Poem I've Just Read--Dug

I just read, at the poetry journal Octopus, the poem "Hymn to Death" by Robert Fernandez.  It's fairly lengthy, and makes good use of its length.  Many of the line-breaks capitalize on the energy that can ensue from adroitly working this facet of prosody; at times, in the opening, I get a William Carlos Williams sense of the line, though that's a bit misleading as Williams had more than one sense.  These ones of RH recall Williams poem with the horse carrying its load and the nostrils jetting breath-fog like the twin jets of a car.  I am not usually much attracted to art whose explicit subject is death--especially when death becomes more like a trope or metaphor than the actual biological dynamic--but this poem has plenty of energy present, and plenty of literal death in the form of, frequently, sumptuously sensual non-human animal details, so I'm liking it.  And I am obsessed with marrow, and the poem ends entering marrow, so this makes me happy.  My only quip is the part that goes into something like choral refrain; I think the permutation meets narrative meditation macro-structure works better.    

More Samples From Ossuary

Would skin and bones
Crowding

Bone-crunching be better?

We fry

Skinny

Girls for bait
Baskets at this fish shack
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[This one has a title]: As Water Warms More Jelly Fish Threaten “Red Tuna”

 Love is not the future;
Love is the eviscerating
Heat of the present.

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I’m smart but dumb.
At the thought of knows how
My cortex goes numb.

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I’m a tourist walking
Vernacular streets.   
When I’m most
Clueless yet desirous
Crossing
Cerberus is wheezing:
Willing and squeezing
That I may get by.
But of course if I could see
My confidence clearly
I’d almost want to die.
I’m the head agent
For secret agency.

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Skies are an impossibility of letters. Wavy locks. Optics. Coptic phrase stitched into the border of a hanky. No more panky at the bank. Satisfactory Action! Activation necessitates savage ken. Doll why didya do that.
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Where has
My jubilance gone.
Other than what I know
What’s wrong.

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...and oink just
Done through
With the pinky pink
Bolt unfurling satin Straight
Jacking any normal
Woman’s sense here’s a jacket.

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Gourds are stuffed with
Freshly slaughtered goblins.
The fun stuff evades
Like pounds of flesh.

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The birds are stranded. Everything can be done to help. This affords little hope. How hard does it have to become before there’s generous action.

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Like any good
Tom she can tell
A nearby hot mama

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Cracking bubbles, smacking
Gums, tender
Attempts at
Smiling, frying off
Fear, to see what clarity
Ensues once world’s...

















































































 

Timidity

I really want to write an essay--assay--whose subject (no, topic) is White Supremacism/Supremacists, but don't yet feel such an attempt could tenably be in public because my position is extremely distant (it is bell hooks who has massively aided me in my changed, more accurate understanding) from standard notions of what constitutes this wretched phenomenon/a.  But I should probably rethink what I mean by public (discursive/written) spaces: one which is not White might be simultaneously freaked out and heartened to see my stance. 
 

More of Not Enough

Here are some snippets of some--have composed so many more, so the some is no sum--poems I've written in the past seven or so months; I'd provide the entireties but it seems most publishers count blog postings as grounds for disqualifying for their stages.  It's unlikely most of these pieces will find those stages, so my careerist concern is likely unnecessary:

from a section of a manuscript I will likely title Ossuary, which will probably be the title for the whole array:

Note--titles are missing

World, worldly obsession
Threatens
To turn my purls into a pearl
Handled scoop
With which you dish my cream.
It hurts badly and
I’m not allowed to scream
Or I am but
Not if my master’s
Me. Could this be?
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So that there’s beauty
We must put her to bed.
Sleep sweetest dreams.
If you feel chains
Graze your ankles
Roll over.
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Let’s shake our asses
In the Jism Dooms Room;
The Room Dooms Jism;
Girl Juice
Gets you more 
Than can marry to merry.
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I bleached my backdoor and common
Sense calls me an asshole.

Friday night
Cherry pie.

To stay safe
No cream
Pastor ain’t approved.
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Brand the burn.

Hot sauce
For one.

Hottest box.

Pepper breath fogs
Windshield.
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All the trees
Are cinnamon.
Perhaps high seas
Are more of them swaying.

Currents carry meats
Killers mince.
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Corn grows. Hormones
Escalate. There are too
Many of these babies.
There can never be
Too many babies.
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...These lovely ethical
Beliefs are imprisoning
Me, unable to see
The full turn of emotive degrees
I value. I am
Damnably stagnant. I need to
Uproot. If I stay
Here any longer
I’m liable
To lose all sight of sugars
All the while suckling NutraSweet.

More Excision--How Exciting!

Blue for the blood which is not blue, for the many, many,
Constitute its magnitude, compassing vortex. Maybe by writing
Relation to painting, to sculpture, I can make such matter materialize
Even as just giving canvas un-ameliorated self-conscious tries
Seems ridiculous: I want to paint what I want, not what I have to
Because I lack sufficient skill to dance through the medium’s declension.What I want for initiating spell may bring
Out necessary skill forth from me but what about next;
Painting and I are not a matter of now, rather protracted past fumbles present.
I am not Picasso, believing I paint, if not think, better than Velasquez.
There is a poet on the internet; his italic seed assassinates.

We should take him off, in order to get into
The spirits of fresher dangers. No, I should
Do this for me. The gun glows
Coolly, like the edge of a Blue
Fin.

Having no
Time is an impossibility,
The painting, oily
Pigment priming poem.

I copied the “crudest scrollwork”
In intricately pounded platinum,
Then tried to figure out what color
Would do for the pinchhit for the platinum 
For the canvas. 
Economies determine the definition and ontology of what happens. This is not fully a matter of money.
The freedom so
Scrambles
Itself with
Conventions. If
This could be
A color
Exactly less than
Approximation
We’d have our
Stand in for platinum.
One of these days, when I’m established enough, I will enumerate my numerous poetic flaws, or tally the tributaries within a few key travesties. I overstate, but elegantly. The élan that’s pattern can trump afflicting someone’s episteme at its root: terrifying motile matrix, hamhued loam rocks like ears of bats bump out of.

Let me celebrate my lack of means,
My stark
Body sun can’t help but
Cast silver, elver
Noon, especially at midnight,
Never fails to
Arrest.

Economies, no triage unless one
Counts the most kinetic braiding,
Confers election on
This counterintuitive construction.
I doubt any of these ratchets will get re-sewn into my canzone. I hope some will. I am such a fan of modification. Tension is when there is no revision. Sense is not always sound, which is a truism and rusty nor freshened by me, but where this “plank in reason, broke,” strokes my ego, crawls its sirocco thorax around my right eye, then, via the terrifyingly tender space between and scalding bridge, my left. Naturally, I close them. Naturally, I can still see enough to be all panic.

I wish I’ve got the nerve to sincerely pursue bullshit. This state would make me making visual art tenable, sustainable, even as entering such a baseline seems unattainable, that which I can think but not imagine, imagine but not touch. 

I am in the market looking for
A venue to market my works;
I am so caught up in the market;
I am going hungry in it; I am
Pursuing it like calories, licking,
Licking, as if in prayer there’s
Bone and, more so, marrow.
How could I tell you
Straight when
Right in front
Of my eyes there are
Patterns bubbling from
Superheated stone;
The drag on
Lashes is
Gnarly; there
Are abundant other
Ways to
Put this; let’s
Go get
Embroiled in
Hyperventilated embroidering. I can almost imagine painting in pursuit of a part of an installation-piece which is not strictly painting, not properly so, but there is still an electric scrim keeping me from contact. I write to paint, and pant my preparation slow.

I am preparing for bastardization. I am in favor, assuming consent, which is constantly difficult crucial discernment, of what, the phenomena, the dynamics, the terrible word miscegenation signals. I am comfortable with my homely flings into the worlds of writing. I feel entitled to play language’s games. I feel survivable.

I to the I as it loves a good prunes. Backs are for pats. Where’s yours. If the question’s not clearly, don’t mark it. Persons play musical positionings. What was I supposed to do except say we were moved.

A kind of clouding, clearing where why limpidly lies. I want this document to be twenty pages again. I want these pages to be as good as when there’s no doctor around and none’s majorly the matter but assurance helps. I want hems hemorrhaging lines. I do not want the world to do what I write unless I’ve nothing to do but be incidental. Ethics are important. They are gnarly; they enlarge one’s visages the way thunder perfect surf does.

It was a major interruption, not what can ever be subsumed into seduction.

The way to navigate the matrix is this: adroitly manipulate, matriculate, “perfect gibberish.”

Better than ever is never. Bling should be recognized by Microsoft Works. Vuitton is not either so at-least there’s not duh classism which, too, is born with a red line by the time every letter‘s been breached.

I do not
Know who you
Are.
Who are you.
Just because
You tell me
Does not
Mean I’ll
Know.
Sometime
I would like
To
Do
The mode Scalapino
Did through
Does 
The way schwas
Don’t stop
Echoing only they’re so
Many purlings out.

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio”
Cannot, now, be, other than a rhetorical question if it’s being contemporaneously asked, not the performance of a masque, mascara on yet more presence.

My sampling is so wide within its narrowness; freedom is qualified.

Lateral diatomite, depending, profile without predicate.

Did this do to me. Where would ever. Everyplace, obviously.

I smashed up crackers. Rice powder dusted stanchions.
There is no way to predict when this will satisfy. There is only

Easing into satisfaction. Satisfaction gets this. This boredom
Gets why it’s necessary to groove in. Love profiles preterit.
I am not fit to be critic but am better than couture for critiquing his theories, his gags he takes seriously while all sorts of slow fatal choking’s go ignored, or mentioned that they be mocked, turned knicknack not resonant chamber for contrafining faith’s fact.

I made it out; what is it; what is it not; it is the predicate; it is the knot; it is the braid at which reality frays and makes sight legible.

Who cares about reality, it’s the realness of the ethics matter more when necessity makes that narration tenable.

Slow, through, one, and to, but where, plus under, screwy, lovelorn, bubble reflects a horn, cold heat, contrary, capitulates capitol, aptitude, aphasia in an afternoon, followed by silica, flecks from a river used to run through here, Sandra, Seamus, images like action, sights zoning in on sounds, resonant rescues, grounds, missions, saints for satisfaction, self for living through leaves, loopy critters, glittering chitters, chirrs honchoing Cheshire, chemical intuition, intellect and its legislation, barb, carbonate wind carves, chthonic tamping when, when worlds rely on words for their import, opportunity knocks, jimmies gasoline from an obscene amount of Duran Duran arcana gets this car I wouldn’t mind being in all the way to Vegas.

My poems are far more dependent on painting, its existence, than painting, the discipline, is my poem. Well of course, my poem is the object, and the subject surely would object to its take on paintings matter, or perhaps grin agreement if it was witnessed that I’ve stated I am extremely aware what I don’t know how to do. I could slowly, slowly, step by slow step, learn to harness minimums, deploy them in bright activity. I wish, though, if I try painting, to wallow in I am so amateur, not even applying for my membership to Primitive. This wish, as practice, feels, cognitively rolls, through me as unacceptable. Or am I only cheap and lazy, unwilling to procure canvas and paint, brushes and a palate, that I may start an installation. 

In my hands, words can do what paint can’t; with a pat that is no speech I can give the sapping circulation hue, which dew can then dispel if this be a proper epoch, glitter-dirt- and-there-goes-the-skirt five exits west of Peoria.

Eggs are important, even if they’re not always a big deal. There are eggs in the river. No one gives a shit about the river, and gives the river so much shit.

The bit below was stuff I was going to, somehow, even if in much modified form, incorporate into a canzone I'm working on.  Now, I know for sure I do not wish to have it other than excised from those draft screens where it until now has resided.  For a bit I thought I could parcel it out in between stanzas, and I do like the idea of twining entire unspun poems in between stanzas of another entire poem, but I don't think the lines below are apt for that brightness either.  Given how I'm keen to get rid of these lines, it's not the least bit shocking that I'm eager to keep them too, to deposit them in a marvelous repository, a blog, a brooks, a Gwendolyn!:


Every time any one spoke, an hour or so later, scars appeared; it’s not

Clear whether this indicates dangerous expression, or if each cicatrix

Is a seam, part of the permanent construction which is the present;

Or does the closest one gets to plausible posit in-between, algebraic

X mitotically divides, constructs, compasses what one does, what one

Hopes for and what happens as perceived by third parties; to do anything,

Even stasis, is to act, to be a force; but force precedes and succeeds

Action, hence crop upon crop of dissatisfaction, and I am so fearlessly

A multifoliate confidence, and equally afraid, so stuck in equilibrium,

Stasis, a kind that goes, goes, seamlessly flows, fabricating fault, quake;

Or should I cheer myself on for what I continue to do well enough

And realize in-between is the present in its very link, ongoing algebra,

That there’s always a gap, a rush one can’t seem to solve; but what if

The action destroys the agent! I fear people will reasonably abandon me.

　

I'm interested--among many, many, other?, dynamics--in ethics and crime (whether legally constituted or not) and especially so aesthetics, as where else is the matter materializing statement so close; I'm interested in their braiding.  Below is a declaration, and espionage, of this braid:

Art is not a crime and the person who claims the crime is art is a criminal; that the criminal is an artist is not exceptional. Those who unveil the mess, reveal its regal clarities--ladies, gentlemen, this is not a tease, it’s stripped to the quick--will engage ethics, make and make unto marl the notion parities can be sown from disparities, make and make till the more there’s more the less massive monstrosities are. Crime hides its error, precisely constitutes terror.