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P O T E P O E T Z I N E O N E
an on-line publication of Potes & Poets Press, Inc.
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A POEM BY ANDREW LEVY
Elephant Surveillance To Thought
Molars are born into them under consideration of too many
options to separate them into homogenous groups of people.
If she's reading Nietzsche, I'm reading Stephen King.
Who cares whether or not the people who do not read
don't know how to spell. The highest levels of the state
have underminded the central authority. The central
authority of the body begins to take its residence in low
intensity hallways with a wide variety of grassroots.
Peasants may refuse to produce to shoot them. Or, better
yet, export them to another democracy. Western civilization
needs only to empty its self-nature to the extent that it
wishes, at which point dogs react to strangers like foolish
men. Nevertheless, the people who approach and depart
remind the rest of the civic body that it had better
recognize this universe can also lead to death, and so on
in backward sequence. Several possibilities converge
in sense of direction one hardly feels -- cosmopolitan
saturation with a personal guide is harmonious impunity
against misfortune. Over the top enthusiasts consider
such travel like a pram in the snow, and gather quotes
from their favorite authors to prove it. It's natural,
some argue, that these new organizations of control
escape their own logic merely to become spines in a
spiritual prose. Cynicism of this kind, that Paul McCartney
tendency, like the novel of ideas, one may link and
cooperate with to drive tourists into compassion with
syntax unlocked and rolling over the ice. In the winter,
it's often best to narrow one's own efforts. Further,
any idiot can call it cold, but those who refuse to lie
down in the sun of corn will scorn those who walk on.
Perusing such literatures is not under anyone's wing.
That carcass of talk vs. walk emerged out of quite ex-
plicit rejections of subsequent attempts to remedy
the supermaternal as it was felt to sleep too late in
the day. Hey, Mom... wake up, for christ's sake!
Andrew is running in the field, etc., to look up the
home addresses of the dead. You've got to stop him!
The future is suffering and we're caught smack dab
in the widesprread. Since the poem and the world of
things seem to swim at the contact of acid, you will
slide between my fingers, starting from this curve,
like no other human construction. Until that day,
the external world, a plague of darkness, or mistaken
identity (the audience's evening) had a wonderful
time. Ejaculation gets rid of that tension, but it doesn't
necessarily follow or generate more clouds in my mind.
In fact, quote the kind of people who never think
twice and you'll have a pretty accurate idea of what
this landscape looks like. Still numb from that
contemplation look over your shoulder and see what's
going to disappear now. "Poetry isn't beauty, it's
inquiry." The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator
sniff the terror permanently fixed in the bitch's anus.
I'm not the only one who smelled these things. To be
stuck (in a rut) of literary tradition is both important
and amusing. The need to dominate and control it,
on the other hand, is not. The ideal place for the joining
and fusing of these solutions is again stupidity and
knowing how to profit by it. Maybe that is the most
successful aspect of capitalism. To get the entirely
expected out of each one. Successful hostages
and hostage taking. Microsoft vs. whoever likes it.
Freedom has lost its glamour, its time for cyberspace
to be acknowledged as the triumph of 'readings'.
The suggestiveness of software buying and selling
confines one's activity to the aphorism of terminal
authority. The form of the sentence is transience,
however, instead of going under (as it once did), it
now is taken out of circulation. In this scenario to see
is to see verbal materials themselves as so much
poopoo. In fact, I'd go farther and call seeing a dewey
decimal clogged with swine shit. What are we going
to do with all that bacterial matter? Swim in it?
The waters of our stinking rivers are fouled beyond
belief, the shit makes it so. Its predication is not
an adjunct root of Heidegger's archaicism. Strenuous
loss of blood a philosophy's forgetfulness duplicates
no world worth the ambiguity of Being. Others
not yet ripe for freedom hold on to something,
usually the poopoo alluded to above, for much
too long -- this is unsuccessful transmission. The
elephant remembers and "cannot act otherwise
than," hence I propose the surveillance of thought
via the model of the elephant as the political conclusion
to ivory exportation as 'the' most promising solution
to Kant's rigorism. One body, under God. Atlas
in an ocean of definitions resembling affirmation.
The body says, enough's enough. Give that
elephant a break. In this scenario now is taken
out of verbal circulation. In its stead, strangers
like foolish democracy consider misfortune
hostage to their own illogic. The dewey decimals,
in fact, make loss of blood an adjunct root
ripe for reform. The shifting terrain continues to
shift nostalgia of a more horizontal intelligence.
A homeophatic concoction, Arnica, both orally
and as a gel, is very good for muscle trauma,
bruising, swelling. In the dream his parents home
rested upon a foundation of water, or the entire first
floor was water at the same level inside as that
of the pond or lake the house was built next to.
And all of the homes built around the lake were
constructed the same way, so everyone
shared the same body of water, and took care
to keep the filters clean and the mind clear.
POEMS BY DAN RAPHAEL....
era forgot
what jumps what jumps on
history on a cage, of, as if in a page, why those young lads,
history keeps penetrating, echoing, drums inside drums inside
a hole for sound and air, meat clock wakes and sleeps
ready to break
as if tempting the river
as if the fish wont act with one mind-- that's their faith
not a long skirt but a freight train, like dead mammals clipped to each
others tails
wanting to see, to be seen, of the scene
to get the light in the interesting places and be able to see
near enough to smell, not too near to fall in, to drop the batteries
rubbing opposite parts together,
even if three of me were in a large room
as if im being spoken by
a flute complex with memories and hang-ups-- i blow in
and dont know what will come out from where
like a random neighborhood of identical housesfront
with no way to get under
a continuum of dissonance, diversion, displacement or dangerous
to add a bite
vine aching for the moon
sample the soil with millions of snifters
an elixir one pours on the scalp shy fumes
++++++++++++
city gathers in the drain
drops of positive what
say one word:
stamp it own it say it over til embeds your skin-mind like
a memory tattoo
gaining in density in nerve ends tied up with the questions/
ramifications
the way silk thread on a cavernous tongue; how parts inverted like a sock
on a whiskey glass
pops to split the dream like a dust of mirrors or microscopic tv sets--
where can the satellites be
like venereal diseases like time release anomalies falling thru an
arena-sized colander--
the steam of my screams white bathrobe fur
like duct tape on my mouth; like gasoline soaked thistles in my nose
what will fall away
dried cow flop revealing hallucinations
milk with tiny cities inside
as if almost every house in the subdivision was hit with a large
hammer,
each house as big as one pore of my skin, a bowl of cereal with bodies
instead of cornflakes,
was somebody's dog, somebody's accidental goldfish
just showed up in the washing machine
clanked like balsa wood armor hitting the brakes when the horse imploded
as if he'd never been there, as if cars had never been invented
but dropped off plants that parasitized abdominal tenements
some would wear as slippers or tucked under
pillows of former lovers
to embroider their dreams with unraveled black silk, mirrors constricted
with black leather
i unskin through the shards where my eyes have popped their
cathodes with greater bandwidth
like tommy dorsey flattened to half an acre
from trombone to syringe,
from campaign button to private jet with naked stewards
my origami jellyfish keeps adding strings to the air:
are they fuses or fortunes, encoded gene strips
or floss about to give birth to fishing line
so effectively severing or seining together like a cheese sandwich
pulled apart in an hour
or plywood sprouting into layers of shale raise half a state a 1/4
mile closer to the calcified sky
where stars lay incandescent eggs in the shadowy seams of skin
our universe is some wrinkle or illuminated shoud of forgotten dancesteps
spinning to contain all cuisines with dull stapes of elements randomly
abandoned
coz when the menus too heavy to lift,
when the kitchens big as a mall we either get lost or over full
and seek the vomitoriums of conscientious recycling
still need someone to re build restore rear up and say those
uncopyrighted words
of a face beaming in love, of hormonal crocuses giving winter a
180 of cacophonous stimuli
where else would we go and why
its april and something green is hemorrhaging in my fingertip, my
teeth are white as flowers
telling the villages to cover their eyes with protein rich
leaves, leaves theyve never seen before
but remember the taste, remember falling asleep and meeting the earth in a
womans body,
meeting a man as bumpy as europe, the dog lifts its leg and shows
us mississippi & the nile entwined like dna to delta the world, make
it more interface and less state,
the vein powering my thigh feeding hundreds of unclassified species:
i see them coming to work, asking for my ID,
unaware of how their posture is the keyhole to more light, more distance
that i can comprehend
between my plate and mouth, a gargantuan christmas tree draped with orange
cities
pierced with cloves and allspice we hurl into the hovering paraclete
reminds us of the work week utility bills the car who wont start
without clean underwear
leaves evidence on the street, not territorial but cumulative
like buying a lottery ticket with fervid presence with a commitment to
the pearl disguised what
as irritation creates value, as rarity becomes a sinkhole a self directing
hook a high pitched wail
no one else can hear anymore-- the strength is in the pitch as throwing a
baseball at 90 mph destroys an arms evolving to the robotic linking mind
against innate judgment and nerve tendons replaced with superconducting
fiber-optics
flowers explode in light the sun disguises so full one
more too many
shoulder to shoulder mooing in the visual clamor til restraint becomes a
caress,
sheets like mud, like a chrysalis holding me til i evolve
to take dreams with me as my room loses its walls & furniture
as the breakfast sky suddenly 10 pm
each step i take approximates a new body hoping what it keeps from
these billion trades
can lead back into airs soothing hallways, places too salient
for gravity to sway
++++++++
"EARTH FIRST.
WE'LL LOG THE OTHER PLANETS LATER"
(bumperticker)
a corrugated line knits this tight diffuse sweater
thru the asphalt, the latex, the momentum of routine
canalized like sugar, cannibalizing this ghost zoo of images
melting in the waste-stream of self-desiccating tear ducts
i can't imagine that chunky, that prolific in color,
intense organic value
an economy too diverse to exploit without killing
designer body germs fine-tune our spasms like optic cables
flossing the inner kidney's endocrine hosanna,
running ridge-tops at 10 miles per hour for days
with the green leaves thru every orifice
so the sun won't set the moon forever in my pineal
i'm 6-legged 8-armed frisbee pollen
germinating between a thousand unnamed species
to croon to set a fine table spew energy beyond our
needs and laws
since we're all family since we all speak separate languages
the way your eye is a tattoo of a dog
wearing a flame skirt and thermonuclear ear tag
jumps between the 19th and 20th vertebrae
ribs straining like the radiator on the 18th floor
with walls removed by acid vision dealing a realignment of dna
razor-wire
despite layers of pavement despite a lack of
conversation,
There's so much work unacknowledged in replacing knees with
stained glass
never wearing pants or leggings;
an environment for the numb; a church for those with several
bodies--
knock and you're at risk, ask
& your voice is no longer your own
we slowly strip search the earth:
fewer species are easier to count, easier to inventory
scanning dna's complex bar code, a treasure map encrypted in
alien physics
so we drill in the backyard on the moon
in long volcano teeth psychics show beneath wall street icon
morphing into textured phoenixes rise from the desert
to greenhouse this land with no official history;
preserving old structures as batteries to focus meat-time
as more bodies gather to tympanize the substrata,
to throw me onto a pavement of rain and possibilities,
floodtide of used condoms and unopened labelless cans
i pray my deepest instinct/luck to know
what won't react, what is safe enough to eat
safe enough to stick your mouth on the exhaust pipe of
"they say the best things in life are free. but you can give them to the
birds and bees"
POEMS BY KAROLINE WILECZEK
Bakery mirror
My oculist witness has turned to bread
A club of a loaf
What was that that brushed against the cheek--the side of my face?
Like the whisper in an ear pinched to a suspicious squeal
or was it a puffed up exhalation on it's way to a love canoe cruise?
The plastic scent, the fiberglass bottom bent in two over
a cavity disguised as a head.
In it's teeth the stale loaf...bitten only whole.
*****************************
Fossil
Propeller blades turning
and i can't see it fitting
in the space of your book rack
tucked neatly away
and categorized.
My octopus arm moving in
softly out toward you
to simply shake your hand
If your sense of touch is sharp
you would then feel
the fossils in my suckers
Sucking in water to move
faster than you thought
Arms too many to count.
******************************************
the implication of the blowfish
the blowfish stuck to the roof of my head.
sucking out my fear. there it is, blownfull loaded spines pricked OUT.
a hat.
eyes drawnshut like some old witches blinds, not wanting you near but signing
to read
in her window..... we walk past the house slowly.
a cool white skin pulled
enough for the stretch worm parallel.
the spines pricked OUT.
Lopped a blood pinch to my nose the blowfish flaked and i gave a big squeeze
in cascade the fish halved.
frozenwater, ice.
my lips parted to hear, my ears bent to word you
tumbling past my two arms downward scraping me
I shed the blowfish.
****************************************************
Goals to not dash and inadequate teaching fears
To pour sweat on foreheads
so it appears as though they are working
and not feeling entirely tense
I admit to spoil to the collecting of dust
your bin is full not half empy
(so empty it)
To produce juice a juice to drink
directly from the pores
and it may be, too foreign
To stand and not make reference
but be instead pointy and inserted
into sureness.
***********************************************
Uneasiness
A duct too small to crawl through
The esophagus rapidly closing and opening
ears the earthquake at length
centrifugal force denied repelled wheat stalks
Space open and expanding measurable only
with a tool that hates.
POEMS BY WILLIAM FULLER
Donkey Ride
What if I were dead
without an expression of concern
or had freely forsworn
the crude scheme, eyes blinking
unreflected, merely a taste
of the epiphenomenon--
the child setting his finger
in porphyry
rose to distinction
beyond the land of Tyre
spurred to truthfulness
by an idiosyncratic enchantment
under its baleful sign
he remains upright
materialized in the frozen
twisting doctrine
by which death brokers
the privilege of irrevocability
on a threshold none can see
named for limpid need
where a screen of tall trees
is painfully expressive
of silence disturbed by memory
absorbed into the heart
of grandmother dust
bright in the northern sky
liberated from the otherwise unlit
mobility of wolves
La Couperin
The deferent is not fixed in a single simple motion, in the little
limbless cross, or caliginous movements of the snow-feathered fly. You
taste, feel, imagine, understand. Privation enters you. You was bad. You
was sleeping
in seas and rivers
by grace or gift abrupt
it bears toward you
to be kindled in seclusion
see where those mysteries
the shoots and grasses
by their simple subsistence
will not obscure the voice
as embellishment of
quickly fading sonorities
it is said
the land felt nothing
and the book of ornament
was seen in you
barren but everlasting
awake in the desert
let the sparrow be
where it apprehends itself
out of descending hexachords
relentlessly discarded
but fit for fading light
do not offend
those who have seen it
figures and colors
wind-blown, deep inside
the efficacious place
incantatory, but less
a matter of words
trees and flowers
in primitive perpetuity
whence and whither
it reverts, in freedom
their pipes can blow
Harmonious Verification
_The various Mother Hubbards occupy the mind of the cat. The dog wears
his reward, a talking feather._
The Flat-Top Steel Company calls out by distant resolution. From its
mitered desks, the Company regards; unascertainable, it has and holds,
then dies. Its death evokes standards we mourn, even as our mourning
evokes an ellipsis within us. That ellipsis we now express.
Ellipsis acknowledges that the transitions it supplants are meant to
disguise it; it confesses a lack of belief, turning this confession into
material. Inwardness is a tonal effect of the elliptical.
The poetic--that element available to thought only by means of
poetry--comprises the intricate self-oriented motions of a few words,
vanishing into imaginary depths.
These depths are entered by way of a remorseless concision. Inside them,
each detail takes its turn as anomaly. The whole becomes deformed in the
act of grasping the part. Thoughts are loosed which have no shape.
Grammatical elements meticulously express themselves precisely where
that expression becomes superfluous. The energy thus suspended
acquiesces in the changing scale.
One exemplary strategy is embodied in J. H. Prynne's poem, 'Her Weasels
Wild Returning,' where the resistance to conventional semantic pattern
is carefully structured into the sardonic shadow of such a pattern,
which slips in and out of the text in pursuit of the pronoun 'she,' to
whose half-lyric figure accrete dense configurations of irreconcilable,
yet rhetorically precise and pointed phrases, each tracing terse and
fitful relationships with one another. Through compression the
connective tissue is deleted or distorted or transformed, and the act of
expression forms a hard exterior, an impregnable, defiant autonomy
broached only by intimate attention.
In rhetoric ellipsis designates the omission of an element that, as
Puttenham says, 'may be supplied by ordinary understanding'; it is the
figure of defect. In traditional poetry this figure represents the
compression of syntax for the sake of meter. To extend this narrow
technical sense to a more general principle of artistic design
comprising 'defect' as a thematic structuring element (wherein what is
insufficient or flawed is conscious of its insufficiency, articulating
its exemption from the compensations 'supplied by ordinary
understanding'), we view ellipsis in conjunction with related figures,
such as enigma and noema. Of the latter Puttenham observes, 'The
obscurity of sense lieth not in a single word, but in an entire speech,
whereof we do not so easily conceive the meaning, but as it were by
conjecture.' The act of conjecture, as applied to elliptical, noematic
texts--the act of divining meaning by 'throwing together,' as in
geomancy, the elements that have themselves been conjectured by
writing--carries out thematic struggles inherent in assembling what can
never be built. Whereas Puttenham's ellipsis readily presupposes a
remedy for its defect, and its meaning already contains a reflection
upon that fundamentally implied remedy, the defects in noematic texts
are remediless. They signify an irreversible dissolution whose
depiction and decipherment have now become the tasks of artistic
understanding.
To throw together, to cast before. To elaborate what organizes at the
cost of its own efficacy. This is the happiness of lambs. Their eyelids
flutter in omitted space. Consolation sweeps over them. Inside, more
fragments, abandoned and observed.
Open your Harmony Book. This is the first note, silhouetted in freedom.
This is the last note, gazing from its horn.
CRAIG CZURY -- FOUR POEMS
AFTERWARD
in this dream dad
you're twenty years dead
and when i woke up
there's a knock at the door
and you're standing there with a tan
and
and over seven months i tell you were dead
when the door knocked
and i'm dreaming you standing somewhere from sun
with the woman i'm sleeping with under your arm
but it could have been anybody's house
when i leave and don't wake her
closer to you
before the house dissolves
FOR YEARS
i look at people in the eyes
to see if there's somebody in there
wide digital almost sky
with the strength of an answer
almost a hope in how vast
and curious in the same place
the same troubled half-squint
faraway like a question
or tedious wish to be somewhere
like last night left over from something
forgotten and seen inside a book
looking up carried into a smile
i saw you with my same eyes
we were tired and old
ONE YEAR LATER
it's true death doesn't fully kick in
for a year
but this wasn't what i was talking about
on purpose
i dragged my bed out to the sand
as if you can really choose who you come from
the way they sound
except
there were never any books
and the old ones who fed us we never saw again
only in dreams
do you want me to take you shopping mom
no i want to shoot pool
but this isn't what i was talking about
the sky opens the diameter of a mail slot
and the sun
orange of a child's wheel behind the sea
hesitated
once it almost got midway up
THEN I CAUGHT THE RIVER
tide out and crossed
for two days i couldn't step through
i had to backtrack to the highway
around how i saw crossing in my head
i made everyone's life miserable blaming the full moon
it wasn't how i saw it in my head
i should have just sat down on the rocks and waited
there was too much sun
too much blue sweeping the dirt clean on the other side
who i used to be roving with dogs in that village
i couldn't get back the way i saw it in my head
every way i heard different was a war
like you said in the dream it was perfect
i sounded like a monster
for two days i sounded like a nightmare
trying to cross over to who i used to be in my head
miserable and perfect non sequitur
EZINE ON IN: A SUITE OF POEMS BY NICK PIOMBINO
Save As... for Peter Ganick
A kind of freedom in erasing whatever I say. In this way the writing
becomes my world, nobody else's. But that is not possible. I would rather
write about the word "evening." Consider, if you will, the beauty of the
world. And add on top of this, it can be felt and then just erased. To
save or not to save? Postpone for 15 minutes? The whole world, my entire
life, not to speak of everyone else's, and I am here deciding to save or
not to save these words that I write just to write. In a few mintues I
will be deciding. But is this or is this not, literally, "too silly for
words."
Silly words, that you could ever think you were recording this silly
world. But everybody knows the "no-world" argument would never hold water
for very long. The brave thing to do would be to "delete." Have the
courage to just say "ciaou."
Then again, wouldn't it be nice to remember how it felt at the very
beginning to deal with the save/no save option? The very thing that drives
you towards the computer becomes the very thing that makes it useless. Now
you can save every useless thing and not have it take any room in your
room. Boxes and boxes, files and more files of thousands of letters,
thousands of documents all falling under the impersonal sway of the
alphabet, in a memory bank without end, forever available according to its
place: the new alphabetical aristocracy. No more random places to rummage
around in, no more associations to a particular texture of paper. Soon to
be forgotten, no, soon to give way to universal access at your fingertips.
The whole world concentrated in your fingertips, the dream of the master
pianist of words.
You needed a talisman to guide you. You consulted oracles, inhabited
empty postoffices remembering forms you'll never see again.
Naming never knew. Nothing anybody ever really felt needed one.
There is a beautiful cage in the empty sound, but you would have to
stay around long enough to hear it. This, of all things is definitely
worth saving, and it will not have to take any fraction at all of a
kilobyte of memory. This sound is what makes memory.
Still you might have to spend some time compiling some physical
content. The only way to get started is to go back to the beginning.
In a mirror; in a haze, darkening light
The river by day and by file edit view
insert format font tools and by window
It is so hard to picture
What has not yet come true
Yes, the lamps are still there
And the pillows and sheets
Mom is waving goodbye
Just like she was in the picture
Then you hear some music
Perhaps from a radio
But this is unclear, because as soon as
You try to make out the words it
Changes into a blank screen
into a blank dream into a blank scream
into a black steam into a light beam
into an old scene
Down by the clocks you listen for a change
You read out loud, you think about the
Cold spring air
As usual,all the sounds are heard in reverse
As the sunset becomes more and more passive
More and more streaked with dark lines
*
Semblance
See the object as a semblance
Moving towards an assigned space
A reason to include confusion
Encompassing,not inhabiting, an idea
The sketch finally faded into
A comprehensible image. Erase it
And begin again, with color. Will
Is an abstraction. Starting over,
The artist herself vanished into a texture.
Say the object was a hindrance
Taking in an arranged surface.
A raging to forbid illusion
Engrossing, and infusing, a career.
The catch ultimately involved
An invinceable pursuasion. Hold it
Or confront it before you speak. Words
Translate emotion. In reverse,
The philosopher himself evolved in a paradox.
Hear the statement as a structure
Tracing an inevitable release.
A premise for arranging connections
Enhancing, not contracting, a facade.
This switch dissolved completely
Into a forseeable translation. Trace it
And endure it because you can't. Thoughts
Prefigure commands. By analogy,
The critic herself emerged as a perception.
Touch some feelings like a zither
Forming a musical entr'acte
A setting that forbids intrusion
Enlarging, or embodying, a mistake.
The crux was amply disclosed
As an arguable transposition: state it
Or suggest it as en event. Dreams
Precede desires. In effect,
The musician himself is an instrument of his melodies.
Proclaim the words as a proposal
Provoking an invisible collapse
A vessel that transports convictions
Embedding and exporting a delight.
Thus chance came to represent
An unalterable conclusion: Recite it
Or pronounce it as a chant. Songs
Select a voice. So to speak
The language of the poem constructs the poet.
*
5/14/88
What other voices could it have been in?
Hot dog man, woman screaming in the street at a kid
on a tenement stoop, dog howling.
The skin grows darker...wait...
Must it all have been there? I don't seem him anywhere (you? him?)
escaping...in between
We see only parts. And the whole "sees" the whole.
Things find their way to the surface. And we let them in or not.
POEMS BY JOHN KIMBALL
___________________
Curly tune
This is a line on screen or paper. Its metallics are taxiing in space I
imagine. The morning star's so close. Nothing added, ummm, here's my
outflow, and bring a towel for reaching
Oh
Green fields rip
kick the door
that's the way
To the sweet bays
and guillemots..
to the bagpipes!
____________________
Valve
It's not that I don't head feelings
or hold you the occupier.
You're my knock off in flight
scored in one black note.
So quit moaning.
Though how could I go
beaten up outside
and repatched
if you wept?
You're but nothing
I'm actually shipping.
____________________
Agenda
In sickness and health I thee embossed dabs o'
each... gosh.
Today is worse, trains everywhere comparing
swathways to stake a slick with ink goo.
Sculpturing against the odds, memories along
with fixations grow on trees that were going to
happen
And not just trees, but coal sycamore. Coal, as
the hue.
____________________
"Strafe at the dictate"
The eye opus:
Some boardgames lashes are very good at..
slurp
drip
cut
sew it..
frame it
on to the next --
These are the poems.
Their drawdown is not fire
...you can't contain it..
Their lay in ancient places we had visited,
where I can't spell
and can't stop,
And without which a sigh could not be written,
an ultimatum,
a loose stare
POEM BY JAMES FINNEGAN
Guided Tour of Skyscraper 2000
We take the elevator up to the top,
stepping out onto an open platform, into the full light
and ceaseless wind of the high steel.
Construction began in 1900 and is not yet complete.
Some Native-American workers mutter "manifest destiny"
as we pass along a narrow gantry,
all around the clank of metal, acetylene blue flares,
the foreman shouts as the workers push to finish
the last four stories before the end of the century.
We take an unenclosed stairwell down to floor 96,
loops & coils running everywhichway, computer cable
and phonelines, a tangle of television monitors
slung under the ceiling. Spread out over a conference table
milled from ebony, chainsawed then dragged out of an Indonesian rainforest
by water buffalo, there's a high-stakes poker game going on in Eurodollars
and yen-value derivatives, winner-take-all,
but the developing countries don't have enough to buy in.
Down another stairway, we walk from room-to-stark-white-room,
hospital wards where AIDS patients lying on gurneys, emaciated,
wrapped in sheets, are daubing open sores
with the newest salves, waiting for The Cure.
Other rooms taken over by garage bands
cranking up huge amps to the point of feedback,
full of power chords and lung-busting angst,
beating on rows of empty oildrums until the fossil fuels run out.
Paisley people in palsied dancing, naked in the rain. Dogs let loose
on black children. Long cars with big fins funneling down
ramps of parking garages emptying onto freeways
headed for model neighborhoods, many square miles of homes,
all alike, perfect green yards without trees, kids playing army
get cut down by the machinegun fire of sprinklers, Vietnam,
Korea, steaming casseroles laid out on formica-topped dinettes,
then flashlight tag 'til aproned mothers call them home.
Stand back and shield your eyes, there's a blinding,
concussive light behind the glass doors to Hiroshima-Nagasaki Ltd.
Floors in the 40s are still burning, a fine bone-white ash wafting
from the offices of the Reich III Corporation, dust blowing down
rutted corridors on 33, whole families in trucks moving west
toward where the sun fails and falls each day into the Pacific,
outside only the suicidal rain of stock traders leaping to their deaths.
A speakeasy down two flights, jazz seeping
molten from under the door, just knock twice, at the bar
a man sips a gin fizz, a hundred dollar bill tucked under the brim
of his fedora, shell casings loose in the pocket of a pinstriped suit.
A few floors below, hallways like trenches cut through mud,
glint of bayonnets, gasmasks, whistles blowing as light fixtures explode
illuminating a no-man's-land of twisted barbwire, bombcraters smoldering.
Farther down, in the basement, all the dead are being stacked
like cordwood for stoking a great cast-iron boiler
which better never breakdown, because by now no one's left alive
who really knows how to fix the thing. The eyes
of small animals flicker beneath a wooden skid,
and roaches scatter under gaslight, growing dim.
PANTOUM
Maybe yes and no maybe
The heart's secret sinks into the jungle
Humble bird spreading its wings
Who knows the exotic bird's nest
Maybe yes and no maybe
The ocean of the heart is deep
What good is it to leave our prints
Prints a nocturnal rain confuses
Maybe yes and no maybe
True the heart is nothing like a stone
In vain to resist sea waves
The swept beach is always new
Maybe yes and no maybe
A young heart is so inconstant
Rain must ignore thunder
Jars fill and water pours out
Maybe yes and no maybe
Let's keep the heart's door closed
For birds there are many preditors
All is finished and all begins again
Firdaus Abdullah
from LIRE magazine, April 1997
translated by Jordon Zorker
from -OCRACY BY SHIELA E. MURPHY and PETER GANICK
Part 3:
apex of an era follows either simmering or a retreat from frostbite
heady little winters linger in enjambment
mint condition is a prize or punishment in context
of the sediment and fluency and put-together
confines that mesh syntax with light
whose poise maybe meanders to a space
the brain had near the thumbs
or that the fingers Olivetti-ed in a swoon
approximating all rejuve and maintained
jaunty rope tricks slide their way into
hypotheses as if to break them down into
a level confidence that folgers us back into
houses we'd constructed of a prior frame
we've vaulted out of in the proceeds of astonishment
tyrants artlessly devour mentors
thoughtlessly spear dieticians
moving through the harbored portions of fear
while deftly assuming no ultimatum
will scold bingo-playing church-goers....
dreary advice columnists arrive later than
the poison-pen anarchists that suffer to
engrave upon the hearts of the multitude
a mercy complete with heartache
noisy with tympani and trumpets....
the hamstrung spot-chaser reels in time
from the marvellous ocean of sighs....
a visionary tact wears braces to the tune
of calderon's tristesse
newscasters' v-neck metronomes
may wizen instruments in sync with luminarias
glowing and not pointed any way
what sorts of free time does a painting need
what rhythmic chelsea contradicts prevailing
sentiments their roots their ivy and their gravestones
become parking lots of impresarios
and syllables perspiring egos
back into the atmosphere
volcanic actresses tip icebergs and retract speech
released from passion sacrificed for clarity
now and at the hour
overt suction-feeds debit their accounts
indignantly adamantly researched
"i walk run down the street" to the pretty writer
at the weekend sideshow....
hundreds advance their soulmates' efforts
there is no shred of denial
to the amassing of music and light....
any hourly drama
sold to the hopping kangaroo
veteran of the minority rule complications....
prayer aftermaths an evening with song's
levity and leverage showing telling
happiness remarked upon
by others so I don't know what to say
is not the same as acquiesce merely
the gentry pearled and riding an amalgam
of repeal I watch her impiness be very much
unchained she'd like to be this
after all the discipline she's no such thing
and as for me the instruments beseech
my kindness and the keys all need
a cleanse most of my dream connected
to the wedding garment wearing the denim jumpsuit
belted and the blazer wool maroon pretending business garb
only a long time will toil resume affecting
nothing else those common placements
of dust and infinity....
reasonably autistic elements
artlessly offered where it helps....
the day in the square, planned to an exhaustion
whose orbit curves under the bridge of units
common to reason....
noxious infants, celibate amateurs
that immolate binary codes over the desire
of feet padding through grassy fields of silence....
the impact on free fall was not exaggerated....
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POTEPOETZINE is an electronic publication of Potes & Poets Press, Inc.
The editor is Peter Ganick, who likes to correspond by e-mail.
Potes & Poets also publishes A.BACUS and perfectbound books.
For a complete listing please send your snail-mail address to:
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1997 will see the appearance of books by Susan Smith Nash, Dennis
Barone, Shiela E. Murphy, and Andrew Levy in the perfectbound series;
Dick Higgins, Rod Smith, Carole Maso, nico vassilakis, Hannah Weiner,
Elizabeth Robinson, Robert Sheppard, and John M. Bennett in the
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>From June 1st through June 9th, I will be reachable at:
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