Tender Buttons (the acoustics of a coup p. XII)

Giddy dread
Against a self shattering hope and the new
sentimentality, two machines measuring one another as some universal minstrel summons their bow in unison, atomic jesters, doubt has been lethal to power, and some mules and some acres cowering from the blast of a straggler bullet, will have been as useless as any principal besides that which announces 'I am time.' And faith that demands you labor against decomposition, I am against that. I believe in coming undone. It is our least violent moment. Hived dispersion. Within the oppressive pentagram of grace, where terror is a lazy matinee which hopes to sell you on daydark rooms in preparation for a doom that isn't coming but why we will it, we need to wonder/what scandals we are willing to invent in order to speak our wills in their effigy. Subtle purple rhythms we don't know how to admit, we don't know why-- Two friends are arguing about salt and traction, claiming our blood could get stuck in a place where the spirit would not know how to fall

What is a museum? (Second Investigation)

The strata of the earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order and social structures. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and the layers of material in the Earth's crust. The refuse between mind and matter is a mine of information.

What is a Museum? (First Investigation)

Candor is our Brightest Shield

And the ballad of time is that we are time
The idea of everything/oneness wasn't erotic enough
So we differentiate, and the repositioning is--
Rock and roll is dead, sisyphus extorts the forever in everything a different deed to rise and fall from and to and fro and form and socialism from dread and the schisms and the castes and the corruption of every reformist is nostalgia, from which I too become corrupt or a dreadfully lucky thinker feels the earth moaning and wailing and waiting for no one, and joins her, for how rare her joy, etcetera, and leans her dialects toward and toward, to never mistake talking for communication or trust an open eye with exposure/ notice: The sound is fading out, it's more like fire sounds, freedom. A funicular that is easier to hear than to see or to touch, and better than everything all at once, be your time, beating your time to you, keep being yours and time too, to possess something, give it the slowest myth you can deliver/ if tenderness is what love looks like in public, justice is what love looks like in private, to deprive of it is to give it purpose and a tempo and risk spheres for the surfaces of right/here, and it hurts and arises and perfect and alright, time is lucky to have such ballad, shine, sends, you and you overlapping/ one word only color(less) clumsy-- come see me in time, map the miles of ways we know or find out we know the difference between a pulse and a past is a derisive myth where leaders a liars and lies cannot time-- tell your story fast as a soldier hiccups in a field of flicked souls to show an era where it lies, etcetera, by that time, hurts my vinyl, and beauty hurts my vinyl, and you too, hurry, a lie does not live, a line does not live, only the two points they exist between assuming their sounds, nor sins, no sense in worrying you know something other than what you be

(in)



style

Against What? Against Whom?

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

Who manipulates the cloth? Death--

What is death?

A gimmick. It’s the time-birth-death gimmick. Can’t go on much longer, too many people are wising up.

Because I Shall not be Disappointed

"Will something old come back again tonight
Send something back to tell me what I like"

and then

I sat there singing her
songs in the dark.

She said
I do not understand
The words

I said,
There are
No words

Metaphor Interprets Memory (In distrust of movements)

Area Boy

Where were you, then

The curtain isn't moving, you're paranoid

Inheritance is only lucky or an opinion about the origin of movement

Beginning with the fascists, (literal fractals) who are less afraid of their sanity than the artists who are too candid to discipline or fear

Orson Wells, sinister music for bells and moog bellow, naive music for bells and moog, blow me unusual kisses over your broken helicopter, broken into, stolen (moments), stripped for parts, for fear, for Orpheu, you stripped things, striped them, remembered them as foreign flags

For what proceeds the common memory culminates in common objects like time or timbre or the fall or autumn, malted or shunted, all the things you were or ought have been, to, fickle urban tribe and tide and nile and the curtain is so still it gives the illusion of movement. I pause for my invisible labor hoping you mistake the stillness for a stunt or some other bold fear like fucking a stranger. Your force is not force of spirit, either too clear and too spare. Intimacy or attentive phoniness. To say, yes! I see the wind you see only not of change which is merer than the revolution I came for--
Observing iron turn, spin, dance, weapon, be called a curtain, and its walls forgotten reflexes of the sun. Cloth, catholics, your factories, your facts, they are dead, they are, dad, they sing black, dada, nihilismus, you sing back like a product of misheard voices thoroughly enacting the red button until the tape closes earth's vagrant eye

Being No One

Don't Just do Something, Stand There (How do you tell a story)

Frames for super 16
Fame for super 8
Frames for folkways
Fame go a way
Yeah, that way
The origin of school days
Microcosmos in the lowdown texture high yellow light going round a stage name but it might be my real name. The likelihood matters not, neither does how good it is if you allow for improvisation, it happens like a good and a service, happen. I don't even call it justice when it's self-defense I call it intelligence

American Gothic/Catachresis on Purpose

A singer called Blue came shambling up out of the dark/jaybird/tenant farmer, your sinner, your whole yard hurt

And when the magic of his song died down we looked around, and the plantation manager had crept out of the church

There are the riven lives of the velocity, the time it takes to have been triad or tried and not as easy as good versus bad, as gospel backs into shock

has brevity going for it

or pasture

Your city, nevermind it, it neither comprehends you nor disappears into conscientious ambiguity, like the plantation, but with no chapel to exit through or gift shop

Influence is often private and guarded, it shuns celebrity, needs no public face, its precincts are reclusive

and when I read

Newark Court Will Not Hear Poet's Lawsuit

The United States Supreme Court declined yesterday to review a lawsuit filed by a former poet laureate of New Jersey challenging the elimination of his post. Without comment, the court declined to hear the case. In March, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that state officials were immune from the suit brought by the former poet laureate, Amiri Baraka. Gov. James E. McGreevey eliminated the post in July 2003 amid an uproar over Mr. Baraka’s poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” a work referring to 9/11. The governor and Legislature had been barred from firing Mr. Baraka, and eliminated his post instead. He sued, claiming free speech rights had been violated.

I thought about blowing out unlit candles, about the scope of a man's influence strobing into copacetic pantomimes of the pressure you use to notice something concentric occurring within a square boundary, accruing there, the tangle of heroes and locals, or go-tell-it-on-the-mountain, but how naive of the one who expects to be let back down

When I get back down
When I get back up again
He threatens permission
Will be the end of estimations

I thought about the kind of technology it would take to make him unsay it, unthink it even
how it was not a matter of sophistication, but one of sophists as in wisdom and your fists as in rhythm blows us up and down the maintenance of letters we lost in ships and found you worshiping. Our power rests and unrests in what is withheld from us, the effort each withholding takes to contain itself shows up at the jealousy on a judge's face when he calls a man guilty just to hear him sing an unjust ballad

They had to come together, all of them, to perform the rite, to repair the web of time where it had been broken

After Finitude/This Is Our Science

What Kant's Critique of Pure Reason failed to do, is being accomplished by modern physics. The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception.

The Stranger Doesn't Even Pretend

Color - Caste - Denomination -
These - are Time's Affair---

And time has officially ended, we live on the other side of time

Media Dreams (fear not man)

You visit movie theater earth, where peace is usually as obsolete as love isn't, and you treat the rubble like a radical, like a loose root, how it was truer before it was proven

Who Will do the Vivid Living

Mythic Bounce

The producer warns the public that
This document with no concession or dissimulation
Contains scenes of violence and cruelty
And wishes the spectator to participate completely
In a ritual that is a particular solution
To the problem of readjusment
and shows
Indirectly the representation
that some Africans have of your western civilization



Cloud fat smeared into my most practiced smile
Cadillac alarm has been going off all night
A soft blast into mostbearable lightness
I hope they stole the radio into naked wires
That they were the black men you'll convict either
way, and that they escape you. Like the ones who held a gun to my mother's frenzy that time in '88
when she reminded them how to ask for directions. Lock your doors
The erection terror gives a play criminal who suddenly isn't playing, anymore,
is audible as the sound of cardoors locking in an automatic--look away, look a way that I recognize

That all my unfathoms fasten to, legs around a hand drum


The one destructive power known, is forgetting
And if you dance/sing in a time of panic or recovery, the language you don't have to tell it speaks through the muscles
and they will know you, remember
them, well as yourself
water as yourself again
could pick them out in a line-up about it a thousand years from or until now or

This is what we hear by omni-directional memory,
your every prediction becoming meek and redundant

Happiness, hunting, panther, thunder
Fat clouds slap the mind like angels spines beyond good and glad

Evaluate yourself
Are you worth it
Their tenderness towards existence
The heart's ridiculous awe never off a fist or fix
of Orpheus and his news radio pretty clothes fast road elaborate hypnosis to break a habit
you say slow words, synecdoche, cold-piece-of-work--
It feels like moving to the country you're already (nowhere) in

Mirror Displacements

...the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the nonhistorical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.

Psychic Warfare (What I Saw Was This)

It wasn't done with mirrors it was done with books



There was talk of fireworks or lightning startling the birds en masse, causing them to flee, but to stay low -- thereby flying into houses and other obstructions --

There was rumor of an eternally regenerative universe

Back and forth, forth and back, was this love or a form of pacing where verbs give place to voices and act fiscal about it

wage, wage, whisper, from there

(the wages of war is either love or

The archives become bodies which the souls of sensations occupy to become visible to the inner eye from whose sight I write down my sensations

Why is the camera named Cannon

Cane break/ cane, don't break again

It is possible to experience relief at a time of sorrow

But why do you

dread the joy of falling into ready-mades, homes that rise like true bread and breeding,


And try hard not to see the same thing three moments running because that is bad aesthetic hygiene

Why do I care what wings are, compared to flying, if these are reciprocal experiences (form, function, invisibility

Why do you walk in and casually take your seat at the eager table, sensationalist, maybe you are the only sincere one left
with whom
to discuss blackness, there was talk of red wings, Sir Isaac Newton, Isaac Hayes, patience, dynamite, all the things you might have been, and are, approaching one another, practically enemies, practically needing the opposition to understand the need

night and day
night and day
day and night

Illusion Suite

And they will return to their country, like ancestors, full of exploits and lies where the least incident becomes power.

Heliotropes, Irises, Ecstatic Stoicism

Lullaby as alibi
Kitsch quiet/
Naive
I don't have any death, he says, threatening the scarlet stationary of an invitation to forever
In the ferris of pure principal carriages turn as inappropriate as interchangeable--
I was where you were supposed to be, he said
Women make the best slaves, I advertised, by the way I folded everything, even his dense glances, even his lies, into something privacy would decipher or disappear

Now he sings, now he sobs, about the cruel immortal, about the union of kitsch and tragedy he can no longer ignore he is living

Women make the best escapes, I advertised, running backwards across the empire state--
5,000 ways of not looking at a blackbird falling from the sky are to fly for him or sing, say one- day-everything-will-be-as-it-should-be and tell him he was there (on that day) already, exploiting the remoteness of humanity in every motel with an empty vase or room we could have stayed empty, That way what comes next is not neat and I can write it a high tide or treaty: How we force ourselves to fall in love with our conquerors to gain some control over our experience and when they set us free we stay near them voluntarily, that was the dream of their Overlook, the luck of Sweden in the took of the Sudan, connections a man makes when he forgets his language and finds its pollen in the blanks

Between youth and a theory of mutant purples
everything you say on purpose is false
even to her
even to him
events snap the ribbon back into one strand and that's when the limbo gains a reason

Stand Flat Footed and Talk

I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after

Epigraph to Field Day

In the voices of:

Gill Scott Heron

Jimmy Holiday

Beau Bridges

Dick Gregory

August Wilson

William Borroughs

The Newscaster And

Lenny Bruce

(Page one of a book I wrote)

The myth comes true when the remembrance of an event grows in magnitude the further that event recedes into the past:

The Narcissism of Small Differences

As the dread of new blood
the dread of what is novel
puckering
puckering
I wasn't afraid enough to make satisfaction taboo
but there is sublime enough to make only the taboo satisfying
Tobais Nights
When Amiri asked, if you were always right, would it be easier or more difficult to live in the world, all he really wondered was when knowing nothingness would become the vogue again or to hope for the conversation on earth, for it to go like cupcaking and wallflowers at the matinee dances 1950dandy, like you're so neat, no you're so neat, you're all I need
Am I black enough for you
Am I blue enough
And yellow
taboo
And new

Motion Studies v.8

Revival Houses (the sudden vulgarity of innocence)

Conspicuous hiding behind the literal produces chores like marriage, war, textbooks which insist there are

Happy natives dancing
Hunting deer and antelope

smearing their facepaint in sweat and decadence
That tears are european

From where love and theft belong to grow up together on this prototypical neighborhood farm territory of the karma mantle where I go on like a trophy displaying my gold for the company as it wrangles over the fire a type of fire mirror holding them together at the urge of the competition
Practicing for the tip of the moral element: air, shore, which must not
be ignored -- sycophant, projectionist

There are so many regions I refuse to think in when the anthropology is talking about me a millennium from here, my rabid electricity, my primitive attitude toward machines and social mechanism, insinuating the machines themselves are the giddy natives dancing and we break them in the radial way we say it, insinuating that happiness came too easily, of blindness, that the nativity was an accident of hunger and the hang drum, that the movement was a spell for numb words

If your syndrome is analysis, mine is the moving picture nestled against it dwarfing its own echo or swell.

When you take me to the movies we sit still and nobody shoots

at us

The other

woman

sits

in the dark mechanics of herself declaring all the pseudo-places we've held together like 5, 6, seven, 8...


To live outside the law, you must be honest

Hunter's Point

I think the Experience is fixing to split
which is what they called Jimmy Hendrix and being hip, my sweet double hipness
I repeatedly lift the reputation up to the christian where my flaws shine with the heroism of absence and love oh, love oh careless love the repeated experience of fixing and splitting



The black man did not labor for this land out of love
he did it under the threat of the whip
the threat of the gun
and the even more violent and subtle threat of the Bible



Weather I go
to Saigon
I don't miss you
I go to Hunter's Point
I don't miss you
I go through the Georgia Faun
to don't miss you
I got the truth to don't miss you too
But soon's I'm gone
Your gun miss me
All the eloquent previews of a nuclear tomorrow, hurried toward the
ease of the news that stays news



Usually where you see tragedies I see just a stack of records
My archives, your archives, our archives, and the flappingest water in the entire cul-de-sac which threatens to wash them back to shore out of order or chaos exactly as they belong to the back of the mind where you are told not to speak and to say everything so you shout hippopotamus and point at the crypt space, or hypocrite or perfect human on the tip of some urban mountain calling the fog: asymptote, asymptote. So infinitely often we plan to cross the ocean and it matters what vessel will hold our memories of the future accountable, what book will do that, what music, what catastropic happiness will do that, will not have to miss you

Mineral Futures V.1

"What lies ahead is an impossible history. / We're facing a kind of zero."

Between Land and Water

The hunted coincidence between dream and event, hence the field
Where any humming/bird hovers like a helicopter before a ceaseless flight from Canada to Mexico and
When you arrive at the canyon, the innocent cannon to the remote candor of a broken camera/man, a local porch develops, the homies are on it smoking and watching the birds scale buildings
Their eyes quoting:

I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous floating,
for it, and the cohering is of it;
And all preparation is for it! and identity is for it! and life
and materials are altogether for it!

Image-nation (A really perfect poem could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in.)

The child's best loved and most absorbing occupation is play. Perhaps we may say that every child at play behaves like an imaginative writer, in that she creates a world of her own, or, more truly, she rearranges things of her own world and orders it in a new way that pleases her better. It would be incorrect to think that she does not take this world seriously and each cycle of abandonment is to be another stepping tangent to eternity. Would it be incorrect to return this eternity using thought from a finite grease lightening, grease lightening. In the banquet scene that follows, nevertheless, she holds on. Thinking too close to feeling is like a stray fireplace in the desert home. This thinking believes the imagination and trusts silence and steps in to where the mind is unwarranted enough to do work, enough to move something toward her

But what aren't you thinking?

Ruler, rebel, champagne and ripple

painless, muleless moscow

What army you empty enters you



what battle the blank space wins

is the difference between youth and blue music games dripping over midair dice like a rearview mirror split second too near

What are you thinking?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap.  Highways
Traveling up and down her surface
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them

On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And he her rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, velvet, dancing California
That I have ever seen.

Willing, send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-eight miles from a night’s lodging

In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this frame
Will be repeated.  How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer

Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that life could go on forever.
that each poem ends like a rope made of rose stems and I am sometimes
gripping
the right parts

'There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.'

"They came treading in the hoofmarks of the mule
passing the ancient bridge
the grave of pride
the sudden flight
the terror and the time."

Begin From Zero

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society--

"From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows:

Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Day 1 (the year of the orator)

In front of all mimetic company

let me chop apart
with my bare hands
this blurred forest,

he said

Barthes calls this 'looking embarrassed' for bravado or the degradation of erotic life or the occurrence in dreams of material from fairy tales or abbreviated telegram from a panicked soldier elephant in the room is the wall moving and is my thinking the drug that proves it

The ones I truly love know that all acts are acts of mentioning, all speaking starts "by the way..'

we need animals so we don't have to enter those woods

and ends by the way

we enter their words without them

(the clock's profile

the orientation of the parasols

the end of sides which die of omni-directional counting between the last hour and the first hour we are ours and we speak about it eloquently with our bare hands, how it's the instance that stammers, never the speaker toward whom the needs of space and time keep going )