This is not writing, to paraphrase Magritte.

Lines insert a false time. Full-stop.

“It was not made for those who sell oil or sardines”
~ W. Leibniz, ca. 1674, on his calculating machine

Am I to take this seriously?  Is there a truth time of writing and a false time?

When we started looking at the beginnings of the modern digital universe—at the origin of this two-dimensional address matrix— we became interested in the question of what had been done with it at the beginning. Of course, one of the things was the work on the hydrogen bomb. Linguists and certain philosophers of language would lead me to believe that there is a basic level of accepted communication, an agreed upon, non-distorted, good enough environment of intimacy, intention, and reception through which we scratch symbols to each other in basic, consensual hallucinatory ways.  One might take blogs as a kind of evidence for this, or not.  If this is true then there is an agreed upon true time of language which is serial, developmental, syllogistic, perhaps progressive, some might even argue aggressive.  I say something, you say something back and shit! we are human and talking the talk of that — Paul Pangaro would be proud, if he were, and Dubberly would make a quaint conceptual model of it.

Yet!

Yet, I am also aware, as a designer, architect, madman, that the ideal time of language is at least part constructed if not completely so.  Language poetry would not exist without the Rorty-like assumption that all language is contingent and so any concept of an ideal speech community unfolding their ideas and hopes and prejudices in the “real” or “proper” time of speech-like language is a historical and ideological construct– even/especially on Twitter.  The most political thing I can do is face the language and certainly the work is full of “errors”, errors of conception, expression and understanding, but also conscious errors based on the procedural rules governing the violence-composition of article/comment/connect.  So which time is more false, the semiotically foregrounded temporality of poetic lineation, or the hidden, naturalised time of prose, even non-narrative prose such as we would have here if not for my sickness?

What I might be saying here pretty much agrees with a definition of a typical feature of poetry before proving through a historical event, a necessary foundation for poetry is merely a significant historical contingency whose time is already passed.  However, while I look for ways to innovate poetry in prose, I have to be beware the seduction of the prose whose transparent linearity is more dangerous in that it is widespread, that narrative prose is the rhetorical preference of the state and its institutions of coercion (what is not new except a really good story chopped up into tasty morsels?) and that is it so hidden.  Television’s lie is the continuity. If you ask someone to tell you how it happened, say in a court room to use a Lyotardian environment, and they tell it to you in the temporality of the poem, would that be acceptable testimony?  Objection!  Next witness.

What I sacrifice, that the time of the line is material, embodied, visual, disruptive, sexually potent, radical, and sharpened at both ends.  Contrast the semiotics of poetic lineation to those of prose with its full-stops and alinea (paragraph breaks).  The full-stop is rarely used as a disruptive strategy and certainly not in mine.  Why innovate in the space between sentences– but rarely, if ever, disrupt the sentence itself?

The sentence is to language as a porn flick is to love. In other words, sentences are socialised language while poetry is somehow, in being more glossolalic, literally semiotic and so goes beyond ideology. The simplicity of the sentences is the ice pick to the brain I feel as I try to get at the ideological-linguistic fabric of post-industrian, pre-simulation social interaction.  Either that or I just walked into the snow with nothing but boxers on– poetically speaking, of course.

This is not an idea, to paraphrase Magritte.

Testaments…

the wind in rustling in his hair tells a story of what has dropped off a thousand miles away is the intention to gather up and then rush at it an energy distributed then through shallowness to those optics

Sepia tones of light and dust fill the room
I’d been lying in bed for a month
one afternoon, on a Sunday. 

I think somewhere there is a room
in which I am living
an old man, looking back
looking out at central park, 

in the future
in a windy
room where I am sitting and
glyphs scroll across my
eyes, and I hear the C train 

————–

the body is what falls from me as I rise in that [bracketed way] by this this (parenthetical) to the other all it is a process of wanting to get closer to that big mooning face

trying to make out
what I had once written
in what will then be
passing for the present,
blindly, seeking, tweeting,

trying to remember
the room
the light the time of day
when the evil whispered
the wind, the smell of jasmine

————–

even in my muteness, I too am homeless; only semi-detached I’ve been saving up for true immediacy ‘halt who lurks there,’ goes nowhere, this unfurling which is ending up interminable as a blanketing of bold insecurity and intimacy

Yellow’d light filled the room
Don’t let them inside
your eyes, my anvil
shot in the eye,
shot in the head,
shot in the ass,
and I smoked
these last words.  

————–

Pale amber light and dust filled the room,

I have become so certain of uncertainty meanwhile el niño has given rise to cases of hurtling upwards my own super-subjectivity of a being of total dissemination whose myriad parts and I fully occupy all and at the same time…

sepia tones of light I assumed
coming through the cracked windows
but no

more a feeling, though light, too

a healing

And I saw again, April’s budding

————–

petal’s intense gold flames

you feel the gentle warmth on your back articulated like the spine of a vast earth goddess let loose amidst the peaks to rise as ether carrying her displacement on her back. then a passage through.

a child’s drawing
of the sun

And loved again
the absolute unsayableness
of the simplest thing in pain
the way it was, exactly

Walking out again

Into the pale yellow light.