movement in motion

but language is silent
on the joint matters of desire and vertigo.
It is the position, or the movement
that gets closest. It is the sitting down,
the this is serious take to it.
The motion forms a form. And now
we see there is too much matter,
not enough shape. When things echo,
we come back to all those things,
a mirror-image in a mirror,
a story within a story,
film within a film. word within a word.
forward worlds push on again though.
we look a set of twins in the eyes
and say you’re tim (for example)
and you’re eric. we don’t like this
anymore than we like the thought
of the end of desire. but we have one word
for park and another for sky.
and even that may not be true, but
the shape is better than the sound,
the motion better than the arc it describes.
my foot is pressed to the floor, yet
the car keeps on sliding lethargic, inexorable.

 

the next time

I am so cold that i think of warm words:
apple, fold, melon. Already
there are those who dispute this.
Pieces of us slide off our skin, yet
some poor kid can’t scrape the flesh
of an avocado from its casing. There is
a sourness to faces that makes me uneasy,
yet sadness I’m ok with. We have no control anymore.

People order food on your behalf and
you think that this is the feeling of an arranged marriage,
or being dispatched in war. Losing track
of your composure, you think of the darkness
of a park at nighttime which is usually lit. I try
to walk even closer to you now, to let them know.
This is what flirting is, deliberate proximity.
In this light though, fight could well
be flight, or bag could be sack. Calling a name
is like rolling a stone halfway over.

 

the undead

all the unread things rise up once more
before us, there was me and you, it’s as if
there was more left, we were left out,
so to speak is a good thing. I fell before it
fell down good and under, I found you.
Coiled like a worm clinging to a pink finger,
I could never bring myself to say it.
Dusting off the soil, I saw more of myself.
Flannel, denim, these on-again off-again beaten
things, these are the things by which we live.
Drawing patterns in milk, I wrote your name
next to my name in the sand. Like in a dream,
I couldn’t focus enough to make out the letters.
I stop breathing in sleep. There are all of these
things unwritten.

 

concession

write down your history.
write down the hours that you are available.
write down what you are and are not willing to do.
what are you happy to eat and off what surfaces?
how far will you go?
what will you say?
what will you wear?
limits are tested out only with the hands and in darkness.
from this forms are recreated.
vases, workers.
where. wear. were. wary. weary.

 

junky/race relations

trying to write, or not even.

copying down citations, not writing

as the junky next door gets back

having been to the shop and having trouble.

grinning faces, they are a lesser race.

his speech effaces, where am i going?

i was in text, but -

that fucken chicken burger was horrible.

 

pure language

tracing complimentation back

to the one pure language, the

tongue of the river mis

spelt, the loaf of the people

all peoples. we got distracted

at the turn before the pure way,

all were synthesized into a common thing

we held it in our hands like our still

born, still breathing, yet breathing?

sorry? what was that?

 

pain, brot.

i have become new aged.

the old age as outdated as the old adage

that those who see not what they seek

weigh not what they way. my

grains, whole, husqvarna, are

pre-seeded by visual aurals.

you cannot trust what you ear,

the date on the xray is ill-

edgeable. here, the new time

passes.

 

getting in first; or, you can’t fire me ‘cos i quit.

he wanted to get me slowly

but i got in first and gladly.

weeks ago the pm got his end

in in the top end now his end

looks to be coming quickly.

jump before you’re pushed.

the active voice is more lively than the passive.

the idea being that the bastards behind you

may already have committed, and with

no resistance forthcoming they may fall off

too, all of us are coming in first. all prizes

go to all contestants. what’s on second?

we’re coming together, our ends therein and waiting to be got,

listening to the sound of  thunder stolen,

we breathe a sigh of relief.

all of us have left.

 

science of dreams

watching you sleep watching you speak your mouth opening but like your lips were wax and had to be moulded apart. seeing one tooth as you spoke to me or someone else from behind your translucent eyelids. a layer of skin cannot be the border of bodily experience. wake up to your new life. unleash the giant within. may all of your dreams come true. the line between here and there is crossed.

 

revisiting the post post

i think perhaps my previous post on the post might have only obliquely referenced one of the important things that led me to write it. it’s a problem that is possibly more general than the focus of the last post. when i was down at my grandparents’ house (i refuse to bump across the apostrophe of ownership with the passing of one of them) on the day of my grandmother’s funeral, i spoke briefly to one of my uncles. this uncle has suffered a good thirty years of pretty chronic schizophrenia (and pretty chronic schizophrenia drugs) as well as pretty consistent substance use, leaving him, basically, pretty fucked up. he was asking me about my studies, and when i said that he studied writing, he asked me a strange question about whether i was learning to write, or to teach others how to write, or how to read writing or something. i can’t remember the wording, but i remember it being a kind of odd reading of the idea of studying ‘writing’. he then went on to explain how he couldn’t even really read a page of the newspaper. he didn’t really explain it, but it wasn’t because he’s illiterate, but he said that it just didn’t sound right. reading the words, just didn’t sound right in his head. and though this is obviously the experience of a fairly dissociated mind talking here, i feel like i have to agree with him when it comes to the experience of reading a text, and especially poetry.

in a class at uni this year, talking about flow chart, the question was posed: so how do you read this? the answer we came to was: line by line, page by page. which was a complete answer and a completely useless answer, but at least we were starting to get close to what was really on my mind. and that is that i don’t know how to read poetry. and my problem with the reading of poetry, is an accentuated version of a problem with reading any text. the problem, i think, is immanent to both the text itself, and the action of reading. the problem is: this doesn’t sound right. whose voice is this? it is a displaced voice, neither the voice of the person whose name the text bears, nor the voice of the reader. there seems to be a pretty important kind of slippage here. and this is something that i feel when i read a book of poetry. and oddly enough, in a way i think i feel it less when i read something like flow chart as opposed to a collection of shorter poems. i remember feeling uncomfortable reading a collection of Celan’s poems in a pub waiting for some friends to arrive. the shorter ones i could swallow in about two minutes, even if i took the time to read them out-loud-inside in the German first, before turning to the English, then back to the German to quickly look for new remembrances. but then it was over. do i just turn the page and get into the next one? do i let the book sit? do i let the voice reverberate? but what voice? like i said before: whose voice is this anyway? often i would turn the page quickly, because at least if i was actively reading, i felt somehow immune from these questions. but i knew that they were still there. i still felt that i did not really know how to read. though let me be clear that i don’t think this is a negative thing. just something to be acknowledged.

so how does all of this relate to the post/poem online/publishing discussion? i’m not entirely sure. but i guess i think that the act of reading online (and specifically of reading a blog) is distinct to that of reading a book. and maybe it’s just that when i’m reading a book, and i don’t know how to go on, how to get closer to the text, i can move on by turning the page again and again. the scroll function doesn’t seem to keep me in the text in that way (the argument is getting flimsy and entirely idiosyncratic, i know). if anything, it seems to encourage me to completely disengage from it. perhaps fred and his students are right, and the poundian wet black bough postcard is the go. i’m not sure that necessarily disrupts that propensity for disengagement that i’m talking about. and perhaps nick is right, that poetry blogs are unsuccessful because the poetry is unsuccessful. and i guess they are poems, tim. i guess really i’m just in the process of trying to find new ways to write – which could incite new ways of reading – and some of the examples that i see on the net don’t seem to do what i want to do with writing, while some others – very few – do.

yours  curmudgeonly,

jstx.