washed in blood
running in shadows
spilled into gutters
Complicit
Complicit
Complicit
Court jester
Lapdog
American
serving a class to which
there is no access
for
an ambulance driver
for the infernal machine
Wakes up in the morning
Complicit
(to
Aspire
To
At last
Be done with the gods
& false prophets of capital
to aspire)
light off window sill
washed out pale
Katje into Nico
then a whisp of smoke
there’s a frame of ghost
passage, a frame of
oiled and polished mahogany
around a vacuum
there are other frames
a hole becomes a tunnel
if you follow it out
a ghost who’s not quite
there
Pocket Power Rankings, main pocket folders
The 18
Preston Highway
hard yellow brown
suicide lane
down to the Snyder
Ohio Valley temperature inversion
parks stink
on top
the Watterson overpass
churches
check cashing joints
the 18
runs down Preston
every 15 minutes
ebb and flow
you’re standing
in the aisle
eight,
nine,
noon,
four,
five,
six,
nine-thirty
the wrong 18
dumps you short of Outer Loop
at the Cash America on Ulrich
Mexican places for Mexicans
Mexican places for whites
bare tube fluorescent
gold-flecked white Formica
Tecaté
can’t order in Spanish
can point
secret menu
all the Latins under curved glass
at the front of a converted Wendys
bus stop
hammered wet cigarette tar
poison fumes
busted catalytic converters
broken cars
making the right
off Outer Loop
accelerating up Preston
in a trail of stink
late
catching the 18
stragglers
they’re not
turning off
the lights
obviously
pull knit cap
down over burnt eyes
up Eastern Parkway
the 18, then a mile home
* * * * *
pulling on a Tecate 24
up Preston
dank night
up about
where Indian Trail
slashes across
oily dark
swimming across
broken asphalt
dirt
you feel as much as see
breathing
chunked petroleum
sloughing off
strip malls
perhaps
not dark so much as light
at crazed angles
coming in
as negative light
always
people
crossing the street
in the dark
you don’t see them
just sort of hanging out
there
in the double turn lane
Mexicans
Africans
Koreans
Whites
strollers
lumpenprole
defying death
hanging
on the edge
broken asphalt river
all it is is
you wake up
in the morning
and find yourself
back
out on Preston
fucked
Funeral Prayer:::
One who is truly wise
has no knowledge
or virtue
nor honor
nor fame
who will know of him
speak of him to others
this is not
because he hides his virtue
and pretends foolishness
he
is
beyond
distinctions
such as
wise and foolish
gain and loss
I have been speaking of what it is to cling to one’s delusions
and seek after fame and fortune
All things of this phenomenal world
are mere illusion
they are worth
neither discussing
nor desiring
Contra Kenkō, if the world is illusion
then illusion it is
fix it
transfers man from the center of the universe
to somewhere on the outskirts
he is an enemy of mankind
and should be treated as such
1. He tried to sell himself to you, but you underbid
2. not only is man transferred –
3. the center will not hold
II.
1.
Clare is the “rootless”
“cosmopolitan” nomadic . . .
the extension à 80s Euro
cocaine ennui jetset
to its Ballardian xtreme,
rootless center
of a disintegrating, metamorphosizing
(“corrupt” per H & N),
CULTURE.
In every place the nomadic
“Clare” shows,
there are recognizable markers of
place
smeared across the landscape
like oils with a pallet knife
Clare, who “never sleeps”, is continuously
falling asleep –
on trains and buses, in taxis and
waiting rooms –
asleep almost as much as awake – continuously
in motion,
continuously weary
Paris à Berlin à Lisbon
narrow
streets wind up and down,
hillsides,
stairs, levels, paths,
lines
of flight
Moscow by 747
(TRANS
SIBERIAN EXPRESS SUNG LI STATION)
Beijing
Tokyo
labyrinth
levels
arcade
line of flight, like Harry Lime
in the sewers of Vienna
by
ship to
ààààààà
San Francisco
(“the
biochemical event of seeing”)
blindness, motion, and vision. impermanence
and flux.
2.
Australia
going
to that arid place at the end of the world
“my
bag? traveling separately.”
The Y2k of self-consumption
The horror of open space
cesura
terrible things have happened
happens in the worst of times
down into the tunnels
down
caves, canyons, valleys,
mountains –
When we touch the earth, it will
kill us.
Dreams and visions
Creation and theft
The unbearable sadness,
the unbearable ugliness of
creation
“You can’t just decide to die.”
“I don’t decide anything. I just
let it happen.”
3.
They have become addicted
to their catalog of images.
They wandered in and out of lost
worlds –
feelings and figures emerge
from a lost past – their dreams
become black holes of isolation –
they suffered finally from a
complete loss
of identity reality.
somebody bought
the house across the street
and painted the
fuckin’ brick white
Lowes truck pulled
up
dumped off some
cheap-assed Frigidaire
stainless steel
kitchen shit
and now it’s back
on the market
a hundred grand to
the “good”
the coffee shop
ain’t open at 6 am
a workin’ mans
coffee
is served at 6 am
they tried to be
cool
Black Lives Matter
signs
No Justice No Peace
Know Justice Know
Peace signs
no avail, natch
“when y’all show
up the neighborhood goes to shit”
sez the neighbor
“ironic” sez my
boy
“nothing ironic
about it” sez neighbor
“we get the shit
end of the stick either way
my ‘hood now be
what they call 'mixed'
which would be
fine
if it was the
landlords that was mixed
but ya know that
ain’t the case”
The Ethics[1]
I can no longer be concerned with god.
If there is a point, it has long since faded
into the nothing of an[3] infinite
violation
of boundary logic. So
I, unlike Spinoza,
conjure an ethics sans
god. [4] [5] [6]
This ethics is a world of vapor,
a world of smoke, of arcane legerdemain
half hidden under a veil,
this ethics is a punch[7] [8] [9] in the
head to dark purpose,
a deck of pornographic trading cards,
that thing you forgot, remembered, forgot
again, then forgot you forgot.[12] [13] [14] [15] [16]
I scratch out an ethics in fine point against type,
a frail bulwark against onrushing words
like waves, words drifting[17] [18] [19] like
ashy snow
that never melts, the snow falling
on the living and the dead, burying[20] ciphers
[empty] like[21] acorns
forgotten by squirrels,
words torn loose and herded by green capital
into holding pens on vast[22] ranches
deep in
words that accumulate to words
like capital accumulates to capital,[23]
with no regard to anything
beyond accumulation and attraction,[24] [25] [26] [27] [28]
with emptiness at the very core.[29] [30] [31]
It is the mission of
this ethics to
It is the mission of this ethics
to kick words into forbidden trajectories
to split them like atoms
to create blinding white light.
It is the mission of this ethics
to liberate words from meaning,
but not meanings.
It is the mission of this ethics
to liberate meaning from capital,
from ranches of privilege and tradition.[33]
I am inadequate for
the task,
but I am what is
left.[34]
the essence of things
that cracks open under the weight of a thousand questions
like daggers in the dark[37]-
bright blue day of confidence
turns out
to be a shadow of something else . . .
that something else is behind a screen,
and we’ve created the blue, or the screen,
or both
or everything
or[38] nothing
“There is a proof for that”
sez Spinoza
“and it goes like this[39]:
Jesus died for your sins;
but there are no sins,
no death,
and no Jesus.
There’s a red wheelbarrow,
and maybe Billie the Kid
but fuck that taxonomy, anyway
more or less depends on them
than you’ve been led to believe.[40] [41]”
I awake to a cold bright day
and understand that I am alone[42]
and what is left
is to breathe deep the air
and begin again,
always again[43]
There is another way,
there is always another way.[44]
* * * * *
Spinoza clears his throat:[45]
“What the masses learned to accept without reason
reason cannot refute.
And pretty baubles and grand gestures
trip the light and sell the rabble[46] [47]
while logic becomes dressed as witchcraft
and is danced
from fear
to shame,
and returns,
hollowed out,
as sham and excuse.[48]
My beautiful mathematics require commitment most find beyond
the pale:
Fascists bully words to their own purpose,
while Capitalists simply purchase meaning.
The rest lack all vision.[49]
I sit here in the corpse-colored twilight,
tallow candle a-sputter,
and commit truth to the page
against all odds.”
(Spinoza doesn’t write poetry by the light of day.)
* * * * *
PART ONE[50]
“There are truths
and they are
self-evident.”
Spinoza emerges into
a cold dawn
candle extinguished,
sheaves of parchment falling from his table,
drifting snow,
flesh snow[51]
“or, as they should
be, at least.
Everything follows
inexorably,[52]
[53]
a calculus of the
real,
a shape of what is.
Only fools question
the otherwise,
for here is here.”
There is a wave and
a shuffle
Spinoza turns his
face to the cold sun.
“Your investments
mean nothing to me.
Your lineage[54]
means nothing to me.
Your rights, your
culture,
that house of straw
that you defend with
your dying breath?
It means nothing to
me.
The essence of
mankind
does not involve
the necessary
existence of mankind;
this sun cares not
that you caper below it.[55]
[56]
You are, that’s
all.” [57]
[58]
Spinoza scrambles
off,
rocks spraying from
his feet,
then turns for a
last salvo:
“The order of things
is the order of thought.
The mind is nothing not constituted by idea.
Idea is the thing,
idea is the flow
mind the machine
buckling down and locking in to the flow.[59]
The idea creates the mind
the mind delimits the idea
and its all connected,
virtually the same . . .
bodies in respect to bodies
machines in respect to machines
bodies assembled
and bodies inscrutable
machines and flows inextricable
from what wellspring?
to what ocean?”
He turned abruptly
to the stone path
rising above him
and was gone in a
clatter.[60] [61]
* * * * *
A word can’t mean
two things
it can mean one
thing, then another
Or it can mean
everything,
or the nothing at
the core of everything.[62]
[63]
[1]
for Tony Woollard
[2]
CONCERNING GOD – or not
[3]
infinite
[4]
effect
[5]
knowledge
[6]
nothing
[7]
ignorant
[8]
true causes
[9]
confusion - think
[10]
only truth
[11]
external to the intellect
[12]
If anyone now ask, by what sign shall he be able to distinguish different
substances, let him
[13]
show that
[14]
the universe
[15]
infinite
[16]
would be sought in vain
[17]
no cause or reason can be given
[18]
which destroys
[19]
existence
[20]
absurd
[21]
nature of
[22]
God
[23]
nothing which is in itself
[24]
this is exactly
[25]
the weapon
[26]
aimed at us
[27]
reality recoiled
[28]
conclusion that extended substance must be finite, they will in good sooth be
acting like a man who asserts that circles have the properties of squares, and,
thereby finding himself landed in absurdities, proceeds to deny that circles
have any center, from which all lines drawn to circumference are equal
[29]
substance could be so divided that its parts
[30]
admit of being destroyed
[31]
as to leave no vacuum?
[32]
God is free cause
[33]
Conceive, if possible
[34]
idea of God does not naturally follow
[35]
as to him alone does existence appertain
[36]
PROP. XXV. God is the efficient cause
not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence.
[37]
everything
[38]
intellect in function finite infinite will
[39]
PROP. XXXII. Will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary cause.
[40]
eternity
[41]
imperfection in God
[42]
concerning created things
[43]
truth
[44]
I assume a starting point
[45]
they only look for knowledge of the final causes of events
[46]
anxious
[47]
reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance
[48]
such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms
their only available means for approving and preserving their authority would
vanish also.
[49]
is things corrupt to the point of putridity, loathsome
[50]
V. We feel and perceive no particular
things, save bodies and modes of thought
[51]
power of God the free will
[52]
knowledge of the cause
[53]
effect
[54]
things are said to exist
[55]
PROP. XI. The first element, which
constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is the idea of some particular
thing actually existing.
[56]
modes of the attributes
[57]
We thus comprehend, not only that the human mind is united to the body, but
also the nature of the union between mind and body.
[58]
nature of our body
[59]
large superfices
[60]
the human body is affected in a
[61]
external body presence
[62]
one possible explanation
[63]
I am very far from the truth
