! SHORT SOCKET.

When the time finally comes I will come before time And declare that I have lost it Between all these years The memories of the past are wedged Between all these years Which are a loose pattern of moments Changed only by the ticking clock These, then, are some of the things I have rifled thru, in my time: A man accosting Me for money Getting hit by a car And coming out of it Unscathed The first sense Of the supernatural In observing the mere fantasy of the sky With round eyes. ........ "In the far South the sun of autumn is passing Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore. He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him, The worlds that were and will be, death and day. Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end. His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame."

"!

Wallace Stevens, Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery ........

#!

THE HALO IN THE MIRROR, by Esdras Barnikelt

In my Dreams I sometimes Find myself going higher and higher Up, climbing up The stairs of the ruin Of some structure, in the attempt To find a place so High, so far Up, that There would be No possibility Of falling My eyes could feel the Danger in her eyes, and soon went out In miserable blindness. I awoke. Yes, I had dreamt Her once more, when there was less Left of her for me than wind to look at, less-Her there in my minds eye anyway than what focus Given to the gusty street, attempting to say a visible Wind, as if what strode in motes Of dust was the wind itself seen: and yet This perspective only means to take my past A place the more atomic, insignificant: but for the Grace of a poetic life now as something furtive Passing me, I could not say, "I was." For, I imprinted thereupon myself On her, again, hearing my own demands Of a merciless ego made on her, she now those winds Of stripped, weakening memory. This danger I had dreamed: she looked upon me thus To plumb as deep a berth as I had made a height, and Left me stockstill in my dumbstruck state: Of fathoms more than I could refuse a fearful gulp: Before the threshold of my ageless

! Fall I stood: and from the highest Heaven of her eyes, I fell, in: into dreams-I saw again, redundantlythough, wakingnothing shone Anymore brilliantly, and all of it seemed by then To have collected at The bottom of my mind, a funk, a gaseous grotto In my mind: where striking things Still hit to vaguely mark some Lilacs Tally: and I find: my words, lamented even now, By the big mouth Of Walt, go down the Grotto: as I am swallowed into Darkness by obeisance of this thought On bad dreams. Walt smiling said, For one Thing being ignored, he said; lamented as a crucial Overlooking. I could not flock my senses to the gourd And there be rid of thirst, this time, And thereof wet my face and call it not So real. I have imagined him. My eyes could see The feeling in the danger of her voice, still do, and still gives-Me fathoms for the fall: just in case on the way down I passed it by as plummeting through more eternity The thing/phenomenon I overlooked. Something there was That countered my present submission To this, to her: like a laugh from weakest Walt And, like a whip, it illumined All my pain again, a weeping water-waster Hankering for handkerchief or sink Just for to shock me back. Reality, Forward march to the place, the place of pegs, The house of pegs. The hog, The wolf not wanting. This was I, Before fleeting back And away again, unto a house of imagery, Safety perhaps, or not and images of pegs That all in time will be explained, tho limp And dead my eyes: tho pain was there, there was no source Nor place to house me once my belly

$!

! Hit the bottom of infinity, seeing nothing I Hadnt already known Id overlooked, At least. So shrug my shoulders: what is, Was. My ears forever listening for what My eyes either cannot see Then, or do not now, in state of dreams-My head gives up and loosens on The eider-pillow: new voices that I hear but once Before they dissolve, shrink all away, Rounding off my memory of her. And so, then, I have only the memory Of whatever I had heard, without What is of what it had been when It had been. Isthat memory The same, despite the different soul Of it: I fall from what was to The junk that junks what is. And not the same. And yet this memory is more real Then the voice itself, whenever it Had spoken:it speaks:and is dismayed At its own translucent poverty And this lack of confidence In time, seeing states of time Only: and this, It only feeds a doubtful watch. This thing on my wrist ends up destroying The voice, calling from infinity/eternity. But then, But then, with time, the confidence Returns, And my frugal imagination rises In the gullet, like a stone of tears Somewhat cautious of its heavy plash The size of stones. Rising from the imitation To create something wholly new-That flickers out, overlooked, once realized

%!

! In a mind: hanging by the noose Of parallels: intimate objects Turning from the dull path to Their prerequisite salvation: And made the rough analogy of kings Of Mnemosyne Who stand, alone, in ageless confidence That yet is false because It is not true, should not be true. Penumbra. The vicissitude alters Until it is unchanging , the king his Bishop falters, The dice drops. Up to chance, What fruit is on the tree, an Apple, peach: until Until by rearranging A new intimidation Crops Around your eyes Like a delay That keeps her figure On the rise And we pray That each measure That we take Will fill like flies That hover on The surface Of the thick lake Of pegs: Will fill the whole With fragments strewn imperfect Like confetti, frivolous As confetti: strewn minutes even As that to turn the sky An object: as dust on wind wind

&!

! That welters garishly Lighted by the noons Own precipice, according To the time, its nearly evening: I No longer fearful gulp at heights, Much less in dreams. No longer, when: Since the beginning of this poem, Things have drifted into changing, Since then: right as the sun Heeling, backs away in cautiousness: The I rattles the watch on wrist, my eyes Of him seize time in selfishness for Myself to sight her, to make most sure I find What Walt wanted me To grab from blurry carnages and dooms; A thing that lives. For it is her it must be her BOLLOCKSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Vacant sermons made hale heft By the thick skill of the mouth And soon will things be going south Once the priest goes home to his wife Chicane about riffraff stupid young people Plain praise of the Lord is enough why bother With these purple psalms immaculate convincing 2,000 years naught except bollockses Seen veridical siphoning value from sustenance Would fail the intrinsic organs of religion by which value Is the only thing it feeds on, can feed on By which the man suited best to lead the question of existence To a halt, had to be first understood in all tenets Of that existence Was only understood horizontally Better ground to stand the faith of shaky hinds Not yet vertical to be articulated I hear the vowels Of a shifting mind

'!

(!

Grown weary in speaking of darkness, so the man Relinquishes the fine planet of his brain To less unsightly and disfigured plans, The habits of the head attempt to change That built headlong the tragic imagery Of perfidious shapes, once innocent and fair, Perfidious foundations developed Like an illness The wills of the mind become expected. The wills of the mind become expected. The wills of the mind become expected. The wills of the mind become expected. In the blatant, dominant blue I carry you, and behind A legend awaits my return Through time. He waits for me to see it finally For what it is, or, maybe What it meant to be, but Could not, but could, but only In some other, newer space, Unpopulated by truth, by the figures Of some salient sonata. The notes Are discordant and jumpy. It is A stringless codagathering Gathering up the materials, So that they may turn into some ethereal mural Depicting our stagnation graffiti Graffiti slung flagging down and up Though illuminated, special In the task of its rendering Depicting our stagnation Which is but another flowering If only we may realize it like that

! And sculpt our own mischief From the blatant dominant blue, The fatal spareness of what is beyond Something, that makes the visible a little Hard to see, and yet, once seen, Is all too visible it holds the clarity Too much in its hands, does not allow For any of it to float Off, into some loftier Retention, opening into The mouth of the night As it too opens and discloses Nothing, yet enacts a response Simply in that it is the fear Of something spent beyond repair We cannot lift these stones We cannot lift these stones I come across a conclusion, Then deny it. Later on, my skepticism Wins me over, and I accept The conclusion as not being Wholly true, but true in a sect A barredoff land of Sanctimony repels my vigor for judgment And intuition bleeds into it Gives to it the fact, I use Inadequate metaphors, They do not really tell you what I said in my brain, and yet, the brain, Will the brain fall? And if the brain Begins to weather pratfalls building Fortresses as a child assigning Extra edge, to every mile, Could not but prove me right in every faculty There lies a summit, and at every summit A point of deference from nature And as the hatchet thrown becomes

)!

! Stuff stuck in splintered spine What enkindles from the wound Is not benign, but a leather tomb, A tomb of apostles, without messiah Sin without GOD What dreaming sod could pin the meaning Down, In one sitting, without fleeing From the first fracture seen, the spleen Of rightness leads us on, but when The throat cracks, and disables The thrall of spitting howlers spitting For a new age, a new succinctness Of motion, a new page In the book, ascend to the Highest notch, we live In a civilization, the nation Is only one man. And one foil Speaks with a grainy tongue of all The fallacies that came before As if that could stop us from Creating new ones, but even then I cannot hope for truth I will not pay Pay the price for the elegant and swift Just to make them blind and lazy, We all must be stupid to realize our stupidness Until the man with the trombone Seals a note and ties it into pain Then lets the pain resolve itself In the havoc of a larger shelf Of notes, a measure, scrupulous And staid, then flayed By modulation, until the scream sinks, And then the most musical of things: The silence grows, until, far off A woman sings I shout phantoms in the tones Of some other, less difficult difficulty

*!

! A runt of change in the gobetween That, from whence expanded shall Become no change at all but At the base. The spirit of my heart as it revolves And is obscured byThe retrospect of scariness Reveals a larkStill to play the circumspect Living is a variety of ceasingIn different areas A stain climbs up the fragment Hoping to top it off Tell X that poetry is not dirty silence clarified It is silence made still dirtier. The tree that moves On the kite of windless motion A pause before the blow, Dude!!!! The motion we cannot say But feel indefinitely-In our stony bones Without the fragrance Of a profounder spring Begging nascence Distracting us and, And cannot play the circumspect To your alignment of swiftly Constructed morals from the pain of dusk Presuming but a lark to weep, To weep away the day again-And cannot see the sheltered Sickness billowing your eyes, And as the poison dies Within Within the blood before the chance It could have taken to be lethal I strum upon a blasted string And tell you I mean many things If these words were made illegal

"+!

! I could not tell you why Only the tale of this Could swiftly construct The base natures And nacreous rhymes Or ludicrous makers That do not exist Of an internal, willing bacchanal The chance for that not gone at all Could not go, refused to stay Went someplace else to Pray, for the limits to recede Like stifled wind Fleece the day and see what you find. Stripped bare, what literate frequencies Would we find in the numbering? And if one lackadaisical spirit Decides to hang under the arch Of a tree Will an apple fall on his head? Perhaps it is a peach tree. Will the slow calumny dissolve Into sensible packaging Though still ostensible? It is in the worm of a phrase. The second and its minions That all coagulate under the Brutal lassitude of light The slow light of the sun The shifting and turning the calypso Of the wires Propulsion and Exertion And could this all lead To something. Could it Find, in the sync of the

""!

"#!

Rotary the effort cleansing Systems, and leaving them without And within, as funny talismans The fort is built and it swings In the scream. The perpetuity Increases, in velocity And the blot is a scream The stain the blot is-A scream, a beleaguered one for For the fickle patty of this Mechanism, that folds into Contraptions and cogs, and Systems gone of causal, progress, The object is endless, in the wires The wires feed the mouth the -Electric void, cracking with Spark and whistle. A fuse bleeds, And the mass against mass bleeds, And the shapely conurbations Of this rational, undisturbing patty, This mass. Consider the mechanisms Of one tu r n To the othe r I do not know my name, That figment has escaped From the shapes that form Around my mouth, at most, You steal my reflection, and Give it to your heart to keep-And I could weep, and weep and weep, And feel no pain, and only know That love has broken this glass heart Fallen to the floor So fragile,

"$!

So free of guile, so innocent, And yet imperfectly gotten, The thing that gave it importance Was started too fast to be early Holding the mess within himself Like left hand around the wound The man descry The rhythmic foon And soiling each malignant shelf Of living each to each a step That calculating martial eye Steps on past the lost provision Communicating long and loud So that his mind is mind of vision And the vision is a cloud Until a mere scratch in the seams Wrought a division so great that The two fragments that became The heart, were completely Different. This fake peace, This lostness, this fugitive -In my guts, dashing off and Creating another bruise to nurse So that this curse-Inflates my preemptive mind That sullies all intentions and Intervenes when nothing is wrong, This mind of glass, as glass as My heart, my bones are made Of glass The reasons crash Against the limits of my brain And as it has begun to rain Outside, I see the drops thru The window and believe in another, Another ghost to bring the division By charity and giving and the importance

! That one person, my give to another, By these things, I know that I have Given all my money for gas, And yet have nowhere to go, so that It was a waste, and yet no waste, A prolonged excursion into the Infinite characters of her Infinite Smile, those eyes, those eyes The SUMMER Is an aperture, thru which May pass a dingy FALL, The snow is dusty in its duty Wafting, down the diagram Of plain. The toppling frame Of mountains, which secede from hills And Gives a windy call in its utility. And fall becomes a dingy WINTER Hindering travel. Time shall ravel Out, and leave the landscape kind And leave the plain as hideous rind Of previous solitudes unexplained, Ranting to a void that is explained, And the graph of ages, is utility That tells of the futility Regarding my futurity Perpetuum of ages And the sages of the hour Are dour in their quest To leave the-Seasons as a definitive Text, for sempiturnal reasons for The EARTH, and why it doth go round and Round without a sound, and yet Shall change in crossing and in breeding Newness from time from fleeting time

"%!

! I am going back to where I belong I am Not wanted here. In the green Of living, I was destitute, and Searched for connection, took A bus into TOWN, grew and Learned, about things, many things And many deceits disguised as things Such factitious personages as I Encountered shook hands with left me With a morbid feel For the human condition. The lies that scape the breadth Across a blinking man tell and talk And tell and talk of grotesque Folly, what they hide is hidden As Blake and his poetry Is always poetry so do The unchanging marionettes Twinkling their idioms compress The found lot of things, all The tracts of death begin with being And the being sounds a freedom -Like an absurd bell. What altruistic Man, sitting in the corner could Follow thru with his magnanimity -Enough, to extend friendships Beyond painted white blankness Everyone here is childish Everyone here is withinemmselves As though, the content of their -Character, were not too much To undermine the biggest core -Of self, meaning that this Simulacrum

"&!

! Is a shadow, an object Terminated prematurely, before It has the chance to die out Fully . The TOWN is full of symbols, the Symbols are the people, and the people-Poised between catharsis, between Relativity, and are thus static The stock is severely thinning In such specters, such vulnerable Slabs of walking meat shun the heat Of bugs, trilling In the evening by the lake, I sit with you among symbols, These symbols, these personae, Looking for a rut To tumble into And arrive me at spangled defining That defiles the meaning By preening the miles it took To quell the rumble of what Had been forsook. By that I mean penitence was driven Out. His dreams remained similar In kind, not in shape; they Stripped the corrosion to a faultless, Eternally concentric presage, Each deep Revealing a lower deep. He limited The trite with dreams, and, Spirited and free, dissembled cues Before the motion of the cleft Rent the views that went bereft Leaving clues inhibited He steps out for a walk and thinks of this . . . . . .. . . . . Returning home, he encounters the frail spaces

"'!

! Of life, behind these mediocre walls And that heart in haste to shed Light on the situation between Us, what was it, really? What Figures could we number out In order to deceive ourselves that Such a thing was able to be Counted? It stretched on, infinitely Because there was no stifling no pause But that which comes willingly, as if Nothing should be said. Or rather That nothing could be said without Proving us wrong, the dour questing Towards truth leads to madness Madness, and confusion, and Wrongness. Believe me, I wish Things could have turned out Differently, and the regrets, Well, they eat me alive. But, then, Could I but see that life is sculpted By regrets, as the inverse is as True as the other, more natural Comprehension of events, the opposites Of each to each are always there, yearning Yet incurious, willing to pass the time Without using much energy, it is Masochistic almost, how much Was left unsaid, Tho i understand Why you would think that I had said All that I could say, and thus in speech-Would I to you be engaging in a hopeless Roundelay, repeating myself like a child Struggling to be listened to, or like when Someone makes good joke when nobody-Is listening, so repeats the joke And I choke

"(!

")!

Had this not been here I would have placed it somewhere else And, had not the other place existed I would have had no choice But to keep my love Where it was. And where it was Is not a place that can be touched With the eye It is a place That settles quietly in the coffin And runs the dose of time rotten For, if the dose of time Could be gotten by a figure That was not mine, and if The loose kite of minutes Were degrees that led to the same Miraculous minute The minute constituted only of the minute And our lives constituted of the only lives My love has become timeless Like the man in the coffin Like a dark, meaningless phase of life That decided to be important Even if it lived in a second-That was ruined, from the getgo And time deathless time begins eternally In the place where my love is The place that is the only place Because there once were others Not quite the same that led As I have said To an entrance into the same grief , A horrifyingly similar sense of loss -Was in each place, and so Was the same place,

! If the feeling was the same And in my brain I count the haunt of minutes like stars And look upon the coffin of the man And wish that I was timeless On words, on hopeless lines of words The hurtle of an idea out into vast vastness And coming back, to me, as something Different then I had seen before, It was not mere infatuation, or something, It was something that involved no words, Which, to me, Is a compliment because I think that words can describe everything, Except this, and all the that in this, Those specific moments, those images, The inspirations and perspirations, Each one is locked in my mind, forever Present, forever digging me out of the Hole. My soul How fleeting is the hand of thought The hand of thought Shaking, bleeding Stigma, fraught . . .. . .. . . .. Is indistinct, sometimes I feel inhuman, unconscious Of the strength that is located In the hearts of people, I take it For granted, it is too vivid For me, it blinds me. I have dreams About finding you, and seeing you In front of me, until some kafkaesque Happening separates us, as in, Thru the chambers of a formidable Maze you go, and I follow, and

"*!

! Lose you. It is something of the Hopeless hope of that German fellow, So that in motion one does not move, Tho, he seems to, and only Sinks farther into the core of the eddy, As the WORLD around him turns slowly Lifeless, filled with deceit, the chase Towards truth has left us without Much to say that could be positive, Because the truth of the matter is that The truth existed only in that fucking Glass heart. Kafka knew that tho The fate of K. was ultimately decided, His protagonists still will, always make Conscious choices that lead them To that fate, or else the fake peace Would not be there, that illusion Of moving forward would not Be there, and so there would be no Story to tell. The truth is I am Crippled in various ways, ways That stem from my own choices Leading nowhere. And thus, My name is an answer To a question I did not ask, And is confusing because I do not know the context Of each vowel, the chords Of sound are meaningless to me, To think, I used to be called that! I am a rat That scurries in the rotten sewers Describing a circumference A small world for me, tho I think it large, as it is all-That I know. If I knew more, Perhaps I could sew glass back

#+!

! Together, and shine the radiance Of love thru the triple prism of -This glass heart, this heart Made of glass, fragile as silence And yet violent I see you, I do not see you, It is rain, the rain is beating On the panes. The pain Is not pain, because it is my fault And the vault of heaven is Forever riven!, divided Of itself, for being too watchful, Too dogged in its wishing To be freed from you, and so I do not free myself from you, These are the only shackles I wish to wear, The restraint, unlike a lack of words Is not voluntary, I can only choose The way I am to be consumed I whisper to you, I tell you symbols, I talk of sour leaves, you talk Of works in progress, I bury you In the soil, I plant signs-Rough this day, and rough The days before that come And drum upon the cuff And stick around Until the clod of dirt -Crumbles in yur hand, Only then do you know-Of weakness, the frailty Of cracking that is specific And the welding back together With a seal that is hermetic-

#"!

! - Not quite closing the door, You do it anyway, something More you wanted to express -But the dialogue was deleted, The, spaces, between, words, depleted, So that you only speak, and never Stop, a lush of sound, unbroken, Hideous, Gone of being bound. So that in freedom, You were shackled, Anyway, to sparse continence, Always alone, always a pathetic Island you are an island, A few girls here and there Reeking of ambivalence and sweat Truth has no heir and has no precedent The precedent existed long before And only now can be unearthed After falsehood, deigning over things Admitted it was false, and false the raveling -Down of my conceits I thought were true And yet, were not, and only alterations Of that truth, which never can be found Except when plucked wrongly from the branch And bitten into like a messy peach What heir of truth could there ever be? I should have made the gesture of repose A nobler movement! I should have understood That false things once were true And that The only truth that can be had Is one that makes the teller mad And all the fabrications of this age Would once have been the offhand thoughts Of an ignoble sage, who fought and had No fighting left in him, and yet fought on,

##!

! And I can only see that life is long And deceives itself in kind fortune blessed With happy seconds made soon into years-Of refusal, refusal of the truth That has no heir, no predecessor And no precedent to amplify That which must be so suppressed Until the falsehood comes back again Leaving us tame in the heart and vital -In the body There is something ludicrous -In a clod of dirt. The hurt Is ambiguous, tho it hangs Like a noose, the man before It, looking thru the hole Where his neck is supposed to go If poetry is the supreme fiction, then fiction Supremely resonates with those Who live in reality. They are Cloistered, within their own distrust Of that reality, thinking it Malevolent: a perfected means To an end, that had before been Greatly flawed; then, altered Itself, unnaturally, to fit The situation. But in the time -It took to alter, The situation had been resolved, Any interest in the difficulty , Dissolved, and And became dust from the words That were spoken between John Ashbery And the void he struggles from which To be freed. Ashbery, tell us, if you will, What the chances left are for us to -

#$!

! -Make it in this world without returning To that dutiful nothing of a remark The streetlight sheds angelically -What seems to be the notion of true light Against the dark. John, you are The dark. And light, you are The insufferable duality, In threes and fours Mystery cloaks in a thrall The reasons for this fall From grace. And if the letter Presumes to know you better Than I do, perhaps The twig snaps And I leave the door Without turning the latch You work for the medlins? You draw The salience of the hoodlums on the train Looking at you looking for drugs wandering In the eye to your knockers A group of men, like crows cackling Some are murderous some are bloodthirsty You do not answer the question, you Do not know what medlins are, he Asks you again. Then, He asks you a third time. You say, leave me alone So they do, but hold a grudge Against you, and stare daggers At you. You get off the train Three stops early. The stertorous drone of the traffic Cultivates an epidemic from one vehicle alone Spreading to a swathe that spreads in murderous Frustration, the groan

#%!

! Of delay resides like an annoyance In the sight of dismal cars That scatter, like stars In avoidance of what could matter, Starving the seminal: Each vehicle to a human, each One trying to reach a destination, And the day is humid: Telling us of what we cannot Comprehend, and of which spot Would be best to park, in the end. They follow you. It is not long Before you notice this, and Quicken your pace. Perhaps You could lose them? You look behind you And they are gone. Relieved, You turn around while crossing The street and see them, Waiting for you On the other Side. You swiftly jerk around, and Start running in the opposite Direction. There are strange Men ahead of you that you had Not noticed before, but they Must have come along with The gang that had been harassing You from the beginning. All paths are blocked. The street Is without a single soul. The men Close in around you. You scream, But it does nothing, and the last -Thing you hear is your own scream Dying into murmurs that echo out Like a voice that strains to be Heard, while knowing that it

#&!

! Will, eventually, fizzle beneath A mysterious layer, somewhat Similar to a subdued, cacophonous layer The voices, together as one Mourning. They shout of a senseless, Fearful WORLD between the lines. Work, young man, breeds necessity This life of work, unbearable and constant Maintenance, deserves to be done with, finished, Hurled like ashes from an urn into the sea. But you chug on, and live, and understand, And know less and less, because you see Some things you do not understand, and Put them in the same category, You do not bother to think About what objects would look like To someone who, does, not, see, them, And only sees the relative, the influx Of materials, too much information! These people are absurd So many young people working So many old people working Nobody is learning. Is this what is, What it is, is this it? Satisfied? No. The panther of Rilke slinks thru bracken wood, And knows more about work than any man the panther Has no understanding of hardship Because hardship is life to the panther, A give-and-take, a harmonious feel for survival The black animal turns the spokes of his feet Around a closer circumference, Dumb to inference I have never met my rival face-to-face,

#'!

! I probably would deck the guy in his self-serving mug And walk away while people looked at me. My work is destruction. I deal in destruction, The silly gumption of my words is bored with itself, It is too strong, too hefty a symbol, It lingers late. I would probably deck the guy Because he taught me how to work, And work and work and never see The capability of an animal that slinks The shake of need, rising in the primal breast The decision to move forward is a hard one I, thus, tell my father to come back another time When I am not busy. But, I was not busy, I just did not want to work I do not want to work I want to smoke, And lift this existential rheum from my seeing, This revelry is misprision, I did not even Tell you, what the reason? Perfidious bloke, Damned universal cock My rival my rival is not there, He is a reflection a distraction that is tame And by being tame is all the more distracting Because I think, as I work, that my brain Has the will to push the rival back Before the specter has a chance To attack. To be brutal. Grow meaning from this, if you want, I really do not care. I just put shit out there, And hope it sticks. Sometimes it does, Sometimes it does not. And so I work, And level my ego And spin a ditty For those heroes in my head, rather, and and

#(!

#)!

And list me as done with on your list I am a monster with a tail of great length, Where did that come from? Perhaps Now, I have jumped the gun so I guess I will stop this I do not want to work I want to smoke, Mr. Apollinaire. Hell yeah, me too, just make it quick I have to kill some time anyways My life is a disorder, an aural haze Of bad ways. I will give you a quarter For a cig No problem man, Keep the change I do. The last chaff of the week declaims / The solids of you, which are now spent: / Yelling for the argument / For the dells and gains / In life / Toggling poles of deceptive cant / Always posturing, always living ways / Not truly lived. And could this be an acrimonious thing that I have said / Within the days and the weeks, of dead / Holiness. A route to squeeze / The ether from this orderly breeze / Without destroying other tangents / And leaving life / To the higher management / Of cherubim that chuckle / In the heat of my knuckle / Against the pale cheek of a starved angel O the thickness of vulgarity Sacrifice is requital to the habits Of overuse. Jurisdiction of the image could be attained / Within the reaches of prudent words / Which do not waste a syllable in being prudent in / Becoming to the full effort of the image / Assigned to them. So it is said / That this blanket of wold is accentuated / On one side of the image, by a house. A house is the mite of an emphasis to be dealt with As a vision, in broad strokes, unfortunately. The porous particulars / Are left out, the reason being that / This poem had previously been made bereft of details / And the idea mutated / After being chucked into a vacuum shall describe / No more of that just keep one guessing, as to / The style the reason of and for the vacuum / So, there is a house /And on the

! other side reaching out of eyesight out , out of the WORLD a stream that is purple in its implications

#*!

Much is lost then in the disposed channels / By which the postulation of place responds with a kind of kicking majesty This persistent metralgia kicking little shit I hate this child of this malformed locale. / The concord of the image still there in the womb / And the math of objective as seen / In the old, house, pickles into something disgusting / In the womb / Because it is assumed not to ever change / And thus, is described and described and described / The hoot of syllables in words meretricious daubs not more than that / Underneath, the primary gist as is is gotten at but is / Nothing that involves this house this house, that is parcel / Into which are thrown the flotsam of intricacies / While word after word will sweep the automatic signs The organic, deeper scopes are sacrificed / For the sake of reducing the parlay of imagination / Which at times found dangerous very dangerous / Meditation on the idea that all things able to be described: / Based on the possible gestalt of daffy phonemes perhaps there is a noggin / Working in each word that together add up / To an afflatus not equivalent yet fathoms greater to / This pastiche: this glum face of country / This limited canvas, this house, this stream, this / Treeless wold / There is a toggling of sketchy faith as to / The accuracy of this description is grounds for a PEG / To be stuffed instead of words into the cuneal modus of the brain / The PEG is an object that jars. The hands of vice of hankerings they fumble people / And drop them on the floor. There is a croaking body In this structure of croaking wood. This house speaks of a serene morality / And that the gubbinses and harlots of the WORLD will break their granitic faces / If only they could take a quick gander at the Idea of the old house The stream the treeless wold. Though, all in the image never pivots From the hard norm And the numbering clapboards mossy with lingered stillness And the inlet. Creeping along the periphery of the / Inlet scrounges Life in circuses of crocus and blue woad And the passing of the stream away enough becomes a junket A pilgrimage almost into The blue hills, wishing to find an answer To this conjectured reality the blue Hills, they are risen out the flat field Like a repulsive contradiction. Just as the house once rose, that is, As though for the first time, still new to the point of seeming temporal

! And the stream, far off gone in a fictive theory:

$+!

A trope, that creases In the sight. It is something of ad hoc Arriving at an impenetrable node of thinking In which the PEG is a creature, a bald creature dwelled Barely in the node. This impacted cleft Not quite bringing roundness, and yet it fits Because the PEG itself is not round, and rises Like memory from the lost ornaments of rudiment life. The same of the simple old house Is true. Greenbrown trinities of brush seeming extruded from The bottom the foundation of the house. Surrogate-Manifestations bud from the nutrient land These hyphenated aureoles formed in the tangles of living and grass That after the flood caused a protracting of the bloom of the seed Into a trussed circuit down reality becomes contrived Because it is consumptive, not brained enough by the cudgel of words Words brained and left mentally retarded. Nonetheless brought the image out of The pocket picked, lint, off, it came from Nowhere came to be maculate like the the The rest of the WORLD, because it is an artifice and lacks Sincerity: the thing of puniest spunk: / In our relevant lines of WORLD as puny WORLD-EXPLANATION: Description of a house next to a river that leads into the hills. The simplicity of the image is mangled by my own verbal expiations, which themselves are quite aware of their thick, translucent vulgarity. This is a pome about artifice and lies, about the senseless nature of an object: William Carlos Williams. Imagist. Ideas consist of objects, objects ideas. This pome attempts to reveal the senselessness of such an ideal: the image is the truth and my words contain the muddled logic of reality; for in reality we are moving thru a continuous fogabsent of the truth, of both object AND idea, at timesand only in blessed moments are we able to detect at least one, as itself, but never both contained in one. This is working under the perception of my mind as the only reality that can be; since, indeed, externally, any object is comprised out of ideas; and one may, externally, see those ideas in objects. But, the external has no place in poetic self, at least for me. DISILLUSIONMENT AT FIVE OCLOCK ! The muse is a dying man

! Full of artistic swill but Passionate swill Nonetheless. He is a passionate man. A cold man. A drunk. A Soberminded individual. He is these things and He is none of them. I Have known him for so long that Actions acquire deeper meaningswhat May seem to be Externally, is not so, when you hear it again, and again, In different times or places, I have an exceeding emptiness in me. So, we are plagued Plagued! With eyes that stare and see no man A petty phrase instead; a cheap connection / Rises from impotence, like an erection / And, the silence, jilted so long / By the din fades all slow Back in, neutralizing the burn of Tribunal, with a resounding hush. Thoughtless, broken wonder / The judgment of others Waging / New stereotype from throwback follies, Long gone and done with, yet the Daunting haunt rots the locker Of the mind, contending over The mind. All that could be left, is The darling sense of spine, gone fast But not quickly as tho it felt so distant Even an inch away from me, clocking nice And quickly from any Involvement with me, who once possessed it so fully That no sly dram could pass a fart Of action, without my knowing. Gone is the year, yet palpable the days within it. For it is not the year we rememberwe cannotbut the series of instances in a day, and the living out of every second, which become the morsel of an experience relegated by chance to memory.

$"!

! Since I do not have much time, I will start with who I am and end it that way. Not much time on this planet, that isand so ends the unity like a dirty prank. I must deal with what I know best, and that is I. And yet I did not understand myself at all until realizing the very fact of this. If I had it my way, I would have told you that I was a nice man who could not fathom, in the least, the nature of the indictment against him. In six months I will be dead; before this I will be alivebut what sort of life, exactly? It seems we all were fastened to another more Romantic progenitor, the picture painted already and the themes dealt with already and all this and everything else but the useless pangs of abrupt imagination gone crazy and spelling on the nerves, while I go observe myself and bust the value of every quiet harmony of friendship, and selfless deed, revealing them all to be for the benefit of only the self, all, all self. It seems that everything Become sacrilege by The furrow of ages Into a Gnostic brow And then the coming of Vice unto the land And haul us back to An elastic epoch Turning over into the next Polemic that shall Frag the CHRIST before It can be finished Leaving its dense pensiveness To atrophy in dust thats done With creeping I came to a field. There was a silent pressure, seeming to rob the WORLD of air We are, after the apocalypse, reminded of the large confusion of personal anxieties, of human anxieties all of which when taken together render us nearly immobile: we see squatting at the base of an oak an

$#!

! aisle of wasted sedge, obscured mostly by thickness of the white snowand, having nothing better to do, we think on the many faces of oblivionfjjjdkeskern34kx,dlwopow..q/ A man made out of eyes The luster of pain And the jangle of teeth That channel my quiet brain And leave me shards of images Of one inside the mirror A man who is not me, channeling Me for its purposes. You have The body of my hand, and the Shape of the pause, which has no Shape but in the intricacies of bone That welter in the breeze of synapses, The habits of the day Are plain, and cannot Be elaborated, So pump this plasma Through the veins In the hopes of new Company to keep within The tenors of a trope And I elope with Emaciated demons in My artificial brain. I would that such A thing were tame, That this embossing Of the climate were More than film to Filch the clarity, And attach to comprehension, Once peeking through practicalities Through practicalities, rescind By the censure of my Drugged sight,

$$!

$%!

At one point yesterday afternoon I went downstairs in the elevator. While I was waiting in the hallway outside of my apartment, I thought to myself: I will remember this moment; moreover, this moment will become the past. I thought this fleetingly, and have not since Remembered that interstice of time The mongrel we become has left us dead Dead in the places where life returns And each sentimental fact is arbitrary And who we were is denied for the sake-Of replenishing the patience we have For those who are entangled in scruples-That do not pan out. We have become A mongrel of ourselves, a false light That breaks the dawn into secondary Pieces, until the light follows a scam-Of light, into a drunken vitality That makes us out to be something that-We are not, and all that we are grows Into the spaces, and translates the vital Paragon into a lesser precinct of right-Ways, ways that do not pan out, except When we are dead, and the beautiful Clarity of our vision is restored To spiteful signs Bring me the time of day When lost feelings return, And I live in the pause: A recurrent delay, Snagged by the claws Of languorous perfidy The lion withdraws And sends me away To tell of the languor, The wait for this time

! To surge with the anger Of something thats kind And leave me with the time of day For which, I wait with feverish hand For luck that I cannot repay: The hours on hours make one demand: That I take this brute Who snags the simplicity From what I refute With impossible vacuity The state of being That consumes the hour And gives me the seeming Conscious bower that strives To end our conscious lives By extending deep into vacuity And testing with annuity The false forges, those denied, Translucent GODs. The pathway rose flatly before him like a tomb. There were ashes strewn bleak about the pathway. With those ashes were more ashes that were people, who packed side-to-side against the walls; the chatter of the many boots hitting cement made a single, repulsive sound. It did not ring out but died suddenly in the night air. The sound was like God chewing on the World. Tolder Bottom saw the pathway rise like a tomb. Yet it was not a pathway at all, but held the oblique substance of a pathway, the half-made feel; like the solid ground of a road within a wood. There were thousands of men in the night that walked across it knowing the hundreds of feet of dead air under it. He was walking with the crowd to The Zone 3-784P, and saw the pathways wide, deserted expanse to the Reighton Blocks and Towers building unfold uncertainly, fathoms above the black water and rocks. He could hear the distant and heady drone of the waves crashing back and forth against the rocks;

$&!

! each rock oppressively thick with tar, made only of tar. The bleak and abnormal sound of the ocean hummed within the men, and the sound shook the Earth and pressed against the bricks and battered cement of the Reighton Blocks and Towers building. The sea shivered in the air, electrified it. There was a battered sign saying YIELD that suddenly burst out of the pathway obnoxiously. It was warning the men to halt; the yellow sign wobbled timidly over the crowd and the impeding storm, and the warning made the men aptly halt. The sign was propped up by a thin piece of metal, which could be made to go up and down. Both the sign and the metal holder glittered brilliantly in the suspending dark among them. And Tolder among the others stopped moving, and silence ensued as only a few dozen men walked like ghosts across the pathway, and lightening flew in thick bolts and set a vicious and barking light upon the Reighton Blocks and Towers building each time, as if it knew the men would die there. The few dozen men trudged wearing all blue denim; they left behind them dozens more eyes, watching piteously for a mistake. Their muscles knew mistakes like a rat-sense. The men made it to the other side and when they were at the other side and safe they faltered as a soldier falters after battle-grateful for life; yet feeling the human expense rattle gravely in his heart, feeling the heft of death in his hand like meat. So did rattle Tolders heart when crossing the bridge, as though it would give to at any second to the waters below, which looked a deep black in the dark. The World had ended basically, awhile back and no one really knew what to do because the reason was unexplained. Big chunks of the World had been blasted away by some space dust or other. The areas were deemed unlivable. The circuitry of the World, the ground beneath their feet, was as wavering as the presumptuous yellow sign in the night. The concept of death, thus, was normally brought to the minds of those who were alive on Earth. The hospital was illuminated in ugly light. The hospital was on the first floor of the Reighton blocks and Towers building and extended to the fifth floor, which largely was unused. The Reighton Blocks and Towers Building was a large, ungainly affair that looked like a very large square box. However the building was not firm and the steel used for it seemed saturated and worn. Still it was a public object, and most people had seen it when traveling to the fiftieth floor to get their Topheld passes redone, or they heard about it.

$'!

$(!

Tolder turned open the solitary door to the first half of the third floor which was the broken limbs and skulls section. No one was around but he sometimes could hear a weak coo of agony from the odd patient who had broken their skull or limb. He rushed passed the coos through the ugly-lit hallway. He checked in a gaudy wooden mailbox for his new set of aldenastin that wasnt there and for months hadnt been there. LAST SENTENCE OF BOOK: These facile connections I have made, between myself and others, they are nothing, they are dull words in the dark.