Data and Dust

Be real.
Do you see yourself-
or is that too close to
the source
of your own breath, body
and a-scent
afloat
and uncontainable-

Yet you try.

What do you mean
by that, when you say
portrayal in lieu of betrayal?

Whose idea was it?

Could we share this notion
like an opinion?

Whose line is this one
with no name before the semi-
colon?

This audience participates
and encourages
the foot-notations.

Closed quotes leave no
space for interpretation.

Where have all the dial tones gone?
Open lines have all been taken
for granted.

If we pretend we appreciate
the little things,
will all the bigs things
call our bluff for the
precarious positions
we attempt to balance
all our collected hopes
upon and continuously
adjust our appearance for
others real life,

meanwhile,
erosion is always itself,
revealing.





Painting by Odilon Redon, c. 1696  [Public domain].

A new day (refurbished)

Meeting with the sunrise again,
alone,
time strikes me as the lone
witness to this.

The mirrors are everywhere,
blinding.

I wrote it all down
to get it out of my head,
to silence the voice,
to make it go away,
and then it was there
in front of me,
like the horizon
line,
too terrifying to retell
today.

Better to watch
the light change.



Photo credited by Fancibaer [CC0], Morning Sunrise, 1/2013, in Public Domain. 

Project-ile

The poet sits with intention.
Knitted brow and with a scrap of
paper, a sharp implement and a
momentary departure, a faraway gaze,

the poet observes the words taking their own
positions simply as
falling
into place.

The poet lines up the marks and cross-
hatches, rounds up loops and keeps it all
justified, inside the margin(al) notes,
deducing answers by guess and check.

With so many alternates and messy remainders
that carry over into the wrong
problem,
we are easily led astray with too many steps
to count.

The poet prefers no word to another,
making it impossible to say anything
of value about luck or music, or talent,
or art or war or philanthropy or money.

In shorthand scrawls,
the poet draws out
the sharpest tips acquired and
compares this craft to the fine work
such as that of the carpenter or accountant,
or tailor or assassin,
whom measure thrice before a cut is made.

The poet shook his wrist.
The poet knew there were solutions inside
so he sought and tried
to say the one thing that would change
something.
The poet goes with the flow of ink
and arrives quickly
in a foreign tundra
where the virgin snow melts
around slated and craggy ideals.

The poet watches the footfalls
disappear,
grateful to have never been
Here.


Advertising illustration credited by 'Bookseller & Stationer', The Sawn Pen, 1919 in Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Direction

The pod pulls past

super slow

And in one way

the future is seen

in a second

Under notions of nightsky temerity

when moon rises and shines

and stars fall and flame out

The past twinkles

inset overhead

A fine line

between the living

and the dying

dissipates

when we look too long...

Image credit By C.R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt University) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

liminal

Fine. Pretend, thinly.
Smile. Pull the cord. Middle C.
Pluck the inside strings. Up.
Ply your arms, for others.
Cut. Hung. Behave. Trim and Prop her.
Hear yourself first, thought, same.
Note turned to tone?
Silence is preferred by the self
Above all else.

Despite, to spite the intolerably cruel,
Endure. Niceties, stand still. 
Erect, not flinch. Faces. Places.
As though-
As though,
You remember You
From somewhere,  around here….

Painting by Vincent van Gogh, The peasant churchyard (1885) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The path is Brodsky

His sentences say

He never repeats them

With eye or I

How would we know?

He is only a product of

Progression, 
an obsession with freedom

Of speech and others

Sentences.

His composure, 
demure, muffled,

intonations

He shies away

From his fiction

Life. Sentences.

Written this way.

Point of Departure is too

Point of No Return.

Painting by Isaak Brodsky (1906) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A line meant...

Look at that desk, he said, five-hundred-page shuffle,

Don’t tell me that is the sign of busy,

Don’t give me some stupid story.

Obviously, to the untrained eye, the olio of font shapes, ink colors,

mixed mediums, led, lead, led to rushed conclusions-false starts-

See the red? I pled. This shows a state of flux.

Minus. He said, Excuses. I use that color too.

What do you do all day? Rotate sheets-scribble letters-

And he was a numbers guy, a math man, a counter of beans,

so the only way to balance

our opposing views was to speak strict geometry,

and stepping outside on  that crisp clear night I said,

See the equilateral triangle up there-look up-

Venus on the bottom right, Mars atop and the

Crescent moon? He smiled at me like the moon.

And said, I see, but what does that have to do with you,

You haven’t shown me anything new.

The next night, the same time, the book keeper asked

the book collector, Red anything today? She denied doing any further editing.

He preferred being in black himself.

There is no less of a mess on that desk. Tell me, Sweetie,

Have you gotten somewhere today? We still needed to reconcile.

So I took him back outside and told him to look up at the scalene now,

Venus sinking, the moon smirking, Mars winking wide and weak,

and asked him what does it mean?

He could not figure out the answer I was looking for,

So I helped him a bit and filled the space in with the correct operators,

Operate-hers, Calculate-hers and Compute-hers

were all aptly named for gender roles.

Without needing further proof,

he understood the expansion and rotation,

All at once he said

Read me one of your poems, Please. 

Image credit By Smithsonian Institution from United States [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

Alpha-betting on-Omega

All whole words are concocted symbols
lines scrawled to convey meaning
not unlike painting,
sweeping strokes of generalities
whet form into abstract impressions
desist and seize definition.

A collector of rare words
admires antiquated articulations
and such-and so forth
forms thought into projections
as aroma refuses to go unnoticed
inoculating ideas, contagion cures.

To say the words aloud, incant
taste the tone on the tongue, palatable
digesting the dreams of others
does wonders.
Look (it) up.

It is alchemy really.
If you have dined around
the periodic table, you know
letters combine
to become more than themselves,
explosive elixirs
of ionic interpretations.

I get the Impressionism
and I objectivist
for surrealism, cubed.
Post-pop abstracted
Neo-classical characters,
re-defined and framed
a sentence for Life.




Image of artwork By Coles Phillips [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Collecting words from the bone pile

The Three Oddest Words

By Wislawa Szymborska

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
Copyright © Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh,

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996

__________________________________________________________________________________

 Italo Calvino on Quickness-

"Words, words that make me think. Because I am not devoted to aimless wandering, I'd rather say that I prefer to entrust myself to the straight line, in the hope that the line will continue into infinity, making me unreachable. I prefer to calculate at length the trajectory of my flight, expecting that I will be able to launch myself like an arrow and disappear over the horizon. Or else, if too many obstacles bar my way, to calculate the series of rectilinear segments that will lead me out of the labyrinth as quickly as possible."

From Six Memos for the Next Six Memos for the next Millennium

 

Imagine words being 

disembodied

from their inky chambers

in confinement

of a stroke on whim

Words set free from

the constriction

of definition

trapped 

by convictions

Language as folk lore

posing as apparitions

opaque and outside

ourselves

a resemblance

While we wrestle with gravity

Here

Words are grappling with reality

Now

Set against 

the woven fabric canvas

of our chance encounters

in perpetuity

strokes on a whim

I get the impression

of vibrant color on a white day

either way

A container to store ecstasy

dripping down

and running

to meaning 

we para phrase

artfully appraise

Concentrate as you read

these words you may need

inside your head

with your minds i

while standing beside

ourselves

in

nirvana

projecting 

maniacal mana

Leaning on clouds

we rely

on coming to a compromise

in order to see 

shapes as symbols, like these

metaphors

thirsty for more

than thin air

An impression

a sense 

of being

with words

we try to share

interchangeable

synonyms

thereby

invoking and provoking

a sense of continuity

An encyclopedic

orthopedic

selfsame essence

Words are the

people pith

that make-up

our masterful myth.

Image by Gerard de Lairesse, 1690 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.