Counterexample Poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry

BLUEPRINTS

One can own a mirror; does one - One can own a mirror; does one

then own the reflection - then own the reflection

that can be seen - that can be seen

in it?[1] - in it?[2]

Alone in her attempts to free Dynamo

and Lucy crashed through true story

fixed on inventing angels

several melding persons

coyly repeating,

“If I wanted to know myself, I’d look at you.”[3]

“Your life is repeated in every eye you meet.”

“You people are dying, knocked upon

cries.” “I’ll throw a wet dream in

your throat and laugh, and laugh and die.”

Let the bewildered, the untouched, the simple

perpetuity that prose invents cry with God

inside us. “I am my mother’s child, the

explosion of apple pies and heart’s delight

the adornment of cracked glass camouflaging

skin.” “Goodnight

heavy gravestones, goodnight

maimed children and your gorgeous bullets.”

Dynamo flushed the Funhouse hall of mirrors with Margaret

closing in one hundred hallowed

hands grappling her indecision.

“I watched the compassionate jazz

in marriage starve,

becoming predatory.”

“I could love you for the rest

of your life

inhabitant of that city.”

Dear Lucy,

I will leave drunken and dissatisfied.

Dynamo

Lucy slit her wrists with red crayon.

Dynamo reinvented her

“born of the sexual shock”[4].

The act of her anger trafficked

intemperance. When you embrace

this flesh, record it accurately

defenseless alone in a room.

With a loaded revolver

he grabbed her arms

to dress her, on a pier

by the ocean, a halved

moon dressed in tiny

pomegranate seeds

chilled to blush.

This is untrue. This has to do with how

she fell asleep on

my lips, a spider

clenched in a fist.

She died at sunrise.

Margaret is drowning.

Dynamo save her.

Darling,

Inside you a guillotine waits

a bloody jasmine attracting

a rigid incendiary.

My ballad to you

is the skeletons

of shut mouths. “Dynamo

I will not allow you to reappear.”

At Father and Mother’s funeral

Dynamo’s fat penis toasted

his pants rubbing against

Lucy’s Queen of Hearts.

“Pass the stuffing. Pass the gravy. I can kill anyone I want.

I’ll drink any poison they got.”

“‘I make myself look like god’[5]

imperfectly modest

forgetting this will make you

crazy. You are the complete thought

of a valueless instrument.

Your alphabet no longer entertains me.”

“These walls have worn us thin,

and in the purged telemetry of angels

lounge the bastard fathers of letters,

poems, and kisses.” Rimbaud sails on a box of Wheaties.

It’s rather like hunting mushrooms

without John Cage’s fantastic smile.

Because “Heros have heavy lips”[6]

Dynamo attached several bags of

sand by two pierced hooks.

This is paradise,

a beach for two between an impossible

God and a back road tunnel

leading to where questions hide

from answers.

This is paradise, a formula

filled with quiet longing. “I love you, again,

standing in dreams,

a night large with stars.

“I wouldn’t embarrass you ever.”

“Tell everyone to have guts.”

“Tell them to burst through the margins.”

“Tell them their mouths have meaning.”

“You are a joyful mystery,

and I am only lonely

intersected

by happiness.”

Is a mirror a sheltering image,

an intangible army of love?

“I hope that we shall find that we have one tongue.”[7]

“I have no use for your drunken babble.”

“I have known for a long time of the celebrating

return of fiction, a love replayed

in obvious unrest. Dynamo placed his arm

around her. “I will bleed into your mouth a new

love.” “Let us kiss

until our tongues

embrace their

nuptials.” “You grow transparent and impatient.”

Between love and the idea of love

for dearest Lucy

has gained the highest function of fate

wanting more for indecision

to abate such slow slurring waters

strong enough to return

arguments from mirrors.

“I want something to eat,” whimpered Margaret.

She slammed her fists against the earth

shoving handfuls of grass and dirt

between her sweaty, rigid fangs.

“You insist on rain

because you thrive on audience,

a place to worship gods and

hold hard to hurt.”

It is not unfair to say that Dynamo is the shimmering

pattern of light and dark.

“I’m telling you a story, a dream

tunneling through ethos and abstraction.”

Margaret laughed heartily.

She slept later that day, faint and short.

“Goodbye, I love you.”

Margaret died on a Tuesday

buried beside Mother and Father

the abstract message on her tombstone

read, “Under and under we are all

dead now.”

Dynamo married Lucy in his sleep and together

raised thirteen children in a nearby slaughterhouse.

“All night there has been a quiet, persistent rain

and I am a being promised to tangible substance.”

Things were different then.

It is an empty house now.

There are only ghosts and skeletons

murmuring in dreams.

What if the last time he was moved to touch

defined her cheekbones, shoulders, and

breasts? “I tell you darling, if I never desire

your body, actual words are only fragments

servicing gasps,

joys of the living.”

This is paradise, lover’s murdering each other

only in photographs. They wait alone in famous

songs, worshipping admirers.

“I cannot be more than a man,” claimed Dynamo

a shadow, meaningless, biting back only

on demand.

Dynamo became a triumphant animal. Their gravestones

were heavy with angels. Margaret’s suicide by

violin became the succulent mistrust

of all women.

“I have lived for years and years talking of love

and remembering not so much

as yesterday.

Lucy

and Dynamo

were married on a summer

afternoon, surgically joined by the wrist.

“Let’s build a house of human remains, beginning

with the silence of a hanging action.”

“Let’s make love an interminably comfortable agony.

When I was four I crawled into Father’s icebox

and constructed a farmhouse in my heart,

and the ice burned and slashed

and the children died, eyes

ripping and shuddering

falling forward.

I screamed.

I sang such impassive lies, such discretions

cloned, sliced like meat,

the inside of thinking.”

“I want everyone.”

“There is only one place for you to sleep,

where beautiful music reigns suction and thrust

the persistent traveling of echoes measuring heat.”

“Who am I,” cries Dynamo.

“You are the water’s edge.”

Lucy drew back her gown revealing his resemblance.

A strange city by design collapsed in

blueprints of her ravaged anatomy.

Dynamo uncorked champagne

and nuzzled her broken streetlights.

“I am stunned and will not soon forget

to savor your contortions.”

[1] Zettel, Ludwig Wittgenstein

[2] Dynamo, Joseph Cooper

[3] Circle, Robert Creeley

[4] To Daphne and Virginia, William Carlos Williams

[5]Childish Poem or The Welcomed Beating, Logan Ryan Smith

[6] A Birthday Poem For Jim (And James) Alexander, Jack Spicer

[7] Letters to James Alexander, section 2., Jack Spicer

from An Average Pregnancy

Things tend to awaken from photographs,

sentences devoted to burning houses. But there is nothing

meaningful in a smile

forgotten by its antagonist.

Lucy stood at the window undressing

a manikin, first his beret

then eye patch,

and cigarette for love. “I love

you again.” She brushed away his revolution

drunken and dissatisfied. “I failed to draw you

a map of yesterday’s love.”

“I don’t know if there is room in the world

for the empty colors and

forms of a loveless marriage,”

said Mother fearing God.

“When you look at me, melted all over her

detached from my own body,

poor, loving, and crazy

bluish violet dreams

creased

and craving an argument still visible

echoing in darkness, you’ll call

against the black pubic hair

of her vagina dripping

sweat from its

wings pumping away

faithfully,

changing color

the open secret

of framed transparency.”

“If you wander far enough

you’ll come to it, gesticulating the tedious echo

of failure, that lies

without any thought of chance.”

Dynamo tossed and turned in his cocoon

undoing the dead in his head.

A glass doorway

a lonely heart,

the monster you love

remembered,

locked inside itself, thrusting

disapprovingly

between sacrament

and cemetery.

“My purpose is no longer distinguishable.”

“I want to understand the symptom of color.” [1]

“Our lake is a secret dear Dynamo,” said Lucy wrapping

his body in shallow eaves.

“We are shadows of statues and rock,

the unparalleled imagination of God.”

Dynamo and Lucy wrapped themselves in each other

in a euphoric stream and suddenly

mirrors appeared in

prosaic symmetry. Compulsively,

she fell into his pockets becoming

chic and pretentious, blue stilettos

a deception at all times. “This is completely wrong.”

“If we want our lips to meet, you must stutter

your revolver between them.”

Dynamo reached for his pocket. “What a filthy animal

you are you

error in the margin.”

“Listen to your perfect swelling tone.”

Dynamo laid down his weapon.

His heart tasted sweetly in remorse.

FOR LOVE,

“I would like to please your constant concern,

completely wrong, the quiet things

broadened into shadows.”

“I thought it would get better.”

“The woods are growing thick. Where were you

last night?”

“I was here at a distance.”

“They rushed me through the ceremony and I

continued shouting, ‘Can you hear me love?

Can you hear me love?’ without reply.”

“And this love is like nothing I can imagine,”

replied Dynamo becoming a single raindrop

in an ocean of jellyfish.

[1] www.michellenakapierce.blogspot.com, Michelle Naka Pierce

Joseph Cooper is currently writing and teaching in Princeton, WV.
He is the author of the full-length books TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009)
and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), as well as the chapbooks
Here Come the Groovies co-authored with Andrew K. Peterson (Livestock Editions, 2011),
Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007),
and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion co-authored with Jared Hayes
(Hot Whiskey 2005). He is the 2009 winner of the Equinox Chapbook Award from
Fact-Simile Editions with his chapbook, Point of Intersection. In addition, his work
has appeared in numerous journals including most recently The Ash Anthology,
BlazeVox11, Counterexample poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry, Bombay Gin,
Brown Bagazine, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Sex and Murder, and Sous Rature.