Me and My Pharaoh...

[facsimile] He awoke, fully charged. You can bring water to a horse but you can’t make it ride. All poetry is conceptual but some is more conceptual than others. Ambient difficulty leads to poetic license. Poetry has no purpose & that is not its pur- pose. You have to get over be- in- g over. April is the cruelest month for poetry. And May is not much better, is it? Why write in prose what you could write as easily as poetry? The poem is a crutch that allows us to think with and throu- g- h it. Every poem must have 13 distinct frames, devices, motifs, styles, forms, or concepts. Poetry emasculates prose. The body: can’t live with it, can’t live without i- t. I want to be understood, just not by you. Last week’s weather is worth a pound of salt, just like the lot of  wives or the snowy pillars of  Danton. There’s not a crowd in the sky. Familiarity breeds content. Yesterday’s weather is as beyond reach as tomorrow’s dreams. The move away from close reading often got drowned in the bathwater, even if   we could never find the baby. I wouldn’t  join a poetic tradition that would recognize me as a member. The wheel needs to be reinvented because we’re still stuck. I am for almost new art (gently used forms) — easier on the pocketbook and on the b- rain (undergarments not accepted). The only true innovation is God’s. Others pay cash. This is a lie and that’s the truth. Better truth in the shade than a lie in the sun. The taste of madeleine ain’t what it used to be. (taint what it used to be) ... all alone and feeling ... Operators are on duty. Call now. As dry as a bubble, as expectant as the dead of night. Without product placement, poetry as we know it cannot sur- vive. Poetry should not be in the service of art any more than religion, ideology, or morality. Poetry should be in the service of nothing — and not even that. If  you can identify someone as gnostic they are probably not gnostic enough, for my money. I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason. The sacred in a poem is nowhere seen and everywhere felt. There’s more to transgression than ritual, but not enough more. There is more to liturgy than doctrine, once in a blue m- oo- n. I left my purpose in my other pants. You’re not the only paddle in the ocean, shadow in the dark, line in the poem, lobster in the trap, pot on the stove, wheel on the truck, letter on the keypad, scythe in the field, lever on the controls, cloud in the sky, fruit in the tree, rat in the lab. Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original is an echo of what is yet to be. Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental. Beauty is the memory of the loss of time. Memory is the reflection of the loss of beauty. American poetry suffers from its lack of uncreativity. I have no faith in faith, or hope for hope, no belief  in belief, no doubt of doubt. They say God is in the details. That’s because the Devil has the rest covered. God is weak and imaginary — a flickering possibility. The dogma of an omniscient and omnipotent God maligns hope and denies the sacred, as it turns its back on the world. God has no doctrine, no morality, no responsibility. To sin against God is to use that name to justify any action or prohibition, whether murder or martyrdom. I’ve got authenticity, you’ve got dogma  ...    proclaimeth the Lord. Saying one more time: It’s true but I don’t believe it I believe it but it’s not so. “My logic is all in the melting pot.” [wittgenstein] Better an old cow than a dead horse. Alzheimer’s: What’s that again? So it turns out I’m not a bull in a china shop but china in a bulls’ shop. Sometimes a penis is just a s- y- m- b- ol. In their gloom, the Jews go and come Talking of Bergen-Belsen. (I saw time but it didn’t return my gaze.) My heart is like a water bucket that returns from the river seven times full eighth empty. Zeno and Heraklitus are my father’s milk. I think with the poem not thr- ou- g- h it. Turns of phrase / my stock in trade. Negative capability: sure. But also positive incapacity. I always hear echoes and reverses when I am listening to language. It’s the field of my consciousness. When we stop making — manufacturing, imposing — sense then we have a chance to find it. A professional poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and the coffee grounds. I think the idea is to be unoriginal but in as original a way a- s possible. Poets are the Pershings of the imaginary: piercing themselves as they perish in spite of native ground. I wish I was still in my pajamas. The unironized life is not worth living. When people tell that joke, three Jews four opinions, what they don’t say is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third ... Ouzo something to me and it ain’t pretty. Absinthe makes the heart gro- w foreigner. “Throughout this prospectus, ‘object’ refers to the digitized file.” Yesterday is a stone’s throw from tomorrow & each new year a vast canvas of impossibility. Kalip in North Folk, you’re on the air. Stand clear of the clo- sing doors. • Too much is still not enough. • Blameless as a sheep at slaughter, am I Guileless as the toll of tidal tug There are no absolutes except this. It was a veritable bow across the shot. “Sacred means saturated with being.” [berssenbrugge] So does scared. So does scarred.