Recalculating Read online

  I don’t

  I don’t need

  I

  I

  don’t need

  don’t need to hear

  all that extra

  extra stuff

  all that extra

  extra stuff

  it’s

  it’s

  it’s

  your

  it’s your

  it’s your

  your

  fucking fault

  your fucking fault

  fucking fault

  it’s

  it’s

  your fucking

  your

  your fucking

  your fucking fault

  it’s your fucking fault

  THE INTROVERT

  after Wordsworth

  Suddenly, those fears

  Your first and ever-dreaded foe! Suddenly

  You turn from some imbecile prose

  That rails and ricochets against chimeric life

  With dictums ripped from surface

  Scars by wanton brains, a moral pose

  Thoughtlessly ill fit to Orphic lyre

  And with your beauteous breath you slowly

  Refuse refuge, jolting yourself with jeers

  That anxious years will bring an empty heart

  And blinded thought.

  STRIKE!

  Strike because the sky turns gray just before it blacks out.

  Strike because when you were little your father told you too many lies.

  Strike because the surf is up.

  Strike because you are heartsick with the old ways and giddy with promise.

  Strike because things can’t go on this way any longer.

  Strike because the thugs have replaced the thugs.

  Strike because every grain of sand tells you the universe is an open field of infinite possibility.

  Strike because you’re sick & tired of bait & switch.

  Strike because the wolf howls in the garden’s translucent masquerade.

  Strike because your grief overwhelms you and the other option is to sit at home and stare at a screen.

  Strike because every hope begins with disappointment.

  Strike because the bosses need a reality check backed up by workers’ sweat.

  Strike because collective action is the only thing that separates us from pejorocracy.

  Strike because you’re not for sale.

  Strike because the sun is not shining as brightly as it did.

  Strike because the machinery of greed needs to be unhinged.

  Strike because you’ve lost your head in the endless circuits of a recurring nightmare.

  Strike because your children insist it doesn’t matter and your parents say the time’s not right.

  Strike because even demons are mortal.

  Strike because the ache is just too bad, the work too much, the reward too meager.

  Strike because you have no say.

  Strike because it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  Strike because the pilots are guiding the ship to the plutocrats’ lair.

  Strike because every assault needs to be countered, every affront acknowledged.

  Strike because you’re hungry for something else.

  Strike because you can’t forget it and are not going to let it pass.

  Strike because your dignity is worth more than their hypocrisy.

  Strike because hands are for making things not wringing a desperate man dry.

  Strike because power is a two-way street with back alleys, overpasses, byways, and unexplored tunnels.

  Strike because your only hedge fund is your bare hands.

  Strike because the coal dust is suffocating and the mines a living grave.

  Strike because you are sick of all that’s called new and despair that nothing changes.

  Strike because you are abandoned.

  Strike because you don’t want to live this way anymore.

  Strike because the deck is stacked but the dealer says you’re cheating.

  Strike because everyone’s listening but no one’s talking.

  Strike because you can’t say it any other way.

  Strike because meaning’s made not taught.

  Strike because life’s a tale and you the teller.

  Strike because I told you to.

  Strike because I will never let you down.

  Strike because I told you one thing but did another.

  Strike because I disappointed you.

  Strike because I made you feel stupid for trying.

  Strike because I made you feel stupid for crying.

  Strike because, win or lose, it’s the doing that gets done.

  Strike because you couldn’t get a ticket to the show.

  Strike because you’ve never had a thought of your own.

  Strike because no one bothered to tell you.

  Strike because you still can or think you can or thought you could.

  Strike because it’s better than baseball.

  Strike because tomorrow they’ll come for you.

  Strike because this could be your last chance.

  Strike because even though you have your price, the offer was not nearly good enough.

  Strike because resistance is happier than humiliation.

  Strike because you’d prefer not to.

  Strike because eternity is ours for the asking.

  Strike because the wind is at your back, even when there is no wind.

  Strike because all roads lead nowhere and all hopes come to naught, at least if things don’t get worse.

  Strike because the jellies in your life are lined up at tide’s edge, keeping you from the water.

  Strike because you are thirsty and the water is spoils.

  Strike because even a match in a dimly lit restaurant can make it easier to read the menu.

  Strike because you hate the way they redecorated the planet.

  Strike because the fall season needs some push back.

  Strike because your wrongs are not as bad as their wrongs.

  Strike because you forgot to pay attention for longer than you’d intended.

  Strike because the bells are ringing but you are nearly deaf.

  Strike because you would have when you knew less than you think you know now.

  Strike because the blood loss can’t be sustained.

  Strike because you heart is broken and the vultures are overhead, ready to pick at the pieces.

  Strike because complacency’s a waste of time.

  Strike because while doing something is a pain in the ass, doing nothing is a pain in the soul.

  Strike because a shadow of a doubt is the hipster’s swan song.

  Strike because you didn’t when you could and now it’s too late.

  Strike because it’s noisy.

  Strike because it’s bluesy.

  Strike because there’s not enough poetry in your life or it’s the wrong kind of poetry.

  Strike because you’re running on empty.

  Strike because the nightingale’s restless.

  Strike because the meds are kicking in.

  Strike because you are in love or’ve lost your love, are on a roll or’ve hit a dry spot, are out of ideas or brimming with plans, breaking down or working out.

  Strike because the wealthy would rather you die than pay their share of taxes.

  Strike because we criminalize poverty and legalize corporate theft.

  Strike because the men at the top are not the top men.

  Strike because you used to believe in America or never did but wanted to.

  Strike because the Supreme Court is jerry-rigged, its justice without honor.

  Strike because Murdoch and Berlusconi make Big Brother seem like chopped liver.

  Strike because it’s no fun to tango alone.

  Strike because you’ve been on hold for longer than you can remember and want to hang up without losing your place in the queue.

 
Strike because it’s nearly as effective as Prozac.

  Strike because there is not enough orange in your green or mauve in your magenta.

  Strike because the Manhattans are tasting sour and the gin rummy’s flat.

  Strike because it’s futile.

  Strike because no one cares what you do.

  Strike because you mean it or meant it or isn’t it pretty to have thought so.

  Strike because I told you you wouldn’t want to hear this and you don’t.

  Strike because you want a break, or you’ve been broken, or you’ve seen the larger picture, or your vision is deteriorating and you can only see what’s right in front of you.

  Strike because in order to fully appreciate sitting sometimes you got to stand.

  Strike because in the end even dreams turn to sand.

  Strike because you didn’t think you had it in you.

  Strike because you don’t have it in you.

  Strike because the iron is cold and as heartless as the green ant’s misery.

  Strike because you missed the revolution.

  Strike because the revolution comes only twice in each one’s life.

  Strike because the revolution is not an end but a meeting.

  Strike because your apathy brings you infinite joy.

  Strike because you’ve lost your voice.

  Strike because you have the choice.

  Strike because you want to join the chorus.

  Strike because you’ve always wanted a solo.

  Strike because it’s taking too long.

  Strike because you want to sing this song.

  SAPPHICS

  Here where I found you, here will I lose you

  Tears on the slow take, tears on the up swing

  Hidden when I go now, crushed by a token

  Sorrow as a cancer, reason eschews answer

  Mobbed by a gay light, scarred in a queer fright

  Little did I know then, nothing do I ken now

  Fate is a torn wing, hope is a hypocrite.

  RECALCULATING

  You can’t be part of the problem if you don’t see how you’re part of the solution.

  “For a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of exciting it in mankind.”

  [Poe, Drake-Hallek review]

  Information wants to be free—from personification.

  As if all we are and do revolves around a hollow center.

  Every poem is a model of a possible world that only comes into being when reading is active, activated.

  The poem is a constant transformation of itself.

  As in the poem plays you or you play the poem. Aces are witches, clubs beat the rhythm, spades are queens, and kings rule!

  We didn’t have it when we needed it but got it once we didn’t.

  Postmodernism: modernism with a deep sense of guilt.

  Language is an albatross, a sullen cross, a site of loss.

  I think of Emma climbing the icy rocks of our imagined world and taking a fatal misstep, one that in the past she could have easily managed, then tumbling, tumbling; in my mind she is yet still in free fall, but I know all too well she hit the ground hard.

  The hardest thing is not to look back, the endless if onlys, the uninvited what could have beens. I live not with foreknowledge but consequences; wishing I had foreknowledge, suffering the consequences of not.

  . . . how poems become sites for mourning—not in fixed ritual repetitions (prescribed liturgy) but as mobile and specific areas for reflection and projection, holding areas, havens. Not words received for comfort but works actively discovered in the course of searching.

  Not to “get over” (as a disease) but as a way of “living with” (as a condition).

  The nightmare reality that erupts in the daylight like burnt offerings at a pizza parlor. You say skeleton, I say: Can you say that again? That’s no phallus, that’s the election of my impotence, writ large. As in: Me transformo, you pale face. Me tranformo, you the unexpected product of a sudden revelation.

  I love art so much . . . but it never returns the favor.

  Poems are stuck in black and white, which means that every color connected to a poem is proof of the inner life of words.

  As surely as God invents the idea of God but also of godlessness.

  Angels brush against spattered brushwork, gory purple eyes loom out amidst hearts pierced by arrows.

  Every misfigured thought a dialect of its moment. (Say! Don’t you speak in a dialect too?)

  Sometimes I am disturbed even by my ability to function. I feel, at times, a shell of myself, a shell of a shell of myself.

  Each day I know less than the day before. People say that you learn something from such experiences; but I don’t want that knowledge and for me there are no fruits to these experiences, only ashes. I can’t and don’t want to “heal”; perhaps, though, go on in the full force of my dysabilities, coexisting with a brokenness that cannot be accommodated, in the dark.

  Right after Emma died I could not stand to look at the photos of her—and there are lots, because she made so many self-portraits. I felt each photo was a lie—flaunting her presence in the face of her being gone. Now I see that the photographs are what she left me—that she is present to me in the way these haunted and haunting works are present.

  Whale on beach like wolf at wedding: bark is bigger than bite but insulates tree.

  [For Yunte Huang, after Charlie Chan]

  Poetry should be silent, unread, invisible, inconceivable. The true poem can never be written or heard.

  Not ideas but the idea of ideas; not questions but the inadequacies of answers; not currency but against the tides.

  Better a weak jaw than an iron fist.

  Stalling is my inspiration.

  It’s what I’d like to undo that keeps me up at night.

  The problem with teaching poetry is perhaps the reverse of that in other fields: students come to it thinking it’s personal and relevant, but I try to get them to see it as formal, structural, historical, collaborative, and ideological. What a downer!

  Orphaned by the world, with no home but there.

  If you don’t make a mistake thrice, how do you learn from it?

  If x is x, then y is y and o, o.

  So much of what we can’t imagine we are forced to experience. And even then we can’t imagine it.

  I’ve got a chiasmus as big as all Detroit and as old the Second Avenue el.

  He had the honeyed lips of someone who’d been in poetry too long, whose idealism had years ago become a manner of speech and whose only aesthetic aspirations were for a revival of the ideas he had rejected in his youth, as if you could get a second chance to bite the apple of the new and not come out smelling like a candied turkey in a slow dance medley. It was a fork in the road, but he had always favored spoons; and now, facing the music to which he had never dared to listen, he dove into the waters he has always reviled, ready to be eaten alive by the sharks of his proudly arrogant misjudgments.

  This is the difference between a sentence and paradise. A sentence comes to an end; paradise has no beginning.

  China export: “NOT MADE IN CHINA” T-shirts

  US export: “NOT MADE IN AMERICA” T-shirts

  It was the kind of day you read about in the movies.

  What’s unseen but said’s as consequent as what’s apparent but unspoken. Words perform for inner eye we o’erlook at pleasure’s peril.

  Listening for inaudible songs in a sonic sea, I lost my bearings, falling, uncaring, into traps of my own despairing.

  Always treat advice with skepticism (especially this advice).

  Freedom from ideology’s ideology’s designer jeans.

  Ideology’s veils are imaginary; the freedom from these veils delusional.

  Universalism is moral, particularism ethical.

  (But every apple has a core, every horizon a philosophic song . . .)

  We are gathered at a site of dialogue. As chaotic as our discussi
ons may sometimes seem, we are always making patterns with them.

  Most of those patterns are lost in the dark matter of the mystic writing pad.

  When I say “we” I don’t mean everyone, or perhaps anyone else, just a sense of some collectivity beyond myself.

  “We aced the shit out of that asshole.”

  My advice to young poets is always: start your own magazine or press and publish your own work and those of your contemporaries whose poems seem most crucial for the art, as you perceive it. And respond as much as possible, through poetics and reviews, to this work. Articulate its values; value its articulations. The web certainly makes such publishing easier, but it does not solve the hardest part, finding a community of other poets that allows for active and intense exchange, not based just on location or prior friendship or like-mindedness but on the qualities and quiddities of the work as it unfolds in time and space, on earth and in the heavens of our “image nations.”

  Our inalienable rights are inevitably alienated; in this way, capitalism seems to merge with destiny; or our fate, through a darkened glass, is projected onto the world of which we are sentient. So then it’s necessary to be reminded, from time to time, that hegemony is something to work for rather than only and ever to recoil against.

  I’ve grown so accustomed to the dark that I can hardly imagine anything more than shadows.

  The Jew is a textual construction.

  You’re not there even when you’re there.

  You’re not gone even when you’ve went.

  You’re still near even when you’re gone.

  In poetics, nothing is new except the exaggerations.

  Beauty lies, I have always thought; a wonderful deception while it lasts.

  The Beach trilogy (a family saga over three generations): Seagull with Broken Wing, Rocks in Basket, Shadows in the Sand.

  Elliptical poetry: language poetry’s bark without its bite.

  The absence of ornament is an ornament.

  Robin’s “Wandering Jew or Nomad,” cut from the leather back of his family’s Salt Lake City rocker: valuable more for what it is than to look at it. But isn’t that true of all of us? (Something to touch amidst the loss.)

  Here’s the message: there is no message.

  I’m talking to you, you motherfucker.

  You want a message, go to a massage parlor.

  I hope I have your attention now.

  Your message has been scrubbed because of possible contamination by a virus.