Lesson for Dropping-in:

If you want to keep your footing,
avoid wrecking your knee,
dislocating a shoulder, etc.,
you must immediately commit
all of your body-weight forward
and down, onto the front leg,
the one initially bearing no weight.
Any hesitation that sees you
still favoring the back leg
as you disengage the coping---
an instinct of caution and self-
preservation---will likely mean
busting your ass in a spill.

Pigeons Thirstily Drinking Stagnant Water From A Granite Bench

RAUCOUS CAROUSEL:
LAISSEZ-AISLE, CELIA'S EASEL
& LAPSED CLASPS: CIAO!
CIUDAD, CUIDADO,
CUIDADO, CIUDAD,
YOU PUISSANT PISS-ANT.

(I find myself wearing
dress
shirts pretty
often,
strictly because they're
so practical.)

Cowl, Confection, or Pall?

Notes on Some Early Films of Peter Hutton

(I saw portentous billowings

dead-silent swirls, emanations of
a vast cthonic ensilvering mind---
displeased perhaps but spilling

out abundance prodigally,
requiring nothing)
......

Close-cropped visions: a shadow
and a patch of light and a few forms

quiver respire sit flash
against each other, expropriated
for a moment from
the lesser sphere of human
bustle and leverage and accounting

(No text here, no symbols at all
This is respite from language)
.......

The eye we're given refuses
to move, it transfigures through
distillation, the projector-purr
warming every tiny drama
of dark and light tones

Kinetic icons, transitory-spectral
signs---though most with no
referent---appearing and vanishing
at variable speeds
.........

We all feel a discreet tension
not untinged by dread
in waiting for something to breach
each frame, or---the tension
torqued---in responding when
something does

The smallest movement, not
occurring or not noticed at first,
in the shot's remotest corners
or, poignantly minute, in the barely
perceptible recesses of the
surface-mesh, suddenly animates
the whole, floods the austere
scene with possibility

And the eye closes, reverently,
as if to savor and swallow
the seen, the event-with-its-things

(I saw shimmers that kept
multiplying in each successive act!)

Le Parti Pris Des Choses,
unabashed love for duration,
for that which endures, and how

Do not fuck
with me on this, I
am determined
to grieve.

Flag-Pieces

Discalced & sporting plantar's worts,
electrodessication & curretage
could mitigate or fix, tho' the ascetic
streak awaits other measures

"Some bustles use
a hook-and-eye
system and are
quite elaborate"

('Meticulous' originally meant fearful)

Bruxism treatable but not-to-be-nixed

A work of salvage, recuperation,
can still take care
to show signs of its prior troubles
or to present a new air of affliction
endured, as elliptical testimony

Harrow or hallow
holographic
Muttering a blue streak

(Every collage carries a poignant tinge)

Two Ways of Protecting Above-Ground Sewage Valves

ERROR: syntaxerror
OFFENDING COMMAND: --nostringval--

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.