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

a 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.

///