At *Around Sea*

~ for Brenda Iijima

"Under the wind waves I transcribe the relentless
no measure with which to embroider"
~ Brenda Iijima

"-- there was nothing more devastating than finding
the birds gone"
~ Rob Halpern

"To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new--more effective or more authentic--articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, that hiatus that--within man--separates man from the animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man."
~ Giorgio Agamben

"--The ungainliness
of the creature needs stating.
~ Louis Zukofsky

"Here, structure is not satisfied in the molecule, is not additive; but is fulfilled only in the whole work, the apprehension of the work's "life" springing anew in each realization, each immediate cell."
~ Robert Duncan

"The expression of artworks is the nonsubjective in the subject: not so much that subject's expression as its copy; there is nothing so expressive as the eyes of animals--especially apes--which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human."
~ Theodor Adorno


Consequentially this firewall or crashing code of waves
Discontinuously *here* were actual spirits
Animated as rock and *mundus* green profounder
Yet for an imaged spring a Maying disasters sing

What they first meant retrospectively not without
Effect before reflections were committed
To that original cancer "Man" mistook for the animal
Always also *in* "him" separate for the Open

Not our animal selves those otherwise noble
Not the mind disidentifying scope & scrape scrap scape
Consequentially not an entity continues to survive
Its critique before disaster became decadent

Called Humanism (euphemistically, perversely) "demo-
cracy" called Art (fascistically, wrong headedly) "popular" *I don't
Want no silicone* (Ed Ruscha) do we "beautifully" hallucinate
Eclipse would we be that noble creature diurnal & entranced

Before darkest light was braver than any commenced mind
Stranger than force of rock force of this promise Beyond
Indebted as such to which sensations and flatness occur
What materials we once made abstract must become disasters

So it is the suffered activate our perfect consequence
A concrete music a music for concrete corporeal particulars
Must be built until the sky rises stop the earth where our hands
Could be consequentially unmade unworked as it were

Again what devolves to these forms grammar snap plastic
To tendril pivot spring where waves won't become captive
As motions quantum likewise around them "delay, decay"
Land littorally literalized notwithstanding this virtual vigil

In our accretions for worlds again sponge percept a blotter
Extracts eyes from Truth a grammar of relation scores sight
Sites the patterns of a shell gnomic so we were reborn
Where once the cries of organs began the "human" recurs

In barbaric gnosis the Open falling to shudder suddenly
"Shiddow-shadow" synthesizer fail for "Nature" provokes
Its own "good work" immediations of mediacy this is but
"A draft of a draft" vocoded where immanence will irrupt

Transcendence can't be put for sure pulsating (for H.D.)
Turned against manners our logistics or a style of fable
Your fabled bees becoming breakers abuzz at breakneck
Speed slowest strobes auto-poesis like standing waves

Utter singularity numbered to every number every One
Must be signed subtracted from "us" fabled subjects
Your animals fall to prepositions neither the other's mine
Around this mirror metapolitics dreaming other contents

Disaster phases number slows this menance down
Pretend to collapse my dearly imagined subject my desire
To be at you around little objects hovering harbinging
What bird Event a voice beside and what is over it crashing.

A Bifurcation

~ for Martha Oatis

Every page
Or so there is
This before
The forest floor
And all around
Crystal states

Remembering
Is this clairvoyant
Grammar breaks
The world in two
Never because
Organic is between
These senses needles
Thrown to a wind

Precarious blank
Of worlds again
Like pages put to words
Backward scattered
To horizons opening
Or an axis for perception

All children recalled
From death-by-growth
An organic dying for which
Wind blows clouds break
The world in two
Becoming what single
Image for the parsed
A body formed by decision.

Dear Univocals

~ to Lori Anderson Moseman
after T.S. Eliot's "Virginia"

"Red river, red river
Slow flow heat is silence
Now will is slow as a river
Still..."

Stiller flame is this heat here
Subtracted still from obsolescence suppposed
The resilience of actual handedness

Polish forms numbered one by one
In the heat of this movement what motions
Gesture before description should be made

--Ever a place to put us

"...Will heat move
Only through the mocking bird
Heard once?..."

Never heard once and often with both
Ears held binocularly to a percept
None shall cross twice except no place

Shall always be here or there
Where time wasn't before us after all
But in us dear Univocals dear organs fleeing

"...Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait wait,
Delay, decay...."

Our stand-stills still like justice, this
Is the shudder, for all movement commas,
Rove in our thinking, the colors of that thinking

The gradations of this, as notes desynchronous
Moved, to that like synchronous birds,
Seen in waters warbled reflection, this inflection

--Our life as we were undead

"...Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thought came with me
And go with me
Red river, river, river."

To repeat with me children
Ever moving with the living
For the dead what
Makes the writing undead

Uniquely a color moved
To with and repeated
Like a sound for being
Overburdening signs

Such was an image in-
Crementally of voices flocked
Subtracted from which
River below or above?

Coda:
Why "Virginia" but for the war
Dead buried between
This border song subtracted
From their repetitions

Anthems like a blood released
From like or appearance over
Our battles of salvageable sky and earth
Battle again like we were

No when no where else
But in this flow no one but bullets
Where wounds were unthinkable
Canons persist internal to us.

Eruv II. (revision)

I.
Turning the inside *in* makes a cut to air
Material here our hands and tools die
Make us instruments if not a tunnel
For their labor recollected in intersections

Time squares lived rooms since we are
Sometimes wherein air nets mesh to
Sky again the dead or dig a portal to

Lived chips tend slivers see no thing
Notwithstanding a roof without a house
Eye beams convey me as you push us around
Where time won't be put the *socius*

Remains what we must be consequentially
Of saws as they see they cut a shade to lift
Light from its impossible place posited in
“real” structures evictions who wouldn't stand

Still in our immanence transcendence already
Against beginning or end cuts interrupt
Unsalvageable over our heads elsewhere above

Cinders dawn designs will be demolished
Fresh Kills cut to any gull any blood shed
In our backyard Niagara's dead call us back
From property relations to process.

Eruv II.

~ for Rob & Elka

I.
Turning the inside in makes a cut
In air material here our hands
And tools die to make us
Instruments if not a tunnel
For their labor recollected
By triumphal sections time squares
Lived rooms since we are sometimes

Wherein air nets mesh to sky again
The dead or dig a portal to
Lived chips actually tend to slivers
See nothing notwithstanding
The roof without its house
Conveys me as you push us around

Where time won't be put the *socius*
Remained we must be exactly
This consequence of saws as they cut
A shade to lift light from the impossible
Places posited in actual structure
Evictions stand-still in our immanence

Transcendence is already against
Beginning or end text cut trace
Unredeemably over our heads
Elsewhere remiss in cindered dawn
Design begs to be demolished
Fresh Kills cut to any gull any blood
In our backyard Niagara's dead
Return from property relations.

II.
Like we were this zone
So you say of magnets Poland
Recovered in Ukraine as one sings
You become a virgin

Of insalvageables remaining
This saintly video blue
Aglow in innocence drawings
The paint in your motions there

Already arrived aflicker with gifts
Exposures so you say
Of fields we sacrifice that this
Is an economy to wander for.

III.
Who falls on time but is not time fallen?

This piece of you grows
To a process removed
From totality mythology
Is dead to me whenever
You are here I am also I.

After David Blair's *Wax*

~ for Rob Halpern

"Psyches are butterflies, but souls are also bees."
--Robert Duncan

"How weapons die every day"
Undeadenned to life's ringing
Furious buzz of telepathy
Calls from our "future dead"
In any desert of this "stench"
Neither here nor sometimes spectral
Wax contents our doubles
The ways each murder remarks.

"The desert became the past"
We are this heat-seeking and *I* is that "X"
Of combs cacophonies and cells of bees
How come we've come to this
Measure at wax atelos inflict
'Friendly fire' in dawns of disappearance
What futurities were still ours to inflect?

"I wanted to take a picture but all I could do is dance."
I want to feel your softer targets
Softer fingers on the buttons of that
Non-site sighted not being when we were
Here together abuzz in which forms
Joy arrives in becoming husbandry
They're "every name in history" thus number must be
A place of "stench" dissembled
True names redoubled in "sunlit holes".

"For they were the dead, and vengeance was their life."
What eyes are not in-sightful
What *I* "not any longer I" yet
"Entity" now "semi-intelligent"
Like weapons dying into a *beyond*
It broke was actually beside
Like certain dissolves repeat
A second time seen from a vantage
Of backs 'out-of-body' experience.

"It's as if the gulf were without history and not one of its effects."--Rob Halpern
Missiles sing of *me* half-lives
And residual deaths if ever
To feel these firsts of distant futures
The past anterior so pronominal related like.

Sight Lines (II)

~ after Straub/Huillet

This is NOT a test but a demonstration
Of *this* their hands point to speech
To not think the letters *they* might be
"X" is a weapon of "undeath"
Sight lines non-sense the verb
Saying these words without a plan does your
Sight line disturb this one line which
Cuts the mortal vision in-half

Like fate moved to no aftermath
Or *as* feeling actors don't speak
For a reason what gods must do
Their dialogues of war & *gigantomachia*
Of sky & earth pan gently your camera
An exception to exceptional states
In a small village somewhere of green
We *are* such problems how to descend
In a desert when the signs aren't given
Point to what cancels what must
Therefore be cancelling like a brighter light
To strobe such is the wind to this

Slight interruption death we are
Actually talking about that death
Of the mind itself in any event
Of percept & horizon's "tick-tock"
Measures our speech but can not know
Itself in number "tick-tock" like a command
To break that desperate night of planes
To dream our suicide yet live to see.

Sight Lines

~ to Jakob Holder after Richard Foreman's *WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD!*

*The unbound longs for death,
The Heavenly, and God's faithfulness, go to sleep,
Reason is lacking.*
~ from Friedrich Holderlin's "Greece" (Second Version), translated by Michael Hamburger

There are sight lines enough
To lead the mind elsewhere
The actors if here
A war are we

Demonstrated by pointing
In unconscious states go *there*
All "X"-ed out & brightly lit
A strobe for the wind

Rushing *in medias res*
Blinding us with the mere
Thought of thinking nearness
I was no longer I

When eyes could see these variations
On nations bomb the hell
Out of "me" the unconscious *is* this pilot
Just as suddenly as eyes were elsewhere

Grieved hidden deserts
Whereof all that was lost should not
Be found wherefore the found
Should remain nearly as silent.

Thanks To the Scanning Bed (part II)

thanks Kyle S. for this postcard image of Jack Pierson's Bastards (2000)

check out my friend Terry Cuddy's video, *The Harriet Complex*, now available on DVD

a postcard image from one of my favorite local dress shops...

re: Belief

Piombino's Undeath

"When the need comes too frequently to resurrect, we begin to suspect that the subject is dead already and we are repeating the story to sustain a picture of the originating source of energy. So that even the worlds that accompany the picture, that help to form it, contain great force."
~ from Nick Piombino's *Fait Accompli* (p. 83)

Is John Fell Ryan...

... ! ! ! LITERALLY HALLUCINATING ? ? ?

The below is from his "Trope Report," published in *The Night Jar Review*... which includes work by Diane Cluck, Angus MacLise, Lionel Ziprin & others. Cover art by Bruce Conner!

Semina(l) Culture (Damn the Caesars)*

Richard Owens may have the best aesethtic sense among poetry magazine editors since Wallace Berman's *Semina*.

Check out the latest issue of *Damn the Caesars* (vol II) including work by Michael Basinski, Pierre Joris, Peter O'Leary, Kit Robinson, Kyle Schlesinger & Andrea Strudensky: http://damnthecaesars.org

*above image front cover of Damn the Caesars vol II.

A Wolf That Knows Enough to Keep Its Distance/Letters for the Letters of Clyfford Still

Below are scanned excerpts from what David Levi Strauss & Kyle Schlesinger read at the most recent Peace On A event. Click for larger views...

David Levi Strauss:






Kyle Schlesinger:

"I read a white..." (Nonsite)*

~ to Nick Piombino & Taylor Brady

"I read a white" site
Thru lyric to review
All things unquiet
& burnt for thinking

That time external to "us"
Internal to its powers
Of becoming-analysis
I drift before a throne

Of sovereign psychologies
Your "hovering attentions"
Mean *me* no harm
Out-moding *our*-selves

As such before impervious
Wills dictates predicate
A time-base for our balms
"Thought-stuff" captures

Attention but is no boob job
For captive audiences
The time-senses you prefer
Of music fragments weave

Note-taking of tendency
Aphorisms play
Tend eyes taking-note
Each of us at *this* war

Making for "second reflection"
In the world a *contradicto*
We have loved but a world
Can't always love us back

Not with our failed hands and all
An unworking into existence
Of *poesis* still exigent
It is perhaps like Stein says

That God (or any empire)
Can not (finally) make a hundred
Year-old mule in a minute
And yet disaster tells us

Otherwise that archetypes also
Abound in our powers
And activate events I want
To love *this* world but I can't

Always so we make another
More powerful so vigilance
Breaks at dawn a complicit state
Where cannons once were

I want to change the world
But its parameters can't be found
Out at any outpost of Theory
Or in apparent lack

I want to synthesize us
But we can't be simply gathered
In facts it should be accreted
To what measure will be

Hold me in your lyric here
Cathect me to convey
That vertical *over*-seeing
A "beyond-in" "in this world"

I like the sense of gravity
Your poetry proposes
Where chips of time remain
A-maying in bared attendance.


*the above (top-most) collage is by Nick Piombino, and called "Chris Dangerous"

Sappho Variation

My Lord Sith (Nonsite)*

~ for JG

The dreams began in which I could fix
The mechanisms of life
As easily as I could machines
Through time forever to play
A song to the arrangement
Of real things

It was obvious when one could read
Between the lines a sword
Of fire I *must* obey
My master less a day
I was born
As billions are I did

Not immediately imagine
When we were between
Casting him about the shop
Like a sack of meal
I go now to meet my destiny
I think about being ordered to sit on my hands

*all source text from: http://darthside.blogspot.com/

Shop Floor ("Non-Site" Collective)

~ for Taylor Brady, Michael Cross, Judith Goldman, Rob Halpern, Joel Kuszai, Bill Marsh & Yedda Morrison

Because we are always working
& because we must unwork
The world because there is blood
Actual blood on the shop floor

Blood of Wildcats other bombers
Of fame in the flames of our
Future wrecks we shoot into this night
Of labor which sites

Of disaster production all consuming
Because we are sited & short-cited
And over-sighting because we believe
In an actual world this world of hands

& voice will be believe-able
We will hold and be held grasped as it were
To that finer edge of removal
Your dispatches finally from the floor

Because you are always working and we
Are always working I want to dig
Print feel something again
Our making of thinking's edges (*poesis* so called)

Boundaries and borders of a material removed
The necessary abstractions "with" and "to"
Prepositions for lapidary scrap cut to this idea
Of longing Remnant succeed a *Das Ding*

A dent in becoming the net & the mesh
The un-mending Pullman glass the Glass Wall's reflection
Limits nothing in the nexus put our hands
To this sense but let's speak mediately

Square the problem make the set "us"
In a subtracted dawn site the case for something
Came back from the dead resurrected *in* life
Sequent to event named where site is.

Dhikr

All this happens in the instant [...] a unit of time that is indivisible in *concerto* (though divisible in thought) the atom of temporarlity which we designate as the "present" [...] the ideal limit between the past and the future [...] though the senses perceive no interval.
~ Henry Corbin

Perfumed Nightmare

~ for Paolo Javier

Call this a non-site
Mental images to scale
History your ways
Are not always ours
What does a wind matter
What the Gods of distant surplus
Upping the ante frame
By frame?

Interlocuted to this same
Voice same Being which *is* a pictured
Wind the "imaged sea" (Crane)
Symbols to scale allegory
Wreck thought to save thinking
With a capital "-Ing" what is
The capital of gumball production?
Why is whitey going
To the moon again, yo?

Thinking with a capital "-Ing"
The gerund of your prayers
-Here- & -Here- & -Here-
& -Here- wherever your
Camera goes in this actual
World of bridges what the Gods
Of surplus can't cross
Both too small and too big
For their sensible threshholds

In the final shots of your film
You remind me this world is
A bardo for that "other" (that other
Which is also for *this*) the actors
In masks like Gods among men
Impersonating a thousand devils
Of a wind already blown

From paradise your own (it must
First be singular) an Iran of praxis
A Fillipines of overcoming...
These voices over-dubbed in your head
Circle mental images to scale
The literal fact no allegory
Rides above your arduous path.

Rococo Rabbit Bouquat (Event)

Come to the Ninth Annual Bouquat. Hosted by Abby Walton...