Forthcoming in Vestiges_04: Aphasia
0.
Prison
—
the pervasiveness of penology
—
to be inside a thing and unable/unwilling to leave
—
some involuntary but most to varying degrees riding it
—
or climbing its walls
—
the glass mountain and relation to the practice of the open that happens along the curvature of stop or starts or stops start
—
“some days you only want to live once”
—
a coast of Yumalantis
—
probably Georgia
—
off the wingtip shrouded in silence.
9.
Forget the head.
Paint a portrait of the dead.
Paint a portrait of the mind.
Forget the mind.
Paint a portrait of feet based on non-Euclidean anomalies like time
—
13.
Even in some Havana bars you can’t smoke meaning that’s done or soon
—
so to come to the world’s end and be told no
—
which means I am near totally out of it narrowing in my mid 50s like a gun scope aimed at a mean small cadre of devolutionaries
—
though I so appreciate the care with which she pours this chump tourist a mojito his drink of choice six hours into Cuba with Kim and the girls and Raphael’s
—
the eight of us
—
and eleven days like the lip Lorca sensed
—
(dark sound viz. “…a mysterious power that everyone feels but that no philosopher has explained” [Goethe on Paganini?])
—
but hard to feel with super-trash Spanish music on the hi-fi and video of a pool scene of lightly clothed people in the water and under showers at a staged fiasco
—
the main character in Capri pants totally vapid
—
and then swinging around the 20 or so people here totally bored
—
Che’d be totally disgusted
—
but what would he do now
—
only the howl survives.
14.
How to fold what is happening into rhyme
—
how to fold rhyme into what is happening?
The two kiss but never touch
—
asymptote (Omar’s poetics)
—
except ahead at the pervasive fold invisible except as sound
—
89.
Quiet across the lake a hawk sways above
—
I imagine through distant sound the road and all that’s on it
—
the strata and stratums as we are stacked the way a single strand of carbon provides voltage from the wave pattern of a single atom a ghost scan slices through all our impressions of each other
—
skinriders together in our listening together in a car to what we can on the radio
—
windows down going to the airport
—
to pick another of our kin in this jalopy in the back of up
—
my head half out the window mouth open watching the road behind me in the rearview
—
and the sun in my face
—
and thought this is my face
—
and in interconnections complicated the wires light crosses so hard to tell where we are going
—
as most Yumas now walk with cell phones wired or wireless to ears like Satan disguised as a frog at one of Eve’s
—
so is this wave of the data wand a Pythonian one?
It’s night and I hear the coyotes on the ridge
—
or who knows the way their cries fill the bowl around the lake a god once looked down on without knowing it was there
—
the deep silences between their calls and barks shaped like a sneer or irrefutable
—
the head of my cock is tipped in poison.
132.
The eye at the center of the pyramid of light isn’t a panopticon because it winks.
We live in the simulacrum of a wink past which there is nothing to communicate just enjoin
—
opening and closing and periodically convulsing
—
but never touching what is through the ears to the heart into space into vanishing time the sum of all we sway
—
like remembering dancing
—
we speak with words but listen with one body
—
sensation becomes speech as eminent
—
as the presence of the future
—
that must respond to pieces of you to move inside the lattice structure rhyme
—
we are all one language there are no words for of.
133.
In the deepest listening we can be each other’s rhymes
—
134.
To give back to the world what I heard to sit with nothing on my mind
—
among the walls of stacked wood each piece a story or a map of a journey though time
—
as sculpture of flow the way a log splits and way a wall rests
—
the painting of shatter
—
as in ear both open to the sound silence wakes enough room to watch a fly walk across leaves and then
—
zap
—
describing the air as also of flow
—
and each connect and grow inside us drunk in the hum knowing it our form.
151.
It’s all comes clear to me.
Life is a dash between two trees two points mark
—
between two dates
—
a flight astride a bear pitching side to side night and day like Omar auguring
—
in the first shadow of the coup d’état already living past the blast of the collapse of America or at least a long while breathless trying to absorb the punch of Putin having pulled off a spycraft masterpiece installing a president that even as it explodes will leave cruel interstitial carnage pulling out not only a hook from the stomach of our country run by his asset but also
—
inside a nation founded on principal that all reality is created equal
—
its guts
—
propounded by an asymmetrical or outright distorted reverb reality as the system vomits its anus at least for now
—
the twenty-eighth of April running for or from the onion man
—
he’s going to make you cry
—
he’ll bring tears to your eyes
—
moving near term faster than we can react
—
Boyd taught.
157.
But is there possibly responsibility on the part of poetry for its attractive course pursuing a path of multiplying fragmentary and/or discontinuous discourse
—
I mean it’s all good to queer our relationship to language as the bibles close behind us and out ahead the nakedness of awareness opens
—
at which point no maps but also much dwells and elaborates within words a superimposition that’s surrendered a measurable world
—
let alone universe
—
is
—
is a cultural tactic which with headphones in our heads the images splash up harder to fix
—
again based on the supposition that the wasteland grows
—
and now two feet away in close orbit to our hippocampus almost all the surplus consciousness allotted each us is sucked and drowned and Earth disappears into shadow
—
like late at night with cigars with Angel and Mariano on the beach Omar at the end of the light stripped and leapt off the playa to swim into its heart this is make of the ways of
—
as this is a balancing way of decisions and actions and within which recombinations are infinite
—
and we make so much of a life when the infinite other alternative ways are floating
—
gazing with head above water
—
on the lights on shore
—
on us
—
in the mouth of space
—
with the sea at his back a smudge of man.
158.
Inherently the hand is tragic like a mask or through treetops the wind in the words I form around my darkness.
As she left the room I saw her slip a chess piece into her pocket.
I don’t want to leave this cave.
159.
Hypocrisy
—
160.
The totality of space and totality of time are nothing to the distance I am always from you or they are the same as Pluto is from me digging away away a hole waiting to hit a rock that I will throw across a field of light on a late spring afternoon in the year of our lord zero
—
or “war” for lord toward the edge of which the necks of the boundaries of our human realm bend
—
and most against the liberal mind including my own fat lazy white junkie one some people of this epoch out of principal would chop open to see what’s inside
—
as though you could swim through this page your eyes in mine
—
to the only place left to hide the roots of this hydrangea embracing silence for.
161.
I feel the writing come over me
—
like a dawn sky
—
I draw around my breathing in its scent a modest breeze blowing over things
—
an infinite cantilevered bridge to nowhere that can be found each time you look to nowhere that can be sound
—
envisioning war and humanity could’ve made it over
—
inside a clearing in the woods
—
but instead we remain rainbows enmeshed in concept and not the contemplation of each moment as a gold flake
—
even down hard in sorrow or hunger or loneliness that is the threshold entering the view
—
the cat inside me still as a puddle left by rain.
162.
The heart’s a monstrous uncanny
—
and sufficient
—
instrument of repetitions
—
163.
What we want beyond all our wants is peace to enact them
—
in a massive Blue Mountains summer rain among cats hovering in a sound we can never name
—
and see hovering beyond what sound they can never
—
like a thud broken into intervals like sighs
—
surround
—
against a white sky in the evening
—
as I feel my heart open on the altar of the state
—
as every thought has the taste of crime
—
as the stone floor under my feet might feel to the upside-down man dangling over a precipice
—
and be to an Alpha Centaurian or now
—
listening to a bird in the forest
—
paradise the sages explore like the fractured story of beginning or ending when there is no more than grinning
—
a few teeth missing eye to the gap in the wall of our believing there is any
—
but I am thinking as the sun breaks itself apart and walks off with a stranger
—
like a fist falling open inside the hole souls gather and drink darkness like water moccasins from
—
your eyes floating here
—
swallowing it all
—
world language knit
—
198.
Belief in witchcraft is common in the rural areas where like getting drunk and laid while dancing is one of the freedoms
—
a fissure in the world the lizard crawls into and hides as the bombs and seas catch fire
—
as at any moment they’re apt
—
or at any moment you pay attention “baffling combustions” everywhere words hang
—
as still as these moments in the crack
—
the polis is blind
—
and breath has eyes and each eye a cave in which some meats hang on lines to cure and dry
—
and the sound that fills them each a cathedral the geckos call to each other
—
the polis is blind
—
201.
Because the mind is a rhyming machine and as big or small as you want it to be
—
as it has no limits because consciousness never had or will have or won’t have a beginning or end but like a continuum we dip in and out no center of what is said
—
there is no beyond
—
to plumb or get
—
yet it gets you if you let it go blow a hole in the back of your head the size of a semi kicking up gravel on a steep grade just making the turn past your face on a windswept afternoon in the mountains
—
your heart jackhammering beats down a road a door that’s always open.
211.
Attention
+
sensation
=
presence
—
and if word is flesh we speak it to build a periodic table out of
—
and face what we are
—
all names of things and places that are missing
—
from what can be heard we have entered nowhere from
—
but which there is no turning aside or back or at all but face now from
—
to point to the prism we sing to infinity tenderly entering the precinct “kind”
—
on a moonlit lake on a moonlit pony in the nose cone of the painted story
—
kneeling in bed and thinking we are self-duplicating endlessly a flowering figure
—
218.
You can tell the shape of a person’s head by the sound of the voice coming out of it
—
but what about the dead
—
the dull numb thud
—
spots of thoughts that trail around by their echo us
—
and the whole of disposition the turning of a screw clockwise in our head to bore out
—
a mouth
—
escape
—
inhabit
—
—
Sam Truitt is the author of the ten books in the Vertical Elegies series, including Heresway (MadHat Press, 2018), Dick: A Vertical Elegy (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2014), Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete (Station Hill Press, 2011), Vertical Elegies: Three Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), Vertical Elegies 5: The Section (University of Georgia Press, 2003), and Anamorphosis Eisenhower (Lost Roads Press, 1998). He is the co-editor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. He is director of Station Hill Press and lives in Woodstock, NY.