Imagine

 

a father

(or mother)

 

who believes

in you.

 

~

 

Remember

 

nothing is

 

ever finished,

noone fulfilled.

 

~

 

Consider

 

the situation

 

apart from

the spectacle.

 

~

 

Act

 

as if

you care.

 

~

 NOTE

I may

be through

with Rimbaud

but he's

not through

with me.

 The sense 

of monstrous

sensual aim.

The sense

of something

gone amiss.

An unspoken

aria or

oblique meta-

physical feeling.

The rigor

of this

semblance of

something that

has yet

to happen

or that

happened badly.

 

Fog

 

The fog of amusement.

The fog of boundaries.

The fog of caution.

The fog of duty.

The fog of enervation

The fog of forgetting.

The fog of gender.

The fog of history.

The fog of intervals.

The fog of joy.

The fog of kindness.

The fog of longing.

The fog of memory.

The fog of narcosis.

The fog of order.

The fog of poetry.

The fog of questions.

The fog of revolution.

The fog of sex.

The fog of television.

The fog of ululation.

The fog of violence.

The fog of witness.

The fog of experience.

The fog of youth.

The fog of endings.

 You have

 more words

 than I.

 

Little Song

 

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a suit

Every body a sweet inhabitation of its separations.

 

The Husserl

 

Wasn’t that

A dance craze?

 

 Anyway, consciousness

Of one’s

 

Own body

And willed movements

 

Makes for

Intuitive fullness.

 

The Poet at Seventy

My destruction

is incomplete

I continue

saying nothing

Something

A word

if you

don't mind.

to the

and flow

*

behind the

*

for any

of their

 

 LOOSE ENDS

Waiting for

a visitor.

 

The Weather

 

The weather

is weird.

 

I’m always

repeating myself.

 

Of course

I’m afraid

of my shadow.

 

Have you

met her?

 

~

 

My shadow

is older

than me

but appears younger.

 

 

The weather’s

not withholding.

 

I’m always

withdrawing.

 

My shadow

says that

feels nice.

 

~

 

Weather might

be exegesis

 

or God’s

pheromones.

 

I don’t know.

 

I’m always

forgetting something.

 

My shadow

losing interest

spaces out.

 

~

 

Weather offers

a blind face.

 

My shadow

ignores me.

 

I’m always

depleting myself.

 

Of course

I’m afraid.

 

 

 

LOOSE ENDS

chatter. 

L=U=G=G=A=G=E 

Everything

that is

the suitcase.

 I've been going through things, getting rid of things and found the first issue of Satellite Telephone, a print magazine out of Seattle that was published in 2007.

I've 3 poems in the mag, poems which I hadn't preserved but that I like.  Here they are:

WHILE I WAS OUT

My vocabulary

did what?!

THE CURTAIN

between you

and I

has two

cut-outs.

Through one

you read

my lips

and through

that other

I caress

your crotch

until we

come to

switch positions,

begin again

with a

curtain stretched

between us

just so.

WHILE I WAS OUT

You enjoyed

my symptoms

much more

than me.

 Between before

and after,

between here

and there,

where what's

working snows.

 New from Mark Young:  https://mhcyoung.blogspot.com/2023/09/100-titles-from-tom-beckett-2.html

This car's

a peach.

Really.

It's got

a pit

and everything.

That's why

we need

to stop.

I edit 

myself all

the time.

Except when

I don't.

Then the shit

hits the fan.

 

 The Poet at 70

A bundle

of symptoms

under a

thought balloon.

 Mass 

murderers favor

legally purchased guns.

Does

that make

you feel better?

 I do

assent consciously

or not

to ________.

Ascending to

the bottom.

My failings

are legion.

 

I won’t

set them

 

aside. Wanting

to be

 

desired for

example. Not

 

embracing others

enough for

 

example.  I

can’t pretend

 

to transcend

the scansion

 

of these

lines.  I

 

have disappointed

others.  I

 

have disappointed

myself but

 

have tried

to think

 

against the

tenor of

 

the time.

It’s not

 

enough to

dream yet

 

I do.

 

 

 

 

My Aunt Martha

 

1.

 

My Aunt Martha

Went to the farm

And with her

She took

An Aesthetician,

A Biology textbook,

A cadaver dog,

Energy bars,

Frequent flyer points,

Guitar strings,

G-string panties,

German chocolate cake,

Harissa,                                                    

Daddy issues,

Killer instincts,

Licorice,

Mnemonic devices,

Neuroses,

Organizational charts,

Political pamphlets,

Quiz show transcripts,

A lover named Rhonda,

Social anxieties,

Tantric ambitions,

Ukuleles,

Sweater vests,

Work boots,

A xylophone,

A yard of silk,

And zucchini plants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.

 

My Aunt Martha

Came back

From the farm

And with her

She brought

A bushel of zucchini,

A younger version of Rhonda named Rhoda,

X-rated schemes,

Wild dreams,

A vision board,

Uncontrollable urges,

Ticket stubs,

Annotated scores for percussion instruments,

Retail therapy agendas,

Quince jelly,

Poems about identity theft,

Burlap sacks filled with onions,

New potatoes,

A slavish manservant,

Lemongrass,

Kettledrums,

Jodhpurs,

Incident reports,

Huckleberries,

Grandiose ideas,

Fever dreams,

Envelopes,

Diaries,

Canola oil,

Blue bowling balls,

And an anvil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Nothing yesterday.

 Something today.

 Another Notebook Fragment

What matters.

Tenebrous

starter categories.

Rouge

gauge.  I'm

here anyway.

Filling in.

Taking

out. Recycling.

Editing.

Getting off

track.

 Trouble the templates.

Unjam the jelly roll.

 Worry the curtains.

 

 

Two Lines From a Dream

                                   For Thomas Fink

 

This isn’t a car.

It’s a poem booth.

 Out of

the instability

of release

the relief

of drift.

 Leaving the Scene

Scarred bare

wall where

our mirror

used to be.

 Notebook Fragment

A body

always talking

smack

between feeling

and thought.

 It has been years since I last posted to this blog.  No reason to think anyone will rediscover this space any time soon, but I feel compelled to resume the practice.  Here's the latest version of a new thing I've been wrestling with:

I Don’t Know

                    Every error

                                         becomes the text.

                                                                 Robert Kelly, The Loom

I don’t

Know who

I am.

 

I’m living

Somewhere else.

 

I arrived

Leaking words.

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every word

Itself

 

A body

Inserting itself

 

Into

A body.

 

~

 

Every word

Overfilling

 

A void

 

And itself

Overflowing.

 

~

 

 

 

 

Every word

An other

 

That is

Absolutely other.

 

~

 

What I

Think

 

I know

Is quicksand

 

In this

B-movie.

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Neither words

Nor me

 

Are free

Of quicksand

 

Exigencies.

 

~

 

Shifting sands.

Shifting registers.

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My vocabulary

Doesn’t belong

 

To me.

 

What’s your

Subject position?

 

~