For the Ride Read online

  and attack the poor ones, with ancient future swords and lances, slings,

  painintheass weaponry ones have none of. Qui busts out of the plâtre,

  Moi je suis your warrior . . . Qui turns blood red, or red ocher, sword and knife

  fighting beautiful figmentoids, all in frenzy of pigmented

  limbs choreographed by mind, a group mind—Need thou to subdue them!

  Can’t live with hierarchical figures even if painted and limned

  artistic for olde eyes. We’re the ones thou shouldst desire, say the creatures.

  Sick of it! says our Qui, screams almost soprano: won’t have it more.

  Bwords flutter over, the last battle ever, ever they cheepeth—

  Noeth, Qui screams fierce, pushing the painted back towards wall places.

  What ever’s pastly still exists in chaos and can arise again.

  Fight scene amuses the One, though, so stylized—so équipés, outfitted,

  encrusted with stripèd kilts, belts for lotsa knives, tassels, kneepads,

  feathered headdress upthrust—this guy has chicken face—Eagle! he screams

  somehow hearing One’s mind. Why not hear it? One wants some privacy—

  Oh walls can topple in mind as outside . . . Yew look like a chicken!

  Yew have chicken eyes and yr beak’s wobbly! One shouts then thinks, Oh no

  have joined fray, like any asshole. Meanwhile Qui presses on—

  Back into the plaster with yr jackoffry!—whirlwind of Force, motion,

  projection of the ones’, all the ones’ will. Artistic figures

  can’t compete with the ones’ mental headbutt! push ’em all up, back in.

  How tiresome! says Wideset. What’s the point of being comatose if

  have to exert oneself? Parts one saith. Seal those bastards up now.

  One of the wall ones, the winged coyote, ’s been friendly bien sûr . . .

  But . . . One’s gonna fly upward away, says the winged coyote now.

  Because, says the long-jawed black-nosed chien, It shouldn’t be this easy.

  Easy? screameth Wideset, and before it can fly up, Wideset grabs

  its pinions and drags coyote to ground of nowhere, the new ville—

  Won’t put up with any more this crap! Stick this figment in the wall!

  Shaker says, One likes its little wings—Let’s like them in the plaster . . .

  There’s something one knows ones need to know, coyote says from flatness—

  Won’t let one loose again to find out, Wideset says. One knows that,

  Écoutez, nothing’s gonna happen, that’s what the ones need to know,

  unless guys like wall ones are let loose. Know that, says One. Don’t want things

  to happen. Never? Forever? One doesn’t, oh I don’t know,

  Unbreasted’s reflecting on question . . . Wideset grabs Un by shoulders:

  Go live in the wall, then, with them. But it’s too flat there! Listen, chump—

  Chump?—Asshole, all right? Breasted seems poised to defend one: Don’t be crass . . .

  Then One must heighten diction, says One. Ones are wearied of how long

  a tumult hath any being endured. One experiences

  déjà-vued layers speaking thusly: this worn fatigue of mischief—

  motives, calumny, erotics of power, desire for jewels

  that quash others with beauty historically imbued, talents

  uninnocently deployed on arenaed stage to agitate,

  and then nothing else: layer upon layer of plotting old wars

  anew, as if this time fought’s the charm, the transcendent finality . . .

  All so cheap and sexual, cricket calls in jars, but not as spontaneous . . .

  mechanics of life like men defined. Ones are destroyed by, pastly,

  this lack of invention—all the same; electronically

  squared, umpteenthed—Don’t want it any more.—And if one wants it?—Breasted . . .

  Not a democracy. One’ll insert the ones right into wall.

  Breasted reflects in one’s most imbecile countenance, brows pulled

  as thinking, scrunched together—mien learned in drama class for ever:

  Does one take falseness into eternity, keep right on acting?

  Recall, says Breasted, One’s pastly only a body—defined thus,

  “woman” being that, no matter the accomplishment. Could change now?

  rather than support that one’s kneejerkedness, kneejerkedly too?

  Remember a dream: Walking blearily nude, pubic features blurred—

  unregarded since old—along a margin of water, angry,

  smoking a cigarette . . . all belongs to the other half of the ones . . .

  Unbreasted’s urgent: Need to live in wall with the ones one’s most like—

  hierarchical potentates and possible foes: Or be bored,

  no friction, struggle for whatever’s defined as desirable.

  Come with me, leap into this flat land and pretend it’s as of old!

  Can’t resist, never cultivated will—Born Stunted. It’s over.

  Breasted and Unbreasted soul suckers leap into wall on their own.

  From the Anthology

  and thou wert she

  bitten by

  mouth of be havior

  so like an cestress

  or unlike perhaps in choice

  of hairstyle profession—wear tunics

  to bureau indulge rules

  of comportment ligaments tense to per-

  form his necessary cognition

  I was office poet read by the main women

  desirous to change their desks

  nest of immortal assistant

  he’ll marry you in beauty

  donate your thighs to his cause

  Urgent Future Tense

  which of us will Love help live

  don’t be an innocent

  let the more loving one be

  was love the name of love

  that wasn’t thus

  he always wins every morning, I don’t know how

  to tell you eros is his myth empowering

  one’s not born .

  XI

  CITY OF NOTHING

  Ones now leave them in walls. Walk on, says Qui, Past the restes of Future—

  ones can disregard it, have been through it. L’Allée now passes through

  mist, nothing but, though lit sometimes by shafts of the light invokèd

  by words—mechanical, flat and painted. There’s really nothing here,

  call it City of Nothing, says the One. How far does it extend?

  “Far” doesn’t make sense here, Qui says, But beneath the ones’ feet appear—

  See? are squares, are floating. Ones’re making them as ones walk along—

  feet feet feet—palely hued. Is it a map? Is it that the ones can’t

  exist without configuration, within or without of it—

  one—ones—mind—it’s The Mind, that ones are of. Each, says Qui, One and all . . .

  One as all or as one. Doing this together, without knowing . . .

  feet feet feet, peach, white, beige . . . Look, there are words appearing in the squares,

  disappearing before one can read them. Must be a way to hold

  on to them, as if to remember them. Try to keep hold of them.

  One is slid-ing in words, making the squares or rectangles: First it’s

  snakelike s’s—see the those? ssss—then become words: Hold ’em!

  Where? In mind ones’re in. Make ’em be fixed, ones’re in cont
rol, if

  all that’s here je suis See? Whose foot’s that? France’s or Wideset’s—

  Je Suis

  I am

  not she

  both ones, of those ones, thought it at once, pink, how anomalous

  anom

  alous

  the

  uni

  verse

  Ones only make it once? make together, thinking this universe

  alous

  am

  cryp-

  to

  Hidden, Je suis caché, One am the One, point making foot words

  à chaque

  point . . .

  no

  point

  Yes that’s it, there’s no point.

  pedes

  Platonic

  foot

  fool Look, it says epithesma, brightness, O

  can one just have that, such shimmering?

  one

  is

  b

  r

  i

  g

  h

  t

  hovering goldenness?

  Ones speak of it pastly, the lumen gone, now it’s internal, France

  thou

  the

  dead

  the

  thou

  the

  dead

  thou

  says. Is the language? What? Whatever . . . Are the ones there yet?

  thing

  before

  think

  or

  Tired of trying to be. Don’t want to read. Ones can sing it to you,

  squares call out under foot, Had to make some thing diden cha.

  Whoa whoa whoa, in the notes, where the song hides, decadent

  deca

  dent

  inven-

  tion.

  Look, a whole poem at one’s foot, says the One. One has exuded it:

  Poem

  If One has left everything but a direct quotation from the soul,

  how is it that that is still divided from the One in the grey day of this night?

  Speak to me while I am unconscious:

  Ancient harbor . . . I almost remember the worst of my dreams,

  where the sails are nets. I am supposed to be stable, eternal but I grieve

  where are my others when there are no survivors, on the shores of air?

  I can’t find thee, you haven’t arrived, the flocks of white-winged

  moths though I know you live for I do. There is no eternal solace—

  only ever the one moment, and I am stable as the center of time, but

  in my time I am its tone as well as its rock, fore’er in each e’er

  oh, I am a translation as you’d hear. Seeking my true language

  help me o dulce medicum, o heart words that are my blood,

  understood only by me until now, until this haunted now.

  One’s secret heart, is breaking one’s unsecret one, France says. Her foot:

  Poème

  Mon histoire, ignoble et tragique

  comme le masque d’une femme oubliée

  m’échappe. Aucun détail reste

  du meurtre sauf ma connaissance

  dans l’hôtel de ville, dans l’hôtel

  des particules, des opales maux

  Buveuse de l’opium de ma mort

  je rêve d’une chambre sale et beige

  Personne est là, mon corps est là

  moi, je suis dehors en nulle part

  Qui m’a tué? La drame des hommes

  ou quelqu’un. C’est ton monde à toi

  où les gens suivent les autres jusqu’àu

  moment sanguinaire, ton vrai amour.

  Because they have to have it that way, they—where there’s their own story.

  If one remembers it’ll just be theirs, even if it’s in one’s head—

  ghost head, what does one need dead—oh it goes on. Have to sing to past . . .

  But ones aren’t all dead. Oh ones’re dead, if Terran nature’s dead.

  Shaker says, Ones are contextless squiggles. Snakelike lines, Wideset says—

  Not afraid to be that. Principle of rebirth: One’s a principle?

  No, a wild, slithery line of force, cut. Cut from the linear

  perception, when ones was somewhere but parenthetical

  to l’histoire. Am a snake. Snakes beneath feet. Lines of magical force,

  powerful effigy. Am I, is one. Words pour from mouth, perfect

  because enacting one, in afterlife. Maybe it’s limbo here

  or dark matter. It’s light, one means there’s no light but it’s light, or sight—

  one continues to see. Let’s agree that the past’s undetailed shape,

  let’s read these present poems underfoot, for they’re what ones are now.

  Shaker reads ground beneath, almost stumbling, falling down on word slab:

  Poem

  Someone has a container containing a few pearls. Were eyeballs,

  One must change again; feels a hardness against the past as it goes,

  foot foot on the street of magenta thoughts abloom like witchy gorse . . .

  And one is transformed, in a crystal momentary pull, pulled up

  into a much larger thought, towering like Aldebaran, dear red—

  One is as big and as forgetful as rocks. Speaking tourmalines,

  beryl, plagioclase, hemimorphite, cinnabar, “Apache flame” agate;

  lunar and solar eclipses; meteor showers; haloes of space dust . . .

  Nothing will ever love one again. Struck by lightning, or icebound.

  Everything’s happening backwards. One started here or always saw it:

  I knew there was no way to portray me and I was left primordial.

  One knows there is no way to portray one and one is left primordial—

  But one is not left. One is articulate finally, articulated.

  Is one no longer one who shook Wideset for whatever reason?

  The new language can gain by that, beauty, humor, clarity.

  Past motivation is of no importance. Shaker says. Not here—

  Have been allowed to forget the details of one’s transgressions, now

  internalized into materials, concrete, for existence—

  “energy,” might say—one was a way, now one’s a transformed one,

  what one is guilty of pastly, a tone, glint in grain of non-atmosphere.

  I’m leaving you, me; I’ve left it all; can’t be in that thought again.

  When something is over or someone. One emerges from the husk

  that’s beige, featureless, or is that a simulacrum of my face

  on straw, a portrait of some face stuff, as if there had been a face—

  those gross species identificatory apertures one knew?

  Those weren’t it, one’s it, and what one says: localizing for thee

  a federation of singular traits, thoughtful, verbal—unjudged.

  Another one’s underfoot, Shaker says. Must be thinking, quiet to me:

  Poem

  In this poem there’s nothing left but a shape and some microtones

  I, one, am, is, the shadow within as the curlicued notes

  the spiraling flinted sparks of tones word-set-off

  wing round one’s purple-grey shoulder forms patching up existence

  so I, one, can speak, sing, call to oneself watching it react, amused.

  The far-hearing ear of my wideset-eyed
lover also distinguishes

  these nuances of shadow longings, of unremembered torments of those histories

  you were supposed to,

  one was supposed to go through o mirage of the world in declension at the end of

  the gorge of detailed spaces.

  I walk into their gothic walls. I mean that I, one, dissolved into the brown-black

  shifting texture

  of this sound sounding disinterestedly justified or decreed.

  On the other side of your wall I am taken apart, taken apart

  abstractedly anguished in the language of costs—in this story, though,

  one is never lost because one is a note, clear and inked-in black. Pedes, one is

  calling to one’s feet. Take one further on. And on and one, adding or losing e

  or eeeeee, screeches into bodhisattvahood. Forgetful of all but, vast,

  the dimensions of the one most common note, maneuvering sunlike around.

  on the other side of the wall I am taken apart, taken apart

  And waltz with me to thy voice, Wideset says. Can one dance in this world—

  oh later but not now. Is one in pair? Why bother now if one

  doesn’t repopulate this space that way? Oh mind is one’s lover!

  One’s never been in love, Wideset’s kid says. Will one not be like that?

  But one remembers love. Love’s existing. It is what the ones are,

  it is the same as to be—to be love—the ones are so social,

  kill out of love, killing relational. Maybe chaos is love.

  Thou’re too young to know, know to speak thus, Wideset says, and One says,

  Differences between the ones are gone now. Only the ones, and what

  ones are is in the air between, among, ones know all the same things,

  same words and ones are still differently configured, ones are stars

  each—same light—not same one. Not same at all. One’s name is One, the One,

  since first ent’ring the glyph, embarked in ark, debarking into ville.

  This is way that it is. Contain back together and rain sep’rate.

  From Wideset’s kid’s right foot the following appears in rectangle:

  Poem

  One with no future speaks as one wishes after all

  Shock of no childhood—do amoebas have one—but

  know the new beings, les mots. One’s visage colors of the creepiest