the A.M. project

lacuna one

2010-10-10T03:29:00.001-05:00

we are gamblers, you & i, & accustomed to winning. but the house will
have its cut in time: thus we find ourselves, handsclasped, in the home

we helped imagine, uttering the banal. losing by degrees all we had
worked so diligently to steal. a code, a call sign, an appointed hour.

easy sidle. recognizing time we could not afford to lose, & so threw
away, gestures of survival. we are not defiant people—takers of small

gains, thieves of trifles, of what the other had always to spare.
winnings from a game played against long odds. you were my loaded dice.

i your stacked deck & the teeth whereby we carved an hour from the day's
dying flank, a bloodwarm evening to kill at playing strangers. how

difficult it is to hand back the chips, to restore that which was only
borrowed. to forgive inevitability, to remember & relinquish at once.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 44K993B09

2010-02-08T17:29:00.002-06:00

thus we learn: sediment has its own blooded history; sand in the valves
will clog as surely as it won't explode. i follow in your tracks, so closely

it is as if only you yourself had passed / to find your spin away not
a video running back but a choreography with which i was not entrusted.

and so. within the moment at which i appear to be in orbit lies the bad
luck of the photographer who blinks too soon: it is escape velocity.

i had been fooled as well. on another timeline (you backward down a path
with enough satellites to keep you in eclipses) i wake. such is the danger

of travel: that among the frozen wastes of memory one might plunge again
into the present's luminous minutiae. the way that detail wounds the heart.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 39D500E72

2009-12-19T21:16:00.001-06:00

in the long light of your fear i cast a shadow. shape goes; your blindness
a scotch-scented thing that throws you back. we have other resources, you

& i--an edged appraisal, a line of sight, your slouch, loud laughter
bellying the night. what is there to say? i am your cipher, the knife-

edge of my outline your refuge. i do not know the substance of your need.
i phenomenal, a trick of light diffracting your desire. but the evening

stretches. adrift we stop each other's gaps. my city grown strange & i
vagrant: a minor storm in your turbulence that might otherwise lay waste

to a system. we shall not meet again, but in an hour of lucidity we honed
our teeth. as mean as that. you would sell me at the next port of call.

report 000029: after the turning

2009-10-04T12:53:00.004-05:00

one wakes to difference, the cold light of practice. money where your mouth is. pull the trigger. having finally & at last caught up with oneself in time: it bewilders. push the button. no rewiring at the core but auxiliary protocols now strange, commands to be relearned, different pitfalls. no manual

accompanied this update. how one observes the world. new traps of looking, of the meeting of eyes. vagaries of reference. one lives in validation, yes, glorious& strange, but how

to slate oneself in context, now, with the proof of one's own changing sealed & stamped, hung at eye-level, unavoidable and sure? i have not yet learned how to live in halving. to be calm in its face.

one must, & shall. a time when the shape of one's own life no longer startles. i am free, now, you see, to hear you everywhere, to recognize your echo & cadence in the pattern of my days. to understand that we, growing

older, are twinned stars indeed; that we have, in some very material way, progressed from hypothesis to fact. these are strange territories. having lived for so long in one land of uncertainty i had become accustomed

to particular darknesses, textures of obscure. to balance the self around a certain kind of vacuum; to accept a set of lacks. it had been years. but there was a crossing. a shift dramatic as the nightline sweeps the globe.

no more a land of fear. something, instead, of patience, perhaps, though the terrain sweeps unsteady away from my looking, & i unsure of my outfitting. i keep the map that led me to this place beneath the packet of your letters which i find some mornings waking. the shake&thrill of new country. i hear you singing back.

songs for keeping the watch: night 12

2009-09-30T17:15:00.002-05:00

the watch begins again: the measured pace, the night's long vantage,
resolute & hum. our love a reckon, sharp & sweet & rung. the autumn

waxes. day waives into day. along the planet's curve i sing you back
the hours we have spent, our synchronize. the sense still lingers;

honey on the tongue. long days of coffee, laughter, sudden sun: each
a ready in the rope of years. the nets we cast for blankets, huddled

here; across the night outstretched we trace the time. the pattern we
have made in passing through, the lope & launch of orbit, twinned & strung.

though at removes, in distance & in lack, our fugue resolves--smooth
merging of our maths--jointly now, articulate & stride. in this brisk

air i bate. we weather to our liking, you & i: improbable, perfected,
now in wait. formidable in season. i mind the days as one who knows

that watches always end, who knows the face that, waiting, welcomes in.

songs for keeping the watch: night 11

2009-08-11T00:07:00.000-05:00

the long sweep of time. but i in perpetual lag spring ever to catch you
among the hours, rota. & you would stop but cannot. so i would fling.

the sense is of hurtle through space, this long thin wire. your reel once
caught turns again. i glee. but honey-slow, heavy as sleep, the quarter-

days tick& drag. a whistle of shifts. an endless revolving. the day an
hart glimpsed infrequent through brambles. i brush a stone. to grasp

the same minutes in arms: for what weather holds so long that it bears
news of you in true lines? no spent molecule does not lose its way. no

turning that does not swing it into orbit. what i will give that for a span
turning will not mean hours i find at secondhand from you but formation

of a line, the sweep of sight; to catch the breath which holds you, & lets go.

songs for keeping the watch: night 10

2009-07-27T00:39:00.003-05:00

i catch a minute fleeing, swing. alarmed by future rushing, restless,
wing. in moment trapped, a current held when i would rather curl & dream

of flight: a need for plan, a sweet design, a stain, blue ink & verified.
a gap between two stones. i shine a light that passing by you might

glance up & glancing gather strength. a long night standing though (the
marked hour stubborn cruel & slow) my stopwatch gives the lie: dawn is

coming, darling, and the time when i peer through a window, laughing, & am
caught your fall of hair/a line of teeth update the image, realign love's

memory with glossy present time. a glory that we have absorbed the years.
a counter running down to ETA & shunting trains, a new light playing

over days, the contour of terrain. stop: new line. the changes ring.

songs for keeping the watch: night 09

2009-07-16T23:45:00.002-05:00

dear is certainty, & dearer still: it is a long watch (a near thing
creeping, a fear, i fend), a night of years, a silence. let it stand.

one factor only to divide sublime from abject terror & one find that wards
& skews the time, that makes of void a playing field. not delight. how

fine one beats the gold, a trick of light: dimension disappearing. all but
time. a thin thing here to cling to, love, a photon out of phase, a

cross-hatched shade in which to lay down grips & wait. with heft of pebble
in the hand i fling a calling cadence (parabola of pattern; arc in code:

the salt of you reagent) on the glass (the trace you leave in passing) as
a tell, a following patter. to live in one's belief is still to live.

against a subjunctive desire lay an ontological certainty. light a fire.

songs for keeping the watch: night 08

2009-07-13T00:25:00.003-05:00

less fierce now having found(ered). there are days. one relishes the heat,
tinny music on the player, pins in the mouth. a basement shop where

hammering steel i waited for you, impatient, disbelieving, in thrall.
coffee in a jar banal & lovely, hot scent setting out & here we are

to leap the morning lingering in hands. a program in the background running
journey goes & on a day so similar i startle. notice. one might not have

guessed: what muscles can endure & growing know: the science fiction of
memory, of non-fiction/ of a history that spins itself in time. a vital

wire. oh the hum of days & slow dawning. i linger in protasis, future
more vivid, your guarantee: if you my apodosis will, i shall. i shall.

sure as days self-propagate. as compulsion. the archways of the heart.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 44I012M41

2009-07-07T00:04:00.001-05:00

half-hearted, choked, flooded. this car won't start. no turnover but the
rate at which i flip stones & leaves for another, point of intersection

consumed by that equation. exponential, asymptotic, toxic to all but itself
& i infected can only cry out & cling to the surface as it ascends. slap

the black box. punch numbers. invoke. one constant reduces all variables to
zero: terror/wonder: the brighter star may be the farther, whitehot &

hungry & among us there is vacuum & so many bags left packed, unclaimed, a
train ticket & sudden flight, but never to you. nor to you. the artificial

gravity goes out. cardiovascular system weakens, strength declines. a fury
of fled. the sick certainty of a holding pattern, nausea of weightlessness.

songs for keeping the watch: night 07

2009-07-05T23:00:00.001-05:00

i noumenal to you scattershot, appearing. the hand you see upon waking,
one sun-shot mote colliding, photonic. how far i would sail, how fast,

solarflare & current rushing. but hush: there is a rustle in the reeds.
i surface, cling & clamber, dream. there is a great heat. the setting

fire. shimmerpool refraction, perfectum, desire: the season sweeps
seeking in radar's sleepless green. at night there is a long stretch

of light in which i live on your behalf, drinking in the day. between
us nothing may escape, no quotidian festoon, a moment's rain, illusion of

depth. making good the time while distance reigns. i shall not pretend
to glory in such lack, but there will light a time when sure as spin

& handedness we clasp. a day of days unfurls. a world, a word. your verb.

songs for keeping the watch: night 06

2009-07-03T00:17:00.002-05:00

scaffolding goes up. an unlovely word. in my habit of lexicon i isolate
a pronoun. possessive. reflexive. undeclined. it is the city of god,

alabaster, lapis lazuli. your white (very white) skin: radiant/ snowblind.
how adjectival. i mouth verbs to myself, humming. release the handbrake.

linear sprawl. intersection, interstice. crawl. ornate my minutiae, future
simple (tense). i shall have had. it will have been. finish the sentence. i

of & for but away from you, going out/returning scratchpattern of gyroscope &
compass & now we're getting somewhere i draughtsman drink deep (my saline

converter my solar panel) the road is steep, the muscles loose with love
& whiplash tearaway. a young night. profligate i pour & droplets scatter,

catch, patter. i recognize the series. there you are. i climb the lattice.

songs for keeping the watch: night 05

2009-07-01T00:13:00.001-05:00

there will be joy again. through a deep sea (vellum, vela) to you i come.
paper fleets. i send a skiff. skittish & brisk, kittenish, tracing

a route. a kiss. hands out in the wake, in the clap and cling of wet
salt: there will be sun, yes, but also wind, & no longer a frightening

stretch of calm water on the world's edge. for lo i am with you & a trail
of words skipping out will lead you. (i myself haul back and grasp.) the

rings of many smooth stones launch & elliptical, surface tension tattoo
and rhythm. o percussive. o heart, harmonic series of ventricle & aorta

our armory/harmony. through summer's rain &heat i will stitch peak to peak,
a patterned flag for the satellites. meteorite. in a shower of sparks,

hammered silver & steel, anchorchain. position acquired: here i will wait.

songs for keeping the watch: night 04

2009-06-29T00:13:00.000-05:00

animal. argonautika. inauspicious. i cry love love love unbinding
the straight stitch i would lace myself knotting coptic around you. the

cliffs of england stand. fresh words for you, fresh voice i would have.
tape loops, degrades, a palimpsest of white noise cold but no!

much play may be accomplished while one idles. i have learned at least
to seek small perfect things alone, brief idylls, & to hold them alive.

my fierce respirator. the blood i have from you the starter, sourdough /
rocket. i cadence you everywhere--that laugh--splitting hairs to fire

our syntax collider, intravenous and sure, our fleet feet dancing no matter
the latitude & nevermind the time. i send packets held over always for you,

the cloud gleam, a car horn, my whistle for the dark. a twine of atoms.

songs for keeping the watch: night 03

2009-06-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

a pattern holds. i had not understood. on a calm water i stop, tentative
& slide, circles spreading. waveform; orbit. just so the blood runs

back. it is easy to live in a phrase, & the tongue learns only through
exercise. arpeggiate. one may merely modulate on a theme but spindrift

kicks & i revolve. look: the day is endless. a short watch grown long
with the longing. only you would i answer, only you not muted, not out

of phase. temporal interference. saccadic, stop-motion the late hour sings
you at the edge of vision in the gust of your trajectory. one blinks

& brushes eyelids, lashes catching. smooth pursuit supplies weight and
shadow to your outline, o chiaroscuro: out here smoky starlight with coals

& crackle the mind grasping makes its game. tonight it is form enough.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 20S423L43

2009-06-17T16:02:00.000-05:00

there is, you see, another. just rest. there is an overlook from which we
may watch the trucks bearing missives to parts unknown. not, you see,

for either of us. there is that. stalled here i have no diagram held
in mind that could collapse a triangle into a line. the summer fleets.

and i, habitually deer-like, may pause no stop with whiskey & a word
for even you one brief evening as the lights come up all over the city.

a wind comes that will bring a song in another language. hardwired into
the blood's long memory, & i having lost root can only read, & read, &

wonder. but in fairness there is time, you see, & a line of light through
smoke that ensconces you, & i also, in window-glass giving back sheer drop.

songs for keeping the watch: night 02

2009-06-17T15:17:00.003-05:00

blessed are those who watch while others sleep. kit knew, his vigil kept
isolate and a fiction to while the hours down with. whittle. whistle.

a craft in the long arc of the evening resonant, taut and strung, harmonics
humming. i will stay for the changing of the watch, vigilant. with wit

to keep me company. trip of syntax/ morpheme split enough power generate
to fire a city electric for your return. sense of motion. sense of

balance on the edge of each hour flips & locks. i have not been idle,
the larders stocked & stockings mended stalking the ramparts for the sun.

i have seen many dawns of late but no early harbinger bearing you home. but
in the stillness of the last watch small birds thoughtless chirp & i your

owl will sleep by day & be content. plays are staged. the day changes.

songs for keeping the watch: night 01

2009-06-17T00:42:00.002-05:00

darling i am keeping the watch. in rainslick & siren one waits, but to mark
time is to revolve headlong. to progress. in dim & linger. but never believe

that a silent sentry is blind as well, o lovely, ears pricking & in the
ear's inner reaches, in labyrinth & vestibule, i pluck notes from wires

tapping. the song we make of distance. the same old tune. i weary but never
of you & in duration, in this year that again grows old i find: there is

a comfort in revolution. if this is makeshift i have never known a palace.
a fit lodging of future: on a night like this, in rain & drowse we will

let the books lapse overdue. our boots are wet; but there is fire, & there
is fire, & the possible is balm & scotch & i fierce will not forget.

having already set sail these long years ago. the time is marked as we.

report 000028: diagnostic

2009-04-23T00:56:00.003-05:00

in silence & in silence. protracted histamine reaction: the body blisters itself. i have never been one for moderation, neither i nor my circulatory system, antipathies, allergies, & once more the completed orbit, complete inability to not

return: see, i have found a pebble worthy of note. see. what worth is distance without a song to sing across it? my ambit is less ample than my orbit. lurk & sift. a holding pattern, a cycle: an equation i cannot define, a skill in declination

i have not acquired. no song i have not yet already in waiting sung. baffle, batten, barricade. in the last watch i make notes. waiting is longer. somewhere the instrument sings back. vast world; world of objects. but there is a fire.

report 000027: target acquisition

2009-02-11T17:43:00.003-06:00

one grapples for traction, comes up swinging. by what slow progress we sift information from noise, delimit by difference: in a gust of rain unexpected one recognizes the accretion of seasons. there is thunder; there is desire, & desire

for desire. this is a new country. where the feet journeying will find their depth, frost a slow tracery in time, if not in space. & yet a map extends, shades itself, solders connections. i have heard the phenomenon

is called history. if distance were an infinitely recursive series; if one could discover a new dimension; one would, & must. there is no apron sufficiently large for how chaotic this project will prove.

& thus, paint-spattered, one agrees to the clasping of hands. i would tighten my syntax. but there is a sharp edge along every pause for breath, a gap into which one must dive if one lives in hope of surface.

shorter the hour, & longer still: one may discover in time that possibility feeds on progression, that the stray pixel is a firefly. one must neither build nor excavate. a watch may be synchronized without being wound.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 36H335B72

2009-02-10T23:37:00.001-06:00

at what great distance--from what great height--i've lost the signal--
this thing, i suspect, is busted. slow as an old copperwire connection

one swims ruinous up along the body's old chains, netted maths; equations
by which, once, singing, we mapped. the same familiar tune. no timeline

is not discrete only, the grapple&hazard we groping make notwithstanding.
or standing; from this vantage i sight, dim& done, wonder less. a slow

unwinding, winded, words i reduced thus run fingers over, counting out
your rosary. one might have believed. zipperteeth popping. the second

law. with a suddenness turning / the dial on my scope: snapback focus
& this stranding pattern belongs, you only ghosting at the edges of vision.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 02S593H47

2008-11-02T23:50:00.002-06:00

a number of false starts. one prods the blackbox: from the blister of
morning, light sluices, pattern-potential: keep in warmth, radio-murmur/

hands steady enough to inhabit another change in state. one fiddles with
the quotidian, ways of making coffee, a grapefruit. by another name

the banal. just so: i a value without your bounded set, beyond reach,
imported absorbed uncanny but i cannot see from the vantage of another

epicycle, within your system deferent, perturbed--our mouths moving
together identical in form only. i have never been skilled in likeness.

i have your words, but you singing them incant me a double, mirror-strange
& assumptive. i catch myself in almagest, lingering in some outer sphere.

among the society of cartographers: day 7

2008-10-12T20:27:00.000-05:00

at last one simply grasps the complexity of trajectory. that's coy. but
look: in an unquiet year one revolves, traverses, traces over. an occult

orbit: the country i have mapped out: train stations, latitudes, the cut
of light on a day snowed & salted in the minute before meeting. a clasp

of hands. reverberation. circles around a center slung in retrospect;
the parataxis of progression. one possesses always this way that which one

has lost to time. but no matter of that now: an arc completing here only
visible if you tilt the axes like so. like so. as now with you, in an

unfamiliar city, all this time marking steady the hours, an antecedent
cycling, locked, in this room in which the maps hung snap to grid, & stay.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 00A472C25

2008-10-12T18:24:00.000-05:00

the mouth seeks its equilibrium. tracking the asymptote: secret rooms
of the ear to the plane of the shoulder, plummeting. one picks up speed.

the body's geometry insistent: vertices of bone covered over, some
trapezoid, an equilateral triangle, the music from math of your movement

arising. in such devices one makes a pairing, grapples with to craft unity
of desire. i am exhausted with possibility. i am distract. in the vacuum

of our passing, in this spark-light & shudder of trains, i cry deaf
to you. i would read your lips by braille. but the balance i left unzeroed

/ the variables undefined: your dialect different only in crucial aspect:
the way verbs are numbered, incomparables, terms of familiar address.

report 000026: brenschluss

2008-08-21T13:15:00.001-05:00

beyond measure: we have reached, perhaps, the edge of this shelf. in hands setting out. life in the waters by night flares sharp &/as copper in the strands going up greenwash & now

here with the brakes unlock coming out of slalom i startle at the closing of distance. too long singing the vastness of space. with the fear there is another, & a counterpoint. between vision & the suddenness of flight.

report 000025: in the plain speech

2008-08-05T03:42:00.000-05:00

thus is the manner of our meeting, in a year grown old. along what forgotten byway i had scented, blood in the mouth yours, & my own. one gropes blindly to meet oneself in the future. with luck the gears clicking do not catch, but smooth, the oil of song

spreading. concentric: by what strange sweet our axles aligning. i would walk awhile with you. & may: at the mind's more northerly latitude, we may stop to marvel over a pebble together. such stillness has grown strange. long have i been stalled in the fugue's first movement in hopes

of a counterpoint, of our maths no longer halved. i am learning about the long sweep of time; about questions i know already. &, scrambling over stones in the early hours, i have come to understand something of indivisibility.

ezekiel in the valley: day 03

2008-07-29T01:42:00.000-05:00

"You come to eat the flesh of the people's inheritance, and you will
stand through the long months that waste them. One day even you shall know

your error. There shall come a time when your companions return to
their chambers, weary and hopeful of rest, and shall find that themselves

are the oblation. I will drink blood. Seven days I shall fall upon
them, barring their path; then shalt thou raise an altar for the sins

of all thy company, and thou, even thou, shalt be cast out
of the chambers of the gate. And I will drink the offerings of many

nations and be consumed with blood." So he brought me and spoke
to the enemies of my people in the place of the burnt cubit. I have linen

bonnets with his face embroidered upon them. They shall be as a roof
for the latter days. Release the lamb of my sanctuary, that and the one

reed. And open the doors of the north gate, and toward the bank
of the mountains look every morning. Therefore prophesy against

the bows and breathe upon them: that gate they shall not have, nor
that ground, nor the mountains, nor the winding of their paths and secret

ways. This shall be his inheritance, to enter by the way of the
priests. I am the breath and the breadth of the brink of the river,

and I shall look upon the offering of all who dwell in the south, but
I shall not rest until you offer up your shields to the river.

ezekiel in the valley: day 02

2008-07-27T01:36:00.001-05:00

For ourselves: palm trees, one reed. For the nations: the burnt
servant's brother upon the right hand of the prince. Prepare your sons

for their inheritance. Your fathers have spoken. The gate shall be opened,
and the thousand graves within the wall along the borders of man.

Hast thou the one gate to give him, a noise of brass, a shield? (The
merchants of the house shall take your daughter for a spoil.) As to

the people, I will appease the watchers at the gate; I will save them.
Neither through bars nor by burnt offering, though there be even

an hundred. See: a man stands in the south. There is a river, a span.
Thus saith the tenth part of the flock: we may as yet be passed over

against the city. Had but one in their goings-out settled the cost, you
should have come out of one gate into possession of the other before

the north grew rebellious, coming with the noise of brass, even unto
the sanctuary's eighth step to rob those that they would bury

soon enough. This is the month. They have committed. I have been allotted
two square cubits in which to make your graves in the inner court. Just

there. Then shall arise a great sea; for it may be that these are
the sanctified of the people, and that their inheritance shall be

the east. Yet thou who approach to destroy the building, behold:
this is the final oblation. None of the waters shall remain.

report 000024: vantage

2008-07-26T15:09:00.000-05:00

always there is the fear of reprisal, of the gift given turning to glass shattered in the mouth, spit back. there is nothing for it then but to kneel, & tremble. the line between perfect pitch&fever. have i learned nothing from physics? oh, Eddington, how quickly i forget; myself am the bitter proof of your insight. but this is not a matter

of memory but of the blood's long knowledge calling across a plane riven at t+the untaken measure of the difference between our pulses in this creeping year. there is a room where the video plays ever at half-speed; there is another, to which i am denied access, in which the glass spinning from my hand that morning comes home. sufficient unto the day is the

terror thereof. forgive my alacrity. i have been incapable always of doing anything in fractions. under Coleridge the part is the whole, but your blackbox's recalibration renders the equation suspect. haste. i fear my own foolishness, & that we have been brought to a pass where fear is no longer strange. an unfamiliar

song, & i play it badly: but rust in the mouth sings antiphony with the living blood, & fear makes its business only of possible futures.

report 000023: out of the underground

2008-07-25T15:28:00.000-05:00

& foolishness is not that always. dragged dully up from dreams of snow to find the bird flown returned. one believes & does not believe, equal/opposite. along how many paths

of light the electrons streaming between us in our fastnesses, my telescope collapsing (& perhaps there will be a time when telescopy will cease; a room shared, scotch warming as hands between, four boots by fire drying), wheels within wheels, the slalom as maze? velocity: down, down, the signage slipping by too fast in a language in which i have become as one untutored, oxidized, made careless by the weight of care. no school for learning to read the underside of tapestry, deliberate

tangled, nest of for. lightening bones of the world. i would trace them around you, shutter-speed, my prepositions a cloak so that you would always know where you are, sonar screaming through these deeps returns. my slingshot, my riverbed of smooth stones. & just beyond that rise the tramp of feet.

among the society of cartographers: day 6

2008-07-25T02:38:00.000-05:00

one does not read while one is keeping watch. one smokes, & thinks, &
in the freeway traffic at hours there comes a sound like the passing

of trains;--& one is called back. i would count ties with you. lay down
a penny, & we will see what there is. Fe, Cu, Fe. flat as passing, as

that which is left in a summer storm only dreamed of here, this land
of cowboys & the post will declare that of your fear: there is no

such address. on a map i know. it is never the territory. one's sight
may fail at worse or better times than this. &, calling, one wishes for a

track back out of this vale, never having desired virgil or guidance
below the treeline. it is late, now, & late. scope is a terror of sight.

report 000022: intermezzo

2008-07-25T02:24:00.000-05:00

the scent of song-loss, it seems, but, waking, one recalls--don't be dull. don't be dull. violating protocol: i have missed you for so long. it feels more, now-familiar that loosening of

syntax, splay in parabola, mind cryo-kept, careening. but this gives it the lie, empty bed or no. from having had your eyes i asphalt-slam see that now truly: each pebble torn from the road differs from its (br)other, though i catch the scent too late, perhaps, to cry victory to you. one's formlessness echoed back has a form in fact if not in truth. you were always a master of the unanswered, church-key in hand poised grinning shiftlessly pardon my adverbs you see all

is not well with me. but they layer, & they layer, & later we will find them in a Texas schoolyard afterhours, to giggle at the break between terms. they all know your name, & your nationality. i will not be deceived any longer. i will sign

for that parcel. perhaps tomorrow there will be a bird winging the welcome news of error. perhaps i am a fool, & lonely. to be frank has never been my strong suit; it fits ill. but here, shards flying stop-motion i remember, my brother-in-arms the sun rising over the coliseum, through you, through you, singsong & ill-favoured, mi amo. there will be no hearing now.

there has not been, nor will ever. but i remain as in an unfamiliar city, hands unclasped, & there will be a lord for my laughter, & the shadows shall flee away. they say, but as in a dim city i live already, though i will skew as ever my commas in hopes of drawing you home.

ezekiel in the valley: day 01

2008-05-06T15:48:00.000-05:00

For themselves: for the walls and for the forefront arches round about:
the sanctuary, the outward court, the fine flour. These of our living.

The east sea house of the inner court, and the edge thereof: the east
and what one brings back: the priests, the posts, one hundred measures.

Before the inner court, in these chambers, ye shall also rise up as
the day. Of it, man, prophesy by these measures: the place at the gate,

what remains of the tribes' houses. They cause me to go out and walk
the four side rows round about, over and over. I shall come near

to make them for all. By these too shall one hallow your grave. We
will sift fine flour over it on the day of our visitation. And I

will be shut up in the most inner chamber of the house in the east.
It is a great sea. You, with your two faces, put away your sacrifices.

[moment:

2008-02-19T16:24:00.000-06:00

thanks to any & all of you who've wandered over from the chapbooks I left out at frostburn.

If you're curious, well, the AM project is an experimental poetry project maintained by yours truly. It began as an exercise in correspondence & continuity, & I wrote alongside a few collaborators. For the past couple of years, though, it's just been me. I'm still interested in the way that we sift data to make meaning--especially conversationally--so it's best to think of the AM project as a series of conversations with absent interlocutors. One speaks always to others, even if those others aren't around.

The series that made it into the chapbook--"among the society of cartographers"--is loosely devoted to the concept of understanding conversation & relationships on a large scale. (You can see the entries below--should probably note here that they're rather malformed in the chapbook & look better in couplets, as they are here.) This is in contrast to the "histology" series, which picks things apart on the micro level.

The current series--"loves of the prophets"--is being written in collaboration with my laptop & the biblical book of Isaiah. Turns out that Isaiah's a whole lot sexier than one might assume, just by looking at it!

That's all. We now return you to your scheduled & inscrutable programming--

yrs,
-piper]

loves of the prophets, ch. 4

2008-01-30T03:15:00.000-06:00

Nevertheless: carve into the live oaks of the mind, of the voice--Oh!
it shall not be said of us, "They turned away the clouds." Lord of

hosts, the people of hosts. He has eaten every one & the caverns of
the lungs of we that are his. Along a straight path of divination

& of lies, we find ourselves among hills determining that even wool
may not suffice for this great cold--in the changeable suits of the mouth.

loves of the prophets, ch. 3

2008-01-20T17:31:00.000-06:00

For the word: let the strangers fail. One by one they shall be driven
away, but for them and, covertly, for us, they shall be as women who are

among us, as our own people remain--& none shall rest of judgment. As
rottenness: from a high tower, we will observe the forest burning.

The lord comes, cruel fire; by a noise in the trees he announces: heads
staked up on the posts of the multitudes. One by one, with a word against

us: the earth, & one, & the heat of the waters of the city. So we become
as a besieged city of visitation, & as snow--though they shall come

into the lord's house in time. Evil & the worms cover the visitation, &
the sea, & they shall burn; men shall set to one side their wine &, rising,

take one another to meet, saying: Afterward, in the midst of eyes
there will be feet, even a scab on the mouth of my people. Even this.

loves of the prophets, ch. 2

2008-01-20T17:29:00.000-06:00

For the word: it is in the midst of fifty, in pieces, & not one
sees, saying: Go down, but (you will) not understand the prophetess,

oracle, vision. Finite, the way we read scattered leaves; contingent.
Go down, & wanton eyes cease. & her by the way, & you, here, now, oh

lord, it is both your grave & the beginning hitherto: a great man
saying, "Since that was cast away, none shall hiss for the briers &

the feeble." It is both. Go down, & enter into Egypt: & from the sea:
even in the midst of shining, the earth shall flee/every one against

us in a war of light. It will overflow upon us, the living, in the
wantonness of our looking. It is required; we are conscripted, consumed,

even when we are as natives here in an unfamiliar land. Every high
place has its mind, its network of bees looking after: & we shall not

escape, nor want to. In our exile, the princes thereof, at least. We
each to each shall be as oaks for whom the land is the other. Our ears

shake in the sending forth; our necks beg for the sword of the mouth.
We shall have it. Or--as if we knew we came to err, to reap the

smoke of our meeting in this barren place, we arrive at our salvation:
when we remain, lifted up, an example, this ruin will be called

Holy. Even not. Having gone down to the waters, & remained. Remain
in wantonness, looking across: done, & still, & the houses are satisfied.

loves of the prophets, ch. 1

2008-01-18T12:00:00.000-06:00

How long?--One might transgress. Folly, dampness, a word of
silver, & to it--& saying--Prophet, lift me up. But even in the taking

hold, the rush of clutch& pull, eyes shall not cease in their way, in
the paths of light one takes in. This is sight: a prolonged rasp

of a tongue on the back of one's neck. Afterward, yes, we shall be
called the transgressors, the ears of one another: & one another's

shoulders, too, bearing. In a time of harvest the people will gather
weapons instead (they are laden with the weight of cities--pressure of

fine gold: & they will eat it as if we, their children, would be thus
transformed, able at last to pass through the refiner's fire of our

lord & purify--we of an iron land, swept, caught; we of a wilderness
for which we should have much respect.) We offered our dues.--That no more.

among the society of cartographers: day 5

2007-12-28T19:56:00.001-06:00

Like the silence after a hard reset. One gathers, slowly, & looks about.
This our ligature a bridge, litany of crosswalks, the steam together

hanging. A volume equation. Here where the surface area diminishes nightly
we project less--distortion is more of a master of spheres--& we are

children in churches whispering together: in arcade & triforium, we make
of our middle ground a hymn barely heard. The vernier precision of our /

without telescopy: sizing up parallax, catch to the arcminute in: one
can barely distinguish from alchemy. Tonight your Sophia, the keeper of

books & eyes. Your stubborn fixed star. & now we begin planing a country
from the wealth of data--our inheritance, the seeds of our algorithm.

among the society of cartographers: day 4

2007-12-13T21:55:00.000-06:00

A new line makes of us a plane. Surface area increases accuracy: we gather
data-points, make ourselves a study. Spread thin in some occult

symmetry, coupling in lexicon, uncoupling. It may be the difference
between hill & river. It may be my watch is broken. More likely still

is the future fleeing itself in a shatter of phenomena, building against
the day when familiar input into the blackbox of self returns nulls & I

rewire. But here in the battered slush the city makes of snow one learns
to build a map in one's head. That is east. There is the train. You know

that all this obliquely makes its way to you. I missive, headlong through
the closing gap--but through, & through, & so much land on which to play.

among the society of cartographers: day 3

2007-11-25T12:44:00.001-06:00

you see. the horizon curves away & with it you dropping now but at last
the trim & fell; we in this balloon measure the weather together.

it is akin to trajectory, the heart's parabolic &lurch in the close
dense topography of veins routing through possibility, for the myths of

future one scans in the steady--inscrutable: for every posited
adjective of the land there is a mine. that which one finds between

integers, in the lull of the visible spectrum. but this is not the lesson
of arc: rather: of space singing, jewelled geometry of irrigation canal

& highway, trust of measure. & when we crawl the land together there
even in blind&embrace that knowledge of spheres, the volumes we fill.

report 000021: advent

2007-11-25T12:39:00.000-06:00

There is an occasional plateau. Not a limit, no; another anteroom in an alternating series of events, chambers, the scent of blood recently oxidized & we trail along together in stabilized orbit. One builds, slowly. One could corner

the market in possible futures, or outlive them. & there will be a time in which/the minute before meeting, as one may say/when Zeno turns friendly & one wishes for infinite divisibility: approaching one

indefinitely, halt in the shifting present, that when driving the crest seems to end in sky only& one might ease&tumble edge over into--some Schrödinger's landscape. The mind hushes in this, recto/verso. One rushes to meet oneself in future, smooth timelines. Decisions shear off

& generate new forks. & I: standing out in this cold: in preparation: in wait; for/against a probability, lines of trains & buses in all those cities to come, grapple of birds in the wires--& creak of step, & with one's fly's feet absorbing/getting one's mouth on the land. There is ownership

& transience. There is a tangle of syntax that lives next the conditionel, as a bad translation engine mangling states: but in earnest, where timelines howl together, & destroy one another, & breed. Each step an emergence, a passing from cloud to cloud. & yet, oh miracle enginer, we plunge headlong & confident, making pavement of possibility.

among the society of cartographers: day 2

2007-11-08T02:13:00.000-06:00

a life in chambered glass--some taxidermist's trick--some push
of pistons, pressure-shift: & punch the key: it sticks. you see.

there is no good meter for this, no clean rule to convert your flat
back to worlds. confusing topology for topography: on a bar-napkin

not drawn to scale, the rings my scotch left on you; i clinging contours
& have not seen our ways diverge. there is something to be said

for the clear way. but i do not. of this new referent already weary
for it is autumn & one looks for the good rhythm again, that which

with another one may, by match-flare& luck, unhurried rove over.
toward the sharing of breath. what's forgotten may return. one limbers.

report 000020: east of greenleaf

2007-11-05T21:22:00.000-06:00

when in the waiting one snaps awake &--in an unfamiliar town. slow as continental drift, that unlucky fly in resinous light: not even a good excuse. it is as though with slippage & acquisition

one takes the wrong turn-off: no services--a puzzle torn out of the novel you mailed, but my formal notation has gaps. i have lost the key to my system. or, worse: i my own stenographer only, reciting lines back in a hall

of half-mirrors & teletype-clack. if i just wait. if patient in the mapless backcountry of our territory, the light from my fire signaling. reduced to this, ad absurdum--it is a species of belief. hard hallucinatory edge of

the dream-vision in which another letter arrives, & another. identical copies of sterne's marbled page autographed in your hand. in molasses & frozen of the thing immediately facing. how far i would in order to drown this dis-ease. being-still not in my job description, but--. how much. how worth. one will learn.

among the society of cartographers: day 1

2007-11-05T21:13:00.001-06:00

it may be more complex, this without effort. this getting back, as
it were, to our oblate spheroid (but no-one knows anything worth

knowing). i find aspects of the coast enough familiar for
savor, the body's warm interregnum, waking thus &--here it is/ just

ribs& hands, those tattoos, that patch of sky. it is only now that we
do not take or refuse to give, when the mind wandering cedes its law. but

graphein another matter entirely, as in: depth-perception; your flat & fall
of /after stir & recall of--some occultism. it is easier to ascribe more

fathoms than fewer. i would rather you a çatal hüyük than some scar
across the glacial landscape: your hands in the morning deliberate enough.

report 000019: auriculares

2007-10-01T01:14:00.000-05:00

bring the noise: in the snapbackwhiplash of your nights, an encomium. lovely, the myths you spin, conjure in the hissburnt world; unfold. when all remedies fail: there is a means of tracking, navigating the pylons sure as all them slick pretty things we sense but in halt & timid fail to equation properly. what can't

be done. & i by blind & sensor, glove: trip the timer. we blur. here where there is no architecture, out past the pale of done & signed. hardly a republic; rather, the spirited selection-for--there is the baring of teeth. our bone structure understands, the interstice between risorius & zygomaticus, feral darling. between

here & tomorrow what barriers to mark our crossing, what impact at--& when in slalom, with the weather coming down & we're crossing statelines there is no protocol for this. but in that early, with environment redrawn rears a possible: wires tangled in accident, at evening, may yet roost the sparrow seeing lines of nest. at the interface

between our binary & our quaternary. two tangled double helices spitting bits. the flip between on&off in our greymatter: you crossing the street as a spray of electrons toggles that switch in vision, vertiginous. the photographic time-stamp. how the drops bead & run off, & i your storm drain in an unfamiliar city.

report 000018: interstate eighty

2007-09-29T02:40:00.000-05:00

another form of communication: in the cold clear of rain this evening one recalls, fleetingly, that first instance of intoxication. one limbers for the sake of it. the shift from speed to velocity: i've got a map. i'll be there by morning. wait

for me until the sun slicing in dances your coffee's silt. i'll bring the whiskey & a protractor, the latter to be discarded after the first lesson, when our hands have found their way. downshift before accelerating the curve; traction; i spent all evening in storm drains & puddles, cleaning my boots as i went. they only forget

slowly. the rainy season's just begun. once the oil clears off the highway & that first slew of accidents come& gone, receding into ambulances, the scrap-heap, the telephone pole intact by a miracle--one signs the release slip on a season. one packs a bag & holds one's breath.

report 000017: the search for syntactical solecism

2007-09-28T02:20:00.000-05:00

when you have exhausted all utterance: through conjuration a new line appears. charles, he said, thou take this mile & i the next. elsewhere a man matches lunar progress to charts. you'd think that after all this time-- but there is a hunger. an ornateness in our mastication. tomorrow rising you will see

that the bird is flown; a line to elsewhere; incommunicado, but to whom? darling, it is time & the gears back in step now, like biting your nails & all them bad habits just as easy as--. judging from the fax it could be anyone. in a court of law that hardly holds, or in grip

we slide down to the waterfront together. some hardtack for your voyage, mon horloge? the aspirate awls between us & our system. this early salt-spray the changing of seasons, that decoded message--we huddle, you& i, around an invisible flame. turn up the burner. proceed. i am

the ring-stand for your experiment. toss one in. it's three for five. we're oh for two. i grow weary of algebra; shift gears after the aleph--siphon off the infinite & make it your aubade. the next time this comes up, increase the ordinal. recompute. devour.

histology lesson 07

2007-09-23T04:32:00.000-05:00

between the countable &--where you are. they find us gravely
diseased, transfinite commitment to the thing well-called &

yet, out in this thin air we bijective &grasp, it no longer
mattering for precision or pantheism. for how long can one

call before--if & only if--we cleaving each to each cleave from
&. along some curve between here & solipsism. nondenumerable as

blood or information. in that wide plain between one
and zero one finds the retreating paradise of probabilities.

it is here that we meet, as in along the x-axis at the outer
reaches of our looking--your pale of iris, flecks of complement.

report 000016: on the slab at mass gen

2007-09-21T03:14:00.000-05:00

what's worse is the memory-loss, the way they tell you over& over again. strike a match. the water-light is familiar--you should--eh. it's no good. you would whistle the dark. but here, bernoulli, where the sound whips away & past. after which you flip

the switch, mop up, break down the boxes. there may have been a time. i am an electron in the outer shell. that/ as near/as--but still, yes--it is easier, brokener& quick(=alive like) slamming that spent double in among the bottles. they are alphabetized; don't cut yourself, here, you don't know where you are--

ted roethke woulda been proud. jb too with his flock of birds & there's a garden for all of 'em sommwheres. but right now, with mainlined & replace (can't find the file. locate?), it is not enough. but there you are. one will discover a new dimension

report 000015: analgesic

2007-09-17T02:07:00.000-05:00

wherefor' the sling-around backslide steady. don't look: there is a genius in/ the way one has, framing up: monument of hands. things never go as--. but look (but it's too dark to--), the semantic content's the same. the difference between the said to recall & forget, the trying-on. myriad. but sometimes one tires

of the mind's slow ice, virus you self-let to feed slow as the drip from a stolen IV tree, ketorolac tromethamine brings down the fever but--in this you catch. your familiar second-person shears off, the cliff-face narrowly avoided--It is familiarity. Ichheit, mein conceptuelle schemata. the polyglot's

hangover. tomorrow where will you wake, whose glass of water a testament to? the pronoun is a problem of geometry. no room at the inn for the dependent clause dangling, your weak past participle. the initiate finds his sweet dialect; a program running in the background of for days back as long as you can count, t-(snarling in the face of, unapologetic, your perfect pitch). from there there is only the marking of time. from here we find the nearest

crossroads. by a new sign barely legible, plug in the string. select a method. all outcomes are equally probable, but there will be no point along this curve at which, in tomorrow's dark of alcohol & traction, one could say: there. i took a photograph. the results are in the mail. STOP

histology lesson 06

2007-09-12T11:38:00.000-05:00

the flexible lens of our vision: tilt-shift, vertiginous: the eye
planing skitters & catch. data-loss is focus's obverse, the awkward

transition. such that, here, an event of particular note sands
us, creeping-of, obliterate. you are cross-wise from: at either end

of a random epicenter, you blur as metal/leather--the chevron of
my scarf trailing. in time we: event-horizon: toward the moment

in which, hot & without sound we cross. here where there is no light:
the felt shift only, the hand of the novelist guiding: to know

always that even in blood& dissolve, there is no refuge from
the economy of bodies that has freeze this moment:--& presses play.

report 000014: huddle in the lees of this

2007-09-12T01:22:00.000-05:00

yes, there are days when, walking, one recalls. waking to a different light: northering: how one has abandoned migrational memory in favor of/ & instead, impossibility our high banner, the sheen on our costly livery. easy, cowboy. we are in no man's service but

the arching, resonate, theatrical. your Globe & mine both. it seems colder in here than--but our windows left open for. by days we bask. there is a time of day when tilted just enough we catch. this a dangerous sport, the keen edge of a quixotism in name only: blading down our latitudes inscribed & etch. you'll wear that one forever, lovely. the liquor's bad idea/the heat we looked-for--our foundling's tricks. from romance to history: our generic distinction, that which mayn't always go

as planned. here in the waft& aggregate of young convention we speculate. pour it on. try this. try this. a predilection for aesthetic aberration too close to knives: the interested surgeon: when the drink to steady the nerves has, i will allow. oh, phrenologist, i caught the corner of a table standing up. the x of my own hand/s to which/ are tied. there will certainly be a fire for such are abroad & my own weaving disjunct, the salt-slick of fever: if we pretend to--who'll switch off the wireless, the broadcast of our flare? magnesium--we navigate blind, by frequency & call.

histology lesson 05

2007-09-11T02:20:00.000-05:00

as parallax, we are in the obstruct interference, the illusion
of static that is our winter. at nights we call to other, each

dialysis a slow-drip, expertly timed. we simmer in the data--just
off the bell curve's planing twinned stars--a dangerous statistic.

i am the shattered fourth tooth of the psi-wheel that lends
your machine identity; that habit is fatal. a skip in the pulse

of your arithmetic, the bruise you tender in memory. that gift
already charred in immanence: consumption's catch-22: to what end

will we have built our machines if turning we light each other's
cigarettes? filtration is only fit in times of violence, or of war.

histology lesson 04

2007-09-09T03:16:00.001-05:00

between us is the middle third, that which makes of us a series.
the thought is of being nowhere dense: the mathesis to counteract

our tendency to gravity, the hot levity of unified song. without that
our numbers indistinguish &lack. without lack no propulsion for

hypotaxis, our reasoning--insofar as it can be called--stayed, caught
below the horizon of. & how will we build, babel, in our wordless

bed? how our compression requires more memory, the professional's
sheen& flare. we do better this, here with the air between us

as dense as/ that which we pretend lacking. the surface of our
math: could fry eggs as easily as retinas. theory is a fever.

report 000013: da capo aria

2007-09-08T04:02:00.000-05:00

but at the same time that there is no hope (perhaps the formula
should be altered: remediable absence is lyric's condition
of possibility), there is no regret, & no fear, & no anger. the dead

are only for the living a matter. cacophony of purpose here resolves,
however abruptly, into that stretch of calm water that is the sailor's
fear: but sun without mercy yet never surprises: in waking you have

already known that for which--. of you, like a thirst for salt. the brain
in its disbelief catches, keening, at a frequency greater than--can hear--
sometimes, an asthmatic romantic knows more than the wheezing-out

can tell. i think i'm unwell ha ha ha ha but we didn't. instead, flayed-open
our sentences, shook syntax's blackbox in laughter &. there are days when,
following you, i will compound insults to form entirely new and outrageous

slurs. when combined with alcohol, the extraction simulates anesthesia. but
that was never to the point. of your wit, the space in which existed.
how in the hallucinogenic of anti-grammar we navigated, diviners &fell, from our

vantage pointed. as children, the secret language we spun. by what metempsychosis
will you train up another for me. that's small talk. leaves that collect
in storm-drains fill someone's need, less self-indulgent than--i will spell

in lieu for you, drinking, correctly. please rearrange. a drama i wanted
no part of. but you, my dressing-gown eccentric: who now will make the mothers
stop and stare? on a vellum sea at the world's edge, three men in a boat have

stop to greet you. in the back-alley bookshops, there will be a time--that
most formal move in your economy of thought /my economy of expression waste
lies, no mercy but in deflection, fascinate. i can go days without opening

my mouth. there has only ever be one rule: don't be dull. it's enough to make
a man take up the rosary. the obsessive's shot at every hundred-ninth. another
round, the way we spun, the way the gypsies laughed, bewildered, at our

in one another. there were days when it was unnecessary to be braver. i will
not be economical. what of that, now? little miss, how devil you are? :unable
to recall. what a wonderful discovery you were. "all i want to be," you said,

"is my own favourite writer." core disintegration/ this no lyric but my actual
question, professor: for whom writes one an elegy? the mind struggling/at-bay
to cry no caricature, no mere semblance of. a frustration--here where there is

nothing but small mewling & a rotten wealth of unnecessary adjectives. i do not
apologize. i shall not sing. however. in requiem always i will keep
you here/spun-up: this cabin where you found something at least to sing to. i

will keep as though you still there, in wait, safe in the mind's warm country,
that bourne from which no traveller returns--marching leisurely but with
purpose. for as long as I can have you--princeling--danke.

histology lesson 03

2007-09-07T01:37:00.000-05:00

you push, fulcrum against me. but only in the looking, the rush
of electrons in/ the cathode ray tube's vacuum. an insularity

as explosive as any, the artificial states we maintain, abhorrent
as nature listening in on: its own silences. as suspicious as

boyle groping blindly through after/ something one disturbs but
in feeling only names. the sought-for magic is that in such making

one generates acetylcholine, initiates an exponential series, rocket-
flare: brenschluss: that we, providential& held, do no harm but wait

in the rush&shudder of tunnel-vision, each to each an effector neuron
shuttling the treatise on which our keys flip, & lock, & change.

report 000012: the new year rising

2007-09-05T22:10:00.000-05:00

driving back into the grasslands (originary & comfort) a blood-sunset, flame-rust &there are many fires abroad in these parts, mind your retinas. gnawing the thing over: it that putative echo, that hope of span that is lyric's condition of possibility. a danger to the settle life some nights perhaps; a comfort. & also

(that all of it have always be the laying-on of hands, as in paul's letter to the ephesians. it is that lace-breath stretch of distance that allows the global positioning of/ourself to others: the collapse of grammars when one ceases to conceive of a thing in legs but, instead, as a single polygon.)

that, perhaps, code& compositional technique no longer prosthetic but truly the fit spanner for some other wheelwork as well, the sweet-slick coupling at some derivative-zero--you see, if you consider the problem in terms of time

--but short, & hush, for even this late the crickets still creak & commingle. there may yet when a mirror shattered not a harbinger, but the end of some need.

report 000011: silt & stretch

2007-09-05T11:41:00.000-05:00

no. 1: (hands laced behind back to audience) now, where were we? how one speaks out/the problem of the absent lover. that reason by which we write; realign all them tiny magnets, wiping drives, stretching out our syntaxes again by some magic of prose, the way the land opens up beneath you when you/out here/nights when the

blood moon& meteor showers occur without waiting for: where you find them. epistolary desire as much a part of us as mesenchyme: how we are filled in with: the wedges we drive between our now & that which may or may not have lined our previous trajectories, may divert our glacial bounty; sluicing. the more unstrung--

but all text transferred between agents is/howyoucallit/a dance, corresponden(ts')ce seduction. &&&no truly the thing never as onanistic as: for always sent forth: with the end of the line knotted 'round the waist, one waits. SASE or that note crumpled in an empty of glenlivet: all calls. but it is easier

on the (free)lancing neurons talking themselves 'round in their accustomed rhythms. your iamb overtreading: it is less knotty by half to call you up, some ephemera of you (whose? which? possessi(ves)on--) that least stable of signifiers when/ the lyric subject has, as it is, disentangled itself from the hands &hips that typically entrap. (a pause, breath, smoothing of unwashed hair) this makes me nervous.

but i too nervy always & gliding your parachute, the least elegant of deaths: the paroxysm of last laughter gasping as/ you know/that which you hoped would save merely asphyxiates. i can live with that, or much else as you know: that hollow, your brush of hair, that great heat. eugh. i am long out of practice. some days i think

i should stick to what i know. but i was never: good: for that; & the tetanus-rust that coats the lips no excuse, not a pay-slip--i'll sign for that. that's what these muscles have been built up for: & everything after.

histology lesson 02

2007-09-05T06:07:00.000-05:00

a sharp of gesture. smooth through your elision the contract
& release of hamstring percusses. a sudden, from the periphery

that flare they hunt after in pictures to cull an essence of
stark hollywood thralldom, or of ghosts. the same it is odd, even,

the photo-finish curiosity of our meeting, grapple&curve. there must
be an equation for--; sympatrically speciated, by some line out

of true the pattern trace(r)s back to the collision of axes at--
the temperature fluctuates here, in among this alert atmosphere,

tentative &cross. wires tangled in the trees: i of the sun no
coffin-ship fantasy, a sidewise stain on some old microscope.

histology lesson 01

2007-09-04T22:03:00.000-05:00

let's see. you map a thing out, slice through t & a, c, g, any
four n for your marker; curiously enough, the chinese may believe

you a necromancer, a bermuda square. you lie down inside of it,
though i have always reject parallelisms in favor of the blood

flowing one direction, the moebius highway patter of our mouths
together. we are denser than we frequently believe, my lambda just

shy of the green light guiding you home, slightly more aquatic, your
oceanographer. i chart your terrain. filaments on the face

of the waters. i the fascia cushioning your strength, tensile &
in wait--at times also the microtome your self requires in looking.

enough to tied one over

2007-09-04T04:51:00.000-05:00

how one figures: when at last longhanded & wrung, stamped, machined the truth

table of our togetherness. a pair of zeros, we two the rings coupled

in one lobe: a handsome (a)symmetry. don't you worry. it's a bad town for anyone

to have to have endured whatsoever. regard less, listen: at that time

overriding, sound the blood on its long journey makes rings out--rush of

quiet, difficult& hot--your tuning fork. it is similar to the song

that the entangled make in distance, in the palpability of space. & there's

a cleverness: the twisting dive into substance, the tensely jointed speculation

regarding our planetarium's molecularizing æther--diagrams we in laughter

wire up. the staying there; in time, the secret language of our prepositions.

this winter parabola 12

2007-02-01T10:43:00.000-06:00

xii.

pause. paradoxical, won't reach ground by your logic. won't attract lightning
either. space defined recursively: emergent/residual/powdered diamond sifting

fine from the cracks in your tumbler. have another. steady. i my own dialectic,
reverberate in the silver panels just back of the self, shocked transparency of

for others. clean. a rewound clock--shy of motion but seaworthy. to go a voyage
now a decision to bustle, draw up maps & rework lines, write a new environment.

yes replace it's good-bye, not au revoir as they say in the biz execute a certain
kind of nonchalance, programmatic levity/fatalism. that which you have bought

balances books; that which you have built remembers gathering; my parameters
newly sound. patient with the undoing of twisted power lines. compile. play.

this winter parabola 11

2007-02-01T10:41:00.000-06:00

xi.

cultivation requires distance; i a sudden ability to grope through pattern toward
form, returning my way to the baseline brace for impact no hold up. drawn up

short, sharp, we stand-off, staring. you a bird, perhaps of prey. search me, you
said. then, oh then, i pointed. determinate in the face of the Now which is not

yet spent. a solder-gun for my circuitry, some resistance undefined, new negative
space on the horizon: a rising mass. from here could be missile silos, pure

possibility, the aparment complex where i found you drenched on the carpet
after three days of hard neurotransmission & a carton of cigarettes / pair

of pliers, copper wire, rhododendron leaves--photog-glossy, night-sheen on
the fender of a car not yours--stop back/catch/ that place has been razed. give gifts.

this winter parabola 10

2007-01-09T15:39:00.001-06:00

x.

a shift in the weft of you. sensed, net, unpinned--undone--your biochemistry
changes. i am trying to remember (unsatisfaction of progressives): wait-wait don't

give it away! more academic now than--anatomist's interest in--they say you
can't name your cadavers sometimes, it's just too intimate when they finally

peel away the plastic from the hands & then the face & all that torso you know
better than flesh, more than eating or sex--this, just this--how can it be any more

than the way you put your hands inside, love of precision transcending
even desire to cut with curves. we biomechanical in the cleanliness of our

lines, we half-steel in cornea, cones & rods & also the tips of our fingers, won't
or nothing to forgive, not even the high-contrast of our days past, bacterial.

this winter parabola 09

2006-12-27T14:02:00.000-06:00

ix.

blasted apples on the trees, a premature frost: come back into the pub what's
warm & dry, why ye standing lookin' out like that, you make me nervous is what.

just so. another round for us as can't sleep tonight. hot buttered rum, rolls, it's
the heat that matters & these socks darned how-many times, can't let 'em go

just yet. a tendency to recursion gets into the weave & warps like smoke, dreams
olfactory sharp & immediate: edge of your sweat, cigarettes, warm-wet wool

steaming fireside. always the things at the edge of memory drifting off into
our whiskey-lit dreams, shoes left out on the stoop & it's beginning to snow, books

overdue back in town. the feeling that this story's been told before, that this
cabin, prepositional, indeterminate, might have once been else's, as you.

this winter parabola 08

2006-12-27T14:00:00.000-06:00

viii.

(reclamation, however, restoration, reintegration. rehabilitation is really the word
i'm after.) colonize me. who'll think or even remember then the coal-dust & ashes

of my dishabille when i am ruffled & feathered, perfectly upright? my posture
impeccable, my taste unimpeachable. cawing at last, at last, the toast of the town,

sailors, darlings, gather 'round, boys i'll turn youse upside down--mid-bar break-
off, paling. i certainly won't. by other lights an incomplete conversion, file-type

switched prematurely. some things just don't transfer, you see. data's idioms,
a way of carrying your books of which no sketchbook Herodotus will ever master

the art of portraying: lost in the precision of your body's syntaxes the playful
thing that lurks, defiant. always laughing, never quite forgiving our looking.

this winter parabola 07

2006-12-27T13:59:00.000-06:00

vii.

no, i haven't quite forgotten. slope of the line tangent to the point, this zenith
time's confection, whipped-up frothy-white perfect now settling, a rush of breath

from the lungs. the moment passing, passing away: the astronomers below
wave back. there'll be a report tomorrow. eh, unsure though. & what? no rain

there, how is one supposed to properly commit the affective fallacy? i find
signs everywhere, detritus telling tales all along the unplanned amble we took

that evening, bargazers AWOL together in favor of stars & opened bottles
of wine hand-in-hand: thinking we read, in scatterplot, a history that has since

given way to filigree & brocade--we root around for the truffles that might yield
if only we knew how to look. reading rightly. these days i'm not so sure.

this winter parabola 06

2006-12-22T12:55:00.000-06:00

vi.

the hup-hup-hup of helicopters red-shifting, i turning catch the last hard edge
gleam/shimmer/vanish . . . insulated, my coat padded with the stuffing of countless

small toys, enough winters to remember for all. i cut threads with my teeth.
incisor, forceps: precision of my fixative moment, liquid-slow, a volume

equation. pocket-change of an hundred countries: the incidentals of season. but
here at the peak i am no longer bothered by my own dead-weight intricacies.

nothing doing, nothing doing, he's a shoe-in, honey-pie--brushed, burnished,
glossy. i self-indulge--& what's left, piping, hot-cross--a self-revising chain. long-

drawn chevron, wool in 16 colors pointing back, back, directionless wraparound
making time knit the self, internal, bundled up against this last antiatmosphere.

this winter parabola 05

2006-12-20T21:41:00.000-06:00

v.

i kick against the lift-off, it not my desire. not even goads now, just the suck
& rush of vacuum: an elevator flings itself suddenly free of wire ribcage

untrammeled its electronic brain misfiring & trapped here on the ceiling as we are
i doubt you would find it appropriate if--the more unstrung, the less knotty

my syntaxes--a fervor for apology. what's the worst that could happen? so i
kicking sling a question out, grappling-hook. you let go; oh well. zip! & whiplash--

ah, chin-up, a throat-check of affection. airlocks hiss shut. in this reaction i break
out, burn my prepositional bridges here now it no longer matters where but

i remember, dimly, a brief obsession with the star-chart & the log, your dead
reckoning sexy & our mutual poring over of maps, bodies we may have traced.

this winter parabola 04

2006-12-20T11:37:00.000-06:00

iv.

mainline you're on watch tonight. the pivot of your wrist holds me. i bracelet
becoming bright hair--not yours--lifted from the nests of the world. i magpie echo

back that which i have heard enough already. diamond, needle, a mewling
at the door, tonguing your metatarsals. tangent. i am your invention:

centrifugal, spin-away. all is not well. visual alarm is flashing light, sound alarm
is--he breaks into beethoven's ninth, takes off clean with the profits from our

losses; our compression was flawed, lack. but you render static. there at the edge
of this photograph you can imagine where i might have, had i in the storm-front

face of this hewn, spooned a hollow the shape & longitude of you, bristles
of your nape becoming warm codec, rosetta. have forgot the world in frame against.

this winter parabola 03

2006-12-19T21:07:00.000-06:00

iii.

oh, i feedback, a neurotic algorithm. cut-outs & speed cutting corners, i learn
to slide soft around you. you'll forgive me. cock an ear to distant stations, hush

for the routers: they listen, hungering, after the wool-rasp of breath in ear. vapor-
transfer warm as wet as no, hold still. CATCH. deep in the weft of you. how

many analogues will fail me this night? how much time spent, gestural, in pursuit
of a sign non-zero, parallel rail of a railroad track--a pointsman, a jump, as made

famous by PRIZE-WINNING GARDENIAS! i am losing track, attention span.
jumpy as hell. this weather inexorable, arcing into that last i fear, stay close now

tonight frozen i no longer knowing, we're losing bearings
i'll grease the wheels after my fashion in any case, the redacted fat of my readings.

this winter parabola 02

2006-12-19T11:24:00.000-06:00

ii.

red-shift, dip. i flatten to this, two-dimensional. you run--mercurial, our night
slick-sharp & poisoned. i am sorry. histrionic. think: remember today: i beaten

gold, flatline of my words to you, mouthing off. even that would be better than
--i know, speaking into the void: even darkness is presence. palpable: long

waxy curves of you, self-forbidden, inviolate. my parataxis doesn't even come
close, & you deny reasons. shrine mentality. i worship, futile, hot. give me more

than adjectives. i would zip into the long striation of your calves & quadriceps, wind
myself in your ribcage, fuse with your spinal cord: indispensability. a fabric

of hydrophobic lipids keeping you safe, knotted into the face of you, set of eyes,
Ichheit, doppelgänger. But now the hair left on your collar, snow brushed aside.

this winter parabola

2006-12-18T20:56:00.000-06:00

: a 12-song cycle in fits & starts

i.

burnt. drift: your sidewise sweet-run glance an elision, illegible. i having problems
reading, you my mark. target. but we, poisson-distributed, a larger map than i

oh myopia can press up against myself, slick splashes of greens & browns &
i can intuit your spaces but help, oh please do, i'm having some problems

not running with scissors, not clothesline-clipping threads & fates on the fly in this
wingèd winter, topographical blindness of season. i need a branching-out, a thaw.

would sing you. (too close to this: singeing my own eyebrows.) lovely, detuned,
this all silver & brushed-up white, transient landmarks of wind become

your cowlicks, the swirl & weave of you unruly. in this i batten down. i brush, i
button. this coat a gift, it remembers days before now, more perspective than i have.

remembering, iterative (an interlude)

2006-12-09T20:50:00.000-06:00

in the wake of all / the time we haven't now, our holydays straightened.

what happens when you let it run along? something nauseous, vertiginious. expletive.

a first run: lift-off:

000001a: a boy will do anything, or almost skeeter, to straw to a theatre.

000001b: A boy will do anything, or almost, to straw a theatre. He will bow& scrape. The audience looks alive, attentively, with yawns: it's been quite a vacation. Thank you.

000001c: Enter hero. (Tragic/tragique?) Lay down the thing, prepare: he will run if you let him. If you will like he will hobble this his own hobbyhorse for you. The thing is rigged. There are shapes in the rafters--amid tangle & pull of mechanism, some organic compound breathing. Pit&box, balcony grandstanding you return, bee-like. The sagacity of a crowd: knows what it wants, dark alleys and borderlands. In the wire an arm, a foot caught. The boot lies on the ground--some hand untied the laces. The riot police are coming, the special effect foil of their thunder creaking semiotically. You hold your breath, and keep holding.

000001d: Entrez, mon tragique. Hobblehorse. Allies sallies salvos & borderlands dismembering. Unremembering. Your teeth obliterate & filthy. The hand is over there, the left-hand fingerless gloved. Magnesium. Falconry in the balconry. Bats in the belfry. Hand’s in the jar again. Unfoil my plot--factor in the necessaries to make this recipe come off it's not returnable & the stones too heavy in the first place. You retenderize me at once, fit to reenter the market. My prospectors don't look so good; they're malnourished. Refractor me.

--well. what then? from here, what vantage? we are coming up on some cold days, & i find myself out all, knees purple in the frost, waiting--

dragging the self in circles. hover near an epicentre, its potential rising, & remember. one doesn't lose that way.

fly-bye

2006-11-09T18:36:00.000-06:00

singular/ly[e]: but everything popular is wrong, you know. don't

forget. the twenty-four yr old drunken reprobate & the weird sister alone in moorish castle. lenten, asters; yr etching requires acid

'g[u]ardless of its intentions. in love with a satirist, homely but with a fine
mind. descending orders. death in the/your

thirties, having "made it." & proceeded to construct a personal myth. up
& downstairs. don't be so very downstairs with me

or anyone else, thank you.

report 000010: autumn in the hinterlands

2006-10-04T00:32:00.000-05:00

no. 1: shit, slinger. it's always when we--when
we (turning) forget--live a little, that these neural pathways accumulate dust, gather a bit of rust in our saltlick sweet-drenched mornings. a veritable moveable feast for your running.

(spits, slants, grins) there's music in the air tonight, honey. honey: bloodrust: ballpoint& carry. the old syntax up again: no forgetting what's in your veins, the slick fragrant killer bubbled through--

bioaccumulation. we don't forget, & shouldn't. i make a move for the reinstation of the comma, for the friendliness of parataxis, for--oh, how i'd almost forgotten!--the curious side-by-sides of it, the trip/stumble/lunge after: an appropriate bedward arc. i've broken my rhythm.

there are days when that's all fine. these are they.

Turns out breathing room is a euphemism for something.

2006-06-10T02:03:00.000-05:00

Not sure what.
All I've gotten is a headache and lower back pain.

Figures. I blink for too long and you’re gone again (no. 3 looks around and the empty stage, a sigh, trying to remember how to unclench her jaw). I guess I deserve that. I can’t count on you for this one anyways. I gotta break the ICE myself. Trouble is, program’s been runnin’ too long; no effect. I worry more about the heat on the deck than getting through. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good parts: Hosaka. But I think this run is outta my league. Last time I made a pass at ICE this thick I almost flatlined. Not that I’m worried about that now, jus’ don’t know if it’s worth the effort. Hard to tell.

There is a struggle here, something like a gear caught in a machine. The motor won’t stop but the gear won’t let go. Some mechanization of that feral periphery we call emotion, like somethin’ you’d get outta Chiba. Chemical jobs are out of style now, unless its drugs. No, this one’s hardwire. It’s no longer made of steel, though, but aluminum and cheap plastic parts manufactured for big suits by children who still believe in Santa Claus. I thought I had grown up but I gave some of that up for a chance and now I am piecing myself together again. I am not sure which parts go where, I haven’t had to do this in a long time. I’m not even sure which direction the coil is supposed to turn.
[dB = E∙dt] I do have that much power, but the parts aren’t liable to hold up either way, so what’s the point.

A fight like this has no winners. Only losers, left in the alleyway like some of Wage’s boys, angry ‘cause they didn’t get their cut. A fight with no winners eventually stagnates into stillness (I can’t get my music box to play). I care more and less at the same time.

Here I can say this, here I have some heat to keep my fingers working on these small delicate coils and springs, wires (a faulty connection). but Anger is a front for something less constructive: each time the gear almost bursts free, some connection is replaced and its surface refaced with that same cheap aluminum. You need real silver for a mirror. I need quicksilver for this mirror.
Either way, something’s gonna break.

(pulls out a cigarette and lights it, pausing to watch the flame flicker, and die)

Not like the other, though. I can barely remember her name. Linda. Linda Lee. Wintermute told me about her later. “I figure you’ve got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba,” it said. “But I didn’t. What’s it matter? How much does it really matter Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you’d give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn’t handle it. She’s dead.”

No. Not like that. Still don’t know if I believe the construct. But I wouldn’t be in this mess if I hadn’t listened to it in the first place; why stop now?

There were some words. Some words I never missed because I hadn't heard them before. I never asked for those. I never asked for any of them. It means less every time I hear it (my ears are ringing: the redshift lost the resonance/hard to hold the pitch, you know) That’s not really the important part. But one of those words was pointed in the wrong direction (No bullets, said the Gunslinger. Straight information.) That might be unfair. But its there nonetheless. I have felt something organic all night. Not like the simstim reality you get from the concrete sidewalks and cold city blocks that you live in. It was real: the wind, the sand in my hair, salt on my tongue. These city blocks threaten to hold me. Maybe it was somethin’ else (she shivers and shrugs) ‘s hard to tell what’s real these days.

(she traces a crack in the floorboards with her fingers) Yes, there’s a crack there. And a nerve. (and throws a pack of tightly rolled derms to the side, muttering to herself) Can’t get off on those anymore. They never helped anyways. The pain always comes back: sometimes as anger. sometimes as apathy. sometimes sadness. Maybe all three. Don’t ask where I’m at now. I couldn’t tell you.

(no. 3 hums as she shuts the window and takes a seat, quietly, in the shadows offstage)

This is for your
sadly missing heart
the girl you left
in Juarez, the blank
political days press her now
in the narrow adobe
confines of the river town
her dress is torn by the
misadventure of
her gothic search

(some salty glance&rust on my tongue)

2006-05-22T23:52:00.000-05:00

(no. 3 quietly enters the stage, curtains down, pushes the window open) These lights are dim. It's been some time for me, but time is the most pervasive of all categories. I danced away through that window, towards that moon that used to watch us (watch over me).

Can I (sit? lighting a cigarette from her vest pocket) I'm a little tired, a little worn from this dance: the come down is always the worst when the high was good. Derms to the wrist of this. A flat, pink octagon for the worst of this. But I shouldn't look at it that way. It was slower, really. I didn't (want to) see it coming. Something like we've seen before in those backward turning spokes of a buckboard. Some relativity here|I saw it for a moment, but I could never quite catch the steps, never knew which way they moved, never could hear the tempo though I felt it.

Sometimes tempo follows beat, follows note::resonant frequency {return TRUE}; //error. But there was a redshift in his motion, something unexplained - some weight of one too great for
the other
[P^2 = (4π^2 * A^3)/G(m1+m2) ]
I am a little shaky now, moving disparate from (have you left something out? Negative, says my Gunslinger. no thing is ommitted). Some chemistry produces signals not contained within

the visible spectrum.
Not contained at all, really.
Sometimes I have to stop playing scientist.

We've spoken of science before, of The Academy*. And the Literate Projector only works within the visible range of the sunset (the sun rests deliberately on the rim of the sierras) I had climbed to the top of the mountain, but it was too late. The full moon could not console me, whispering as the music kept me moving|I couldn't stop moving. some restlessness resonates.

His knock resounds
inside its own smile, where?
I ask him is my heart.

I'd left The Academy for once, for somewhere less civilized (instinct, let's say). Instinct didn't work either: I am not sure where that leaves me now. Time is more fundamental than space. I will need some, I think, to wander back through Ninsei where the port lies stagnant, weary with neon lights that play-act stars. Sometimes I think the stars enjoy dramatic irony. The internalization of this social construct, some reflection required before the energy state can be achieved for re/emission.
[ hγ = Ef - Ei ] .naiga enihs lliw I litnu nwonknu (r)t emit

* I was at the Mathematical School, where the Master taught his Pupils after a Method scarce imaginable to us in Europe. The Proposition and Demonstration were fairly written on a thin Wafer, with I nk composed of a Cephalic Tincture. This the Student was to swallow upon a fasting Stomach. As the Wafer digested, the Tincture mounted to his brain, bearing the Proposition along with it.

Some words drive this circuit.

2005-12-04T14:58:00.000-06:00

Shhhhh, my sweet. Come sit here next to me. You don’t have to speak a word from your pretty little mouth. Most of them wouldn’t understand it anyways. Your language is encrypted, my dear. It’s a little more

set PATH=%PATH%;c:\jdk1.1.7b;c:\jdk1.1.7b\practice;
set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;c:\cryptix\classesSPT_0-1-1.jar;
c:\cryptix\classes\TOOLS_0-1-1.jar;

cmd
c:\jdk1.1.7b\practice: run encryption.class

of a process. Process produces imperfections, energy lost to resistance. Some to heat, and some induced current to oppose the change in B-field. Even then, deltaB = deltaE. Don’t wear yourself out. Thought is never as clean as we’d like it to be. Science lacks perfection, not in its concept but in its execution. There is no ideal system. We just like to pretend because it makes things easier on us.

Science is our salvation, but our words must still bear it out. Even definitions must signify. A signifier without a signified cannot bear function.
The problem with language is this: Words can be transliterated between sound and symbol any number of ways. How much energy do you think is lost/transfer in the space between my neurons and yours?
Even, my life, these symbols I call numbers must mean in some lingual way. There is no problem with negative definition. We usually take the absolute value of something so we won’t get lost. Yes, something else is lost in that simplification, but it is a choice. Negative yields red shift. And so we are left with something overly simple or over-complex. Sometimes I feel the poem resists this choice. Science is not as black and white as it would like to think.

Define the limit as x approaches event horizon: Rsch = 2GM/c^2. You can watch the apocalypse from there, my love. But no farther or you become the sacrament.

Science is a creation story. Never forget that. It defines more than others, its true, but it cannot be without faith, without ritual. I have never believed language to be against science. After all, they are both the same set of symbols. Read: agency.

They both rather are in need of the other. Body is text. Land is text. The function of that landscape is described as S: A[x-x(o)] + B[y-y(o)] + C[z-z(o)] = D. So many things I can see in you with this. Vector fields (some direction, but never a singularity), and at any moment some tangent plane (A = df/dx [x(o), y(o)], B = df/dy, C = df/dz). Hold one variable still and let the curve along the surface be your smile. O, and the traces of you, add some variable and see the places you have been: the behavior of each variable invariably forms some sort of picture. Rather a pictograph. To be read aloud by some. Too cryptic for most.

Won’t you come in for a moment, love? Its cold outside. I’ll put some water on to boil while you rest.

notes toward a shakespearean vacation

2005-11-29T17:49:00.000-06:00

Dear Other:

i a s t o h a "t" & o m o t "s". iastohtcat, ttwm/mnMfuaa. it; hus; bSinefS. ibas, y, omj, omt. nevertheless. d, let's go out raging together, give me something to cut through the grease of this. Deliver me from the parish of nodding heads & bobbing criticism; don't let them look at me like that, all that accusation. I don't want to talk today. If we empty love of meaning & Shakespeare of love, where are we then o darling? Deliver me into the sweet purgatory, your refinery steel after our empire has risen up--let there be less

sterility in the world--but if thought were cleaner, less linty, less plaguey, we'd need much less our oversanitation, our thin slices of thought deveined, uprooted, reeking of antiseptic & formaldehyde. Science should be our salvation.

Is there really a problem with negative definition? All of our descriptions are too weak & life too varied for our nouns & paltry adjectives. Even to the edge of doom--let us exemplify our way toward apocalypse, the revolution of the Romantic imagination. It will rise. (a: ycdwwadwtwIi, dg: we're having some issues with clarity.) Immanence, not definition--sacrament of language--bears it out--exemplification&practice. (p, ftlog, p, SRY. watonmbrto&oa--r, taithsf absurdity. If language exemplifies let it do so but you can't not use definition just because the poem resists it.)

Let us not be emptied of meaning--we are extension but we are not against science. Let us hold some meaning for ourselves away, for Shakespeare's great faith & love for words. If we can't believe in Shakespeare, who can we believe in? You learned how to question but then you couldn't stop--not believing only takes you so far--Shakespeare is our priest of language:

if he can't trust his words, we cannot speak or think to speak at all. It's all in how you spin it, & Shakespeare's our master of spin, our spinner of meaning, our unfailing Arachne with the battle-cry of Athena riding up loud behind him, breaking long not on but over him, sweeping wide into the future. Here still even we are drenched with it: the attempt to get out from under is an impossibility, o slinger of inappropriate terms; no gunslinger, not of impeccable personal smoothness--no--you have been described: a plain, unassorted white citizen. If we don't have the words it doesn't matter. That hasn't ever been the point.

We are wedded to our language, & he is our arbiter, our priest, our bearer of sacrament. I'll take that. Not ashes in the mouth.

He's our trickster, our half-god of jokes in deadly earnest. True minds together--a difficulty yes to find. Our hands were firmely cimented. How do we share perspectives, behind other eyes pure illusion--how necessary? & love that renders us inanimate sepulchrall statues--for what have we outside the body? (you can't look in on one-way eyes) Let us not refine ourselves out of existence, pure spirit. Leave your dream-visions, the myth of a dialogue of one o longer after the perfect dramatic scenario o looker after a dissolution of the self--

we'll never lose place & please be pleased: we have no simile without place, no imagination without concrete. We have a problem with it but o when it's good it's gorgeous. Body is text. Land is text. Read the soul in the hills of us, our land, our high desert of the self, us together on a straightline due east highway--we are from the west already

o yes i am your pioneer your mining town girl with sunset in my hair & salt rimed on my spurs on the last seashore of your manifest destiny

& the compass said "east" & we went

up into the desert, through the ghost towns & the diner coffee & the neon light of a Salt Lake evening--there's another city too in which we pure place became, drivers together

watching telly in another cheap motel, sex& cigarettes on the windiest of nights in the town that gave you name--& all the kids there gathered around their cars, all that nothing

to do--epidemic of the small town. They are the same everywhere in our America--yes, our land of promise, our sweet&abiding nationality. Sympathy is nervous: it is involuntary. Nerves taken over: galvanic--no--just living, more akin to the electric fluid descending, that glance of God in the moment before--

this shall be our consecrated house, our theatre, our sacred space in the antiphony of call&response, our voices together calling out.

report 000009: interlude

2005-11-20T15:33:00.000-06:00

& the journalist said: do you like it here? & we said: we'll never tell.

picking up (pieces &c.); the urban cowboy-warrior. notes toward some shuffling dance. proliferation: we work the crowd.

maybe now we're adults, getting home & into beds before too late. maybe also we've just taken it underground, navigating the street-sides by feel, reflexive, honest. there is a glory that rises up: long highway lines receding, vanishing point of reflectors. it's very cold, but brisk, yes - sharp.

report 000008: new media/channel: noun

2005-10-16T02:25:00.000-05:00

& she said: keep busy, my child. if you entertain yourself you'll never go awry. but you'll go away, o yes, sloshed on the wind. the self tethered to itself though always already - to your origin. amid lots of false, a set of binary stars: shuriken, red velvet, his chromed constellation, some winking tarot. we tell jokes about the fun we used to have. you know i'm not talking about this us, though, yes?/overflow from other rooms of the mind; my mansion's bleeding, schemata crumpled all around. blast. a slick rain fell in the night, the only free car wash in california. ha ha ha ha. very, very cold here to be smoking alone. not accusation/no causality/

today in a town where the sky opened up wide & it wasn't raining but over on the mountains o! the clouds bunched up together - that's where i'm from - a burned-out boarded-up theater, six hundred block, a nice day it was & very quiet, except for the pigeons flapping up, startled, out from behind the sign the old name peeling - & i thought, don't shit on me, you asshole. said: make a difference said: what f? i agreed.

see? falling out of my own self-reflexive well; well, i realized anyway what it does to you, & i more bored than tired now, occupy with letter-writing to distant stations & imagined histories, cover letters. there's a job: a heraldic trajectory, my name sprayed all over it, trail of last night's beer & cigarette ends & photographic paper. who knew? all along

our shoreline, carved spine, shipwreck: masthead, wretched treatise. that's not your responsibility. that thing i said about business? i work for fun, practice alchemy on the side, take phone calls. less smart but i breathe easier some nights, let the microfilm play out on its own without pausing to print.

context-drama & the conversation poem

2005-10-09T20:17:00.000-05:00

i'm all right. i get strung around (along or out) sometimes, trip. this mess o' wires a nest for: apparent motion: connecting events together to make coherence, intelligibility, tense-shift: shores of the self. i've no problems with illusion but i sometimes misread. steaming along at capacity; there are mercenaries in these waters: lingering/if only i'd stop to think about it sometimes. an imperfect sine wave, but slinging along nonetheless: it's an apologetic thing for you to be tied to my equations. apologia: defense of my game, half-pack of habit, the third thing in a series.

it's a lot of need for less knowledge than i'm marked-up for. dictionaries at a yard-sale: we have the internet. these nights i go back to the archive/return, run-up deep in lamp-light & the slow drying-out of all these symbols. --referential, my only depth in recursion, my own obsessions playing out: you find what you look for: individuation to the point of absurdity, walking the lines. projected out into somewhere space is that style i'm trying to make.

versions of versions of versions: every body's got a story, an angle, a spin. caught between revelations: the deaf-mute or the thoughtless pedestrian, the one with all of the wrong texts, the unright symbol-set.

[ping]

2005-10-01T18:38:00.000-05:00

Some shell, appears. Ping.

You've just started on again - I have been running for a little while now and it hasn't seemed to settle the circuits yet. I keep reading peaks in this I=V/R, disrupts the E=kQq/r, ya know? My wires are already running too hot. The resistance has built up past the last junction. There are some new wires here I haven't calculated out. I can't read these symbols yet.

At home though (lights a smoke, musing on the slow afternoon) at home I am a little more calm. Thoughts run in three dimensions here, adding time back into the curve. Out there, two dimensions are not enough to arrive me - always some distance away, always post-ephemeral. I haven't got my head on straight.

But some rhythm has been singing for a while. Frequency is defining my variables (so much of my energy comes from those notes; danceable, yes.) Resistance (R) from home is negligible, but somedays is inversely proportional to distance (d). My life is a sliding scale (a=v^2/d) I've got to slow that second derivative, down the tempo just enough to keep my steps in line. But all the input/output's held the cross-over up. The connection will widen some, it'll just take a measure or two for the plane (Pєjl, in R^3) to flatten out.

[some creeping sadness: no directionality

2005-09-28T13:52:00.000-05:00

fragmenting: shards flick off, drift away. the core concentrates/crystallizes. i can be this way. preparing to disconnect external drives, reseating memory within, where it/i belong: romanticism of pure internality, no need, heterocosmic. dictionary entry of the self - a picture face-down, plastered on the roadside, hitchhiking to the interior/frontier: the last edge of absurdity. there's a fine line between that & mere caricature. forgive me.

that program won't run on this operating system - not after that kamikaze uninstall you performed without warning. you, you, you: semantic instability. interstitially i know who you are; no one else, though. riddle me that. how's my ambiguity? deconstruction/hold steady. location: with all ties severed, my network only a net, dysfunctional, i'll move back into the library & with my poets sleeping beside me nothing's too big or empty.

keeping busy: opiate of the bereft/berift.]

report 000007: with the foresight to know

2005-09-21T12:04:00.000-05:00

that i knew you had been had before you were through being had.

no. 1 (crooked grin): darling, don't you worry. i pick fights with cowboys sometimes, just for shits. & they love me, o yes, they love my audacity, the spin & prick of it. some wit for their cigarettes. at poker they misread me. i blink a little at this face sometimes: in the mirror, reversal, they see something of me & wish a bit. in reality it's easy to forget this,

snapped & gone/stir crazy; oblivious/blessed. (whistles tunelessly, wanders across the stage. at the far left, sits, swings legs off of stage. takes a string out of pocket: cat's cradle.) isn't it obvious? how we remember, how we make. this meaning in our love, affection of solipsism. progression/digression: moving forward & back in time, our non-linear novel. we pass each other on these tracks, some nights, & stop to light our cigarettes. (we always smoke together.) (puts away string; removes cigarette from case, packs on upturned boot-heel, puts in mouth.) it's much more difficult to regulate when i'm alone: time dilation/compression. pack o' smokes, case of beer: will you join me? might still be drinking alone, but i'll give us the benefit of the doubt. (lights cigarette. exhales.) there's a rhythm in this, a lurch & sway of our ships. pins in our mouths & needles in hand; domestic gods, an episode. in this mission even there need to be interludes. birds in the trees, bring all this weight to bear on/off switch it up, mix a little this night.

my hair is cut, but my boots are still dusty. i've got to go to work, find a job for myself this slip & cut-up morning. there was no rain in the night, but i dreamed of snow & missing flights. i'll get back; maybe when i get that letter, the one with all the questions answered. organ music & cufflinks: i'm getting old. i may buy a snifter for my brandy, but for now i'll stick to whiskey: it lights up my dreams. show-blind in the middle of this field, i hear you in the bleachers - creaking of steps, tromp of boots descending.

go easy on me, Queen of Languages, please

2005-09-19T05:48:00.000-05:00

O queen of languages, yes that’s you. Distance is relative to the origin. You are at some origin but your words of ‘cabs’ and ‘carry,’ and ‘step’ and ‘home’ make the origin somehow less arbitrary.

The catalyst was before that even. That sunrise I think, that small breath exhaled across adventure worn smiles that up on top of the city, look out across dry land. To some, desolate; but the dust, and that heat that moves, us/we separate and reunite as if lightning had cut past leaving behind a simple experience.

Reality has sunk fast, here, got its grips on me again. These mortals have their teeth fast in me and it itches something fierce. They can’t even speak, not one language. I can read numbers and write letters within this dollhouse but sometimes it strains the eye more’n the sun ever did. I suppose I’ll manage, like usual, the instruction, construction, re-/

Why is it these places are so disparate. I guess that’s inherent, but I’ll say I can’t live without them either or any including you and this triangle is not proportional to my current seat. There are no mute waves here, so long as there’s a medium. The delay, though, through this thick air is unpalatable. Don’t say these things, darling..(there is some false interpretation)...your words are of better use to me than shot up through that. I’ve missed my turn, but I’ve the cards to play. I’d throw the dice, but I won’t risk probability on you. Velocity is a function of time to move your place. Your vector pointing to the neighborhood of infinity (time dilation). Vectors have two components and I’ve only one, caught between the backward turning spokes of a buckboard.

some nights language remembers me

2005-09-16T02:49:00.000-05:00

from somewhere in these states of mind, i listen, yes. i'll wait, & sing. you know, this salutory existence is peculiar: a swing around, a catch, symphony. to dance like i mean it, always: they seem to appreciate it. drained all out/remembering. maybe if i quit smoking i'd catch my breath, but the bounce & gasp of it its own game, some dangling, some hopscotch for your gin. less verbiage, tense-shift, gold&glory. some years ago i could have told. antiseptic

in the teeth of this: analgesic does not mean obsessive. my puns should entertain but not uplift; i'll leave the pictures for that. twist around, crane to see: some exercise, a fall. later is tired: time zones, old lines of communication, wit & misinterpretation, smoke rings. if only you could see. indefinites: slick glare, analogy. my bridge to back caught, too many ropes, too long dodging: i'll craft you a sweet periodical (run: sentence) for my pains, self-fulfilling, elliptical. some time ago there were other ends, but that was years & time zones away, some strange city. ah, glory-sparkle: blood&honey. i've got a web.

snarl, tangle. my ashtray is full. i've got an angle or two, some desire. when i go home, when i go home, i'll remember, & you'll forget. have i been drinking? wouldn't you know, wouldn't you; o you of the distance, you of the angle & mark, your cutting edge of past, anger. some specter to grab you as you go, to cling to your shoelaces, your belt-buckle; no, it's not like you think. you're a correspondent; i'm from the front lines, your journalist, your editor, your redeemed. but you won't sing to me: pull-back, compliment, harangue; run along home, cowboy. trackmark of intravenous caffeine injection. the best time's been spent; don't point at me. when i step out of the cab, i'll be home: & i carry my liquor with me, in the blood.

report 000006: carried on the wind from the caspian sea

2005-09-12T02:21:00.000-05:00

no. 1 (turning, & a stretch): it's tired here, yes, but o some way of difference:

falling into beds, slotted by sides turning over & when it's warm out the sun's up o babe let's rise & shine the day off, bicycling with no brakes & no need & only hunger & a pack of smokes, or maybe two for the two for the road.

summer coils, uncoils: there's woodsmoke in the air to-night, darling. forgive my rhapsodies. a time when colder just means jackets & starting fires. coming down from the mountain it was still warm, out where the flat shines a glisten in dust/heat/

you: pull on some stockings & we'll throw on our boots, a little less grey now but the laces still sticky with alkali & spilt drinks. (shivers a little) in this distance we cry no commentary, no whiplash. spit for glory; flip a flapjack; swing up the jolly roger: parataxis, pathways - they'll all go to hell; what of it? duels need no thirds, & with seconds like these the hours pull past, rush of orientation, spark& diamond.

back to the streets, autumn of our beginning. new times, new steppes: up here no need to unwind the magnet held, shot through with that vital fluid: continuity, dash, illusion. no sickness under these lights, no sunburn. gold: revisiting 1849, but no wagons this time, no pickaxes, no fear of winter comin' on: negative definition: dynamite.

it's like a sure thing, gathering underneath this evening; press the dust from our glasses: hypotaxis. let's wander off & remind each other, maybe go to bed.

[Request received: new program under construction]

2005-06-09T03:14:00.000-05:00

[Static:] Cling a little as do the wisps of your hair, the light threads as they are spun off the skein of our thought and onto the road left further behind each time we laugh. These long strings of nanotubes to reinforce connection [communication: please stand-by.]

You never stood still well. You were always moving - a trick from your lips and the twist of your hips kept you swaying in this light breeze. We made the pair though, with I always so shy of the tower’s blinking lights. (offers a smoke) Tonight I’ll have the ballad.

A little feverish I (turn and step) into this light to [review: scan pages.] Sort out this life of mine, love. It’s all a mix in here, o, but you needn’t worry. A smiling past have I, dancing here in disbelief. [Scan: hold-screen.] Current algorithm holds a single inequality.

You see, machines do not forget. These wires from my eyes to yours remember that time when your rotation was around city blocks and street lights. Now I have come and waited for you and rarely could we stalk these streets. There is many a bounty to be had, my love. (lights another smoke, kneels to tighten a bootlace) What a mischievous face you taught me. [Scan complete: cooling down. Please stand-by for program to be completed.] I’ll glance the side way, you keep the leading corner.

(a grin and slanted eyes)
If we are finished pretending not to run alone, won’t you join me for round two?

report 000005: parabolic

2005-06-06T21:24:00.000-05:00

no. 1 (back to the crowd): you know i never liked standing

this way. lovely, there's something in this air to scent, all sorts of things in the trees. we cling a little, fall together, rotate. never mind the lapse. (turning) the road spools out behind us / a double-sided satin ribbon / a moebius strip - some old song, remembered. hum a little with me. foci of an ellipse; there's a small wake after at least & you know the chase&song, purr

of journey. i will pay out all this time beside you. i'm glad that we've never been the type for sidecars: hop on babe & wrap on tight, the coiled spring of summer, antiphony of our sacred space. hymning you is all i'm good for some nights when the radio towers blink some deliberate

message. light-pollution to map through, syntax of your cities; i've a ballad for this night if you'll bring the smokes. got down in through trouble without you / backing, backing a regroup of the wagons & you there across catch these eyes - thief, lover. o

how quickly i go to pieces without you. i can only reseam my self for so long; sharp end of the bass strings cut. i spent years learning to hear.

(a sigh for the ceiling; stopped by heavy grains and shingles)

2005-05-16T01:42:00.000-05:00

That's how this play works, I guess. One thing mends, I hit my cue and then I miss the next one. (sits down, mid-dance) A step, a trip and slip and I no longer need that delusionory element to speak the audience. I never did. I wonder that eyes watch me here blankly. I wonder that they compliment the step and refuse to dance themselves. My delusionory element is the intricacy that I invest in those. This pulse is all too constant to overlook the possibility of the cold star, a dark lighthouse.

Something calls to me, my love. You did, yes and our dance will forever remain in tempo, but these curtains are wearing me down, grinding with the push and pull of machinery long rusted, neglected and weather-worn. (a shift of skirts over sore feet) Even the tides cannot soothe me here. The breeze through the back window is the only force left not strong enough to break down the intensity I pride.

The lights are harsh tonight. Core shifting, changing and this fuse of my eyes and this city burns heavier and heavier. Eventually only the pressure of stillness will hold my quiet thoughts. I fear the retreat, the cold pressure that allows for some eternal distance from my center. (R=2GM/c^2) I need a more familiar place to restablalize this fire, a more familiar face and a rooftop where the stars can watch over me.

Reconnect: A grid of lines mapped and moving.

2005-05-08T12:27:00.000-05:00

(these streets a new circuit)

The library was not for me. The city streets, though, to prowl get the blood flowing. There is color in my cheeks again.

A dance? (and a grin) darling I would love to. I forgot to listen for the music, forgot the hum of rail lines that places you permanently in my peripheral resonance [w = sqrt (k / m )], snapped into perfect standing waves. Here our steps are mapped out and familiar, node to node and note to note. (a nod, acquiesce) No more of this slipping, sliding- I’ve emerged without any bruises though I know you have a few. But you were always a strong dancer. I can read those deep undertones and light overtones that resonate between your mouth and your eyes when you glance my way.

Glance my way,

Dance my way.

Allegro vivace (a kick, step and sway) as if the music never paused for we who are binary stars. Back again in some old approach, some twist and spin- matching the tempo pulse for pulse. This stage is coming together now. The orchestra’s caught the strains, the countermelodies to our steps [y=Asin(wt)]. And now, darling? We’ve a world to conquer through that moonlit window behind the curtain. They insisted on waiting outside. Some fear of theirs (shrug) I don’t know. I always wanted to stay inside, but even that wasn’t enough. Now we have move through these lines- no longer, I feel, defined by static variables. [define P^2=4(π^2)(A^3)/G(m1+m2)]

acoustically

2005-05-05T17:26:00.000-05:00

filling out: some formal relapse, a reviving of the thing thought lost. i thought wrong. you see. i near blinked myself away in the rush & pull of it, some small of days. a slip, a damned fine thing on this morning. hush. the room's not too silent, but speaking isn't the most full thing

lexically. eyes snag together. you know: gritting against the catch of wool in fingernails. it's disconcerting like that, but i've trimmed my sails & tack away. there will be no more of the old sliding, the slinking of memory & desire. o no, darling, we have not forgotten. perhaps you'll wish we had. but we've got the blood flowing again. shall we dance?

another round this time, a slick geometry - the filament of life. this case of nerves i've had has spent itself, the low buzzing level of adrenalin maintained for so long i feel as though i've lost a habit, a friend, some reflexive need. i'm falling into my own traps of syntax. divvy me up: clinic or asylum? i am a case study for myself, the religion: creating problems & then solving them. magic.

but we're good, o yes. & we've got some fire, & we're sharpening. ha. at last i am not afraid; i cultivate. the self held back returns to the body, a slam to ground. the electric fluid descending. i've remembered, as if from a past life, the driving: the motor, the galvanic impulse.

fear? hush. caution. fragmenting away but this time: not the self but the shucking off of the old thing, no longer rising. this heady air is not a new thing, just an old tradition. let's leave the library for now & prowl the streets, lovely. there we can break what we feel. we'll make all the noise we want.

Some kaleidoscope frame of you:

2005-05-01T19:38:00.000-05:00

fragmented but precise and beautiful.

The sun sets later now. I may be seasick if I stay on this ship any longer. The lateen sails will wait. I think I’ll have one more cigarette before time slips under the horizon (y < 0). But then

I saw you that day, in the library. I saw you through the quiet shuffle of feet and heard you through numbered shelves and multi-colored covers. The green book was there. I saw you from the space between shelf and book, the space where they wait patiently for someone to have use, to have need of them. Eyes running along, jumping to the next number, searching for the words like weather-worn glyphs and I could feel the cracks down the book binding me to it.

I stayed still in that place, I saw you move, shift your feet as if to leave but I could not say anything in the silence of that cement building – silence rules there and the only words I have had of late are not my own.

Machines now run those gears have been turning, been turning since the beginning of them. I keep the days but (time is relative and) I have since lost the power to interpret each calendar, each cycle in we who are binary stars, dancing around each/the other in darkness. I feel the archaeologist. Sometimes I have only a mythos left of you. Sometimes I sniffle softly for having let it wear away- I cannot polish crumbling stone now, for fear the pictures will smear.

Yes, I have the fear. I should have whispered in the library. Should I? Will I see you there again? I cannot speak, but glancing eyes can grin, can speak.

living curriculae & the rise of biomechanics

2005-04-28T18:49:00.000-05:00

you probably thought i'd forgotten. ha ha ha ha. well. i'll silkscreen my face on your things. sometime i'll remember not to leave this place, this means of being. there was some brink back there, a way i thought of fall & evening & you -

there - i know no longer. we are the sweet machines with some pretty machinations for our galleys. o, i'm rowing onward but i think we're in different boats here. if we're chained together the links are lengthening & more importantly i think - we've snagged an anchor. i am always hungry these days, metabolising the fast action of our weaponry, our slick silent arsenal. this love burns like drugs: after a week in the mind, echoes: the deja vu perhaps just a slow reach of data to parts of the brain or - that seizing up of the temporal lobe, a stumble. that blood is not mine.

i think our pulses are not so synchronous: do you have the fear, dear one? i'm cutting my hair & slowly going blind here. when was the last time you cut your fingernails? i'd give you mine but they're all ragged, some nervous habits to go with my cigarettes & my insomnia & the singe of flesh beneath metal. i can't help it that he&i keep breaking things: we're twinned destroyers, chimera feeding on those insecurities. our falsity is truth. hush: we've found a new game, but that doesn't mean i've forgotten. i'll twitch away & run the seduction against some other grain.

probably you're safe, your skirts&boots& clever eyes. probably we're all safe from the processing power i've got all fans turned on & will settle, will stop running some functions, may offer a hug instead of - some other thing -

A grin to laugh away the fears

2005-03-06T18:08:00.000-06:00

(has already, now)

Oh, I haven’t much time to rest anyhow. I’ll leave the chair for others to fill- my dance card is full up. In this twirl I cast a gaze your way while we spin ‘round opposite corners of the stage. Seems like less often now our fingers actually touch. But actuality is relative, and we all know relativity was the death of ends. The end of beginnings. Its better the dance is this way I think. Here I can see you all around the stage and mark out the steps: parallax.

These grinning eyes of mine across the stage and I have begun my aristeia. This is a new place for me across instead of next to your hands in mine. A gift some from Pallas and more from Phoebus (some strength through bare feet from this stage)- my steps aren’t so shaky with this brief intensity and I keep the time. I feel myself the time and tempo and truth. (what is truth?) Here I abandon the thoughts for laughter. The calculus problem, the painting and the glass of wine I will leave to be discussed under dim lights and sharp suits- it does not suit this new strength of mine. Never such delight as I feel now. I could dance the world around.

Still, love. I could dance the world around and it’s less matter of need than desire. This world is only so big and you’ll never be far from my eyes. Delight is a big feast to fill only one pair of eyes, one set of lips.

break for some water

2005-02-28T14:02:00.000-06:00

half-cracked: o dear one please still in this unnecessary rest. i am sorry to be gone for so many to have a look at paintings, unfamiliar & a slight last lover. the sea-horse & the rarity of it, some bronze to match with our rust-filled failing light this week-long stumbling fare - we are all too serious at turns. no one thinks it's you but everyone we'll all see this edge of tooth, a small sharpened.

what a fine perception! a sick sway of light & gyring o we carry on i carry it along: this road's a little rutted. to generate: if the heat's out maybe we'll just sleep here for a while until

taking over we're taking over throw away your card & saucer here the lights are brought down again & the band throws down a nice bass-line for this step and swing. we should pity ourselves less, forget it's ourself of which we're speaking. & he's got it & she's got it & o they're going to get it she said they demand some judgment; but i don't wish to have to care about any of this since. we can recycle images until they're mulch to fertilise your grave (& we will no problem get me a trowel stat) hey nonny nonny the fool's hit it proper i'll tell you a Lie Circumspect & not a one further no.

kick that chair away - you don't need it to stand any longer & probably you don't need me for a dance partner neither / but it don't mean we can't cast gazes away together.

A tug on my ear, and being coy never works.

2005-02-18T02:14:00.000-06:00

I laugh too much.

no.3 (smoothes her dress; sidestep-left, face&turn, bow to your partner) A neat step with your quick approach startled my eyes to blush. Red lips held in high regard and. Bittersweet. (step) Your voice in my ear and a whisper Shhhhh. Do not worry so. No one is watching. Only we, and we are waiting for no other reason than to delay the dance.

The audience is quiet tonight. It is late but I will dance. I have all the moonlit hours. You must be my audience in this reflection. A neat step to your quick approach and down we move the lines. Take my hand- steady now, no trip to flip the stars on. They shine so brightly already. A soft light though, sparkling. Of course. The lamp was a simply a distraction. It was never broken- never fell to shatter the nightly swing and dim lights of the jazz on the record player. We have all the moonlit hours and the iron taste in my mouth mixes so sweetly with the sugar keeps us high, keeps the dance alive.

(turn and sidestep, a glance&bow) A measure of rest, I think, to catch the breath you stole away. Oh these hours are the most filling. Some cakes with our tea? Or I’ve made a pie to fill our bodies even as our minds. The dance is indefinite, but sometimes it’s nice to sit and watch the world whirl by. Whirl and twirl and laugh a little despite its hurt. It is sadder than we, we think. I am sad for it, but I suppose it does the best it can for its own dance. I can’t remember if I know those steps, but I think if do I can retreat here to plot our next conquest. Such a tease are we. (wink, turn&) I can make you laugh a little (a grin, sidestep-right). The whirled can wait for now. I'm a little too tired to conquer tonight. And anyhow, the tea's ready.