D I U e m n s a i c g v r i e 1 5 i n r p a s t r i i y t o y n s of an 14 october 94 "There are just laws and there are unjust laws" Deeper Jeopardy, one-syllable ouija fields of sawgrass, lost looking down the slope to where we are-- it's right here & could have opened years ago... avoiding everyday mortality slipping to a place faded in the bright yellow sky, backs dappled incoherence & tar grit, no liberty, translation possible only by light of interior bulbs... We shimmer in arcs thrown at the table of the oppressors... A clean break, a first step... New shoots on the dill and those bugs again on the daisies ...I want more than language and imagination-- I want links Yr name has burned like the wood in the windowsill all night long yr natural symbol sucked to the inside, then deeper, afraid there, annihilation, you have to face it, no getting away & no direction to the scream--it might be cool crust metal glittering on bone & cypress, Brilliant chroma playing on... But I forgot to write you from inside when lives depended... Dream compressed: Smell of melting snow, fine dilation & contraction, disparate elements shoot information in tense and reference, points of contact-- I'm a dropout in line 1, a statistic. Maybe a field gets laid like empty pillbottles rolling in a concrete square (the "spanner") fading suddenly flaring parallel bidden >From there sleeping & laid high... I had a picture when I was little: Ant and Bee Gauge an Idea. And an alarm clock, too: The hands moved in the present, the face stayed still. But as life winds down we're confronted with what's hidden in the more terrific machine: a little place- holder! Like zero! There's space to slip these chains of paperclips... I make for the margin of trees. I've been watching you & surrender never, see you out there, I'm stone dead where scorching fragments take off into symbol--everything turns into writing & I'm in somebody else's tears again, dream land stretching clear into land, fossil walls trailing libidinal green and blue stars, your hair and the little white rug; lines like heat haze. snapping back A place-mind I meant it: for you. lobellia, magic words, moon bluing the clouds, our crickets Morning-glory's what you make me, muddy ditch lapping, multiple cores of responsibility We leave the scene at night, the object world faded, not a suspended sentence but a delicate human particle-- we could recover an interior, meditate the mechanism oriented over gray water, variations yoked by toast and juice. Rock, beggar, some round table in moonlight, further off the bay shimmering, emotion neglected or put on display, shells, little defensive skins; we pace the sidewalk & cars gleam off heavy breath trees & silver telegraphic frost slim terraces, shadow, thoughts freeze in imaginary air Compromised & dying by degrees Some connect or don't, even the words come slow, constructions reclaimed by time & waving branches. I wanted irreduceable meaning together, transcending all positions taking off into unburdened form gathering openingness. No; vanity; what's voiced wants to be whole. Long ago I was a room in the earth. & what you & I know depends what's left of day vision, scraping where grammar fails; "taste" does not agree with "bring"; White light architecture, fragile heat paint on basil in the windowboxes... --RP Unquantified, the same and the different are humanly meaningless concepts. Unity, totality, and negativity (i.e. one, all, none) speak of limit cases; objects such as the gods might think but to which finite beings have no access. They constitute the tease of certainty. They are, to be sure, extremely venerable; they constitute the core of the western tradition--that is, the core of that tradition that has repeatedly brought tragedy upon itself in the quest (ion) for unquestionable authority. These grand concepts, which are so powerful and so little dependable upon necessary knowledge, often lead even young men and women to speak with a prophetic rhetoric. The rational categories become confused with aesthetic creations, and grotesque forces of the unconscious well up dangerously, underwriting a thinking that can only be true in eternity. It is a quest (ion) for death, not for life. Such forces are dangerous to the commonwealth whether they are associated with mad-dog religion and the politics of hatred or with the most liberal forms of piety and repressive tolerance. Not more than thirty years ago, in order to get a Ph.D. in English at many universities, it was more or less required that one join the Episcopalians and pray to the god of T.S. Eliot. This was far more stifling to the necessary thought than the tv preachers who have subsequently appeared. --Thus, Albert or Hubert Readlist, The Last Days of the White Race Radio Free North America, 10/14 94 Lorna Goodison, "Guinea Woman" / *Greenfield Review 1985* Cynthia James, "the anatomy of race" / *Iere, My Love* Marina Omowale Maxwell, "Caribbean Woman Birth Song" / *Crossing Water* Pamela Mordecai, On Reading _Gran_" / *Journey Poem* Velma Pollard, "Road from Xunantunich" from _Belize Suite / *Crown Point* Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Beneath the Shadow of a Freeway" / *Emplumada* I see your features blood dark appearing in the children of each new breeding the high yellow brown is darkening down. Listen, children it's great grandmother's turn --LG pity we'll continue to use these words until we get accustomed to being not squatters, but true inheritors of this rough-edged square of earth --CJ in this archipelago of stones still pebbles peed on by history fissured by Reagan breaking. . . . . --MOM Break, break the chains, break them till the last link is shattered... --PM This silence sobers us and sends us feverish seeking home --VP She believes in myths and birds. She trusts only what she builds with her own hands --LDC nouveau western wrpi 91.5 fm troy ny 13 october 94 0920-1205 Box O' Laffs--"I'm Sad|Mr. Headache Pill Man|Chemical Angels|Chemical Angels|Flowers|Blood Spirit|et al"/What's New, Stupid? 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