from t.a.p./SERIES: IRRATIONAL DUDE

Announcing IRRATIONAL DUDE, a new chapbook of collaborative writing by Nico Vassilakis and Robert Mittenthal from tir aux pigeons. 

Until the crayons ran out of color. A gargantuan snag of me uphill. Supine on their backs an instrument with heads attached. The stars are out above the bivouac.
       -from Testosterone Poisoning

On collaboration, to quote the others on the plateaux: "the two of us wrote this together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd...  We have kept our names... out of habit, purely out of habit... to reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I."

PURCHASE COPY for $6 (plus s/h) at lulu:
or read downloadable PDF here.

To request a review copy, please reply to me &/or the publisher at tirauxpigeons-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

======UPDATED 12/20======
 
Birds until the night swallows their song.
Lost in the borough, no bridge to brook the flow, no sea to settle
The stoop birds approach. The marvelous perch dispersed.

These are the most sonorous lines in the poem, and signal that it isn’t only the natural world that has been damaged—in fact, everything human, including our innermost core, becomes collateral damage. Stu Dempster, the trombonist to whom the first part of Irrational Dude is dedicated, has talked about “tuning yourself to the room you play in.” Our room is the world—on the whole, the language, the aphasic diction of Irrational Dude, is tuned to the irreparable damage of worlds. It “barks back into the night.”
   -Petra Backonja

After the fact, I've discovered that Irrational Dude is synonymous with Whitehead's secular notion of god, the ultimate limitation whose existence is the ultimate irrationality.  It is the irrational dude who works alone, perhaps in a clerical role, at Whitehead's novelty store.   
   -rm
 

Blackbox or blog?

The shell beyond which clarity
Counting to five wrongly
The armor that prevents understanding
A pedestal sink in the way of thought

Not metaphor or one idea
Following but the urge to tear apart
The fingers and hands cannot
Unscrew the phillips screw


The fingers can only seek the various
Tools that built the tools that built
The object inflated in a world without will
The foregone conclusion we allude to that only we can stop

The skin is faster as I
Patch in an old text here
These frames wired then
Into an assemblage of fact

*

I meditate on the little stars
Disasters for a body built
Whose perfect expression walks itself
Stumbling heavily, prone to misdirection

It chose to remain within
Not at rest but alive or in pursuit of a power to be affected
An image masochist whose bent eyelids recede
Passion by turns harnessed

Abraded flesh of a composite
Reaching up to pull down
Each word on my forehead punched out or remaindered
It's a chorus of voices in the ear

Or a knife, a tag team
For the prosthetics that extend a hand
Before then how do you do
Fisted numb it's the black of all feeling

Resonance in the viewer a taste on the lip
Where words break to reverse thought

Transpiercing The Text - Nico Vassilakis Books On

A book museum - pinning up the object of affection. It's your defection I read between cover stories - each reveal of tattered color running into open air. To worship such ships the most relevant foresails. Their representation of blood trickling to the street.

To feel the wound - the uncorrected proofs - the inadvertent flair of internal text. Blurbs of the high minded imagined there. Unseen leaps a totem of action clamours where words fail me.

Thumb Drive - Stelarc

Circulating flesh body to body
a book floats above the street
printable organs in excess of body weight
"Can we switch to the prosthetic head please?"

I talked to the ear - fractal and phantom
one exalts ones own face-station
the hook line and sink
the allure of blind carbon

This involuntary writing with
distributed footprints
the artist’s indifference
perceives a possible action

Implicated in each
objects pose in a body and vice versa
sensational zombies fill me up
the prosthetic is an empty shell

An experience of cutlery and culinary icing
The yes. It thinks itself
where the sinister piano plays out its highest pitch
close up and into the 3rd hand

A chimera or avatar - this cadaver without flesh
sings the consonant and improbable song
vowels staring back
in fear of its talking head

Blandiloquence (the word for “a word for Seattle”)

Startled by the décor of the logic gates a portrait stands tall with the genial spirit. Black plastic patent pending the diameter of your wrist – about three inches small. Its vinyl bindings pinch the thighs – running down the double wide. An optical cable. Rods of refracted light marbled between cork and wainscot. Logic as such lines up watching subroutines work their way to the top.

Already written, the book talks back but with different hair.

It has knobs on. It takes its miniature fabrics off. Hollow when sawed through – a Ken doll with plastic flesh. These contradictions only prove K exists. The illusion of an argument alive in the eye. Feeling an arc that guides each step. The constraint of a three-legged race. Or a tumbling apart that produced silence.

We’ve become there – as adjacents. Ready to wear. Enacted in body words populate the gestures that own us.