the mastery of the ten thousand words

Sunday’s symphony.

Across from me we have a cacophony of light bulb
a proliferation of exclamation, of “I love you’s”
but there is no love lost, no opportunity cost.

Frozen peas can’t replace mommy’s love, no doubt I have
but your cleavage is making a commendable effort.
You reek like beer and three day old underwear and I don’t mind.

I’m mostly thinking about the waking up anyhow.
“How now, brown cow,” you say to me, and I’m disinclined to
disagree. I’m fully armed and you’re one foot in the grave.

Let’s mince words, lets burn the farmhouse of conventional love to the ground
we don’t have to stop for anyone, we don’t need no emergency break.
You and I we can run it forever if we want but sometimes you got to sleep.

Don’t pull off the highway here there are no johns in Lynchburg
only these bizarrely inviting arboreal apparitions begging for justice
of a kind un-balanced before the blindfolded momma of America.

The knowledge of a thousand and ten strong-minded men held back by only
a simple push and twist plastic saves lives bottle to prevent the dissemination
of possible destructive factual explosives and other secrets of the literate.

Spastic clay-faced clowns parade their balloon dog men across the crosshairs
while patriotism sits in the witness stand swearing left and right wearing the flag
like a diaper and holding a sack of bald eagles in one hand and saluting with the other.

Neo-Geo liberalism invokes clauses of old Eastern European bloc traditional contracts
that obligates the proletariat to activate their escape pods and blow the porcelain seals off
into the far reaches of turned-off televisionscape and simultaneously hide in the closet.

Deep cover deep throat deep chasms in Kentucky serve as illustrations of the nature of the landscape of the politico, inc. methodology, warning signs facing backwards so we can revel in our own mistakes as we repeat them like high fives on a merry-go-round.

Fat lard filled egg-o-tron 5000 prepackaged breakfast love shot down like a bolt from above while we read the death toll ticker that relates to no disaster in particular as it
floats off towards the network insignia into the land of forgotten trivia and bad dreams.

sometimes we find them under rocks in the forest

Andrew S)iskind


Poetry, for me, seems to be several things all at once; an

intersection of various points in time, space, and emotional expanse

that coexist in the arrangement of units (as here (letters, numbers, handsigns,

words, etc) on the face of a page. There is a tension in poetry that is

the result of multiple presences, diametric opposites even,

maintaining a tenuous balance – what I mean to say is, poetry needs

to have both levity and gravity in each individual moment, so that

each component can float up into your mind, then fall (or rather

plummet like a cartoon piano) down into your heart and soul.

Poetry pulls both ways, and(rew d(raws living
sketches)) while it pulls it also

pushes, lifts and crushes, builds and destroys, illuminates and confuses,

ad infinitum, et cetera, et cetera, Amen et goodnight.

Like all art, it is something like a cross between demonic possession

and cabinetry. It is eagles falling from heaven, but more importantly

it’s also the memories of your childhood. It’s memories you

haven’t made yet. Poetry is the (crockery in the) recipe for

nostalgia, even for places you have not been. Lightning bolt-nighttime

razor blade multifaceted diamond wheel of infinity. The perfect un-

wisdom that cuts through the void. Poetry is the difficulties of

metacognition. It is the wall we build. It is also the sledgehammer.

This is a poem for you.

Winter

The snow is piled up against the woodshed,
the woodshed is piled up against the house,
and we are all sitting around the table
the table is thick with maple-flavored syrup.

There is a cast-iron stove sulking behind you
on top of the stove is the last of the wheat bread
and it’s becoming the last of the wheat toast.
in the fridge is the butter-packets from the restaurant.

Today we are supposed to finish this coffee
and zip up our parkas and stomp around the house
picking up empty beer cans and bagging them all
to bring down to the store for the bottle deposit.

Man at the store doesn’t give us any money,
just credit for some more wheat bread, some
honey, some bologna, some more coffee,
and another case of canned domestic beer.

We give Man all our dollars and cents
from a weeks worth of painting and playing
at being working stiffs behind the counters
and at the workbenches of our town.

But today is Sunday and we have no work
To do and no toils to carry on our backs
So when we get home we will have a fire
And we will sit around it and laugh music.

Hex

Repeat four times your incantation
it will make him vulnerable
his teeth will flash
that is your cue
this is your only chance
before it's camouflaged again.

Float

You were refusing.
I sensed the deceptive cadence,
a hanging vapor
some small surrender.

It was this I stashed in a bladder,
the balloon of your doubt.
With some string
it pulls me upwards
through the stratosphere.

I survey some landmass,
a continent with no depth or shadow.

Conservation

when, in winter, we paused
beneath the yawn of the cathedral’s door
for one whole, slow minute
to watch winter happen to our town
I could feel your skin,
damp and cold, through your wool
and my flannel –
I tugged you in closer,
so we only made one breath-cloud.

a new ethic

this uneasy and tired night,
settled firmly into the ground
like interlocking parts
of a whole portrait.

the story of our lives
displayed monochromatically.
the lights of every living room
abolish the stars.

the darkness is like winter,
thin and built of wires, like
saying hello to your uncle
at a funeral

alone in every bedroom
we wait impatient for
our due diligence to
pay off in the long run

every back to a television set
we are bound together in
our communal ignorance of
the soft blue-green light emitted.

this year we have begun to read
all the books we want to have read
not for us, but for how they look
creased and annotated on our shelves

we have impeccable taste in music
it’s cultivation, a scar
here between the rolling hills
all we have is depth.

Writing our poems after midnight,
smoking cigarettes like in our dreams.
we are the poets of suburbia –
we’ve learned to ignore the TV.





And another





what do you do
when you were raised so far from livestock
that you cannot remember blood or milk?
do you cower at the stench of birth,
or can you learn to be born again
in the other America?
I am holding out hope that I was wrong,
that the vindication of my generation fast approaches,
and we will be set free of all machinery.
I am trying to write the great American poem,
but not from what I’ve sensed –
from the other America.

I’ve lost sleep, waiting
for the rebirth of wonder not in new, wonderful things
but a passionate scenic view
coming up on our right.
when I look over the cliff I see the water tower,
and the closed down mill.
I see a hundred stories I can never write.

so, I wait, and wonder –
will it all shift so heavy?
am I living in the other America?

After midnight, we're gonna let it all hang out.

as soon as she told me, I knew
the ledge wouldn’t hold,
underneath my hand it would crumble
and away
into the void I could follow it
reach out and beckon
and clinging to the debris
like a comfort item
make my peace with the ravine.

Another from July 3rd

all the sweaters and tea cups in new england couldn’t remind me enough of you
to break my heart all over again just for the fun of it
and try and close my eyes and tighten my face
to forget that you ever breathed
right next to my face
when the rain
was on the
window.

driving
east on 495
with the top down
and the radio way, way up
winding our way to your house
far from the town we grew up in
and learned what it meant to love and
forgot everything we ever knew about hearts.
all the sweaters and tea cups in new england couldn’t remind me enough of you.

After the Fireworks

I am the ghost of summers past
the kinetic reminder of sweat
and worship
the fearless explorer on Sunday afternoons
fueled by sunlight and teas.

the fearless explorer with
intrepid bookmarks
memories of a thousand chapters
the history of our language

secret jazz trumpeter
cannot tell a lie.

What the mountain told me

There are no words is a lie
There are more words than we can hold
Than we can use

With a broad net there is no meaning
With a fine net we express

First work of Summer '06

Turn the wheel
into infinity
from the grayness we evoke
a sunbeam explosion
the green of trees
Ten thousand yellow blossoms

There is no stillness
in the water
it breathes the life-breath
of all seas and lakes.

Our heart-song is softly growing
with the silence of summer
to eclipse each other
with an eternity of loving kindness

we become less-

In this season,
grow.

Revitalized

What You Should Know To Be A Poet
by Gary Snyder

all you can know about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
the names of stars and the movements of planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods.
kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum'd and golden --

& then love the human: wives husbands and friends
children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work long, dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and lived with and finally loved. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger. gambles. and the edge of death.

Rationalization

The reason why I haven't posted any new writing in months is that I've been furiously studying Post-Structuralism and reading Wallace Stevens. So get off my back.

Reckon (an internet original)

I said, "What do you make of this?"
it was a round
it made a sound
it smelled a fruit
at night it hummed
it's middle was vast
it had no gripes
some days it waterskiied.

Vermont Work, pt. I (Opus)

… …

The car glides through
scenery that is only an anagram of
scenery from five, ten, two-hundred miles behind.

I see my reflection in the constant brown rocks on the roadside
in their blue-grey icicles
I see my Grecian urn
the ever-present yearn downwards,
an eternity of failure.

Each road sign that waxes and wanes is a reminder
a mirror image of all other testaments to highway safety
another reminder of the vast rolling sameness of New England.

Like a bullet, our journey has no plot arc,
we are only the straight line, dashed, from point A to point B.

I roll down the window/, -

Paradigm Shift!


The word is colors now,
and on the wind comes molecules of dust and scents rural and right,
the smoke from chimney tops are a hundred rude exclamation marks to my
discovery of America.
I am the new Christopher Columbus, sailed the ocean blue-
me big man now in history books.

Instantaneously I am the world’s foremost expert on apple pie.
narrating this tour with fireworks or gesturing,
peals of laughter over the roar of the wind in through the
window.

I have inborn knowledge now awakened of the secret lives of trees
from inception to destruction
I want to pull over and commute my sentence in favor of
a thick-booted and face burning run through the forest so much nearer now.

Vermont Work, pt. II

The light by which I work, transformed
now by windowpanes into a new character
on the page.
The remnant of all other unfinished works.

each thought a sonogram for a reader.

Here in uncontested delirium the poem is written.
Each letter pressed upon the page, a hideous mark.
Crude symbols of arcane witch-workings and prisons
built each day, coincidently. Byproducts of a law
left too frequently unrevised, paper bags for liquid
contents. Invisible caltrops expelled with plumes of
spittle from the mouth, the pen. To each his own
unbattened hatches and un-coiled lines, languishing in
silent menace across the desk.

One More.

I see you now
As bug-in-amber
Ancient

What remains is to be seen,
fickle
I still remember

The word game
Hop-scotch
A remnant.

a Language

A language


with accents in the eyes
the stiff boot insinuations
the well-creased reproach

I trace the history of each deep furrow
Remembrance like ice water
Eyes blinking wildly to regain focus

Interspersed the pocks
of hideous entanglements
now come frighteningly undone

subtle motions of the lower jaw
conveyance of an institution
the other descriptive mark on your felon.