Understanding Your Body

Phoenix, AZ

Waterfall thru colander: I’m split into a bunch of change.

The change rattles in your pockets, tickling your belly.

So I’m without belly myself. I’m ice made from steam.

Now the historian needs tinkering.

The change goes on tinkling

Like it would if it were in a novel.

He drones on about wheelchairs with legs,

But the broken hip healed months ago.

Still he tortures his host with a pale mouth.

“It should now happen that moths kiss our mothers.

They should do it on the surface of our moon

When the moon is red as menstrual blood,” he says.

That’s one construal; not the only one.

I promised you then that I would alter your sounds

Very carefully, taking my time with them:

Volume, timbre, pitch: I couldn’t.

I don’t care to differ from it anymore,

Whatever it is, whatever it happens to be.

If the world has gotten thin from mud,

Let it eat the bone too. Let it eat living hair.

Let it have what it will have.

What I’d like is the sun;

What I’d like is to shed skin;

What I’d like is for a burnt heron

To nest next to my thymus.

Then I think I would be able to speak about

Just how much can be wrung from a dollar.

Parents

Everybody mistakes
their own mistakes.  They had their
reasons.  The children...

Familiar Saboteurs

For their privacy,
family would surprise me
violently as a holiday

Coping

From behind the wrong
forearms of my problems
I ate them, one by...

Data

For Tan Lin, Kenny Goldsmith, etc.

The cobwebs under 
the stonebench collect leaves like
skintags between thighs

Eco-Poetry

One can't list all the
cans in the rivers, much less
clean them up.  Nice try.

Presidential Debates

"I spit on the fact!"
I've got little to say.
I guess this is ok.

I'll Lose Everything

A red sac
allergic-- my
stomach--

inside with a ground-up
cat of clawing-beans
tics its jaws
I don't ask for help

what am I going to do
hung-nailed
from a rented door--
prayerplastic
to not disturb

what am I going to do?
I can't help myself

Balloon-Jello-Mold-Animal Fashionably, In The Desert Preggers with Guilt

Maternally and unsurprised again to be knocked down

By a thirst so fool to be knocked up full of a lasting fight,

My distant hopes continued to rub the fat horizon of its hot belly

And saltlick the unbalmed lips of the mountains

Until, down the cragged thighs

Switchbacking through the smoothed runs of her kneehighs,

She saw fit to burst

Another birthing wishing-fountain poisonously

Poised to give birth, yet again, to thirst.

Trenchcoated, blistered and lankily perverse

Balloon-Jello-Mold-Animal, changeless and penniless,

Took out his hankie, nevertheless,

And spanked up the spilled primordial soup

Into his own little wonderful-thirsty feedback-loop.

And victorious as willing himself an ocean of leather

To slake the sun with his already-baked and blistering skin

He then conceived of his life as an emptying, holy

Change-purse of sweatshopped pleather.

Fashionably Balloon-Jello-Mold-Animal Arrives, Late, At a Dork Party

Neon-yellow I walk, a balloon animal filled with disgusted Jell-o, into the kind of room I, immediately squeaking, wish I hadn’t.  They all bird me, till quivering I break shape and wind of already broken bone and bust like blushing flesh over the hardwood corset of the floor.  Curving their beaks, so to speak, they collect, carefully careless, my scraps into plastic greetings sticky with the greasy rubber of their too-handled and muggingly caffeinated opinions.  Then I see myself wirelessly wired and puppeted into a cloud, a gray glaucoma, screened like a film over the high-branched projecting nests of their bosomingly-blossoming vexingly convexing eyes.

Where will I go now?  Into what skinned mirror treasured in a judgmental chest find peace & all the rest?

Artificially nervous, I can’t think without some twisted artifice to twine my animal around, snug as a veined snail in the quilted-vine hell of his familial trust-trussed shell.  It’s not that I wish I hadn’t come here—here to this dorky party of Twister, fashionably dainty cakes and even daintier handshakes, here to this dorky party of Twister to get all bent out of shape—but that I wish I could mold myself to myself, and cover myself, spreading like 

an adaptably viral rug, parasitically uncritical, all over,

till from humble pseudo-fungal beginnings,

I become the shower curtain I grew on,

the moldy black curtain of the curtain

which can never be withdrawn

to screen the clean staging of being alone—

me the video nasty everyone, seemingly English, already owns.

Costly Asceticism Made Short Work Of

Like your Lent's rent when you're shortly changed
Down to quarter-sized pocket lint,
Every sprint's gotta take the hint it's spent.

Passing Marks

Into this school passing, as small as a life,
We came to give and leave our reasons,

To pledge allegiance, unflagging,
Through all to wife, to divorce our strife,
And graduate

In guilt upbuilt,
To betray, at last, our treasons.

For him, one by one, small
Whimpering & red

We lined up in the hall
Alone by our selves
Together in this,

To mark how unheeding we remarked our own heart
Beyond the scope
Of his stethoscope,

How well was all we never saw
And how ignorantly tall
We'd grown for that bigger fall:

Our bandages were the wound
He wanted to confess,
So undressed

And then, then I confessed to you.

"Love is a lie & time shows it,"
The professor said, shaking the red bruised paper
Of his inquisitive head.

"I confess, I reason:

In the allergic blue season
I was throughout
But yours by tears
I'd cried in treason.

Tears I professed
Time taught me were treason--
If," I sneezed,
"If I could give you a reason..."

"Love is a lie that doesn't know it,"
The professor said, drying the furrowed
Flag of his condescending head.

"If I could give you a reason
I wouldn't regret
That all my years
To myself were treason...If,"

I stammered, "If I could give you a reason,

Time, my dying professor, would not fail me,
But pass me onward past forgivingly,
Surrendering white-triumphs from his remarkably torturous head, crying,


'Love is a lie that shouldn't know it,
And tears but the attempts of my essays failed to show it...

If,' he stammered, 'if I could give you a reason 
I wouldn’t treason'."

Chinese Takeout

It doesn't make sense--
the hot lo mein in your lap--
to not laugh yet eat.

Best Friends

One day you will die.
I will likely have greatly
Mixed emotions.

On War and the Responsibility of the Artist

It is regrettable that the arts have for so long now been apparently populated by devout pacifists. Not that we ought to endorse war, but to fail to recognize that, like it or not, we are in the midst of one is at best naïve and at worst reckless. Everywhere we look appearances arrange themselves around us, coordinate engagements with our eyes, require us to negotiate their terrain.

This is by no means the entirety of the battle, but a first principle of the tactician’s craft. “To command,” Napoleon Bonaparte insisted, “you must first of all speak to the eyes.” It is unfortunate that our artists have disconnected this from that other quote of the emperor’s they are so apt to unwittingly abuse—that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” It seems, in fact, that those who ought inherently to be the vanguard in this combat, precisely in failing to understand the immense strategic power implied in that now cliché line, have actually been demoralized to the point of collusion with the enemy.

             What is the responsibility of the artist? Let us first of all be clear that aesthetics is in general a moral conceit: beauty and ugliness are every bit as codified as all the other mores that conspire to form this thing called culture. The task of the artist is in this respect indistinct from that of the ethicist.  In other words, we must scrutinize and give challenge to so-called “received wisdom,” nothing being so moral as that which our world takes for granted.

            Clearly, when we speak of war, of tactics, of morality and culture, we are already caught up in the language of institutional practices. We can exempt, therefore, the example of the child-artist from this program, since the process of becoming adult is essentially the process of becoming moral. Other exemptions also exist: we ought to note them well when we discover them, for there is a great deal to benefit from a deep appreciation of such outliers.  It is the nature of our culture to subsume all it can and to muzzle whatever it cannot.  The artist cannot simply listen to these other voices, he must learn from them. 

            This is, of course, but one strategy amongst a multiplicity of strategies, the best of which can be said to carry the spirit of that famous maxim of Marcus Aurelius, “The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.” It is also, then, tactically imperative to become familiar with what is most obvious in others and in ourselves.  And knowing this we are drawn onto the battlefield: the inscription of morality reads, “You are either with us or you are against us.”  The responsibility of the artist is to recognize that he has already chosen his side and to take up arms accordingly.

They Were Always Sabotaged: the Problem of Space Camp

Among my concerns prior to entering the Space Camp exhibition at Lamar Dodd were two interrelated questions regarding the ostensible raison d'être of the show. First, to what extent is artwork created by art students in the art school not site-specific when said artwork is shown within the art school facilities? And second, does not the artwork become paradoxically vague, a kind of shadow of the site, when the site is already so specific to the work, already prefabricated for assignments, their creation and display? I was eager to discover how such a challenge would be met, and lo I discovered: they simply avoided making site-specific art altogether!

            True, “altogether” is hyperbolic—a few attempts were made to at least consider the space. Rachel Debuque's short-corridor work “Fancy Room” and Elliot Walters' paper-behind-glass evocation of waves with “Water Memory,” along with a few others, offer fleeting acknowledgments of their immediate settings. Yet this acknowledgment never moves beyond simply making use of the terrain. Nothing escapes the fact of the site itself, a kind of booby-trapped environment that one would have either to negotiate with the utmost craftiness or disregard entirely. For what can site-specific art be if it is merely specific to the site? What of the specificity of the site? Lacking this interplay we are left with little to consider: signifier lacking signified, signified lacking referent (as though all three would even be enough). One can hardly blame those whose work could just as easily be hung from one ceiling as another, built into any wall, laid out on any floor. I suspect that on some level each of these artists knew they were always sabotaged by the demands of their assignment.

What Happened to Wake

I had a dream wherein I felt my parents were getting divorced.  They lived in a smaller house, white walls, no portraits of us hanging on the walls. A large bowl sat out near the sink, white porcelain with pink flowers.  In it, there were pink squarish cuts of pearled ham, roast beef, and something else darker. A man came with a white piano that rolled easy and it had food on it, some wrapped in butcher paper, some in ziplocs..  Steaks, ham, fish with diced peppers, and a bag of circus peanuts.  The food/piano man insisted I pay for all the circus peanuts I'd eaten, but I hadn't.  My sister said she did, so my father yelled at her to pay for her silly circus peanuts.  My mother and youngest sister left to go do something.  I took a long shower.  They had cakey soap and I had to wash myself over and over again.  I left the wrapper for the soap in protest on the shower floor.  My dad wanted to  do something.  He said, let's do something. I wanna do something.  I said let's go to a baseball game.  We were suddenly at Turner field, but the regular season was over.  Little league teams were warming up beside varsity softball teams.  And then we ran into my mother and her new boyfriend.  I ate a hot dog.  I didn't make eye contact.  I felt weird.  My father was angry. I ate chili cheese on my hot dog.  I took a bathroom break, but the field's bathroom was their bathroom.  The soap wrapper still there.  I pissed on it.  It was feeling good.  I realized I was pissing on myself for the first time since I was a child. I woke at nearly 11 am, damp, with a slight cough.

poem for yellowist yellow yellowing yellowism, all both of them

2 ppl with a art movement
1 rite on a big ol' rothko :-o

not art not anti-art:
like honey boo boo w/out the huggz :-(

rite a manifestoe
make it not make meaning, duh :-P

animated gif on yr bloog:
taxi driver :-|

you just heard about dada
cool story, bro :-)

sum advice:
buy this
free that*
don't git bored in jailz, I guess?




*Update: Katya is out!!

Fantasy Baseball

To speak first

Is to speak out of turn

To speak, first

You must open your mind

With your mouth

Without breathing it

Keeping it in

For hundreds of syllables

By which you mark time.

When the spheres were our cartels

We could do whatever we wanted

Now they orbit the moon

Of diminishing return

And when it is noon

On that gnomic orb

Hands full of lilies

Vanish under the sundial

And a venial rain

Falls slowly on it.

And when the spheres were our cartels

We began to speak

Of diminishing return

Without breathing it

Slowly filling the vein

With hundreds of syllables

That rhyme with blood.

To speak first

You must open the eye

In your mind’s eye

Out to the edge of

A bodily bound

To keep marking time

Until it is noon

On another sphere

Where hands filled with litter

Cover the lilies

And a grass house

Is deemed fitter for flourishing

There a virginal rain

Fills the vein slowly

Without bursting it

And marks time.

I was born with a gun to my head

And a face made of glass.

I was stone once

Before they made me.

I was made of the world’s gravy

That a god sopped up with a crust

And tasted of and ate, and was ashamed.

I was born in a grass house

Out to the edge of

Town (this would have been

Before the city succumbed

To the wicked sons

And the streets became veins

Filled with red syllables).

I put a gun to my head

And marked time.

I was a stone once

Before they made me

Do it.

I put the phone to my mouth

Without breathing in.

Young girls in the last century

Anybody who does not feel or feels only furtively the anguish, nausea and horror commonly felt by young girls in the last century is not susceptible to these emotions, but equally there are people whom such emotions limit.

-Georges Bataille

From nowhere we could dance

And sing, unmixed up in

The stupid and real need

To tell it all but tell it not all

At once but very slowly

While more sensible days gather

To sew us in their leather pocket.

Why won’t you come back?

Where’ve you been?

You got here nine months ago

Still feeling super bummed out.

The earth bums me out you said,

Painting over its little mirror. 

Whet Anchorage

Anchor cut

Frothing regret & promise of a pillow--

The past through hurt—

Discovered out of the lightness

Put velvet between my vertebrae:

The glands of a man are ill-built hands,'

Adept to seize

Put velvet between my vertebrae,

I relent—

                         let others gather your poses.

I am tired of rending

In the rind of your elbow--

A standby tree, snailly emotive,

Flexing thirst,  

Along distance whets

The eye a metaphor of toys,

Harbingers of gesture satcheled

Past hurt in the insipid nightbread

Muffining of the violent glass.

Fool Disclosure 2

In the beginning, a cool mirror of quick opera

Is taken like a finger, fascist over her cheek,

And the daughter watches from the study

Until her jaw hangs from a wire

Like a painting waiting on crutches

For the new doorbell to ring.

Monday's a briefcase full of left-lame legs,

And this is where the daughter sits--

A new car left for a long vacation in the Munich airport.

Our lives crest like rental cars

Topping a picturesque hill

The villages gone ugly, like flute music for Christ.

Anyway, everyone got the right things.

Where do you have your eyes?

Soon thereafter a dark mouth haired with no false teeth shawed the illumination from her words: "The business of friendship is conducted in gifts. It cannot be traded, and as such, friends cannot be betrayed.  Friends are that which cannot be betrayed.  Betray-disclose-reveal--tell the truth-disrobe-denude-expose.  To disclose is not to end you--for then did I clothes you, as a door closes, when I refused to expose you--expose--photographs, bodies, food left out, to the elements..."

And like a bird in a ballroom we grew up in bewilderment

With all that paved space and none cobbled for flight.

Fool Disclosure

Like a cotton rib

         we hurt and spread

 lightly through the afternoon.

Near the whaled windows,

lunch happens.  The eye

is a dog's girdle

rising distilled.
There is a hand 
               to efface the eye

naked as rice
               in the cauldron 
               of mourning

and an oiled-boulder clear

           as a cut onion

smells and sits strung-

out the waterfall and

          beltway between our hearts.

I made a face

with no false flowers--

           the first expression I'd

never made to face--

for the store window

looks at me

like an invisible father

drinking the better concentrate

          of my former distribution of love

in a clear vowel

            of false teeth,

  

 like a cotton rib whaled

    in the world as it is