In sex she wants everything.

She forgets the song

walks right in

floats right along the river to the waterfall part.

She mangles

the words with her fancy teeth.

—

This poem was titled “Cactus” when I first wrote it, but it’s changed a lot since then, and the title no longer makes sense.  Suggestions for a better title would be much appreciated!  Oh, and it’s not supposed to be double-spaced, but I can’t get it to publish single-spaced.

1) Rats - Syd Barrett, from ‘Barrett’ - 1970  http://popup.lala.com/popup/576742248995947025 2) Memories of a Moviegoer.  I recall the fine film Willard (1972, Daniel Mann).  A “B” movie perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular because the heroes are rats.  My memory of it is not necessarily accurate.  I will recount the story in broad outline.  Willard lives with his authoritarian mother in the old family house.  Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother orders him to destroy a litter of rats.  He spares one (or two or several).  After a violent argument, the mother, who “resembles” a dog, dies.  The house is coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it.  He likes the principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious intelligence.  There is also a white female rat, Ben’s companion.  Willard spends all his free time with them.  They multiply.  Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben, to the home of the businessman, who is put to a terrible death.  But he foolishly takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to let the employees kill the white rat.  Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a long, hard glare.  Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his becoming-rat.  He tries with all his might to remain among humans.  He even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office who bears a strong “resemblance” to a rat–but it is only a resemblance.  One day when he has invited the young woman over, all set to be conjugalized, reoedipalized, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate.  Willard tries to drive him away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he then is lured to the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him to shreds.  It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.

(from 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)

3) Corporeal - Broadcast, “Tender Buttons” - 2005  http://popup.lala.com/popup/5836946618128270675

4) The Wisdom of Rats.  Laws are passed, uniforms designed, theories float like butterflies over the mountains and valleys and deserts.  Things are Mexican or things are American or people are settlers or pioneers or savages or aliens, men are outlaws or lawmen, boundaries are violated or secured, armies sweep through, order is insisted upon, revolutions come and go and succeed or fail and it is all under control at all times whether there is control or not.  Havoc is disguised as police, violence parades as an economy, murder described as establishing peace or law and order, and the bugles blow, dust rises from the cavalry, warriors descend with lances and clubs, screams slash the blue sky and it weeps blood, governments tremble, the men gather on the mesa and puzzle out the science of mass murder, and the rains fail, cattle die, villages are put to the sword, entire nations of feathers and tongues fall dead at our feet, the books arrive–those histories–and all this is tidied up and made sense of, history becomes the final suicide where we block ourselves off from the earth, from the ancestors, from ourselves, and from the hungers that feed our dread.  I go outside in the night and sit on the ground as it slopes toward the creek and rats appear and move all around me as the music plays in the houses and spills out the French doors, yes, the rats mock the metes and bounds of my world and they have been here since before the beginning, were here when Cortes rocked on a ship off Veracruz dreaming of conquest, back then, even earlier, but certainly back then.  The rats came out in the night and moved right here where I sit, a continuous thread of rats reaching far back with love and anger and lust and dreams and reaching past any place my world will ever attain, and the rats know but will not say what they know and so we must find out, experience the fantasy of power and control, and finally we will go under like everyone one of our kind they have ever seen and still they will come out in the night and move around, not making a sound, not a single sound, but move around and thrive as the creek purls along in the black love of the night.  We must not play it safe if we wish to share the wisdom of the rats.

We stand on the deck, Cortes is pacing, it is early in the sixteenth century, an empire is in the offing, he paces, and within twenty years, men just like him will cross what we now call the border, as men have been crossing that line on our maps for thousands of years.

Our idea of history is the end of history, of tracking a concentration of power that finally reaches critical mass, and by an explosion of force solves all problems and ends all change forever, amen.

No rat has ever believed our history.  (from “Contested Ground” by Charles Bowden, selection in Harpers Magazine Jan 2010)

5) Sad Rat (2009) http://gothamist.com/2009/10/24/sad_rat_in_sidewalk_forever.php

Not to answer the postmodern with the modern, but… to make a suggestion towards un-nostalgic ‘couth’… recalling July’s notes from George Lukacs, which mention “a world of intended and would-be soullessness”… and seeking somehow to exist within a ‘difference separating man and God,’ within vibrations in word and color, within flows of internal necessity, within the music striking keys of an anachronistic soul… watching without knowing, not present, not absent… unconscious, wide awake… 

I. ‘Masquerades’ - a selection from Fernando Pessoa (1936)

I like to think, because I know it won’t be long before I stop thinking.  It’s as a point of departure that thinking delights me– a cold, meticulous harbor station from which to set sail for the vast South.  I sometimes try to focus my mind on a large metaphysical or even social problem, because I know that, ensconced in the hoarse voice of my reason, there are peacock tails ready to spread open for me as soon as I forget I’m thinking, and I know that humanity is a door in a wall that doesn’t exist, so I can open it onto whatever gardens I like.

Thank God for that ironic element in human destinies that makes dreams the mode of thought for the poor in life, even as it makes life the mode of thought– or thought the mode of life– for the poor in dreams.

But even dreaming channeled through thinking ends up making me weary.  At which point I open my eyes from dreaming, go to to the window, and transfer my dream to the streets and rooftops.  And it’s in my distracted and profound contemplation of so very many roof tiles divided into rooftops, covering the astral contagion of people organized into streets, that my soul becomes truly detached from me, and I don’t think, I don’t dream, I don’t see, I don’t need to.  Then I truly contemplate the abstraction of Nature– Nature, the difference between man and God.

II. ‘Panel for Edwin Campbell #4′ and ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ (1914, 1912)

www.wassilykandinsky.net/work-106.php

www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20of%20art/kandinskytext2.htm#1

Could’ve chosen nearly any chapter, chose

71: MORELLIANA

Basically, what is this story about finding a millenary kingdom, an eden, another world? everything written these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia.  An Arcadia complex, the return to the great uterus, back to Adam, le bon savage (and so it goes), Paradise Lost, lost because I searched for you in my eternal darkness…And so much for islands (cf. Musil) or gurus (if you have the cash for hte Paris-Bombay flight) or simply picking up a coffee cup and looking at it all over, not like a coffee cup any more but like evidence of the immense asininity in which we all find ourselves, believing that this object is nothing but a coffee cup while even the most idiot among journalist is assigned to give us a precis of the quanta, Planck and Heisenberg, knocks himself out in thre columns explaining that everything vibrates and trembles and is like a cat about to take an enormous hydrogen or cobalt leap which will leave us with all our feet sticking up in the air.  An uncouth way of expressing one’s self, really.

The coffee cup is white, the noble savage is brown, Planck was a formidable german.  Behind all that (its alwasy behind, convicne yourself this is the key idea of modern thought) Paradise, the other world, trampled innocence which weekping darkly seeks the land of Hurqualya.  In one way or another everyone is looking for it, everyone wants to open the door that leads out to the playground.  And not just for Eden, not so much for Eden as such, but just to leave jet planes behind, Kikita’s face or Dwight’s or Charles’s or Fancisco’s, the waking up to bells, the adjustment to thermometer and weather vane, the retirement from kicks in the ass (forty years of rubbing one’s behind so that it won’t hurt so much, but it hurts just the same, the tip of the shoe digs a little deeper every time just the same, and [I got bored of that passage]…

7o: a quote from MEISTER ECKARDT’s sermon:

“When I was in my first cause, I did not have God…I wanted myself and I did not want anything else; I was what I wanted, and I wanted what I was, and I was free of God and of everything…That is why we beseech God to free us from God, and to let us conceive the truth and to let us enjoy it eternally, there where the supreme angels, the fly, and the soul are all alike, there where I was and where I wanted that which I was and it was that which I wanted…”

[but I want to add this practical advice for writers, and none of us are writers]…115:

“The novel that interests us is not one that places characters in a situation, but rather one that puts the situation in the characters.  By means of this latter cecase to be characters and become people.  There is a kind of extrapolation through which they jump out at us, or we at them.  Kafka’s K. has the same name as his reader, or vise versa.”

Inside

Inside is a redness outside is dust.  Inside is a bird only a bird can make that sound.

Needle

In between the feather and the leaf is the drifting needle.  It is tender and true.

Nothing Pretty

Dangerous and fainting.  A large box is customary.

Milk

If the name is something white then the inside is burning.  Oh, burn!  Better that you love.

Aim

Here, a yellow bird.  Here, waiting and humming and waiting. Wind, take these sails and let them touch.

Man

Anger and bile and fingers it is like weaving.

Outside

Outside is a branch nothing rests upon.

Ruined by having read
too much philosophy I board
the tram and head downtown.
It isn’t much, I think.  Sitting
on this moving rectangle,
moving downstream with a
bunch of who-knows-whats all
of us just sitting blankly staring,
it isn’t much to take when you’ve
just come from God knows where,
her eyes and no it isn’t hard
at most it’s soft, rather soft
sitting waiting for the tram to move
on

Tram traffic ahead you will be
moving shortly, they tell you and
if only you had a pretzel stick to
munch at the first time I felt
this peculiar feeling in my side
I was sitting in a park by
some trees, on a sloping hill,
sloping towards the water in the
sun I sat and children biked
down the sloping concrete and
the grass all swayed and hustled,
a park full of people sitting being
reading each other in the soft
fluorescent glow of sunbaked summer,
that was when the sensation of
eternity first beckoned in the
crevice above my left hip, I
felt it like a child feels love
and it’s been there ever since
and even now, waiting, for her,
for the tram to move, I wonder
if it will ever go away….
awe

“And yet–and yet–” great rapper Homer went on–
“Dare I say to you that poetry
ain’t what it used to be
since there ain’t no Ulysses around to carry tales
Oh lend me your ears lend me your tears
all you finger-poppin’ daddies of poetry
gifted with ‘giftlessness’
you poet’s poets writing poetry about poetry
you deconstructed language poets
you far-out freaked-out cut-up poets
you prestressed Concrete poets
you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti
you cunnilingual poets
you A-train swingers who never swing on birches
you eyeless unrealists
you self-occulting supersurrealists
you Nuyorican slammers and gangsta rappers
you bedroom visionaries
you closet agitpropagators
you Groucho Marxist poets
and leisure class comrades
(who sleep ’til noon
and talk about the working-class proletariat)
you poetry workshop poets
you masters of the sawmill haiku
in the boondock heart of America
you lovers of suicide poets
you den mothers of poetry
you Zen brothers of poetry
you hair professors of poesie
and all you poetry critics
drinking the blood of the poet
all you poetry police–

“Take heed take heed
all you who still should be
the gadflies of the state
Here is my burning answer
to the ever-moldering question
as to what poetry can be
(which I being  blind can see
better than thou)–

“Poetry a graph of high consciousness.
Poetry the truth that reveals all lies.
Poetry a camera eye without a shutter
looking down both roads that diverge in a narrow wood.
Words wait to be reborn in the shadow of the lamp of poetry.
The flight path of a poem must be upward or it will crash.
Poems are emails from the unknown, beyond cyberspace.
Poetry as a first language came before writing and still sounds in us,
a mute music, an inchoate music
Poetry is white writing on black, black writing on white.
Poems like moths beat against the window trying to reach the light.
It is a madeleine dipped in Proust’s tea.
It is a player piano in an abandoned seaside casino, still playing.
Poetry is what we would cry out upon coming to ourselves in a dark
wood in the middle of the journey of our life.
Poetry is news from the growing edge on the far frontiers of
consciousness.
Poetry is a mute melody in the head of every dumb animal.
It is a descant rising out of the heart of darkness.
It is the light at the end of the tunnel and the darkness within it.
It is the morning dove mourning night.
It is the morning dove mourning love, and nothing cries out like the
cry of the heart.
Every great poem fulfills a longing and puts life back together.
Every bird a word, every word a bird, and birdsong is not made by
machines.
Poetry is boat-tailed birds singing in the setting sun in the tops of
jacaranda trees on the plaza of San Miguel de Allende
It is all the birds of the universe flocking together for a congress of
birds and singing singly.
And every poem an exaggeration understated.

re edited

The cobble streets are empty, the birds sing in peace.  Across the square, over the bushes lining the street, a single bicycle stands chained to a signpost.

I sit down and employ the method.  It is a clear day, the air is crisp and cool.  Like apple season.  When the season of labor thickens.  When wars begin.  The day is just beginning, the sun is only rising.  I put my hands into my pockets, and watch those passing with their lives in their pockets.  Under trees wavering in the wind, one goes by now.  Chattering away in the morning stillness.  Making something this early in the day.  I should produce something like him.  I stand up, survey my surroundings, choose a direction, select an object on the horizon, and begin.

The man of business on the corner, a hurried look in his face.  The spectral glow hovering suddenly about him.  Split second reaction in my mind.  “Make an argument for this.”  And so I say all of this.  The becomings he could’ve but did not.  Life an abortive seduction, a seduction realigned to the plane of the one.  The plane of callings, the demand of necessity.  Ambition and nervous energy and goddam hypocritical but nothing to do with laziness or ideology or power, just a cultivation one undergoes, a cultivation of ones singular and separated as a matter of course.

And so The great fantasy, says the genealogist, is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills.  A swarm of bees, no less than we, forms a democracy.  But supposedly we have a will, so what wills the separate wills to come together?  How does one learn to do what one can, what does one do as one learns?  Says the genealogist, If it has been possible to constitute a knowledge of the body, this has been by way of an ensemble of military and educational disciplines.  Yellowjackets sitting at desks learning how to use their stinger…. is that all a student is?

One ought to be more specific about this constituting, this cultivating one undergoes.  This separating and singularizing.  In post-nativity, there is great passivity.  Then, slowly, apertures to the mind become the apparatus of knowledge.  Taking in becomes a knowing how to react.  On a larger scale, conquest and crusade give way to correction, the spread of democracy.  A grand co-erection of souls, held accountable to some enormous limit or end.  ‘How I learned to love the bomb’; the alpha in alphaville.  Then the cold war ends, the earth starts warming, and co-erection begins to seek for a social concordance of responsible, purposive subjects reaching around the globe.  A bloodless flood.

And still science leads the way.  Human sciences, social sciences, earth sciences, trump-of-religion sciences.  Quantum physics replaces the superstition and paranoia of the vampire-count with the quantifiable reality of scientific account so that where once mere intuition guessed at unseen aeffective spectrums invoking “spirits” or “demons” to explain events not understood by common sense the sciences give a subject confidence in a ground foundation of knowledge and in the possibility of building truth upon it and in this lies one’s seduction.

All for one and one for all. Held accountable, held to a system of accounts, included in the count.  What Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about an unnamed South American city can be said of the entire extending habitat of scientifico-civilizing man: “The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.”  Alas, now it is such complicated frivolity.  And one would like to rejoice in this.

But as of yet, nothing complete.  Precious little to show.  The account consisting in a profile and a wall, or in the story told by grandparents when they take you to the airport.  The unknown dispersed over a range of remembrances, the becoming characterized by a sequence of moments in time, significant as to what one had been and was to be, a flow of life channeled into the watertight table of contents.  Fear of the unknown, the vampire, the count, giving way to a count ability,  accountability, consulting replacing numerology, a uniformless militant order integrating a population of singularities, ones, under a uniform expectation of lawful action in accordance… and yet some bicycles remaining unchained… accountability, stymying a core dance, but then in the breeze, air whipping into one’s ears, one hearing nothing…  all ac-count-able, all countable and bound to an account.  But the streets are empty, one can peddle oneself anywhere…  and then running into it again, not just money or the facebook not just science but a story told about oneself and learned over and again anew: the insidious habit of autobiography.  “What did one do after college?”  Well…

*

The account is stymied by an encounter.  The writing of oneself into a map of life meets with an alterity it does not comprehend.  Immediately left naked in a gap, neither one nor the other can distinguish itself apart.  The meeting a moment of absolute unity: a part.  Eyes tangle with eyes, blinking and blinding and all gone into one another, subjectification a haze, signifiance and interpretosis shot stopped still.  The blood boils, the flood comes up to a levee -

Why play the game as though there was only one way to go about it?