chapbook excerpt
hmu for a copy
I wrote a chapbook. The Year published it. It’s kind of 16 pieces in 3 sections, kind of 3 pieces, & kind of one. The bulk of it is made up of a sequence of “sonnet”-like & -length stanzas, which really you ought to think of all together as a single poem, but not so totally singular if I’m being honest. The remainder pieces are addenda upon it/them, sort of, but otherwise are sort of distinct. I should be more clear, probably. Top down, big picture, the book goes:
14 14 line long stanzas
1 49 line long stanza with 2317 characters
1 4-ish line long quasi-lineated post & pre script thing
Note that none of these things are titled at all. The chapbook itself is named “While,” with the quotation marks included on the cover, because that is the opening word of the 4-ish line closing piece.
I’m going to set up a store to sell chap copies very soon, but if you’re really inexplicably eager to read this shit as soon as possible dm me & I’ll tell you where to send your 10 dollars + shipping
Anyway, here’s a random few of the “sonnets.”
Then again, it ain’t the damnedest thing to be not herein adept. Given the slack vernacular americanisms all folksy and down home, pantomimed by clouded recollections of dead relatives’ speech patterns (half-killed off by time already), the heart of the thing’s where the pictured home is. What lil self-knowledge I’ve managed commands a big deal not be made out in the fog of this, lest too the hundreds of kin cruelly shred n various other corpses rest -less out there clattering sticks and stones like the old ghost new percussion decamillitet, down deep in this fogged up mind appear. To hear such a legion is enough plus some considerable more of what other wise, reasonable people’d call egregious. In the drowse of this retched out self-dim, may we be heads in the sand, so hereafter through all time’s murk, think: of sand’s answerless rebus composing piece-wise proof we are not. This hard fact bound down gets cramp tense and drowses off the pressure. Force sovereign as American dollars, shellacked thick over every- body else otherwise under these numberless and sick clouds. In this hourglass, us looking up amassed legions count the grains, whiling it all away with mad ready-to-kill -for-nothing-whenever talk, lead-pipe-makes-right type down -for-it-all talk. We say every eye a picture of the dark, and ain’t flesh in face-to-face, but stone. We say the sole true commandment: (all puffed up, too tense to rest) don’t count its pain in dreams up, the agonies are hundreds, and hereinafter hundreds upon hundreds to many powers of hundreds, like grains of sand on earth or stars of the universe or… [fill in the rest of the trite images for what is massive] of beings not remarked on must dance the death continuelle. Q: Why command each thought finish? A rationale’d drowse, would drag like stones in a water suicide’s pockets, and here in my American heart I’d rather live. And this requires this: a picture be made, attended to, maybe framed. Not like those others, unthought of, consigned to die and, again, die. Q: Down writhing on the ground, with my head in the clouds, what am I? [A pause, dead air]. “But I remain un-killed!” resounds the rally cry of the cowards’ legion. And once, quoth a demon: “We are: legion in a flock of pigs, one construed of hundreds, a proof: an other-than against this finitude, a killing the sense this universe is known, or knowable, sanding down reason’s discretion.” Not clouds comprising mist, set against the aether—not rest’s totality in fidgets, set against a wake. Neither down nor up in their various instances. Their one is not any unity in thought, or mass, it is other than numbers are. Beyond all those commands of biology, sensibility, existence, there is: a nil picture death can’t live in, where time itself seems drowsy, now, as if on discovering the Americas its head were bumped, concussed on the Plymouth stone. [Hues: cool grays, bluish, like stone] The train scene: a legion of buffalo killed. White America’s expanding. “Thousand hundred killed, last year alone,” a drowsy ghost is told by Charon. Killing is the western motion picture’s obligate theme, like sand for the beach. Commands of native genocide, coal clouds on Charon’s cheeks, an other where than here of rest -less dreams, but this hell is not another country. This is our train, which travels down.
