As/Is







3.19.2004


Anti Stalinist Draft

If my family tree goes back to the Romans
then I will change my name to Jones
(Belle & Sebastian)



1.

clean wake-up drought
for insurance, you'll need
our arms sustain you

these for you, melodic
siren toward this
effort, written tinsel

The measure, then, is
approximately two to
three lines, pleasure

of the quick stop
routine, recovered
tones or the lost

ones become twice
bound to narrative,
its historical dissolution

There's some danger
in the sudden pauses
unequal transitions

of power, political
mistakes, allegiances
distributed unevenly

making the reading
process itself just
as complex as first

transcription and edit
to never speak on behalf
of a dictator or nation

instead, the stanzas
represent avenues in
the city, the parallel

quality of couplets
being a dated formalism
with no aura seemingly

left for the self-identified
failure poet to use for
what resource reasons

a repetition /


2.

Which can open a second book
second look at whose
visionary sidewalk words

in that city sustained our
losses, in relation to what
stable place whose affairs

coincided with ours, the we
invoked as a repetitionary
measure, obsessed at times

with Measure, John Wieners'
rare magazine published
only 3 issues between 1957

and 1962, I could be wrong
about the years and numbers,
now when I pass the Lamont

Library in Cambridge I think
the great Boston poet worked
there, etc. there's still no

romance in any poem, beauty
is after all present despite
the dictatorship of the present

repetition /


3.

With music the pact
was sealed, a mean
established to hold

the words to purpose-
fully developed chapters
each fort disguised

a wilderness reach
a train shakes our
apartment in the air