Poemunity — your poem community

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain, Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view, Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judg). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, I cast thee by as one unfit for light, Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could: I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run’st more hobling then is meet; In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find. In this array ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam. In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come; And take thy way where yet thou art not known, If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none: And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.

“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.” —The Insight Lady Dear old equivocal and closest friend, Grand Vizier to a weak bewildered king, Now we approach The Ecclesiastean Age Where the heart is like to go off inside your chest Like a party favor, or the brain blow a fuse And the comic-book light-bulb of Idea black out Forever, the idiot balloon of speech Go blank, and we shall know, if it be knowing, The world as it was before language once again; Mighty Fortress, maybe already mined And readying to blow up grievances About the lifetime of your servitude, The body of this death one talkative saint Wanted to be delivered of (not yet!), Aggressively asserting your ancient right To our humiliation by the bowel Or the rough justice of the elderly lecher’s Retiring from this incontinence to that; Dark horse, it’s you we’ve put the money on Regardless, the parody and satire and The nevertheless forgiveness of the soul Or mind, self, spirit, will or whatever else The ever-unknowable unknown is calling itself This time around—shall we renew our vows? How should we know by now how we might do Divorced? Homely animal, in sickness and health, For the duration; buddy, you know the drill.

1. did your child lose acquired speech? A fount and then silence. A none. An ellipse between — his breath through the seams of our windows. Whistle of days. Impossible bowl of a mouth — the open cupboard, vowels rounded up and swept under the rug. 2. does your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals? He’d coo and we’d coo back. The sound passed back and forth between us like a ball. Or later, an astral voice. Some vibrato under the surface of us. The burst upon — burn of strings rubbed in a flourish. His exhausted face. 3. is your child’s voice louder than required? In an enclosure or a cave it is difficult to gauge one’s volume. The proscenium of the world. All the rooms we speak of are dark places. Because he cannot see his mouth, he cannot imagine the sound that comes out. 4. does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon? To my ears it is a language. Every sound a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst. The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid a want. We make symbols of his noise. 5. does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)? Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small. 6. does your child pull you around when he wants something? By the sleeve. By the shirttail. His light touch hopscotching against my skin like sparrows. An insistence muscled and muscled again. 7. does your child have difficulty expressing his needs or desires using gestures? Red-faced in the kitchen and in the bedroom and the yellow light touches his eyes which are open but not there. His eyes rest in their narrow boat dream and the canals are wide dividing this side from this side. 8. is there no spontaneous initiation of speech or 
communication from your child? When called he eases out of his body. His god is not our words nor is it the words from his lips. It is entirely body. So when he comes to us and looks we know there are beyond us impossible cylinders where meaning lives. 9. does your child repeat heard words, parts of words, or tv commercials? The mind circles the mind in the arena, far in — far in where the consonants touch and where the round chorus flaunts its iambs in a metronomic trot. Humming to himself in warm and jugular songs. 10. does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)? A pocket in his brain worries its ball of lint. A word clicks into its groove and stammers along its track, Dopplering like a car with its windows rolled down and the one top hit of the summer angles its way into his brain. 11. does your child have difficulty sustaining a 
conversation? We could be anywhere, then the navel of the red moon drops its fruit. His world. This stained world drips its honey into our mouths. Our words stolen from his malingering afternoon. 12. does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pausing? When the air is true and simple, we can watch him tremble for an hour, plucking his meaning from a handful of utterances and then ascend into the terrible partition of speech. 13. does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)? Because a reference needs a frame: we are mother and father and child with a world of time to be understood. The car radio plays its one song. The song, therefore, is important. It must be intoned at a rigorous time. Because rigor is important and because the self insists on constant vigils. 14. does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)? Always, and he insists on the incorrect forms. The wrong word takes every form for love — the good tree leans into the pond, the gray dog’s ribs show, the memory bound to the window, and the promise of the radio playing its song on the hour. Every wrong form is a form which represents us in our losses, if it takes us another world to understand.

I have nothing to recant, I am just the decanter. You, the just destroyer, have in faith become the role, recalling for those gathered the noble fallen with a prayer to his-grace-above-fire, (“Turn me, I’m burnt on that side”) St. Lawrence. Well done, I applaud. And you: Well executed. This is it. Not much else to await when our fates touch: I’ve nowhere to be but eternity, you’ve nothing to catch but the thatch. Dry on dry, we keep our wits about us

Think of   a sheep knitting a sweater; think of   your life getting better and better. Think of   your cat asleep in a tree; think of   that spot where you once skinned your knee. Think of   a bird that stands in your palm. Try to remember the Twenty-first Psalm. Think of   a big pink horse galloping south; think of   a fly, and close your mouth. If   you feel thirsty, then drink from your cup. The birds will keep singing until they wake up.

All clocks are clouds. Parts are greater than the whole. A philosopher is starving in a rooming house, while it rains outside. He regards the self as just another sign. Winter roses are invisible. Late ice sometimes sings. A and Not-A are the same. My dog does not know me. Violins, like dreams, are suspect. I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island. The strait has frozen, and people are walking—a few skating—across it. On the crescent beach, a drowned deer. A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck. The world is all that is displaced. Apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red. Memory does not speak. Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus. The poet’s stutter and the philosopher’s. The self is assigned to others. A room for which, at all times, the moon remains visible. Leningrad cafe: a man missing the left side of his face. Disappearance of the sun from the sky above Odessa. True description of that sun. A philosopher lies in a doorway, discussing the theory of colors with himself the theory of self with himself, the concept of number, eternal return, the sidereal pulse logic of types, Buridan sentences, the lekton. Why now that smoke off the lake? Word and things are the same. Many times white ravens have I seen. That all planes are infinite, by extension. She asks, Is there a map of these gates? She asks, Is this one called Passages, or is that one to the west? Thus released, the dark angels converse with the angels of light. They are not angels. Something else. for Poul Borum

I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the champs of the Dante Billiard Parlor and the French pinball addicts. I am leading a quiet life on lower East Broadway. I am an American. I was an American boy. I read the American Boy Magazine and became a boy scout in the suburbs. I thought I was Tom Sawyer catching crayfish in the Bronx River and imagining the Mississippi. I had a baseball mit and an American Flyer bike. I delivered the Woman’s Home Companion at five in the afternoon or the Herald Trib at five in the morning. I still can hear the paper thump on lost porches. I had an unhappy childhood. I saw Lindbergh land. I looked homeward and saw no angel. I got caught stealing pencils from the Five and Ten Cent Store the same month I made Eagle Scout. I chopped trees for the CCC and sat on them. I landed in Normandy in a rowboat that turned over. I have seen the educated armies on the beach at Dover. I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds shopkeepers rolling up their blinds at midday potato salad and dandelions at anarchist picnics. I am reading ‘Lorna Doone’ and a life of John Most terror of the industrialist a bomb on his desk at all times. I have seen the garbagemen parade in the Columbus Day Parade behind the glib farting trumpeters. I have not been out to the Cloisters in a long time nor to the Tuileries but I still keep thinking of going. I have seen the garbagemen parade when it was snowing. I have eaten hotdogs in ballparks. I have heard the Gettysburg Address and the Ginsberg Address. I like it here and I won’t go back where I came from. I too have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars. I have travelled among unknown men. I have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark. I was in India when Rome was built. I have been in the Manger with an Ass. I have seen the Eternal Distributor from a White Hill in South San Francisco and the Laughing Woman at Loona Park outside the Fun House in a great rainstorm still laughing. I have heard the sound of revelry by night. I have wandered lonely as a crowd. I am leading a quiet life outside of Mike’s Place every day watching the world walk by in its curious shoes. I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn. That Bridge was too much for me. I have engaged in silence exile and cunning. I flew too near the sun and my wax wings fell off. I am looking for my Old Man whom I never knew. I am looking for the Lost Leader with whom I flew. Young men should be explorers. Home is where one starts from. But Mother never told me there’d be scenes like this. Womb-weary I rest I have travelled. I have seen goof city. I have seen the mass mess. I have heard Kid Ory cry. I have heard a trombone preach. I have heard Debussy strained thru a sheet. I have slept in a hundred islands where books were trees. I have heard the birds that sound like bells. I have worn grey flannel trousers and walked upon the beach of hell. I have dwelt in a hundred cities where trees were books. What subways what taxis what cafes! What women with blind breasts limbs lost among skyscrapers! I have seen the statues of heroes at carrefours. Danton weeping at a metro entrance Columbus in Barcelona pointing Westward up the Ramblas toward the American Express Lincoln in his stony chair And a great Stone Face in North Dakota. I know that Columbus did not invent America. I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds. They should all be freed. It is long since I was a herdsman. I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day reading the Classified columns. I have read the Reader’s Digest from cover to cover and noted the close identification of the United States and the Promised Land where every coin is marked In God We Trust but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves. I read the Want Ads daily looking for a stone a leaf an unfound door. I hear America singing in the Yellow Pages. One could never tell the soul has its rages. I read the papers every day and hear humanity amiss in the sad plethora of print. I see where Walden Pond has been drained to make an amusement park. I see they’re making Melville eat his whale. I see another war is coming but I won’t be there to fight it. I have read the writing on the outhouse wall. I helped Kilroy write it. I marched up Fifth Avenue blowing on a bugle in a tight platoon but hurried back to the Casbah looking for my dog. I see a similarity between dogs and me. Dogs are the true observers walking up and down the world thru the Molloy country. I have walked down alleys too narrow for Chryslers. I have seen a hundred horseless milkwagons in a vacant lot in Astoria. Ben Shahn never painted them but they’re there askew in Astoria. I have heard the junkman’s obbligato. I have ridden superhighways and believed the billboard’s promises Crossed the Jersey Flats and seen the Cities of the Plain And wallowed in the wilds of Westchester with its roving bands of natives in stationwagons. I have seen them. I am the man. I was there. I suffered somewhat. I am an American. I have a passport. I did not suffer in public. And I’m too young to die. I am a selfmade man. And I have plans for the future. I am in line for a top job. I may be moving on to Detroit. I am only temporarily a tie salesman. I am a good Joe. I am an open book to my boss. I am a complete mystery to my closest friends. I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day contemplating my navel. I am a part of the body’s long madness. I have wandered in various nightwoods. I have leaned in drunken doorways. I have written wild stories without punctuation. I am the man. I was there. I suffered somewhat. I have sat in an uneasy chair. I am a tear of the sun. I am a hill where poets run. I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain. I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry. I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song. I am a playerpiano in an abandoned casino on a seaside esplanade in a dense fog still playing. I see a similarity between the Laughing Woman and myself. I have heard the sound of summer in the rain. I have seen girls on boardwalks have complicated sensations. I understand their hesitations. I am a gatherer of fruit. I have seen how kisses cause euphoria. I have risked enchantment. I have seen the Virgin in an appletree at Chartres And Saint Joan burn at the Bella Union. I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world. I have seen the Venus Aphrodite armless in her drafty corridor. I have heard a siren sing at One Fifth Avenue. I have seen the White Goddess dancing in the Rue des Beaux Arts on the Fourteenth of July and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy picking her nose in Chumley’s. She did not speak English. She had yellow hair and a hoarse voice I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the pocket pool players making the minestrone scene wolfing the macaronis and I have read somewhere the Meaning of Existence yet have forgotten just exactly where. But I am the man And I’ll be there. And I may cause the lips of those who are asleep to speak. And I may make my notebooks into sheaves of grass. And I may write my own eponymous epitaph instructing the horsemen to pass.

we didn’t really speak my summer wants to answer the architecture doesn’t matter this is not my real life when I am here I want to know why do I believe what I was taught a storm is on the way close all the windows begin at the earliest hour is there a self

The Book of Company which I put down and can’t pick up The Trans-Siberian disappearing, the Blue Train and the Shadow Train Her body with ridges like my skull Two children are running through the Lion Cemetery Five travelers are crossing the Lion Bridge A philosopher in a doorway insists that there are no images He whispers instead: Possible Worlds The Mind-Body Problem The Tale of the Color Harpsichord Skeleton of the World’s Oldest Horse The ring of O dwindles sizzling around the hole until gone False spring is laughing at the snow and just beyond each window immense pines weighted with snow A philosopher spreadeagled in the snow holds out his Third Meditation like a necrotic star. He whispers: archery is everywhere in decline, photography the first perversion of our time Reach to the milky bottom of this pond to know the feel of bone, a knuckle from your grandfather’s thumb, the maternal clavicle, the familiar arch of a brother’s brow He was your twin, no doubt, forger of the unicursal maze My dearest Tania, When I get a good position in the courtyard I study their faces through the haze Dear Tania, Don’t be annoyed, please, at these digressions They are soldering the generals back onto their pedestals for A. C.

Yes, I was born on the street known as Glass—as Paper, Scissors or Rock. Several of my ancestors had no hands. Several of my ancestors used their pens in odd ways. A child of seven I prayed for breath. Each day I passed through the mirrored X into droplets of rain congealed around dust. I never regretted this situation. Though patient as an alchemist I failed to learn English. Twenty years later I burned all my furniture. Likewise the beams of my house to fuel the furnace. Once I bought an old boat. I abandoned the tyrannical book of my dreams and wrote about dresses, jewels, furniture and menus eight or ten times in a book of dreams. It sets me to dreaming when I dust it off. Our time is a between time; best to stay out of it. Send an occasional visiting card to eternity or a few stanzas to the living so they won’t suspect we know they don’t exist. Sign them Sincerely Yours, Warmest Regards, Thinking of You or Deepest Regrets. Brown river outside my window, an old boat riding the current. What I like most is to stay in my apartment. So that is my life, pared of anecdotes. I go out occasionally to look at a dance. Otherwise the usual joys, worries and inner mourning. Occasionally in an old boat I navigate the river when I find the time. Water swallows the days. I think maybe that’s all I have to say except that an irregular heart sometimes speaks to me. It says, A candle is consuming a children’s alphabet. It says, Attend to each detail of the future-past. Last night the moon was divided precisely in half. Today a terrifying wind.