I'll read a few poems from the book.
The first is called "Corruption."
I was writing a series of poems that I
was calling all of them "Corruption"
because they were borrowing lines from other writers,
and then warping them and corrupting them.
So this opens with a few lines from Saint Augustine,
and ends with some warped lines from the German writer,
W.G Sebald.
"Corruption."
"I'm about to recite a psalm that I know.
Before I begin, my expectation extends over the entire psalm.
Once I've begun, the words I have said remove themselves
from expectation and are now held in memory, while those yet
to be said remain waiting in expectation.
The present is a word for only those words
which I'm now saying.
As I speak, the present moves across the length
of the psalm, which I marked for you with my finger in the psalm
book.
The psalm is written in India ink, the oldest
ink known to mankind.
Every ink is made up of a color and a vehicle.
With India ink, the color is carbon and the vehicle, water.
Life on our planet is also composed of carbon and water.
In the history of ink, which is rapidly coming to an end,
the ancient world turns from the use of India ink
to adopt sepia.
Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid, and the cuttlefish.
One curious property of the cuttlefish is that once dead,
its body begins to glow.
This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity
a few days after death and ebbs away as the body decays.
You can read by this light."