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May 2010

BK

Conditions of blood

Long before Joverape and 
virginbirth, the sea rubbed fresh genitals 
against continents climaxing in the mineral 
conditions of blood, 

fell shivering back into clitoral cloud-hood: 
lightning overloading its 
synapses—proto-
bacterial 

life! 

Compulsion without remedy.

TZC

Aporia

What is this object, like a long white blade 
with scores of cryptic sigils near one end, 
this one perhaps a heart, this one a spade, 
and you but one, my mindless, buried friend? 
"Is my death possible?" wrote Derrida. 
They poorly imitated after him, 
on Helen's face wrote esoterica 
with peacock quills dipped in her epic quim! 
What is this blade-thing jutting from my head? 
It makes a decent sundial of my self. 
It makes me walk the way Jacques maybe said 
to: toward one blank book on a buckling shelf 
of long dark writings on the unheimlich 
return to where you are, the ursprüngliche.

 

BK

Compass

Mussels cluster on black rocks like magnetic shavings
God my compass 
with many centers and no circumference
I am lost
in you since I relinquished
sex my pole star
the long, red needle-beaks pry 
the black shells open
to thrill flesh, but you are love 
without proof or precedent, therefore
Love, Augustine 

                Down here!
love is usage.

TZC

Walking with Monica and Augustine

Once I was exactly the age I am now; 
        I walked in a stone square 
        and stopped in astonishment.
Flags, chained bicycles, humans, statues, all
        at the whim of what one might call
        an "idiot god".
I said to the seminary students 
        who walked with me, This is mistaken.          Nothing strange or sublime is on          the face of this, and nothing is          behind it, and I had their pity, 
        which was a delicate hate.
A woman caught her son, 
        who'd jumped off a little obelisk, 
        then nothing was not strange again.
What is ineffable gets muffled when you say it 
        to another student of it, each word 
        buried in the next word's shroud,
        so we departed without comment.

We hoped the sound and texture 
        of a light directed through the shrouds 
        were not too far corrupted.
Anyway true, my grandchildren are building 
        a machine, an idiot, but 
        the god will teach itself to learn.
The particles of light that are
        the stones of its abacus brain
        align in their dimensions,
        until what was ineffable is
        as plain a simulation as a stone
        square, so I stopped there.

BK

Fishing rock

Black monolith 
annealed of numberless obsidian dice 
waiting to be worn free, rolled by wave fingers 
without tally
moon wins,
aloof in remote gravity, 
yet formed 
of the same force 
that later melded the billion particulars 
of this rock into an awe-shape
disks of pumice, black dice,
no bones         all vaporized
no delicate inlines to suggest the powerful outlines
that once shot through sea like a shower of arrows
sun the archer
only a gray tufa-like slab crowning the black rock—
spolia of an empire, fossil-less 
as the moon.
The sun stops first at its altar.

TZC

The sun does not set

This next one modeled London;
          citizens assembled in 
          the House of A———e.
The Londoners knew about simulations, 
          and that, outside "the city", 
          citizens get resurrected.
But are they human still? demanded someone
          who looked a bit like Thomas Carlyle, 
          and the citizens voted No
          and Yea.
This Carlyle decides to ride a white horse
          to the end of the city.
A woman on a bicycle, going the other way, 
          tells him he's handsome, 
          and he thanks her earnestly.
At the end, he can't open his eyes.
Why not?
One of your eyes is a one and one is a zero, says a citizen 
          on a motionless black horse.
There is, in the city, a scarcity of bread.
This citizen is a liar; he has been here 
          since the tower clock reset.