THEREMIN SELECTED POEMS

VINCENT FARNSWORTH

Prague 2011

Litteraria Pragensia Books www.litterariapragensia.com Copyright © Vincent Farnsworth, 2011 Published 2011 by Univerzita Karlova v Praze Filozofická Fakulta Litteraria Pragensia Books Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, DALC Náměstí Jana Palacha 2 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. The publication of this book has been partly funded by research grant MSM0021620824 “Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy” awarded to the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, by the Czech Ministry of Education. Versions of some of these poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Brooklyn Review, Exquisite Corpse, Idiot Tooth, Lungfull!, Mike & Dale’s Younger Poets, RealPoetik, VLAK Magazine, The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010 (ed. Louis Armand) and the collections Little Twirly Things (San Francisco: Norton Coker, 1992) and Immortal Whistleblower (New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 2001).

Cataloguing in Publication Data Theremin: Selected Poems, by Vincent Farnsworth.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-80-7308-369-4 1. Contemporary Poetry. 2. Literature. 3. American Literature. I. Farnsworth, Vincent. II. Title Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Typeset & design © lazarus Cover image: Karl Bielik, “Untitled,” mixed media on wood (1997) Back cover portrait: © Vincent Farnsworth

CONTENTS Theremin 5 Downtrodden downloaded down 7 Why am I always surrounded by the earth’s crust 8 Particulate matter that my job is to arrange 9 Spring 10 Poetic events hotline 11 Amerika’s Top Forty 12 Dalek bird poem 14 Not long 16 They have arrived 18 Sea horse poem 20 Dresden poem 22 Most things are like 24 All this cumulus 25 Out dying on the vine 26 She disappeared during a trip 27 Cheap stereo blasting in small room (Verbenas) 28 How did we see space still 30 She wants me to 32 Focused to burn 34 He was a shoe-in the first day 35 This is wolf 36 Comb together 38 The canyons of San Diego 39 Terrorist poem 42 The effect of this perspective 46 Caminiti in Mexico September ‘96 48 Clearer 50 In the morning stretch 51 Osmosis Cosmosis 52 It’s all about housepaint and ruination… 54 Exquisite corpse 55 Twenty years of no future 56 Poem to look out 62 The help line didn’t 64 To wear a robe 66 Half buried 67 […] 68

But MTV is public television 69 Poem in the kitchen 70 Saturday night suicide note 72 […] 74 Multivitamin 75 Poems written to the temporary statues on Mánes Bridge 76 Poem with a ruler 85 To Andy, corporeal master 86 Statuesque 87 Like Patton in Rome 88 Kite 89 In the help that is 90 [i feel the little birds escaping] 92 First snow in Tábor 93 Redbeads 94 Birdseed 95 A crystal night for Lucky Lindy 96 Such was my joy 97 Universe graveyard droplets 98

5

THEREMIN spaceship invasion scenes massage my being tendril all around shivers we knew it all along & then comes yesterday’s sound of the future part ether, voice quavering from unseen hand not touching the antenna on the first and still most unlikely music machine of the electronic age noises new but they seem pure products of the start of the universe there’s no end in sight how will we get there how do we get where we are the here and there in theremin part ghost, animal call, flute-strings much sought legendary caterwaul drone bees do tangible pall contagious spheres the ribbon of moonlight road u-turning in the ears audio willow an extended beautiful gag or a neverending flourishing punch line to a long forgotten joke music plus electricity first to apply eons of instinct to electrons flowing in copper wires

6

the capacitance of bodies the only instrument one plays without touching Stradivarius sense to currents and resonance tubes of glass, filaments aflame gazing at a noise for hours your stare beams horizontal while being revolves vertical in the illusion of time and space no more set than a wave rolling through the Black Sea or Rockaway Beach a jungle of science and living noise as real as emotion and as hard to control I find myself playing theremin in Kosovo postwar dirt with a gypsy village band onstage in Praha amped volume and mummy shreds rubber eyeball vibrato sounds recall Hollywood Cold War UFOs to post-communist coasts of Bohemia thinking midgesture: how do we get where we are except by feeling what we can’t touch

August 2011 Asilomar, California

7

DOWNTRODDEN DOWNLOADED DOWN a “loner” and a “loser,” FBI stakeout took him out. his own rod and home in the comedy. someday comes the photo with his smile, local page one hot mile of speculation, could’ve been healed with neurolinguistics, dianetics, selected buddhist olios. a sanctioned and normal-common american way out: barricaded condo helicopter loudspeaker come to the door with a gun refuse to put it down. son, I’m calling to say when I get home I’m going to punish you.

8

WHY AM I ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY THE EARTH’S CRUST crust these books the last chapter wood goddamn foliage chippy water even rip out a thick page smaller more crust the U.N. commission on particulate matter relegated huge clumps of mass transit athens banned flakes and hoarse coughs in city center large deliveries of shredded fiber to newsrooms from victors another right wing mayor here city there parliament dried sticks congress old stumps pulled out with dirt clods stuck all over them

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PARTICULATE MATTER THAT MY JOB IS TO ARRANGE sometimes I just use my hands to sweep it little piles but sometimes I have to transfer it without tools once I just eyeballed it when I stopped it was a job well done they were skin flakes and scales little bits of the bikini atoll finally come down to demand justice I used my nails to pick one big piece up each one is different like snow or the ocean even the sea that ended up in the upper atmosphere at the end of the day I shake out my clothes and my hair I don’t like to take my work home with me

10

SPRING

sun essence hangs in sheets shredding through my mental dumpling slicer into makeshift bandages on mortality tourniquet me baby see the red soak headlong we go many a man in no-man’s land many a widow on widow’s peak with loose lips, rose hips and acres of corn harvested by thought and miles of limes subsumed by minds and square kilometers of round watermelons devastated by a child’s question sunlight the tablecloth on blackhole table saying a message for the differently-abled a communication between strawberry and mold from the front lines of the revolving door of a cycle that must sigh and kill sprung forward like jack out of idiot box 1 2 3 war is a crime so I only bleed for peace

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from POETIC EVENTS HOTLINE FREE KITE must move, please adopt the adorable little thing so I don’t have to put it down THERAPIST WANTED for my fear of telephones please don’t call FREE FURNITURE TABLES, CHAIRS FRIDGE WITH FOOD IN IT. MIRROR WITH PEOPLE IN IT

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AMERIKA’S TOP FORTY rubber frying; on the stove, emotions stretch between two people

like a taffy pull or a murder (plot.)

lies allowed; in love and war, and unreasonable demands in fact if you pursue love

you might get war, or if the fascists shoot tear gas

we will cry (softly) anyways. how many doors are there to heaven? (360) three hundred and sixty heavens and would you know my name if I saw you in heaven 3-5-2 from 1-9-8 with a rubber airplane frying; on the stove? your lips are a spark and I have a mouth

full of ashy gunpowder: (underwater) you are a walking charge card and I am drunken bought and soiled underwear

you are trying to return

for a cash refund. guarantee; whatever I said I regret it. looking at the lipsticky wineglass—

I probably did; do something wrong. we’ll put on your music next time

(that crap).

13

babyface (getting) old: you made me make myself all made up.

if in your goulash you come across some menudo; intestine, just chew and chew like I do a rubberband man frying on the stove.

14

DALEK BIRD POEM an orange hummingbird landed on the hand of an orangutan and became an opposable thumb canadian geese fly at ten thousand feet this is appreciated and they get sucked into jet engines the turbines rarely cough meanwhile back on land lies a wing with the bones sticking out but the city hasn’t killed all the good birds even the sparrows will have an interesting stripe if you hold very still in the garden one might get close enough to see what it’s really like when you hold still the ancient stone stairs are worn concave which shows every step and beating of a wing or heart or gums makes a difference as if we have a choice pigeons shit all over everything people curse in many languages yell guano bravo author the world becomes coated

15

and hidden with words the terrible mistake of language the only thing worse is fluency it is not song singing is light of illumination of light is singing of a world existing with a different consistency the bird without the wing singing all the way down singing all the way down in one fell swoop I fell I am falling I have good balance but I have fallen I am going to fall again I was about to fall when I will fall I was going to fall I have good balance though long ago I made an appointment to fall someday

16

NOT LONG (AFTER CREELEY) the palms were slaughtered everyone turned into animals and jumped overboard washed up and dug holes in the sand that continue to fill with water and we bailed buckets of fish schematics and globs of loaves, descended the here of the hole filling with the there of the sea as found in the oxford english dictionary some old norse link but nothing more than the meaning which is elementary pothead revelation everywhere you go there you are yet even if you’re not going anywhere and the bud’s worn off the oscillation continues as more pothead everywhere in the emptying distance everyone jumped, washed that bailed fish scrubbed vanishing points better left unpainted distance comparison turned overboard their going off continues disoriented in the orient dude in a jeep there’s no front there and what am I doing here behind enemy lines I should be home

17

filling my quota of shitty things the ones we all got to do before coming off old and nice not driving burning tires the smell obscuring our vision sweat of my palms on the wheel our entire crew is slaughtered and we continue on to the next island

Prague, April 1998

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THEY HAVE ARRIVED (to the music of Andrew Schwartz) 1 either cars like inner tubes or inner tubes that night seemed to be driving on an elevated river freeway stripe, they stepped off shining and dripping deflated their craft and wanted to stay for the meeting 2 the microscopic orbiter he injected to fix his consciousness with a little psycho-surgery went bad, started strafing vehicles on neural highways and he had to poke into that blue vein something even smaller that will also have its own plan 3 leaves discovered in asteroid belt frozen spinning and tinkling inside an orderly procession around a kind of maypole that was the sun and still is 4 presliced sandwich meat laid and the toddler toddled out the fourth story window

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didn’t die didn’t die became kubrick’s fetus in space the fireman didn’t have to hose off the sidewalk no bubbles popped (our numbered planets and days giant tangled knots crazy eights of infinity) travel achieved involving massive fuels one agent assigned to an outpost in orbit three years of trouble shooting an obstacle course of satellites monitoring the world’s telephone and e-mails the small spy lost it bigtime realized all these aimless conversations these thoughts were stacked like cards and all the cards in the world stacked would tower into space and circle the earth seventeen times and in fact did so he programmed the NSA’s/NSC’s (nth degree) stratospheric broadcasting computer to randomly shuffle out words and it generated sonnets, erroneous theories and recipes for plaster of paris, the words immortal whistleblower forty thousands times

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SEA HORSE POEM the full moons sea horses paper plates hydrants will or won’t go on alligators will still swim with their forelegs tucked in or not gila monsters spitting night trucks dumping mystery mounds of dirt and the kids playing in it the next day then the sun will swell up and burn everything around and extinct whatever crawlies are left so so fall mountains burn forests burn sleep sleepers sleep carouse carusos dive godivas because really elvis twitches as he’s pulled apart and thrown into the new corn harvest while the victorious marches through the ark de the covenant on the mayflower compact four cylinder matriarchal reign fortune cookie message read by the samurai in what he notices moments before is a suddenly bright sun

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and only a seahorse outside the whole universe stays goes swimming blim blim blim

22

DRESDEN POEM if the ripples moving around on the Elbe seen from the Augustus bridge mean something fish or wind or churning currents then so do the groupings of bushes along the shore, and the angle between the hawk’s tacking flight and the tram tracks, the length of pauses between beer sips by two side by side strangers staring off the bridge toward entire avenues of buildings from late this century versus the clusters from late this millennium showing where the firebombs hit or missed the see through green tarp in front of the giant mosaic of workers standing unnaturally proud head scarfed strong women with raised fist stars sickles scientists the green tarp, see through a marbled wall’s stencil of rare graffiti the truncated word ANTIFA a ski-masked man smashing symbols mercedes benz swastikas within a tender curtain of hanging ivy

23

the students sitting on the steps to sketch the exquisite cupola and not the bleary eyed man prone three meters behind with a sign HUNGER in three tongues the arrhythmia as in heart murmur of tourists stepping around him to admire the young artists with sweaters glowing bluer as the sun sets and the reconstruction goes on

Dresden, Fall 1997

24

MOST THINGS ARE LIKE I slept that I dreamt of most things are like flying or mariachis school appears as mariachi and weather flies around the world a hurtling repast airplane food bringing us peanuts or more school serenading us but we don’t understand the words or customs of our parents who are just passing overhead

25

ALL THIS CUMULUS the tunnel of the road through the trees some words fall off the wall of rock peeled senselessly did curly q’s and shangri las susie kept away from me stayed in austria dancing catty beware scratching beware: thoughts are like magnet and skin iron filings away under the heading southeast aphasia nicht sprekken it built up and amounted to people on the street hiding under their coats little shrunken bodies they reveal with the right password or grimace

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OUT DYING ON THE VINE out dying on the vine my soul fell off from another cluster a grape not wanting to be wine I watched as bemused as a Venezuelan president couldn’t help choking up the fresh pita thumbs up on a luckless hitchhike gathered a storm of information but it just drizzled my spirit merged with the mist where past and future laugh I knew I was through and said so everyone was relieved said Funny how I keep existing everyone agreed

27

SHE DISAPPEARED DURING A TRIP she disappeared during a trip they stayed together I understood the language we decided the boat went to the semiwatery horizon and ripples like in shiny clay swirled and the boat seemed to go down into the absurd funnel the inside was or wasn’t beautiful for the witnesses are missing and silent she undisappeared but one half of her people never knew because they died they stayed not together and unrelated people knew I understood a different language and a continent imperceptibly changed we thought we decided but minds don’t grasp like hands in fact: I made up my mind but from the outside no one could tell

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CHEAP STEREO BLASTING IN SMALL ROOM (VERBENAS) I squint out of the entrance at white sails on horizon say Go Home and light fuse called volume

I thank again and again the crunching and grinding guitars going in the back the smell of genius paint from the wall harmonies of man and woman who don’t care I thank again and again thank the ankh in thank gain in again the goodness of the graces of the great halls of fire all vibrations rock through my giant closet artforms on the wall dust forms by the bed potted plant forms stuck firework and word as clearly as mouth shapes vowel and winter rolls summer then the stalactites come raining down and pin me to cave floor electricity lasts lifetime of starting me was child in barber chair sixties crew cut electric razor music against my skull the drunk barber cut off my ear and damn thing grew back reaching out

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as five string noise outlasts all the horizons always is the whirlpool center in the hairy drain of the universe I thank the verses in the universe’s Milky Way I thank the cum veins of all color arcs of all light once they threw my body and I just watched now I pace the base of this cone half looking for the corner wile away in the distance brought to me by ear pressed against breathing speaker

30

HOW DID WE SEE SPACE STILL how did we find out that in the end they were trying to kill us (v-shaped crowds flowing down the street) how did they find out we wanted to be left alone (it is the serum inside the syringe) who ate the poisoned food meant for us (still life with bowl of fruit) why was life blocked at every turn (invisible sprouting flowers of transcendence always sliced from every crack where counter meets wall between fingers of a fist) --------------------------------- we all knew this was gonna happen (layers of colors plunging downward) afterwards I remembered how they stared (sunflower daisy in dark blue vase snow banks with a bone to pick that random mass of planning people self inflicted wounds not stigmata) we decided on cheeriness and turning away (X-rays natural or hospitalized burning flesh into carnage or dinner or black roses for public view) how could we have predicted there’d be no other way to say it for eternity

31

(a space fleet of eyeballs trailing optic nerves leaving Earth and never looking back)

32

SHE WANTS ME TO It’s so cute how she wants me to live I read a CIA psych warfare manual while listening to bootlegs hear Cobain cough in the section on Subjective Internal Control it’s so silly how she wants me to go on while the shotgun of my dreary glance blasts every hope as it flies from my heart fading from sight like dead birds on a trash heap it’s so attractive how she wants me to thrive behind bars of grimaced smiles the unconscious salesmen we called kin from memories preserved in tupperware and reheated in a cracked microwave leaking cancer so plausibly deniable it’s a marvel how she wants me to grow it’s like light from a star you couldn’t touch in a million years or an organic metaphor fuguing but I see the twisted ladder I ride splitting like DNA in a Monsanto lab filled with such twisted and tortured creatures it’s beautiful

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how she wants me to live so sometimes I think I’ll do it just out of spite

34

FOCUSED TO BURN sunlight focused to burn to refract colors pure as emotions hate or desire the light is there evil / divine shredded photons I do believe sad sad photon flows along particle come wave on some scope stared at for endless days oscilloscope unplugged into itself sunlight staring for endless days

35

HE WAS A SHOE-IN THE FIRST DAY with a smooth tongue and no one noticed the new mole on his neck at the closing gavel the second day he shriveled slightly a rash spread along the neck towards his chin he dropped three large skin flakes and they broke for the weekend on the third day corrosion in the meld points of his junctures invalidated. this went on till he had to sit at the hearing table a mass of unlikely skin colors wobbley features eyes nearly out of their opening and closing augments holding his head on with both hands surrounded by thick clumpy fluid and was confirmed unanimously

36

THIS IS WOLF at midnight center this is wolf eating cabbage it steps paws around quite permanent enjoyed cathedrals. most of us slept through it. my own mind was being probed by an alien super intelligence with my windows closed. xanadu destroyed by small talk and obsolete mobile inner space. one paw set softly into renaissance courtyard one paw brushing the new mall. one paw undemarcated a border between cardboard slums and purple affluence sending children screaming into the streets both dirty urchins and babyseated in sedans it would eat and we would cry though infinity is not just a word but it subsisted on maggoty carrion in its former life. mere climate we evolve and burn in found the unlike wolf crunching our undemocratic selves’ sharply splintered and bloody bones

37

into no danger for the wolf’s inured. the wolf has tenure. scabs in its fur it’s squeezing down computer highway sniffing the top of the great wall. changing the coarse whitewater in to flood the villas the children float through its teeth. surprisingly ignored westward mind shines in the esophagus of the wolf’s dynamic glaciations returning to the heartland.

38

COMB TOGETHER if I dreamt I dropped like a spinning ankh into fire I’d be embarrassed the symbols were like cheap candy I know the Easter Bunny rises like the phoenix smudgy ashes ruining the soft fur I like to pet dreams comb together the split ends of our collective unconsciousness or a peek in the dirt bag of the vacuum cleaner for thoughts we forgot to think the earl of sandwich nightmared of islands not food, bucky fuller dreamt standing up like a horse of geodesic corrals in all my dreams I’m lucid like a person with rent money.

39

THE CANYONS OF SAN DIEGO another blue-black crow in front of grey-white smog, soaring over a temporarily tree-filled canyon that runs west from the 8-oh-5 freeway bringing the drybed of Otay river under the Beyer bridge, then the bridge at Broadway the new trolley tracks, and freeway 5 to the bay U.S. border, south california temporarily tree-filled: like was Mission Valley: what mission? whose valley? ride through for the best chance to feel tangibly, the Curse. cruise along interstate 8 and see us damned honk if you’re driving on sacred burial ground or just a flood plane: gosh we didn’t think about the rainy season when we put in the business parks, car parks & these are the parks we get: knew someone up in Oakland who didn’t feel the earthquake that flattened an overpass that smashed the people that waited to merge

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because she was parallel parking that skill required for citizenship the perception of depth. and now over the canyon soars a border patrol helicopter like the one brought down ten years ago by a boy with a rock by the river the Goliath machine smashing down a bath of metal and flame but killing just a guard who’d driven on freeway 8 to work frustrated with the traffic clearing his throat changing the radio worrying about his gut and his hairline his unruly potsmoking son mad at his exwife flashing his mind tumbleweeds, a chance of showers, roadrunners, and a funny reverse swastika trailing feathers as he careens and careers through pockets of fibrous souls over the singing of springs driven back underground through walls of holes from the missing sounds of gourd rattles of bees swarming of eggs cracking from within across the trajectories of hummingbirds that overfly and mistaking for sky

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slam into the mirror-sided highrises on the edge of Mission Valley their little dead bodies raining down.

42

TERRORIST POEM let the car bombs come let them come let them come let the loaded trucks swerve around the barriers and the guards with no bullets in their rifles let the slide of state power for this and laissez faire for that into a world of crap happen with a quick dash of tabasco sauce the glee on the face of the true believer his foot to the floor and molars showing to be atomized in seconds with the squint of the agent hoping his check isn’t late putting an altitude-triggered bomb on a passenger plane booby trapped baby seats effective individual action that kills individuals there is good art and bad art embassy bombs and church bombs a premature detonation by the preschool a gentle retiree with the wrong package heard the Net is the sum of all knowledge a keystroke in Langley exploding a monitor blamed on a bomber who gladly accepts and studies the pancake effect, gets hungry or a smaller letter to only remove a hand that just stirred honey into coffee.

43

Why hasn’t anyone in Chicago brought down a jumbo jet with a bazooka? Why hasn’t San Diego’s Coronado Bridge twisted into the Navy’s bay? Why does the border patrol headquarters in Texas still stand brick to brick, why isn’t the Esalen Institute reaching the heavens in the form of radioactive dust? All these beautiful moments and monuments to explode no problem, the grunge skater apparently had something in that backpack when he entered the office of the ACLU seventeen molotov cocktails through the windows of Mothers Against Drunk Driving the board of the League of Women Voters eliminated over the course of a weekend nailbombs to private homes rug tacks imbedded in the treasurer a kneeling girl who just said Father forgive them they don’t know what they do buried under beams and pews. Dave was just standing at the water cooler in the Federal Building for Susan the World Bank was her dream job, as she saw light glint off low flying aircraft from her office on the north side, she approved a higher interest loan to a starving African state, with finality. the innocent bystander guiltily laughs when the heat explodes a Mercedes Benz the delivery driver wrestling the hand truck of soda stacks around the lunch room corner in the World Trade Center ten percent of all coke machines in Japan powered by solar energy blew up simultaneously

44

slitting the throats of kids who don’t brush their teeth by a religious cult that opposes western cola and held its meetings in the basement of Exxon before the British Petroleum skyscraper went kaboom, not killing the honored visitor, an expresident in a different part of the complex he hadn’t been told he was going to lose his election he didn’t know the Shining Path were so out of control he ended up with only secretaries as friends nobody who could overthrow anything. the first bomb was a diversion, the second an afterthought in between was a moment of silence where all who heard considered their motives doing the right thing and indulging in self hatred became one and the same, this inspiration sponsored by the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Iraqi soldiers buried alive under hot sand pushed by army tractors powered by the american minimum wage. when I worked to help the weak and the persecuted the poor and the victim, I did not find love warmth did not flow through our hands and eyes but bitterness, defensiveness neurotics, phonies and informants many hands holding up a sky dripping down cold filth all the pieces in the puzzle of an ever more sickening picture I detonated the hundred pound charge in the “nineteenth hole” because I hated politicians and their golf games but also the groundskeepers

45

and also the green grass itself and the caddies’ mystery ethnicities and the little animals struggling to exist in the miniforest by the sand trap on top of the desecrated ancient burial ground full of losers.

Prague, 1998

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THE EFFECT OF THIS PERSPECTIVE the full moon sure but every day a full sun and no one’s talking about it or staring at because love is already blinding, people murmur moon moon mons myak, trudge up Petřín hill looking for the invisible statue. It’s not there! now what? some new excuse is throttled into place. imagine parting grass with your bare hands, the huge rustle to the ignorable ants. having developed a special way to watch the sun, I could see the static descending down onto the earth. it looked like crud, if animated with instinct of the ages. it rounded the corner of the curve of space! now we’re dripping with ions and that is why everyone’s behaving this way. I would say stop it. to live your life by impulse is to give up. never confuse rake with antenna. unfurrow your brow and torment not the caged. these sparks motivate all living things. moonlight is little comfort for the obsessed.

47

everyone: walk along, hold hands, embrace, deal with the inevitable.

Prague, 1998

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CAMINITI IN MEXICO SEPTEMBER ‘96 Caminiti stirred from in front of the blower, stepped up and watched the pitcher throw a giant aspirin. Cam swiveled his hips and it flew away. he decided to jog around and approaching third recalled the gulf of mexico, that one indigenous fish that during aquatic famines can tunnel under the texas desert to eat the roots of cacti.

what was it called? the arboreal muddler? not the barbed wirefish.

Caminiti sat back in his fever chair and forgot. he’s dropped the ball in the IV in his hamsized forearm.

rehydrate the angel sloth. try to be a better citizen.

he was up again just before he realized “locker room behavior” is a small set of arbitrary responses, both verbal and non. he took it out on the ball

49

from the plate’s other side this time, fragmenting it to the second deck. this jaunt around the bases cooled the sweat on his forehead, pushed a drop of blood into the cotton, spotting his sleeve, to be caught by the cleaner, to catch hell from her husband, to contract Caminiti’s intestinal virus.

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CLEARER (for Dave Brinks) which jesus did you choose? allegiance to patti smith doing Christian music which half of the telephone conversation do you use? Beethoven alive today rubs his palms in chain mesh after dollar kamikaze shots I’m sayin he’s not a fuckin jerk, he’s a fuckin crook. hours spent imagining diverting Emily Dickinson’s energy into sex left more or less poems me or her. what were you thinking when you went out with that person? did you ask for permission? which view do you settle for?

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IN THE MORNING STRETCH in the morning stretch glimpse a message: i would save a life work flowed words crunched in mouths led to oh a new lambrusco treading prague sidewalk barrier reef strangling bottle dragging it home where after laps i sense in the other room flies drowning in the forgotten glass i go rescue with my finger lay them carefully on cloth soft like the wine there at least they can dry out

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OSMOSIS COSMOSIS (with Dave Brinks) the thin blue sun comes through an open window and my heart with its tail in your mouth becomes the bird you see juggling green slices of light in the trees the sun goes down the birds create lights of constellation from their sleep of suspended animation coma: I bleed into your map an evening gown slips down into a distraction little babies dragged about in red wagons shedding all the hair of their life into the crazy field hedgerows of emotion light cracking open broken glass on the tongue this fever is your fever with all its stars asleep at 60mph rubbing up against my fuzzy cigarette if the heavens held still as the red dot cigarette for one evening we could

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understand what’s wrong with our constant vibration staring finally give the birds their glorious victory and us ours with soft purple minds coiled behind silver eyes the afternoon walking lovely through our quiet heads on the streets of new orleans where pigeons live rolled up like pajamas

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IT’S ALL ABOUT HOUSEPAINT & RUINATION… (with Karl Bielik & Martina Leeven) It’s all about housepaint and ruination repeat, repeat that’s all anyone does the tree, the leaf, the wind, the death something dug up by animals they scream and cry and no one listens. How can you expect them to listen when they have no ears or something that looks like an ear, a tuba, but it makes noise does it taste good? do you even want more? No. No. How can they ask for answers to such questions? An unconscious moment, a twirl of the finger, a spill, a splash yeah, yeah, tell me something new. Fear? Fear of the unanswerable. hear ye hear ye the fish are a-singing and the fish are a-dying delicious is second and swishy is the first Hit me baby, hit me and then I’ll win… alone winning alone is the big joke of people wanting to be loved alone staring at your own eyes in the mirror But in the end what do you know? Isn’t it the same as the first

moment you felt pain? No. It aint. The pain, the birth, the end it’s all self-inflicted. But slippery out of control you need to steer your senses so they fit into a nice neat package no you don’t.

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EXQUISITE CORPSE (with Gwen Albert, Thor Garcia, Joshua Mensch, Ken Nash, Holly Tavel, Clare Wallace. Poezie Suterén, Café Sladkovský, Prague, 4 March 2010) dead fathers everyone gets one and dead mothers too walking the streets like wounded storks babies tumbling from our mouths we all exist in the actual and live in dreams in our dreams we can live alternate lives I can be you and you can be me but red is not a place and it is not called by balloons or clown balls crawling slowly – a slow drift, you might say, across the ocean floor or maybe just a crab right – and whatever happened to polly, found by dogs

under boards next to the freeway she was a peach, alright, a real peach

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TWENTY YEARS OF NO FUTURE I’ve seen Lux Interior come out in gold with a bottle down the front of his lamé and yanking the almost-empty accidentally pry out his dick saying Love Me, Love Me What else Jello Biafra, a nylon stocking stretched over his face bleating about the toast of Reaganism buttered with dead rock stars and the legendary stench of their bipartisan recording studios before a riot at the Democratic convention in San Francisco set off by the very plainclothes police he had just identified by their tie dye this is even to Gary Numan being the real cripple creaking inside his car, not fake twanging but in an epoch

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marksalot message of pearls before teenyboppers for Last Will of KAL-X in Berkeley slathering the ruptures in his part of america with the sanity of unpredictable music, and to all of KFJC in Los Altos Hills playing Louie sixty hours of Louie to Mudhoney to Mudhoney the Cramps that saved my life the Fall that still and stills the piles of the Butthole Surfers the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 slicing horns of plenty amperage into hors d’oeuvre-ish ectoplasmic chunks sprinkling Alien Sex Fiend and Alice Donut rubbing together in the vibrating bootleg record bins of El Cajon, California Big Stick carried me through the Grenadan invasion Einsturzende Neubauten vomiting up the deutsche id like so many Bollock Brothers tinkering with the Sex Pistols

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this is to Johnny Rotten’s canceled San Diego radio interview because he wouldn’t sign a promise not to speak his own language crawling from the Rorschach mess of Flipper to Will Shatter choosing death over posing and the Fastbacks’ slam mandala descending in the whirlpool of subconscious history to Pixies’ screaming reminder of caribou and suburban body counts while Kim Deal smirked and planned and Poison Ivy eyed the hole in her fishnets while channeling Link Ray through high input A Dave Thomas of Père Ubu his the sounds a housewife makes when she’s alone or the last thoughts of a sentimental rummy watching his legs swell Gang Of Four knowing they were alone

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Exene deciding it’s not worth it all the unheard music, electrified snails in a salt of corporate control and hippie nostalgia and the one and the same this is stains seeping into shapes someone mistakes for their messiah the blessed mother statue crying tears just spat over a pew, from the pit for stains seeping Psychic TV, the kindness and logic of utter alteration refusing to mourn or scoff at Kurt Cobain finally doing it this is to no one but Lydia Lunch inventing possessing and destroying fucking until a radiance glows out of her skin and her dancing hands return to us

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the language of the saints this is the present of Lydia Lunch this is light rays, rage against the t-shirt machine, a chuckle at the poison— corporate, governmental voluntary, human natural church sponsored, music videoed computer enhanced alternative for sale for free force-fed unavoidable moving to cover the globe: there is something molten under fearsome over this is to the mixture of human spirit and electromagnetism occasionally sparking fingers of electricity crawling along a floor reaching nothing but glimpsed kept transferred home taping samizdat tamizdat

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finally these are just smudges on the wall from ashes stolen off the cremation smears spelling No Future twenty years of No Future and counting

Prague, 1998

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POEM TO LOOK OUT fruit flies forcing their way out of the banana bbc sums american news up military spending first time in ten years cuts to poor elderly health care flowers open geometrically into dangling pods eyes more red than blue the hero of ruby ridge kind of admirable supposed bomber extremist sort of unacceptable gingrich conservative dole moderates the failed two week old presidency lasting years the smell underneath untrimmed garden bushes a kelp bed dragged by children to the fountain moiré lace scurtains in the breeze male american poets with predictable fears aging bachelor tips reprinted by permission hemorrhoid cream for the bags under your eyes we all after all have girlfriends under twenty four staring at soil produces organisms and found old bones that might be human the couple snuck across no mans land their bodies stayed there bloated twice their size croatian retreat in the krajina region political american poet stands up in the back call for a hungerization of english literature a commutarian steps over a body mumbling family values and decline of morality barbie bus hits former dissident with manuscript a rolled pastry with fifteen layers of raisin vietnam street kids get help from sex industry blowers installed the heaters of southern california rage against the t-shirt machine house spouse in budapest gets corporate grant

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to write first novel of love beach in france a dworkin clone triumphs the cause inbetween commercials for the super bras I ought’ve bought a pair of ragged claws I’ll see you in hell or the shopping malls

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THE HELP LINE DIDN’T she still felt like heavy, chipped glass, decorative candy holders maybe. expensive and only existing in the catalogs. though someone must know, the photographer. she wasn’t born deformed, she didn’t have to make constant trips to the doctor. she wanted to take apart the phone. make it ring more. more people. less sound of clothes rustling for the bored and lonely. dry. loud radio that hurt her ears but the sound didn’t seem to exist. nothing amounted to anything. there were satisfied people somewhere, unreachable. here

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were empty husks, eyesight that only went two inches outward.

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TO WEAR A ROBE oh to wear a robe and be st francis didn’t he have the hummingbirds eating out of his fingernails he dug long trenches just to light it on fire filled them with old fashioned straw and took notes on his friends the animals an eight year old stops the piano lesson to laugh at the sudden image of a cat with a head the size of marble then even funnier, the size of a house and for the meow to be heard across the bay the cat’s head would have to be the size of the hindenburg (regular size body) was a time (?) such utterances would precurse would foreshadow would ominate but how can saints be coming out of a place like Walmart where long aisles of christmas decorations whup on the tree at home

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HALF BURIED opening the line within the body half in the ground song of the skin of the voice of the fallen opening the known shell down under the sea the seen pearl with inside the dirt analyzing the grain of sand of the pearl destroying the pearl to get at the grit body lying half under the beach keeping the arms at arms length the depths of the height of the conflict almost survivors gathered together half under the pasture half in the grass the thread of the bodies woven together the giant clam on the ocean floor half buried in silt irritating silt generating bodies bothersome bodies becoming soil annoying soil thick forming muck torso trying surviving the clam tunneling to the center of the earth its tongue touching the molten core burning to ashes underwater washing up lines of black sand onto the body half buried on the shore

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[…] I didn’t understand her behavior that day, and I didn’t know I’d never see her again. a couple years later I thought about her but didn’t know I’d never see her again. like a decade later I knew I’d die someday but I didn’t think about it very often, and I still didn’t know I’d never see her. when the time came I might’ve realized I’d never see her again but all I could think about was how bad I felt. I didn’t understand her behavior. I didn’t understand mine. I think mine was based on hers, I was all reaction. and I didn’t understand her behavior that day and I never saw her again, which might explain it.

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BUT MTV IS PUBLIC TELEVISION some sound of individual voice the shape of the mouth packs a fat wallop packs your bag and hands it to you pax chicana your staring straight ahead you are your exact age you see all the hope and the lessnessness the world is bending, you know it leads to this say: I am led astray I am led into gold I am a lead paint sandwich eater a pipe upside the head of ts eliot something cradled on your shoulder warm it feels like it’s connected to the whole universe going off alone away from the empty visuals being in this world not of this world

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POEM IN THE KITCHEN on the floor. the bottom of a chair seen from below.

not in outer space, in the kitchen,

dry wood splintering.

the cool tiles felt like love

these smooth tiles, the rough seat,

love.

the light from the lamp spread like a flower

opens out said Ephesians / Agape / Amor!

I reached up and touched the light passing through the air,

the silky trim

on the blanket as you fall

asleep.

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but I was awake, awake, so awake! on the floor,

my cheek so happy.

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SATURDAY NIGHT SUICIDE NOTE (NO.22 OF A SERIES, STAROMĚSTSKÁ VERSION) an eye swelled shut a ukrainian tick’s head imbedded in my scrotum, my amp destroyed by the terrorist baggage handers of delta airlines, 4 track tape recorder stolen in san francisco an ex mails me my synthesizer cable hacked up into pieces. no hot water: winter begins, kurt cobain ends. there go the forests, the turtles, it’s war for simple profit the mood of that far country of my birth uglier than its poverty, malls or roadkills. Sunday morning approaching like a mother dog rolling over and squashing the runt of the litter.

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old friends preferring their wrong kind of rut to any vibrancy and I should talk my any resonance withdrawing away from me I see the flow of life

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[…] Roman gods Tetanus and Polio waiting for a comeback, (Luddites of biology) water wanting further down or a dry sponge. a pressed flower outlasted the book, should’ve used acid-free, from that era we’re sick of, they recorded and retarded themselves, smaller cams and huge parking lots the disconnects behind their eyes accelerating to a chaos of fat-free obesity, every man and woman a ruler with a different standard of measurement, a ripped open beehive of orderly thought, ‘til the endtime when this poem was lost

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MULTIVITAMIN mmmyou taste like a multivitamin to me great paeans to great lanks that tiny space bacteriological between two hands between two eyes me parson you parsona fold our clothes in origami sap rising everything bubbling conversation in isotopic decay mutations can be good evolution backwards is now to love when you laugh I see your heritage and I see lattice I see actual mosaic conk shell quiet moisture beating in night air

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POEMS WRITTEN TO THE TEMPORARY STATUES ON MÁNES BRIDGE IN PRAGUE 1. looking for fabled stability the youth of today are doomed socrates said for they read too much. and so this walking young’n, looking for a stability between the energies of youth and the pain and ignorance. when falling, pretend you are flying. child is mother to the woman, but child don’t know this, pretending to be bird, airplane or walking on coals. 2. formerly extinct combination the amazing success of creatures once thought extinct to fill the room you’re sleeping in screech at you with a giant tongue as long as the mastodon of the body’s trunk would be out of the dodo bird alertness head signifies how despite the potshot attempts at eternal destruction taken by those already counting their wrinkles,

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forms of life, rows of eyes and even imagination spring up on the edges of the crater. 3. awake to be awake is a heavy wait- ing period of doubt when the process is such an old and incomplete one, to feel awake so many times only to wake up some more later then to have a moment of pure alertness that still could be improved on. tai chi every morning only dislocated your arms and for your growing humpback the doctor prescribed lying down some more while rolling eyes up into a dream of a dinosaur head, drooping reptilian face, maybe you are a tired dinosaur dreaming of a sentient being being tired of being sentient. 4. refusal to draw conclusions the refusal to draw conclusions in your citricky time on this or any other plane amounts to an ancient memory of prenatal indecisiveness,

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opening your arms in a gesture of defenselessness, but even birth was ruined for you, so few moments of peace. 5. skull contemplation in the moment of contemplating its own skull, consciousness came fully that it was a mutant, doomed, a variation on a motif forever silenced. 6. wrong way went the wrong way carrying the wrong sign and the natives are not friendly. they want to buy your hat for the high price of your head. maybe they’re only kidding. you didn’t ask to be here, but it’s rude to say so. hopefully they won’t notice that your same silhouette now means you’re leaving bringing your absurd tool to another uncomprehending land.

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7. hoping most creatures look up in hopes of a table scrap to be tossed by benevolent or indifferent masters. you are a dopey but lovable animal and the former will take precedence on slaughtering day. 8. rushing to order or change he was urging her on to a glorious future, an order both breathless and gestured at first, but as he continued to heil he didn’t notice her reluctance, that she preferred to mutate into the second creature of the procession. turns out he wanted to wear the dress anyway. 9. first NATO nuke/pet disguised as bird-monkey dog waiting to catch a table scrap, the first NATO nuke in the Czech lands watches with seven eyes to see who will poke first. totems or missiles or archaic processions of creatures designed by a world matriarchy would look much different,

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figures based on a conversation between Gertrude Stein and Madame Curie, and pet nuke waits to unsure that some day a clearing of history will happen. pet nuke is filled with nothing, only thoughts held by its masters and mistresses in those idle moments when everyone just wants to kill everybody and destroy the whole world. 10. god (little) the little god cute and harmless visited with rather simple signs of inner bliss and auras in happy full bloom available to all. they threw stones at him. 11. another victory for sex another victory for sex, the youngster in the dress from procession number eight has the new friend bent over under that dress. and boy does hair fly, but also melding eventually into one, yes, also the new life form of no. 2

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12. closed eyes before it ever had a chance to find that balance it was looking for, creature one faced an incredibly bright light, shut eyes tight as blurry mumbling refraction danced between the legs. 13. even smaller goddess even smaller goddess, hardly mobile, kept a corner on truth in her pocket, she is the head of a two headed snake with schizophrenia, she has the character of the moiré effect, she in fact never moves or changes, only your perspective does, you, the viewer, all with your different angles, even your two eyes do not see the same thing. she just contents herself. would an emerald envy a repulsive queen on whose finger it found itself?

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14. citrus visitor constantly aerodynamic, the sprouting citrus hid a descending consciousness, a bomb coming down to spray a lemon juice of awareness. there is no logical conclusion inherent in the taste of lemon and no word. that’s the point. 15. house moon/unborn in her house with moon she thinks she is, but in fact another small god carries an unborn child. the one eye of wisdom, or fanatical butchery, žižka or prophet, four legs of the chair, the girl under the moon, the house holding life. 16. birdjoy joyous is the hummingbird on its visit to europe, prague, and sad is prague, europe, that does not know hummingbird. or it’s a new attempt at bat, again looking for table scrap,

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or the beginning of singing by flying mammals, or and vestigial wings by singing ones. 17. all into one trumpet blast trumpet is peoples’ gift of metal to singing, in celebration of, announcement of, ending the melding of the archaic procession. still perhaps flinging braids or crowing mouth, probably going this way or that. holding the now flowering sprout of tart consciousness, that all the realities can be found under this dress, the body will into time join the plants, the music, that everybody is seeing differently the same things, the experience of shapes and sensations like flavors or a song in your ear outlast the bridges over the Vltava, at Mostar or the shores of Tripoli, the blats of trumpets, conch shells, horns of animals make even the mountains temporary, and the mountains make the monuments and cathedrals temporary, and the cathedrals make the people a momentary movement,

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flowing individual possessors of consciousness stretching as far back and forward as imaginable

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POEM WITH A RULER ran with a ruler over my head to

measure the air floated in the bath and tried to

weigh the blood inside me

airborne I could figure my bones

I jumped and jumped off things

focusing on that moment

the truth was in books when I threw them

fell in love with transparent overlays

of circulation, digestion, nervous system stopped chewing so I could feel

the chunk with it stuck in my chest my sight became

a projector thank you table cloth hello cardboard box

oh tree you warp just for me? my hand on the warm spot where the sun was

the personality of the hot floorboard

and me merging like water and

sponge

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TO ANDY, CORPOREAL MASTER you have so many shreds of dignity I sit here now and robots are being shot out of howitzers constantly. I think of your apartment as a wind tunnel everyone so used to the tattered chords they can’t hear anything but you, making your way to the fridge, leaning into the gale, achieving a full tilt forward as you reach behind the milk. the other day snow flew into my ear I know you had a weary look on but so do fresh walnuts. remember the time your skis hit those electromagnetic coils we just looked at each other with more ringing in our ears. the world getting flatter, falling beneath the static our internal vale that murmuring sound expressed on an oxide ionizing, spreading, never touching.

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STATUESQUE (for t.c.) the problematic glee of naming frissons along like a cruise past the forgotten projects of your childhood life gives us decisions too few but realize this is not the process expecting death to come any month for decades on end was either a curse with unlimited gifts of grace and awareness or a blessing filled with pain and remorse the Black Sea tolerates frolicking on its edges the skimming of its surf as the sailing over of its depths that’s beach life with its stasis endless bodies facing baking temperatures and blinding rays the lulling effects of wave sound and action: the purgatory that forgot heaven, really quite pleasant

Ukrainian Crimea, 1997

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LIKE PATTON IN ROME tentative resonate I went round here yonder dried lake cracked into a great shattering reminded me of hours spent splicing that famous interview in a closet with nothing in common like Patton in Roma his two thousand year memory driving him over fellinopolis I straggled off the castle tour and found the stables to be consecrating on something sandpaper tongue licking chlorophyll off the bottom of a leaf a tiny world coming across a spider web the size of your smallest coin the sovereign’s eye is how big the arachnid is so I broke and spilt bread and milk smelled only ozena and flour and boiling noodles lactose secret flowers opening and flying buttresses dumb things I got to do today got to remember to water the moat

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KITE

I am coming to you live from a room I am monitoring my voice with my ears

I will now show you how I am the only poet who can drink a kite

I’m reeling

in the kite now here it is I’m submerging it in this warm beverage

yes, it is soluble now it has liquefied

I drink

the kite

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IN THE HELP THAT IS sitting on a trolley, hair possibly in a cloth covered rubber band lifting all off the shoulders a mural bad but bright a happy recently third-worlded day and the storage tanks and

the navy seen all the cranes? larry with the belly gonna move some steel around she says the new guy hasn’t passed his physical cleared his medical the seventy tons per barge he was hired

on aesthetic charm razor wire wealth concealed in drapery in might in booby trapped unionizing gotta get peppy for the convention the mosquitoes really got to me behind the mall or in the jungle a shadow from something

dreamt of sleeping in it the thunderstorm poured rain the rain poured words, it is impossible

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to waste water or words it is impossible to waste water or words bumper sticker: lead me not into temptation

I can find it myself

San Diego, 1996

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[I FEEL THE LITTLE BIRDS ESCAPING] I feel the little birds escaping

from my hands

five billion people I mean six

do the little birds escape from their hands

do they feel it

why do I

(the sparrow views the child

the featherless skin newborn bird

is abandoned by the drunk adolescent

who doesn’t know what else to do)

but now wings brushing my palms

a furious flying away

from me

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FIRST SNOW IN TÁBOR when your gaze is a bright light forgive my turning away. life holds potential like a bee trapped in a flower.

buzz buzz. as the snow sinks into the grass lately even a candle refracting through a glass is an interrogation lamp.

I didn’t do it.

a rose under snows juxtaposed these humpy banks new on the list of things that seem to be staring at me.

the view is dim like my memory.

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REDBEADS hummingbirds string red beads on a necklace for the fun of it they can’t be trained but billie holiday she always

sounds so tired there is joy there is people who believe since one day years from now you will remember this exact moment and all the time in between will evaporate better fill it up with intense feeling and vivid experience

(“this is not a come on”) a new project: call every name in the phone book to hear the texture of each hello

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BIRDSEED fingers grew out of the ground where I planted birdseed. like the whole garden was flipping

me the bird.

I pulled them out by their roots

laid them in rows. I saw my ring finger

was missing. I held my hands against my stomach

curled my legs over them and stayed sideways on the grass like that.

the nub hurt and desolation spread out the land through everyone else’s garden.

the fingernails were long and curved.

they poked out of the soil again. I kissed the fingertips and

they went back in. they were happy and

I had avoided falling in love. I was really

sad. my hand felt better but I couldn’t see it.

I was in the sand with just my head sticking up. a shadow crossed the sun.

someone bent to kiss me

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A CRYSTAL NIGHT FOR LUCKY LINDY

these things come back to you somewhere north of the Horta Is1ands still fifteen hundred miles from France

where if you could see the sea it would be all you’d see

the figures came into the cockpit wavering stretching one reaching

they seemed composed of the color of the spots you see before you faint

I swigged the cold coffee thermos but they didn’t go away that one seems nice it is somehow a woman as womanly as Anne then she is funny tells me I will end up in Hawaii I laugh say I better stop for gas in China No she says and now she is above me here we can all read maps and you’re the one who has done this to me

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SUCH WAS MY JOY callas chinese maria violin and modulated field generator humming ripchord kinetic gowndrag combined in the room until the mixture made graypurple waves like evaporated pumice ripples in the air and I stood up under the sky raised my arms up and said with great joy I am not bombing Iraq! I am not bombing Iraq! I am not bombing Lebanon and Lebanon is not bombing me! I didn’t kill a woman and her six children or a busload of soldiers, I am not destroying a hospital supposedly by mistake! and the purplegrey fog flitted into round eggs and hid themselves in me, such was my joy.

1999

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UNIVERSE GRAVEYARD DROPLETS surfing on a raft of carcasses tied together: not sexy cholesterol wax toboggans down an artery then rows back up: stroke, stroke you are all red blood cells ready to burst out laughing we are droplets in capillary action you give me your attention through sniper scopes my chlorophyll supplies the green giant of fabulousness and love is a kind of heart attack heart: attack! another victory for the medically unexplainable prolonging the logically inevitable yes: strike heart but don’t go on strike. is it dia or dios de los muertos god of death almost as big as the universe but so far I’m kicking ass they gave me last rites I got a second amendment killer flood and earthquakes claimed others in my place: friends of yours? should I leave a message? who’s the great sower? while personally trying to remember all those forgotten my cranial fissures slowly part into smiles amid the smell of fresh ozone rain in the turned soil of a graveyard the virgin mary has sharp elbows