Inclusion as Means of Exclusion (Amsterdam Review - Fall 2022)

​What is the purpose of the artist, one might ask? The Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis makes the point that art isn’t everywhere, and everyone is not an artist. On the contrary, it says, the artist is a singularity, a creature fated to hobble across the world alone, misunderstood, surrounded by those who seek to exploit him and by impostors who succeed by playing the game. What really fosters the production of art is uncovering and bringing to light whatever lies hidden deep down, accepting the chaos both within and without, and waiting for it to impose its own order. The artist is an exception to the rule, to the spectral-structural Umwelt, the one who can tell that there is a rule, and that the rule is wrong. Had it been right, his sheer presence wouldn’t be needed. He'd be living within art. 

Convention as Means of Repression (Amsterdam Review - Spring 2025)

​

​​​All warnings to guard or refill it ignored, what could restore it to health?
The living reservoir’s dried up to dust, 


a mire of sludge that yields a different kind of time flooding the remainder, 
an altered medium, circular yet hollow-bellied like a roof without a temple.


Algorithms may relax the nerves and muscle tissue throughout the body 
but emotions are as dry as the salt mountain’s thirst.


You want to dive in and turn it to stream.


The choice lies in the act of measuring—it is the product of some frank, 
dispassionate inspection, a lucent audit of your standing 


amid the same choreography of commerce and importance,
honeycombs of desire, the honey oozing from one vanishing point to another


like a river of momentum, of concords framed as the myth of getting somewhere
when in fact you fell upon it and still your thoughts, 


piling up along the far banks of your awareness, drift inevitably 
toward that stream and blur into the current so fully they forget their place of origin.


Because acute, transactive instead of gifting, 
life stays blind and restless, 


mere instrument in the service of something lying 
on the wrong side of whatever line is drawn, the loss of world inevitable— 


A more complete view entails a center without angles or degrees.


To take back the world and know it in yourself, a stepping out into the open is required, 
a reaching beyond a paralysis of dances 


even as your bootprints quickly fill with meltwater.
The ground shakes and moves under your feet, the edge is always now.

Bildens Äkthet (The Authenticity of the Image)  (Amsterdam Review - Spring 2025)

- after Melanie Challenger

​
​Ascend and the feel of air,
descend and the feel of air, 
what turns the strobe light on? 

In the dream I am in the same room 
the other me is sleeping in 
and everything, 
down to the light and shadows, 
appears to be identical, 
perhaps just slightly tilted,
as if in a trucking shot
along a narrow hallway
in which one of us is now 
only a mirror figure 
on a scale other than the original, 
moved by an invisible hand 
along a predetermined track,
a human breath collection apparatus                                    
dancing softly on the walls                                            
ushering life forces through.

When I speak, he 
speaks: 

I, who soar high into the sky
no longer subject to the laws of motion 
but rather to their echo, across 
the horizontal approximation 
from where I can see 
the four corners of the world, 

and reach them, shall keep 
a weather eye on everything.   

​Axes of Alliance     (Dream Catcher - Issue 45)

​                            
​
What spark there is seems to light the scene from either end. 

In an interpreted world, you see what appears, 
each day more, or less.

The tree shadows on mountaintops are large caterpillars. 

The compound eye a vending machine. 

The train window a skyway in which an arrow shoots through space. 

When the arrow line is active
it creates divisions into imaginary planes--

Yet when moving round a vacuum 
you’re hermetically sealed in

not all that much changes… 
Nothing happens off the screen.    

The layers and the dots are yours.
There’s no other law but the one you yourself have devised. 

The initial impulse is extracted from 
the new identity assumed      [feelings you’re no longer feeling,

stimuli converted and proportioned 
to avoid disturbance]      

twelve-bar pneumatic reflex 
in the condensation chamber 

circulating like an echo 

mornings when the mind is clumsy 
and bumps into things.

Down the mountain 
a man and a woman, light and darkness, slowly approach in a canoe.  

A Victory for the Sultan and the Queen of Spades     (Lothlorien Poetry Journal - Volume 8)

​

​In the dream the man stood in a grove
with his palms facing outward, showing the way, 
blue as if he’d dipped them in blue ink. 
Smoke billowed up behind him. Perhaps mist.  
Something had been burning, 
or we were being engulfed in a cloud.     

He said, The City’s come to take the place of nature--
Nature as disorder. 
All depth bent in. High density of the near and contiguous. 
Half the time formless, as if nobody could reach it, 
the other blocked by objects in the dark 
like an old music box. 

What if we lived in a night recalled 
over a distant city,

       we’d remember ourselves already flown--

if what we call time 
wasn’t comprised of days or hours, mere segments 
devised to break up duration, but of something like pixels
that produce an image, or maybe of regenerative matter, 
like skin, whose cells spontaneously generate new tissue.

Consider the music box. 
It sits idle 
yet when you open it 
it springs into life and sings its song. 

Central Locking     (Lothlorien Poetry Journal - Volume 8)

You can play a music piece so differently 
it becomes a different piece.

Playing it backward
there’s a sense of being followed. 

Say: 

compose me 
a replacement.

Soft-touched 
by a ghostdance>> transferring 
to mezzotint>> transferring to aquatint

the squares on the floor 
have many drawers.

​The stream is blue.
The woods are green.

The dreamscape contains everything.

Watercress distorts 
like spherical umbrellas.
Dragonflies swarm
fluttering mid-flight.    

The sky above revolves, 
you remain motionless.

What connection is there between things?


To the left you see the outline of a church.
The hand of a clock turned 
away from the wall, 

a few trees, 
edging the forest 
maybe, to the right. 

The gray sky inbetween. 

But why is there 
a bellhop waiting on the stairs? 

It reminds you you bear gifts. 

Micro-Machinist     (Exilé Sans Frontières - Summer 2022)

Back inside the ring-shaped tunnel, fluorescents trace a pale, 
lavender tint. Flashes spark the place like lightning--
                                                              
                                                                                          
A series of configurations of reflective acts without reflection
gathered in the walls themselves, not in the mind, 
along the floorboards and hallways, 
hovering upright in the lower quadrants of the visual field, 
developing density, exhibiting mass. 


A baseline unreality dances with the real from the confinement 
of the naming self. Confinement has a long memory, like prayer,
the same smoky fidelity peculiar to sleep, 
although prayer isn’t so much searching 
as it is just being still.


In the stillness, the sound of the city waking up to life 
matched to the waking city’s unique sound print 
reveals a voice signal unaccounted for. 
The signal is a wave flowing through our bodies. 
When sounded clear, it streams right through, lifesize, 
sonorant howl hardened into everyday acoustics, 
the guards cashing in each time it runs across 


free to continue plaiting
fresh data strands unimpeded,              ununiform with the near- 


daylight sweep so that we can access                                           information 
at a higher speed,                                                                   then become it.


Our thoughts are slow-navigating afterthoughts
tethered to events dissolving behind them.


Everything takes place before us                as if on a screen we watch. 
Memories pin us back every .4 seconds,            generate miles and miles 
                                                                                        of industrious erosion.


Nothing that we choose sits still.


An investigation has been launched and is now ongoing, 
persists in the mirage configured/ 


reconfigured in the eyes of statues we can’t escape 
around the room, a kind of watching that predates the watcher, 
each figure engaged in a meditation whose object has been forgotten 
but whose form remains intact.


Saying, how’s the thing felt when there’s no getting through in order to begin to feel at all?
Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra, 
life awaits the big homecoming 
cheering on


                        nothing but survival training 
with a deathwish: the music crumbles the alveoli 
on either side of the recruit’s heart--


Having come across the late familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
machinist, all that commands him does not exist.

Manifold     (Amsterdam Review - Spring 2023)

​With the hands close to the body, breathing evenly, 
the performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem 
but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity. 

In on the con– 

conscious. 
A near uroboric act.

Else take it in simply
by reading—reading as searching 
as the act that splits the mind and sets it in a state of conflict with itself,

pieced out in the only medium you experience,
the one crossing over from another…


                              … Here you appear and turn 
                     and turn again. Light comes through 
                        from a high window out of frame,
 
at the most quiet. All the dead poets you love stand in the empty yard. 
Their arteries are weighted octaves 
that truly receive time.

                                But all time already exists 
         in you—both past and present
held together at once by a now in process 
              yet the story remains something hunting for—to let go, 
                            let it be told,

                so tell it, let go of--
           you deliver the news to no one and know there can be none 
                               made of any substance.

Reincarnations of sense-objects 
seem whole to you 
in a world, 

a mind sectioned 
by arcs and aural circles 
where thoughts come at reality in light of a new survey, 
lines burst wide open around living grains of magic. Decrust--
and the breadcrumbs stick together. Fotomontaggi: a fresh loaf pops out.  

Mirror Language     (Amsterdam Review - Spring 2023)

​The poem grows a little every time you read it.

New centers of reality are rendered 
somewhere else away from the here and now
as in a painting.

                Far off, long ways you must stop, 

                       think over: all you 
forget a language, because 
           wrong, a language forgets you.   

Don’t words 
articulate  
               the sky and land in unchecked sliding
                                    fragments fusing a suspended 
state,

turn around, 
they disappear…

The wind rises: 
exuberance. 
Warren of polymer dots           

warp-bubble feathers fall upon the water.

Ghostdance vertigo. 

Did you not know 
in translation   
         
one becomes less than a person more than a person
ever was   
                             of whom neither remembers
                    nothing. 
​
Is this the limit to the poem?

Notes

​Convention as Means of Repression
Emotions are as dry as the salt mountain’s thirst - in reference to The Thirst of the Salt Mountain by Marin Sorescu
​
​Axes of Alliance
When the arrow line is active it creates divisions into imaginary planes — in reference to The Thinking Eye by Paul Klee

A Victory for the Sultan and the Queen of Spades 
We’d remember ourselves already flown – in reference to Indivisible by Laynie Browne

Manifold
The performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity – in reference to Charles Bernstein’s introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed 
Word
In on the con—conscious – in reference to In the Future by Rae Armantrout
Reading as searching as being the act – in reference to Leslie Scalapino’s introduction to Of Indigo and Saffron by Michael McClure 
The act that splits the mind and sets it in a state of conflict with itself – in reference to Eros the Bittersweet - An Essay by Anne Carson