To the morning we must drop the bass
Mad rhythm throbbing through your chest,
You’d feel it through and through
Beats soaring high in the sky
And if I could I’d shoot heaven on down for you,
I’d do it whenever you asked, it doesn’t matter your past,
Finish that glass of wine and give it here
Lets cheers to a new year!
Sleeping by yourself at night can make you feel alone
Your girlfriend said so but I don’t really know.
I’ve heard you can get injured from to much love
Not the love that nurtures, but the kind of the joker trying to
Steal your soul
Creating a monster that only wants out of the position it’s in.
Trying to find a way on the railroad tracks of life, hungry and cold, full of strife
And struggle
And pain
It turns into a ball and chain, kiss em’ on the check and that’s okay.
This is the ball and chain I call my home.
Now im right back where im from.
Music reminds me of a seduction
that I was powerless to overcome.
Battles that were impossible to avoid.
It changes my life, turning right instead of left,
and has brought me to become a different person.
Words and phrases drift into desolation everyday of our lives.
I heard my god tell me something yesterday and later realized
it wasn’t worth remembering.
Whether my spilt second decision was a fair judgment,
I don’t know.
It saddens me to think I might never know.
Can we follow enough of what is said and still get to where we need to go?
I don’t know.
Is it not our duty, then, to grasp the answers
that catch, hold, and resonate?
Music is more that words as I am more
than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Are we not forced to reflect upon
The sounds and words that influence our perspective?
Why these words, these phrases but not those?
We don’t know enough about the universe
To explain its purpose or what happens
To it on a length based timeline.
I don’t know exactly why I enjoy being who I am.
I don’t know exactly why I don’t.
When somebody is able to put these same thoughts into sounds and words,
I finally feel like there is hope to find answers.
And that I am not alone.
Nathan Lefkoff
Calculated Poetics
5/23/13
“Mantis! praying mantis! since your wings’ leaves
And your terrified eyes, pins, bright, black and poor”
-Zukofsky
“River that must turn full after I stop dying
Song, my song, raise grief to music
Light as my loves’ thought, the few sick
So sick of wrangling: thus weeping,
Sounds of light stay in her keeping…”
-Zukofsky
“The Rhino is a lovely beast…”
-Zukofsky
Eyes and lips, eyes and lips
now you are a lovely beast
and I, a lonely mantis.
Forelegs folded, stone upon stone
thus weeping.
Once for preying, these arms and body pray now
in dream and in sentient thought
for a death or a birth.
Enough with this weird limbo.
After I stop dying
I will be borne into my mind that bares the weight of your eyes and lips.
The night sky dangles a faraway planet
which looms like a beautiful ghost
and hopefully someday
will come circling back to these arms akimbo.
The rain it pours
and the lightning lashes.
Each season comes
and each season passes.
The cycle of life,
the cycle of death,
neither will stop,
neither will rest.
The tree, it stands tall.
The branches, they sway.
The tree, it teaches
we can all be this way.
I stand in shelter,
still in the rain.
Inescapable
is nature’s pain.
And, just the same,
is nature’s light.
Through lacy wings
air finds its delight.
Cathedrals of fractals
A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
And Nikolas certainly makes Perloff sweeter.
How refreshing ideas and abstracts, no ties to the physical.
A great mass of free floating language begs for poetry
Because it is human nature to give birth to patterns.
Or do patterns give birth to human nature?
Traffic has a rhythm and a pattern, reports turning
Drudgery into poetry.
Poetry needs a revolution just like art.
This is not a pipe and this is not a poem.
But it is the idea of a pipe and the idea of a poem.
People make poetry with more than just words.
Here we conceptualize the unimaginable,
The quiet daily life.
A friend of a friend who is an editing intern
Offered to edit my story. She shattered my
Fragile spun forgetting, my hopes that maybe
Someday I will manage to be normal.
She didn’t understand my story, editing it
With all the finesse of a bull in a china shop.
It clattered to the ground in pieces, the meaning lost
Because she could not put herself in the shoes
Of this lost little trans* boy. Her edits made him
Sound like a butch girl, a woman who he is not.
Sometimes I go about my daily life and I get to forget
That I am an alien. I am an impostor, a conundrum that
Shouldn’t exist. I am transgender, a transcender of
Cultural norms. So unique, a zoo animal.
And then something like this happens.
I will do this with my story many times, if it gets picked up.
I will shelter this lonely little trans* boy and keep him from
Being turned into a butch girl. I will explain myself
Justify my existence before anything will ever happen,
Before my writing will ever be more than a pipe dream.
It’s just so tiring. Surely somebody would understand.
But maybe if people understood I wouldn’t need to write.
I ask myself would I rather be doing anything else and the answer Is no.
I would not give up the muse of my gender for a normal life.
I just wish it wasn’t so tired a bargain.
It is a beast that roars in the night, eating
The people you love. It is not so easily slain
As a simple beast. Radiation changes them, takes away
Who they are and replaces them with someone
More jittery, more cranky.
Their flesh melts away, they are not there.
Instead, they sleep. They sleep, they eat, they need.
They tire, they hunger. Oh, but they survive.
It is hell and it is painful, but they survive,
Flirting with addiction triggers, defying this monster
Ripping away at their insides.
But what if it ever comes back?
The quilt I never made for you, a double Irish chain
Weighs heavily on me today.
You never got a chance to add your quilt to
All of the generations that came before you.
Even when your body was broken you engineered a way
To make sure that you could still craft, could still
Make beautiful works.
You gave me a job, gave me a chance.
But you’re not here any more, stolen away
By multiple sclerosis. Even when your body
Was breaking down, falling apart
You had the best sense of humor of anyone
That I have ever met. Will I still be able to make the chain for you?
Something to hold you to this Earth now
That you can no longer hold yourself. I don’t know.
You left behind your children and husband
And a collection of quilts that would be the envy of
Just about anyone. On me you left behind
The ability to stand up for myself, even when people
Are family, that blood isn’t any thicker than the loyalty
That comes with it. You taught me your humor, your management
The ability to look at people and laugh. I miss you.
I will continue to miss you when I head home
And don’t have you to talk to about my mother,
Or her boyfriend, or politics, or sports.
I will chain you to the Earth with my memories,
With your quilts.
I hope you found heaven, because you certainly
Deserve it.
I can’t read my own handwriting when I write quickly.
Which is a problem when I can only write by hand.
Eighty pages of chicken scratch to somehow
Turn into a story. The paper responds better
Than any keyboard, my mark left in the world.
My hands write better when they move, get rubbed In ink and marked.
I can touch the language here
It isn’t filtered by a screen or the perfection that is typing.
Here is where my drafts are born, because drafts are
Messy, imperfect and full of flaws.
On the computer, they will be edited and processed
Turned into something clean and pure.
This is necessary evil, because in its raw state of ink
And flaws, my story is not what it should be to others.
It is a raw idea I mold much like a potter, working clay
Until there is something beautiful and functional.
Except I can’t read my own writing.
Always an exciting adventure.
S/T
“Depending on what I meant by here and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.” –Samuel Beckett, Stories & Texts for Nothing
“…Libraries have survived as an institution in part because of the success of the internal orders of books. That is, the tension between the library’s external order and the internal orders of books makes the library a success. The internal orders of books contain and supersede external orders through their status as writing.” Loss Pequeno Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries
– – –
“Good intension.”
My science-bent peer delivers this breathtaking typo and I silently thank her for valuing i more than “t”.[1]
I try to explain that GOOD! everything actually is better in tension.
Meaning doesn’t coagulate around singulars– an event has no hermeneutic value unless placed within
A tense shift or
A cloud saturated with potential or
A storm: every raindrop a crystallized conjunction.
Tension maintains shape.
The bead of water cloistered into itself,
The insides pulling outside, re-membraning like blood
Tension creates definition.
Paradigmatic chains illustrating how all precision is relational,
Language a loosened network of differences.
And tension creates beauty.
Her muddled consonants rubbing up against a paper-trailed legacy,
A frictioned formalism sparking so much more than what she
Intended.
We are lost in the desert of babble,
Where words swallow meaning and I don’t see a tower.
I think we’re in the wrong Babel.
Good.
Otherwise, I would climb the tower and then be further away from water.
We are lost in the valley of idea and word,
Where my tree doesn’t look like your tree doesn’t look like Ferdinand’s tree.
Good.
This is what makes a forest.
I don’t think I’ve ever understood things the way they were intended to be.
Good.
The sparks will keep me warm.
[1] “I love generative mistakes,” I say.
“Did you say you love generative music? Me too!” says an eavesdropping classmate.
m _ s _ _ _ _
_ i _ t a k e (this as a good sign.)
A Promise Died
Up on Oly’s westside
Down the rural, wooded
blind-corner stretch of Cooper Point
there grows a lot of goldenrod
and grass up to the knees.
In amongst what used to be
that backwoods brush beneath the trees
on 14 Avenue, you’ll see
a labyrinth of empty streets
and lonely lamps that never light
The ghosts of all that could have been: a man
who steps out just to drive to work
and walk his dog just once a day
never looking up to say hello
Houses, I say, not homes
windows dark, tall trees
bushes growing all around
just enough space between the leaves to spy
on unsuspicious passerby.
And lawns are always neatly trimmed
to show and tell, but not let in
for secrets live in empty closets
look at them, their eyes are haunted.
All the perfect, hidden houses
All those inside wants to his own
Every one looks just the same–
Just another John Malone.
I see these people wash their cars
In driveways that were never there.
The end of the Boom Decade:
houses eat the woods aplenty
and scattered up from earth in droves
all the cheapest land, like this, ate up
Some of them were red or blue,
every one the same.
Need it be said that it all fell apart?
Too many houses, too little space
A modern-day Gold Rush, it was a race
then the Great Bubble popped, and in this case,
the Ghosts of Excess stare you
dead in the face.
So much promise, now empty and rotten
this place has long since been forgotten
two years, three years, four years, five
and never a single house in sight
Crumbling roads, broken lamps
–the symbol of a promise died.
I just need some time to
rest my weary bones
waking up at the end of a rough night
I would rather stay at home
I wake up and find too many
books upon the floor,
notes to take and life to scrape
I will never find the door.
I just need five minutes to
rest my weary bones
Then i will wake up and jump into
gear and into my unknown
I wake up and too many things
left undone last night, unsaid
nothing here when the Robin sings,
in the morning I am dead.