THOUGHT MACHINE II

life for poets, a sweeping, flowing movement of
insight, a daily collapse, repetitively rebuilt with
enthusiastic memories of childhood___hindsight is
an Aristotle Purposefulness: “What is the purpose?”
Discipline of poetic energy relaxes me, or no neuroses
could develop: EXEGESIS of particular wandering,
particular skill, skulduggery, shovel-less, my grave
has been overcome___abortive, Thucydides’
right-&-might schooling, fooling eye of insight___
hidebound cloud, fuzziness of prosperity & brother
-hood___invincible obstacles in the immaculate musical
soul: sopranos, contraltos, tenor timid of testimonial,
monumental, ungovernable impulses___our eon-ancient
entity, ie. earth, has a face that grunts at the conflicts
between the status quo & the pull of Power, sparking
from the flint of money, like fishes that need the flash
of a surrounding organism to be able to notice them___

inadequate black box rescued from sitting in the
ice of the sun & air, rounded by snow, height
& coldness, chilly; are chilies thought of the same
way in their homeland as they are in foreign fields
& lands where a diet’s difficult to melt? what voices
of multitudinous horrors does a black box hold
within?___anesthetize amnesiac America! ortho
-doxy of bomb-making plots__clerical bull-pens
withhold relentless growls; who will let out the
anti-celestial choir? anti this, anti that, I foresee a
new century of instigators: The Masters of Tragedy
are soaked up as an attempt to escape from
materialism & urban contempt, malnutritional
Monsanto lingering over society like a flaming,
residual piece of steel___who avoids thinking?

aging reappearing in different guises; harmonious
spinning of danger like a master machinist making 
mistakes___aches, leaving the sea must be like being 
in a non-musical family that became musical, then does 
not remember being musical: the sketchy waves score it, 
most of us lack money, contacts & the proper platform
___who cranks your intestinal equinox? rebec & symbol, 
connoting evil? psaltery & the harp, sacred pageantry, 
objets d'art of stars with plump pink cheeks, twinkles 
in eyes, walking like penguins___A. S. W. Rosenbach, 
considered the “Napoleon of the auction room,” paying for 
The First Folio of Shakespeare, libraries, liebraries, 
a pimple inside the nostril, Button Gwinnett buying the 
original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland: what is dust? 
sizable clientèle, boom-years blew away years ago,
& now, nervous dictions in the ominous belly: 
a dialectical shadow, vortexes of  baroque sunbursts 
from our notably unknown retellings of life, what memory 
will reward or haunt___what convergence, what 
ramifications to be had for obeying the wrong voice, 
like wearing a clip-on Qlippoth___ofconsciousness, 
ofdwelling oftransition, offputting resonance still sly as 
a fox, smug as a shepherd___music arcs into me, dispatches
itself with Peter Pan-skill; my future-self, threadbare,
a feeling of having passed beyond the body___

POEM

The process of change is dreaming that God had a dream—
this is what allows deaf people to hear.
I once had a dear love that must have dwelled nearby a blink from God beneath my
    fingertips.
Polarized inside a bottle of glass, embedded in a color that has yet to be seen.
What is madness anyhow but a hoot, an owl-eyed aligning of a visual perfect circle?
Out of this skull flowers a mirror behind you, like the first time that you beheld
your own features in the looking-glass, glassy-eyed . . . or,
the first time your new neighbor saw you from a distance,
as you carried in furniture, clothing, boxes upon boxes of possessions.
One would think our entire lives were auditioning to make decisions without
    thinking twice—
sequential ranks & performing towards goals that are dismissed by dictatorial
    diction.
Ode to inchlings. I crawl to the finish line like a foregone conclusion—
I’m not looking for sympathy, but if it comes from a man drinking Jack Daniels
for breakfast, that kind of sympathy must be where Rock-N-Roll first got its
    reputation
yet I am here in this damp orchard of accord. perfect démerder of day,
having, at first, succumbed to the Drill Marshall of oppressiveness,
but now, allowing the fruity aromas of this garden of blooms to immerse me,
as if I were standing in Wang Xizhi’s Orchid Pavilion Gathering—
ethereal foray of sprouts, dewy grasses, like broken glass fragments
on assorted blades—breathing, breathing—a tender breath of wind, like musical
    notes,
unfogging the windows of my mind,
this bountiful day of reflective spatial elsewhere.

POEM

My life has been like a literary trifle,
vis inertiae: mentally begetting a master
-stroke of still-motion: I am on a wind-faculty,
delicacy of muscles petrifying my fluid
movements.   Most all philosophers are too
ridiculously-serious.   In short, I would
rather flatter them with Existence.
Zen-conversation, but existence goes beyond
intuition, staking one’s reputation on
a mere hunch.   Back to square one,
sunshine deep into submarine streams:
That’s me, a besmirched entity, static
through a transistor radio.   In essence,
a peaceful hippie is better than
all of the pompousness.
A gendermondering category error,
the smug & professorial.
Daily beloved assassin of life: I love you!
Born from the womb around a learning curve,
warranting an asterisk, not for subtextual
information, but for jinxing the hijinx.

POEM

“Out of disunity, out of being torn apart, comes thinking.”
                                                             
                                                                          —Hegel


Here is another one. A grave rage of great
grayish shadows bending in the Light of a
half-opened Universe of the “either-or”
that stands out like diamonds on a muddy
road. The weight of distance is understood
then & now: Love enriches the body.

Thoughts for aficionados of the Morning Ether
coming from out of the misty countenance
of my mind that is escorted by Vocabulary.
Let’s feast on one another’s misery. Most
of us are somewhat conscious of the way
in which piano keys are like eyelashes.

Let us teach the elderly to beware of scammers.
Let us surrender to love that swallows
everything else whole. Summer has arrived!
A blink & I see the window frame shiver
to postpone light that the heartbeat of the air
tranquilizes, or because I asked it to.

I know what the Future holds. I am waiting
for something to shift, to be disemboweled
systematically. It seems like mechanical objects
ache to be torn apart by either time or
clumsy hands or I don’t know. Red seams ripped
from a baseball. No, what I really mean is

that a nervous pang can be felt when thinking
that at any moment the light-bulb could inhale
darkness, or the computer will collapse in on
itself. Pulling pixels out of photographs.
I want my poems to be “autocorrected.”
I still welcome flowers to the world,

though they could tell me a thing or two
about the world, & they always do.
When I take off my glasses & look upon
the moon this night, the waning gibbous moon
becomes a full circle. Imperfect refractions
which perfect imperfect circles. I stand beneath

a spotlight in the Universe’s theater—
the passing sunset was my blush, my hush catches
hold & I cut up the air to see if I can find a
word-pocket hiding somewhere.

POEM

Re

-pea                                    ting
                                    things

as if to be a parrot is to claw the abominable cage
                                                          
                                                            earthian DNA        dia
-chronous phrases?

Re

                                                      -pea
                                                                                    ter

preacher-like 
                     St. Peter

        the
                         demand
                                      for
                                            i
-dent

                                       -ity                         ten

-sion                               points of                            

mirrors                  [ ]                 srorrim

                     I                                ’ve

seen the drunkard
drunk on tiny morsels of the only power that they have

                                           I                                ’ve

seen all of these things

                a
                  petulant   
                                                 man
                                                          says to me

 
So, what?

& I could say       What else is new?
                                                      but still a sad eye

eye of trouble                    trouble
-some gulp                         glint                          flint
in my stomach       

            My dear frend

you see            he puts out advertisements
to visit the theatre        but no one bites
no one responds when you want them to

laying down large sums of money
                                                 to people
                                                               that are
                                  ungrateful
ungrateful
unappreciative                   Let’s become

POP ARTISTS                          Oprah O-mouths

couch-jumpers                  from town-to-town

pop artists              I mean

         
                                                             so
-da
                   soda
                             sticky

                                                 sod
-a

in
                                                          -corp
-orated             ratted on

    I mean like a Philharmonic
that

may or may as well
spray an audience with liquid monikers

                                what are they?

Another friend is sad & lonely
               not weeping
                        but
                           sobbing
she says
& she says

that she wants to get her life back
                        on

-track                     the world tells her
that
                      “money is the only way to do that”

                                           which
                                                  makes
                                                         me
                                                               want
                                                                        to
                                                                           strike
                                                                        currency
                                                                     down
                                                                 down
                                                              down
                                                         with
                                                       an
                                                   ax
                                                of
                                           shat
-tered                     
            passion

to get off
                     of the grid
                                                             start a group
                                      of helpbodies

let us re

-consider the belief
                                   in the glorious
                                   dream

I close my eyes & become a stranger to myself

POUNDS

to shed a few pounds        to weigh down
    my geometric vernacular
        in this coy Or
-wellian age                       well   
             of art
-ificial minds  & art
-ificial joints

you                          can take the evil
                                                      out of keywords
but keyboards
                       are what humanity has become


every ounce of lassies handclapping 
                                                                               softly
a girl whispering to me
                                                           as if I can hear her              
as a helicopter flies overhead

                                                                                 the wind blowing
bodies 
                                                                  jiggling

              from                      the                                  completeness

of flamboyant adrenaline
                                                               pupils
                                                                     rolled
                                                                             out
                                                                of our heads

                                                           the stopping place              opposite
of
the realm
of animals
 


all I heard was
  

you can play the melody plus tax

                                                                                   Overhearing speech 
                                                                                   in exoteric language
                                                                     The world

is an enigma of angry silicon

PDFs                                           black mouths                           full of dark words


In other news  DEATH IS IN THE AIR
                                                                God forbid!

                                                                  Television                               a death-box


Pandora has spit out a dozen babies

                          for Lamia to devour


Sugar ain’t cheap


I come upon a book on the Art of Breastfeeding

Someone show me the Good Life!

                                                                                               Gung-ho
                                                                                      I have become



                                                                                                 becoming


                                                                   The American Dream


                                            as an expletive

I am the American Spleen 
                                                                                                   rupturing
where the nervous system is opened
                                                                                           beyond
                                                                                      the
                                                                    continuum

                                                              A man
                                                              from Wichita, Kansas

asks me how fast                                 I can text someone

He says that he used to go to the movies for a dime

People 
          are 
              so distanced 
                              from kindness  
                                              saying Thank You 
                                                                   has become
                                                                               the Underground thing to do


                                                             Medieval melancholy chants
                                                        associated with

                                                Certainties 
                                           are 
                            considered 
                
                                                  a psychiatric illness
 
I’d rather chat                   with 
                                                   a Suburban Mystic
                                                             than have my spirit vegetated 
                                                             fidgetedly

                                                  which could lead to physical illness

                                                                                          What is the source 
                                                                                                      of daily despondences

                                                                                                                 perhaps I live 
                                                                                                                           in a fantasy world
                                                                                                                                but at least 
                                                                                                                      it’s my own 
                                                                                  baffled by conjurers
                                                              Dante & Aristotle must disagree

they flame in their resting-places



Behind my eyelids 
              a flight of madness

                                 quivering 
                                                  as if the soul had vanished

THIS IS FOR SOLDIERS

dressed in temperate-zoned madness in the middle
    of a desert   thinking of their wives their children
seeing a friend’s torso blown out of their sphere
    Nothing but their heartbeat left in their friend’s throat
that stands there   what else does he do? skull jabbed
    with sharpness     shrapnel inner-wall screamed  
the kill-zone   slopes    the green glow of sludge
    of death oozes like broiled titanium   combustions   
sinkholes   If anyone disturbs the skull it will rise up
    like a sword   Sir Thomas Browne said that in nature
there are no grotesques    he was right    man makes
    grotesques     Reconstruction of whatever it was
that killed the lights   What glows   Ghost wardens
    still stealing still spinning in some cold place
like steel blurs in abandoned prisons    familiar spirits  
    ancestors understanding lustrous black nights    
Vanishes this life vanishes quickly     like a former love    
    like a wife’s husband in a war      I remember
how she had vanished she had vanished frontally 
    coppernosed aglow leaving heavenly prospects
flakes of Golden Alps   pulled obscure tendons   
    background check over my shoulder solidity reformed  
curls its tail on a cold fruitless moon-lit night

MYSTERY

Is Mystery the slashed brittle music of a tender bud
growing inside us all? The fantastic voyage of worlds—

but the displacement warped beyond all
goes in through the nose to fill empty spaces,
to fill miscellaneous praxis.

Poïesis—what Mystery seeks is to
devour disciplines, theories, practices, approaches
& methodologies. Compare our brains to a vast computer
& you will receive angel-time.

I walk outside to take in great lungfuls of sweetness;
the relationship between scent & a flower’s opened interspace:

Ears of mediators, I network with the earth’s vines;
they crawl into me, out of me, weaving me, weepingly.



 

POST-MODERN PRE-ANTIQUE GEOGRAPHY

What power is & isn’t    
in this generation of
Who Will Save The Day.

Prank of merciless chill
with blood around the mouth.
This is a new story

about confirmation
or disconfirmation
of Uncommon irrationality        

Cleverly executed.
I sat in the darkness
with a cup in-hand

as a woman with strong
-scented perfume
& pink slippers

walked lightly
into the darkness
(my geography).

I felt like an Icon of Film
which works in a strange way
if your garments

are like the framework
of post-colonial discourses
or visual art

digitized by glow-in-the-dark
objects. Am I a mere blooper
waiting to happen?

Inflammatory compulsions.
She said, “My problems range
from loss of love,

loss of heart-rate
and other lady-part stuff.”    
& this is what America is all about—

Vegas vegans
meating in turquoise.
The winning numbers

do not matter here.
It’s all about
guns & missiles, shnookums,

spinning several hundred
RPMs like only a president could,
like reaching

a new plateau of maturity.
I must have been alien
or an alien,

abducting her heart.
My camera was jolted
when I photographed her

spinning in sparks
& I must have sounded like a
river-boat gambler.

“I fall in love too easily”
she said. It’s like spinning
around the sun     

as a ghost of Yesteryear
in the universe’s
spin-cycle.

She sold her drama well
like programs that teach
teenagers the dangers

of shaking their babies.
The earth is crying.
The woman in pink shoes

is the earth
& I must be the earthquake        
shaking

in a circumstantial way.
The seal shall be broken.
I said: “Look at it

this way: why so morose? None of us
are getting out of here alive anyway,
so cheer up...”

EQUALibrium

            Whoever seizes the greatest unreality will shape the greatest reality.
                                                                                —Hugo von Hofmannsthal
  
Best of friends
are like Borromean rings,
tight as Brunnian braids.       

In the course of this strange odyssey
that we are embarking on . . .
have I told you how much I miss hearing
about Michael Jackson in the news?

History tells me nothing,
except that my body
could be a wonderland
as my youth slowly vanishes.
I wonder

what feeling
could be if it were 
our only source of energy.

Rabbit holes & secret doorways
to Narnia?

History books
will never quite capture the essence
of how I can trace a cat’s whisker
in a curvilinear way.

History?
Oral or Oedipus-blinded?

Like a snake’s sloughed skin,
I demand sacrifice.

Instead of Fraud Prevention,
perhaps Freud Prevention?:
For the shallow dreamers.

A girl that I went to Art School with
had an obsession with Heath Ledger
to the point where she said that
she had attempted to stalk him. 

“How could I become that desirable?” I said.
 
“Only if you’re Heath Ledger,” she said.

“My middle name is Heath. Does that count?”

She snickered the way that people snicker
like an energy that overrides passion.

I thought of the agony,
the heartache,
buried beneath her body
when she learned of his death.

The spasms of her explosion
still echoes in spaces, outer-spaces—

our highly individual visions
devoid of human comprehension,
like a man
that chainsaws-off his own foot
after being bitten
by a poisonous snake.

Is that a passionate extreme?

What seems tragic
hints towards the formation of
an understanding on the Theory of Life.

Everyone wants to feel passion,
to feel admired,
the way that your loving cat looks at you,
unstoppable & indisputable,
her eyes leaking fluids, could they be tears,
making me look wet-like from her perspective?
& thus resembling an impression of water?

What are the mechanics of Illusion?
The womb of a ghost?

We will be fencing before long.
You still want to get down to the bottom
of every secret, you say.

Secrets are the only thing worth interrogating,
I think to say, but didn’t.