[Fritz Pfleumer invented recording tape; Les Paul invented double-tracking.]
On the dressing-table with the nail-paint,
Pfleumer's rolled gold skin that stayed
On tips of gold-lipped cigarettes
and never left a leaf of Pharaoh's smile.
Folding the sound, from the foil of scruples,
He sprayed a metal paste on plastic strip
And sold it to BASF for a
Minstrel cotton, a mint vortex.
From jeweller's wire
to suffusions of aniline dye
How small were the ripples
that laid the sand; how big were the
Blusters of musical smoke, from Ludwigshafen
And downstream.
Les Paul stripped the first Ampex that shipped
And added a fourth head
Turned, and walked straight into
Kiss of mirror halves of sound shell
Turned, and walked straight into
Brilliant cocoon from lacquer applique
Turned, and walked straight into
A stretch steady for four mint copies
Turned, and walked straight into
Wekausha, Wisconsin
By the river that runs both ways
Lost time that paints on loops
Aligned, looking down
On a ridge between two patterns,
Cutting silver away
To chase a picture on silver.
A mask of narcissistic blond wood
With American-classic semiconductors pointing thataway
Butting sashes of fine shaved sound
You put germanium together with Germany
That's when you've got
Purposeful distortions of the recorded groove
Linger o phantom as I retouch a mood
Flattering the
Dissipations of a simulacrum,
A dupe of time regained:
A garage like that will never end
The Ampex Memphis pickup and fixit man
Says, The music won't stick to the tape
Because you haven't lubricated the tape
(Abundance)
Lichtbild
Mood pulses in actinic glare
Wegener's three-colour system
three vertices of a catching frame
Light swooping through frissons of ice
Thaws the coloured pane and freezes
The summer pastures of Greenland
The North Atlantic rush of a feathered turbine
swooping onto timed abundances
the flickering upwelling feast
the balmy fat-smeared surfaces
rattle of wing-racks
Shore to which they soar in summer skeins
fatal beyond Faeroe
Humus too poor for thorps and acres
Incorruptible in the dusk of declension
The wrong island
the effect of latitude on group size
Scant askance slats of sunshine
Slight aslant tints
skimming the captor mesh
grudging
Instrument scales on the objectless plane of light
notches against ice-blink
straining of sight on white
unscattered clarity where distance is near
trueness where farness is too sheer
scaleless blank plane
the eye flat falling without eyefast
from Lewis to the last land
Wisps of heat dissipation
Drafting crystal austere polygons
Starring of sea-ice from petalled edges
Feathers flicking thermal flakes
The ruins of Guldursun
To start with the fading. The animation
in its virtual planes shedding cells, washing back;
the wind sand which is all pictures and none;
a beach of coloured grains where acuity slides away.
Just a desert, and the word kanat.
The parting sand rising into conjecture,
the void ground packing the propylaeon maze.
A difference of culture on microscopic scale, or
from mould ferment to abrasion
in the small porosity of the mesh your water slips
distilled in plain sight away from, the lexical gaps
between smoke and dust?
To proceed with the lighting. dar zamin dur dast
The shimmering surface of ignorance plying itself
where eye and hand make place, and sweeping
what they gain into what they lose: dullness
mimes, and blurs, the swimmer's shape,
somnolence swallowing what its surface copies
in lump darkness feathering at the edge.
Twisting itself out of vacancy in a thin air, the castle
aust i korusm, to the east of the Aral Sea,
the set of sounds at modest cost in the cellar,
the guardian tenuity
past which the focus of the drifter flares and flicks on
through the developed and exploded spaces
quite small in this labyrinthine shining.
The roof covered with apricots, parching.
Following heuristic loops, in 1936, Tolstov;
good German glass all found, and comforted by tea.
Concentric, circular, named: Guldursun,
blind spots all swept, its layout dualist.
A set of winds furling,
the fine development that vanishes as we go through it,
floss metal radiating to its own tenuousness
A lost word and the array of all words
amounting to the same account:
a shower of mica and a stitch of water.
Where the strength of the sun slopes, and the starlight
is cold enough to walk upon,
Zoroaster, in the belts of falling white, turning and
framing sets of law and turning; the son
of rainwater that fell on thirsty grass. A copy
learnt and carried by each of a million,
from among the thick splashes of speech,
disposing the city in the order in which sounds arrive,
before the city was built.
The brewing of tea from ephedrine, and the course
of Nine Words of Power
which raise dead clay, make its limbs
listen to its head, its head listen to a shared array,
its skin grow firm and red, about a paired order; genial,
picking out a neurological tune;
the individual consciousness or organ of faith
set about with swept eyes and with timed commands.
The tea makes his ears glow and muscles tighten.
And he did listen
and that sound that was blind
separated itself
over the Thraco-Cimmerian plains with the white heads of cotton,
Iranian tongue denied to something more elusive, sinistral.
and the eyeless disquieting roar
shone with the floods of light slashing through it
Over a course of horse pastures where /s/ turns to /k/
the lost phonology in its cube of oral geometry,
on the banks of the ancient workings of water
west of Tokharian, north perhaps
of Scythian. The currency flow led across the detaining web
in the hours the water master allotted,
in numbered surges at the raising of a slat or hatch
softens the syllabic peaks of sound, the air column
detailed by onsets and lapses.
To complete with the flakes of pigment.
The Tiger and Pheasant Chamber,
charming in red and blue, the rolls of moist forest
coveted by the court, patches fallen from the wall,
for delicate hours; a second shape crossing
where deep rips run on and off the brilliance.
Deep Dish
An unknown
Sofia
Dimshits-
Tolstaya
glass kontr-relief
red, on black, obscuring
glare to govern space,
jags of the ripsaw
that spins in the plane of its resolution
a fictile pane; oil in the mask of metal.
Parker's sound
as impurity
on glass acetate wafer: the
U
P
town House
1941
snake's patter;
of dark treble shivers radiant spin;
curved column of French
brass
from a blast finesse.
Recreational
refractin' and relaxin' in
the Mughal crystal opium bowl
Dished
Nonsense, dear comrade
grown in a garage
manager.
a sly blade
and cold slurs
in my throat
and up my nose
When cack turns to cackle
Piffle pizza - mmm!
Low institutional
fingertip control
of my ego's intimacy
that calls for bleach.
From awed decades, serving,
your internalised dullness figures-
Salt Lake coulis
on a potato base.
Glass Beretta with ceramic rounds
a homonym for
alternative dispute resolution
Spectrum flight
Dizzy with drift
Leica's cognitive filters
Store spectrum flight
Exotic pigments
strained through testo-
sterone: two in line
Dummy phonemes
from the intermittence
Quite calmed
drips of alien experience
at the lens edge
Liquid of known optical quality
Washed out
By a sexual blue-shift
The ghost of fusion
bambalam, Shambhala
bonanza in Utah
The dirty liquid of language
pinched by zero flow
isotropically radiant
without decrease of noise.
A peer network
not capillary
glittering in a spray
of vapourised palladium
It doesn't work!
and the Japanese already have it!!
Congress doesn't dicker
with five big ones
From fusion to leak
via writs, patents, and flashes
to start with vindict and finish with verdict
a room with no people
is an illusionless room
Helium-3 boils up from
rock flaws
in the mountains
above Bengal; problems of diffusion
from a thermal vent on the seabed
or a chink of improbity.
The catalyst outperforms the analyst;
international mirror setups show
that wicking in solids is a site for
interpolation. We see only heat
in the new Short-Lived Products Wing
dedicated to
observer-funder
interactions.
A pond where the curious
dunk the canard
about tritium being cheaper than canards
in the forward tariffs
The starvation of the wishes
by a scaled background
a concept mapped more exactly
onto itself by radial
flow, or, zero wriggle.
foofaraw, jamboree
gas cheap as water
power for free
A Building Code for Jerusalem
The Military Governor of Jerusalem
appoints you to lay the town out to show as foreseen,
picturesque peoples of the tended walkway.
You redesign the scene to fit the watercolours
as the citizens rehearse the civil war.
Using a bowl to design a lathe.
Take thee a tile and pourtray upon it the city
fallen through falls and burials and seas
as the plan for the principal place, where twelve gates
open
To the cross-modal leap, from theories of equity
to three-dimensional things encoding them,
putting ideas in objects where they are safe,
siting the traces of sorrow in a place
where it can be talked round and signed up
called Bethnal Green, from where to lead the band of artisans
to the mullions in the scatter of stone golden cubes
wet-footed in the tiny sheltered valleys.
Using happy objects to make happy people
closed in a cove of years winding out
proofs of themselves.
Repleteness itself follows from repetition,
by self-distributing processes, or,
a wood-block to print the textile of civics from.
Completeness itself follows from each several place
closed with a horizon, the bank that smooths
the anxieties of a whole shed of men
bending the withy and burling the cherrywood.
The admirer casts and catalogues a model
with the ripple of hammer-pats to say "hand-made"
in deception of the desired quality, closing down
the far-fetched and high-minded in Chipping Camden;
this is what everyone took to their home.
If you can embed knowledge in an instrument
Eastern plum cherry and orange colours
Fine waking movements where the hand
instructs the brain.
The new society starting with a beautiful wood
the new mind starting with the authentication of the Orient
the new behaviour starting with the furling of an iron strip
the new country starting with the way you walk
the shedding of unhappiness, practicing a bit each day
Parting the spaces in the cleaned Cotton Suq.
A wash of pure blue as the Armenian potters
cover the Dome of the Rock with new glazed tiles
from mediaeval kilns relined with safe fire.
The assassination
under a roof uplifted by a stern Materials Code.
Wonders of Classification
got the talons and beaks of birds. got the skin the dried skin the
withered wrapping tissue of weasel and lemming.
the teeth of wolves. got the slight scales of fish.
small devils on a strap, the stripped relics,
the talon caring kit in the belt
of the man from the River of Men, the
caribou feller. They protect you more
the further they have come to find you: the seal tooth
deep in forest country.
The concretion of surprise. the lesson objects. the
precious clutches. a rarittenkabinett a
tradescant hutch. a place privy to
slight retrievals. Annular
felled anno 1565, Kentner's
gallery in a hutch where fossils
eggs, minerals and bones
return like artificial memory
drawing to light the analogical series
but qualified by paradox.
Re-animators
shackling;
galvanic corpse-tensors
Judgment Day trick riggers
deploying cadaver vertebrae
in brisk paces
in the cabinet of Kensington
arpeggio of ichthyosaur phalanges
copied and attenuated to
palpable, papillar zero.
a tray of bird's legs rowed
to speak, and expound their structure.
Small coups for the acquisition of a body
counting one, two, three
missing a limb, and failing the test of pattern
returning to the lashing surf again.
fin fling. tetrapod matrix.
seizing an opacity of bone
freezing a rapacity of calcium
clenching the wayward rushes in steady edges
slot spine from skittering discs
the minor coin of moving parts
harnessed to cartilage
hoops of tension
stilled as bearing stanchions;
a theoretical set of curves, catenary
reared as monumental armature.
My hand dripping with a shelf of dredge
Why acquire sensations?
Why nuance them? What
tariff of preciosities? a clutch. a nerved interior.
a keeping where I rack the notions.
Lhotsky's keeper chest with
The entry rolls of Schloss Ambras taped up,
where one copy of every strange thing fetches up,
cabinet mania to frustrate a brother.
a set of fitting rows they violate,
a hardened paradox, a seizure from the time
of monsters.
a sssss ev everl pecial zyll
ver a llll a ser a ver a llll a ser a ver
a series of several special syllables
the names of organs that don't exist yet.
Gambas suras femoralia
capitali centro cartilagini.
A drip swelling to a sheet
a flexible plane flaring as a wrapper
restating a hole as an inside.
The falls of sensation, the contact sheets
in mill where the dissolution of the world
sifts out a schema clear as a blush
in swirls of pourable white powder
and soft folds for the linen drawer.
Water, silver, milk, and so on
a set of serial surfaces, mirroring folds of tissue
to shake and bell and nestle
new cloth that flatters both shoulders
the star-robe with its flowering of separate lights.
The burial at Maglehj or Muckle How
where she assembled objects
in her pouch, loose distinctive parts
of birds and lynxes
to draw down the power of flight, or
run at speed by night, or
renew the flocks of wild things after winter.
Some vertebrae from a snake
A piece of a bird's windpipe
or the finely sidling-bones of a weasel.
From far and wide to close and tight
objects glowing with virtue
fatally uttered
in the classic and enclosing pattern,
the populated stanza.
A Virtuality/ Cyclical Polygons
To your frequent and favourite demand consenting
encore une fois
encore une fois
encore une fois
The curve carrying through
the women in coloured woollen hoods by hands linked,
three sisters turning and repeating Time
Number which is all that holds the boundless back
the infinite set of finites
the repeated rules that produce asymmetries
Music, the line parting which promises to recur
the turning mirror with a tempo for each star
the disaffected right auditory cortex twirling it out
disused intelligence without information
the favoured velocities of an organ of timings
seizing centre stage to say I am the rage
ripples that purl and search for a shore
the sister
of Language,
the thousands of sound
leaving and arriving
in proper order,
the labyrinthine flashing
and serial intermittence
the sparks which part oblivion
the cyclical and fading polygon.
Take this point and extend it till it meets itself.
Does it become a curve?
Draw a plane out of it till it closes up above.
Is this a horizon?
Estimate the relative size of these two objects.
Remember the absolute size of the first one.
Starting with a horizon
at the turning of sound and silence
the men filling the winter with contests of oratory
fierce swift animals and extreme rules
governing phoneme occurrence
the beasts worsted by riddles,
necks drooping and grooming for distraction.
An archaic scene with movement in three tempos
a staff regulating the trackless recurrence of tales
the condition of myth
rolling away fluently with the slope of things
dark spiral coming out of shine
that starts with a ripple and ends with a rhyme.
The festival of the new flowers of May
the lovers in green clothing, the white beech-nuts
and the grain drink bringing immortality
frothing and fetched in pails
A choreography of several bands,
a fine gloss of words transqualifying the
shared actions, the music specific to that day.
The public shape the stanza fits in
fitted to the cultic hymn strain
flows through honorific and two-part epithets
and stands off, still and alert.
The liquor was echoing around the hall
and the song was going straight to our heads
in runs that stretch across and back
to make a horizon we call, what
are the utterance of their own names, gods
formally declining termination in an implexity
turn and turn sinking and heaving
the symmetry running after the poem ends
in gatherings of great aerial blanks.
Draw a polygon, two squares by two.
Translate it in the x-axis.
Translate it through 180§.
Repeat it 13 times side by side.
Does this look like a town?
Find a family to be born in. Study their language.
Imitate what they do. Connect and repeat the patterns.
You may go on with the rest of the poem now.
The winged ceramic figures with an aperture.
A volume confined in planes by
boundaries jagged in and out
imposed on a sound billow, a geometry
sharp and evanescent
that realises rules and is transpersonal
up to a thermal boundary of disturbance
where articulation is reversed and thaws into a murmur.
Starting with a terminal pigment
where colour fades into a murmur,
towards which objects are distributed at intervals,
defining an invisible and periodic concept
we call space. Drafting too
a field totality within which
everything joins to everything else.
A metre regulating the occurrence of the self-similar
firmly conducting our attention
to the point we are distributed around
or to an empty quadrant of sky
framing the expected flight of birds.Split a transform into segments called
turns because they mark an end to sight.
Each is to be paired twice with the unpredictable
and the implicit; halved, and self-complete.
Draw a polygon and distribute qualities at its edges.
Now fit it in your mouth.
Can you find the qualities again?
The damage of the loved pair
wiping out language and consciousness
the debris of our fictions
through the wound much larger than the body around it
falling fleeting fading
a self choked with fluids
swallowed by the non-self
burnt by starlight eating its own eyes
an optional skin growing as if to close
the new origin of inside and out
in several starts that move at different paces
milky and flecked with silica
throws
shimmering helical cylinders
fleeting out into an edgeless volume
to sound the holes between
the massed object inventory
taking music as the mapping of three-dimensional polygons
rapidly and briefly
changing shape, virtual objects
gripped by an audible force.
The coupled curve in several parts.
An incompleteness that completes itself.
The surface dissolving in shared space.
We learn to speak in order to tell our parents
we are listening to them, as if to
a near surface expressing, perhaps, pain in terms of colour
a separation lifted by serial quick flashes
of symbolic similarity
a volume describing the distance between two skins
poured steadily full of anxiety
mapping all the empty regions where
the self moves into non-being (Tillich)
the heated air swelling rarefying,
vessel tracing at once two surfaces, as
sound arrives in exchange for closeness,
in sign of loss;
the flows of air that calm the sun's molten light.
An Expressionist theologian describing the emptiness
before the painting, or,
why is it apples leave gaps where the sunlight slips
through, to a dappled paving made of soft cuts?
The bar before the first,
pure pause hanging without falling
parity unimpaired
strict gathering
before the first touch,
the scattering of bright waves.
Devise a game in which sounds recur at intervals
within a couplet, grouped by articulatory classes,
repeating a thousand times without recurrence
Using anomalies of pigment and outline
construct a 3-D image
from two halves of a flat surface
made of coloured geometrical tiles.
Can you restore a full flatness
by healing the discontinuities?
In the village of Pair Non Pair
a deep mantlepiece
of bird-shaped jugs containing songs
at our request that start
again and again from where they begin
between the boughs the tint
of the air that caught on song
that never got faster as we got excited
or slower as we clung on
I touched it to my forehead
and began to speak
Am I asleep? no. I hope I'm asleep.
have I got my ears closed? I can't see.
how do you know I'm awake? I might be
faking. What's that splashing sound?
are those pears falling on my head?
The language language is written in is probability theory
a wordless child that learns to score
a featureful band of sound that offers itself
bundled as puzzles
for as many as will;
turning on a seraphic set of mathematics
in reverse from the first
to learn the rules from the message.
I want to hear that again, we repeat
and join the lit room.
People setting out basins of water,
of wood, glass, horn, leather, or pewter
to catch the sound in
turning the air into
tall brass pipes, standing
fastening strings taut
that were shaking plain,
setting birds in cages
to whistle or sing it back to them
Finally starting to listen with
a ceramic bird-man for each tempo.
An open bubble
filled with phoneme-length scans
fitting under word-length scans
fitting under clause-length scans
cleared as it fills, bobbing; we are
ducking inside the edge of retrievable sound,
eddying towards us and receding,
all around our heads
gusts of warm bodiless breezes
a murmur urged to recur
that knows no words.
Two hundred people
drawing in the finely divided sand
each the same labyrinth-
a lattice, as a path coursable without a skip.
Like, using the geometry of solids
to demonstrate a rule in information theory.
What is the difference
between a variation and a mistake?
A duct through a canon of puzzles:
a spiral distracted in
an unreadable strew
of cubes and fallen cylinders,
a strange melodic light that would not go straight.
Telling off a thread of 7s, 11s, and 17s
he walked the winds
past the panes of alternating colours.
When he had answered all the riddles
the path behind him dissolved and flowed away
his blood stopped moving through his body
as foreseen
the centre is also the end; on the lintel
"exploratory phase with lethal outcome"
Castico Catamantaloedis filio
Carassounios Carathitonu Caradhdhouna
Prudhca Pruscia
Veliocasi Veliocaqi
AQQIIDOMarus Assedomarus Adhdhedomarus ADDIIDOM()
Tessignius TEQQICNIUS
MEQQILLOS Messilus Medhdhillus
Adhedias AqiidioV Redsomarus Ressimarus
Thirona Sirona
High Rhone phonemes blowing
out of the southern hands of the alphabet
A frozen underhearing
with the thick spirants of the periphery
Yes, we like the wine and the foreign code.
Something as small and fat-rich as the brain of a bird
concealing in its convolutions
the songly courses
lifting in its steps
the voice on which to lock and be lulled
as if to fly on a single wing
the origin of left and right
Take ten thousand English words.
Turn all the p's into f's.
Turn the s's into h.
Make an infinitive in -an.
Can we get as far as Persian?
In a far country, in a long region
the start of the line of verse
held up at each end by blanks
and marked by smaller units of symmetry
Perhaps first as a span for choral responses,
a length suited to short-term memory?
A stability virtual and shared
in a wash of optative phonemes.
The hero Suwassunna
son of a river and a willow tree
came to the land bringing the pistachio
and the line juncture, said
repeat after me. And one more time.
In Urartu the first city of squares.
A pattern shifting into dominance
seizing the space for its recurrences.
A flicker
of un-normed patterns
not bearing, not charged
He reformed the n/r alternation,
failed to invent yoghurt and was stoned to death.
That straight-edged city
measured by turnings
to form an arrangement
extendible by mirroring
I am the distribution
of my internal linebreaks
the mythic forebear of the Soviet state
a refluent archipelago
so full of eyes a
coast where the waves of oblivion
rush up the beach that is aware
swirls flashing out of reach
dipping out into the big darkness
tiny as your throat
the fallen trawl of lost ideas
the strong hand that squeezes
air out of surf
or water out of foam
a pure state worn
by the constant crossings
We plead our insistent pleasure, a true bill, this:
encore une fois
encore une fois
encore une fois
**********************************************
A Chide's Alphabet | Second Chiding | Third Chiding | Fourth Chiding | Fifth Chiding | Sixth Chiding | Sixth Chiding Continuation | Seventh Chiding | Waif | Bone Chronicle | The Gilded Man |A Chide's Gallery | A Chide's Eyes |