drafts...

*
DAYS AWAY

Days away. The lazy orchestra
lip-syncs the sounds of its instruments,
the audience itself gawks in vain
at an apparition of kindred yawns. In
the perfect parable every letter
is equal to an alphabet.

Days away. Last night someone scraped
the paint off Ivan Albright's verminous
portrait of Dorian Gray and they
injected it into my eyes neck
and every feature. Buboes
pustule pouches blistered the lips
that bussed Bosie buff. MGM
commissioned it for the 1948
film, he stayed young and spoiled
while his picture impugned, while
a gleaming palette knife cued each glop
of dull oils into their title role.

Days away. A state of oasis is the sun
in enervation, the lowest ebb
of encroachment when the desert
is around one, inching closer with
each footstep took. The solitary
palmtree shrivels, the waterhole
shrinks to a pinhole in a mask
worn once to assist desire.

Days away. On his deathbed
he wears summer clothes, out
of season to the end. Always
had to embarrassingly carry
his sweater where others strode
short-sleeves and free.

...[

////

drafts

*
*
matter anti-matter it's all ain't matter to me
the guns and the butter think I am the worst
the guns and the butter think I am their brother
they think I'm dirt

out of paper and teardrop I made a tongs
I crafted a calipers
to grasp
to snatch this last word from the hand of herd



*
TRAIN PASSING A CEMETERY

Its room compartments are the size of graves—
Passengers paint in their fast frames of glass
The colorless stones and plots with screensaves
Less-lasting perhaps than the weeds and grass
When death's depot arrives all day through
Such faultless schedules: timely they portray
The cemetery's vista of decay,
View which is nothing but residue.

Where even the trees are obituaries
These creasing cars' avid artistic panes
Collage still reflections nobody sees
Though each transit-by seems slower each year.
Defunct in an instant, incessant trains
Depart. They forget their destination's here.

////

drafts...

*
LANDSCAPE

How I painted you, first
offering the blank canvas
a cigarette and a blindfold:

but no executions burst
all the frames we place
purloin your last vast-hold,

vanishing through the next
text cliques click into view.
What scar has interhearted

us in poses the thousand
roved letters I wrote must
have mentioned, the notes

I wrought in similar airs
to you, simpleton valley,
fall hive of greenery, high

desultory vista. Was it nine
noahs ago I boarded
the golden number of

infancy, time whose vacant
aprons reared name welcome:
a wonder of no thanks rowed

the snake's laconic mimicry
of bracelets or sidle sinuous
canoe through near-antiquity,

bound fawning in toe to you:
now your yawns keep reading
their kleenex for the word

(sought as one, it dims;
wrought by many it screams)
tar vomit covers day with.

Let snow unsheathe those peaks
it holds above our craned up
necks to learn how sharp

such echo-other heights keep
their prospects honed, each
precipice razorboned to thrust

all lapidary mist that clings
unstoried to their summit:
my pane re-sinews bleakly

every wind from up there.
Each brushstroke I heap you
with is broken by its cry.

///

*
SON OF UNCLE SAM

From the trestle overpass I tossed
one of the chopped-off arms onto
a train heading for Miami and then
another limb upon a Chicago-bound

freight and so on until eventually
all the sad parts were disposed of
in this manner, saving the head for last—
it went to L.A., they need heads

there, perhaps. Dispersed around
the country each piece of the corpse
can never be accounted, my crime

will go unsung until such time the U
S of A unites to solve me, save me,
resurrect this never perfect body.



////

drafts....

*
PEACE CONFERENCE

I scream down the ward. But can
any rooster I rip
from my veins be red enough,

loud enough. The sundials
I posted at North and South
Poles forewarn me

of your encroachments,
world. Atlas feels
Antlas crawling up his leg.

Your groundwar civility
tells me I must confide
in amp-amnesia

or paint toenails with tickles . . .
I scream down the ward,
silo hooves

of duelling hymens follow.
Their hollow traffic flames
my planet's war nation.

At the UN one flag lacks alive:
that nonbourne's montage-hatch
is what I scratch at

/
(my face a horror to novice idolators).
Doubtless this maze
moults its walls too late for me to emerge.


A child separated from his thought

can function as before but when
I I I I scream down the ward
snail-icicles line the lids

of my inmates. I try to lay
my tiny laughing tithe upon
Sodom sinuous ancestry high.

I repeal the Reptile Age, dead
speadeagle, dangling testtubes.
I forbid my coattails to bark.

Crossroads gymnastics; suitable sex
closed the symposia whose l-
ectures merged. How slovenly

I went at the mic, beckoning wild
with either-fingers, tall
sought by nothing equidistant,

indicators passing sat-wings
over lands beware all told.
Wings whir by me

with the transparency of hands
flung up to ward off each blow's
verification of flesh.

////

But with neither frothing on
my shore I don't care. lacks my brain
Lands beware all told. Tied
to a civilization
insectile/
oh though. Hollow traffic—polar sundials measure
your tall world's encroachment.


///

*
THE LOVES OF A DRAIN

Our lovemaking summarizes the wallpaper,
its repetitive visual rhythms find
their analog in every urgent thrust—

designed to repeat patterns our flesh meets
and lies apart, subsumed in the love
of a drain. The drip of repetitive

visual rhythms across the ceiling
finds analog in the clogged couplings of
two who find themselves sinking into

each hole with swirl-on-cue tongues
insistent, barely saved by the act
gestures they denude the bed with,

waking transgressions that express
vent the urge to lie on one's back and
advocate thumbs. Gurgling passionately

their pipes express me better than I,
internal plumbing meets in these feints
across the sheets like a hand waving me

away from the precipice edge, whose
fidelity assuages the prayer to die here
caught in this transit of self, the score

scaled in ascent. Otherwise to lie here
in else submerged in the event that
creates its surge, in which our part

is incidental, types in the format
of excitation and release. Ergo
eager as love in a downpour of thumbs

they bite each other shock absorber.
They requite each other in prescient
measures, the prince whispers let me

stab this glass slipper into your heart
to see if it fits. Cindy stirs her stupor
of tongues, what can anyone say that's

not surplus. The prison left our pores
for a moment; orgasm hopped a plane
to the coast. The departures fell hurt

staggering or instead staggered, staged
at conversant intervals. Let me see
you there inbetween the cursive coffin

stains on the blanket, the rack designs,
see what they try to cover over with
arabesque or maze motions, shapes

harmonized by how we occupy this
torture clockwise counter, north south
one liquid motif finds our mouth gorge

all peasant tunes and themes untapped,
swept violins replete with vulgartone
conductors percolate at the sink-rim of

"The Loves of a Drain," opus utter,
ought whose sudden faucets flush
existence from our loins. It is

these fountains flowing in the hidden
innards of the house we address
our plainest parts to, heart to hearts

no one overhears. Their intercourse
maps the circuitous vein of thought,
juncturing thwarts or coverts caught

in the crook of architects' nightmares,
foundations unjoining to reach apex
here beneath the daily business of sex

and cloister, nude transactions above
such bare facts, dusty basement ducts
[ the waterheater

toilet conveys all thirsts and wastes
[pipe-joints constantly

[wallpaper patterns, plumbing veins
that twist the house's id into its
antithesis; channels for emptiness

to empty around in; [

core beyond. It creates its space on
the theme of oasis. It waits to inherit
the whole of empathy's desperate

waste-lands and saharas subsumed
in succession of scene one and scene
twos without intermission's mercy:

The sun standing for relief on the shoulder
of Harold Pinter may dazzle these
silences with increase of time there

in the dream acts that aftercede
our closer contacts: blinding each
dalliance of desert, dunes awash with

the cess, the bigamous cusp of us.
Greece unifying space with ruins
offers no landscape vast as this

or desolate. Nothing is as nonce, yet
recurrent orchestrations quest the trite
for a perfect dull ballet whose score

can hoard off the hours death regales
our lucifer belle with. Maybe this slay-cud
of dinosaur—overcite memory, sour sleeve

for all flesh's defenses to grow polar in—
can lure, out of confident distance, more
regrets and drunkenness to attend us.

///

The sun standing for relief on the shoulder of Harold Pinter

drafts....

*
THE LOVES OF A DRAIN

Our lovemaking summarizes the wallpaper,
its repetitive visual rhythms find
their analog in every urgent thrust—

designed to repeat patterns our flesh meets
and lies apart, subsumed in the love
of a drain. The drip of repetitive

visual rhythms across the ceiling
finds analog in the clogged couplings of
two who find themselves sinking into

each hole with swirl-on-cue tongues
insistent, barely saved by the act
gestures they denude the bed with,

waking transgressions that express
vent the urge to lie on one's back and
advocate thumbs. Gurgling passionately

their pipes express me better than I,
internal plumbing meets in these feints
across the sheets like a hand waving me

away from the precipice edge, whose
fidelity assuages the prayer to die here
caught in this transit of self, the score

scaled in ascent. Otherwise to lie here
in else submerged in the event that
creates its surge, in which our part

is incidental, types in the format
of excitation and release. Ergo
eager as love in a downpour of thumbs

they bite each other shock absorber.
They requite each other in prescient
measures, the prince whispers let me

stab this glass slipper into your heart
to see if it fits. Cindy stirs her stupor
of tongues, what can anyone say that

won't be plus. The prison left our pores
for a moment; orgasm hopped a plane
to the coast. The departures fell hurt

staggering, or rather staggered, staged
at conversant intervals. Can't you see
me there inbetween the cursive coffin

stains on the blanket, the rack designs,
see what they try to cover over with
arabesque or maze motions, shapes

occupied by how we harmonize this
torture clockwise counter, north south
one liquid motif finds a mouth gorge

of peasant tunes and themes untapped,
swept violins replete with vulgartone
conductors percolate at the sink-rim of

"The Loves of a Drain," opus utter,
ought whose sudden faucets flush
existence from our loins. It is

these fountains flowing in the hidden
innards of the house we address
our plainest parts to, heart to hearts

no one overhears. Their intercourse
maps the circuitous vein of thought,
juncturing thwarts and coverts caught

in the crook of architects' nightmares,
foundations unjoining to reach apex
here beneath the daily business of sex

and cloister, naked transactions above
such bare facts, dusty basement ducts
[ the waterheater

toilet conveys all thirsts and wastes
[pipe-joints constantly

[wallpaper patterns, plumbing veins
that twist the house's id into its
antithesis; channels for emptiness

to empty around in; [

core beyond. It creates its space on
the theme of oasis. It waits to inherit
the whole of empathy's desperate

waste lands and saharas subsumed
in succession of scene one and scene
twos without intermission mercy [

The sun standing for relief on the shoulder
of Harold Pinter may dazzle these
silences with increase of time there

in the dream stage that aftercedes
our closer contacts: blinding his
dalliance of deserts, dunes awash with

the cess, the bigamous cusp of us.
Even Greece unifies space with ruins
yet lauds no landscape vast as this

or desolate. ] [........

nonce of whom. Recurrent orchestrations
quest that trite silence, perfect dull ballet

to hoard off the hours death regales our
lucifer belle with. Maybe this slay-cud
of dinosaur—overcite memory, sour sleeve

for all flesh's defenses to grow polar in—
can lure, out of confident distance, more
regrets and drunkenness to attend us.


****

*
re-organizing my books—here's one which i have restored to my list of vanity volumes (see first link in right sidebar):

*
*






INSTRUCTIONS TO A MAP

:

A SELECTION OF MY SYLLABIC VERSE





Bill Knott


copyright 2009 Bill Knott








*
The poems in this book are fictional.
Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s
imagination or are used ficticiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

INTRO NOTES

*
I've done many syllabic poems over the years.

In addition to all my other faults as a poet, I don't have much skill in writing metrically, and it's that shortcoming which led to this counting and curtailing of lines as a means of measure.

Many if not all of these are rhymed—

Elizabeth Daryush in her 'Note on Syllabic Metres' advises:
"Rhyme is almost indispensable, but since it can be unaccented need be neither over-obvious nor monotonous."

*
I think my interest in syllabics began when I started writing sonnets—they seemed to demand a rigor I was not capable of, and in my need for a work-method of composition, I found that restricting each line to ten syllables often helped the process. This became a deliberate strategy at times.

So probably most of the syllabic poems I've written are sonnets, some of which are included in this selection.

*
Where there are variant lines, I note them.

*************


CURTAIN UP

The last whirling dervish to drop
Beholds transfixed what those who stop
Dancing an instant prior can't:
His veil is pierced by orbs that grant

The properly-spiritual leer
A picture which should inspire fear.
They say the face of God, maybe—
In my case I would probably

Flashback to 1961
Where filmqueen Romy Schneider's gone
Down on co-star Alain Delon
To pose for my holy vision.

They're flung in bed with me between.
See us there: I am their screen.




(octosyllabic, with a variant last line)

///



OEDIPUS RIDDLED (heptasyllabics)

the course of his crime unfolds
each time at a blind crossroads
whose four legs forever show
less murderous ways to go
but every young man must opt
to stand his ground and stay stopped
so to prove unmoved he waits
daily till he demonstrates
to the empty thoroughfare
how brave how bold how strong there
beneath noon's knelled prophecies
bound to meet all enemies
on his own two feet alone
or has he halted hearing
the stepsound of his unknown
father's cane tap tap nearing

///

THE HUNGER (enneasyllabics)

If a path to the Gingerbread House
could be established by breaking crumbs
off its edifice and sprinkling them
so as to find what lies behind us

across the featureless fairytale
void of childhood: yet how very quick
that trick wears out when the story's track
takes hold, takes toll, a far-older trail

prevails, we're forced to give up this lost
cause; and the fact is that every last
morsel was gone long before the you

or I might totter our way back here
to try to dissuade all these other
Hansel-Gretels hollering in queue.

///

THE TRESPASS

On every corner I stand the street ends.
Others zoom home ignoring curbs and stops
And find themselves in family or friends

But I observe the sign don’t cross this line.
I obey the words that say back away.
I mind these limits shown in case they're mine:

I share their lawful urge to prohibit—
My own words witness so many sanctions
How dare I unsubmit to any writ.

I can't jaywalk or say I wonder why
Verbotens written then can still turn now
The unstoniest road to a no go by.

What’s wondering me here is not this halt
Or prior heedings where I nearly see
Such blocks and stalls and balks are all my fault—

I note the welcome-mat at the center
Of my maze: how each sole turns back relieved
To have found a spot it cannot enter.

What’s wondering me then is what attends
To nothing I say on my way nowhere.
On every corner I stand the street ends.


(decasyllabics, line 12 variant)

///

31 SYLLABLES

even the wisest
(even the esteemed poets
who when I was young
acclaimed me as promising)
have at times been proven wrong


(tanka)

///

EVERY RIFT WITH ORE

How fiercely foilsome the facial knife shivs
its two blades up to where the forehead ends
as wound-deep-wedged widow's-peaks: how weakly
the old hero hair-line fights back and fends,
each pass of day fewer gray-strands save me—
how deadly dull's the duel our sword lives.


(decasyllabic)

///

THERE'S THE RUB

Envying young poets the rage
You wish you could reverse your night
And blaze out born on every page
As old as them, as debut-bright.

Child of that prodigal spotlight
Whose wattage now is theirs to wage—
What gold star rite you wish you might
Raise revised to its first prize stage.

But listen to my wizened sage:
He claims there's one disadvantage
Should time renew you neophyte—

There'd be one catch you'd hate, one spite:
Remember if you were their age
You'd have to write the way they write.


(octosyllabic)

///

ROMANCE (Hendecasyllabics)

But when it had engulfed them all two by two,
the Ark itself became a greater creature,
an omni animal. And yet Noah knew,
surely this new behemoth shall also pair

and mate now, and that unlike the beasts before
this one is destined then to find true marriage:
because as soon as his keel breaks the water,
born beneath it will be that surface image

none of us desires to engage in divorce—
Natural nuptial partner, mirrored other,
the Ark's clone would emerge from nowhere out there

in the waves. And upside down hold bound the course,
faithfully accompany her spouse across
any world to reach at last their offspring shore.


///

OCTNOV AGAIN

The year’s wrapping comes undone: foliage tied
By sun-strung cords is cut and cast aside

To present the godsends, the great last gifts
Time donates to its ingrates, sad thankthrifts

Who throughout their dotage-dole still forget
The parcelly-priceless rose of regret

Never stemmed them against one bestowed weed—
(Why can’t our greed grant instead of our need:

Each field and tree stripped packing, boneward bare,
Was nowhere on our wish-list: we’d prefer

Ribbon-prinked paper/a crepe-plush pinkbow
Glitzing forth their vulgar veneer: and now

Mocked by how little of its kitsch remains,
We crave our carton, not what it contains.)



(decasyllabics)

///

TO MYSELF

Poetry
can be
the magic
carpet

which you say
you want,
but only
if you

stand willing
to pull
that rug out

from under
your own
feet, daily.



(alternating trisyllabic/bisyllabic, with a variant last stanza which reverses the pattern of this weave to trip up the toe a sprawl or two)

///


CHRISTMAS AT THE ORPHANAGE

But if they'd give us toys and twice the stuff
most parents splurge on the average kid,
orphans, I submit, need more than enough;
in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid
the tree where sparkling allotments yearly
guaranteed a lack of—what?—family?—

I knew exactly what it was I missed:
(did each boy there feel the same denials?)
to share my pals' tearing open their piles
meant sealing the self, the child that wanted
to scream at all You stole those gifts from me;
whose birthday is worth such words? The wish-lists
they'd made us write out in May lay granted
against starred branches. I said I'm sorry.




(decasyllabic)


///

SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS HYENA

Kindly deferrer to lions,
Late flocks of vultures, packs of winds.

Last to destroy the lost, discreet,
A shy, toothpick aristocrat.

Servile, even, leaning over
Droves of bones who disdain such care,

Who in their marrow preen and bear
Huge swarms of self, a hubris herd.

Is that why he laughs—why he finds
Joy in these humiliations,

These measured modesties that mass
And make him eat his words at last?

How strange it is to stay astride
This prey, to taste its pride of pride.




(octosyllabics)

///

ANOTHER HOLE FOR W. R. RODGERS

Speak like a singularity, a lack
residing deep inside every lock, just
past the point keys can jab: against all thrust
make safe-ensure your door's core is held back,

for reckless access to this pure center
quarks more quintessence than taking exits
from those pried voids whose secret quickly sates:
ubiquitous if Space presses Enter.

Which inadmissible sill still calls loud
with imagine: our skeleton keeping
each such portal neither open nor shut,

unhoused of that exclusive dustborne cloud
we breathe, though there must be something
it accumulates, accommodates: what?



(decasyllabics)

///

BAT HABIT (or, Who's that Coughing in My Coffin?)

bats are the nicotine of night
that's why I always need a light
ten packs o' Dracs a day or die
my lung-caves crave that fang-wing high

skreakedy skreak suckin' soot-sticks
makes me blind but I find my fix
when I unearth my undead stash
I slake its flake through a neck-gash

bat-weed bleeds me butts and gobbets
can't switch to cygnet cigarets
flick and sip those swan-white filt-tips

no heck I'm hooked black-hack bad-toke
what a tough puff bite-you-back smoke
Vlad the Inhaler loves my lips




(octosyllabics)


///


DREAM AMID BED-WOODS

You must pull down sheets from these linen trees,
Blankets too, a pillowcase in full leaf,
But can't: to snooze amongst their fruits, beneath
The sheath of that composite canopy's

Roost, you must raise yourself past hammock heights—
Up where its deepest roots feel doubly sapped,
That orchard dormitory might lie wrapped
And ripe with you, whose foliage still invites

More lure of surface sleep. But must you trust
The ease in these boughs, the sway of whose loft
So often now wakes vows to never rest,

To somehow remain alow, to resist
All berth above: you must push off this soft
Palleted grove, this tall, forest mattress.




(decasyllabics)

///

TRANSHENDECULOUS

Granted every poet “constantly aspires
towards the condition of music,” that sphere
of perfection which Walter Pater declares
the other arts must humble themselves before:

so why shouldn’t I kneel by the podium
and beg the conductor to leave her baton
propped upon my proselyte head like a sword
knighting me until I can hardly rise from

that ideal sill: one could have no grail beyond
that grace; could never long for that pated wand
to guide your own quest: its shadow bids us toward

the stead path still, sticking out over the brow
like some penile spitcurl: so why not die there
while maestro Mater makes his lowest bow?

Note:
“In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art.” —Pater.
Title: Trans(from poetry to music/from Pater to Mater)hendec(-asyllabics)ulous(ridic- of no-brow me to adumbrate the Great Pate).



(hendecasyllabic, with a variant last line)

///


PARABLE FROM CHILDHOOD

Something about a pond, and on the pond
a paper boat; something about a child's
act, dropping a pebble upon that boat
to study the effect: but then to let
other pebbles fall to see if it holds,
to kneel there spilling them one after one
until, until finally . . . If I weigh
this poem down with much more, it too will sink—

Writing my poems of a boy on the brink
has shown how ripples horizoned by sky
remain the only real cargo aboard
whatever that craft that unmoored us was,
and yet why he treasured such passages.
Saying they be lost we would launch each word.



(decasyllabics)


///

LAST ON EVERY LIST

Each schoolroom tells them who they are,
But rollcall always goes too far

So what boy listens any more
Beyond his own responsive roar—

If names get lost in roster blur
The zed lad's shout may not occur:

Throughout that endless classmate choir
His final voice will still aspire.

Like him the poet waits aware
He'll harken heed all others there

While he of course remains obscure,
His word ignored and ergo pure:

Unheard it screams in every ear
Its absent claim of being "Here!"


(octosyllabics)

///


RODIN'S THINKER (pentasyllabics)

To reduce my thought
to none is my aim
to spite the trite name
that bit chisel brought

me knee elbow bound
thick fist to forehead
pedestal pasted
niched on no good ground.

Even Rilke was
caught by the craft craze
of this forger, this

make god. May steeples
hoist up our pure souls
to people their walls.
///

1946

The year noir was born; the year Nazis hid
In monasteries to restore their force;
Peace, but peace that made some things even worse
Than they were pre-war: I was just a kid,

Hard at play, cap pistols, hooky, apples
Filched through a farm fence: then my mother dies,
Killed illegal abortion style by guys
Quoting God, his badboy lies, his bibles.

Pope Vandal burnt the last Complete Sappho
Publicly, my mother was butchered in
A secret site; their results much the same,

So I blame him and him and him and him,
All of them from Adam onwards are men,
Meaning me, meaning the worst thing I know.



Note: In 1073, Pope Gregory VII ordered the public burning of all books containing the poetry of Sappho.

(decasyllabics)


///

STRAND

To swim in water colored green
means you may never reach the shore—
but if the waves are blue, then you
might revive your stroke and strike more.

Past surface shades could find the one
arranging dust, the hue your own
adequately echoes, earth tone.

Neither primary nor pastel,
its prism all but shallow bathes
every island that can be found
in scenes preserved by paint: it saves

the picturesque yet quickly drowns
our honed harbor, your wake, your wake
says, flowing home beneath no ground.



(octosyllabics)

///
ADMASS

The comet whose path is contentment
shall seldom appear: compared to it
Halley's daily. What eye flared to it
espies that rarest speck in the spent

of space debris, moonspat asteroid
magi orbit-site Bethlehem by,
bauble the Hubble holds in gem-high
illumination. What vocation void

I have to pray for that view ray caught
by two poets I admire, new converts
Karr and Wright. Well may they sing as sought
in such light, but I will not pay church

no matter how witchburn-bright that tailsphere
nails our night with its sales pitch Christ Here.




(Enneasyllabics, line 13 variant.)

///

GRANT PROPOSAL (Category: Performance Arts)

I want to go out each day at noon and stand
On top of our Capitol's highest highrise,
Where aircurrents stack, where storms restore themselves,
Where the crossroads of sky are swept by radar,

Up there, buffeted, stand, cupping in my hands
A gleam of gold-dust, a handful of gold-dust
Doled out to me each day by our State, by you
The modest mandarins of its Arts Council,

Trustees all, you whose grace I must stand for there
And being thus empowered begin to pour
The gold-dust back and forth, pour it in sifts from

Hand to hand until the wind has left my palms
Bare, please note that length of project will vary
Daily, at noon, and not one grain remains.

Note:
Line 2: Capitol with an 'o'—meaning "the citadel of government" (OED), its cloistered towers, atop the tallest of which the applicant desires to venture. Line 6: maybe "gleam" should be "flash"? I associate the former with earth, the latter, sky. "In the things that arise [buildings or structures of any sort], earth is present as the sheltering agent," Heidegger avers in 'The Origin of the Work of Art.'


(Hendecasyllabics, with a variant last line.)

///

CELEBRATION

The conversation-pit is filled to the level
Of the floor with the soil of former parties here—
Crushed cigarettes, napkins, all kinds of cocktail swill—
We stand at its edge, grinning, wondering who’s there:

Is there some version of us lost in that rubbish.
Such a Pompeii probably took years of soirees.
Where’s the carpet to cover it—dense, bottomless,
It makes the livingroom around it seem empty.

And why get superstitious—why greet our fellow
Guest from way across this trashhold—since we must know
Its surface could bear our most intimate meetings.

Oh, somewhere the host is winking working elbows,
Showing no embarrassment—but here we have grown
Sober over the grave of what greater gatherings.



(dodecasyllabics)

///

TEMPTROUSSEAU

The clock is dressed in drag, I mean it wears
space instead of its own proper aspect—
but if it wore time, would it disappear—
isn't visibility an effect

of transvestism, that shield/pastime whose
crosscausal aim unmasks the eye: must you
assume the costume of the other to
be here, to present the sense with an ess . . .

Narcissus saw his guise decked out all ruse,
but if there were none, what would our true clothes
consist of, our rig rags, our regalia—

Whose dapper element dons us: Einstein's
continuum, or Flaubert's confidence
that come the same the Bovary c'est Moi?



(decasyllabics)

///

THE SINGULAR (enneasyllabics)

Whistlecraft aloft in the blue, birds,
belief has assured me your choral
enthroatments are whole and yet I spell
them out as similar to our words—

Your songs define you while mine unvoice
my field of lieu and fail to call up
a likeness new enough from the group
auguring each face its fate. The choice

seems too great for me but you seem to
flourish as flocks beyond your final
ornifact which Braque for one pictures

all wingspan style, his pursuit single
as I used to be. Is he more true
tracing the tune that eludes my ears?


Note:
After Braque: singleness/wholeness; individual/group; poetry/art; etcet—?


///

GROUP PHOTOGRAPH (THE EARLY YEARS)

Most biographies of the Moderns share
A common pose: ranks of raw youth appear
Often capped and gowned, uniformly there—
It looks alike in all such Lives we read.

Torn from some album somewhere, its focus
Is general: all the figures are crushed
Anonymously together and lost—
Just, some airbrush has dinked a single head.

Imagine rummaging through raindrops on
Transmundane panes and eenymeenywhile
Plucking from amongst them ‘Source of the Nile’!

How of this many is there but one self—
Whose underneath name obtains its caption—
In book beside book, on shelf after shelf?



(decasyllabics)


///

INSTRUCTIONS TO A MAP

Approach, map; let me spread your lats out here
and shape them to that abject attitude
conducive to embarkation: lie square
while my coarsest cartographies intrude

with plumblines cast that fourways force embrace
newground boundaries as I toss more throngs
of tapemeasures in loops across your longs
and leave them involuted there to trace

fix each secret breach of all our borders
so dumbfound for terra incognitas
where my lost flesh enrobes your erasures:
underfoot I will track these meanders

and stamp down every territory town
till none can ever drive outside my own.


(decasyllabics)

///


A MEDIUM TO DOUBTERS

How can I make you sit
Beneath the clairvoyant’s
High-table at seance,
And, while her tongue transmits
Some tremulant spirit's
Long-withheld voice in trance,
Make you tongue her clit,
You true communicants?


(hexasyllabics, line 7 variant)

///




WISH I COULD (AND DO IT IN 31 SYLLABLES)

like someone whose quick
halt in the midst of traffic
to check his wrist makes
him late for that appointment—
that's how to think about death


(tanka)


///

COMMUTER SKILLS NEEDED

I'm like a spaceship flooded with roadmaps:
The guidebooks that marked and led me here are
Archaic. All the ways they praise have lapsed.

They program mirage the moments I know—
Even my going home fails threshold then;
The path I nailed's a trail of blood whose flow

Is like what, a heritage halt, but just
How extinct can I get by existing,
Must I recant the past or can I trust

My family when they promise me some
Of us have not abandoned what crumbling
Almanachs applaud in words verbatim

From Star Ache reruns: they say our save screen
Is full of the old jism, the thumb-jam.
Can one yuckskull of us hold that vision

Safe, can they fly off fled within its sky?
From vid to vid we lean, to wave goodbye.
It's like that thing that whatsit wrote, but I

Know it's mostly misquote. It don't apply.



(decasyllabics)

///

PUTATIVE POEM FROM SAMURAI ERA

he made a haiku
before his blade took my head
why not a tanka
tanka would have let me live
fourteen syllables longer


(tanka)

///







KNOT (Hendecasyllabics)

After you've sewn it, bite the thread off my grave—
Please leave no loose seam of me to wave above
The bones unknitting, the flesh unweaving love.


///

PERSONALLY

I saw this screenlegend guest on TV
promoting the need for everybody
inbetween plugs for their latest movie
to help out like with our ecology

small daily acts each of us personally
just little things we can do at home, one
example is don't let the water run
hey people! ya'know? when you brush your teeth?

Sometimes I remember that admonition,
sometimes after meals I'll grumble beneath
the bristles, under frothy gums and lips:

Hey filmstar! love your save-the-planet tips,—
and hey, look: my faucet's off, not on—see?—
the least you could do is come fuck me.



(decasyllabics, with two variant lines: 9 and 14)


///

PAGEBOY

poetry is a matter of blond hair
of course dark works too you could use either

to wit tonsured sonnets and tanka conks
eclogue shags and song-of-bangs and blank hanks

add pastoral ponytails bob aubades
pomade odes and scads of other po-modes

brush them out bright for your any-anthol
dog-ear heads with the year's best doggerel

some word-gel helps if linebreak-curls won't hold
yet each poet fears her verse coiffure's bald

and the cowlick couplets the tress tercets
dread every stylist's editorial cuts

see formalist beehives and langpo buns
all cling together when the big comb comes

braid bards scalp skalds locklyric laureates
scared half their heaneys are a pollard yeats

let's tip our toupee to a topknot trope
before my permpoem flips its meter-mop

if the quicktrim rhythms they parnass-parse
today don't shampoo my poor metaphors

away I want to take and scan each strand
syllabic-chic and make it mane-enjambed

though most of the time I'd like to rhyme that
maybe-mussed-a-bit muse Erato's ringlet


(decasyllabics, with a variant last line)

///



OVERNIGHT FREEZE (heptasyllabics)

Window-glints of ice glaze fast
what last night flashed the mudflats,

down in which dawn has found pressed
small animal tracks: inch-niched

skylights affix these quick paths—
Each step is trapped beneath slats

of translucency attached
rime to rim: they sit there ditched,

puttied into glare hatches—
All around the ground looks patched

and spattered with puddle-thatch,
but note rather this etched stretch

where a late trotter's tread's latched
with pondgild on its ledge trench:

how glitter-together cached;
incandescently encased.

Not bins or barns' coiled harvest,
glozen molds hold placed this trace,

bold encroachments caught across:
each hoof-, paw-, claw- mark's embossed

by its lunge run: each rut crests
to extend its range, end-launched—
it must hate these lit nimbus
lids, must wince beneath such frost—

sun has tamed them flame of squints
yet some after-image haunts:

Lands on every side lie creased
with spoor that mars their hard crust

and floorflares most summer's waste
imagination, that pinch

not worth pittance, that thin purse
clutching what breast abundance

of flurry foliage tossed, prize
profligate with years' penance

whose cease has summoned what peace—
tarp white winter's carapace

tries to hide that mislaid dust
carrion in graneries

and bury deeper what grace
war's jarrior deifies—

what Troy, what toy's sacrifice
leaks justification, beast

whose Homered oathwraths can't match
this farmstead's secular crafts—

Beyond the coop's chickenhatch
pieces of a greenhouse burst

up from the clays as ghosts pass
to implant sole-sills for what's

still clear to me—I approach
each glimpsy-glaziered gapgulch

afraid my galoshes squelch
break their skittery sketches

or skidheel slide a childprance
puncturing every damn sash

I can smash, whatever blanched
and specious glow my outstanced

kick can dislodge idolfest
haloes those pit-portholes hoist

from lamb-trample slaughterous
gods displayed bad raptor hosts—

herds of ape they pasture-traipse
bestial cattlecats who scratch

paved prowess in the dirt splotch
like border-dots on mapwatch

or liens miser ledgers clutch
feral figures for our debts

predator prey pays poets
that panther pads our wallets
Ted Hughes' cunning hawk-pastiche
plugs its parrot author rich

this savage extravagance
animates each TV pitch

your Energizer Rabbits
breakfast lions and leopets

like easter eggs and christ creche
exist to rake in the cash

as you sit and clicker switch
from Tiger Attack stabsites

to Martyred Bible Prophets
can you diff any difference

in sanguinary scams which
verse-ho's popes and other shits

exchange/exploit for lootsplits
getcher *guts* getcher *spirits*

festering fetish lame wish
goldgash wildpack "religious"

imperious dazzlements
its screen between me unleashed

shall I plain idealize
the sight. Pitter pattered glitz

the poorest field-rat can task:
"Trance entombed, my forage-struts?

strangely crowned with iciclets,
thaw-askance in silver nets

that snag some Nixnaut banished
from huge spook-lakes diminished

to these mini: spangle-splashed
and scaly his mermarsh face

is damming yours to a drowse:
your powers sod, your earth cursed,

bear null this lair's fatal laze—
bide its nether-tide enclosed,

its potent emptiness poised
to bolt free, vain, hopeless wish:

train of hymen's bridal dress,
heil flower drowned mire and mess

in this fecal foul recess—
delusional any parse

that aspires to soar from smutch
or scat escape its burnished

prison-urned prism-units
lathed and locked, crystal cubits

where spot-carpeted carets—
pools, flood-scummed with gem, facets
unstrung-flung diamond pendants
it strangles you, chain necklaced.

Immured your murder-led bents
that followed friendly bloodscents

till fangs throat-fonts firmly drenched
and feast fell anticlimax—

till cycle lay established
again. Eternal matrix,

your game's destined accidents
choreograph each pounce once

but here they're preserved in twice:
cryocrypts halt their advance,

vaults for phantom enpassants—
stabatjammed their rhythm dance.

Here stands this clearing's essence,
filmed upon fillspace distance—

oh hear its car-crash score-scants:
sharkshrieks stilled, prowl-growls silenced.

Look: its slope grows near scar grazed
with overtook's veer. Steer-squished

leap-lopes laned below this sluice
this rapacious avalanche—

this meander labyrinth's
constellated those hunt-sprints.

Star-quenched in lurid casements
what vent revives these vagrants.

Plunged in pent, your harms unhitched.
Sprawled for sleep's random ambush—

hibernate, die! sink finished
along this blank fishtank maze

or wake, with mindblink ablaze—
see your scintillant depths catch

magic from the mimic glance
of this mirror while it lasts—

how soon noon will melt to mush
your hoar hour which Eskimos

have more words for than I, mouse
Michigander, verminous

mite of this sheer terminus
the Knott brat teetertoes his

trespass at. He has spare choice
and careless proceed he must

toward the devouring bless
this coldsnap moment's incised

in his own flesh. Oedipus
ankled. Pale autumn's glozes
grail incarnations of slush
frail trail we fugitives mashed

in the wet soil till chill lashed
it tight with glacier paces

palls in the mornings' stale mess
of luminescence. Sunrise

et al. Against its bright best
(nature's norm-channel brilliance

versus some thumbed thesaurus)
this polar-stamped dirt contrasts

my feet in a fret of froze
silly syllabic sets of rows

extinguished glimmer glimpses
shattered all their gleams I guess—"

Stoic, lone, those shine-lines cast
to show no magnificence

or quests quixotic-thrust, just
folk stalked by their hungriness,

critters croaked, varmints vanished
species extinct or deathwish—

Theirs is not an innocence
chosen, their hands are not clenched

on church-prayers' lack-response.
Their trek unlike ours abounds.

Under gait-grates it waits wise
in its ways portrayed saycheese—

Carnivore, killer-corps seized;
poacher captured, frozenchase.

Mid-stride taken, frigid paste
haste-hail jails this trodden caste.

Roadcage for an arctic race;
shod-zoo stocked with dull dreambrates.

Before the snow's blind expanse
blunders every further fence

a walk may stop precipice
top this fierce fenestrate lens

but what happens then depends
on some lost, glossed over sense.

One might pause to muse that post
or else forget, astonished.

Or kneel to urge weathers worse
come seal his brr-brief life's course—

(Let elf and unicorn dash
climate at its timeliest

congeals their furtive crevasse
strayhorde stayed for a nor' rest.)
Spurts of rhyme, suicide-sparse
For obvious sake. Because

It all seems so colorless.
The past and everything since.

But our chameleon's footprints—
have they been paned with stained glass?





(there is one variant line here—perhaps you spotted it?—
:
"silly syllabic sets of rows" . . . )

///

MIDDAY WORKBREAK (after Montale)

Lunch to forget the morning's sweat
Against a wall along whose top
Broken glass has been set to stop
Thieves' incursions: sit back and let

Each limb find ease in dream beyond
A rest-time undisturbed by cries
From highest nests when summer tries
To place entire its days upon

The hour we swelter in down here—
Even those nearest earth, the ants,
Even they can't span more distance,
Or map one noon-nap's short career:

None of us can orienteer
The maze sun sees in that mirror
This wall uplifts in rifts of shards
Wherein our lives all labor towards
Their end and never quite get there.



(octosyllabics)


///

POEM

You’d have us compare madness in a glass
and then for contrast’s sake strike one face from
that frame, one name off that list just to see
who’s left. But all the asylum I am,

that whole alpha-non-grata of heads torn
from the page can’t disengage your veil slur
stare where I sit, I wait, I browse my state,
I collate these collected offlurks of.

To attain the state each stark strives for, all
that sill is unevolved, a thumbless clone
halfway home, desiring these threshold scenes
be furthest strand. These never near at hand.

To die in a once sense, once in a sense.
My necktie longs to rise and tongue my brow.



(decasyllabics)

///

OFFENSE OF THE MIST (hendecasyllabics)

Stamp inside my bathroom mirror the flesh steams
Pout with desire that must fade awake to find
Adonises never fairer fauned than mine
Whose handsomeness waits just wisps away it seems

To him shivering over the sheenshed glass
Or is he sheer suppressing the emergence
Of many gods who would have succored presence
Once affront such fallen minor forms unless

The vapor kissing my razorblade purepours
Sure its shorebank will brook no pollutant face
Unlookly as this streamyfaux Narcissus
If gendered beauty can fountain up more source

Cognizant as such should any boy grown old
Still feel his tepid taps run their course to cold.



///

Afternote:

My next to last theoretically-real book (as opposed to my vanity volumes) was reviewed

or rather reviled in the Washington Post by MacArthur Genius Fellow Edward Hirsch . . .

he drubbed me top to bottom:

of his many condescending scorns and insults,

one in particular sticks in my mind—

as if to suggest that my heinous habit/pathetic practice of writing in syllabics

was indeed an ultimate folly, the worst sin of all,

Hirsch sneeringly noted that, quote,

"Knott is a syllable-counter."

(Poets schooled in the tried-and-trite verities of Romanticism are of course suspicious of any form which is not "organic.")

published by the author

//

this edition: OCTOBER 8, 2009

*

drafts....

*
THE LOVES OF A DRAIN

Our lovemaking summarizes the wallpaper,
its repetitive visual rhythms find
their analog in every urgent thrust—

designed to repeat patterns our flesh meets
and lies apart, subsumed in the love
of a drain. The drip of repetitive

visual rhythms across the ceiling
finds analog in the clogged couplings of
two who find themselves sinking into

each hole with swirl-on-cue tongues
insistent, barely saved by the act
gestures they denude the bed with,

waking transgressions that express
vent the urge to lie on one's back and
advocate thumbs. Gurgling passionately

their pipes express me better than I,
internal plumbing meets in these feints
across the sheets like a hand waving me

away from the precipice edge, whose
fidelity assuages the prayer to die here
caught in this transit of self, the score

scaled in ascent. Otherwise to lie here
in else submerged in the event that
creates its surge, in which our part

is incidental, types in the format
of excitation and release. Ergo
eager as love in a downpour of thumbs

they bite each other shock absorber.
They requite each other in prescient
measures, the prince whispers let me

stab this glass slipper into your heart
to see if it fits. Cindy stirs in her stupor
of tongues, what can anyone say that

won't be more. The prison left our pores
for a moment; orgasm hopped a plane
to the coast. The departures felt hurt

staggering, or rather staggered, staged
at conversant intervals. Can you see
me there, inbetween the cursive coffee

stains on the blanket, the rack designs,
see what they try to cover over with
arabesque or maze motions, shapes

occupied by what we harmonize this
torture clockwise, counter, north or south
one liquid motif finds its mouth gorge

of peasant tunes and themes untapped,
swept violins replete with vulgartone as
conductors percolate at the sink-rim of

"The Loves of a Drain", opus-utter,
nonce of what. Recurrent orchestrations
quest the trite silence, perfectly dull ballet

to hoard off the hours death regales your
lucifer belle with. Plus that slayself cud
of dinosaur—overcite memory, sour sleeve

for all fleshly defenses to grow polar in—
may lure, out of confident distance, more
regrets and drunkenness to unattend us.


*
LETTER TO A LANDSCAPE

How I painted you, first
offering the blank canvas
a cigarette and a blindfold:

such executions burst
all the frames we place
purloin your last vast-hold,

vanishing through the next
text that cliques into view.
What scar has interhearted

us in poses the thousand
roved letters I wrote must
have mentioned, the notes

I wrought in similar airs
to you, simpleton valley,
fall hive of greenery, high

desultory vista. [............
..............] Was it nine
noahs ago I boarded
the golden number

of infancy, whose vacant/vagrant
aprons reared name welcome:
a wonder of no thanks rowed
my childcanoe, like ancient

pillars unifying space
with ruins, or the snake's
laconic mimicry of bracelets

that bound each toe to you:
now your yawns keep reading
their kleenex for the word

(sought as one, it dims;
wrought by many it screams)
tar vomit covers day with.

Let snow unsheathe those peaks
it holds above our craned up
necks to learn how sharp

such echo-other heights keep
deaths suspent, precipice mist; /precipice honed; /boned;
my pane re-sinews bleakly

every wind from up there.
Each brushstroke I heap you
with is broken by its cry.

[...........]
*
LETTER TO A LANDSCAPE

How I painted you, first offering each blank
Canvas a cigarette and a blindfold;
Such executions burst the final vast-hold
Frames that place purloin your serried/unstoried rank/bank,

Vanishing through the next text its clique clicks
Into view. What scar has interhearted
Us in poses the thousand roved letters
I wrote must have mentioned, the notes critics

I wrought in similar airs to you, simpleton
Valley, tall hive of greenery, desultory
Vista. Smirking I render this lapidary.
Oh was it nine noahs ago I sailed upon

The golden number of infancy, vagrant
Aprons reared name welcome to none new:
A wonder of no thanks rowed my childcanoe,
Bare ancient pillars unifying space

With ruins, or the snake's laconic mimicry
Of bracelets that bound each toe to you:
now your yawns keep reading
their kleenex for the word


////