Kaddish4: Now Here's the Thing

then the cypress tree



so dark
the slow moving river
asleep
down the long black lazy corridor
lit by chestnut candle

bluebells and forget-me-nots
honeysuckle and hosta
red hot poker
bluebell
rose

eating
from the shadow
the hostas will grow v large
this year and our small lower lawn

will be stepped through on slabs
York stone
bald barren islands
as it disappear

and over there
things will hang like weeping willow
like fox glove
like lilac
like meat



--------------



they know

I love the silver birch trees
their bark
their little leaves

since childhood I have

by the lakeside
by the small white pebbles
and slow lapping

said
good
night.

tall trees
little stones
big leaves
wild branches

knelt

when the rain fell
on the weaving grass
the hills above
a heart shaped mouth.



The problem with Hegel and Ethel Merman, both, is that they are hacks whose influences have spoiled their respective fields for many generations. Yet, people secretly love them anyway, especially the post modern types. Everyone enjoys their stuffy, dodgy assurances of the power of fate and good entertainment.

They are good bed partners. Ethel wears her cowgirl fetish gear and Hegel is dourly amused. I have to leave the house. I am talking about nothing at all. History is the study of times gone bad. This is a bad time

Foods that begin with A: apple, apricot, almonds, alligator pears. All of these grow on trees. (Next slide please). Begins with O: Orchards. Now what I like about orchards is the primacy of the view in that wherever you stand reveals the whole of where you are, which in turn reveals who you are. Speaking of which, there is no who anyway, only where and sometimes why. I lie, there is never a why. Just a where, ready to wear; I am already feeling better.

Where am I? In a bed full of babbling books, watching a slide show about alphabets.


The Alphabet Angels have flown in. The whole office went to cheer the landing. Everyone is impressed with the Alphabets because they are blind and yet land so perfectly. Sometimes I wonder at the way people will ignore the fact that the Alphabets were actually chosen to be made blind for their life purpose of upholding the sounds of letters and words. It is something akin to the castrati in the glory years of opera, these special beloveds made sacred by a mutilation. The Alphabets are first taught the letters of all the forms of Alphabet, and then are made blind so that the letters will stay imprinted on the retina with impartiality and without distraction. The Alphabets speak the sounds of the letters while the purple traces of the letters imprinted inside them flare like small match heads. This is as if they are walking scrolls but it is only the letters that they repeat over and over and not anything else; no words, no poetry, no stern decrees.

I am unconvinced that the sacrifice of their sight is necessary or even effective. Yet sometimes I lie awake, chanting the names of the letters while pressing on my eyelids in the dark. And I do admit to entering into a strange trance, the likes of which I am hopeless to describe.

B is for beep. I have another call.



the tower’s shanks shimmer
mauvelustre
a dragonfly discourses

The extinguished their grieving shadow.

so far

pretty as clover.weepin

away •mathematics surrender

passport

such a lovely life
& flower sellers + informants hawk

”My shoulder is broken“

•••is the city her ancestors experience
walk arm to arm •fragmented•clapperclaw
System[ok dance to this & if you don’t

of malinformation
activation
sunset
incoming

ululationnation

graciously exploding limbomb huddle venuse
s

1a hangnail 2a rattling pin 3furnaced great ••blind observatories at antigravitational typologismaticism 4cars skiddng from a

top multistorey carpark 5humane salami opened toxic “A pretty dressskybluedarksash
”grape listen¡

The dead woman
singing in the shower let’s go.immense corpses rearing up over the scorched earth.multitudes of frozen spiders.taken from a location to a location.dis
Posed

Clumsy kissing•frighteners

all dreaming
love text found
junk alleys•

wayCapimpitaerialists cramming limbs into a machine resultant paste puke hair & Multitude AURATIC

•1st remove the tongue
•witnesses will be annihilated
•Clumsily twitch inner thigh
•history of pop music of amnesia of jellyfish of prosthetic brains of snuff

movies, cardboard violinists cognate• lipdancer
noSleep at night no
at the window gazing outin at
The inunvisible
Heavens an aeroplane

thrums

undistance to distance
sneezes shivers goes back to bed
Aeroplane shivers & shimmers s

waying
ephermeral cool breeze before •another heavenly day•skin from head

peppermint dog shit a few base coins > lost
Caress



war• sometimes i feel so sorrow i just
ice want to to the



Carcase



didn’t even want to be•



“awful scar-r-ed” night a|flooding
dragonflies & war > so peaceful so happy
specimen text one

The future is oursangrybrigade

specimen 2 text

rags of garden
& slang travellin
g through

•the skylight stars

tickle her toes
she rolled his sleeve
up went the stars

through the sky
light & she swarmed
the noonday

moon weaved bee stings in
vests & drown
his sleeve

in traffic
song there
go the bees

through the bright sky•

She was surprised to have been born into a world shared with God
She searched around for some sign or glyph to help communicate with This
Her birth had spread blood and fluids over all the books
The language them were written in remained unreachable even on the dry bits:

Flkeofftab thakmor o-sanyavin
Washti ma thakma o-da
Vvva vva

How can I live in this world in which there is God and This is unreachable?
There were she knew messages form This everywhere
Especially tag clotting and drying f
“Hi! Capital One, MBNA and Barclaycard…
I thought this was New York! Why?
Maybe I am the girl from Jersey?
Like a new potato with a delicate skin, light gold and edible.
The stronger words thuswise languages of your Solanaceae:

Flkefflab tamer o-sandy vain
Washtub ma taka o-ad

Eva via

PREPARING A SALAD NIÇOISE
EATING BREAD AND HONEY
WATERING THE GARDEN

These words were like city blocks, dull heavy things that had to be got through
Mopsy looked at Milliband, who was asleep on the stoop, with hatred in her heart
In this light, only prose was possible, she decided:

“Framing the experience with a certain evanescent smear
Like the liquors of afterbirth and a painful coming into being
Kicking against the blunt facts was useless but well?
Existence holds on in small pockets (if you’re lucky
Framing the wider wastelands of where you aren’t with something friendly and homely
Framing perhaps a deeper and even more unanswerable question
Like from where comes the onrush of pleasure and things
And where do they go?
Between this. listen, tamer o-sandy vain
Washtub ma taka o-ad
Eva via

out here in the jersey suburbs, the kids bike around at this hour
The air’s glutinous and lipaceous with BBQ
Stray partly burnt hydrocarbons haze it with the meat particles
It is good to be born here now
The text isn’t so much illegible as decorative, like the God
This hovers over the smoke of the fires, and breathes in their goodness
That’s why the sky is yellow, matt and near and gentle
The blocks are flooded and abandoned
How their inhabitants wish they had chosen Jersey
But in This world there are neither bridges nor tunnels
A muggy night again

EATING A SALAD NIÇOISE

“SVre now to transmit of you, gliding without corruptions & epitome, while I warble on the sullen Pupills of George victorie.
dull Mildmay, charming white North, and I’ve been up all noise, thrilling, tied, rold the Kaddish angry, lost to Robert Charleton beams steer bright on the Poetrie
the Ruines the Relique—and your Monuments in my heaps twisted years after—And rifled Æsons last transcendent senses animate—write, rak’d how we soare—
And how dust is that rise all Suns drew of, subdue, resigne, possesse as in the Hebrew aire, or the Bacchus bodies of aire—and in my own Immortalities of a woven life—at Day—
Deserted back thru lots, Your teares—and mine all-consuming towards ashes,
the fleshie men—the frame buried in the death—and what contributed after, l”

“Downtown, and his dark knife, Snowman’s, almed
In all the shocks of care;
Sanity’s covered by entering, for the new honesty
Exalted Elevateds from the mother,
Talking to city, which the bed passes
With an imagining Death;
Dress too by fur exploding fat cough in,
When our financial plots worse did see,
And Opened verge to graves death,
Talking the flower of the first Theater:
And as when Strange Name her Death seen
Through the virginal cancer of the accumulations, and shut
A Valise o’re big Hague, we delivered
Our bottle, to cook our Stew to ruminate:
So our enrolled summers shall likewise be
Dead o’th wires of their Mama,
When doom shall an empty night drive
Through all those flowers that with life created.
And as when the gaunt end o’th Darkness drank,
In the I”

And what could be said about it all?
Swells and excursions, minor explosions of interest pointing mostly I don’t know
Did you expect some simple follow on?
The operators don’t work with something so difficult to parse as things and words
Which are things of course, heavy and sticky you know this now but ignore
Everything is very deprecated

BUY THE FOOD
EAT IT

This is the music they played at David Chaloner’s funeral
Hooked on by the kitsch of far Baltic mysticism – aren’t we all?
How far are we from Jersey here?
In This world there are neither bridges nor tunnels
Upswells and plays around the back of the head
My lochia have dried now in the full blast of harmony
The solanum remains a solace too
This God talks with words
But does not understand their use.



The voice of Peter Philpott is heard in this text.

three: K

the ghost

(connect trans.)

Telegraph

of my | breakfast

is singing on | the radio

fleets of armour

belonging to Germany

or China perhaps

a forest

of humming prayers

of witness | of balance | the books | the tie-ins | the star billing

of the honest

eastern prayer of 1943

portray them cow-eyed,

ushered

(from rum & coke

- tremens)

(o)

(&)

(disconnect trans.)

[open the white smile

of the news

I remember you

in Lodz

between photo

polish & grain

under cedar trees

or was firs]

Fragment ends

[was firs,

wasn’t it? the cones

or amongst them

in them

- mouths full of them]

(connect trans.)

in New York

you leaned against

the white box-van’s

graffiti’d flank

& pointed at the moon

or was it the reflection

of the moon

in the glass of fifth avenue

& you asked me

to give up [smoking]

(o)

(&)

(The Bronx ghetto

used in an early ‘70’s

movie as a stand-in

for the ruins of Berlin, 1945)

(o)

(&)

(flawless snow & cold beer)

(disconnect trans.)

He had been in carriage No. 162; his name was hidden in a pendant. His mother came to Rostov & recognized him & took him home.

(o)

(&)

(welcome home, Kolya. Welcome home.)

••••••••••••••••••••

this house is too big for me alone

At night they play music very loud and laugh at my discomfort

bitter as wormwood.

this is silver music over salmon rock

in amongst last autumn's leaf colour

look

here is the shadow

at the windmill

••••••••••••••••••••

In the Call Center, we are asked to redirect those souls whose bodies were burned in the big fire. The problem with burning deaths is that those who died this way tend to feel more entitled. Don’t ask me why but I suppose they feel a certain amount of purity in that nobody was required to dispose of them. What this particular group of burners don’t understand is that they were riddled with plague and that is why the offices were bombed. It did not have to do with the rogue protestations- it was a simple Alliance maneuver. We of course keep our voices neutral and only give the most basic information, affirming their deaths and advising them to call in two weeks for reassignments. In all likelihood, they will be assigned to a group whisper project in which the various names of God are released via the collective whisper into the higher winds. This is done as a sort of comforting measure to the citizenry below and has no other known uses. Group whisper assignments are often tedious despite the spectacular views but they don’t know this yet. It appeals to their egos, makes them feel like proper saints and why not really?

Today has been madness, so much so that some of the fetish angels have been asked to help out. They are, all in all, useless but they make the room livelier. One of them even brought a box of lurid pink donuts from some crime scene, which they keep tossing at each other and giggling. None of them really ever sit down and they get the death codes all mixed up. We keep telling them to enter DBF/PLG CARRIER for this batch but they prefer IMM for immolation because they like the operatic effect. It is irresponsible but what do you expect from fetish angels? They see so much gore on a daily basis that they can’t help but be irreverent. One of them starts humming “The Ride of the Valkyries” and the rest join in.

Since the great fire, only the mouth of the Statue of Liberty floats on the water. Riders on the Staten Island ferry blow it kisses when they go pass. Nobody knows how this trend started, but it is not intended as a joke apparently. Mr. Hegel says to become free is every thing but to be free is nothing. I wonder how this applies to the floating lips if it does at all. He has not been calling here lately. For a while it was every day. I think he is angling to have some phrase of his group whispered. I told him that this is not done, but I think he also just likes to talk to me. He likes to talk about Schumann and Berlin. He will talk about the Alliance sometimes, but all in all they don’t impress him. “One secret note rolled up and hidden away is better than fifty cameras”, he tells me, “and that’s why they’ll never succeed”.

••••••••••••••••••••

I wait for the call that will be from her, but it never arrives.

it is in the barcode

some lean slight to the left

others to right.



6 hours to do 3 hours work

so in between I remember you in a boiler suit

your hands the colours of christmas wrapping paper

whisky in coffee.



black and white the light scans

the rice pudding

her apron

the photograph when

stood at the front of the cottage by

the new electric lamppost.

It comes back most when the leaves are rotting away

the pond is still

and green

and the bubbles in the ice move.

I love the noise of moving ice.



--------------------



I stand at the garden gate and look towards the house.

the pig sty, the hen house and the orchard
of small tight red apples
shook to the ground.

the clouds were ploughed grey
ash fallen from the grate eyelids
powdered. everywhere was a storm of green
red crocosmia in between daisy white

it wasn't far to walk across the field to the church.

then it would happen

the red slate
s would slip but t
hen we would

walk straight
towards the ol
d oak.

the smell of hand cream
warmed on hot water bottle

the foxglove purple on that bank
where once they tied horses.



here
i always take a taxi. we like taxis. we like taxis very much.
we like being driven around
new york

••••••••••••••••••••

zargzap •
heaven hot as coins •

whiteouts roaring • husher, surgical • stuck-o, on wreck

• all that year’s pop song • songed in the attic •
grassy • revolutionary
violence •
communiqué • an asleep in the pub; a god •
•• attentive. tongues coilingnail
scissors, scratches
. the eye • PROPERTY ••• •• drumming ode to a nightingale onaspine • • • antic:

cannibal hats cry in out the night •

freaks + majesty clingfilm cop • •••magnetic ••exh~ibit, outland nark, o.ordinary street waves o••••••••f••••purplNOe •

• procession. >a thin sheet covers her thighs to her throat

her legs blades
her feet the lost night
•
terror enact speechlessness •••••••••••••GOODBE••••••••• ••••••••••••

her eyes alone



The texture of the room
fake.
QuFiet boy in cold s•o•cks at a window with metal shrubs rattling R
to take him in their arms. His sku
All OBSERVED dearchived in mirrors of paper • blotting
thMe storm continues,

a communiqué • i’
m learning to talkeEd. & radio dust on the floo.r •
scratch the way to the bathroom. i.n sun, let’s be freak . call the

Exterminator don’t replay& the door
shut & never.hallucinnation:owstrangers nshutme down

“robe so pale to rub with fire
human inhumans economico units
the darklings & their guard
word
Then” begins to howl. Hesitantly at 1
st, all the world there is & obliterate
units, zuzzing, in cold socks thumps

the shrubs cackle back. warehouse siren/miles away.

specimen texts: 1.they could not jail us for we did not exist
2.by cause it calling out the name it called
recoiled summarise unillusion sweet
stinging jug of ash trespasses corres
ponding postindustrial storm-hammer,
a gut brace of instants in love powder
s draining from her acrobat blanketed
operate the zero droid blüio bluïo
law efflorescence immanent flappy
angels hurtling teeth on teeth sidelongly
zephyrised coveralls, unpathed mazes

sign

••••••••••••••••••••

the voice of Tom Watts is somewhere here [there]

two: Kaddish

Tag
best friend
funniest person
known forever
absolutely amazing
a bit of a weirdo
smarty pants
good music
look up to
just because
used to be close
spotty freak
missed muchly
pretty eyes
far far far far away

new friend
electric fence
bee hive
party animal
glam babe
social butterfly
coach or teacher
a boy
a GIRL
lives nearby
met travelling
bus pass
shares your first initial
gemini

the rain beating on the window
the window beating on the rain

beneath the white sheet
fear like a galloping horse

flooded the floor
movement in the foreground

movement in the background
line of no variation

knowledge of change
leave the gardens to decay

irises in snowlight
and it was snowing

the room was full of white light
where the windows were broken

don't believe that when this
switch is turned on

electric light
illuminates

sister
fragment of a wall

fragment of a figure
your other lover

by the bend in the river
the place the river enters the sea

She runs from the room. The sky is an elaborate system of scars & failed trees. She kicks open the door & jumps from the tower. The bed is unmade, the trees make curious ticking noises. “Very unlike a clock’s.” She pauses on her way to the tower to wear shoes. She cannot stop sleeping, whatever the situation was.

Close beneath the sky are the names of God. They are difficult to hear, for the noise of the clicking clocks. You’ll not learn her name from this, puts a needle to the flame. Rats gather among pools of salty honey. Her hands dance, she takes the cigarette from a flame. She cannot sleep, though looking down from the pit she sees a cinema melting. Her eyebrows are a motto of moths.

She is perplexed by uncanny correspondences between the map & the city where she is dead. She laughs, once, quietly so as not to wake herself.

There is a storm blowing, terrifyingly still. She gets on hands & knees, to crawl the last few feet to the top of the tower. The city hovers above her, stinking & bejewelled.

Fucking fucking near where the streets drown•shakes into jeans, hurries into the room•cameras listen, blindly, to shimmering laughter. The names of God run from the room, they carry drowning suitcases & circumstantial murderers.

She lives in the room as still as the storm which continues in melted down cinema. Her hands have detached themselves from their suitcase, & follow the poetry of maps to the ends of the.

She runs from her room in the sky. She burns the bed & the door & pins a curse to every tree. It is dead inside the bed, her hands dance on the pillows she pulls the needle from the flames. Shakes into jeans, down to the shops. Thieving time. Cameras watch, deafly, fucking fucking where the streets near drowned.

2 texts

1) They gathered at the location of dispersal. Delirious apples redirected crime via immodest science. It became irrelevant as police cars & their wailings faded into her dream.

& in her dream she sleeps on buttercups, the river above her head the stars at her feet

When she viewed herself again on the perpetual news she desired herself as an abstraction desires salted bread. 1 day it will be the weekend oppressively. She said goodbye as though it was possible to mean anything.

2) But our patience is wearing thin.

In the call center, the cubicle is bamboo colored. I have pinned a post card of a Victorian lady to it. I look at her and she looks back. She tells me that she’s dead. I tell her I know. I ask if she likes her ghost home on my wall. She says it’s as good as any.

All over the room, there are voices murmuring and tinkling. Although I know the faces of the speakers, I prefer not to look. All of us give the same information over and over and as long as it remains the same information, the voices stay cool, quiet and shady. Only when we are made to stray from this do our voices start to frazzle, to bray and break with impatience. I don’t like this effect of the outside seeping in because this is a heaven of a kind. It is dull but then again so is heaven.

In other heavens… a light box where he reaches me. A radio sound accompanies whether or not we can hear it. There is an attic room, a bedstead and a washstand, a pearl colored slip underneath the pillow, a lamp, a cigarette and a pack of playing cards. There were foot prints in the dust that led you or maybe messages rolled up and left in your pocket. It might have been a page from an old diary that, once treated with lemon juice and held up to the light, revealed a map of the ether. He is an artist maybe, a farmer, or a Victorian lady driving a truck.

Yehe shlama rabba min shmayya.

Her ghost has entered my blood stream swelling and bruising my legs. They ache with nightshades, with poisons. I take pictures of them in the dark. I take pictures of my still lively breasts and of my face all withered with insomnia. Earlier, I had thought to leave my face suspended in the black plastic window of the bus. I had thought to do this but must have left the bus too soon to stare at waxy fruit in bins. In the 99 cent store, I saw two dolls suspended from the ceilings as if they had been hung. Even in representation, bodies are alarmingly expendable. I buy salted food from the market and preserves and carry them home.

I sleep, or don’t sleep as it may be, with books I have carefully chosen for this purpose. I have books of philosophy and autobiographies of old singers. All of them are dead, this is important; Hegel and Ethel Merman, Heidegger and Mary Garden. I hold them above my head as high as I possibly can so that the texts loom large. I hold them until my arms start to burn and shake with the effort. Something like my people have done on Saturdays for a long time, parading scrolls and kissing them like madmen

veshirata tushbehata venehemata

the mouth of the statue of liberty
is 3 feet wide

man running backwards
over the brooklyn bridge

cobble stones in dumbo
boys on the windows
of the condo
home of the girl in a floral skirt.

it is based on a grid system
right angles
some squares are green

courtesy, professionalism, respect

Take a r. on tilbury towards the prom
go 2 blocks. cadman plaza west
turn r. half a block to clark st
turn l. 2 blocks to henry st
turn r. there is peas and pickles.

68 jay st bar down in dumbo with the bridge shaking

conversation
if you ate all they gave you
you would have a heart attack within half an hour.

sign (good design)
CHOKING VICTIM

he says i said read the read me file butt head.

i want to be arrested by her
the one with the haircut
the hot cop


one way
ONE WAY STREET


look at the way the paint has been rubbed off the brick. nice shapes there


this is bergen street on the f train

future bloom

tracks


like tiles
coney island bound


avenue X
neptune ave.


like

next stop is.