I was leaving ceramics class early. All my pots were glazed. I walked to a tall building, entered and found the elevators. I got in the elevator and was trying to find the eleventh floor, but my vision was blurry. A young man in a suit and a lady in a dress ran giggling into the elevator as the doors were closing, like a commercial (life insurance? cologne?). The elevator started to ascend rapidly. I still couldn't find the button for eleven and the floors were going by faster than I could read, so I randomly pressed one. The elevator stopped at the fortieth floor and I got out. I saw then that the small footprint of the building had continued up the entire height, that I was in a spire. I walked out of the spire into a bigger space. A couple was floating in a pool, embracing and laughing. Tourists were eating at a restaurant. My father walked up to me and handed me a bundle of white envelopes, all labeled with black writing. The envelopes were filled with different types of pine pollen or pitch. I said "Now I understand why I'm so sneezy. My allergies followed the pitch up the elevator. I can barely function." My father said don't worry just put the envelopes into the trunk.

HOOT

they are three persons related complectly, they sing for You! this the hammer kill'd the Jon Henery/ this the summer where you made your pile o'cashes/ this the big sea where you lost your diamond pearl-rings/ I find you nuther suit for sunday lunch// I kisst you in the gardlen/ I kisst you in the spring/ we don't hafta go to town nomore/ cuz there aint no lackin thing// Macker Jims he gone for seatime/ he dint leave me no coin/ gon'hafta scrounge for rum-jugs/ fill'em with gooseneck wine// Run down Jill-gal run down/ catch my yaller hound/ bring them kegs of dandy-coke up/ and gather all the kiddies round

First good dream in a long time

I had just arrived back in New York. I was in downtown Manhattan. Seth was my brother. Our father called and asked me to go to 180th street to run an errand. I started walking uptown by myself and passed a mortuary. I went in and it turned out to be a combination mortuary and paleontology lab, the mortuary took care of the flesh and then scientists studied the bones. I started talking to the people that were downstairs grinding down and polishing vertebral bones. I was offered a job as a bone polisher. The catch was that it was from 5 to 8 every morning- did I mind? I got excited thinking, wow this is perfect, I can make money polishing bones in the morning and then can have the rest of the day to do my own work. I showed up on my first day and was suddenly confused, it didn't seem like I would be polishing bones after all, there were tables and a band, and it seemed like people wanted me to wait tables. I asked the supervisor for clarification, and she said, "oh no, for your job you're going to be playing in the mortuary band, we hope you don't mind." And then there I was playing clave in the funeral celebration with this awesome "well respected Dominican Republic style" band. I was really happy.

I rest in Sofferetti.

Born breathing, soon forgetting just how it's done. Relearning leads to the heart.

Consider the lilies of the field: I learn to love by watching dandelions practice nyctinasty. As soon as its breaths stop my body will rot as readily as a taro corm.

The big machine exhales noisily, sweet-smellingly, more hugely than any lung ever could, and begins to glide off. By the time the last car clacks itself across the seam in the steel there where the rails curve to leave town, I've reached her house and am working to get my breath back.

A grotesque at thirty-one.

If the tissue of a paragraph be inflated or engorged like pulmonary or clitoral tissue, is it abler then to hold these half-formed passing things, eye-spots, memories kept in friends' heads, flakes of light? Inflected with separateness, putting up the prose-system anchor it rode, does it signify more potently now or does its new heft sink it?

My window was everything; four hours between me and my lover's arms. Window-pillow, window-mind, window-heart. Window-eye: bare and hatted heads pass across it like prayer-beads as the train begins to move quietly down the platform. Head, head, head, bead, prayer for openness, prayer for hugeness, prayer for nothingness. Big early-green spaces open up beyond the town's limit, invisible leagues of track pull me on through the morning's tenses.

All Mercer county resisted me while I walked. In my wake coal-towns I suppose would lapse back to their habitual owner-choked dullness but while I was raising the dust off their main streets it was like Yojimbo, suspicion animated the doors & porch-boards and ocularized the windows till before long I'd always be approached and harassed in turn by a coal-company thug-band, a coal-company sheriff & deputy, a general knot of folk, and some evangelical fools. Everyone wanted me on their side, or out of town, or in their depressing little jail or deal-wood church. One time I did accept a meal & some monies to stay a day and fix a busted Estey reed-organ for a couple of bible-jerks but usually I took care to get through as quick as I could. I was headed to Bramwell. All these hills' messy eructations of raw carbon were turning to diamonds faster than God or time could ever figure out how to make them do and that silly Gilded Age saw little Bramwell enjoying the residency of more millionaires per capita than any other place in the U.S.A. The Bluestone ran red from the earth-disturbances upstream but cradled the town in an elegant kink like how the Tennessee does the golf course opposing Blue Goose Hollow and the other old rail slums of Chattanooga which are all gone now, gone, gone, for highways! My blood ran kinky too, a certain instability to the electric charge of my heart-muscle. I felt it falter, times, my heart, thought little of it; but since have come to understand what a damned complicated mystery God worked in building me. Love can be any of so many things, any tiny thing, a little animate quiver of Potassium ions!

The Italian Doctors Are Mutating the Gene in a Dish

(to match our own mutation)

"What is the normal function of the KCNH2 gene?

The KCNH2 gene belongs to a large family of genes that provide instructions for making potassium channels. These channels, which transport positively charged atoms (ions) of potassium into and out of cells, play a key role in a cell's ability to generate and transmit electrical signals.
The specific function of a potassium channel depends on its protein components and its location in the body. Channels made with the KCNH2 protein are active in heart (cardiac) muscle, where they transport potassium ions out of cells. This form of ion transport is involved in recharging the cardiac muscle after each heartbeat to maintain a regular rhythm. The KCNH2 protein is also produced in nerve cells and certain immune cells (microglia) in the central nervous system.
The KCNH2 gene is located on the long (q) arm of chromosome 7 between positions 35 and 36.
More precisely, the KCNH2 gene is located from base pair 150,272,981 to base pair 150,305,946 on chromosome 7."

My great-grandfather dropped dead at 33 years old in Bramwell, WV. The doctors said it was a heart attack. But now these Italian doctors hypothesize that maybe it was caused by the above gene mutation. Hypothesis: the mutation was inherited, but during the course of its inheritance, the genome perhaps compensated, and though the mutation remains, something else now makes the protein necessary to the potassium channels.

I have nothing clever or eloquent to say. I feel totally overwhelmed by how complicated all my loved ones' relationships are with each other and how deep the feelings run. In presence, things are intense and confusing, fleshy, tense, clever, raw – in separation the layers relax into a painful tangle. Visions scatter, communication is layered through time, space, and multiple media, memories are nonexistent when I want them. I will never have the money to buy enough gassy plane/car tickets, nor the time to feel like I'm not always running when I visit, nor the emotional capacity to be able to spend enough time.



Does anyone know where Jophet is?

1. Sass you are mysterious and strong
2. By mysterious I mean so very thoroughly known as to be loved completely
3. Do you know I didn't put that excellent Buddhist textlet there, Kid Nid did
4. Does anyone know where Jophet is
5. Don't you all feel we should be interrogating the FORM of this more than we are
6. What does six divided by 5 equal
7. By mystery I mean like when Flannery O'Connor uses that word
8. I'm less of a humanist than I ever was before
9. By strong I mean really super strong

"What the Buddha actually suggested is that it is the avoidance of the elusiveness of the object of desire that is the origin of suffering. The problem is not desire: it is clinging to, or craving, a particular outcome, one in which there is no remainder, in which the object is completely under our power."

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like
http://deliriouslapel.blogspot.com/

In Chandigarh, plants grow on dogs.
In Chandigarh, dogs jump fences.
People in Chandigarh don't walk, they waddle, so full of pee, tears and breath.
Spiders in Chandigarh reside between skin and muscle.

Apple Scholars' Loving Labor

Will it fruit?

Fragged in jigs & waggles, familiar blurs, you bluff these eyen with your hazes. Struggle to produce a subject-position, strengthen in sun. Compton's tortoiseshell, Milbert's tortoiseshell: sometimes these words mean more than "I".

This is not an effective strategy for stifling dissent.

Country Music

Who're you?
I'm Marlowe.
It's my second name. Clarence Marlowe. Not my middle name, I don't have a middle name. I go just by Marlowe.
I play the guitar. I have that red one, that yaller one... Now see, I'm real country, you probably don't understand me. When I say yaller, I mean the color. I've got a Fender, a Gibson, I have seven guitars.
You waiting for someone?
I have a four wheel drive. Not everyone has one of those. A Ram Raider. It's not like a Bronco! It's a Ram Raider. It's like a Land Rover. I'm about to go to Philadelphia to get another. Another four wheel drive. Philadelphia, Mississippi. All that gambling out there, I might do a little gambling on the way.
Have you been married? Just asking.
Me? Yeuh, twice. It didn't work out like I wanted. Got a restraining order on her the second time.
We still see each other. Can't keep her away. But, I do what I want.
Did you come with someone? I don't want any trouble.
How old are you?
30, well you're still pretty.
Are you taller than me? I like ladies that are tall and slim and pretty, not fat like me.
Me? I'm 20. No, 30. Well, I'm in my 50's.
This is my telephone right here. I keep it in here. Do you have one? My number's 535-7070.
Just sayin. It's an easy number.
These guys think they're so good but they're not. They think I want to play with them but I don't want them. My brother, he was the best player around.
There was a girl once here. She was going with another guy and then she was going with me and then she said she was going with someone in Tuscaloosa but it turned out it was that other guy and he stole $285 from her but she took him back, but she said to me I want you and I said well I don't want you, and I didn't. I didn't want her.
He thinks he's the boss up there, telling us not to play. Well then, I'm not playing, for the rest of the night. Used to be nobody could beat me. Also, that other guy up there, Buddy, he was the best around but now he has arthritis.
I've got blood pressure.
I like you, you're like me, you just say whatever you want.
I sell cars and tractors, a little bit of this and that.
Hey Butch.
You seeing him?
I have no vices. I don't smoke, I don't drink. Only one vice- flirtin, that's right.
I've gotta take my medicine. Wait, no, where you going, wait a minute, I've just gotta take my medicine.

I slippt into the hometown screening of Astra's movie halfway through it. In this way I was able to avoid paying. I'd never seen the auditorium so full; I stood in back and watched the Žižek antics with inward groans: "This is just what I expected, so stupid." But when it became clear I'd not missed the Judy Butler bit I was very glad. I'd never even seen a photograph of her before. Watching her & hearing her I loved her as much as I already did and was moved to brimmy briny eyes by her comment on the Bangor queer-bash murder from several years ago that always gives me the flinches when I walk downtown across that bridge.