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.