circa 1980

poetry=subtractions
unless
table
left out the most familiar
thing of all- where you put the thought.
Somewhere else, maybe later- where I put
the thought no longer called "it." For this
I use multiple languages, a variety of
arbitrary, freely related or unrelated
instances.

Handwriting is one instance of what
may be photostated. Later I'll apply
an approximate map. (This may be a hardship
on what seems to be simultaneous).
How to note the spacing of the calls...
is an amalgam of a garden of choices.
(That's what they make, bells, to communicate
their intentions.) What may honestly suit
is "wait." Only that word is copied
in the next last version.

But this
is a cut
version, the last
book, meaning the one before
this one. "Last" is next
to: "your heart's in the right
place." A motorcycle accident on
the way, I lean and look out the window.

Anxiety, with image. Transparency
into the feeling of a story all
afternoon. Foggy Thanksgiving. Poets
sign pages with words. A signed page.
Alphabet of names. Alpha bet. 2,3.
Alphaville. Still, or even if there isn't
my name, stay home, stay put. The
shamans, the advertising men, the ones with
titles are all hanging around outside,
so I'll stay in, I'll stay put.
Meanwhile, driving, "You got there,
you ought to be real happy."
"Comin' from left field."
I signed that part
"for" a poet.

Anyway,
though I'm angry,
I stayed up all
night during the early
part of the evening. Also,
I'll rest.

"You stay."

"No, you stay."

"You're" over here, on the left. I'm holding the
camera. (Turn on the tape).

Find the clue or close the case. I don't
want to close the case. So...

So, first I'll note
the details.This is
how an ordinary day is
worked through. Words, like
words go up and down the way
your moods go - could be more steady,
then: rational. Full stop. But the boxcar
(you let it stay, drifting along, they
wouldn't let me talk like this: ruins,
dreamy). It can't always be that way:
so, how do you review, reinvent all the
words, a whole new language? As angry
as we are, we all go back to her- the church
on the ocean to the right. But the ground is
close up too, sooner or later you have to
breathe, you ventilate, you have to invent
your own. That's how you bring art
back into it, how "one" does
one detail: I don't know,
but it's a socket,
a negative image,
a female,
phallic symbol

I know a page is a picture,
something to repeat, to continue
what came before is its
opposite. You get there kind, in
thought or language. No blueprint
for a picture of her- the
remainder is an origin- I
don't mean only this one
beneath my hand-

Letters are sexy-also
sexual.That is, if I
recreate your presence in this,
an accumulation of
abandoned object-cathexes.
Words smile.

She visits a
man she deosn't
recognize, a bourgeois artist.