Possible new assignment

Not fully fleshed out, but here goes...

Post 1 line at a time.

The line must be a combination/mash-up of an overheard line and a line of poetry.

Or, more specific

The line must be a combination/mash-up of an overheard line and a line of very old (17th Century?) poetry.

Play with this a little and see what you come up with. I'm certainly not tied to it, but I like the idea of smashing together a found line (which will help with listening skills) and a bound line (like we might find in the 17th century).

Title possibilities

1. The Bound Opera
2. The Found Opera
3. Sloppy Hope
4. A Weed in the Weather
5. The Daily Bleed
6. Opera Weather
7. Humdrum Swishing

Forget it, I'm listening.

The remedy for an unahppy occurrence is a decision. It interrupts the flow of thoughts that come from the past event and prolong its vibration by a reverse flow of contrary thoughts coming from the outside, from the future.

There are several methods of making fake body parts. The method you choose is determined by the end result you want, your budget and the amount of effort you want to invest. Among many choices, your most basic options are;

One feels, yes, but what one feels is like a negative which shows only blackness until one has placed it near a special lamp and which must also be looked at in reverse. So with one's feelings: until one has brought them within range of the intellect one does not know what they represent. Then only, when the intellect has shed light upon them, has intellectualized them, does one distinguish, and with what difficulty, the lineaments of what one felt.

I assume that the music now backing the opening sequence of the picture is temporary.

Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful... nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over and over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness...self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there--those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only...to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.

Compelled by love of my birthplace, I gathered together the scattered leaves and returned them to him, who was already silent.

The essential core round which loves that have been lived through make and unmake their halo, that mysterious human being, loved in spite of himself and ourself, interchangeable and yet unchanging; scrutinized as though everything depended on what he is in himself and yet accidental, always the victim of doubt, that doubt which whispers in our ear that any being would have replaced him, if chance had disposed of him and us differently--has this essential core an existence of its own, or does its existence come from an illusion whose seat is inside us?

Write a page of standard prose, as fast as you can, about how you felt the first time you saw your loved one, how you felt the first time you knew you were in love, and how you feel right now about being together. These three moments in time will create the structure of your poem. Replace any weak verbs with stronger verbs and any pronouns with proper nouns. Words depicting the 5 senses work well for love poems. Reread your passage and pick a metaphor to tie the three moments together. Choosing a metaphor is the most fun part so be wild with it. An opening flower is a tried and true metaphor for love, but a cloud that looks like a heart might work even better. Rewrite your passage using the metaphor to describe the three moments. Read your page aloud, change things that sounds "off" to you. Make notes where you feel there's a pause in the flow.
Write the poem, putting a line breaks where you made the notes. Whether you type or write the poem consider framing your poem. Your loved one may want to keep the poem as a memento! Read the poem aloud to the person you love, or present it as a gift to them.

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

the moon needs adjusting

Having cleaned his armor and made a full helmet out of a simple headpiece, and having given a name to his horse and decided on one for himself, he realized that the only thing left for him to do was to find a lady to love; for the knight errant without a lady-love was a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul. He said to himself:

Even if the girl does everything for your eyes, she must also do something for your mind's history.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

I have been a man and you haven't: This intelligence of ours only serves to replace those impressions which make you love and suffer by faint facsimiles which cause less grief and induce less tenderness. In the rare moments when I recapture all my affection, all my suffering, it's because my feelings have ceased to be based on these false ideas and reverted to something which is the same in you and in me. And that seems to me so superior to everything else that it's only when I've become a dog again, a poor little Zadig like you, that I begin to write and books that are written like that are the only books I like.

Diversity is therefore built into the most intimate experience that we enjoy in our souls, and we have no reason to look for or to require uniformity and stability outside ourselves and in the soul of others. 'I do not at all hate opinions contrary to mine. I am so far from being vexed to see discord between my judgments and others', and from making myself incompatible with the society of men because they are of a different sentiment and party from mine, that on the contrary, since variety is the most general fashion that nature has followed...I find it much rarer to see our humors and plans agree. And there were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.

Outlined above are three easy vanishes, but as I said at the beginning, it is the reappearance that is important. One great reappearance that can be used for any vanishes is called "cough up." It involves a little patter and a flourish.

I take it as common cause that part of the human condition, if not the essential flame, is the process of imagining ourselves to be. We are who and what we are only in becoming. We survive, we live, because we try to conceive of the nature and the purpose of being. Our consciousness is the constant invention of what we may be, bounded by the possible.

Freud also asserts, however, that artists possess special abilities that differentiate them radically from the patently neurotic personality. The artistic person, for example, possesses to an especially high degree the power to sublimate (that is, to shift the instinctual drives from their original sexual goals to nonsexual "higher" goals, including the discipline of becoming proficient as an artist);

Concepts and practices of democracy (or democratization, because it is a conduct and not necessarily a state), development, and culture overlap thus to define one another. The aesthetics of interacting with the environment, of experiences morphing through art into objects and processes of beauty, constitute the ground for ethical consciousness. Beauty--however we conceive of it (but we always recognize it)--is a way toward accessing ethical values. Conscience flows from consciousness; the other way round would constitute moral dogma.

I bet the monster was happy when they made him a maze.

Increasing our range need not cost us our focus: quite the reverse. The person without a range of reference is not more authentically human for being so. He is just more alone.

Our cameras, our wordy spokesmen or propagandists, don't seek and celebrate an old man's pride, an old woman's faith, a housewife's ingenuity and intelligence, her husband's almost desperate carpentry . . .

Mythological and philosophical constructions are obviously capers to relieve our anxiety in face of the intolerable. It is a sign of slight progress if we are able to stay fairly quiet.

That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other;

But a past act is dead, i.e. meaningless to the historian, unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it. Hence "all history is the history of thought," and "history is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying."

Yet in tracking the history of those dead faiths and dead eras, Quinn came to see that the way people clung to their ignorant beliefs was what shaped the conscience of their age. However dead those beliefs were now, they had once elevated men to heroism and bliss, reduced them to cowardice and sorrow.

In the society which he paints for us and in which, as soon as it is a question of moral truths, the majority of people prefer knowing less to trying to justify themselves, where they are tormented without being uneasy, nervous without really being preoccupied, where they only perceive in the act of learning the unpleasant fact of not having known, where each person willingly accuses himself of error rather than having recourse to the means of no longer having to commit it, where indifference alone engenders impartiality and in consequence makes it sterile, where contact with other people is therefore in every sense of the term extremely 'limited' owing to a general absence of curiosity...

The pardoners lived merrily; certainly after a well occupied day they must have been cheerful companions at the inn. The thought of the multitude of sins which they had remitted, of excommunications which they had taken off, of penalites which they had commuted--themselves simple vagabonds menaced with the gallows--the knowledge of their impurity, the singularity of their existence, the triumphant success of those mad harangues which gave them the keys of heaven, must have made their hearts swell inconceivably with coarse brutal merriment.

Thus love is not only for him the one spur to activity, the force which will sustain him and help him to grow old well, but is the only interior climate which is completely favorable to intellectual work.

There is a sheet of paper on which, at some time or other, I tried to begin a poem with the line "Others are bodies," but got no farther than that.

He praises a relaxed will, an easygoing enjoyment of living and its contingencies, and he dislikes erudition if it is painfully acquired. 'We would be much better off if we dropped our inquiries and let ourselves be moulded by the natural order of the world.' 'The natural order of the world' gives us the essence of Montaigne. Ecstasies and visions that may involve escaping from our corporeal selves are dangerous and not to be trusted. We cannot bootstrap ourselves into some elevated state which is not our natural setting. Each one of us has his own idiosyncracies, both of body and of mind, his own forma mentis, and the idiosyncracies are the result of countless causes and influences which will never be traced. Therefore it is foolish to publish rules and disciplines for all humanity as the Stoics did, since humanity consists of endlessly varying and diverse individuals, whose needs must be endlessly varying also.

I'm seized by laughter every time I remember how I used to think--and you apparently still think this--that one might set up a happy, honest little world and lead a peaceful, quiet, faultless life, beyond reproach, serenely doing only what is right. What nonsense! It can't be done, old thing! Any more thant one can keep fit without exercise, just by holding still. To live an honest life you must struggle, stray, do battle, make mistakes, begin, give up, start over, quit again, fight and lose without end. Peace is spiritual degradation.

Great writing involves protecting one's intuitions, even one's ignorance. Knowing, as such, is not always an advantage to making significant art. Acknowledging one's ignorance, and learning to respect personal as well as human limitations, WHILE one works with the welter of fantasies that tumble between certainty and helplessness, is not learnable in school, and can probably best be dealt with in what I would call 'neutral solitude'... For a poet, ignorance is as deep a well as knowing...

The events in the poem are as follows:

FIT I. During the revelry at King Arthur's Court one new year, the Green Knight rides in with an axe, and challenges anyone present to strike him a blow with it, provided he can give a return blow a year later. Gawain, the king's nephew, takes up the challenge and cuts off the visitor's head. The body, still living, picks up the head, which tells Gawain to look for him at the Green Chapel in a twelvemonth's time. The visitor leaves.

And if in some cases--where we are dealing, for instance, with the inaccurate language of our own vanity--the rectification of an oblique interior discourse (which deviates gradually more and more widely from the first and central impression) until it merges with the straight line which the impression ought to have produced is a laborious undertaking which our idleness would prefer to shirk, there are other circumstances--for example, where love is involved--in which this process is actually painful.

It seemed we would be capable of a great communication now, but as we walked I realized I didn't know what to say to her. We went down the street without talking. The traffic was light, evening was approaching, and as we passed below some trees the streetlights suddently came on. This moment has always amazed me. I knew the woman had seen it too, but it is always a disappointment to mention a thing like this.

grief is merely the mode in which certain ideas make their first entry into us.

; it is the source of his radiant serenity.

Style perhaps will come to us from the sensible and shrewd disenchanted, who are conscious of the limits of their art and prefer loving it in humility to reforming humanity.

Holding on with one hand to poetry, she stretches and stretches to grasp things which are best gained by letting go of poetry.

Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.

Many people are congenitally unable to appreciate the sight of a peacock. Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is "good for"--a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none. The telephone company sent a lineman out one day to repair our telephone. After the job was finished, the man, a large fellow with a suspicious expression half hidden by a yellow helmet, continued to idle about, trying to coax a cock that had been watching him to strut. He wished to add this exprerience to a large number of others he had apparently had. "Come on now, bud," he said, "get the show on the road, upsy-daisy, come on now, snap it up."

The peacock, of course, paid no attention to this.

"What ails him?" the man said.

"Nothing ails him, I said. "He'll pull it up terreckly. All you have to do is wait."

In later years [Proust] enjoyed frequenting a brothel, where his habits were jotted down in a notebook by one of the young men who worked there. He preferred for the man to stand naked beside the bed and masturbate. Watching him, Proust would also masturbate. If Proust had trouble reaching a climax, the man was obliged to bring in two savage rats in cages, and 'Immediately the two starving animals threw themselves at each other, emitting heart-rending cries and tearing at each other with their claws and teeth.'

Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of reality," Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when you're not there."

Proust has no taste for inventions, fakes, unjustified leaps and misleading invocations. He never establishes relations between two things which have none. I know of no finer meditation on absence, death and oblivion than THE SWEET CHEAT GONE: nothing more transparent, patient, supple, sincere and a more careful statement of genuine effects. If it existed, that would be metaphysics: that deepening of real life, that absence of sham, of complacency; that modesty, that calm manner of presenting oneself full face to a certain number of illuminations, where there is a sense of the meaning of life--things which fall to us of their own accord and our only course is not to run away from them.

Under the eyes of the placid hermit, comfortably established at the edge of the road, under the glance of this man, who calmly prepared himself by an untroubled life without care nor suffering for a blissful eternity, flowed the changefully coloured current of travellers, vagabonds, wayfarers, and wanderers. His benediction rewarded the generous passer; the hard look of the austere man did not suffice to disturb the blessed indifference. The life of others might rapidly consume, burnt by the sun, gnawed by care; his own endured in the shade of the trees, and continued without hurt, lulled by the rustle of human passions.

Now the fact that something can be at the same time obvious and incomprehensible is repugnant to us precisely because it places a brutal obstacle in the way of the exercise of our own subtlety. We need things that are true, but are explained; or alternatively, things which are incomprehensible, but enriched by an infinite number of commentaries. But only to be able to offer a banal commentary (at any rate so far as the content is concerned) on a thing which is incomprehensible is profoundly humiliating to us and we refuse to listen to anybody talking about it.

The overwhelming experience of the sacred is no doubt an essential element of any religion. But the week isn't made up only of Sundays;

To William, then, art was an extension and clarification of the fluid, fugitive deliverances of experience. It was a special, deliberate mode of 'taking'. It was creation also in the sense in which the mind creates all objects, but with inner and outer relationships offered in a form that gives the impression of complete novelty and a heightened reality. It satisfies a need not satisfied by work, play, thought, or worship. From such a sensibility one might expect a corresponding subtlety of perception and behavior in personal relations.

What I am writing is a confession. I saw those vistas with the wilful eye of protracted Innocence. Winnie the Pooh was closer to my heart than Christabel, and to say so is to confess myself not a child but a divided man who has trifled with visions of degredation and visions of exaltation without admitting either to the center of my heart. So I suppose now that center to be not known, and I flounder as I floundered thirty years ago, in shy love of a country innocent and personal as a piece of bread in my mouth, and like it silent, comforting, warm, and selfish.

Berberova said a beautiful thing about Muratov. "He was always in love in a balanced and quiet way." She also said that he was "a man of inward order who understood the internal disorder of others."

Anxiously the novice listened to the crisscrossing voices. Each seemed to him right, and a strange confusion overcame his spirit.

This last fact was the real issue, for the way grew straight from the moment one recognised that the poet essentially CAN'T be concerned with the act of dying. Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him, and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle. The process of life gives way fighting, and often may so shine out on the lost ground...

Soon Robert . . . was erasing a drawing by de Kooning and declaring this act to be its own work of art. Yves Klein was inviting Parisians to an opening of an exhibition at which there was nothing to see. He called the show Le Vide (The Void), and a mob of 1,000 people jammed the empty Iris Clert Gallery, spilling onto the surrounding streets (the police and firemen had to be called in), drinking special blue cocktails, a mixture of gin, Cointreau, and methylene blue mixed for Klein by La Coupole, the famous brasserie, which caused the urine of drinkers to turn blue for about a week, roughly the planned run of the show.

An artist steps up to each person individually, whispers in his ear, and quietly demands that he recognize him. It has happened! I have one, even two, who have recognized me. I now have fifteetn, one hundred, four thousand of them. I begin to breathe deeply--so I am approaching seriousness at last! How many years it takes! My climb swallowed up thirty years of effort, poverty, and humiliation.

Over time, she built up and scraped away the paint, again and again, gluing the work to an even larger canvas to center it more precisely. Every day she went to work on what she finally decided to call The Rose, although it never resembled one. For years she did almost nothing else, surviving, it was said, sometimes on brandy and cigarettes. Increasingly, she withdrew from company. People started to talk. The work went through phases and names. . . . Finally, in 1969, eleven years after she had begun working on it, The Rose was exhibited, but by then the art world had changed. Conceived in the era of Jackson Pollock and the Beats, the painting, a massive gray monolith of strange delicacy and gloomy bohemianism, emerged in the age of Pop art and psychedelia. A reviewer dubbed it "a glorious anachronism." It was falling apart. Slabs of paint were sliding off it like lava from a volcano.

It is easier to forgive an author for not replying to the questions we ask ourselves than to treat as important those which do not concern us and which should in reality interest everybody. It is a proof of our own poverty of thought. Montaigne always offers us more than he announces. He is one of those writers like a Freud or a Proust from whom we may always hope for some unexpected observation, who always fill their nets all the more abundantly because they do not ask themselves in advance what principles they are going to rely upon in order to establish a connection between all the material they bring to the surface, or how they are going to reconcile it with some pre-existing explanation or moral attitude.

I suppose there is nothing / so good as human / immediacy // I do not speak loosely / of handshake / which is // of the mind / or lilies--stand closer-- / smell

For me, all of man's strivings to escape himself, whether they are pure aesthetics or pure structuralism, religion, or Marxism, are naive and doomed to failure. This is a variation on a martyrlike mysticism. And this drive to dehumanize (which I engage in as well) must inevitably accompany the drive to humanize, otherwise reality falls apart like a house of cards and threatens to drown in the verbiage of unreality. No, you will not satisfy man with formulas! Your constructions, your structures, will remain empty until Someone comes to live there. The more elusive man becomes, the more unattainable, abysmal, immersed in the other elements and imprisoned in forms, as if they were not articulated by his own lips, then the more urgent and burning becomes the presence of the ordinary man, just as we know him in our everyday experience and in our everyday feelings: the man from the cafe, from the street, given to us concretely. An attainment in the human peripheries must immediately be balanced by a violent withdrawal into ordinary humanity and into human everydayness. One can immerse oneself in the human abyss, but only under the condition that one returns to the surface.

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernal but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

I've been a moon / shiner / for seventeen / long years / I spent all / my money / on whiskey / and beer / I go to / some hollow / and sit / at my still / and if whisky / don't kill me / then I don't know / what will / I go to / some barroom / and drink / with my friends / where women / can't follow / and see / what I spend / god bless those / pretty women / I wish / they was mine / their breath is / as sweet as / the dew on / the vine / let me eat when I'm hungry / moonshine when I'm dry / green grass when I'm hard up / religion when I'm dying' / the whole world is a bottle / and life's / but a dram / when the bottle / gets empty / god it ain't / worth a damn

Montaigne and Proust know human nature because they are in themselves several different men, because there are few human feelings, already existing in embryo in themselves, that they cannot experience if they set out to do so. They have that spider's web kind of sensibility which enables them to penetrate another person's defences and discover exactly how he feels. It is a polymorphous sensibility which is the only true source of ideas in psychology, but which, in those who possess it, makes the acquisition of a personal equilibrium a difficult and always precarious business. Or rather, the equilibrium is constantly being broken from day to day, but the continuous rupture is simply the raw material of a general equilibrium extending over the whole of existence. We might say of both of them that out of days as psychopaths they constructed the lives of sages.

as a poet i was getting extremely tired of^^^^^what I considered an unnatural^^^language act^^^^^going into a closet^^^^^so to speak^^^^^sitting in front of a typewriter^^^^^because anything is possible sitting in front of a typewriter and^^^^^^^nothing is necessary^^^^^a closet is no place to address anybody

Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy--the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate--requires effort and character.

In every instance, he must instantiate his Cynicism by means of physical gestures and acts. He insists on eating in the marketplace and in the temples, drinks out of his hand and eats scraps of food from the floor, and urinates in the presences of baffled witnesses. . . walks backwards through the streets, enters theaters only when people are leavng, embraces statues covered with snow . . . points to people whom he dislikes with his middle finger, clears the plegm from his throat on the face of someone he thinks is worthless, sleeps in a tub or in the porticos of the temples, accepts disciples only if they are willing to cary a large fish or a piece of cheese in public . . . plucks a chicken to demonstrate the senselessness of Plato's ideas . . . folds his ragged cloak to expose his nakedness, and so on.

Above all, his supreme mastery of verbal satire served to prove that satire is not a view of life. It can be a useful and even necessary by-product of one, but it can have no independent existence, because the satirist hasn't either. Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world. The secret of a sane world view is to see virtue in others, and the roots of chaos within ourselves.


2.

It was yesterday waistdeep in the drifts. I have quite forgotten what I may have said. . .

making use of the void to think the full

You drunken / tottering / bum // by Christ / in spite of all / your filth // and sordidness / I envy / you // It is the very face / of love / itself

...we must be, above all, capable of 'seeing' another person--simply opening one's eyes will not do. One needs a peculiar kind of initial curiosity which is much more integral, deep-rooted and broad than mere curiosity about things... or even about the particular acts of people (for example, gossip). One must be vitally curious about humanity, and more concretely, about the individual as a living totality, an individual modus of existence... But note that such curiosity, in truth, presupposes many other things. It is a vital luxury which only organisms with a high level of vitality can possess. The weak individual is incapable of disinterested, initial attention to what occurs outside of himself... This paradox of 'disinterested' interest permeates love in all its functions and actions...

The staircases, galleries, bopeeps are inexpressible: it takes a fortnight to learn them. Pipes of affliction convey lukewarm water of affliction to some of the rooms, others more fortunate have fires. The garden is all heights, terraces, Excelsiors, misty mountain tops, seats up trees called Crows' Nests, flights of steps seemingly up to heaven lined with burning aspiration upon aspiration of scarlet geraniums: it is very pretty and airy but it gives you the impression that if you took a step farther you would find yourself somewhere on Plenimmon, Conway Castle, or Salisbury Craig. With best love to detachments stationed Hampstead believe me your loving son

According to Meister Eckhart: he who has renounced all things finds them again in God, like the man who turns his back on a landscape and finds it incorporeally reflected in the smooth and illusory surface of the lake... The mystic, a sponge of God, is slightly overwhelmed by things until God, a liquid, seeps in and glosses them... But it would be mistaken to thank the mystic or the lover for this 'generosity'. They applaud people simply because they view them without involvement.

Oh kids life is feelings like these it's the talk of it / drawing / the others outside to our house: the news is throughout us / the mondial flames of hell, the funniness, we are / unironized. // Yet I keep not being able to be there.

According to him, a heart in the right place, rather than a mind in a high state of training, was the more likely source of truth, and the only source of creativity. Art, far from being the furthermost refinement of intelligence, came before thought, and was as natural as breathing. Croce's guess was that the first human beings sang before they spoke. He was certainly right that they drew before they wrote, and wrote poetry before they wrote prose.

How songs start / is in a thing seen not seen / before, now held / not with the eyes / but a breath / comes off the heart / like a wind off the river / & says its name

1.

Our eyes were too full of tears during his life to leave us any for his death.

As the image wears away, there is a wind in the heart, the translated men, disappear into what they have translated

feelings [can] become promiscuous too; that is, no longer in proportion with the things that arouse them.

I hated waiting. It I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected—an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

R.I.P. SHYKU

At least for me anyway.

The reason is simple: I've been writing from a different angle lately and have ceased to think in shyku. No more perspectival shifts, semantic mutations, winks and feints, etc. The quasi-mysterious thing--and maybe you'll have some opinions on this--is how the impulse to write shyku left me almost immediately as summer ended and school started.

As for what we should do now, I suggest we post excerpts from whatever we're reading. Except, and here's the thing, we should try to make each passage follow the one that preceded it so in the long run they form a kind of gradually improvised supercollage. Our Fall project. What should we call it?

My suggestion: "THE BOOK OF TALLEST WEATHER".

shyku on the day I was reading Alice Notely at 6 a.m. and spilled coffee on her beautiful book and myself and burned my balls

Until this new elegant water is century wiring my entire doubt, I finally have still open at least dawn ^ Notely’s collected resources thank god or who made cup of coffee what is twenty minutes missive ^ a quiet personal ^ want it to ascend the floor through the ceiling how it spilled onto my space as architecture ^ it is warbled on the page at home a bold breath-blush ^ location entire ^ perspectives and swallowing of mistake ^ and only then could we framework for meticulous permission ^ once used finally below point of intersect maybe twice used ^ offset by a calm idea one with elbowroom for color ^ one that doubles as an ideologue with brogue that dances an island to trespass with distinction in loss ^ fragrance shall be footprints for flight to ^ you bloomed elemental to form the outer space where too a geyser ^ essential foam in twain ^ I am what else can come next ^ yes there is noticed bliss that is oddly just after

pettyfilch shyku

Ambience, I think,
is a romance

not a thing
between too much. Done

inside there
it goes

making something
it can't know.

Like two futures
wondering inside

some people,
neither of them

well blended.
What other reason

is there, artfully,
and more

wooing
than its modesty? --

The more I withhold
from eyes

inside hands,
the more

we're both led,
living, by something

bold. Face:
a translation

that wants both
seeings (far inside,

where there's us.)

on 'on modesty shyku'

what was i thinking to screw
the lightbulb into the
lightbulb--so obviously
immodestly, and back again

on modesty shyku (outre sap lilt wreckage foem)

Romance, I think
is an ambience

not a thing done
between, much less

shown. Inside itself
there it goes

making something
it can't know.

Like two people
wondering inside

some future
neither of them

supposes--well blended.
What other reason

is there modesty
and artfully more,

wooing ten more
than its opposite? --

The more I withhold
from hands

inside eyes,
the more

we're both led
bold by something

living. Translation:
a face, Lady

that wants us
both (far inside,

where there's seeing.)

underscoring ted berrigan shyku

sing in idiom of disgrace
the cherrywood romances of rainy cobblestones
and then one morning to waken perfect-faced
to the big promise of emptiness
the air beginning to thicken
banging around in a cigarette
whatever is going to happen is already happening

shykumache

what is noise endless reciprocal ^ the way the park ends in continuance blades of grass the sheen of hills and activity playing catch kissing eating sleeping I once even saw two people asleep with their hands in each other’s pockets and of course clouds ^ did you make time faith ^ rendering peak paranoia a tiny tweak becomes passion ^ continuum New Hampshire via New York via Jerseytucky ^ that was a horrible decision ^ what was that in the margin on the shoulder the car like all machines mache seeing ^ my dictionary bless its heart defines mache with a note that says, “see corn salad” which means “a plant of the valerian family that often grows in grain fields and has edible leaves,” the UK term is lamb’s lettuce ^ my mother who hates disturbance would say “you should have used the original word you selected,” which was “makes” ^ tiny tweak becomes yes she knows part of me was in her Nebraska perhaps the skyline or just the way you could throw your eyes like dice across the table of endless plains and that gambling is called romance, the ancient kind, nothing to do with man and woman, rather something tumbling deep the heart’s locomotive dream ^ corn smut is a fungal disease of corn that produces dark swellings on the grain which is kind of what I was trying to say when I was trying to say when something was trying to be said about romance and Nebraska it produces dark swellings on the grain ^ corn snow is fallen snow that has a grainy surface because it has thawed and refrozen, it is also called corn it is beautiful conceptually but there’s no music in it I imagine in Spanish or Italian it would not be so useful and therefore like the thing itself that is beauty ^ a cornball is somebody who cares too much for romance, he is “very sentimental or unsophisticated” ^ how you track days measures meters you out ^ coffee with a friend maybe music the right kind why is that so hard ^ only stop you can be king/d again but bleeding debt opportunity ^ “stop being such a cornball,” she said I take that as compliment ^ calendar squares hours tiny windows painted white bloom defeated already weep ^ have you discovered anything new lately that they haven’t smoothed new ^ incomplete I want it like 10:20 a.m. a few sips left Akron Family or Bonnie Prince ^ his lament my lament internal glamour what for someone other ^ a line is a ledge where I can pile new data experience perhaps an extra eyes ^ I want so much to fall away a life minimalism what is the tone most like flame ^ perhaps simple joy like falling into what is that scent of mint words leading the thought before the experience is enough ^ loss of meaning disorientation sonnet mind nameblind I wish I knew a beautiful word in another language I would say it three times would skip it across the water there ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

shyku on a ruined wavelength (from red pinchbook #2)

Winter Zero Swartzel’s
‘Bottle Farm’—Farmersville
OH no doubt . calm euphoria
Douglas Gordon 24 Hour
Psycho . a present image
interpenetrated in reference
to everything past . cyclorama
otium cum dignitae—leisure
with dignity . Volunteers
of America of Kentucky
Inc . cryptwork . tenderness
that isn’t a function of
self-consolation . two
separate facts will proba-
bly come from this . the
boring a mood of itself
intense and helpless . penny
whistle . shock troops . pinkus
Memoirs On The Tether .
not to be an instrument
of modest erasure while
carefully resisting to be
an ambitious one . acanthus
leaves crowning Corinthian
Picasso and Tchelitchew
change as variety within
a form . stretching kneading
time romancing its taffy
properties . Baron Alexander
von Humboldt—surmised
altitude sickness from lack
Linnean binomials . Viola
Saint-Pauline the African
Violet was discovered named
by a Christian missionary
hymenoptera . mimesis . tallest
weather . Harvard denied
Thoreau the use of its library
hot water plus solvent with
Clorox half a cup . blurs to
harden into historical humans
endless fund of suggestiveness
jellyfish from graffiti . furred
and crystalline tetrahedronal
structure of the unblown
tourniquet . safety net . debt
the poorly held . in organized
bewilderment before the simple

again[st] genius shyku

sometimes someone
wandering
has

nothing except
in the city many language
diseases, the people

the space between buildings
who talk and cannot
breath

you stop then
in
do not have

out
"what it takes"
again[st] genius and they

are only repeating
sometimes
what they see

like today I saw
gregorian chant poured
all over everything

now in everything, as everything
I keep hearing
their voices, most happily

silver haired shyku

I've hardly ever been able to sustain the tiny voice I emit walking ^ belief that walks admits ^ from the hardly fleeing, but ^ how can I expect harvest ^ the thing a thing to be perceived ^ to believe in this thing, well, that's ^ that is supposed to be the hard part, the echoing of the voice to sustain, bolster generations, time, what a manly word, this word that moves an inch inward and with mixed motives enters all the big victories, the fanfare and thinks away from the way to be endured while enduring ^ it is yours, yours ^ I probably should be thinking outside your epiphany ^ to squander, to examine ^ family and furniture is true value ^ who love without taxes ^ men can hardly say the word ^ you must ^ a new kitchen ^ midden like me ^ then these are, for me, imponderables like who breathe the most beautiful ^ say it ^ sustain ^ I cannot lay hands on stars or thoughts ^ smoke wants to be lost

shyku in bright quarantine (from lime green thimblebook #2)

healthy again . fit for looking
in this time of living rest .
benthic haze over soccer
annuit coeptis—‘he smiles on
our beginnings’ . tomography
neogenetic . the thing being
about an unbroken mental
scream is the brain never
runs out of breath . ousted
trichonoma—eye disease
China—20 cities over
10 million . the danger-free
privilege of silence . he
meant trachoma . estimating
37 million blind in the
heavens . pity being care
extending beyond the end
of loved much . rescinded
caravansary . trumpet vine
crystallizing bewilderment
into platitude . unconsoled
by his own inventiveness
which is not a power
and changes nothing but
a view of things is not
insight but instead
mere internal glamour .
melodrama mugging for
its mirror corner . called
American Witness . Blue Mark
the Reverend Charlie Jackson
Marcy’s Roman Lure . with
will in right proportion and
direction to synchronize
with unprompted bidden
lifeflow . not to strain
or contradict . didacticism
in embattled circle safe
from softness . a gospel
moment . improvident
ferruginous—of, relating to
or containing iron . insight .
jobs . yoga

shyku in sampo of a feather (from black flightbook #1)

ornithology . architecture
time (a history of) morphology
movies of turning away
toward . ambitemporal
Nocturama . walking alone
for a year’s worth of hours
trapdoors of simple surface
with something from the
sea narrating . knuckle
to forehead kernel of the
real . Limonilla . depths
that were once diamonds
thieves for stillness in lateness
sized by pain . intricate
interlooking all to be
cruel . Laysan albatross
(gooney bird) . Chihuahuan
Raven . Bobolink . Black-
Capped Chickadee . Dark-
Eyed ‘Slate-Colored’
Junco . Cuzco below us
navel of the whirlwind
aqua origamist creasing
finches from water . inter-
necine . wingless factitious
doll with money hair .
blue eyes . blonde air .
at a lowness five foot
ten . maiden-frail
bacchus of the sugar high
hummus spinach cheddar
redbuds heart-shaped leaves
sheer energy released by
juxtaposition . gangbanger
to flower girl . the Flood also
mass deletion . in ruins of
boredomjoy . treacle

through prison music shyku (from lime green thimblebook #2)

downgraded into ancient
ineptitude . disappearing eider
down . Bechterew’s disease
autocephalus . The Diversity
Of Life . zooids and corallines
quadrants and sextants .
Mike Higgins ruined drunk
carried passively all the
way to O’Hare . the Kara-
korum Mountains . sampo
curls are purling . Robert
Erikson—The San Francisco
Tape Center . spangled
with counterfeit realization
on the bee-eyed wavelength
Serbian tamburitza to
shakuhachi—a Japanese flute
analytical hibachi . door
height 40” width 28 .
body ten years old and
yanked with breathless
suddenness to zero . Un
certainty by David Lindey
or poor Henry Cowell’s
prison orchestra . composing
to this day in a cell at
San Quentin a piece for
band based on the moods
personalities of fellow in-
mates his famous out-
mates except Varese
having abandoned him .
burnt umber . musk .
bathroom stink of mildew .
lexical anemia where the
truth tone begins . a stuffed
armadillo on the back panel
of a police cruiser . Kalevala
Aesthetics of Disengagement
Contemporary Art and
Depression . Anatol Levin
of the New America Foun-
dation . aphelion . the
Red Mosque Siege . Cooper
Union (an art school)

shyku for mrs. graves

would you when startled ^ each narrative the undeniable ^ brief the form ^ reflected a word in a fleck collective ^ noun my favorite ^ "I" empties itself of radiance ^ more suited to ^ meaning what can a sentence like this mean ^ or is nothing tiny ^ narratives of syntax ^ the story is that explosion ^ within grammar yours wanted you ^ cruelly to empty ^ derange to craft radiance ^ what's a man ^ to mean anyway ^ isn't it ^ to expect ^ allegiance of water ^ wind and con ^ not ^ at ^ ions

ten fingers, ten toes shyku

the eternity days ^ long gone would ^ an extended pitch of lost ^ real numbers instead ^ wind-empty and you ^ what you lose, what you expect ^ everything is to lose ^ would you ^ if all became ^ what if the time came ^ denies the ability something wanted ^ a wedding ^ bliss ^ day ^ the house made noise to be ^ counted ^ willing but your appetite ^ other than that which is participant ^ disappear breeds something inebriate ^ and what about breathing, cloying, begging, besmirching this ^ guess how much I love you ^ about it (this) no doubt ^ more ^ simply here ^ that there can be transformative looking ^ far-far foundation thinking ^ secrets and wishing ^ counting ^ to unfold a way again ^ in the way that too is a way ^ handed breath as to own it ^ only resemble ^ what number are you on ^ turn this day into days and overturn ^ swift ^ spoils go ^ the victor empties bellies ^ I almost ^ and with love or hatred ^ it doesn't ^ not I ^ zero just past ^ almost became one ^ become one ^ matter ^ no

shyku for angela, holding the face of her eldest

in this time of living rest ^ listening, making void ^ tree-faking ^ two grandparents in synchronized dying ^ reaching out becoming hands on ^ the face ^ held close ^ shored by ailment ^ what's been left ^ out withheld ^ by what hides it ^a quality of ^ vigilance ^ ready to be let go ^ attentional ^ echo^ location of a woman ^ from ^ inverted spirit ^ radiating don't, not ^ yet, breathe ^ me my eyes some ^ more ^ a little some ^ more ^ of us nuanced ^ by the quiet

shyku for one voice

only will ^ dreaming ^ how it happens ^ spine makes this trend ^ is ^ no it cannot ^ I almost ^ anything ^ lived so as to ^ blood ^ yes it can ^ you ^ barely be believed ^ lost ^ I had to include all religions, even bone ^ in baseball, the fans ^ but for the guilt, its homily ^ they finished ^ but in closing they flourish ^ desert ^ it is, after all, a way ^ flourishing, happy ^ machine ^ what rules desiring ^ much ^ fusing, wondering ^ we can, we almost lost ^ much more ^ concision, home ^ richly ^ a conclusion ^ the distance ^ sad ^ then our losing bending ^ did I say distance again

33 west 67th street shyku

these days, the elements of time are perfect ^ grays fog ^ making often symphonic, that is, many driftings, possible ^ they blur, engage passage ^ for example, I want one of his further studies ^ so ^ find the studio where Duchamp, what you see, lived briefly ^ and sat there ^ sequence, in element, is ^ for an hour ^ and then add ^ there’s that word again ^ element ^ will it last ^ a periodic table ^ everything needed dissolve ^ who cares ^ for a world

shyku admiring your late clarity

eye missing
longwalking with you collective breathing riding
the silence to language
mas h blas-
pheming the daybreak is healthy mood for distance
learners Mason Dixon
lines everywhere gaffebliss,
gaffebliss, we are inhaled
by churches derelicts
tussled by hands but don’t touch
my eyes let heaven unknown harmonics
hum the belove
don cheadling in pizza shops, buscemilike
Houdini in liquor
the heavingart of
stallioning down ave.
smelling
heartily discount hookering
breezeway to blundertalk
everything’s a beer Bronx air
behind us your own mythic way of approaching
a sandwich stopping to admire
the poetry
in certain bookstores
zooy with eyes
I think I saw a giraffe Chinatown smells like
dyslexia yes I enjoy
my senses when I am

greatest compliment shyku

I'm taking your dance moves
all the way back
to Oklahoma

sex with 2 sticks shyku

pas de bourree--a walking or running
ballet stop executed on the points
of the toes

pas de deux--a dance or figure
for 2 performers

with new clothes surging up from the floor

mirror space for 18 shykus

Another still morning born—

Another stillborn morning—

Believe the maker born in the morning.

Still believe to give birth to the country of lies.

The country of lies is born in the morning.

Morning lies, another believes.

Lack of dust means lack of settling; before that, lack of lack. Nothing dust means nothing lost, nothing stillborn.

Do you believe that stillbirth is better than still-life? Your answer means so much, even if it is a lie.

The maker, too, is in the country of lies, but he does not believe in the morning.

Dust lacks only nothing, another still.

Let us always fail to lack lack.

I believe I would choose stillbirth.

The country of lies is never still, and never still the maker.

Still-life in the morning is far from nothing.

We do not believe in still-life; each breath is morning, each breath shuffles dust.

Stillbirth gives birth to the country of lies.

Morning believes, another lies.

The maker fails to choose.

'shyku interlude' (exegesis)

Reading this I think of Wittgenstein's example of how we are tricked by language into conceiving our place in the world according to certain narrow, culturally inherited habits. Describing time in

terms of flow, in comparison to a river, etc. This is totally fallacious, says W. To illustrate his point he cites a passage from St. Augustine—time as river—which he then, I think, traces back to

Heraclitus (can’t step in it twice) and the Greeks in general. His point is funny because it's so obvious. This Is A Metaphor. We have no proof time flows or even progresses—progression,

which may just be an illusion produced by cause and effect, which might also be, or could be, David Hume, an illusion produced by the ordering mind. Time is a river, cause and effect: consonance

from chaos, gestalt. But the metaphor is totally inappropriate for another reason (and this is me talking, not W.) in that it describes something immaterial in terms of something material; and moreover,

in terms of materiality-in-movement. This is totally inaccurate because, though, yeah, a river 'progresses' and produces form from variable substance (from moving water, a shape, a river), it

is also entirely defined by its environment, by banks, obstacles to its flow, etc. A river’s shape is determined passively, reactively; as a series of responses to the run and wring of the land. Which doesn’t

resemble time in the least. First of all, time doesn’t have a shape. Secondly it is an active agent rather than a passive one, both everywhere and nowhere. Moreover our only proof of time is by

way of material rumor. By which I mean: we have always deduced the existence and persistence of time according to material responses to its effects. Time is more an aftereffect than an actual

presence. From the metamorphosis of things and the emergence, interpenetration and development of events, one from the other, we’ve deduced this abstraction descriptive of an

action, time. Which ‘passes’ (like living people into corpses). Which ‘heals all wounds’ (and produces them). Faced with patterns of emergence, growth and decay, we orient ourselves

within this idea of time and then stick to it as if such a view of things were natural and even preferable.

That’s why I like this passage from "Austerlitz". For Sebald's switch of metaphor: no, time is indeterminate and unpredictable, like weather. And like weather can't be precisely measured;

and because of that, isn’t conducive to the regulation of lives in any fixed or predictable manner. In other words, time is more a play of fluctuating patterns than a unified march. Slow here,

fast there. Contracting and expanding, according to its own internal logic.
Actually, when he switches his metaphors from river to weather I wonder whether he isn’t just

reorienting our relation to it, from an objective, material, empirically measurable event, to a subjective, psychological play of phenomena. Psychological time. Which is to say: bodily time.

Which no precision of description can catch. Since the heartbeat is not a clock, after all, nor a barometer, bridge, or ladder.

a shyku interlude by w.g. sebald

Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointing through the window and down to the curve of the water around the Isle of Dogs glistening in the last of the daylight, if Newton really thought that time was like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river's qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?...Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been nonconcurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time...

new fabrication shyku

that mattering of facts
suffers all
bleak, momentary suspensions
is
one reason to dress oneself
in shyku

shyku as living fable (ending in negation of a group hug)

it started around midnight
on June 16 when a group
of friends was finishing
dinner on the patio of a
District of Columbia home
authorities and witnesses
authorities and witnesses
said that's when a hooded
man slid through an open
gate and pointed a hand
gun at the girl's head "Give
me your money or I'll start
your money or I'll start
shooting" he said the
witnesses told The Washington
Post everyone froze but then
one guest spoke up "We
one guest spoke up "We
were just finishing dinner"
Cristina Rowan 43 told the
man "Why don't you have
a glass of wine with us" The
intruder had a sip of their
intruder had a sip of their
Chateau Malescot St-Ex
upery and said "Damn that's
good wine" the girl's father
Michael Rabdau 51 told him
to take the whole glass and
take the whole glass and
Rowan offered him the
bottle the would-be robber
with his hood down took
another sip and a bite of
Camembert and put the
gun in his sweatpants then
the story got even more
the story got even more
bizarre the man with the
gun apologized the witnesses
told the Post "I think I
may have come to the
may have come to the
wrong house" he said "Can I
get a hug" Rowan stood up
and wrapped her arms
around the man and the
four other guests followed
the man walked away a
the man walked away a
few moments later with
the crystal wine glass in
hand no one was hurt but
once he was gone the
once he was gone the
group went inside locked
the door and called
the door and called
the door 911

shyku of the rock kicked kicking back

to have been
is to be

perceived,
Bishop

Berkeley
(these

eyes of
gone old

mothers)

call and response shyku re: the sad acupuncturist's lament

why would you write a poem
about a sad acupuncturist--
in this climate
wouldn't it be more challenging to write a poem
about a flower
without winking?

ah, but I was born
with a wink in my eye
and it is slowly turning in
to a coin

dotting the seas shyku

victor brauner's

eye

{inframince...}

like the i

hidden

by ahab + yoga =

cough, yowl, suture

of love stutter

a.k.a.

the collected corkscrews

of claude cephalus

(the c.c. of c.c.)

assisi

ah, see see

si! si!

imposed symbolism shyku

while I have only seen a man
strip down naked
to be handcuffed
once,
I have seen
solitary karate in the park
a half dozen times
which means it must be read
symbolically
and stands for
what I do not know

shyku in the middle

A tremble of /cup in water .
Victor Brauner's /eye .

for example shyku

I invented the word "mistalking"
as a response to my own mistyping--I meant
originally to says "it throws stars"
but the t got left
in and I liked it better that way
because that seemed to illustrate my point
better and then I thought of
"mistalking" as a way to reiterate
but that led me down another path (start),
you know
the idea of stalking
improperly
the wrong person
or something

start of [critical] response shyku

it throws true starts
that blackbook, the flightbook,
like closing the eye
until a fist jostles
********(stars)
those are the kind
of starts I'm mistalking
about

skyku within a fiction of running water (from black flightbook #2)

bad art . know it by how it sounds
as if passionate to be art and just
that . Allan Kaprow . Forbidden
Knowledge . Proust smelting down
the seen . diseased by host likeness
out of the cradle gently mocking .
iniquity . how so much could meet
in so little as an opinion and be
crushed . contrived dualism Apoll
low to Dionysus . postlude . maimed
oxygen . cartomancy--fortune
telling with cards . pleasure-mash
homomorphism . private as a
corpse . alive as ham . selfishness
won't help inherit the inches . water
is 800 times more dense than air
spinarets--with which a spider
manipulates filaments . gallicism
sleep-scrimmage . a glutton
for English . a flesh expresser .
no allusions . more narrative . less
humor . flowing diction . fiction
The Last Gentleman--Percy . no
sweets for a week . coffee--2 cups
not stillness--concentration in
movement . Freeport Wolf Neck
State Park Wells . desiranoia
of the flow . henotheism--the worship
of one god w/out denying the
existence of others . obnubilate--
to obscure . gratis--free . the
display of pointless plumage . "En
and Omen" . secure a small place
in the whirling . "Some Story No
Blame Would Care To Read" . Vidal
versus Mailer: "Words fail Mr.
Mailer once again" . capsis . ungelic
down in a meaning hole with hearts
outside their bodies . all equal
in the eyes of lice . flight of the
understandable . slow and purposeful
applejack . copracognition . Olmecs
self-aggrandizement via put-down
Laura USAA . Steve from Pennstation
for I am my loneliest best friend
again

skyku of 'the unanswered question' (from black flightbook #2)

a too easy conflation of severity
with honesty . aphonic . twain
mistake church acoustics for cosmic
resonance . the sublime more a
charade of tiny noises a chewing
on the other side of a sand grain .
consoled by the failing and pains
of the perceived to be mighty .
carding wool . a vitality panic
-ing worms . squirts confidence
like a cuttlefish . to create the
illusion of sufficiency for this
they play tree in a forest of
poses or a real place a park .
Lucky In Love ... Life Not So
Much ... Hope To See You Soon
x0x0 The Loaf . exaggerating
to be accurate . to a slender point
my person has been diminished
even farther . miscreant . abattoir
simplifying into caricatures of
the generic . Mika . Parnassian
storytime . unexamined atheism
with flippancy on top . a moral
or emotional problem can be
presented or defined volitionally
but actual point of entry is
intuitive . surface structure
versus deep structure . Fort Foster
past Kittery route 103 Chancey
Creek right hand fork stop sign
right over creek and follow road .
diatonic containment of chromat-
icism . 'circle of fifths' . monogenesis--
languages stemming from one
source . The Harmonic Series . energy
in vibratory motion . ictus: attack
morpheme rewritten as a pitch
event . acromegaly . macroglossic
(enlarged tongue) . hypertension
optic chiasm . as boys pass in their
sleep into a lawful drinking age
Snape Maltings a concert hall in
Aldeburgh . Takemitsu . appellation
of a lady . vision bullion . biofuel
The Middle Path. Breytenbach
by way of Nagarjuna . move-
ment and pinhole of attentional
focus . bundles of cruelty and noise
Licht . licked . German for light is
licked . our clean and well-licked
place . alluvium

new england bricolage skyku (from black flightbook #2)

Girondo--Scarecrow and Other
Anomalies . Murio Mendes
Regis Bonvicino . phenobarbitals
George Balanchine . idiopathic
bon vivant Paulose S. John MD
contretemps ver digris . Concord
woman in museum (from San
Fran) who corrected me 'thorough'
Thoreau ('how do you say'?)
conCURD no OH . appletree
in bloom Emerson's house and
family orchard . spare strident
string quartet (Henze) irrational
connection: waterstriders . sojourn
to Glouchester shrank his
heroic concept to the size of
a lobster trap . geological layers
Cafe Dolce cappuccino $3.50
wraith verses starved for any
coloration . places are always
better than the people who
write about them . nutmeg spritzed
on top froth . camera obscura
archivolts bunting aspergillis
hydrangea tamarack bluebottle
hawkmoth katsura marigold
muscae volitantes--shadows of
motes in vitreous humor . ornate
precision: Nabokov . coenesthesia--
organic sensation of existence
what he said I added to by hearing
it what was seen carried the
amplification of clearing meaning
cumulophobia . Little Filth Flower
Nadacephalus Golias Baby Nickels
Roderick Angela Tate from this
angle I'll admit . Greenblatt lecture
condescension well-hidden in
ingratiation . Schopenhauer--art
object as objectivication of the will
Emil Cioran 1-800-Genocide . Racine's
Phedre . a few stragglers on the
grass behind the bathhouse adding
flesh to time . labored attempts
to convert pain to charisma . Helvetius
simplistic hick gumption . a
decorative outgrowth of philosophy
each house an epicenter . Gombrich
Art And Illusion

shyku by proxy

battle on several fronts shyku

but we can lead many lives without necessarily
being sailors until the sea shall free us
invalidating any of them right
weirdness that instructs
only so much longing only so much endless
returning to your earlier question
yes there's plenty of room

shyku of lucid split/one true action

we break into hands that happen
and so jack the ceiling walls
to a great perihelion height
nearest to implosions that
perish in the frail as light
and fake you

duchampion shyku 2

"against the lucidity of
instinct he opposed the
instinct for lucidity: the
invisible is not obscure
or mysterious,
it is transparent,"
said Octavio Paz

duchampion shyku 1

"his attitude of amiable and
idle onlooker, puffing slowly
at a pipe in an apparently
empty studio, could not
have been more misleading
if taken for inertia rather
than serenity" said
Anne D'Harnoncourt

h.p. roche shyku

was an intimate New York friend
of Marcel's who according to
the novel he wrote in the fifties
I think which was later plucked
from the illiterate continuum
by Truffaut and made filmic
then remade only a few years
ago by Bertulluci (misspelled
of course) a movie you left me
to watch actually during my
last all-out trip to New York
so you could snuggle with Amy
and Hunter not yet snoring
nearby called 'The Dreamers'
about a young trio who tryst
their way into a menage and
echoing all the way back to
Manhattan in the teens and
maybe early twenties when
two French transplants with
Roche being by far the more
prolific in his carnal bagging
tussled a wealth of Amer
ican women in the vicinity
Marcel even once coming home
(an accident, I swear, this,
coming) to a charged herd
of nymphs in repose on his
bony squalid little cot that
nearly everyone was appalled
by when they visited his
studio which was not often
since there was very little
to appear there and in-
frequently as recognizable art
a snowshovel hung renamed
In Advance of A Broken Arm
or a footstool bearing a
wink and kinetic horn whirring
such the unicorn of aesthetics
emerging of course improbably
from itself from force of
belief in what can violate
laws of nature by being
imagined, much like any
story of conquest involving a
skinny but by most accounts
lizard-like lothario with 'smiling
eyes' an ex-lover called them
warbling over an always in-
expressive fall-out of the
face below in what could
only be stoic outgrowth
of everything quietly discounted
beyond control or concern
nothing of which has anything
to do with friendship or Roche
or an expansive or even
visionary use of one's time
but to that since that is
the topic at hand I should speak
of how time clung to him
and elongated itself
an effect due to his solitude's
ability to navigate its own
dimensions without growing
weak that is without being
converted into loneliness
as it is with most people
looking out of the other side
of the Large Glass

shyku in conflict

A bunch of well-tucked bastards,
'Come on, sissy dick', nothing obliterates
purpose like a surfeit of options.

blood sausage shyku

buy your sausages from a local
farmer if you can
and your wine from a local winery
and make sure it's strong
at least a Cabernet:
put down some oil
in a heavy-bottomed pot
then add some thick-cut onions
and garlic and when it's sizzling
add the sausages, brown the bottoms,
flip them, add about a quarter bottle of the wine
and let the whole thing cook until
the wine's about burned off
and meanwhile steam some spinach or something
and then throw it all on a plate
and put on an old Rolling
Stones record and
clunk your elbows down
on the knotty wood
table and don't worry about wiping
your face, don't worry about
taxes or time or
any other trouble that finds
men, just chew the good
sausage until you are
barely there like
the silent character
in an old film
or a Hemingway story
or, better yet,
one of the characters
the director or author
erases at the last minute
promising "someday
I'll write a story
just for you"

going away for a while shyku

off to Millerton tomorrow
to figure things out
alone and
something's waiting
shykus, shybans,
beckett, sunset, bugs
the image of
not my son

empathy against shyku sculptures

sometimes the shyku
is just there
to hang the title on

hawkeye shyku

apologies accept the space
they have rented behind the face
they are paid to

shyku against empathy sculpture

no caricatures for you
to strike to
understand what's lost
in your likeness

shyku from within a policy thicket

that you know nothing and yet
withhold everything is what
the commonplace shows of
repose which we as beasts of
heart and lucre
can only plunder

mithridating shyku

to surprise the paralyzing plus
of aggressive human doing
a means by which falling
lands in itself

shyban shyku 2

for one is married to the world too we learn love of the world from the song of songs don't we not copulation with material goods but rather a spreading out in the good earth this too is symbolism sure but allow me to be hard-headed to be literal after such an original start after conceiving an idea that might reorient the spaces of our lives for one is married to the world too one took a vow in the earliest days of living when fallen stumps could be tinkered into airplanes and flown and the night fell like a blanket with breathing holes we took our vows in and the sacrament was so large it did not need a church or priest the question and the answer were simultaneously born in the body and now you are older and have neglected your young wife she is still so young how many days how many times I want you to stop and count and then we will all add up our numbers and the total figure will be rough approximation of the distance we have gathered

shyku waiting for a train to pass

'i like my women
thick like a snake'
graffiti union pacific

shyku in quiet proof inframince is life

who can say how confusion moves
as an internal swarm
or fragments of total home, but

walking past without much mind
a typical billboard this morning
above me there was this
demure and gargantuan model’s head and bedroom
eyes shrinking
to thoughtful size
obligatory parted lips
amassed curly hades
locks (black) frothed in fertile contrast
with an ambiguous flower
(yellow) of paradise, tucked
like a pledge
behind the ear, purling
in star formation open
long thin petals from which
a heathen stamen tickled
my eros, not unlike
antannae and not quite
in subtle fantasy displacement of legs spread
rhyming with invisible torso
to which what? the sole response
could only be
this is Dana, gangly charming
of several parties not at all
smoky or fatal, vertical and inverted
into a flat thing
to be touched, elsewhere
how stupid, for a haircut at Aveda salon

all natural shyku

cockleburs straighten me
and so i am no small flow king

simultaneous shyku

bewitched by variety . this and this
at the queer end of focus . the softer louder
glints, objective spots . a woman in a wheelchair who lifts
out of penitentiary flood . a feather to her lips
with no finger directs . worth swearing by
........................and so we follow.................................

shyku in the shadow of reductionists

facts a kind of pyre to be
and sense unsettled out of
the brain nearly accustomed
to what shouldn’t greenly surround
pageants of ghostlessness with coordinates of vibration suggest
a fool’s field
and outstrip the one

bronking beckett shyku

an accumulation
is handy, what
we cherish obligation
for, to be endless
unti the end
is to be
what longing
is, a hard word
to place near
silence, to bookend
all possibility--
still not still
and that is all
all can be
or needs

news from the real world of fiction shyku

no comment

pain scene in the greatest skyku

ralph eyegene
glimpsing family out the
window . around back
blinks sadness . what will happen
in a name

greatest shyku

meatyard: think about it

shyban shyku

are stories possible anymore yes of course the story of responsibility, it grows tired, tires one remaking everything in its image one of wrestling an ancient throw match where bodies are breaking against each other joints the muscle this all so holy coming as it does in a body, a single body being tied to darkened horses bid to rush for a kind of fortune that is beyond the body what the body can know and such knowledge being unattainable is of the spiritual sort and also what sustains, only what can sustain without it lost with it less lost but only because direction contains the bidding

untitled shyku

divergence remains a friend
that movement all ways can save
only a coward is besides
the point as I am delivering
another worthless sermon to
some corner, a silence grafted
onto the endless background
noise that lulls me into
a half-hearted coitus with
what world and nothing more

ironic libido shyku

time to fuck like a wild man
he said climbing
onto the kitchen table where the
divorce papers lay

shyku of diogenes or not

to what extent
inventiveness stems from ignorance
is the nod
without lifelong warning

metaxu shyku

tap once
let me out
i'll hear you

detail from 'shyku in the valley'

it is for instance electro
chemical energy in brain
cells derived from photo
synthetic sugars in vege
tables whereby we can
see a star at all and the
fire of the star we call
the sun could be seen and
thought by nourishing the
brain with a glimpse of
god in it with knowledge

shyku in the valley

the paradox of originality houses many rooms
the views from the windows are all different
invention where there is nothing to see
we remember means finding trace . intricate
and subtle lines wherein "Every force" Mother
Ann Lee of the Shakers "evolves" . a form"
the painters of Lascaux found their horses
wherever a bulge in the cave wall suggested
equine solidity surrounded with elegance
of mane legs and tail unfinished or sufficient
to say 'horse' together prancing legs that are
man's first graph of the verb 'to move'
says nature the very first voice of philosophy
loves to hide always to know how much
the world has taught us to see once we are
quick to suppose it was always waterfalls
before Turner and Wordsworth moonlight
before Sappho without . rhetorical cosmetics
the apple has its history . the word eros
conceals a rose . is a rose

shyku tying everything together for the very limited time being

and I quote:
I rock out
with my
cock out

shyku at the harsher end of gossip

yesterday there was hearsay that reached my general
orbit about some hipster who jerked off on a
girl while she slept beside him and i thought
how lazy do you have to be to
so accurately describe yourself

shyku of ominous measurement

gesamtkunstwerk
i cannot pronounce
through rent is paid
within it

unthinking collage shyku, with brief cannibalism

by driving home
so many jealously recurring
motifs
whoever leads with this
mirror language
is squashed

shyku of kitchen midden against early killings of the road

where possum plus is squashed
by driving so many
carelessly from where thru
jealously recurring with
many steps as height
whoever leads this
mess is directly
the mirror

the brooklyn bridge shykus

1.

right at monk's backside
leaving chinese o.t.b.
behind

2.

rosebuds over iron trellis
colorless
shadow

3.

when they see me
they say
who is that man
walking next to
neck face

4.

17,439
individual conversations
and this is just
one

5.

a good friend can save you much time
and also
from stepping on a dead bird

6.

I see them walking
they're walking
me

7.

Benjamin Franklin:
printer
patriot
philosopher
statesman
sculpture

8.

on a quest as absurd as this
we still become tourists

9.

cold water
1 dollar
sold

10.

joyous paucity
of bras

11.

keep me out your film
he said
lovingly

12.

it is okay to litter
on litter
is it

13.

Murray Bergtraum High School
for Business Careers
god love you
let us out

14.

fame
where are you

15.

thick calves
bowling shoes

16.

woman in white dress
with camera phone

17.

the true idiot nature can be revealed quite simply:
bringing the wrong equipment for the journey

18.

brooklyn bridge cables
reminiscent of tron or
my time in the fallopian tube

19.

the true nature of his fear
was really
his hatred
of inconvenience

20.

laying on back in grass
gazing up sycamore skirts
to the bloom

21.

somewhere alabama
a big pig was killed
and the father
proud

shyku poetikka

hew ( ....
hew .........)
campanology
won't rein
the ringing

beckett shyku 2

I want to know
what you know
I do not want to know

lazy shyku

my joy to consider
more strictly
the appalling logic
of eyes

shyku of a last line amputated from robert penn warren

my eyes to consider
more strictly
the appalling logic
of joy

manhattan tantrum shyku

when withheld from being given
some sweet or crucial knick-knack
demanded of his father
often william blake
is not above licking
the floor, though in a sane world
wouldn't that be
a ceiling

shyku for joe on the night he taught me about graeme obree

your stoop was not open
for business so I left
a book and wandered through Park Slope
until I hit Mooney's and
you and arranged, among other things,
an annual foot race with the whole family
watching and tried to play
bocce balls but there were
too many hipsters, oh so many
hipsters and they could never
understand Grandpa Joe
or Uncle Al or the game
they used to play and then
I was in a cab flying
toward the Upper West Side
and when I unwrapped my
whitefish on pumpernickel
the cabbie stopped at a red light
and pulled out an equally
delicious bagel sandwich
and said, "the bagels at
that joint are good, aren't they"
and I agreed and for the rest
of the trip I thought about
how everything that wasn't beautiful
was trying too hard
and even that was kind of beautiful

shyku for glen detinger, contemplating the lydia within

the gentle touch
is your house, friend
i look
at my fingers

shyku for joe manning within his art and spoken troubles

definition of beauty
that that does not know
(throw)
how much it is

ennui thesis shyku

gratitude without fulfillment
zugunruhe

nachbar shyku

piety of your own
improvised opinion
repells, Second Person
be first, refreshed again
troubled at the nexus
where beer is them

post-nach patio shyku

because I am so bad
I mean strange
at being people
this fig tree
planted by time diet
travels

shyku of miraculous blushing

rigorous flubbing of meta
lugdubbing the groundswell
moisting the cherrybomb
lazing the schlub
lushing the bon
and then
wherever
you find yourself you find
a plumper summering
rubbing like velvet

shyku of widening address

135 lbs
to lose
before I'm
you

intelligible shyku

to write from the thorough
bottom so there is nothing
inexactly to be undercut
by the affirmation if one so
happens to explain feeling
of having no one to talk to
being everyone in particular

Beckett Shyku

when he learned a new word for pus
he said, oh yes, that will work
perfectly, a new title, Sanies, and
then it was back to the rusty
liquor, back to filling the bucket,
and all the while they thought--blindly--
poems were made of dreamy stuff
and that beauty's only
an inch wide, an inch deep

shyku of the habitual projector

tinsel that fears itself
clings caress
to on
for from
adorns each act
of decoration

team sleeping shyku

no things except
in ideas
the walking
sometimes swimming
cages

Casual Space Shyku

There is no casual space.

Ambulatory Mysticism Shyku

Eye vs. I.

Red Dawn Shyku

Tanks, machine guns, Russians, firing lines, national anthems, Patrick Swayze.

The Last Days of Left Eye Shyku

When she was younger she painted pictures and later
she burned down a house.

metaphor shyku

the road is one long shyku,
too, you tell me what else

r.i.p. shyku

here lies the last
digital dissolution of my
flesh from one
Exeter New Hampshire

oracle photographer shyku

as Sadie & Bella riot from the
minivan in matching cherry tree
dresses Thursday cannot tell the
lie to not chop them down

shyku of waxing disinterest

what concern should I have
for ineptness to succeed for
myself
secretly on their behalf

shyku of waning disinterest

sophia comes into my office and shows me a painting called
"The Transylvanians" and I think how much funnier this life
is than the last one

living dead shyku

like a match buried in
wet cotton
I mourn the distance
from stasis
to ecstasis

hampton beach shyku

la mer
like you I've been
shedding myself
inland

Untitled Southern Hunger [working draft]

Anna and I made that oath beneath trees. Pinnacle
of July, 7th year, cicadas. Ousting everyone's memory of them
to hike root and bark, fuck, then drip twitching in

a fluency, a sound I could hear beyond the clatch
and hum, and almost follow. “Osteoblast,” my friend
said, “a blooming nothing,” and it would take a while to settle.

Afraid to point to the problem that functions
like a mutual mind, I let it think. And it did.
And my courage became a climb from soon to past

and my marriage became a kind of ruined glass
shivering whatever was beyond it, whatever it
could not hush down into embers.

Beating the Sky Way out of Johannesburg, I headed
where my wife wasn't. Straight towards her.
One shade. Erratum. The great American arboretum.

And then, for me, transience stopped. I hung on
like rock, like time itself. The day’s light opined
a place where numbers failed me. No addition. No subtraction.

This was in Peoria, not Pretoria, so the blooms, though
alien, were Midwestern. Hidden in the science of
each was a generative grammar, Latin. Mimosifolia. Always

when pitching for humility, for grace,
they told me
hold [______________] in your deepest pocket,

so when they put out my
eyes I'll see
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/BlueJacarandaFlowers.jpg

shyku [tuesday, may 29]

when the bad smell came
I put my head out the window,
then my whole body

shyku [tuesday, may 29]

across water st.
comes Charlie Pratt
waving

Untitled Southern Hunger

Anna and I made that oath beneath trees. Pinnacle
of July, 7th year, cicadas. Ousting everyone's memory of them
to hike root and bark, fuck, then drip twitching in

a fluency, a sound I could hear beyond the clatch
and hum, and almost follow. “Osteoblast,” my friend
said, “a blooming nothing,” and it would take a while to settle.

Afraid to point to the problem that functions
like a mutual mind, I let it think. And it did.
And my courage became a climb from soon to past

and my marriage became a kind of ruined glass
shivering whatever was beyond it, whatever it
could not hush down into embers.

Beating the Sky Way out of Johannesburg, I headed
where my wife wasn't. Straight towards her.
One shade. Erratum. The great American arboretum.

And then, for me, transience stopped. I hung on
like rock, like time itself. The day’s light opined
a place where numbers failed me. No addition. No subtraction.

This was in Peoria, not Pretoria, so the blooms, though
alien, were Midwestern. Hidden in the science of
each was a generative grammar, Latin. Mimosifolia. Always

when pitching for humility, for grace,
they told me
hold [______________] in your deepest pocket,

so when they put out my
eyes I'll see
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/BlueJacarandaFlowers.jpg

These Of The Soft Pitch And Maybe Too Random

What's irksome about these collaborations,
though welcome, is how little land they make be.

Beyond that, a sea, and entr'acte, a millennium of
whispered stances. Gathered strum of horsewhipped

Exeter is a town of two million. Faces, that is, his
betters turn against themselves. With vocabulary and

with pulchritude he wept at gallows he could not
be hung enough in. His brood too thin to seed an ending.

The auto-da-fe, a classic Inquisitional solution. It
knows a stray when it seeks one. Fan, stoke, scream

forget to bequest a breathing lesson unto the inanimate
is to sequin wonder blessed with hands and fire.

Who Is This Jennifer Wren?

I was happier. Which means: I came from less.
Slight as an excess of past mixed with

slow winded and crop dusted consciousness
grist in the must bed and more dream as [ ]

per usual the second person unwinds in apparition
a muse-tool, a knowingness I rehearse to

slow your world for mending that
hourly knows no comfort, o my homeless,

my head where information goes to die
slighted before it can fake a kingdom

to know nothing moored is the only
human timbres go on in. Vaguely now, gently.

Duo Portraiture (5)

makes fleeing calm sign of believing
nourishment’s being and long crave et tu

to heal their own heat in disparagement
of too real a rumor as a person















..

Folk Seeing at Birling

Tending one's animal, one's malleable, one's matchless
bending (which is breathing, which may be bleating) is [ ]

a form of hovering, a fern for gathering, and also
way for wind and cousin silence to be skeined.

Unknowable unless dressed in soundly seeing;
unkowtowable when naked, they seek a closer clothing.

Request For Tete-A-Tete

A collaborative effort this time. In anti-heroic couplets.

Of course an anti-heroic couplet will avoid iambic pentameter--so let's toss that--and will equally avoid end rhyme. Instead each line should begin with a word that rhymes with the first word of the line that precedes it.

You lead off. And again, refrain from letting the rhymes lead too predictably towards silliness.

It might be more of a challenge to attempt a measure of thematic continuity. That said, flow as you will.

Note: Refrain
from titling these.
That way the
lines might see
each other
more clearly.

Slow Human Numbers

Made misreading a marriage. That was how it started.
Stilled the deepening—
didn’t matter if it was mystery
or fact, it was all
mystery scaffolding
metacognition. When I worked
in the Traveling Monastery (“envisionment building”)
each day was hard prayer. My supervisors told me
spark each word off the flint
of the last. I fought
with the analogy until
endless wish untangled. I was first again, my head unspent.
Retirement followed. Distance obliterated. But still locked in a method
I couldn’t erase. Of course life tried,
life tried. In walked so many, so much
that had forgotten me. I introduced myself
to old ones. Apparently I had earned the look
of too much loss, and I got it. Boy did I get it. So many
had lost me. I used to live there, there, in the eye, in the billions,
in the slow human numbers, how they haunt me.

The Astonishment Apparatus

"To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of THE ASTONISHMENT that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an APPARATUS capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For that astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us."

Duo Portraiture (4)

Scholastics and The Jacarada

"Pretoria in South Africa is popularly known as The Jacaranda City due to the enormous number of Jacaranda trees planted as street trees and in parks and gardens. In flowering time the city appears blue/purple in colour when seen from the nearby hills because of all the Jacaranda trees. The time of year the Jacarandas bloom in Pretoria, coincide with the year-end exams at the University of Pretoria and legend has it that if a flower from the Jacaranda tree drops on your head, you will pass all your exams. Other towns and cities in South Africa have Jacaranda trees, but none produce such a show as that of Pretoria.

The city of Brisbane in Australia has a local reputation of having a significant population of Jacaranda trees. The University of Queensland in the city's inner west has a very high concentration of the tree, and due to the impressive display of purple flowers in mid-Spring, which wind up littering vast sections of the suburbs, local folklore claims that "one won't start studying for exams until the jacarandas have molted". This has led to the slang name "exam tree" being attached to the plant. At Sydney University there exists a similar expression "by the time the jacaranda in the main quadrangle flowers, it's too late to start studying for exams"."

Your Enduringness, That Sometimes

Your enduringness, that sometimes
shudders several sleepers at once
but continues to remove itself
imperiously to cortex corners
has nothing to return to
though having navigated trysts
successfully is a rumor
even the waking skeptic
is excluded from

We are now on a willow islet
Hammock and honey
eighty years later

We are now on a willow islet
amidst the quietest like
murder from expressed emotion

Impregnable and myriad
without a single allusion

stranded in the billions
outside a forehead plus window

ovations of accidents becoming
obvious unto yourself
to know me

Challenge - Titles found in a poem by Laura Riding

"Slow Human Numbers"

"A Common Air and Eating"

"The Necessary Quorum of Suspicions"

"The Trial of Looks"

"How Foreign Was Our Flesh"

"An Arbiter to Sample"

"Of Freak Terrain"

"Your Enduringness, That Sometimes"

_____________________________________________

20 lines.

2 lines must be generated by a chance operation, explained in a footnote or comment box.

Quechua For 'Navel Of The World'

Nothing more absolute and undreamt
than the conqueror’s right
to with pressed lips force the tongues
of natives to split what the law
so resolutely purses
which is the word in all its variable
correctness meaning radiating
the truth back second-hand
to its one unlocatable source
that flourishes from the historical
mulch one Francisco Pizarro
the bodkin sweetness of the mountain
ruined air expressing itself
in breezes through his standing
unalterably still as if sculpted
by superstition and its people
one of whom departs with both
halves of himself laden with
diseases

I Have Named Them

larches[,]
“some things that leave
doormat’s bondage
between each secret

footfall.” Underside the reverse
of conversion,
a what-pump:
no marrow in a vacancy

whose lectern[‘]s disarray [is]
entombment’s twin
confusion. Technically[,]
transient eyes parachute

as if driven
toward dead lands of scorched arcades,
toward fouled fare instead of
Sunday afternoon Americana.

Duo Portraiture (3)

Request To Wrestle

Choose one:

'Splitting Down The Middle Their Worth'

'Exeter Aubade'

'On Exaggeration As A Means Of Avoidance'

'I Have Named Them'

'Quechua For Navel Of The World'

'To Socrasphinx, From His Lessers'

_________________________________
18 lines.

Hecatomb For Comfort

Quiet. And then: aspens. Crepitations
of new something leaves untwisting
from dormant bondage like Houdini
en masse. Between each in its secret

gasp for an underside the reverse
of oxygen, where bronchial translation
mimics conversion like a Christian
evangelical from contraction, what

pumps bleats, circulates to ensure
no vacancy in marrow whose height
lectures from a busybody disarray
of entombment. Thinness collects

silhouette confusion. Technically
skinny and below, sans thought. Sketching
transient ripcords. And what. The eyes
screaming up, no parachute.

( - )

As if driven by dread of obvliousness (into
hints and lands of scotch arcana), we
clung to the stinging and byzantine rhetoric of
Mets fans, bounteously heckling
that which would go fair instead
of foul, foul instead of fair,
advancing the much hoped for
plot line of a Sunday afternoon
in the bleachers, in the sun, and, yes,
in America but not
the "triumph of Americana."

Request For Duel

Choose one:

"Hecatomb For Comfort"

"This Is Not Where Women Come From"

"Treemonisha"

"Fleece For Voice and Ear, To Be Repeated"

"As If Driven By Dread of Obviousness Into Hinterlands of Scholarly Arcana"

___________________________________________________________
A poem. 16 lines. Avoid temptation to overcook with silliness, if and when possible.