I was in the city that night for work.
On this midsize pile
among the vessels of annihilation and bliss
I wandered as a magnificent beetle
from Ernst Junger’s collection.
Cicindela Ohlone
was not a position,
but the description of a possibility
we met at the empty bar.
This furious erudite
shit from The Holy Family
left illuminated Zoom transcripts, shouted, “Sick
were these descriptions of Lisbon’s weather.”
I quitted laboring under
an unquestioned canon,
whose seasick cinematography
was the Alamo of
tiny, infinite idiocy.
Our street art critic friend’s kitchen
played the concealed theological dwarf
of thought’s continual reference
to optimized services.
Film Forum screened a beautiful
print of Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Meeting up afterwards I didn’t trust him.
He seemed drunk and his vlog
showed basement living.
One stream he surveyed these satellite
images, which failed
to dissipate the dense war fog, now
in the grip of iPhone photos. “A new Trinity,
creation, Lord, our God,
make the highest rank of multiple meanings,”
said the denier of hell and infant baptism.
*
“What can you do for Uncle?”
Boston Irish slang and bone loss
led to morbidity. He went from
upholding the Western line on the Ukraine
to shook and stunned by the end.
Glanton gang got him.
America now warmed to nuclear war,
like the Cold War with a space heater.
Rather than less fearful, they were
more okay with non-existence
that pure sparkle, too, not that
New York City baby laxative.
Nobody needed that.
*
Zoom as radical art is super
rare and will have been available
solely through imposture
the alcoholic poet said
about this mystico-critical
prose in the voice of god.
Commercial unviability,
rough thought’s jagged melody.
Non-chiction and broetry vs. Bernie bros
for the Catholic Church? POC VIP poetry?
No, he was full on Nazbol, the reactionary
moved forward in him, burned cane fields,
cleared villages until Grenada was ours.
*
He was blackmailed
into one last mission in Hudson Valley,
which was an artwork, exhibition, action,
denunciation, criticism, transformation,
poem, earth art, or definition.
All these faded away
in many screens on the ceiling. Les Fleurs du Mal
wie es eigentlich gewesen. Like a defense
of regicide, Miltonic even, the meetup was done
for the good of the commonwealth, above
what the Turks, Jewes, and Mores enjoyed under
the Sublime Porte? By Zeus, yes, we had all manner
of music mixed without a standard of judgment.
A ragged infantry of notes raged there
as in the brothel we spake goblin words.
*
Ad business worked out
Adorno on the Dorito form.
Fusion power. First
a fist of energy gain boiled in lead
but not too clever a title. It was
das Gold, a formation not to be confused
with the Left unity
of anti–sectarian sectarianism. The triumph of life
over sail rigging and reef
split history into an explosive discourse
of German Greek. The dust of suns settled
into mini-internationals.
*
Hell noticeably warmed for work.
Inside Diyu we uncovered
the inner courtyard of Earth Mansion
at Yellow Springs,
moved across Fengdu Ghost City.
Four motel hells edged Union Square.
Traversed the Willy B Bridge,
we glimpsed Mulian rescue
his mother from the skinning place.
We resupplied at the Hell of Weapons.
August 1988. Hamas existed.
Later Tennis formed as a band. The land they toiled
place-named their consciousness,
their sacred rite and power. The defeated side’s
hiding was rubbed in to the point of blisters,
with the victors conspiring
to evict the Tamil refugee poor.
Arise, the people’s movement,
defended them with a tide of neon,
right foot on a pedestal of blood level alcohol.
At the kitchen table
with a microcontroller
we fired up Andrés Fava’s enormous angel.
*
Spin this plate, spake the Doobermensch,
aka Winston “Bob Lion” Lloyd.
Ezekiel “Jah Concep” Baxter
and Prince Snowy Owl
mixed boards for the B side
of Caucasus Mountains languages.
Assorted musicians played intricate aircraft
wreckage, fluorescent
light tubes, tesla coils, vintage neon,
chains, concrete, and fiberglass.
For work our hyena was sabertoothed.
Feeling his large upper canines, we watched
the donkey movie on
that night with personal Boswells
shouldering black sparrows,
the projector lit by a blue, wintry flame.
Killers retained rights to a Wotan lifestyle.
*
The church remained the last
pillar of politico-juridical antiquity.
Its atheistic doctors
suggested this POV for the remake
of Kingpin. No god this Soviet Christmas
just nonvoters, copyright narcs,
a section consisting of embeds,
public ones after clampdowns on workarounds.
The biblical faraway look of the winning,
stone-hard language game. Maybe the Sparts
were right. Intersectionalism: the highest
stage of Stalinism.
It was all loser
readings and takes at this resentful
parody of a party, nothing but lousy,
low down sophists here.
The Weberian rationality
of design hacks for analog
output at this hotel bar Tuesday.
*
She had a strong Chanel odor
from Tower 22 in the Jordanian hinterland.
A semi-automated process of man and machine
painted the spinning 155 mm shell in fatigue green.
“People, I’m the US Air Force. I love to play golf
with the Anti-Christ of wingman-ing.” She said
this was her real name.
At the convergence these different
intelligences debated each other until
a Red King rumbled out.
*
Mother’s poor choices have made finding
something halfway between fentanyl
and applesauce difficult. We are screen
prisoners, uncut IRA men
reading dog-eared copies of The Big Money.
Each night what a year it’s been, already Soviet
Christmas again and god still beastly dead.
No new god or state, just iPhone access
to Grundrisse passages
on pre-capitalist social formations.
*
The design didn’t sit still, bled
full abstract vice hotel bed stain,
one braindead rightwing
psycho, that’s for sure. Krine was semi-smart
at playing the Pat Buchanan
but had no passion
for thoroughgoing truth battles.
Adolescent darkness talked hostility
and warmed up bits of phrenology,
sucked tetas fabulosas for the black mass
of succinctly restated arguments
in clearer order
with eliminationist intentions.
*
Your exposure was mine. (Leans forward.)
The city surface spake to the coal mine
in semi-lower-upper middle brow.
Julien Coupat, debonair, was a bit nuts,
but his young adult rad lit bible
made for mellow-mood Deleuze speaking
played-out militant subjectivity jargon.
It spawned many cowardly online formations.
Evening it supped at Chez Beautiful Soul
of the tiny, timid anti-cop demo.
American collapse was wishful thinking.
He made more humanitarian appeals
to the non-western world.
The mine spake to a new
same-old Russian State form. Now just air but soon
a non-stop flight into nostalgia for
the emergence of original peoples across eons.
*
The criminals had dog names
coined by Xenophon: Pluck, Watch, Riot,
Rome, Much, Force, Sunbeam, Rockdove,
Killer, and Dash. One had a daughter
who worked the local Walmart gun counter.
Called Hurry, she was docile, effeminate,
but increasingly male until she decomposed
in the camo aisle. It takes the feeble
Passage Press poetry judge to make this
Dungeons and Dragons fan art
for a Lower East Side podcast.
*
We had dinner that night after the birth
of historical societies with work. I anticipated
their response. WASPs didn’t enthuse
except with Italian grandfathers,
skull of Aquinas, ashes of Gramsci.
We ran a tank over it. Quieted them down.
Thus spake the Chinese proletariat
combined with new productive forces.
*
We reincarnated Heine to direct
Measures Taken set among freelance faculty.
I gave away my tickets to the performance.
He didn’t want to be the heroic face
of the Ukrainian cause.
Sorry the Federal Reserve was not
consulted about the Swift System cutoff.
Not to nitpick, but Sekula finally
reached his potential in Fish Story.
Nachgewahren accrued ahead of time.
Free cases of Reported Sightings touched
Apollinaire on Art. This thread
reincarnated a know-it-all substack. For effect
we provisionally accepted their definition
of class politics, however strange,
while stripping down around a midnight pond.
What was photography?
*
I said bottoms up to this
radioactive half-life with joyful my Catholicism.
It was time for a first communion
spat upon the throne.
Pre-containerization maritime vessels and boats
recalled routes of a young Pessoa
synopsized by Colonel Clausewitz.
Eco-nuke annihilation prophet,
a lib would not give a shit about
escalation in the only war, holy.
The future was green, preferred pronoun shimmer.
Ideal-X steamed into Houston
with fifty-eight metal truck trailers bolted
to its deck. Erie Canal and the Port defined
New York’s economy and the container
made its 1970s decline reality. The way it went
forward made the way back
a winding column of wazalendo.
We shored up György’s revival this Ash Wednesday
of Parasitic Brooklyn Leftism,
faded Bernie face tats.
*
During the War Scheler visited
me in Heidelberg. He argued
phenomenology was a universal method,
explained research, bracketed
the devil’s “reality.” Open the cage.
The devil is there before you, I said
and he shrugged. He was terrified
by the sound of the snowy owl
but needed a substantial theologian
to go anywhere further than the pro-Jesus
side of today’s sewer socialism.
*
Ever since Nietzsche
bourgeois philosophy
also sprach of vital forces,
each of their characteristics accompanied
by cartoonish anti-machine.
These systems understood specific
situations they were exposed to in a part
of the past until 1973
when metaphysics went down. That’s all, folx.
We were its undertakers, composed of yellow
houses and bearing smallish, inappropriate
electronics. Souls endarkened, blind adults
invented schools to frighten us. I read
how you saved your brother. Yes, with
two others we rescued him as shells
exploded all around us. This reminded
me of classical antiquity, a mill
for extermination. In the explosions
there flowered seas of death.
Up spake the Proto-Indo-Eurotrash, “The point
stretched them. You touched their mouths,
traced the world order. Remember
everything destroyed, how the cattle farmer came.”
*
Behind this version of the Rivera mural
there was a shadow preparatory ceremony
for the city I was with work.
Streets in me
were close under the floorboards.
There was yet a surlier
version, smaller, a few pastels in the notebook
whose pages were pressed garlic skin.
Behind that there
was dawn wind and the sun
over a rank cavern. The pure mob,
its world body, craved instruments.
Boulezian funnels of sound burned
these fitful wave distinctions out.
*
In Riverside healing, empowerment,
justice. The ball stuck
to this muddy deformation zone
spotted with moon. We
were regrounded by a speaker insistent
on circles, a real crier. She obtained
the VR goggles. Her pastor Bruce Bauer said,
You are in a storm. You were coming out
of a storm. You are going into another storm.
Schoenberg vive! A score neither begins
nor ends. She needed to step
back from the decades she spent
brainwashing professionals from the barrio.
They performed an unwanted, disaggregated
Oprah. Permanent rush hour birthed a mafia
throwing up signs of the pigmentocracy.
*
Mother of heroes, this Venus’s
ejaculating éclat of sonorities were Romantic,
Ethiopic even, rather than Second Viennese.
The conducted performance aimed
for a new composition where theory doesn’t exist
and ideology foams at the gears.
Kitchen table at night, we refused
these operational terms. We made
for the cutoff of prevailing language.
All wanted change, so we couldn’t invoke
Feuerbach when the old academic Marxists
were forced to make way for the queer POCs.
Always nice to see.
*
This Brechtian base
and Plutarchian confusion concluded
the sex workers’ non-war.
The downer poet peopled his slave catcher content
with climate change, anti-Europeanness,
and sympathy for bindlestiffs.
Midnight after work we added
a layer of quit and suicide memory.
Lenin’s giant red hand held
the levee breach, left the ego alone
against destructive psychoanalysis.
You couldn’t know how deep the problem
of leverage went in the system.
*
Neoliberalism? No, it was always this way.
New Georgian wine in the old flagon,
the young ultraleft sage answered.
It was May
Floralia worker fracas 1790s. 1830s
political parties. The Coal Heavers struck
1835. Then hard times reversed any changes.
They mounted campaigns.
The Knights crossed the color line. On May 3rd
police descended on this manifestation.
A bomb blew things apart.
After that martial law.
Albert Parsons hung in that first
employer orchestrated Red Scare.
Gompers declared May Day 1886
a Second Independence.
The Left peaked in the wake
of the Russian Revolution. Gompers
abandoned the holiday in the Palmer raids.
Seattle defeated in 1919,
but the strike returned in 1934 San Francisco.
Today, the speaker said,
we need strong unions,
with Occupy signs in the slide background.
The partial city walkout plus
an uptick in strike actions in the recent
decade put labor back in the streets.
We must pull it all together, he said.
We once organized more effectively
than the capitalist class.
*
This was the bag of stones I used
to collect illegal debts.
Reading old friends
was like seeing them missing limbs.
We knew then Stalin
would be the strong figure in two years.
We rode in a star
after we left the bar.
The anarchists intervened before
final felo de se.
The Cal Poly Dean thought
his thoughts in the study
at the end of the day.
There flowered goodly nugs.
He, Moishe, had the dank,
a grip of the kill.
*
The last battalions avoided a fire sack.
Hell kept developing
seventy meters underground.
There was no money, a seasonal word.
Lost in the city that night for work,
our iPhones displayed occupied campuses.
Surrounded by rubble, they passed
around bread dust, meat speck.
They took cover in the streets
from Royce Hall to Rafah.
They dug, they wrote
down tunnel
and barricaded beach wagon,
folding chair, backpack,
garbage bin, table, umbrella,
wood panel, rope, pallet.
*
Dark smoke wandered above
in the drone footage.
Depart, quit were weak matches.
Decamp, go away, move out, exit.
There was no mandate.
Roots graffitied where this plant once stood.
Occupied territories,
small white flowers dusted distant olive trees,
the conspiracy of words,
the mind’s revolutionary party.