Thirty

what tags the bats
entering light
what motive / so they say

300 velvet curtains
on 300 reaches

bird dances ladders
eyes each zero branch
nests on one

Twenty-nine

once again this year
we drafted for
harmony with nature
on day one

even though we were 29th
in the league at illustrating
the decline of civilization

we know
what sells cracker jacks
to ourselves

Twenty-eight

ba in the mirror
14 of 28 limbs
fur coats rioting

guardians of zero
pursuing cardinal numbers

situations of zero
blocked by hosts of essence

hypothetical lions
or browns

Twenty-six

26 / feet wide
the mangrove / vultures each side
turkey and black / 100+

why / carcass appeared
distracted / I entered the eye

it flew / to the ocean
I rowed / as before

Twenty-five

kula two heh bowe bowe bowe bowe
kula two hen bowe bowe bowe bowe
kula heh hen bowe bowe bowe bowe
kula hen heh bowe bowe bowe bowe
kula tell wid bowe bowe bowe bowe
kula wid tell bowe bowe bowe bowe

revise bear fish with specialists
revise oedipus with horse tricks
revise acrobats with reference

revise bowe hen hen hen hen hen
revise fish bear bear bear bear bear
revise trish horse horf horf horf horf
revise reference bat bat bat bat
revise trick bat everything thing goes
revise go vat that that that that

Twenty-four

economist from Dresdner Kleinwort:
Sarko doesn’t understand economics
but understands perks of being ‘divisive’
like leading in the polls

Le Pen’s daughter: Sarko
steals their ideas

the markets say:
‘let Le Pen’s imitator
privatize the oil’

the government either owns the oil
or the oil owns the government

a fact lost to those who blame
the Americans for the wars

Twenty-three

when I became water
if you’d walk on me

then blood
if you'd have a drink

then covered myself
with a tambourine
and slept

Twenty-two

ten coats align
for the twenty-two skies

ten coats arrived
from the beaks of ten seas

where a rose is not a rose
til you’re born

Twenty-one

feather hands
after mask feet
in Saturday air

feather leaves
multiply mask space
lost in the eye

through their hat
talking the map
sacred feathered cast

Twenty

Bigger than a breadbox? No
In your skull? Yes
Looks like a cabbage? No
In your mind? Yes
All in your mind? No
Involve memory? No
Anyone I know? No
Would I find it in a supermarket? No
In a graveyard? No
At the State Fair? No
Is it alive? Yes
Do the pious seek it? No
Referenced by Lucretius? No
By Aristotle? Yes
Is it a jet engine? No
Atlantis? No
Does it fly? Yes
Is it a jet engine? No
I already asked that, can I take that back? No
Is it a catharsis? No

Nineteen

white teapot
white pantheon
in two three four
six smoke eight
nine ten

smoke ten
white whole white
artichoke white
bicycle wheel
loaf of white

towpaths
and nineteen
bone white
smoke rings
rings rings

Eighteen

...................................‘tis but our fantasy..........
.......And will not let belief take hold’..................
........................beacon disappears........................
....................five miles off.....................................
...............................................................................
.................Dick Nixon and Frank O’Hara.............
................discuss Rachmaninoff.............................
................................................................................
........'thy commandment all alone shall live’.........
........'unmixed with baser matter’............................
................how each limb feels.................................
..................in found sarcophagus.........................

Seventeen

nothing left but gold
and songs of wand’ring swallows
soul’s a creation

Sixteen

I’LL STRIKE THIS PARAGRAPH on the forehead once it reveals to me the antithesis of your curiosity. NATIONAL POETRY is DADA, says the taxman in every tree, as he is writing this for me while I turn to sand. No one can escape FATE no one can escape NAPOWRIMO. Poetry has nothing to fear but poetry itself. Enter through the purple door and make for the front of the boxcar, don’t stop, don’t read the signs, til you have reached the antithesis of your curiosity. Don’t reveal to me its enigma! Don’t get in the way of the paragraph!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRISTAN TZARA

Fifteen

cavalry’s horned
to out mountains

corners attached
to their old buildings

violins in your hair
bring forest boxes

oxen walk gently
in unlit shapes

Fourteen

Ensor’s mother dealt masks; Longhi’s rhinoceros
across the channel appealed to him, for I saw yesterday
his masked men viewing a tortoise, across the room
his Watteau’s Pierrot and his Delacroix. The grotesque
in masks found in the spirit rituals, players' masks around
Pierrot made to shine in Carnival, where Leonardo
and Daumier used the face for grotesques - Ensor’s
is a spirit ritual of another kind. A grotesque existence,
fitted onto minds that choose it, peering at the animal hoped
to show its essence under its shell. Creeley said
sonnets ‘are highly difficult to use because society
does not offer them a context with which
they are intimate, anymore than society
offers a context for dancing the gavotte.’

Thirteen

Jefferson and/or Don Adams
is the title

the contrasting traditions
of Lukács and Lacan
is the topic

the text is a synthesis

or

Jefferson and John Adams
died the same day

26. Kxg2 Rxc3
27. Ba3 Ne8
28. f4
Game drawn 1/2-1/2

Twelve

Birthday today: You don’t want to know.
Star birthdays: David Letterman, which makes for a good argument for posting this as a poem and a good argument against it.
(Video can also be found here)

Aries (21 March-20 April) Cancel your lunch appointment and make a detour to an Asian buffet that involves at least three trips to the dessert cart.
Taurus (21 April-21 May) Emphasize in your remarks that you don’t know how a flagrant racist could come to work in your media corporation.
Gemini (22 May-22 June) Your lawsuit should include the damages incurred by not only preordering the Here Comes Everybody anthology but by the fact that you rented hundreds of thousands of lunch carts and pay toilets with the expectation that everyone was coming and your deposits are not refundable.
Cancer (23 June-23 July) José Bové isn’t going to win, but who cares?
Leo (24 July-23 August) Your witty banter and terminology-intensive yarns about the early days of the Situationists are certain to keep that Eastern European stunner from going back to her ex to shoot up heroin again.
Virgo (24 August-23 September) Treat your apostles to an after dinner cognac and broach the question of which one of them betrayed you later.
Libra (24 September-23 October) A poetry flame war will take your mind off the easily resolved problems in your relationship.
Scorpio (24 October-22 November) Even if your anti-war resolution is non-binding, you won’t encounter anyone in your sheltered existence that is affected either way.
Sagittarius (23 November-22 December) You can quote Bela Akhmadulina on your blog til the cows come home, but you’re fucked no matter what you do.
Capricorn (23 December-19 January) So what are you doing with this guy?
Aquarius (20 January-19 February) I’m just going to project my anxiety on you now.
Pisces (20 February-20 March) When making your presentation to the board of directors, just say that the venture is sure to be a success because your horoscope says so.

Eleven

Lake was spelled snake
then you jumped into its mouth

your shape was the boat
from the reeds of our distraction

now a map of the lake sits
above the jar of old skins


climbing up
the side of me
you get to the top
then you go back
down again

Ten

the sleep of one is zero

the sleep of zero
produces shadows of monsters

cast on a sea of one
caravels of love and planets
navigating animal wind

zero revised to zero
one revised to one zero
the sleep of the wind
produces animal zeros

Nine

Praise be to crustaceans in Mme Crevette’s soup
that she keeps watch for us and that
the Mlle’s man sleeps til noon

Scorn to the lark’s cry
the celestial spheres
scorn to time’s torch in mine eye

I’ll walk to Figeac
where the laundresses by the Célé
still think me a mute

Eight

soon the Digital Sappho
will tell you all the places

where giant dinosaur teeth
rise from the earth

but first the Digital Sappho
will tell you all the places

where people are throwing out
their recently purchased appliances

Seven

in sonnets Berrigan found Ben Franklin graceless
in sonnets Mallarmé found trumpets graceless
Rilke thought the sonnet more real than grace
playing the glass armonica in the trumpet of his ear
my bread is a sonnet because I eat it
buzzards encircling the seven deadly arts
breadlines form tomorrow for want of grace

number nine number nine number nine
Kehre me on dead man
line eight is avant line ten is post
happy birthday Mr. Wordsworth in your grace
you preferred Milton to the pricks in London
come see what sonnets lurk in the reviews of Today’s Man
lake in daffodil in a lake in the daffodil

scouts from Mount Parnassus
chomp cigars in San Pedro de Macorís

looking for southpaws that follow chin
music with hard sliders away

to retire Romantics
in powdered wigs

S I R E N

F I R E S

S R I N E

D E M U T

C I G A R

Four

Eve of all hollows, the children factor cruelty with population density, findings suppressed. An egalitarianism as extreme as last night’s mischief, moon’s appetite for leftovers. Authorial intention spilled as seas, the philosopher’s stone migrates North, Spicer steals his thing from the prince of thieves. Tip the maid and she’ll wake the unhappy hermaphrodites. Annihilate the senses be for rations of four-sided croissants, the line’s duty to frame the Last Judgement for dessertion. The Gothic sequel’s pizza boy bearing Taco Supreme enters your casket on all soul’s, I see him on the analogical mountain with Persephone and then never again.

Three

Sea creatures in tanks at the Museum of Modern Art, my internal logic contingent on the expectation that you would elope with Nelson Rockefeller. The love triangle reimagined in Graces, Fates beside them, Furies in tow, Muses tugging the other side of the rope. ‘On board the Circe’ she sends us via abode of Scylla, their past appears closer by superior mirage. My dream a drink with Harry Cohn we mirror the coats of the west (spoiler). Boating is an aid to memory, you can leave me at the next sight of land, keep the limbs, ‘lose all companions.'

Two

if the self tastes bitter
it is not self

(mundaka
upanishad)

so the bird on the high branch
eats the symbols of the fruits

only to spit the seeds
where the second walks

‘two of us
wearing raincoats’

the eagle signs its name
to its antithesis

only because the pen is dry
Loplop is 116 years old today

free to die 21 years ago
wake up tomorrow

and bet on the cockfights
between blinded kings

One

notre musique
Video sent by magnanime77

Voice-over, immediately after credits:

"And so, in the age of fable
There appeared on earth
Men armed for extermination"

Almost halfway through, couple flees burning house in b/w:

"They’re horrible here
With their obsession for cutting off heads
It’s amazing that anybody survives"

Near the end, as children sled:

"We consider death two ways
The impossible of the possible
And the possible of the impossible"
___________

‘The state dreams of being one,’ fixate on false beginning, the cruellest mouth, fool’s golden dawn. Before you can sing like a bird, you must learn to sing like a machine. To understand the world is to destroy it, to destroy the world is fate. They fly into place while the oracles sleep, fashioning your eyes into backyard swimming pools. Fate prefers the radio for its memoirs, the TV for its excitements. The death of one is zero. The death of infinity is one.