Three Apps

#1647

She told me I love boy/girl poems, love
scenes in them based on a deep degeneracy
inherited from too much heat around my
genitals, as manifest in tangents I could only
see if I was getting laid. She told me this as
I was getting laid in such a way that any notion

of telling was subsumed in an ass as stately as
a mansion, which I filled with the liquid
cobwebs of my imagination. There was grass
outside being smoked in a car in which another
boy/girl scenario played out in a brunette giving
a fine performance of Bolero in her movements,

and I immediately flashed back to the deep
genitals of my first girlfriend and the way she
used to implore God’s help at certain moments,
who was certainly watching this. That’s it, that’s
the whole spiel I have on boy/girl poems and
why they are hated by the dry dunces who love them.


#1511

steps up to my flat, on
which we sat, tongues
flailed like fins, on sea
of you, not me, but we
thought (or I thought)
there'd be reprieve in
between yours, for us
to combine, you were
terribly vicious, this is
our end (here, amidst
I and I), does she even
remember this, obscure
island, lost in Atlantis?


#1617

Philosophy says that poets want to lose.
What are conditions of losing: to whom?
The conditions (to whom they concern, to

unrepresented phantoms, mostly) are colors,
which, to transcribe, require a solid core of
nebulous necromancy which philosophy calls

(for its own poetic reasons) "loss." I took this
from one strictly (which necessitated looseness
towards me) for himself, took several median

blended colors and painted a razor on the roof
of a red building. Then I fell off. But I lived.

Apps in Jacket 40, Pirene's Fountain

I realize these posts are becoming slightly redundant, but nonetheless...

I have some Apps, including 1345, up in Jacket 40.

And Apps in Pirene's Fountain. Many thanks to the editors.

Reading from the Apps at the Eris Temple. 

Apps in moria poetry, Great Works

More Apps are up in moria poetry, and Great Works.

Many thanks to the editors.

Botanical Gardens being one of the Great Works in Montreal. 

Break for a Week/Two Apps

I'm still recovering from completing the manuscript Apparition Poems in a big burst. There are still many Apps that need to be published, and are looking for homes. I've decided to take a week's vacation from blogging, as I work on a new essay for Otoliths about the Philly Free School at the Highwire Gallery.  I thought as a "quick fix," I'd post two new Apps.

#1580

"Waiting for the heavens to fall,
what can I do with this call," this
asinine pop song was written by
me in a dream of you where you
called me (obviously), took to be
already granted what I haven't
given to you yet, but experience,
my love, is the only thing worth
giving, and I've got that from
you in spades, so when heaven
falls we'll catch it, lay it between
our sheets, dirty as they must be—

#1557

Since you are a scorpion
that stings herself to death,
after so many stings, redness
never leaves my joints, I feel
zilch. I call this your passionate
time, as I have no intent of
tempting the scorpion again.
I've seen nests for you all over
Philly, from Front Street right
up to Baltimore, and you know
what? You might finally get the
death you want. A sultry night,
desert all around, legs akimbo.

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Here (as of later '10) is the book Apparition Poems placed in The Poetry Library at Southbank Centre, London. Thanks again to Chris McCabe.

Here, also, is the completed manuscript of Apparition Poems, as was put into book pdf form and then published in print by Blazevox in June 2010. 

Apparition Poems

#1596

I was talking to a dude
I knew from school, I
said, “I see the levels
from sleeping with
psychopaths, that’s
how I get them,” levels
were (I meant) places
between souls where
spaces open for metaphor,
“but when I carry them
over to my bed, every
psychopath levels me.”


#1605

This killer wears a tight
black shirt, glasses. There
are noises of digging happening
from the bathroom, she’s in
bed, hands over her mouth,
frozen upset. Then, the mirror
is dug through, his face appears
in a wall with a square cut in it.
The face is there, hovers there,
just sits, it has the promise of
action that kills. This is the
tableau I watch every time
I’m in the bathroom while
she’s in bed. And smile.


#1625

The "I" that writes cannot be
(he told us, perched on a hill of
flowers which he crushed, but, of
course, incompletely, and not all of
them at once) strictly for-itself as it
has no substance: a student walked

up, pricked his forearm (the back side
of it) with a small razor, he cringed but
only briefly, leaning forward so that a
row of buttercups doused him yellow.
The "I" that writes has a relationship
that is very much for itself, but it has

a strictly independent existence, so that
what constitutes a human "I" has no
meaning for it. Now, you need to know
this: I was not the student with the razor,
but I supplied the razor to the student
that cut the professor's forearm, but you

will never know how I got it, or why.

App 1613 on PFS Post

I have decided to "go meta" and place App 1613 on PFS Post. 

                        Tangentially, App 2044, also, on PFS Post. 

                                          App 1613 on mp3.

Apps on PennSound

Proudly, recordings of me reading from my Apps are now up on PennSound, and in four segments: 1, 2, 3, and 4, or my Author Page. Recorded at the Eris Temple. Thanks again to Matt and to PennSound.

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As of February 2017, here, also, are the Cheltenham Elegies on PennSound. 

The many levels of Kristen Orser

Kristen Orser’s Folded Into Your Midwestern Thunderstorm is just out from Greying Ghost Press. It is a chap that, in many ways, extends the multi-leveled, multi-layered approach I noted in Orser's earlier work. Orser displays a penchant for “doubling,” playing semantic games with phrases which take on multiple, simultaneous meanings. The prolific way Orser deposits these doubles or triple meaning phrases throughout the chap makes Folded a head-spinning, hallucinogenic experience. Rather than pursue a minute analysis, it might be wise just to jump in at the deep end with one of the poems. This one is called Recently, The Fence:

A bit scary to spoon in someone’s mouth,
             the marrow of anyone. We keep

   the birthday party a secret:     Difficult
   to completely look like moon

   when Mother is asking the shape—

   A symbolic posture:     The robin
   is a story of existence.  My lower garments.

             I mean, I haven’t paid attention
             to rhyme recognition.   Which memory was first,

             the chestnut or the blue egg?           Winter

     is half measure. From your ribcage
     to your middle thigh, there’s a kind of radio silence.

              Decidedly unsayable—

                          The mouth opens,
                          has limitation. 

The word games here are extremely sensual and intense. The first phrases alone (“A bit scary to spoon in someone’s mouth”) ricochet in several different directions. “Spooning in someone’s mouth” evokes a lover actually giving his/her mate a taste of something; there is also the unlikely image of two lovers spooning in a third person’s mouth. There’s a pun on the more graphic/literal/gutter-minded “spooge,” which alters the perspective of the poem drastically. At this point, directly in the first line, the reader must choose from a plethora of meanings, or make the tricky decision to engage all the levels at once. The next, characteristically mind-bending Kristen Orser moment in this poem is “We keep/ the birthday party a secret.” For the informed reader, “birthday party” immediately triples: “birthday party” could be a literal birthday party, or a sexual encounter (as in, two lovers in their birthday suits). The doublings and triplings in Orser’s chap are phantasmagoric, and also amusing. Orser manifests a unique sensibility, and the chap is magnified, gravitas-wise, with each re-reading, even as the mood is comparatively light. Like fellow Mid-Westerner Kristy Bowen, she melds the hyper-sexual with the bizarre. I recommend this chap to anyone with an interest in sex, or word-games, or both (apart or together).

Apparition Poem #1519

She says she
wants babies

from me, she
sends this to

me, nudging
my body in a

straight line I
recognize for

its blue streak,
I’ll give her a

baby, I say, it’s
part of a plan,

indecipherable—

Apparition Poem #555

#555

Wood-floored bar on Rue St. Catharine—
you danced, I sat, soused as Herod,
sipped vodka tonic, endless bland
medley belting out of the jukebox—
you smiling, I occupied keeping you happy,
un-frazzled— suddenly sounds behind us,
the bar wasn't crowded & a patron
(rakish, whiskey-flecked big mouth)
lifted a forefinger at beer-bellied
bartender bitching back, soon a real
fight, violence in quiet midnight,
I, scared, got you out of there

but you had to dance, you said,
had to dance so we paved Plateau, tense steps,
found nothing, you started crying & stamping
your feet like a child, I grabbed you & dragged
you back to our room you stripped, curled
into fetal position, beat your fists against
the mattress, in this way you danced
through the night, dozed & woke ready for more—



More Apps (including 1345) will be coming out in Jacket Magazine sometime this spring.

Apparition Poem #1180

I went with her on
a daytrip inside her
head; there were kids’
toys, storybooks, red
monsters, fire trucks,
silver streaks, stairs,
rooms everywhere, it
was a funhouse, but
in each mirror she
looked different, and
I couldn’t see myself—

Essay in The Argotist: "On the Necessity of Bad Reviews"

Jeffrey Side has published a new essay of mine, On the Necessity of Bad Reviews, in The Argotist Online.

Also in The Argotist Online; an interview with me, as editor of P.F.S. Post, on Net publishing.

To Jeffrey, many thanks.

Apps for Winter

#1649

Oh you guys, you guys are tough.
I came here to write about some
thing, but now that I came, I can’t
come to a decision about what I

came for. What? You said I can’t
do this? You said it’s not possible
because it’s a violation and not a
moving one? It’s true, you guys

are tough. You know I have tried,
at different times, to please you in
little ways, but this one time I had
this student that was giving me head

and she stopped in the middle to tell
me that I had good taste and you had
bad taste, and I’ll admit it, I believed
her. She was your student too, maybe

you’ve seen her around. She’s the one
with the scarves and the jewelry and
the jewels and the courtesy to give the
teachers head who deserve it. Do you?


#1603

"Be careful what you handle,"
I told her, "you can get to me
even if you touch another," it
happened in an office shaped
like the foyer of a huge hovel,
built of mud, etchings of bugs
on the wall, perfect perverse
kids scampering among clods.

"You know what I want, and
how I can get it," she replied,
as she took another out, put
me in, but only inside a brain
used amiss to find a level that,
shaped like a foyer, was past
office, into brick, sans mud.


#1341

Secrets whispered behind us
have a cheapness to bind us
to liquors, but may blind us
to possibilities of what deep
secrets are lost in pursuit of
an ultimate drunkenness that
reflects off surfaces like dead
fishes at the bottom of filthy
rivers— what goes up most is
just the imperviousness gained
by walking down streets, tipsy,
which I did as I said this to her,
over the Schuylkill, two fishes.


#1488

liquor store, linoleum
floor, wine she chose
            was always deep red,
            dark, bitter aftertaste,
            unlike her bare torso,
                       which has in it
                       all that ever was
                       of drunkenness—
to miss someone terribly,
to both still be in love, as
she severs things because
            she thinks she must—
            exquisite torture, it's
            a different bare torso,
(my own) that's incarnadine—

Posit: 2 editions

Posit, print chap pdf and e-chap, as a first edition, 2007, from Dusie Press. 

The Posit Trilogy, Argotist Online e-book, 2017, boasts the second edition of Posit. 

Apparition Poem #1335

#1335

terse as this is, it is
given to us in bits
carelessly shorn
from rocky slopes,
of this I can only
say nothing comes
with things built in,
it’s always sharp edges,
crevices, crags, precipice,
abrupt plunges into “wants,”
what subsists between us
happens in canyons lined
in blue waters where this
slides down to a dense
bottom, I can’t retrieve
you twice in the same
way, it must be terse
because real is terse,
tense because it’s so
frail, pine cones held
in a child’s hand, snapped.


P.S. A new interview with me on Goss 183.

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Apparition Poem #1571, from Cricket Online Review 6, extends, illuminates this meta-terrain.

New in The Argotist Online

Several of my new Apparition Poems (more added in '17) have just come out in The Argotist Online, the excellent online UK journal edited by Jeffrey Side. Thanks to Jeffrey, who has a new piece in PFS Post.

Apparition Poem #565

#565

Battle for deliverance,
struggle for salvation,
Christ's passion condensed
into ten fluid seconds,
sections of flesh leaving,
sense of "Geist" overhead.
Yet you've shrunk before
Romance into "post-
everything entropy," so
even the love of one's
life becomes another show,
rigged like a government's
actions, glommed onto
deadly ennui. Christ.

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Earlier Apparition Poems, from Beams/Jacket 31, in The & Now Awards Anthology: The Best Innovative Writing, from Lake Forest College Press, in conjunction with Northwestern University Press. And being taught at the University of Oregon by John Witte.

The White Album: 2 editions

The original 2009 Ungovernable Press edition of The White Album.

The 2018 emended 2nd edition of The White Album from Eratio Editions. 

Apparition Poem #1223

She was seated at a desk,

giving a dramatic speech
(pronounced with acidic
bitterness), glaring at me,
I was punching a telephone,
trying to reach Dominique,
who had given me a phony
number, while two young,
androgynous sprites made
love in a chair, Leonard
joined my committee—

she was seated at a desk,
her voice rose to a pitch I
couldn’t tolerate, but also
it brought me to the verge
of orgasm, because she was
sucking myself out of me,
doing it psychically, when
I woke up, she was updating
her Face about lost sleep—

Apparition Poem #1553

I see her head, not yours,
on my pillow, dear, but I
don’t really see either one
of you except as you were
when you had no interest
in my pillows: isn’t it sad?