Perhaps all men then end like Chaplin,
Bumbling and sprawling and interrupted by titles
That brace existence, though none may speak.
And we must wander too these wobbling streets
Around these obscure hobbies of
that we cannot extricate, a small ship
That may not land on a foreign shore.
The sun is black; the walls are white,
A gracious lady awaits her stumbling fate
And as we are, it is unknown, if a small crowd
Has gathered here as if about a fire
To stir sense in these outtakes by their ridicule,
Or else some editor to cut the strands
At whim if it pleases– it need not be a tragedy,
When the last reel spins– a mere ornamented fin,
A jaunty tune, a tramp merging with the distance–
Some tears amidst applause, but mostly laughter–
that one man could stumble so, and redirect himself
Suffer the swings and the barrages as the fool,
Not a sanctified, cripple Christ but a solid man
Up and down the alleys of hard earth dignifying,
Unaware of bruises, that God has taken everything
From him, a wife, a family– the curtain pulls;
the organ grinder bows. It is good to spend a day
In the city of God.

The furnace of the sun blows on.
Infinite is the town you have travelled
Far to see, drinking in its blood.

Day is a glass bottle broken underfoot.
It is beautiful to pass this country
where the sun has
Our days have little weight; they blow like newspapers
Crushed in a pane of sky.
Over the cramps of the earth, the infinite geographies.
We have our pretty faces for the names. The names have pretty faces
For the names. Each thing born is as if written by a casual hand,
who dazed on lazy afternoons had no knowledge of the weight
Thrown earthward. It is enough to be exact
When passion fails, to pale the shadings of the wall
The mind's pale, which in the season's mind
May not dissatisfy. It is enough to watch in the street
And know a woman in the street, collecting
the bitter pandemonium of some angelic rage
As a television, tuned to a false channel, would a blurred world
Of solid value to grope among the seemed.


There is yet too much sanity in this madness.
A rotten fish propels the river upward, on the shore
A fisherman sits allegorically in the waste of his life
And the two meet, senseless.



After the witless night
Day came in long sentences.

You turned like a mouth
and shut.

sunrise on katahdin

A solitary heartbeat must suffice, if the soul has made
This blistered yearning to a skin, a blank wind rattling
Dead thoughts from the trees that lift in dim processions
Over fantasy's feet, the feet of a wanderer now still.
Still, one feels the mountain as oneself, meeting the pass
Of lone ridge that yawns and gives to the last face a mere truth
Void of shine; one has just begun to catch oneself, here
In the dark space of things unsaid, eternal hesitations,
When an ancient sun dips back, invidious, to blank night's eyes,
Its dark peaks seen in darkened pools dissolving

Irresolute truths that scatter in the brain.
Each thing's fitfulness is opened to the midnight eye:
Infinities of flickered flames that creep and wander on
This incessant lack of god. It must have once sufficed, the flame;
It must suffice. But in this endless bliss of stones we falter
Consciously, through these mute things loved by feet, and carry on
Extinct desires in object tongues, though the going soul may keep
Its needs concealed. It is audible, the heart of earth
And tendons of earth that strain beneath its vast and unfelt weight...

Perhaps we are born to carry this, an eternity the earth forgets,
a close craft, through some machine upheld in anguished cry
Pandora caught where the path ends sculpting new of earth,
Shaping earthbound things of us. And yet we breathe the sky...
We have climbed too quickly, seen the forest plunging to the floor,
The arduous path discarded like a string and disconsolately
Broken, our bodies stripped and left as we take the air.

The heart grows faint; it knows its altitude. Each earth below seems
As a man who rises and falls, craving a consciousness of sky
And vanishing vainly. We have known these episodes, these atlantic
Places that linger like a loving hand and lift, where we gather
The stones' agony and the pain of air and stand at last
Shaking the cool containments in the peak of the mind.
The highest is too high; we stand a moment; it shatters us
In swift minutia that sweep across a strand, mere exiles gathered,
Gone– this is a footprint of a father– this a wife–
This is the valley bent below us with rage, a soft thunder
Tilting the glass of daylight down, upon the gone, veiled
Forest that hides the soul. The mind unmakes this
Ecstasy of peaks, this mesh of self and miracle.
A vision sealed in a simple sleep, or a constant foot
Need not know dreaming, as if the landscape were a murdered god
The soul climbs, a childless angel pinned to the back of god.

At last there is no world but heaven, speared in the atlas air.
As a country once traveled is forgotten, it dissolves
With the thought of it. It is clear, we may not fear this leaving.
But must the mind always mark its height, its progress in time?
The mind in dreaming dreams the mind awake, like a net of hooks
Catching. So reason spreads its blanket in the new bald sun
Below a clear and miniscule past like an ant crushed by a child.
The mind wants universe and it will comb the mind outstepping
The skull to grasp at paradise, still, a slick sight held
In an empty handful on an empty globe. These unseen diameters
Hold Eden bare: this it is; the mind at radiance, when hope has fell
And vision, the raw thing beating in the meat of day.

Is it beautiful to break the passing days
Underfoot, like glass bottles?

The furnace of the sun blows on.
Infinite is the name of the far off
Town you drank blood in.

Our days have little weight; they are blown like newspaper
Over the cramps of the earth, the infinite geographies.
We have our pretty faces for the names. The names have pretty faces
For the names. Each thing born is as if written by a casual hand,
who dazed on lazy afternoons had no knowledge of the weight
It threw earthward. It is enough to be exact
When passion fails, to pale the shadings of the wall
The mind's colors, which in the palest season of the mind
Has little chance to mimic fire. It is enough to watch a woman in the street
And know it is a woman in the street, without saying it,
And to feel the bitter pandemonium of some angelic rage
As in a television, tuned to a false channel, to look at a clock
And return a solid value, to make of the groping world a thing not seemed.


There is yet too much sanity in this madness.
A rotten fish propels the river upward, on the shore
A fisherman sits allegorically in the waste of his life
And the two meet, senseless.



After the witless night
Day came in long sentences.
You turned like a mouth
and shut.

I am unworthy, Walt, of your tripping sentences,
your biblical oceans, your beard that tumbles with boys
In the furnace of night, always the supple yes of dignity
that redesires you as you are, as you splendor and shake
Moonlight from your wondrous old form like ancient tongues,



You who lay exposed too long, licking the cruel ironies of wind
From a lone bedpost, groping the infinite sockets of day
For a cheap solace,


A wind is in oblation
With a way we capture wind


The first human must have come into existence with a loss of faith, like a stone dropping. It is a loss of faith that leads to observation, for observation splits, but truth is whole.


(write a book about the first humans!!!!!)

Before there were words there were pure needs. Only when these needs had gone were there words for them; with the word we could to try to recall the need, but they remained separate things, the word always exercising its tyranny over the object as if it wanted to wholly replace it.




Light satire among the sublime is genius...show how human foibles are encased in this enormous natural stir of purposelessness.


You despair because you feel purposeless...and yet the universe is purposeless as well. So you need not feel as if you go against the universe, which would itself be the most depressing thing you could do. Living your life purposelessly, even if you haven't reached that point, is the way of the universe. Following doggedly whim and discipline is the way.

Beautiful is not the shape of things assuming heaven
As a sphere where pure unblemished nations lie;
It is a mirror smashed at angles wrong toward earth
Its odd revenge flung down, false teeth and strict cannibalism
On the vortex of the still becoming man.
To speak of beauty is to lie where beauty has devoured,
Splintered as a thousand tears of glass
That devastate a widow's arm. The soul grows in hideous fire
And rakes its wordless being on the world, unfolding
That real thing more than real, perception's edge,
A vision of all these ruined things arising
In onslaughts of peace rifting temples old as wire
Torn from a heart. It is the mind's tornado:
Do not wait in the basement for calm to come.
Unskin fear's parasite, the heart that craves itself
Surviving, to that cold unthinking
Nerve laid bare in a palm.

(It is not this– this violence, this flowing germ:
It stems from this, its radiant spike unravels
The cool recollections of furious night.)

Beauty is the boy who sees death
Torn with life:
Hologram blown, bent
To a shivering deep, to resurrect
like a gathering god
an unfilled sentence,
Refusing the rule. He stands in the threshhold
of the fallen world
Swollen in death, like a drink poured in a glass
then frozen, pure urge emerging
from the wreck of death–

This is the word that starts the world,
When gone forms crack
And scratch their names into the soil–
The terrible oblivion of a scarred title,
A nude expectant hand
That traces the chasm of ruins
It dreamt of the new world...

He wondered if there was a word for returning, after long absence, to a familiar place and feeling it shrunk, as if the physical world had given way to a mental reality that transformed the streets to neural pathways– there were so many things that could not be said, he felt, but what was worse were the things that could be said but would be left unsaid– and yet, why need to say anything at all?

The trouble with words is that we inhabit them like houses, like cities. We have learned to desire words to lay over the world around us, like sketches of a reality that stands there unnoticed. We can live in this reality, but we have become tame creatures. Some academics scoff at 'socially constructed' realities, as if the reality of a man's mind were not as solid to him as a house, as fundamental as his clothing. Like a house a man may build his inner scaffold for himself; but the vast majority let other men build their dwellings for them, perhaps as much from indolence as from ignorance of the laws of construction.

His identity, he knew, was like a film: though it seemed a constant flow, it was in truth a series of distinct objects advancing frame by frame. So we are to our past and future selves like slides seen in a row,from the outside appearing to constitute a whole.

He felt that even in their intimacy they resembled two strangers who passed in a hallway, adopting momentary faces each to meet the other. He was at the age of just learning that what is feigned is not entirely unreal; that to act on a feigned intention is still to act.

If there is a God, we better hope he has no sense of irony.

"But I've known you forever", she gasped, perhaps believing it; in our play we had forgotten the weight games take on when they become a last resort, and we clung on desperately to this performance though we had no audience.

She held up her hand as if interrupting a sentence I had not, in fact, begun.

We peeled out of the lot in her Nova. It occurred to me that somewhere she must have learned to drive, felt the anticipation of the first moments sweating at the wheel; that she had not emerged as a person merely by my sight of her, but had scores of secrets and memories I would never know about, or perhaps never believe if I were told. She had parents; someone had set her on the first bus to kindergarten, someone held watch over her in feverish nights. The world seemed then impossibly obscure, though the pavement burnt at my bare feet, and the orange sun drilled the sky, as if it were a giant house with many doors, behind which mysterious noises invoke thoughts of private dramas, festivals, natural disasters, bare chasms filled with ethereal light: all locked and forever inaccessible.

She was watching me; her voice peeled thoughts from me like a reluctant blanket, thrusting me into the bare winter of actual day.

Was wir Wahrheit nennen ist nur ein Versuch, des schwarz verengten Ichs endlich loszuwerden.


Nicht ein Gleichnis des unauslöschbaren menschlichen Ehrgeiz ist der Ikarus, der doch nur den einen Fehler machte: gering zu bleiben im Gesicht des Großen. Wie Ikarus sind die, die ihr kleines Anstreben und geringstes Traum nicht ertragen können, die auch nur die Sonne annähern, um ein wenig Wärme zu kriegen. Wie anders sind doch diejenige, die sich zur Sonne umschaffen verlangen, die bloß die Ozean werden, in der die vielen Ikaren verschwinden wie tauchende Schwärme.

An der Vielfältigkeit, der schaffenden Neuheit menschlichen Daseins, war er nicht mehr imstande zu glauben.

Wortein, wortaus ein Neues sich verschwand. Sprachlandschaften blühten, verdarben im bleichen Sprachtag. Ein jegliches Paradies ist klein– so groß geworden kommen wir nie dahin.


Was bist du mir? Ein Mörder des Altgewordenen, des erstickenden Hoffnungsverlust in mir? Sonst nichts. Nichts anderes verlang ich vom Menschen, als mir ein neues Glauben schaffen, egal wie klein.

Einmal eine echte Tragödie zu erleben, ist das schönste, was man je hoffen kann. Wir erleben so viele falsche Katastrophen, so viele nicht vollgebrachten Weltenden, dass wir im echten Fall nicht wüßten, ob es echt war. Im Internet, im Kino sind wir tausendmal gestorben, am Ende verlassen wir aber die Illusion ohne Wunde.

Des Lebens einziger Beleg ist Blut, Zerschlagung.

Dass könnte nur der sagen, wer kein echtes Leid ertrug.

Das unbeschädigte Leben bringt sich nicht zum erklären. Nur erst, was sich als Mangel und Schmerz erkennt, kennt Wörter.

Wo es finster ist findet Geheimes Ursprung. Das Wort ist ein Licht, das alles fesselt, erklärend. Es kann sich im Licht nichts bewegen, nichts glauben.

Sie bohrten durch die Nacht, Unzerstörbares suchend. Erst im dunkeln, wo es nur Ungeschaffenes herumgreift, ist Ewigkeit zu finden, da kein Wort der Ungeteilten ihre Grenze aufklärt.


Es geht immer darum, eine Zuflucht zu finden, oder auch eine selbst zu schaffen.


Ich wäre gern Terroristin geworden. Oder Hüre. Nur das, was die Sinnlichkeit zu ehren versteht.

Die Gelegenheiten menschlichen Lebens sind zahllos zerstreut, wie Faden die die Katze auf dem Boden schlägt oder auch ein Spiegel, der sich selbst durchschaut, und endlos wieder zum Vordergrund sich bringt, sich nur. Wir schauen überall und überall sehen wir nur uns. Wie sonst– der kleine Mensch sieht klein, er will die Welt auf ewig vermindern.


Da sind wir, ungebraucht im blinden Tag. Verzagen kommt, weil wir nicht mehr nötig sind. Die Freiheit, im Leben zu machen was man will, ist das tödlichste Gift. Einem größeren nötig zu sein: nicht zweifeln zu müssen.

Beauty is not an image of things
as they purely assume: it is tormented,
the glass that devastates the widow's arms
In a hideous fire, drawn to void reunions,
the mirrored sliver that is flung at an angle
wrong towards earth, scavenging
the thick unwanted growth
of false staccatos and rotten symmetry
in strict cannibalism:

the real made more than real,
perception's edge,
A vision of all these ruined things arising
In an onslaught of peace
That uproots temples old as wires
Torn from a heart.

It is the mind's tornado:
Do not wait in the basement for calm to come.
Unskin from your heart fear's parasite that craves itself
Surviving, a cold unthinking
Nerve stripped bare in a palm.
It is not this–
this violence, this flowing germ:
It stems from this, its radiant spike unravels
The cool collections of furious night.

Beauty is the boy who will see death
Torn with life:
His last hologram blown, bent
To the shivering deep, resurrecting
like a gathering god
an unfilled sentence,
A refusal of the rule. He stands in the threshhold
of the fallen world
Swollen in death, like a drink poured in a glass
then frozen, a pure urge emerging
from the wreck of death–

This is the word that starts the world,
When the gone has cracked
And scratched its names into the soil–
The terrible oblivion of a scarred title,
A nude expectant hand
That traces the chasm of ruins
It took for the new world...

There is a darkness to the start of day
The hand eludes,

Before sun's head has beaten
Through the wall of world.

There god crawls,
there a funeral wit redraws a landscape.

Has it begun?
Has the ending and the blot of things begun?

Must every day then be created
From pure muteness?

Once anything sufficed
To fill these teacup abysses,

An aimless thread,
A tree that was the palace of a king;

Now only you suffice,
The sight of you, the shape of things

That bend to kiss you in the street;
Whose fatal love

Before dawn draws its penitence from earth
In an endless sermon, always

the same, soft tyranny of words
Winging over the trembling sky.

A solitary heartbeat must suffice, if the soul will have its miles
Of blistered yearning still to make, and an arid wind
That shakes dead thoughts from awkward trees. It occurs as scripted:
One knows the mountain as oneself, obtaining the pass
Of the lone ridge that yawns and gives to a final face its mere reality
Blown of shine. One has just begun to believe oneself
When a sun drops livid on a thread to melt these mysteries,
these dark peaks seen in darkened pools dissolving,
these irresolute truths that scatter in the brain.

Each thing's impermanence is disclosed to the wandering eye:
Infinities of things extinguishing, things that sublimate
The incessant zero of God, and burst. It must have once sufficed;
It must suffice. But here in the endless bliss of stones we falter
Unconsciously, these mute things loved by feet. We must carry their need,
These extinct desires, or bear an oblivious tongue through immediate space:
The soul in going bears desires minutely. It is audible, the heart of earth
And tendons of earth that strain beneath some vast unfeeling weight...

Perhaps we are born to carry this, as eternities the earth forgets,
to step too long, through some magnetism culling an anguished echo
of Pandora's thought, where the path ends sculpting earth
Making earthbound things of us, as refugees who, risen to arise,
Have climbed too quickly, seen the forest plunging to the floor,
The arduous path discarded like a string and disconsolately
Broken, our forgotten clue, as we hasten to assume the air.

At such altitudes the heart grows faint; we know each stretch of earth below
As a man who has risen and fallen, antagonized upwards
And died in vain. We have known these episodes, these atlantic
Places that linger like a loving hand and lift, to gather
The mountain's agony and agonies of air and stand finally
Sourceless, bereft, enveloped in the corona of the mind.
The highest is yet too high, though not enough; it shatters us
In swift minutia sweeping across a strand, mere exiles that gather
And are gone– this is a footprint of a father– this a wife–
This is the valley bent below us with rage, a soft thunder
Tilting the glass of daylight down, upon the gone, gone
Forest veiled in the hidden soul. The mind unmakes this
Ecstasy of peaks, this mesh of self and miracle: it is needed
To bring vision, if at all, to a simple sleep. But a foot that passes
Need not know dreaming, as if the landscape were a murdered god,
each height a childless angel one steps on climbing the soul.

At last there is no world but heaven, speared in the atlas air:
As a ground once traveled is forgotten, then dissolves
With the thought of it. We need not fear this leaving, it is clear.
But must the mind always measure its height, and time its progress?
What could bear the body in its treason of the mind? At last the mind,
in dreaming, dreams at rest in mind, like two deadly hooks conjoined.

So reason spreads its blanket in the new bald sun
Below a clear and miniscule past like an ant crushed by a child.
The mind wants universe and it will comb the mind outstepping
Still the skull to grasp at paradise, though slick, a slippery vision held
In an empty chalice on an empty globe. Unseen diameters
Hold Eden bare: this it is; the mind at radiance, when hope has slipped
And vision is the raw thing beating in the meat of day.

TRANSCRIPT OF A SILENT FILM

Perhaps all men are like Chaplin,
Bumbling and falling and seeing titles
Brace their existence, though no one speaks.
And we must wander wobbling streets
Meshed in obscure customs of
that we cannot extricate, a small ship
That hesitates to meet a foreign shore.
The sun is black; the walls are white,
A gracious lady awaits her stumbling fate
And as we are, it is unknown, if a small crowd
Has gathered here as if about a fire
To stir sense in these outtakes by their ridicule,
Or else some editor to cut the strands
At whim if it pleases– it need not be a tragedy,
When the last reel spins– a mere ornamented fin,
A jaunty tune, a tramp merging with the distance–
Some tears amidst applause, but mostly laughter–
that one man could stumble so, and redirect himself
Suffer the swings and the barrages as the fool,
Not a sanctified, cripple Christ but a solid man
Up and down the alleys of hard earth dignifying,
Unaware of bruises, that God has taken everything
From him, a wife, a family– the curtain pulls;
the organ grinder bows.

Master List of German Oddities

Dusch Das (for men)
McPaper
I'm Bag
Corny
"Long Branch Saloon"
The Oscar Wilde: Authentic Irish Bar
Wellness Flakes