Robert Mittenthal 

from LIQUID PAPER

              -self of lack from just beginning


The tumble between

Neither is made of what


And no isn't any more

a line in "them"


than what it is 

in damp years


the swallow a song if she

is followed


face down in the light

not there


not against the machine

example where arrival clocks


a new frontier

portly word -- glass and water


more than a word's confusions 

in the threshold that reads me





River of ouch, coin 

barrier the furrows encase


A sort of seal painting (ecstasy 

              of sheep)

                              furnishing

the fire's citations (pleasure optional) 

               in a circle

whose yellowed lines draw a part


Inserting the page 

opacity parks its maliced 

                words in the mind flats

Thus, 

                white -- and white swath -- shadow

                not desire's same

                               brushed or gently opaqued



                we take this weigh station Latin 

review of his curve

whose eye through the air 

                stays in touch


In this -- cross section of book

compare flatness -- plush, worsted

almost wet (dream of) nature's 

unclothed face dives into the 

skin deep end





Somewhere Spicer says

The Angel's hair is square

A definition identical to one's mouth


These -- our followers -- whose ear is

It -- leaking vision -- egglike -- welded --

Curled into a map where the body

Parts -- where one needs to work no answer in 


Please address all replies to . . .     <<me@horsesass.com>>


              (one mint julep)

              whose finger cots felt pins

              to find the treasure folded into

              or prints of a sculpted green


Just forget the bridge 

Depth charges add

                                      travelogues of 

                                      words exchanged why

                                      the desire for nothing

                                      happens -- why


              life shoots of a city's likes --

              why her book impairs to contest

              the loss that stands: stamina


              an illegible hand floating words 

              as one must -- to sever

              the cups that form over the lip --

              no -- general is -- in Thing-dom





Let the ears surpass the eyes

abstract maps starve in the 

loop attention breaks 


An auditor, the one with the small 

ears, says "repeat after me" but 

hears nothing when


               reading a funnel 

to pour one's word in.  Reading 

at a speed not equal to pass

               for a fence


The eyes of this mute

               faded to a glance

               How untrack the cold 

sequence of the follow

coalesce





A solid scoop of person -- trunk 

to tree with a relative color of sound 

the word 'pain' in a possible description


                                          A page impossibly flat

because character does not exist  

Another gray & brick song

caught subsuming the dictates of the only air


Though elongated -- one's fist appears to 

amass.  A simulation or dodge whose

other visible narrows . . .

                                                            flickering,

all wet as an escalation, animal 

to a cruel fit.  We are faced with & displaced

to mob the assumed & dive.  As if 

my name bobs to prove a witch.

Sink of spine to serve as book

Money is a load off me --

bought out, a deliberate bounce 

off the agency clown