Somes Lines & Phrases From Robert Kocik*

"Which is ostensible democracy"
"can only cause" " English speak
ing to fight" "to simplify" "we lea

ve for our children" "America ca
ptive" "self-justification distorts
eternity" "I prescribed life" "as o

pposed to medicine" "correct in
complaining" "the sensation bit
ing into" "to be brought before"

"no bodily link" " is all that's req
uired" "soldiers and salesman"
"the patient is the medicine" "but

basking is neither light nor dark"
"takes effect" "scorn for spiritual
discernment" "heal first the words"

"are heaping up" and a word tur
ned pathogenic" "may not have
intended the wording" "the inver

se nervous system" "even at the
point of the heart" "the brain isn't
even involved yet" "creditors panic

and rage" "the predator is on the
inside" "no one told me that this
was a poetry reading" "remember

labor?" "one's own medicines with
in" "is the building inside not in
capacitated?" "nothing is wrong it's

just we're diseased" "copious copy
ing" "in a post psycho-somatic age"
"I just love the taste of a stranger"

"people are dying from nothing" "f
ree range genoming" "the parasym
pathetic system" "accusing Darwin"

*transcribed at Segue this past Saturday

Three By CA CONRAD*

April 21
“Ought to send the mayor and them
other politicians over to fight the war!
You know how long they’d last! Yeah!”
--Kathleen McCollough, one
of Philadelphia’s homeless
Senior Citizen Soothsayers

phrasing lack…
time was
longer once

then the
sponge of
routine

whose idea
was this
planet
anyway!?

you mother
fuckers
shitting
on life

time

throat muscle!

hearse & 4
of Hearts
corner of
15th & Green

celebrity guest: ABUNDANCE!

car is nick
name of auto
mobile
Jay’s nick
name his
first
initial

what was a
window before
the word?

imagine entire
cities with no
language
no?
no.

for other
possibilities
please ignore
your priest

your
mouth will
free
you

gnaw your
foot from
the trap
c’mon you!

who mentions
Pegalina first? (one time
this guy yelled
*SUCK MY DICK!*
she yelled *I’LL CHEW
YOUR CROTCH INTO
A PUSSY!*
she’s not
kidding
mister!)

what are we
doing here
Sherlock
playing
Black Jack
at the bar this
fascist restaurant
where I once waited
tables Police Trainer
video game where
I sucked dope and
made out with the
nerdy dishwasher in
the cooler where
sausage beat cheese
where sex on the
job replaced health
insurance and rent
overdue where I
first thought if
restaurants in
the afterlife
don’t serve
themselves
I’m not
going!





May 1
“We just heard a live recording
of Dvorak’s *Symphony No. 4 in
d Minor*, with former president
Ronald Reagan playing all
nine instruments at once.”
--radio DJ in my
dream last night

shooting six
pointed stars
for the seal
of Solomon

what american
corporations
did Death
contract to
build our
eternal
hotels?

the unions
are *fucked!*

the Third
World will not
enter the
Afterworld as
the Third World
or was your
bible another
political
promise
or warm
piss
divined
as milk?

taste your
own and
let me
know

my friend
says she’d
rather see
state-imposed
atheism than
state-imposed
theism but I’d
rather see
the state
disappear

can’t we
imagine our
hands on
one another
instead? question
our extent
of warmth
LOVE was
a tomb for
awhile
between
borders

I will live
with you like
war has finally
ended please
meet me
there

if drag queens
ruled the world
our warmth
would never be
in question

great teachers
remain great
students

classic
evil new
evil what’s
the fucking
difference?

Sherlock and
I see Masonic
symbols every
place we look
Setting Mauls
Trowels a
butcher’s side
of beef in
window
sports an
All-Seeing
Eye this is
getting creepy
can we
leave
now?





May 30
“Just when you think
the work week’s over
there’s one more
lap to go!”
--Brett Evans every
Thursday

it never said
Tear Gently
it said
Tear Here

look at rush
hour—what if
it’s just a
repeat of
this after
we die?

I’ll be so
pissed off!

hold on
initiates
of the
sun

see how
they danced
and died
in a
hundred
year old
movie

they NEVER have
the *Valley of the
Dolls* soundtrack on
these goddamned
juke-boxes
around here!

ME: his father made
him pray to expel
all deviance

SHERLOCK: expel all
deviance!? where would
I be without it!?

that’s not a
loop hole mr.
president that’s
a hula-hoop

let’s follow the
insider trader’s trail
to the University of
Pennsylvania

Karma
another
cleaver of
the rich

it’s never
poor folks who
tell me every
body gets
what they
deserve

Sherlock wants
Diana Ross and
Lionel Richie to
redo *Endless Love*
as *Endless War*
it’s a
virus
Peace somewhere
means War was
sneezed some place
else our planet is
always sick with us

but I’m grateful
insects aren’t
bigger

(to the High Hat poet
who snubbed Sherlock)
Alice Notley told us
after her reading
“some poets like to
pretend poetry is
middle class” YEAH!
Alice KNOWS!

Lorrine Niedecker
mopped floors for
a living but if
her poems were
bullets most poets
would get it good!

* from his collaboration with Frank Sherlock, *The City Real and Imagined*, forthcoming from Factory School.

Recurrencies

for Carolee

Tapping the blood prime image of them
pomegranate red a rose arose life like

a dream dreams us like linings for be-
coming paint stirs potentia menses deep
research stirred like red pomegranate
red a rose aroused from bed this firm-

ament sex to extricate from lips mouth
of that boundary red in perpetuity
information divides the self recombines

no one since these states were made by
psychos such hard won ambiguities re
course blood prime image of her erotica
pomegranate red rose arose a round as
here no dream can end no where with

the lips we kiss or can’t with what bound
aries dividends divide the soul image
makes its way as space your conscious

ness enduring mouth lips of that which
kiss them and are a face brightened by
expression and are this whole body taking
place blood red rose arise aroused not

merely the symbolic not merely a history
of the real those stakes of your willing.

Anecdote

for Kyle

Just the facts my friend the man
taken for dead literally ‘at his

word’ is undead like a sign we
point to or hold-up like any

logical picture of harm points
disconnected on which map

a march of engines set a match
to search the fire so be it for

substance reveals what’s seen in
the said and demonstrated don’t

repeat yourself this that ran deep
lining their real with the sym

bolic giving number to event
defacing space so stats reveled.

Wonder Beirut

We are attempting to find new ways to create images through evocation, absence, latency. Latency is a state which haunts all of our work. Traditionally, latency is defined as the state of what exists in a non-apparent manner, but which can manifest itself at a given moment. The latent image is the invisible, yet-to-be developed image on an exposed surface.

To this should be added the idea of "the dormant", of slumber, of slumbering, of something that can be awakened. To us, latency is beyond evidence. It is the reminiscence of an image, of knowledge but which can be barely grasped. How can one produce images, export them, move them around, while avoiding cut-and-dried definitions? As image producers, we try to avoid being made use of, or taken over by, propaganda within our country or region, or reduced to a simplifying , often "orientalist", vision. Our work takes into account this possible risk, this breach.

Aware of this situation, we resort to the idea of the anecdotal. Etymologically, the anecdotal appears as something unrevealed, something kept secret, at odds with a certain concept of history.

In our opinion, the anecdotal is not necessarily metaphoric, but rather symptomatic. It is not small history trying to reflect history at large, but a research around sensations, and the re-appropriation of events, like elements of space-time that record a specific, significant moment.

The symptomatic is therefore the possibility of an image, the manifestation of something made visible. A symptomatic image is intimately linked to its context, to a situation and to a history. It is a proposal, an experience. By going back to a personal fact, to a given event, or to "something secret", we refuse the spectacular aspect and the general sociological subject. The symptomatic image is the product of a situation that cannot be reduced to an allegory or a symbol.

The anecdotal is the possibility of approaching our history. If we consider official history as written by the winners, there is another unofficial and subversive space governed by the anecdotal, "the thing kept secret", which perforates that official frame. Latency is about affirming a presence. The anecdotal is the story and development of that presence.

~ from Joana Hadjithomas's and Khalil Joreige's "Wonder Beirut," in *Out of Beirut*, Modern Art Oxford, Manchester, 2006.

For Martha

If we could find anywhere those points
of contact skin perfect tense nervous
make us commence breath gives us some

reason to be us here together and some
times delay I ‘provisional termini’ to make
a point is not always to identify to awake

fingers figures this meridian sense is deep
ceded on the skin how the brain blossoms
in between we too percepts mitochondria

was the mother of no one prehistory a cle
ave of cells tell us where it hurts the animal
talking out there in that open more harmed

than usual please take me on tour with you
points puncture misfire from more we too
blank dwellings in which worlds formed.