First Day
In the you of this, I hear tremors recapitulating further information from our mutual interior, that there is already a history fathoming out into the landscape. I'd held on too long to see otherwise, and into mute sentences cast afar too long aside no rumors persist among the uncommunicative, who, after all, perfect their isolation as if it were an object to become polished and pure. These. What I'd skipped into, nor time out of itself, but rambling around another old, familiar territory with no one in view for the long ride home, and what was fashioned out of old television images, that is, a cultural memory calling out for chocolate and peanut budder; still the hero persists within, as if solace were too much for such a blunder. No, the arc persists, drawing you upward from your own station, mists pushing inward from the dream state, it is something which no longer has your attention, it is a part of it.
Somewhere, I call your name. My hand goes upward. The pain has been removed, and yet the particulars of existence remain in their own, uh, realism, wha, their own, uh, animal magnetism; at this pace, no further discussion inquired. But I see the mad fire diminished, and so it should, I suppose, calm down, in the interests of survival. What was assured a moment ago now has its hesitation, having seen life's persistence at the hour of what passed for something mysterious but which was ultimately something of a draw on my mentsch, as I understand it, the life force, vitality...
"...an expanse of spirit in a waste of shame..." means just what it says, he pouts. Or was the word "time" in there somewhere? No doubt the typewriter is put to bed; I heard a report which surrendered supposed typewriter moments (taking it out in Istanbul and doing some "killer poems" on the bed, nothing but you and the tap tap tap of it) into the space of the nostalgia museum, where lifestyles, old emotions and so forth are franchised out for the hopeless among our masses of masses searching for a lifestyle identity, but without a clue to how to access that space. Why is it so hard to have an authentic life. I did, but I paid the price for it, and after going to a few AA meetings, I find my, uh, unique shit was really pretty mild, compared with what you can hear at meeting after meeting.
But lifestyle is another matter, and for a poet, more important, if one is to "become a new word". Giving up all pretension in favor of something career-oriented is contradictory enough, but to eschew life itself in favor of those importances which befit the token, originality: why is that itself such a nuance, not that each poem is the same poem over and over and that the lifestyle itself could be either a complement or a costume, an evasion of what the work is and how one should be using one's span of attention, to the benefit of fitting in, which one must do, or in driving oneself into the reins of a new terror, encountering the fear and insecurity of working into new territory, which is the same, rather, of passing out from the doctrine of one's safety into the palaces of the practitioners, who are they anyway, passing judgement on the work of others, if it is free war in the marketplace of the world's faltering consciousness of itself, then it is of some importance to address that clamoring, self-centered loneliness which is man and declare the unitive no longer in exile, and make the poem less invisible in its special realm, for what after all has become of what is left of the special realm which poetry occupies?
Poetry is not another shorthand for spiritual information, nor a realm of special effects which tickle the ends of the brainstem: its special realm is in the kind of truth which is carried by (beyond, suggested) the poem in its interaction with the conscious, in its stroking of the unconscious, and in its relation to the will of the reader (one is taken over, one gives into another out of trust), all of which are a part of the creation of a community which can take place in no other way: especially as the globe is no longer (was it ever) a smoky cave with body language and arm and hand signals playing as much of a part in the sacred rituals as did the words uttered, which after all were really the Word; we don't possess the Word in that we are no longer in the sacred room, but the energies are/have been franchised out over time in the pooling of syntaxes and the relation of grammars to states of mind; after all, styles of thought and mind control can be messed with just as the words themselves.
And so message becomes less and less important as style more and more becomes behavior. Entire cultures develop through generations of lifestyles simply by the introduction of facades and the force-feeding of behavior models via the video, when after all, the video could be training us all to be transcendent space captains, as for some it does.... Thus the dominant grammar resists any changes of form, and when the change of form becomes a form itself, then the experimental is in danger. Once a movement or mood or whatever becomes accepted, it loses its radicality and its bite, its do-harder approach in the face of unopposed success. It's time to retrench in order to maintain invisibility, for after all, one simply wants to be in the here and now, and all this stuff about poetry and so forth was more than we'd bargained for. And the intensity of the life itself, who would want that; on the other hand, finding yourself with a unique (or maybe even not-so-unique) life, you just don't know what questions "others" (if so there are) are asking. I continually run into people who don't know what to do with their "spare time", and there I am, my life always in a mess, and besides that, worrying about what the fuck this poetry stuff is all about, that I could only gaze at them in wonder/and the poets I met who didn't have that sort of double life, those I worry about, afraid that I've met a franchisee.
A ring clings, or surfer bowled, no fatter skeins were foregone, nor concluding sensations where musked out frankers were no longer impolite, I don't see why machines like this shouldn't improve sentence structure since you can always go back and change it; her own signatures seem to be a great distance away from here, and the thoughts of how would you spend your time with someone else, a partner, is more a topic than a fantasy, like telling a friend I wouldn't know what to answer to someone asking me what I want from a relationship when I've never had one that succeeded; the fantasies one has when thinking about it are familiar, not just the sexual ones, but fantasies like having her hang on my arm as we walk in public, leaning over to stick her tongue in my ear or to say something incredibly erotic....
You say this is to be expected, that as one heals, the urges to normalcy might even be overwhelming, and might even win, one might become normal. Interesting thought. People have always been incredibly nice to me, and the only hard times were the ones I created to mirror-out, act-out some self appointed hierarchy of attitudes which seemed determined to convince me that they constituted my reality, made a difference, to evolve or survive in spite of their committee approach to ruling my life, and when the results weren't what I wanted, I really threw a fit, I'll show you, I'll take my toys and leave, to which nobody ever ever said well now Tom please stay around cause we sure like your toys and want you to stay. No, staying around was always a volunteer proposition, and if you wanted to go off and be a looney, it was your privilege, have a nice trip, somebody told me once when I was doing that in a kitchen in Missoula, "have a nice trip, man" was what he said, not looking up from his (whatever).
The score: what's the score. Units beyond measure are called into the dialog. Various parts of the body confer with eachother in order to decide how they will vote when the chips are down, when the adrenalin rush finally "hits". The other days are just too warm, and not remembered too well at all. You spoke. It was too soon, I was not ready to leave my state of expectation and move into something in the here and now. Maybe that's why you won't send the picture(s). "Take a polaroid, baby." A rush.
Slow music combines with patchouli incense to create a picture of you. It is all embers and light, and the smooth air between us turns into a viscous love glue, and the rest becalms within a newer sign that we are alive. You've given out, and call remainder another collar on the lam. You went on further along, retailing out some newer calm. It's a flaw, you might say, to stutter beyond seeming into clearer porches, but the bright flow of chance indicates a freedom in which we wish fervently to believe. Not too far. Only so far as to, uh, deny denial, or stay within the comfort zone. ComZo. Relux outer. Her sighs detached, like a distant distance, you'd call ahead or fold no outer, in his own fools replete, but sentenced, too. I am at the beach, writing this.
Nor orthodoxy recalls his disco days and nights as a complete blur of inattention, your house discarded again, but palled silent nor mist your love's own anchor rusting outside in the rain, your own tears unmixed nor shouted out below, her signs, made intense and sad, continue to mystify and diminish. Nor excluded, either. "The Jazz Referrals." Appearing nightly, and too slow within chants to utter disregard. Nope unintented. He got too close, once, and I saw myself in him too soon to recognize and too late to ignore. Outside on the street, I turned and ran one time when I looked through the crowds and saw what seemed to be the profile of my own face, and a familiar herky-jerky of motions which could only be me. And I turned and ran, for who wants to meet his Same and stop to say hello, better to seek yr Others, and welcome them into some odd fraternity of hangers-on. She waits twenty-three years in a hotel room. Pipes clanging in winter. He went out and never came back, but not me. I'm back.
The intimate is the union of the personal with the impersonal. There you have it, voice interpenetrates with what is real, and somehow it is your own voice you hear, mocking the wilderness of dissent, but still a straight arrow in the morning...he pauses mid-stride to see what time it is on his wrist, he stops and looks down at his wrist, now doesn't that tell you something? I've been there before, I tell you, and it's a cold dawn when the sun doesn't doesn't happen, because if it doesn't, we're all in a lot of beeg trouble. I wouldn't know, I'd only had the job a few months, and now it was winter and everybody on the crews wondered aloud and at breaks who was going to make the winter roster and who wasn't. I didn't say anything, a rude stranger with Montana license plates on the old blue van where I went to eat my bowl food warmed over the Coleman stove instead of crowding into the lunch room for supposed camaradarie.
"No room at the inn, it decides." There's a fatalism to that, imbedded as a surface (not below at all)--tells you the inner landscape is crowded with stronger ones than the one to pay attention to you, and the decision has already been made. Your own fortresses less distinct but lying far beyond what has been described earlier as Moto Plenitude, or Foregathering. An attitude or a position, in either case a mistake. You'd be far better off to hold your own in a distant hollow, and mix the two alternatives into one good course of action: retreat. Here, however, your way is blocked out from underneath in the form of something far more accessible than you'd ever imagined: an escape hook, a giant, rusting turn-of-the-century Escape Hook, gar-an-teed to take its fair share of abuse, no longer a symptom of doubt but its able messenger, and she wanted to do more than hold your hand, I can tell you that.
Nonetheless, I've longer waited in the here than now, you'd say a doubter then at bay, and your own senses tell you that you have come to rest in a strange lingo out there not at all from what he'd said, and even if your own spells are strong enough, you might still carry the sun too far to the left to smell your own blood scattering in less pleasant rows of the dead and dying down; no hills remain after his "flat earth" policy, and the Cat D-9s were grading day and night to bring everything into a suburban tract-builder's dearest dream, to pave and put instalawns down over the entire continent, a coast-to-coast mall, think of the parking meter contracts alone! But my heart is still beating along, thinking of her in all her aspects, and where are you tonight, Sweet Marie?
And you--I'd called your land a heathen one, with beauty and darkness conjoined within a patois of power and imagination, close to nature's ruin, somehow in the geographical cloaca of an entire continent, how can it not sometimes smell strangely of life's processes? And so the beauty you have in your language is as much a combo of mixtures which is native to the region, and though you're no regional writer, there is something in the disjunkt combo of the flow of yr poems could be endemic to the, uh, locale, and in yr work a kind of sexual tension in its progress which is sharp like a knife, the song goes. I'd even called the even hours a target in regret, and made no longer any tribes or causatives, nor made plain in anyone's other dream, it's mine and I'll tend to it. Would you join?
And still no other skills the flame without intention, nor finds the healing powers a realm and pleasance, in his eye cast out from foam to friend, a pallor in remiss, though a finer corner turns from dowo t@nu ` 2s|{{|pD {` ship at half price and then only so he can hustle her... Weren't you paying attention just now? I sure wasn't.
Luf is blahnd, he sang, his Russian accent barely hidden by his meticulous pronunciation from the phonetic cue-cards; and beneath his calm exterior, not a blatant choreographer in deceit, you are thus, nor hidden beyond doubt the signer from another scheme: this is the way out, and if you follow, there are more seasons to tend than you'd like to count on, though if this means nothing, then there is nothing to mean at all, and, man, how do you feel about that? Can you go with it? But the calm derides, and you feel flavor in your favor of her mists unattended wires draw along the floor without piety nor any other code word, nor drawling at your cusps and farmers, the latter dude a flatter spin than would detain. Sharp, the flooder skins. No muler forests that should stop him cold and colder. Tufts. The fever pleas insense or outer, Cadillac, no, chevron, uh, what was her name?
For awhile, I just kept away from them, women. I was still hurt and afraid, confused, only recently aware of my anger. I would practice, having the fringe of an intimate dialog with one female, and the tale of another with another, and so on, but that's just life and getting on with women. The thought of a real relationship just didn't occur. In the back, yeh, you're dying for it, and keep the whining stranger at your depths, lest he scream with insolvent rage about not getting what he wants, just like a kid. The range of error is not so great, only its magnitude, its range over time of having existed at all. This you might have glossed over, or not seen quite so much as a flaw, or a possible sign of failure, or its remiss pleasant, document. Finish that! I'll no lessor pin than spot, nor cue his own foment into calm and disrespect, a piner at his glots.
Nor mute, nor insensate chaum, hil'd spot th forded spline its' agronamic feam--hister thuts n'itage pluton grots, then a nire wd mimble in his quaid. Park yr doter nearer here than not, nor plough its glen and squid, a parker at yr fists. Theen ack the dimmer spleen, a figure quadding at the plusk; 'a theen th'd doober wast n'plain. Eesks. Duds, a plumber. Planar Shock. News at eleven.
No, I'd not ignore you pushing at the walls. Nor wait no longer for your heart to break again in your own longing after love, it is not too late ever, like poor Ivan Ilyich, falling in love on his deathbed as a possible malnutrition or clause of affects. Null, as only Rembo Can. Flagellant, migrant toker and leavener of the ovens, his angle of doubt a spectcacular zero point seven. Oh, outer due, I mask you in this angle of forgiveness, and hold your seven eleven hostage to the moment, as another disguise relinquishes its hold on you, chicken choker, bulb-snatcher in reprise, I await your challenge, and love's, to become holden not stronger, but a whole and sentient man, beating at his trumpet calm enough to see, the rescue having been done, there that. The total plus, afforded not be sense but by discard, and in what was done no heroism but a calm position from which one would not retreat, and when romance was declined because one was not, uh, ready, was that a sign to give up? Hardly. And now you are still available is what they say in the books, available for what, for the mystery of it all to descend throughout this returnable hook which keeps baiting you with its own dialog, no it is further from the truth than that, and you beckon willingly where no other fears to tred, and they said that Star Trek had done more for, uh, whatever, than the space program couldn't compete when someone said, yeah, that's cool, but I saw it on Star Trek last night, well, it's hard to compete with, ah de Toqueville, you rule, and where there is nothing common, there there is also no denominator, and so nothing divided by nothing is yet nothing, where you might count on some kind of intervention to release you from this eternal funk, again.
And call your name into the center of my left hand again.
Second day
You'd plussed out the stringers in their own hesitant endorsements of women as humans, thinking only that "they" were or are some other race of life with which man-kind (or not) had either fiscal or political relations, and while sex was a pleasant memory, it was nonetheless the habit of youth itself to enjoy that which it had little appreciation for, and while sd appreciation might have come late, it sometimes didn't come at all. I mean so much is made of the so-called differences between them, men and women, that it is almost impossible to see the similarities at all, that what is going on in most coupling, if such it is, is a development of the individuated personality underway, depending on which partner you look at or which aspect of the relating you look at, there is still a dominant and still a recessive in most relationships, and to find a couple in balance one must look far, for they are hidden in their ordinariness from the view of those who look: there are no flashes of personality or even of color by those who no longer look to the outside for acknowledgement either of their sexuality or for that matter of their right to exist.
You'd not reminded but occupied a newer space within me, as if in the discovery of a hidden self I found you there too, nor mystery but in pleasure follows, nor to share out but hold and spin and grow, uh, that way--interior signs fall ahead into the light become, a rose, a shower, a newer spine & center, evolved from love and not its opposite. You'd been there too. Or still a hurry or forgotten implement, was toasted therein by expansion; so thinking of you is causative in its pleasures, nor empty in its imagining of what is real (enough)--later on you'll spell me out against time, moving through declensed passion its own reminder that you are here within time and space, existing, you might say like an outsider on the inside and an insider on the outs. Yo ho! Of course, the pictures are not enough, but something to decide where to look when your left hand calls out for a name, a face, a gentler act within than wanting.... No stars willing these sighs, thighs, uh.... I hold through the morning.
Distance calls the signs newer, more remote, assigned to risk and its consequent declarations of chance & committment, as you are imitated among those whose partners remind or then assemble wherein, but noticed, her heart beating aside your own, and in what is called to accounts, called to action, you are speech in the making, but silence in recall, a quieter doorway remained open long enough to get through, and we got through it in the midst of silence, the silence of reading signs and letters, and the silence of the heart in its own growth and pressure to be real, how the arc is triumphed in simple emplacement, the stain....
I held you once in firmer stars, and let my own impassioned reasons intervene with what was storming from the heart, only to ignore my self in reasoning that what I wanted was nonetheless from the deeper layers which permitted such feelings to exist at all, nor in reason steeped but called affirmed to hollow-out her slated rhyme nor season, but cold upon the layers of the old, I marked your signs as something new and welcome, but stilled in wait I held with caution from the way where something called out for me to lean ahead and take the signs where they led into forgiveness and re-time. But the heart's slow welcome flowed from side to side and made me dizzy, or culled from the cloud heights, some raster plume, some foamer-spoon, delight your words descry from loaders in the skip to schemers in the mist. I awayt yr only line remits then clouded one-on-one recalls flight among the distances, a yearning which is then fulfilled by less inert beliefs than what would hold you down forever in these learnings of the heart's way.
I called resistance a part of tempo, just as the skin remembers the graft and the time before, and welcomes it from wherever it came. Were you so preoccupied as to forget? I never did, not for a minute, not in the depths of what I knew was not real did I ever forget the sign to which I was (am) drawn, whether it be you and yours or not I can't as yet tell, but I know the inner drama indicates some fusions and extensions do occur, and beyond simply enjoying a mutuality at some vibratory level, and I have friends like that, with whom one simply feels good, I know that beyond recognizing that emplacement within each other, that there is something unrecognized between us which is now in motion, unrecalled, unfinished and potential, and what is a letter but a part of the many, spoken softly without, but courting nonetheless, as active and pronounced, even though there's no one to ask for permission.
What took finally held, or the reverse, what held, finally, took. You too. I can tell though I am overwhelmed by your Molly Bloomin yesses, or maybe whelmed, too, by their fluidity and repose, in their promise-to-be-real, nor spasmed-out, either, a fog left along your coasts and valleys, nor earth to become real as she is the sign of what welcomes you back to your existence in what receives, seed, climate, opinion, and love's cool anchor in the heart which says hello, or receipt, or golden hours recall'd with what remains of innocence. It's hard on top. It's a hard-on top. You know the difference. Did I say this before at all? You'd lean back and give. What's life to the other becomes one in yr heart assigned nor leisure, but competent within chants. Alight. Furred into. I held your rhymes and reasons were not there at all, but potential, coming into view like a random fashion which clicks and holds beyond what you thought might be the reasons for your continuing this, uh, dialog with whom and its consequences which lie far beyond the mere horizon of simple risk but follow from time spent in waiting but before, nor a myth one has hollowed out from his left hand clawing the air year after year, it is a healing and a becoming which clears the way.
A space is made, then set. And time resorts to its own relinquishment, as if. You'd polled that and found results within your grasp, a chance worth taking, a sign worth leaving, no longer a part of the movie which seems to run day and night, but an allowance for an intermission and perhaps a second feature would follow what could only be described as something between an advertisement and a cartoon. Another franchised lifestyle, when to purchase originality with one's life led only to the exclusion of others in their own misery, or joy, and yrself with that special isolation one finally wants to rescind for something a little more pleasant, a little more mundane, and yet the special time has its own reward, like a cuteness one comes to dislike in others only because one has suffered through it oneself, or like understanding, finally, why those old people act and look the way they do, you can sit there and see exactly what happened to them in the cast of the voice, the later-life posture (either of victory, or defeat, or resignation) sitting across from you at the table at the Grub 'n Stuff in town, her hair in its tight gray curls, maundering on about some uppity female by whom she was noticeably threatened, which accounted for her snide, aggressive posturing while the hubby hunkers down over the cheeseburger & fries, dipping each fry slowly through the pool of ketchup which diminishes on the side of his plate, the side of his life, you mean.
You've plunged into yr own stuff, too, I can see that, which beckons some destiny, eh? Or wd've anyhow--naw, you'd never run into me, nor I you, beyond this stuff we do. It's a cling. Cling to a spin. To loop and tell, that where's delight your own within straining to finally get out (again); separated at an early age, the lovers reunite quite by surprise, finding in themselves the seeds of what they were as youths and lovers who [were] parted too soon to know what they had in store for each other. A bit like deMaupassant's fatalistic short story, the lock of hair and the watch-chain; and in remiss you call no shorter than before, but have meaning and tense to your adverbs, even, as every day before dawn the moon sets inside time's own permission to recall, return, restore what was once promised but left aside in the hurry to leave what was really not so awful but perhaps only prematuresquirms of passion and reason which were left untold, unexperimented together but which finally yeild to what calls you back into the dream.
I never thought I'd have this, a place to write, to be alone for days at a time and fucking not worry about it, nor did I think I'd have the time or patience to do so, I thought I'd always live with the uncomfortable need not to be alone, helpless clinging afraid-of-the-dark bullshit, not that I was entirely, but there it was, a hamburger with no meat, my life. Now it's there. Relinquished doubt scores its opposite, and the light returns within you calling to be free, which you are anyway, and that what you sought was found, already there in the first place, placed first within and found later, goes the story, calls the day, hums the hummer in her own delight. Be a hummer.
Ancient rhythms chart their own rise and fall, or where you are again resumes the day's own plans to do something new today and go where no man has gone before, not so difficult, if you think about it, a repetition calling time's line away. I spelled the day. Here's a spoken work, "Love" arching my back into you, what's called return or, just, nice. Nice. It has an empty ring to it, reduced as it is to a commonplace; though en retard, you are my sunshine, falling as the rain, you are my sunshine, please come again. Squish & plum. You'd sharpd.
I have this air besides what's unexpended; his field trip is underway, no doubt, and here I am, thinking you'll arrive tomorrow, when it's probably winter before you come to visit, flowers filling the air with their own repleteness, making a sign between sighs which would declare the new age to have finally begun "against all odds" was how you put it, which was its own sort of problem, or that I'd wait for it, after all, the best should come in at the end, n'est-ce pas? Nor occlude the outer liners to commit no pressure in the portable room.
This is the portable room.
II. STUMBO.PAN
first day
Your curious self-portrait, eyes staring intent at a camera with no one behind it.... A mudra of expressiveness practiced for a real encounter, and the eyes declare their readiness and intent, still it is a photograph.
"Power, you sang as we march in darkness...at the pure ides of day, what know we of our dream, older than ourselves?" (St John Perse)
I think poetry is the attempt to reclaim language from the machine, from the force of darkness which exhibits itself as something which is "out there". It is an attempt or a battle as it were to make the word become flesh, to get what is going on out there in your thinking about what you are doing to a place which is deep within the core of your being. I am the event, it goes. Not "I am the poem," that's a commonplace. And to say "I am the event" is no solipsistic drabble, because it is the beginning and not the end of the process of what, mastery of one's self and emplacement within the scheme of things, you, uh, just know where you are. The experience precedes the model.
"So at some point, if we write, we come into or towards an understanding, and the page will no longer hold the work, syntax and grammar and spelling, all of the wonderful tools of communication, language itself, is no longer a vehicle, but is a barrier. but we write, we are writers, so we begin to do battle with the language, writing becomes a violence, writing against itself. We eliminate punctuation, ignore correct spellings, invent new words, invert syntax, scramble grammar, scatter lines and columns of words across the page-as-field. We lose control, discard control, another barrier, ego at its words. We use chance, collage, found text, improvisation, borrow rules and methods from other areas of practice, other disciplines, from techniques of the sacred, from the visual arts, from music, from science, write chants, verbo-visual constructions, aleatory arrangements of syllable and letters, mathematical arrangements, lyrics derived from chaos theory, fuzzy logic. We use computer assisted designs, random patterns, random number generators, iteration. But we end with language on a page, or on a screen, or maybe on a canvas, or as the spoken word. What we have produced, the creation, the addition to the stock of available reality, is not what we want, and is not all that we get, and finally, is not what the process of working, or the work itself, has to give. The process of working against barriers, slowly, returns us to the source, less intensely, and partial, but recognizable, a different tilt of light stretched ~8{s{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ { } ._s~_swownnLo` ÷ B $# $ $ $ < g, what we can do with and in it, is concerned, we come to realize that freedom is the only law. For the most part, this is best left unsaid. But it is the case." (fr email of 7 Jul 95: JL)
Nowhere better said. It is text. It is freedom, and what are in those? We are the progenitors of the sacred codes, those repetitions of time (in space) which sahaja-like bespeak of the access to the space wherein freedom lies. In syntax in communication are the sacred codes expressed in the timeliness of ones barks and growls which signify communication there is yet the unspoken invisible text which is (perhaps) as binary as the on and off of rhythmic en-trancement of speaker to speakee in this rite of sharing flesh to flesh, blood to blood, which is man in the act of being how poem, how Vincent says "Life is the poem" and means it what does he mean and how do we come to it?
Nonetheless, we have taken back the streets and I think that's what your list above indicates, that most of the various available avenues of fuckin around with words themselves are now under our control. The computer is another matter, and that comes later, but look at Olson and what is important is not so much the doctrines of the proprioceptive but in fact that it get done by a man (sic.) in his means, that one come to breath come to life and speak in these rhythms like the muezzin at the top of the phallus tower challenging us to leave consciousness for a moment and bask in the glow of the nothingness of just being there.
Who you are to come back into my life when it was "something ventured, nothing gained". But the truth is that we bonded beyond measure and what is left is another story. I mounted you, I mourned you, I put you away, I let everyone go and came back another person, and you too ventured into your life like something you needed to do, in order to relive the pain or advance into the arena where you would hold forth in your own battle to become yourself, and you, too, stopped writing the codes and patterns which so entrance you that, like the chinese dude-poet who was so enamored of the reflection on the surface of the water that he fell in and drowned, is it like that where you come from?
I loved you like a twin, like \Dylan says, somewhere in A Simple Twist of Fate. But you know what I mean, it was like hands across the darkness for me and I always wondered what was in it for you, we never talked when we were horny as if that was some sort of taboo in the long-distance love affair which could not be abrogated. But deny it not, we fell in love over a project and are left, each of us after an excursion into the dark from which we battled out, you did I think, or have, or want to, I know you want to or you wouldn't have called and we wouldn't have caressed the past so lovingly, we are still in love and wonder what to do with it; at least I do--like ok, now what?
I know what I want: to feather upwards into the heavens as a column of light [see end of V GER] in communion with my other, my feminine my machine of light, in some caresses made human by love; The Silver Surfer. So, I felt we'd be twin singers, another part of the dream, uniting in song, creating the new word; but I neglected to notice yr corrosive edge and obsession with apocalypse, and thought that in yr transformation, you'd experience a rebirth-in-love wherein your tendency to lyricism & song would finally predominate; but no, the human in us is too much present, and we each descended into our plasm, me at the end of my inappropriate love affair, and you at the end of yours.
This is John Galt. Remember? He who controls language controls everything. Having broken the sentence, having mastered the avenues of transmission, the forms themselves, all we need to do now is fill them with light, fill the empty streets with the waters of life, fill the void of the internet with poetry generating machines. [see Horndog]. But I think the radical of what we are about is to rule the world, no longer, uh, unacknowledged legislators of our wankers but in control of the medium itself, we can make it do wheelies. And the transmission of the unspoken codes which we learn in our jazz-like suffering through experimentation when choice is linked to pain or joy or whatever, it is a mere internalizing of emotion, a self-willed muting of speech and sublimation of its honesty into the tapping of the fingers on the keyboard of chance operations in an attempt to (re)write King Lear. Face it: we have broken syntax and control the means of (invisible) transmission, all we need to do is exercise that control and the rest is gravy.
Certain syntaxes and word-emissions are liberating, we learn that in the random fluxus of our jazz solos, and that in listening, or re-experiencing, or whatever the (ineffable) relation between singer and song is, we learn that in his own mimetic does the witness relearn the codes in his cellular presence that what is heard is also made flesh, and as we are together in performance (be it linear or mental or spoken/heard) it is nonetheless the word made flesh, what we are talking about unawares that it is already happening, has already happened. "moon & stars & signs astrological/fling animal into phases of personality or/inscribe symbol onto chaos: here I stand..." (SSN) "Grow imploded stars in play, vertiginous spirit. Your portrayal of hour fire...." (JL) And you, unbearable sign of my relinquishment. Call at the mark of my own disaster, relieve me of yr dusks and sentences at the morning of light.... For I have heard you yearning in my own mists, husking out these lesser terms for light, benign presence of love in my own making out you were not alone is likening what we do to something cosmic and prhaps satisfying but in no way a substitution for the real thing, or else we wouldn't be out here hacking away at the bamboo which has grown into everything....
So face it, the old order is corrupt. Finished. Of no use and pertaining in no way to the problems of now. And it is as Gertrude pointed out, that the art of a time must mimic or contain those survival codes pertinent to that time, and obviously the old order (it depends on you to cut it off wherever from now you wish to) no longer transmits the necessary codes, even as a foreigner listens to the staccato bursts of sound which is poetry in a foreign tongue and knows knows what is being said at the meat level.
This is dealing with poetry among humans. The computer poses other problems, since each medium of transmission (printing press, alcohol) has its own rules and styles for what gets through, and so you always have to analyze the medium of transmission at the same time that you analyze what was actually transmitted: poetry on the computer will have to use chance and information aesthetics to be "true to itself", for what use is a message if it doesn't respect the vehicle which transported it, as it were, from here to there... Unless that's too much, uh, communication theory for you.
Love, on the other hand, seems more determined by present circumstances to grow out of what is there than from what is not. And inasmuch as you are not here, how can I love you? Too much in the realm of my dreams, I long for what is unattainable and get what I ask for, a love which is, in fact and at present, unattainable, yup, you get what you ask for.... Now if I ask for you, fer yew, what wd I get? And would you give it? You've proven admirably that your fear of love is greater than your desire to have it, isn't that what the recent episode points up?
"In advance of the broken arm" no longer rings true. I've a friend, Connie, who's been a confidante throughout all of this, my own thing, I mean, and I recently found out that her own way was a lot like mine, the alcoholic husband, a new relationship and all that, and it seems to be working for her, and I asked her how they'd met. She said he was someone she already knew and they like looked at each other one day and said, yeh, maybe so.... So the whole idea of falling in love with someone you already know is, more like when you were growing up, if you did before now. I mean, in my own case, it's just now. But what would we do? Ah, yes, making due. Or the idea of falling in love with someone you are already in love with. What do you want anyhow? Most don't know. Do you want to be transformed by love, to unite with another? Or is that all just another bunch of bushwa?
What's not enough, another spreading triumph outside the law, your own remissions nor coded skins they've left around the campfires glowing with the last signs of life on the planet, no food in the alcoves and just too many souls to recognize.
You'd ben thr, dun thet. Uh, yeh, too. More to spark than triumph, more to have it centered than to feel any more pain, there's enough of that to go around. This was plenty, I'd rather have a life than whatever this has been, and that seems to include relations with women, or a woman, or what? What if we just didn't like each other, so many of my relationships have been preceded by the body language and dance of lust, that first one is attracted by a style or a moment when "it happens", and to seek that physicality in whom one has already felt the pangs and spasms (once or twice, I will admit) of lust but never seen, thts another deal altogether.
Which is to say only that the quest for the beloved and the quest for the word made flesh have been parallel but not undecided and not always aware of each other, but usually so. Here enough at the beach without you, wherever you are tonight, Sweet Marie. And the poem is without integrity, it is all poetry and diction and voice and that's where it went astray into something new, first the different voices saying nothing and then the different voices wanting to say something but having forgotten how to do so, and then voices saying what they are all join in a transcent song unwinding and yet joining into a column of light uniting at the crescent at the sign of the millennium. All divisions cease, let them have their material reality, the sign of the planet must be made or its image will not exist in the consciousness of man, he will live his brutalized, codeless existence, not that the codes wd cease to exist, there they are in blues chording, for instance, I am in the radio.
Clean my lizard.
We don't need to worry about what to do next. It's thrust upon us, and the core dilemma is ours not because we are poets but because we are human, though as we work it through, whatever the illusion is that fascinates mankind at the moment, it is our work to give code to our expression of the relieving of the illness at its point of human contact as far as language is capable of doing so, and when language becomes phenomenal and no longer functions as a carrier of illusions, that is if the illusions no longer work as illusions and have become, simply, relics in our museums, then how we sing and dance in our words is the message itself, and the medium has become the message, to bear at least that prophecy out, what that statement seemed more than anything else, a challenge to make it so, as Capt Picard sez, to make the poem itself the message of the poem, as it were, and so we have by reducing image to its redundancy in time in consciousness in percepts we see the image as taking too much time when lingua structs can carry energy more efficiently and with greater bang for the buck, that is, more of a rush when it strikes you either to write it or to read it, I mean we're not writing this way by accident, but because it relieves the pressure that we are trying at that moment to "write through" with writing, that is as one becomes addicted to it, a kind of cosmic analgesic, ah, there now, that's better, an erotic fantasy, a cosmic fantasy a lingua fantasy whatever and you go on not writing image-driven poems like they never ever existed at all, leaving the old order in the dust, and of course the question is where does the old order end and the new order start, and who gives a shit really, but you'd guess that the recent tendency (just this past year) to anthologize certain periods of modernism or whatever you want to call it, that those points of demarcation are also points of historical maintenance, that as the thing is set, so it is. And then what follows is, uh, after that. Tottel's Miscellany.
I would be your stolen ham, ringing with delight. I'd hold you down the streaming times the hour called to touch again no matter in your mists, a name declining expression but come to its thirst and clamor; and inasmuch as "they" are in possession of the language by virtue of, uh, making the rules, that is for how transmission occurs at all, then we who are diminishers of respect in the facts of the unknown are also purveyors of disorder at the comfort level where most humans exist qua language. Nonetheless, you begin to see certain language-driven formerly poetic constructions (statements in which syntax is disrupted, for instance) beginning to worm their way into advertising lingo, the current way in for new forms of language, rather than fringe activities and their supposedly inside jargon, railer skate frinstance. I'd be your friend just as I seek my own, uh, companion, we have the killer giggles, you know, that seems legitimate, something I've never had; and to take control of the language is to take control of the planet, and if what we generate is a superior form of communication and begin to teach others in its use, the supplemental benefits to a new grammar (such as the state of mind which accompanies it) would be hidden from view, which they are anyway. And you'd sing.
And so to the extent that it is all diction and voice, it is therefore important, finally, just what is said. OK, Joe, you've got the mike, what's on yr mind? And you begin to stammer some sort of nonsense about the goddess and getting high on adverbs, and the semicolon, for god's sake; what next? You'd better have something in a nonsensical but available vocabulary or you'll lose him to the sound of it, and it'll be Wong Dong San, sitting there slackjawed listening to Dylan Thomas do his Child's Christmas in Wales, pure sound cascading through unknowing ears, does it make any difference, in the Euphues of it? So there is a signpost somewhere between jargon and the word. And the word be flesh by being shared, but seeing the commonality of all utterance, of mixing in the final collage of display and tenure, of silence and the mumbo-jumbo of elocution and magnificence. "I've got a porch light."
"betrayal of desire" it leaks out "I am flattened animal corpus"
I believed my own technology, and felt alone. I got tired of that. Rastier dudes portrayal, no loner in the heart, but sufficed of that, too, no longer straining at the midst to final aloner no more matter to the fog be-lined, duh, blind to chance portions of doubt resist no more aligned but left aside behind as memory but not one that one has, really, but one that one had, one has the memory of a memory, and what wanes in presence is that which has not been reinformed or brought back to life.
"text gleams machine"; I thought that because of who I was or thought I was and who you were, or who I thought you were, that this was a marriage made in heaven or some such, and that besides that I found you foxy and elusive and somewhat interested in me, affaire du plume I fractured it. Whch is good as long as it is good. But how else are relationships made? And do you always have to end up working out the worst? "But no phoenix I, reconnecting/severed limbs & plumping out--/I am flattened animal corpus...I do not away rise up and walk"
What stains purpose away from its infinite originality, the elusive strain is not the worst nor necessarily what I ask for, ending out beyond seeming who you are, as, who are you after all, now, disconnected friend of a thousand battles ago, now we are panoplized benitent pressures (accented-out), tomorrow came and stayed beyond expectation occurred, but healing out the tempo of poetics is not a poetics of restitution but of recovery, as I have come to understand the term in AA, but in an even wider (or narrower) sense, what our work has been for a hundred years or so, beginning with Breton, Tzara, & Duchamp, though for me Tzara was the most politically inflammatory, but with that effort begins the struggle to free language from, whatever, you know the drill, but that the struggle is now over and there is another, more challenging task ahead, which in yr discussion of vision and transmission must also lead you to see that filling those channels with those questions and answers, giving a form that is to the void, that's what the work is.
And you who furnish the seas with my opening sadness, you who call to me in the isometric wilderness of chance, you who sing in the forgotten languages of the foreign students; unassembled discord gives way to the heart's own song, and what was once disjunkt enables into a forward weakening of its own rage, and poetic diction might be less inclined to give up its dissimilar attitudes toward word choice in flavor of more useful constructs, but then someone pointed out to me that the inventors of things never reap the benefits its the developers who later come along and commercialize ("popularize" in the case of ideas and styles) said innovations into a marketable enterprise. Syntax Associates. you know. Mind Control. Only it's not so insidiously self conscious out there. Sure, there's people out there watching trends and gambling on what they see, but the evolution of syntax from filling to emptying is a step away, now that surrealist dogma is just about, uh, not discredited, but it's used up in some way, the surrealist styles made their way through the advertising and popularizing intestines until now, where the whole style of seeing is lodged in the cloaca, "in advance of the broken arm".
But then, you say, in the hands of the same old machine, every new idea loses its integrity (as new) (as revolutionary force) and becomes the same old product, the same old society changing the names of the innocent to protect the identities of the guilty, and all the rest. Cultural history is as much a series of coverups as political history is. Though you have to believe from the prophecies (and they are available wherever and whenever you live) and the old stories, that the invisible substructure of life manages to exist in the secret whisperings of the militant mendicant priests and warrior priests, and so it goes that when you listen to your own interior around the campfire late into the early morning when the drugs have finally begun to die down in you and you are empty and vulnerable from within as well as from without, that you hear the ancient growlings from deep within you, tumbling out like the distances themselves, like another voice coming from your interior. What does that have to do with our dialog? Are we not speaking in tongues always? Cola non rafa.
Horndog's secret mist, by chance encounters with the other in his own secret, penetrates to the loins of the prince of darkness, he strokes the outer loci of inattention beyond what was provoked in the first place your own whatever on the face of it no matter was removed against your will and lesion would particle calm the doubter his own restitution was palled forward in your heart's dimension made a calm flutter of what was once flattened gumbo on the plate of the stranger when you forgot everything.... I'd begun the whole affair, if so it was, in my own outright sense of need, I'd been honest with a chuckle as much from my own need to confess (and to a woman, my shrink and I worked on that one), and I did, and so now everything is different, goes the story, and whether or not it is has not yet stood the test of time, and in time's own beginnings might I find the yew of yew, an' how it might have been, Leon goes. I've made nothing yet, in spite of all I've made. Now it's, uh, on the way. Rites have been observed and yet the whole deal has not been tested.
What happened stemmed from an inability to give, give in to love's possession, and on the other side was possession. In my own case, "compulsion ruled the nest". From whenever. And so all the twitches which now accompany me into living alone and liking it, no doubt, become proverbial causes for alarm when isolated into being with someone. I've been an oddball, long enough when I met you not to be worse by now, or at least more of an oddball than before. Certainly the rest is new, unmet, untried in its own time. But I know that if they knew what we were up to, they'd worry about it. The best is that they don't.
Your own personal observations are welcome, but I have a problem some times knowing what is poem and what is self, and I know how and when I hide behind the lines and how little it works, it is all so transparent, like when you're drinking and you think you're invisible, that you're getting away with something. And what is a spell, too, has you by the balls, and hand in hand you go down to the sea and melt beside it in your own fantasies, but left to go aside in what was once wandering outside the heavier fits besides being filled with surprises contains the secret of surprise itself, and in that unknowing trance, to accept what is no stranger really, but an unfathoming of the deal to senses' own left alert into and besides, where you were kept from knowing who she was and caused you to go for all those substitutes.
Or were they transmits on the face of denial? Love in the absence of any proof has her face down on the bed, crying again, or plotting my demise, or calculating my misconduct, who needs it? What called out. Was real. The photograph still holds me on that morning when we sat at the table, she & I, and I took the snaps with my little Leica, bing, bing, and there it is, and that what went down was no dream left on the magnificence of what was remembered. No, you want that magnificence to return in some fashion that doesn't burn you into insignificance & on the other side of return there is the downsizing of all that is familiar into its particular location, how he sings in the background as you fly along these particular moonlit trails and paths, into more circular parts of your self than you'd come up out of and from into the into, but there's the song on your behalf, and you know I'd hold you in the moonlight, singing your song....
I fielded properly, I dealt in musk and binge, and held no favors too long nor for too much, if anything, a little too honest, too ready to give it all away, and along the time I met you here and there, no other gives you here to be the same and not no other in the looting of time and what you do recall in close houses, on cold floors, in the remembrance of penetration and her cries to you, you remember all that in the resonance of what has been there for you to remember at all, though its mix with fantasy is a lessening of each and not to the credit of either. Where language permits me to exonerate my own conceits, I do pursue thee in the manner of my passions in the cooler airs between us sometimes unknown member of my other dream, I call you in from outer space where you have spent these past ten years, and I call you back into the air between us in our more remote locations to hear the time you sent me a letter unannounced questionnaire from the heart's mumbo-jumbo (there it is again) where you made no takers from their own specificity and in the time-honored crouch into the leaning-forward position wanted not so much to, uh, score, as to get revenge on the family, besides which I always found her to be completely sexy, slinking around the house like she was ready for it at any time, which later turned out to be kind of true, at least from what the diary let off to more than one guy in a day, was a little embarrassed and not to say a little impressed by her ability to, uh, schedule everything and get away with it for so long and not get diseased or anything, that was before AIDS and you wonder; then, a phone call out of nowhere from Florida, I think.
But you, who do you think you are. I wonder, because I know we both want to know, after all, never knowing what was possible nor even a matter of interest, but you were the model for one piece and continue to have some hold on my ability to go off and write more than I thought I would. I don't know if that's good or not, nor do I know even if this is fer yew, but between time and memory, I can get this down another rhyme and meter, calling the day into question not like something you remembered but like an expectation in the midst of questioning how you might remember that you'd left something behind and wanted to know what it was and where you might have gone wrong....
What's spent beyond recognition? They know we're here, but don't realize yet that we are in control. Nor do we, for that matter. It's a matter of behaving as though you were in control, how do you think that they've been behaving all this time? As if they were in control. Oh well: submissor and submissee. Good money drives out bad, but I think conventionally it's the other way around: and so it is with syntax and the unknown, if you have a voice for it, they will listen; if you build it, they will come. She looks back with a certain smile from the photograph which is now 15 years old. I remember every bit of it. And how she called later and said, remember, we got away with it. And we had. Until the last screaming episode from Patti, when she threw that back in my face fifteen years later, that I'd been sleeping with two women at the same time. Is that the poem in its transpositions? This is a journal today, not an epistle. Jimi Hendrix reflects out of the past in good sound
"You will rise again, Desire! And you will tell us your other name. O passion....."
I found you down around my ankles more than once, I cried my hopeless diagram of trouble in the provinces, and found myself amused and alone at the end of another trail; departing for where? Here? No more (mere) hesitation, the boat is ready, it will carry quite a load; crossing the great water begins to be more of a possibility than something in the book. "Why do you want my picture" she asked. "Do you take pictures of all of them, all of the women you've had?" and her eyes widened pruriently. "No," I said, feeling sad, "you might not be back." And she wasn't, at least not like that. I paused her knots and seasons in my run down to the ends of things, and I waited like that for her to catch up with me, breathing hard against my chest. What passed between us was an intimacy from which there was no denial. "You'd be another loom," she called into the wind. "No matter," I whispered. "It's noon."
At the unspeakable room, you deny your heart's outer, you leave time astir; "form is the shape of a handful of air." It is kinds of statements that take you here and there, not so much what they say as when, and how the strategy works toward making you think think you've been or are being "talked to". She smiles from the photograph. The obsession of the flowers. The other stuff too, what made it mad. It is definitely the pursuit of the whatever, not love's. Pure density and outer plinth. I'd musk. I'd dig you deep and long, we'd stay in bed all day, just the way you want. Probably asleep. You are time's memory of itself. I have invested the wind with all properties. God is in the wind. In the winding. Wintered out and smoothing. I've you in mind tonight (O lucky me, she says), for something, uh, more mental. Oh, great, we're going to think about it. There's safety in that. No meter in yr mists. When you have 'em by their syntax, they tend to get a little testy. Hey, boy, get your hands off my syntax. Adjust! Adjust! And goes down the long way winding out from here to there her message on your heart, give again, dearest, I've in mind to come for you again tonight, come for you in your dreams along the long trail winding out as only fantasy can into the mists of where we might have been....
I'd been gone too long; a paragraph is not a rehearsed fragment but a whole in the sum of its parts, made coherent by no disabilities on the horizon at least within its internal registration--a shift from here to there made into an alignment of possibilities, perhaps reiterating the list, or the litany, along the way toward a solution; in the composition, there is a solution, but in its paragraphs, nowhere would there appear to be an answer at all, & it is in the pure weight of evidence, style, and argument that the composition makes its point, wins its day, as it were; it is in the becoming that takes place during the course of the journey of the argument that the word somehow becomes flesh, becomes felt, that is, and then you've got the hook in your reader [who] is as likely to go back and start over as anything else--at least he/she will realize that going back over means that you're looking at it with different eyes. Each time. And you know that secret while you're sitting there. And when you go on you've been changed. A little. A little bit at a time.
It says, "Yes, that was!" And it was good. And so the reparations have been made, at least from the point of view of presence, at least there you've been plain enough to reoccur in the presence of others at least their own questions are the ones you listen to, not mistaking them for the shadows from your own unconscious. Not in the presence of others do you distinguish the closet cloth makers from which their own presences delay and formalize, uh, evidence of stopping. It was no fun, spending that year without you, but neither one of us knew what to do with it, it was that sudden. Not a topic really, I just got overwhelmed by life, caught in a side track where I had no business being there in the first place, some karma to live out, I guess, and your adventure into what you'd been skirting all the time we were talking, about yr love life and marriage and how they were after you, and I sure as hell wasn't having that problem, so what did I care; all the time the twinship denied and my dream of penetrating the heavens in a column of light intertwined with you went down the tubes, whoever you were, subject of a couple of grainy less-than-greyhound-booth quality, uh, snaps, otherwise a voice on the phone squeally giggle over troublesome details, and the tough poems of pain and language and whatever elemental details attracted, not just another face in the crowd; a relationship of 3 years' duration, or more, and you want to know where do we go from here, when you aren't even writing and seem to be going through some life madness episode, me only recently emerged from same, after all a year out is not so long, not long enough to consider a real collaboration, but yet the whole game is rolling along and suddenly the cosmic has reappeared to man just as Vincent said, as the millennium approaches they'll get nervous, raise up their collective head and wonder what it's all about ronnie. But then I'm getting off track. when what I know is that there's some kind of unfinished business between us; like one of those relationships that goes through an episode where they say, no, if we had sex it would ruin a beautiful friendship, I've thought that a million times, and where does it get you. All I think about is that we finally meet and each doesn't really get that particular squish and tingle from the other that is required in a relationship that wants to be passionate. And the part about working together, that's another story. But you can't say I haven't thought about you and gotten along quite well without anything in particular happening but talking for half an hour the other day and missing you.
Says your other. I've been alone too long to think otherwise, too. I don't suppose you've had a letter like this for awhile, but then, who knows. You're right, I'll go along and run into some SYT, as we used to say, a Sweet Young Thing, and maybe have enough presence, support and good will to keep myself together, and as you say, something nice will happen to me. I'm kind of digging this, right now, writing to you and smoking pot and listening to some music I like on the radio, and what else is new? And beyond that, who are we to each other? We had a hot affair once and then went on, and now come back to say hello and what's new in your life, and went on again in the back seat, dreaming of writing another poem as much as of having an affair in the back seat. Though there's that to think about too.
Oh well, its a hole in the wall, a hole in the air, and you go in to find what's there behind you in the other ethereal realm, undivided as it is into any partitions or changes made into whole cloth the realm is undivided, and no longer reams chance in the butt for another quick fiver in the dark her eyes her eyes told me everything, and it was still more than I wanted to know, quick rhymes in the passion of everything, where you went along so long and then you spoke out, in the room full of everything there she is in another hallway outside the rooms and in the mists reminding that it is here and no other calls you back into the sunlight where you started.
Yesterday.
Your panache. Smoking Shermans. The slow drawl of your eyes. and when we were drinking, Bushmill's it was, that was trouble. My heart was on my sleeve, as it still is. Carburetors. Oh, yes, now is the time of light. Anything printed can be shared, even this, even thus. My love for you has no privacy. Wanker's Corner, a local bar. Number nine. My love for you has no piracy.
Your panache. speaking in tongues. The latter porches, or have allowed more. But spoke. In sense or outer in these markers still collide, but meet you smoothing in the lapses of inattention still have too much to say, as if I thought every poke of the keyboard held some great interest for other people, what a bleeding ego, and go on with it, tapping out reminiscences of doubt, leaving the calm air, besides. No other's outer. Her own room heal'd, too. Roughed sheep asleep. And I'd gone on, too. Into number nine. Your crushing arrows went deeper than passion's positions on the nine o' tails, too. Butt exploded. In no outer can than caning outers, others, too. I'd marked them straight up and no other. Wheezing no repetition had them, too, swelling out, or spilling. Spelled, was what it went, and when you taled-in or spent, it was here and there. Whence. Her eyes. Where are you now? Where is any of you now? Now that I need you, goes the song. My own, too. Where are you now, now that I can give. Goes the song.
So where are we going right now is the question, and the answer, too, to have fun after all enjoy the moment, it is now our own, and lay claim to what is not taken among these areas of the new territory which are just now being staked out and claimed from inattention and neglect, an entirety which is as yet hitherto relatively unexplored--we go beyond the corner entry and check out the gloom beyond, it is the here and now, and it is empty save for the echo of our voices in a hesitant, gray atmosphere which is lighted from somewhere, above or beyond, and where are you tonight, Sweet Marie. Relative to what. Just as what said wait was awaitment itself. No other ringed the court without piety or transition. It was the empty shell, and you were light at the center, in conversion and making small talk among the pygmies where you grew up. It was also noon. Sit both ways. At once. Duh.
III. VENTO.MAN
Your beautiful but purple skies, forever amber waves no fucking bullshit I too saw the best minds of my generation but where are you tonight, sweet marie? You'd yarded out, but held here among the natives where you want further than you ought, we count the signs among us that there are no lesions on the song caught unawares by the midst of plenty in your sheeps astir. And here, woolen, ought, the reminder of the significance of the chance we have altered in our penetration of the outer husks of what there is left of the altus mundi, the frotter pluden, the other half. And you were caught no doubt in your own planter, cooked into submission by your own doubt, whatever, and meeting her half way is no feat for the indecisive no matter what you measure. Up to. And in the chances we have taken with our time, wasting it in the name of patience, for God's sake, what we have left with the opportunity as it presents itself is to make hay while the tractor is still warm is how Ross Perot was quoted. I think in one of the shaman dreams there were these two rocks crashing together back and forth, and he had to run through them, and like they say, timing was everything, and, bang, you were through into the next, uh, cavern or whatever. And so the acquisition of voice ("verse") no punter squat, but hazeled in between history and its opposite as the mere experiencing of self as it is an obsession and not a gateway. I mean, you'd win?
Yod'd plud. North they wane, nor to get away, either. I'm in no space but your own, that is, unwelcome as this may be, nor transcend, transect a fictional "there" as opposed to your own mark on the universe which right now you are totally obsessed with, as if the Universe gave a rat's ass. Nor scatter out these other voices coming as they do in amongst David Koresh and his near Cousin the very rev Jim Jones. Our heroes of dark hours remiss no love was ever sung too deep to measure out forgiveness Amin the center exploded with its "extra people" concept and the Malthusian demonstraction, who exactly is in control and of what exactly would you do with it anyway?
The document precedes.
First deep singing no hours left their clarity unknown syntaxes relate the structure of anything to its random sounds in the palette of the mondo structuro of the heart's beginning to hook into spasmic reclamation within paragraph structure at once the same no-man's-land of the document in its own presentation of the facts, how are you here in control of what exactly is the nature of the language in its distribution across time in the sensory apparatus of the listener, the witness first who claims in attention the span of the message in its first delivery into the appetite for what is new. Your own disorder might precede the witness into the laboratory. Yod plud'd, nor bent her arm against no will is left on the face of the planet save your own pathetic paying-attention to the self inflammatory noises of the feed me feed me apparatus of the mind's own bending into the noise of the wind from the inside to hear the storm roaring through in its asking for clarity of thought to penetrate the mystery in its forgiveness and its forgetting. But spent, the energy too far gone to realize and must therefore be regenerated, Scottie, what the fuck are we going to do? Displace that modifier, Captain.
And we are in fact going down into insouciance, or displeasure with certain molds which have lasted far too long for the emerging unity and recollection of its singular past, to find an image or an energy or a specific code by which the transmission of sd unity can be massaged, I believe maybe what the harmonics of the tonalities of the giant horns the Tibetan monks moan through. Whale tunes. Delete. I'd held them responsible perhaps for what is no longer in style or mere measure, driving harts no specious derision, her hamper fosters light waves the ear denies its hold on conscious endeavor, butter not within heart-shot, another plume distend, and I'd held. Nor fashion, but declares the matter of control and the islands of contention, like for what or over what, I do think that language is the issue and that what passes through the conduit be in the hands of responsible people, no mere mechanics of the blunted stripe. And so the singers return, populace and throng, nodule to the mounted spin, nor emptying into mystic froth, no matter how you slice it, it still comes out baloney, but harries forth with a sense of mission within still more silent binges on the internet, but what of the suicide, what of the emptying of the silent hour?
I even tried to write you, but the letters to some apartment unit down there in Florida somewhere, they just came back and that was it.
And so love without or deprived of its obsessive quality would be what, the calm glow of the silence of the heavens? Nor that far away nor matter in the skipping glow of what substances you've left afar too long to remember why or how who was even listening the first time you read they all and I mean all fell asleep, but it was ten thirty and after three others. Still, I knew the trance quality worked, that if you set up the right rhythm in the flux and flow of the fragments, they with their own musicality and interreferential sound patterns, would entrance (entrapment, you might cry) as the staccato plump & pun of the word flow calls you down into the deeper layers of association and remembering, and you get a false nirvana inasmuch as that is a low (whatever) wave in the top end of the spine lets you down easy easy now into the couch baby and spin again in the center of the song you remember owning another version of the same thing went this away and not calling any more in due time, nor falsifying anything but this sense of purpose and desire in itself a memorable experience not any longer being alone in this mire any more than anyone else, that is, but calling out, there is more water in the pool.
And who is in control of what the language does, whoever is in control of what the language does, whoever, that is, is in control.
Punt. I'd held. Signifiers in time of essential remiss, nor platter. Butt held, nor forms. In time, that, too, wd give way to pure juice, at least in the time of composition, that you do get loose and find the unexpected in control of the loss of what is there besides the shadow, uh, you know "falls the shadow". A spanker. Went further, held. Some. More.
But here you talk more, and what is said among us becomes our words are spoken out like something drinking water is like that, when among your friends and outers, there is agreement and spawn in the telling of the tale. Here among the priests and fathoms. You'ld spin, her center of oracle, the demands of the flesh, I understand you now in your conceit, giving up the torrid dress, that was it, and in that giving up do I see what has happened to you this year. Nor robbed nor given, but told, OF SPITED IN. 2-wha/nor outer, butt held to the innert ear. Your old can of three-in-one oil had its own Mandrake quality in the bump of the pump in your ear, where are you beloved, and what is your name? In my own dream I fall asleep, a dark, internal slut. Gainer-missed. At the rut, she held me down again and again we came together. Once maybe. And in the sentence, cast, alight, foreign, how we displace our grammar without intention, more out of carelessness, our Random Academy, wielding their shears and intents, making rules about adverb safety and concentrating at last on the comma in its five levels of use, through to its relation to the period, the absolute. No more. It's dark and the sentinels have left us alone with the waste we left behind, and I returned to settle it out, Berkeley, that is, the first of the dark, dusty streets of the here and now, wherein the froth of the broth is still the same old bullshit, and we are in control, we are in control, we are in control, etc.
IV. EAT IT WHILE I WORK
Doorwise mainframes recalled that messages were left purposely incomplete, indicating rhythms unexpressed by specific contents left in the realm of the implied; unstated hesitancies become a part of the design itself, and noise, leakage, or friction become elements or forces of intent, an oddly ironic testament to form-warp, or something in which an aspect of the development of an idea or stance turns back into the whole and leads to a stylistic repetition wherein reference itself is a causality rather than a byproduct of process.
The exhaustion of one style leads to production of work within a comfort zone, where the scent of the chase is toward familiarity, resolution, acceptance. Where was risk expressed? Was it in a color or an attitude? Only the composition knows. Nor other flippant commentary leads one astray, not into the center of the document (a source outside the composite), nor do definitions particularly matter in the fluxus of determination which is progress itself. No, it is not the material itself which matters, it is as though the progress of a material through to expression were out of your hands, or should be, for how does progress come about, certainly not by frontal assault, that's surely the best way to oblivion; a hand is shown, a way is made, then set. Nor occlude, but star-out into evasiveness, there is certainly a tendency to skip to the left, or just sort of sidestep the charging bull--he moves a slight inch and a half to the right and the locomotive charges on by, over the cliff, and into the berry patch, oh no, not the berry patch, sez br'er rabbit, why I just loves the berry patch.
Perhaps this leaves you feeling a little impatient. A good wander does, but there comes a time when an approach seems to work and becomes a little too comfortable, lulls you into forgetfulness, and that's the time to jump. One learns how. I'd missed the boat two or three times, then swam. My own journey means nothing to any one but me. The examples therein are made pressure in forgiving and in the tenor of use which emerges from the voice one hears, not particularly in the story itself, for there are infinite stories, each one worse than the one preceding, or better, or different, and finally a cacophony of implements of denigration, a salience of the profunct. Finally a single song or voice of sensation and emotion emerges from a callow morass, he flickers into submission and, uh, hears; you are alone still in the silence of self, alone in the movie of mourning and encrustation, how your pitiful wails into the darkness of your own soul go unanswered for maybe all your time in step with your secret, but hen another realm reveals itself i @@@@@@@@N@\x|@@@@@@@@@@e is the spoken tomb of the new beginning, and in that change there is also renewal.
What speaks against us is an unwilling tendency to listen again. It is no joke that the sentences come out this way, it is a fairly new sign that something is taking place, for what is worse than to revolve around the time one has in a sense that nothing is taking place, and although the news is dreadful year after year, still the houses on your street always look the same, and suddenly you are at a meeting of people with old habits and white hair and you realize that they are you and that nothing has changed in all this time but the beating of your undesigned romance with the quest for perfection which you failed to notice was going on underneath your eyes like a pancake on the plate of life, syrup oozing into the profusions and markings of the butter on the edges. Still, it'd eke. You'd nor mark, nor held, nor phaeded in the plud off star, nix, plume at, somer at, the fording skin of shoot, yr flamer hooded at the plume. This is not new nor is it forgiveness in the heart but spinning hours you call response or token push't into newer realms of desire and flame.
I think there is new. We are falling all over it but missing the specific gravity of reference, and that is why it is new. Can one in process become aware of process and yet not retard the forward motion of that history, given that it is a salience slightly beyond the grasp of perception or intention itself, like, no fucking around, this is it in the locus of potentialities, and now is the time to act is both a slogan and a fact of life always present in the cellular larvae of intent, the slighter gasps which precede action itself, how long will you just think about it? Don't get left astir. You'd be encouraged to scuttle all your lifeboats and just swim for it. Don't forget to leave what's left beyond circumstance (if only I could get the nasal twang).
So the footnotes and cross-referential dogmas have been abandoned to the wolves, they'll chomp the baby you've thrown from the sleigh as it races toward Moscow, that'll slake their blood thirst and omit you from the sentence proper. Somehow, you think, the observer is not the observed, and that even so, within process, your very self consciousness delimits purpose from its crust, its very progress if only because one is carrying the extra twenty-five pounds represented by the normal human head, if only you could sort of guillotine-out of thinking itself, then you could really go fast, like the chicken with only half its head cut off, twitching around the barnyard with a ten-point migraine, oh, if I could only finish this paragraph I could go on to the next one.
So the spaces between words are also the spaces between atoms, and you'd finally notice that the vast darkness inside prose is in the very phlogiston of the material world, and that true communication with language might not finally be possible, and so a kind of truancy develops between the verb and its noun, and the diagrams seem to have a lot of dotted lines in them, as if there were a kind of obstinacy in the material itself, that which precedes speech or language, the word itself before it is made.
A scrim or perhaps notice in the midst of plenty. You are not yet complete. Still the monster gleams your heart away. There is some blind intent driving the words from you, he marks and you follow. Or she, whatever. In the vastness of what you have ignored, there is simple description, that's all I can do for now, talk about what the room looks like, uninhabited save for the figure in the chair in the center of the room, noticing. Yet scrim remove. Nor push to pleasant realm. The doter and the dotee. As in "owe." This declension is not held nor formed apart from this. There is "that" and there is "this," the doctrines yield into us. Like the sideways thrust beyond which the incremental makes a foray into silence, boasting of its willfulness to the heart's fancy, I'd not mention this to anyone, but carry it forward and into the cellular level, you cannot do otherwise; in the strategies of self-healing in which you aspire to have one substance in the body communicate with another, how about beating on the heart/head thing for awhile, not noticing the absence in her eyes when you can't "give," it's nothing mean, you say, it's just the way things are. It's a hole in the wall. It's another dark absence where you wait at the corner and nobody comes. A sharp cool.
So I'm trying several things at once, perhaps to defeat the loyalty one bears toward one's communicant, directing the line of fire into the crowd, as it were. You'd not notice in your electronic things that there is a crew of intentions reeling within the paragraph, and as it wanders, there is a naming taking place which eludes even your most potent notice. He said he just wrote the first sentence and the rest of the thing grew out of that. No plan, just a copying out of what wanted to be said, and if there is no directness to the spirit, then nothing will be said at all, and you're still in there safe behind closed doors wanting to get out, I assure you, the more you bet on it as a locus of safety the more cold winds will blow up your pants legs, streaming forgetfulness into the day's own tempos, lining hours with their own vegetative calm. Into seeming sent. Where's the beef to that?
Yet the master evasiveness is more than a clue to what is not noticed. It is the cloud under which you operate, your own private Idaho. Would you share, for that is another call, requiring a moto plenitude of doubt, a release of purpose into the order of following. Here you are confronted by the sentence itself, and you rest within that. You'd meant torpor not. Is it cultural history? We're after naught, nor begun anywhere, it's that cool. And the purpose of that stuff is self-serving, as are most purposes. That's their purpose, you might say.
GLOSSOLALIA 3: Copyright © 1995 J. Lehmus. All individual works Copyright
© 1995 by their respective authors. All further rights to
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