You could say that Socrates slept in eucalyptus trenches
As a way to move the self beyond the work.
Although he himself didn’t write works, you could say
He had an existential je ne sais quoi for the ages,A kind of petty eucalyptus suffering
You can expect from your elders, though
I have no elders! I, Theodoric the Bland,
First Thane of the North End, Once
Removed, do herald thy approach, good intruder!
In youth of laws & mangled
Company— it’s show time!
You are not as thick as you look, you know.
Sometimes, there are actuaries
Who work out those details. None of them are rare
But still somehow you miss
Waitpersons in cheap, nostalgic dives
Rollerskating to the blues
Until dawn’s early logos thrive
With sensitive eyes & keen
Detail—
Nothing in that wastebasket!
Nothing on that menu!
Nothing in that fullness, the flex of a reach
That leaves you wanting
Nothing
Nothing more
Am I the voice of what I’ve thought?
Am I the thought of what I’ve voiced
Within Blake’s parallels
Through films’ demanding rain?
Don’t be astonished, but puzzled
Rhymes are films of straw
When the rhythm of neon is up to speed
Don’t win the battle only to lose your place in line
Where are you, in the impactful jade
Summary? The bus will stop at
Seven. No one
Will be waiting
In the trees of what you promised to ignore
A minute ago, though
Perhaps the terms of fate were not yet
Clear
Human with dog:
Classic example
Film with dog:
Classic punch
Don’t let the rain throw your name away
Fate isn’t fatal all the time
The world also cries
Just before get-togethers
Brand names are hasty
It’s a perk of the industry
Shuttered modalities
Where dreams are almost few
Who are you, a jerk of speed?
Let the weather forecast what you mean
While lopsided personas stare
No longer interested in what you wear
Don’t believe your own mythos
Does the sun burn only for your eyes
Like a leaf fallen in a flowerbed
But first, a new city starts coming into view
To hurl taut shadows down
On method, or any other passage of time
Fallen over like a beginner
Recused, in a kind of gaiety
After the bombastic departed were deported
Who laid minimarts to waste
To use space like wastepaper
Or sing, until you can’t stop breathing
A charred example
Discontinuous with speech
Bebop locution index summaries
Another fire or fine arts survivor
When trees add up to music
New ground gets edgy
With estranged placeholders
A form of stillness suited to your timely disappearance
When you hold all you know up to
The day in wonder
What mirror escapes
Night’s grinning call?
Don’t end the wind in your getaway
To view outmoded views
The page is now, but not quite real
The page is a bad example
If the faint should ever break us apart
Inventing all we know
Let the uncreative come down here
To die laughing
On rooftops in winter
Until dead children plunder
The lengths of their shadows thrust in supper clubs
Where women often barge
& The dead go behind us
Until we’re not quite here
But flicker in & out, behind the grates
Where the dead might leave us, then, to go
In their passive-aggressive wanderlust
In their winterlost showmanship
Unlike others, held between
The wind & whispered cries
In gross, unsteady forms
In still-impactful lies
In the heat of all we were, of what
We’ve still not set aside
“I eat wool of milk stool” — Charles Stein
Tuesday’s incidental
To yesterday’s storms. The stain is on
The tongue.
Words do what they intend
Or not, when sensate
Love binds us
To its false claims. Wake yesterday;
The wound on my pillow
Suggests all I know.
Cold residue is the new foretelling
Like an incredible but filthy poem
You thought of once before
When you lived among thistles
Getting older
Apart from the wind & the
Sea.
I.
Who dreams by rotten slumber
Entering jetties of storm
Furled in rain
Where you order then embalm all surveys—
Surveys of wheat
With their skinny palms
Jet lute backorders
On a lackluster holiday—
Check out sketchy materials
Then dream by all your nerve
’Til the sun gets up to zero
& Dreams become clamped-down minerals, or something
Else fierce,
& The sun is a bucket of molten tin
Full of neon eyes
Preventing emblems you can’t describe
From appearing or disappearing, when the sun’s a ghost register
Reigniting rivers’ fevers, where the wicked also lean
II.
Evident blur, lapsed axis—
cooking, architecture, sex, health, space ships
All things that time contains
lettering, handwriting, concentrated and diffuse scratchings
Polyphonic vocal alchemy
hot type, lithography, Xerox, typewriters
Twirled in vowels of song—
Saying this is saying more than that these qualities need to be invented
Doesn’t the sun come up every morning?
Only capital’s absence appears as a constant, identifiable quantity
To the unobserved, though that kind of tunelessness is rare
arising out of Warhol’s “artificial” or “unreal” color
See also mangoes in January
Or marching bands that play only talking drum & glockenspiel—
Marilyn Monroe is related more closely to social issues than critics think
So are we, but it doesn’t matter,
Who ride the world in waves—
Thus, a fish in water is doomed to remain a fish
Just as you were doomed to enliven, Tom,
This bleak life, who now are gone.
III.
O Tom, we never met, it’s true
But I wish we’d had a good drink together
By the fire on a cold night— if I’d ever been to Wisconsin
Where you took root & labored
& Thought & read & wrote about
Those both close & far afield from you.
Goodbye, poet.
An active mind clings to the life
Of him who bears it, even against death.
_________
Italicized lines all come from Hibbard’s Transcendent Topologies: Structuralism and Visual Writing (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2018).