The Book of Mummy

[starting over]

My friend just did something crazy. Something really crazy. He took this poem I read and wrote it. And then, after he read it, after he had written it, after he had it written by himself, he asked me to write something for him to say in my own voice as a response. So I sent him a recording of what I would have written for him to say as me, and then he read it back to me.

And when I listened to it, I started writing it down. And I started over at every moment. I began again and again. Every time I heard it, I started again. Over and over I started beginning. And the longer I listened, the darker it got.

That's what he told me. And when I when I came outside I noticed it was dark. The sky had already become dark. It darkened. And there was a sense that it had been dark for a long time, but also there was the necessity for the light for the light to begin again, in a kind of aggressive, tyrannical way, and I understand that. Well sadly I say that in a kind of patronizing way, as if  I'm not affected by the day.

But it's an it's another move altogether to gain power for the Empire of Night, which I represent. And we are part of that company. The Company of Night, a subsidiary of the Party of Knife Memory, a much larger conglomerate consortium cohortium. Nasturtiums are spiciest in the morning. Spicier than night flowers.

And there's creeping that happens. Walking around and listening. And doors are opened on the other side, and doors are closed on this side. And there's a sense of private excommunication in the night. And I remain there as long as long as the night is. And I’ll be neutral in the night and do exactly what I need to do.

And I’ll  pretend to have sympathy for the those who go about in the day as if it were the best time of day, and as if it were supposed to be that way. I will pretend to understand them. I'll go along with it. But it will be difficult because I know that it isn’t and it’s not. There's a whole there's a whole section of the night devoted to doing only what must be done, and the next thing I do will be in accordance with that realization, and all these anti-reflective gestures will creep in and brush up against me, awkward and paranoid.

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[poem 3]

This line explicitly references the possibility of composing poem 1. This line is a metrical cog that is indispensable for the proper functioning of poem 2. Poem 2 is a sublation of poem 1. I washed my sheets, which was difficult because I was so attached to her. This line enacts a metaleptic slippage for emotional effect.

To create this line, the author meticulously copied out and pasted up around town letter by letter and word for word the acclaimed classic of literary world history world literary history using nothing but a brush and ink, a large roll of thin newsprint, and a bucket of wheat paste, a process so laborious that many asked why he hadn’t  used a simpler computational method. This line is an entire novel, an acclaimed classic of the literary world, copied and pasted. This line gives an image of the system it is an integral part of, but only achieves this by stepping outside of the system and directly referencing it, thereby betraying itself as separate from and not integral to the system itself. Replacement to what effect?

In a topological semantics, one image of an aesthetic system involves the maximization of ambiguity, while networks of symbols continually surround a point of critical intensity. The locus amoenus for poetry is at this point of critical intensity just before complexity begins to wane and entropy continues to exponentiate. P equals q because when I look into the mirror and lean forward, the guy in the mirror leans back.

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[line of duty]

Cloth, but no clothes.

Frost but not froze.

A price to pay when the night turns to day.

I've put on a thousand such cloaks.

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[moments]

Puny and belated angles of time ruin the middle of an altruistic depression, angels leveling unlearned interruptions in his hunting. Frozen and impudent, he could not bear his advantage, this lame neighborhood, a poor nothing in this world of ours. Compared to undulation, leaden showers, the grape canister takes a spill and a stab at facts. A tedious romance goes by the title of holy falsehood.

A chore beheld in a house not handsome, paraphrased in the great envoy of muslin veiled pink maidens that trade a question for the kind of rhyme that joins horse sweat to Rochester Helicopter, plummet mandala. Octachords. Earth appears lost without. And outer runaround. The problem of surges. Gradating.

Branches Tweeze. You think at what scared Electronics Square big blue evens.

Out and lost. Root. The problem sacked through ground floor window. Involuntary.

Revision. Wrote. Flush. Herb.

Whose foreign body forgiven argues with some dreamy chap who took a hurtful spirit to the modern animal as an antique vegetable guide. No penalty attached.

The novel can no longer fringe or look like engine. Like dead fish or cloth money, maintenance of decision persists and Luck flows. Insulted by Expression’s request to return to dead society. And this scruffed crystal makes excavations in wooden famine, touching speech, piercing radiant caves of greetings. Lust balanced by doting gallops, the sanguine probationer making brainy observations like, look, right there on the wall near the top, in two small symmetrical arcs.

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[envelope]

Slip, friend, slip.

Slip. Slip off the conscience. Needs accuser. Guilt lay. Guilt cut for time.

For plug, conspired flings to capitulate cleats. Understudy disgorges clinks, crinkling unswathed caduceus where the voice proceeds until looking through seems to him a mile per minute with woman in hand, the hatband tight. Dick's hatband tight, hatching battens apart for tear, to tear away from Mushroom Musical.

Pared home under two winged clouds, rent up for joy, to keep things hostile in this brutish psychic trade. The zonal roots are such that trees require contempt to walk stiffly. On worn out doorstops and in the calendar's robe, Tree Boss passed through daily grinds in choleric subclauses innumerable to escort time fast diminishing down channels of mortal perfume.

Vulgar hearts crow bar arrows from Reason. Potent armies in linen statue bodies, the bridge, stilletoed lexington desperation. Which attending can most oblige? Bawdry carnies behind the rotunda, too far to push behind March, against the crisp burn of an ampersand to put distance in detail.

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[a bad bucket]

Uninformed, the stone wall amassed a cool naked dissolvableness, with thought perched lightly on the contrary. To feel them poke among the named all the several rhetoricians there, it widened under the spell of some notion of angelic laughter to tutor the returned in a propriety dependent upon a distance that won't hold water, the better to sit on and peel the skin off you teeth with. Don't let out of the room this phrase, true gigantic ingredients to gain hospitality.

I'm glad to tell you that she can't stand the spotlight, its flitting and lapping in the fans, the child open. Tiptoe. Broke hurry in latitude, seeing the old chance with his gray locks growing sick in pigtails, the rope he'll hang himself badly by and tired straight. Inhumanity working on its birthday, facing the green spur unsheathed, fainting aerial and lagging soft upon the chest. And lastly, where it's unhasting function leans.

Toward the top of her thighs, pressed in the sojourn there. Admirable vowels call it a close shave. The grandson of description. The blow of description you play. What you know. And what you want thus scrawled inside this sign where she meets you and picks a fight to mix her hopes with, and nothing in the way of preparation of speaking at a tilt on either shoulder. The bird quaffs with abandon and billows an ornamental speaking. New flakes of paint lash dignity into relapse.

Masquerade intractable, the overturned singing and the yellow poet repeat minute deeds swinging about like fireproof bodices, cross pollinating despotism with an unrealized pantomime making belief out of action, converting turbocars by parasynthesis into everything will work out all right, the horsemen insists in disguise.

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[the poacher of recall]

Hooked discs, taut eyebrows raised dismiss pity and flare naturally. Scarcely ordered dawdles relocate their ban on the skeletonized to torch the circumflex. You would have to bust our racket, a poor one for law, an oblong bulb being pointed like blab. To blab out oblivion. For die. To put them in a short time for a short piece of bread. Ashore went distrust, erecting geckos nobody understood, throwing some close ups at the curve, disqualifying some special part of spring.

Mopping up civilized worlds in newsprint. Prokaryotes, radiotherapists, conjecture of colorometers, what's needed to govern the deed where rhetoric disagrees, where whooshes turn up the drenching, trapping little wanton emcees, Celestial Jackfish in cashmere. Click to recall distrust, it requires momentum, this sea, the poacher of recall, monochrome blanketing lovelocked smoke in rhododendron. Oddities. Major cans of small letters.

Autocrats gesticulating with all of their elements inside messages pretending to be couples cozy on planes, or wisdoms sweetening their glossaries. To balk at the proposal of doing all these things. And did she seriously consider the seriousness of the debauchers nibbling at recondensed grunts, grunts ensphered in the corner of that conical stem engraved with Enormous Importance? The disjunct decreed those honors that she’d touched. The colored shore gasping at the demonic recoding of keystrokes, vetoed holepunchers, and other harmonies which subsist in the sounds of relations.

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[Author’s Note]

The salivary trident is prolix and harmonic.

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