Operation Enduring Dust: A Diary (at Fascicle)



Patriotic Games

Rain in the cup of Sha. Courtyards are empty, skies simulating their blue etc.

Simile — smile — simulacrum — missile:

The paper sucks ink, drags its substance & dazes insignificances in a stormy surface, sure-fire.

Black Island. Signs pulse. Back to the future.

We open envelopes with anxiety: find only blank sheets.

Wave, syllable breaking there; lip’s edge.

Think of truth, chimera, while you finger the first leaves of grass.

Exhaustion, suspended phones, off the hooks . . . . . . .

The ego erases itself, sous rature, sutures itself; gazes at the mirror and sees only its back. Thalassa — ad infinitum.

$.

Dry dream, sour rain, joints of abyssinian/discontinuous prose. . . . . . .

An abyss.

Language in zig-zag, cornered by a zugzwang, scuds over a neutral zone.

One zap, and the moon dissolves. A zoo from zen to zoom? Zeitgeist? Polaroid logic.

Expectations & disappearances.

You focus and suffocate, unnoticing the snake’s venom, the next sentence’s moment.

(1990)





c:\polivox.doc

          For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again
          into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompssed
          by one idea. Single words floated round me, they congealed
          into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to
          stare back - whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling
          incessantly, led into the void.
             — Hugo von Hoffmannsthal

          cut the word lines
             — Williams S. Burroughs

          The bit of noise, the small random element, transforms
          one system of order into another.
             — Michel Serres

On-line. Shhh. “Epic is a poem

including history.” Too much.

“What if a Health Plan

Could express

Your

Individuality?

You’re not like everyone else.

Your individuality is something we like

and understand.      We also know that

your security must be

important to you. And it’s

important to us.          Mean

while,        false

flowers, carrion, black

snow. “I don’t look for what I find.”

Language escapes:

Since when is ocean

Sky? Access denied.

FOR MANY, STORMS BEYOND COMPREHENSION/... they saw tornados

throw their cars around like toys and cows flying in the backyard...” This, the

American Dream. Petals

made of rain, strange postcard

ticket in obscure

Esperanto — from Beyond: Cézanne: “The landscape

thinks itself

through me. I am its conscience.” Mute books, red of

trees spread in fake sentences, and the desert devours time.

Shift

What makes Dell

the ideal choice? Dell

is always eager to offer you

the perfect combination of power, performance

and price. THe cLOser We lOOk aT a

WoRd tHe FUrThEr OfF iT

fAcEs Us. All rights reserved @

Leave your message after the beep.

Sour cherries: flowers once.

“If a lion could talk

he wouldn’t understand what we roar.”

Ideology is language dressed up as transparency.

Megaugnil: slowly I will tell you who you are. Medicine or poison.

Humankind is not contemporary with its origin.

Let’s turn up the volume on the language.

This page is under construction. Zip! Nobody hears thoughts like here. Now

you don’t need me anymore, now form

is an extension of content. Baþel.

To swim

this foam, virgin verse, pampas snowed with black walls.

“Poetry’s the supreme virtual reality, girlfriend.”

World. Wordless. Into which we enter

stripped.

This is the way the world ends,

not with a shot,

but without a meaning.

Resistance of Materials. “This

is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.”

The sentence is out of focus.

“When you dissect it, you kill it.”

“Pain is impossible to describe.”

The dance of the duende in the forest of signs.

“If we always write only

that which we already know

the field of knowledge

would never be extended.” The weather turned, this

page — (from pangere, to grasp, fix, join)-morning. Just because,

“a doubt that doubted everything would no longer be

a doubt.” And

what changes after everything. Changes,

after everything. The dance of the duende

in the forest of signs. Madame Yahoo,

there’s nothing epic in lighting a cigarette:

or maybe there is, as in the heroic act of

opening the door and taking out the trash. “The difficult thing is being able

to jump over the wall.” This line of lie.

The hymen is testing the extended memory.

A hot bath is the conquest of Egypt.

Who said that? I was

your amulet amidst the riot:

I protected you from war, goddess —

I was the whetted blade in Thoth’s hand

amidst the riot.

The fall of the pen on the carpet is an autumn dawn.

Skies of liquid crystal.

Iron filings form a magnetized rose.

Remains of conversations our prophecies.

A kiss is the conquest of Egypt.

“Each morning you have to break the dead rubble afresh

to reach the living warm seed.”

Vox, Vak, vaccum. Who knows, man

kind‘s not contemporary with its image.

Mirage isn’t contemporary with its image.

Let’s turn up the volume on the language.

In American matinees they teach us to watch a film

in the old style: in silence.

With time, we become

Invisible:

Sub verborum tegmine vera laten, or

behind the veil of words, the truth. Voices in the Mind’s room? “But we awake at the same time

to ourselves and to things”

“Appearance’s arduous path.”

THE EYE OPENS.               THE EYE OPENS AND DIVIDES.

Air, to articulate,

like an animal leaving its nest.

Cinema of the Grotesque taught us

to configure an action, black instant, not a reflection

of reality

An apple floats in light: this its meaning

(“we accept credit cards”)

that mOves as One breathes, immediate,

while it lOOks at spirals Of time, rings Of smOke.

There’s no escaping it.

(1999-2000)





black peonies
serene
nearly dry

doves warming
in a remnant
of sun

a plant
struggles to
break the branch

ants drag
a bee
still alive

winter
pilfers the flower
the fruit’s color

(gestures & waving
of shadows
do not console)

the evening goes by
crawls and leaves
a silver trail

(1994)





Thoth

          Storm Reality Studio, and retake the universe
             - William S. Burroughs

•

Noises have sex with the superior things of the Immense, Sodium,
silences reducing noises to their nexus, none. The Immense turns
itself around with its Kama Sutra, its Wittgenstein, its walkman
that knocks them dead at the festivals of Thoth. Nearly immense,
ruined Angkor blooming Vietnams, the sea sets traps for scars,
and the skin is a pharaoh ticket.

•

The river trembled in membrane, in the brahmin’s mind, in the scale
of the shadow, in the soul’s pomp: icy cold; a prise reveals dense
valleys — smells of death: crystals... Life is exiled here, liquid...
And as for content, we might say it has to do with with an alchemical
process incessant as the sound that blows out of rivers or rain of
meteors on a lake, the shadow of Iago, and this animal night.

•

The invisible’s scintillae, splinters of Osiris, silence denuding
the secret made of dry petals; rain’s paradox refining its metals. All
is made light when light liquefies into sound, rain out of season. Signs.
Serpents spiral in their skin, leaving there their double exposure, in the
transference of ruins the eye reunites, and ruins. Doped by the opium of
caring, with the tenuous distance of a doctor out of position, he razored
the precise, Egyptian thought of a total dream. Apotheosis of laughter,
Osiran rivers, sun: jewels in skulls and bones that go down the Nile. How
does this become that? They, the modern ones, that bite the bizarre flesh
and snatch up their modeste ration, their Reality Studio.





Solarium

slow
disappearance

letters caught on the way
tracks, dry
leaves.

the horizon’s invisible line —
this distance signifying nothing.

the air that’s short
the untranslatable fever of silence
that breathes us in

and separates us.

one day, they tried
a taste-without-knowing
life saying yes without wanting to
marine breeze like a blues
noise of airplanes crossing time.

the limit of meaning
establishing itself, temporarily, there,
where the poem’s pumice

shatters

waves abducting
only the steam from our mouths

poluphilosboios
foam

impressed still
imprisioned in spray.

words spread out along this beach —
they are nomads, drunkards —
until we know neither
which of them translates us

nor the mute light that floats upon the waters
and reproduces us

as if we were muses.





Upon An Old Saying

          Be like sandalwood: perfume the axe that wounds you.

I will say again what once was said
So the mind will never forget
That one day our lips, leaves, were made
Grass, rapid sky, velvet and dense fog.

This smoke in the void seems
the other, the life that
lasts as lightning bolts last, quartz
a pupil dilates and irradiates.

Who would say, for instance,
that under the flesh of incense,
in the evening’s duramen,
the sandalwood inhales
and causes no scandal.





Polivox

There is no voice that is mine
on this morning of being awakened by the washing machine,
birds in cages made of wind and Villa-Lobos.

Other voices intersect with it and mix
In the cataract of sentences which I am writing
and which slowly watch me, recognizing.

And other breath of silence reanimates us. Tongues
collide in the toxin of islands
in the exile of all paths
(which, however, do not fork. They
hide — in the yesterday wherein they drain —
In a tumult of echoes, reflections in a grotto).

Would poetry be the art of listening?




• — • — • — • — •

First posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One, 3.25.2006
Under continuous revision and augmentation
Translated in close collaboration with the poet
Reproduction rights granted upon request