While It Can 

Precipice with blue sky,
what's in me to host
an imagination brought
from youthful morning
for sparse adulthood, 

to lift beyond a weather
shore's coastal collapse,
the irretrieve freeboot
physics of water, horizon's
thinly washed erosion, 

time always beyond me.
I look to dragon strung
hum of sea cloud dreams
alive on unstoppable wind,
coils of indecisive vapor 

offering toward fictional
peacefulness of air. These
protected intentions,
to place the back sketch
of forgotten memories. 

Those fugacious images,
all that this boundless world
ever newly modeled upon
it's ceaseless brevity
does ever promise. 

[  David Hockney Painting His Pool  ]........

The Lyric
--Tom Clark 

Suffering
lament, sorrow and wild
joy commingle in 

the lyric—a collective
sigh of relief comes cascading
out of the blue— 

a yearning to submerge
in life like the swimmer
in the pool forgetful 

immersed and quenched—
water trailing scattered
diamonds in a rustling 

voice of resigned subsidence
as though in the same stroke
everyone alive were speaking through you—

The Day Goes on Forever
--Tom Clark 

We’re alone my shadow and me
You’re alone with your shadow too
The first day and the last day the same
First song same as last song 

The stream weeps passing under concrete
Habitual deer have retreated
The earth is covered with vehicles
Meant to secure the unknown against us 

The caged bird said this place is very pretty
Excellent for lunch fine for sleeping
But if I might ask one thing more
How come nobody thought to put in a door

Negation
--Wallace Stevens 

 Hi! The creator too is blind,
 Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
 Rejecting intermediate parts,
 Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
 Incapable master of all force,
 Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
 By an afflatus that persists.
 For this, then, we endure brief lives,
 The evanescent symmetries
 From that meticulous potter's thumb.

Ballet
--Aditi Machado

Though I live in a mountain I hear the sun
.............outrage the skin
of a desert, it become a blister. But
.............the mountain
is what I understand as one understands focus
.............and monument. The nature
of dance, its arms and legs. The monument
.............of the body and gravity
in relation to what departs from the pit
             of self. How far
I stretch. What is the end of time, is it
             the peak of a mountain? Is it
the way a tree stops upon its leaves? Is it
             the concentric mind
of a tree, the rings and rings of a tree
that forever one escapes or falls into
and survives?
                 If the dead center of a tree is not its mind
                 but the moment about which its thinking devolves,
                 then fallen am I
                 into orbit—
                               I am time as much as sand and water. I travel
                               along a landscape of laceration. Someone
.......................................measures me
                               and cannot entirely. A vastness
                               like the opening out of a molecule. (The rain
above a desert will not rain because being a question it cannot answer.) Who am I is the question asked in the mirror. This is not answerable, so I kiss the desert and come back a blister. The desert is all about me. It inherits me. I have come along with the nature of Everything. How fast I go when I eliminate the sandstorm.


[via conjunctions]

[ Day Dreaming ; Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999) ].......

Errata
--Kevin Young 

Baby, give me just
one more hiss 

We must lake it fast
morever 

I want to cold you
in my harms 

& never get lo 

I live you so much
it perts! 

Baby, jive me gust
one more bliss 

Whisper your
neat nothings in my near 

Can we hock each other
one tore mime? 

All light wrong? 

Baby give me just
one more briss 

My won & homely 

You wake me meek
in the needs 

Mill you larry me? 

Baby, hive me just
one more guess 

With this sing
I’ll thee shed

Ode to the Harlem Globetrotters
--Kevin Young 

…………vs. the Washington Generals 

Because they always win. 

Because Meadowlark Lemon. 

Because for them, double dribbling
              is literal. 

Because on your finger
…………your knee, toes
…………& elbows, the world can spin. 

Because the ball
…………on a string. 

Because rubber bands for hands. 

Because the ball a banner. 

Because where else do Generals
…………meet defeat without blood. 

Because the best offense
…………is a quick depantsing. 

Because mercy, not pity. 

Because the bucket
…………of water tossed
…………on the cries of the crowd 

turns like tears to confetti.

Beyond Words
--Kevin Young 

.......Mudd Club 4th floor gallery
.......Manhattan, April 1981 

If you bomb
the IND
or tag the 2 

downtown
—gallery-bound—
dousing it in tribal 

shrapnel, you're it
—the shit—
If you can lie 

between the rails
—Please Stand
Clear the Closing— 

or press yourselves
betw. train
& the wall 

spray can rattling
like a tooth—The roof
the roof 

the roof is on
fire—soon
the 6 will whistle 

past, swinging
like a night stick—
Officer Pup throwing 

a brick
@ that Mouse
Ignatz, in love— 

#$!?!!!!—then
you'll have found
risk. A calling— 

Crash, Daze, Pray
covering trains
like cave paintings, 

avoiding the German
shepherds—ACHTUNG—
while the cars sit 

in the yards
—what no one else in this
city owns. Making 

their names
known—Dondi, Boy-
5, B-Sirius, Crazy 

Legs, Coolie C—
The city clears
its throat 

the subway shaking
the buildings above—
We don't need 

no water let
the motherfucker
burn— Futura 2000, 

Phase II, Quick
& Sex & Zephyr
& Lady Pink— 

Fab 5 Freddy
(n� Braithwaite)
saying everyone's 

a star. "Rapture"— 

the whole planet's in
on it—Chilly Most
Being the Host Coast 

to Coast—Freddy's painted
Campbell's Soup Cans that read
DADA & POP instead 

of beef barley—
the UFO has landed
& a brother's 

stepped out, alien, dressed
in white. Then when
there's no more cars 

he goes out at night
& eats up bars—
graffiti like 3 card monte— 

running, avoiding the pigs
like a black muslim
bean pie. DJ spinning 

says my my.
Pay attn.—
say, ain't that 

Basquiat spinning 

disks behind Blondie—
SAMO AS AN END
TO MINDWASH RELIGION— 

45s stacked high
as a Dag-
wood sammich? 

Hungry, this B-
boy's headed
to the top—Yes 

Yes y'all
You don't stop—
blowing up.

Woke up this morning wrestling the vulture of the post-trip blues. Planning starts months in advance and after that prolonged period of anticipation, when I’m finally thrown into the flash pan of gleeful experience, it all passes seemingly instantaneously. Fortunately I’ve learned that keeping busy is the best way to handle such woebegone moods, and why I was out fiddling about in the yard this morning before any of the neighbors had even left for work. And keeping busy for me has always been spliced with creating. I find ways for them to be one and the same. Where I’m most myself. And I am using a very broad understanding of the term, to include anything I might personally do, no matter how small or personal, as well as conceptually internalizing the creativity of others. Whether channeled through specific art forms, the broader connections which result from culture, even certain physical activities (at least those that don’t involved numeric values), its all liberating play to me, an expression of like human emotions, finding forms for the endless possibilities within our imagination, the intense wonder of interacting with life through the body. I welcome, seek, chase, immerse, heal myself with it all. So ever onward. No man is ever an island. 

[ Philos Adelphós and the Smartphone Crushes ]

sk81 - Mark Gonzales
sk82 - Keith Hardy

music by Bobby Darin; "Mack the Knife"

We cross our bridges when we come to them, and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. 

............--from 'Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead'; ..............Tom Stoppard