"for whom pictures are paradise"

Children's books do not serve to introduce their readers directly into the world of objects, animals, and people, into so-called life. Rather, if anything remotely similar to Platonic anamnesis actually exists, it would take place in the lives of children, for whom pictures are paradise. By remembering, they learn; what you put into their hands should have, insofar as human hand can impart it to paper, the color of paradise, just as a butterfly's wings have their patina. Children learn in the memory of their first intuition. And they learn from bright colors, because the fantastic play of color is the home of memory without yearning, and it can be free of yearning because it is unalloyed. In that sense, the Platonic anamnesis is not quite the form of memory specific to children. For it is not without yearning and regret, and this tension with the messianic is the exclusive effect of genuine art, whose recipient learns not from memory alone but from the yearning that it satisfies too soon and therefore too slowly.
-Walter Benjamin

Instant Light

There is a certain mist
Mistaken for memory
A gauze or filter
Which teleports the words

Over fields fields over pools
And pools over an umbilical
Voice which twists at night
And says words we can't

Make out and that we
Must imagine instantly
Like a procession passing
In broad daylight or images

As if they were a moment
Ahead of the things we are
Waiting for an idea of
Our bodies so dispersed.

You have made an angel disappear
Through the most mundane
Means -- so what remains?

A mist, a kind of sheen,
As objects themselevs disappear.
A glass for the worlds we have been.

How can't can become literal (Erasing Red)

In an interview in 1992 by Michel Denisot on the French cable station Canal+ for the release of *Fire Walk With Me*, Lynch was asked about his taste for textures and materials, including things which are considered compulsive, like the series of dead flies he used in compositions. He answered that it is the name we give, the associated word ('dead flies'), which prevents our seeing them as beautiful, and that all we have to do to see differently is to erase the word.
--Michel Chion

I.
The erasure of names approaches paradise where a name once was and all that remains is the thing itself resonant and destroyed.

Paradisical beauty is this resonance -- silence beyond sound. The thing resounding no longer attached to a name.

II.
Colors truly become colors without their names.

III.
The signs of paradise remain not only in polesemy but in the dissociation of sign and signifier.

The mind itself cleaves the body as it says the word and a word as a body itself whether said or expressed -- fluent in telepathy.

IV.
The throbbing of this word like blood becomes a trance distanced from an idle grasping at meaning. The throbbing of these words like the real.

A ceiling fan, a turbine in slowest motion.

Eternal as our sex-changing.

V.
The red in blood -- blood red.
The red that can't be destroyed and the red that can.
The word red -- hovering.
Bodies hovering in secret judgment.
A red room -- the blood in red.
That are both symbols and images and sound-images.
The image of blood resonant around a word.
The whirring of words like leaves and the leaves of leaves leave-taking in a single ear.
The rushing, like a rushing of liquid -- a falling of the image upon eyes.
A liquid sense of eyes -- ear conscious.
The reflection of a fan whirring for all time and no one fascinates.
Substantial is this.
Wired for a body made only of blood and useless cuts in time.
The heart of the heart of the motor in these incisions.
In becoming a word the word becomes not merely a word.
Paradise is the renunciation of this word having only its one sense.
The denial of the denial of the doubleness of words.

VI.
This is not a word.

VII.
Words like literal hallucinations of a general voice.

VIII.
Literally words are tearing us apart.
They go down like gifts towards another who is not exactly us.
It is as though these voices were in the next room on a monitor and not here.
Voices rushing in like angels resounding around the fullness of any place, a portal in the ear.
I want them flung, the blood torn, but I literally can't.
How can't can become literal.

IX.
Connecting a sound to a sound movement resumes and we are here before it listening in.
This literal scene metaphorizing only a mood of blood.
Waiting for an image to connect image sound connects what image can not.
We rest in this failure like an eternal word.
An angel rushes upon us again missing the moment it would otherwise grasp.
Red and the word red, blood and the word blood.
Absent-mindedly reciting the world as if it could remain still.

X.
A towel, for instance covering, an angel.

The horizontality of afternoon light
as it falls on the wall.

Signs of a longing
for home follow us afterward.

Icons, like actual homes, alight in our
hovering.

Anything That Moved ('Immobile Growth')*

Sometimes a wind blows/ And you and I/Float/In love/And kiss/Forever/In a darkness/And the mysteries/Of love/Come clear
-David Lynch (quoted in Michel Chion's *David Lynch*)

If a light went out in the world
Candle light light of indifferent
Dwelling
Light of a telling seen
I would fuck anything that moved
I would be you and
You would be me

If a light went out
In a windy world
Wound so around a noun
Predicated on
A desiring but secret name
I would fuck
Anything that moved
The scars of your breasts
Fascinated like a statue
Speed of thought speed of
Violence
Disguises rest

Speed of this car light
While we are parked
Nowhere discernible I would be
Like you you
Would be like me
In the light of a world gone out
Evil dictates
A space to hit

Velvet we would be
Slow in this movement
Of wind
Roaring the
Anti-hero of dialectics
Love will reign
Speed of love
If fucking won’t become
A nightly thing
The exits we pass-up
To become each other
Will be velvet
Nowhere discernible
But darkness not of night

Slow slow slow
In this movement of wind
Before the light the candle
Light
Of the world gone out
There was a refrain
Velvet in
The mouth of fucking
I was you and you were me
The face it lit
Up with false flame
Unwavering
Perfect for our vehicles
Of immaculate song

Dreaming slow in this
World
In this other
World red
The lips red of
This slow
Mouth of fucking
Lips close-up and
Slow to breath when dead
Unfalse in a night
Of wind not yet

Not yet velvet
Not yet this light please
O please
Not yet please, please O
Unclasped this
Night not yet of wind
Unclasped around
A verb to fuck

Lets drink to fucking I am not
You
You are not me yet
A dog roars the real
Voice sounds slowed
The patient slap
The lips
Nearly breathing
Not yet unclasped

Cleave to night verb to fuck
Love love cleaves to
Night to unwind wind
To light slow
A flame of rearview
Mirrors neither hero
Me or you “poet” or
“Assassin”
It goes with the territory

The refrain the wind through
The trees from which she
Emerges
The light light slow
Light the
Object of night of
A mirror around these beings

I would fuck anything that
Moves
But nothing’s moving
Too slow a light lighting
The face as it does not sing
Speed of this parked car light
While we are parked

The ear relays this unseen
To the composing eye
Newly breathing a world
Of wind of wind and
Flowers as they beginning
Slow reds and yellows
Of the wind
Wind around a car as
It is passing wind around
Our being

For that moment I am you
And you are me
I would the hero fuck
Anything that moved
Slow speed of dialectics
Libido love will reign
The lips the patient slap
Of flesh but briefly

I would the anti-hero
Uncleave all song all sound
The words as they are
Signs of breath wound slow
And rhythmic like waves
Around the dark

If a light went out in the world
I would hear only
The lips the patient slap
Of flesh as spirit
A final chase of
Speed and chance
The revolving movements
Of two faces under
The dark light of a parked car.

*composed Spring 2005 to Zack Finch and Michael Cross, after lines from poems by Mike Kelleher and John Taggart and watching again David Lynch's *Blue Velvet*.

To Crown To Cover*

Outcome

We see every outline as them
And yet they are not we veiled
By this event not desiring
To be gathered again
By some historical operation

I want to love them and yet I also
Want them flung exited by some
Side-door that only leads
To another wilderness deserts of
These withdrawn interviews.


An Autobiography of Henry James by Chris Marker

The eye sees the victims
From which its dislodged
And participates in its own
Capture in order to lose
The captive again
The cause of death

Hunting the hunter
Or the hunted having memories
Before they could be made
There are four frames
Four thresholds and therefore
Four ways to fear
In choosing oneself guilt pries
From us our fingers and
Stammers alibi

This womb of time a time of
Wounds becoming true
Unhealable the double at the
Door is not the double
You thought you were
But each so many fires
That burned us and
Gave us unbearable wills
While what we stalked were
What we still could be.


Stealth

A need to hide radiantly
On the branches and in the white
Webbed hollow of a tree
As it roots too much.

The shadows only
Come alive
When they’re struck.

For now is not treasonous
Being like a wall before a stage
Not a question.

*

Cut to no longer closing
No longer this admired
Window but as we sing

Into an orifice monads cathect
Each other distantly
The distant spirals of these minute plans

Exceeding a pale of means
Or dates as they’re remarked
By a repetitious glance.


Cremaster III.

Those stilts your torso rests on
Frighten that half of me
Which is not myself

In a play of mending half-lives
And one more tooth
Blown out

Discharge makes for lived tableau
Time of costumes
Space of vicissitude

Meeting at Ground Zero
Culture dreams
A mass of like-to-kill

To claw where magic
Makes its face
And skin cools colder steel

Vaseline holds for allegory
We who remain
Much vicious and take lovers lately.


Emersonian

Promise me love
Your force disunite
A sky for our stalking
Singing the wilder
Fires of hoarded salt
No image forgives
Which strips us of sight.

Show me matter
Make me a new ring
For the eyes which cry
Rapt now I is reap
Now I’s a drowsy rim
By the waters of receded
Struggle and weather
Recalled by rhyme.

I fail to lift how I fail
And yet it goes on beginning
Anywhere in proposed song.


Rousseau Barouque

Opaquer flame hearth frame
Johanne know knowing only sometimes

Destroys the object known.
Cannibals show-brie-on,

Fire themes through a string
In the eye. See sky for what

We are not what opens
Too much towards its freedom.


About When, Which Should Never Be Forgetting’s Completion

I share this journey towards ice as you share I.
I share a name longing to feign recovery.
To sense thought was an instrument and yet the animal
Still noble. Who become us when it no
Longer matters whether we look.
We might frighten them if we did
Or forget forgetting too soon to be dead.

Dying is shed so why not do? Articles won’t
Be for us nor like anything. Hang up your guns
And thereby shoot crooked. The will becomes
A colder flame too much having been mastered
By love. When our only recourse is to go to hell.


Brakhage I.

Aggregate and slow light
Dive to
This snowblind burden again.

Face
A mountain looming
Being awakened.


Identity

Clearly what we’re seeing
Are these patterns in-echo
Awoken in a cared-for wood

Wed to every existing expression
Placing this finger here
As if to verify the fact

Of this finger being here
Hearing prescription determinately
Words do also constitute

A time of fact
Memories of genes
Cling to other memories

To the hovering genealogies
Of a brain
Or a horizon gently scanned

We die imaginary deaths
So we may always
Like revenants return.


Brakhage II.

That this protective blink
Is actually I identified
By a circle which pierces me
Moved to an opening tone

To a diurnal rhythm
Of slow zooms to difference
Painted by energy and
We flick as far as we can

In that from which we came
Slowing these free-falls
In the body snow fallen
From an unlikely bough.


Distracted

How
it
may

feel
to
wake

and
continue
unaware

these
lapses
were

not
in fact
death.

*

But a kind of sleep
Which may verify
This recognition

We citizens
Of the literal
We witnesses

Of the floating
Worlds I is the last
Time I noted myself

By quoting
Myself the risk
Of this is in

The search
Moving between
Two ranges

And pretending
To be
Of both.


By the Sounds Of What Was Taped as Tape Rolled

As the waves roll they also record
And as the passengers did not know
Their destinations they could not
Prepare for an afterlife.

All the tiny houses of the valley
Are recording this through premonition
Every shift of the wind inaugurates
A position by which we is no longer
Interpellated no coverage being enough.

I feel as though I am approaching it now
A place where suffering points to us
And tells us we are the thresholds
We will always be nothing more.


Not Reconciled

One too many lambs sacrificed by one too many buildings bombed.

And reconstituted by the way we walk the basement intact, firing artillery into a more open field.

He's driven this city too many times not to forget the narrow passage your traffic patiently is.

There are too many speeches lacking place for this not to be a film about memory, an embattled hymn or merely a poem.

If she recedes in a pure image of purer space she takes the gun from the drawer remembering prayers as remembering for itself, pleading statelessness & psychosis.

Choose your own reenactment, the other signs are chosen for us and shall not result in reconciliation.


Circles expanded impossibly by an enthusiastical organism.
Who may be lit all day yet do not dream they sleep.


The Preformed Weather

By so many blows in the dark
I remember you as a wandering caress
That has no other territory but voluptuous torque
Nearing forgotten breaths.

Twilight mark how many
Disappeared by hiding’s hidden
Glue bluish gray
Having cows as we may.

Caves within which to unsee
A screen left to its devices
To long unreflectingly without
Remorse for who are real.


Real-Time

To assume that the ballplayers were celebrating in real-time might otherwise seem absurd.


If You Would *Not* Have Visions

The phoney proposals of a hushed and raping voice.

The music of your most private fears.

Car-wrecks hovering on empty pylons.

The vampire, as his lips don’t move, but the answering machine picks-up and he somehow and distantly speaks.

The frozen.

Those words risen in the poem decomposed by a cracking tarn.

Uxorious doubles buried alive.

Music for the deaf, painting for the blind, recipes disappeared in a scentless index.

The unspeakable deeds of unprintable words.

The will to leave.

The face becoming larger as the camera pulls back simultaneously zooming forward.

The sense of terror that one would drink milk while in the background white noises are exploited her labor is that hum unoriginated attacking the nervous system.

The will to feel.

The face as the film burns.

The face as white overexposes.

The reason for tape loops.

Mobile termini.

A discriminate chopping.

The nostalgic bones.

This blood of the image.


The mind will catch up to the body. The memory will make such an adjustment to the screen. As the animal relays our gaze, and the words we are watching betray us. Is this the reason we have chosen to write? I have strayed and yet how I am struck by the symmetry of when we occur.

But I’m not nearly strong enough to forget these events. These moments of an endangered consciousness, laughing and laughing until death-do-us-part, trembling as one can not be at this conception twice. Torture and ecstasy forget only because they can only sense the present. The blood filling the mouth. This should not be hermeneutic.

I am alone now. This is the way you will know me. By a clearing when the treaty has broken. By the warring of war itself in the over-weaned light of telepathized day. The knocking of my autography at woods, the needing and not having of my words. They appear in a struggle to be attentive to immediacy. “However, there a mind’s complexity is a common factor in all minds.” How one understands the world to appear at all.

If there’s disinterest in a thing of beauty then for miles miles don’t touch. The doe doesn’t see the cross-hairs, nor does one need “get-off.” For a while there is no incorporation of the real, nor the fear of such an incorporation. A rock is truly a rock. A stomach never the home of becoming (i.e. merely digestive).


*composed Fall 2003

Now Man (Kiss Not)*

Home Is For Miles

Those buildings so painfully foreign
Of your life scarred and grown
Inwardly recalling them in pieces
I became afraid
At a meaning of light grown
To the symmetries of
Daytime
In the impoverished nation.

Time sifted into time as it lives
In itself and we it
Standing for, standing against
That light so painfully foreign
To all be is
The apprehension of forms ruined by no one
All.


Pages

Boning then
In some sense of the past
Legions go to harm to whip

At the first alarm of vanishing signage
The semaphore meaning
To kill every last one

Blinks unwittingly whose every tic
Of variant cane
Bears witness to the pirated

Echo of these pages
Waste products of more
Primitive accumulations.


Fluff-a-nutting

How we would ever think to hide
In words “hellebore,” “hello”
Helter-skelter seeking shades
Private no more
The nose runs blood from this

Roses, Hellebore, hella’ bored
Words clip their own hair
Cultivating a fence linked
By twinkie intuition
And defeat.

The twitch of his nose
Grows like Pinocchio’s
Doing it sideways
To the slinky rhythms
Of late machines.

This latest paradise
Being close to what was meant
Through the walls of ourselves
Heavy petting
& patty cakes.

Rimbaud
Of all our pretty things
Thick and thicker
Thickest starlets
You stick too much to this mold.


Pay Attention Motherfucker

This zone around the word
Its staying power leaves
From a place of fading substitution
For the subject’s watched-for back.

This is just to say
They shoot all night
At shadows on sheets
As though they weren’t cast
By intelligent things.

My body no longer
Follows me round
This corner upon seeing
Anything at all I knew
I was the first
I was the last to leave.


Tween and not so
So many chiefly
Filling the ditch with a hole
Not expending too soon
The meadows of our need
The truth like sorrow
Being all too sticky


Please Pay Attention Please

The position of the camera
Is the only
Trace
Of an un-
Skeptical
Mind.

The eye goes first, then the
Fist – ah!
We want love, we
Remember love
As the mask of the lost
Waxen and everywhere
But where we, negligible, step.

To be
Any
Nearer
However
Wouldn’t
Be to
Communicate
The predominate
Urge
To be implacably near.


Obselescent Choreographies

The people a corridor moulds us to be
Objects frozen by labyrinthine glass, by optical fibers
Would we appear erstwhile any intelligent design amnesiacs and claustrophobes?


(Un-)Mending Wall

Is he sinking into the floor
Or rising from it?
The still has changed
Waves of light outside these caves
Photographs of them.

As the entrance grows near
The heart beats a little
For never having been here
As the entrance grows near
Penetrate my ear
As music made by a lost year.

This sense of discovery is
Of tethers that free
The organs to leave
And anyone to arrest
The mind with their unwilling.

This sense of loss
Is of leaves to love
Is to go into any situation
Not wanting to kill
And being so unprepared.

A mode of seeing is not heard
The lips are tired of waiting to know
The terms of their custody
As neighbors we go to blows
Over who has the right to say
“I kiss not these lips.”


Pity

I’m not picky, really
I feel bad
For the way you move
Under the bright
Bright lights
Ceaselessly bugged.

I’m not picky
And the fog-
Machine’s not on
Really.

Yet you dare
A sense-
Less dance
Never done
With the tears of
Your undoing.


*composed Spring 2004.