rope wild four - Aleph

8/31/06

1960 ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, with case, for $35

ENCLOSED PLEASE FIND YOUR COMPLIMENTARY
ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA WORLD ATLAS OF
ROOT BEER.

8/27/06

be a first responder. the delivery boy

be a first responder. the delivery boy is late again. the payload is stored at a safe house somewhere in this neighborhood. keep your eyes open for the man who’s supposed to meet us here. where you hear gunfire, you know it’s one of our boys. be a first responder. be the one who meets the opposition without blinking. incredible feeling, to fall from this height, don’t you think so? be a first. he was in there when the building came down. a terrorist wouldn’t wish that on a dog. after the vacuum leak was breached, we smelled the alarm before we heard it -- they call that synesthesia. how you can take your shoes off in a hotel like that and not attract attention, I’ll never know. when we dedicated this place to the fallen, don’t you think their children, where ever they were in that moment, do you think they knew we were there reading aloud their parents’ names? the multidimensional approach to cosmology doesn’t allow for repetition, but it accepts parallelism. it’s a rule governing the mechanism. our mechanism appears to have a flat tire, and I don’t believe in God and we’re 30 miles from the nearest gas station. be a first responder. the porter will take your bags.

8/20/06

troop formations on the River Hydaspes

take a shot from your hiding place
in the colonnade--I got no fear,
I line you up, spread data in rows

like acrobats defeated by elephants
along the wide river Hydaspes.

this is no place for military action,
no sign of victory for a newly won empire,
either in the numbers or in multitudes.

ethnic identity is always a better gauge
for peoples’ staying power than any statistic
you could drop out of your bullet-ridden hat.

strains of foreign language get washed down
to the river every monsoon season, down,
purged from this land to the waiting jaws

of the beasts of the sea.

8/8/06, edited 11/5/06

SF Vision

San Francisco broken down
with time plans area the roads
a color (red)(tan)(black)
city populations & the sea
and where the rugged cliffs
onto the reaching land’s arms
were tugging each soul
far far inland Farallones
see the nails the seal rocks
Ocean Beach and beach’s
ocean sand all mixed below
their everyone’s feet.

8/8/06

she's dancing in Cubist heels

Cubist heels
Getting back to nuts
American distribution
Straight up the old empire
Takla Makan sprinkler system
Lord Carnarvon had been
waiting all morning
Then the sea was carpeted
with tiny plastic doll heads
Do something right once,
they think you’re the expert
The Communists were having
breakfast in the next room

Jackson riding once more
into the vulva, Shenandoah Valley
The Hallowed Land, the Hollow Earth --
those are lizards were his eyes
She surprised everyone when she said
“I don’t even care where Frank is”
Lakota boys claim they saw a sasquatch
ten miles from Rosebud, carrying a
shotgun and a couple boxes of shells
Last night we heard about the prison break --
the guards were stuck in some
kind of suspended animation --
nothing they could do

8/18/06

piece of a map

piece it all together.
Smith hit his head
when he came in late
to the meeting.
summit reached, air clear
and visibility fine,
25 miles.
he pieced the map
of the wilderness
back whole on
top of a large
granite boulder.


7/25/06

maximalization

turn these resources over,
feel them in hand and under

fingernails, curl on the palm
and look at them, look at them.

the smallest effort blossoms
and no one looks into that world

without you being there first.

7/21/06