A flat surface of tongue

Notes from awareness:

the recursive I

strained through mirrors

loses solvency

the primary play of language

on the plump primariness of lips

original essence

encoding air with similitude

the spaceless point

of vertical self

diffused in horizon

Alexia chatters in the morning cafe

bagel tortured with coffee

the butter, disembodied,

is a buoy-light

the ever-shifting shore

Her friends form a knot of intention

single mind

of the many bodies

tabula rasa

in the confluence of wood pulp

the profusion of manyness

from the lips of the few

and they speak

lines out of nothing

speech out of sound

choking and gurgling

drinking

the river of becoming

their clothes are constructions

of fakery and pomp

the polis

of the manufactured thread

the recurrence of the dye

fabric like airy wings

the vibrato of the breeze

pennants and flags proclaiming:

I

am the sound of what I say

the texture of my movement

the self of the sparrow

lies in the birdsong

+ Kadir

I stand in the distance

little I, little man in hers

and she

leaves off her segmentation

into lines and still pictures

the stutter

that breaks apart sounds

and in the revealing reveals

the geode

of clicks and whistles that smooth themselves

into the lattice-work

of windows

and she bursts apart, her dress like rags

hair split along hairlines

into birds

catching what may be the breeze

of a new order, a humanity

beyond human

where all narratives are shamed

before narration

where her hands

are strung in the loom

out of the fog, the weaving

of a morning-texture

the last emergence from night

the scape of sound escaping

atmosphere

the Final Mission:

to die in space the way that space has died

in us

Kadir strokes her temples

plants kisses on her cheeks

and smiles

his old, electric, piano-key smile

and cradles her head

in the eye in the I in the aye

of the dawn breaking dawns

against the changeless sky

never again to be broken

Introducing Alexia

She put her claws away

She has dispensed with the rhythm

of flickers of fire and flowers' cascades

she puts away her beating heart

organ of life

metronome of spirit passing

grey beating of a metal piston

on a metal drum, signifying

nothing nothing nothing

the beating of pulse on the brain

struggling to kill language

she dragged her fingernails through the

thorax of being the abdominis

of change- yogini of many arms

bhikuni of many minds

she put her tongue, disembodied

on the bed of the censer

censored the sense of the fire

in the coals which have coalesced

to syntagmatic structure

LITTLE BURNINGS

the vibrato in the throats of the bells

calling forth jack

from the candlestick

speaking to the bones of the embers

commanding:

Awake

flowers garnishing the embryonic

children living in flame

be me

me not alone again anymore the way

I function has surpassed

again nonrepeating variable life

of dissolution and change

Unnameable Spawn of Science

A little background on this one is deserved. On an online science/literary journal (if there can be such a monstrous thing) they had a challenge to write poems about quarks. Specifically, it said to take as your title one of the different subtypes of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, or bottom. They also mentioned that 'top' and 'bottom' had before been 'beauty' and 'truth' but nobody could keep the names straight and the two were constantly being confused even in academic publications.

Well, as I write untitled poems, I thought "Hey, why not use all of them? And in an ascending scale of complexity until complexity becomes confusion? But still have it real small and minimalist so it feels like quantums inhabiting vast galaxies of empty space at a microscopic level?" Of course, it became a slow joke about science, empiricism, and human ingenuity.

Well, I never submitted it to the journal, so I thought I'd put it here.

up.

facing into fiction

down.

supine in the mud-

nose in the truth

strange.

your bearings are slowly relinquished

in planeless space

teasing form out of void

charm.

you twirl epileptic

sufi of the fire

tracing you in rays of light

the sun absolves of darkness

top.

when were you alone before

in the context of man

the tweezers and engines of inquiry

the genie's bottle

exorcised the genie

bottom.

the pyramid has a base

the column has a root

studying roots & branches

the science of beginnings and ends

yields the discernment & the is or is-not/neither is nor isn't

negation of [beauty] and [truth]

something playful

there is light in my garbage

I know not from whence it springs, large and unseemly

places inside of places

black coffee, rum, and constructions

of badly sculptured cigarettes

what the fuck do you think you are

some kind of fucking cowboy

some hipster detritus

pastiched from a world that has

equalized virtue

imagized virtue

virtue responds:

hey, I shine, as if shining

would ever be enough

to burn the sugar and mix the paint

emerge into intrinsic value

submit to extrinsic death

the doom-that-comes-from-without

perhaps bogie plays the role of bogart

in celestial noir; perhaps the cake

perhaps the painting

consume themselves:

exchange of value and virtue

rusting wheelwells on the river-bottom

are playgrounds for the fish

contextualized by water

they breathe themselves

I wear waves like fins

oxidized on my cowboy's brim

disclosing:

a hundred years too late

to exist

the body of the eye

Lost in Translation

Stumbled across a blog in Romanian and hit translate

lo and behold

beauty fractured, coalescing

into a greater beauty

so without ado, my found poem, courtesy of bad internet translation and the liminal space:

I start wrong, you do not you care
I crush butterfly wings, you hum a song deaf
I feel the wind ribbing, you make yourself that it's raining
I chew a jelly, you let walk-hui

you are the wind blow in my genes
I am lava melts you
you are at one pole
eu other
not see you.

there was something else, but I forgot, as they usually do.
Where the hell have you gone?

carnality

in the carnality, knowledge-state

of enforced recognition

seeing the face which grows

like fruit, from the root

of the shifting fixation

white flour and crystal screens

contraceptives containing

the seed that burns inside

burns

through slag and plastic

the fire from which

the touch of polymer flees

and ties itself, basket-wise

into the imagination

of unity: I do not become thee!

unnecessary step past completion

darkness in which

the spark travails

like the gush of fuel

dying into the inferno

I am:

dead and inert in the midst

of your violence

alive, struggling fearfully

in your sea of confidence

which confides:

trust I am not, not faith

nor fire

I am Wisdom wearing the wise

I am deceit, sugar and oil

on a fool's lips

I am the song

for which the note must die

perish into me

inhale that you might expire

suck through the membrane

of illusion

seed of the fire

core of the star

FINISH

On Poetic Confusion

A well-informed confusion is, and must be, the basis for all poetry that seeks to tilt its expansive lance at the contemporary fissions and joinings that link man with environment. We must risk being obtuse, we must risk risklessness and abstraction: for in truth, we as poets today no longer have a better world to coyly reveal, but only doubts and criticisms, and especially the clinging, cloying doubt that applies to our own endeavor.

I have been lately delving into the world of Buddhist doctrine and thought-criticism, and in my search uncovered the allegory that I use to explicate and conceptualize my own work. In the Tathagatagarba sutra, we find the principle of Dharmakaya, the Buddha-body or Buddha-nature, the eternal Self. In fact, this seems to be the entire thrust of the discourse: to establish this True Face, this mirror of soul, which we must cleanse of distraction and abstraction in order to see the world pure. But this flies in the face of one of the most basic Buddhist tenets, the characteristics of the world: Dukkha (suffering), Anicca (impermanence), and Anatta (Selflessness). One of Siddhartha's most important early philosophical positions was to deny the Eternalism of Hinduism and the progression of an unchanged Soul: Anatta very literally means "No-Atman." There is no Self, in classic Buddhism, besides the psychological characteristics which condition our consciousness; these characteristics may carry over through rebirths, but they are qualities, differentiated qualities, and as we all know, all differentiation, qualification, and conceptualization is false. There is no Self. And yet, according to many schools of learned masters, there is a Self; there is a mirror from which to wipe the dust. In this, one of the greatest systems of terminology and discourse which the human race has ever produced to discuss being and consciousness fails. And it fails in a way which seems unforeseen, but which truly could not have been any other way.

Rather than syllogism, in Buddhist critical theory we have a fourfold application of truth value: something is (affirmation), something is not (negation), something both is and is not (affirmation & negation), and something neither is nor is not (neither affirmation nor negation). Aristotle would be confused. Now, with a couple thousand years of philosophizing under our belt, we can see that Buddha was speaking on the space between signs and their referents: my word "tree" in no way corresponds to the tree outside, except by artificial consensus. It both is and is not a tree, and it also neither is nor is not a tree.

But even this I'm not sure about.

There has been quite a bit of thought lately about the nature of meaning and sound: after all, the Word was with God and all things were made by him; without him was nothing made that was made. DNA is a system of signs that generates life. The Hindus and related schools have long said that the universe is composed of sound, or as a modern physicist would put it, we are all just vibrations on strings.

But what are the strings?

Does the tree have some type of inherent linguistic value? A point on the grid of language?

I read massive amounts of modern poetry. Many deride the state of affairs in the Poetry Biz today, with PhDs and Institutional Approval everywhere, and much of the anti-culture stuff like Spoken Word being simply bad. Tarn vocalized his discontent, saying that though perhaps there was better poetry being produced now, in the twilight of his life, than ever before in the world, still it was impossible for him to sort through the vast jumble of bad poetry to approach the quality work. What he decried, I applaud: the democratization and equality of poetry. Even if you have a MacArthur fellowship, you're still just some guy writing poems. It may give you the commercial go-ahead to dedicate a significant amount of time to thinking about poems

but really

we who labor not for success as a commodity nor strive to have the label of 'genius' affixed to our resumes by a publicly-funded gallery or institution

are free to say what the fuck we want

to question the often-frivolous art world and literary world

to laugh at our heroes

and be comfortable in the assumption that if you write bad poems, no one will care to read them; but if we take care of poetry, she will take care of us

I am thus absolutely not comfortable taking any position that resembles a stand in my work, and I am not able to valorize anything but what is already privileged: the Question. This doesn't matter, anyway, because I cannot affirm something without simultaneously sowing the seeds of its destruction; the human mind, the writer's mind, the Mind that is & is not just doesn't work that way.

So I will mythologize things that arise from the convoluted, twisting ball of sameness beneath myth; I will gloss emotions that are dull, or bright, or anything but glossy; I will discuss things that cannot be subjects of discussion; sex will be the creativity inherent in all matter and the illusion that must be banished; technology will be the excretion of Nature and Nature will be the vomit of the mind; I will vault over language to see God's face

and in it

to see my own.

Goodnight and God Bless.

Hymn

nascent in the enigma

alone in the dark

the spark reposes

sotama eko valance

I respond:

Emanation of the absence of light,

screened by the infinite door,

I grasp you with my eyes!

I subdue

YOUR RAINBOW

My half-closed eyes

cry your violence

and settle

into silence

she glows a minute

pretty and dimpled

the quiet girl

who is the light

that catalyzes worlds

her (offspring) and her effulgence

the cynosure that hides

past the latency of the night

the unpassable

the never-bringing-forth

Out into you

little daddy's head

grew a poisonbush

but Blake was wrong

he couldn't stomach the wrath

it spilled its iridescence

his own primitive taste

on a flat plane of concrete

like an old solid window

confused with the floor

and she saw, she did, her

in her guise of happenings

her swollen maternity

salty and thirsty and hot

caked with waterless sweat

she looked

and the column of his anger

excited her.

that night he was hers

in the bed of humanity

the child howling

displaced

slept on the floor of the Earth.

for M

oil in the fingers

honey in their webs

you and I

the gloss of the catalog

the monied linen

slid between the digits

the point of fracture

seeding in the hail

the white-on-white-on-white

of your ghost

luxuriant, resting

on my retina

you are the falsity become true

the wrenching pain

eaten by the several mouths

of admiration and fear

of doubt and longing

of the molten gold and liquid steel

I call your skin, your eyes

Spirit closes her hand

enclosing the jewel

of you, arrayed in your own pure being

I have seen you wearing nothing

not even nakedness

alone with none of your shadows

no diffracted dressings of eyes

you are the sun inside my chest

the spark inside my eyes

commanding:

speak with the fire, converse

with the light: O Man

be unburned!

your limbs are the rays

of the pourings-forth

of flawless bronze

into a flawless cast

my tongue is brutal and coarse

to abide itself speaking

and not to sing, glorying

in your touch I cannot feel

your beauty I cannot see

the radiance of your affirmation

I cannot taste in the midst

of our night

and your full-throated song

your breath that cries

the scent of broken lilies

which I cannot hear

through the noise with which

we've stoppered our ears

and dammed

the rivers of separate lives

split with a sluice

the streams of the rainbow

diamond of unspotted color!

brilliancy of life!

far away, in the place before

there is no I

no final note of passing

I repose, always

within you, beside you.