Les Blank

I said If you exist, cut from me the stone of distance
I said then cut me from this wall of my own web-work,
this feeding tube filled with sadness & seltzer, cocaethylene
dreams, sadness & Swiss omelets,
this Rickroll of numb gums & dumb love.
I stayed who I was as if I had an option.
I nursed my bag of maggots, learned to do laundry.
Forty one years bending the bar, biting the bar, my ear pressed to the bar.
Forty one years of Herzog thinking out loud
it was him that moved that ship through the mountains.
Cleared smoke & human patience reveal in my dream
commonness, a plate & glass, the tablecloth pulled.

Hot Coals

I have been awake for forty-three hours
moving from complex to strip mall
to escape the voices.

The person in front of me is shopping for a grill
to asphyxiate with. I’m looking for a photo
of my doppelganger falling down stairs.

the hot coals
the ring of snow
the sun behind a mountain

I heat the glass before I put it in my nose.
This could go one of two ways
but anything you try to understand owns you.

My father is all bound up in the haggard
Kodachrome of sleepless weeks.
People once called him fear.

The light you bend towards owns you.
Your lover’s point of view owns you.
The neighbor’s cat owns you.

the empty scale
the empty sky
the world before computers

My mother said it was a worthwhile investment,
the pills, that she didn’t teach me to live fuck to fuck.
She’s painting me a knife that never ends.

The room falls asleep and I wrap myself in a blanket.
I move to a broken chair in the courtyard.
Dawn breaks through a ring of snow around the desert.

To View the Middle as a Position of Dominance

First it is true

We more or less need others

And others, they need not us

In terms of a single pattern

The idea defined by dependency

Is how the notion of affect emerges

As a division between relations in hierarchy

Eventually in the course of accumulation

What remains of the vast spiral of nature is property

To weep is to ask what is in us

And still, it is true