HELLO 2015

“O meager times, so fat in everything imaginable ! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays – and on every other day of the week also.”

                                                                                                  —William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“Twister, Dust Buster, hospital bed”

                                                                                                       —Lee Ranaldo, “Skip Tracer”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/2/15

The question is boring and so lists

fracking subsidence sinkhole formation ex-permafrost tundra deep-water offshore platform listing

such an obvious move, she thinks, and we’ve seen this film

 

*

 

Basement reminiscence, 1/64" drill bit, balsawood biplane,
machined spiral, pressed sawdust unspooling blue
electric motor ozone haze, sawdust-crusted duct tape
sneaker sole split concrete floor, garage door chain, oil patch
wood glue, turpentine preteen divorce passage
up to this just-read second’s trending anthropocene chic, mercurial
glitch DJ nomads, mad frequent flier miles son, late bluefin tuna
sandwich (Shanghai’s finest) loose consular coke gossip

 

*

 

Non-binary curious aversion to pronouns: as if my identity slips with us in utterance away to them, and falls so false that oops we could no more quite be: or rather must, not as us, but rather someone-else-just-the-same-as-us but on now (love’s singular verge or blade) confirmed in our desire to cross over & pass through—too afraid not to—just like the others

We imagine ourselves not at all you-and-me just oneself: alone, broken, exhausted, too alive, alive too, just too, merely on some other side, in love with some one or another, not me

Yet enough like you as you used to be

Whomever we’re for, or were, rather, falling as we know we may be/have yet been/or can never hope to be, in love again, as we—yes you-and-I—imagine otherwise, again, again & again, compulsively: It’s the death of thee, Romance!

 

*

Confusion boring deeper, lists, viral mores appear spiral and Thee Reborn lists
finally and sinks into the cold bay so deep and blue

*

It’s January 2, 2015, and I’m 45 and 13 days. Just short

    

with new mutations

of what my browser is the history of

like Big Data say, PLA NSA

 

 

*

 

No, really: as in “you or me,” yet more again, yielding new questions. This one attracting foxes—

 

*

 

MOGANSHAN

 

to the mountain and its will-o-the-wisps
we must escape the city’s heat we must

for diminishing returns rose
from the swamp among us
in dark sweet muddy haze Shanghai

spike not even interruption graph quite
because you always leave almost
thinking in the browser—where were we?

 

*

Lost to cold fox-bidden, fox-hidden thoughts
in the mountains and the forests and bamboo above

Discussing Shanxi terroir, wine
chemistry, climate change, húlíjīng

 

*


And in the process of thinking it became and it thought I kid you not he became the Fox Spirit then thought not in language, not in emblem, not in correspondence nor in syntax, but in one blot, as if our all-consuming moment now doubled, trebled, bloomed: you too, drupelets, ink, all-consuming memo, meme, with him, her, you, exponential us & crash until we all thought one blot, and think it now again, to the end, sewn into our threads, our eyes, base pairs, postconsumer face-savings, carefully spelling “ends” for the Fox Spirit’s kid who inscribes its momentary double in characters — 狐狸精 , nine-tailed fox — and then nods off, in the air, on our palms, thereby spacing, relieving mind of yet more memory, and so to write in this book with this spike

“…for oblivion,” says the Fox Spirit in his oilcloth trench coat, fedora, vintage boots, Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycle and Cornish accent, obliterating “Chinese culture,” he spat “they have…”

 

*

 

And there above the presumptive wartime torture chamber, a mote in my phone camera eye: the other Fox

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/3/15

STICK A -PUNK ON IT

Fogbank cap-punctuated terawatt LED arrays—light theory from near futures, alternate worlds bought on speculation, pure abundance you imagine and you buy it—lights coursing up & out & through, white-red-green-blue-white-mirrorball Pudong from the Bund, golden terroir above the muck-black Huangpu, silver scales where you went down into the go-downs, junk docks, catfish mudflat rats, bamboo everything, sepia-toned coolies, ladders, European and white American race enthusiasts out for a day at the track now People’s Square, down to today’s tourism tunnel and the ’30s wallpapered Deco dummies beneath the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, Tibet Road, 2015, Line 1 Entrance, “Western Treasure House,” 西藏 ,Tibet, People’s Park overlaid upon the Concession-era colonial pony oval—

then the fireworks crowd surges down the promenade, down Zhongshan Lu, same street name all over China, the same street that has become all China, the street with all the edges gathered, attending power, and frayed, hissing like weathered thin shopping bag plastic shreds in trees and the fence, not far from the heart, central yet centripetal too, hoping to smile, just-polished bank floors, Heaven reflecting us there, too, like blood the fireworks 

as underground live streaming
from the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel

where up from hungry Hell or worse,
thirsty Heaven, floating sudden down

falls

*

not yours
the blood
not yet

*

I wasn’t there
and besides I didn’t
see anything
                 

*

Nanjing Dong Lu: Forever 21, your surprise companions, they      
go with you when your heart stops, Eight of Them, Immortals, riding
in Lotus, Ferrari, Maserati, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, Jaguar
& Hummer

in the Floating World
 of engineers, managers, Tesla owners

while peasant vendors on trikes haul all away
below to the Sorrowful World: There, pedaling

quaintly where
I, too, enter

Uniqlo

 

*

 

The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel is real takes you through MAGMA and HADES to PUDONG
in SK People Movers to 2001 where one may still
believe in old futures, Vegas green atomic
outer space, even, and yet time only
travels backwards through you
who remember nothing
but the world as it was
speaking its wonder in
lies flash-frightened
smiles beneath
the Huangpu

 

*

                                                     
Spirit money for souls of those
departed as here rumors burn

and speculation runs to cash
coupons floating down from

the neocolonial club balcony
over the Bund where Opium-

for-silver inscribed ghost web
headline reads inverted: RELATIVES

OF MISSING VICTIMS STORM HEAVEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/4/15

That’s an easy movie to make, she thinks. Oleg the furrier (“call me Ollie”), White Russian exile, lands on his feet, catlike, in old Reno after a rough time in Shanghai and a rougher time leaving, and the roughest yet on this, the other side. Passage across the Pacific out via Yokohama on the NYK Line (midnight knife fight, man overboard seven hours out of Honolulu). The outrage on Angel Island with the crooked San Fran gangster cop. Cashing in on a favor owed by the Chee Kong Tong boss. And then sitting down beside her on the Overland Limited out of Oakland. She held court at the card table in the club car: Kickapoo-Irish-African girl-in-trousers-and-a-jacket just off a stint in a big top novelty jazz band. Carla. She’d worked Shanghai, too, playing her horn in drag with Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentlemen at the Canidrome Ball Room. Anyway, she was on her way home, she said, her folks’ farm outside of Lawrence, but planning to stop off first and see about a holiday-season orchestra gig at the Pair-o-Dice in Las Vegas to make back the money—dog track winnings mostly—that Johnny’d swindled out of her in Yokohama. Ollie knew Johnny: there were scores to settle both ways, and Fate had it in for whoever, it didn’t matter. Cut to: chases from car to car throughout and atop the train and a stop overnight in a dying desert mountain lead mining town. Kansas City and then on down to New Orleans. There everything collapses. Morning radio news of planes bombing the International Settlement. They hit the Great World, where Oleg first saw her: she’d stepped out of the mirror maze as he’d exited the shooting gallery. Half way through Kansas, she seduces Johnny, then chloroforms and strips him and leaves him tied to a bunk on the Illinois Central. She’s fallen hard for his sister, who’s been with him the whole time, keeping watch for Mother. Ollie gives chase, steals a Studebaker. He’s smitten, too, but not with love. The movie practically makes itself. The motorboat chase and tropical storm and fade away into the Gulf, and she falls asleep to occluded gray-tone frames, brass reeds & hi-hat sizzle gassing through speaker static, hissing neurons at the laughing gas ball, beautiful sounds all ’round.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/5/15

 

Creon lay delay (Echo), Antigone frames the goose. Dead cabaret. An ancient Greek theater mask projected into the night haze over the city in laser holograph. Tragedy, you win, comedy you lose. πρόσωπον in the smog. Cut, paste, search. The Huangpu river dragon requests the call center management conventioneers (awake in their drunk dreams, dead awake, looking) return to when the real Chinese invented Cthulu

 

*

 

Antigone fires her life coach

 

*

 

This wasn’t the idea, she said, clipping the “d” in “idea” with the tip of her tongue on the teeth in that lingual smile one naturally makes when one says “idea.” The furniture was/never was checked for fleas? DNA? Hash crumbs? Give me an upper, says the Emperor, so I may throw down. This is the wormhole doper version of events, replete with soft-focus needle-strewn parks and junkie cougars. Please don’t hurt ’em Hammer, states the Shirt. The Emperor hurls a bolt. The Dragon awakes, rolls over, zero-to-ten-seconds infiltrates the city with its SMOG. The Emperor cast his line. Plunk. Up from the sewer grates arises the New Thing. She crinkles her nose in polite disgust: “same as the Old Thing.” The Emperor does not, of course, deign notice, the CLOUD having enclosed them all, drowsing now. The air churns cadmium muds, the sun & your eyebeams go slower and slower in the humid night glow.

 

*

 

Bodily remains

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/6/15

Fighting heavy in the morning giving way to uneasy peace by afternoon. The skink escaped, leaving its tail behind. Back to school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/7/15

THE VERSES

all possibility to the point of extinction
is consciousness. A verse new aware
that it’s us, entangling possibilities
in the one we already know
from a verse just like
us: just slightly off
every time until
nothing like
us nothing
at all
you
&
I

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/8/15

 

impersonate blank
noise in the air

every broken stop
pull the wool off

pull it on repeat
daily and ever

like/unlike ritual
him he’d cross it

out and crumple it
up, or make it stay

which is worse
which is worse?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/9/15

 

air obsession mitt invisible
the will overwhelms us all

the only way out’s deeper
in, accelerant, factotum

class, do whatever every-
where property climbs

even blind limbs like old-time
history fuel, plenty wicks

way out one side
burning in the other

as our aim pulls high
to miss every time

 

*

 

Rubber buckshot rounds chambered in a cop shotgun:
Fiocchi is one company that makes such rounds. People
intentionally set out to manufacture hard rubber rounds
with which to shoot other people if you are police or

whatever or beanbags! The riot of color outside us, the language
we use to gauge our being, report on it, inform, betray
love one another desperate. I know this style
is recherché, I mean real dead by that.

Look, the zombie craze shows the turn of the century to have taken over
45 years and counting (1968, Night of the Living Dead), a slow turn to —

back home

 

*

 

On this day in history in 1349 the citizens of Basel rounded
up the city’s Jews and incinerated them, believing them
guilty of having caused the Black Death.

Shackelton’s Nimrod expedition “planted the Union Jack
at their southernmost position, 88° 23'” on this date
in 1909, just 180 kilometers short of the Pole.

In 2007 on this date Steve Jobs would unveil the first iPhone,
and thus is history-as-a-poem revealed within our lives
as pleasingly vexed plays at self-liberation from one
among others, won with some form of love or betrayal
worth having been betrayed for, or another—call it, if

you will, brains