Like the #myWANA twibe--and does that not get at it? Tribe of tweeters? A collective art? A collaboration of otherwise cordoned off creators?
I suppose it could be worse if we could talk about the shortening of URLs to something like https://n.on/SenS3/ or the rest, et all infinitum
https://whatwerewe.doingthinkingthebeautyofURLcould.oureyesandcrossourTaslongaswecreateafullstopat.com/mercial_enterprise/instead-ofthe.org/
For there're organizations and corporations, the latter swallowing the whole in body, the former giving the body to the whole, profit & non-
I still have these doubts, questions, uncertainties that give faith some breathing room, even in the midst of this medium we use, questions:
Do drug dealers hashtag their work like #hashish (coincidence) or #uniformity (that's irony) If no, how they get paid in this climate? #DARE
If threads of @ chase back to a source, is the most recent like the roottip or the budding leaf? If so, does that make the original a trunk?
Do sources come as result of conversations held in real-time, in RL rather than DL? Can we conclude that we participate in continuum? Hmm...
& how's that different? The layers prism into our eyes, refract #rehashed thoughts, retweeting what we ourself tweeted in re: unto another'n
Or'f my one-armed uncle Billy (RIP) got his hook on here his kleft hanmed woulkd mnake senmce buit hjs rugjht's a hjoiok. Mean right hook...
So where's the expression for Billy (RIP) who drove me on a jetski when I was ten using his hook for the gas and his left hand for his beer?
Also, doesn't automated tweeting defeat the tweeting purpose? If people gave a tweet, people wouldn't tweeting automate like mother tweeters
My friend went to prison there heard people use profanity, twittering about, trying to express the inexpressible. No poetry, but only curses
Like: tweet tweet tweet Dude tweeting took the tweetareet tweet tweet book atweetingway from weet twitterytwat me, don't you tweeting tweet?
"Never been more proud of my education," he said, "because I'm the guy in here that can express various shades of angst, ire, woe, euphoria"
To which I'd add acedia, zeal, poesy, ignorance, lighthearted jubilation, discontent, murderous wrath bits of joy and sorrow sprinkled about
We are more than our words, we are our wordings. We are more than our tales we're our tellings. We're more than poetry, we're our poetrings.
The action in motion, the progress of prose, doing rather than merely being it-- like marriage (where people do it)-takes more than footnotes
Not that footnotes're invaluable, but only the ones you're reading, not those you've read. In media res come the footnotes, not postscripts^
^Schaubert, Lance "Twoem" (Twitter:Joplin, 2012) #51. He continues, "Because they add subtext to already established thoughts, reflections"
...and we continue as if they never happened, a daydream, reverent reverie saturated with subliminal messages and author's intended meaning
View translation
It's certainly a betterfluffalternativeflufftoflufffindingfluffwaysflufftoflufftakefluffupfluffspace. Especially this one:___________________
So yes, footnotes've value, but only insofar as they work the midriff, plunge into middle earth and meet us halfway into the action, y'know?
WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST TO BRING YOU A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: [Insignificant product] will give you [divine virtue] if you [shady action]
NOW BACK TO OUR SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING: Of course there's a difference between intermission and interruption, and though I'd agree with Nouen
"The interruptions are your work," he meant in terms of the least of these, not the most of these. Interruptions work as poor, lame or blind
Not interruptions as in rich, mobile and visual. ∴ no, I don't listen to the advertisements all the way through. Because I've better things
To do: Better things than these. Better nobler, more manful framings of this cubby hole of a world before we crowd ourselves out and falling
Falling, falling toward the black linoleum. That's what happens in a crowd: trample damage. Good for the rats, bad for the butterflies, see?
"Wee sleekit cowerin' timorous beastie," Robbie said, & he truly meant "best laid" when it came to plotting grounds, when it came field mice
For we do, we do we do go on and crush one another beneath the weight of worry. We self-motivate ourselves until no one else feels motivated
Where were we? Who gives a-- Say! I do like green eggs & ham! I do so like them Walton, Sam! & I would retch them in a train and in a car and
My, what a lot of funny things there are. (funny [fuh*knee] adjective 2. – "unusual in such a way so as to arouse suspicion") Funny guy, Sam
By this time, all three of you who follow this nonsense will expect me to ask you to retweet and, not wanting to disappoint: please retweet!
But don't retweet out of pressure, but rather pleasure, not out of obligation, but out of a sense that you (pl.) are doing something herenow
We (the collective "I") plan on saying something together as we begin to redefine the restrictions set around us from an SMS world, txtNptry
one more "T" makes: TEXT and POTTERY, which is so interesting considering the plethora of misinterpretations of personalized plates on HWY44
But yes, RDRVR (or any other license plate or SMS or tweet, for that matter) could mean any number of things, one stencil for phantom rhymes
RDRVR could be "red rover" or "rad raver" or "Our Driver" or even "Rider Ever as in the eternal biker gang in the sky which is why, I think,
Brother Scott teaches usns that context's king, which, in the context, means interpretively not (as others libel) for allegiance or idolatry
Much like Hebrew without all the dots & tiddles, propretonicreductions & other fancy linguistic words that don't apply to the matter at hand
RDRVR with an "M" at the end might pluralize it or with "'M" might dualize it--the duality of Red Roveraim, two lines, two teams, a face off:
RDRVR RDRVR SND TWTTR RGHT WVR where "W" is the Vav or Waw, functioning as vowel and consonant, similar to our letter "Y"--duality of context
Like "Y" or "W" or the phantom "RDRVR," GOOD and EVIL exist in context-abstractconcept sof right and wrong don't come from physicalityorsubs
stance, they come from the application of virtue and vice unto myriad moments like the addition of cacophic or harmonic vowels to consonants
Hebrew & Twitter & perhaps license plates, taught us that. RDRVR for an orange 2012 bug might be "RedRover" but for a Lexus "OurDriver" fits
"RiderEver" fits for a philosophy professor's Harley (or Honda)--I know one who has one just like that but the license plate's way more hokey
something like "DSCRT" I assume is a triple-entendre between the Ebonic "Dis Cart" the mispronounced "Duhcart" & the philosophic "Descartes"
But who knows? You explain the joke and the funny dies with it, like dissecting bubbles-the effort's in the blowing not the popping. Myself?
I like to watch them float off, hoisted on humor, buoyant above us by our own attentive tittering never probing the work of the comedian for
if probed, then popped if popped, then foundered if foundered, then no longer funny. But to make a funny? Blowing alone in our corner? Puff?
Efforting our own ruach upon amalgamated water & alkali until orb "music of the spheres" globe of hydrogen bonds exists, that'd be something
And so absolutely I respect the comedians for they confusticate and bewuther me by taking the longest way around to turn a very short phrase
In this, stand up comedians are some of our only public #poets left, cause they do the same thing with language &'ve a single measuring rod:
They laugh? Chortle? Chuckle? Giggle? Twitter? Titter? Crack up? Be in stitches? Roll in the aisles? Or, at least, they even crack a smile ?
If yes, then success. If no, then failure. Thats the formula for good comedy. For this alone #poetry fasts into the next millennium, exiled,
seeing the land of milk and honey from far off, daring not to go in until the infidels clear themselves out, having cannibalized one another
For poetry's an unmeasurable thing, with no quantifiable canon. Comedy? She's a form of poetry, but the only one that we can gauge or assess
For get that this makes us a bunch of asses-sors, forget how it degradates our legacy, our great-grandchildren's education, forget that our-
kids actually envision the literal end of nature (not 2 mention the literal end of literal) that they'll grow up in a climate where students
Exist: To learn, perfect, and complete a given task. (rather than: To learn how to become a good, decent and responsible human being) getit?
Forget that we've forgotten our roots, our etymological roots where "politics" has something to do with the city instead of TV or newspaper,
that "education" has something to do with leading out like a wandering prophet rather than "socialscience" brainwashing or worse, employment
that "religion" means a binding-a sense of self-committed devotion rather than a systemic means of oppression, violence, or false politicals
and that "media" means middle like medium like art-advocacy between the living and the dead, ignorance and truth, love and enemies> not lies
which means that "social" #media –socialis meaning "allied" or socius "friend"–could mean a society of advocates OR a society of united foes
I spose that it's up to what the people put up with, for that's always the case: the twisting of words in the context of our nation may ruin
us yet. And yet, and yet I bet there's something more to us than meets the eye, for we've toppled triple times the regimes than any of our f
-ormer fathers, collectively, a global nation rather than one - begged to believe nations & colonies still exist on this ever-shrinking ball
We don't, and that's enough, for they will die off before we do and if we refuse to believe lies, if we hold to our integrity-that is enough
It's enough to say "I'm not like that, whatever I am" with no set agenda, for Robbie agendas "gang oft agley & lea us not but grief and pain
...for promised joy" will pull through, I believe and that's where he & John too were wrong. The present only touches thee, yes this's true,
And "Och I backward cast my eie on prospects drear" as well, though there are good memories too, we must not forget our triumphs as a people
But the forward part-why guess and fear? Why guess at all? For it could be worse or better or both, but if we hold our integrity, I believe.
That same man, after all, said "You did not have a home. There were places you visited frequently, took off your shoes and you'd scratch yer
that we can still do greater things yet, greater things in word and deed in paint and power, in the vulnerability of our trusting commonhood
One man said we're not as strong as we think we are, this is true- the smallness of us. But our smallness is our strength, weak lowly things
feet cause you knew that the whole world belonged to the meek and you did not have a home, no you did not have a home." Which is, I must say
honestly true: homeless people own the world, no one else. The nomads, the gypsies the hitchhikers'n hobos get it: all's grace, naught's due
You cannot claim what was here, neither can you truly create-you may subcreate, innovate, remix and rework, but ex nihilo is not for us "Get
your own dirt" goes the lame joke, lame because true to a cliché, true to an assumption, true in our bones, the things we walk upon so often
Then the #fruitninjas and #angrybirds of the world come and tell us that lie: "Old things're lesser, stupider, more foolish than new things"
Clive called that "chronological snobbery," acting like we're better than our primogenators. #Success & Successor may be #LinkedIn roots but
unlike all of these other words, I find them woefully unrelated (in context), an eitheror addition to the end of one propaganda becomes the-
brass of its opponent, for this's the #dilemma of our age: success or successor? Win or emerge? Fame/fortune or greatness/fragility ? Chosen
my side, have you yours? For I hope to live a mythological #life rather than profitable one [that my name's forgotten] my story's remembered
Thats our question & inheritance: to flee, or not to flee? Whether tis nobler in the mind to fight another day the small campaigns of men or
to stay unarmed against a sea of troubles, and by remaining end them? To brawl, to beat or more, to catch some sleep at night from peacing ?
These are the grammars from whence we choose: corporate takeover, espionage, and seduction OR corporeal rupture, confession, trust-building
The one from self-preservation spawns apocalypse, the other from self-immolation sows a neocosmos, a curded, honeyed milky whey, a new manna
These visions I see with mine waking eyes, and when I go to sleep the nightmœres come in twisted forms: cubicals, 401k's, tax-deductions, a-
pplicable Christmas bonuses, FICA scores, litigation, reverse-engineered drone strikers, rigged elections, genocide coverups, reserves call-
ed "Casinos," drug cartels named "state police force," and Senators who in another life called "this life" worked for banks, pharms, trucks
Prepared 140 ways (four short of gross) as George Washington Carver might have asked us to, a future union in diversity (and not uniformity)
of Pacific oceans washing over, flooding stores of warheads and hardheads and jarheads, of the old "Come Together, right now" over me and my
dead body, if that's what it would take. When our generation leaves the solipsistic, over-invested side of their convictions and wills hers-
elf to die for the others, for the cause, rather than to kill for it or worse, kill one of our global brothers for it, but to die fullbore -
I always wake soon after (three-hundred and sixteen characters pass quickly in masks) and remember that this's all a very bad dream or #joke
More like me see the world gossamer and gilded, Edenic and Urban, Garden and Guarded, city and country-the difference of culture unculted or
and unafraid for one another, to release our clinging to sustenance and to embrace quietus, to walk freely into massacre- Boston-style - and
relinquish ourselves to whatever red, grey or blue coat takes us--that to me's courage, that to me's conviction, that to me changes the world
for it was a similar sort of death on the edge of the empire that crushed Rome and it will be that sort of death that brings us into new age
But don't mind me what do I know? I'm only some affected soul on this edge of empire: part Ozark, part Appalachia, part Cherokee, part Jew,
part Zimbabwean, part Barbadian, part Shawnee Forest--a noname upstart from a line of carpenters (union & otherwise) that chose ink over wood
I should go on like this, should continue in characteristic restriction, in #thevoice people use #thesedays, #amwriting something more here.
Then again, art consists, as Gilbert said, in drawing the line somewhere. Somewhere we must refuse to type, to fill, to censor, editorialize
Then again the time comes where: silence... listen... (and then again) hush... shush child... the wind gasps answers back, hoping to startle
In the end gag or tweet. I'm the former: _____ ______ __ ___ __ ___ _____, _____ _______ ___. ____.
Giving Up the News
...Is harder than hearing. How you shatter
Bones as a boy before the season
Ends and you ache to even the score
And return to the team, or take a sick
Gardener's groaning for the great outdoors
Or a landlocked lady of the water
Or a shut-in sailor. Soon you will find
the lane to the life you love is behind
The avenues in the alleys where even the news
Seldom will stray: in the singular voice
Of the Clarion call of Christian thought
And Philosophy's prude
nce and the power of Historic
Agreement gathered in the grisly books
On the shelf till you're sure that status updates
And news is a nightly enigma that cannot
Be solved as quick as stitches on broken
Hearts or the healing of a holy man's pride.
Untitled Man
I play this thinking game
as an artist by the scene
Or dancers sitting oh-so-serene
moved beyond their minds
nothing comes out right
Angled.
spirit groans
fashion my true name
on a stone
The Gentry Moved in on Halloween
Blameshift
market boy
leaves (yellowed)
hit by carts
The Wild West
The Wild Wild West is what they call
Baltimore's broken -- the battered western
End of The East. With Indians murdered,
A white western needs rewritten as an Eastern
In this city's sinning. For soon The Black
Man is made a modern native
And Manifest Destiny masquerades
As eminent domain. Even the firemen
Ponder the plastic pouches and shopping
Bags that are blowing like bits of tumble
Weeds in the weather of the western films
Will blow by, or the blue and red
Illuminations of the long trucks
Of paramedics that paint our earrings
And our whorings that hedge us by habits and the vices
Of saloons and not our longings. Leave the duelings
And high noon hoarding of respect
And the Trail of tears take and replace
It with the praxis of peace. Power is a fickle
Thing when the thunder is thought awful
yet is bark and no bite, a bumbling shout
That's strikeless and strong, when the stranger in town
Is the sheriff who is surely the scoundrel and the brigand
The wandering wicked. What are the natives
Left with to love? Left with the tyrants
to rescue hope? they would rather die
At the hands of hell than husband evil.
The Yoke of Mothers
A Queen is a King who carries the weight
Of the world within her. Enwombing the younglings
And entombing their titles, taking their passings
On a pilgrimage or a parade. Powder she spreads --
The ashes of embers that echo the flames
Of memories marking men and their gains
And lovings or leavings. The leftovers abide
Within her insides. As if she's an urn
Made of flesh and flight, flare as her throat
And incubating her nest of ashes for fires
To crack their creases in cognate eggshells
With phoenixes inside. Fertile, embracing,
The life light leaves and then backward
From manhood to Godhead and then childhood again
Nursing on the nectar newly replenished
By matriarch's mam'ry. Making, when we die
Embattled, the bridge to the births of the sires
Taking twine and a twinge as they hoist
Their father's firearm. The fumes lift
And stands the structure: see how Queens
Bridge we broken princes to our Kings?
Mother of Exiles
Eight-hundred. Their open mouths
Similarly sing songs we all know
Though know not: their tongues -- they show
No face cards. Nimble, demure, go ghosts
Of the Mind of God, mad sod made sad,
Triangle eyelids, squares and trundle sides,
But they're still eyes, you know. Stopping together
They see as one. Smell as one though
Misshapen besides, share the same tastes,
Touching race to race. Liberty Regal --
My crimes are crude forms of your name!
Languages languish, lampposts made fenceposts,
Made into metal pikes masked by barbs
And whatever the shipyard itemizes
For cordoning cows. Killing clouds and
Roosting with pigeons unrich and sundry,
Your overture oxidized, olive and sickened
Remembering tyrant, Napoleon moneyed
Whose citizens ceded céleste to us
In the form of a figure with flair for the gracious
His Frenchmen entrusted freedom to U.S.
As a strike at his reign, as a slap on his chin.
And the chauvanists of Chauvin? They chaffed cause they ruled.
Perhaps it is time we handed the torch
To some budding statehood of freedom?
To places now warming, their playboys deserted
To United States, knighted for evils
Done in her name. Dead are the ways
Hospitable Yanks hosted each other
In the wake of the voyage. We opened borders
At the start so we'd found this state of migrant
Pilgrims who had dreams. Pilfered dreams
Of mixed-race babies and the peace they imply.
We did it at the start. Will we do it again?
Can we become a nation on pilgrimage
And leave our little bit of land?
Guantanamera
You sing it. Yourn -- they mourn, they
Wring it over, ragdolls and wine,
Listening somber, listening longer
Than anyone else in the "N" train's crowd.
Others ignore you, mothers note the
Boredom born in baby faces.
Teens spend their braincells as tender
On turn-based games in their tiny screens.
You sing it. Yourn -- they mourn, they
Wring it over, opium petals drip.
None here know: Now is Cuba.
The sounds of the lady: alma my lover,
Alma mi mater de terra mi pater--
Torn out of time the trucks of the fifties,
The men who make more on donuts
Than dentistry or law. Done are the days
Of teeth and order, taken, embargoed so
Long ago, oh. The Long Islands
Commuters make no memory of this
Your National Anthem. Theirs announces an
Empire's entrance, an empires sins and
Strangleholds. But strings on your
Guitarra strain to say, "We are strong
Because we stay carried away by
This woman, my Cuba." The closest we come
To a fair hearing? "Come here.
Is that guy singing something about
Guantanamo bay?" Goes away: intimacy.
You leave it. Yourn -- they mourn, they
Wring it over, towels and the blood.
Train doors slide.
Your pronedance moaning dulce o(u) salé
Dies as our crowd's tide washes you away.
Rio Sunset
Ghosts in the gold, ghosts in the late
Grate growing wet from grey waters.
Ghosts in the water gushing its spray:
Men in it which men aren't mainly,
Shadows and shades, shadows in spades
Twinned and twining, twisting liquid
Pining from physique, from playing rain:
Where are the men within? White water at
Nighttime walks is a newness to me:
Beguile and charm, enchant and bewitch
Illuminating liquid marvel,
For we have arrived to watch one another
Move from my side to madre's porch.
I leave it, I leave things
Charged and I think of thunder.
Upon returning to the tempest the tinkers
Heavenward woke f
rom hydrant halls
Their cap clatters, is cast away
By grey ghosts in the grizzled pipes,
By poltergeists who perk to fight
The Zeitgeist of the ziggurat's kings--
Landlords and landlord things loved
Not by common creatures or their cats.
Mats are soaking. Maybe children
Choking goes unnoticed for tonight.
The streets, they melt. The streets, they smelt
Of sulphur, of piss, and perfume until
The ghosts grist us back our grates.
A native child takes note:
"You play? You playing in the puddle mister?
In the black river we built, we reached?
You've passed to my crossing con tu perra?"
Was Venice very varied like Brooklyn
Before it floundered in the foaming sea?
Was Atlantis loved by little kids
Who gave its flooding streets felicity?
Pigeons and Turtledoves
Watch and the world withers before you
As you sit and sip. Seats on the peaks
Of stool stumps rock. Staying on wheels
Lateral that lean? Like we are just sliding
And their dangerous drakes? Dream about biding
Time and the tide. Teach the childer
How racist we aren't. Reach in and neglect
The trails of tears, the transgressions repeat
And the childer chase a choo-choo south
To the mouth of the rivers, to the moats in the seas
And the spaces of heaven to be seen by our watchers
And the holes where hobbits hide and bide the
Time and the tide. The Shire will be razed
Again as the evil gains footholds but
She hates the hillsides. She hides in Coney,
In Bay Ridge and Rio, in the bowls of seas
Crossed on floating things. And she clings to a hope
Of water rising. But the flames get anxious
So a mother migrates amid the poorest
With turtledoves two she treks south
Pregnant with her God. Prepare the way
Of the immigrant illegal who aims to save
The privileged by hanging. Prepare the way
Of the homeless heavens. The refugee -- oh how
Did he die for deporters? The dark-skinned child
Of the Middle East? Mary migrates
to the Edge of the empire. Even the Romans
Meddled in the Middle. And made their Maker
Into their brazen image: a terrorist.
Do suicides always slay?
Do immigrants always pilfer the union?
Or do some save nation states?
And even steal our sins?
Gotham Wakeless (A Cittandine)
I saw the consequences of our chosen fate
we read the world's ending in cardboard and mile-high signs
– to be so near by so far, so far cause so close –
on intricate sandcastles grown men make, which vanish at night.
You have not died. You had fallen asleep and will now wait...
I met the kite club at the beach. They grow wings, yet stay
tethered to this sand through snares imposed
by those whose consequences cage our chosen fates.
Where Astoria's humor meets Inwood's bachata under the eldritch lights
no seer can take stars by astrolabe Home.
There we write world endings on mile-high, cardboard signs.
I met the Minotaur at the center of the West Village labyrinth.
He said to me, "What, you want a fucking cookie?" And clip-clopped off.
You have not died. You had fallen asleep and will now wait
for thirty minutes on the other platform for a fifteen minute train ride
or walk for forty. You choose to walk, repose
from intricate sandcastles grown men make, which vanish at night.
(Walking was a bad choice at two in the hot mornlate).
One-hundred dollar ticket for a used two-fiddy swipe-o
I saw the consequences of our chosen fate:
Hell's Kitchen's tiny forts fading in a purgatory of might,
Chileans shouting to Arabs "In English! In English, poto!"
We read our world's ending in cardbored, mile-deep signs–
"This here's a misdemeanor. Ever been arrested?"
"No." "You sure? You ain't lying? Cause in a sec I'll know."
–you have not died. You had fallen asleep and now await
flat Triangles Below Canal Street to grow up spires.
Still in two-thousand years they'll stand on Wall and go,
"This seems to have been some sort of market site,"
on intricate sandcastles grown men make, which vanish at night.
Though not yet midnight – drinking five minutes later
means you missed the train and will wait until another ghost
goads dioxide into humid carbon from some unknown palace of nether-sky.
To be so near by so far, so far cause so close
we coax the world's ending onto bright rag signs
trim intricate sandcastles grown men make, which vanish at night.
You hope for consequences of The Chosen fate:
we will not die. We had fallen asleep and must now wake.
CSA Potluck
Ciders spiked and the simmering wild
Rice that she rendered in a root soup
For the CSA staff and Martín
As we planned produce. Patience is a talked
Dialog dance. We drive one
another nutso with no thought
To listen along out of love for the mind
Of fellow men: we fight for time
to speak and spank. Speckles then form
On the hull of hope that harden to coral
And barnacles black to burden dreams
Of things thought but now thunder afar
Like the rain that could render a ruin to garden
Or drown deserts but died in the air.
Listeners left when loamier soil
Bid them back to bear a lighter
Burden of talk: the beauty of heeding
And having been heeded: hulls that are smooth.
Beckon
When you sail between both soundhouses
You will hear
that the lighthouse ain't the only keep
emitting sense
for the feelhouses – those phalluses –
reach, tingle
make the hairs... how they stand on end,
shivering.
And the scenthouses billow upwards,
smoke signals
of the fragrances, fair and foul, to come:
ethereal masts.
When you walk between both soundhouses
feel free ----
for the lighthouse wards off crashes
twisting counsel,
for the feelhouse wards off creeps
– it begs permission –
for the scenthouse wards off stenches
olfactory white ----
The soundhouse wards off sounds-to-be.
I walked outside in Tuesday morning's
cold, gusts, ice
between a man and a woman both
saw neither
until my periphery noticed
me between
two soundhouses: both emitting scrapes
scratches, both,
nails upon jail cells, burrowing,
two humans
scraping gilded tax papers for sums
hollowed. Both
harrowing one more future of
&nb
sp; reinvested change.
The Lottery. Scratchoffs heard, unseen, warn:
"crags ahead in the dark"
Prog Code
From the broken bytes of Bernie's movement
A scrapyard assembled. Seams were bound
By unseemly stitches, a scarlet old thread
With a green or a gold or a great navy
And the parties perished and progress was encoded
On the minds of mankind and the matriarchy
And they plugged in the power. They primed this well
With a meeting map and a Medium for social
Events converging on varied issues
And the code progressed. Clearly the machines
Were intended to tame tyrants and bind
Bureaucrats to their base, to the blue virtues
Of the life we live, learning from each
To each and earning an evening with the mic
Open and our ears too. Every noble
Adventure varies, but viking and coder
Alike will leave the land they know
For the sake of a sudden search on a new
Map and a morning maybe-we-could
And a vision of voice. Virtue will emerge
from the bricks of brothers bound and sisters
Who were run aground from the graves of sailors
Who journeyed on out, jumping at fate
For a mainland where mountains had made a life
Of namelessness and were nourished by the Native Good
And in this the thinking of Thy Progress
Is regress towards the right uses of the riches of creation.
Holidays
Notes from Heschel: The Architecture of Time
Techno-civilization
breaks existence – time for space –
more objective(s), more to place.
Having more ain't being more,
might of space still dies at time's
borders. Existence beats its
heart not in spaces, but times.
Set out to control my space,
gain some power, forfeit time.
In time: not have, but to be.
Own not, but give some graces.
Not control, but share. Subdue
not spaces, live in accord.
We forfeit life when control
of space, accumulation,
concerns us first – stocks and Fords.
nothing's more useful than It –
nothing's more frightful than It –
poverty once degraded
us, but now we are threatened
by Power's degradation.
Enjoy your love of labor
but hate your loving of gain.
Hearts and pitchers break before
the fountain we call 'profit.'
Technical society
grows up from propriety –
tools and spinning, farm and house,
sailing, aleing, data, blouse,
each in spatial surroundings.
Subdue? Manage nature's force?
Worship nature in mountain,
forest, water, flame or stone?
God's not space. Is man alone?
Inside the universe you
like to see God make presence,
but do we get to choose how?
We want God in space, not time,
in nature, not history,
as if Godhead were a thing
not a life-giving spirit.
Pantheism worships space:
Supreme Being is no more
than infinite space minded
– deus sive natura –
extension – space – but not time.
For Spinoza, time's mirage –
he wants philosophy warped
to geometry's place.
Primitive minds won't realize
ideas unimagined. Space –
where imagination rules –
we revere sacred image.
Monuments, places, banners,
flags, national shrines, statues
– memorials stultify
ends, aid amnesias. Though too
sacred to be polluted,
not too sacred to exploit.
To retain the holy, you
fashion gods you can confine:
mere shadows, shadows of man.
THING is the category
heavy on our minds. Concepts
– all – we mold into its form,
attending to seen, smelled, heard,
touched, tasted. Reality
is thinghood. Even our God's
conceived by most as a thing.
We're blind, we're deaf, we're muted
to half of reality:
all that is shy, all that won't
identify selves as things.
The insubstantial we make
inconsequential, know
not what to do about time.
Time is sarcasm. A slick
treacherous monster, jaws like
furnaces burning moments.
We shrink from taking on time,
face to face, escaping to
space instead. Possessions are
repressions – fuel for near flames.
We can't conquer time in space.
We can master time in time.
For the higher goal of all
spiritual living is not
to amass wealth of data,
Evernotes evernoting,
but to face sacred moments.
Please do not use your moments.
Please don't abuse your moments.
You cannot spend your moments.
Your cash won't trade for moments.
They aren't alike, your moments.
Not shells, nor stamps. Your moments,
sole, enchant. Savor their spells.
Each hour's the only one given
exclusive and endlessly
precious. Holiness in time –
to this, to sacred events –
we must attach, we must build
our great cathedrals – Sabbaths –
Our architecture of time.
Qadosh. "Holy" in Hebrew –
mystery and majesty
of the divine. What was first?
A mountain? An altar? Man?
No. "God blessed the seventh day
and made it holy." No thing
was holy at creation.
God did not become a tree.
God did not grow up from rocks.
God's not stuck in Jupiter,
atom clouds or public stocks.
God's not mere geometry.
He chose time, but we choose place.
God's right here in history,
builds his cathedrals in time,
palaces and brandywines
of hours and seconds like a
castle in the clouds, G.K.
called them, without regular
rules of architecture. Then
he takes his time with timing:
For providence means that he
takes the sixfold pain and toil
of spoilt maidenhead, agley
schemes of mice and men, takes a
murder here, lies and theft there,
and reupholsters them all
the way down, down to the bone.
Reordering disorder,
he takes eons doomed to die,
deemed by men to make men cry,
and turns them till they catch then light,
until he finds their prism,
folds it into his white bright
of all, and redistributes
moments, rewriting from old
component parts and pistons,
cheery-picked the engine of
time and put a new one in:
His very self within man.
God, defined by history,
became History again:
Fir
st he set aside a day,
Then he taught us, way by way,
"Take the time to face my face,
take the time away from space."
In time, Lord Sabbath
Was put to rest
on Sabbath. Rose an eighth day
called it "Today, if you hear
me, don't harden your hearts." Glimpse time...
Ode to a Carpenter
In hopes that the world relents before
breaking your back for a third time
Below the old dark basement stair there sat
your drafting desk, whose nuts, whose rambling arms
belied the old fine flicker of forge and vat,
of framing, making, building, dreamt-up forms,
of vision, hope from unsung pioneer
will one day invent his masterpiece, his tour
de force. Aged desk, are you prepared to tell?
Has time arrived to meet fear
with nose, to nose? If asked, work surface, flour
everything kneaded, ease us--all is well...
Tinkering sets and Lincoln logs dispersed
along with the plastic basketballer toy
buried within a young man's cedar purse,
casket of treasures, strong-box made of boy.
Always I played with playthings left from when
younger and younger versions of you lived
in worlds where daydreams folded on the earth.
Desire and intent
informed a simple world that muted moved
en route to Blissed Everlasting: Birth. Rebirth.
Soon come the fadings, manhood disenchants
in worlds without enchantments, glamoury.
When Everyone is worried, caught in rants,
conned, abused, used, massaged with emery--
they take (cause taken), break (broke), bricked (in turn)
because they know not if the "what I should do"
can break the reverie
of all I've known and know to do: to burn.
And thus the good we know we never do do.
Or do we? Really, do we only ill?
I think that the good men in this world are good,
that every bad man still in bed feels
all his guilt growing blackened mold-food
upon his own soul's plinth and weeps inside
the backside of eyes, either eye like glass,
Man who, unmanned, unarmed, unmasked regrets.
From such no evil hides,
though some exist like their remorse can't outweigh past
sins. Godly-born sorrow makes for better brides.
Repentance without regret ain't hard to get...
For grace does marry mercy to the just,
it pays the debt with money from above,
the death deserved by inflictor still a must,
yet made innocuous, the vile removed.
Our resurrected Savior is alive
who died: it is his demise that extricates.
Be free. For good men get their goodness from
the Ghost Whose Life still thrives
in all things, reminds us all that "Grace on grace"
applies to the apple, airplane, smile, the broom.
For the begotten's better still than the made,
for making takes what's given, makes it less.
But the begetter rears up a peer, his shade,
his shadow, fellow, counterpart to bless.
Was not the Father him that Christ promotes?
Got not Christ glory making man his friend?
The Spirit earned his praise in Mary's womb
slept not with her, but woke.
Begetting is the better thing: to die
so what's begotten remains (empty tomb).
I can't achieve your feat: No you? No me.
No you, then none of me of whom you're proud.
I say that in begetting me, a seed
freed freedom -- piece of you. Behind this shroud
hid Heath -- a kinder man -- and Lauren came,
who is favored in form and pax arsa.
In Heath -- that open land untilled is a bond.
Distill these two, their fame
still trumps my own. You see? Like a dream, far as
I know, your achievement cannot soon abscond.
"But Lance, my boy, all men beget!" How true,
but not intentionally. And none can
beget this son, these three. Dad, it's not new,
but older things are often better: you stand
where others flee. You foot our bills, you ache,
give when there's none to give, and give still more.
This means more than the theories relative,
which split atoms, dry lakes.
carpenter, learn from Carpenter this trust:
Beget: to give another life, chores.
Through ecstasy, family from family lives.
This, I believe, is genius.
Cradle of Stone
It's not when he came
Not his time of birth that matters
But that he came
Established his throne in fame forever
Little babe, little sage,
Little cradle made of stone
Holiday fervor with
Capital's seduction
Mass produces our nativity
To dysfunction as a scene
Rather
Than our story
That proves again Epiphany
three, no twenty
star gazers
poets from the east
invading a town
Whose newly crowned king
strikes fear in a once-bold
Herod, a grip of fear holds him
So, in the night he fights
Waging war with the firstborn
Babes helpless to onslaught
But our story proves through his wrath which,
However gripped by fear he remains,
Won't last the night...
Our star beckons
Twelve shepherds, deck the halls of time
With their presence
God's angels reckon the word by him
For his manger clothes aren't
Mangy at all, but a robe
Whose train chugs glory
Yet our story's one of a twelve-year old
Lost in a temple, but far from alone
kept company by riddled rabbis
as he teaches his teachers
Parents had left and still he spoke when found
"I'm here for my father."
People loved him
A man, hilarious, the life of parties
Bent toward healing and feeling
the pain of the poor
Loosing their chains to set them free
People hated him
This man, vicarious in spite of word-traps
Sent from heaven? He's a heretic & crazy
the bane and a sore in our side,
soon they'll make him king
if he stays
So chains came on a night
surrounded by saints & scoundrels
his friends and fouler men
All watching his silent march
Up an infinite hill of skulls
Scourged and taunted
forgotten in time as guards
put his own clothes on him
yet they weren't shamed rags at all
but the famed robe whose train chugs glory
Death met glare as he locked his jaw
He obeyed to rule.
And he would stand
At the turn of the week with Holy Hands
And side proven faithful
His true, grave clothes known only as a robe
Whose train englories,
As our stor
y strolled out of a tomb
Talk about making an entrance...
It's not when he came
Not his time of death that matters
But that he came
Establishing his throne in fame forever
Little babe, Little sage
Little cradle made of stone.
Baltimore Buildings
...Are a weird weave. Windows, for instance,
Speak of the seasons of certain men
In America and their Maids -- of the Michigan sticky
And Virginia giant juniper leaves
And the Boston bricks baking and the drenched
Patoka tempest that tidally rises
The rivers nine. Read of the south's
And the northern nuance's names and acts
In these ruddy roofs. Read of San
Francisco's solving in the sequence of row
Houses hanging. Ahead of the eastern
Apartment pillars. Ponder the deep
and whore houses high meeting
In medicine's middle -- maybe old John
Hopkins will hold the healing of a city
Walking The Wire, woken though broken
By racist ruts. Uproar this crossroads
That houses the homeless, how we forget
The closeness we share -- cleave out our
Inconvenient orphans or neighbors
Or black babies. Baltimore will
Never neuter the niggard past
Of white hate: wonder at the houses
that remember many masked lynchings
and the return of tyrants. Too many of the
Towers in the terran towns would rather
Fall than befriend a fascist or an Arab
Baby whose brain is bundled in the modern
Swaddling clothes. Or a swindling Jew.
Yeshua, Yes, You are not welcome:
You come to your own. They can't receive You.
Vulnerare
In the Christmas Carols are the covered truths
About the battered beauties who then love
Despite the signs, the signaled fears
That cue our cowing, that create our fights
And fletch our flights with the feathers of something
That kidnaps our courage. They execute a
Plan as if plotting, as if placing a mole
Merrymaking among our jaded
Ranks who revile, who renege on Christmas
Spirits like Scrooge. See the lovers
Leave us, laughing? Look at them thrive
As they come alive and call us to rise
And love the leavers and lend to the dreamers
And sleep with the slackers who slumber in parks
And cosign their causes -- they co-habit
With certain failure. See how they risk,
How they frisk their freedoms? Frayed are the strands
Of ambition they owned, once before this
Chance went and chose them. Now they will linger
A little bit longer over the poor and the poor
In spirit like the Scrooges, who seek three
Spirits to speak so that they can see.
These risky rogues. These reddened lovers
Who grace and grace, who grant and then give
Like gods who go gayly along with
Single-celled existence and our minor
Attempts at terror. What truth I see:
Non-entity enters our Eve as a baby.
For the Love of God
Could we with ink the ocean fill
Oh, God I know how we have tried
where pipe has burst below the Gulf
or man poured into it his pride
of place and privilege till it stank
of sweat and sin and suffering
and floated to a poorer shore,
our lavish petty offering.
And I, I stand before them all
The Worst with pen then pen again
all bleeding in my pocket's heart
the black, vague, unpublishable.
And were the skies of parchment made
not skies we've used but walls and trains
and bathroom stalls and table tops,
felled Amazons, fried Kindle brains.
We've written on the ocean floor
and staked our flags into the sky,
we've sent The Beatles to the void
Un(d)sealed gas chambers with a lie.
Though not of parchment, still of waves,
though not of paper, still the sound,
though not the skies, we've taken reams
from flame and water and the ground.
Were every stalk on earth a quill
we seldom use the reeds today
unless our name's Hermione,
we choose to press – it's keys we play.
As beatles scuttle down night's wall
the sound, the sound of typing rose
to me – a terror glazed in prose –
some dragged-dead sound: a typist's maul.
We've hammered, punched, and primed the keys,
grew one long tail to history.
We've stroked Your love like a lover's spot
but to its climax bring it not.
And every man a scribe by trade
I hear that literacy's rising
in the places tech has preyed
on countries without road or school
for power, peace or shade.
They read the books we've never read:
The Whale, the Brothers (less undead),
The Hunchback, and The Book once made
by sixty-some in sixty times.
That Book, they learn, was bound for them:
to give them pardon for their crimes
and learn to write along with Him.
To write the love of God above
oh let me, help me, make me try
or if not Your agenda, love?
Whose program bids me come and die?
For if it's mine, my death is vain
and if my country, death is hate,
if for family, kilt the dove
That lights upon all kindred fates.
To die for writing all your love
on sparrow backs and under crates
would push me past some sacrifice
for kin, self, business, or the state.
Would drain the ocean dry
(reverse of Noah's time and place,
fulfillment of temp's cry)
if loaded in my pen all space,
if I, immortal, write
forever then another day
like a programmed keyboard meant to play
each song of languish-made-okay
till I wrote myself to the Judgement Day
I'd need another night.
Oh God of mercy, give me strength
to write I must write:
nor could the scroll contain the whole
this too we men have tried,
for no more books than about this man,
nor sculptures, planes, or grains of sand,
nor half of all canvas (if canvas can)
were made for any other theme.
God gave instead our light its gleam
behind the man who cried
the blood, which better forms an ink
for pens, unlike our kitchen sink
of ocean black and draining thin:
red letters, scroll of skin.
though stretched from sky to sky
that skin-made scroll at one sky's end
not tanned, but soft applied
to wood and iron, bone and piss
first slayed, then buried, still is this
your prince, your savior, one called Chris?
(We hear fiend hiss his lie).
But then, three days, our scroll's complete
then rising up, new body meet
foretaste of healing: skin to sk
in,
scroll stretched from death to life again
and from sky to sky ever after end
enigma knows defeat
in red ink larger than the sea,
in a scroll of skin like a prophecy
written on either side,
in reeds like railroad ties on end,
like printer paper gauze descending
upon a warmed-up grave, ascending
Love to Love aright,
rewrote the tale of the world's ending
Love with Love in sight,
He lives and does not need defending,
Love. From Love we write.
To Love,
...
with Love,
Insight.
Sinking
As the vinyl turned once more
sounding closing cord
As the needle soft arose
toward its resting board
As the old man slow approached
knowing sounds no more
As he lifted up a disc
placing it in drawer
As now walking out his den
in his study's core
As now seated in his chair
foot upon wood floor
As crossed-legged, smoking pipe
fireplace before
As he drank a last cold scotch,
sank down on cold floor.
Asking in his very self
(wondering all the more)
"Did I ever love another?"
Died there on the floor.
Inconveniences, Rightly Considered
Untitled Ablist
Cut from the ending and pasted here:
not with hands, with running meat, just in case I get my hands cut out from under me.
A young man asked
"Legs or hands?"
Asking me which I would choose
to lose if given quandary
the paralytic point of view
Or
Captain Hook's dual-wield?
"Hands" I said "I'd keep my hands."
For what are legs to me?
For I can run and stand and limp
But legs shame amputees
Hands, of course, have given legs
To those who make Olympic games
And I have written of the fame of
Walkers
If you had a moment loose
To see the simple plain recluse
Who weaved her web with two small hands
And not by legs, you see.
Both hearts and hands affect the poor
No room for legs, but HANDS the more
We lend the more we open for
An army grasping love.
Yet still I wrote this with my feet,
The Speed of Sound in Water
Waves hold up
pillars hold up
The Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway
Beneath the
concrete surface:
hear ye nether
sounds, you see?
Still above
instill below
the din of men,
of fishing--
rubber hooks
rounded, calling
Me from the deep--
run aground?
Or deeper
dive? The acid
air, it muffles
sound in sleep
City Who
Never Sleeps, I
call you to the
ocean well
beneath the streets
above and rock
we rockabye
under the
wheel wells
and their splashing.
When It Hit the Saltlick
when it hit the saltlick --
sunlight -- crystals added white
to what'd released its color
when it hit the snowfall --
dayglow -- crystals made it better,
bright
Salt of the Earth
adults drawing from light's
Abode magnificate
Innocents in their first flurrious
attempts at changing
the landscape(s) together?
Not.
White.
unbright, unilluminated
melted, grimed, calcified
on the subway's aisle.
Innocence from holiness?
Holiness from innocence?
without a solid light
Source snowplow and dozer alike
rearrange piles of slow-eroding browns.
My Hooker
I write too few poems about Tara.
I forget she enchants children, scaring
away dark tears with bright blankets, how she
summons them to play, whore and Bowery.
You'll say, "Don't compare your wife with a whore!"
Not whoring but the non-whoring part
Of being a whore:
How even prostitutes must find Sabbath
when bad men proposition her form er.
She may refuse her coin, trade for a bean
and plant a garden in the brothelyard
and tend to it all year by daylight's guard
after many untended nights come out
into the streetlamp light to shout,
"Wake up and see! Wake up and see!"
calling those who've been rough with her, too free:
men turn to kids
taste unforbidden fruits
like children on an airplane who
cry until one kind hooker
hooks them not by a flash of skin
But an orange blanky.
Upon Finding Your Old Prison Letters
It was freezing and fire and filled with the smell
Of men who made due with maybe two
Pairs of britches and who probably shat
One anyways in the evening. Yet over it all
You sing your song of something like a hope
Or a cosmic comedy, of a careful need
To never neuter the novelty of prayer
Again if God would go on helping
You and yourn. The yearning to "Never
Disappoint my parents or my Papa in heaven
Or my family and friends." The food your cellies
Invented and vented like vases of steam
That you lovingly look at and leave thinking:
"I could open an Interstate Railway
Powered by pretty and precious containers
Of steam or magma." The structure of life
To come has come and the collective ambitions
Arrived though eroded like rare Greek
Marble men who made it through
The wars and rains, weathered by things
They never knew would neuter the drive
And the hope of the heavens their hands raised
To praise and opine. Epiphany is a "showing
Upon" where a promise pours forth as
Manifestation. Maybe the hope
And the prayers you prayed have passed away
To make a means for the modest ambitions
To rescue your reason from the rigor of jail
When the hope of Heaven and healing prayer
Were the better broth on a blizzard day
As your blood froze, as it nearly boiled
In the summer in that box, and you screamed your hope:
"God protect and guide me out
And bring me back to brew coffee
In Sikeston Missouri safe and not dead" ?
Home
You yanked up years of dreaming
When they pulled the plug out. Powerful longings --
How they flounder in flame. But fleeting are the ways
Friction frees us: it frames our pains
But tames truth -- is the time we spend
Bitter a better base for erecting
T
omorrow's morning? Minds fashioned
After the evening will ever fade
In the dreaming dawn. Dreadful, I know,
But the beacons are lit, they beam out,
Lingering light leads the way home
And the Fatherland foams with a fibrous tide --
This undertow aiming to pull
Us inward and upward. Isn't it scary
To leave the land of your long birth
For the country that's called Camelot by your people?
Inheritance: Part 2
We're a people without homes
We trod a world of shadows in our sleep
Choosing tiptoes while you plant our feet
Still we're learning how to belong to The Meek
As a people without homes.
In a global house of bones
half in flesh incarnate loyalty
Just like us, you came fleshed Deity
As we walk, so we own, both the barefoot meek
Over global house of bones
Call it: "Valley of Dry Bones"
"Can it rise?" people ask, hoping homeless meek
Take off their shoes and scratch their feet
Just like Zeke raising up both the dead and the bleak
Bare feet raising all dry bones.
None of us will have a home
Every place will be ours when there is no sea
Kick off your shoes and you'll soothe your feet
'Cause the Heavens and Earth all belong to the meek
For His presence is our home.
"Birds have nests
Foxes have dens
But the hope of the whole world rests
On the shoulders of a homeless man --
No you did not have a home."
Looking into the Abyss while Chewing Glass (and the Abyss Stares Back)
To Della Beyond the Veil
You yearned for your homeland.
Always do. After the era
passes you, you pass too.
Music styles wane as moons,
Norwood's fiddle when new knew you,
knew grandkids too, never me
though or the little themes that we know,
millennials make do. My how the strings
request of me: "Play." Can resonance reach
across a sea? Out from you
unto we who sing? Or... are the strings
synced to this season of century gone?
Their song sung and strings rung out
whenever loss leaves us songless?
I've made my mothers feel
not so proud. So crowds take me.
But you are yearning. You quietly burn.
Obscurity scorns the scoop, awards --
The sounds of clapping cloven from hearts
Like you and yourn. Younger men make
Mistakes of fame, stake their claims on
Followers fondling, but fallow grounds
Grow up greenlings, great and silver
Towering trees take seeds to start,
Kernel and soil, corn and soot.
Thank you for thinking of us,
Toiling away at tender things,
Toiling away like tinder twigs
Will smolder -- sparks and older twine.
Hope I that I will integrate
The privacy that premies bring
To wombs or moss weathers in shadows
Or stalagtites steal from stubborn ores
Deep beneath the dungeons.
The axis of our world acts unseen,
Yet it spins and clings to spiritual things.
We owe ourselves to owlish beings:
Nocturnal, wise, weathered, silent,
Sure to sneak snow mice in cold,
And watching, ever watching us
With eyes that know. With eyes of stone
That melted long ago in the River Jordan.
Færwel Welfær
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