I have a theory, or, as I actually think it, there's a principle that has had a grip on me for decades:
            In time everything turns itself around to know its repressed, suppressed or excluded other(s). This may happen unconsciously and with uncertain, even unknown results, or it may happen consciously and with a definite thrill of recognition, radiating outward until, for one charged instant, nothing seems unchanged or unchangeable. Of course things do not remain turned around, but, once turned, they retain a trace, a possibility of further turning — as if already in communication with their future. If the turn is unconscious, fear clings to everything valued; if conscious and willing, excitability rises in the site, showing movement within identity. You might say, in the latter case, things breathe freely, even as a spirited stillness gives over to the torque of awareness.

Language tends to take on the condition of things in a world, and especially the active view that holds a world together. One's own language perpetuates one's world; indeed, this may be a primary function of language, world-preservation. To assess the condition of one's world, one might examine the state of one's language, its degree, for instance, of flexibility. It follows that the very possibility for conscious change can be read in the functional range of one's language. Poetry, then, is an art form of this possibility, registered in the sense of verse as intentional turning, including conscious reversal.

This theory of inevitable turning (around) has the functional status of principle rather than concept, which means that it translates easily into personal practice, but does not imply a particular style or technique or any other "self" defining orientation.

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That's the general view, and in time I intend to write further about the role of intentional turning and conscious reversal in poetry at large, particularly as the Axial and its specialized execution as Poetic Torsion. ¹ For the moment, I'm concerned only to discuss how the principle operates in a particular work of my own. This statement is created to accompany publications of The Preverbs of Tell: News Torqued from Undertime ² and their alternate version as Preverb Posters. ³ Let me say once and for all that, for me, the purpose of theory or a particular poetic principle is not polemical but dialogical, by which I mean "metapoetic" — the non-exclusive principle by which any given poetics is an imagination of possible poetry. Or as Blake said: "All things possible to be believed are images of the truth." Poetics, or metapoetics, is the declared (non-competitive) space in which all possible poetics are in conversation.

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Each "Preverb" — that is, each line of The Preverbs of Tell or each page of the Preverb Posters — works in its own way on an AXIAL PRINCIPLE — a principle with both linguistic and non-linguistic expression. ⁴ As regards The Preverbs, a working definition might be: the principle by which freedom of being arises as self-aware language turning freely upon its occasion. The AXIAL is not a technique or style or device, but it may acquire certain technical or stylistic tendencies relative to individual practice. Where an AXIAL act is true to its own principle, it will eventually subvert these tendencies, so that at times it may appear unfaithful to its own modality. The AXIAL functions as a declared space of practice — here I am referring to language practice — in which language may discover itself as alive and willful and free of accumulated habits, free, that is, of the dominant tendencies of the generating personality and its received traditions. The space is self-interruptive, self-(re)organizing, self-(re)orienting. It shuns its own success as a danger to principled survival, yet it is in love with its own production, which generates further instance of its possibility. For that reason every AXIAL statement stands alone. That is, even when it stands in a field of resonance and collaborates with statements all around (as in a composed series of lines in The Preverbs of Tell, which may have a "pooling" tendency around certain words or themes or sounds, or a published group of Preverb Posters), it retains its aloneness as a freedom of being and source of immediate energy.

So an AXIAL LINE is indeterminately situation specific. It has open resonance with its environment. Its form (as line or "poster") is intended to "free" it into local specificity while retaining self-variance. Such open resonance is a principle of "construction" as well as placement, individually and as a body of work.⁵

An AXIAL LINE suffers every unitary, referential or surcharged connection as if it might be an instance of "original sin" — principle of a first wrong turn — ready for a process of self-immolation. Its cleansing of pattern ends in a free embrace, enacted within appropriate reading.

What, then, is appropriate reading? An engagement free of extraneous constraints and somehow truly "in the moment" — outside the tug of prepatterning momentum yet following the momentum of the moment (the instant-specific "movement") itself. Something discovered on the spot. A leap into the fire and out at once, a flight in Between. Every flight invents a sequence ordering the data of the topos, a periplus, a mapping of actual bodily trajection, the concrete "presencing" that reverses our thrownness in an instant of time. But we are not necessarily stuck with any one of these orderings — therefore they are free to be truly meaningful, belonging as they do to their moment, where real meaning arises. Chosen meaning exists here by force of self-action. If I map the actual territory I travel, my map is the most accurate possible plan of my occasion, where I fall true. Here is the one place on the map that maps itself, maps truly in my act of pointing (to) it. My condition thereby is AXIAL , and the language I speak in the irreducible event of self-tracking is Preverbal.

Preverbal? Preverbial? The latter tells the tale that is itself to the degree of being before itself. It rides the edge of its own possibility, between pre- and not, tells the tale that alone takes you along the further edge. We could talk here of something like preverberation — , as an AXIAL neologism of original turning, a lexicographic rendering of intensive resonance at or near zero point, accorded by freed speaking. Such resonance is projective of its occasion, it throws its possible connectedness before it / around it, it fills out its field and is radial. That is why anyone who hears it may feel "chosen" by it, as if something is "meant" to be, synchronistic, aligned in the expression. Resonance at the event horizon creates radical context. Everything surrounds itself with meaning. This might be called the poetic condition itself.

The Preverb — like its predecessor the "Proverb of Hell" in Blake's invention — is the site of a certain focus, a moving "point" within a radial field, and despite its single-line declarative force, attracts reading by field. The "full meaning" (a quality rather than a quantity) is never fully sourced at the spot of its occurrence. However no account of the "meaning" is richly relevant without reference to the site of exposure to the specific language. The site attracts the meaning. Yet the meaning is not a thing but an occurrence in this time and in this place that makes it possible to think a certain thing in a certain way. A site/situation specific assemblage, a local performance.

But where is the locus of the local? The AXIAL as a pure force field creates a liminality at the surface — between on and under, conscious and (un)(sub)conscious, above and below. The torsional force (like a twister) joins the contents of above and below, indifferently. No hierarchy of important contents; also no exclusions. Torque busts attitudes.

So a Preverb occupies the space of wisdom-mouthing, twisting the tongue of truth to include its field of variants, even those not yet considered, yet inevitable. AXIAL wisdom includes its contraries as true friends, baptizes its devils in their own blood. It drives out sanctimonious closure, such as the priestly voice on Sunday that encloses divine words in pretended pre-human tonality, the lure of ultimate comfort. Such closure cannot reach into the heart of present being. We need a crack to crawl out through, a flawed bell to sing its cracked peace, to remind us we are here. The AXIAL self itself cracks, listens in on itself through the new aperture, hears itself by tracking what it lacks, knowing itself as never more than a sound away. A given AXIAL line can lead us out, and pushes a surface toward its outer.

An AXIAL utterance may seize attention below the threshold of syntax, in the moment before a reading knows it is in a sentence, and carry it over the abyss of unintelligibility by sheer synaptics. When the mind lands, so to speak, it may flood with multiple syntactics as a condition of realizing that real meaning is never without (perhaps unexperienced) choice. An AXIAL moment tends to be self-instructive in the valences of elective likeness. And thinking or speaking about it itself tends to slip into AXIALITY , which can feel a little like dreaming awake. Meaning showing up at once as absolute, vanishing and at variance with itself. A syntactic act can have the structure of sensing that one is being followed, a sudden turning, and catching one's own mind bearing down upon one.

Of course we can't catch the present moment; the thought that we should be able to is a lure of the Limiter. Non-limitation is a ride of another kind along a vanishing edge. AXIAL poetics is the practice of talking ourself [sic] through. This is a journey in conjunction, and we join our multiplicity to take it at all. Poetic engagement in non-limited/non-linear field dynamics — a participation afield — draws on the energy of possible reading as something like a virtual fact of interconnectedness, the sense and sensing of how we are already "cross-wired" as it were by "nature." The AXIAL keeps these doors swinging.

The simulations of being thrown into free space may even be training for the great cutting loose at the end of our efforts. At least it does no harm to allow art that kind of force of destiny. One must consider that the mind may be incapable of divesting itself of the wisdom impulse, with all its opportunity for addictive self-delusion, chateau-like constructs where the ego glowers in secret luxury. So faced with an impulse toward wise saying, one can choose among the paths, including, perhaps:

    — to give in to a known thought, a wise way tested on enough minds to assure a certain restfulness;
    — to think better, according to a philosophical or theological method, to accept the challenge of wise saying;
    — to resist with, say, a blank stare, or otherwise (meditatively) allow space to show;
    — to sidestep the habitual, to seek a shift below the threshold of experienced wisdom;
    — to ride it wild till its root (or branched) knowing twists free.

The Preverbs test-drive the latter. One tries to develop a certain touch — perhaps to stimulate, even if necessary to provoke, the thinking impulse to further awareness in saying itself. It's a kind of persistence in folly, to paraphrase Blake, giving the fool his realized moment. Perhaps if not to see the full face of one's private angel, at least to read its lips.

The sound in which one's individual folly is spoken is first of all that of one's own voice. The integrity of that voice is profoundly at stake in the AXIAL. Poets are often obsessed by "finding one's own voice" which usually means something like distinctive style or a sound-like-me tone. Success in this direction can be effective, charming, even powerful. It promotes the sense of a stable self. In the AXIAL, however, the notion of knowable stability of self is continuously in question. Yet the actual voice individuates, in unpredictable ways, as if its source precedes the known personality. AXIAL utterance aims in any way possible to revive that source at the surface of speaking awareness, or to keep the channel open. Perhaps primary poetic function may be just that maintenance of the open.

In meditating this possibility of openness I have come to a notion of ZERO POINT VOICE, which stands for the point of origin in speaking that allows an optimal release, negligible pre-patterning and minimal momentum. Each line is generated on the spot from an energy arising just now. In my theory this "point" (of course not really a point) accesses what I call the UNDERTIME of the poem, the non-temporal "time" that runs "below" any formalized rhythmic time, perhaps a sort of ur-time, but in any case a full-potential time that allows radical particularity in any given line. This degree of particularity serves a METAPOETIC PRINCIPLE that allows every poetic act the possibility of an original poetics and, therefore, is non-exclusive as regards poetic possibility.

With respect to "minimal momentum," there may of course be actual momentum in the carryover from line to line. (I am speaking here of AXIAL lines grouped in apparent sequence, as in The Preverbs of Tell.) On the other hand, there also may not be any line to line momentum; there is the continuous possibility of zero momentum. So the AXIAL as poem space has no built-in principle of beginning or ending or even continuing. It is open, in a potentially unlimited number of ways. The mystery of continuance, then, is particular and ultimately arbitrary from an aesthetic point of view — leaving only an ontological or somehow magical possibility. The line therefore can be AXIAL in the sense that its center of gravity is open, locally reversible, and variously in motion. Because everything is locally reversible, gravity is complementary to levity. What weighs in a voice gives rise to it.

The actual energetic base here is the physical voice, and where there is intentional engagement at the level of what I am calling AXIAL POETICS, there is a complexity of voice-urge — what makes it begin. It arises out of itself, as it is, where it is and in relation to anything whatsoever, with no obligations to continuity, logic, or any other principle of linkage/necessity, therefore open to all continuities on an immediate basis. In practice, this means that the voice gathers itself anew in each line. There is uninterrupted risk. The wish is to avoid stabilizing and intrinsically coercive forces such as stylized voice, e.g., literary/musical elevation, "personal voice" as carrying the thrust of personality, etc. The voice arising from its zero point is in some sense transparent to complex intentionality, and optimally avoids manipulating in the direction of fore-given aesthetic. The key here is "optimally," and the interest in OPTIMAL POETICS or a "poetics of the optimal" is not purist but open — that only in the condition of openness can a thing be optimally itself. Hence the AXIAL , which is the condition created by an open matrix. In an AXIAL situation the voice can perform itself, its "presence" in multiple ways within the verbal matrix.⁶

The notion of ZERO POINT  has a range of implication, especially with respect to poetic function in the environment, however defined. ⁷ To be conscious of it implies a discipline of attention that goes beyond a conceptual focus on the zero point itself. It implies a state of listening to and through the voice that returns at every opportunity to the condition of freedom from extraneous momentum. I am suggesting that, as is argued in Zero Point Physics, the zero state paradoxically holds the greatest energy potential, and in that way is the foundational state of poetry itself. Poetry in this view is the result of a discipline of attention that draws on what is available in the actual voice before constraint by "form" or technique; it could be called an intrinsically charged speaking with listening. This attention allows a potential deepening of participation in the undervoice and the source of the rhythmus, a radical reformulation of the rhythmic impulse itself as singular event. One taps into the self-refining nature of a poem's energy, which is stepped-up energy in many degrees of living intrinsic modulation. To be able to go with it one must discover the special attention appropriate to the poem by joining in the poem's own listening. Its listening requires its zero point. Optimally, the poet/reader in each instance entrains to the voice of the poem as close as possible to its zero point. This involves a kind of release into the source of voice itself.

The intention of this release is to induce a state of AXIALITY. The underlying assumption would be something like the view that freedom of movement, at root (or point of branching), is the STILL POINT / ZERO POINT of primordial possibility. In this state the "wisdom impulse" is AXIALIZED , which means that it is introduced to its basic, you could say primordial, energy in such a way that opens dogma and indeed thinking to being itself. And that could be an original role of the poetic.
 
 

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¹ My earliest effort in this direction is in relation to the work of William Blake, which has formed the base of my work over three decades: "Orc as a Fiery Paradigm of Poetic Torsion," Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1970), 263-284.
² This is an ongoing work currently comprising some 4,000 self-contained lines (Book One in four series complete, Book Two in progress). The "structure" of the Preverbs as a sequence of lines is open and never definable beyond certain basic formal agreements: e.g., each line is complete in itself; it is not a product of energetic process as evolving sequence, but begins as close as possible to "zero momentum," so that the energetics is individuating and site/situation specific; and each line comes to an end before running over at the end (in the basic six-inch word-processing line). Thus, despite evident sequence which sometimes seems locally resonant, the absence of reliable or binding sequential connectedness leaves every line radically open in resonant possibilities. The title, in one aspect, expresses the work's connection with Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) — the template of proverb (single line wise sayings), an always surprising, heretical and antithetical view, including general unpredictability.
³ Preverb Posters are single lines from The Preverbs of Tell presented in poster format. When they appear in a context with other work, they should not be chosen according to what surrounds them or any other sense of context, nor arranged with any specific order in mind. There is a principle of selection but it is "unnamable." They nevertheless should serve somehow as "posters of their locations."
⁴ Regarding its non-linguistic expression I discuss elsewhere what I call the AXIAL STONES.
⁵ A Preverb line appearing as "Preverb Poster" is one of the various possible reading situations. My statements about either manifestation are not intended to explain them or instruct in how to read them — which would be counter to their poetic intent as AXIAL (small-capped to distinguish it from a range of other usage) — but to present a portion of the thinking that supports a practice and its underlying principle.
⁶ It is obvious that much of what I have associated with the AXIAL can be claimed in one way or another for any number of poetic systems, and I am aware that a number of systems produce powerful and profoundly open works in the sense intended here. I personally do not like to use procedures and prescriptive systems. I tend to view the great works, for instance, of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low as due not to their systems as such but to what can only be called poetic genius or some other word that means the same (i.e., something finally undefinable). When Mac Low writes a non- (or at least minimally) procedural work like Bloomsday, with its spectacular level of language self-reinvention and visionary richness, one might conclude that his procedures were something like a support but not the main event. (Obviously, others have used Cage/Mac Low-like systems with not very exciting results.) The AXIAL is not anti-procedure (my particular practice is processual rather than procedural), but it exists in declaration of the values of openness and freedom of movement and mind that is previous to the issue of method. How one achieves it is an individual matter.
⁷ Subsequent to theorizing a ZERO POINT VOICE I have become aware of Zero Point Physics, which views, for instance, the so-called vacuum as paradoxically a plenum of vast energy potential, and at least one physicist has convinced me that our interests may be on common ground. However, my understanding has not advanced to the point where I'm competent to discuss this.
            I have long been aware that the STILL POINT of CranioSacral Therapy invites comparison with what happens in release of the voice, as well as with the concerns of zero point physics. The term of course resonates with T.S. Eliot's use in "Burnt Norton" (Four Quartets), section II: "at the still point, there the dance is / ...neither arrest nor movement...." This vision of suddenly realized timelessness ("To be conscious is not to be in time") derives from Dante's vision of eternal stillness in the last canto of the Paradiso. Interestingly, "still point" used as a technical term in CranioSacral Therapy denotes the act of causing a momentary suspension in the fundamental pulsation of the body (the "craniosacral rhythmical impulse"); the effect is to mobilize the system's inherent self-correcting abilities.
            The Monroe Institute reports that their research — on brain waves, biofeedback and hemisphere synchronization (and the "binaural beat") — has led them to theorize a NULL POINT in neurological activity wherein, following specific hemisphere-synchronizing impulses aurally introduced to individuals, physiological measurements "indicated that the body's electrical polarity shifts into a neutral phase." This neutral phase reportedly allows more conscious control of mind activity in a desirable direction: "Subjects consistently reported this [neutral phase called "null point"] to be a productive 'window' for taking off in any desired mental direction. At the null point you may purposefully and consciously decide exactly what you choose to explore."
            I know of no research into whether "states of thought" and "states of language" measurably produce such a productive free state, or whether at this level thought states follow brain states or vice versa. Poetics can embrace all of these possibilities, accounting, for instance, for the changes of reading state during, say, John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" (read according to the rules) or Blake's Jerusalem. Reading-induced still points....
            A further area of comparison is the Japanese notion of Ma — something like the time-space between (therefore empty) — which is valued even more than the things or events it separates. It is the space of deep integration.
 
 
 
 

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from
 

The Preverbs of Tell
 
 

News Torqued from Undertime
 
 

BOOK ONE
 

Fourth Series

[One, Two, Three, Four]
 
 

Copyright © 2000 George Quasha

 
 
 
 
 
 

One

Eyes Take Away What They See
 

The herringbone fabric was molding to her body before our eyes.

Freud's slip enjoys the name but not her shameless game.

Optimal pleasure has no measure.

Come to be.

What else can save you from your likes?

Only my death will never leave me.

Great souls like alike.

My eyes took the shape of her body.

Step up feet last.

The axis flies free at the root.

True meaning comes deeply in her senses—etymolalia, speaking in roots.

Life's a nerve-racking situation.

Eye shapes like bodies.

Hers rings tones in the bone.

Herringbone notwithstanding, shape like song bursts from her middle way.

Right spin tunes in as dolphins twin.

Leaping between two worlds / unable to bear either.

And styles to go before I sleep.

It thinks itself new in being the line that moves it.

Traces distribute on poetic principles.

Saying times itself.

Etyma twin.

Meaning breaches.

No vices? How about the idolatry of perfection?

Earth gives back her heaviest takes—lift off without drift off.

The dowser finds water to change the course accordingly.

There's a god who only reaches out—breaks ground—to grab you by the balls.

Hell of a guru.

Step up root first.

There is a point inside language where the talking stops.

Come here, it says without saying, in my secret place. STOP.

You rack, I'll break.

"Everyone has a song," he said, "here's mine," and by the fire burst a barrier.

Down the line the poem sings to its silence. Music spaces.

Look, the sky is lit deep as always never before.

Fault line and truth line align with difficulty.

The mind's falling away from itself, looking the other way...

Hence this horn. Sounds lorn. Time's apparent rime.

Not what you say but what your saying leaves space to be known through.

To state a way is a state at bay.

Never mention heart in the dark unless the eye sees its own base need.

Now it's your turn to break.

You say I always say the same thing and I say you always say that.

Let's not argue knot size.

Time attracts itself to possibility in being spoken.

A song a line till breach of person.

Life content to be what is forms omniopportunely.

Throw your arms around me till I show up to myself.

Words tangled with taut space pervasively leave the secret between.

Heavy in the middle may mean pregnant.

Poetry tastes like you long enough to save you from your own taste.

Born again a line at a time.

You try on everyone who comes your way. Pray none will stay.

Dying, flying backwards.

Down the line a walk-in talks like stray intention—god knows who you hear.

Transmission between two alters the instance of both.

Line by line completely incomplete.

Eyes give seeing to their object.

What is enough to be anywhere near?

Dreamt backpacking sludging in undertime through hintermind.

Spooky to be spoken.

Keep watch a line at a time to wake in the end.

The truth line plumbs the fault line.

Daily the words cast their net between.

Disciplined inattention for intentional incompletion.

What's a truly meditative art? One that sits in the mind.

Little by little you know where you aren't, seeming to be.

Dyslexia in the word itself—ambidirectional from the root up.

Yes withstanding. Get with the poem to struggle with same.

Four-letter surd. Reading silences.

Withholding sense holds with meaning.

The irrational numbers, voicelessly, read withstanding understanding.

Number secretly enverbs to be thought.

Such powers subsist that breach in brief.

Sustenance by incursion.

Thinking digests.

So think it over in a suprasegmental free zone.

Things come new by right waiting.

A poetic thing may differ from itself to be itself.

Great systems have room to get lost in.

In the faults powers lie.

A hot night left her with poem.

A cry from the heart of the sentence has said: "I can't hear you."

Who broke the connection? Who's on the line?

Roomy systems make room all over.

As a text moves toward authorless autonomy it creates its own poetics.

A line is a whole text at a first level of sovereignty.

Therefore or rather therethrough what exists through itself calls itself...

Poetry is the self-made word proudly belonging to no one.

Never lie on the line.

Conscious dying, hang-gliding in reverse.

Not much ease here but lifts the soul by its mouth traps.

The line dowses for its meaning.

So lifelike it likes life less than life likens itself to it.

Fall on your face early enough to get up in the end.

Never judge a text by its author.

Her head turns not a foot away from the line being read.

The poem is being read for the time being, the line being, your own being.

In the faults the powers lie to take their meanings home.

The object you see sees you.

To the question, "Are you on the level," be sure to ask, "Which level?"

Life imitates the line you take.

Slow chewing sludges through first nurturing until welcome being cries out.

The order of the statement tells more than it should.

There goes her slip again dancing toward identity itself.

Seeing stones pose on an edge belonging to both of us—thrills the empty.

The line is not itself linear.

Here it comes—or is it me again—out of thin air.

Even the gentlest line has a heart of chaos.

Mind continually pushed to not grasp itself pushed.

The actual optimal includes a world of force.

Lost, lost again in the forward rush back not knowing, hope to wait it out.

You never know where it is, such orientation.

Turn on the axis to raise language from the dead.

Verse diverts in staged attentions until nothing reverts.

A sentence calls itself to hear for itself—the optimal performative.

Seeing the thing seeing is being seen.

I promise you a rose is a rose is a rose garden.

A voice hearing to be is inside though it hits you in the face.

Intimacy confuses.

Suprasegmental genitalia secretly speaking incarnadine.

I ask you to appear and you appear unable to refuse.

What's that rustling in the dark but oscillation of gender in its shaded open?

So wrap your legs around the text to prove its penetrating insight.

Black scintillation of the blank holds in the heart of light.
 
 
 
 

Three

Anything Truly Spoken Has An Undertow
 

I put a line here to hear a whisper move along it.

Being is kind.

Illness is an attack on the sense of humor.

Money is no object.

I tried to tell you a story but it refused.

Not for you, she said, to make a thing talk over the line.

On. Debt surfaces.

Everything is not knowable in one language.

The split heals in speaking split.

The line is listening for you.

Saying to be—golem poetics!

The Fool gets wrapped in a lump of earth to leap backwards from her mind.

Here comes a birth!

Eyes are children of the sun—here's looking through you!

A true line magnetizes the reading field.

She widens her ways to receive thinking in the wild.

If you don't know it's there do you have it? Or does it have you?

May the wisdom tongue exhaust itself by line's end.

The secret goal of cleaning house is to get all your stuff in one place.

Here's looking for someone to see me in hiding.

Count from one to ten and suck the universe in.

Florida rime, primordial swampy mind-slime.

Scan the line climbingly.

Step up to the moment as perfective instance.

Inside comes out of its own accord.

A line magnetizes the space around it.

Here is the place to live. Take it back.

Look where humor is absent, illness is trying to squeeze in.

Do you speak physics?

Everything has to suffer the freedom of its core.

Be born with intention waving.

I wish to crawl up between these lines and watch you reading bare.

Poetry, she said, is language making love to itself until it makes another.

Abracadabra—Let no moment be less than itself!

Thinking being arouses writing to being thinking.

I am here as study of the poetics of impatience.

Setting up coils attracts invisible currents.

All good things end coming.

Lick the split lickety-split.

Judge not line by line that ye be not judged thought by thought.

In scanning hunt down particulate instance until post-pattern speaks out.

May every line end with a clean house.

Thinking to read here thanks you.

My poem would give you what it has taken from you.

Words know themselves well enough to say know thyself.

May you get caught in the line-end undertow sucking toward the unspoken.

Like knows like that likes like.

Birth youths to fruit possible to be live.

No line no time.

Every language possible to be spoken is a burble of mind at a distance.

If the line shimmers is it still straight and narrow?

What is the point before us here?

Question quaintly to know yourself carnal.

He thought of her with a gentle sound of sucking.

Even the calmest line has a core of sheer nerves.

What is the sound of the mirror dissolving before your gaze?

Will the real me please withdraw from rapt self-contemplation?

Being swallowed wakes up in the belly of the voice.

Crack open to birth a singular intention.

State focuses as focus states.

Does a full house beat a clean house?

A poem is a request for judgement by field.

Oil your incarnation. Life is upkeep.

Illness slimes the sense of sublime.

If I'm lying here your ass is on the line.

Two no's don't make a yes—or a no.

State specific knowing words.

No no.

All lines lead home.

Stand over here when you think that.

No no is just another hardworking no.

Learning listens to itself.

Ego was Freud's slip.

Look down the line to your work hanging over the big end.

Vacuum vacuums itself of meaning—the word, you overheard.

Allow me to jumpstart your axial propensity, lest it get hard for its cure.

A line works over time.

Any sleeping hour come round at last renews a beast born to your senses five.

School is a handle.

Literary history litters history and the work of the poem is to clean house.

Keys travel tunnels between audible di-mentions—fork tongues.

Eye of the needle—opening pierces.

Line reckons.

A cave is a space that mystifies itself.

Map found in vacated genie bottle says dig here for ultimate treasure.

Haiku is sneak attack on mind pretending language.

A line magnetizes reading throughout.

Pass the egg I have to crack the birth code.

No again.

Koan pops underwords.

Notice high incursion of emergent treasure in situ.

Poems speak in rhetorics, styles, voices, & personae at their peril.

X marks the spot so we must be here.

Visualize a line. Did you see this one?

Every mood has an undertow.

Repetitive grammar tightens the circuitry.

Most lines are non-linear.

Go to hell. Go to sleep. Go to school. Go to pieces.

When a line turns within its orientation it is radial.

Go to Florida. Go to the moon. Go to press. Go too soon.

Love lines inside a radiating heart.

With each repetition the circulation spasms.

Every line a field and a dynamo in hiding.

Tear into the flesh of the ruby orange to honor its color.

Continuous rewiring is a subtle possibility.

Repeat this line after me.

Echo in a tight box.

Nightmare space can't get out. Look around.

Mixed signals normalize in time.

Include self-contradiction in the last thing said.

Any moment a line will liberate.

This is a waiting place but I can't predict the company will keep.

A line is a non-linear plane on which things can be seen clearly as not things.

Look now! She lives!

Neighborhood vastness knows itself radially.

There is a woman who can walk the line without touching down.

Poems speak in confessional tones, tongues, & abstract systems at their peril.

Line magnetizing mind around it projects off the end, happily.

Speaking out loud and clear in the void attracts integration to the root.

Reading reckons radially—here!

Any line is serpentine leading to the rest of life.

Tunnel poetics: Time itself is neither here nor there both ways at once.

Line motivates by willing itself to dissolve the wall mirroring.

To live at last on the plane of whispers.
 
 

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