Thomas Lowe Taylor -- D I C T I O N

*********************************

Stephen Ellis
-from 2 letters

04.19.95

...diction, L. dictio, pp. of dicere, to say, orig. 'to point out in words' as a speaking.
not so fiercely opposed to grammar, i.e., 'the whole apparatus of literary study' but perhaps more the nimbus w/in these "confines". this 'speaking' seems a primary curriculum, an active term of study, back from Homer, say, to get the Arges again in full sail - the 'trial/trail' then the voyage thru the Speakable - the common - unrehearsed (!) - i.e., if there is NEED to 'rehearse' the common, how common can it BE? and where dies this put writing, vis-a-vis it being not so much a codification of that rehearsal? Olson (& Clarke - and Clark Coolidge, so some extent, say the whole LANGUAGE proposition, in part) still bears significantly on this issue. The issue being, the temporally formal. Writ has to remain a 'speakable voyage' if it is to have value - discussable - as in 'therapy' as exchange (from whence to understand HOW 'law' is this permanentized rather than (to get its BEAT) valorized....
The nature of this thing has...to do w/ accelerating TEXT past its most obvious definitions, and into the more primary question of method - how to sustain the necessary harmonics of relation, to encourage the fluid, the fluent (as Clarke got from 'analogy', or Olson, his (misunderstood) 'allegory'): to enact the questions ('speaking', again) so not to make any answer redundant. Any other seeking after 'plurality' is the burn-mark (brand-name) that remains enforcedly NATAL. Undiscovered/covered-the Childe enclosed (engulfed) in aeons of soft-sweet sadness, rather than simply, nakedly, availably THERE. in conflictis, yet valuably so, as Vincent Ferrini is currently in tremendous mastery of (alas, ignored)....

**********************

05.16.95

Interesting implex, this diction business, as yr own 'word choice' extends, of course, as everything does, after the fact of itself, into, well, as it's guided in some sense, toward, health(?) - that's if learning has some practical application for other than to its own sake, as, the aesthetics of the body, corporeal life the embodiment of whatever estate one finds themselves within the limits (advantage!) of, as it makes itself known, to, and as, the forms of (its) feeling - 'things' that pass, a kind of counting that makes a visceral 'crowning', as to each evening its stars possible (meaningful) - each dictum a passing reference that leaves its interweaving trace as the floor the mind sets its favorite things out upon, 'as if' t'were indeed the 'dance' that it in actuality ever IS - a 'floor' sewn with 'seeds' - so (just maybe) there is in back of 'diction' just that stream of vision that produces same, and the question therefore points to one of actual value, especially in that (again, just maybe) the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group hasn't really been 'feeding' anyone, as per, look, just what ARE one's "favorite things?" [& how might they be proffered, primped by whatever 'pomp-and-circumstance' is necessary toward making them other than codified self-aggrandisement? (the whole 'problem of reference' is just the university ditty, "ding-dong the hitch is dead" - as if that could produce any thing that more than analogously [merely] an effort toward 'freedom' studded with the good fortune of 'tenure.']

diction, L dictio, a speaking pp. of L dicere, to point out in words Gr deiknynai, to prove, Ger zeigen, to show, OE teon, to accuse, taecan, TEACH

teach, ME techen OE taecan base of tacn, a sign, symbol (see
TOKEN); basic sense, to show, demonstrate, as in Ger zeigen

token, ME OE tacn, akin to Ger zeichen IE base *deik - to
point, show TEACH, TOE, DIGIT, DICTION -- a sign,
indication, symbol, sample, [syn., PLEDGE]

pledge, ME plegge OFr pleige ML plegium plevium, security
warranty, infl. by Frank *pligi. liability, akin to OS
plegen, to warrant, "the condition of being held or given as
security for a contract (or promise); also, a toast (of
allegiance)

digit: finger, toe, inch, orig. any of the numbers 0-9,
'cause all was counted 'pon one's own digits.

but the 'accounting' of that also implies "toe hold" - a 'digging in' (also 'toeing the mark') - even as it is our TOES wch, like the tails of dinosaurs, are one of the more important elements in keeping one's balance in the sheer 'accounting' of each step - i.e., that they (toes) are TELLING. thus, to bring it back to diction, telling of just what, exactly - TOES leave the likes of letters in the sand w/ each step (given that yr going' to the beach every weekend!) -- you count on yr fingers, but you remember w/ yr toes given that they are what most obviously are imbedded in the matter of the moment -- fingers are sensitive, toes are "of an more steady apprehension", the 'sounding' of wch keeps one in concert with precisely that sense of PLEDGE as a 'grip upon' "each forth along each their own trail", plurality for sure, not KULTURAL so much as to each individual in his/ her own ability to receive, the RATE (truly what diction might point out) of the common occurring profoundly within the locally possibly and fortunately small 'pledge' that counts anywhere between 0 and 9 - & each that, our own tithe, moment attached to moment as life's only true lineage, and thru wch diction's allowed to indentify, what shall we call it, The Family Name.....

A 'behavior' and 'a method' are productive contradistinctively as to what their confluence 'dictates', we're in the realm of counting here, say, the rungs of the ladder that must then be climbed - though not to emphasize duality - 'up' and 'down', as either way, as you call it 'the rush' is what overtakes the moment at any rung (& there's your 'constancy'!) - 'that which exists through yourself' - such that a composition is located essentially 'beyond itself' (like in the song just came o'er the radio, "Stuck In The Middle With You") at the outset, and that the apprehension of that 'place' cognitively is 'a result of' the strengthening action that both makes the soul 'dry' and the 'construction' (of it) on foundations that are thus sufficient to supporting it - the presence of 'the mysterious' itself essentially what is 'outside' the parameters of the construction of 'the temple' (Gr: "back of head") materially, yet is referred to precisely as such construction's extent. Diction is thus forwarded as the 'sound construction' (the projective)that alone is able of producing the 'tokens' that mark the whirlpool whence 'behavior' and 'methodology' commingle - the litral 'ark' of Utnapishtim which not only was not necessarily 'a ship', but also was a stone - either of which was 'square[d]' - and both of which were meant to 'excite the waters' whilst keeping them 'at bay' such that the literal 'source' of materials on which to work also defined its limits as Bellerophon's invocation via Poseidon of a 'flood' against Iobates contradictionedly loosed from within Iobates' temple (the equivalent 'object' of Bellerophon's quest against Iobates' 'ingratitudes') the Xanthian women, who hoisted their skirts above their waists, and rushed Bellerophon butt-first, offering themselves to him if he would only relent. Bellerophon turned tail and fled, as this wasn't the 'flood' he'd had in mind - an object lesson of the invocatory 'power' position is capable of, i.e., the 'undescribable' IS described 'elsewhere' - (as behavior come incidentally to 'instruct' the former restrictions of the methodology that unwittingly encouraged it.) So, sure, the 'journey' as you say, is 'it', though only insofar as you do admit there be actual 'beads' to string on its 'thread' - beads as word-choice, and word-choice made 'new' only by reference to that which in actuality has been so felt - the 'innate', including the extent to which the person of it does deliver his/her excursion' of it (that 'innate') through to the aeration of - the 'playing' - the 'leading ledger' (first blurts) of - the con(ed) from which might lilies rise. The unexpected whose 'ground' has yet been thoroughly laid - the group ensemble and solo work, unhedged, that the best of 'head arrangements' allows - and includes maximal possibility of 'dishin' on so-and-so', making the whole time' a rune-bridge, dictated across as epaoide, 'to lay a trip on', & as "precision abiding in passion to 1st powers' / invocation, flooding amor, cor, flor / by analogy, no mere repeating of the magic / words, but making mum to an act shimmer" - diction as that sound(ing) knot.

********************************************

Ivor Winters (in Defense of Reason)

...The poem, to be perfect, should likewise be a new word in the same sense, a word of which the line, as we have defined it*, is merely a syllable. Such a word is, of course, composed of much more than he sum of its words (as one normally uses the term) and its syntax. It is composed of an almost fluid complex, if the adjective and the noun are not too nearly contradictory, of relationships between words (in the normal sense of the term), a relationship involving rational content, cadences, rhymes, juxtapositions, literary and other connotations, inversions, and so on, almost indefinitely. These relationships, it should be obvious, extend the poet's vocabulary incalculably. They partake of the fluidity and unpredictability of experience and so provide a means of treating experience with precision and freedom. If the poet does not wish, as, actually, he seldom does, to reproduce a given experience with approximate exactitude, he can employ the experience as a basis for a new experience that will be just as real, in the sense of being particular, and perhaps more valuable.

*...the poetic line...should be a functioning part of the larger complex, or poem. This is, imagine, what Mallarme should have had in mind when he demanded that the poetic line be a new word, not found in any dictionary, and partaking of the nature of incantation (that is, having the power to materialize, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, being, a new experience).

**********************************

style is psychoactive

Suddenly there is no cultural history. Maybe it snuck up on us, but I perfer to think of it as a coincidence of critical mass and a cumulative effect of the past 20 years of media-glut. There are I suppose some consequences of the post ww2 turnaround. Not only the death of the image, flattening the canvas to a two dimensional phenomenology but the cumulative effect of surrealism moving from cult of secrecy to basic fare from the ads, this rendering of a intentionally & privately obscure code to common discourse ("It was Surreal, man.") An ironic success for the for the Surreal, to create a world in its own image. But the flattening of the epoch into an oppressive immediacy bears some examination. First of all, the audience has become frighteningly literate, at a nonverbal level, it is Hip. It responds primitively to a sophisticated set of signals or messages, but you can't fool it (all of the time...); but the main consequence of this immediacy, what makes us "hostage to the moment", is a subsequent flattening of all doctrines whereby none has any ascendency--it is an entirely democratic situation in which each school of thought has its direction discretion and nobody is right. In fact "being right" seems to have nothing to do with anything. Nor being wrong, for that matter, every man has the right to be whatever kind of fool he wants to be.

What this means to poetry is the same was what it means to everyone else--if nobody is right and nobody is wrong, or, rather, if it doesn't make any difference, how do you talk about things. It used to be you'd compare an item, a poem, say, to the existing canon and see if it came up short, succeeded, or, perhaps, lead the way to something new. Here in the third generation of "do your own thing" there is no established canon, and the elitists who act as if there were one are, uh, cute. I don't buy too much of this. There is a future, of course, and we all have a place in it. It's fine to talk about the past, but all those fine writers we get compared with are dead and we're the only game in town. That seems important to me when talking about the basically closed shop that seems to exist at present.

Times change and with them and with that change what was once disallowed becomes the rule, or gets its fifteen minutes, whatever. Measuring a poetics against itself, however, is a different matter. We are hostage to the moment because we want it that way, we wanted to imbed ourselves in the cultural immediacy of being present in the present, after all, one of the mystical goals of self effacement. Poetry is, after all, a progressive series of seizures on the part of the practitioner, and the cumulative effect of those seizures is that one develops and improves or else one stagnates and withers on the vine like yesterday's eggplant. This vitality is manifested and measured by the feel of the work, how it strikes you living in your own present, and to that extent, yes, indeed, syntax is psychoactive, you get a little thrill after you've weeded your way through a complicated transmission and arrived at the end with a sense of completion, of the 'passing beyond.' And of course it is the poet's task to take you there, into the beyond, by hooking you onto his little red pony and pushing through the fog into the next room. That's the job.

There is also the statement from Gertrude in What Are Masterpieces.... to the effect that each of us lives in our own time, of course, and when it comes around to voicing what and who we are we do so in the character of the moment in which we find ourselves, for we can do nothing else. To do otherwise, that is, to write a complicated poetry from another time, is, well, nostalgic and vital, but it does nothing to advance the cause. I'm sure this will piss somebody off, but now that the avant garde is just another school of thought, embedded in the soul of the academy as tomorrow's salvation, where then is the so-called leading edge, why is it invisible and where is it going and how do know when you've bit into an olive? By its taste? Hence the focus on Diction, it being an examination of the smaller units of the poem to discover what kind of glue holds them together and whether the current crisis which is much epistemological as it is anything is getting anywhere.

Of course, criticism and theory have done little but confuse the issue by competing with the poem for primacy in the cultural dialog. If in the present where all arguments are reduced to the same platform where none is right and none is wrong, all you get is your fifteen minutes on the soapbox and it's time for the next one. This is what bothers so many people about the Slam, not that it's competetive, but that it reduces to mob rule the ivory towered moment of purity and grace; nonetheless, what rises to the surface is usually what is permitted to do so by the relative buoyancy of the medium itself. So it seems to me that what has been there, so-called Language Poetry, got the center stage because it was safe, it involved a celebration of consciousness without any of the messy, spiritual stuff which usually accompanies that venue. LangPo really worked over a lot of territory which actually precedes the poem, issues of resemblance and repetition, issues of consistency and sense, the vague feeling that one was being lied to, or at least that the deeply true and private self of the writer either did not exist (a currently attractive notion = there Is no self), or that if it did it was all a game to get five pounds into a four pound bag.

Disruptions of syntax, or the development of the Disjunkt into an ascendant style is cause for alarm if one is lodged there. Thus the progress of styles is seen to be a progress in the direction of self improvement if not self effacement. The disjunkt is just that, an admixture of styles which declares all states equal in the range of their attributes and succession of their operations into a new whole. Nonetheless it arises from a hopeless state of confusion. It's like trying to make a decision when you're having a nervous breakdown, all possibilities seem to have equal value and one vacilates from one choice to its opposite in a continual disarray of decision or growth. I mean, it's amazing how an invented style, as Lang Po was invented, can be proposed and run through an entire gamut of acquisitions and disarmaments to become ensconced in the academy in less than 20 years, is suspect to say the least; it smacks of manipulation. However, it just, uh, happened...it was all that could get through, this dry, non-musical, definitely non-sappy stuff. It makes you feel like your skin is covered with words, you almost want to wash them off.

I write the disjunkt with uncommon fervor, it's easy and fun, its a head trip, it sometimes carries the force of intense personal experience, and to an extent, it's the way i started writing when i got loose of the trial and error of imitation and flattery which characterizes beginning writing. It's a game and a fantasy, but it came naturally, fulfilling Gertrude's announcement. And carrying without music or what's called prosody, technical practices exiled without ceremony, the celebratory and hypnotic trance-dance only language can create effaced to a set of simpler operations which held the creation of trance states to be somewhat illegitimate; nonetheless, the sustaining of the disjunkt into a major style is a little like making schizophrenia legal, and haven't we?

And so along with Foucault's loosing of the lunatics into the twentieth century and the hero worship that followed him around, the notion that A Stle Is Also A Behavior needs exploration. We are, after all, selling little trips in our poems, and if it feels good, one will let it in, and that's where syntax is psychoactive, you can tell how it fits and feels and you let it in, and that teaches you to lower your guard and let new information in, this is the messaging of the poem, how it Feels in a phenomenological state: i mean, now that the criteria for judgement are all reduced to equals, all that's left is for me to note how the poem makes me feel, and if i assume the writer is being sincere, not always a good guess, as i hope we can note later, i alter my inner mood and go with the writer as long as i can trust the intent of the message, then i sign off. and the relevant features here also need to be described in terms of presssure, release, time and space perceptions, what sort of state the writer is communicating in his non-verbal arrangements. It is no longer a matter of opening the door to let the cat out, we have to decipher a strange set of signals and scan them for sincerity. I think the language with which we talk about poems is up for review--how the poem works as an organic, phenomenological enterprise, part of My experiencing, enables us to discuss poems as events, events which open and close according to what is in them, what specific phlogiston enables the phrases and units themselves to imply a cosmos, for that's what is happening, each unit becomes the bearer of the dna of its message, and if the speaker is not at rest, then, too, his/her message is not at rest.

This is the morality of what we are doing, what cannot be expunged from the enterprise at all. If a style is also a behavior, and it is, that one cannot hide what he is in what he is doing, we are that transparent. Then, too, we must consider what we are about as people, we are obviously trying to grow and become more complete individuals, more in synch with the world in which we write, and that is also expressed, we look at the poem as a sample of what a person actually is in relation to all of these assumptions we make about life, that, for instance, we are writing to get somewhere, to explore this unknown we have blundered into, that we are mapping out an area that is strange to us and we are returning these reports to share with the others, to lead into areas where no man has gone before, as it were, V GER to our self. This we share in our fragments. Remember Archilocus' [In fucking...one discovers...that] the total frag.

And so in the body language of the poem, an entire aesthetic and its cosmos are described, defined, given holographic presence for a fraction of a second, and when my attention is down for that fraction of a second, i'm receptive to a degree of reprogramming, to a resettling of my own vocabulary to receive something somewhat new or different from what i'm used to. The didactic. And so styles must evolve or the message becomes stagnated and the style empty and safe, a haven for the insecure and stodgy, and while the most wildly associative stuff may come out, it may be seen as being guided by a kind of safety, a reveling in what is disjunkt for its own sake, for the comfort of being somewhere at all. No matter, the jobs are all gone. We're getting along ok without you. In fact, I'm close to retiring, then i can sit and write all day long, like i used to, 24-hour poems, short ones, too. After a while, you just do. Those incipient questions no longer nag you, it just doesn't matter; and when you do what you do, that's enough, returned to the realm of play, returned to the realm of just happening, poems occurring as naturally as the leaves sprouting from the tree, spontaneous extensions of who you are.


A sentence is infact a transfer of energy from subject to verb. As experienced. The poem is in fact an encoded experiential diagram interposed between you and your literacy and the raw bleeding fantasm of the present moment, terrifying in its narrowness, if you've ever been mad enough to be "in and of the moment", it's no high, it's hell, it's prison, it's the smallest kind of two-dimensional space; and so we have this agreement not to go Too far, and so you give me your trust and we go through a gradual dropping of your guard, one word at a time, one new, disjunktive disconnection after another, i gradually open up to you and Slam, you get to communicate with me, and you know it, and you give what you have to give whether you want to or now, transparent as you are, a poem is an event and thus subject to laws and descriptions of events as they are and events do not occur in a vacuum they occur in a cosmos which itself is event and as you grow into it you come to see that event as life itself and gradually become the event, you become the event, you become the poem, you become the cosmos. That's the drill.

And so if we are all speaking private languages, getting the message involves decoding, involves reading the unspoken cues which are cosmic within what one feels of the choices of the words made and not made, in the so-called diction of the moment are you revealed to me, you are so transparent i can read you where you stand, and you me, and that is what we shy away from, at least in the diction of shared symbols one can hide behind the meter of the moment, you see, it is all time and space manipulation, that in that small amount of territory i have allowed you to have there is a time and a space and you create it in the variations of your syntax and the referents of your words themselves, how they relate to eachother in their own moment; and so you create your rhythm (the trance dance) which spins out a psychological space, we are actually experiencing something together, getting into synch as it were, two becoming one in a confusing momentary exchanging of places and then slam back again into the me of me and the you of you, it is that event that takes place in the reading of the word, the word made flesh. But if that context doesn't exist, if it is words set against nothingness, how then can there be anything but lists and diagrams? If there's nobody home out there, there's no reason to leave this solipsistic emptiness of a hollow echoing ringing in whatever the memory of man is, three generations they say, then it is all myth....

But memory is cued too in manipulations of time and space, in order for the message to get through, in order for you to leave your forbidden solitude for a moment, in order for there to Be an ancient residue for you to encounter, the laying down of arms must occur; confronted as we are by head trips and mysto macho, what are we to do? It is time for poetry to get off its ass and get real, as they say, become a force in the dialog which is now becoming rather desparate about the future of man, since all the evidence for extinction is there and as "antennae of the race" (Man, you can Feel it) all you have to do is go psycho, or as they used to say "sensitive", and you can hear the howls of the future. There is such a vacuum in the here and now--all ideologies have fallen away. It is dark and quiet in the moments preceding the next millennium, a moment which usually sparks the deepest kinds of thinking about man and his planet; surely, it is the moment of The Poem, a moment when the poet is called upon to step forward and give us the benefit of his ability to see into the future...

And so the encodings are carried unconsciously and spontaneously, you reveal yourself in accident when you let the shield of your own style droop for a second and, uh, make a mistake. I think that's why Tzara & Co. went on the 24 hour automatic writing marathons, to see if in moments of exhaustion something real from "the other side" would peak through, or whether some ancient residue would growl up from within you in mescaline trance there beside the fire in the middle of the night. Poetry deprived of its context must ask for beg for explanations and so the poem comes with an introductory text, is the poem a text or is the text a poem, and where do they meet.

On the more insidious side, we are kept in check by a host of mutually acceptable (the social contract) devices, of which language is the most resonant and universal aspect. Who controls language controls control. And if the universally accepted style of communication is subject->object, then the way of the renegade is to create a language of secrecy or an encoded, secret language which seeks to supplant, even if by subterfuge (ie., lying), the existing, outer-directed authoritarian language response with an object->subject language of association, a parallel language as it were which lives within the accepted symbology long enough to replace it, as "good money drives out bad", so, too, a more efficient style of communication replaces or at least discredits the existing, totalitarian symbology. We create this schizophrenic set of awarenesses almost militantly, daring the reader to let go and come along. This freeing of the individual into himself for the creation of his own, inner-directed being, is generally unacceptable to the controlling mechanism, and so poetry is constantly being stomped out or made acceptable in non-threatening media (rock and roll or advertising) (entertainment, basically, or what is regarded as such).

Of course, this is my movie, i am only activating these pronouns within myself and you are the witness. if you approve of my automanipulations as far as how much you have to risk and where we get in terms of the "passing beyond", part of the contract we make in course of reading the poem.

**************************************

criticism should be at least as well written as poetry.


1

sometimes unwilling filth, filled by despair, no wrong in seeking
butt held and firm, the flash forward indicates compression
you'd been heard again, but not the rest resting then Seems
to call ahead, no matter in the fever sings her praises
down among the land forgotten, another time seems best begotttn

you'd at the harder signs, no masking of anything left outside
but the schemer in the mists, a liar to boot, and not much
else left aside for tallying hooks or beginning to seem
the program from Dryden for god's sake to include text & crit.

what seems to be the end of time, when you have plenty of it,
marks no more the dialog between pressures where you must submit
or mark your collar with indistinction in the phalluses of others
lining goat gout the meeker sustaining arches interpedulated

six no cow the meter's running, and here plenty to nucleate deals
in the scope what's sent her (center) marks encodes belittle
the rescuer nixed plattitudes nor holds hope out beyond here
to flux review the poorer lines becalm no doubt but your own

these at the arrow doom, nor calm portend, at textual grip
the later dues not said nor even hinted at bills protrude
and scores not paid for their sentences; piece work sucks.


i'm not rised surprised, but heated coded encoiled within
your own particular syntax a reminder of the bills unpaid
or your history a parallax insider with no more credit
than who'd benign or flex them sinister attributes quicker

no sound unowned, but copyright a plenty dude, his honor
sucked upwards in the spin of golden haloes unremuted
by their own dictive absolute the emptier hours remind
what works evener hucks upon the table babbled out life

her down. at leaps the froward collapse encentered global
heals you signing out no more doubt the light within
blinded heats the darker side exposed exploded narcs
no-car teat, but then a future favored forward replumes

astride the mooner tangle, this empty sack my own luck
enflamed boot, a diner tangle belies this web my own
particular disturbance moot to outer scans bethreaded
heads into the particular disarray without a paddle.


2

nor what flood out from inner sphere the dot the dot
where such tenor tenuous take on the with-held domain
innert pliance substant, nor make moon the skin's air
nor arc nor any other flame might deal this spinner
from late no pleasure in the seeming after lightning

then what follows is laid up, made aback nor flamered
butt held and firm, the saying goes, and goes far enough
to flame the dictum that what says goes aloft, or his
"donkey crying mist" which deserves to be shredded out

is it flame enhanced or a doubter's musk, that you ask,
afar fixated but the nonce declaring here's the gumbo
doc, and fixer yourself you brought her, tha's enuf;
in the delay you've called ahead for salvation's mark

the bleeding shrine discovers you shivering toward
the later bloom, her single tusk belated you downer
and into the appearance of meaning, good as the real.

narfed plutod: astir pressures keep you from the goal
and hears science itself beginning to beg for mercy
where you'd benign nor plenty, here's the mark for you
to flake, to score the muted signal, to flood the park

So you'd see the appearance of structure become the thing
itself a meter on the unknown at least in terms of time
or how long it takes to barter from this stat to the plain
and mark sensation into its proper sphere within acts;

mark ascension the swifter means what'd bin there
affirms astar in your own imagining made plain and
simple, how you are met here again along what's made.
this'd dick out, mark the door your own and hold

Doctored on the bin, tie not dictum into layering,
mark the sides your own and measure out directly,
skinning the outer marks without sensation or angle,
but leaving the center bare for others to fill in


heed these aching roofs their own location in the air
or headed into something reminiscent of other lives
they still have their density as something special
in the plenty to which you have given yourself again

and sharp these final signs their own destination in
the arc and center of the act, where they are made
again into seeming and sustenance, another claim
against time bears out along the lighter path.

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- WHY I WRITE

***************


Just doing the work for its own sake, all the rest is gravy, who can tell anyone anything? Vincent Ferrini, from a letter, May 1995

We were going to change the world--that was the line when I was coming up in the sixties. There actually was a sense of commitment and mission, more or less unheard of in recent times, there was a sense that some sort of “we” could replace an old, dying set of linguistic symbols (images) with counters which were more directly accessible to consciousness, there was going to be a revolution in the kind of poetry that was made. Maybe this was only in my own mind, but I did feel a kind of crazy, radical unanimity which linked poets together, not the sort of careerist fending-off-the-wolves approach we have now. Later, when the revolution had been co-opted by the very success it had courted, I wrote out of commitment, or foolishness, or because it was all I knew how to do. Poets are good for baby-sitting and housepainting, a ”friend” told me once... And even later, more recently, that is, I wrote to save my ass, from what exactly I do not know--from the void, the dark emptiness one encounters which is cause itself. Now, somehow, writing is more playful

We were going to take over the world, replace an obsolete discourse with one which was more efficient in its relation of conscious to unconscious, somehow more aligned: no thing but in seeing. But you forget along the way that the way is there at all, and so I wrote for all the reasons one could have, I made it my reason for existence, an esoteric, private activity which explained my moodiness and my inability to share myself with others in intimate relationships, be they colleagues or wives or my own children. I wrote from arrogant self-righteousness to blind, drunken (averted) rage, to the isolation of the secret masturbater. Isolated and you desperate for the company of others, so afraid to be alone in my “genius”, as it unfolded from calm intention through self loathing and sabotage to addiction and personality disorders and the absurd vow of poverty, those were part of the deal, and so I kept writing, day after day, page after page of black scratch on yellow paper. I courted chance, error and those compositional mistakes which the unconscious to penetrate through and into conscious mentation, like Gurdjieff’s monks chanting in such perfect union that the world itself ceases to exist at all.

I became aware of the disjunct and the profunct in my self. At writing, I would continue to feel the sacred rush & focus of depth-diving not experienced in any drug or ecstatic love state. I became addicted to the “passing beyond” one can experience in the repetitions of time and space manipulation in the writing act that one learns to control. I wrote to allay (escape) my depressive states, sinking through them and their associated pain to discover the inebriation of the poem. I did not really want to experience any real feeling at all, and so I stayed in the world of my own creation, with its autism of self and song; “the play of the mind, to see whether there is any mind there at all.” (Olson)

And people loved me, put up with me, though I could not return their love, I was in such a selfish, narcissistic state. I could not return the glow of humanity I could sense in others, even into last year, when I fell into the hole of my self again, the second or third or third-point-five nervous breakdown. Ah, how pure it is, the irony of one’s own isolation and favor all in the name of the poem, sacrificing everything, even love, to the quest, the cause, the act, a false matrimony with the self. Writing is suppressed speech, with its own sense of breath: I chew my lips and crack my knuckles and pick my nose as I write compulsively .

This has all changed somewhat. One year after. Clean and sober. After a year of holing up and not writing. What is now described has no indistinction--”futures favored forward” inclines the day to a more experienced sense of being. “Life is the poem” (Vincent). And what came across from the old to the new is all that was imagined in the restitution of the present which begins upon healing. I could still be lying, having replaced one delusive state with another, but I am still write, as I must, day after day, from a center that is sometimes calm and still and flowing without any palpable sensation of being there at all, following the lines across the page, or free associating on the screen at eighty words a minute, sometimes it is that good.

It was all so calculated, with me a bit player in my own dream. Writing became the self-causal progression through the inchoate and out into the light. And one’s youthful fantasy that one could change (rule) the world effaced to just being there. Our last image of Peter Sellers is as he walks out of his last movie, becoming smaller and smaller as he walks out upon the water, into, what, just into.... So now I continue to write because I must continue putting one word down after another, and then another one, as a web of surprise continues to lead me across my time into whatever it is that is there to be discovered in this spasm which is continuing itself. Today is the tomorrow you were so worried about yesterday (A.A.). I go every weekend to my unfurnished house at the beach to think and dream and act and write and continue.
April 18, 1995

Referents:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet
Eric Neumann, Amor & Psyche
Otto Rank, Art & Artist
Gertrude Stein, What is a masterpiece and why are there so few of them?
Charles Olson, Projective Verse
Johann Huizanga, Homo Ludens

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- ARKSTAR

***************


Sooner here than not, your simplicity carries forth what's new among me; never having spasmed this particular, its a car going forth into other dimensions, and here among the rescue, I am intent still on being in your emergences the one friend you thought I'd be. Still and no other, there is continued amazement at the stand that is there, as, what speaks is also true. And love in the confidences of the heart knows no other, but holds to what is true and simple. I might say that light is true, or that the eye has its own declarations to make. What is not spoken may yet be a sign in the heart that it is making time of itself, and finding that what is there is also true and simple, making the heart a welcome place. Is it so unusual? As yet I'd spoke no outers calling forth one after the angle in and holding: this is still what is real in my own imagining, feelings coming back into the layerings of freedom itself, even though I'd waited almost too long. Its a pattern entirely outside itself, suggestive of the hearts own dominion in what is cast forth from these deeper realms which seem to have been exposed, drawn forth, made visible. After all, you are a singular destiny even to your own promises, those which you have made, and yet I call you in closer to find the heat that is there making allowances for nothing to escape notice or perusal; and here in these, uh, particular expositions, there is something newer making itself known, or at least made visible to the sense of going on.

I'd spin around again and find the center. What is described must also be known--at least in the centers of one's own being, there are areas of cognizance which are aligned with the sensations of their own recognition, that is, felt as flesh and known as one. Voiced sounds are not spectacular but carry forth what is inside. And as one is visible, as there are no secrets from our own transparency, no jettisoned deerbark at all, nor some infinitesimal destiny warped out of newer proportion into seeming itself, these would be allocations of disregard, nor presence, even, though itself described would challenge our outer into its own definitions. Who you are is this, beloved, a sign of the times itself, reinfused beyond where you might be heard, crying out for inclusion, or made into what you are by light itself. If it is half itself, then, what is new is beyond description, nor even recognized but known as the lack to which it corresponds in the mental events by which it occurs. These events are also the hearts own anchor, but made into light by what is also made intense or outer. I'd flame around again, and hold you closer than what is known but kept internal, and thrown aside in the appositions of the known. This would be our secret itself, and made aside by what is song or spoken word, made into seeming by the insistence of the heart and shared by sign into an active participle in the distances we travel, unravel, make infirm but cure or heal in our thrust toward knowing--known in and knowing of. These are the signs that are made in the beginning.



RENOB JONES for you

What's corner to the dot, a manner saying you beyond the telling out is moving before you think to speak there is some semblance of passion to your being, how you are sent one-on-one into the fray, belittling no person before you think or speak; here's a doubt which rings the surface, turning dimension and plane into the scatterings you mentioned at the heart of the matter. I've been here too long to say goodbye, but there is a moment when the rest falls away into nothingness or being, and how the scores are kept is still beyond measurement, in some outer sphere of belonging, you might say. I've held things in their own sphere beyond the hour of remission. What remains is the cool sphere of action for its own sake, or have you met anything in its own regard for who is there and who is not. And thats the total.

Assault lick. No fatter the hour, but skilled at her own touching in tune with the times, here's a movie in your face, framed after the old tunes on the radio again and again. Its a mantra for forgiveness changing from doubt to oil and musk. A friendly smile on your pillow calls the day a longing after nothing, and where love is kept from the air around you, coils and fermentations recall how there is emotion to the laughter in your heart, and what calls out again and again is the sphere of action. In the calling forth from the domain wherein you lie about, thee is spake at framers, flood and chine, and I hear a motive draining forward in your own being to be calm at all which hears them singing out against the tide and flume; it's a dark day in the heart when you hear no music at all, following fall down its roomy spin, leaf to leaving. In the heart you call a name and hear an answer, no solitude in the moon remaining out again.

I'd the door to fall away, marking you out with longer strides than you remember. Its a newer thing to say this or that, but what makes the movie real enough is the heart's own response to tide and flame. This is the hour's reminiscence. In your healing out there is some responding to be made, yet a maiden in her song is sweeter than the longest drive to the moon or taking out the spin and melt of desire's own penetrations. It is the song you remember, it is the day beyond imagining that brings you in and holds the restless heart in its own space. You'd been too far away to remember, yeilding out from the darker portions of your imagining; yet that too falls away into a mute silence and leaves you gasping for light. In the after hours, she shines in the darkened room with love's own beginnings in the heart.

Still the hours remind and stem from nothing longer than dusk. In specific time, you fold and stride along with the intensity of a marker in the sun. Here is where the trail winds outward, forming within scores you'd swept away; internalized specifics say you are the door. In passing, thee is spake aloft and sudden, but the honor of the terms is yet undone, waiting for your call. Here is the specific mention of mountains without regret; here is the longer shade of what's been met in the allowances of time and space, a recluse but fomented calm residing in the dusk.


2


Over the sooner longs, the darker marks are set aside for nobody to remember. This'd been it, but the looter plain was killed in front of you without pity or sign. And the hour itself was a meditation in reverse, scaling the sooner musks with their own destiny into a lesion or a flux. The graves were swept clean, lighted from within, and held infirm by their own imagining. These are the doors you met opening and closed. A house was going up in the wilderness, scoping out the days ahead with their own forgiveness, the trees along the road along the river glowing with their own being, calling you toward the breaking shore where there is no plain besides. And here's the others in their darkened automobiles, meeting in silence where there is no longer any tide to the answer of your mentation. And here is the moon breaking apart from its own remissions, falling into the sea with a force and imagination you don't particularly recall. Where's the door, you ask; but there is no focus to your words, and they fall apart before they are spoken, looting the light of its own forgiveness.

After you speak, it is a slighter silence for remembering, it is a passion in its own discourse to allow anything at all. Later scores revolve into imagining, and hoard presence itself like a forgotten summons. Into the lighter gasps she melts behind you, forming allowances for what was never spoken but reminded like something in the mists. The later calm forgives you too, answering out from the longer reach, speaking from the heart's own beginning that you are in tone, in palace, in the formatted spume of words arising from your own centers. And that's no rubbing in the dark, you muse, but a speaker in the heart's own Drive-In, answering calls from other planets in the forgotten language, a stroker from his own specific destiny. I'd hear something or other in the silence of the day, but there is no air to carry it. What sounds are left aside are beyond description, and your calesthenics in the jailyard have finally come to something, you guess. A darker light emanates from within yet has no shadow. Are you after gold, after all?

I'd heard the stories of the bears dancing together up in the meadows, and he had, too, reminding me how the connection makes light of us, makes us into stories in the darkened skies. She leaves the door ajar, and calls for me to enter. I do. In the darkness of your body, in the inner spaces where I can touch you, I can hear the signings of your heart welcoming me into being. It is no dream, finally, and what the air does around us is also a welcome song. In these particular hours, there is a finality to love's answering tone, a spinning formation of light between which the angels call their own day a longer song than you'd permit, almost like a single wisp of something, another donated ebb and flood shining through the years again. It's a longer road than you'd met again, but still the hours grate against reverse and calm, and still the road yawns apart from its own calm stroke. You give and give again, but the still heart hears its answer in the silence of the time. The door opens and closes with its own calm, marking out the distances you forgot to measure from the map and chain of how you left the years apart and then brought them together again, the tides rushing in again.


3


A larger angle signs away from where you are. A following or flowing ensues or closes in from behind, ringing away from no new thing under the sun; but spoke was tailed aside this reminder in your heart. There's the door and here's the sun, a signing from there again that you are meeting within doubt. But there is no other, you think, and call the day forward from its own secrets, cloaking the air with specific detail. Houses dot the scene with their own destinies. What takes place inside the deeper reaches is beyond description or imagination but still true in the hours before and after. It is the spoken sign of another age reminding itself that cardboard and plastic are the icons of the period, a newer detritus than what had been there in the silences of the heart. Nothing begins again but scores the dirt around the floor with newer seeds and flowers blooming from the sand. It is the hour of something new, and you speak slowly, not thinking that it might also be real. In the hours that follow, signs themselves become a longer plane of attention for recall and doubt. It is now.

Perhaps you went too far. It's no distinction to be further along the road than the others in the dark. No moon means that you have to follow. And in the dusk of time itself, there is a slight sensation of hope which is singed beyond allowance. Cars flood the air. Roadways are specific intentions from the builder's standpoint, but really only a suggestion that there might be a score to drive. Light. The other folks are just marking time, droning and drooling in their lisps. Cooling and crawling on the lists. A fool would spy; others would knot. Now there's a hardened force leading you on into shelter, into fermented sky, into shifting rims. It is now another force within, and what was transformed yesterday is a callus today, saying dusk, or "sheep". I don't know. These are the shores upon which unknown waves break and spin; these are the doorways into another realm which deny entry at the same time as they encourage you to press on. Even prepositions become hazy, whether either of us is real at all; still, where love allows songs to be formed on your lips there is no outer to the skin which wraps you in your self, your precious self of which you are so very protective and defensive--it sheds like an abandoned wound, staining the earth with its evaporation, making benign all that follows.

Oh no. This is an hour beside time which has slowly passed into its eternity, its writing. Would there be enough to go around? Is this a tale told by another? We are anchored in silence. Is there really "data"? You push your ladder into her flowing robes; when I call out, I hear your name answering me in the flavor of your own speaking. It is the musk of signs that bears me along, and as love's beginnings flood the turf with their own calm, it is in the morning's moving that you hear me call out and cry for what you have given into me, it is in the signing of the heart that the light begins to burn against the two of us, making something melt into itself again, and what you hear is without words, only a slighter score than light itself, making whole what was not.



STAY

Staid and elder, the sending sands, beached outer, went forward into seeming or pleasantness; or elder still. Nothing moved again, but held into what was there in the mists of chance, a beach was raised from nothingness but an abrasive powder scaled forward to the seas edges were not made even or is this a leaner? You might remind yourself of the effort at seeing, how difficult the very management of chance is in the actives of what you do intermixing attentions into the span of light which you seem to occupy even beyond the naming of things where attention itself is made into light for your own seeming as how it is. I'd no outer, but held in these hours after you call my name, looking up into the light as mediation is almost overwhelmed into who you are again, and holding out from here to there, the beach beckons as time and tide revolve from indistinctness and made some mother of your heart again.

No more than that. I've clamored after you one smooth into the next, and held what is too far away to be recompense. Was this your day again? Don't call me, I'll call you into the rooms you left behind in staid sadness was not recalled but named from this very spot you culled out and sold simple colors where the doorways chime what's your chance trance interning here to mark the day at autumn or its opposite, held like a string emanating from the spider's belly, his own soul transformed out again and again, but still the simpler terms are not met here or in disgust, even, but in the pride of the hour which remits you forward into these are the hours we missed together, thee of after longing--was this a terminal redux, the froward claim unnoticed at late hedges, spent where I held too far aside to say enough. Power the army of love in the cold, cold ground. I listened to your name against my skin. I held you close and whispered songs and focused his door into opening sails and followers, another shore wept aside in promises, or in promises wept aside in remembered airs the division of silence in your own partitions is yet a claim to dusk or doubt, a newer focus from the black warrior in your heart healing outward chimes are the rough voiced profit from doubters are the holding pattern you mentioned me to the others, I called you out into shimmering light; in his own sadness was the terminal reduced to nether reaches a skill, a flaming beach house was a meeting place to say a day a dusk, another flaming foreigner in his house of cards was not welcome, no longer welcome in the house of the raining king you sailed the beaches down the rising mists at the end of day, color to the hour, color to the kin's forwards. These are not mentioned from the handles on the door, from the lighters on the foaming canister.

I'd said this is the day and formed my own persistences from doubt to lesion, from angular recall into a heavier shambles the movies on the scream I met you in between the house and garden showers of light, showers of the roomier pain in tense or kept former, nowhere was I met in your heart a simpler man sought the way and pain to recall love' specific densities healed me out into color and the remaining signs. Spoke. Not from these indistinct allocations, but I heard his voice retreating down the hallways in some tale tole spore; shim-shammie wheeling palms; I've sent them scattering down my own rooms are specific and said intense.

I'm in the moon between you and what what. Teach me how to do. Flail these souls their own inner doubts away in tents and outer. He's too far gone to be an old man, and too loving to have given up. Waits. Make me simpler doors rewind from the mooner spin. I'd have kept you down too far to witness the evidence from my own claims. He'd rather wait until you have the money, but the car is dusted beyond measure. And when I cross the street, it's not too sunny in the empty lanes, and where they cool you down is still a memory of my own hailing frequency. And this a looter plain.

It's a slow draw from left to right. He heals them from the indistinct shadows they create in their utter ruminations from doubt. It's a clearer show you make into something imprecise to be told that here is the door and there is the plate on the floor. I have no doubts. I implement nothing but heal the causeways left in between my own showers and the later implants she said were waiting in the wings. No, it's a dull day in hell when you change pajamas and call her back into the light. I've said it before, you know, there is no change in the pocket of light. And there are no bills in the walled towns of the nether cities. It's all right. It's all change and walled cities, there in the realm of the newer sciences. No big buildings were scored alert, but read as lines and fathoms, as roomer calms and the doubt you said between us. Its the model of the day and I hear her singing. I hear the singing in the back of my mind and it is all right. I hear the singed waves of hair you spoiled me doubters on the moon. What can I say? I held you in the layer cakes of chance and surveyed my own disasters where I might. No, it's no fun to get high alone. It's rather a selfish air you deeply inhale and then spin out into the room; and where you kept aside was not some simpler harmony but the layers on the floor you kept aside, a meditation wherein and outer. I've said this before, too, but wherever you go, there you are, but not so simple as stars attracted beyond their own dimensions into some scale unthought unsaid and the mooner in his palm a spinning dragon where you let go too soon to measure and too late to feel uncomfortable. I was a chance for you to finish, and clear the pages out one by one into a specific order you might not have imagined had you not been going so fast, but then let them go into their own space like children, or like emotions you culled out into the shore and plainer mists were left behind, and culled out beyond the terminals as you rushed to finish out the day into something recalled, into something chanted from a great distance like a scream at night in the darkness of your heart, and waking unafraid, you roll over and go back.

So what had flamed up resided there before notice, before the model itself, herself. Testing out what had happened was not so much an intention as a residue of thoughts and feelings laid bare in the intensity of emotion recollected in futility, but harbored on into the fog, into the confusion of the present moment where you'd said perhaps that there was more to remember than met the eye. I'd held onto the past far too long to be comfortable with it, and the evasions of the age were no help either. In the salient moments of recall and doubt, you felt passion arising within spheres of action, culled out perhaps from the memories of who you were in the passing moment. The doorway opened and there was a dark hole on the other side, a horror, a fundamental emptiness, and yet you pursued the pathway into the morning's moments.

A scored light of other rooms with their furniture scattered in a design from the other side of the moon. A style of reminding let you down into the forest pathways, linear spoons wherever met no single pattern beyond later days and nights you scaled afar and rhythmed clearer spores their own sensations described or fluttered into safety, after all, what we all seek in the emotions of the day their own totals unknown and made specific into these and others. His words ring quietly on the radio, and the intent of these actions is not any clearer now than at other times. You are here alone in the silence of the heart, and what is beating out is the tenure of the model in her warmth and feeling. She is a moment in the room where you are keeping your heart. She is the tempo of the hours from which you define your reaching out.

Later in the day, another person comes into the room and disturbs your solitude. Is it escape that's on your mind? I met nothing in the hallways of my mind, only doors, walls, a flooring made of colored tiles left over from other jobs. It was not so much alone as a change of tense, as if, here in the moment there was no syntax or proposals relegated into silence by the beating of your heart. A beginning, perhaps, but not anything you'd write home about. A wrinkle and a beating heart. Another focus laid bare by the moving monuments. They measured it, this bruise that was left on the kneecap by a madman who later disappeared into a snowstorm. Nothing was mentioned about cause and effect, but still there was a slight edge you might remember in the darkness of your hours and sensations. I don't know. Maybe it's the layers and stratifications you hesitantly describe as your own that relieve the day. A remainder.

Still the model of your feelings is not an abstraction but contact with another human being, not simply "a part of yourself", but a definition that there is someone there in the room with you making a plain statement that this is the day to start ahead and go into the future. Without making any specific references to this or that, it's a pressure and a promise at the same time, a demand to become yourself in the darkness that follows light, in the waiting time for who they are in the midst of chance. I'd say this is the day, but there is no assurance that anything flows from anything else, only a faith that it will come. If you book them, they will come. And come again, an advertisement made from a phone booth in the midwest, a color of darkness which you have not seen before, a faith that there is one word following the other in the happiness you have.

It had palled beyond the recollection of the hours. What you'd met was not so much another hour as a description of doubt. In her heart, you were the one and only, and this was the source of your beginning, of the start. The heart's start.

The light is not a metaphor for anything, it's a glimpse of manifest no thing, words don't have any room for this, they recoil to their rightful place among the objects. The divine is a metaphor for a metaphor, distance inside of distance, the kingdom of objects raised to a higher power through encounter with an altered subject. The trick is to erase the boundaries, and to encounter what remains at the invisible line of that erasure. Self as manifest no thing, paradox compressed to a point of conscious absence, inclusive of and entirely other than. Two things in one....

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- BONE APE TIT - arse cosmologica

***************


By furcation n’eer within, or horsed outer, I’d acclided her pinty schemo, yet yarded out the funky planes of inattention. (Horse, I.,a-2). Nor fine recline, nay, a pinto inherits them as has, no let in semplo yet asided herein you’d suk’d me plento, then aparted nor the skanky pline, shuck’d, jive’d, a taller musk than you’d afforded into the marks now.

Bloe to dam-nite figger: Your own beginnings are hard approached within tempo and design by unknown participants you’d sunk too far below to knock-‘er-up. Thor not fern. A new appointmento yard-afforded toward the newer skein or fiermo, here! Buttressed and calm, she’s a finer nugget than your ever-chewed formation, now her giant tits flux your designer memory from without fragments, after all, “a man who hates women can’t be all bad” (Foment, ***, I, a-3), nor calm intent a withering force for declination and pursuit as if (duh) AS IF yet occluded increments had not been worth revealing into the summation of your famous loss of character.

I’m a sultan’s risk, yet a hedon, nor a firmer scar on her abdomen. Still you’d been a man abandoned into his how sinking feeling, yet a firmer star not beckoned would not have been intense or outer, other than what was provided by the younger star she’d been a pinto in her musk sent into the world without feeling anything at all in the sentiments you’d saved thus far.

What’s remembered in the silences of the morning unfolding lays about your heart like spinach on the plate smothered with butter and lemon juice. It’s a huff’d inhalant smothering your light inside, a pollutant from the dark star smothering your flame with its own cystic fibrosis of the spirit turning all inside into a sticky mucous substance without poetry or information. Spanky hears your moans and smoothes aside to clear the dusk of its own stars in hand and underway, yet the insubstantial of the moon leans into your smoke like some wandering vine dangling down from the bookcase beside you, and the reeling, celtic hymns squeeze from the speakers’ pneumatic anabactine substances elongate and squirm along the edges of the room, snaking under the rug with a hollow sound.

Introduction of Federal Butt-sniffing Dogs will begin this weekend at all major airports; they are specially trained at undisclosed locations by unidentified informants who have been randomly selected from lists of the Surfer Clans. Held forth like a short story. Consult Homilies, page 331, left column from the bottom of your seeking, a veritable ‘passing beyond’ of intent and pleasure. No mistakes in nature, all signs readable by the eye that sees (seize). You’re no country, to be sure, yet a smother steers aside from hamburger teats twice the size (seas) of all that precede intent into its own oblivion, to be sure, yet sculled internexus floods the viewing platform aparted (apartheid) from extra-polations north and south, a gloved hand strokes the universe, the one poem (unit-verse) from the islands Apotheosis and Foreplai of the left hand of darkness, starkness along the trail “no touching” printed on the hands and lands of the foreign observers declaring a mismatch.

Butt knot for me, no sonnets deride the sunset with misinterpretation on the wings of doves and violins from a plywood sign has structured the light with calm intention, nor arrogant repast (as: seen {scene} again) and the re-passed who’ve been lapped out against the tide no strength as parts the lines between your legs I’d eyed ‘em Haddam suffice as knots noted butt first furs elide and spunto from lower signs raised one chakra at a time she blows and fathoms one suck at a time. Two more corpses found at the back of the train. God comes in the sign of the line, a stroke at the end and you’re home free enough to mark “return” as the ticket to ride. Notes noted: (Assumbrian) Flux to Tine, the history of puns, 1854, Farks and Dunham, London, p. 34 &f. AND (in Houston) The Puncture Wound Ahead, 1973, Bo-Ass Books, The Light, 875-999. Stroke your plennie.

Summery. The long grain winds ahead and sports your own dimensions far apart in sign and tempo made one by the beating of the same heart overall makes the day new from head to toe your own rhymes are forced apart by the tongue in hand she views the scene and spurts ahead no mere manner to the forms and tallow a seeker still.

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- HUEGOS REVOLTOS

***************


1

Sudden languor the cool air fills the rest along your sudden waves collapsing sentences are here: the air enough resembles what it is to be the same connective ide to ide, the roomier calms are showers clear and strong the other days have chalk along the sides where move the weightier climes, his eases wrapt or left to the forearm sliding across the page. You kept to yourself too long; he clears the wages from their accustomed slots, greased ovens betide her frozen warps at singular distances recalled, the day you left for some strange place without goodbyes, the place that is the place.

Is kept aside: again you clamber forward climbs the issue kept aside again against the tides upward bound to slice apart. Your own airs have moods inside, or salient features are cooler still without definition imprecise wallows of eastern fringes as something blank filled in from outside, perhaps even by the slim tactic of looking up a line or two but never down, the Acrophobic Avenue is forged ahead of where you are; the other friends, alert shadows have kept them up so far along what becomes a name of easier things, an association is both a bunch of guys who write the same songs as well as a place to jump off from.

This has been going on for some time, you know.


2

A fugitive, perhaps, another air or languor. Smoothing in the days you called your own particular time, in no particular place, with nothing much to do, called it out or outer, or just another day, the anthem they call across the canyons, leaping The waves waving here and there against the head-spinning tides, blowing the inside of your head apart into light reflections spinning around the room with no-one to share with is now a thing of the past, your old networks diminished, responses tingling further apart than even you'd imagine; the crosses borne up against the tides, kept just about this far apart and then another hungering boat cast up against the shore, his own errors left aquiver in the chill from which there is no retreat but the light broken up into fragments on the ceiling and on the walls, chicken-scratched and fallow, where green and yellow call the thing sincere or opposite. A more intelligent man would see this through an eternity or an entirety, whichever comes first.

"Haggis Revoltos" is perhaps a side dish, or else a part of speech, a splinter group, or a syndrome, or something under discussion. You recall no wasted space on the edges of the notebook, even the discus was heaved up just a little too far to be taken seriously; no, you certainly wouldn't want to do that, now, or never, howling sings the same as going too far from the headier distances.

Even my own heart skips a beat; once in awhile there is no more rain to call your own. Distances are made somehow cooler and more angular, mental substances which are moved to and from their places of definition, not even moved very far from the shadows; you left the coolers roughed out and claimed, for something less than perfect is clearly the way to go, dotted lines parch the landscape's fuller arrows and contradict the more or less imprecise spin of the ball collaging off the top of the racket-wheel turned, and a rather noisy elbow dug into your side has these lessons to permute the loaners wrapped-out. It is too far off the line to remember anything at all: clearly the day you met them here or there, singular, too full, un-remembered and un-repentant, but somehow cooler in white than tan; and what you do with the angular distances recalls nothing to no-one.

In the sharper times you left them standing in the hallways never looking back for nothing, to look back on the little guy in a field of cows barking across the stony fences, through the underbrush with no-one around. Along the way, you called them farmers, lurking at the edges of the fields where there might have been a name or two to leave you in the air, alone, along, among and swept out, the airs about the time you called me out into the associational rooms, the air of which--the smell--recalled you. Forward sentences are cast, this term the rest of which you are already gone along.

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- MORNINGS AND EVENINGS

***************


Laughter, schooler to palm, what's inside but makes no sense unknown beyond seeming, but holds along to the sides, in inert sentences, but you are waving at the sides, and heals to former slights, astir and bending, to tongue in and hold her at the sides, a speech or morning mood, what's told is not a smoother line, but something slowly unfolding in movement from one side to the other. This is the holder stuff, and moving along the wavier soups to become a thing in love's eye would store, becalm, and rise to the occasion, stiff and erect within you, a sentience or passion to light release in the time of your own moving, hears the day align into something real, storing the heart's images one after the other is not another hooter on the plain but a forest in his eyes, trees lined up beyond memory, but noting lost arrows scattered among your own memories is still the stuff of dreams, and made like something not released, it's white to the touch and spreads around you, either light or its first cousin in the streets: This is the day you spoke aloud, and mentioned one thing after the other, love's own positions on the floor, in the air, in the mind, after all, where it starts and holds.

Floater spooled, what's stuff to the grease is enough to wonder, or make something out of nothing, inert to begin, but former to what is not mentioned here, it is still here where you have not seen it before, and in some distinction reclaims the past in a pooler wisp, his demented intentions are not too soon recalled, but stay within specific parameters to describe what is going on before you. It is here and no outer spoils and deride pleasure at her distant claims on your attention. What is going on before you notice are the relevant distinctions, and the details are held from color to doubt, another sailing would be this in what is going on before you notice is the relevant distinction, and the details are held from color to doubt, and another sailing would be this in what scores from the remaining sentences; easier days have still been described, and hold you one after the other into the future, as his own names for you are as yet indistinct, and if you are used, as he said, it is not noticed, and her own scores were left aside in the rush for definition, collated as it were into a simpler order for description, rotated from beyond the paler stories within which there is intention and fluctuation. Doors open and close. There is within the quest a newer tune to imagine in your own destiny, a rap from the coast, and if you notice it at all, it would be a little too late for anyone to help you to the door, through it into the next room; after all, something lesser than doubt would welcome you into service, into use, into the future of the others in their own ways, it is how it is held in conscience that the beckoning hours have their way before them, and what meditations are beheld, there is some agony in their hesitations, there is some refusal in their consciousness of style, there is some relief in their very existence when nobody welcomes you at the gate, and your own history is perhaps a weakening of the day into its own forgiveness and simplicity, there is some air to relieve the less fortunate hours into their distinctness, and it is here that the bellows fluctuates between presence and the next day.

You hope that she would call, or that there would be a sign of forgiveness, that the attributes themselves would elongate into space or at least into the air between you; lessons from the previous realm specify a newer hour for islands, or for release, but the silence is undeniable, and the doorway is still a glistening attribute of the calm which fills history at this moment. Whatever solitude is indicted within presence, it is no other that beckons but the specificity of acts in their own magnification of the mundane. Poetry is still a possibility, but it is less so than before the moment of which we now speak; poetry was a distinction made in the haste of the hours to conclude the day's elevations, but those, too, have passed into a historical necessity which precludes the monument and its own descriptions. There is no "other" to this historicism, but still the delay occurs within which you are defined. It is the here and now which speaks to us, and wherein no outer, but poetry itself is called into question, into usefulness.

This is a test, of course, but you do not obey, and fall into color or light, waving a lighter line than you might have before you hesitated into action, into color, into history; those who have passed this way have either been ignored or left outside in the rain to rust and blow away. Where there was justice, now there is the law. Where there was ecstasy, now there are endless dialogues about love and its place in the world. Without any passion, there is a simple lust to the denials of the passage. And simple complaints fill the air without meaning. If you would simply wait, there might be a sign, you think, but it is rushing, this time after time itself has ceased to be beyond the rougher airs, intense and denied, you are a witness to your self, and hold your own poverty up as an example of simplicity. It is pertinent to description, for instance, that you might find objects in their density to be themselves in revolution from the commonplace, attempting in their vanity to dissolve and become pure light.

Would you hold? This would be an outer plus. The other days wait. What's forced as follows, and here you are intent upon what is passing, but hollowed into something less infirm than fortunate, and in some, uh, disdain is passion made less than perfect but in its sensations more profound than movement might be in its own lessons, and by what has becalmed you in this positionless document, there is some following to be made from what is here. You hold aside; you determine to these allowances in the dark that there would be light, that there would be a lessening of rancor, to whom beheld, but not following, and thereby told from what you have permitted to less accurate emissaries within, to hold apart no longer in remiss or patter, but spoke aloud to term and sign, to fold these reminiscences therein or outer; this would be it. Another spectacle is resumed, and in your own heat, there is a density, a portion or tentacle of light to what is seen, and in becoming, there is speech, there is action and discord, but holding on to the riper days, a roof, a peach, a newer star within is sentenced on beyond doubt. Following, then, the speech of others, a line becomes the forward spoke and chain. Here is the door to another room, and within which some dancers at the pole, climbing into the air with lightness and being, stories from hours left behind, from the days and nights of a calm remission, made within the heart like a witnessing. Ah, if only there were a sign to make to the others, an allowance for what is real within acts, a focus, or a lighter scheme unraveling slowly, there you would hold and wait. But not too soon. But not now; no, it is simpler still to do your thing and wait for the immersion of the hours to float away.

Heart to shore; hour to palm, the open door waits for the ringing of the hours, or spokes to shoals within. the pooler skims what speakers flip and spin. A floater in the pool. Perhaps what pulled aside was not a destiny but a fate. Perhaps what made the day was still waiting at the light. You do not know, for there is only following to be made, and no mistaking what is there for something else but for what it is. Time passes, and you see your own calm approach as a sensation, and not a progress. At the start, there is promise and intensity, but no warning. Within the frame of action, there is possibility and renewal, but no hesitation. And in the minutes there are signs of revocation and a spoken future of which you are part and sum. Would you hold? How would the hours mean? But what is settled is a progression, a futurity, a motive to light. I'd be the name I have, and then pass into another realm intact, without position or demand, but at home in the meetings of the signs I have made. Here there is no hope, only term and flame; there is the flush and spin of love's anchors wealing forward in the time of time itself. It would be light, or the stroke of flesh upon flesh. There is the motive of the hours.

What spoke within term, thus was out from what is there, but in no other maintained from this to that; was to term, and then a passing thing, bit to sign, flowing forward without inexorable density from the inner marks were flooded but also signed by light in the scheme of outer denials made like this and movies held apart are sighing drunk on what is inside, in relation to, or out of the mark as held by the force within, is holding still in time, at here.

It is what signs between lines, sum to part, the angular distance coming into, within focus, or posted outer spoils recluse and calm. What's plussed outer, coded forms relinquishing into meaning, what speaks through spontaneous discharge, sahaja of light, the internal gloom made formal by precedent, by history in its claims for attention to seem, then, at being what is real enough to declaim, to devour head tail to ouroboric intent, he says, in what is thrust outer foils presume whiptail and outer, to be the one or the other, but lined out beyond the news, as momentous as it might become. You are reminding of what is there beyond the screen of your own inattention to the messages from your own receptors, antennae in the night, whipped out, "antennae of the race" Pound calls 'em. That is really too accurate to be passed over as a gloss or metaphor on the sensory apparatus of conscious declamation, not simply a character set or induction of social role to the discard persona of "poet". His is a singular density, "being there" as even Gertrude has it, a creature of his times, but not, seriously, anything more than that. Evolutionary personality set, gained from the press of it, indeed, might be more, yes there might be more to it than "that".

Pronouns declare intentions within language's structures, and even attitudes toward 'the new' might be more than simple careerism. It is the set of the thing in its domain, the character of the person underway, and, and, we add, the nature of the battle taking place as well as the conditions and rules whereby the ground rules are set.

Thomas Lowe Taylor -- TURF

***************



The bird of paradise recalls you toward the three graces in your moist and sentimental hours, through the signs on the floor that tell you, yes, you have gone too far this time, and let them down again for hours, floating in time, moving too far along to become anything new enough to have them waiting in line for the rest to occur too soon to wait and too long to measure, in the occult hours bending forward in another language you forgot to learn the last time you were here, smoothing through this forest of honor and letting them rest along the highway. It is now and then that you come along across the others as another newer thing in the air, moved too soon to be signed off in light or dark, there are no others in the hours ahead, and you sail through them one by one and call forward for some carpets to be stacked.

These are newer signs which named you thus, and thus again, turning the day's hours inside out with repetition and recompense, and making your own colors something to recall; hours and days of motive which lend an air of magnitude to your own thoughts, turning the other terms into an aura of light superimposed over thought and action in the in-between hours you said were not exposed or threatened but left to their own, they would decide where to emplace themselves, the doors were ringing inside your mind like another color and said to be some things are too soon to allow and very smooth besides, allowing something more to becalm the tides without pity or remonstrance, as we have said before, and before that, there was nothing more to mention but the saliences, the salivations, and the excretions.

This was another day you said hello, and smoothed the hours recklessly within the terms of what was there before you looked: It was new and smooth, and had symbolic features to render them one on one below the hours you said were this and thus. Something sudden foiled the anchors within their definitions for what was either latent or fostered and said against them one on one the movies settled into this forest of fragments where you have color to tell them which way to go, with red and blue trees set against the yellow foliage to heave them once and for all the foraging monsters of doubt eating out and staying slim to heed them still and later, mounted and sudden as the songs are settled out into their exact repetitions for the images to empty out and stay that way, you are still heaved aside with a grandiose air of refusal.

Hovered overside, and sled them further sailing, one into the other was the reigning error in their weighs and ballasts, foreign enough, or slipped them edgewise and smart, and said they were too firm to recognize in passing, but slithered the rest resting here and there you were the one recognized in the simpler terms for doubt or utterance, and this was the thing made into a suspect, a rising thing, a falling thing; and between what was said and what was thought, nothing remains of the unbidden excess of those who favor these alternatives to some other kind of thing you might imagine in savoring the attitude that some things are better off left alone than removed from their contexts and scalped, you might say, of their integrity, and left for dead along the highway, smoothing out their own hairlines into a newness.

There were some days when you just wanted to say "This is not the sky I imagined flowing through your abyss." And the natural reflex is to bend to one side and then stretch out both forward and backward, loosing the energies of your own latency onto the plane of action, where the simpler achievements are settled hour by hour in the less appropriate terms you have for this: One and two and three. The lighter hues are sandwiched between the more erudite layers of material, like the symposium the clatter-bell and the mellifluous one, in his polished category of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It was not a mirror at all, but intense passion directed at strangers, and hollowed out without pity or sensation, merely described by Mind in its absoluteness to become something made out of leather and old wood.

Older climates perjured the air with noise. They were moving across a flattered plain with innocence to ride them backwards into time removed at spatial disturbances recalled to their own lingering doubts regarding the purposes of life, assuming one was aware enough to set it all straight with a glance or two, psychic energies radiating outward from the nimbus of light haloed out into space from her globelike forehead a continent-sized dayglow suitcase of money hanging from the parachute, glowing coals for eyes, and the lighter terms were against the tides your own wooden casques fluttering buds of angular substances tooting along the white rose highway with his noses draining into the sink, sinking into it all together was soon enough to recall them to the utter disturbances of your own terms for this or that.

This was it, he said, and let the implications rise to the top like creamery light in your hands the answer calling in verb to verb, the lingering lights were falling black to green and then saying who you were to the others; this was another matter entirely. The masks of the soldiers were emblazoned with the portrait of their god, Self-enough, and featured many different colors and interpretations for your own distinct impressions laid out from one side to the other. You stopped. The inner doubt was tinged with a slight suggestion of excelsior, a cellophane definition of what was going on that would have left you isolated and unexpected, in the new movies roughed out and told to stay in the back room until the bug guy came with his clever nets and tape recordings of fluttering sounds, in order to dance with them now.

There were others included in the glance. What was at first only a sudden thing became more than doubt itself could afford in its declinations toward a fuller sign for the existence of itself; no, it was not something heathen that filled the rooms with a sensation of being there itself; no, it was not a singular demonstration that mental illness was but a prelude to some higher state; it was just that the grey fog that became thought itself was more initiation than doubt. And every day, there were more and more indications that what had started out perhaps as a prank was becoming an international quirk. The openings and closings of the great darkness were coming more frequently as the days passed. And who you were was not just some kind of song, it was a position and an attitude that left you naked and defenseless.