Explain your answer

May 20-22 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Mon, 23 May 2011 04:07:00 +0000

Airy Temples

An excavation
in the ribs
of what you're worth
before you end up
buried treasure
good for no one

*

Forever may it be extruded
in the greenest dale
on the fakest day
through a lapdog's voidest meditation
this radius of pith
restrings your age

*

Between the blades
after a two-week rain
between the ribs
of a barbèd saint
a brazen pool
of faint deflection

*

A sick bird's meditation
at the thresholds of her pain
a blue flash under thistles
instantly still
as its shadow stalks
and whistles

a name
that belabours
and beggars
the rain

in elevations of a hybrid rose
from beercups propitiating ashes.

11 Jan 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Mon, 23 May 2011 04:06:00 +0000

New ears

Shoulders forward
in the dogrun
thrusts the head
of a man

the sun's scanline
the bark strips
the bag of stones
I am becoming

& sleep softly descends
a digestive humour
lubricating
the gizzards.

*

Coal-black hair
framing
an olive-hued face

dropping level with the withers
a thousand hoof-spans high
when she dives
crags strive through the water

so Scylla

clawed & writhed

*

Lost in that immortal struggle
found Genesis smuggled
in an egg-cup
but uncongealed
(no hips to measure her by)
elliptical
swinging around. unfocused.

*

Laid end-to-end, covering new ground daily
from what end to what end
flag
stones

2x4 (epitaph)

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:33:00 +0000

the evergreen
has never been

Orbit Coset

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Planes break up
a world of wet sand
amass dimension
overcome boyscout humidity
by mast ignition
lightning stripes
the collar or can

in the quest for bonfires
and timetables optimized and controlled
by simple trade-offs
jobs or weather
a few inches off the neck
marks a species of brass ringlet

where I had green curried meat off menu
flesh traded high
fives slapping thighs
you have to know to ask
but they were bolted to a shibboleth
we could not understand

*

the ants followed chemical messengers around my fingers
as arrows or bullets find their men
targets eroded in the rock
proof the land has changed
why should he smile
the harvest-son
slightly stupid
cut open his heart
wrap it round a trunk

with aristocratic contempt
for the blood-lust of the populace
one sees the shadows of public life
in the arcade ritual
the lyric choir of labourers
in a hole in the ground
under the flag born tree
when burned gives off
a smoke far-famed for inducing visions

a keyhole window framed the compositions
filled with dull stuffing
a stranger at the entrance to her chamber
the mystery of the mountain in her trance

*

A pattern cuts across intention
in decandence's efflorescence and collapse
A bone breaker or tamer of horses lies
dead as he must
but statistically speaking the same man.
Then the blood is read — a mandatory votary
voluntarily retires. Sunflares glint
beneath the dead man's eyelids, flies
the outside choir
source of all comparisons.
Fear of breeding worms itself then rots
the body.

Let us consider now a different outcoming
a crossroads spinning in the head
with the song, a challenge to our
integrity.
fixed in tin & gold
it bests our courage
and then
We sit down at our beloved chair
and guarantee our dinner.
Eating it
dead-knit to the living, a lamb
of fine breeding, dull, a ready grin.

*

much later

some fan spun around a ceiling
or parking lot like clotted oil

but down to the intern ex
up anti fact you know already

a crane to lift that wit

a tomato we thought would kill us

some pseudo syrup psy-op cyclops roundup

"discriminations"

police uniform & boots do not a fake
policeman make

Django

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 03:59:00 +0000

The red concentric eyebleed mocks
the forty-year-old poster paper
yellow saurian pupil outpacing
baseline white
guncotton
colour popping
in the emulsion of a nitrate
sandwich on unsafe stock
hot cross mustard piercing
the plangent cornea of
the boy who sits
where reels within reels
sprinkle the antechamber
with humours wet
and not glassy.

Preserved meat serves
to feed and clothe
the gun-smoking cowpoke
in blue jeans and a jazzy name
as he sits, barely leaning,
cantilevered pelvis
and four-square knees
against a wall sketched by shadow
of a potted plant, slowly
animated by
the off-season convection
of affairs of the
blood-pumping world
its random coils
set and ignite.

When the wind whispers
his skin blisters
a sensitive transistor
in word and deed
a carnivore with a pure heart
conceiving in the deli's
revolving blades
a vacation by you
to which he'd ride
if his spurs still had
flanks to bite;
but the horse
was slaughtered
by the sauerkraut cackle
of a raging chaingang gun.

Alone, he rests
half in and half far gone
beyond the sprockets
of his kind
of picture, which
kind of hangs
on my wall. A
cross-shaped stick
pokes both
our eyes sharper
than any star-shaped
slice of tin; but faded
meat and rabid
dye
will bring us
to our bruising heels -

limp them into coffins
as the train rolls out
and town just tumbles away.

if nothing stops us in our way

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 12:58:00 +0000

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine"
- Sterne, Tristram Shandy

sounding hourly through heated wax
a hobbled horse sours to salt
delivered in pewter ice-buckets
broken-edged and ripe off-vine
urge wavering to eat out tonight
a shortcut orthodox stile
bite a hand in a haversack

over public acreages an ergodic footpath
reaches a long fact escrow
booked a ticket to east gondwana
belly-dance opera en-route
often clapped if espied the dying ox
apt to be cropped on the croup
if caught coughing along the tracks

roundabout bereavement mechanic
black biotechnology
grey the withers I once piloted
or maybe I engineered
abuse scandal breeding more suicides
swarming barnbred podunk cousins
of flies in the laboratories

roomservice the paperless emi-
grés, tin lids binding a time
bright mirador of the empire
sinking under equipment
dies the days diary rays retire
spine cancer and ossified
riparian seep unconfirmed

by edgewood arsenal stropping afore
the enfilading panther
hive-mind-ripening wildernesses
oubliettes portside gamble
distiller of strongbox supermarkets
don't forget the merry men
negatives stuffed in mattresses

so if the pony express don't know him
he'll send them a telegraph
signed the wire with a quantum clot
under sea moans empathic
bones of his best friends made cameos
hedgers gripping the dry grey loaves
hoping somehow to survive the wreckage

August sweats

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 02:01:00 +0000

August sweats

The events

Up tonight to eat some cherries
filled a shot glass with pits
a small page with these words

a fat cat crossing the street
blameless tiger
stalking a thin man

my carpets are not nearly as fine
as his are
but my poetry's thicker

the thunder's echo delayed
uncertainty skewed
becomes catastrophe

her boxers bunch & sag
like a sad sack rice farmer
fleeing a Samurai

the last cherry done
whiff of the subliminal
seeds of one day
wetting the brandy

With the dogs

In a public place
One leans against a piss-bleached tree.
The urge to excrete is unbearable.
So society
The skinnier you are
the tighter the squeeze.

Runaway

First the shadow then the bird
away from the sun
then grounded, this unit proves
the myth of independence crude
a fleeting refusal of invitations
Mercury visible in an eclipse
in the meantime ripples through the equations
These ghosts filling out the trees
Like putty in a tooth
The wind rot and gravity etc
pinball the implicit between light and shadow

"F on, F off"

"The poor old sun in the virgin again"

The wall of prurience protects
a red raging dull boy
from a theory of combinatorial society
A government, a motive, an organ
when the organ knows one note

Old men can hear it too
in the empty room drawn tight as the sheet
but for the open window
law & viridity would not enter
those who are no longer permitted to enter

and like the boys can't imagine
a wider form of participation

Specific descent

The best of the vulgarians praised Piltdown
in hunger before the purge
to lick a false father's cranium
from the business side
late vermicelli
False teeth to compensate & ape
the ape donation
To nationalize the origin
the undraping of its appurtenances
witha little stain of coffee & vitae
over chrome
And we'll still never rein in those voices
now awake without a pot or lickable symbol
quiet in the kitchen
the chauvinist seasoning drips out
rates a thin postman
among other things lost or swallowed
a weak sister, an alligator
one day she'll no longer answer the door
a star over her intersections
guiding mine
to a really boring party
dirty brown when you follow the webbing
spidery legs stretch then stir
fastened to a made man off centre
who screamed
among the other things
stop the boats
my leading man
my bleeding son
my very own

Starless Aurora

The cord snaps. There
is your answer.
The whine of the crickets
sawing through the afternoon.
The dragon of envy captures
the virgin of fruitless conversation.
Our domains purged of fortune.
From night arises sympathy, each trunk
dangling its indifferent rope.
The wind tenses our separate branches.

Irony

The infinite universe sweats enough
to dissolve all of our ideas in a day.
Limits to self-substitution
iterate on bicycles
mine shrinks - its tubes
suck into themselves
their zeros. land mines
piled on beaches. cities
fester and wash away.
chain-linking and lasers stop
the revolution
cold at the roadblock.
rust assassinates reflection
of things nailed down
scraped to brown
oceans of dust.

Drunk dragon rodeo

Cold breath of minty smoke
choke the mower
up a bad boy
cloth torn & blowing ash
tickling the spinning blade
The signalled truce to harvest corpses
jammed.
A rabid, bushy-tailed vampire squirrel
drops shells
kids dressed as midgets
cram
the elephant
ambulance
rescue-van
A pomegranate is shot
straight up its drain pipe.
Horse radish snort
While feeding
they mate
in mid-air.

King Slice

A building transfixed by ivy
next to a 24-hour coin laundry
below a balcony garden
tended by a bending woman.
She hears the rattle at night
of $1.25 deep in my pocket.
In the manner of worms
I feel my hair growing
dirtily through me.

Soda Pop

Burning chocolate
& falling filthy water
The bum at the bus-stop
is home for the night
All week he's slumped after midnight
mornings picking his scabby legs
Always his guests wait to leave him.
It falls, pure at first
mixing with sugar
onto us after uselessly scouring
the crusted waste of pigeons.

The House is Sound and

Hell, in its idea, entertains. This
is obvious, here, in Paradise —
the elect in love with our own
dead nouns
a system of evisceration
engendered by eschange.
Here, tonight, I suck the seeds dry. There
with my first million
I'd lick the bones barren.

Thebes was a tough own for thieves
wrote Apulieus
the bandit captain who lost his arm
to the rich man's prick
while working a lock

Condoms flutter, tossed
like halos after purposeful losses
No system to this place but making it
sound alright (not too loud) &
tightly knotted (not too tight)

Castles made of salt

Thrown down one day
limply at your door
the apparent geography of roofs
retrospectively melts.
Virtue confounded by excess
an end-directed abscess
while the eyes that were always watching
wilt.

"The constant presence of terror & death"
while praising the manna of thy sweet effluence
fluent hosannahs of amours & valours
& powers evaporate. We arrive
at this one remaining structure
where we all dry up. Cut off your head
and roll it around the moat.
The body sinks, reduced to its element.
A failure of dialectics. The fat tongue floats.

Canniball

They put the teeth
into transcendental
boy on a leash
the joints stiffening
after the blood drains
leaving
"nothing but the great
taste you love"

Bachelor night

The anxiety bred by idleness
and the neighbours' voices
A summer breeze
frees this evening of its garbage and decay
Slightly smokey does for fresh
A tall dry tree
conducts electricity
The eyes are leaded pains
No one
here
to argue with or with whom to breed
with whom indeed? The decision to stay in
is made.

Real Local Calor

I rode my bicycle outward
past the catacombs of the Gardiner
& the flying-saucer pissoir.
Stripped to the waist at the edge of a swamp
on the side of a lagging river
where a mysterious meter counted kilowatt hours
above a manhole locked & spray-painted
"lost."
This was still in the city proper,
but deep in its lymph sauvage.
There were blimpy bees and feeble butterflies.
An improvised ladder was a bridge to nowhere -
an island in the air where trees and stones hummed
under high-voltage wires.
Is it mad here or there to add to Nature's song?
I was the victim of insect blindness,
and its astute & opportune exploiter.
Maxwell governed their flight and cheer
which were always
and in all ways
perpendicular.
And this summer I've often seen
how gulls will circle the soccer greens
and how bees will trouble the corpses of flowers
indifferent and numb as the tongues of flatterers …

Springs a way

brachiate shiver
a long pole
what you pull out
a burr
a singing grasshopper
at the end of summer
springs away

*

infatuated with their own
beauty
ignorant
of their digestion
time jangles
in the young couple's
pockets

*

The wasp in the sandbox
skims dunes, dodges
sticks & detritus
In the temporary hollows
of children's footsteps
this killer must
be seeking bones

*

how fast does a pigeons
heart beat?
the mark
of conditioning
significantly coupled
to pecking pattern
and homing

*

a stuffed housecat
eats god
dank in here

nostrils plucked
for the queen of the air

sleep the great pacifier
he handed it to her
but flakes of the sphere
fell away from his hands

the neighbours light slices the night
inside the apartment
the star
that polishes your teeth
clean

Fresh sweet hay

The only horses regularly present
on the streets of Toronto
eat from police troughs
Judging by the evidence
they get quality rations
A good contract for some farmer
making hay
while these useful animals
shit where?
anywhere they want to

Early morning whipping boy

between the cracked & the cracker
skinny arms slash

Bequest

Uncertain hours of an uncertain day.
Though the teeth fall out
the gears keep turning
Ideas gloam
through the hormones in the envelopes
and there are canteloupes
on seven-year-old girls.
We no longer believe in the mind or in the body.
In the event of catastrophe
with our personal identification
pass those burdens on to some others remaining.

Above, below

Above the concrete
terminals
they strap lamps to
above
your blowing hair
you look down & check yourself
above the 30th floor
the comb & the keeper make three
the comb stuck in tar
in the road
like a feather
where the chiliast likes it hot
summer
crushed the insects
like so much stained glass
ants
biting the ankles of
the thing
you love

Spring lamb, summer sausages

Endless, useless memory
Our golden Victorian sculler
bronzed
imperial perps personate his rectitude
still & tall & flaccid
the sea drips, the sand scratches, the
oars get in your eyes
each one tall & silent, brown
and taut as a
wet paper bag
drifts the tide
a skin
too tight to slip out of

The play

Brick the buildings by the park
where dogs played with their lives
& children learned the purple of sweet clover
Sand and memory, a smudgy rainbow
of discoveries in the covered passages
& gravel spread for landing, the mud
showed through where others stood
tall returned from the peak of a steel pipe
A church across the street. Some willows held their poses
Confections of a event
Bricks and slime
plastering over
the stone that stung my hand
inside
the true maroon
of her velvet dress

Real deed

guns and wonder
criscross to danger
in the cloud chamber
vermicelli lick the grout
the epiphany
of the ingrown ear
attuned
to the death of a known forger
sex and video games
duly dilate
in waves sent over the border
they propagate
the dance
of avoidance
while the real dead estate
hangs out on the property
and blooms prosperously
there is no object to
origins
after all

Passing lizard show

I said I wanted her to pretend
even if it was true
because when you
pretend a thing
you can't prevent it showing

there are many trivial examples in
the papers

for example
we could pretend
that the toxins in the Athabasca river
are a natural elaboration
rather than a human
development
but the water will still kill you
and I've never been to Alberta

we could also pretend
that the man who slurs his speech on the bus
is a drunk
and not brain-damaged from a car crash 25 years ago
but on either line
he's left by the side of the road
where
he
won't bother
us
and I rarely ride the bus

similarly
we could pretend that
Gary McCullough, 53
schizophrenic hermit from the country
unpopular with his neighbours
stocky, a little paranoid
came to Toronto
with his crossbow
chainsaw
sledgehammer
arrows
baseball bat
and several water and gasoline canisters
locked in a conspicuous
home-made wood-and-metal roof-box
atop his silver Hyundai Elantra
with a
dangerous purpose
and for merely being so accoutred
and curious
in this furious city
(during the G20)
we could believe, still pretending
that he should be held without bail
as he truly still is after two months
and a beating
in jail

and yesterday another guy just like him

shot

anyway
she started to pretend to be a salamander
I didn't think it was true
but I liked how she looked around
anywhere but at me
her tongue shooting out
like a bolt
as we squirmed
friendlessly

"He's suspicious of everybody else
and just doesn't want to be bothered by anybody"

well
who
does?

outrageous
and in our cages
we eat

pretend it's air
ergo
we must be hungry

Hot meal

The hottest hour of the day
By the side window
the mold on the dried flowers
dries
the air-conditioner is off
the window here blocked
the others at equilibrium
cut off
the soft brown top of a plum
for the worms
who will come

Not really

in the skunky swamp of the park
as I look backwards at
the girl on the bicycle
then forwards as she passes
me, a lady bug crawls
across my crotch. It seems
unseemly
that this should happen in front of
the statue of the greatest Ukrainian poetess
but it does. Then two
young women in sundresses
speaking slavically pass
pretilly as I suck on a ripe plum.
I collect my thoughts on a bench
in front of the bald, bare-chested
tennis men
one is Putin to the vodka and "t", I
pretend he's watching me
as we try to identify
the trees. Their
breasts and bigger bellies bounce
with their balls, I guess.
Somewhere else
kids cry and whine
as their parents
ignore them. I'm
going home
back to all that
but I'm not
rushing

Cryo-why

Quiet unrest the autumn brings
an old lady in a sunhat unsteadily approaching
to cut your hair
& freckle your skin
like bananas ripen
in a special way
then put you in the freezer
someday, maybe
make
you a
cake

Imp it

"it's the last day of august
good morning"
sneers the radio
blame the sin, not the sinner
blame the shooter, not the long
rifled
gun
for once she's up early
almost with the sun
already making it too hot to leave the house
for this organ donor
still abed in
this beautiful, cool
stifling
apartment
too far from any place interesting
if there are any interesting places
where the organs aren't slowly poisoned
or cooked
like fried
liver
even here
it would be nice to help someone somehow
I have not discussed this hope
with my family
but her signature
has witnessed my rope-a-dope scrawl
alive
nervous
and impure
some of our organs
were
assuredly beautiful

Prose & cons / Trilobites bite

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:41:00 +0000

1.

A necklace of live crabs
       before the odds
how did they live
       cowardly estimations
the earliest known examples
       street-crossing sideways blind
dramatic changes in climate & chemistry
       steady small gains
union of geological sciences
       until the blow-up
discovered at Mistaken Point
       a moral hazard
mouth, anus, shells and hard parts
       trusted but sterile information

nature usually sneezes on our hopes
       unclean, clearly not actors
yellowing ivory of peaches and cream
       sweet and suicidal
the report evolved in a snowslide
       firm in principle
fossilized credit jelly
       mismatching scales
foraged for uncontaminated sponges
       a level of expectations
bringing the stone back home
       two systems in the mind
a foundational document
       or a more intuitive

plea for fellowship a national shame
       different development
a false view of chronicle as practice
       a round medallion
gift for visual bias unavoidable and sheer
       looking left and right
everyone's favourite invertebrate fossil and dust
       expectation of repeated images
the anatomies of advanced arthropods
       a perception of the new normal
fusion differentiation specialization
       modelling trust
a tale of decimation not increasing variety of design
       how ideas can be bad for you

would you rather love a greyhound or a jellyfish
       framing the evidence
discomfort when we view them eating
       killing more than they help
the power of a question mark
       tripling the chance of death
blood always ready to leap
       quacks but nevertheless
basically elongate bilaterally symmetrical
       leeches, worms and their food all alike
like to know where they are going and move away from what they leave behind
       a fact well known by empiricists
such as a great appendage, whiplike
       less nice than currently

and forming the most precious of human continuities.

2.

The unbroken skein of intellectal genealogy
       never replicates out of sample
disparity followed by decimation
       not computable from data
a different story revealed by the heretofore invisible soft body
       eighty percent away from normal

repeated emergence of predation as strategy
       no different from astrology
top level fully occupied and functioning
       value at risk as value
the subsequent decimation and consequent modern pattern
       that we prefer to ignore

leaving something for the evening to reveal
       a freak out between the dark and the light
conceived the world in metaphor
       we have predictions countered the institution
experimentation reigned in a world
       without the concept of consequence

virtually free of competition for the one and only time
       hands clenched or tucked in a
slower process of competition and displacement
       starting to bet down to zero
a change in organic potential
       increasing exposure to the total

becoming less forgiving of major restructuring
       the system was getting a lot more efficient
webs of interaction not easily broken
       until the sudden emergence of a black swan
his shrill ancestral convictions
       a song sung once aloud, a hundred times a losing whisper

patter the most profound of the great dyings.

Shorts in July

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:27:00 +0000

Two Evening Encounters

The rarely-seen underside of the window-frame
A refrigerator opens in another room
An arrow pricking out of a posy
hurts the posy
The compressor turns on
The lintel gapes

*

Petals out the window sent
meant the charity of exile
She was outward bound towards a hostile tautology
The tall girls dressed as beanpoles
the short ones, flower pots, fell
to break the ice. They photographed their separation
and called it "A Liberation Album"

Coughs in darkness, icerbergs smoke
returning up to the window
A squeezebox stutters for a choir
I mimic a tick, I dream of Mimico
and a hungry picnic

Indulgences scramble
with sin and ugliness

but what for breakfast?

I go out for something to get

The Sleepwalker

Sleep was a singing bird
It was redundant as a theodicy, redundant
as two heroes with the same name
or one with many. It was the ebb and flow
of bathtubs, the jib and jab of armies,
the occupation & insurgent traffic stalled
& blown up.

When the god wakes he'll make the future
there is no doubt I could desire to gracefully
or safely express
The sirens jog in shorts
and the sailboats skitter
A black garbage bag spills its fragrant entailments
over the inland sea.

The Fragrant Cloud

The bold were the first to swill it
it's always that way
the host ghost propagates between the parasites

I eat the produce of the Polish Economy
rose & plum donuts
3 for my dollar

We'll avoid combat & accrual of awards, titles, names
(K is for Kestrel, beaked murderer of the paraclete)

But the dough's speared in the side with a real syringe!
Ouch! & the roses
    truly boiled!

Forte York

A piano once played is never the same
piano

from the cellophaned cellphone to the
           mechanical pencil wrapped in a bamboo mat

it is possible that this is true, or at least alive, an issue

(we are still in consultation
       & invite your submissions)

we do not act or ask rashly, do not act or ask

we numbly request
       a theme a term a new anthem
(thank you)

we plug our ears & think we can hear it
          as our fingers under the table unsteadily slip

to
ec
static

the hammers bang on the tense & discordant guts

Article 1: Heaven & Hell

" … no great art in that … only the censor knows what is art" - H.M. Enzensberger

The instant perception of weightlessness means only
no resistance to the centre's pull.
And "no great art in that" evades the censor
in the heart, the mind, and their prostheses.
The perception of a particle plunges as it pumps.
The bruising blowback of the pen
Newton's second kickback helps us wash our hard-to-reach parts.
Some unpleasantness, true, but laws are
what they are.
The friars will spew in satire
out the devil's asshole & the flies
like angels scrawl over the parched scraped skin.

This Thing

This dis-
orientation
Being the best
wet
man in the rain
The brain
of the tinkerer
waves
Blinks     sinks
At least he
knows
he won't change
anything

Also too young

But has it always been this way?
Under doubt grows milkweed. These
bored pines, this spayed orchard.
This obscurity in the city. Off-kilter
like a Narwhal in our sex. Her
breasts enlarging in expectation
glut the apartment — August light
stopped at the portals. Our faces close
our eyes close as a last resort.

Complaining on the plain

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:54:00 +0000

It is apparent and done on the cheap
I scream "this is what I look like" and cover my head in a paper bag
I grab the first person I see and whisper huskily "that is what I want" with my hand in his or her pocket
I have a thousand talents and the graspingness of a caged octopus
and change my colours in mid-season to match each passing shoe
clip clop blue
There's always a wrong to be righted after it's undressed
but the velleity to unveil must be accurately assessed
and it's a theorem that each particle possesses free will
if we do
clip clop red
spin cycle spinnaker spanker
sometimes I lie bleeding on the edge
the sphinx yawns in our wind
who's riddle? our piddle
right
violate then abort

(thanks to Z.D.)

The mirth of tragedy

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:58:00 +0000

Sunday goes the parade of the real
out the bookshop window
a canoe on a Subaru
shufflers with walkers, speaking
unintelligible Portuguese
To say nothing of the boys & girls on bicycles
who say nothing anyway

         The imagination is on the wane
         as quick as radio it goes trepanning
         studied medicine though reticent
         & was gassed
         Survived in the Alps of Italy
         through cannibalism of bare facticity

& taxes, 5% on the rare side.
Telephone call from the US EMBASSY
we're open til 5
and a streetcar wrapped in advertising
loves everyone alive

just like our prime minister

& a large car parks under a small tree

to go for a walk barefoot in a wheelchair
   a reckless, obvious irony
(at least he's moving)
   with the speed of "metaphysical
stuff " not "new age crap"
perhaps "food things?"

"the furious, vindictive hatred of life implicit"

in dream and certain realms of intoxication
    blasts the stereo of the soccer fan
the ball at moments kicked through the veil of Maya
   or appears to be

Fat chance the veil blows in the rain
     is the rain & the players
happy as ducks
     neither dream, ectstatic, nor hunger artists
   they kick the ball around & sometimes get hurt or wet or fake it

    The keeper has the stance of the skeptic
or a man who simply loves using his hands

But what will furnish the metaphysical solace
if no one scores? if no one's keeping score? if no one knows who scores?

the mass of a ball, crowd, or fist

with greasy good luck and an old hat
       the man from the embassy arrives
"You speak the language very well!"
projecting a certain lyricism onto the heavy metal
desk

the spy
had tapped into what we might call the contemporary unconscious
contempt
that serves for banter

barters principium indivituationis for common courtesy
buys no books
but I had turned off the loungey opera
that had broken the ice with dionysus

      Later I got the score but the game stayed hidden
      I was not up to date, had no permission
       At six years old was no longer modern
      (Ivy grew up the network cable, mouse shit dangled in cobwebs from the mouthpiece of the phone)
      I had no right to protest, no audience, and would have seemed an alien
      And the play was something I could not even imagine

He had no such trouble. He printed out a bubble. He stepped into it
and floated away.
and then the airstrike. mythic provoquestion.
goons & the opposition absentees
keeping the skillet good & greasy

just like our prime minister, chief apollonian
(a smile connects two points on one face
the sun's and his own)

I locked up in the dust and went home
and the oversight committee broke for another long lunch.

Gods Measure

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:50:00 +0000

In Homer, "Gods, though gods, are conspicuous"

"For I knew easily as he went away the form of his feet"

     Lattimore a subject

     the other night with the older poets outside the bar

or by the signature walk, getting there

our feet passing legs in red
named "Artemis" she said

the boy's in love, but she's "taken" her girlfriend's arm
      around her
     hardly / fails to / almost starts a war

but hardly a likely siren, virgin huntress or lunatic lesbian

Or our new landlady, crawling on her knees up one floor
   to our kitchen

her edema swells the odyssey
her claws bared like a harpy's

insomniac, deaf, but tough & eager to please
especially in this heat with the new air-conditioner

sees mine — big feet what size? ten or eleven

blows me down to the basement

to her dead husband's shoes, hardly worn
damp     practically new

I tried them on. "Too small," I lied.

He was a singer.

Can you lie to the gods?

Walls around walls

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:44:00 +0000

A circle stark on sand
marks a cone of legibility

palisade pikes
                an embroidered seam
reticulates the wind

pure passion & virulent violence count BTUs
while wisdom's flame
& the home fires cool

our allies among divinities chatter
spoil & evict

                the apartment scoured to ash

       ash cannot reason, ash cannot speak
                       of who roasts spit
over it the horses unhanded

     & who hand-holds walking home
at the truce

under the sun, which is under the earth & both
   are on top of you

*

within
wishin for some fission
my rock chapped to give birth
began several investigations into aspects of the event
& a real-time map of foreclosed avenues
stones & seeds in the belly of a bird
& no matter how hard I pushed
no topical watermelon emerged

sometimes I think instead the evening has the structure of a peach
pulpy fiction & lightly poisoned pit
reserved in its cloaca
rubbing for & against you

*

this talking & walking
or, more likely, standing wanting to be sitting
against a fence, it happens
is vaunted, guarded, & electric

who sits inside? Noisy & paradigmatic

maybe just better
   looking
   focused                  or nicer, happier, all around
   connected                  reasonable human beings
                           when

napping
       I awoke on the other side
   & was instantly arrested
   & woke again, tingly & on edge

   unreason unable unhuman

unbeing
&
dinner, then anyway after
talked & walked about the perimeter

*

it's funny how things can get abstracted
the life stolen away

       my hands covered in semen
engines outside the window and my lover's ragged breathing
she's burning up & the tracks
rattle with the weight
passing by

the engine of our future
turns over
& so do I

Acid reflux for the luxury of an unfed head ... thus spreads the crunk of Godelian quincunctitude from zygal I knew up to here

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:23:00 +0000

A word's reward
reorders this disorder

A method aims
at ethos, at what
you are am I
immured
in the h become x
chiasmus
he comas excess
erotically

hassled or becalméd
has led or méd the spill

A system or a machine that eventually explains or explodes
while a plain S tory instigates then investigates a mystery
at a planned event
the extent of politic all
a lost shelter
a shelf for surety

he rights
as he writes a letter & letters a right

Now equatorial response ability
equals the tight belt of a salted self
which forward lashes
to speak or say

a probable law
we might obey
equally well

inside the
vaunted
guarded
line

or outside
black
bolted down

July 1-6, 2010

Turning Vice into Versa (G20 Stone Soup)

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 03:53:00 +0000

The stone grows slowly in the underbelly of exaggeration.
Some turbulence in the tub
a warm disquiet stirring the mock soup
as the young lovers disappear singly in chokeholds
riven by the wall of the kettle
by the rivets that were
and will still be, after, people.
In the manner of "hold the line."
In the manner of cannibalism.
If evil is the acceptance of untruth as verity
then it is good to verify the untruth
to taste what may be cooking.
We began with a pot with some stinging in it
and now there is only stone.

July 2/3 2010

Heinrich moves

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:21:00 +0000

What can you do-do
with a banjo or two-two
when you’re lazysome and crazysome
and the moon is a fool?
When the brainsies proud moulder
smokes a bucketlist of clover
and the nursie rides a hearsie
like a fairies-wheel?
I’m wretched-like and trying some
to sow some harmlessness old lying mum
but the violets of rhyming um
keep a-burbling out my nose.
Boil the doorjam of the senses
Forget incasements and tenses
Fool the memory with some moonylight
Leave the'art clogged with a resoundingbite
Log the organelles for the arkive
Leave no nictitating florets alive
The real regrets
what it refrains
to stain to steal to strangle to feign to uh full-feel-fangle

The End of Pretend

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:46:00 +0000

The waters' random flash of indifference
to a verbal performance of morality
burbles like a crude Marinetti sparkling wine.
An obituary is no philosophy;
The forbidden and impossible look the same to your eyes
with the addition of a revelation or a shrewd disguise
a bikini bottom snuggly tugging around Niagara
or up towards the glutted breakwater.
The difference between to think and to believe
as if it were a parasite to be cleansed of before rising
to be heaved and hewn out of gull shadows flocking
far from the attics they jewel with oiled crystal conveniences;
or how wheels roll and how wheels within wheels follow
a matter of a chariot and the wing-marks in the sand
for those who are able to understand, by and for and just themselves;
or wisdom and the word wisdom, or in and of the word.
Toiling silence snips at fingertips
like a bitch's nipples quivering as she pants
the wedding party like a row of ducks in strapless uniformity.
What colours pattern the wings
of books and butterflies pinned down on the town?
The alliance of the eastern provinces against deportation and red crime
welcomes you to the addictions, mental health, and gallery district
joyfully not listed in chronological order
and a very nice place to buy a condo. In a bathroom window
beneath the tulips of truth or the vulgar imagination
points the icon of the root or the down arrow.

Early June Poems

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:55:00 +0000

The moon in June

       the lampost stands musing it out
law & legend lie in the deepest dustiest alcove of the ark
once they were married, mystically
went whale-watching
then built a civil ship, docked
dry in a beach-house dynasty

       today, from this beautifully lucid spread-spectrum of vision & revision
& predatory white that dappled the museum
in heat-mirage wetting the impression
of a been-to destination
we lived in two rooms
tubless & together like saltines

       leaping into & out of our boxes
urgently confuting tidal imperatives
ill at an easy oscillating tether
through the dead spots of transmission
found where our bodies boost the gain
of a CBC afternoon gardening program or morning strain

       of linearity & growing, older, fuzztonier
crispness of the cabbage
dusted the collage implements reclaimed
from silly little boys & girls
morning mumbledance of sustainable illusions
illusion of the outside on a sunny day

       aid impending
striding without warning through the floral boundary
a month later the barricades
to the amphiteatre, empty before rain
pulse and emission when we come together
sparked by the background energy

       of june always somewhere away
a prize that makes things possible
even enmity shitheads amplifying
NO ALTERNATIVES again
who remembers trusting the brain
is there sales tax on your poetry?

       this is a stupid ramble
i would like to learn to play our new-old piano

A night at the pressers

a kiss
whose optimism opines
"most people would say that's perfect"
i agree and bite into my red-steak sandwich
greedily
will it cover the rent
the income from our apple tree

we're what the weather
snores
surrounded by ideology
torture prisons
improvisation confined
to occasional magazines
& catches of trains

pretty girls change
the atmosphere
especially with manifestos
beginning again
at the edge of each season
to convince themselves
of the virtue of seed

tamping down my
love for men
all "I"s in the
conversation
blindside agonistes
hope you make it
home

Persecution and the art of writing

"a variety of phenomena ranging from /
the Spanish Inquisition
to / social ostracism"

Our new neighbourhood's
obituaries in bricks
scratching the sky on the brightest day
are obvious to see
not so their philosophy
falsified under humps of grass —
they lie
& we walk
or slump around the parks
scars under scabby paint
selves to reface on cloudy days & at parties
Hello stunned toddler
Hello gum snuggler
Hi there, switchblade set
This is not a natural motion, position
    or a primordial fatality guarantee
A bumblebee crumpling the grass like a small cat
An inner freedom from supervision
An oversight, a vision, or a right

The Creative Class War/Room

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sun, 30 May 2010 03:13:00 +0000

"… it has become again what it was in the beginning:
the esoteric wisdom of small groups of men out of
touch with life and without any influence on it."
- Gershom Scholem, "General Characteristics of Jewish Mysticism"

On a green slope, under a blank blue
life swings its arms and legs and bats
and curated cultural commentary
fouls the hotbed, then proffers polish
applied, obviously, with the universal tongue.
Out of nothing, nothing will come
and so this must be an emanation.
Something to get tangled up in, before fire or flood
or medicinal apathy punctures
the live event — or brightly-coloured clothing
suggests a civilian presence, the children's screeching
muted on the console in Creech Air Force Base, Nevada
where "inaccurate and unprofessional"
(not to say predatory) reportage drones on.

Overloading Zone

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:40:00 +0000

"Our task is to become … "
The ghost remained pinned to the ground
Marble beside the sea
the eroded face
to lean on in mourning
what happened only minutes ago
happened impersonally. We judge echoes
we are. Nipples unusually large
& expressions of despair. Choosing
the shade-side and the bright
rippling & smoothing the fabric
Always dangerous, always entrancing
fire in the hand or in the air
set free to celebrate a holiday
only the wise man manages properly
what reality dissolves of good in him.

*

Taken from him it spilled out
frozen orange juice from a can
the answer too superficial to be excerpted
but still visible on the contours of his brain
preserved as a common property
a map of human behaviour
projecting the highest pleasure
the n-fold or the double-stitch
overheard from the neighbours
when I come home & you close yourself in
dissolution equally plausible
either side of the gate
He gave out a euclidean whimper & though he did not control the code
saw that it was simple, the problem of nonsense-mediation
to participate in what is to be emulated
world-making easy as beers on Sunday.

Acid balances

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sat, 22 May 2010 20:21:00 +0000

"Dark in hue, the head is still full of life and
more beatiful than the best portraits by the world's
greatest artists, since it is the man himself we see."
- P. V. Glob, The Bog People

The countdown filled your eyes,
convex paraboloids flexing to resolve
the metastatic future. A wall moving forward,
absorbing all sound, light, odour
confidence & form. A porthole leaking shadows
of nudes neuter behind the wavering pane.
To be digging one day for fuel
& come face to face with this distortion
this parody of possibility, this imposter
tactless genitals deaf to the
throbbing of the engines' love-calls
lined up at the liquor store
in a peaty T-shirt at noon this Sunday
Or today, a man gone on spin cycle
into the newly found old sound
of bend & slice exertions
hand missing hand against the green
bodies wandering slaps
the spine rippling against insecticide …
Two in a buggy makes an anthology
wheeling alongside the great divide
we eject into different tempos
though infections are bracketed
the anatomies decay with each copy
cite pollen in his stomach
a species common still
not food exactly, but a totem antigen
to whip in the harvest
with a performance of our own permanence.
But like everything, like white elephants
emerging from the grey
carnivorous anagrammatical desires may reveal
the guilty dreamer's characteristic tooth decay
brought into focus by a probing question
"who designates the nonsense?" you spew
the love that is simple and cool
between this treaty and no treaty
neither stillness nor perfection tails
forgivenesses aping vocable illnesses
losing a voice at the speech of another's
carnivalesque modulations in blood
A gallant friend done up in the style
of the painter at whose funeral
the Kaiser walked behind the coffin.

time sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:11:00 +0000

a red wingèd shoe
sporting popsicle sticks
bugs lick cusps & ascenders
the code of trees
stiff pretend convergences
three steps to the right
a scatter of branches

the shavings of tonight
curls in the grid
on her head
insufficient grounds to believe
she had exhausted
all performative avenues
to end up at this authentic abortion

a glass-coated rotor ought to
snap the hawser
showlace caught on shifters
ratios between the plates
engines cut
the grease from excess food production
easing the limbless obelisk

machined into position
the bearing principle
was built into the hillside
scaffold of poles
pastiche on a mast-in-air
eternal as fire-water
& older than carbon

carrying piano wire to a 4-am appointment
dinner was a liability
disbelief in parasitism
by law, fit for human consumption
built like a vending machine, dispensing
gold from the bowels
wristwatch, fillings

my own goal is toxin
homeless & delivered weekly to your door
the joy was truly meant
to coincide with custody
under the gas to reach peak maturation
pass into future generations
once outré and swollen with human interests

that baroque image
eyemouths and orisons
here to be heard, to see, and to seem
speak of vanishing
into broken focus, use
feature detection to
sweetly tighten the ribbon

parabola

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:09:00 +0000

subway train
weeping willow
sleeping tunnel of the sun
where one comes from
bulletproof bikewheel
wandering on leash
hair smothered & hyper
reproductive allergencies
one waits for the examination
a red-winged blackbird
catches a drift
tarsmell mirror
the roof combusts
slow as the highway
to the gathering
underground

*

out in the green world
one hundered steps from the last payphone in Canada city
one accessorizes —
if one has ideas
THE INFORMATION is everywhere
a partial & ritual exchange
green for grey
you for me
follicular chronometries
inaccessible as
stinging nettles
lines around
our eyes

Falling and Freezing Pieces

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sun, 09 May 2010 00:03:00 +0000

hope of sleep abandoned
leaves flee from their branches

*

life's gridlines overwritten

*

a face become
a projection on vortices

the days doubling
a bust from life

who figures
square measures

is pierced by all parallels
unless a greater gravity deflects

your scything eyes
to the corner pockets

to the mauve umbrages
of the pink room

*

Every year's best title, progress
has pushed past the barricades
swept up your letters & down deposited
neatly in their wooden cages
No index to their apathy
is possible or necessary
who turned red at the handcrank
now burns in the mere season

Air beyond compare devouring
our bodies as we sit or sleep
idleness of ice cubes cracking as
the purple toe is stitched
A season without what now withers
The romp wrapped & quivering at the flame
& whites & reds float browning
at the over-brimming of this barrel

A yellow tree has captured the sun
In the ground of the white-sided house
reliquary pierced by the wires
fringed by the green remaining
Willow and vine shiver at changing
verily bow to the jaunty isolate
A yellow tree has captured the sun
& rendered it gently mortal

*

spilling sound
of milk and marble
till the garden
greens again
seen through the ice-dry window
in the moldy cardboard box
inside it the eyes
of a mirage
savage at least until
the fiction washes in
back to self
sometime
front to
everything else

*

Weirdness follows
the next next
A chain of fishes, tooth to tail
elaborate the seqence
Some checkered tongue
laps our conversation
as fears might our ambitions
unstated and abutting the inner causeways
But out here, the sweet tooth's
on youth, & right tight
behind claptraps smokebreath d___
packed too tightly to evacuate
each drinks a socrates milkshake
& swallow tongueless & alone

*

he was an angel of the snow
in polyester pants he lay
he swished his legs
together apart together
they stuck & stayed
in cold and icy weather

his breath could melt the snow
but could not sever
his legs that had so grown together

*

and the flakes piled in
the cracks of colour flocking
this way and away

like one who dangles without dropping
he hung on red and blue

i saw that movie too
my hand on yours like some moss around a tree

the architects lines, drafty
unity of a spider
strangles without shopping
best thing to do in winter

*

bugged out by feelng
garbage black

auto-eject into
wind whine wind

diagram into
tran quill idiom

our boy idiot
no

nightly
he-man

*

three aspen writ into
open arrow

snake rundownto
the bubbling gonetime

*

scarred endings & terrible, bearable beginnings
An engine ignites & a tiny little light goes on
Ricochets from heaven, return your mittentouch
The green glass we stand on
Hails your frosted roughish tongue
A wall painted over
is covered in surprise
(BLAMF!) Eat icepop custard
shiver
sunrise

*

An ion almost out of phase
An object of a deep surmise
A sequence of disordered days
A parenthetical reprise:

(A lion tallmost as she lays
The subject of a creep's demise
The week when she disordered plays
Her bare heretical replies.)

*

A soul flies from
its egg
to tar oil and snow
how long's gone
the dancer number
time to reproduce
a feeling

*

liquefying pink
mix crust and bread
in slender buckles
short sleeves prolong
the manner of facts
a flame
in a burning chalice
meanwhile means well
keeping our pants on

*

Beauty without sugar
Who pays for this register?

Sirens demand what they may in the dark

the sea of she-horses
false step through the eye — centre —
careless of latitudes 4x4

come out — the wheels are burning

The Marrow-Eaters

noreply@blogger.com (Sam Kaufman) — Sat, 08 May 2010 20:46:00 +0000

They prove under examination
to be another kind of evisceration
stoned flakes of athletic frame
crackling under time
The bones were found scattered
over a bed of dried flowers
of medicinal potential – spackled pieces to meal
a kind of cochineal
on a massive scale, the weight
of death in the dye of a shamanistic mind
No such egotistic tripod ever lived, mulch scavenger
No ecstatic lighthouse stood still to shine an anorexic shiver
In the vineyard where all things to be sought
Could be taught — the labyrinth of pulver & gist alphabetized