Bob Perelman

There is a company called Marathon Oil, mother, Very far away and very big and, again, very Desirable. Who isn’t? Back connecting pure dots, Fleecy intelligence lapped in explanatory sound The faces make difficult. Learn the language. That beautiful tongue-in-cheek hostage situation: My mind, up close, in pjs, and I use it. Wanting to fuck an abstraction nine times in a row, Continuous melismata, don’t stop, don’t stop, no name, no picture. There is a series of solids, mother, Called people, who rise to the transparent obtainable Solo windows, mornings, afternoons, And there are military operations called Operation Patio, Operation Menu. It is the individuals who finally get the feel of the tenses. So that it may snow, has to snow on the muddy corpse. There is a boundary, mother, very far away and very Continuous, broken, to interrogate civilians, the self, The text, networks of viewers found wanting a new way To cook chicken, why not?, to kill while falling asleep. There is the one language not called money, and the other not called explosions.

Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for decades. Really since the early 70s. Before that I pretty much wrote as myself, though young. But something has happened to my memory, my judgment: apparently, my will has been affected. That old stuff, the fork in my head, first home run, Dad falling out of the car— I remember the words, but I can't get back there anymore. I think they must be screening my sensations. I'm sure my categories have been messed with. I look at the anthologies in the big chains and campus bookstores, even the small press opium dens, all those stanzas against the white space—they just look like the models in the catalogs. The models have arms and legs and a head, the poems mostly don't, but other than that it's hard—for me anyway—to tell them apart. There's the sexy underwear poem, the sturdy workboot poem you could wear to a party in a pinch, the little blaspheming dress poem. There's variety, you say: the button-down oxford with offrhymed cuffs. The epic toga, showing some ancient ankle, the behold! the world is changed and finally I'm normal flowing robe and shorts, the full nude, the scatter—Yes, I suppose there's variety, but the looks, those come on and read me for the inner you I've locked onto with my cultural capital sensing device looks! No thanks, Jay Peterman! No thanks, "Ordinary Evening in New Haven"! I'm just waiting for my return ticket to have any meaning, for those saucer-shaped clouds to lower! The authorities deny any visitations—hardly a surprise. And I myself deny them—think about it. What could motivate a group of egg-headed, tentacled, slimier-than-thou aestheticians with techniquies far beyond ours to visit earth, abduct naive poets, and inculcate them with otherwordly forms that are also, if you believe the tabloids, salacious? And these abductions always seem to take place in some provincial setting: isn't that more than slightly suspicious? Why don't they ever reveal themselves hovering over some New York publishing venue? It would be nice to get some answers here— we might learn something, about poetry if nothing else, but I'm not much help, since I'm an abductee, at least in theory, though, like I say, I don't remember much. But this writing seems pretty normal: complete sentences; semicolons; yada yada. I seem to have lost my avant-garde card in the laundry. They say that's typical. Well, you'll just have to use your judgment, earthlings! Judgment, that's your job! Back to work! As if you could leave! And you thought gravity was a problem!