Dear Bloof Friends :
Thank you so much for the April poetry month fun!
It was really wonderful to participate in this writing & reading with all y'all.
yours,
Pattie

Honestly / Yours

Catching up with Peter:

4/28: Honestly

I've tried but I haven't succeeded.
I tried but it didn't work out.
I meant to, but I didn't.
I've had ideas, but forgot.
I went places, but was sidetracked.
I've had threads, but haven't
mended anything. My holes
all have holes in them. 
[…]

Read the rest.


4/30: Yours

Dear April,
You were here.
You left.
It was a good time.
I wanted you
so much, just weeks
ago. Wanted to touch
you and feel you
and make you see
my worth. But now,
[…]

Read the rest.

4.27-30.13

Catching up with Kirsten at her blog:


4.27

[…]
I bit no poisoned apple, pricked finger on no deathwheel, laid not with wolf in Marmar’s clothing. I suckled no vampire until half-dead. Nor in such state would I, nor did I, shuffle malevolently towards the living.
[…]

Read the rest.


4.28

dear honesty,

we are sewn knot. you
are such a lonely world. we are
not what we seam on singers.
you are bombshellshocked –
aren’t you? […]

Read the rest.

4.29

be, please, strong. I should give you a name for will. hammer or thor or oblivion. I gave you a name one letter off conundrum. you make rhythms. that was not a hole in your head that was fixed while they weren’t looking. […]

Read the rest.


4.30

sifting the time I’m sentenced to, I continue with
calculating the weight of my wreckage. I’m no good
at maths. I know there are remainders, uncertain-
ties of guilt. […]

Read the rest. 

Poem for Poets

The longest letter I ever wrote I never sent.  Two poems, an account of swimming in a river in France, muddy footprints.

What if original disappointment always gave way to pleasant surprise?

A very tall man looks in the midget mirror.

King Midas has ears.

Fear of abdominals.

Filth. 

Sanity.

How did Katy put it? Brooklyn Pastoral

(How many times have I had that thought again and forgotten I already had it?).

We are babies and the parents of babies, but only temporarily, with an audience of parents of ex-babies and non-babies.

Philosophers think what poets write. What if poets wrote poems?

Poems are verbal contracts written down. Poems are noose knots that stay nooses. Poems are the best words misspelled. Poems are minuets of particles.  Poems are machine-made machine-making machines made out of machines. Poems are rice cooking on the stovetop. Poems are Balinese massage. Poems are never Finnish.

To be against people. Or was it the floating world?

All the words were erased every evening. But really it was me in my green Saab from the nineties.

Oak trees are pines.

Both of us lived before now.

I am too tired for poetry,

Do not talk to the police. Do not talk to the IRS. Do not talk to the census taker. Do not talk to the mailman.

The crime: stealing what remained, stealing substitutions, stealing copies made, stealing underlying principles, stealing “the look,” the time it took to look, the attention elsewhere directed. 

I want to remember my life but am beginning to forget. I read about a mnemonic device of imagining a street every event took place on and the events reduced to letters deposited in a series of mailboxes. In Tokyo there are no street names, and the numbers are assigned randomly. 

Parable of the reed that bends, trees that blow down in the storm.

“And that one… And that one…”

I open so many bolted bulkhead doors I’m convinced there’s something horrible down the stairs. But it’s only the landlord, not on vacation.

Decadence. (De-cadence.) (Decade-nce.)

What if these were the last words you ever read? Would you hate me?

THIRTY

[expired]

LISTENING POEM ON LISTENING POEMS

Somehow I know that it is Hegel who is haunting people through their electronic devices? Andrew gesticulates wildly regarding this phenomenon and seems to know how to address it—he’s all business in a somewhat crumpled black suit, white shirt, black tie, identical to E’s ska revival nostalgia uniform. N kills himself because he has been haunted. And I know it’s the context we need to change, but I’m looking for a way out of the building so dim with fake wood paneling and waning yellow light bulbs, which I associate with flies and flies I associate with Emily Dickinson, and in thinking of her I am reminded of poetic isolation.

For like ten years I lived in remote places with no poetry communities. I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of tribes and finding your people. Someone I love questions my artistic kinships, talks about operating at competitive levels, and pillars of achievement. Bleh.

“I prefer a ruin to a monument,” says Édouard Levé in “When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue.” Was the building a monument to dialectics? It was sprawling and confusing and I think the outside beyond it was regarded by others as if a B-horror forest.

This morning Lisa Robertson quotes Severo Sarduy (from Cobra, 1972) on Facebook: "We must correct the errors of natural binaryism"— she added, Benvenistean— "but per picere, gentlemen, this is not like shooting fish in a barrel!” Not like, as Kasey Mohammad posted yesterday: “Today on the Harriet blog I bash Robert Frost (yes, yes, fish in a barrel, etc.).”

Dear Carrie, when you asked about the process for the listening poems, I think I responded in a really literal way and now feel like I owe you a better answer. Levé: “Sometimes I realize that what I’m in the middle of saying is boring, so I just stop talking.” The more I think about it, the more I want to reclaim regurgitation. Like wolf mothers. Not its negative denotation of repeating without analyzing, but as a physical behavior, as contact and embodiment of nutrition, a mixing of juices, the self with the other, then bleh. Some bulimics are really good at this. Some mothers are, too.

According to Wikipedia flesh flies blow bubbles as part of their eating and regurgitation process. I heard a bubble pop when I died. Regurgitation in most animals is natural and voluntary. Also: “Honey is produced by a process of regurgitation by honey bees, which is stored in the beehive as a primary food source.” Honey is nectar (from the sex organs of flowers) that has touched the mysterious vibrational insides of bees—this is an erotics of attention & relationship.

Maybe in the dream I was exhibiting symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder, looking to get out, to abruptly disappear. Either Hegel or the flies were coming. E’s mentor, Akira Ouchi, always encouraged him to have a “Get-Fuck-Out Plan.” And that N kills himself. N must be a stand-in for narcissism—identity fixation disorder. In one of her annotations to Edward Said’s essay “On Jean Genet” in Revolution: A Reader, Lisa Robertson writes, “Identity is very ungenerous and completely non-erotic. If we can’t live without striving to lose every aspect of our putative self-knowledge in our search for the other, there is no hope for relationship, and hence for politics. It is this crucial loss that the regulatory state would prevent. In revolution, we must become unrecognizable to ourselves, divested.”

The regulatory state says stop your messing around ah-ah-ahhhhhh. Revolution makes honey.

Dear Maria, I think often that my poetics is one of "writing against," but I'm increasingly, by virtue of these listening poems, wondering how that is limiting and what would writing "beyond" be. Beyond what. Beyond against. Beyond the limiting confines of the Tyranny of the I and its lock-step antagonisms and paraphernalia. Or as you say in your response: "mEIKAL often talks of 'writing through.'"

Maybe because the idea of being “after” anything is so problematic, I want to say the listening poems are a kind of deliberate messing around, a daily exercise in getting lost. “--after…sort of,” as Shanna has said. Or during.  Simultaneously. And often thinking about how listening might change us. An erotic confusion of material. “I prefer desire to pleasure.” The poem that comes out becomes something other, one that touched the desiring spot then came back deformed and deforming.

on the last day of poetry month :


wifthing stanza


I am in character                  please
catch an early train
whan she woxen is a wyf       watch kipper
eat cheese hand hold ladybug           are you ever
going to nap              & she replied I cannot
I'm a beautiful boy                 are you lying
& she replied I cannot I'm a beautiful boy
fishwife applewife housewife officewife
something made of cotton & seashells
& knotted good for chewing & it
gets in everything            wife it finely
strawberrywife herbwife tripewife goodwife
a pun expunged as indecent oysterwife
the sort of tale an oldwife tells
my friends    phonics practically sparkling
one dead sexy fol-de-rol

* 'whan she woxen is a wyf.' Chaucer, The Physician's Tale

Props

Oh we were the featured blog yesterday at the official headquarters of NaPoWriMo. Thanks, Maureen!

TWENTY-NINE

[expired]

Ear to a Seashell

Every time I do this I hate it
Like television
Shouty news. Actors acting in their sleep. No, actually sleeping!
And then in friendship my hate is forgotten
In a cresting   wave of   small   talk
Cresting and cresting but never breaking
Corks can come loose but bottles and boats can also be broken
How do you love your normal family?
How do you give away a thing nobody wants?
I almost fell asleep pondering other possibilities
Such as kittens.
How to talk to you, have I forgotten again?
That’s when to get out a bowl of soup and drool in it.
I consider everything but bodily functions.
Pseudo-pheremones.
Awful those pathetic awwws. (I believe in often.).
And on the second-to-last day, the firmament.
Sixteen-year-olds were paid to erect a weather dome over the tennis courts. 
Every year I wanted that money to be mine
Saving up erections for New York
Where giant floating heads in the sky
Peer across the East River getting in a cab over here in Brooklyn.
A shipwreck in a bottle.
Annie Hall.
“Porridge almost rhymes with orange”
Maybe this is not unusual
Maybe there are constantly sometimes monkeys.
Tiptoeing through I let most of them stay asleep
Being what I considered to be quiet
Until Farrah said, " do you have to be so loud?"
As if it were possible to answer, "yes, I have to, there are noises I have to make."
Cleaning up took what felt like a long time but in retrospect wasn't
"Compared to what?" 
“The shoulder next to mine?”
And before we even knew him we had named him
But I shouldn't talk like that.
There are confidences and if these aren't respected there may be none left
(If talking about the ocean, talk about the ocean, not the roads under and over, not the transatlantic cable I'm probably using without even realizing it!)
News casting, dangling a fishing line, because
If this is news why are we shouting?

BIRTHDAY POEM FOR MARIA DAMON

IGGY POP IGGY POP MARIA DAMON IGGY POP. IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY MARIA DAMON MARIA DAMON IGGY POP. IGGY POP MARZIPAN PUDENDA? MARIA DAMON WHIPPED CREAM HEART. IGGY POP MAKES LOTS OF MONEY. FUNNY HONEY SEXY FART. DEAR DEAR MARIA DAMON GUN DOG DOUBLE D ETCETERA. LOVE FROM THE QUANTUM IGGY POP. MARIA DAMON I’M SO SAD THAT YOU’RE LEAVING BUT IT’S OKAY IGGY POP. IGGY POP WIGGY HOT HE HAD A SHIRT ON FOR THE SOUNDCHECK BUT NOW IT’S OFF. MARIA DAMON ARIA AMEN MARIA DAMON FIGGY TART. THIS IS THE BEAT THAT’S STUCK IN BODY THANKS TO THE WASHING MACHINE IGGY POP. MARIA DAMON ECSTATIC FORMATIONS? PENILE ANGEL IGGY POP. MAYBE I PUT TOO MANY CLOTHES IN CUZ I’M LAZY? I HATE DOING LAUNDRY IGGY POP. THIS IS LIKE A DRILL FOR MELANCHOLY CHEERLEADERS WHO QUEER IN THE CHANTING MARIA DAMON IGGY POP. IT’S OFF-KILTER & ROCKING RHYTHMIC & BANGING LOPSIDED STANDER IGGY POP. TOPLESS AND CLANGING, AUTONOMOUS AND CHANGING FREE-FORM UTOPIA IGGY POP. DOO-WOP PLEASE HELP ME. SQUEEZE ME TO RELEASE ME CUZ I’M EMPTY & GUSHING SOME THICH NHAT HANH. THICH NHAT HANH THICH NHAT HANH MARIA DAMON IGGY POP. I GOT A JOB, THICH NHAT HANH. I GOT A JOB, AND IT’S FUCKING IMPERMANENCE. IF I’M LOCKED DOWN, WILL YOU FREE ME? IF I’M SQUARE WILL YOU WHEEL ME?  I GOT A JOB, IT’S A RAGING MOB, IT IS A FRIEND WHO IS HELPING ME COME BACK TO MYSELF. MARIA DAMON, FUCKING THANK YOU. FUCKING THANK YOU SEZ IGGY POP. RAW POWER I AM LETTING GO OF YOU. RAW POWER HOLD MY HAND. MARIA DAMON IS A PUNK ROCK BANDWIDTH. MARIA IGGY DAMON POP. BROOKLYN IS SO LUCKY, IT WILL BLOOM WITH YOUR BEING. MARIA DAMON NON-HIERARCHICAL IMMANENCE SADO-SENTIMENTALLY IGGY POP. MARIA DAMON I WILL NEVER FORGET I WILL NEVER FORGET WHEN WE SUCKED ON MANGO PITS AND WATCHED IGGY POP. YOU LOOKED LIKE A MERMAID IN YOUR LONG SWIMMY SKIRT BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL POET FROM THE NORTH LICKER AND LIKER OF SWEET MANGO PULP. SPRING HAD FINALLY COME AND BEATRIX TRIED SAYING FOR THE FIRST TIME IGGY POP IGGY POP. THE WINDOWS WERE OPEN. YOU RODE OVER ON YOUR BIKE. AND IGGY SAID THAT SET WAS SEX & DEATH. SEX & BONES. FLESH & DEATH. FLESH & BONES. OR IN THE SPACE IN BETWEEN FEEL THIS AS LIGHTNING MARIA DAMON IGGY POP. MARIA DAMON IT’S OKAY THAT YOU’RE LEAVING. YOU DESERVE COMPLETE ADORATION & UNFLINCHING COMRADES & A PLACE OF MULTITUDINOUS CO-UNICORNS. MARIA DAMON IT’S OKAY THAT YOU’RE LEAVING. WE CAN SAY SAYONARA TO MEET AGAIN SOON. BUT NOW IS YOUR BIRTHDAY AND ‘I WILL CRUSH YOU’ IS THE OLD WAY OF THINKING ABOUT ECO-SYSTEMS ANY SYSTEM AND THE MOTHER TREE IS IGGY POP. NOW YOU ARE HERE YOU ARE HERE IN POWDERHORN PROPER MINNEAPOLIS MINNESOTA UPPER FUCKING MIDFUCKINGWEST YOU ESS UV AY NORTH AMERICA NORTHERN HEMISPHERE EARTH ORBIT STAR.

[ expired ]

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

At the whisper party
The children were sleeping
The adults were debating whether or not to drink water or alcohol

"To take the edge off being together” or was it "to take the edge off" "being together"

What I want is to think the best of everyone using the fewest words possible
Nice
As it might be and as it turns out

Starved speech in a feeder economy

We live not in this brick house but the next one, where the bricks are more brick-colored.

Bricks, that is, don't demand clarification at some point in the future—
birthdate, death date, incidence of hapax legomenon
An older woman who was not my girlfriend wrote me, in a spirit of seduction, as far as I was concerned:

Happenstance lego phenomenon

(Legos were these little stackable plastic bricks. Plastic was a stable chemical byproduct of oil. Oil was found in the earth. The earth was

Zoinks, gadzooks

Romance in marriage

Why is life worth living? I'm starting to feel history rearranging my collections into a concordance

But if I see a different green, what about snow, salt, dust

To be so down to earth, they say, so beery, he is the beer
Not to be so commercial provincial
A hoppy saison, a blueberry pils
But no other berries, I promise, and what about grapes? cherries?

(library of lie-berries)

The challenge is siphoning between containers and
Yes, I know, mostly water

How long does noble suffering take? What do zebras say?

I keep expecting this person to finally turn to me and...
but in a heroic display of self-discipline...
Then it's all about the babe and the lunar canals again.

In the word in the word extrapolate a life

For Pierrot (Peer’s brother) even the grotesque was an art movement spanning centuries
Why not aliveist why not togetherist why not an International Generation of Manufacturers

So like lost ones. But hopefully more like the ones we like, I mean, personally.

(Impure products stay sane. This food was prepared in a kitchen that also has peanuts in it)

In 1929
If nothing was happening was it because of the process
Journalese, Modernese

Predatory exhaustion blanketing my beloved geniuses

(And without noticing it information passes through me constantly)
(And without thinking about I decode and recode)

Cryptozoologist

Gross morse pulse dose
Poetry should not be mean?

"It must be small. It must be inconsequential. It must last forever."

Maraschino
As the bubble popped my pen ran out
But luckily there is always another pen

I'd rather be happy than productive, but can't I be both?

LISTENING POEM #31 for day 28

 

                        after trying to listen to Canto 1

And them went down into the deep.

Sex led to breakfast, froth on the godly rim, and

we cut up space and sailed on sweet sleep,

bare sleep showed fear and our bodies also

hungry while warping weeds from a soundtrack.

Give us our cowards with bellyful curves.

Bitchcraft is a three-horned goddess and

we are a spaceship with wild jimmies like killers

thugs who scratch SAD, rent while sex little dead ends.

Much of the language is obscure and wants piercings

everywhere glittery rays I suppose

I could keep on getting pounded

but seriously really bore me with libations

inverted syntax phantom limbic system seizure

impenetrable opportunity for display

of groomed accents and flawlessness

a tyrant meter. With golden wands

many men of a particular standing

in a mall. Just sayin

TWENTY-EIGHT

[expired]

Poem for Tardy

Everyone has been alive since they were born.

Your Jewishness might help you understand.

What I like I am like; what I am like I am;

Why do tiny changes change everything? 

Hopefully I'm not white

I'm 

Chhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhcliclimhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhanticlimahhhhhhhhhhhtranhhhhhhhhhhshhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I've never seen a believable fake ear

Not on

And on?

I'd probably never notice.

If I were a robot or a sweet little girl

Regardless whether my father knows twenty people or twelve hundred,

I'd say, hello, ma'am, pleasure.

Red synogogues are different than gray synagogues

But not to a blind one--

Is it ok to say the?

Traveling not out of but through the middle class

On the beaches

Where, on a walk in the park in the middle of the night

Process circumvented.

What else can I try

If I intend to love you?

Improvisatory listening to jazz

A fast of air.

But every time I look away, a pantomime exchange and a check is handed over.

I don't miss what happened but I do miss the past

When my friends lived in my refrigerator

All underneath the palms

If the left clasps the right or the right the left.

How could I have done what I did.

I'm trying to figure out if I insisted

or if it was simply assumed what I might prefer.

Shadows for children.

But sometimes… in Massachusetts…

Predicates are larger than subjects.

Where the action is.

There are so many possible skin tones:

Carry the baby over to the window to see what he really looks like.

Prayers make me cold;

Assignments are assignations;

You'd like to get out of the habit, wouldn't you.

7x(7x7)x(7x7x7)…

All I hope for is to not turn into somebody's voice-in-the-head.

Looking diagonally, looking diagnostically,

(Jumping can resemble falling but is still jumping.)

If we'd known you we would have invited you to our wedding.

And at the end a blank series of separate ideas, a lover's knot--

Vague explanations for an atrocity.

Tell me a funny joke.

Remind me why I am laughing at the ocean.

TWENTY-SEVEN

[expired]

LISTENING POEM #30 for day 27

 

after Pina after Sarah Fox & Friends (a Psychomagical Event/book release party for The First Flag) after “town hall” on “careers”

Dear Sarah, I realize now after watching Pina for the first time this morning that last night I could have worn the accordion & nothing else except for heels & granny underwear. Lightsey said, “That’s quite an instrument you have,” & I said, “Yes, it was my mother’s [red squeezebox],” & she said, “That’s dirty!” & the drink called Placenta was very red, too & the accordion, an extravagant bustle for the bust or something from the inside now out—an origami uterus that sighs and moans. Pina begins with that gorgeous androgyne with the accordion and the invocation of the seasons. Your invocation was (in)tense and beautiful—everyone seemed to be sitting on the edge of each silence or maybe that was just me, aware of the analyst sitting behind me in the anonymous, historical dark. “Everyone on the couch needs love.” I imagine in each pause everyone in the audience taking a big sip of water but not swallowing then slowly opening their mouths. What is an increase? “Her mouth drips and hangs over my face like a hood.” Carnivores do it again with raw ground meat just mistyped “meant.” One of the dancers says “This is veal!” then wraps it around her toes and puts on her pointe shoes and prods the public square with the tips of her toes, the raw red flesh protruding from the lips of her new pink slippers like grotesque clits. One of my students wrote a poem this week about two men regarding each other with eyes in the backs of their heads, the first guy wearing a “big ass pink fluffy scarf,” and with that “imaginary gaze” they knew they were one of a kind. The poem was called “The Man Who Had Ten Fingers.” Another student wrote about the erotic awkwardness that comes after sex and the ineffable follows—what was it about your show/ceremony last night that has me feeling wide open this morning and completely possible, like washed through? Carrie and I talked about a feeling of weird melancholy we shared directly following the show the ceremony the experience I still don’t know what to call it; maybe it was the jagged bone-filled divide between the “town hall” on “careers” and the WILDS of your show (B just came over and pressed the caps lock just for that word). Infantilization vs “PROBABLY EVERYTHING I DO IS ILLEGAL” (caps lock mine; “I caps lock you,” another student wrote). The things there are no words for, the things we can only hint at, says Pina, is where dance comes in, but also, margin note, the un-language of poetry. “Questioning began to break the circuitry in the air.” When you read with the men, there was a phenomenal dynamic of Lucille Ball shaman bitches. Then, at other moments—a bloody reeling, a reconfigurement. DISFIGURING. Maybe it wasn’t until I saw the dirt dance in which the women, who have just rolled around face-first in the lush powderdirt, take turns offering to the camera (man) the silky placenta, which then becomes a dress, which then becomes death that the windows opened. An increase. That the disfigurement increased me, that the poets increase each other, that the sister-husbands and brother-wives increase and the divide is now a river anyone can cross, or just fucking ride, a channel to channel. I crown this public wish with raw ground meant.

Great Poetry Cities of America

But Peer lives in Norway
And even when he is in the jungle and even when he is in the souk and even when he is at the International School of the Americas and when he is Ambassador of Mexico or  Cultural Attaché from Ecuador or King Glamarch I himself
He is in Norway

except when he is away in Sweden
(The difference is the rosy off-piste glow in the cheeks)

57 among the 62ers

In Sweden to visit grandma on his mother's side...

I barely remember New York and the layout of my apartment
Greek made this- Or my assets-
Or weakness- and these were the impulses of a grown-up?

Maybe Peer tagged the homeland.
Working for the money
To send to an IRA. To Jerusalem. 
Maybe Peer has a mission to the mountain.
Otherwise, why play a game that isn't even very fun?

It's a lie I don't know what's coming. It's the only thing I know. 

Walking down the street hugging brains in bonebowlboxes till they squeeze out of the ears

Erasing the earth from where it hangs in the way of the sky

But my lack of principle could also be a character flaw-
Is it better to be off or to be nothing?

(Each word eventually gathers its antonym like a magnet)

The theme of this essay is how easy it is to find a constellation of stars to trace your self-portrait.

Every time you meet someone they tell you:
stop being shy!
I have a breath in my mouth for you.
I am awake.
I have tasty saliva.
I have no agenda in this congress.

Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas

Padlock lips, turn key - I go silent on Tuesday.