Poetry
five
Mosquito wakes me up
Mosquito wakes me up in the night bites my cheek my knuckle
I hear it first in the right ear try to sleep and then the left
I’m giving up because sleepless now I bristle everywhere
with old humiliations what ring in me inexplicable stupid hot
and minor I have always thought of itch as property of mind
but of course some feelings do derive from things I can hear
cars in the street it’s about 4:00am I had a cup of hot water
with lemon I remember my parents warming their cars
in the morning before work the different chores I am relieved
I do not have to attend to I attend to my nascent Mahayana
practice world of mind or sphere is distinguished and continuous
with form as opposed to what in the West we might consider
matter form what we have no word for the thing-event the measure
the assignment of perimeter mind as openness within relinquishment
of human desire to classify I am thinking of this in terms
of itch and my desire to locate isolate diagnose what the feeling
is and where and how and to what extent and how can I
diminish and trying to determine what is indicative vs what is
and what the versus is or indicated the infinitesimal in the fulcrum
what hinges in the sieve what ugly variables curiosities performances
we contort ourselves and store unthinking but I lose the wind for example
the sound of light even as I remember light low hum I will go I think
for a jog the heel falling the ball and then the other make myself
known to me at what speed another car now I remember
the movement score we practiced to receive and embody and release
all of the information physical and psychic of a room how responsive
we are to this the richness of space damp erotics of the bass
now passing in the night I mean the morning the fourth car
the sound of the axle bouncing clicking a car door opening and shut
another acceleration an alarm now another door another car
my head itches things awakening moving turning into language
another car or perhaps one of the cars of the door before a bird another
car the sky most magnificent indigo now I never get to be with this
color remembering trying to sleep by synchronizing breath with
Max’s breath in sleep feel of him his hair his face the jewel lights
of another car there is something in the body his and my own
a feeling out disappears in without the obligation he is breathing
I am watching for feeling to become meaning more birds construction
I thought I had misplaced the pencil I was using and of course it was
in my pocket all along here where it hurt me and I ran all the same
Sex fills with memory
Sex fills with memory of other sex. Forgetting.
Brain like a weather vane rooted to a barn and echoing
with entropy. Brain is an organ metonym for fire.
Speech what the switch makes burn and disappear.
You are in my ear with the part of you that tastes
and I hasten in my meaning to curl into a letter.
Skin becomes a brain at the faintest stroke of memory.
Mind lights the organs I am composed of symbols
which have also truer function beyond what they inhere.
In I am here I am by means of preposition
the failure of a phoneme to salt the muscle of a shifting.
Body the mysterium the abacus the disks titrate to form
the basis of a social sense. Alien conspiracies made lingual
by anatomy. Mise en abyme the faith of agony
and pleasure a net two bodies apprehend in one another.
Mind goes a blessing I am vessel for what consuming
I become. A pyre of you appear with every entrance
I am getting I am forging what the hole
makes in me makes a turning when I think I am remembering
what I see and what I hold and what you are is disappearing.
Incitements
We endeavor to experience the language that waits underneath the obligations we feel for language to mean, to impress, to communicate, to assemble, to work
We support ourselves and one another in finding what barriers may exist for us around the liberation of our respective speech
We try to get ahead of the habit to inhibit the unexpected and uncontainable pleasures of voice
Poetry is what happens when no one is looking
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Take pictures of language as you explore a place you’ve never been before
Download your google search history
Dance for at least ten continuous minutes, lie down in corpse pose, if different places in your body were parts of a village what sorts of occupations would your various limbs, organs, and sensations have (my lungs are blacksmiths, my knees are cobblers)
Research the etymology of the first word you think of or look at, histories of usages, crossings of language and civilization, bastardizations, obscure and discontinued meanings, associations, etymology can come from something like Oxford English Dictionary, it can also come from Your Own Personal Etymology of a given word (its history and presences in your life)
Note language that feels particular to your job, whatever that may be right now (“work the file” / “ripe for social”)
Describe what you imagine to be the journey for every element of food within a particular meal, from ingestion, to preparation, to shipment, to cultivation, and maybe to a context that stretches even earlier than this
Compose a history of lovers where everyone gets one sentence
Compose a history of lies you have told
Zoom your view of a google map to a point where you can see names of towns and cities, imagine and describe the buildings, work, environment, spirit, colors, and any other associative perfumes of any place with a name that interests you (Lost City, West Virginia; Nothing, Arizona; Santa, Idaho; Hell for Certain, Kentucky)
Using only nonliteral and automatic terms, describe an unpleasant physical experience (headache, exhaustion, indigestion)
Identify as many manifestations as you can of grief, joy, agony, or curiosity around a particular element (rubber and where it comes from, its colonial history with Henry Ford in the Amazon, its applications in flip-flops, condoms, the tires of cars and tanks)
Write a continuous uninterrupted cartography of your body past the point where you feel you must stop
Describe your day so far but you can only use prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and pronouns; you can use these as though they were nouns, verbs, adjectives, but you may not use actual nouns, verbs, or adjectives
Write a letter to someone who is dead
Our visual experience of memory tends to be closest to language, but if you choose another sense, try to compose the most exhaustive catalogue you can of memories that come to mind; what are your foremost specific memories in terms of touch, scent, taste, sound
Look in a dictionary for a word you may have seen before but didn’t really know the meaning of (pusillanimous, propitious), attempt to translate into a dance or wordless song the meaning that is relayed to you, translate this back into any words that come automatically to mind
Make a list of questions, observations, critiques, and associations that come to mind when you look at pornography
Keep an ongoing list of one word selected from every news / media article you read
Describe any series of images you scroll through on social media, but only in terms of textures
What do you think might be the constitutive elements of particular dust in your home
Doesn’t It All Go to Vinegar Margaret
the calisthenics the records the portioning of
pleasure the karmic deals we make with no one
but ourselves and the conviction that a secret
can manifest a force of absolute and inevitable
justice or work can the raft I call
supposed to the fractures the splintered obligations
whose notions of purpose lodge stupidly in the ball
of my foot so intractable the pain becomes
the given the duty I mean the point
so I water the plants so I move the papers
from this pile to that pile I sever my habits
from all of my devices I sever my reliance
upon food subsidized by corn and other sugar giants
I don’t go there anymore anywhere
that requires an emission above a certain threshold
I cut what makes me sluggish or enacts a kind of
harm which I regret to say is kind of all there is
is harm I regret to say I say
and say it all the same and this accomplishes what
the admission the down to zeroing I have made
my sutra speech the follicles of behavior
the dye should I say processed I imagine
in an assembly line of adolescent goths I have been
at different intervals the kiddo all of me piddling up
inertia with a constant want machine
if harm is how I spend more than half my life
what does that mean for me democratically meaning
is democratic yes or no determined I mean
by the most of us or the more of us at least
or if I am more than half my life asleep
does that become reality can it could we
just say the real is governed by the majority
or gerrymandered by the algorithms of our various lonelier
and lonelier diets or shall we acknowledge that
judgment by systems of half fail us as much as
nomenclature by systems of two
fail I fall I let the limbs go before the mind imposes
fall I fill myself with nothing where nothing was
and then I breathe again as I have since I was born
the most minimal thing I can do that qualifies as living
nothing fixes everything but there is no future without
breathing or watering or falling and so the three I do
I bind them as I do my enemy my ancestor
my beloved my other past beloveds
the stranger whose face I have carried since the morning
the first person who appears when I pose the question
who have I forgotten and forsaken and for whom am I
grateful and who may need the courage I do not know
how to send but do I turn them and myself
to the wild sorrel the lupines in the north of the northern
hemisphere all turning toward the midnight sun in summer
a place without a future without
clock watch phone computer job rent debt property
and I ask my friend the temporary monk
in your time here what was time it was need she said
and aid and did you feel more connected or less
to the people you were here with relative to what she said
beckoning adherence where before was only opposition
pulverizing the whole into particles like ants moving hopelessly
in a line beneath a magnifying glass when it follows you this way
there is no distinguishing instrument from power
from the one who wields it the one cruel sun the man
and the burning that I am with you and you
we who everywhere make pestilence and green alike
spiraling up through the floorboard out of structure
into momentum a house of going of wind of falling
and rising meeting cresting tangling breathing falling breaking
circling breathing a house of mouths passing breath
between them us two mirrors which together make infinite
the distance the intensity of a very brief moment at the moment
we decide to make it memory watching shadows of leaves
in the park while the harp goes and piano I decide
a particular hot lavender setting left across the avenues
I decide being read to held made love to while upside down
through the window’s blue square I watch an airplane
I decide to remember what is here and is
unfathomable there multiple leaving or arriving
I decide I am object and subject at once I decide and this
is the rationale that speech constitutes itself a material
but a decision is not an object nor is vow nor promise
you cannot hear touch taste give away possess it
it can mean nothing I love it anyway it can do nothing
I do it anyway behind my house another house
and this is everywhere the case without a roof through which
trees grow weeds unidentifiable ferns all as dead
and thriving as any architecture of intention unfulfillment
accident abandon with my one useless hand I eat the plum
and with my other I throw the pit into the other pit
Fragile Please
Romance is a glottal terroir composed in the imaginary.
We require an elsewhere to proceed proceeding being
The premise in the first place. Shelley or the knight speaks
In and of vernacular a tongue of other local the story or
Conditions have occasioned. Everything in the Romantic
Sense is crossing producing manifesting especially.
A claim is required for a sentence of Romantic type to proceed.
The mutual definition of subject and object is
A fiction of grammar unique to the West. West an imaginary
fixed from what meridian. Time an imaginary but only in
The Western sense of a line with eastward and infinite appetite.
West is a tautology gluttonous with self.
English has Romantic grammar but we consider it Germanic.
How does it develop. Through story and through syntax.
The scaffolding of empire is speech in its sprawl.
The knight is narrative and literal the story is a matrix and a script of order.
And in the voice of who possesses you you learn to form a mind.
I have a dream I am reading a poem by Elaine Equi called Manila Eclogue.
All I remember is a line Green Comes from Freedom which feels now waking
Very Rukeyser to me. Also Kandinsky – Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Also this ink with which I am writing Herbin Vert Réséda.
Is an eclogue a morning poem. Aubade. I cross my vowels and consonants
And in the pleasures of sound I am freer incrementally from what it means to mean.
Reading in a dream I am writer and the sound that makes the writer
From the work which she is making the work which is a place I excavate
Through reading the text exponentially more archaeological the deeper in I go
And nauseating and delicious when language becomes sense without a referent
A haptic total I am tracing green and what it spools. I woke too early I think
It troubles my loved one like a cat territorial insofar as time. I am in the way
Of his morning ablutions. So I sit in the kitchen high chair unuseably elevated perch
Meant for quickly eating opening envelopes while to my left the green Kitkat clock
Wags its tail a gift from him for us. Green is time and the envelopes for business
Reply the postage prepaid to make the payment. In front of me the top fold
Of a piece of paper proclaiming THIS IS NOT A BILL. The piece of paper
Folded in what a kindergarten teacher would call accordion detailing sums of money
Which correspond with various medical testing. The paper titled THIS IS NOT
A BILL explains YOUR INSURANCE CARRIER PROCESSED OUR CLAIM
FOR TESTING and covered some amount THIS IS NOT A BILL this is just
The part you owe. This is the DEDUCTIBLE. Signed SINCERELY
PATIENT BILLING CUSTOMER SERVICE. What I like and despise
About language are the inherently transubstantive properties.
But things do cling also to reality in spite of nomenclature.
Tried to cook an apple regrettably one had spoiled the bunch.
In Tagalog sentence structure is often verb first then object then the subject.
Spoiled the bunch the one. Subject last or what we think it is I am
The vocalizer at the end though what we I use my English here
Call end is in Tagalog a place equal with any other within a structure
More circular. Who went in to make it.
Well the Chinese the Malays the Arabs the Indians the Japanese the Spanish the
Americans occupied the language what changes my throat my mouth
Where the stresses and the tones fall when I speak are accreted and eroded
With extractions and exchange. The tongue I am a tourist to.
TAGALOG
Unadulterated by its colonizers comes from the river I am here the I
Apart from me. There the river dweller. Yes is two circles Oo
Like binoculars I am waiting for what crosses the apertures
The I apprehends further constellations by which a navigation happens.
An archipelagic feeling not unlike oceanic but what I feel
Deep connection to is what is fractured and beyond me.
One must believe in what. Believe in must what one.
This is not a bill. C’eci n’est pas. La vie c’est. Tout der Welt.
Immer ein Erlebnis. Ist dieser Traum ma vie tao ka nang humarap.
Mein Welt ist nicht. Immer ist nie bilang tao kitang haharapin.
Tout n’est pas somebody. Niemand demanded ma danse.
Jamais may I magaling mandala. La monde the moon almond annuls
Lundi Dienstag Mittwoch Huwebes. In der Mitte von ma Vie
I vivre’d der ich. Liebe kaibigan ici. There I dare I put the sum.
Somebody put everything somewhere.