"Route E" and "Route D" first appeared in Aerial, edited by
Rod Smith.
"Route M" first appeared in Generator, edited by John Byrum.
"Route E" was reprinted in The Best American Poetry: 1988,
edited by John Ashbery and David Lehman.
The author wishes to thank these editors for their support.
A portion of this work was written during the period of a
generous grant from the Washington D.C. Commission on the
Arts and Humanities.
SCORE Publications 1992
Copyright, A.L. Nielsen 1985, 1990.
This version of Evacuation Routes prepared for electronic
distribution.
for Anna Everett
CONTENTS
ROUTE J . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
ROUTE S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
ROUTE B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
ROUTE A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
ROUTE C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
ROUTE H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
ROUTE R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
ROUTE U . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
ROUTE M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
ROUTE P . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
ROUTE L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
ROUTE E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
ROUTE D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
ROUTE J
JESUS DELIVERS
Glimpsed like an old joke hidden behind a HARDEE'S. Takes
two semis to bring revival to this town. No Jews for Jesus
these, but bona fide, born again truck farmers. They have
abjured the odd crop, idled their engines, in the valley of
the shadow of azure. We stop for Famous Recipe Chicken; I
would walk across water for an orange. Hardly spoken.
Abrupting upon the highway. Rub out. Newly arrived in
confidence from a small town, a small man with raised frames
abhorred the farms with steerable earth stations, as well as
the hot pink shocks on the four by fours. Return audio from
receive sites via land lines obviates feedback but must be
delayed so that lip imaging may catch up. A similar
situation in a crowded cafeteria. A sudden clearing in the
background and you can hear the man at the far table
proclaiming to his colleague, "our audio bridge can handle
forty-eight lines." After us, swine applications for
microprocessors. Halfway through that dinner which we all
must eat, Software, Firmware, Courseware, Hardware. Like an
odd joke glimpsed. Genre studies. I don't. Sharp objects
were found in the Girl Scout cookies the year I had a job as
an image consultant. "Officials at the sperm bank say that
they have developed a number of methods for assisting men
who are unable to conceive children." Spongy gums clapping
together beneath the seats had to be massaged daily until
they let go and fell to the floor in a sticky pile. Pumice
scraped derisively across the subject's teeth. Swatting at
the gnat in his signature, a French eye asserted himself
while reading volume 24 of The International Journal of
Fracture, in which it was reported that Inman was an inmate.
Loose earth. The ground had been disturbed here. The judge
recited an exemplary sentence. Repeated over and over could
form a basis for public figures. The bread of haste. like
the seemingly unplanned wanderings of a lecturer, or the
scars left on suicides. As if one were paying for the
transmission by the character. No difference in weight
between the memoranda and the street corner talk when
telexed. Making a go of it. All symptoms. The life. Del
libro. Django, delivered.
ROUTE S
Shango.
What it must be to be a fact. An iron will. A steam iron
will. A pleat in general knowledge along which grime
gathers. Iron need in the library. Seated by the LEXIS.
Criss-crossing traffic between the stacks, from reference to
rest rooms, out of catalogues, out of literature, German,
out of poetry, a data base, out of order, built upon the
pulsing of human flight. The seats in the center facing
outward as in an outmoded bus station channelling the
movement into the various disciplines. Serial murderers
with short memory spans were laid across the river at
several points to facilitate the crossing. After a
successful pregnancy has occurred donors are cut off,
wondering why they paid more for gas in March than in
February. Provocative, late-night, adult entertainment.
The Mardi Gras beads could be had for free, yet, with the
addition of a simple metal clasp, many paid for them. Oh
gun! Serious rubber-necking delays were caused by the
terrorist attack this morning. My walking memory is not
remarkable. Reporting from some place in your house it had
become increasingly difficult to pen well-formed letters.
His weight loss first became noticeable in his wrists. What
we had all assumed were mild earth tremors proved upon
closer examination to be concerted efforts to alter our view
of ourselves. The age bore the stamp of his intellect.
"And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains." The
door to the Red Lion opened onto a wintry afternoon.
Everywhere the obvious was becoming more so. If I remember
correctly the mountains vanish. If I fail to remember
correctly there was a time when mountain regions were
considered to be unhealthy. Today the Federal Trade
Commission approved the biggest murder in U. S. corporate
history. Heidegger on the horizon. Core memory. On give-
away night the price for children was raised two dollars.
After the game they could be seen streaming from the stadium
waving their green fingers in the Baltimore air. Rumors
circulated freely to the effect that there was an old man in
the next county who had never made reference to any chart.
{A breathing space
for lip readers}
That night he had received a call from a gentleman
conducting a survey on the use of women's products. He
couldn't remember at the time if Samoyeds were some kind of
dog food or chocolatey Girl Scout cookies. The students
pipe. The prices of our books increase in inverse
proportion to the length of the sentences inside them. Vile
footage. They dropped Whitman's brain. If lacking
furniture, erasers or chalk, call for other maintenance.
Potomac Flamenco. I have prestressed the text. This, then,
will have been a crook. From the cows burning in stray
trees. "If you leave out his personal life, he was a happy
man." His motivation was to help burn victims. On those
few occasions when he found it necessary to go to the
bathroom in somebody else's house, he would aim his stream
carefully down the curve of the ceramics just above the
water to lessen the level of appreciable sound, not wanting
to disturb anyone more than absolutely required. An episode
in history. I went to the dentist to have my old filling
replaced, and his rest room was under construction. It was
reminiscent of the time a tonsillectomy was performed upon
me with only partial success. It could have been so much
worse. In Mexican prisons you have to purchase, from the
outside, not only your drugs but your meals, tooth-paste,
toilet paper and dental floss. When he pressed his ear
against her breast he could hear the scaly wings beating up
and down within. I was surprised upon entering the
bookstore to find the cashier reading a volume of verse I
had not yet written. "Among his previous books are The Book
of Laughter and Forgetting the Joke." How a magazine comes
about. Perfect bound. Did I get that last thought from the
serious notebook? He punctuated his silences with groans.
Mango. "Nothing better than eating a piece of." He and she
were characters from an earlier work discarded when it was
discovered. The rise and fall of the mind in the act of
bobbing, lure-like. Elsewhere I am writing a poem about
Abbey Lincoln. ". . . images understood to be vehicles of
analogical revelation occurring in a flash." Like an Edsel
that bursts into flames in your driveway one night during
dinner when men fail to call things by their right names.
Higher the Handicapped. It is a mirror which, when held to
a mirror, persists in showing some dumb lamp. Essay on the
Inappropriate. We allowed ourselves to be explained; Oh, be
my moving object in the designated light. "Persephone" was
not aligned with "shaken." I am the object of this
sentence. This one is yours. Brutal compliments met each
succeeding performance, nasty, brutish and short.
Isoglosses for gunnysacks. Multitudes of Maltans. Your
items may have shifted during the flight. He tries to
remember his first watch. Sighs diminish in relation to
distance. There's weather in Dallas. No one to drive, the
car, he said . . . Juanita was arrested on the threshold by
what she saw. Valery's diminished alphabet, missing its
rarest letters. The cowboy who rode a dead. Everyday I
receive letters from numerous lawyers. It pleases me to be
able to provide suitable employment for so many. The
President's lawyer writes to tell me that symbolism is
important. The afternoon Michel DeGuy spent in Annapolis,
ring dust, was the same day I'd driven with my brother up to
my brother-in-law's place on the water after a long night at
work. The two of them went sailing while I went into town
for beer and pizza and discovered the annual clam festival
in full swing. The crowd around the pier was too thick, so
I ducked quickly into a near-by bar, nearly bowling DeGuy
over in the process, and ordered two dozen. They were
served in a cup that appeared to have been saved from a trip
to some local short-order restaurant, and hanging over the
cup's lip were bristling what I took to be tails. I had
never seen clams in this state before. I had first eaten
them in New York, where they'd been served cleaned, steamed
and buttered by the dozen. I soon found that these tail-
like objects were ideal for grasping between my finger and
its opposed thumb, and made short work of my order. DeGuy
was still on the street when I left. Back at my brother-in-
law's, we ate two large pepperonis with the works and drank
a case of beer before starting back to D.C., where I was
soon due back on the job. From all of this DeGuy derived a
lovely poem in prose, and I a stomach ache. This is the
true story of my stomach ache. About half-way through the
darkness I had to ask my brother to pull over to the
shoulder so that I could lurch out of the car and over the
guard-rail. Categories for experience coding. As I heaved
into the grass I recalled with some delectation the
alphabets of Elmslie and Silliman. Where the "B" sucks,
there suck I. Valenzuela's alphabet concluded unexpectedly
in the fourth month with dysentery. Feeling somewhat
revived, I proceeded to the Africa of Abish. Rising,
refreshed, I stumbled back to the throughway through the
stubble.
ROUTE B
Barney Miller
Barney Fife
Barney Rubble
ROUTE A
Al's Automatic Transmission Specialists
Al's Cleaners
Al's Coin-Op Laundry
Al's Commercial Air Conditioning & Refrigeration Service
Al's Denture Lab
Al's Drugs
Al's Electronics
Al's Family Shoes
Al's Fiberglass Repairs
Al's Liquor Supermarket
Al's Lock Service
Al's Magic Shop
Al's Motors
Al's Roofing Supply
Al's Shoe Repair
Al's Sub-Preme (Now Closed)
Al's Tire Company
Al's Tri Star Body Shop
Al's Transit Stop
Al's Tree Service
Al's Trucking Service
Al's Underdog Roofing
Al's Works
I am a man of parts.
Al-Saad Fahad
A Salaam Aleikum
The Blue Ribbon Commission wrote a White Paper about the
Black Market in Greenbacks. Had this been a real test, you
would have been directed where to turn for emergency
instructions. So much begins to read like so much that has
been read before. Sexual Trauma by Author. Men by Title.
So much begins to be red. Ear Piercing Service. No
Entrance Will Set Off Alarm. So much begins. Sandwiches
for Sales. To read like so. Nothing was ever akimbo. Much
that has been reads "before." Hell enhances the flavor of
tea and yoghurt. "Untimely Considerations." Whole word
recognition. The Committee for the Preservation of Brittle
Books. In the bald room, women, horses, it was a piece of
window-glass that cost him his eyesight. Hamlet's father
wore his beaver up. The weakened patter of the established
magician. My mother was all in similes. The week-end
pattern of the ravished beautician. We all had shotguns on
our porches to guard against the Girl Scouts. Foreign
objects object. We painted their names on the sides of the
pheasants so the hunters wouldn't mistake them for cows. A
poison ring. A figure that is larger than life. Compulsory
dance. Compulsory figures. Independent views. The
constant bombardment of familiar ideas. Who doesn't know
the precise day upon which he or she walked out? So much
reads like or as before. We must reclaim the work of art we
have loaned you as it is scheduled for an exhibition. He
wondered aloud in English how to form the past participle of
the verb she. The possibility "that" exists in German. I
would be practicing the rankest form of self-deception here
were I not to confess, to myself, that I failed to see
through the most transparent of fabrications. Many are
chosen but few are called. You begin to worry about your
thoughts. Like so much that has been read. The last good
eclipse this century and it was too dark to see it. Cows
went to sleep invisibly. So much of the East is red. While
his mind was somewhere else he was unable to speak of the
unspeakable beauty of the clouds that eclipsed the grandeur
of the eclipse. Others, with the sun at their backs, stared
dully at the surface of the puddles of water left by the
storm as they waited for a break in the clouds through which
the sun would not shine. Pause for reflection. I once
believed that A = X(2b + y2), but I have since come to know
A much more intimately. A torn and rusted sign
reading "Steel
Plates Ahead."
That was the year that the homosexuals took a long, hard
look at themselves. There had been a sudden outbreak of
food-chain thefts in the subway. The mass nouns had been
gathered together into a field and gunned down. Today, two-
thirds of all Americans are not old enough to have memories
of World War II. As we age, fewer and fewer will be old
enough. I, for one, will never be old enough. Today, at
the Terminal Hotel, from which the bus company has recently
sought to distance itself, men are celebrating the fortieth
anniversary of D-Day by dressing as Nazis and allowing young
boys, mostly run-aways from places like Spokane and
Bethesda, to attack them. An idea approached Michael, but
he was busy writing a poem and so ignored it. A woman who
considered herself a thoughtful individual oozed and ozed
over his output. She was concerned that mini-mills might
militate against the survival of integrated mills. In
tonight's episode, Beverly attempts to recall her valiant
struggle against amnesia. Continuous casting was: (A) A
modern means of trout fishing, (B) The solution to the steel
industry's woes, or (C) The term in which lascivious
theatrical directors couched their activities. A number of
pages with nothing written upon them were summoned before
the king to explain themselves. Subsequently, when the king
himself was finally summoned he was outraged by the slight.
A British patrol tries to hold off thousands of Zulu
warriors. Tourists stranded on an island encounter a giant
alligator. A murderer wraps his victims in an odd, spider-
like web. It's a two star evening all over town. A man
makes a coast-to-coast trip clad in his underwear. A
flower-girl is forced by hypnotic suggestion to pose as a
princess. A woman returns from a concentration camp to her
family. A religiously inhibited girl invents the strip-
tease. A marine officer on trial refuses to enter a plea.
A newspaperman, covering the trial of a murderer, suddenly
changes his opinion of the case. A writer trying to gain
recognition in literary circles has an affair with a married
woman, then leaves her to find fame in Europe. A fighter is
made to believe he committed murder while drunk. A lunatic
plans to seal three strangers in a cave with a monster.
ROUTE C
C.C. Rider
In the Center for Therapeutic Writing I am possessed
suddenly by an anonymous sense I have had so often in the
past that I am proof-reading something that I have read
somewhere before. But then I've always been one of those
who is constantly looking at the end of the novel to see how
much I've yet to write. Hungry? Try a Pop-A-Cop. Chump,
change. The birds were on a winning streak that season.
His notoriety was a closely guarded secret. It was the
opposite of syntax that clogged his minstrel pads. The
number of sentences in English that begin and end with the
definite article "The." Grooming behavior. Grooming a
successor. Shots fired. Time served. I live in Complete
Disarray, a community some blocks to the North of Stanton
Park, from which three stories rise. They would rise to
greater heights were it not for the restrictions having to
do with the capital. (Since this method is being used by a
child, it can't surprise the driver.) What makes cats such
a successful adaptation? "Dust mocks Nietzsche." Trying to
find who it was first found how to render his fellows into
his debt. It is always a question of a meal. I am invited
to dinner. I abrupt on the scene. The table is laid. All
is preparedness. But first I must say "Grace." That said,
all else falls in order. Suddenly everyone in the room is
speaking in the same language through mouths full of tea.
In an earlier time, before we had all attained our
happiness, prodigious children had been rather more
commonplace. These thieves, captured and convicted, were
then sentenced to a period of years to be served in the
deafening din. The sentence, however, was pronounced in a
language unknown to them in order to ease their transition.
The mathematicians seated in the courtroom listened in
amazement as the simultaneous translation came over the
fuzzy sets clamped to their ears. The telephone works, but
I am without employment. Lovers of vitamins and roughage
rued the day that they were glued to their television sets.
Couples have generally already begun their first arguments
before they begin maudlin reflection upon the course of
their relationships. Credit comes in the night and fills
your house, spreading its wretchedness into the very
closets. An Armenian extremist group claims responsibility.
This has done nothing to allay the suspicion that things are
moving about inside the refrigerator of their own accord.
At night, the sound of the water seeking its own level wakes
me. Homicide finally recognized as a public health problem.
A weeping willow. A water melon. Though this was in the
later period of his illness, it has been widely assumed that
the repetition of certain structures during this period was
by design, and had not yet become the symptomatic tic so
well known to his followers. A book of imaginary images.
Water boy. Water cress. Water bird. Once the clarinet had
been contrived, could there have been any doubt that the
saxophone would follow? Accused of autobiography.
Background noise. Where do women spit? On the seventh day,
God created the rest. When they show horror films the air
conditioner works harder. Never call the three of clubs
wild. Eskimo irony.
Mother tongue
Orphan Embryo
Dry Wall Waitress
Hubcap Heaven
Foam Computer Parking
The experience of voice.
He had never been one to hold a goat. She had never been
one to carry a great deal of conversation about with her, so
these occasional bursts of volubility were surprising even
to her closest friends. And the "juggernaut," as the
British chose to spell it, is not actually the cart itself,
but the Lord of the World who rides it. Like calling the
cart before the horse. No rest for the restless. Do
insertion. "They both wear one glove for no apparent
reason." Carrying togetherness too far. Writing in the
sack. How many novels denied us by loving? Had an image of
Providence, Rhode Island, as a town in which everybody was
writing all the time. A rage of responses from indifference
to difference. This is the beginning. Residually oral
people engage in frequent changes of ink color to confuse
the rest of us about the actual dates of composition. She
was easily able to accommodate his changed circumference.
It reminded her of something she had read vaguely before.
As the line of sun light moved down the mountain from the
tree line, the cows were mowed down like flies. Now that
the guest workers legislation has been enacted, we may
expect an abrupt influx of foreign influence. There was no
more than the length of a sentence between them, and yet
they found it impossible to make contact. Their lips
continued to flap in the basest similitude of a kiss. It
was not that she actually knew how to do it any better.
Exert. Excerpt. Exergue. Except that a man have love
before Mrs. Williams comes down the stairs. Accept the fact
of neon lights on over the undertaker's. Foreign influenza.
Fear that our science will tell us how the universe began
before our science will tell us how we began to tell. 98%
of all liver cancer victims die from their disease. 2% die
from somebody else's disease. Crestfallen, she rose from
her bed of roses. Motor heads in the life modelling class.
Thaw and resolve itself into adieu. Undress code. Attitude
sickness. He gave her a key to his apartment, after which
she moved in and changed the locks. Summer students in
shorts. Living affluently for eight days, then losing
weight for three weeks. I wished that I might have come
upon her in various parts of the city. Virginity should be
savored in solitude, or it should be shared and printed
locally on a dot matrix device. Have I made mention of the
cow magnets yet? Of course.
ROUTE H
Horse
Cowed magnates. Magenta. In a time without tumult "he
answered many advertisements, that he might receive mail
daily." Just as I had always read with a pin in my hand, I
always wrote with a book clutched in my right hand. Magna
Carta. Great letters I've been inscribing lately. Swale's
collapse. Remarks aren't literature, but then what is
anymore? A lengthy prose work conceived of as no more than
a particularly apt name for a western trained horse. These
figures do not adequately reflect the potential for growth
of the issue. As the elevator rose, I looked at the nine
discrete reflections of myself that indicated the passing
floors. Should a picnic finally occur in English. Food
preparation surfaces. Flood prevention measures. A rash of
violence, followed by billion dollar babies. Fraternity at
the folk festival. Occult following. Voice over. He
carried all the records in his head. He read much like
something I had read before. Thousands of near-sighted
Americans had this surgery. Jesse Jackson and the Jews did
not. In view of the gravity of the situation, she unmanned
him. A suspicion that borders on wisteria. The handy man.
The only way to get people to use your middle name is to
become an assassin. I knew he had a temper, but I never
thought he'd go that far with it. He was good at preparing
bodies, but he didn't have what you need for the people end
of the business. All his life he'd wanted to be a serial
murderer, but he couldn't afford a car. After an afternoon
spent attempting to explain circular irrigation to a
navigator from the coast, history enters the room at an
alarming rate. Heroic measures. Who knows mosquitoes? I
don't want to be kept alive by heroic couplets. Menu
driven. The way things tend to grow sticky when left alone
for long periods. Places where you actually do things like
that. Wind surfers complaining of hydrilla around the
marina. Soon it will be as bad as in the clogged cove. I
finally bought a computer to use at home, but I've never
plugged it in. This is related to the tendency I have to
continue reading as a means to avoid writing. Wood that it
were. I paid for it with my credit card, and now I get mail
everyday. Otherwise.
Knife
Candlestick
Wrench
Pistol
Rope
Shot Gun!
After having corrected ten more of the most remarkable days
of our vacation, Michel Butor locked himself in a corner of
our bookcase. Heidegger imagined reading Marco Polo's
Description of the World. Having at last attained an age at
which I've begun to forget my early reading, I have begun to
rewrite. Document builder. Hot print. Volume functions.
Nanoseconds. Sloppy nanoseconds. There was a sink in that
kitchen. A check-up and a check. Will the sex and steam
win out over the sweat? At this point an air message will
be received. At least in Nebraska I wasn't subjected to the
truly ridiculous sight of rain pelting the ocean surface. I
seem to recall having made use of this same figure in some
other context: Dolphins breaking water off Virginia Beach.
"Daddy, look! It's sharks!" Old man dragging an inflatable
raft across the sand by a rope handle, the white underside
of his belly protected by the burnt upper half. Cell days.
He set himself the task on each of the fifty-five days which
he had been led to believe were left to him of memorizing
the names of all things which passed before him during the
day-light hours. As no paper was permitted him, he relied
entirely upon certain mnemonic devices to accomplish this.
At the end of these days he fully expected to expire, taking
his newly acquired glossary along with him, leaving no one
who so much as knew of his strange endeavour. A large and
untimely vice.
Discretionary income.
Thousands of documents taken from the Cairo gazebo.
A rental moped.
A mobile.
Children tormenting a scribblemock.
Read only memory.
A man kiting a loan.
An empanada.
Whole word recognition.
The thing itself.
A faulty swimming pool drain sucking the intestines from an
unobserved child.
Lifeguards calling in the rafters.
Police officers in shorts riding scooters, their stomachs
completely enveloping their guns.
No beggars anywhere despite the free sun.
Orphan drugs.
"I shall attempt to give an account of myself as if."
A ruined bow on display, behind it what we took at first to
be cannon, but which proved to be sort of an engine.
Cytoplasm.
A noise to attract the attention of cats.
In what way vegetation is accomplished.
A stick figure in the sand with a balloon above its head.
Mosquitoes hungrily beating at glass doors.
A seventeen-year old boy boxing shadows on the beach.
A what walking with a way of being.
The repetitive storks off again for Africa.
A sea soiled list of all English words that have never been
used in poetry.
Curtain lines heard at dusk from the hotel.
Show jumping.
Arms and hammers.
An elderly woman found murdered in her bungalow.
Broadcast journalists fanning out to ask all of us how we
feel.
An unusually quiet man standing under the pier looking up at
the fishermen.
At a break in the waves of Rachmaninov, soothing rock from
the room next door.
Fleets of floating paper cups.
Yachts pricking the horizon.
An odor of sweat off the ocean.
A group of Chicago gangsters vacationing in disguise.
The expression, "the actual."
Non-existence occurring without being called upon.
An actual dollar.
A virtual dollar.
A case quarter.
Something representing itself.
Lamentations in the sand.
Names coupling in the waves.
Tender minds at the arcade.
Surrendering his initial approach.
A strong service.
A weak return.
A silver service.
"Here, too, the sober Englishman's misreading of history
appears quite clearly." His words, however, due to the
failings of the new time base corrector, arrived too late to
illuminate the situation. "Why had children suddenly
occurred to her?" If there's anything at all that you've
forgotten you must tell us at once. He had derived a
remarkable machine which, by means of holography and
electrodes, gave to masochists all of their most favored
sensations, such as that of having their teeth smashed in by
a beautiful brunette wearing a garter belt and brandishing a
baseball bat, without having to suffer any irreparable
damage. A snake in the glass. Suspicious customs agents
opened the "H" shaped, transparent sculpture and found that
the white substance sealed inside the plastic was indeed
heroin, or, as it is known in the street, "horse."
ROUTE R
Roast
The poet, advancing upon the podium, tried to collect his
thoughts. His friends were all in attendance. Some of the
earlier singers hadn't had microphones, and so were forced
to drink if they were to be heard. This is a precise
reproduction of a page previously written. Who can that
knock being at my door? A timing problem in one of the
computers caused a delay in the liftoff. We performed well
in the relays. The microwave repeater was part of the
redundant system. Cherry mole: no discernable food value.
On the dais he was collecting his faculties. All day long I
am encouraged to improve the quality of my life by handing
my money over to rich people for their use. Everyone has a
secret desire to be a store. Fireman's carry. Fireman's
ball. Filled with egrets, his life no longer seemed his
own. He was either earlier divorced or later. In the house
of eleven sables, Austin's baptized penguins experienced a
lapse of faith. I come into your dream business asking how
a contraction is to be performed. Rothko's floating
rectangles reproduce heavily, coupling in the corners of the
room. Why are there no photographs of me taken between the
years 1972 and 1979? She was secretly working as a
secretary. What's that door doing over there? I wish you
wouldn't keep asking me the same questions over and over
again. Babies from Egypt. They kept talking without
interruption. Their argument went on interminably. We must
be frank. Their discussion continued incessantly. The
Indians designed their roads so that they did, in fact,
vanish precisely at the vanishing point. Any car abandoned
on the road at the front of your house, having been reported
to the duly constituted authorities, becomes your property
if unclaimed, after which you are responsible for towing it
away yourself. The amount of redundancy in common speech
averages approximately fifty percent. Tuesday night I love
dead roses. This means that we can eliminate half of all
language and still be understood. Big medicine. The only
man left alive who knew why white women. What we look like
when we need sleep. A poisoned woman in black sitting
surrounded by friends and family in Notorious. A key. A
bottle of sand. When I type this it will read like so much
typology. Seven Steps from Heaven. Ninety-six Tears. The
men wore veils. Or, in my handwriting, a gold chain. You
can do this by doing this. A pen in my side. A thorn in
the hand is worth two in the bush. A hand in the bush is an
excitement. Spontaneous introjections. I could have
glanced all night. In mediations res. Lean Lenin's
destructive poetics. Pyrite tunes. They also wait who only
stand and serve. He was enrolled in the Humanities pogrom
at the university. Rumblings from the theory room in the
basement. Traffic was backed up for miles in all directions
due to a demonstration being mounted by the former Future
Farmers of America. Land-locked salmon under smoked glass.
Little played for violin alone. His undesirable underside
was usually obscured by his undersized good side. The
lizard dome. Terra Turf. One particularly strikes the mind
dated October 22, 1950. What is a needless word. We could
use a fairly simple poem. The parent plays no other role
than bringing in the toy. She faced a moment of indecision
trying to select one of the small Hungarians for her
collection. He sometimes felt oddly that he would be doing
the same things even if he were not writing about them.
This feeling became acute on the day that he ate Chinese.
Bound association. National Podiatrists' Association. I
started out to write a short, fat poem, born of praxis, bone
of contention, as Tina had excised A to L, at this point I
should draw the reader's attention too. The notion of
compensation deserves an analysis to itself, and will form
the object of a third paragraph. One of the financial kings
of the nineteenth century arrives and is immediately
compounded. Subject Verb Object. The anodyne, "elli," on
the other hand, comes to the surface in Botticelli. He
wants none of this child. Substantive Adjective Verb.
Josephine was upgraded to a hurricane in the perpetual
present tense of poor poetry. The dream book that wouldn't
give you a number. The birthday book that promised you an
uneventful life. What had they had in common beyond being
bound.
Time to go to work.
Time to get up.
Time enough.
When faggots were firebrands firewood was free. Feyerabend.
So much writing reads. Illegal width. Press cancel. Call
field service representative. Illegal use of reserve word.
He was followed out by a number. "What do you think is the
use to you in looking at words along these lines?"
Call waiting.
Call forwarding.
Call home.
Hold my calls.
An incredible concentration of poets in a town whose largest
industry is the manufacture of costume jewelry. How sky
stand, man? Rights won't be read unless arrested and
questioned. He held a number of strong opinions which had
been exercising in a spa for a number of months in hopes of
exceeding his grasp. Jews for Jesse. As the lesser vowel
shift robbed it of significance. Skeltonics in his closet.
Films without aliens in them reeled through the night. All
the furor was caused by the expectant mothers arguing in the
foyer. He calculated the time it would take to reckon the
number of minutes involved in arriving at a final figure
which would accurately represent the period remaining to
him. Baby Lenin buttons. The inferior distance. The Drug
Czar was out to use the Drug Kingpins to get at the Drug
Lords, but their financial wizards, in cooperation with the
gnomes of Zurich, used flocks of legal eagles and
mouthpieces to get them off the hook. Certain breasts.
Mother fog, sister spoon. Frog in your cleavage. Anything
for money. Anything but love. Cat hairs accumulated on the
stove burst into flames before dinner. Restrained
restaurants. It was not unlike a nonentity. Nearly three
million peasants were killed in Cambodia during the Pol Pot
regime. Many of them are now living in refugee camps in
Thailand. We had a Swedish government when I was a child.
After five weeks in the Behavioral Adjustment Unit I'd begun
to feel like my old self again. I was never able to sleep
in beds other than my own, but then that's why I was invited
in the first place. Homes looked like houseboats. Metal
detractors for family fun. Cleanliness is rectangular.
Foundations of stress management.
Theories of Elasticity.
Pre-Stressed Construction Planning.
A Course of Action.
Halfway across the courtyard she called my attention to the
bosom which she held in her hands away from her dark dress.
The pale heir of the goddess. This is vivisection. This is
not. Once he'd gotten her breasts into the can he shelved
it for several years, hoping the distributors would come
begging for the chance to show the pitiful thing. Brainiac
and his earth shattering scheme. My father waking from the
Germans chasing him home from The Bulge. Guileless in Gaza.
What happened at Fall River. Nature is made possible by
public television stations and the American Gas Industry.
So easy to make children like to do it themselves. After
several years of study the task force recommended the
creation of a strike force. Spent Christmas day in front of
a television set grading finals. My uncle was recently
named Deputy Assistant for Innovation, a title which he
immediately changed. Different people have different kinds
of coughs. Alain R. LeGume, inventor of the soft bicycle,
was recently, and unanimously, elected to the presidency of
the International Association of Presidents of Short Lived
Organizations. She liked to spend ours in front of the
mirror. We had always thought that our language was
infinite until.
ROUTE U
Rub
Not seen since page one? "There's the erase." He broke his
collar-bone swimming with an abandoned baby. A pal; an ode.
A Mr. and Mrs. Van Winkle died in their sleep last night in
a four alarm blaze which destroyed their home. Fire
officials conjecture that the fire may have resulted from
Mr. Van Winkle's habit of smoking in bed. The bowling team
which Mr. Van Winkle captained for a number of years is
sponsoring a charitable fund in his memory. Jeff's wife
said he didn't come because he doesn't like culture. We
were to come to the costume party dressed as someone who
died needlessly, or as someone who should have. All those
years living alone and unknown in the ghetto I had my dues
and was prepared to pay them; saved them up; but nobody ever
came to collect. It was the third time that week he'd met
someone who was named for a famous salad dressing. These
are the ties that try wive's souls. To make room for the
antepoetic. We've never had a suicide at our sunrise
service. Jack was afraid that in his drunken state the
previous evening he might have created a scene. Jack was an
antiques dealer operating out of Economy, Indiana. The
scene he created is on permanent display at the museum of
short lived phenomena on Fairchance Road, just off Cheat
Lake. His memory lapse of earlier that morning was quickly
forgotten in the afternoon's rush. He worked assiduously in
all his essays to make his intentions absolutely queer.
Panty Waste. It was only a phrase that he was going
through. Household range, Home Home on the. Donated
organs. Leslie speakers.
Beneath the Planet of the Underlings.
____________________________________________________________
Two novels in a row now I've read with scenes of children
hanging one another. When I was a kid we used clotheslines.
A fortuitous mob scene intervenes. Velcro in fat corners
makes the butter easier to walk across. Arms weigh at
harm's length. Foolish blue facts stir in fat air.
Downtime downtown. We had all been invited to a braille
party, but the invitations arrived too late. Hundreds of
people gathered to watch as they dined. The heath is
totally flat and bleak, and I have miles to go before I
peak. Sin's mittens. Last week my sister gave birth, thus
adding a member to the set of things about which poems may
be written. I tell all the women I date that I've never
understood why any of the couples I've known were together.
None of the couples I've known has ever met any of the women
I've dated. This may be what keeps them together. Group
portrait of a man painting himself out of a corner. Two
pedestrians were struck by a resemblance while crossing the
intersection of 21st & K Streets early today. Officials
regret that both are recovering in George Washington
University's burn unit. The same idea was crossing the
street the other way. A steak and cheese with eerie thing
to go. Nerd gas. Noel was ranting one of the apartments in
the castle with the aim of bringing some order to the papers
there. Let's listen to the corner. Growing up ethnic
journals. A survey of porthole painters. Ancient Age:
Don't Settle for Anything Less. Flattered by gravity when
breathing occurs. Bamboo shoots. The half-life of a near
beer. The Tennessee self-concept scale. He was strung out
on all leather uppers and hadn't slept in a week. This
toaster has a brain. If you try to get to bear reality.
The Cutlips Motor Inn. Whole life, or term? An occasional
outburst of narrative. Question catfish. "When she got
over things she would not mind about the years." What was
left of her thighs. Pundit among the pandas. Once vowed
never to be taken alive. A walled city which when neared
was without. Why only women are allowed to be lesbians in
Lebanon. The body exhumed in a cemetery in Sao Paolo. Two
zany plumbers and a female cabbie attend a high-society get-
together, but no one knows they weren't on the guest list.
The kids stir up excitement when they decide to take over
and establish their authority. Two unscrupulous hunters
steal jungle animals. When her weight problem begins to
affect her marriage, a housewife goes to a fat farm to shed
pounds, only to learn that her second husband has been
unfaithful in her absence. Sunday, Monday. A sailor
searches frantically for a young woman he fell in love with
during a chance meeting while he was on an eight hour leave.
A 17-year-old becomes the first female lifeguard on a
Southern California beach. Police paralyze the underworld
as they search Dusseldorf for a psychotic child murderer. A
bigoted Southern girl is forced by circumstances to hide out
with a Northern black man. A young working girl experiments
freely with romantic encounters. Two hours. Three stars.
A narrative structure manifests itself during the credits.
To counter a libel suit, a newspaper editor plans to frame a
society figure. The legendary comedian's mistress recalls
their problem-filled relationship. In 2053, an underwater
colony named Pacifica faces destruction from an approaching
comet. After having a lot of time to plan, an escaped
killer sets out to murder those responsible for his
conviction. A cowboy in Montana leaves the hills, joins a
rodeo group, and finds fame and fortune. Two people, each
unhappily married to others, meet and rescue each other from
the brink of desperation. Tuesday. Music and mayhem mark
the opening of a new show. A village by the sea is affected
by the rescue of a young girl from the water. An amateur
private detective is determined to find the murderer of a
popular songwriter. A rodeo star is forced to re-evaluate
his life following a tragic accident that claims his career
and his happy marriage. A young nurse in a British hospital
makes a fatal mistake for which her sister takes the blame.
An American woman has a tragic affair with a happy-go-lucky
crook. Three sailors experience love and adventure. Top
spies and bathing beauties discover a plot to steal an egg
salad recipe. An ex-con finds himself being followed by two
strange vans when he sets out to recover a cache of loot
concealed by his former partner. This is the true story of
the only choice for Universally Praised Hyper-Insulated
Windows. Wednesday. Thursday I hate what time has done to
narrative. A band leader manages to entangle himself with
race cars. A daring space hero tries to prevent the dreaded
Purple Death Plague from reaching earth. A childless couple
arranges for a free-spirited young woman to bear them a
child. The Japanese plot to enslave the world is
dramatized. A lovely little girl develops a deep affection
for a stray dog. Friday. A lawyer refuses to admit that an
alcoholic ex-con is his brother, but he later risks his
reputation in order to help him. A man elopes with his best
friend's wife. While staying at a fashionable German hotel,
a woman finds herself the object of the obsessive attention
of a stranger. A 14-year-old mathematician and a 19-year-
old coed who is a volleyball star become involved in an
unusual romance. A terminally ill girl receives two weeks
of pleasure as part of a publicity stunt. A lingerie
salesman faces a shortage of silk during the war. A mental
specialist's experiments on himself eventually cause his
destruction. Saturday. A rocket ship is hurriedly erected
in case earth is subjected to a meteorite shower. Two rival
gangs of motorcycle thugs tangle in a battle over a girl.
An American mining engineer faces a native uprising when a
ship he has promised them fails to materialize. A woman
from Tombstone is more than a match for a gunfighter. A
drop-out from a motorcycle riding gang joins a hippie
commune. A senator's daughter has a prizefighter kidnapped.
An insane hunter decides to hunt people rather than animals.
Earth's defense systems are put to the test during an
attack. And then again Sunday. Dinner with M. in
Georgetown.
Chicken cooked with potatoes and papers. Chicken cooked
with chick peas in medium spine sauce. Shrimp with nixed
vegetables. Skewered pork balls. Wanton noodles. Roasted
caff in ginger special sauce. Scripsy pork tripe. Slicked
king clam sauteed. Bruised pork over rice. Beef jerky with
sheds papaya.
ROUTE M
M Street
Battered wives following wartime Washington. It started as
rain. It was as right as two people being there for each
other. There is nothing that is nothing. Writing on the
left side of the drain. What I mean by this is that Miles
drove one of only two yellow Feraris in Southern California.
The monster from the last chapter reappears in the story
being told by a girl on the steps to my left to her fellow
nursing students. Confused, he changed the yoke and slipped
the joke. I saw the future and it wasn't so much. The
shoes burn. How isolated, like a fart, it is. Hundreds of
people were crowded onto the small square of the tarmac
covered by the camera so that they looked like hundreds of
people crowded onto the tarmac. The subdivine comedy.
Lassie fever. Do you want to send a massage to anyone in
Greece? An incomplete thought. The first leg of an
extended journey I made on my last legs. A partial shipment
from Hicksville, New York. An anacronymy. There are two
schools of thought on that hill just outside of town. The
least priest has handles more varied than any in all of
Altoona. Would the Zig Zag samples be safe if I left them
in the car overnight? Mention his collection of underwear
fragments? I was holding their bets on the eventual
discovery of another prime number. Each time she laundered
his blanket she cut a piece from it, till at length he
carried it as a kerchief. You surely will not expect me to
provide descriptions. Next week we'll have all kinds of
fruits and vegetables that you can't touch. I can not
recall having seven rooms in the dream. Experiment in
progress; Please do not water these plants. The portrait of
imbecility is incomplete. My schedule did not seem too bad,
if you discounted the cursive. Each year he would ask for a
kaleidoscope, but he was never given one. The police spent
three weeks looking for the murderer named ALF who had
scrawled his name in the butcher's blood across the shop
wall before they received the letter from the Animal
Liberation Front. "Everything sounds like a line these
days." ROTC on the lawn at dawn. A plant was brought in to
hide the oriental screen which I had used to cover my
nakedness. Wait for light, then fly off handle. Bargain
hunters' haven. Ones more way. The poet experienced a
panic attack whenever he thought that he might be the
subject of a critical mugging. There were far fewer
correcionsin this route, the route not taken. Attendance
at the phobic lecture was poor as so few were afraid to come
to that neighborhood at night. All my children will be back
in a minute. All my children hair delights. Caution: buck
stop ahead. Mainly muslin. Over a billion people can't do
one simple thing; this. Tom spends much of each day laid
out in the sun in front of the log fence that surrounds the
dumpster. His associate, Rhett, is able to range over our
own yard due to the generous reach of his leash. Soon
enough it will be too cold to have variety.
ROUTE P
Pound's
Melt Away. Points well taken. Points need cleaning.
Listening to Braxton's through-composed pieces.
Participials and their guiding principles. Victoria falls.
A gathering of gerunds. A pride of proverbs breaking away.
My pronunciations of allusion and illusion are identical; my
cot and caught nearly indistinguishable. The longest
sentence ever spoken by an illiterate woman in New England
was surprisingly incomplete as recorded. What Whitman calls
the adhesive principle in his more erudite age. Why I never
got entirely used to being around White people. Children
were brought in from suburban school districts so that they
might see history being made. She teaches movement to
bilingual senior citizens. He hasn't been heard from in
many a chapter, but he has not been idle. Did we play
Marienbad last year? Early each Spring I thought it was
dead. Where all the cows were standing when we decided to
build fences around them. Though it wasn't my name that she
had pronounced, it was "me" that she meant. An oral history
of American writing. A moral history of American writing.
All right then, a molar history of American writing.
Written beneath a naked light bulbk. Every morning I take a
shower and make sure my children are depressed. Bad law.
All my children hair designs. Sullenly, all was calm.
"Nevertheless let us tenderly recall the unbelievable
naivety of social and socialist thinking." Objectivism came
to campus on parents' weekend. The lights were as small as
pinheads. It was customary in that country to wear lights
in one's hear. In pigs you learn something new every day.
Rise, and annoy the Lord.
ROUTE L
Litotes
Midships to Miles
Midst midsummer, midterm, midvictorian
Midway midweek
Midwest midwife
Midyear mien miff
Might mignonette migraine
Migrate, Mikado
Mikron (variant of Micron)
Mil milady
Milch mild mildew
Mildred milepost
(genitive Miles)
Not unlike a nonentity
ROUTE E
Em,
Auntie
an extremely small person who is otherwise normally
proportioned. Any of the various gnatlike flies of the
family Chironomidae, found worldwide; or any small person.
Often a term of endearment for a woman with some other name.
Lucy and Ethel at the nude beach. "My God, you've been
writing down everything I've said," she said, then took my
hand and clasped it to her bare breast, making it the more
difficult. This was at the ninth annual Skeletal Symposium
in Sun Valley, Idaho. The first bus had no poetry so I
waited for the next, a kneeling bus with a Niedecker. After
several days of sun and temperatures in the seventies,
winter is found lying on our doorstep with a befuddled look.
There's another sentence I'd nearly forgotten. Why so many
American poets write like Wittgenstein, or Gertrude. At the
center of the town square they had constructed a small
circle in the shape of the letter "E." The waters of the
Cheat River, swollen by storm, swept away entire passages of
ROUTE T. All the information pylons on campus had been
cloaked in khaki the week of my father's return from Egypt.
His slides were full of ellipses. Everyone in the
photograph drank 7UP, just as they had in Ecuador. Thad
increased the volume at this point so that I couldn't hear
myself up the ante. It produced an interesting effect, much
like humming into a cement mixer. How might I gesture to
explain to some other what I mean when I write the word,
"here"? I wanted to make love to her, but she was in the
next room balancing her books by lizard light. "Tut, tut,
Em! Don't talk so gloomily. Do you know of any one, now,
who has been hired to put me to death?" said he smiling. No
one was more elated by this announcement than our friend
Kinch, who had, in fact, grown quite ashy in his complexion
from confinement and grief, and was now thrown by this
intelligence into the highest possible spirits. "Let me
take your coat; and, Eph, see you to that trunk," said Mr.
Gairie. "I'm going north, because I wish to emancipate and
educate my children--you know I can't do it here." "Oh,
this will explain," archly rejoined Esther, as she held up
to view one of the tiny lace trimmed frocks that she was
making in anticipation of the event that has been previously
hinted. She could not restrain the tears as she dressed
little Em, whose eyes were large with astonishment at being
sent home from school at so early an hour.
ROUTE D
Damnation
Several of us had gotten together at David's house, as he
was entertaining an idea.
"I have known instances where parties have gone on for years
and years undetected; but some untoward circumstance brings
them out at last, and down they fall forever."
The pile of dirt is dirty.
"And what is to become of little Em?--she surely won't
remain alone with him?"
Slow, slow commotion
Fire has displaced eight of the complex residents.
"This animal has seduced me, I think," she said.
The deaf man turned a deaf ear to her pleadings.
December 1995