Time and Resources

wtf was that, new global catchphrase, mediocrity
built for two, as an appendix to all these weird proposals
in the sweaty head culture, trying to get the right person
on the phone, the story of our affective lives together
in the nasty disconnect, time vs. recursion, failing
to explode, in relation to the materials, scatterbrained,
so I collapse, in the evil starting corner, set of delusions,
the choices you make in the low-res future, pre-common
and flogged, across the street from the Acropolis, name
that feeling, in the form of wages, at the mercy of small
things, in the twitch vernacular, sure enough, the field
diminishes in us, everything’s real, manual, pegged on
inventory clearance models, people fall out of their
boring lives together, unable to formulate thoughts into
words, both an abstract thing to have happen, and a flight
from abstraction, let off the alien hook, at the brink of
a moral precipice, the voice of a semi-processed commodity
cranked out in various shapes, the difference between us
and the soup is difficult and non-functional, another day
in the circuit, lost in dispute, ordered to don the tracksuit
of death, with its heightened visual aspects, jacking
the supplicants, one by one, in contaminated time, not
reality, but a form of consent, instantiated by repetition,
publishing it in the back lots as one would rub nasal
cream on every free surface, scented and burning, in the
gross lime light, riding with the ogre of duty, to the market
with the hoi polloi fifty feet in the air, buying up presence
for your life job, wired to the mega-story eyeball, staring at
a jet stream, among the grocery laden pallets, at night’s
surmise, here on the gentrified ave, I’d be lying if I wasn’t
standing bolt upright, afraid to miss my train and pass
over into the zone of ‘no pay,’ here on the grid, what
appears nourishing is merely out to get you, there’s a field
of translucent sting rays clouding up the visual field, a
forest of closed tabs, at the bottom of an elevator shaft,
where Harper dons glow-in-the-dark makeup and stares into
the illegal cells, a gun at the hip and an elevator for a
constituency, breakneck and bound for reconnective surgery,
merciless beasts on the bummer feed, from our mailing
room to your recycling bin, their unmournable bodies,
who don’t line up and die of old man, half out of the zippered
earth, this generation’s lost its faith in the formal potatoes,
time and resources, and will someday leave a beautiful after-
image, from the jerks of thought and vision, thick as a still
breathing network, the working world, having been eaten,
put on four hour delay, and cleared of the whole inner-outer
world distinction for utterly familiar terrestrials, the tears of
an office clerk, material man longs for, a reality film about
somebody else, a literal record of dying trees, these are
the songs, the seasons, life goes on, waking state, en route
to whatever, and nascently points out the objectless stars

Bad Infinity

1.

Every time you don’t die,
the internet uploads a picture of you.
Feeling stupidly romantic in
the break room. Trying to keep

that spotless figure long
enough to say ‘yeah,’ I thought
some stuff, put one foot in
front of the other in the semblance

of some work being done.
I had a dream I was giving a
commencement speech
about Georges Bataille’s
The Accursed Share, but it

was interrupted by an enormous
student demo. Where, like any-
body in a thesis, I wasn’t.
Theoretical pepperoni on a pie chart.
You are the demon you choose.

2.

Conditions are different.
Conditions aren’t perfect.

Joan said that our desires
would fail us. That loving each

other is tragic and that’s why
it’s important to do. Cities, ships,
machines, credit, collapse.
In time to wake with all the things.

The earth doesn’t need you
is the secret of democracy.

I’m really just an administrator
of the resonance that sustains me.

Alienating in circles where
I’m unfounded by true art’s

only continuous being.
A fatal kindness refill when

you least expect it. In the shells
of factories, in the empty union

halls, in the empty mansions
of declassed medium business owners,

in the photographs of failed
revolutions, in the broadsheets

of all forgotten sects. Whatever it is
it’s always too much.

3.

Since coming back I have
wanted to write something great.

Where the background
weather is ghosts, telling you to write

in sentences and laughing at our
epoch’s legacy of debt. Conditions

are different. Conditions aren’t
perfect. I’m busy reliving my

vacation past, at home, through
totals. The people around the

revolutionary table looked
dismayed. Each one left to found

the fantasy that would sustain them.
One of these was a falling out

with vowels. They went ‘tsk tsk’
all day. We didn’t feel bad about it.

Is this an example of gestalt?

4.

The social produces antagonisms
at Dundas and Yonge. The void between
taking and giving that certain
bounds hold against chaos.

Old English, brook: to use, enjoy,
possess, eat, and cohabit with.
The systemic moral hazard that
privatizes profits and socializes risks.

Be well, be strong, fit for action,
business-like, be of worth.
As the cement saws and rain amidst
the equitable silence. On this side

of our ability to imagine and so
inhabit different worlds; an electrified
plaza in our own damned mediums.

5.

Yosefa texted me, “I had a dream
you sold your spleen to fund a
poetry reading. If it ever comes

to that call me.” I leave my back door
open like a symbolic communism
I only hear some people mention.

I want it like the smell of frying fish
from next door to be expected or,
like my always mustard stained

pant legs, to be predictable. That’s
one hundred pages down and
an infinity more to go. Another

violent dream, this time I’m sitting
around a picnic blanket with a
bunch of people. Each of us has

a kitchen knife beside us and we’re
playing a game where the objective
is to kill the person to our right.

6.

Our bodies break down along these lines:
needs help, needs care, needs extra consideration
here and here. John wrote, “the Nazis were
killed but fascism lives on.” Meanwhile,

I’m getting LinkedIn updates. This is only
the half way mark. Some great labour is still
needed to break out of the current impasse.
Nothing looks stranger than a body at rest.

I live in the world you are just passing through.
Terrestrial mega sale. As a deeply fucked
and flawed search engine, I understand.
The Postwork Imaginary Clown Dong.

Balled up on the couch with Thor. Whopper,
bunk, crunk, yarn, fib, old chestnut, old saw,
hogwash, apologue, fad. Your references mean
the boiled world to me. The boiled gorified world.

7.

Conditions are different.
Conditions aren’t perfect.

No one hurts anyone else.

In time to wake with all the things.