Treatise on Spit and Eternity

Owner of proper nouns

this body prefers the high horse

barefoot in a barrage of images

 

No stocking feet

no voice better than

a kiss against itself

 

Against the unity of representations

could this really be poetry’s plan

how to abolish itself

 

How to take that categorical imperative &

shove the value form

how to spit out the old master

 

Preoccupied before each bodily fault

drinking in each caress

Raised buttons

 

where muscles park

How to pronounce 

the marbleized swarm

 

Tracing gravestones

dead letters

astonished to be alive

 

Here to celebrate the broken hammer

lost in a cathedral of trees

carnivores in pursuit of a body to be divided

 

The bird beside me

as white collar primitives

picked me clean

 

 

Prior art

We captured

opposing threads

How antecedents get up

on the downbeat

 

How the coffee mill killed

Groove, the crosshatch

Origin unknown

Diagram insufficient

 

Was it enough that we sold out

Vertical axis‎

The pronoun’s fatal lean-in

inconsistent

 

Thumbdown song‎s

trapped in the corridor

of thought

Syncope of words

 

Which brings me back

to what the White Wing wants

Montegreens up past the snowline

The rebel splice‎

 

Killed by contrail

No mirror phase no cordial view

‎Queered by clouds

Embraced by tears

Ghost of a lion

-after Charles Ray

Skinnier here

at the back of the neck

unswallowed

I couldn’t eat my way out

 

Caught tying shoe

dreaming without pants

‎I wore all my clothes

imagining some other future

 

All mocktails & shebrews

onions and crust

delectable transit

smooth in the rough

 

all the children

Lucian & Lucy

the smallest punch for whatever purpose

My gut said this is my field

 

the Rock said this is my relation to field

No orchestration

no hang time no banished theatre

no inner resolve for outer cruelty

‎

No artifice and body

no broken vertebrae

just Jiminy & Cricket

old names in the hour of death

St Ann M’ass

       (after AH in spirit of RG)

 

To control gas

Burn the bottle

Ban it!

 

Let us liberate

Fingers, sentient noun

Whirligig mount & dismount

 

Sutures that thrive

& cut to the quick

Hold expansion slot & turn

 

Litany of names

How much per head

How much per likeness

 

Dear Calvin & Hobbes

Whose Rabbit Ears

Have lost the image

 

Monuments to monuments

Lochness monsters

Till it hurts

 

Image of music

Blue acetate thread

Below Crow sky

 

Let's haul flesh

Bell curves

to spin and contrive

 

Clothes to gather what

Command singed

Bred in smoke

 

& dressed in ranch

A little pepper yes

Table racked

 

For bifocal vision

Landless aperture

Embraced

 

Red & black

Unanimous swing vote

Mailed the pigeons home

Direct Action Donut (or Latent Construct for Decoy)

            “Creative compatibility is undervalued, creative dissent is overvalued.” – J.K.

Drawn so that lines

Cavalry from green recruits 

Slim Pickins' body English

James Caan as the con

Answering the call to play

(which might be funnier if I knew the movie better.  The Glory Boys based on the novel The Dice of God.  Sam Peckinpah’s Little Big Horn.)

The recipe says

Too much tomfoolery

So that the donut vibrating next to us

testifies to its family of gulls

of Gullivers

‎Each pulled thread

Flight lines to contradict

Synonyms I subscribe to

To incinerate deep freeze

Splayed on countertops

My emulating machine‎

Which is an ear

Regulated registered regimented

Pedagogy's birthmark

Scratched in concrete

Skin particles & parchment

Sticks and stones

Did I say intersectional bliss

Latent construct for decoy

Blacked out

Resonating boxcars

Going all 666

 

Junkyard hammer

  “if all property is theft then all intellectual property is detournement” –M Wark

Sworn to silence

I have become the unfriendly ghost

gone to swim with the fishes

to protect the capsized dream

Ballast inverted

to write down the terrific

facts which appear thrice

first as tragedy (where are we?)

then as farce & finally 

behind our backs 

as intellectual property

What we value is self-abolition 

camouflaged & crossed out

when we danced against ourselves

learning to move elsewhere

against weaponized clouds

against the abrogation of treaties

Geneva 1977, Seattle 1865

against mud on the Ho Chi Minh Trail

we danced to impede the flow of bodies

against the sign that said

be the algorithm you want to be

This mission should you choose to accept it

Salt dropped from sky

to counter intelligent fog

transparent yet sworn to silence

Ghosting

How to circle wagons

how to signify what looks like a nest

If thinking > feeling

does recognition exploit comic mode

or unfold as motion picture

In our comic strip we met for coffee

anxiety baked in time & place

In Beckett’s Film fingers trace the walls

& refuse to answer

Buster Keaton holes up shushing his pets

turning us one at a time

to face the wall before opening

the envelope of inner images

His action is subtraction

a wave that owns poets

whose feelings precede calculus

whose pictures double what is not I

Proofs of accumulate matter

Scourge of clouds after math

after terminal degree as if speaking to you

of the many ways to maintain scars

Just past the cluster of soothsayer signals

the trashcan curve rattling fastball

time to just intuit and swing

I now work for the outer agency

originally a translation

of what history thinks it teaches

lulled to sleep by a set of config commands

silent switches to suppress

blades thrust in chassis

Let’s just say another world is possible

network of disappearances

Spitting image of what

loved to be loved

Lost premise

How little do I need to say

to be part of the conversation

Three or four buses

crossed the street into the shop

I dreamt of an airpocket

where it doesn't rain

I watched it race along streets

your storm of wakefulness

blind spot to account for

More negative please

Shiny object

I lack all feeling for

what speaks thru parentheses

If gesture cut loose

wrangled yet undefined

I punched the mirror

it’s my repugnant theatre

I chose the tangent

internalized the negative

& sold myself a bill of goods

Have I told you the story of the

ventriloquized scream

(she says she is in pain)

We seek pencil on paper

a deadpan translation

& struggle for stubborn facts

so that the weak may triumph

if there were time to take time

I would subtract myself

& yield to the senator from Minnesota or Maine

or rather opt for nullset or muzzle

& question my body's response

answers captive to the memory of music

I lack all feel for what speaks

(night in which all cows were black)

Paradise if you don’t mind the extremes

the outliers the laughter the tumultuous

drone the placebo

The intoxication coupled in place

with complicit tears

I lack all feeling for

what speaks thru parentheses

(discourse of the unsaid)

exempt from superego

We found your reciprocal angel at the 99 cent store

A barbarism absent all ideology

how to mimic doxa

(inseam of digestive tract)

how to return the pitched ball

how to become proximate cause

to the point of indifference

The miserablist

Every selection, every decision, is a little violence. The artist who cut off his hand to display it in a self-portrait. The end of the hand in contemporary painting. A phantom limb.

Here comes denial

no possibility of change

Here comes eyeroll

They said leave no footnotes

they said don’t fire until you see the whites

the eggshells the blood orange communes

Let us extinguish light and shadow

Let us reverse cinematic shock

& abolish magic machismo

They set out to destroy thatched huts

social compunction until sodality goes poof

until heroic fade to black

Frantic circuit to synapse

Remember the empire state

plates handpainted irradiated

They said believe nothing

they said manipulate yourself

Motto for self-cannibalizing hole-in-one

Leaderless flak jacket

immune from stunts and strategies

our puritan misanthrope refused to look back

I liked your interior stylesheet

almost no punctuation

commas but no periods

If I embrace the alien

literature

I’d stand six feet under

We succumbed to Occam’s signature cut

& fell in with the in crowd

his emoticons her Moby Dick

Here comes denial

no possibility of change

Here comes eyeroll

Signal distortion

-for Charles

Did you see the headline

Unrest spreading to grain markets

Intense handhold explained in code

I uncover nostrils

& take my poison straight

Dueling neurons

for the quantum leap I want

to feel the lives of those lost

If memory is triggered by a virus

I desire to be infected

I want to blank the blanks that Jack built

Frequency dependent

linear in gain with unstable levels

When the stars are struck

paparazzi in jars

work to collect us

We pretend to act

Film stills out of the question

working to dominate ourselves

Mouth to mouth

against comic destinations

our transit pass

the difference between anecdote

and antidote

Send the thief

By internal logic

out of books

into the ruts

of unfruitful meditation

We wait for radiant heat

for ink to dry, for uncoolant

for the initial corrupt

It is time for sad scholars

to make a pile of cash

for the mock elite

for rigorous quaking fist

for unreliable sump

time for sunsets & expertise 

Let’s send the thief

pwned intensity

all click & drag

spider pants & porn

the problem with masses

robots in service of song

Hot dog hysterian

                  -after the village explainer

something about a dust jacket

something something about pounding fascists

& then we went down to the slip

illegible as the tender night

you talked as if you were living in a cloud

as if the line that once connected us

heh don't touch! You’ve already

stolen too many calories per hectare

as your fuselage creeps south

truncated due to size

the most private blemish

bigger than anything

tattooed enough to shout

count me out

I want the non-transferable book

my little blacklist

squeezed into a closed fist

Naked brutalism (Lone Ranger & Popeye edition)

You not we

Mr Bigley not George Jetson

Binaries not fill-in-the-blank

Spinach & vegemite

Olive not garbanzo

Exhaustion not exuberance

Math Rock (SRO)

                  Godzilla at Hotel Palenque

Out of the meth lab

& into the gym

I see aluminum foil

disco lights

the better to receive what's outside

I count on

no calculating angel

This exercise brigade

turtlenecks and topiary

stomping it out 

& trucking it in

the flames of Lenny & Steve

Patrick & DeeDee

Your name here leads to more tears

Pierre Menard and so forth

more dramatic yet unreadable

uncharted schools

& bottom fishing expertise

To surveille friendly fire

I count on

no calculating angel

Concavity ducts for

tedium bounce

Only then did I seek

unshaped digits

bodices and bong rips

dropcloth fires

what to do with whippets

wool cloaks

stripped of insignia 

bleeding reverb

& clean drumwork

Dear Calculating Angel

I count on

no warrantless urge

no mock mock

at minimum minimum

Time's arrow

clothed in dreams

sticks & stones

nature's number

no blackbox

no artifice to shed

thought capacity of one

solidified in image

A petal factory

soldered to the logic gates

she loves me

she loves me not

And Found

Most likely due to sea conditions

Wages paid to date, if any

Through sin to worldly alienation

Memory of life

Even our ability to recollect it

The capacity to provide productive tension

Play of abstracts

How to recover from defeat

All confidence

For a little while

In the swamp of matter

In a monologic insanity

The status of being unique

Dissipated narrative

I mean velocity

Its rectifying force

The sword of power between us

Death in order to save

Lazarus who already smells bad

Idealizing

Terror and oppression

His right hand

Its hold on time

Power in a continuous manner

Foreclosure

Momentum again

Its sound properties

Brutalize its

Ability to revert

The chorus that captions

Fallacy of the perfect dictionary

I want battalions

No metaphor or fact

Beautiful horse or storm

With a chance it will kill

Passed out to perfection

Too close to repulse

Our adrenal event

Celebrates the scepter class

The shadow defense

Happily draped

Nothing but an effect

You are confirmed in seat 21C

Goosefat & gristle

Caws to muscle

Who's buried in the floor

Who wants to know

The Equalizer - Third Series

PDF of The Equalizer #3 - with bookmarks for sections

If you download, it's a bit easier to navigate. Thx to editor Michael Schiavo.

Samuel Ace
Jeff Alessandrelli
Zachary Anderson
Rae Armantrout
Steve Barbaro
Alan Bernheimer
Elizabeth Bevilacqua
Cathleen Bonner
Ana Bozicevic
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Simon Brown
Megan Burns
Jenna Cardinale
Ching-In Chen
Lauren Rose Clark
Shane Clements
Clark Coolidge
Jack Davis
Jordan Davis
Shira Dentz
Christopher DeWeese
Cody Donovan
Trezlen Drake
Carolina Ebeid
Zack Finch
Jessica Fisher
Graham Foust
Benjamin Friedlander
Schuyler Greenway
Phillip Griffith
Luke Hankins
Nathan Hauke
Maximilian Heinegg
Destiny Hemphill
Walidah Imarisha
Mason Just
Robin Kirby
Michael Lally
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
Carlos Gomez Marquez
Maya Marshall
Charlie Martin
Farid Matuk
Charlee Meiners
Lynn Melnick
Catherine Meng
Sharon Mesmer
Philip Metres
Robert Mittenthal
Gina Myers
Sanjana Nair
Urayoán Noel
Alice Notley
Dylan Nutter
Jena Osman
John Pluecker
Alex Quinn
Raquel Salas Rivera
Anthony Robinson
Judith Roitman
Jan Sanderson
Adam Strauss
Jacob Sunderlin
Eileen R. Tabios
Adam Tedesco
TC Tolbert
Gabriella Torres
Sarah Trudgeon
Jennifer Tseng
Vickie Vértiz
Emylisa Warrick
Afaa Michael Weaver
Stephen Scott Whitaker
Geoffrey Young
Timothy Yu

Niagara

I trust the hammer

Idyllic tears & tributaries

back basin echo to sign the air

to trap the fish

Your low center of gravity

somersaults to evade

Niagara’s request

was it Destroy all monsters or the MC5

lacking the love Iggy required

Stooges unable to answer

A riot not a strike

no misnomer

happily withdrawn

Cave of our own making

how do you spell

lost words how do you spell

missing ingredient

your article too kind

the Utopian airways

boat floating all boats

what is or equals

echo and Narcissus

I rest my case

painful letters cascade

‎fingerprints

loop after loop

here to perform the vanishing trick

Haunted illusion

false to its own memory

They say it is curtains

named for the Roman gods

who hammered the water