No Show @HedreenGallery Thru 13 September

Breathe. Not breathless. Amanda Manitach explains here.

A catalog in place of show. Free to pick up at gallery.  Some portions of it are: here, here, here, here, here & here.

With Sharon Arnold, Rebecca Brown, Sean J. Patrick Carney, T.s. Flock, Jason Hirata, Robert Mittenthal & Matt Offenbacher

Audaciously Unexciting

-15 seconds of useful consciousness

Even at 40000 feet
the world is made of accomplished facts
of viral ignorance
enclosed in the crisis that makes us sick

The crisis of enclosure is the Poem
found on the b-side of Exhaustion (literally on the backside of my stapled copy)
That’s the Omnibus which appears as if out of nowhere, unknown and unseen in the next poem
Instead of eliminating all artifice from the apparatus – which is the aim of science – the artist wants to create an artifact that has a life of its own, to make an artwork as alive as a sugar cube in a horse’s mouth.

But how to resist, how to write rather than be written
How not to be a minion?  First, resist all forms of agency. There is no need to authenticate your own incapacity.  Refuse the “we had to.”

For over ten years we have been showing people how to receive immediate cash flow. No selling, no explaining, no cold calling, no chasing friends and family.

Exuberant verb which
makes itself into a good meal
Inhaling and exhaling
Drawing to a close
this age of extremes

Caught in my craw
the hook beneath each hyperlink
Its other name is domination
Traps all the way down
Cymbals timbales
The snare
when ignorance goes viral
when Gidget goes Hawaiian
goes to Rome
to Waikiki
grows up
gets married

It is sabotage – within Sabotage
our Triple agent’s
useless fail
Never have I felt so rested
My love wants to destroy Art
as weaponized concept
Ideal exit not
to escape but to contain
regions beyond work
The IDF’s infamous rhizome
walking thru walls
Liquid city
doubled in the Ancestral dark
Big headed river
destroyed
when leisure poetry
is set to dial out

Predigested or rationed
I am the battle
Conspiracy theorist of my own contingent material
the shitting machine
lost to memory
thinking within what thinks us

Song to myself

Poems are exciting
don't write them down
Nauseated sex negative
nature is a stupid business
I hated her Heidegger socks
Bereft of the power of division
dead shoes
The red I feel minus what –
molecular estrangement?

OK, I should be happier doing what Robin James calls the work of viral upworthiness.  I mean pass it on. Pharrell’s hat is already turned up.

“The point is to make signals that, when co-opted, skew the balance and bend the circuit- sort of like retroviruses and malware. Critical delinquency generates noise that isn't noisy in the ‘right’ ways (and thus might not even register as noise), queer noise that, when it gets co-opted, distorts the processes it is supposed to support.” – R James.

In other words, please don’t read the lyrics!  Instrumental ideals are too banal for words.  Something about sadistic enjoyment.  Yeah, I was hooked but I merely lost myself, just as the tailor disappears into his suits, just as the accountant gets lost in accounts. How to capture what is written at each remove.  I want what the smuggler hid in my inner ear. Not some dream of a coin extracted. The artist surveilles surfaces, unmapping and remapping, resting on the dead labor of past generations.  When I hear the good life, I hear the good life, a wall on which to project false positives and true negatives.

We wore the same pajamas
Alien maps
Opposing thumbs
Mr Green Jeans vs Capt Kangaroo
Tell it to the tree
To the molecule that just slammed the door
To roadrunner who refused to fall
Earth will possess us
The untold story
‎More at 11

The rabbit strayed from his hat
Insert happy lyric here
Austerity’s hairshirt
Dracula's happy meal

To bypass psychic add-ons
unfailed fallacy of consent
7 footnotes per page means
Messianic nap time

Th' expense of spirit
‎against the ready made – I made it up
Need to lose this silly moustache
this AOL address
against appearances
against the ‘I’ that would stand up
‎for downtime
for dreamlife

Chunk & Permeate

   Conservators of true contradiction, of all that is both true and false 
          – after Graham Priest’s ‘paraconsistent’ logic

The flow within proceeds – parallel or doubled – a celebration of what’s blocked between.

Assume consciousness is parked in the storm within – a contrast that allows all inference.  The compost of thought ground in fact.  This news is not accumulation – it’s the byproduct that pays back.  But none of it buys a daily deadline.

Internally with others or alone, I am chunked in a certain sense.  Not uncommonly inconsistent I swallow sweet inference – a reign free of limited permeations.

Caught between temperate zones our choice is to lick or be licked.  Kitten with two tongues is devoured by a snake.  Inadequate image of a friend apt to stray.

She moved Legos from box to box.  Translating torsos to brick a trail.  I backtracked to plagiarize the footpath and misspelled my name.  Stepping into the dark, a monument stands against inverse proportion, character that transcends the logic gates.

It’s this tender time theory forgets.  Robotic engagement not of the world but of flesh.  All this drawing with wings worn.  Each night a density of bird or bug.  It’s the intermediate body that refuses.  Your ass an isolated edict.  Inviolate world free of discharge.  Its seedlings a packet addressed to all employees. Downriver my wet wound pleads the night.  It’s the yelp of ages.  How I howl for the heart of kings (a Knaves taunt) set to refuse angels.

Practiced Negation

   You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.  –Mario Cuomo

No never did this.  Against denunciation of one’s neighbors, against denunciation in general.

No, his books were negatives. Missing imprint that washes out all perception.  With this rock I do – nothing negative.  Lost in amplitudes of disrespect, sincerity as a pen withholds intent.  No longer accumulating in the margins of opera programs, on laundry lists, on the palms of hands, in the litany of words inserted here.  

No never did this.  Indestructible, it’s as if charm schools you.  Grabs your lapels, shocking with an electronic leash.  Yearning for a proper collar, to seize the power that deforms us.

If resistance is surrender, I denied myself to you as a joke – unable to comply.  The job is to check and recheck – to suspend the negation our bodies insist on.  At bottom, written in the paths of disputation, stealing asides from adjacent pages.  A nomad life lived between black and blue.

Surveilling daylight, I become indistinguishable from an image.  At night, out of sequence, I savor the bite of each strophe, and conserve the itch to push for more.

We’re told to obey the crime.  We’re told it’s our vampire – rising from the depths. Earth’s disgorgement cached my clock.  Each moment pre-owned – underwritten as a hedge against the past.

No never did this.  After the cognitive dissonance of work
In pursuit of the next enslavement – King George
Rethroned by alternate verbs (quote)
I love and love the treble
Damage – the fear that oversees
bypassed Meaning
Simplicity of some other angel
Better in margins arguably amassed
We manufactured crisis
embodied symptom
Misfortune as good as it gets
Ornament that refused collapse
Bottletop weave that skirts the eye

Bartleby: Living but everywhere dead

The power to not go on.  Whimper of night where we would actively not.  Animated in his cage, what’s offered is just this.  An entire world enraptured – flickering a message up in lights.

Paid to go away, the second letter is ultimately defuse.  Volunteers await a gardener’s wrath.  This lack of limits becomes the ultimate limit.  Naked he thinks this is the life.  Discharged to keep a close eye.

Applied to the lower tides, transparency as such becomes unreadable, glazed opacity of fluids that follow words.   Reverting to the crawl he sidekicks and rolls back to float to a place on the beach.

It’s an amoeba phones home.  My nomad answers.  Yolk of jellyfish that lurk, yellow hearts pumping in the sea.  Haunted by animation, nature tests its mental being.  Indecipherable, it is the hardened fat – impenetrable not thru but in language.

Remember leisure poets who invert the body’s response?  They yield to an earlier image, back when fruit dots were candies of the gods.  A twilit lozenge in the wake of dawn’s burst.  Dispatched to that suckling place – a pure exposure or announcement before birth.  That’s the ticket, pleased to admit one.  A baby shower that delivers a pillar for the waif.  Advertisements followed by popcorn and sticky feet.  The Magi caught looking can’t get enough.  Dead letters arrive just in time.

Dear B – I heard that you were asleep.  Too personal to enflame the animus that remains.  Aborted message whose ground takes off.  No need to decrypt the hand that signals a sequence of faults.  The policy ruptured is us.  It’s what we can’t see for the not quite trees.  Unchanged matrix a constant roar. Revolt pitched, lost in the severity of manner.

Before machine readable dreams, ribbons precast in a typewriter cove.  Each finger alive crescents, untapping the dream that precedes it.  Where election lights the lights.

Discarded words burn four times a year in the great city square. Bonfire of lettered remains.  Stunned, yes – but falling off the horse, no.  It’s the new form of method acting.  Copying music without knowing the notes.  Sitting for a test, multiplied by the one who wins by walking.  The same theme and same frown for the always changed song.

In these times, who is cut to copy flesh?  Give us a sign when wisdom returns.  I refer to the one who wears shoes, to the one whose mouth is unable to authenticate the hand.  Without proof, unable to follow, he appears at his desk, watching the hand but not the mouth.  Watching the general become singular.  Watching the singular fawn, dip and turn back as if reanimated in commerce.

The hand loses itself, ghosting its name, an outlaw thought. Impossible to coincide, it is the part of those who have no part.  Rolled in the weft, riding a flotilla of lines.  The scare memory plays to avoid refusal.