PLEASE GO AWAY


Lapse, remember . . .

We do a vertical pan

Shot through the sky like an abstract garden . . .

Stay right where you are

The Late Renaissance

I begin heading in the opposite direction

I like this song I heard on the radio about prostitutes fishing

One-hundred empty tollbooths in a row

Places evolve

LITERALLY HIMSELF IN SPIRIT

0000000000000(Dowagiac, Michigan)

The way we sit on the bus as if to say so

a cup with a few aspirin in it

one blessed blissful farmer who planted sunflowers along
000King's Highway

"Something keeps flying up top,
attached," he said, "to the fuselage"

I don't remember the news exactly

One guy had eaten another guy's head I think

Somewhere in Canada

Or maybe he just hacked it off

"It's clinging with its sucker fins," is what our guy says

I say to the woman who has been knitting beside me for one hour

"Have you ever seen that Twilight Zone movie?"

It's easy to believe in God in the summer

Churches like boats
with no ceiling fans

My neighbor's got a cement pig next to his driveway

The knitter says "I just graduated from Tulane"

Good for you

Back about three rows a long haired kid

cradles a violin case

He nods, and I nod back, look down at my book

(Carson McCullers)

Then there was the time in between heading south and nowhere

It was dawn

I was up

I don't know why

I just walked to the end of somebody's dock

It was early and dew was shining on the many spider webs there

black widows all over the place

TWO THIRDS CAST ARBITRARILY AS "SIBLING"


But mostly talking to it

Each of us were given a kit full of thread and a mirror

(the things in that mirror kept breaking)

The narcissism, I mean

The genitals growing right in plain sight

We were

Secretly a product of our own initials

Like, who wants to play Gas Station

(Nobody)

The panther only wiggles her tiny ass

The whole thing just grieves me

All those capitol Ls and the tithing

JC with His shining crown followed by that bad boob job

SPRING AND ALL


"Your account has been accessed by a third party"

That's not on paper

Never mind the galoshes

Or what Robert Hass thinks

"Our eyes squinched up like bats"

I don't know about your sex appeal buddy, but . . .

Then came the balloon payments

They were just pygmies

But then there is always Nature

like a forest between the joining of two rivers

a recontextualization of your partner's nudity into B-movie status

I almost forgot the state park sticker . . .

"Dear Beloved One"

We are getting hungry

No more blushing under the mistletoe

baseball and Robert Desnos

her large portable cooler in the shape of a strawberry

"I am Raymund Okoba Ibrahima, the only Son of late Chief
000Johnson Okoba Ibrahima Nationality Liberia . . ."

Schlitz Mini-Malts

coupon for 50% off for an hour long "bake in the sun" at Tan-o-riffic

ANAMNESIS


It double-tracks on you

the aquarium light

the turning

of a swan-spun

milked

dream

of perfection

This might be the tourism guide to the ghost

boat of the post-war industrializing of diet TV

City wave

salt blocks the size of cathedrals sink

this isn't the depleted earth

Like cavemen excavating a woolly

mammoth

And this isn't Before Time

Though it's before Casual Pleasure

Hot water running

in a luxury of silky cascades down one fairly oblivious

blonde artist's

shapely Euclidean ass

Dinosaurs did die and were buried

They turned into freight trains

No one anywhere in sight would ride them

The thing shook so nice on its bright silver way

THE BLISS-TREE PHOTOGRAPHS II


We want it now--a room

Everywhere

Put Nature in a room, and be in it

Let your heart gush in a bowl

Roses

Blood pulsing out of the center of the chopped-up bed

Pull the axe right out of the wall

Start breaking windows

So the wind can get out

Sleep

Sleep as though you are completely willing

Until the idea of living just is

PROGRAMMING NOTE


We should be able to summon that kind of blustery self possession

The one isolated head framed, and wind-whipped

The alabaster eyes

I remember standing in a west-facing hay mow

The sky divided by lightning into independent countries or states

A storm doesn't care about your little crunched feelings

Third-world world powers

The flat Mississippi mud on one canvas multiply-cracked

And the rustling of dry cornstalks

Janis Joplin bleeding in neon while she binds her own wrists

Then when the TV starts over we get Burt Lancaster leaping from
000pool to pool

Another day in the 'burbs with John Cheever

(Perhaps with your Tareyton buring)

I can't believe I'm back in the sixties! some baby-boomer cries out

She's holding a vodka martini and laughing

He's thwapping a Blackberry against his palm and thinking
000That bitch

ACHAEOPTERYX


They took a cross-section of spine

This was encased

Like everything abandoned in the desert

Going way back

Just my chin on a corner, a brick shuddering under another sad brick

Telescoped

Back to the Now:

A belt dreams over the back of a wooden chair

40 years later you're still packing

The rose is a delicate thorn and it punctures

The burning match

The shadows the evolving birds throw down all levered with efficient
000teeth

They stand in the limelight of the past

(Their faltering voices won't plow through your windows)

Just throw away those chopsticks

They put in a pond

One large, artificial bed

She wants to come back as a golden retriever

I'm still trying to recover

THE CALICO MAN


It's out there in the woods, north of Ypsilanti

"major and minor triage"

Grandiloquent of body-slam

The teacher made a noose, inside

And this is the composed, civilization

Stitches where the keyhole turns to sassafras

And all those other things where the diamond shrinks to the size of a
000swimming scar

The body is a hinge

*

The Louisville Sluggers

I can't begin to tell you

They're eleven years old and he orders pin-stripes

What's left?

The Bomb Squad shows up and they cheer over the cyclone fence

Leprous contiguous

Although I can't see very well hiding under my bed

I mistakenly bought a first baseman's mitt

This is what else I remember:

The knobs of his hand

Instead of a completion of fingers

THE UNNAMABLE BONE-SHELL ROOMS


Insect processes

everything stamen-inflamed to Fragonard

this is as it should be now

where there used to be a pond full of burning buses

a damsel on a swing made of gold ratchet wheels . . .

Could you be more frivolous

only if the dogfish ate and then spat out your pocket watch

it's as languid as Florida then

(ovipositor swelling between cerci)

The plumbing steams in both their chests

not a ticket for noise pollution

or evolutionary perversion played out

compelling analysis of the swinging-woman motif

who should be on top

"Do you actually call what your husband does on Thursday
000nights "baby sitting"?"

(the cricket's not a violin)

Just put them in jeans, and let the 19 year old wear his skinny tie
000already

I remember the breeze like a flying buttress

"L'amour est bleu"

the chiffon was swept up, separating the clipped-off wing covers

and they shall pitch their tents against her round about

It's somehow better that way


***
italicized line from Jeremiah, Chapter 6; line 13 found online

THE BLISS-TREE PHOTOGRAPHS


It's better than pure

anything you want to pray under

heroin, light bottled and released
from Antarctica

what we mean From the knees up only

water at 33 degrees Fahrenheit

her teeth over a black background

the birds keep dreaming
with their throats slit

calm as a dinner abandoned during a neighborhood house fire

miles and miles of cars parked at O'Hare

and who knows what lunchboxes

eleven year old boys
streaming with projection in their flickering mirrors

Apollo 100

while the older sister uses her razor

he doesn't read Penthouse--

he eats apples

it's the summer of the terrified bobcat dissolving
into the wisdom of the stationary gar

Gary Glitter's long been replaced by Gary Numan

Lou Whitaker bats .286

The Dan Ryan Expressway doesn't really defy anything in situ

a trip to that city now

while the dogwoods drop lace on the grass

xylem and phloem

they're both startled by his reactive nipples

INVISIBLE


I'm in a hideout in a state that borders the one I live in.
Maple helicopters, a pond over there, and a rock in the
middle of it, an island for birds. My mail was stolen,
and it's not as if my zeal for privacy--which just gets more
and more urgent the older I get--needs any help,
an extra nudge. This all got me reading Weldon Kees
and bumped me into a little Don Delillo phase--I'd lost
touch with D after Underworld. 1997. Kees either jumped
off a bridge or wandered into a new identity down in
Mexico. Nice to believe he did the latter. I found the leftovers of
this mail of mine on the street. They felt no need to
hide--just opened the stuff fifteen yards from my door.
I've had all the usual thoughts about how many times
this has occurred, etc. On the one side, the rich, and
the greed. On the other, the poor, and they don't care.
They shoot one another and take stuff and it all goes
in a big ridiculous circle. In the meantime, here, a rippling
tulip poplar, and what more does there need to be?
There's one of those hand mowers here, and the metal parts
make music as they cut. No internal combustion
anything. I brought some Robinson Jeffers along as well.

WRITING


Are you really going to just sit there complaining?

This means everything you might think it means

I know

I see it, too

out there prancing on the grand promenade

but what gives with the self-deprecation?

Draconian Death Organ

(and are you cool enough to pull it off)

Splenda then

a little injection

your poem, it really isn't so synthetic, or bad . . .

let's all put bar-codes on our book covers

Vicky Cristina I Can't Pay to Get to Barcelona

I was in New York City in the rain with Herbert Scott

when a guy in one of those horse-drawn carriages yelled

"Make room for the little guy under that umbrella"

just rip off that normal face

Are you perfect enough for God?

Herb just laughed


***
line 17 comes from Brenda Coultas, 16 Alice Notley

UNTITLED POEM

And just what is a convertable-ized Winnebago

I'm sorry

The table is sprayed, fresh, capped with green soft drinks

Macaroni salad
and Georges Bataille

but I'm not sure what features come with the broken monocle

a teaspoon of S&M on your tuna fish biscuit

In the meantime

Get your television camera the fuck out of my house

(this isn't Elkhart)

Cindy Lauper mud wrestling

Larry Karaszewski

Zachary Zimbolee

(he's right in the phone book)

it's a bildungsroman

The story of a sputtering boy, and his dismantling of the learned,
000the too long beheld

and trust, preternaturally

"This is your blood speaking"

777 feet above sea level

where they steal the phlox right out of your mailbox

A SNACK, BY DENIS JOHNSON


I read Denis Johnson's Nobody Move. There are some
great lines in this book, some insight into the psychology
of violence, the usual casualness in the dialogue.
But mostly it's the book Johnson wrote as a kind
of vacation after the multi-tracked and voluminous
Tree of Smoke. Nobody Move was serialized
in Playboy, and it reads as if it were written on deadline.
This is a book for fans of DJ. Nothing really clicks into
place when you finish it. And, frankly, by page
150 I was tempted to put the thing down.
That's okay--a lot of novels do that to me. I can barely
make it through anyone outside of Roth lately.
Stories--that's a different kettle of mockingbirds . . .
The slightness of this novel begs the question--
why not put "Train Dreams"--one of the most haunting
novellas I've ever read, between covers. Johnson
was swinging for the fence in that piece, and it swells
in the imagination, feels substantial. It's deeply historical
and hardly casual, though it manages to be truly
funny. Tree of Smoke, Jesus's Son, Train Dreams,
Johnson's Collected Poems, Angels, The Stars at
Noon, Fiskadoro--these all seem essential in the
Johnson canon. Already Dead, in its oddly flawed
and excessive way, seems necessary somehow as well,
for beating a path to Tree of Smoke, even though
it's thematically somewhere else altogether.

***

Anyone else notice how Johnson likes to mention Wonder
Bread an awful lot. It's my favorite part of Resuscitation
of a Hanged Man--the last part of the book, the principle
character now locked in prison, happy about the Wonder
Bread (I remember he shakes it and it flaps back and forth
like a pancake) and the hamburger gravy. "He liked being
in prison and hungry" I remember it ending . . . I'm
paraphrasing, don't have the book with me. Was his name
Joe English? I think so . . . rather an incarnation
of Jesus's Son's Fuckhead, as is Jimmy Luntz, I suppose,
in Nobody Move. But there is little substance. He does
just sort of float through his self-imposed hell-on-earth,
not as dumb as a rock exactly. He heads off to the cold
river, at one point, one assumes for a self baptism.

***

Lukas Moodysson has a fan in me, but I'm not going to
get all descriptive now. I watched Lilya-4 Ever, and it's
harsh stuff, heartbreaking. His masterpiece is Together.
I'd rate them thus:

1. Together
2. Lilya 4-Ever
3. A Hole in My Heart
3. Show Me Love

A Hole in My Heart is very tough to watch, but I found it
very compelling and I think it held together as a metaphor for
the life I see around me. Show Me Love is a sweet movie,
a fairy tale almost. I can't stop thinking of Lilya . . .

I've always guiltily liked several Abba songs--Moodysson
makes me feel good about it. Oh, how I long sometimes
for the seventies . . .

***

Rotten Tomatoes. 31 postive rating for Jim Jarmusch's new movie.

Close to 100 percent for the new Star Trek.

This is why Rotten Tomatoes is no guide to anything.

KALAMAZOO HANDMADE PAPERS


Government sponsored rehab

it will make people forget Frank Sinatra

This is a tall symphony

Placing the torn paper inside a bucket of water to soak for two hours

USFL dying like the licked postage stamp

And then there's the arrowhead, a real one

I want to go back and change everything--pictographic

Barrett and Wardrop, and Andy Partridge

"Kaleidoscope"

I can't recall
if the raccoon

We all have that mammalian sense of being living baggage for organs

he didn't exactly ruminate about

the mold and deckle

too many replays of "Barracuda"

foot breaking through the insulated plastic in the studio barn

I kept setting the timer

December

close up shop

There was always a big burr oak in those farm fields back then

***
the poem quotes Jordan Davis

NEAR NOTRE DAME

00000000000(May 17, 2009, South Bend, Indiana)

The landowner, and his girlfriend, were both standing on one leg

I was simply parachuting again

right on through the left side of the brain until I was almost with God

Deep, deep

the carotid is what the light shines on

the writ of habeas corpus

the geese, gentlemen

the geese

folding dark napkins

it was the most formal of floods, the Saint Joe with his toenail
000polish gleaming

and two miles away

the trucks with the body bits

coins and liquids

and politics

a crowd hushed under the dark night of all this spilling

I saw an oriole

rhythm guitar by Vic Chesnutt

the President stands in the university's carnival of animated light

some kind of plover runs over my left shoe

everyone's been ignoring my borders

TINY HISTORY OF NAVIGATION


No, that's not the right dimension

or granular

long vein in the single swan's outstretched neck, and the motionless
000cry

the lake was like a glass video of heaven--

Cracked Head of a Sailor, by Kenneth Anger--

and this is its Romantic

nails being driven into the softest tree

Piles of bones that keep kissing the headboard

the ceiling fans whirr

the color of a glass of meat

It's Sunday

Crucifixion of another planet--

Astaxanthin--

crop damage often caused by this urge

POEM WRITTEN IN MAY


you don't want to die

everyone talks around the secret of knowing

you might want to kiss a church

naked bodies churning in the sunshine

I schedule what's next according to nothing

the arrival of hair

no discipline

it's my phobia

JUST WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES


Forty-eight eighty, a jaw-bone

a spiraling gate impaling the doe, who twitches in the moonlight

(Here is a bucket, now go find the leak)

the odometer looks over the carcass
and stops spinning

this is the mind-body connection right in your face

a hydroplaning stroll
through the cemetery

the glow of the bathysphere

the cosmos divided between theories of direct mastication

and the use of alien stones

but I only came to stop the applauding--

in one hand I'm holding Little Birds, by Anais Nin

in the other a copy of TV GUIDE

it's just nerves

you haven't knocked yet and still the front door slams shut

the odometer stops spinning

years go by and no one new is ever born

the disembodied leg of a spider twitches beside a half full glass of
000Diet Pepsi

***



I Remember

Stevie Smith

It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.

HUNTER'S ORANGE


It's autumn--the Hendrix dies amidst the orange leaves

a car rumbles on

tympani

and the gun bakes in the lukewarm,
ventilated with paint

rufffffed grouse, the dog all asleep on his side

"I want to discuss overkill"

Or there's a tear in one eye

"You can't get through the foil and the cotton fast enough"

God's little love grenades

Reminds me of the time he threw the rabbit ears out into a
000snow bank

crows argue in the bright treetops

a spider mounts a box of shells (to the swelling of strings)

.410

double-ought

tuna sandwiches on white bread with one deviled egg

I push the tiller hard, and the boat shakes, luffing into the wind

"it's just a stress fracture"

it's just wildlife

NIGHT LIGHT


There's a crime scene near The Saint Joseph River

My point is, why are we still so obsessed with these
000penultimate leavings

Three empty nights on the beach

Something Catholic
sitting in a cracked clam shell

I'm not saying my night-terrors are better than yours

You with that dental work

A cup of light in your hands you stole right out of Follain

I just can't stop falling in bed

It's like sitting at a red light crying

The hospital room looked so peaceful with the sheets pulled back up

Decorated with a light switch

Someone left a dog tied to a post outside the Dairy Queen again

THE CABAL OF THE PROGRESS PLAN


I think you know

Streets lined with cinnamon air purifiers

Registered cave dwellers
place their toes in the sunshine

It's the porch sermon, and a teaching certificate

Rehab for the little ones

Big blossoming window cracking to a bass guitar

I'd sentence the owner(s)

Hidden in the trees like the myth of the literary recluse

The dullest species

There's one message left for you in the message center

It's an alert

No belt

No sharp objects

The streets highlighted in red are in an error state

Incarceration with a former army recruiter

When the faces start caving in

Water your own damn flowerpots

***

Browning, etc.

GARLIC MUSTARD


It's invasive,

it cycles quickly through your information.

I thought then of the north pole,

the sturgeon swimming in the underground stream,

the old freezer outside of Hastings hunkering in deep grass like a
000doorway to the underworld.

Sleep is a golden breeze all right

wheat still as the ocean under a geological moon.

And the weeds are absolutely choral, moving after the mind . . .

But now you're sequestered--

box inside a room inside a frame

(with that stink on your hands)

your wings breaking silver.

The carpet moth dreams in a pontoon zone.

He taps out a message . . .

The light hits all these icons that look like crabs, you see,

trojans or antibodies

croutons

and white flowers

drying, then crumbling . . .

And all you can do is grin through the bloodletting.

SOLIPSISM


There's a long dream boulevard like a bone encased

pigs standing in mud

all this fog and memory pitching over the falls

the fish die in the mountains

each like a living fingerprint

I know this because I can hear her breathing

star-kissed and quiet as trees

The x-ray--

there's a clear tube in the shape of a Y

she's got blood in it

civilization under a fingernail

you open the museum door . . .

That kind of wanting

it's a wall socket

WHITE DIAGRAM

Centrally essential's
nothing but peripheral.

Meditational ermine

with only enough volition

for no conclusion.

And I say this to anyone who claims for herself the desert landscape.

Another tan stair-step.

Illegal procedure--

True or False: hamburger is now made out of turkey ( )

Get ye down to the Polis and vote.

Look at the quail cemeteries.

The ego is stuffed.

People do want delivery

in 29 Palms.

BLACK DIAGRAM


My ten sisters lie face-up under their beds

To the sound of someone using a Water Pik

Books open everywhere

And a giant red phone starts ringing on the other side of the glass

Cross your arms over your chest

The jeweler takes his tweezers and plants the tiny Crucifixes
inside the open windows of the minuscule house

Now open your eyes

ROMEO DEALER


First of all, it's in the shape of those desks

Turn the thing upside down and string it with spoons

You're Alexander Calder

The French word for palette is palette

J. M. W. Turner with his mediocre deity fades under the shade
000of the unfair universe

It's in the zamzetti, the paprika and peculated ground-down
000mushrooms

bongs the color of Christmas ornaments

while the elder others litigate through a divorce . . .

You're just trying to formulate a style

Still riding your bicycle to Driver's Ed

That kid with the wandering eye--

The paw paw grove

Marijuana in fact goes well with a plaid-skirted uniform

And a bell dings like a typewriter

The sun slanting down through a wedge of chimney and rooftop

She was cracking a red hot

She'd placed her POW bracelet on an outdoor window sill

ANDALUSIAN


We're spelling it all with chiggers

Bon mot!

And then the drastic spasm
one might call his storming eyes

Believing, then belching

You and your paper people

"I'm coming to be near you!"

It requires elasticity to execute such a willful lack of dimension

And pedigree

And many layers of onion

That pulp is not ground chuck

Or living in a closet

You shake the love until the bruises leak out

No sunset for torture

Just rayon

And pigtails

I'll stick with Rolling Rock

HUMANITY


There were plenty of cubes of the special cheese.

WEAK COFFEE


A little art, we get blurred corpses

A little art, we get dung on the Virgin

A little piss

Broken into pieces and violently smelling of gun powder and
000sliced apples

A little piss gets in the art

Chris Burden gets nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle

And I've seen how you flicker awake

Not born again exactly--

Not born into light

(You will never get to see Las Vegas)

But drowning into consciousness

(Where have you just come from?)

Surveys have shown people prefer a green landscape full of water
000and animals

They do?

The shaman of Nomenclature squeezes the shit out of the hypothalamus

He's aiming his flashbulb at you

He's dragging a bullwhip behind him

KURT COBAIN


A second time--

His second life

We make it all the way up to the space station

And look down at the planet earth

New cotton T-shirts for the newly dead

And Hazardous Waste

The problem of the lithium leach

Night is such a terrible time

The amnesiac awakes to what he's really done

2,000,053 dates on a Monday night

Corsage made of broken guitar strings

Only there's fluoride in the water

Toxic, in fact, to most Saints

Or you could be floating in an ethereal state

In a second cage made of stars

Feathers ripped

All over the lawn

All over the street

CIVILIAN DEFENSE, 1942


00000000000000(after Edward Weston)

She was gas-masked, darker
Than shells

Miles of coastal plutonium . . .

I'd rather you didn't

A cartoon landscape isn't a better idea

A cassette tape the size of a thumbnail goes into a slot
In the back of the manikin's head

"We're going fishing"

And all that other stuff, like royalty, hangs down in the rain

One arm falls off

"I've got some sandwiches"

I think of her eyes then

Birds drifting sideways over blue Aleutian Islands' smoke

Like drizzle misting over the grain elevators in Lima, Ohio

They just stood there
Looking at the hotel bed

A transistor radio and static along with the pose

Some kid must have gotten hold of the keys and gone crazy

STUNT DOUBLE


This is near Hanging Rock

Pole-stone and an escarpment where the poet undresses
000a girl

And what to do with half a human body

Make a chart on the wall

Nobody left to do all that kissing

It's the mystery of the missing twin

He's been remembering, and taking notes

Boy-friendly

Carbonated with twilight