textimagepoem: 10/19/08

tom taylor

Friday, October 24, 2008, #31, Influence, or wooing, the fourth line says you can only influence someone upon whom your thoughts are fixed, changing the inquiry to number 39 blockade, Obstruction. Hmmm. My thoughts are always fixed on you, no doubt about it, all the conversations endlessly taking place in these night time disturbances, always obstructed it seems by the forces at bay. So much for a clue toward right behavior, more or less to continue the same track day after day the same meditation yielding the same indefinite results, like, ‘hang on’ and not much more to be seen or said

‘Given over to our horses this deedless earth / delivers to us this incorruptible sky. The Sun is unmentioned but his power is amongst us / and the sea at morning like a presumption of the mind.’ (Perse/Eliot) You carry me along the flat shore like an afterthought this mind of sky which carries the colored light in the air no doubt an unreflective generality from the written word itself no machinery evanescent prayer from the interior of the paint brush and the caulking gun immersing themselves into my frontal consciousness like a job to be done just coming in over the horizon without color or putty. This is man’s fate, his attention focused on the names and faces blurred into one constant recall of hope and the magician of the days flowing blood red inside the small tubing of the inside of my body stretched across my own sky and template cloud ridden inner mindscape the focus of the meditation on the you of you whom some pornography obscures from consciousness like a taboo or a doorway which has been closed prior to this bare knuckled tap on the door, like a taboo, who is the you of you, miniaturized compression of the monolog and the demotic in their relative rooms, from which other utterance becomes obsessed and made a rhythm of conscience across which some energy flows like remembering the parts manual in the window of the BAP store window in Berkeley 1965 thinking we need a parts manual for consciousness itself, nuts and bolts of syntax with long handled ball breakers for torquing down an idea….

This is the way out of somewhere. Only the silence remained in its infinite glow from available light photography where chance incursions yielded the newer transmutations from syntax to the gymnast’s unclaimed luggage in the hallway of the performing arts mop-and-glow for the next day’s diversions here at the end of the hall. This way out! The murmur of forgotten strains yet shills you along the trail with random strands of associated compulsions and thought/memory sequences jumbled together your own forgotten private movie all stringy and vague trailing along behind you in the near term where the illusionists grow their vegetables and watch the sun set in the minor glow from now the then….

Now in the aftermath of counting do we add and subtract our styles from the air around us, looking underneath the frame of reference to discover underpinnings and root structures, the like…. I’ll settle for a calm equation of tongue and sign where the meetings still ring out like a carousel or like a calm afternoon on the shores of life.

You remember these empty moments in the suddenness of life’s meditation before lunch where the dog asleep on the floor is a reassuring sign that you are still here on the bench of life before the new day arrives with all its accompanying slap and dash or for the surprise of the hour in news and information from both sides the world.

John M. Bennett

Neck Gaze

neck plunder help me shad
the ow crate yet slumber
melt ,see angled low plate
slipping shore the floor set numb
er felt my strangled ,slow face
,gripping hove the snore pool .sent
dumber ,spelt your dangled
,blown gaze

Nation Tested

tested ,drape the shower ball dented
lubrication nested in the cake glower
,fall or metal indication for your
suit lunchage what a quested lake
,slower ,crawl the mental abdication
nor your loot thumpage ,“luck” ,a
best nor fake ,a tower stall a
lentil ,age and nation