Halloween II

i remember wanting to be
michael myers
because then i woulnd't
have to speak.

i remember
it being so cold
in buffalo
on halloween
that we had to
wear our costumes
under our
winter coats
and snow pants.

i remember going
as a kurt cobain
in high school.

i remember halloweeen
sex always
being rather
violating.

i remember the excitement
of halloween decorations
as a child:
the frankenstein's monster
with moveable
joints hanging from
the bathroom door
the witch's head
peering out
the front window
the skeleton
with moveable
joints hanging from
the high foyeur ceiling.

i always remember
getting super
excited
for the new episodes
of Roseanne
and because of the
halloween specials:

Dan pretending to have cut
his hand fake
blood everywhere

Jackie's head on a platter

Roseanne always
decidedly
The Master.

i also remember watching
the episode where dan,
jackie, and roseanne
find a tin of old dope,

and watching it
laughing at it
wondering if
my father
could decipher my
laughter as experience.

i remember always
being afraid
and not wanting
to be afraid
anymore.

Halloween

i remember reading andy peterson's
i remember horror poems
remembering that my
first experience
with a woman
happened
during the shower scene in Psycho.

i remember waking up
on Halloween
with a bloody nose
and thinking it
a fine preface.

i remember celebrating
the completion
of Casual Encounters
on Halloween day.

i remember dressing
up as a bat.

i remember dressing
up as an old man.

i remember dressing
up as superman
with bulge.

i remember dressing
up as a woman
in heels.

i remember dressing
up as a ninja
or more notably as
Karate Kid.

i remember dressing
up as a dead poet
and a dead poet
looking much
like me but with
makeup.

i remember
dressing up as
a robot.

i remember a friend
dressing up
as me.

i remember the leaves
streaming across the street
and always looking for
michael myers.

for.memory

i remember forgetting
i started
this blog.

Comfort #8 & #9

Here hope is a fragment of memory
and fantasy. One responds to the
impossible determinant. I am only a
number confined to remnants of
humanism. I have difficulty eating
without assistance. I have a drug
problem. I’ve had run-ins with the
law. You are so kind to take me.
Give me a chance. Give me a toilet for
piss and shit and vomit by chance.
The movement of bodies in space, the
tenement dancers subtracted to a
rubbish heap of laughter. You’re so
convincing and you sleep with me
quickly. Only the meaning and frame
are referenced. Draw the line of
failure.



I am writing to you but it’s too late.
Barely tolerated, ushered out, and still
stray into body. When do humans
become monsters? Shut my face
against love’s constructivism. Admire
space faultily smooth. There are no
more kisses stitched into goodnights.
Your jewels and dressing gowns are
animal backs. It was pleasant to
imagine them as immeasurable thrums
and kicks. There is no opposite of life
only loneliness in landscape.

Post ReGoonion II

i remember tim drawing
a penis in snow
on my rear
window
and a heart
on my
dash-

and arm restling
for a barbie
radio
holding a barbie
radio between
our tethered
grip.

i remember loving
when andy
laughs

how he always
presses me
to read

and unassumingly
writes better
than any
of us.

and i remember jared
continually throwing
imaginary semen
in my face

using words i'll
never need
to know
as long as
i have
him
around
and nod
assuredly.

i remember him
calling me
a fiction
writer
and me
not quite sure
how to take it.

i remember celeste
out of
nowhere

and liz riding a wild
horse,
which sadly
never happened.

and jane chewing gum
while her words
wrapped me
in Cellophane

and jonah...a comic book
used to
swat flies.

Post Re-Goonion

i remember hugging jared
remembering hugging
jared goodbye
the first time we
said goodbye, remember?

i remember being so tired of artistic conversation
after &NOW and getting
into it deeply
anyway
on an empty tank.

i remeber asking her
about sexual
figures
and her
saying
a celebrated, and dripping
pussy is freedom

and thinking her
more beautiful
than ever.

I remember new books:
the carcasses,
babyfucker,
bloomdido,
the importance of being iceland
and grendel.

15

i remember getting busted
by a mailman
my hand
up the skirt
of a Narden girl.

i remember
thinking
doc martin's
would last forever.

i remember being a clerk
at Red Apple
when someone told me
i resembled Trey
and my night
going more smoothly
from then on.

i remember another
customer
suggesting i bed sisters
because "everyone outta have
sisters at least once"

and never having
sisters
once.

i remember making love
to Bjork's
Homogenic:

dragging down
her baby
blue straps
exposing her
tiny breasts

before kissing
her belly

her goosebumped body
standing before me
young and
unpredictable.

i remember disposing
of condoms in
sewer vents on
midnight walks home.

i remember smoking
cigarettes at
Perkins Family
Restaurant believing
i would be
the next.

Comfort #4

Headaches and lightheadedness
usually result in death. Demand a
degree of luxury wherever it denies or
disrupts conservative society. If we
are to observe the constant interaction
between movement and sensual
experience I offer a short allegory.
Dream the brain has taken hostage. It
whispers love-tricks to secreting dead.
I held them so close to life’s horrible
secrets occupying armies of flies and
worms to sleep in their minds. Their
bones are a fairy palace sucked of past
and future.

Sunday, Sunday

i remember faceless
love dancing
the rake's song
across the
kitchen floor pouring
two cups
of joe
before
disappearing.

i remember
dehydration without
a mirage.

i remember the buffalo
bills playing
well.

Upstairs with Hulsman...

i remember losing
a wonderful
i remember
poem
twice in
one
night.

Today

i remember most
recently flirting
over
facebook.

i remember confusing the
gender of the
cashier at
Jubilee.

The Telephone

i remember jerking off into
Dixie Cups and stuffing
them with
Kleenex.

i remember Tim saying we
were out-writers and
thinking he said
outriders and
really wishing he had.

you'll never be more beautiful than you are at this very moment

i remember feeling my father's
forearms thinking he
was the strongest
person in the world.

i remember thinking
i could never be
that strong
and today knowing
i won't be.

Comfort #3

One’s strategies must demand time making or experiencing a
real space. Blood evacuated the nostrils. Every action is
inseparable from damage. Any argument was relieved. Last
prayers clawed then gargled then wheezed then stopped. And
the cardboard of their bodies anesthetized into masks. The
literal formality of masks is more gratifying than metaphor.
Once uncovered, the parody and nostalgia imitate a simple
masquerade of pleasures and blind obedience. The ultimate
pleasure is architecture of forbidden parts. This is called
anything for the silent face. It is dedicated to compulsion and
tough comfort. I will take my privacy and wait patiently with
this voice.

miss algier

i remember bringing home
my first serious
girlfriend
and my father
after examining the
port wine stain
birthmark across her
face asking her
how she
bruised her
face.

i don't remember my
twenty-first
birthday,
much of american history,
anything geographically
throught the world,
all the don'ts
in moses' hands
when to move
clocks forward and
backward how to
write a pantoum
how loud to play the
music in the
car, algebra,
spanish and the periodic
table what my first dog
looked like and riding
a bike over a hop-
scotch game
cock and cup
spurring against
my rubber
seat.

i remember outings to
Chi-Chi's being
dynamic
and zestful
jarred salsa,
sodapop,
unfrozen nachos grande
cooked to indigestion
and a sideshow of
gaudy electrocuted decorations,

afterwards reconditioned
by the intestinal
waterpark
distributing one free
mercy flush
per
drop of blood.

Comfort #1

Material gain is sedition unrecognized. A comfortable

lifestyle looks openly out of the picture. My victims are

knotted into dreams distanced from suspicion. The

opposition between form and function is ideological calm.

Arsenic erupts into other senses at the limit of theater. I

began by taking everyone that was doubtful, and burying

them in the backyard. Kill for insurance. Kill for social

security, the edges of the village often under attack. A

surplus of inactivity is guarded and linked to the prisoner.

The body and its losing origins are reconciled to chance. As a

result concepts and experiences are syllables in dreams. The

eroticism in grave-digging is in the shovel.

Education

i remember
thinking about
chip delany
mouth-fucking
zz top.

i remember wondering what
anne waldman
carried under
all those scarfs.

i remember elizabeth robinson
shooing away a
homeless man
ransacking
our graduate
meditation circle.

i remember feeling old
when i complained
about key
cards and
wishing
they'd go
back to keys.

i also remember
yelling at
children
running across
the lawn
i rented.

i remember all
the beautiful
girls
in their belly
shirts and tank
tops wet
from rain
thinking
it was worth
adjuncting
after all.

naropa number 37

i remember bhanu
kapil pouring dirt
into my
suitcase
as a class
demonstration
on inhabitation.

i remember jared
hayes andy
peterson jennifer
rogers tim
armentrout kevin
kilroy jamba
dunn jane
werle travis
macdonald celeste
davis rainey
warren liz
guthrie ben
hersey john
sakkis michael
koshkin reed
bye bhanu
kapil steven
taylor soma
michael max
corrina
lesser shannon
davis rowland
saifi
the freebox
the curry
the coffee
the blue smoking benches
laird hunt reminding
me of the WWF
and waiting
for eleni to abruptly
produce wings
and for anne waldman
to go up
in smoke.

Harvest Moon and the Peeping Toms

i remember getting
high the first time
with a kid
programmed
to run home at
the sound of a bell.

i remember imagining being
covered in autumn
leaves a caterpillar
making an example
of time.

i remember "Lou
give me a milk...
chocolate"
and "Loraine...
i'm your
density...
i mean...
destiny".

i remember listening to
the secret track
on sgt. pepper
with jon and
alanya on lsd.

i remember being in graduate school
high enough
to believe
where the sidewalk ends
was an innovative and original thought
when i reached a point
where the sidewalk ended.

i remember my grandfather
and norma giving
me
a remote
controlled airplane
attached by a cable,

and being too
young to
conjure
the reply
i was looking for.

i still remember the one
and only one
true
beehive
hairdo ever
in my life
in second grade.

i remember track eight
in rainbows
my wife's head on
my shoulder.

i remember getting head
in an alleyway
behind a bar
by a girl
ten years my junior.

i remember buying Of
Grammatology
and having
no clue
how to think.

bits and pieces

i remember wanting to be
in love
and nobody ever
being good enough

i remember being
turned off
by
kindness.

i can't remember
the last time
i relaxed.

Moving Day

i remember her
jerking
me off with
her right hand
steering
our 14' Uhaul
with her left.

the child in me...

i remember turning
down
sex
to watch
Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets

i thought i saw your face today...

i don't remember
the last
time
i watched.

i remember
the mysteriousness
of subways.

i remember The
Indian in the
Cupboard
and begging
my mother for
a cabinet and key.

i remember baseball.
i remember baseball
freshman year
first game
of the
season stealing
second
sliding face
first
over the bag.

i remember wanting
to kidnap friends
on Halloween
in a
big
silver
truck.

i remember seiously considering
necrophilia
if
within
an hour.

i remember wanting
a programmable
coffee maker
and having
a programmable
coffee maker
and never using it.

i remember crying
when it snowed
in boulder, co
after moving
out buffalo, ny.

i remember
having a dead squirrel
thrown
at my back
while navigating lsd.

i remember only one perfume
on my lips.

from here to there

i remember shitting my pants
in nursery school
in front of everyone.

i remember aaron palmer
vomiting on the carpet
in social studies
in second grade
sloppy joe's
evacuating porously

i remember a cool autumn
breeze careening
over
my penis.

i still remember the phone number
of my first
girlfriend: 626-0609.

i remember making out
for the first time
with an amputee.

i remember making a god's eye
from dreary colored
frayed yarn.

i remember peanut butter
and jelly
tasting inconsistent.

i remember my twenty-fifth
birthday in a studio
loft getting high
alone eating
noodles with green pepper
and onion powder.

i remember hoping
i know how to
fall in love
again
when the moment comes.

As I Lay Dying

I remember when i realized you
make me
want to write
something beautiful.

I remember taking
breaks
from writing
murder poems
to write
something beautiful.

I remember playing Yahtzee
by myself
drunk
on the kitchen floor
near dark

I remeber being in love
in a photograph.

I remember my father
telling me
so sleep off
depression.

COLORBLIND

1. Fortress America: I came here to get my audience out.

2. Terror Then and Now: What kind of architecture should be arranged for this performance?

3. Patenting Life: Provoke conversation.

4. How People Turn Monstrous: Feed each other’s speakers a host text.

4. Bataille and de Sade program folded and bent from the drive.

2. Randomly expose various lines, books to my left and a stack to my right. No writing is without invocation.

1. Never quit thieving, cutting, reconnecting layers of flesh and intimacy.

3. This is my moment of saying we are inherently this very interaction. This is my delivery.

2. I strip Reed Bye’s “…Planets” down to gas, land and water and bed him with Robertson. What better introduction than to expose the self to its insecurities and alienation.

4. A promulgation of the diaphragm is reduced to action.

2. We are reduced to action.

1. A distillation of human intentionality.

3. Every post-it note, every journal or diary, every message carved into a tree or graffiti on a bathroom stall is made public.

2. Nothing is private.

3. Public for the very reason that exposure is most crucial to language, therefore audience is precious antagonist.

4. Hide vulnerability beneath a pillow. Weep for days.

1. Instinct, curiosity, countered by proof of natural inconsistency.

4. But in saying this I must also advise the author.

2. OWNERSHIP…DO THEY NOT OWN EXPERIENCE?

3. Relativism!!

1. Based on the acquaintance, the association to memory…I say waterfall, you say ____.

4. Text is owned as much as text is conditioned to be owned.

2. Language is the driving force behind experience.

3. BASED ON THESE CONDITIONS, THESE MEMORIES, DRIVEN TO OWN, TO POSSESS THESE MOMENTS INSPIRED BY LANGUAGE. LANGUAGE IS THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND EXPERIENCE, HUMAN RELATION. EXPERIENCE WILL EXIST INEVITABLY SO, HOWEVER THE EXPERIENCE, WITHOUT AUDIENCE IS CAVERNOUS, FORGOTTEN, UNMARKED BY THE DELIVERY OF EXPRESSIONISM, OWNERSHIP OF THE MOMENT AND THE UNDERSTANDABLY ALTERED AND REASSEMBLED CONNECTION BETWEEN AUTHOR AND READER.

4. Attempt to reach a hermaphroditic state where gender and authorship are unidentifiable.
They appropriate mirrors. Exhale a trembling entrenched music. Reflection diagnoses sickness. Cry loathing heave, arched through obedience of lips and wounds. Monstrous obsess. They are participants in a destructive and implacable frenzy. Indecent beings are comforted by perishable flesh. Hanging by their eyelids their fingertips their pubis is the conquest of territory. Understand the obligation of this role. My blood and organs are surging with carnality. Irreparable depths of thigh betray memory. The unconscious are stripped naked of eroticism. Profile a cold moon, a gesture spared for rare cruelty.

1. Extension of self: a place where the borrowed/stolen literature is a vehicle for expression, where originality no longer takes precedence the language, the interaction with this thought process, this creativity is then developed.

2. Steal me stealing language.
“Christ,
You’d think it would all be
Pretty simple
This tree will never grow. This bush
Has no branches. No
I love you. Yet.
I wonder how our mouths will look in twenty five years
When we say yet.” Jack Spicer

4. Writing and/or speaking with another affords you anonymity, a separation from ownership, possession, this desire to maintain an authority over language. Once you alleviate this notion of ownership, a text can exist cleanly, without any hindrances of singular emotion, a design of action acutely driven to an individual and their experiences.

1. The Age when one has ceased to Blush is a dissection of emotions and individual inhibitions. Write blind on an electric typewriter. Listen to voices. Compose a line. Become lost to destination. “Everything’s throbbing so much” “he expected it would be copy-edited.
You are scared too. You roll your eyes, quite disgusted
and distressed. You were less afraid when the blood flowed
from the veins I desperately slashed and you took me to the
pharmacy to save me, you didn’t faint, you had the gestures
and brave behavior of the savior—that blood seemed much
more estimable to you, you could bear its sight and behave
as a man you thought. --Catherine Breillat

2. Reduce tendencies to devise plot, linearity, cohesion around a specific dynamic, a specific objective.

4. Become anonymous, and distort perception.

3. An ice cube pops in gin and tonic.

1. I am an elusive condition acquainted with familiarity.

2. It is something peripheral, a phantom, a curtain moving in the distance, a shadow outside your window.

4. This phantom is completely hermaphroditic.

1. A culmination of spirits, aliens…

3. I myself probably used the seventy sonnets offered.

4. I say hermaphroditic because, while the text is perhaps more definitively revealed as from the hand of a male or female writer, it attempts to disregard gender, or perhaps even embrace all gender. It is sexuality. It is tenacious, a verve in the flesh continuing to pulse.

2. Secondly the inescapable witness authors the telephone. Do we offer a pseudonym? How do
make language anonymous?

1. It is by function designed for communication, and as young writers, many of us were directed to find our voice. What has been most revealing to experiences writing is that many voices deliver condition.

2. Hammer the keys.

3. After each writing session I read them back.

4. We extended outward beyond restriction, to achieve the dissolution of gender or whether it’s amplified.

2. Language exists in tremors.

4. An entirely alternative voice can decision over lines.

2. Mesh gender in linguistic accordion.

1. Let us conserve all the indeterminacy of the word for the moment.

2. For the stray considers himself equivalent.

4. The crowd milling on the bridge is the pure emotion of nature.

1. And if one imagines, and imagine one must, the revealed subject is captivated and then replaced.

2. Translators tended to be squeamish.

3. Don’t go away mad there is harmony already within melody.

4. Although we are interchangeable with temptation.

2. Nevertheless upon the body.

1. But the scandal of reason is grease on the hands. One that prohibits ulterior aversion. Seduced by this fatal advantage he seized the stain of love upon the world. Ambivalent hostility harbors a tactile image.

4. That edge of the black night sweeps into a sort of economy of aggressivity. The hemorrhage subsumes the others. All the grass dies in front of us.

3. Every time a man touches those areas is carnal concupiscence. A crazy orange sun; we cannot conclude wickedness from non-goodness. Conception is confronted with inaccessible folds. The fall of feet dancing in the different situations of the larynx.

1. I’m the buffoon at present. This technique brings into being a full sentence. No wound deeper than death, not knowing, the cause of two kinds of voice. Statements bare commentary.

2. Truth is a scrawl born of harmony alone. Mark lacuna in the clause. And what do distances have in common with our passions. Follow prayer or atonement.

3. In one breath, cutting and chopping. Such a distance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible. Hold the unsaid effective meaning of text. Push against a huge and unending door, an economy of signs is organized.

2. He was the teacher that famous masturbator there’s pleasure deep with hands he has a philosophical wet dream. A language now manifests itself in a women’s dormitory. Over and over not your face not your simultaneous bundles termed phonemes.

4. That symbolic law is not necessarily the superego. Some other experience deepens in the air of language, after having been its servant. Stop the hemorrhage by stressing taboo.

2. In another dream I’m hanging on to the blank part of the text the index of a differance. To preserve himself he becomes incompatible, a forever irreconcilable term. Nothing to worship but myself, my own body and the closure of the episteme.

3. What a fuss was made over the body being beaten. Moment to moment the body seems to me to be the battle of proper names. Accompany me to a non-object of desire. One’s come now to the graveyard in the theory of relationships. Does she not overly seek the surety of the professor?

4. And what surfaces from this discussion is that language is without ownership, or indeed can be owned by anyone who chooses to commit to that very language

3. How do we/you navigate through questions of violence and perversion, these flesh questions when they surface from the voice of a man vs. a woman? And as collaboration is communication, is any language restricted by gender, location, etc?

2. In fact it is not the text that requires authorship/ownership but indeed the writer themselves that demands recognition. This, though perhaps obvious, is one routed in sincerity. For without the obsession for identity, for desire for isolation from the masses via this acknowledgement for the act of writing, texts would appear as they truly are recalibrations of expired language.

1. In fact, often the only reflection of originality in language that I find consistently revealing is the mismanaged grammar and syntactical formations of my composition students, and they don’t even realize they’re challenging standard language, and sadly I’m in no position to congratulate them on this accomplishment in that particular setting.

when's the last time you thought about jack palance?

"IN my opinion sound is the key...I'm not separating sound from meaning.i don't think that's a useful distinction any more than form and content is a useful distinction."

coolidge, beats at naropa

when we consider this continual debate i think we must consider not whether form manipulates content or vice versa as a rule but rather how we distinguish as individual word musicians how that accordian behavior expands and contracts based on the human emotion and the binaries established that are contracting with every force and release. in other words when i consider form and content, in my own writing, writing that consistently has been contained with in the format of a block on teh page imust consider whether this form is contracting around the content or if the content is expanding against the form. and what i've come to in this conceptualization is that the block acts as mostly a containment unit, one that strides to sedate each sentence that is uniquely in its own rite is wickedly battling the constraints of not only that block but indeed the sentence itself between capital letter and punctuation. so this containment unit is very deliberately however subconsciously responding as a straight jacket for the eratic behavior gestating in a line. so whichever came first i'm not quite sure, but for certain they intrinsically unified, incapable of existing without the other, even as conceptual as you stretch the boundaries, a jacket will always contain, but will not often be of use in walmart.

i remember

i remember thinking the eiffel tower
would market well
as a dildo.

i remember my wife's red sash
on her wedding dress
and watching
our wedding video
on the year anniversary
of our divorce.

i also remember her wanting
to watch jeopardy on
our wedding night.

i remember macaroni and cheese and green beans.

i remember running face first
into a 2 x 4
during a game of chase.

i remember my third grade
teacher mrs. domaracki
telling me
i looked
intelligent in glasses.

i also remember her
teaching us
cursive by drawing animals.

i remember my
speech pathologist looking like a real
live Gargamel that over time
became Billy Collins.

i remember smoking a joint
at northeastern university
arguing over ron padgett.

i remember being caught
in the rain with andy
and jared
worrying about my shoes.

i remember a black boy blocking
my shot before the basketball
even left my fingertips.

i remember living in my younger
brother's house writing
this poem.

i remember promising myself
that i would never cry
over a woman
two women back.

i remember wanting to be eileen myles with a beard.

i remember hearing bob dylan
for the first time
listening to a chainsaw
become a waterfall.

i remember lineage
having too many pages.

i remember washing the dishes.
i remember washing the dishes
a meditative
and ill repressed game.

i remember farting hard
enough to change
two
pairs of underwear
in thirty minutes.

i remember listening to
zooery daschunel
singing thinking
her voice
could get me
off.

i remember listening to
fiona apple
singing thinking
her voice
did
get me off.
i remember the first time
i touched
a vagina
and jabba's tongue
strangely being what entered
my mind.

i remember never having
enough
but always
just
enough.

i often consider
one morning,
two mornings
from now.

anticipating a fried fish
dinner i sliced
the tip
of my thumb
into a rubber glove.

i remember secretly liking
to sniff
women's underwear
and my fingers after
cleaning lint from between
my toes...and occasionally
from between
my cheeks.

i remember trying
to impress
another poet
when i was 22
and then never again.