ISSUE 24: WINTER 2014

How to Cohere

What it resembles. Something. The front of one creature.


What it resembles.

Something.

The front of one creature.

So.

Like talking to themselves.

No was.

Mostly, I have.

Talk as distinct from figuration.

Dwell.

Away and with

the multiple of dense voices.

Then say

It’s not ever today.

I’d light what it stands to be.

And speak that physics.

These smatterings alone.

The only way of my sense.

A practical spoken we.

All of a code swinging subject.

In chattering lines,

what could cohere, loosens.

Know whatness.

Open up. Say I.

Part from each.

It’s all presentation.

It’s jaw as a

universe about to drop.

What it resembles.

One and one other and others.

The city summarized in

the tallest structure.

The CN tower not

green tonight not

blue tonight.

So birds go there

go up there

The noise of light—

Was going to say:

Green veins in the turquoise,

Or, the grey steps lead up under the cedars.

So.

Talk tower, say south

say it straightens say ah oh so

it’s red tonight

going up in waves.

Neon vein of the tower.

Do you see what I mean?

If you paint houses

sky blue and they are.

All over blue out there.

Is it red tonight?

Is it going up in waves?

A veined structure

postcard close.

The moving city

so settled on stillness

flicks off with weather.

[tab15]Take a seat[/tab15]

[tab15]The chairs are not[/tab15]

[tab15]Move around[/tab15]

[tab15]Open your[/tab15]

[tab15]Or stay[/tab15]

[tab15]Look[/tab15]

Buster Keaton in The Playhouse.

Dances himself. Mother-self to son-self. Lover-selves quarrel. Married and a bachelor, all instruments. Conducts from the stage.

Voiceless he says, This Keaton seems to be the whole show.

He splits

in chorus with

theatre loge, orchestra pit,

backstage, front row.

There they are.

Buster Keatons.

Bored and joyed.

The bored joy

of taking a seat.

Keaton dreaming

himself awake and infinite

as Circe or Tiresias.

The screen in black

and white mouths

honky tonk.

I was coming together anyway,

so I clustered.

This Keaton seems to be

the whole show. And I am,

I am almost Keaton in

the audience one

hundred years later

another shirt

more coffee.

The CN tower

out the window,

the stairs going up.

Eternal patterns.

Figures of the mind.

The whole show.

Every Keaton falls on his ass

silently.

I ask,

Can you say you dream

wakefulness?

4:30 in the morning.

2 a.m.

At the last, let go.

One Keaton throws the cello.

Another one plays.

One and one other.

Say

hold still. Say keep.

The film flickers a silent

chaos of Keatons.

Out my window, the ceiling

is corrugated plastic.

Being alive with the talk

of boys in the city

and

creatures that came

with the weather.

Still

You might want some yellow.

You might want some purple.

Goes up in waves. The singular

structure.

Where leaves lean

they’re south-west and winter.

Grow black-grey fur. Grow eyes.

Flesh tails and teeth.

The daydream

is digital puff

turning brown and light

enough to enter.

Out there choice as

ice trees caught as

wild fountains splitting.

“And I have tried to keep them from falling.”

This Keaton is the whole show.

The complete unit.

Photo files

line up by date.

Faces to the fore.

There they are.

Three boys break bottles

in the alley again.

Sky-blue houses

drop off the grid.

Flood alarm.

Continue.

Until what

comes next.

A selection of yous.

Forward or onward

motion, as a timeline

marked by tallest structures.

I love you as

a record of dates.

NOTES:

ease of surface.

NOTES:

surface holds the

genre of fairy tales.

NOTES:

the moral spell

written.

NOTES:

the resistant histories

and the types of decay.

And Thoreau emerging from the woods says,

If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes.

Perhaps I have.

Every recording

begins with the word So.

An axis of

hula hoops and skipping ropes.

Saying multaneously:

It is as the edge of embryo.

I was it. I have that approaching self.

It is theatre

fooling around in

the human amalgam.

And what there is of light loves

the dishes first then takes

to the floor.

Light of the city as

word, myth, or Do Something.

The sufferance of objects

contaminated first.

This mess of afternoon on the dishes.

Keaton says, “Messieurs, assayer-vous.”

To go in backwards

Begin silent and sit.

The sublime contaminated

by intents will forget

the light out the window.

The light in the kitchen.

Real coffee in a real cup somewhere.

What seems to bother

people’s attentions?

Music one listens to.

Music one plays.

Builds toward a person

of little routines.

In the alley

[tab10]stairways go up[/tab10]

to

be composed—

[tab5]to[/tab5]

be

made.

Tonight

orange light going up

the tower in wave.

And here is the house

becoming oneiric.

In attention

and the usual

sense.

In our daily experience as

mimetic contractors.

And there is the story

of the cat and the bird.

The voice suffused by

what it says:

Saw a bird by its head

in the cat’s mouth.

If I compared it

to a sky

that’s where

I last saw it.

The bird sound

in the cat mouth.

When she dropped it

there was calm in the house—

everything appearing to sleep,

all certainty in light and sound

where appearance is made.

And there

on the floor

the tremor

of the tea towel.

Every attention of the neural,

the constructive, and the definable

existing subject altogether aligns.

Now

I am

you again.

Not like a tower.

Not red or blue at all.

Closer to

the edge of a dock.

What it resembles.

From none to some.

Run a dirt bath.

Assemble.

You dissolve into future

versions. Coffee on the stove.

So.

Remember this:

In the creations,

all that says

God is Buddhistory.

And to protons,

the world is their influence

of a massifying looseness.

Buster Keaton dances,

bones, tambo,

asleep in the deep.

Wake up. Be here.

Give permission: collective-poet.

A series of minoritative-I’s

gathering to creature.

Out there in the hours

you learn dialectic.

The red light going up

the tower of the city.

This is all previous.

The amalgam that scatters.


About the author

Jenny Sampirisi is a plucky narrator of one thing or another.