Fascicle 1 by Thom Donovan

Someone wanted to dig a hole as deep as the Towers were tall

There were sunsets and spots in the flames no one would have believed

There were shadows like the sky doesn’t usually make them

Upwards they seemed to be falling in the play-back of all things the bodies

No one could tell what real time was or if it were a simpler distance than this

Only place was important, always and only place, in that motion

The auto-companies, who were largely to blame, didn’t flinch if not for oil

Democracy kept flowing and flowing channeled by our distance from history

Undulated on those tubes where its hero voice kept hailing me

Even those who should have been that event’s truth got clipped.

The disgrace 

Destroy

My sister 

Heard nothing

Nothing  

Not a word

Not since  

We lost

Our world  

A double breath

A double

Death left

No further 

Neither nor

Bad  

In the air

Troubled trouble

A sad dead body

None can bury 

Bereft bereft

Who know nothing

Condemn to death

I will never  

Forsake him

Unloved 

I have no power

Nothing of you  

I would not permit

Not the living 

But the dead

For I will 

Forever

Dishonor no one

Nothing but terror

No fear   

Tell no one

No scream  

Denounce me

Your love  

Is impossible

To seek what  

Cannot be done

Will hate  

No one.

Impersonating the void we no longer

play in the dark

—Eleni Stecopoulos

What ken we follow the blood down where future

Should have been wherever “we” goes genea-

logies of monsters step teeth follow from them

Productions from despair swords search-out

A limit to this body in the limitless dark you

Are a cave for no one will be forgiven kill them

all he said the undead who shore words against

Sense ascend if ever to follow them down

Into a field of open letters into a force followed

A hollow all ours wound to a Balkan blankness

Ensconced at the bottom of the self yet for them

Something persisted believing in no grammar

No syntax in need but the words in your mouth

Spill out myths spell mnemotechniques as

Possible conditions in this wind I’s occluded

By sight who proffers an anthem excludes.

Declaratives operatives I distends you you I

We spoke of empathic radicals you are Greek

To me of that community of believers holding

Wisdom straps-up the bombs again hailing us

Through smoke how could we do anything dif

ferent corruptible mortal immunizing whims

Of progress difference saves face put the blood

And don’t triangulate don’t trilateral unilaterally

Submits no more signs make fools of us con

tracts of letters debts others paying through the

Nose for culture makes our culture totally fucked-

up some holistic imbalance points to I doesn’t

Want to make sense at a certain point sense be

came senseless where anger deafened flights

Of degrees no one into those buildings swell with

History and forget their promise like a rainbow.

These two bodies belie emergency in the inside

Getting sick to progress democracy purges itself

Of justice the physician brothers Cosmos Damian fall

And we call this death two postmodern crystals

Capitalist in their unwishing a sheen to all economic

Indolence scrim subsides like butter does like healing

But in healing is laid waste real bodies accumulate

Risk real bodies of exchange second life that was

None other than the other magic lantern  times 10

Preparing for this lack of sense the bunkers were

Them on the screen fantasy of us deterritorialized

Or “germy” what was in this code that told us

To be us while capital waited for a cure wishing

Its jaundice on the world retroactive presentiments

Of terror greener pastures property rites and rights

Of the undead flung to the wind tell trauma slant.

Power becomes you dear endangered body skin so thin with armor

Amorous Isis Osiris scattered becomes us compels you this subtlety in over-

sensitivity as the hills which once were white-mottled Romantic models as

Rukeyser would make ironic alloy call a rose a rose and us by any other aim

Would recognize no other power but in degrees of this world transcendent so hell

Is also my self on earth because we made the factories time convolute

Vertov touted the machine age Williams never sang the Passaic for labor per se

That other Eternity power always exists the problem is what to do with it

How not to use is sometimes how to direct writing from a white heat O Love

O downy picturesque particulars and pastoral spotlessness pimps your poem

‘glassy moons’ confound the social every rose wants to be a rose merely

Every nation just a nation but can not because we fall to rise every rose begs

To be both interrupted and ongoing a paradox as every pane of glass which

Thisness inheres that bears witness a soul for every violence committed

To someone in this world of force and nothing else a gun sites the said

Dialectics tread on where desires go into the Open of control my sovereign 

My ‘brain-sickness’ my body my head prevented the tongue as well he asks him

self am I alive? a ghost of sorts while she pursues her actual Bardo power at

The price of exploitation hatred at the price of force so illness transformed her.