Primitive Information

spread out, fragment-weave

tighter threads, dream logic

“listen” to object in the mind,
just sit and pay attention to words

“literary” poems — inspired by lines or
characters/stories

process poems

no form but in content poems

epistolary — written at somebody

more about Pound’s solution to “voice”

narrative (post-mod) vs. lyric (mod)?

~

voice-ominous, heavy-lidded,
slumped over table

train horn, dog’s bark with
little whine at the end
reproachful
pissed off at each other
each in a different room

we going out?
I don’t want to go out.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
4 Comments »

Dante’s Dream

“… e mostravami ’l ventre;
quel mi suegliò col puzzo che n’uscia.”
– Purgatorio, Canto XIX, l. 32-33

No, it will take too long
to explain; the belly stripped bare

and by whom and where
for the poet’s

sensual eye; yet it’s the nose
that’s assaulted, connected thereby

to “the foul stench that
awakened me,” a whole host

of questions emerges from
Dante’s dream – is it the smell

or the song that’s siren,
Odysseus become dog descending

into the not, the never, said,
sniffing to sense what’s what.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
4 Comments »

Man-made

Define her as empty? No,
there are days like this.

Let swift be the rate
of passage, swift

unto swift, let her
sing it, the whole body

lift up from what use
man’s made of it,

there is a world there,
universal, a mode

of existence as yet
unexplored by any

but her, the siren
“a hideous old hag” as Virgil (reason)

reveals. But keep listening.
Dive into the song.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
4 Comments »

Balloon, sort of

the body as held
simple, birthen/avoid

‘wombe’ the asexual place
smells arise from,

what’s carried over/
left out, I like to eat

she said, so did
and grew

and grew as man
fell further and

further away, name
with no strings attached,

balloon, sort of, with
nothing inside

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
1 Comment »

That’s Love

What is it we lose
ourselves in when there’s

nowhere else to go? This body,
here, asleep on the bed, edge

brushing other, against or whatever, where
contact at any point means an emptying

and a filling, tender as crack
of door opening, or branch

cleared away from lines
the ice bent low, what

to excrete or leave out,
darling, body as map drawn to

exact contours of body,
that’s love.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
2 Comments »

Her Body

Her body grew enormous
in the night. There was

a new loveliness,
as if she could be said to be giving

birth to herself.
Traffic and train

sounds, pump of hydraulics,
extension of prosthestics into

every inch of unexamined space. Still
she grew. Against

neighbors and pavement, parents
children and pets,

skin-quake, ache of
sinew and joint, beyond

margin and page, she heard words
that no poet had

ever uttered. Songs and images
filtered upwards through her into

dreams, in her
dogs twitched and moaned,

only cats, whose one good eye
had been trained on her

from the start, watched calmly
as she spread.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
1 Comment »

as silence

keep searching for something
serious, final, womb-
baroque, stand

before books wanting to
come
all over them, feel

the perfect release
as silence
and chill

~

A Dream of Purgatory, II

will come a time
when the body’s fictions
dry up into

empty urges, slurred words
following blood
into semen, where womb

even applies unto
man, the eyes
sewn shut

spirit bent to the dirt
500 years? a thousand?
however long

it takes, letting the earth
cake
with constant tears.

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
1 Comment »