If Thought is Life
If I am alive
If I am thinking
nothing has stopped
in the way of wheels
I cannot leave
If where I was born
was a basin
Where was it
I was thinking
If I breathe
If the wind
If resilient
the basin
is cold
and thinking
tensile
If thought is life
and the want
of thought is death
the incendiary dress
(Note: Some language is taken from William Blake’s “The Fly.”)
Blessed Is
a day, avid
centuries.
A time when when
bestowed locus.
I look about the place
as it dislocates
for the venereal heart.
Here
is the symposium
and time is ludic.
I feel that I am happening
in a sleeve.
*
Locusts are swarming.
Lust is. Here is
a valence we were
paragraphing in the sun.
My friends and I, unhappy
with anything pitched
higher than darkness,
discouraged beatitudes.
*
What is more dangerous—
perfection in the body or
perfection in the mind? I saw the sea shell
everywhere making a unit of life,
the unsprung sound
of a thing unseen.
*
There is a place in my heart.
There is a heart.
There is my academy
searching the hinging
preposition.
*
I configured myself one day by not
entering the pool. No contentment
overflowed.
*
To fill my life as an index,
to feel crying as by onion—
there is an astringent for everything.
It is lexical.
*
Blessed is the heart.
Blessed is my gethsemane
of florid logic. I am lucid
in the afternoon.
Graceful living—benevolence,
pure bawd.
The God Word
It was told never. Never had a certain
sound like iron or beating.
Never use the tongue for any purpose other than speaking.
Hunger is a reason to speak and starvation
a natural prism.
*
Let us say it was trying to be kind. Let us say blasphemy is a form of cruelty.
Let us say blasphemy.
*
The mother taught it the god word, created a system of pointing
beginning with the god word to all things and back
to it. This was a kindness,
which had the sound of iron or beating. The sound of a foundry
and the smell of hot things touching the temperature of rooms.
*
Let us say the god word is an idol, abstract, for the menial concept
that is childhood.
*
When it grew up, for it had a tendency to extend itself
across time like an insect leaping across
great canyoning swatches of space, it knew the god word to be
not merely an idol, abstract, but idols, abstract, plural,
for the superior concepts of mother and history
and nostalgia, those that collapse into a finery
known as the past.
*
When it grew up, the god word was rhetoric.
When it grew up, the god word bore stamps, concrete, plural,
like a thing delivered to every square on a sphere
of mud and water and rejected.
When it grew up, in short, the god word was golden.
*
Let us say the god word comprises the inner ear.
Let us say the god word aloud for full effect.
*
It was told never. Never speak
the god word.
Never deny the god word. But
it did not believe
the moment or the condition or the geometry
to which the god word pointed.
Yet the god word existed.
How to eliminate the god word.
*
Let us say it was given by its mother. Its father did not take it away.
Let us say it fell when the system of pointing collapsed
as from a lack of grammar proceeds madness.
It fell like a seed, singular, golden, and would not grow.
*
Let us say the god word is a property as of magnets. Which is to say
the god word is a type of physics, abstract and menial,
creating shapes, though not physical, and with less certain
intention, but in an essential sort of way, which in denying
certain things vivifies certain others.
Which is to say if the god word was denied to speaking, it was not
to thinking or feeling or tapestry.
*
In the end, it was told never. Never use the tongue
for any purpose other than speaking. Hunger is a reason
and starvation the natural prism.
Soon, it was allowed eating. Soon, allowed drinking, soon,
dark liquids.
And if a thing could evoke a sense of not requiring atmosphere,
inside, it was allowed.
And always it denied the permissions by exceeding them, saying god,
o god, o my god, writing letters, dear god, sincerely, it.