Down the length of a trench of snow
Dug by the wide turn of a Ford Explorer,
Should I be my dog and put my snout to the tread
Dug along a shallow arc by the wide turn of an automobile?
Should I put my ear to the mouth of an evergreen strip
Between street, reservoir and mumbling parkway?
Should my shadows fall from the mouth of Chimney Rock
Rebuilt in white by haphazard plows and snowman piles?
Is winter really something to get high about,
Or should I tug his collar and take him home?
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
The view from the panopticon
In a comic once I read
the next step might be something like
taking off your own head and putting on another
like a new cap and tilting it a new direction
called for by new situation
schizophrenia,
but in a different direction—
beaming an innerstate with white lines
streamering cords of mucus and bellyburn
meals from shitty greasespoons and roomservice
meetings where turkeys and southern gentlemen
and anglophiles undress the queen’s royal guard
and gobble down the beef till we don’t notice it
streaming down our cheeks like broken hands pouring
tears that might otherwise be pouring down cheeks
if we had courage enough or knownwhatnow to show ourselves.
Does our technostate approximate the prophecies
of a burnt comic book mind?
A Modern Postmodern Post-Person place?
Where the person is a real face in a real place
for real in your face? The cultivation of personality
at a hyperindustrial pace?
In my hyperion orbit,
even as I grope the astronomy of titaninformation
before the cold of my open window huffing winter,
should I know whom the people who birthed and died before me
were talking about when they said things like, *(following will be filled in)*
“barth quote
“grotesque
“Hell is other people
“All’s fair in
My friends and I and family?
Were they trying to talk about people and the people now
who turn on cameras to film themselves and other people
doing things like living, screaming and living crazy?
Were they talking about the things people do
before people told themselves?
Inventing cold fusion for the silent audience
of himself on a youth mantle and Muhammad Ali in photographs --
(a rolemodel and jittering adversary) a pictured image of
what could be, might have been
if not rape and insanity—in the public restroom where he filmed himself
and his polandspring litter alchemy.
Now the world may hear him speak!
And my time watches the horse’s mouth.
When the good old letters were put to pages by pen
or set to strange arrangements by the freedom of type,
were the minds behind preparing us for the truth of things
that we in our gentle positions may not yet have had to see?
For the benefit of those in proper homes:
where lunacy and heartshed and person to person intracontemplation
hide in nests of shadow
between gothic woods of southern shapes
and alongside faraway tracks where a station waits
to hold late locamotives to task?
Hiding like sideshow after sideshow showed
Crying like lost brothers when those called brothers go home
Grotesque when grotesque is too foreign a word
What did they know I don’t?
Did they know what my hyperion station would bring
as it belts around my time and rings?
From a balcony I watch a blond haired boy try to bellow
with all the might his young neck could, it not coming
more than wounded screams. I watch from my balcony
on a balcony through the eyes of a telephone and I hear
a disconnected excoriation of laughter that coincides
with my own disconnected hoots and I hear the muttering
of a third party in the company of the conduit
but am unable to decipher her interpretations.
The young blonde is bleeding down his face
and the scene is a flurry of skull printed sweatshirts
and peacoats and branded swinging sweatshirts
being thrown down by angry participants
who decide that maybe a fight is not the way
and tears alone are more insulting than another punch to the face,
then dissipate, then the blonde and a faithful idiot descend
towards midnight streets where only bicycles still ride
to blow off steam—the idiot accompanies to do what is right,
to calm the blonde say it’s all right.
And have I been there before?
I’m sure
I’ve been somewhere nearby
the blood in his eyes,
the madness in his words and on the same world
that swallows him up and folds him up inside
the head that finds these things important at that time.
And if I weren’t I could say
that for that night at least,
I saw the same things he did
and I saw the same things the nameless balcony did
that we all stood on and watched from through
the electric eye in the hand on some funny guy
who recorded the show and put it to music like it were a show
so myself and countless others
could unscrew our heads and put on another
so we, for those few interspective minutes,
were one
watching him, a nameless character in simple story
acting out the history of literature
beneath a balcony
into the camera of a mobile phone
behind a plate of image and sound
alone in my bedroom
before bed.
the next step might be something like
taking off your own head and putting on another
like a new cap and tilting it a new direction
called for by new situation
schizophrenia,
but in a different direction—
beaming an innerstate with white lines
streamering cords of mucus and bellyburn
meals from shitty greasespoons and roomservice
meetings where turkeys and southern gentlemen
and anglophiles undress the queen’s royal guard
and gobble down the beef till we don’t notice it
streaming down our cheeks like broken hands pouring
tears that might otherwise be pouring down cheeks
if we had courage enough or knownwhatnow to show ourselves.
Does our technostate approximate the prophecies
of a burnt comic book mind?
A Modern Postmodern Post-Person place?
Where the person is a real face in a real place
for real in your face? The cultivation of personality
at a hyperindustrial pace?
In my hyperion orbit,
even as I grope the astronomy of titaninformation
before the cold of my open window huffing winter,
should I know whom the people who birthed and died before me
were talking about when they said things like, *(following will be filled in)*
“barth quote
“grotesque
“Hell is other people
“All’s fair in
My friends and I and family?
Were they trying to talk about people and the people now
who turn on cameras to film themselves and other people
doing things like living, screaming and living crazy?
Were they talking about the things people do
before people told themselves?
Inventing cold fusion for the silent audience
of himself on a youth mantle and Muhammad Ali in photographs --
(a rolemodel and jittering adversary) a pictured image of
what could be, might have been
if not rape and insanity—in the public restroom where he filmed himself
and his polandspring litter alchemy.
Now the world may hear him speak!
And my time watches the horse’s mouth.
When the good old letters were put to pages by pen
or set to strange arrangements by the freedom of type,
were the minds behind preparing us for the truth of things
that we in our gentle positions may not yet have had to see?
For the benefit of those in proper homes:
where lunacy and heartshed and person to person intracontemplation
hide in nests of shadow
between gothic woods of southern shapes
and alongside faraway tracks where a station waits
to hold late locamotives to task?
Hiding like sideshow after sideshow showed
Crying like lost brothers when those called brothers go home
Grotesque when grotesque is too foreign a word
What did they know I don’t?
Did they know what my hyperion station would bring
as it belts around my time and rings?
From a balcony I watch a blond haired boy try to bellow
with all the might his young neck could, it not coming
more than wounded screams. I watch from my balcony
on a balcony through the eyes of a telephone and I hear
a disconnected excoriation of laughter that coincides
with my own disconnected hoots and I hear the muttering
of a third party in the company of the conduit
but am unable to decipher her interpretations.
The young blonde is bleeding down his face
and the scene is a flurry of skull printed sweatshirts
and peacoats and branded swinging sweatshirts
being thrown down by angry participants
who decide that maybe a fight is not the way
and tears alone are more insulting than another punch to the face,
then dissipate, then the blonde and a faithful idiot descend
towards midnight streets where only bicycles still ride
to blow off steam—the idiot accompanies to do what is right,
to calm the blonde say it’s all right.
And have I been there before?
I’m sure
I’ve been somewhere nearby
the blood in his eyes,
the madness in his words and on the same world
that swallows him up and folds him up inside
the head that finds these things important at that time.
And if I weren’t I could say
that for that night at least,
I saw the same things he did
and I saw the same things the nameless balcony did
that we all stood on and watched from through
the electric eye in the hand on some funny guy
who recorded the show and put it to music like it were a show
so myself and countless others
could unscrew our heads and put on another
so we, for those few interspective minutes,
were one
watching him, a nameless character in simple story
acting out the history of literature
beneath a balcony
into the camera of a mobile phone
behind a plate of image and sound
alone in my bedroom
before bed.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
A body of water
Hot across my jawline,
up my nostrils and down my sinus
my eyes burrow brow and strangle my spine.
The people on television with orange skin
at once cry what is wrong
and what is wrong with them.
A laugh cry thing-
do they joke,
am I,
or is the joke the fashion it’s told?
Laugh or laugh with them?
This is the aria of what we eat:
The potholes in asphalt
are craters carved cautiously by mad scientists on Discovery
to make room for commercial breaks
and are
dishes of unrest
burned into our foreign lands
for the benefit of startled villains in stretched Hanes
who are also men smiling for glamour shots
under balaclavas and banners proclaiming beneficent actions
that bury lands in craters
and balaclavas and Hanes
and are
parts of children and human shields
in ruined babymalk factories storing arms
and ignorance and symmetrical history
and are
potholes we avoid with a flick of the wrist
or miss and drive over in a moment of uncomfortable jostle
that wake us for a moment on our way
and are
nothing but a series of unoriginal geography
peppering the landscape like Oh’s in a photograph of the moon
but plus erosion
so that the Oh’s are more like ‘Ah’s’ of wading in an August stream
that’s been running longer than the bombs have gone off
on asphalt on television and in my head.
And are these contemplations mine?
Or do we all make them
sitting on our ass
watching things go by
like breasts descending with age
hairs turning gray
skin growing lined
mind go blind-
aretheyisthis the way things go?
Like some Greek said,
‘The next generation’s worse than the last?’
(I paraphrase)
Or is this the bank of a stream;
the Mississippi really wrenching away
those bold protrusions of earth that peer into the bends of moving water?
Or
do both reach the same end?
up my nostrils and down my sinus
my eyes burrow brow and strangle my spine.
The people on television with orange skin
at once cry what is wrong
and what is wrong with them.
A laugh cry thing-
do they joke,
am I,
or is the joke the fashion it’s told?
Laugh or laugh with them?
This is the aria of what we eat:
The potholes in asphalt
are craters carved cautiously by mad scientists on Discovery
to make room for commercial breaks
and are
dishes of unrest
burned into our foreign lands
for the benefit of startled villains in stretched Hanes
who are also men smiling for glamour shots
under balaclavas and banners proclaiming beneficent actions
that bury lands in craters
and balaclavas and Hanes
and are
parts of children and human shields
in ruined babymalk factories storing arms
and ignorance and symmetrical history
and are
potholes we avoid with a flick of the wrist
or miss and drive over in a moment of uncomfortable jostle
that wake us for a moment on our way
and are
nothing but a series of unoriginal geography
peppering the landscape like Oh’s in a photograph of the moon
but plus erosion
so that the Oh’s are more like ‘Ah’s’ of wading in an August stream
that’s been running longer than the bombs have gone off
on asphalt on television and in my head.
And are these contemplations mine?
Or do we all make them
sitting on our ass
watching things go by
like breasts descending with age
hairs turning gray
skin growing lined
mind go blind-
aretheyisthis the way things go?
Like some Greek said,
‘The next generation’s worse than the last?’
(I paraphrase)
Or is this the bank of a stream;
the Mississippi really wrenching away
those bold protrusions of earth that peer into the bends of moving water?
Or
do both reach the same end?
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
farts
Chestnut wool
Falls in curling leaf
And hot breath.
It’s a summertime expression
That leads me to believe
things are for me.
Falls in curling leaf
And hot breath.
It’s a summertime expression
That leads me to believe
things are for me.
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