Us & We Talks With by Dave Wright

Includes:

I&B-Logs,

Delta Wave Deism,

& The Numbers,

The Twitter Report,

and The Triptych Conspiracy

*this is the sister of “I & B-Logs” (undone) “U & We-Talks”

poems, adopted poems, adopted forms Reading poetry

On the internet

Is no harder than Reading Poetry

Any place else

Just remember to separate

Its plain of action from

Its peripheral views.

on

Say for instance you

Are reading a love poem

From a book on your desk,

Under that book the

Old copies of Time Magazine

Top open to an ad for cosmetics, not sure

You can make out the outer edges

Of a rouge brush, cheek, and thigh behind the book

Under Time

There is an East European playbill, which internet

Suggests it comes from under the top

Of the love poem, a bright canary playbill

Indifferent riddled with embellishments

Eye-catching more than likely in any light

Because the theatre picked canary yellow. (Never mind that it’s East European)

Under stacks a variety of lengths

Extended just beyond the yellow of the playbill

Peaks of light/water/gas bills

Official, rigid,

Busy red in official public works

Legal envelopes

& returns for each payment,

Under that, perhaps a draft

of another poem or two,

a bank statement, a photograph

or any number of material txt

The poem is framed

By page first, page by book—

Book by stack of flat and urgent materials,

Stack by desk, stack by walls stack by many urgent things on walls and so on.

They’ve been in that space too long,

Started those drafts over a year ago;

Read Time several times before

The love poem

Already taken back by embellishments I’ve been

Around the director’s maybe-Latvian name several times before with similar effect

Against yellow canary card stock (materials primed for big-theatre distractions) See?

No peripherals invading into poem for love,

We separate them from the flattened plains of view,

Or they separate us, from action on the fringe.

2.

We

on Web

mingle: the scrolling banners

The flickering neon pop-ups, nothing

the drop-downs, to see here

the scroll-outs, nothing

The instant chats, to see here

Tabs, nothing

control bars, to see here

sub-screens, [there] nothing

secondary windows, to see here

Official reminders, nothing

Retail polls, to see here

Spam, cookies nothing

system updates to see here

inboxes etc. nothing

these fringe materials together

with the poem into one field of action is action

You see where I’m going with this?

The loss of action focus, the poem is action. Action!. Act focus! this

Read on the Web as much stuff

Atop the desk, or more, or out is

in the busy of the world M

these things don’t distract us, I

Or they do L

And we’re not reading ESa

a love poem way

*Worried that My Poems Won’t Survive Any Number of Disasters

I’m writing an Epic poem

war with love,

In fact—

I’m thinking of titling it

Just that:

A Poem— War

with love

I’m thinking of calling it

Just that, I’m writing

An Epic

Poem war with Love.

In fact

*

I guess that’s to say

old poets had the same

Worries as new

House fires

With no prompt emergency response

Floods

With no scuba gear

Archives

With no chemical preservation

Manic rage

With no chemical-script relief

Furious Defecit Lover’s Attention

With no tires to cut

new poets face the possibility of deletion

& the impending fear of corruption

In the system file

new poets face new possibilities

new worries

On top of all these, like the old poets

*

In Response to an Afternoon Class.

A poem is just a poem

It isn’t a water balloon; it isn’t

a racket ball; isn’t a spare tire

If your plane happens to crash

into a body of water a poem will not

keep you afloat; I say a poem will

not keep you from drowning

Nor will it hold your hair back

when you’re sick, not even pay for your dinner.

A poem won’t buy you nice things.

Poems are cheap

Poems overcharge for labor

A Poem won’t wire you money

From another town, It won’t hold your hand;

They can’t shave necks

Poems don’t have fingers

They don’t wear rings;

They don’t eat, sleep, drink, or die

They aren’t living in flesh;

A poem doesn’t take up space like paper

If you bend a poem it won’t break

They don’t bend; a poem doesn’t have pieces

You can’t divide one, subtract from it

Or add to it A poem

isn’t poetry— never

what it’s not supposed to be,

Never has been what isn’t a poem,

and won’t be.

If you pour a poem into a strainer

Nothing will be filtered

And nothing will pass through;

Poems don’t heat up or burn out.

A poem won’t boil water.

Poems won’t be distracted.

A poem isn’t lost,

A poem has nowhere to go;

They don’t take trips

A poem isn’t a mansion

Or an automobile,

A poem doesn’t use maps

They don’t follow directions

They don’t head one way

But all ways

A poem is just,

A poem is,

just a poem

A poem is

Much More

Than what it’s not.

This is not a poem about dying; but anticipation

*

What anticipates death more than dirt?

A Poem

Sidles along the early ledge of a skyscraper

And waits on Death to arrive at the office.

What anticipates death more

Than dirt?

A Poem

Breaks down intentionally on desolate highways

And waits on Death to chance by with a wrench.

What anticipates

death more than dirt?

A Poem.

Openly admits its guilt before action

And waits on Death at the scene of the crime

What

anticipates death more than dirt?

A Poem

Anticipates a name to refuse it

And waits for Death to become a poem.

Poetry shakes faces off.

On My Way to Work

Are we getting cold in here? We,

Frigid devices: we few ripped from birth

Half our words tempered to dig

Through our vital organs for

Buried letters of the alphabet

We spend half our lives in half-lights

With a shovel app and some kind of receptacle—

Unearthing spines & guts and gullies

Turning out fool’s gold, and

Take up the lost art of eAlchemy.

More than likely the world’s greatest reactions

Live comfortably on a few instinctive genes

Of a species other than our own.

My guess is a grey squirrel; have you seen them in the road?

Otherwise,

The other half we spend like house cats to claw through

& exact revenge on a sofa,

I mean stretch out and perfect it with revenge

Where’s the squirrel when we need something without revenge

To stalk our hereditary traits and impulses

that double cross the medium, the written modes,

And purr like a fresh orange smashed

On a crushed velvet dance floor

On a road!

What does an orange on a crushed dance floor mean

For a malnourished wrinkle of animal

Membrane mingling with cat hair?

What does any of that verbiage mean?

Not a thing as far as I can tell

This is just a first draft...

I’m trying to say a few, final words

About the squirrel I hit early

This morning on my way to work.

Delta Wave Deism1

When does energy finish in its proper form?

Just after breathing, or elsewhere beyond?

Excuse the scientist and the poet,

Excuse the nun and thief,

The heretic and lunatic— the priest,

Please excuse us.

1. There was a time when time did not exist.

Time. N.- A singular event— no sender or receiver,

Past, present, future— a three-act comedy we call time—

Absurdists with birthday hats and lab coats.

There is only energy— only “occurred” and “in the motion of occurrence”

All within a single event, “Time.”

In the way of absolute space, where no motion exists

Energy remains— there is only energy. Where is the evidence

In the notion of tales of existence— cyclic spirals in words?

Where do we rest in constant motion

Freely falling and preaching a definite

In our existence of chance,

Constant gyres of falling?

Man falls upon earth falling within a galaxy

Falling through a universe falling.

A gift, perhaps: The illusion of certainty,

Propping us up on a great arrangement of words

Keeping the illusion intact with proactive progression,

A proactive nightmare explosion in the face of man-made philosophies.

The power of thought where the poet lands his words exists only in energy.

There is only energy. The energy doesn’t die with a falling top hitting the ground—

But continues living then in the ground,

Same of the illusion words create, together crammed

1

The Belief that God created all the Earth and everything thereof. Then he created mankind and

abandoned them both— assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena—and

giving no supernatural revelation, only the energy to exist.

Or pulled at the ends apart on paper or thought.

The end result derives out of itself alone, not in the process

Of building itself an end result. And out of itself alone

Does this process too exist. One in the same, only variant by perception.

One certainty: The presence of energy in both.

There is only energy.

2. So what constitutes a sufficient base

To balance the antique vase

That is the origins of sensual energy?

Dealing with the 5 senses. Sensual. Are there five energies?

Or one energy of five forms— or perhaps more?

Senses:

Shadows, shells of tools for harnessing and processing energy,

Maintaining a set of standards on which to base an archetype of balance

(An equal intake and creation of energy void of a particular moral standard—

For which there are many, globally)

In our existence.

So what? Where do we store this idea of energy in 10% of the last, greatest wilderness on

Earth—The human imagination? Complete genius. A definite. Where do we find a place

To lay this notion down when we only wake our minds for minutes a day?

Where will we land?

Where will we land when we scale the next wall slowing progression—

Epoch of the human imagination, a breaking through?

In the interest, for now: There is only energy.

To breathe is to live (in the physical sense), creating and using energy.

To live is to doubt. After energy, there is only doubt. To doubt is to expel energy.

Energy in human element: Element of our Identity, a figure fixed; yet,

When combined with itself creates a slight shift in appearance

While leaving itself unchanged,

A twenty sided die with only one number,

Always arriving at a certainty:

Our certainty now: There is only energy.

Let’s pretend for a moment

Just a bit, then we’ll get back to the task at hand.

Let’s envision a world where poetry is nationally sanctioned

As America’s favorite team sport, perhaps even edging baseball out

As its pastime— and there are Forty-one teams in the league.

Representing the lower forty-eight.

Rhode Island is too small to have its own, sanctioned poetry team

So the founders of the league grouped the tiny state with

Massachusetts & Connecticut to form the Tri-State Dactyls,

A formidable competitor year in & year out. (4-time PaperTeXt’ s EPIC BOWL Champs)

There weren’t enough poets in North & South Dakota

During the formative years of the league for each to have its own team,

So they too were grouped, forming Dakota Rhymes.

Subsequently, the Carolinas were grouped accordingly, The Carolina Diction

So, it be only natural the Virginias were known as An Appalachian Ode

And since we are pretending, we will go on assuming that

Texas refused to participate. For one reason or another

It never has, and won’t, not in a million years, had a team. The rest did.

So, there it was, the PPLA

(Everyone agreed to avoid making the league’s name overly wordy)

Professional Poetry League of America (land of the giants) each with a skill: some quick on end stops

Some tough when it comes to last-minute enjambments, and the line breaks

Some work out of the sestet approach, others prefer more trochaic strategies

Some more organic in their shifts and formations, others more rigid & methodic

But all have their beloved team mascots that wear proudly big foam heads

And taunt the opposing crowd, “Trochees Suck! Trochees Suck! Trochees Suck!”

The fans laugh & cry, get drunk and fall, complain about the officials,

and demand instant replays. Deep down everyone wants to be a Poet in the PPLA.

Matches are won and lost. Divisions conquered. Championships slipped away.

And when the season is over the poets Will mend their bodies & minds

in their million dollar mansions, pull out their freshest suits, and take a limo to dinner

And America will slip into a medium, seasonal depression at work when it hits them

And they’ll talk at the water cooler about how many days are left

Until the first pre-season match-up airs that fall: PPLA in PT HDTV. Religiously.

I know… I can’t imagine it either.

The Numbers, a web assembly#14 Miraculous gallows,

Star-struck lunar ocean,

Slight shown diplomacy,

All moments

Mesh together

Under the tenacity of spring

With an

Open voice

Lost in musty rugs

And funeral precessions,

Perceptions

Change to shifts

In worm jumpsuits

And laundry burns.

#15 Costume death,

The guise,

Little grey orchestra

Wailing hysterical in slope rants,

Never level—

#16 Child horse of creation,

Briar fists fly

With time’s

Three act play on words

Grow to

Make more words

To make more words.

Is anyone

Left to cry down

The hall, well lit

Cigarette end

Smoking dim room

In

Carnal excitement?

These countesses make

Fish float.

#17 Another taking of coconut dreams

Must submit

Their application

Into our realm of

Corkscrew obsession

“It, they, have so much

Personality”

You don’t say.

Percussion thunder

Wakes time so

Match stick

Maids dream of

Heaven

And misplace fear for

Diamond rings.

#18 Is your thinking done again?

Have you soiled your

Words?

Magic light bulb

Anticipation

Build tension

In frightened solar roses

Power to stop

An uprising,

The clock’s room

Counted your money,

It’s time to fail.

#19 The current issue

Is just that:

Mixed Local motions,

Manic martinis,

A mixed array

Of sea life

Supporting

An unbroken sun dial

“That’s it,

Yeah we lived Saturday”

Painted the world gone

In glasses

Of merlot, peace

Sleeps easy

In morning light

#20 The sword party began

In yesterday’s museum—

Ripped flag staffs,

Sun beaten

Sunday diner reservations,

Easy gone people’s speech—

There is no denying

The incongruity of

Saving tomorrow

#21 Thirsty bleak numbers

Are always

Round,

Fall so short

Of mirrors bleeding—

Can’t you see the

Repetition soft

Anchor weight,

Pressed down steerage class.

Is anyone left

To bleed with

Night symptoms?

#22 False video image,

Shoe laced teeth,

Grinding metal filing cabinet

Keeping

Time softly lit,

This is the year

Of meadow’s laughter,

We always lose

The marching sight

Called a misplaced wind.

You faked tomorrow

on piano chords

Stacked eight feet

Lower

Than the reclining

Madness.

#23 Pull your hair down

Faint conductor stain,

Speak volumes on river construction

Murderous

River children only exist

To mock the circus

And spyglass

Brilliant sun catastrophes.

#24 Absent

Bird institution,

Home-sick grass stains

Breath in north artic paradise

For

Lovely slow lacerations

In a soiled

Lung epitaph,

The graveyard gala

Mingled in

Victorian recollection—

The art system

Fashions rules for

Boardwalk prophets

“make a mince

On scientific oceans

And naked

Tree communities”

Relic charts,

Sand castle deviance,

Florescent mania

Envies

The serenity of

Tile floors.

#25 Phenomenal igloo

Construction

Baffles

The House of Lords,

Ivory coated castles

And meticulous

Fence-post magicians,

“Little devil”

The concept of time

Must be a sin,

Fools us into thinking

Everything begins.

You don’t say a word

On the income gapped

Canyons

In polar bear soup

Or

Unholy

Cotton envy—

Shed verbal mold on

Raped-razor

Religion

And congregations

Of a zoo council

#26 Utopian-tongue

Prospered poet mentions

A turtle savior

And minds

His world in

Cave dwellings

#27 Venus birth

In water,

Where do I stand

Before mountains fall?

Marble frozen city

Forever

Art

Collectors day trip

“No running”

The pool bleeds

Youth servants

Sprout brown

Hail storms—

The brewmaster’s game

Spells orange

Trees

Against Mediterranean

Acid-free paper,

Ancient scrolls and sea shells,

Masts

Fashion best in wine

Conceptions

While pewter cone

Solutions make off

To elephant parades—

Sliding marriage rock

Backwinded

In an avalanche’s dream

“I see only right away

And never

Just after”

Caked-pile-ice-chest

Makeup,

Fake surrendering

In the red square’s

Chest of drawers

The Triptych Conspiracy:

An Authoritative Account An excerpt from The Art of Religion

By R. A. Peckham Ph. D.

… And there was conspiracy, oh there was.

One no different than the other two,

Though casting the illusions of variation.

(And this particular triptych no different than the rest)—

Legs and arms as others’ legs

And arms outstretched, stranded

Stitched between a single radiant lenses

Refraction on the eye of the scientist

.

Conspiracy all repeating

The Technicolor overtones,

a triple movement, a new form!

At one point,

The center a fixed position

All images appearing as one paint

On the gallery wall of glass:

1. One Woman and One Child:

A faint blue dress illuminate— delicate

Fair angel face where highlights collide

A baby child amongst rocks

And clovered meadows in ancient light,

Child unharmed

The Rock Lady and Child at center

Thin canvas of the theatre, stage flats.

2. The Night of Fire, the left Canvas:

A series of lights merging, a festival of fire

The narration of subtle nuance

In theory no different from the center.

There is no difference.

In my studies I find no difference.

3. Of the third lies the conspiracy:

Another lady of low brow smirk,

Fixture in a proper pose, a secret.

She held a secret,

One number ratio divine

Linking the other two (and the rest)

Completing the triptych.

And there was great conspiracy, oh there was.

Unmoving under foreign eyes,

Divine intervening in the corner of human thought.

Thought is energy.

It was only thought that leads the conspiracy,

So it must be:

The Rock Lady and Child,

Ratio Divine where highlights collide

Indifferent, but taking the center.

And there was conspiracy, oh there was conspiracy.

clearly, unmaking words: meaning (learning the ropes)

If you had asked me had I said something, I might have replied…

I told you, and in turn

You said to me, once,

That I mentioned I felt

Neither of what we said,

So are we, then, now, freer

From what we tell?

The sliding doors open

We pass through, interminably

Permeating like bits of biological information

Wafting through the hull of a cell wall,

Toward a place where we may be deciphered,

Housed for future distribution:

the air cuts us that way, the air cuts us like that—

cuts everyone the same, humid like hanged

drying leathers parched or frigid

like a faster moving waterway,

_____________

Faster either way it lays open layers of skin

And spills liquids normally faster

Kept inside a body, inside a body

These things are housed in calcium

And by radiation we see them

On hanged hospital monitors

Delirious, how outrageous

We see them. by radiation these things,

Our bones, brittle the integrity

Some of our human structures, a stature

Aware if divide in halves and to see those halves

The first time won’t know

They aren’t whole, not pieces but

Categories themselves, the possibilities:

Extra real links between spaces of time

The places we brace our brittle bones

By radiation to see them

We share some words:

To begin I told you, and again

You turned to me and began to tell

What it wasn’t, what they weren’t,

What you didn’t see,

How you don’t know

A thing so admit it first,

Everything else is possibility

We can’t hold against you

The possibilities you list, ‘it could have been this

Or that, or something else’

Are you freer now for having gotten

What it wasn’t they had off your chest?

______________

The question here is identity, and the root

Of words so vague they double

For cheese cloth, screen doors, or another leaking ‘thing’

Of your possibilities, another off the hook

Suggestion, the question here

Is who’s who and what’s to tell(any word) isn’t

For the biological mother and father tongue to sling,

They know just that, and exercise as such in transient forms—

The question here is what a word is and isn’t

Passing through the membranes of animals.

The question here is the vibration of words never stop, never die,

Never make meaning make meaning, or make meaning

To mean something like a symbol of a romantic idea, a turn signal maybe,

The dictionary is so laughable and yet it has laugh at (and) us

but can’t hear us laughing back,

Tricks us into cooing and cawing our meaning out of meaning, out thin air. And has

laughing Just like that like that: and lightning (another word) like that

______________

No repetition, lulls, just new vibration,

And if happen to collide, They then may—

In some reverent form another— mean something

Somewhere

The resulting wave finds a place to be deciphered,

Repackaged, bundled, stored, and eventually released

We will say what we think we say, we may think

The idea comes from what we said,

But if we think it so it’s so—

But are we the same

NOW:HERE

For having repackaged a movement,

Stretched a wave-length,

Bent the amplitude of little sound

Having Asked

“did you say something?”:

I told you that So that

you may have a freer word,

in turn You said to me, once,

That I mentioned I felt

Neither of what we said,

So are we, then—now, freer

From what we tell,

Or just vibrating?

I’m over it

______________

Twitter Report

Dear Reader, bear with me here, as I digress for a moment: Twitter

Free social networking tool. Micro-blog. Allows users to send and read messages

known as “tweets.”

Text-based posts of 140 characters or less. Character being defined as 1 type

space. Example tweet in brackets [R E D.] is six characters long. R being the first,

space the next, E the third, etc. Not counting brackets as part of the tweet.

Each user has a followers network, and a follow network. Users are allowed to

make their page of tweets as public, or as private as they choose. A user could

block all followers; no one could see the profile except the owner of the profile.

Or be viewable by all twitter account holders.

*IMPORTANT FEATURE: Like blogs and other board-style web postings, Twitter reads

in reverse chronology when read from top to bottom. As a user tweets and others tweet

back, a dialogue is created from the bottom up. However, when logging into the site at

first, the user is at the top of an ongoing conversation, a conversation they may or may

not have already been part of. The nature of the platform/user philosophy behind this sort

of web-chat format allows inter-user communication to occur in regular chronology as it

would in everyday, real-time conversations that are re-read top to bottom. This due to the

“post-reaction-post-reaction” format. Tweets and re-tweets can happen like rapid-fire

communication, each user tweeting several times per minute in response to other tweets,

or a topic totally new. Or they can take place over the course of several days, with just a

few sparse tweets from each user— making the conversation spread thinly between thick

groves of unrelated tweets that have happened between the two account holders, and their

followers/followed.

Here is a conversation that takes place in a relatively short amount of time:

(read from top down/reverse chrono)

“Fine! Be that way!” –clara123 7:14pm

“I’m leaving then.” –john316.5 7:12pm

“Oh, get over yourself— I can’t stand you sometimes!” –clara123 7:09pm

“clara123 & john316.5 r being soooooosoo reedunkulous!” –jimbob9696 7:08pm

“Whatever, Bush’s mess is stilling looming.” –john316.5 7:07pm

“Obama.” –clara123 7:04pm

“Who you think got us into this mess.” –john316.5 7:01pm

(now read from bottom up/real chrono)

For the regular user, conversation happens naturally in real-time. When read from top to

bottom by a bystander in hindsight, the conversation text itself, linguistically, is informed

only by itself (the illusion of otherwise is created by format alone); it (the statement)

doesn’t rely on its position in the whole text to achieve its meaning.

The closer the tweets are in time, the easier it is for a reader to recognize the

quick, methodic pattern, and begin to construct a story, albeit a back-story from collected

fragments, of what will come.

So, it becomes easier to predict where the conversation started, and see how it will

change over time. Like we may know, or have strong inclinations toward knowing, that a

film that begins with a scene of a man and a woman signing divorce papers— followed

by a scene of the two arguing in the master bedroom— followed by the two at dinner in

uncomfortable silence— followed then by the birth of their unplanned, second child—

followed by their first child’s birth— followed by their first date, (this film) may very

well end with them meeting as young lovers on a beach, for the very first time ever, as

the sun is setting, and new love is in mingling shadows on the sand. While that first

scene, the end we think we know, may be in fierce, hot colors, we may see— or think we

see— the ending in old black & white (but imagine the colors of a tropical sun set).

Never mind that though.

Either way, I’m not necessarily interested in the reverse chronology of the whole

love affair. And I’m not necessarily interested in using Twitter, as a social

communication tool. Although others are great for keeping up with old friends. I am

interested in using it as a personal model of composition, a format example used to

address the concepts and perceptions of narrative past, present, and future— working

toward a narrative that has none of those restraints, but is at once informed by them.

(Given the 140 character limit, the site itself will only prove useful in noting the

natural patterns of narrative that are created out of this format of communication. In that,

I seriously doubt that any good writing will come directly from it. Although, poem

sequencing might be interesting under its, Twitter’s, constraints).

When read top down:

Creates a dynamic, definite series of immediate premonitions,

A record of verbal, exact reactions to things yet said.

Allows each to become the moment of entry into the narrative

Allows each tweet to be its own pinnacle text as the reader moves down the page

By becoming in the temporal world of the reader, the past when they have moved on.

But in user-time, the tweeters’ time, which the text is composed in, and in which it

informs itself under the philosophy of— as the reader moves Down the page,

as each passing tweet is becoming past in temporal reality,

The tweets themselves are becoming the future, informed by the past,

One of two reasons composing seriously within twitter is overly binding—

Reactionary premonitions of premonitions reacting: the future

Works its way, moment after moment, toward a past it has no previous knowledge of.

A future unknowing of it’s past, or the notion of past at all,

Is no different than a past predicting the future.

Simultaneously pushing the reader forward and backward in time,

At once past and future cross into the other

And this is exactly the case, but…

Where is the present located between these strangers passing?

At the ever-shifting point of origin, point of entry— ?