B.K. Shapere
9 poems
Benjamin Shapere is writing here, now there. His new book Perfume Anthrax (Progress Print) is coming this year.
All along I rode.a
At the next greek calends When all the world will be content And you will be your own Heir. I mean this unironically You will be your own air. John Said you have to hear the air As if every one of them were Your vibrations cold train. A Young mask does not care to Do chores I easily perceive How much. I chair it anyhow Weathering it out under an Umbral umbrella it is neither Shabby nor hot wheat comes Here like cabbies where you Are. I don’t miss the city where Being is fundament, is agricultural I think we are turnips, and as I’ve gotten grayer my eyebrows Smile nonsense as you once As we once spoke on holidays The correction is absence Is a peasant’s leave of stay Sliding out suddenly from The compound gentry.
Nuclear potash as veteran benefit...
nuclear potash as veteran benefit in volume finding deep magnates this is weeping reduction as trace no longer the liver is noon now this ostensively rect spits bones copious wave water re-gills spiral terminologies of geocholeras worms become fish as they snuggle in to umbral alexandria angles meet me at the next exit this is not an entrance to mealiness this is rubric to lunar plexus a sybil shipwright in sun substitution it grazes me often how the light is so razor charlie
In a Motel
If they could chart up all the sex we had on a big graph, If you could just walk around, here and not laugh If you could emanate a blue light, a blue light not squeamishly pixelated the technical project would be technically completed, and we ourselves suddenly would blast off for vacation in Manila.
Spell semiotic
I wanted to I wanted to erm Lol so awkward to say it Even the lols were Even they were gallop polls Vaulted holes? Surrendered koan I mean coal surrendered born I Meant burned I said that again the King Fishing the forest copulating as they Say under the moon and out of Fear we had the sudden remembrance Of the printed grotto its images of Jove, and his multiplicity, always positive Lies. To the philologists I send Lies. I come to my senses Or was that a true proposition, The explanation of nest never interesting.
Geriatric Mississippi Cruise
The most silent of all lamps This long passage through song a short cut I blare my horn twenty time so all the dogs get shorn once This is a geese festival for twenty HAM radio-hours the load is good it is cerebral
xenotherapy
can you ejaculate an imagining immediately as if that had no concern for me here? burn up to the tune of the nine therapies for strangers Yo tambien había hablado mucho Perhaps no sabe donde está la niñita via earphones veritably distance airplaces the rapport between one and another translucent mirrors Suddenly being watched in the information surplus party ignorance being distributed in three distinct piles the first the horse or the vacuum of phases then reminiscences of court fifth count of the candle’s inconstant cauldron finally skip only in zip-ties until antlers grow tarnlike into the thinking alleyway of a peace-jacket so resolve the pointillism under your eyelids into sundered weaving tutorials tarry where money is attended: non-offending baseball games wherein he wept ambiently holding nothing’s hand, it wasn’t easy to navigate yandex to call in the damn ecce homo I had no idea you ran an online mobile I simply had to empty my empire I hardly stepped aside to disguise my orphans where is the war mainly? there shuttlecocks under oceans of new turnstiles watch for just the right moment throwing jade knucklebones my fleet watches the right stereo die and smile I can teach you no more young proteus so sorry I gave you that entelechy so here are the wires, understand you can’t now go finally without soldering.
Yes that was the
yes that was the first film mystic river balcony bar with that olive tapenade that could make you go musical universal aristocracy of everyone involved here here let’s get some applause for these criminals condemned to taxes and what else never mind a phrase i learned of an onion man in inland croatia has just come to me spoken into a church wall where the Id slops.
Brittle
The philological spasm was on my lips O.D. Brodie I tried to time the prophecy but there were augers there Were more, there were much more northern than pirates, viking horse- Heads and drunk for 3 days in thousands of designations Of insight. Of course you were there and around there Always I saw your swim-tights compound trill. Neither Bound and both gosh: neither bound and both got Feeler-down I couldn’t. Gosh fuck I couldn’t life you Down so suddenly and keep going northerly.
Lecture
There seemed to be three options. The first, contraction, in which the system would, before or after or at the same time as it deadlined or almost deadlined or began to deadline, balloon in on itself, like a deflated football, slough off its skin or its mass in real time in a way that would have been incredible or either really sad or really incredibly sad to see, and sink into its deadlock, its bare bones pulsating with the marrow-heart which had always been held too close or too much at a distance for any respectable kenning or reportable presentation or at the least, at the very least scientific measurement: and perhaps something then, at last, would begin to speak. The second was expansion, in a proliferation of itself the system would pass over the obstacles, merely empirical at the end of the day, and become more than we ever imagined. Within this option lay a two-fold danger: that it would accelerate beyond comprehension, and become a sort of trinitarian mystery without even the schema, triadic or otherwise, which we have always applied or been able to even the greatest enormities. This was not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the system kept its peace. What would an expansive peace look like? An endless rocketing in every direction? Of fire but the heart of silence in it? But what if the heart was too silent? What if this heat bred a work so cold that the system would dilate in fever, we ourselves sucked into the vacuum cleaner? At any rate, expansion seemed good, seemed the upward path even if in reality it was omnidirectional, or of infinite scope, perhaps it would give us, dialectically, an inner eye on what the first would reveal only apocalyptically: what if we could represent the heart indirectly, as though through laser-proof sunglasses, and toast our marshmallowing champaign glasses or Marlboros, as in a circle without a center whose circumference was everywhere, and all laugh heartily? There seemed to be a third: rectified equilibrium. This would be a kind of Confucian stabilization of the nodes, a revoking of both the instabilities necessary for setting off contraction and continuing the growth of the upward path or reddening spiralisation of the connective-disconnective edges. This would curve both the downward and the upward spirals into the figure of an open sphere, or circle, cooling the babbling magma or ossified chaosmos that is speculated by the first and second options to be at the heart of it all, respectively, and walking the middle road of peace respectably, like the Anglican church, we would stroll or bathe between two extremes which both in their execution posed potentially final solutions of barbarism or annihilation or even barbaric annihilation. Could we scan the surfaces of the system, then, in a detached topology provided we had a fireproof method for reciprocal and friendly (I mean distant and sea-like) observation: the rectification of heart-names? Would we then write a final haiku always or something? It’s hard to imagine it without relaxing a bit, like the idea of going to a sauna. At any rate, these are the three, or were they really, appearing on the screen just now, and we wanted to know, like kids at a candy store, if you pardon it all, couldn’t we have all three and in that case who’s papa?



this is what whats-his-name was talkin' about when he said you gotta "transcend the mere mastered algebra of your craft" good stuff!
ok bangers