On the October Poems

It has been six months since I began the bellumletters. The links continue to disintegrate. Some files have moved, others have expired, a few have been blocked.

There is a type of language -- a set of words and phrases -- in which I feel steeped. It isn't elective. It insulates and swaddles and makes things fuzzy. Writing the hypertext poems is one way I can deal with the fuzziness. It isn't a solution, but a coping mechanism.

In the Bellum Letters I focused on the war. The war continues, and the poems will continue to bob and weave the frayed hem of war reportage. But the hem spreads and webs. There is no edge. There are knots of power, of money and greed. There are traps. It's all connected. This observation is banal, but that's a trap too. There's no justification for the suffering produced by capitalism and war -- by small groups of people who keep getting it wrong. To thess elisions, the October Poems will tether and cleave. And cleave. The faux edges. The dotted lines. The incisions. The invisible stitches. The poem can be a machine of optimism and intention (hopefully).

Fixes (in anticipation of September)

(RE)SIGNATION

today (again) it isn't anything --
a bud pretending loneliness, failure --
always bending the obvious (the drowning).
For now, I'm kin with longing.
Colored plastic veining the tethers
of our lives where elsewhere ________.
Letters climb, binding fences. Shovels
feign contrition, photography.
The body is represented, sometimes.
Or perhaps that is only a trick --
a kneecap, an elbow -- the imagined
spine that, when unknitted, sings
and spells a better self. If we could
gather mirrors, it'd be easier. We
must try harder to remember.

BellumLetters (2.1)

BOOKS OF TOMORROW (waving goodbye)

the needle threads the space that was
the body before handguns, plastics.
glass-litter in the grass, a home
for ants, crow-gifts, a sublime
hatchet the sun glinting over
the tracks, razor zips away
towards corn, corn-fed autos
and stones stacked according
to plan (whose home?). Waxed
lumber builds our wishlist, snug
in water, a place for bones
to bend without a sound.

BellumLetters en route

I mailed out the BellumLetters chaps for Dusie yesterday. It's an interesting punctuation for a project that I feel is still developing. I like this actually -- the idea of publication as a moment of shift or diversion or pause as opposed to a sort of terminus or ending. It's almost a way to see it as a terminus in literal sense -- a point of simultaneous departure and arrival in all sorts of directions. Disruption.

In the end, I opted for a design that satisfied my desire for a tactile sense of the pedestrian. A design that used materials familiar to me from days in elementary school. The war is in everything I touch. It is even in construction paper and glue. And in stickers from kmart. Stickers that depict dog tags and tanks and army stars and bombers and helicopters. No ambulances. No wounds. No flag-draped coffins. No people even. Only the depiction of materials that remotely represent the human who wears the dog tags, who drives the tank, who flies the plane. And a representation in which "the enemy" is an absence. A space without. For a moment it possible to imagine that soldiers are released to this emptiness. That this emptiness is not a construction that intends to conceal the humans who live there. Live where soldiers are sent to fight. Sent to _________.

post bellum letters

Making the notes section for the bellumletters chap, I'm struck how it too is a poem. The juxtaposition of text, rather than the sort of layering text that linking constructs, is effective in a way that is at once more and less familiar. Like looking in glossary or appendix, but also disorienting. The mapping of virtual space that is this troubling information which is always under everything produced by an imperialistic, capitalist machine. A palimpsest or x-ray. And what to do? Perceive the limits of geography or feel the limits dissolved? Pretend to comprehend? Fight? Play dead? And there are so many bombs with names like "dumb" and "pineapple" -- and uranium and planes and tanks and people people people people people people. It is a lie to feel any war is far away. A weirdly loose knitting made by fake text and metal.

May Day

There is this. Police firing rubber bullets at protesters? And the numbers -- can it really be true that only 25k showed up this year when last year there were more that 500k?

The bellumletters april project is done; it wasn't about "a poem a day" as much as it was about a daily act of protest. This is not enough. I'm going to keep thinking about different ways to make poems acts of protest. Also, I want to make different kinds of protests.

And this is what is killing the birds. Today I saw a dead seal on the beach.

Sometimes I dream that there are new letters in the alphabet -- that they are on a string. Sometimes I dream that I am not shy and not afraid to talk to people who I like and admire because they may not like me back. In real life I can pretend that I am not this way, but pretending makes me tired.

The garden is growing, which seems like magic to me.

There have to be better ways for people to be in groups.

I am beginning to dislike things that are precious, yet I continue to like things that are cute. Eileen Myles said the most genius things about pets and gender -- how pets/cute things create a sort of gender-neutral space.

Which reminds me, I an now a *huge* fan of Eileen Myles. Also, I am determined to meet K. Lorraine next time I'm south of SB.

BellumLetters # 30

Synthetic Animals

I lied. We went into the woods.
But when did we come out? And into
light that was like the light
of an amusement park, themes
of many colors charming the wheel?
Facades of arrow-hoofs under a dome
of expired wires, glitter-pins
amid plastic coxcombs, gills flared, fur
mapped in imaginary lines. Menagerie
replicating thrills, feigning capture.
Glisten-grill like a pair of jaws unlocked.

BellumLetters # 29

MUST IT BE TURNED ON?

REGIMEN

You Are NOT allowed to do
anything unless it is new.
You think this is a rib-flick
joint, a root burrow?
Everywhere's a desert
these days. You may braid your
hair, you may make a ladder, you
may make a trail, a house, a wheel.
But its the fattening that matters.
A lap for greased palms. We love
those who frighten us the best.

BellumLetters # 27

Renaissance

Amid genuflecting spheres, bands
of nylon filled with sand, knotted
to become disembodied pairs, headless
limbs spread as though to scissor
the white air or swim-kick
the dry light, shredded tiers
of warped atria, of wrapped hollows
and corners shaped by where
and how a body wants to move.
My pen moves like a needle
in the wrist, ink-flick of a vein about
to bloom, about to loosen, about to lose.

BellumLetters # 26

SOME TYPES OF FEARFUL SYMMETRY

It's true: we're all for making blame
disappear. But when it comes
to linking, those choke-chains
tear at skins and walls as if pinned
with eyelash glass and hollow
marrow tubes. The organs tune
their keys, devour clues. The scum
rules under the gun, under un-
believable yellows and blues, sour
as soap rubbed in fur. Aorta, a cannon
inferred, spare spears in the swallow
___________________(in tombs).

BellumLetters #25

SYRINX

Syringe of singing, see-saw sealer
seeking a find. No note for the taking.

Take-toc-tic, the slit lip the sleek throat
whittled to a line that hollows and pours.

Clean beam of the tuning. Little red wheel
mining the air, fountain of bloom near water

spills, trilling. Sweet throat of the nipped
whistle plumed with beading -- rubber band

thrumming -- threshold beating with chime.

BellumLetters # 24

COINCIDENCE OF WANTS

little captions scattered

___________________feed and seed

(I see where what was buried blooms)

you are nothing to me

________

one could burrow, worm through
one could move, under stylus of worm, glue

the undersigned (the underused)

_________

persona or mask? I could not do (Plath)

__________

they bathed the recluse in ashes
not made by a body, but by oiled feathers
made as leather, a leaking hurt
threaded through


_______

pull it

we can use it

BellumLetters # 23

Victory Blue

BellumLetters # 22

INTO THE WOODS

You were all for leaving; no beauty
contests or pageant queens. The trees
were full of secrets, undisturbed
save for several endangered species.
I wanted to bring my trowel
in a basket, hopeful that digging
might relieve the strain and static
of clinging phone lines. The roof
of the barn smoked, begging for rain.
I raked rows for sowing, dirt
blackened from where you hung
the doe. New greens from these
hewn veins remind us, tasting of coal.

BellumLetters # 21

Mine Field/Bridle

BellumLetters # 20

THERE WAS RED WORK IN THE BACKGROUND

BellumLetters # 19

Which Things Could We Use?

1. Luthier, hook, we should try
to be so hard. String-wound. Coil.

2. All the sewn books go tap tap tap at
the tabernacle door. Rib-swifts. Lung-guards.

3. Threaded jar lip. Tender rips. Dome
of forget-me-not blue. Rotten we.

4. Soldier-love and spark-sparrows
lifting wool where needles fall. Curtain dirty.

5. Monstrous sail eight times folded
to a purse. Cotton-wire crewel.

6. Paneled hilt. A spring-pulled
labyrinth. Hoof-print primed.

7. Vernacular gills web cold tablets, close flaps.
Arrows: little throats stuffed with thread.

BellumLetters # 18

OF PREY

Today the falcons -- wings curled like lashes
at their tips -- their wings making marks -- slashes
back and forth above me -- etched a zig-zag script
upon the air. The trees ripped
of their leaves -- bare but for the few black nests
in their branches -- cast their stray branches like nets
up at the sky, their ragged limbs
reaching for the birds -- the falcons' slim
outlines -- letter-bone-bodies writing a song
that sounds like winter -- lean, and white, and long.

BellumLetters # 17

"domestic incident"

One thing, a peg on the board, could
be isolated. Pushed forward along
the block to block path that swayed
front to back and back; the peg
moved dully along. The trained eye
does not blink back. They
are trained to not come back.
Roving the boxed-in track, the pegs
truck along. Not in halves or pairs
or packs, no door-to-door knocking.
No knocked over bottles. No
pink babies in the back. Only
the tick tick tick as the lines
thicken and sink. One by one
as elsewhere ink overflows its gutters.