Pillars of Ash In the beginning Nature had no voice. Then the gods threw a pest Of fire called language Upon the world And are watching it as it blazes. Now fire clings to the palate, Burns the throat. The smoke of rhetoric smarts our eyes. Tongues of fire consume the page — Paper curling into ash, Perusing fingers sifting to ash, Bodies stiffening into ash, Pillars of ash that’ll topple and disperse In the coming wind and rain .

By the Sound of a Voice After a long silence that seemed An eternity, There came a turbulent noise, A spirited noise. No, it was a...

A man carrying a voice recorder pauses at the door, enters.   He looks a lot like Kafka but has the eyes of Tennyson.   He possesses a...

Words like mosquitoes swarming / Around me, pestering

What is language? Where does it come from and what does it want (from us)?

A tool for imitating movement, For the small things that penetrate, For the breath's expulsion ...

Cryptic The scent of a foreign newspaper in the morning: New ink on old investments and trades. While down in Berlin, the autobus...

Having material weight, a poem can be shaped, sculptured and refined; erected as units, structures, factories, bridges, outhouses and...

Irked Like a sacred text folded in on itself, a page half torn away, stains in the margins, a footnote wrongly numbered, the letter ‘i’...

Discourse in the Garden: A Short Drama An olive grove. Night. The sound of approaching footsteps. SOCRATES: ‘Swounds! A dark day for strong flowers and cool breezes. Can you deny it? PLATO: Are you spreching to me, sir? SOCRATES: I am, almost certainly. [Sits beside PLATO.] Call me I am. PLATO: Ha! Welcome. Call me anything you like. I’ll deny it later. SOCRATES: Ho! I’ve only lived the one life. Where next? Should I go on? PLATO: Always going on. Even when you’re half dead.

A jazz trombone extends a metaphor, the length of a memory.   With a memory, my grandfather says,   You got to hear its pitch, its tone &...

Once a code of nature without a subject.   Now: language tongue, la , signifying   Illness, la , a foreign verb linked to other verbs,  ...

Ezra Pound's Apparition When I called for the Direct treatment of the thing, Ezra Pound saw at once that if Words are to be as things,...

The piling up of words into units, struc- tures, towers, is what might be termed the phallic unity of lang- uage. It was Hulme who said...

A Subject without a Code gazoom: a new section opens up undertones of black subterranea. reconstructed man exits the door, passes into...

Environed by varying degrees of space,   (depending on where you draw the line),   a poem is a picture of the artist's mind on a...

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy  Jordan River, I make you  Mine.  Into shape I press the grit, into shape I...

In the beginning was the Wyrd . A story of weirding words and the poet fluttered his pen over the ink. What comes to pass has passed and...

What are these things before me That come into shape? Do not ask And I will not have to answer. Weird creatures that run amok Inside...

Languages are outposts on the outskirts of being. By voice and by text we perform raids on being, but we find it impossible to capture...