A DISPATCH FROM DEATH ISLAND
The dial is unsure as the one, urgent, comes through
precise in( andbetween ! !)
each moment yet hopeless in whole
for any shape but shapeless
as the fingers at the knobs
have, too, established language,
so speaks the statics out
in all colors sings the fingers:
pink, white, brown, and
there is blue, violet, grey,
and velvet too ( whoknew ? !)
to say nothing of staccatos,
precision jerks, or slower motions
with simpler modeling,
& so on etc. i.e. what’s gestural.
—But what exactly was it( the‘one’ …? ?)
came ‘through’ this muddled tumult
of twiddling thumbs —And a nascent grammar
is the point! by mutual possession and
interanimation of machine and hand emerges,
there! right there! a signal( notthroughbut ) of
the noise comes out, and it has meaning
to decode —or to make, you mean,
and meanwhile the dispatch lies dead
beneath, and I’ll tell you what:
I’ve had just about enough of this
speculative bull, and I’m sick to death of
being way out here just you and me.
**
WEDNESDAY NIGHT MUSIC AT TANGIBLE BOOKS
If there are many flowers, the lilacs c’mon strong,
but there weren’t any, ever,
just a bunch of letters
in some or another bundle, many
not even indexed to anything you could see.
That is in fact most. Maybe, in fact, all.
With listlessness so ever present
and so unearned overhead these iliac plains
we are so thoroughly caught up in,
what is there to do with this
life so awful chthonic,
but get out of our own groins and navels
and on to bluer skies, less
haggard landscapes higher
up?
—But who has strength for
a will so hefty as to
ward off all that kneejerk abstract
come straight from our fundament
to our minds, direct, in these dark times
which spurn, of what has worth,
it all on our behalf?
asks a voice
from afore a nice evening spent
a part of some sparse audience
amid the dust, across from music.
Now is different. Now I see:
ember (undying) beneath the steam,
concrete, that
in the gap between people,
and a solitary ballasting fact
(heedless of and having everything
to do with us)
of the unbroken daisy chain
of personal transmissions
of what exceeds all
sputtered graspings at
(which are forever stalling,
failing, for want of better tongue or
piece of paper)
of this
(which must be, which will continue,
which can be in part construed as, when heavy compressed,
when said, when crude,
when this communication is what culture is
(it is): the beyond and after of the horizons
the daisy chain falls back and onward into).
Then again, often, I am thinking,
and have a lot I think I want to say.
Often what it is is: I wrote a poem once.
**
HMBURGER MN, OR: THE HEART
“Hmburger mn, coc ure & wi
rom moun o ooe eh ripping come
etchup out hi hmburger woun”
said my keyboard, whose home row
recently was broke,
So much the same as hmburger mn,
so weep the little children
of his sad fate.
I can smell the grease from here:
putrescence, fat drips
decohering as ersatz:
sweat, tears. Anything of use
sloughed off in
some inferno,
(perfect broast
on their backs)
as if the black skins
of half chickens
at Pollo Express,
Transmuted to some poor creature
come to in the instant it
must give up the ghost.
Also the heart
so pink in the flesh,
and so weak,
as a weeping infant.
In xerox: all gray,
dry. This heart of mine.
At home, against the news
it says: Love is
an ugly riddle.
But on the bus sometimes,
I think it’s not so right,
or: it is but
I’ve solved it,
simple,
after all this time.
To think: love,
a person among people,
on the bus sometimes.
**
CLASSIC JOKE
Did you hear the one about
?
What about the one above?
I heard another, positioned
some other
way near the door, maybe,
“bouta dip”
was the general mood
then, with it, as it were,
but what of it I heard I
can’t quite call up to
mind right now.
Anyway enough with these fucking
jokes, let’s get
serious, and down to business,
let’s have the courage
to face the world and today
with our talking full of points,
our letters wan little, pallid
pale little things, actual
-ized in their inner reaching in
-to naught but pasteboard masks,
but pointers: to something
other than themselves
is all what is important,
let’s us all be
adults out loud, let’s copy our letters
all their smallness, those fair transparencies.
Look, I mean, behind you’s
so important; look behind:
the whole world.
**
(SCENE: THE PERSONALS SECTION)
BE MY MIRER
Gots to be: selcouth, nigh inenarrable,
a tongue that love fennel & stay fecund with taste,
metaphor-burdened,
& out-of-there view: half-lost but that ain’t news, ain’t no
harbinger of adriftness from the standard rout
like a case of metaphysical pica, mind all insular, pied
on itself, type of mind like NO entry posted,
but over there the side door swinging a smidge,
hopes of a flock glimmers in
from far off,
then say to them: brighten this inside,
inoculate me, gimme your antique cure.
— One-of-a-Kind Dime
DEAR DIME,
Ain’t no self-styled bodhisattva coming possible
in these dharmic hinterlands, hence the ego attachments
like: I been knew intrinsic truths; I been my own chief persecutor;
I done trembled before death; I stay on that ‘I am’ parataxis.
My kjv remix read ‘Seek ye the illusory’ which mean see yourself.
Self-myth as quick as a chessboard queen. Narrative, life = husband & wife
which always already been the situation.
So why not love myself & mine,
embrace the bulk protruding phallic
as a tree behind my forehead? Why risk paralysis
rejecting the false me when all of me false?
Other words: I feel you heavy means I fear the scythe’s interception.
–Just a Mire-age
The respondent waits weeks to no avail, fearing they came off too bold.
They have no way of knowing, much to the contrary, the poster found them too dull.
The poster, for their part, is very lonely.
They have only loneliness in common.
The loneliness would have been enough.
In another world, they met & fell in love.
In yet another, they met & killed each other.
In still another, the mushroom cloud put a stop to their second date.
In still yet another world, neither of them reached the personal nadir which,
in this world, drove them to so blatantly misuse the classified section.
In a strange & far-flung world, bards will sing of the poster’s exploits,
in this poem left unwritten, for a thousand years.
In that same world, they are enemies & have a secret affair.
In the majority of worlds, neither of them were born.
**
JESIE is a writer & filmmaker based in Chicago. Their first book of poetry is forthcoming with Propeller Books.
