A Moving Object
March 18, 2008    File under: Alabama , America , Civil Rights , Denver , Editing , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Labwork , Language , Listening , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

For my RSS readers, I am radically redesigning my entire site, so the blog root and RSS feeds are changing. Please visit me at www.jakeadamyork.com and let's go from there. It will probably be another 2-3 weeks before all the RSS feeds are in place, but maybe you can take a gander and let me know what you think of the new look and function until then.

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Migration
May 16, 2007    File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...

I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.

If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

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March 2, 2006    File under: Tapeworm

something at the corners of the room, a syllable fluttering
like a bird again bright walls, the echo of itself returning
into itself and caught there building and building until

the shadows of wings beat from the walls, rising into
the sound and then there are two birds there hovering
round one another in the gloaming light: something:

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   File under: Tapeworm

black gloss split, opposing tracks spread from the center,
that cross-over whisper where magnetized heads would
replicate signal over itself, echo's threshold now gone:

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Static
February 27, 2006    File under: Tapeworm

but the tape's still rolling, though the signal won't come through
and everything is whiteout snow and a hush out of nothing and
you want to know if what you hear is your voice or someone else's

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Multitrack Tape
January 28, 2006    File under: Steganography , Tapeworm

the eye opens on one Broadway or another: here, the usual:
bright, chill wind shuffling in between the walkers, a knot
of characters waiting for a bus, construction cranes craning

overhead as I crouch at curb, storm drain, standpipe nozzle
to match one opening with another: easing toward Speer.
straining to catch Pike's Peak's distant gray: the phone rings

and you're crossing Houston or Bleecker on some fool errand
I've suggested pausing, I imagine, to wonder why, to draw
the camera, that small, dark room with a window small enough

for the world, reach of stone and steel and light, the narrows
that spread like a shutter's leaves to admit, contract to darken,
the hush of traffic around your voice, what it is you've seen

curling, spindled, waiting as I wait to see: I'm moving South,
you north, each blind to one another, two thousand miles,
magnetic constellations of our having been just here just there

moving against one another on the cassette tape, shift the head
and you hear the other, the ghost of one voice in the other's
silence: one mind a small, dark room with a pinhole small enough

for everything—

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[please turn off all portable electronic devices]
January 10, 2006    File under: Tapeworm

sudden plain, high-contrast washouts then uplift, dim facets
in sunlit dust: we're just passing through 6,000 feet,
on the ground in minutes, low-level radiation, rush of Vitamin D,

these streets, tailpipe drivers, jay-runners, overweighted grooves
again beneath us, a different kind of Jesus on the radio: O Lord,
for weeks I have listened to faithful voices wavering through the

piney hills and barrens, on my way to Marion, to Selma, Montgomery,
Dothan, and I am convinced I am a sinner or a disbeliever or
misfit altogether, until I view these works: the mail comes in and

S reports the growth of faith-based farms, biblical pearls cast
not before swine but for the fowl, a trend analysts call clanning,
the demand of like for like, but I have had enough of that: heat up

the peanut oil, break out the suntan lotion, ready to fry: though
I remember at a barbecue a short film in which a preacher has taught
his hogs to pray when he comes with their slop, they gather, heads

down as if truffling, and chortle in half-speech as his cadence rose,
the whole demonstration as if to say that the unclean spirits no longer
formed in hogs' flesh, so let's eat, after which I lay in a dew-wet field

and felt right at home, as in the morning, Coltrane on the stereo,
the sun coming, distant facets gleam, everything seeming to fall
together: is to return so different, when everything is off, to hear

some new quarter-tone or crack in the voice after the last track plays,
to watch the weather fumble over the mountains, a blur in the
pinhole chamber, slow work that's caught you at last by surprise:


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viral
December 15, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

comment moves within us like a virus, the unredeemable
microscopic node of otherness, of foreign-ness replicating
until part of us isn't part of us anymore: the leucocytes rush

around it like playground kids ready to pummel the snitch
but it just won't give, repels all blows, escapes to hide
in the holly hedge and divide: imagine the child in the cradle

of sticks and stickers telling his tale, the words drifting cold,
substantial from his mouth, hanging there in December air,
and then another mouth forming around that story,

an explication: and then another and another and the process
continues until the school is filled with cloud-breathing kids,
the air's a mist of snitching, the hallways unnavigable

and in need of some serious clearance: the janitor emerges
from his closet with a giant fan, sets up by the chain-locked
fire doors and lets his industrial current blow, then the mist

and the mystifying kids vomit from the ends, wander in the
road-side weeds just looking for another school: they collect
by the river, break in small groups and retreat to unleash

computer hacks and comment spam and soon they are here
with remedies for clarity and ease and reticular disfunction
though we know it's just a ruse: you see them curled there still

like smoke in a lung, a hallway, an ear canal, though what they're
saying you can't hear clearly, like static in an ear canal, like
the virus on your hard-drive, the tapeworm glowing on the film:

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December 10, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

the thaw is on, hate mail comes in, what's pent's unpenned,
an urged repentance, but I can't recant as I've expressed
very little after all, each idea but a momentary coalesce

in a cloud of possible coalescings: inside this nebula something
may condense, ignite, illuminate, whole galaxies begin to
burn, a mutual gravity compelling them together to some

story, the one about a plague of lies that left everyone unable
to tell the truth, or everything may dissipate and the clear light
of day shine through and against the flatirons and new-snowed

peaks, or some other ignition might occur, regardless of if
we can see it straight: the best thing is that such light, obscure,
clarifies in distance, the cooled universe as if a lens to tighten

each loose wave: the city's clear again, the haze of evaporating
snow, of smoke and smog caught in heavy air, is gone, and
anyone can see a hundred miles, so much light it's blinding:

coffee magmas in the espresso kettle, and I imagine the great
granite batholith beneath the Sierra Range, riding on a surge
of molten earth, the slow eruption of subduction melt that

shapes the land, push that breaks plain here, that dries the air:
Who I Am is elsewhere, a beam of light refracted through
so many prisms Who I Am can't be trained to a single

contradiction: I am the reasonable, the despicable, the sophomore
and the professor, the professor or the professor, the inquisitive,
the obstructionist, obscurantist, clarifier, ratiocinator, incinerator,

seditious, secessionist, ameliorationist, carcinogen: comment
moves within us like a cancer, just waiting for other cells
to rebel: come on, you know you're ready: incorrigible:

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[precipitate]
December 8, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

tonight so cold the city's glow is violet, not jaundice, the
sodium light shifted in hardening air now ten below, now
twelve: exhale hangs, bright, a flag of our standing, a sign

of the ice we could breathe together on the blunt bud end
of an aolanthus or forsythia, lungs' moist condensing quick
to a crystal, a prism through which cold's refracted strange:

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[tape blur]
December 6, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

flaking in the wind, wind-tunnel forced through mountain
channels and blasting down the city's ways, high-rise focused
now blow-torch sharp and even a breath is a burn, a blistering

column in the windpipe and the bronchial tubes, something
strange moving there giving you a second side: the storm front
erases the city's bowl, but in that x-ray white where everything

moves no motion's visible, though something might emerge:
a crow, a dove unfolding in the chilly vents, hovering for a moment
then gone, as if a stuffed toy's stuffing exploded into wind:

the bus, sudden wall of window, weak yellow lights blearing
from the squall, a column of warmth moving through the cold:
the homeless erupting from beneath the bridges into the open,

every open hand now closed, clutched, cold: I imagine you here
watching from my window as I disappear into the blur, the static
of something about to happen, and wonder how you will wait,

how you will watch, whether something will emerge, some song,
some stranger, some aching to be met: now the radiators rattle
some approach, portending, some knock: will you take it in:

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Tapering
December 4, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

Sunday, snow second-sunning everything to blinding, hard
to even look out the window, see the couple moving their bed
through the sub-freezing cold, the ghosts of their breath

dissipating, drying into air, the building super crunching
on the roof in his down-filled jacket, puffed up like the sparrows
I watched blur from bush to bush, sudden blooms in snowfall limbs

inspired with brief warmth but not to any new song: this
is what I want: a forgotten record slid from its envelope, static
and crack of paper a foretelling of the needle's popping over

the smooth initial quiet, dropping into music now strange
though known, something familiar edging out of novelty,
a chance meeting in an airport now fit into a narrative of

inevitable familiarity, the dozen times you were in the same
room unaware now a sort of prelude, now an order reaching
back into your accidental pasts to bring you here, as if

a pine warbler would blossom on the blue spruce outside my
single-panes, sudden and out of range, or perhaps a mockingbird,
something I've missed, to show me here to witness, an order

emerging from the noise, the nervous structure clear after
leaving, skeletons starved back into sight, the wormy kids
anatomy lessons in search of a theater: instead, a lot of the

accidentals are the usual accidentals (minor third in the major
key) and most of the same old music is the same old music,
holly jolly most wonderful time of the year here we go again

and the candles are out again and the wicks burn down to plan
the scented wax pooled, evaporated, apparently gone and
nothing beneath the flame but a small tin disc like a dime

spent for good: somewhere, though, all that's gone must
collect: something's growing, some tally like a sales receipt
emerging tentative at first, then suddenly improbably long

and frightening, the cadmium length in the tapeworm x-ray,
the arthroscope, the telemarketer's scripted pitch, the to-do
list, the recipe: the ash on the somnambulist's cigarette:

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Staple
May 25, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

to wed skin where the worm's been removed, hold sheets'
arbitrary gap, bind day to day with a fiber or wheat, some
gluten thread, cotton knot, dependable crop: what's cut

ties, staples staple: together, an archipelago, an x-ray,
a scar for a spine for these metallic ribs, each bending
to hold: valley string: imagine a ridgeback walk, balance

from heap to heap, each prominence geography's abundance:
See Seven States: what emporia of prospects,
circumspection, spectacle: down from the heights collect

the trash mnemonic fetishes, a Cherokee in a feathered
Plains headdress offering Bavarian steins, tomahawks,
sky-bucket rides, arcade tickets, woodburnt scenes

on slices of branch, a real spread, such stapels:
the branches descend from the hollows, collecting
to raftable streams, roil of motion, tangles of engine

and metal mark the two-lane curves, the kinks
in these snaked connections, old horse-paths paved
for ease of travel, stedl to station to roadside stand,

the things that stay without staying anything:
everywhere the Spring ground loosens like a bowel
and the cattails on the banks break and burr, stray,

never so regular as tobacco or cotton or corn,
the flowering repetitions of stalk and fruit and leaves:
what leaves stays, what stays strays, smoke or seed

drifting across the county fair, into open fields:
a small girl comes running from the creek, her brother
laid out on a rock below a rope swing, and the ambulance

comes to amble him up, twelve stitches, but the fair
fares on, and the boy in the backseat on the winding back
fingers the scar like a guitar's neck, fretted and fretting,

some song curling in fingers, on tongue, a pattern
in the small hatches the radio needle threads, signal
and signal strung together here in these spreading folds:

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A Tape of Your Voice
May 19, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

found, the small box of sound laid in metal and plastic, gleam
of pregnant dark encased in a milky sleeve, in the bottom
of the desk drawer, one in a box of voices I don't need the tapes

to hear: flex the case to open, the cassette slides out, tongue
from yawn, package of waves just waiting to radiate, radiant
in early-morning-office-window sun, blinding, the friction

of the hinge, of the reels' wheels against the body, almost
inaudible chord of the player's motor, magnetic tape over
the playing head, static of static, static of dust, static of the

fluctuating alternating current along the frayed wire of the
headphones, the gravelly run of your voice through a poem,
an answer to a question I never quite discern, a smoothing

of creekstones beneath the stream: this is the rasp of the
phosphored string, hum of quarter sawn spruce under the
strum, a riff from the universe's deep throat song ascending

here: Rodney Jones said I feel odd hearing a tape of
my own voice / That marks wherever I go, the sound // Of
lynchings, the letters of misspellings / Crooked and jumbled

to dupe the teacher, / Slow ink, slow fluid of my tribe,
meaning // What words mean, when they are given / From
so many voices, I do not know myself / Who is speaking

and who is listening, and I quite agree and wonder
what you would say to this, whether the sound of your own
voice gave you such pause: the tape unrolls, unravels,

and I imagine the magnetic sprawl of your voice, the disposition
of pitch and timbre, the piedmont hills of the wave that could
describe this slow disclosure, this drawl on these homesick drums:

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Transcriptionist's Tape
May 12, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

rolls out endless helixing from the machine from the hand
collecting on the floor phonemes clustered on its width
like karyotyped bands cyptographic clusters come face

to face some steganography there the transcriptionist
can see right through: read back: these weeks I've been
dreaming of a long obsidian roll that rusts in the light:

what do you mean by "roll": a narrrow band of hunter-
gatherers trapsing from Africa, heading for India, south-
east Asia, mitochondrial disposition, molecular smear:

I'm sorry, Your Honor, the ink has smudged, it says either
"either" or "ether": diaspora, miasma: today the clouds are
dust suspended, eroded mountain-top, bits of cirque

and glacier flying, somewhere over Kansas organizing
descendiing as tornado, these currents braiding one another
six hundred miles per hour: at six hundred miles

per year, migration's speed, slow relocation of cytosine,
guanine up the chain, vibration of some colored phoneme
in the throat, curling in an ear, tape-thin membrane shakes:

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Blank Tape
April 7, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

charged quiet: easeful snow: the laying down of lay-down:
smooth black rolling over the magnetic head saying nothing
but what everything says without saying: background static

or radiation, hum of world: a waiting, a pause, a blank ready
to glisten light should it fall, to shiver voice or instrument
once tendered, ready to be erased in the service of some

sound: but now, a calm, a reticence, satisfaction after the
angry unwrapping, case-breaking and sliding in, after the
clunk of the button, clutch of the motor catching the spool,

an abient absence, a hiss (not whisper) that fills the room,
the record of electricity and hungry fiber, of nothing:
no secret secreted there, nothing to puzzle out: nothing:

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Imaginary Lines
March 30, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

Who I Am is a picture with some lines hatching to verify, laminate
physiognomy Canadians inspect then stamp, lines on lines an
allowance, permit, recognition: I've stepped over the imaginary

line that demarks one country from another, the power of which
is that it gathers attention and gaze and is presided over as in
a vigil, a watch, by people of different countries, accents, faiths

and now, Who I Am remains untouched because the lines that say
who I am remain, fix and locate me, a face beneath the boundary
lines that cannot be removed, the fingerprint sworls of water-

mark and water surface, the skim and skein of registration that say
citizen: I wash from the arrival lounge to Baggage Claim
and Ground Transportation and Those Returning Home who eye

and locate me: Who I Am is Elsewhere: eh? the sound of lattitude
or lassitude of torpor and ease soon forgotten: money changed
but still money, the faces change, a queen underlined or under

lines, the watermark and engraver's weave that keep her there,
keep impostors from sneaking in: short cab to hotel and once
again Who I Am peeks from the topographical reticulum that says

True and the concierge smiles, his rictus wrinkling his
cheek-skin in verifying creases: a few stroke on the keys and
the paper's up: please sign here (Who) on the dotted line:

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Masking Tape
March 26, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

the Alabama judge: the party chairman: the doctor who stands
on the Senate floor with the brother of the dead or dying
or comatose or minimally conscious woman: the Fox News

anchor: Fox News: the homeless man with his creased card-
board sign at the corner of Colfax and 14th: the striking
teachers at the Department of Education Building: the author

of the Taxpayer's Bill Of Rights: the Governor: Ward Churchill's
former student: the Cherokee Nation: a former student who
explains the way Indians know other Indians: the university

president: the groundskeeper who is spiking beer-cans and
confetti once again: the driver who's just been rear-ended
by another who's gawking at the gathering of Lebanese-

Americans on the Capitol steps: the Lebanese-Americans
gathering on the Capitol steps: talk radio host: blogger:
newspaper columnist: common citizens just waking up

to the third day of light snow: everyone is outraged:
outrage is general, like a power outage, but opposite: the
conversation's wattage on the rise: frequency of insult,

ad hominem, false generalization, stereotype classing,
vocative positioning, apostrophic address that voids the logical
opponent, appeal to God (ad baculum, ad diem) or Governor

(ad vericundiam) or The Way Things Were (ad nostalgiam)
rising like snow, each flake an assault on Hallopeau-Siemens
skin, each touch an assault, a scar, an outcry, outrage:

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Call Tape
March 24, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

this conversation may be recorded for quality assurance
purposes: may be taken down, backed up, my voice
nestled on a hard drive next to the voices of so many other

disgruntled, I imagine us there on the dark platters, so many
strained and strident, latent magnetism never unleashed
never drawn into the trainee survival course or the customer

satisfaction survey or the boss’s holiday audio collage,
this unhappy chorus: when the call center closes our
complaints cross each other, ready for the moment when

some unsuspecting operator unarchives the conversation
in question, to ensure that the company never said any
of the things the caller claims, but it is a static of crowd

instead and the company is never indemnified against
its negligence and misinformation and the operator and
the call-center manager sleep uneasy at night, the static

rill ringing in their ears and they both realize that it’s not
pure random static, a pattern emerges, and they begin
to hear all the voices washing over one another, a sea

of American voices, they call in sick to work next day
and the next, they lie in their tubs with the water running
hoping the rush will overcome that speech, afraid

to go out walking in the streets, not because we will know
them but because they know our voices and will hear
them unfolded and complicated on the street, a crowd:

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Audio Tape
March 19, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

road trip relic, back of the office drawer, white spool
eyes blinking back when I rattle: half an hour's scour
to find the retired machine, feed this black plastic

biscuit to its robot mouth: and then: caterwaul and
case noise, three generations of tape to tape to tape
and the howl keeps getting better: Howlin' Wolf baying

to the Alabama moon, honeysuckle sweet moonlight
sticking in the Spanish-moss trees, wind backing like
tape hiss or high-hat dish, harmonica and sharp guitar

piano's off-tune tone the gasoline kerosene carb-spray
coctail of the littoral wind, stomp of petal on the floor-
boards of a Mustang or marina lot, thin tin walls what

keeps me from the water on this river road or what
keeps me from the river in the fishing shanty where
the whiskey's passed in jars, fine evaporate leaving

its sugars on the rim, passed mouth to mouth like rumor
or song, the lyric old as anyone knows: Ooooahh My baby
been cryin' — Ooooahh she want me to come home —

You been gone so long: too long: the tape unspooling
black slick to the stainless head, an ear to the noise
and pattern laid in waiting as tired catch each smooth

and rough laid in tar and gravel blacktop concrete clay:
I'm running now 60 on the curves on the bluffs high above:
I can cut the tape, catch radio from Memphis or New Orleans,

Chicago if the wind kicks in, heat lightning lighting up the
summer sweat: pilots high above worried through the night:
Mr. Airplane Man, can you fly down to Jackson, Tennessee

for me? I want you to find my baby and give her this message
for me: beyond: the hills quiet down, Sumlin on the chorused
strings of his Stratocaster, cymbals hushing as I curve into

town: who I am is elsewhere, still driving in rare solitude
blank the quiet I hoped would take impression as well as
give: If you don't find me in the heart of town, I'll leave

word where I'll be: down by the river the herons
fold in early light, the long wings having shadowed homes:
curves flats scalloped water static wash requested song:

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Cut To Tape
   File under: Tapeworm

the dead woman lies breathing on the screen, politicians are
clamoring in her throat: solecism and sophistry: Tancredo
stands outside his home asking why we shouldn't give her

the same rights as death-row inmates: is he saying everyone
gets a second third fourth chance or saying perhaps that
the death-row folks are already dead: is he Jesus, is Bill Frist

Jesus standing at the tomb of Lazarus: cut to tape of photo-
tropic smile: lawmaker beaming for the camera while witches
deck the Capitol steps: second anniversary of war: earthquake

in Japan: little girl found dead: her father praying thanks:
cut to tape of bleach-blond anchor-woman angry: in this strip
of sand barren 200 sex offenders, maybe more: everyone

wants to know how, seems to want a law to sayYou are
safe, O my children, some safe in the iron of the State,
some in the stainless bars of the hospital bed, some in the

country's fragile soil: it seems you get to choose some fates,
not all: explosion on the Western Slope, the hotel accessible
only by SnoCat, helicopter, skis, several dead though no one

can confirm: file footage: film tomorrow at 11: sirens through
the membrane windows: crime scene tape flapping in the wind:
the city filling its basin with random flicker, a field like binary

snow, videotape after magnet wipe, close-up of hair of motion,
detail of senator on granite steps: the act destroyed now a ghost
in the static you only think you can see: respirator noise:

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Surveillance Tape
   File under: Tapeworm

a blur on the high-contrast frame, stop-motion stepping
through the post-office lobby so late at night: crouch
to the box door, envelope developed, scraps left in the

counter trash, a trace of being there: cut to parking lot
and sidewalk, strobe of a body passing in and out of the
sodium haloes, there then gone: elsewhere the monitor

flickers over transit routes, the light rail trains sliding
through their signal clearance, line manager napping
in the decaled hatchback passed out beneath a busted

lamp: spray cans click but there's no audio, the agent
in the booth can but watch as parkas repaint the car:
when it's over she rises on another screen and walks

from purview to purview, her every move in view until
the bathroom door: someone has tried to tape this too
but she knows all the tells, avoids the stalls with vents

overhead: her shift-mate, fired for tapping calls, sits
in the glow of his laptop monitor trawling porn, his
surf logged downtown, just a block from where she

watches: a photographer's in the alley setting a tripod
to take a span of office lights that morse all night
the goings and comings of third shifts and janitors

and maids she is also watching in her box of screens:
in his prism's edge, a detail he won't see till enlarging
prints, a trenchcoat at an ATM, fluorescent glare

from the pate, a face only she can see: detectives
scanning crime-scene footage for a glimpse of the killer,
gas-station camera with Camaro and Audi, flash

inside the door: a father checking for after-curfew
coming, a hair across the door, transparent tape
that tells: a casino boss worried over counters, the flick

of the eye, addition, the checker scanning each item
in the red hatch of my consumption: how many pounds
of coffee, of ham, how many doughnuts left until I get

one free: I push my cart from the grocery line, feeling
the folded envelope in my pocket digging corners,
the lens catching the glare on my head, flash inside

the door, recognition as she looks from the screen,
look up to see me frozen, washed-out, caught
in the act of being: a blur in the contrast, framed:

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Red Tape
March 18, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

then there will be a committee to review what you have
written said thought suggested what others have said
you have said what you should have said but didn't and

the committee will be like God but better because there
is more than one judge in this judgment which is supposed
to make it better: already this has been thought of me,

official measures made thought not yet brought together:
M Tourette who has accused me of shabby, noting the
wrinkles in my raiment: M Cashier who has asked twice

to check my signature against ID, M Librarian who has
reminded me that I have overdue books they would like
returned, M Office Manager who has asked again why

I have broken my office chair: they say I have been
careless with my appearance and introduced more
brokenness into the world or I am a bad

example of a citizen or a bad and unbelievable
example of me or I am a slow reader or
a miscreant, book scavenger, scoffer at property,

anarchist, public threat or overweight: and
for my sins they give me a committee: The Committee
To Oversee Inappropriate Touching of Self or Other

On the Bus and The Committee to Identify Myself More
Clearly, By Means Scientific and Semiotic and
The Committee to Prevent the Molestation of Public Books

Unless They Contain Profanity Or Other Potentially
Morally Reprehensible Acts and The Committee
To Redistribute My Wealth of Girth Elsewhere As For Example

To My Favorite Panhandlers On the Streetcorners In Giving
A Pound Or Two Of Flesh Intead Of A Quarter and,
for good measure, The Committee For Returning Phone Calls

From Unknown Numbers and The Committee For
Clocking Out Late: I wander all night in my derision,
late from the office with the weight of papers and reports

pulling me down to the right, the strap of my brief-bag
carrying the improbable load: somewhere here there
must be something worth saving, a line or phrase to quote:

I pause in the burnt halo of sodium light and check over
my shoulder to see if I am being followed and see that I
am standing beneath the sign of local machinists union

where they are advertising BORING MACHINE OPERATORS
NEEDED: I think, I am qualified for this job: I pull
a slice from the report of The Committee For the Over-

Redundantification of Suffixes and place my head upon it,
drool, the resume of my excitation, remove said head and
fold the paper so I can slide it through the crack beneath

the door and begin to operate myself back into the anonymous
dark: the taggers are skittering from blank to blank, each
sign an aresol with which I fix my hair: It primps before

the unreflecting and It stands alone in the dark
and believes everything it sees is blessed by its seeing
and It conflates its identity with those of othe people

and Therefore it is a thief: such are the accusations
brought against me by The Committee To Watch The Writer
Who Believes He Operates A Boring and Free Enterprise

In the Midst of Those Whose Zeitgeist He Steals: they are
written everywhere, posted in the bus-schedule and City
Council meeting, debated quietly by all the citizens I

will never know: I say I take this, draw salt to hold, follow
buffalo grass and the tall wheats and photographic prints:
I draw all to me, an aquifer of sorts, and am told that

to possess is crime is withdrawal, secede: a vote is
taking place behind a door that says The Committee
To Remain Invisible From You: a pen is scratching

on paper a sound like Don't you own an iron?

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Oscillation
March 14, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

and when the papers have been filed, reports and
payment vouchers, room requests and purchase
orders, when the dossiers have been tendered

to the proper offices and the staplers tendered
to their drawers and the drawers returned to their
wooden sleeves, when the printers and copiers

have cooled and the office chairs swivel back
into place, when the feet rest quiet on the plastic
pads that protect the cheap commercial carpet

and the cheap commercial carpet closes its fiber
and its pores, when all it harbors gathers to its
benthos some new crush of breath-mint or toner,

when the offices have quieted at last and the tube-
lights flicker dim, when the students have boarded
the trains and buses and carpool vans and scooters

or walked off toward the mountains or the creek
or the downtown yawning bars, the happy hours
of abandon and abandonment, when all colleagues

have memoed their good-nights in outboxes
and e-mail boxes and the elevators have descended
at last for the trash-cans and vacuums and the late

shift I meet in my departure, when the snow
has spun around us in the sodium light like comets'
dust or galaxy, when the stars emerge above the burn

the city gives to the night and this abuse settles down,
when the hands slip from the bed and the blood
pools in the tips of the fingers and the words crowd

to the skin of the ears and the small hooks of the tongue
and the rarely-watering mouth gathers its wet like
ink, when there is a then, then there will be a then: and

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Memorial
March 5, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

News of your passing — Of course you’ve heard
— but I hadn’t & no word of how, when, the
usual profanations, thank God, and I was too far

away to attempt the pilgrimage, so I met C
on his way out of town for lunch, a farewell already
planned and only the departure had changed:

we performed our valediction with a shot of whiskey:
it was 11 in the morning & we wanted to answer
with diminished minds diminishment, to write it within

with the radiance of all ferment & distillation:
that’s when this started, ferment of a letter started
but never finished, let sit, its sugars breaking down,

beneath a stack of poems on my desk, apologies
and thanks slow in forming to my tongue, my pen,
already too large to be wound into letters, a card,

to be enveloped, already coiling beyond any body’s
bladders, canals. Your voice so clear in mind:
you’ve created a form that can hold anything,

maybe everything: except this: so it grows,
shedding in my hope its flat for full, something
beyond digestion, toward a body: it’s February

again, which is why I remember this, four years
since, this sitting like a worm, gathering everything,
drawing energy to itself: now to release, express,

explicate, to draw the pall & allow what light
I’ve gathered, cadmium dye shocking me
from dark: there will be so secret no silent now ::

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Tape Measure
   File under: Tapeworm

what is the measure of this line: get out your rulers
folks: three inches, more (depending on font size,
kerning {letter-spacing: 1em} yeah): period defined

by pause of eye or voice, like the Baptist preach-ah
on the radio calling you to witness: involuntary ah
after the water has gone down: alimentary canal

in which food water swallowed air conform like a
tapeworm to intestine walls, tapeworm like a
sentence: to be skinny and long: my grandma

used to mark our height on a wall, worried when
the mark laid on the previous, the sewing tape
tight around the waist the same as month before,

accusing us of eating unwashed fruit, strange
pork, tapewormed, ringwormed, country boys,
those accents sprawling out our mouths, ways

of talking our mother'd long eschewed, fed us
castor oil poke berry tea leaves snuff and
peppers, Force it out she said, ready

with the sewing tape to size the thing when
it curled in toilet or grass, worried too that
the worm would emerge at night from the

throat or nose, close the breathing, wait
in the sheets, be gone, no evidence to stop
these Sunday queries: either you're eating

too much or not enough: this is the question
of measure: what is enough: my doctor tells me
I'm ten pounds over weight, borderline

hypertensive, definitely hyperbolic: no
he doesn't say that though I wish
wondering what I could write on those thin

pads he doesn't use anymore, all computers
now: short poems measured back by edge
or margin, forced to different principle

by occasion situation space made manifest
made soul made organic architecture out-
side and in- reflecting, phrenology phiz-

iognomy ignominy sincerity Jefferson chair
next step: is this the measure of the breath
the swelling of the lung the astronaut blow-test

keep the bubble up, a quotation of some
standard, width of roll of adding tape or thermal
fax I found discarded in the college dump:

give me surplus supplement the poem's ride
against the lane: the inch, having been defined
as the widths of six barleycorns or lengths

of three, the hand of course an average
a nonce (once) no measure niether none, ruler
made from ruler, King's forearm, this poem

at least one Elvis long: what about the rhyme-
period, echo-interval, syllable count between
bad puns: can't we count it off on anything

as in church the canting of psalms, syllables
not explicit made multiple, ready for the twang
of Southern voice on the hymnal's rack: Yeats

running rhyme against the grain, small internals
breaking lines into smaller staple, stitching
line to line, a second poem hiding in the one

you thought you know: great mosaic rhyme
contracting Byzantium's end, smashing
what is past, or passing, or to come

against the holy city's rocks: yz:is ant:past:passing
ti:to um:come, surely the decay or expansion
of the rhyme-spread some kind of measure,

an event you can name can hear can describe:
this tape's more than 16 coaches long: tape
I ride: you could hear it coming, the echo the

yard stick t-bar square: Gary, you can quote me
(echo the): also: ballad meter common but not
common meter till hymned is decayed form of

Anglo-Saxon four-beat line: take Celtic-laden
German language fold in Norman French and whip,
sugar strings stretched, made airy, more taste

they say: no four-beat here: beat more:
double bulk but let rest, the eight beats shrink,
and missinig is memorialized by a tombstone

rhyme: I saw her set the bowl aside, saw the whole
pie made without a cup, the measure in the eye:
it always comes out fine: be glad you saved your

fork: grand maw says eat up ::

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