Didn't you like the way the ants help the peony globes open by eating the glue off? Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable, in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe baloney on white with fluorescent mustard? Wasn't it a revelation to waggle from the estuary all the way up the river, the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck, the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring? Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old Webster's New International, perhaps having just eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon? What did you imagine lies in wait anyway at the end of a world whose sub-substance is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck? Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren and how little flesh is needed to make a song. Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph split open and the mayfly struggled free and flew and perched and then its own back broke open and the imago, the true adult, somersaulted out and took flight, seeking the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial, alimentary canal come to a stop, a day or hour left to find the desired one? Or when Casanova took up the platter of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff out the window, telling his startled companion, "The perfected lover does not eat." As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine pinworms as some kind of tiny batons giving cadence to the squeezes and releases around the downward march of debris? Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs what seemed your own inner blazonry flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air? Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy hinged beings, and then their offspring, and then their offspring's offspring, could navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico, to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree, by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors who fell in this same migration a year ago? Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert to wake in the night and find ourselves holding hands in our sleep?
FLOCK THEORY
why regret? - galway kinnell
This is my little brother’s music being performed at Berkeley this past month. It is lovely and sad and old-fashioned and not at all. I love it and him. He is in the audience somewhere all black-clad and mysterious in his brain hermitage.
WIKIPOETICALS
i’m really interested in information and how we get/trust the information we get/trust. also, i love wikipedia. not because it’s real or right, but because it is, in its myriad falsity and authenticity, always true. i love it not because it is reliable, but because it changes; because it helps us understand and draw connections while severing any real ones. i hate it for all the same reasons. it is very hatable. and lovable. and unavoidable. so i’ve been making some poems of it:
THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA
This article is about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. There is no (disambiguation)
Much happened.
Much happened before Korea
and then there was Korea
and then the halves
which was the mark of the thing happening.
Much happened.
Of which you and I were parts
even before we were you and i
when we were still Joan and saints and Yu
and even before that,
back, to when stories had beginnings.
And of which we are more so now that we have bodies.
Much happened which is impossible to pronounce in the same language under whose signs we say love with capitals and with mouths—
What God let you die that way.
_
LOVE
This article is about the intense feeling of attraction. For other uses, see Love (disambiguation)
Oh the mammalian drive.
Which is also a crater on our only moon,
a river in Taiwan,
a catalog of singing to the highest power and the lowest.
Shape-shifter love, what word swings circles so wide and so varied:
I loved a father.
I love a mother.
I love that partnership makes survival more likely.
Love the second hand. Love the fruit bat.
Love all the whispering that comes from totems I cannot see.
Eros. Oneness. God. Love the transportational/
transformational tug of Boston’s T
Or maybe it’s just the dopamine, norepinephrine (no-ra-pin-ef-rin), serotonin, and
pheromones driving through the blood I share with the mother like a bullet.
Either way we grow more nerves.
We get to say God is love, God is love, in Latin, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, and Persian every time we slip a finger into each other’s bodies, and join, in circles so wide and so varied, Darwin, Erich Fromm, and all the Canonical Gospels.
Your body is Rome. Your body is Roma. Amor. Amo. Your chest is Deuteronomy, the thrum of pumping immunity and the mosquito hawk.
Let the falling toward each other disambiguate here:
Oh mammalian love song, whale call, quick pull, all the universe is tethered through thesingular axiom of the one plus one. Every finger to finger here, in the hot steam of the yellow shower, high-fives infinity.
Sing advesa. Sing mettā, Sing every whale, American basketball hero, sing George, Nancy,
and Robert Love. Sing mammalian absolute values and the proliferation of every sentient being.
Sing, little heartstring. Sing.
_
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
For Daniel McGowan
This article is about the historical sea route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the Arctic waters of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. For other uses see Northwest Passage (disambiguation)
Fully navigable. That is to say, we can get around this, too.
Only just not all of us.
Condolences white bear. Super sorry Inuit! Two of a kind of only one kind: the penny and the oil drum.
When God closes a weatherdoor, He always opens a window—
Fully navigable.
That is to say, finally.
Finally the word means the thing.
Passable distance.
Circles inside circles.
Unless of course, you’re not a swimmer.
But think of all the new ways to use archipelago in a sentence. At last we find it time to open all that watertalk we jarred for seasons without.
And we’ll need it. A hundred words for snow. A hundred for the deluge, for the too much
and the too not enough.
Example: Vermont swims with the fishes.
Texas dries off the map.
Make it rain.
But what is the dance for making it stop. What from here where ice reads only as the pink mass of satellites. Where we still say Eskimo and love a good adventure, even us, who dream in greyscale, the pornography of black bloc spreading across white land like the Little Ice Age. Like ink.
Until we dream: we close the gap.
With violence.
Which is also love.
“from THE PALACE OF JUSTICE - by ariana reines
when my boyfriend called the cops on me
i waited in my room for them to come
i waited a half hour and then another half hour
this naked whiteness i could contrive to cleanse me
officer i am in love and now my lover hate me
always having dreamed of being a monk in a cell
if i eat celery for ten days and with an ether commingle
i could sit in the seat of rocks and razors
standing on one foot for ten years near the gingerlight
where the lees of my mind would fizz and then unto heaven saileveryone i know beats up their lover and their lover beats them up
and the cops come and the cops go and sometimes someone passes a night in holding
i saw a shade pass across his face when he said he loved me
and he would not tell me what that shade was
i’m just a lover officer
but they never came though later they would come for him and i looked at my computer
and the internet was so depressing
then you wrote me a message like
call me sometime
and i think i chatted like how about right now
and you were like
yeah
do it
call me right now
when you walk in the rinsed orange light
shining like rotting tangerines picking up a deck of cards
low mean cards a low mean deal
twos and threes of clubs
which is pretty much what we got
blood is a spangle
bright colors are hidden deep in the body
fruits impossibly moist
trees blow out their hair along a furrow
i’m sick of eating beans in ugly light
i should not have spent my friend’s money on a miniskirt
but this is the future
the insects are dead in the cupboard
and dead on the floor
and i left one over there
quivering
alongside a clot of strawberry jam
to write this downthe small ones and the fat orangeish ones
”
they die through the holes in the ceiling
and they live and die upon me no matter how much love I make
sleeping like promises when I have to go
to sleep against the future which is not
going to come to term today and not tomorrow either
why would you sit down and write it
this is the total experience
we’re too big to fail
Ariana Reines.
“ The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. ”
David Foster Wallace: “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
“ Magic then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different than ours. For it is likely that the “inner world” of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of our Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with animate earth. We are only human in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. ”
David Abram.
