Wednesday, January 15, 2014

drafts/worksheets of unfinished poem

*
That the acrobat would remain instead
In the burning hoop rather than complete
Their turn through it is a suspect thought.  Why

Halt there in that residual nought wrought,
Assault that seary vortex, flarehenge shroud, 
Round and red as Plath's ovenhead.  Ghastly

Silhouettes of gaslight pervade our past;
Kindling images. drenched in daguerre, ancient    
To the point of banishment when evenings

Vanish in a similar coup, v-neck-deep in
Loinclothed caverns it's best to hide.  Abide
May elapse and they, framed by flames, fall from

That looped height finale, that halo-hold
On all our eye normally denies.  Still,
The signal desire to stay locked in such

Arsonous arcs is one the circus rocks
Against each night in its maze of dreams,
Replaying the deaths that dared defy this ploy.



*
Is this highjinks all our mountebanks allow:
With thrall a ring of fire they marry the day
To their devious acts and thus are at last

Delivered, severed from its whole, that portrait
Momentarily clicked past every portal
Scorching their soles as they halt there bathed

In that eye whose lashes fry their hair and toes
Posing perhaps for the one photo its parade
Lines our streets with, vicious charade whose

Promised feats are purely made, not performed.
Gaudy, tawdry trick, a mock phrase the lecturer
Faces lions with, the tamed stadium stoned as

They lean over the podium to watch us wince
At each pick ax throe.  That cam contaminates
What it captures, bright cages bulge with fetish

Divulgences—it freezes trapezes, the bareback
Rider's nude knees.  They cannot move beyond
This figure, they must die there daily just for fun. 


*
Hash, this stasis verges on the absurd, its word
Unmute, neutered, crude, farce, though objections
To imperfection are part of the drama

Enacted by critics: A's illusive tiptoe
Teeter that flammable cameo concerns us;
How the spotlight is mottled in the star, blotched

By their performance marring each watched face.
The sight must perpetuate what it sought
Or go astray: but is this status, this

Jumpcaught bit what our linear needs
To finish its deliberate taut onslaught,
Swan somersault halted strid-air, though no

Continuation of the comedian
In that conflagration could be the true
Disruption, the correct avoidance of

Transcendence: it can't taunt that denouement
FX-splendiddy enough, unlike the way one's
Living beyond their years in splatter or

Pattern brings fit end to each leapt theft,
Though certainly one stalls its engulfment with
Curious realms of appalled affrights viz.


*
An astral body coined in light, the vaunt
Tumbler pauses there in their circ de solar
Auto da fe, feral fireball our drone

Missiles visit hourly to satisfy the spacious
Prey of the ticket window's demands:
Hurtle-wrapped envelope, primal trope which

Anne Sexton Hart Crane shrink through in their
rubber tube of zeroes, cashcall's hologram—
Why do I care if they char there in mid air

abandoned by the gruesome need to reach
the applause line, to round the stadium track
racing for the tape across their chests hurrah

the victor olympian marathonic greeds gild
post-event.  Better calamity for them, they
should perish publically in clusters of cloud

clash fare, the bomb heard posthumously by
the body it shatters.  They should explode there;
let their body droop like an upside down U from

the white hot hoop.  [When Hart Crane sailed through the goalposts
to win the game for Sodom High in their annual
grudgematch against Gomorroh Prep, he
shone for a moment as bright as this, the stadium
cheering his touchdown; ]


[Fireworks to our face must fly the phantom
bound pyreward wrenched
Pompous Pompeii 

*
You will have seen the sun as a figure standing
inside a similar wheel, etched enfold, Da
Vinci's Vitruvian Man.  Sustained by his

refusal pall to ever leave this modest pose,
that threshold of gold spits scarring us for
the sacrifice that surely the crowd expects. 

Inca-high that knife gleams.  History buffs
confirm his death and worship none but him
perhaps.  Lingering, third-degree, ideal,

some hung circumference of furnace
festival.  Like celebrant Empedocles
we prefer an oval entry to eternity,

who saw how perfect circ his volcan rim
rose in its apotheosis of form, pure
aureate anti-goal, broken so un-coned

and conjured in its ofference of O.
Say it is this incompleteness restores/amends us.
If it were closed, if the acrobat aced

her symbiotic roundgame, if the goal
were reached as an endship, twinning its
beginning, would [DadaVinci] vinevangogh have cheated?

*
Shall we salute, requite, honor, any
height which resists summit, disdaining each
ultimate point that might map our madness,

spurning the pursuit of angels who seek
peaks only, dullards pining for the crest's
honed sharpness of spite, groundsake shed where

we doctrinaire humans find sync thread in 
some secular oriel.  Regardless of descent
an actor takes their bow from this window

lit by licking jets as if its footfire
spanned the entire stage, or, thinned to a line,
led tightrope misstep regrets.  Circling

whom is the audience, applauding for
coherence they gildgrid the enclosure
with incendiary candles whose torch would

barbecue them if they dared abandon
that pose their tragic-guarded aspirations
demand every artist must adopt: don't

bail and save yourself, Rimbaud, show-and-
flambeau, rainbow-scald us till we laugh. 
We love to see your turn-as-burnout blazed

across our bluetube skies, your moon
rockets die Titanic-wise.  Hush-lit
orchesta pits await but why would she 

not complete her set, traverse that fiery
core and land back safe in center ring;
when cymbals cling their triumph there, why

does artifact elect the Paphos illusion,
scales wept in random arbors, desiccate
flowers whose vase unearthed the breach

of our first kin.  Appalled sleep of the sentinal
culminating in twelve o'clock twelfth night
celebrations—fixated by laminations of

dexterity: to remain there in that Shadrach
shade, that Abednego abyss where tapering
grapes render the host bodied as mer mouth,

incomplete transubstantation to the ashes
promised by such.  No red in this wine (to
accent the mime's whiteness designates/underlines

their cry for blood [nonlineage]
/the liontamer opens their cage/ opening
[Hoping to channel the crossing over of

the dice, odds gods wrestle, the angel porthole
Jacob juggles with and must jettison the piracy
of, because the act must occur in the show:
the acrobat could stand there on her gymroom
treadmill encircled by flames in solitude, who'd
care?  Publication is such a scandal, to air

one's immolation privately is de rigeur—
thrown] wager/hazard entrance] The exegete
costumed in cameo, the circular locket

/solar island]  [static, marmoreal [situated
posited] motionless / visual , this principal[
this model of madness, suicidal fixation

[focus of interest [ poised inaction,
cessationpoint [ Lapidary leap ]  exposure
[a defiant disgrounding around which [

cancellation [incompatibility [
transcendent [ evanescent cat-sill [
foreign frontier [ erasures [ the farer flies—

*
In this caesura [ this suspension of
the poet's portrayal of silence, this
rude interruption of the spectacle by

I would prefer not to, a Bartleby'd
ecstasy of decline, refusing to go through
the stoop of routine, elevating its spasm

[the tragic transport is empty (Holderlin)]
barren/contradictory [ purgatorial [

Ask her/him: is hovering in that hell
preferable to the headlong hurl
of time: does it protect the climax from

commencement's rash intent: from end
(and then the only end of end, has Larkin)
[ pause / unconnected /  discontiguous
[ coup [ bridge span [ bride's threshold

[ liminal / catachresis /  Who repudiates
/ in spite of himself / the gulf between
[winning with this loss of trajectory a space

wagered by weight, a grace of phases
while down at alley-end indistinguishably
dark the honorcade parade dumps its

clump of statuary, safely far enough away
to be borne now by the citizen brow, laurel
yearning from emerging light to observe

their whole deleted origin, or a version
displacing this usurpation of a course
reserved for lustral berth [Acro is a stand-in

really for the hearth whose gate waits to
comsume this fence-sitter unwilling [arbiter]
to choose which of their substituted

phoenix-eyeblinks can span this whirlicue
to escape the eternal bracing it takes
[fix cold within a corpus of coals her coat]

[bracing his space in that cut-out coin[
[collage ] practicing whose personae—
Unanimously deformed, incessantly lazy,

[things seen clearly, veils cleaved, as when
your nape dawns for the headsman's axe and
he spits to make its split-edge shine sharper

for each arctic-pitted spectator—
[Investing the forsaken sat-sky with this
decisive dearth is not enough to placate

[alleviate our loneliness as probe-missiles
out-limbing him with love for his ice-cream
hat and hacked-off head, the holo-guillotine


honing itself against any lack of descent
from that arcade's space capsule [Rolypoly head
aureoled revolt upon a shocktuft tree [


*
That she, the acrobat, should fear that sphere
of fire would seem synonymous with our own
hesitance, but can that figure sustain its ground

up there in transient factuality[facticity], that
matchstick myth mourned by all, mute-phlegmed
to the core].  In Summer harvest the hung

fruits manifest spirit, flesh hangs from an ideal
wheel flung and clinging to air's a-leaf, womb
atmosphere toppling at hand.  How near

it roams its round of annihilated creation
emanating from the central cone of sun
[Can the burning child awaken the father

in time to be rescued or will he too grow old
against vigilance.  Someone must watch
over this oval cremation where the syncope withers

infancy's summation trending toward spurious
apparitions, godmaze stalled in 666, corrupt [. . . ]

confer U
S A on the lucky suckers who happen
to be born in those oilfields we need for
spectacles like this.  Netpix barnburners
buy this acrobat a beer if he survives
dropped slumped on

seedpod for maggots, dick's fuck's launchpad. 
flames render the host body in the mouth's
incomplete transubstantation (no blood in
this wine,  Rape-scene flames

where it finds

[     [ and
wreck-weeded as it is. 
/
gift-grind
/ slitted
[As Empedocles preferred
the oval O of Etna to any P for Peak
the sky might throw as fatal shadow
to thwart our ascent] [
hackjaw

*
carbon monoxide tints skin with in your


garage shrug-poet post-event life's vents as

///

draft/worksheet of unfinished poem

*
Since I caught the train at Le Depot de Big Bang
(wow, was that terminal crowded) how far have
I traveled is a question that occurs to most of us
on this journey, I think.  The other passengers
seem to agree though as always one can't speak
for all.  You can lean out the window and catch
Philip Larkin on his wedding Whitsun or similar
fictions in this ongoing card-spray of multiple
universes, each one splintering off if we sneeze
perhaps, heading out on its own branchline of
destiny.  The rails never end theoretically.  Each
nitwit aboard here can flick their wrist and start
a whole molecular new-load of shunt and offshoot,
a freight of filth and fulth.  No one seems to know
for sure.  Take me for example: Homeless mote,
at how many borderkneels, constant-contagious
as Chuck Berry's riffs have I stormed evenings 
gnawed with gauze on the Island of Palau (these
particulars are obscene, I realize: forgive me),
or worse, dawns of emaciated car-thief silences.
Was there nothing I looked against to fail?  While
every possible mixamanque of worlds and words
await the arrival of this choo-choo whose ETA
they say might be never.  Subatomic or subtle-
arced, Graham Greene Virginia Woolf bunkmates
on the Orient Express.  I wish.  All permutations
could exist as possibilities expressing our due
desires if desires can be due, if they have a time
schedule and destination to which they might
be late as one resort.  Vacations are a nightmare,
yes, but consider this: if we do arrive at that spa
where Szymborska and Chekov are soaking in
the restorative baths featured there, the water
so warm and mineral-new, so magma-medicinal,
poured out from the heart of the sun as it were,
could we really be happy in that serene shangri-la,
knowing it's just one of the endless encounters
and encoutrements available on this route, whose
contentment quotas lack specificity or spinach
(I like it, some don't) enough to satisfy each our
particular tastes.  In any case given my age they'll
soon take my seat and burn me for fuel back
in the corpse caboose, my flesh will inch this
dust even further in permutations and perverse
meanderings and yet, always, despite the threat
of climax I thought my concerns were shared
by all those sold the rare, the indiv'd miracle of
birth, origin tickling its boarding passes and ports,
old option of blood we wake badly toward.  No
wonder everyone likes to imagine they know
certain actors and actresses whereas in reality
such legendary tidbits function chiefly to delay
our sense of arrival, stalled always by the urge
to record each mile traveled, the captain's log
kept so merchant-mundane its rigged citations,
though history probably shuffles the deck daily
to see who's here and who's not: enemies all.

///