not far from New Orleans by lisa pasold

after It's a Fine Line by Jonathan Regier

Mobile and ramshackle, motorized vendors seek and hunt in their lust to sell without someone yelling “Taxi?” on foot. We are unheard of with almost equal frequency, establishing rapport with virtually no chance they understand. I ask them, "are you one of the tribe of Seraphim?" The next evening, I understand the situation better. Go hype thyself is the worser fortune. Without exception in the Mata Hari shopping mall, really fine coffee worth is almost half our lackluster currency, miscoloured by repeated cycles in fate's unsteady washing machine. At the final language barrier, Napoleon pastry in hand, the driver refuses the big yellow sheet, so we veer impolitely around the roundabout, striving oh justice not to fall from the bike.

It's a Fine Line by Jonathan Regier

after Tones are lickin' under by JKD, Approach Misled (Translation) by Sue Chenette, Distillations by Geo Vance, The Music by JW, The Greyhound

In the city night, it looks like a fine line one hundred kilometers away. It has nothing to do with the laws of perspective: it looks like a fine line up close. A homunculus is riding his bike along the line.

I ask him, "Are you a Virtue, a Cherub, or one of the tribe of Seraphim that hide their multitudinous eyes behind peacock feathers?"

Falling off his bike, he shouts, "Be quiet! I'm not far away. It is a ... 'fickle gulf'!"

When he says, 'fickle gulf', the heavens shake as if a tremendous Scrabble piece had been turned over. I cover my head, running to the shelter of a nearby tree.

The next evening, I understand the situation better. It was indeed one from the class of Virtues that I met last night. They must be so tiny because of the very fine lines that they navigate in the world. The winds doth rattle the hand: one must slide one's finger along the creases of the petal or dangerously lose the sense.

The next evening, I approach him from far away. (Although it's difficult to know when I've gotten close enough, because he doesn't change size.)

I holler, "Orchidblues!" A storm cloud appears beside his head. A yellow bolt of lightening pops from the cloud and shocks his hat, and all the felt and stuffing explode.

He looks up at me with terror. He begins racing along his fine line.

"'Hello-tropic'! 'Hype the love'!" (I'd prepared all of these that morning, noting them on a morsel of graph paper that I folded up in my pocket.) A milk truck flies out of the intersection with its horn running so fast and long that the doppler effect puts a shiver in my spine.

I laugh deeply and bellow, "Thou dost ride thy bike like Job himself!" Then: " 'Please relax', 'Shaft of salad', 'Writing about snow'" . . .

A greyhound--which had been hitherto the stone adornment of an ancient fireplace--springs to life and speeds alongside him.

"The spheres turn and comets whizzz, but nothing can out-pace the greyhound! He is faster than television, he is the fastest of all the arts! He is faster still than even Virtue!"

Not a word by Justine el-Khazen

After Alone, they are a-maze (by JKD), Everyone's having children now by Jonathan Regier, and Everyday Includes Today by Lisa Pasold.


Magnets are the maps,
world smoothed over:
things that settle beyond the GPS.

An aeroplane arrives,
and it’s all over.

Mourning and noon agree blankly.
Night and the numbers:
10, 9, 7, 8.

Blood of the children,
black and level.
Vines map the body
in thick braids and ladders
of blood,
of blood

(children included).

A bridegroom opens the door.

Alone, they are a-maze (by JKD)

After Everyone's having children now by Jonathan Regier, and Everyday Includes Today by Lisa Pasold.

A bridegroom throws open the doors:
playing in the soil, mourning noon and night,
The madcap flatterer’s leafing through the butterflies.
A cup, a paper doily, the fix-it maman
cannot quite re-stitch the happy couple back together.
You listen in closely, you can hear the whispers:
Where has she gone? And, hence, to Mexico!
We clink our glasses with everyone’s children—
or vines. And then it is we begin to agree blankly:
Finland is a fine place to be if you are finicky. Or nimble.
He will drink his exquisite coffee though the dogs bark
and not say a word about the magnets
soaking in their blood, or the hemlock she’s just plucked.
Sympathies? Whichever happens to come before 8am.
I say it will all be fine again. The world smoothed over.
Just wait or shake it a little bit.
Scraps of blown papers settle beyond the GPS.
But at 9 o'clock, when you think it’s all over, I hear him say:
I suppose I should have tagged her. An aeroplane arrives.
Will you sit a little while longer before you shimmer?

every day includes today by lisa pasold

after Everyone's having children now... by JR

At 8 o'clock it is a maze;
At 9 o'clock, an aeroplane arrives;
At 10 o'clock all is possible; wash your grubby little hands.
There is everything to soil.
It is a few minutes after 10 o'clock.
Visit 'burn all your regrets' at
abonfireinyourbackyard.com
At 7 o'clock, none of this has happened.
At midnight, you are basking in the reflected glory
of being able to say no, I have nothing to declare, it is gone
entirely now and I am leaving on that jet plane
with my small fluffy dog.
At ten minutes after midnight, your taxi is waiting in Mexico.
Everything is possible.
The dog is barking.
Flames lick at your fingers.

Coffee breaks banned in Italy? by JKD

After Jennifer Huxta, Jonathan Regier, Beverley Bie Brahic, George Vance & Rufo Quintavalle’s poems about coffee.

Put contemplation on the burner, simmer. My legs, I say, then soil like a door throwing itself upon the bridegroom, chocolate covered grubbies, I say, toasted magnetic. These fields foreshorn level, eyeglasses UP, then wait. Wonton. Remember the 50s images, the test subjects, pilots, recordings, mushroom or lava lamp? Pass me the… I will drink my children, or to. Trinkets and car-salesman with beat-up cabriolets or the four-door can’t hold it open Cadillac. Give me a polish, stir, caffeinate, get it to take out or up. Fine, the paper says, the paper explains, the paper announces: Smartphone simulations systematically can’t get enough of other explanations, opinions, news. Morning tipping a hat to TV dinners, bailing on M*A*S*H. Is the fact that Hollywood makes so many war films an endorsement? What was she practicing? I would join the CIA, FBI, ATF, PTA, IRA, WHO, FDA, LBGA, ABA drooling swindled with her AK47 something like a pistol, she was, or pissed-off piston. Too many shots. Should limit oneself to a cup in the morning, a cup at noon. What did you think I was talking about? Out of tune, time, sixteen dead fawns don’t make a musical. I was the sound of…. Or off. Remain. Stay? Tunnel. Out past the deep, the buoys, the borderlands, the reputable. Split or spilt. I like it black, no sugar. That’s what I would say if I were Ret at the counter of a 5 and dime in a beige trench with a pair of Matrix glasses I could pull on then do it all in Horatio slo-mo “noooo, suuuggaar” waiting for the Miami boats to roar up in HD colorized fantasy island at my back. Cut to credits. No subtitles. Raw. A flash, he writes, hanging only a flower. The sea, the scapegoat. A designer farmer in an organic bushhut serves up the BLT, holding himself down, Stockholm syndrome. Life is just as surreptitiously slanted as those olive trees, 9euros90 each. Didn’t I tell you I have always wanted. This is a ringed circus. A meditation circle. Step inside, just be sure to hide any the trace of the frontier. Book positioned on the shelf, cover closed, leather-bound. An artefact. The last one left in a post-post-post moderncontemprary third millennium digital wasteland. You board the shuttle, and the door swhooshes closed. This leaves me a lot to think about, but is there still a nespresso left? Hand me that purple capsule.

alternate theory, or somersault by sean s

after Nuts & Reverie by Jonathan Regier

A squirrel seen in Australia is like an egg resting on your head.

(I would apologize for associating the frantic and the smooth, the compulsive and the enigmatic, but scholastically, emotionally, it is right, plus you started it.)

Inside the egg are stock rooms, libraries, liquor stores. They are unevenly distributed, chances are. They are Australian, pushing down the waters unevenly in that part of the world.

The squirrels in Australia are more than 99% invisible. But still less than 100%. So I wonder. How do we divide a squirrel? Is it the difference between white and yolk? White and iris? Between wick and childhood?

Between falling up and clinging to gravity by one's fingertips?

Swimming between the stocks, books, and bottles, tow-headed children, crane drivers harnessed: to their avenues, high ledges, memories of upside-down sunset in streaky panes above girderwork, of feet trimmed too short for burning, for the wind.

They are hunting the squirrels there. Their one-percent pelts. Double-hafted algorithms that can part anything, or that's what they were told at purchase, though it doesn't matter because the vendors do not give refunds.

It doesn't matter. The squirrels live a true life and everybody knows it but them. Just another doubt stickying up the measurements. It is a red red. And an unred. Or. Try laying a knife edge to it.

The egg burns with a calm and slow flame. The flocks in the shell squirrel in delight, a chance liquid running up the walls. Broth, liquor and ink. The semisalt of waveform. Tide by balance.

The powerlines die off into radio waves, bobbing on the air, bonehums.

The corner of your vision, a squirrel startles at the snap. The egg falling from one's head spills an ocean with an incomplete margin of error.

Sleep Cycle II, by JKD

After vocabulary in Nuts & Reverie by Jonathan Regier

Theory lines wake her, curved slow axe. She turns.
To look back at the visibility, running stock retired. Retry.
To split the egg without losing yolk, consider the signs
under anaesthetic. Tides bound or bounded by salt licks.
Her refraction still power. Lines make her remember.
Overlearning, oak, cure. The sleep less an axis than spit.
Basic patterns of respiration between rapid eye movements.
No need to say what’s beyond these comforts.
Speed down the wire, speak and roll over.
Precipice. She is her own.
And from the outer calls herself, beckons
as if the curtained night were behind her now.
Reckoning. Plates clatter in the quake. Hold on.
Snowstill incubation of winter falling towards her.
She would make it stop, wherever she is.
Amnesiac dreamcatcher, letting every image pour
through its net. Those which held her down, weave
along unsuspected flights, chill, naked to the wake.
And then, to call up under fingertip, a print, curl
foetal alongside artefacts, raised dust pinned back under.
Roasting, or robed, the sheets twist and strangle.
A light breeze, or hair, wafts closer.

wirecannies by sean s

accidentally after the moron-theme (?) of G Vance's Moron-egging and J Regier's Morons?

The squirrels outside my apartment are not complete
morons. They've seen Sweetie watching
them and they know what it means: run along
the wires through the leaves when I am out with my
back cooling on the concrete steps.

Neighbor by Brandon Shimoda

after The Dangerous Part of Sleep is the Afternoon by J Regier, after Sleep Cycles by Jennifer K Dick, after Sue Chennette's What Was Offered


Dangerous parting of sleep
From terrible head
Heart
As grease responsibility
Desperate for reason is a feller

Patient
Pear upon a moistened sail
Winter afternoon, I found
Marking
Starry skin

Desperate
And anemic for women
And men
Delicacy of the nose
Inserting itself into the hole

As danger masks starling to greet
I will soon be eating my neighbor's house
Before
From winter splits
Or die. Soon also be eating my neighbor

Circadian rhythm by Jennifer K Dick

After J Regier's The Dangerous Part of Sleep is the Afternoon, a bit of self-rewording off yesterday's post, & a ref to Anne Carson's Decreation.

Or she is the opened skeleton. The dangerous sleep caught cross-continental through cycles, REM, remote. Underfatigue, reasoning afternoon’s disparate, dislocational. She, the ululating, cuffed to decks and mopped her wet sloshed overboard. Linked back to mineral. Time longed or longing as she lounges in sleepchains with women along miles of vast breath fawning. Of cicatrice and scraw, of clicks and clichés, her torso separated on film is maw of language. The tidal cauchemardesque cobalt slipped under her. She would let her self float, here, hearing. She would buoy or anchor. Drag light, the sack of bones which become her. Wintered as blank. As frothed horizons. Wavelets letting blood or bled under seeping belljars centuries of belonging could not carry her back even in the green underworld of that dream to here, to disintegrate. Beam. Solid. Chalky. The morass of daring openings. Should she not nightly endure, displeasing, reason wracked out like coughs. Pestilence, parasites, pandemic of her release nightly upright. This ballast. That angled harkening. Siren dissection of ear and her lured lightly into the dawn’s illusive certainty. Now, to tag that, phalange, femur, thoracic cage cartilaginous structure which surrounds. Hull.

Moron-egging by G Vance

After J Regier’s ‘Written About Doll’ & S Chenette's 'What Was Offered'

The arrow is light.

The hog is pig who sacks

The crone. Spock fakes

For a Pasteur (Who, Man?) all dead.

It is barred to bare up

And buy curfew : of that self

Can it bare up a lewd meal

Through divers’ epox’.

A Spock is a lewd-tryst acted

Dead. An arrow is light

If a spillage or shitty-hog cannot sack

It, but the south will be vary-fête.

Will she save any killed men

And give to sea-heirs?

^^^^^^

on a morning like this morning (Intellectual Honesty)

by lisa pasold (after Ursus by Jonathan Regier)

a sympathetic hypothesis—that fictional portrayal of what you meant, he meant, we all were hoping for. imaginary, of course, but can’t we pretend we’re keeping track? sorting & recycling, putting it out on the curb every Tuesday, blue-bagging it and still we feel poor. minds designed big enough to encompass whole celestial motions, thinking up words to calculate heaven, and instead you’re humming while you fix the garburator, he’s out to lunch with boss number seventeen, and i’m hunting up floor wax, trying to look distinguished. all of us more or less succeeding—isn’t that the intended purpose, the goal of this art? fiddle it around, we’re all true and false and feigned and next week the big blue truck will come down the street just the same whether we’re here or gone dispersed into its elements, the world-system contrives to function rather well without us.

The difficulty of activating anyone by JKD

After yesterday’s strike plus October 2008 rewords poems, What’s Enough by Jonathan Regier and the form of All those Choices by George Vance


I.

To
the extent that rain is its own Metropolis of strikers
in
lament against the accepted guard, we stand
at
the iron drawbridge of the palace, crossed, a crossing, no luck, staring
into
the sun, of entering
there
is barricaded—we have no chance of getting through.

II.

For
Galileo an Armageddon of what was said, to
take
cover, rain can't ever, a certain voice hearing, over
take
running is still the break rushing to greet its brethren walking
forth:
the blind masses blinded, blinding sunrays, rise.

III.

Hours at our windows
here
climb upward to the past, back forever going
over
windows lit from the upward rushing future stars night
fall
we call "The Streetlights of Tomorrow" ancestors
blushing
strongly upward grazed to see us here, immobile.

IV.

To
say the old faith is that I believe in, as in I
believe
in a Universe without Void,
in
the Plenum, in the Vertical lacking Emptiness, to
fill
with touch its creatures I am among the
new
faith, say, I in the rain mass chest of Metropolis
rolling
forward. This blank page is just the sign we
needed.