Music in Scraps of Payment

Some more cut-ups and appropriations

Right now I’m in the middle of writing at least half a dozen manuscripts, and each one is wildly different. Something is going on because I get further and further away from the ways I used to write. A few weeks ago I shared a cut-up poem here, and I’ve continued working with this mode alongside other modes. Each of these was written in a different way, but all use some measure of cut-up and appropriation. Not sure what else to say about it right now but thank you if you are reading this. Truly.

---

YEAH

after Ted Berrigan

I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
The butterfly puddles the wiry puzzles
Of great mud intelligence & feeling
Yeah I like the wiry butterfly puzzles
Of the pilgrim’s mud & verities
The fiery frayed intelligence 
And muddle toward this feeling 

____________

 
LYRIK AMERIKANISCHE

Life went on. Grift and acid, stolen lights and cockroaches. Insurrection was in the air. Tom Cruise, who'd helped me deal with the February case, called one day and asked me to meet him. I did. He asked if I'd like to take over the publishing end of The Berserk Cannery Ltd. I'd get a laser printer as part of the deal, he said. I considered this. Then he asked me how I felt about lotteries. He asked how I felt about terraforming, and then he said something about guns. The last publisher of the Berserk had blown his head off. I wasn't quite sure what Tom had in mind. I said I’d have to learn.

______________

Another reel, then cold. 
Then he shortens it, gives in 
to common price. Says, “You bite off 
your Earth then die on Mars?” 
Pronounced it “foal,” pronounced “flux.” 
After that he signed the contract 
with a voice like nothing known. 
Signed “ash.”

                     Winds. Soft incisor
modeling. Music in scraps of payment.
We find ourselves midsentence in pure
malevolence formed by labs, days on loan. 
Chipped remnants of his mother’s generation, 
an otherworldly romance exposed on film. 

Then nothing for six billion years. 

It brings suspicion like it reads. 
Still listening for the buried couple, 
the fieldmouse you squeak up to me.
Filtered wishes, voices I address to you. 
Always shadow, habit of news, stockpiles, 
genesis of the true. Arrived here only yesterday. 
Strayed, in cuts, then listened for you.

____________


APRIL

is a technique in astrology providing a detailed analysis 
just a monstrosity it’s true a kind of black swan event 
of a person’s life. At the outset I base this on apology: 
I am a last-minute fill-in who comes out of nowhere 
and if you don’t have an explanation of “morally corrupt
aesthetically obsolete thematically superficial temperamentally 
boring” then you can’t read the social dynamics of the project 
& its literary productions. Meaning (since it's no longer 
autocracy) I'm sensitive too, silly to say. Love, the co-op.