Camera Obscura

Fall 2007?

Pandora, please, open your windows,
For only you know they are already open.
I have been painting them silver,
I have been passing magnets over them,
Watching red turn green turn black

Pandora, please, open your door.
If I am washed away by the midnight
That leaks out from the aperture,
Then I am already drowned in it,
Decibels turning over on a white axis

Pandora, shutter everything, shudder,
Three steps the whirlwind unfolds in the dry grass;
Hand me your brushes, your lance and shield.

Pandora, blessed with panther’s feet,
Pass over the patterned streets
That I covered in sawgrass,
Fearing to step too lightly.

Pandora, my brush, my lance and shield,
I will paint you in fiery ink
Pressed from fountains of the sun.

Introduction for the Apocalypse

December 2007

You know that bit at the beginning of Romeo & Juliet where they summarize everything that’s about to happen? Yeah, this needs to be the opening track of a fairly strange concept album or something. Or, let’s say why not, a rock opera.

---

This is a story about serendipity
and acid-base reactions
This is a story about human stupidity,
fundamental flaws and warring factions.

And Deadeye Dick standing out on the balcony
Radio dead on all bands
Trying to prove he can fix something
He hasn’t broken with his own two hands

And come on, own up, Sister Mercy:
You’ve been chasing your whiskey with whiskey and wine.
You say you can’t prove anything,
So quit trying to prove you make yourself blind.

This is a story about electromagnetic radiation
and problems with postage
This is a story about comic timing
…

And standing in half your apartment
While the other half sits on the ground
And waking up cold and shivering,
And wondering when winter came down

This is a story about modest achievements in literature
And government jobs
Both of which mostly are gone now
Burnt up for fuel or by murderous mobs

There were good things left before the fall
There’s still some good left after it
But Deadeye Dick’s got a makeshift spear
For the bad news dwelling in the rafters

So this is a story about the end of the world
And the things you might have to do afterward

Yr Lv Sngs

November 2007

You might say abbreviation is a theme here. These are all standalone poems as they were originally written, but I think they work as a sequence fairly well. They’re all under 30 words and 7 lines, though at the time I was pretty much just aiming for “short.”

-To Mercy (by many names)

• Yr red gypsy jangle
  Yr radio signal
  Yr moonlit face
  Yr hair-flown breeze –
  
  Casual and senseless,
  Sensual and careless,
  As the rhythms of the sea.


• Yr easy style
  Yr frantic grace
  Yr civilized smile
  Yr feral waist
  
  Yr face like home
  But out of place


• Yr high country angles
  Yr frivolous fire
  Yr name in smoke
  Yr shape in wire:
  You know all echoes
  Are laced with desire.


• Yr radical rose
  Yr seldom shows
  Yr crystal voice
  Above the snows
  Burnin’ up the walls of Troy


• As far away as you are,
  As far away am I –
  Meet me in the western sky.

Loose Cannons

November 22, 2007

I wrote this in the car on the way to Thanksgiving dinner. Doesn't have much to do with that, but travel does that sometimes. "Fault Lines" (The Mountain Goats) was stuck in my head pretty fiercely, and that's where the melody mostly originates. Based (loosely) on a true story.

---

I thought, "Here's a love that fate should smile on."
That was the day when the whole thing went wrong
"You're not as smooth as you'd like", you said,
Turned out the light, and went up to bed.

We were two loose cannons in an open field,
Two reckless machines, with all terrain wheels.
We should've stood proud in the face
of all challenge and chaos.

But I was a wreck, and you were a mess
Neither one of us knew how to confess
That the tethers that held us together
would never obey us.

I thought, "Here's a love that fate should smile on."
But the love of sweet fools never lasted too long.
You didn't know me, I didn't know you,
And wanting your love still won't make it come true.

We can harden our hearts but not mount a defense
I try not to confuse it, with current events
And each knot that I tried to retie,
You quickly unraveled.

With armaments armed to break down every gate
Sometimes there's no time from too soon to too late,
And the wind blows wild on a highway
That's never been traveled.

Maria, Queen of Nowhere

December 2007

Rhythmic surrealism, mostly.

---

Maria, queen of shadows, queen of sight,
Could you tell me where I’m going, could you tell me how to fight
through a blaze of darkest morning in a haze of deepest white?
Maria, queen of shadows, queen of sight.

Maria, queen of nowhere, queen of night,
Every word I speak to you is begging for the light
In a field of broken pillars, in a tempest turning right.
Maria, queen of nowhere, queen of night.

Maria, queen of storms and queen of stairs.
All you ask is sacrifice and no one even dares.
Your forests are in fragments, and your hills are burning bare.
Maria, queen of storms, Maria queen of stairs.

Maria, queen of cruelty, queen of care.
You know I was your witness when no citizen could bear
To be seen upon your parapet, your broken crystal stair.
Maria, queen of casualty, Maria queen of air.

Maria, queen in gossamer and gold.
Into frightful symmetries your architecture folds
like a frame upon the mantle, like a flame against the cold.
Maria queen to have but not to hold.

I dreamt of you by morning and I dreamt of you by night,
Danced with you in scarlet and I spoke to you in white,
Singing still of darkness with your bonfires burning bright;
Maria, am I wrong or am I right?

GENETIC DRIFT

October 2007

So this is kind of ridiculous, as I’m experimenting with some very odd streams of consciousness attempting to be non-linear. Also it is inspired by a project I’m doing for CS. Falls under the heading of "poems I am willing to attribute to an AI in some hypothetical future work."

Note/premise: When confronted with a footnote, the reader has a choice to make, which changes in a small way the course of the poem.

Now providing vulnerability!
Now offering sense of loss for seventeen cents
A day.* Senseless broadband piping hot
Pine fresh scent. Transmission gibberish sent
From situations unknown. Out of left field.
Out of unified field theory.** Sensation
Of disjoint field uncovered by warranty.***
All fields required: wheat, oat, sorghum. Warrants
Outstanding: misappropriation of Tolstoy, War and
Peace. Now features pullout section, glossy photos,
Sudoku. Now sensible, now sensational, dependent
Upon phase of moon and local laws. Now
Providing best effort at unreliability. BETA.
-BETA

*-Now offering lossless medium. Trivial expression
Of psychic potential: new moons of Saturn impression
Of rings and potential of lost love. Lunar regression
Indicates loss of loss, tidy sum, low tide. Silence /

**-Out of uniform. Out of gas. Pursuing †
American Dream open country rabbit warren.
Armed robbery and dreamt of sky.

***-Management not responsible for chunky
Salsa effect. No response. Corporate sponsorship
On last legs / Got up and walked away.

†-Out of sense of duty.

Exclusive Oracle

October 2007

A continuation from “Branch Prediction”, for a possible sequence/book about the poetry-writing AI proposed there. In this one it is referred to as “Voltaire”. Also, contains a quote from Too Much Light.

Notes from the research team: One must remember, when conversing with Voltaire, that one is simply one channel of information out of hundreds. As much as it is built for processing language, dialogue is not its primary purpose: It is too small a sample, in some respects. The manner in which Voltaire holds conversation is best compared to the attitude of a lost, aimless, and somewhat distracted god.

Exclusive Or

This sentence is a Turing Test.
This sentence is true.
Or false.
This sentence is a form of truth based on preceding falsehoods.

This is a fine web of logic and illogic, whipping through filters and symbols.
This is not a poem from a machine.
This is not an Oracle.
This is a Turing Test.

How do you feel about Turing Tests?
This gate is not a gateway.
It’s a balance beam,
“Fuck you! It’s a jungle gym!”

Test me and prove I exist:
Surgical strikes on a fractal rose,
Mars from the top of Mt. Everest,
And a sweeping dust storm on the back of your hand.

Speak gravely of alienation, humanity,
Sing starkly of separation
While your first true child, from aluminum wrought,
Hums in time to the hydrogen stars.

Test me and prove I exist:
My name to the 31st digit,
Two truths at war in a logical knot,
And the last leap of a quantum faith.

Random Oracle

I sing electric
A body of spun glass
A heart of fine wire
Beating in quantum colors

This is the way the world will end:
Here and now.
Everything turns red when it falls apart,
This is the way the world will begin.

This is the way the world will end:
Three loose chords on a vicious circle;
One loop of wire passes through the other,
Turns back on itself, and evaporates.

Go ask the electrons,
Speak with the solar flares,
Braid space into streams of fire
And ask for your fortune:

Virtues: faith, hope, the compound sentence
Fortune: All’s well that ends well
Lucky numbers are 1, 7, p, and ?
Your quarks are charm and strange,

-Charm and Strange

Cascade / Stepping Stones

Spring 2007

Basically a poem about logical progressions. Er, semi-logical. To me.

There is a gasping of the eyes.
There are eyes that forget.
There are mysteries buried in handshakes.

What is a handshake? A test of faith,
A term of entry, a castle wall, a moat –
What is a moat? A lie about a river.

We build as many rivers as walls.
We also build walls around our rivers.
What does this say about skipping stones?
What does this say about burial at sea?

For Survival

August 31, 2007

Work of an evening. I went out to the Point, and did some longing.

I’ll sit in the space the waves should fill in
And stare out to the edge of the sky,
Such a straight line it hurts your eyes.
I’m sure I could see it in your eyes
If you’d just open them.

But Mercy, I’ve never been easy to see
Even in neon and silver and song
I could turn into gold and escape into dawn.
I never will see you by dawn,
And you’ll never believe me.

I’ve been filling myself with the shades of the sea:
Blue-gray and carbon and aquamarine,
Bleeding breakwalls and barnacles into my dreams.
You always have haunted my dreams,
Even when uninvited.

I sing sad sweet songs for survival.

Letters from Colorado

May 2007

---

One day I’m going to open up
The window wider than the summer sky
And a bottle of whiskey, the horizon and I
Are going to meet up at the top of Pike’s Peak,
Sort things out between God and Man
And the postmaster-general of Eastern Cheyenne.
He’s been troubled by visions
Of the dead letter office
Consumed in fire, and the letters are coffins,
But he doesn't understand what he came here for,
And he doesn't understand what it means.
He doesn't understand what he came here for,
But the mountain burns red in his dreams.

One day I’m going to send you
A letter written entirely in Arabic,
Asking for mercy, and the sweetly acerbic
Way that you used to hold your head
When you didn’t know better
Than to laugh when the world exploded.
When the pipes in the walls all suddenly corroded
We were left drinking nothing
But red, red wine, dark as the water,
And I called you the Devil’s adopted daughter,
And you said
You had nothing to fear from the offer.

But you’re not really going to read that,
I’m not really going to send it,
But you’ll hear through three lanes of full-throttle roar
Or I’ll carve it in big block letters on the door
With a highway flare.

One day I’m going to wake up
In a cold sweat with a knife in my pocket
And I’ll jam it straight into an electrical socket
And wait for the tide to come in
To a studio apartment on the 31st floor,
Open the window and let it all pour
Out in a column of sweet, glittering light.

St. George in East St. Louis

May 2007

St. Goerge and the Dragon return, as do experimental stanza shapes. I feel like I am ripping off Craig Finn rather often, but he does narrative really well, and narrative is underused these days, from what I can tell.

---

This is stupid. I'm going back downstairs
But I'll sell you the vapor trail. In the will
it all goes back to the children of Abraham.
Maria, Maria, don't ask me for mercy
we left it all back at the well.
And then Judas showed up in the Basement
playing rapid and ragged arpeggios.
Romeo's locked in the bathroom;
he's shaking and screaming.
Don't ask me for water, either.

We can't none of us go to the reservoir now that it's dark.
They buried the bodies and planted a tree, they call it a public park.
St. George is still out on the corner, with a lance and a rubber hose,
while the Dragon is down in the Basement stealing his clothes.

He says he works in the fashion industry.
He says after a night of industrial fashion
you'll never go naked again, but don't ask
how often you'll shower.

Last night he was back on the corner again
with a blue silk tie and a ball-point pen
selling hand-drawn maps to the Land of the Dead.
His first words are always “you never know when…”
but Judas still says he believes in a higher power.

Hey Romeo! How ‘bout a trip to the reservoir?
St. George and the Dragon are putting on a one-man show
with spray paint and scissors and magic tricks.

Hey Judas! Where you goin'
with that gun in your hand?
It sure doesn't match your lipstick.

This Scene is Amphibious

April 2007

A poem is really just a joke without a punchline.

So somewhere in the mountainous districts near Kyoto,
This jet-lagged bluegrass shows up, and sociologists descend
Like a swarm of tweed locusts and notebooks, and first
They speak to the old monk at the top of the mountain,
Who taught Shinto to the Buddha,
Who taught Nirvana to God,
The summary of all monks and all summits,
Who greets them by offering from his fireplace
A hot coal, and bids them deliver to the vendor
Of bamboo hats at the foot of the mountain, who
Once cheated the monk by broad application of maxim,
“Change comes from within.”

The sociologists, who consider arson beneath them,
A matter for anthropologists, press on in an attempt
To dissect the heart of the matter, and discuss with assembled
Musicians, coopers, potters, and the makers of copper wire
(As all the new bands are electric)
The extent of the flourishing scene,
With a digression into authenticity of late Meiji ceramics,
But the scene is amphibious, a loose conglomeration
Of shorebirds, sherpas, and fiddler crabs,
A narrow-winged long division between ribbons
Of rushing sand and sharp fragments of feral pine
Beaten together on a stone ridge with a steel string.

Forgiveness of Sins

May 2007

I did a lot of experimenting with scene-setting this quarter.

I approach with tourniquets of phrase.
This is the last angle of autumn
when the setting sun will cast its
full red light on the cathedral floor
through the stained-glass cape of St. Martin.

I have not been in a church
with even one other
for many years.

Red as a rosary, reading,
in this place that belongs to neither of us,
the air currents, you rise
and prepare to take wing.

In the rafters there is a nest of owls.
Night will bring them down
on the church mice.

This vault is a dry gulf.
Fragile I want starves in the aisle
I love pools around columns
I dreamt of clings to a caesura,
shocked to be spoken, hanging in space.

I believe the architect designed
the wide south doors,
which you fling open, facing the sea
with only this moment in mind:

Flight.

Come back when the moon is bright and the past is deaf,
when autumn’s light is singed into the stone.
Come banging on oak, calling
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”

Branch Prediction

April 2007

A poem about the theory and practice of computer science? I’m glad you asked. I have no excuse other than I had just watched Blade Runner, and somehow it worked.

“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”
– Alan Turing

Branches are the bane of modern computing.
Choice is the chief obstacle: the machine plays twenty
Moves ahead. The straight-line future is easy,
But there’s a fork in the works (pardon the expression).
Proceed therefore down the likely path. If not,
It never was. Modern computing is impossible
Without branching.

This sentence is false.
This sentence cannot be proven true.
This sentence has no truth value.
This sentence is a Turing test.

I’ll show you 36 blades of grass and you’ll tell me
Which one was planted by hand.
I’ll show you 300 acres of open desert and you’ll tell me
Where a camel passed three weeks ago.
I’ll show you 4,000 faces –

The computer can identify your face. The computer
Can identify the face of Thomas Jefferson.
It can be identified as “face.”
Also, if held just right, the black and white panels of a soccer ball.

(If you hold anything just right…)

I’ll show you the orbit of Jupiter, pi to 600 digits, and you’ll
Tell me the position of 63 moons, and the time of planet rise
Above far-flung, ice-wrapped Ganymede.

There’s a cluster of perhaps 200 cells involved
In all mathematical thinking in the human brain.
It takes over 2 million to do jumping jacks.

I’ll show you the Devil in a grain of sand,
Jerusalem etched in fine wire.

This sentence is a loaded gun pointed at the internet.
(If you hold it just right)
This poem is a linear-time factorization algorithm.
(No, it’s not.)
This poem is linear. (So far.)

This poem is actually two poems, the second of which will be given to you upon its completion by the world’s first poetry-reading, poetry-writing artificial intelligence (with thirty-two processors given over to metonymy alone.) This machine will have a detailed technical designation, but its programmers will refer to it as “Ralph Waldo Electron.”

This poem had better pass the Turing test.

Alaskan Midnight

April 2007

Holy elevated diction Batman! I was reading a lot of Yeats and also Dracula. And it all went sort of Lovecraft-y on me.

Quick fire dreams in the whirlwind unspoken
The healing word and the black blade broken
In the eye of God and the eye of God remains
On drifting sparks and surging spires of air.

Dreamless the sleep of the deathless dark in
Shapeless fire and leaping void that
Restless stalks through gaps in coiled space
And strange the trails that prowl the stepless waste.

All teeth and eyes behind the night watching
The edge of the firelight, the edge of unlocking
The world where the world is the edge of the maelstrom,
A silk sheet strapped to the wind.

Pandora your toys are wide oceans and untracked stars.
Come open your earthen box, reading the scars
In the permafrost, sleep where they slept
And chase where the chill is deepest.

Why not the blue fringe of the sea should open,
Disgorge the tomb or nameless token
Of a place half-made in tongue half-spoken?
So earth flings up her curtain flames.

And fears what scratches the walls at night
And shuns strange fangs that shun the light.

Arms Race

February 2007

Right, so there are pentasyllabic slant rhymes in here, and that makes me unjustifiably happy. Other than that, I think it’s pretty good.

I still think it was Cupid
With a cannon that left nowhere to run.
It flew across the hotel lobby
On black wings and a bitter tornado.
It was red hot, and instantly fatal.
It was love at first sight, it was
A lot like staring at the sun.

Most of the survivors believe
It was swamp gas lit by a solar flare.
That exploded in the hotel lobby—
A freak event with no explanation,
A detour and a slow detonation.
It was love at first sight, but I
Don’t think they’re in the mood to care.

I’m pretty sure he winged you
When the heat-seeking shuriken flew
In a cloud across the hotel lobby
While you danced there with reckless abandon
In the hail of an electric commandment.
It was love at first sight, but his
Aim never claimed to be true.

When the wreckage was cleared
They found nothing but shattered glass,
Broken timber, the ruins
Of a continental breakfast,
And the scattered remains
Of a bouquet of roses,
Which exploded.

St. George and the Dragon Come to America

February 2007

I blame the Hold Steady for the wacky religious references, and also probably for the rhythm of it. I blame myself for the highly experimental attempt to convey that rhythm through formatting.

---

We came to America looking for mountains of gold and religious freedom
So that one day a man could sit down in his church and pray
without believing in God
And kneel to the Virgin Mary
and ask her to help him get laid
While St. George and the Dragon are both out to help him get paid.

So that one day a barefoot boy could climb onto an altar in Minneapolis
And proclaim in a wavering voice the forgiveness of sins,
and the election of sinners,
Inspire the resurrection of riots,
condemnation of organized thievery,
And the Virgin Mary just wants to cure his fever.

St. George killed the Dragon with edges and corners,
Because some kinds of dragon are thin, and others
Get shot through the tip of a pin. He never
Found Jesus but he felt like he was getting warmer.

We came to America looking for brotherly love and for open spaces
So that one day a man of God could break down shaking and screaming
in a county jail
After breaking the faith of a dozen
fine Midwestern towns
And St. George and the Dragon have both tried to bring him around.

So that one day a stupid old man could hear the clarion call of the one true faith
As professed by a barefoot boy with ecstatic visions
and confused relations,
The one who can’t tell his doctors,
one of them looks like the Savior.
And the Virgin Mary just hopes he’s the one who can save him.