From Dusie Press

To Bill Allegrezza, after reading In the Weaver's Valley

“I” must climb up
from a whirlpool
swirling down,
but sans belief
in signification.

“I” must say I
w/ out knowing
how or why
this can happen
in language.

“I” must believe
in my own
existence,
droplets stopping
my mouth—

alone, derelict,
“I” must come back,
again, again,
‘til this emptiness
is known, & shown.

© Adam Fieled 2007

More from X-Peri

LIFE SCRIPT

Born Cuckoo, Technical
I became a Vagabond, Condensed.
She was très Avantgarde,
always the Jester.
Our relationship Allegro.
We vacation in Geneva.
Our life Storybook.
Our son Tristan, of course.
How Poetica.

© Larry Sawyer 2016

More from P.F.S. Post

AN EVENT

i
above
me

though a beginning
a way through

still we corner direction
with beacons thrown
into night

a goal or a sight

we could wait for an event
with fingers shifting among the goods on a table
but i prefer the multiple act—
the digressive broken word changing in space.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

four parts falling
that was how i came to see it
what’s happened is
the spirits take hold
and then thrust us out into
the brilliance of a day on its end
as though only thought
can remake the system in
clean lines in frequent
violent reverberations of sound
that remind us of battles
of hinges raised for a moment
in the sun.

A SWITCH

the beam flashes and is
gone

dreams crumble with bickering groups gathered

"she stops before babylon and goes invisible"

i gage my strength
against rock
as wind playing
lone sounds

idle but understanding
immensity is overcoming
light drives but allows

"i am years for you just now"

© William Allegrezza 2007

From P.F.S. Post

9/1/07
to Helene

There’s a green dustcover over every place
that seems worth going back to, piled
by thinking, candy-apple tart.
You’ve just begun your trip around
the map of where you are when some
remembered patchwork drops on top of it,
catching every hook with an eye
that glances homeward. Don’t tell us how
you’ve always wanted this to be
your starring role. Cast
off your energetic plush
and wrap one callback finger
around each ornament.
That’s when you’ll really know
how wishes rise like buried
grains of rice or bread-loaf,
juttings into marked-off space,
nodding spring-loaded heads along
to this defeated beat.

© Timothy Yu 2007

From Ungovernable Press

Mariehamn

Your ukulele. Just because I could not play.
By sleight of wave our names are forever erased
from the sand. By sleight of hand
your card is pulled, melts, seamless,
and our dainty pastel admittance seizes
the moment of gentle tumult to burrow maybe
beyond the discard pile: beyond my boggled-sight?
Beyond my fire-fingered grasp?
For my love is a painted hermit crab,
yours for a good cry…

The sea, the sea will provide.
This evening,
there will be intrigue
while our clothes tumble dry.

© Brooklyn Copeland 2009

From Words Dance

GENERIC STRUGGLE

It’s sort of a horror—
ashes in the mouth, fish subsisting
on mud—
hypothetical fringes, camps, camps
of cracks where real humans slip…

Homeless, here on the last frontier
there’s room enough for millions
to live out of a car, pitch a tent, grow
up in a dark texture of thatch.

To taste the stale odor of resources drying,
to breathe that exhaust
is to suddenly find yourself another
bottle-tossed boat person
washing, washing…

I’m inside that knife
experiencing the exposed belly’s
sensations, and what pierces, and when.

It’s the heart of a photo of three women
weeping over some body shot down.

Madonnas aren’t myths. Truly, martyrs feel:
grief, the black garb, not a symbol simply,
but more a face wrinkled expressive with
gestures, of having stolen sights gelling
as dreams at the edges of breathing, of breath.

Is to lose them to harden, become brittle,
hollow, a shell of straw
whistling in the breeze?

Down at the bowels of featureless dots on
a chart, down past the grid to a network
of sewage tunnels, the human soul’s reduced
to the garble some loudspeaker blasts.

Each evening, on the airwaves, that trouble,
a roomful of mirrors, delivers the same
news.

© Stephen Mead 2005

Equations on PennSound

Equations 1: The Thesis Episodes.

Equations 2: The Jade Episodes, completing the dialectic (antithesis, synthesis) & book.

Equations: Thesis: Julie Hayes

Time and sex: sex chronology is not linear. Sex and time are both conversant with strange leaps. It is the first day of the first class I will ever teach. Julie looks at me with big round black eyes, soulfully. She has long wavy black hair and her looks are dark, foreboding. We often want what wants us; Julie makes a habit of following me, from the classroom to the subway, from the subway to the Last Drop. As a student, she’s haphazard. What she teaches me is that when someone follows you, they can make you follow them; on the walk home from the Drop, I realize my mind is following her, into her apartment, onto her bed, underneath the sheets, underneath her folds, into her little stomach. But I can’t. So I let her follow me, knowing that this will lead (eventually) to a culminating moment. My hunger is for continuance. Julie wants the thrill of picking up a hot potato and dropping it back into the pot. But these early weeks are all titillation, so that every soulful look to me is the countenance of continuance, has endurance written into it. Is this my wife? Marriages have been initiated in stranger fashions. Julie is as pale as Marie, but much flintier, so I know strife will be a feature of my daily existence, after we are married. I think this as I stand before the class, discoursing on Chaucer, gazing at this little wife of Bath.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………...............................................

The semester is over, almost. I am making a pact with Satan to get away with this. It is all fine and feisty as I bite the bullet, walk the knife edge, get in touch with my renegade parts. But I never lose sight of the hunger for permanence, which is by no means Julie’s. Her hunger is just to have what cannot be had, so that she can be a special person. Two hungers collide into nakedness, and neither seems to care that they don’t coalesce. We are separate via our separate hungers, and human in our desperate need to pursue them, singularly, and only marginally together. Her apartment is a mess, but with high ceilings, who cares? So we climb into our bed of separate hungers and square off. I learn nothing because I do not see what her hunger is. I think she’s just like me. Of course, she wants what I want. Of course, she thinks, he wants what I want, to do something to make himself a special person. What neither knows is that we’re both not special, we are both (and more than we realize), lusterless in our separate lusts. There is no innocence lost because raw hungers remain innocent until proven otherwise. You can pound away a hunger, but each thrust by no means puts you deeper into the other person. You move deeper into privations of private passions, unexpressed. But Julie looks so young and callow that I don’t notice these things. This, I think, is the beginning; but Julie has already become a special person, and wants a way out. We both sleep topless in the May heat.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….......................................

Something holds Julie back so that there can’t be too much of this. While I am with her, she controls everything, from my sensations to my destiny. She can bite me off, permanently cripple me, or please me if she wants. As master, she decides how much hunger she will or will not assuage. She uses her hands as well as her mouth, doing little twists like she’s learned to do from Internet porn. It’s delicious, my legs shake from the unbearable nature of the sensations. The problem is, she then freezes, which means she is deliberately effacing my most overwhelming pulses. So I come in her frozen, static mouth, with a sense of intense anti-climax, and I am too bashful to instruct her as to how to do this properly. Yet any woman who brings me to this must be a darling and an angel. Julie, this darling angel, stands on the threshold of womanhood, and her hunger is merely to control. There is no sense of service, and since we are in my apartment there is no sense of comfort for her. What she wants to take home with her is a sense of having bested me. As she gazes at my closed eyes and opened mouth, there is (I imagine now) a sense of bitterly held contempt for my weakness, my humanity. We never fuse our different stupidities, so that I see no depths in those rounded eyes of jet, and she knows that she has now gotten what she wants from me; there is no more specialness.

© Adam Fieled 2011