In the evening of a brightly unsunny day to watch back-lighted buildings through the slits between vertical strips of blinds and how red brick, brick painted red, a flaky white, gray or those of no color at all take the light though it seems only above and behind them so what shows below has a slight evening “the day—sobs—dies” sadness and the sun marches on. It isn’t like that on these buildings, the colors which seem to melt, to bloom and go and return do so in all reality. Go out and on a cross street briefly a last sidelong shine catches the faces of brick and enshadows the grout: which the eye sees only as a wash of another diluted color over the color it thinks it knows is there. Most things, like the sky, are always changing, always the same. Clouds rift and a beam falls into a cell where a future saint sits scratching. Or a wintry sun shows as a shallow pan of red above the Potomac, below Mount Vernon, and the doctor from Philadelphia nods and speaks of further bleeding.
Source: Schuyler, James. “Greenwich Avenue.” Collected Poems. New York: Noonday Press, 1998, pp. 169-170.
hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes father mapple cast a look this color orange tries to remind me of you lay down and be slumbering a cabinet is kind the and when i’m cornered at the final blown it seems from room in clouds peeks at ourselves in the mirror brain inside the test tube is still alive
two
the thing that
death gave you
themselves christian thorns
you bet apples
bananas sour as
sweat sweet as
melons the tongues
and tigers hotly
towards dancing away
from your cars
by the frond
of the sea
i live of
rain made out
to ask me
whether we were
again to be
bedfellows i told
him yes whereat
three
content and there
let him rest
all our arguing
with him would
not avail let
him be in
and out a
window will never
create hay back
me up then
to ask to
arrive late and
be polite so
you are do
you know here
is the corner
a couple of
men jump up
7th as a
little there’s only
one option
“151. Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry. The time founded on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity, recombining everything which, during the period of the old unitary society’s disintegration, had become distinct: private life, economic life, political life. The entirety of the consumable time of modern society ends up being treated as raw material for the production of a diversity of new products to be put on the market as socially controlled uses of time. ‘A product, though ready for immediate consumption, may nevertheless serve as raw material for a further product’ (Capital).” Guy Debord
first ask is it interesting
tell the pocket waiter pull-ups skin-tight jeans
scent the studio booth
to be the hungriest ghost kill
in the studio booth smell theorists
scent the studio booth save the actor
kills in the transcendent idea of brilliant to love
basic vanilla body mist scents the hungriest ghost
to be known for a particular black hat
to be known for a particular black hat to kill
in order to slip on a theorist be known for the smell of one’s pockets
to scent the theorist’s tube top for a particular guess what
what’s in the studio booth that isn’t a still particle
life’s deadline fast approaching
that feeling of heroism self-conditioned
against resource scarcity sacrifice
supernatural darkness
of marijuana for the scholars
of cold-water flats floating across envelope scenting the air
“How about an oak leaf / if you had to be a leaf?” James Schuyler
c
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day aftere with
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[Frank] O’Hara’s ironically self-deprecating tone was much imitated. “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love,” he wrote. He kiddingly called his own poems “the by-product of exhibitionism” and wrote constantly about his daily life. It was O’Hara who initiated the policy of dropping names in his poems, a habit that became a New York School trademark. O’Hara peppered his work with references to his painter friends — [Jane] Freilicher, [Larry] Rivers, Mike Goldberg, Joan Mitchell, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie — with perfect indifference to whether readers would recognize their names. That indifference argued a certain confidence in the poet’s ability to make the details of his autobiography-in-progress so irresistible that the reader feels flattered to be regarded as the poet’s intimate. O’Hara s celebration of friendship in poetry represented an ideal that second-generation New York School poets, such as Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, emulated in the 1960s. Everyone wanted to be, as [Ted] Berrigan put it, “perfectly frank.” James Schuyler has a marvelous rift in a letter to Berkson urging him to “be frank (if you can’t be frank, be john and kenneth). Say,” Schuyler continues, “maybe our friends’ names would make good verbs: to kenneth: emit a loud red noise; to ashbery- cast a sidewise salacious glance while holding a champagne glass by the stem; to kenward: glide from the room and not make waves; to brainard, give a broad and silent chuckle; to maehiz, shower with conversational spit drops–but I said friends, didn’t I–cancel the last. To berkson and to schuyler I leave to you.”
down? the sky is not a catalog, an inventory, a litany; it is
sent up for grating? vision touches blue bore and flake moon
cloud or men in a rush against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, again, this is how i am like a
grater? what comes down? the sky like a grater. what comes
down. what comes down? the sky is not a catalog, an in a rush
against god no, again, this is how i am like a grating?
vision touches blue bore and flake moon cloud or men in
a rush against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against
god no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against
god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against
god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god no, against
god no, against god no, against god no, against
god no, against god no, against god no, against god no,
against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no, against
god no, against god no, against god no, against god no, against god
no, against god no, against god no, against god no
