In the ruthless furnace of the world, plants eat light and air and water.

Coming on five years of written muttering and calculated inversion, with shame at the hope that the collected works will be read, if not understood, and exalted, if not reified. I deflect and deflect and deflect, trying ever more elaborate knuckling of dependent clauses and conditional antecedents, in the hopes of achieving dizzy rhapsody. Of late I stage mother imaginary scripts and cryptically refer to idiosyncratic culture previously consumed as though it were a genetic marker showing a predilection for blood cancer and bone cancer. I shall establish that five years is a blink to someone with more discriminating taste who can shake a stick at this claim to inestimable provenance.

---

Painting is above all translation. Ada’s partner has never been part of a boring conversation, and Tilda Swinton can confirm.

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He came from the era of the crop top and sweat-sheen tanned skin.  She was departing the era of the long white socks with green stripes and being voted most likely to be in need of naxolone.  It wasn’t love at first sight but if this were a movie and not a desolate display of mental furniture it might be pulled off if Vera Farmiga signed on to play her mother and Sydney Pollack (RIP) played a take-no-prisoners lawyer who was working feverishly to stop a corporate takeover and periodically paused from implementing the poison pill to urge the young charge in the long white socks whom he served as guardian ad litem to summon the nerve to make a move on Vera’s troubled waif girl before she overdosed already. Trent Reznor’s son would do the arpeggios. Obviously.

---

It was the era where David took Peter’s corpse’s photo and held it all in close to the knives, standing rooted in one fatal spot in a studio apartment without running water and rippling with frenetic rage. In that era Our Lady of the Self-Devouring Image maintained that papa don’t preach. Ten years later, when effort took too much effort for most of them, she starred in a movie where hot wax was a foil to bring bigger doses of release to the foe, our Lady’s defender.  That coffee table book made all the pawns overeager to march a straight line to the end of the board and get slaughtered in the process. Sharon who gazed at Medusa also played a character in a movie featuring murder and lust and made smoking seem alluring.

A different era, with a different kind of necrotic malaise, with a different assemblage of know nothings careening us off the cliff.

Nostalgia for the Absolute

Nostalgia for the absolute, and there is a man taking off his shoe and chucking it at the President. Some would call him the leader of the free world, this one shoed wonder.

Nostalgia for the absolute, and I can’t quite remember in stand by me who the kid was who got hit by the train, that absence at the center who prompts the great crusade, a twin to John Cusack, the dead brother. Dead kids and dead brothers and crazy one eared anomalies who are lost to the dustbins of history but not the angels who hover silently.

Nostalgia for the absolute, when conviction and faith existed, back in the centuries when cathedrals were being built and dissenters were being defenestrated. Men feared witches and burnt women.  If there is one fixed constellation in our constitutional system, it is that craven myopic egomaniacs will elevate rent seeking above play acting at nostalgia. the atomic absolute succumbed to quarks and color and spin and gluons, but not before god rolled snake eyes.

I could spew out more, like quarters plugged into a meter, so long as we have meters and quarters and the concept of parking isn’t displaced by the concept of compassionate coups and dioramas of L-shaped battle structures with battalions filled with okies, Bronx tough guys, and quiet spoken killers from The dakotas.

Nostalgia for the absolute, or else parenthood didn’t happen and all the false stories we told around the campfire are but instantiated metonyms for our multigenerational sins. The price of progress is a relative field onto which those who lack class map out fatalities and those who can’t help themselves do not fear to tread before ending up dead. Like all the rest of us.

Every surface craves dust, for dust is the flesh of time

Consecrated space, true, but not like what you would think, or fear, when the quotation marks bracket the sacred. Different horses for different courses, and no harm in being illegible to what denizens of alter egos and deifying motives would take for worship.

I sing for my supper with a foamy sophist’s mouth, whored out to the highest bidder whose cause cashes out and whose end to be achieved can be cajoled into a talking point and zealously curated. Masked clout, claimed suction, intimated access to a personage behind the curtains - what hangs together is the appearance of the ability to deliver. That is the coin of the realm in the schizoid souk that sits in the middle of this city and stands out like a solitary star against the deep dark blackness of this nowhere. This besieged city surrounded in all directions by section line roads no one travels down that serve no purpose beyond framing in a grid the endless unharvested cornfields, clattering in the wind.

But back to consecration:  in the quiet of late night this pervading lack may pass for what self-help tomes would deem restorative.  Pay no heed that I’ve never once been mindfulness, never once succumbed to the hard husk of suffocating love. the universal standard bearer is a television strapped to the chest of a median voter.  It’s not for nothing that Parnassus isn’t mapped or couldn’t be.

How do you externalize emotion without descending into sentimentality?

The trees are still screaming, Kurt Loder, and you’ll never convince me otherwise.

Big brother number two on loop and Joe Camel on the hour every hour,

Sinking into inertia, doing nothing but questioning the accounting of amounting into anything .

kick push and kick push and kick push again.

Carving Pussy Riot into the bus stop bench and wrapping a Mike Kelley premade in gold leaf and unleaded abasement.

The kids are alright so long as the seven inches are buy two get one GED.

Sleeping it off in august Rapid City and gilding the limpid lilly in Waukegan,

From this duct taped grandeur may be mortgaged a slimming abject grandiosity,

why fail better when trying one’s betters’ patience works so well.

You might’ve had to have been there.

Good gracious it feels to hurt.

Through a gray fog of tepid sentiments

The nervous, the anxious, the self-abridging and stretched taut, the tachycardic and the leg-shakers, a dog’s breakfast of walking neuroses fill all the available seats and worry that those who stand will stare in vacant judgment until whatever occasions this assembly - no one really knows - comes into focus.

Proserpine and the dark black place

Beauty on an ass-cart

Sitting on five sacks of laundry

That wd. have been the road by Perugia

That leads out to San Piero.

Eyes brown topaz,

over brown sand,

The white hounds on the slope,

Glide of water, lights and the prore,

Silver beaks out of night,

Stone, bough over bough, lamps fluid in water,

Pine by the black trunk of its shadow

And on hill black trunks of the shadow

The trees melted in air.

“The loss of form through aimlessness, through moral slither, through the continued use of form without content, or by influences hostile to the organic nature of a form is a metamorphosis that is seedless, a stasis.”

Having units of measure at hand,

We stand churlish at a new path and

Think it fine new rising action

To run amuck into Lethe’s silver shadow

And declaim the appalling peal of a

Refurbished bell sounding

In the chastened steeple

Trees melt in the air, for sure,

And this limpid bidding of the long dead

We stoop to praise anew

Outcomes birthed from incomes, and the escapist wants nothing more than to get somewhere really real

Sick as a dog,

sheets damp and clammy from

the shiver sweats

and it seems possible

the night has itself began

to elongate

and shape shift.

---

Morning chock with tasks and

early worms getting birded isn’t enough

to shake free from impudent sickness

which isn’t waiting for me to traverse

the eleven steps into the soft hazy noon of the bathroom

But comes up as soon as feet hit floor

---

Dab dab don’t rub the slick sheen

Leftover of what has been wrought from a meal it seems ages ago having eaten

---

And hours or days later

still comes the sweats and shivers,

an unnursed body married to flayed ego

like soutine’s meat hanging on abased display,

but with no flaneur passing by the window or

sauntering through the white box gallery

to take me in and feed me

to my own lonesome company

---

Alone and unwell,

candle burning to compete with

the smell of the stain

that has effloresced

into the carpet’s fibers,

not so faint

that it can’t yet be glimpsed,

waiting for yet more morning and

what might pass for respite

from this sharp shriek of a night

which might have more flaws and

more fissures in store

but it’s hard to fathom how

Thanatos Generalized v. Green Emergence of Dream

It is the cruelest month but you need not accept that as fact.

Choosing not to accept facts can be like choosing not to accept that actions have consequences, that squirrelly responses to direct questions can decimate whatever momentum toward clarity was building. Lightning in a bottle is a desultory fiction that we seduce ourselves into thinking an improvement on the real live wild thing.

---

I miss the clarifying moment that would come in the predawn stillness like you miss sitting on the edge of the tailgate of your father’s pick-up with the garage door up listening to a soft steady rain, kicking the heel of one foot with the toe of the other.

Newness is an affliction. The logic of obsolescent design is a curse. Documenting experience as a precursor and condition of its authenticity is an affliction. Pic or it didn’t happen is a curse.

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it is also “against” death in the sense that it seeks to “defeat death,” to magically, mystically, apotropaically make death die purely through the force of its sentences, presenting its wordings as warding spells to annul the reaper or at least dull his scythe.

J Cohen.

Let Hypnos have a say.

The ascetic’s last pleasure is blaming you for all he has forgone.

Reading Yeats on Blake, and Blake on Milton, and Elliot on Blake, and Milton on divorce, and Mlinko on Koethe, and Heaney on Yeats, and Hofmann on Murray, Solie, Seidel, Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler, Goethe, Heine - Hofmann on a shopping list, an obituary of a tepid life lived in the interregnum, on anything that causes his pen to scrawl on paper.

The phenomenology of a sigh.  The epistemology of a claimed infidelity.  The futility of a clasp on this living hand, now earnestly grasping. The causal vector of a distracted driver. The slow spreading of a spilled secret across the dead leaves by which this enlivening conversation occurs. Where Have You Been?

Like a dog with a bone (::) wrestling over Polish consonants

A soft spot for delaminating psyches grown aghast with insight that one day, potentially very painfully, all the pictures don’t just go dim, but suddenly stop dead.

A soft spot for old dogs with benign growths and ragged rancid garbage breath, tails thumping and tongue lollygagging around

A penchant for taking a mulligan on getting wrong footed in a difficult conversation, blinded by ego and shame, overwhelmed by an indiscriminate need to be liked by this listening someone to whom love cannot be professed but who is awaiting exactly that. Can I start anew? Now that we both know we are going to die?

A penchant for wild eyed sages for whom sitting on a stump is always exactly sitting on a stump and who offers a full throated hello to dawn but with no expectancy of reply.

The knife likes to think of itself as a mirror.

They say you can’t smoke in a church but they stop saying it soon enough.

white on white Lisianthus bound in twine and the ash burns into the filter

My bill of particulars can’t puncture the gaze affixed to your face, can’t make you listen.

We’re seemingly done standing on ceremony, but of course calling quits isn’t quitting.  Not really.  For all my chips, I still don’t know that yet, do I?

I take pains to fathom glory and approximate a solace as cold as the frost on the stained-glass pane in this false knave

It would be easier to lie and supplant this moment with a breathless I love you then ease out of the sanctuary, into the gray afternoon, beyond the cloying handshakes and painstaking hugs and animate aching.

But being kind and congenial in this appalling moment is to mute the grandiose monster begging to be fed.  Better to give offense in the full obscenity of this glistening grief.

There will be ham sandwiches and red juice and salted ruffles chips in an adjacent room and an adjacent time, as though anyone could swallow in a time like this.

There will be another round of having to say words as though they may pin and be pinned by their signifieds.

There will be consequences, penal and otherwise, if the smoking in the sacristy continues, or so they say, but they will stop saying it soon enough.

Flick ash, inhale, repeat.

The festering held always in.

The dissipating hiss of a struck match coming ever closer.

The wispy acceptance of not having you hear me say the things that I’ve always had to leave unsaid.

At last, some hope

That impulse toward propitious self-destruction:

 Exactly, and then you can say, If I hadn’t done this gram of coke I wouldn’t be a maniac, but it’s because you’re a maniac that you have. You can reverse the order of cause and effect and materialize your emotions. Those are very great advantages. And you commit suicide slowly instead of making the perhaps nauseating decision to do it totally. So drugs are great—drugs were great for me—in slowing down the act of suicide. In fact I think I’m alive today thanks to being an intravenous drug addict.

And of dead fathers neglecting to leave in their wills what they couldn’t help but devise in their genes:

he’s clearly a sadistic individual, and he takes advantage of some of the props that the world has lent him in order to aestheticize his existence, and reject what Americans call a can-do spirit. Not that it’s a can’t-do spirit—I don’t think any culture admires pure incompetence—more a won’t-do spirit. It shows that you could do, but then you refuse. Why? It’s a sort of decadence, the last withered leaf of an idea of effortless brilliance. Why worship a thing that doesn’t exist anyway? There isn’t such a thing as effortless brilliance, so there’s a cunning exploitation of things like that in order to cover the fecklessness.

And Lethe-wards sunk, a conjecture of time entertained

The insouciance with which a boy at six can sit in church and pick and discard a booger with a nimble finger’s flick, but not without first appraising and taking its measure. His eyes grow big as the money plate comes round and thinks of what God will do with those bills.

The wild look on the sunken face of a hospice ward who vibrates near the end with a sense of there must be some mistake as the stranger in a collar strikes a falsely somber tone and stumbles at the start of last rites.

Dilating from the local color. We become afflicted with the complacencies  of the wide water, to the point of forgetting that wetness is what we emerge from into this life.  Protest just the right amount and Goldilocks will leave your porridge be.

Style being the deference grace pays to uncertainty, and mother’s milk its own reward. We wait, as though somewhere in the baked soil of this big skied Flyover country we might finally inherit a st Aubyn steeped in Cather and ready to tell a story, having shed the callow, blue-veined skin of the rich wag’s frivolity. Eliot can lose St Louis, perhaps more easily than Edward can take on the trappings of populist navel gazing and a wide, serfless landscape.

Not every self to be portrayed can cock and wield a brush before it goes off. Even the autodidact from a barren zip code has to breed celerity on credit and earn stale poise through repetitious toil before the self mythologizing can take flight.

The best kind of a Brechtian soul, foulmouthed, deep-dyed in sin and dirt

Cheap grace and costly grace, tossed out into vivacious space, each wanting to be confused for the other, like how sometimes lust flies the flag of love. Cheap grace and costly grace, vying for the taciturn affections of confused theologians serving an apprenticeship to belief and pining for a moment when it becomes cast into a final fact of faith freed from the confines of coherence.

---

Doubling as in Blake, the seeing doing doer who sees that it will be done without escaping the moment in which it is done, no longer wanting to be seduced by the time present-is-time-past lines that came after shantih shantih shantih.

The impatience for the new hour of stilled utterance where the poetry may shed its skin and well formed utterance, advanced as an argument-making meter, may appreciate into some form of quiddity on which the state may levy a value-added tax.

---

A gun running retired poet gone glassy eyed in the opiate den will do as a boon companion to the acolyte of precarious happiness who goes hoarse from singing its dead-eyed lamentations. The stairs no longer ascend to the treasury where grace sits without a price, which is not without a cost. It should not be lost on anyone that when the user is not a purchaser and is a product, these roughed out thoughts don’t boomerang back with alienated majesty.

Deleuzian hit man, spilling hot takes against a backdrop of a Roman criminal with lithe visions and a German secessionist multiple times over

The set up:

Nietzsche:St Paul as

DH Lawrence:Saint John of Patmos

Rising action:

In truth, it is Christianity that becomes the antichrist; it betrays Christ, it forces a collective soul on him behind his back, and in return, it gives the collective soul a superficial individual figure, the little lamb. Christianity, and above all John of Patmos, founded a new type of man, and a type of thinker that still exists today, enjoying a new reign: the carnivorous lamb, the lamb that bites and cries, “Help! What did I ever do to you? It was for your own good and our common cause.” What are curious figure, the modern thinker. These lambs in lion’s skin, with oversized teeth, no longer need either the priests’ habit or, as Lawrence said, the Salvation Army: they have conquered many other means of expression, many other popular forces. What the collective soul wants is power(POUVOIR).

[. . . .]

With the Apocalypse, Christianity invents a completely new image of power: the system of judgment. The painter, Gustav Corbet. (there are numerous resemblances between Lawrence and Corbet) spoke of people who woke up at night, crying “I want to judge! I have to judge!” The will to destroy the will to infiltrate every corner, the will to forever have the last word long – a triple Will, that is unified and obstinate: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Power singularly changes its nature, it extension, distribution, its intensity, its means, and its end. A counter power, which is both the power of nooks and crannies, and the power of the last men. Power no longer exists except as the long politics of vengeance, the long enterprise of the collective soul’s narcissism. The Revenge and self glorification of the weak, says Lawrence- Nietzsche.

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The deferral of the denouement:

Saint Paul is the ultimate manager, while John of Patmos is a laborer, the terrible laborer of the last hour. The Director of the enterprise must prohibit, censure, and select, whereas the laborer must hammer, extend, compress, and forge a material…. That is why, in the Nietzsche-Lawrence alliance, it would be wrong to think that the difference between their targets - Saint Paul for one, John of Patmos for the other - is merely anecdotal or secondary. It marks a radical difference between the two books. Lawrence knows Nietzsche‘s arrow well, but in turn, he shoots it in a completely different direction, even if they both wind up in the same hell, dementia and hemoptysis, with Saint Paul and John of Patmos occupying all of heaven.

---

The drone, with a video camera, hovering over a man in uniform whose options do not include escape or survival, dignity in death or privacy in annihilation.

Of the five plastic eggs holding hidden candy, the children found only four. Wet wipes were distributed afterward.

First things first, I’m gonna eat your brain. Then your heart can think for once.

All the supplicants in town are singing karaoke, and the single moms who were teen moms are putting cornflakes on the green bean casserole.

One characteristic of the times seems to be a sizable percentage of the population which looks out on the world and believes there is good reason to think things are getting worse and will only continue to get worse.

A much smaller percentage of the percipient population is familiar with a litany of commentators over thousands of years who have looked out on the world and believed things were getting worse and would only continue to get worse.

Perhaps this is a great shock or a sick joke, but there is no such thing as a mutiny of small differences or an asymptote climbing toward the limit of the degraded worst. It won’t take too long to find great goodness and boundless love, cross-pollinated with destructive greed and ceaseless strife. It’s not about looking hard, and it’s not about optics, really, at all.

But what do I know? I’m just a guy who eats his meals over the sink and has to act like maybe his wallet is under the bed, even when I’m alone.

---

Reading the ceaseless murmuring of innumerable bees

Weinberger translated that Bei Dao that put me in traction for two weeks, a complete mental yard sale, when I was 33, unless that was when I was 26, unless it was Paz.

Miller, of Brooklyn but against it, late in his book about Paris and gashes and proto-Beat straight narration of a bender in Le Havre, vaults into phantasmic riffing that starts by quoting all caps Goethe, then segues to feverish delamination, plays on Fyodor, and declares in homage to Milton the love of everything that flows. And right before invoking blind aeropagatica and right after the arpeggios of vision quests and the aesthetic superiority of bilious screed, he declares, in the high style of this ten page riff:

It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so, then let us set up the last, agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living once dance about the room of the crater, last expiring dance. But a dance!

---

The music critic recites:

I suggested that there might be no more potent motivation on earth than “I’ll show you,” directed at everyone and no one. “Exactly,” she replied. “That’s the energy that I had after I left that situation: You’ll fucking see. You just wait.”

YOU. JUST. WAIT.

Came no church of cut stone signed

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money, or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?

• atropic but not atopic from H miller

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There is a wealthy man in my modest anonymous third tier burg who must be mid 8 figures if not 9 figures and probably liquid to boot and resides somewhere on the spectrum with dwarfism and small dick energy. Quite good at making money, but repulsive in its social media display. And oblivious, in a characteristically autistic, archetypal oblivious way, to the aggregating cringe effect that comes from posting screen snips of a W2, a Lambo, a Rolex - all the accoutrements of new flash and the clingy tasteless gauche. And whether from envy or a faux sense of having better hypothetical sense on what to hypothetically splurge, it is a reflex to lampoon and lambast him in the text thread, as though the flaw is lacking a tighter compass upon which to rely in setting a conspicuous consumption course. And why I care enough to care at all is its own indictment, obviously. Ah but worrying changes nothing and you can’t help but arm critique with the unintended consequences of your neuroses and be afflicted by their abnegating acuity at the same time. Just the way it is

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The ordeal of undeserved grace

Dream breaths weigh out even if the scale seems broken.

But it’s not as if waking to erasure makes easier the bearing of frustration that comes with the jolt back into this life. Let’s just say it: having just the last scene of a dream on the tip of the tongue, and then trying to describe it, and cognitively coming to, as though from a fainting spell, as the words come into the tighter focus of an expressed thought, is a kind of exquisite and dutiful futility, in that the remainder of what happened immediately prior - the thread of the dream - always goes to wisps of smoke. You hear me, don’t you? You can pick up what I am putting down about not being able ever to pick up what the dream put down?

Or maybe it’s just having too many layers to pass through to get to bedrock of what hasn’t ever happened, but somehow did. And still the effort to adduce it plays out like a spinning top that was flung out from the exhaled space of that steady sleeping breath.

Another angle: you can’t complete the grind until you break contact, and then again it’s not really pulled off until you land.

Axioms to be rejected by, arias to saunter to, and codas to be buried with

Joy W. on the late style imprinted on a codex with the pen of the now dead man:

afterimages lingering in the afterlife of a mock moon, soon to be made absent forever in a world waning null.

Bowden making it known that he knew and was on speaking terms with the one who did the fear and loathing and making it known that he shares the abyss of the infinite with the one who taught us about fear and trembling from inside the carapace of all of the pseudonyms, and making it known that he broke bread with the unkept beards of all the sagacious desert rats whose bones are sun bleached and gnawed on.

He can speak in declarative sentences that would sooner sculpt despair than flinch at sentiment.

He would have you think he comes by it naturally, on account of being Chicago-born and going at things self-taught and making a record his own damn way, up to Madison, Wisconsin where he had been temporarily housed in the department of the futility of intellectual history, then on to an Arizona flophouse and a newspaperman on the trail of depravity, and hunting down and being haunted by all those stories, rising and falling in Los cruces and getting beat down in Murder City, old and tooth-rotten and scarred and honest about how the telling of it is fiction that aspires to truth and that is anchored in facts that no one really wants to believe.