He awoke,

fully charged. You

can

bring water to a horse but you can't

make it ride. All poetry is conceptual

but some is more

conceptual

than
others.

Ambient difficulty leads to poetic

license. Poetry has

no purpose

&

that is not
its

pur-

pose.

You have to get over

be-

in-
g over. April is

the cruelest month for poetry. And May

is not much better, is

it?

Why write in prose what you could write as easily

as

poetry?

The poem is a crutch that allows us to think with

and throu-

g-
h it.

Every poem must have 13 distinct frames, devices, motifs, styles, forms, or

concepts.
Poetry emasculates prose.

The body: can't live with it, can't live without

i-
t.

I want to be understood,

just not by you.

Last week's weather is worth a pound of salt, just
like the lot of  wives or the snowy pillars of  Danton.

There's not a crowd in the sky. Familiarity breeds

content. Yesterday's

weather is as

beyond reach as tomorrow's

dreams. The

move away from close
reading often got drowned in the

bathwater, even if   we could never find the baby. I wouldn't  join a poetic

tradition that would recognize me as

a

member. The wheel needs

to be reinvented because we're still

stuck.

I am for almost new art (gently used forms) — easier on the pocketbook and on

the b-

rain (undergarments not accepted). The only true

innovation is God's. Others

pay cash.

This is a lie and that's the truth.

Better truth in the shade than a lie in the sun.

The taste of madeleine ain't

what it used to be.

(taint what it used to be)
    
...    

all alone and feeling

     ...    

Operators are on duty. Call now.
As dry as a bubble, as expectant as the dead

of night. Without product placement, poetry
as we know it

cannot sur-

vive.

Poetry should not be in the service of art any more than religion, ideology,
or morality. Poetry should be in the service of nothing — and not even
that.

If  you can identify someone as gnostic they are probably

not

gnostic enough,

for my money.

I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason.

The sacred in a poem is nowhere seen and everywhere

felt. There's

more to transgression than

ritual, but not enough

more. There is more

to liturgy than doctrine,

once in a blue

m-

oo-
n.

I left my purpose in my other pants.

You're not the only paddle in the ocean, shadow in the dark, line in
the poem, lobster in the trap, pot on the stove, wheel on the truck,
letter on the keypad, scythe in the field, lever on the controls, cloud
in the sky, fruit in the tree, rat in the lab.

Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original
is an echo of what is yet to be.

Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental.

Beauty is the memory of the loss of time.

Memory
is
the
reflection
of
the
loss
of
beauty.

American poetry suffers from its lack of

uncreativity. I have no faith in faith, or hope
for hope, no belief  in belief, no doubt of doubt.

They say God is in the details. That's
because the Devil has the rest

covered.

God is weak and imaginary — a flickering possibility. The dogma of an
omniscient and omnipotent God maligns hope and denies the sacred, as
it turns its back on the world.

God has no doctrine, no morality, no responsibility. To sin against
God is to use that name to justify any action or prohibition, whether
murder or martyrdom.

I've got authenticity, you've got dogma  ...    proclaimeth the Lord.

Saying one more time:
It's true but I don't believe it
I believe it but it's not so.

"My logic is all in the melting pot."


Better an old cow than a dead
horse. Alzheimer's:

What's that again? So it turns out I'm

not a bull in a china shop but china in a

bulls'

shop. Sometimes a penis is just a s-

y-
m-

b-
ol.

In their gloom, the Jews go and come
Talking of Bergen-Belsen.

(I saw time but it didn't return my gaze.)

My heart is like a water bucket that returns from the river

seven times full eighth

empty.

Zeno and Heraklitus are my father's milk.

I think with the poem not thr-

ou-

g-

h

it. Turns

of phrase / my stock in

trade. Negative
capability: sure.
But also
positive

incapacity. I always

hear echoes and reverses

when I am listening to language. It's

the field of my consciousness.

When we stop making — manufacturing,
imposing — sense then we have a chance

to find it.

A professional poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and the coffee grounds.

I think the idea is to be unoriginal but in as original a way a-
s possible.

Poets are the Pershings

of the imaginary: piercing

themselves as they perish

in spite of native ground.

I wish I was still in my pajamas.

The unironized life is not worth living.

When people tell that joke, three Jews
four opinions, what they don't say is that two of them,
the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third ...    

Ouzo something to me and it ain't pretty.

Absinthe makes the heart gro-

w

foreigner.

"Throughout this prospectus, ‘object' refers to the digitized file."

Yesterday is a stone's throw from tomorrow

& each new year a vast canvas of impossibility.

Kalip in North Folk, you're on the air.

Stand clear of the clo-

sing
doors.

•
Too much is still

not enough.

•
Blameless as a sheep at slaughter, am I
Guileless as the toll of tidal tug

There are no absolutes except this.

It was a veritable bow across the shot.

"Sacred means saturated with being."


So does scared. So does scarred.