“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?

So, I was to write a thing in which I was to let The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which is, as you know, about a Cock and a Bull, inflect itself upon the thing.  incidentally, i cannot on good conscience recommend reading that book.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid mention of the current perpetual apocalypse, whether it be foretold in hoary texts or lived daily in our desperate and soiled streets.  That it has been ongoing from time immemorial is immaterial to our daily coping with what might be rightly called The End Times, though perhaps we may rightly wonder if life was so very much easier in The Beginning Times, during which times scholars seemed nearly consumed with the practice of predicting the date and time and manner of the eventual End, whether that end be of their now paltry-seeming empires or the end or innocence or the actual and factual date that their pagan deities will take fearful fiery form to engulf and return to darkness their own mortal creations.

All of which remains stubbornly moot and meaningless to the issue at hand, which amount to an auto-asphyxiation of physical space in the name of a contract with our own imaginations and the capacity thereof to produce wealth, whether it be stolen or invented or birthed, a situation which could result in a skin rash upon the body politic itself, if not the green earth itself, which is already displaying the telltale black and blue buboes last seen in the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, a plague which ought to be an impossibility as we are currently bathed in the warm and welcoming light of reason and architectural steel, which serves to set the scene upon which our Hero will stride, or perhaps rather bestride, as she occupies more space than a single scene can provide, being as she is a larger-than-real beast, which has the eventual function of reducing her life to futility, as we shall see in due course—but I am getting ahead of my self in a most unbecoming manner.

For all those that have held the end will come in fire in ice, in avarice or cowardice, in fair intention or foul, none has seen the threat in the very argument itself, in that greatest cock-and-bull story we perpetrate upon ourselves which is the eventual end of meaning itself.

And on to the scene strides Significance herself! In all the glories of the Birth-mothers of Hindustani lore! –and tho her many appendages grasp pots of ink and cans of paint and scalpels and stringed music-machines and glowing screens and sodden pages–and tho on her distended tongue all the tastes of all the cuisine of the earth, –and tho in her ring’d ears echo all the sounds known to utterance, –and tho upon her breast a thousand philosophers suckle, –and tho inside her belly a thousand headless princes and politicians dance,–and tho upon her hips she bears the weight of a million procreative lusts,–and tho upon her toes vast armies clash, she is as yet One, and not the Other,  Vitality and not Death, Filtration and not Infiltration (as the ant can chose a grain of sugar from all the sand of the earth), and so we can let her guide us on to my Story itself, which will commence at the start of the next Chapter.

Man Man: Friday, Oct 2, The Beach at Governor’s Island

The Ruby Suns: Tuesday, October 13, Music Hall of Williamsburg

Mum: Saturday, October 24, Le Poisson Rouge

Anyone want to join me for any of these shows?  I especially want to go to Mum (sorry, don’t know how to insert the accent), so I’m hoping someone will come with me.

Under the bird,

a startling cat.

When did you grow so silent?

A small gift

tells me what I’d rather not know.

The possibility of a real and terrible love.

The ability to sense the snap of a twig

from the other side of the wood.

Where have you gone?

The pitter-patter of rain

on the roof of my house

reminds me what it means

to hope.

I feel like the ending is a little weak, but I think it’s a little better overall.

Now they’re starting to get a little more abstract, the way that I like them.

—-

Under the bird,

a startling cat.

When did you grow so silent?

A small gift

tells me what I’d rather not know.

The possibility of a real and terrible love.

The ability to sense the snap of a twig

from the other side of the wood.

What say the preacher?  And

what of it?

I am the great and miserable mistake

of the Clown God.

I am a symphony of dark and shadow.

I tell all to anyone

and everyone

who will listen.

I have always been this beautiful.

It is not only when you lift up my skirt

that I am beautiful.

It is not a secret.  It is not a prize.

My beauty is not waiting

for your praise.  It’s not yours

to give or take.

I am a silver cloud

dancing among curls of black smoke.

A beauty like mine is undying.

It is all mine

and I will not apologize.

Here’s another one that I’m working on.  I’m having a hard time shaping it into something that I really like.  I feel like it somehow goes in the wrong direction after the first four lines, but I can’t figure out what direction it should go in.  I’d really appreciate some comments.

—–

I have always been this beautiful.

It is not only when you lift up my skirt

that I am beautiful.

It is not a secret.  It is not a prize.

Come closer, dear.  Take a look

at what you’ve left behind.

I am a silver cloud

dancing among curls of black smoke.

I am a lone red poppy

sprouting up through the snow.

I am the woman who dives back in

after nearly drowning.  The great beast within me

is afraid of nothing.

For me, the best part about a break-up is the poetry that pours out of my head.  Here’s what I’ve been working on.  I don’t think they’re my best poems, but they needed to be written.  They also probably need some editing, so critique is welcome.

————————————————————

I remember a river.

I remember rocks in the river.

I remember cutting my foot on the rocks in the river.

What you don’t understand is that my nakedness

is not the same as your nudity.

My hunger has nothing to do

with the taste of your mouth.  My moods

are not cyclic, nor shaped like stars,

nor will I ever bemoan the coming of darkness.

You must know by now that my swimming

is very much like floating,

but my running is a dream that has no end.

You were always there.  I remember you there.

I remember finding you like a shiny penny

and cutting my foot on the rocks in the river.

No one said I love you, but somewhere

a baby is crying.

————————————————————

I’m drawing a map of the city.

You’re always in it but I never know where you are.

I’m always in it but I’m usually alone.

There was a time when things were different –

the two of us pressed up against the bathroom wall

in that gay bar downtown.

Afterwards, you held my hand in the snow.

The terrific pink night sky

nearly swallowed us whole.

There is no route back to where we started.

The city will never remember us tomorrow.

————————————————————

The other day in the supermarket, I saw your deodorant

on the shelf.  I couldn’t stop myself from opening it

and smelling you.

There are so many things I want to tell you.

I’ve started painting again.  I’m trying to write poems

even if they are all about you.

This week alone I’ve had four first dates.

The best part always seems to be

coming home alone, undressing,

and eating crackers in my underwear.

No one kisses like you do.  There’s nothing more depressing

than a terrible kiss.

The seasons are changing.  Yes,

the seasons are changing.