Deadpan cont'd

with Dorothea Lasky

Animal

I have lost my mind completely
Animal is in every room of this house about to walk in
He is turning the corner with his giant red, ghoulish head
What will he do to me?
I do not know what he will do to me
Darling, I am sitting here and saying goodnight to you
We can be friends if you would like to
I would like to
Be your friend if you will have me
Now I am leaving this room cause Animal is moving in
Making his way into the room, his eyes are on me
I am going into the bedroom that he can’t get in
Not one person who will do me harm can get in this room
I lay on the bed and everything is safe
And with the words of this poem I am thrusting Animal everywhere
I am putting him everywhere
He gets scarier with my every word
I am shining through my fear with the dreams that the lovers make
The dreams that the lovers make, I do not make alone
I make with two people, their twin heads fanciful and wise
And utterly blond
Gleaming in the sun with their yellow teeth
My twin lovers
The ones who will save me from this nightmare
Two-headed
Turning their heads towards me and then towards the ceiling
Unable to see themselves
This monster that escapes me

*

The matting in my mind
And the matting in yours
Records a place not qui
te here the ways the wor

ld possesses us and surr
ounds us with products
Of no known substance
This is what it means to

Make worlds and make
Them urgently our comb
ined speed is blood as the
Time it takes to form that

Definite idea clear as fuc
k when we breathing tou
ch and our breasts touch
And thus night interrupts

Our continuous burning
In which open flame str
uctures the breath and is
Far away in a mood of

Fear no brooding can ba
nish nor God apprehend
Even through our trembl
ing kisses veils are tears.


This weekend’s aeons reek
Of evidence wanting to take
Everything further worlds
Moon-signs and signs of blood

In alphabets always bursting at
Their skin with what life we would
Like to share but never can the
Lips born together to any satisfaction

Other than adequacy but then ideas
Like blood rush upon us love
Us more than anyone we could ever
Know when they touch no one

Is the wiser when they fill us with
This warmer feeling of knowing and
Not knowing somehow that you
Or anyone I love will not always be.


You sing of larger structures in me
Of rhythm still with monsters growing
Bigger into the sky scaring-off all

The guns and weapons we were once
Serving the night the servicing night
Using us up into the night that night

The human once grew to like a giant
Ear filling-up all we once were all
That was an empty head so that’s all

Hearing is and speech and music a
Function of animal vigilance a need
To hear the vowels these origins stink

Of blood before melody and motet
Dominated us with numbers with
That music militant in essence.


There was no sanity
But trails of resources and the

Soul given to money
A phylum written

On the backs of organic history
And women and slaves

And children we will resurrect
Them with our sounds

That are not music controlled
By a deadly logic of wise-

Schools and science and rhetoric
Hardly for any people

Singing into each other’s breasts
We must destroy those deathly

And insane songs of ratio
Singing the song we must sing


A crane fell this was all emblematic
Of the economy laboring to make
Of itself like any good soldier or cap
italist something more than it should be

Without a structure to distribute wealth
More fairly or enact laws that counteract
This fundamental unfairness of the human
Since we are human and we made those

Cranes they are part of us and when they
Break they are even more a part of us
An accident may be more meaningful in
Its effects than any cause it manifested

A militarized sky mocking our civilian
Domination by glass towers and glass re
flecting helicopters countless times over
When the sky should be one subject.

Strobos (Deadpan)

Strobos (Deadpan)
for Dorothea Lasky

There are things we live among
and there are things that make us
undead in seeing them or by
their very use of us I saw Dottie
the dead ones we would feign
on our adult screens scare me
"me and my shadow" where I go
nothing follows no one because
this not-following was us at play

in eternity there was no trace
had not been taken by our steps
our ands and buts and conjunctives
these real sweet-nothings pimp us
out like substance interrupted
a baby which grows from it
and doesn't have a name we
would like to say yet if a name is
like a strobe staggered in shiny
moments we felt its actual poses
as our impermanent movement

what we don't see as a duration
but only the semblance of when
you put roots here and name them
“desire” desire which made things
grow only sometimes which left
bite-marks like question marks
while we were still in medias res
birds swept down to catch us
and care for us before we really
fell back-to-life such recurrences

were real you say death is never
really fair like your life like our lives
when you touch me there and stare
out from it like it was always here
always before a guilt of caring I don't
want your roots & branches to ever
die this forest of meaning even if we
know their names even when love
knows the names it desires to be
called by to make a new subject from
this subtraction this being entity

where the sun’s often trapped like
bronze and outlives our lives the simple
animals torn limb-from-limb the things
we should be startling poetry for the
first time and make everything fear
we were finally We deadpan seeing
everything the sun involved as though
for the last time this sickness a cure

that can in fact have no name but
gravity given to teeth and pain all
the machine movements we ever make
like stop-action babies we can't ever have
the noonlight of that video which is you
in a way ready to announce yourself
an idea of your “bigger” self little ones
that go like big ones do the lumps meta-
physical lumps of the mind and actual
lumps materials as they are made by
no one can never be a shared child

can this be embodiment like bumper
cars only shocking when they stop
our techne a world of surprise and
blinking the eyes were so exhibited
for control and controlled us verily
they were convertible they made our
lives more real writing through riding
to make this last man suffer the dis-
tances the little huts of us a *domos*

the wind swept them and blew our
windows open disturbed the curtains
changed the mood of last things that
would come to touch us like a wind
or tears thru which we see the world
somehow corrected sex was true
the wind when we are coming (and
we are coming) complicit in evidence

no longer some excrescence or
stupidity of the sky like Williams says
herds and heads of men like armies
battalions of stumps men should also
sing joyous stealth what’s burnt at
least is seen and what isn’t seeing
a faction not entirely opposed to
force tingling where we might dis-
appear still within a trembling earth

under a torn canopy through the open
night before anything we learned was
useful or what we could see the blank
neutrality of those lips before me the
genital contact of the animal too close
to this color to feel it to feel anything
but a general dreaming that thoughts
were feelings too and sense an image
catching up to us totally desynched

from worlds in their prehensions of
what poses us what moves discretely
not as me in this detachment semblances
of “haunted” nature the quote around our
necks stubborn as our literal dreaming
preponderances of flesh mold this
crawlspace this airlock the sudden
dying-with-you how the shadows grow
and close in and are in us and become
us so we were their insatiable interior.