God make me a glass
splinter in the eye of all
contempt everywhere

Nothings

Sweet William, gone
grey-green with stall-out
bile pooling, cache

Full complement
of shoe-lasts, trifled with

Quaint trumpery, stirrup

Welter-whelp, laudanum-
stupendous balk

A teensy, shrill-magenta
aria looping between the
eighth and ninth millimeter
....

More and more
I've learned to let
evaporation do
the work for me.

Our cloven epos---"having 4 melody strings
& 17 sympathy strings"---face-plants.

(Thanks, sister,
for those red
silicone tongs, they
pinch beautifully.)

If outgoes succeed reined-in storm-outs.

Snake-oil of samothrace salve in bulk.

How much cold
does it take for

city-pigeons to
freeze to death

or can they wea-
ther it, no matter
...
Would that we
knew some else

to do with such
shows of aggrie-

ved endurance
such august ef-

forts at keeping
going or staying

put: admirable
pitiable, un-sto-

mach-able, nil

Ashore

Same, Pt.III

More Sign(s)

Two Signs/A Sign

92 Facts About Your Enemy

[TBD]

We'll stop
trusting
you to handle
new phases of
ennui if
you ever pull
a stunt like
that again

Directives & Other Motivations

What I Engage & What I Want to Engage:

The peculiarly American interest in signs, and in 'conversion': typology, transcendentalism, pragmatism, modernism. The everyday, the ordinary, the small and particular, but those as more significant, even more sinister, than they are often said to be. "The vagaries of you and me."

Pragmati(ci)sm.
Uses, values, use-values. Know-how. Realist empiricism. Novelty & habit-taking, disposition. How a thing plays out. How it is found. Trying something out.

Poetry & Semiotics: ideograms, page-glyphs, speech-acts, CSP &/vs. Europe. Ordinary language: utterances performative and passional.

Poetics, both what is enacted and implied through forms and practice, and also the explicit philosophical announcements, whether exploratory or manifesto-polemical.

Form, forms, informings.

Women & Men---gender & genre comminglings, blurrings, floutings.

Long/Large poems & Small poems; large & small poetics.

Conjunctions of the verbal & the visual/tactile.
Materialisms, both productive & nefarious. Same for Science, & for Technology.
Textual scholarship, handiwork, archival exigencies.

Competing realisms.

History as always being determined, worked out, 'known,' in the present. (Olson, Howe)

Old, weird America. Errant, dirty, small, regional, rooted, perverse, silly, sacred, experimental efforts and practices (say rituals, also actual religions). Homemade/handmade. Primitive-lyrics. Visits, visitations. Things ephemeral, Lo-fi. Analogue technologies.

Violence & the Ordinary, the Vernacular: 'Life & Words'
How form and voice (style? tone?) in any so-called genre, emerges from, incorporates, and anticipates woundedness.
Writing as witness.

Forms of refusal. Forms of, allegiances to, silence.
Poetics of stuttering.
Wabi-Sabi.

Some Spectral Selvage

Nothings

Mad dash, talking the talk

Weave down the aisle, missal, mass, apse

sere collect, echoing orotund

acedia, erethism, dyspnea,

extending courtesy

transference: hail/hale to alae/a la,

obeisance, complaisance,

erose...PAROUSIA

rimy stimmung, round fiats
atmosphere tuned to advantage

Lebensform As Polysemy---

Too much synthesis and prosthesis---

Automation, mechanization, extension---

The body doesn't like to be treated graftingly;
attempted or enforced synergies precipitate new allergies---

A frenchman said all that, in so many words---

Levying rough bills on the sneaks:

perturbations, strobe-lit swelter,
we shill those appurtenances, sleight
and the rub, no, say tackiness

of indiscreetly disclosed flesh-
bolstering trusses; here’s hand-painted
ceramic buttons on a dress

shirt---real special. What interpellated
trills of poorly-knit presentiments, what
gaudiness in copulate spangles,

flashing at fever pitch, what fever,

you have no idea!

Shove-Out

given over to some grand
send-off slavish hurrahs

still-mute vocable singes
priming the engine-

room upon most we'd
slathered much silvery

pitch sealant tested the
under-ribs with our much-

most weight sun's mouth
droning cured exploits

most words coeval with
what trash attends them

bits of mauled cracker egg
white spittle-flecks these

words declaimed belated
to corrugate deeds dis-

owned given to dessicate
founder along banks edges

Damages

Midsummertime

Bid gingerly,
and bide rightly

*
Metal doors swollen shut,
binding,
have to be throttled then
kicked open

*
Had the adequate
points of
identification so now
the state
approves me---tho I
still owe it a list
of which body
parts I'm willing to
forfeit once
the whole's
defunct

*
Bury me in a stone
fruit compote---

Amended cameos,
qualified pleasures of
merely circulating

*
Can't tell anymore if
cell phone's
ringing or not since
its buzzing's become
a frequent feature
of my thigh's
pocket-spot

*
Full-tilt, no frills brokerage

*
Think I'll just
ride atop the
errancies & inefficiencies
of my movements
SPUTTERING

*
Empire waist, empire waste,
say it how you
want, fashioner, paper-
doll deputy---

*
That likeness
a sketch in oils
on a square board
possesses its features
as I never will mine

My own face
over there

Livid ear,
muddy brow

Resolute skewed gaze I
strain toward but
can't meet

*
The patter patter
of outtakes from the deposition

(It speaks for itself, that
rusted-out charm)

Cast eyes on
connoisseurship, scudding cant,
you name it

Scour the outtakes, whatever,
you break it you buy it,
delicate flanges on the meanest words

*
I think I would work hard to please
a tarnished metal surface if it asked
me nicely enough. 'Redo, Undrln,
Italic, Open, Print, All, Save, Find,
Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Bold, New,
Ctrl, Ctrl.' Are those macros? They
're actions, anyway. Falling all over
myself for approval and gets called
goodness. What sad sweet stricken
keys.

Took form from
wafting airs of

A musk-musik,
a pliant plaint

Took my cues from
sturm-and-drang

A ship-
ment of bearings

Took heart-form
Took haven from

A ship-
ment of rivets

Savor-heft of amer,
a mur, amo, ammo

Musk-musik in
plaited zero-airs

Splinted oars, keen
for shallows, swept

Seven Faces of Refreshment

Je Est Un Autre, or The Figure of Youth as Virulent Poet

Compunction

involves guilt, self-reproach,
contrition.

It doesn't truly obtain
otherwise---which is to say
that it is an offense
and a lie to announce "I'm driven
by compunction" when
you are actually suffused by

lyrical weltschmerz, which absolves any
one from personal shame.
..........
Resolutely staying open to, and hurting on
behalf of, the world's pageant of evils
is a noble comportment and mode.

Compunction, on the other
hand, is ignoble stabs
of self-loathing and striking
your chest with your own fist.
..........
The word should never
be claimed but
through lips trembling

with real fear, real grief
over one's own failures and malignity.

If you don't feel those things then
shut the fuck up about compunction.

Courtesy Lorine Niedecker

Lugubre for a child
but for you, little one,
life pops
------from a music box
shaped like a gun.

Some days you find
you are a furnishing
in your own home

a kinetic embellishment
tricked out just right
matching the scheme

Some days you find
a tiny fly in an empty
green mug

lying on its back
dried-out to greyness
spaceship-like

Some days you can't
write, but you do
anyway
......................
No one dead
from the rain today
I hope

no drivers out
there who lost
control, etc.
......................
Each thing so close to
every other thing, colluding
so the given day'll render

Nothings

av-----av
ert----oid

thews, thaws---rueful or dour
hew haw

THE 7 DEADLY SINS AS
DISORDERED LOVES

turn, or tune it, run, ruin, tinny, tiny
twin/n/ed---

An eschatological way of seeing
of operating
that works hard not to
pose, impose, and imposter---
that expects unknowns
to seep out/break forth---

NOT TREATING BUT TREATING OF
to minister and not administer

Morphologies of effects:
themes, motifs, pheno/arche-types...

TO TEND (intrans.), TO TEND (trans.), TO TENDER
firstness is savor, how something feels, all sense-
perception as taste-&-touch...

((epiphenomena are overlapping numbers
played on vibraphones---a fluid
surround, a billion
or so invisible dull barbs

keeping you in place))

I do not espouse openness

neither do I espouse closure

but I do reject the rejection
of it

Icons

Ladykillers and Maneaters,

WE

are insects

in love

Nothings

Make Do
Play Fair
Meaning Action
Make Known
Count Down
Left Out
Make Sense
No Thanks
Never Better
Give Pause
Mean Well
Come Again

Writing

Nothings

What are you about?
Whistling missiles

What did you take me for?
How did you find me?
How did I come across?

"Primates en Accion"

Sluiced rudiments, alluvial nutrients

Pedestrian, "domestic
& unavoidable,"

.........................
NO SUCH THING AS A SUBTLE
GRASP

O'Hara Pastiche

Gosh where am I apparently crossing
some street called
Bobby Short Place
nothing but Italian shoe stores

and crap jewelry where's a goddamn
cafe I can hide in take a load off I'm
sweaty then suddenly I'm scuttling
under some gold

and black and I read The Carlyle so this
is where it is! A man in a suit (not
even sweating!) and grass-green
tie is eating olives all by

himself I can almost smell them as I
pass and I'm tempted to pat his
shoulder confer a wordless
blessing the rich being plenty poor as most

Twenty paces further on I spin
who knows why a quarter-turn and a
giant silver god is reclining and
(so it seems from just this spot

where I'm writing) diddling the crotch
of the giant silver goddess
who floats half above him ignored
totem of 980 Madison

Writing

Pedestrianism

"...the vagaries of you and me"

step upon step after step, less
often forward than
around corners and into or out of
positions of rest

"domestic & unavoidable"
STILL HERE, STILL HERE

learning to let the unaccountable be
itself
and taking careful account of what
driftage, trivia, or disorders
ask to be tended

knowing when to abet or court
disorder, as a check against the reflex
to pathologize it

STILL HERE alleges every particular
at infinite remove from the hermetic
sphere of heimlich

to step out, to believe that the world
of signs is a world
of things and relations, to willingly
subject oneself
to the irritant-wounds
of engaging said things and relations,
and to the "rubbishy anticlimax"
of every day's event

STILL HERE, STILL HERE
the poet mewls

Temperamentality

Choleric: dislocated shoulder to the wheel

Sanguine: washable magic markers

Melancholic: winding-sheet as tablecloth

Phlegmatic: name-brand snacks, & avoirdupois

Blurb-verbiage

exists at once in a future-past
and in a variety of temporal modes

fluid time set free from linearity

an open space that is motile
and multidimensional

multiple orders...multiple forms

mappings, cosmic calculations, flowering of the world, corrosiveness, desire, wonder

folds and fields of the actual

..................................
complex, wondrous, strange, blooming, polyvalent

quantum folds, deep space, mischievous orbits, all-ocean worlds, seismic tremors,

quirky thorn-opals
jeweled delight

traversing all manner of __________

tended, tucked

spacetime stimulant

Eye Dialect

-is a visual contrivance in which conventional orthography is modified to indicate dialectical deviations from the phonological system of the standard language.

-is a casual or colloquial speech which often characterizes an individual as belonging to the lower socio-economic stratum of society...a particular minority group.

-may convey both social and geographical information.

Nothings

Verbs: 'occurents'
Nouns: 'existents'

What becomes of or issues from
fertile clutches

"It plies a bracing, severe tonic both
iterative and terse..."

Why won't the cool air
linger longer? Quick, reassure
me that he doesn't really
believe that
nonsense. A SHAPE-
LESS MESS.
. . .
The text unexpurgated,
infested, histaminic.