"Excerpts"

I
t i
s con
tent an
d form dem
ocracy is so
me say lives say
others and is mi
staken for they bui
lt the capital walls whe
re !res burned and concen
trations of bones do suggest f
amilial structures so much like th
e tourism of our youth have all but be
come possible again this is a test of eme
rgency itself the tensile strength of whic
h is critical to our love stories and it break
s and monarchy is form but falsi!es content the
last time I saw you you weren't capitalizing your
name for reason you were struggling and now you have
a deathbed that changes temperature only with the passi
ng fate of weather we is struggling to exist despite images
that compare an event to a beetle on its back or a "y whose w
ings were pulled o# while her parents were at school learning t
o incorporate form and experience and blame the media for the de
I
do
esn't
mean t
o set out
a thesis the
re to leave a kern
el of truth in m
edia res the train s
tation the momentary
is awash with hypotheses
derelictions of the steel
beams holding !ve hundred
and eleven tons taken for g
ranted ceilings are no exception to
the rule of law suicide must be i
llegal though I doesn't believe in sui
cide they have never seen it outside of t
he photographic negative the ice cream s
ocial hasn't melted away let us be clear it
was tortured and burned with napalm and kicked w
hile on !re if love can survive a marriage can democrac
y survive a revolution a revolutionary voyeurism hovers jus
t above this page as if I is daring you to continue reading to pu
sh through claims of hypocrisy like millions of Christians I condemn
I
n re
cent y
ears disco
veries in physi
cs and cosmolo
gy have led a nu
mber of scientists to
conclude that my univer
se may be one among many th
at the afternoon run into her gran
dparents' barn where sun re!ected
o" of particles tossed into the must
was just one among many of the respects
I gained for his father when he slapped his
own brother and said no one speaks to my wife
that way was among one of the many or the wome
n who live in my neighborhood whose face she had shi
elded with the remnants of last week's plastic shopping
bag tucked into her hood were one among many or the pol
ice o#cer's handgun rusted from years of non-use was amon
g one of the many a belief in the goodness of all human beings
at birth was among one of many the disorder whereby I could not
focus on a larger picture hovering just in front of the visual noise wa
s one among many of the $ngers crossed behind her back at the school
I
n t
he se
nse tha
t snow is
rapacious I i
s tending to a w
ish that she stoke
s with militia newslet
ter typeface and the go
d in between channels the
re is a stake in the truth expe
riments we con!rm our beliefs wi
th turn out false on occasion and this
adds oil to the blood in the sense that s
now is ice on micro and ice is storm on mac
ro for instance this word is simply part of the b
ell curve the card catalog entry for love has becom
e obsolete deleted by a growing need for speech ex
periments that con!rm our amorphous intuition that sh
e will be an ex-senator one day that wait will be the money
of the future and we shall each be attendant to its will paus
e for a moment and be silent for the card catalog entry on death
of loved ones in the metaphoric sense can what was once written o
n that paper card with which we now stoke the !re have been worse than
I
nfo
rmati
on muti
lated tha
t him perc
eption twiste
d back upon its
elf thousands of
times like the stee
l of a samurai's blad
e I feels like the symp
athy should fall on the s
ide of the victim's family
I is in love with every fam
ily member of the workers w
ho toiled to make your handgun
if I doesn't connect objects in terms
of love your attention will most certa
inly wane I is guilty of this my self when meet
ing something beautiful loves it so that I might no
t leave it behind like tootsie rolls dropped out of an overlarge
parka pocket on January 14 of last year hurt is the building blocks of love
into a wiretap say my name say my name when no self is around you say baby I love yo
u as if it means anything independent of us foreign policy in the lowercase sense which ee
I
is t
rying
to resis
t the
rhythm in
our head the
alternative to
rhyme the resist
ance in every head has blo
ated the far o! radio stat
ions metaphorically call out for
revival or a return to the use of revolutio
n in the sense of returning to a sense
to sense itself punctured and anomalous contained or receiv
ed on the date in question my concept of cell phone was of
f thinking that if the truth could just be whispered in one
end it would exponentiate instead Ii s the tower a membrane unive
rse permeated by existences non-existences anti-existences the exist
entialism of my youth becoming mutated by the essentialist hope of my
adult vocabulary and there stands Jesus the cliché whose meaning has died for ou
r sins a book of psalms printed as the serial number of each server whose name we
must not utter and so we have approximations oh how long his death has been far long
er than His far more expansive has the image of His death been than the event itself and
we as little lambs shall choose his adventure the image of our death long preceding events
I
t c
ame t
o I as a
dream slee
ping while out
side men dressed an
achronistically in mi
litary uniforms dumped co
al out of cars as a form prot
est that does not matter cannot
create meaning for himself even quar
ters left on the railroad track are rem
iniscent of Dali climbing a tree is Goy
a-derived every suicide is ripped o! of a
backwards record it was originality she sou
ght when she decided to rob the K-Mart pharmacy ov
er at the shopping village and pile the loot into
an in"atable raft tethered to the tree he climbed as a
child with initials carved and everything the form of
love nothing the content building permits sedimenta
tion provides a means of survival weeks of unusual weat
her leads to conversation amongst participants in the Gu
lf Stream I cannot force us into punctuation a means of de#n
ition perhaps the most important of which is Da Capo al #ne
I
f t
he co
nvex mi
rror is p
laced in the
corner of the
store it takes o
n a wider ability t
o portray the self I
has moved beyond this
anachronism to the secu
rity camera a conceit that di
storts not the the representati
on but rather the color and something
about the way objects move everythin
g movement becomes more !uid when con
strained by a frame and stored on a hard
drive I has been digitized so many times th
at we can't even count to a billion before we d
ie I dares you reader to try what you will have lost
by pursuing some logistical curiosity such as an
individual under stress yet simultaneously created by histo
ries like water through the gills of a shark that must continuo
sly be in movement to preserve life my analysis assumesn o externalities
I
nsa
nity d
efense i
nsanity de
fense I can'
t step in the sam
e phrase twice eve
ry break splits under
standing inde!nitely I l
imits his weekly travel re
lative to the form gas prices t
he content visiting his father to talk
about bodybuilding the form photography t
he content polis clears its throat and waits
to speak inde!nitely understanding limi
ts imagine the death of I becoming an index pr
escription washing over you like rain on we d
ance conclusion to the end of love push him o" a cli"
stand at attention for the rest of your life if only money
could buy consciousness if collage made a coherent imag
e each !lm is the sum of its frames the product of velocity a
nd confusion perhaps maximizing our experiences would lead
to clarity perhaps violently conforming to this structure is the on
ly tool at our disposal whose function is destroying the master's ho
I
ca
n !n
d meanin
g in momen
ts only when
they removed th
e mountaintop did
they see it was full
of individual rocks th
ey couldn't discern from
simple observation whether the
rocks had always been or whethe
r the force of dynamite had de!ned t
hem as individuals as a teenager I becam
e an anarchist and voted for Reagan as a f
our-year-old she became aware of death while l
istening to Huey Lewis sing there ain't no
living in a perfect world try to remember and un
derstand two radical actions in seas of information
we learn to evaporate solutions so that liquidity becomes
separate from the elemental nature of our being we are als
o color sound and movement I has trouble counting in publ
ic I gets distracted by ugliness I had a dream I was a police o"ce
r and it didn't feel that bad it felt kind of good to see what weight
I
ca
n't
put a
!nger on
whom is sp
eaking right n
ow in the bustlin
g train station nor ca
n I !nd a place to dis
card this worn out perso
nality that she has been using
for the seven or eight crawli
ng years since we last spoke
about terror and lips trembling a
nd then melded the two while Viva
ldi played as my ringtone I feels like
she has said that seven billion times wi
th only slightly varying results and goddamn wo
n't leave my head in the middle of church the way tha
t terror won't leave my head when I'm holding hands wi
th you in Target while simultaneously tall grasses are still
being blown apart in Indo-China and you are still checking yo
ur answering machine hoping for an apology from my Kissinger
disposition we stand parting ways in a station you is all around I
I
f b
eauty
happens
in the mi
ddle of a f
orest and I i
s not there to s
ee and it still ex
ists this must be an
epoch of unrelenting
elegy I has trouble not
writing about cars or de
spair in each poem stemming
from an anxiety that is usi
ng too many inde!nite articles
in her eulogy the casket is a bra
nd you had never heard of something s
acred that receives no television advertise
ments perhaps these too are hidden away in
the hypothetical forest where we are afraid t
o take our shoes o" bullet casings lie there the
mouse blood sprays into the air when they are p
ulverized by machinery and can produce hantavirus
which can spread globally even if beauty is not around
I
raq
smel
ls like
the fake
cookie I ha
d when I was fo
ur it was cookie-s
cented I put it in a
fake oven and fed it to
his relatives who were co
ncerned about gender-speci!city
and murder always murder just outsid
e the window a face is leering the aut
hor is not the one responsible for enca
sing homicide in a crystal box she is simply a
one-way mirror on each end of the co"n tryi
ng to capture death through in!nite re#ection a
fractal economy of life emerges if one compiles e
ach moment gathered together like those leaveso r
the wind knocked out of your lungs on a root at the
bottom of the pile it is hard to represent something as l
arge as a country and all of the blood within its borders that
no one ever sees until a cut until forty-!ve hundred o"cers sh
ow up at an intersection to punctuate a sentence that has been re
I
se
es be
lief in
God on a s
pectrum never
has it been great
er than the night s
he got healed and was
laid on the ballroom carp
et for hours until hotel se
curity removed her from the pre
mises that duality between faith
and hotel is central to existence we can
lie on the ground full of certainty u
ntil the moment I lies in the icy middle of
Fifth Avenue before the war began I fell in lov
e with form and content and futility in all its various
genres spreads itself thinly across the rutted sheet of
ice that Winter has packed onto concrete bounded by si
dewalks designed to channel liquid into storm drains bu
t they cannot account for its hardening sediment most often refe
rs to material within a liquid but at times the chill of atmosphere get
s tired of technical language and must begin using words like lust antdo
gather and the !ow of information from mouths begins to crystalize it beg

Click to read: Excerpts