Thank you.
I'm going to have trouble living up to that.
Thanks to the Poetry Center for everything.
And thanks very much for a particular and engaged
introduction.
And it's a real pleasure to read with Bhanu and Mónica.
It's wonderful company.
I'm going to read a section of what I hope will be a new book.
It's one piece and it's called "Mean Free Path."
And in physics about which I don't know very much
the mean free path of a particle is the average distance
that a particle travels before it
collides with another particle.
And the poems are full of little collisions and recombinations
and fragmentation and hesitation.
So there's a kind of entropy or the poem's kind
of breakup under the emotional pressures of the other.
So I think you'll hear some of those formal processes taking
place.
Am I being too loud?
So this is called "Mean Free Path."
I finished the reading and looked up,
changed in the familiar ways now for a quiet place
to begin the forgetting.
The little delays between sensations,
the audible absence of rain take the place of objects.
I have some questions but they can wait.
Waiting is the answer I was looking for.
Any subject will do so long as it recedes.
Hearing the echo of your own blood in the shell
but picturing the ocean is what I meant by.
You startled me.
I thought you were sleeping in the traditional sense.
I like looking at anything under glass, especially Glass.
You called me like overheard dreams.
I'm writing this one as a woman comfortable with failure.
I promise I will never let the predicate withered.
If you were uncomfortable seeing this as portraiture
close your eyes.
No, you startled.
Identical cities, how sad.
Buy up the run.
The unsigned copies are more valuable.
I have read your essay about the new closure.
My favorite parts I cannot follow, surface effects.
We moved to Canada without our knowledge.
If it reciprocates the gaze how is it pornography?
Definitions crossed with stars the old closure,
which reminds me wave to the cameras from the--
the pillars are glass that's all you need to know.
Lines have been cut and replaced with their opposites.
Did I say that out loud?
A beautiful question.
Barbara is dead.
Until I was 17 I thought windmills
turned from the fireworks to watch their reflection
in the tower made wind, brushed metal apples
green to the touch.
Oh please, for an astounding irrelevance
structured like a language.
But I like the old music, the audible kind
we made love to in the crawl space without our knowledge.
Robert is dead.
Take my voice, I don't need it.
Take my face, I have others.
Pathos whistles through the typos, parentheses slam shut.
I'm writing this one with my eyes closed
listening to the absence of.
Surface effects patterns of disappearance.
I kind of lost it back there in the trees
screaming about the complexity of intention.
But, but nothing.
Come to bed.
Reference is a woman comfortable with failure.
The surface is dead.
Wave to the cameras from the towers built to sway.
I promised I would never.
Tell me whose hand is this, a beautiful
question her sources again.
Unhinged in a manner of speaking crossed with stars and rain
that can be paused so we know we're dreaming
and their feet like horses in the city how sad.
Maybe, no maybes.
Take a position.
Don't call it night vision green.
Think of the children running the sisters through the lawn,
where were we.
If seeing this as portraiture makes you uncomfortable,
wake up.
Wake up, it's time to begin the forgetting.
Direct local statements wither under glass
a little book for Ari built to sway.
I admire the use of felt theory like swimming in a storm
but object to anti representational bias
in an era of, you're not listening, I'm sorry.
I was thinking how the beauty of your singing
really describes the hope whose death it announces.
Wave
in an unconscious effort to unify my voice I swallowed gum.
In all my weeks in the airport over a missed connection
the color of money is night vision green.
Ari removes the bobby pins.
I remove the punctuation.
Our freezer is empty save for vodka and film.
Leave the beautiful questions unanswered.
There are six pages left of our youth
and I would rather swallow my tongue
than waste them on description.
A cry goes up for plain language in identical cities.
Sikorsky appears in my dream selling knives.
Each exhibit is a failed futurity,
a star survived by its own light.
Glass amperes confused bees, is that pornography?
Yes.
But.
But nothing.
Come to reference a mood of undress equal to fascism
becomes obligatory in identical cities.
Did I say that already?
Did I say the stranglehold of perspective must be shaken off?
A lot of the tradition broadcast with a little delay
takes the place of experience like portraits
reciprocating gazes.
Zukofsky appears in my dreams offering his face.
Each of us must ask ourself why am I clapping.
The content is announced through disappearance.
Like fireworks, wave after wave of information
breaks over us without our knowledge.
If I give you my denim will you simulate distress.
To lay everything waste in the name of renewal,
haven't we tried that before?
Yes, but, but not in Canada.
The vanguard succumbs to a sense of its own importance as easily
as swan succumbed to the flu.
I'm writing on this one with my non-dominant hand in the crawl
space under the war.
I can feel an axis snapping in my skull
and soon I will lose the power to select
while retaining the power too.
All these flowers look the same to me, night vision green.
There is nothing to do in the desert
but read Penthouse and lift weights.
My blood is negative that's all you need to know.
Sophisticated weaponry marries the traditional pleasures
of perspective to the new materiality of point and click.
I'm writing this one as a woman comfortable with leading
a prisoner on a leash.
Combined was the word I was looking for back there
in the trees.
My blood is Scandinavian modern.
I kind of lost it but enough about me.
To return with a difference, haven't we tried that before?
Yes.
But, but not from the air.
Unique flakes form indistinguishable drifts
in a process we call all these words look the same to me
fascism arranged the flowers by their price.
Then we're despairing.
Then the voice of Nina Simone.
Parentheses open on a new gender crossed with stars.
Ari removes the bobby pins.
Night falls.
There is no such thing as non sequitur when you're in love.
Let those who object to the pathos swallow their tongues.
My numb rebarbative people put down
your blocks and your big gulps.
We have birthmarks to earn.
Around 1945, the question becomes sleepyhead.
Since the world is ending may I eat the candy necklace
off your body?
Turn on the record over, turn the pillow over,
it has a cooler side.
Like a vein on the wing of a locust, the sea of hope
disclosed by her voice.
It cannot save us but it can remind us survival is
a butcher's goal.
All hands to the pathos.
Let the credits
bend the plastic stick and break the interior to the reaction
amidst light but not heat, the tragedy of dialectics.
Sand sized particles of revolutionary possibility
fall constantly without our knowledge.
The capitol lawns sparkle with poison.
Since the world is ending why not let the children
touch the paintings.
The voice of Nina Simone contains its own negation
like a pearl.
As brand names drift towards the generic,
we drift towards fascism.
A life in common replaced with its image.
The predicates are glass.
I blew them, I'm sorry.
Sorrier than I can say with such a tiny phone.
You're breaking up, no damn I held
the hand of a complete stranger during takeoff
unaware it was my own laying bare the ideological function
of numbness, felt silence, a sudden inability
to swallow the dream in which the face is Velcro describing
the film in the language of disaster, the disaster
in not finishing sentences removing
the suicide from the speed dial failing to recognize yourself
in the photo coming home to find a circle of concerned family
and friends.
It's more of an artist's colony than a hospital.
It's more of a vitamin than an antipsychotic, collective
despair expressed in I statements.
The dream in which the skin is stone washed denim running
your hand through the hair of an imaginary friend
rising from bed, dressing returning calls all
without waking the sudden suspicion,
the teeth in your mouth are not your own let alone the words.
She handed me a book I had read it before, dismissed it,
but now in the dark I heard the little delays.
If you would speak of love, stutter like rain, like Robert
be, be unashamed.
Let those who object to them but that's
familiar rage isn't a system it is a gesture whose
power derives from its failure.
A child attempting to gather us into her glitter flecked arms.
It isn't a culture of fear.
When a people pats itself on the back with a numb hand
it isn't a culture at all.
Take a position, cut it off, leave
the rings, the president that you
promised you wouldn't mention.
I saw myself in the mirrored lenses,
you cannot kill a metonym of his bodyguards.
I'm moving to Canada when I wake up.
You mean if.
No concept of clockwise rotation can be described on the surface
continuously so this might take a while.
Bring a book.
Have you tried breaking it into triangles or changing hands?
No hand in this.
Fascia, a tangent bundle can we unfold what we can't figure?
Not without making cuts.
Orient me for the night is coming amphichiral,
manifold, and looped.
We have no reason to hope.
But what's reason?
What's reason got to do with it?
Accent not duration, cancellation not punctuation
and that's love.
Why not speak of it as we are drawn up into the rising
toroidal fireball.
This column of powdery light is made possible by Boeing,
but what, and here's where people start disappearing,
made Boeing possible.
If you could see the tip of the vector it would appear
to be moving in a circle as it approached you, references
a slow wave transporting energy through empty media
you can't rush it.
The displaced pathos returns with a vengeance and painters
pull grids apart in grief.
Only a mass or only a butcher can unmake sense.
The rest of us have axes to grind into glass.
By complex I mean my attention is drawn downward
to the bottom of the cloud.
It hurts me when you listen too closely smothering reference.
Carefully decanted left to breathe.
That's criticism.
The subject rises to the surface, bursts.
All light paths from the object to the image are reversible
and that hurts, to know it didn't have to be.
I mean, don't get me wrong I enjoy killing
birds were these little ships that flew and sang.
There are some cool pics online.
Funny strange not ha ha funny, how the black canvas was
realistic, a bird's eye view of their disappearance,
wave after wave of deja vu.
After the storm, the sky turns night vision green,
the color of murder.
I can hear the soldiers marching in my pillow.
Even in Canada
her literature is irrelevant to October, Anna
of all the Russias, whose body was an ideal October that
has yet to obtain a face.
October approached asymptotically by tanks.
The leaves turn night vision.
Anna, do you see how the sand sized particles
of the true October rise from the asphalt like fireflies
whose bodies are night vision.
Neither do I, the irrelevant I, the I of all.
It will develop recursively or not at all, the new closure.
In lieu of fixed outlines modulating color.
If concentrated light strikes the leaf,
part is reflected through the droplet producing a white glow
around the genre.
It's like the whispering gallery.
The fighter pilot sees his shadow
on the cloud crossed with the Wailing Wall.
We can't distinguish rounds of ammunition from applause.
Speak plainly.
Keep your hands on the table.
Do not flee into procedure.
Do not wait for a surpassing disaster
to look your brother in the eye and speak of love.
Make no mistake, the disjunction,
the disjunction stays.
Do not hesitate to cut the most beautiful line in the name
of form, the bread of words.
Look for me at genre's edge.
I'm going there on foot.
I dyed what's her face's hair with lime Kool-Aid so
when I read "Bezhin Meadow" I lent her aspect
to the green haired spirit.
There is a girl trapped in every man made lake.
She will pull you into your reflection.
Stephen tells me what's her face, who
used to sleepwalk into the snow, piss her name
and glide back to bed without waking,
was thrown into this poem through a windshield.
Once she gathered me into her glitter
flecked I don't care if aspect is archaic.
Once she walked into the sliding door
a plane announced the disappearance
you made it this far without mentioning Topeka.
Glass in her hair.
Patterns of I will throw my voice like a clay pot
keep her ashes there.
I don't care if love.
I don't deny the influence but it's less a relation father
to son than a relation of moon to tide.
Plus my teachers are mainly particles bombarding gold foil
or driving rain.
It's the motion not the material,
not the nouns but the little delays.
A gender crossed, a genre crossed on foot by Marvin Gaye.
Filicide.
Strong misreadings arise on the surface.
Burst.
It didn't have to be.
If I rise from table, if I wander
discalced through the sparkling lawns,
if I'm lost in Juarez and Topeka if it's winter in August when
the prodromata, when the birds cite the past in all
its moments, there is no need for examples, police, doctors.
Let me walk to the edge of the genre
and look out into nothing.
I will return.
The fit will return me in time for coffee and oranges.
Authority derived from giving it away is how I define aura.
Like Zukofsky's paper flowers picked from Kapital
for Celia's hair, priceless.
The high reflective ceilings allow
us to receive our own applause.
When an audience takes a bow that's fascism.
A looped encore.
Surface effects.
The auditorium is a standing wave, a sentimented roar.
The entire system weighs about two pounds.
A small bird governs the atria.
You dream the donor's dreams.
The donor's breath breaks your lines
across their prepositions halved and polished to display
the crystal back formations.
Go in fear of abstraction, but go.
Be gone by morning.
There is nothing.
You don't need a shell.
Just cup your hand.
Nothing for you here but repetition.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]