When I write The girl is dying I do not mean to enter the girl nor deconstruct her state of abstract goingness.
It’s a figure beyond an open window in a time of plague.
Disemboweled skywriting or the family name forgotten in water.
Which is to say: Vicious mercy becomes the uncountable gallop of the ruddy horse forging the sandy horizon.
Let the creature offenses stand in beauty among their rare pigments.
Honeycut, should I fail to mention light — What kind of poet is this? — but here!
Look!
Cherry and evergreen ring the moon like a bell unrung, you see them or don’t.
These next few moments of balance determine your eligibility for brief happiness.
Remember first to crucify the middle-ground; translucent, gathered up, mercurial, for modernity.
Mobility.
Into sun-sucked ink, oil, platinum, I vandalize form.
You, widely recognized as a modular prophet, briefly part the asbestos curtain.
Who, among these long-ago minted currencies, profits from the quietus of pulped paupers?
Ultramarine, of course, picked up and deposited here at my feet like seed, forms the reticulated reach of your life.
They do.
When they’re gone they’re gone.
Something else, especially if this chaotic rest goes unexamined.
Time lays a recursive trap in which most get caught.
From the Old English for eye-hole.
The skin that threatens to scream in from its triangular sleep, vanishing from the fog of natural history, just as quickly as it had long-ago been shed.
You suddenly appear vaulted and the sun is beautiful.
My favorite spot across the entire desert.
I am describing the man who offers the creature, spoken into long-to-go life, a bucket of sewing needles.
Mostly I see your bones and saddle.
Faithful reader, a sharp splash of light on the cheek come, potential space for potential space.
All piffle & twaddle—influence of the Bottom Dog man. For real “decadents” read Huysmans & other French authors. Diarrhea of words—stew of classic allusions. Fuck Artemiset alia! Don’t put intellect in your prick! Write honestly even if poorly. Humor is weak—immature. Try drugs and compare two kinds of writing. Try using only Anglo Saxon words. Throw your dictionary away! Don’t mix realism with poetics! If you can’t make words fuck, don’t masturbate them! When you speak of the Cunt put hair on it! Try to forget everything you learned in college. Try talking like an ignoramus— or an Igaroti. Read, for emetic, “Palm Wine Drinkard.” You will learn to write only when you stop trying to write. A line without effort is worth a chapter of push and pull. First ask yourself if you have anything to say. Don’t draw the pen unless you are ready for the kill! If you don’t get rid of the Classics you’ll die of constipation. Never show any one what you’ve written until a year or two later. Use the axe to your 1st draft and not the fine comb. The latter is for lice!!!
Source: Miller, Henry. “Advice to a Young Writer.” The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, edited by Alan Kaufman, Emeryville, Calif: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000, pp. 115-116.
Photo: Gerace, Joe. “When you speak of the Cunt put hair on it!” Nov. 28, 2020, JPG.
The days — likely the months — leading up to Thanksgiving 2020 have left a hazy tarnish on my ability to be present for my family and friends.
It started, of course, with the economic uncertainty, political instability, and alienating nature of COVID-19. But it is bigger than that, more insidious, and ultimately more profound.
The rich got richer without doing much of anything, the poor kept fighting at great expense, and the world never stopped its dizzying spin. All this while 1.4 million people across the world died and left a dolorous wake in their leaving.
Please consider: The death of 1.4 million people is, by its very nature, an abstract and impenetrable number of individual lives gone forever and an exponential number of living grief.
Everyone who survives bears a scar. Every witness who remains watches from the silver shadows of their own guilt.
While I have much to be thankful for, I can’t stop making pictures that tell this terrible story writ large on quotidian society.
And I feel ashamed of its toothsome moral: There is a dark and resolute solace in this pathological estrangement from the brothers and sisters who survive here alongside me.
‘Cherry Blossoms at Evening’ by William Carlos Williams
In the prebirth of the evening the blue cherry blossoms on the blue tree from this yellow, ended room— press to the windows inside shall be out the clustered faces of the flowers straining to look in
“Somewhere someone is sleeping, / somewhere the lady of the house / puts the alarm clock in a drawer / where she cannot hear it / then tells the children to be quiet / and stands there listening / to its tick.”
‘Lightly, Very Lightly’ by Mary Ruefle
It was raining. I could hear the rain taking the pins out of her mouth. Soft rain became hard rain so that hard things became soft things. The wet leaves under the trees became heavy as diapers, the book left open on the grass could finally sink in her bath without a word, the way, after a hard day, I rest my head on the edge of the claw-foot tub and my mouth falls open, empty at last. Actually I saw that in a painting when I ducked into a gallery because it was raining. It is always raining somewhere, somewhere the wells are filling from above and from below. Somewhere someone is sleeping, somewhere the lady of the house puts the alarm clock in a drawer where she cannot hear it then tells the children to be quiet and stands there listening to its tick.
Source: Ruefle, Mary. “Lightly, Very Lightly.” Dunce, Wave Books, 2020, pp. 52-53.
Photo: Gerace, Joe. “The Lady of the House Puts the Alarm Clock in a Drawer.” Nov. 7, 2020. JPG.
“My word / Hand caught in the door / Stuck tight old boy stuck tight”
‘Safety Lock’ by Louis Aragon
My word Hand caught in the door Stuck tight old boy stuck tight In other words Or The password please Many thanks Now I hold the key The bolt begins to twist like a tongue Therefore
Trans. Michael Benedikt
Source: Aragon, Louis. “Safety Lock.”The Poetry of Surrealism, edited by Michael Benedikt. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1974, p. 151.
Photo: Gerace, Joe. “Stuck Tight Old Boy Stuck Tight” Nov. 14, 2020. JPG.
“This is the song of one hundred / Thousand chemicals approximating / Sunshine in my hair. My lover bit / My cheek this morning.”
‘This is the Song of One Hundred Thousand’ by Ariana Reines
This is the song of one hundred Thousand chemicals approximating Sunshine in my hair. My lover bit My cheek this morning. I think I’ll Fall from one trance into the next Might fall asleep any minute It gets tiring making yourself look like you’re alive while you’re looking Hard practicing turning Away from the shit we’re in
Source: Reines, Ariana. A Sand Book. , 2019. Print, p. 157. Photo: Gerace, Joe. “The Song of One Hundred Thousand Chemicals Approximating Sunshine [Secaucus Junction].” Nov. 14, 2020. JPG.
