flume, and in the time of time itself we name the light our own space, recompense and favor, the platters on the wooden sphere, technic and decoration, numerical, possessed of life itself revolving forward the electric body calling poet-dance and mime the savor of the moment still unyielding silence names us forward, forward houses heal the heart's own swarm to light, outreach and plasm, the names of the song and honor, this continuing and arriving in the day to day. As what is shown, the beauty of the gesture itself makes love's name your own passage into subject, it is the arm and hand and foot inclined to shoreward pushing erect this calm reflection bears us outer metaphors no less inert than life itself the spell unwinding colors sail the room the eye's foam, your honors winding signs below the sky, plant-men, seed-child the heart's reproductions meaning meeting all along, the waiting moons becalmed, astir, blowing forms and shattering the monumental morning, honorific, your hand's fingers lighter touching hours in retreat the cleverer stations are these additive accumulations of value and purpose, the hymn of the common, solitary motives, reviews, positions, excuses, flattery and purpose, doubling mind and song into presence, the poem of the hours calls the skysung asphalt looming mountains, the age of signs returns at once, sudden, in the beauty of the gesture itself, said from one to one. It is the arm of the many in the one and he who holds her back and forth, the markers flowing blood between them given child to child the conferees their plasms resolve the inner claims are moved against the all, the numbers, the numbers of us interchanged and individuated, arised and flattered, signing across the spaces of the eye's instances, memories of earlier lines remind the total of its functioning intelligences, the body's favors spasmed-out from one-on-one into the higher reaches of the language spoke, the gesture itself in unredeemed brilliance and clarity, the common hand against the wall of the house, in the depths of the soil, in the eye's focus of detail do the fingers twist and speak, at plaster plastic platters, the voices of time remove and shower the more tranquil hours, feeding and creating the simplicity of her hand before the mirror, affectionate and precise, graceful and monumental, this crowd of solitudes arriving in the morning moving back and forth and down to down and back. You are there again, you are here; the space inevitable and profound, the secrets of the gesture accumulate between silences, it is no encyclopedic catalogue of mechanical contrivances which marks us out as humane, or specific, or new, we are the name of the age, we are this one of many, undeniable and profound, diminished, indicated, an allowance of the planet, the few and yet all of it marked out and proper; we are this gesture, this song, this moment, accused and resumed in the nomenclature of the hours in the beauty of the slighter gestures the hand twirling out over the top and in, into the mood of the sound itself, into the pop and sign of the music itself, we are the gesture itself, the history of the insignificant monuments, the smaller reaching flames fanned and flawed again, we are this and this again, feeding, stroking, sensory and astounded, filled, furthered, futured, arrived, made and molded, the contemplation of the hours, mortal, described, accumulating, resumed. Simpler spoke than smoked, he ploughs on. There are the trees in lines, again the bluer skies settle into morning bushing out and flaming, the pettier hours recede, outside, they are they, paisley, monochrome, beyond variety, located inside the gestures made, the assistances of the forms themselves locate the mood of the moment here and thus: you spoke out now and then. There were the years and years, your own gestures climbing hand over hand, feet sweating, heart pumping, the mind bending out beyond the slighter gaps between the woods, populace and identification, the flat gray plane of sameness evolved and textured, the map exploded dusts and red and blue and green, the power of the gesture itself made and given, driven forward foreign soils recalled the games and moments in the air's hearts' meetings more profound than silence, a subscription, an endorsement, a risk, a proof, a bowl thrown against the wheel, computer and flower, the motors of the mind's beginnings. The list grows longer still. He comes out of the back door, a brown bag in his hand, he opens the garbage can on his right. It is full; he opens the one on his left and stuffs the bag in, pushes it down and replaces the lid, turns and goes back into the house. It is done. Across the sea's waves waving, music fills the air, working over the same ground, you look for the small green shoots pushing the brown flat plane side to side, the music in your head is this constant beating of the hours now and then against the tides of blood, the planet growing heavier, spinning faster now than thought itself, in the ether of nothingness the waves waving back and forth, the list grows stronger, flatter, more precise, the colors of the planes vibrating, marked, thrown against the room again and faster still they move around the day, one-in-one, me and you and eye to eye the same distances returning less complete than more than this is less enough to be the same in more and more.
He holds her open, driving in and holding, leaning into the opening, the gesture itself giving and seeming, at once a gesture and an act again, following. Did he arrive fully clothed, or did he arrive at all? There were more again and speaking lines at the ends of times removed, spoken, smoothed out and angled in. The whole accumulates from the smaller gestures. Are you new? Are you nothing at all or forming out of dusk the sentences in your mind, again the seeking out, again you move across the day, again you hold the movies blank and flaming sure enough to be released, thrown aloft, gesture and throng, all of it aroused beyond the minor qualms you said your own were sure enough, they speak and shower out the simpler language made of this and that again, the beauty of the gesture moving through her sighs and substance, rare enough to be relieved, silent, at the edge and waving, come on, the rising and falling of the singsong chants they offer up forgiveness weaving in and out and back and forth and down.
Do you hear this? Are there others in your own line-up waiting for forgiveness? It is given freely in the sunlight, houses in the morning growing mossy roofs the singular details push around the houses mentioned on the pages preceding dust to dust the winds are blowing through the hours hands on hands the lines unbroken water-holes and mountains various and profound, shifting from one light to another, the same against the tide's rebellion, foreign forms the linear gasps her tokens weaving in and out and held aloft, flags waving, lines below your time, the music and the beauty of the gesture itself, at the edge and waiting, his books again arrive the fuller warps are deep within the here and now, what used to be is nonetheless the same as now, now and then are still the same as this, the gesture itself waving free and freer still, the water in the lake is rising, the heart returns to warmer moments in the sun's beliefs, they are they and still the motive in the room, hands across the light, you reach, you touch, you stop and hold.
And then there are the forms themselves. Between the tragic and the comic, there is the sentence and the trial, there is the paragraph itself. There is the flux, the very dynamism of the preceding, the nomenclature of the moment without definition, without recompense, without even desire. There is the gesture of the moment and the form of the sign, it opens and closes, it is finished, it is complete and final, it is the tragedy of the end without feeling, without sadness or pity or desire, it is the cold finality of the moment within the moment, the end of the line, the box, the shovel, the dirt and the tree, it is the silence. Or it is open and opening, it is the great yuk, the hee-haw, the regenerative spurt, the interchange of one-in-one, a trading of identities, the blur or chasm, the leap and the throw, it is the open door opening further still than thought itself, it is the peculiar particular human, it is me; and between the two polarities, he climbs through the window, he falls on his butt, he leans against the tree.
Deep within the flattery of the forms, you find allowances for the lines, the sphere of action vibrating off center deeper within and holding on, Ah! And giving way to release, relief, relapse, and song, there is the variation of the one and only tam-tam drumbeat of the heart against the gong of consciousness, the flat brass gong beaten by the one-handed man dressed in rags with a photograph for a face, it is the oscillating pendulum throw of time, the arc between this and that, subject to object, of life to death, of one to none and back again, it is the day grown cold with the hearth fire glowing coals to feed the manner and the dream continuing airplane noises weave the world's hours, cargo-cult of saucer-landing platforms on the tops of mountains, I saw him descending the lighted stairway from the heavens, the infinite sadness of outer space lined between my eyes, the fictive salute, the dreams of heavens and process, the times of art itself made serious by the absence of play, deep within, this.
But the birds do battle with the evidence, the laundry becomes evasive, there are definitions to be made, is it a tragic moment or a comic mode or neither or none at all beyond the faces in the dream where history has exhausted itself into this prism of presence, is intelligence finally outweighed by numbers, are we left alone, laughing and crying in retreat, piling up wheat in seedy mountains, feeding oil to polar bears to test their survival responses until there is just too much paperwork to go on with it, is there more than waiting for the moment to decide between the yuk and the wall, is the day too soon to be enough to yoke this pressure into some benign forgetting, the geometries of memory less recall than doubt is or is doubt itself the measure of the age as the age of the yuk gives in to the age of the box, a flatter and more perfect landscape paved and painted, sealed, made less natural and more manageable, process-management, thus and so and thus and so, he natters on and on.
And there's the play made plain. There are the words around the corner, piled up, stacked in brown bags against the walls, arthritic wrists snapping and bending, the dancers making lists of images, spontaneous madmen eating out for lunch, you pass passion up and down the lining of your throat, swallowing against the lighter hues in these more than fortunate remonstrances, it is the great spelling bee, he flies them snapping out their stingers, pulling their guts out, being one-in-one and left alone, the solitary goat measures his milkers left unwinding cords the sudden bursts electric fathoms deeper still the image without seeing suggestive hours recall the fall from grace as something in the sense of form the age brought with itself, chairs in rows, thought forbidden to all but the harmless, the darker hours are marks along your sky and souther calm the form of form has us backing off, holding firm, feeding each other with what is left after all when the others have gone, what is there left to see?
You are this between lunch and dinner, growing slowly rounder still, the compulsive writer hammering it out line by line the spaces get defined, filled, rotating swords between the tragic line and the comic tone, it is this linear tonality which is both a median and a compromise, it is the combination of nothing and something which gives a tension to the forms themselves, or is anybody at home at all, hello, is anybody home today, the bills are due, the jazz on the radio remaining closed or open, the museum of consciousness broadcasting thoughts instead of feelings, is there anyone there at all or is that another one of those numberless commonplaces which has become, just, too cumbersome to be of any consequence; there is style and imitation to take the place of the full throated body-yell, the drums hammer-heading the further reaches along the walls you drive them back and forth, and if you don't like it you try to change the channel, or adjust the color or call a repairman, a shrink in coveralls, "I don't like the show."
You come to it, systole, diastole, the in and out of orbit, where the forces themselves intervene with their own motion, and as there is tension there is also balance and the movement between inherencies; and just as going too far in one direction inhibits the propriety of the relationship, so too in not going far enough does one encounter the static, white noise on the stereo airways between the ears, headphones going out, too soon to be relieved he smacks his head with the flat of the heel of the hand, thump, bang, the ears go out and wait to rest beside the active forces, generalizations derived from the sources made visible, you go along between polarities, resting now and then on the shores of opposites, at the very verge itself, beginning and ending without crowds, the cool silence of alternation, wherein hours, archaic utterances, plainstyle homilies, dictionaries of chance, a puff of smoke, a catalog of sentences, there is one and then there is two, and you rest at two because there is another on the way, a series, a cereal, with milk and sugar.
The resounding powers of plus and minus, additions to the wholeness of the sum, lessening from the completeness of the total, styles of discard and accumulation, variations in the sameness of life without comparison, the dullness of the hours unrelieved by conversation, long distance calls from creditors, masked mummies underhand floating out from underneath the pier, stroking out across the lake, bandages unwinding, coiling white plumes of bedsheets torn into strips from the day before yesterday when you forgot to look in the mailbox; is he tall enough, you ask, for what, for comparison, for the eye to open and close, for the nails popping through the curved plywood surface, for the easier determinations to be made against some easier distinctions you thought you'd left behind; no, there are no others in the field, you are still walking along, waiting for the woodstove to warm up, waiting for the lights to change, for the forms themselves to change, becoming change itself in the depths of your being, waiting for lunch.
But the easier features reside in alternating current, they look both ways at once and are happier, they have evolved with eyes in the backs of their hands, the back of me hand to you; it is easier to invent between parentheses, between the curving half-moons on the upper row on the old manual typewriter, or lining them in with the flat-lined black-inked felt pen, throwing these arrows from hand to hand, watching the eagle nest his fallen prey between hands the reconstituted music of the easier spheres, waiting at the mail box for the day's supply of window-envelopes, watching the pair-bound sensations break into speech, wear clothes, walk out the door into the moving lines of traffic, hearing the silences break into the forms themselves, noting the alterations of the figures themselves floating upward winding lines between apposition and delight, the light and dark define the time along your spaces winding flowers in sacks around your turns turning forward floating parks and valleys the miniatures are woolen spheres alert beyond recall, today, here.
After all, the lines grow stronger, or lesser, more into resemblance than the series, there is not so much a distinction of opposites, the pendulum swing reveals a greater portion of the full mandala cycle, but rather than a mere open and shut, the parable includes itself and becomes both an observation and a teaching, the motive expresses itself in a criticism, and as what was once a singular gesture bifurcated into the modes of comedy and tragedy (really, motives of the whole), the ultimate figuration recalls the original impulse to intelligence, wherever that went down the line, the more recently ancient appositives for energy find their final entry into our specific presence, our dark ages, our bitter soul of the night; we find the healing impulse perverted into opposition, as the whole devours itself in the uncontained side-effects brought on by what can only be remembered as the final ding-dong of good will, we enter the sphere of action itself in another misconception of the real, the trio of sameness-falling-short in the worship of ignorance, mortality and death.
The asshole in the street, punk cannibal, the over-civilized magnitude of the rejection of superficiality in favor of knowing nothing, as nothing at all is preferable to something which clearly contains a whole at least half of which is an unacceptable monumentality, the rejection of the tragic, I suppose, in favor of a defiantly centrifugal ignorance of the forms themselves, as delight dissolves to not feeling at all, and as not-feeling at least becomes a heightening of the obvious, the casuistry of the vision itself is measured against the cosmic and comes up short, for therein lies the totality of the measurable, the scientism of mortality, of the machines at Tito's bedside, two months, now, humming away "against the natural order," the man-god plugged into himself, the worm-ouroburous feeding on pure feeling and registering the biological dismay of the failure of the senses, the inculcation of the competitive realm which figures in the primitive made modern, the religious made spiritual, or simply spiritual and not humane, and as highs go, the blood sugar dropping, inclusion becomes death.
There they are, the three sisters wailing over the loss of self, the reduction of love into the pornographic, after all, a hard-on is better than the true passion which includes the head and the feet as well as the erotic tingling of all the layers of consciousness within which the motives sustain and flourish as well as give rise to successive states of being, all the way up the line: no, the mortalist declares, in what is really an endorsement of the life force, I begin and end, I refuse to observe the manner and kind of my own intelligence, I embrace my own ignorance as a kind of will to immediacy, and he becomes a hostage to the moment, brittle, forbearing, decorated, air-dried, a convertible, really, riding along with his top down, cruising along the biological highway toward the brutal eminence celebrated by the death-worshippers, the mystical hawks of the passionate discord, haggling over the price of fuel required to feed the refugees from the last war we lost, did we ever win one, does one win a war, is there any war at all but the rise and fall of sunlight?
Still, he undermines himself, this Idi Amin of the cosmos, this Reverend Jones of the loser multitudes, this voracious cannibal of the Ivory Coasts, he'll get his, you hope, and watch yourself descend into hatred, or escape into a wimpy mysticism. No, you do your days and scale the downgrade of the planet from one to ten, oh, seven point five and rising, the millennial gloom sets in, and you surf it out against the waves, armed against authority, your mask intact against the horrors of ignorance, mortality, and death. The indictment is your own, perhaps, she knew what she was doing, they say, carrying out her love affair with a commoner in plain view, off with his head, they drowned her, it said, one final suck of ice cold stuff, had her liver for dinner, soaked in oil, headed out with petrodollars, no, don't look back, gather in the children, stroke them, they are the last, the argument goes, Sodom and sodomy survive this seedless war of nerves, and you try to sleep it off, try to keep it up, try to get it up, against all odds, flying.
But the norm is pattern and response, you take it in as the inevitable spree of the last survivors of the ice-age, maybe they'll kill each other off, at least if you let them, is this enough, to give in to disgust and corral the elders into their high-rise condos, laughing at wrinkles, failing in our own visionless celebration of the other to note that the fantasy of the new age still sells subscriptions of escape on a monthly basis; really, it is time itself which is out of sorts. The false prophet calls us in to watch the races, the white against the black or red or blue or multi-colored paisley giants from the biosphere, the mantises orgone-ized into their lemming-spasms, more, give us more and call retreat a halting pressure of the known into its limitations, complete with the cybernetic notion of "extra people". He is hungry, this TV-cyclops-god of our own implosion of attitudes, it is the cosmic which warms us up, gives an interview, calls the wayward children outlaws and says not enough is enough, and soon, too.
Still, the fiberglass, sheetrock, plywood temples grow along the way, sprayed with acrylic sheets of blue and orange, continuous surfaces containing, uh, eggs, thousands of eggs, like styrofoam packing material, the newspapers printed in another language, his high-strung outrage another fifteen-minute best seller in the overground of failure, this black-scratch on green paper leading along the line and out, out. Outrage is not enough. You'd better dig those mental tunnels which allow for some survivors, and let the Blands go, it's a hard choice to make, but are Ignorance, Mortality, and Death the only ad-men left in the business, the great IMD Agency, replete with paraphernalia (rubber hoses, syringes, the easier dopes allowed), they'll be selling us canned Cambodian next week, you watch, perhaps individualized with pictures on the cans, silkscreened by old hippies in the bush outposts. No, cannibalism is far too simple, the darker the age the more we seem to like it, and we let the houses go to the dogs, dog-style, if you can't eat it or fuck it, piss on it.
The lines go deeper, from the beauty of the gesture we describe the fall of man, we wait for the escalators to burn our feet, wailing complacently, "I told you so", the Eichmann of us all, signing chits and rolling around sleeplessly at night, moaning, watching up and down the street for the cars that run on blood, they stop for hitch-hikers and don't look back, either. Kicks. Kick it out. Be cool, baby. It's the low profile that does you in. There was this going-away party out there in the desert, at the country club, for all the young teachers at the JC where I was a pain-in-the-ass for two years teaching whatever it is, and this lady's boyfriend was hulking over there at the bar, I was there, next to them in the gloomy farewells of having given a lot to, uh, trying something, teaching art as a kind of mental survival of these tortures they perpetuate most places, a kind of gelding of youth, I guess. Well, I had my pen in my shirt pocket, "I guess you think," he said, quivering with rage at the mere sight of me, "that the pen is mightier than the sword," "I'll stake my life on it," I said, and I could see that he wanted to take me up on it.
Sandwich-board guys, the hour of doom is at hand! Follow me, to the promised land. That was it, too, Jim Jones', promise, to go through death into the new world, into the new life, what a crock, what a steaming pile! Surely we die into life, like the old ones teach, surely we all get struck blind on some road or other, but believe me, coming to see your death as a release into life, or coming to the visual immediacy which is vision, these are not no flashes in the pan of the pseudo-mystical power seekers and death worshippers, no, not at all, there is the immense and risky will to be which frees the soul into its own being and lets us go, lets us off from the stale shit they sell for seventy-nine cents a loaf, and you know that as well as I do, we all know it, and I left yesterday, I came back, too, and here I am, celebrating the monuments of my own being, watching my own hand spin and curl across the page, keeping my eyes open all the time, watching the sets build and curl out there, turning my board into the big one, getting ready to surf it out.
My neighbor is half-way up the hill behind the house, where brush-bush and thornvine go into the trees, about twenty-five feet above the flat the houses sit on, a small fire going. He is throwing some sticks and pieces of bush that will burn onto it. My own back yard has several branches down from the ice storm three months ago when we lost power for about a week. It's the first week of the spring sunshine. Last Sunday we went to the dump, the truck loaded, stuff tied to the roof, an hour's wait to unload in ten minutes what took two days to load and a year to accumulate. Soon, I will go up the hill with the bow saw to salvage fireplace lengths from the fallen branches and burn the rest, pull out the wild berry vines, clear a space out to start some cannabis plants up there in the foliage, and keep myself busy until the house is ready to paint across town, when I give it two weeks with the belt sander and a four inch brush. Candide's example welcomes me back to work, a parable the horrors of which I once thought entirely mental, and where the notion of tending one's garden becomes clearer every day.
Blog Archive
-
▼
2007
(189)
- ► 08/12 - 08/19 (1)
- ► 04/15 - 04/22 (16)
- ► 04/08 - 04/15 (11)
- ► 04/01 - 04/08 (91)
- ► 03/25 - 04/01 (52)
-
▼
03/18 - 03/25
(18)
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- SLASH AND BURN POETICS
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- THE WORLD IN ITS OPPOSITES
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- mas menos
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Kilobyte Magnificat
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- IMAGE, MEMORY & EVENT
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- An homage to Bob Dylan
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- T r a c t
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- THE ONE, THE SAME, AND THE O...
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- I CAME HERE WITH NOTHING...
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- ON COSMIC POETICS
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- MANDALA
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- JUST A PINCH BETWEEN YOUR CH...
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- BEFORE I WOULD REMEMBER TO F...
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- WE SCAR WHAT BRISTLES TERMIN...
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Untitled Auto Body Experiences
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- HORNDOG
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- WHITE LIGHT
- Thomas Lowe Taylor -- SUPERPROSE
