Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989-2009

from Teachable Texts

from Teachable Texts It’s suffocation time again how’s that for temperature as if your shit could think chiasmus without consequence herring bone at brink of tide pool education a composed puss in my boots memory deserves the best like the time it all happened for once without sketch-book momentum demarcation reached by Bloop street serenade then digitally remastered sounds of Pol Pot from the dugout posse dress magenta sweaters holding swab safely thinks i’m not Picasso i’m out of breath thinks again metaphysics of presence is not an innocence it’s pancakes like the rest of yesterday’s support of sense except this year it began with the drapes and the cleaning bill body skid without entering the ear canal the logicells clearing on instant contact showbizz retina and all that snore tactics white’s utter tournament time back to the sea is it? or probably should be seepage via a split screen anamnesis reconnected from its background grunt of scalpels 2 / Verse and Worse as death so life my dixie cup within whisper range its violet voice the particles of raccoon smashed and the hyssop dominant through perfected summer rains or was it a crevice made for taxis? (crude bark logic) (wanton flops taxonomy to starboard and i’m not even sailing.) become a copper flush the junkies out from a used suitcase to gorsefields somewhere east of turning dark vomiting on Burns’ night elemental chill with linebreak check out this holograph it’s either light or charcoal dinks at dawn hardly racist slang to the myrrh-fudge sucked sideways into sports so are we getting happier? my style of impotence dilutes then depoliticizes says hello then shuts up thermometer repeating drinks in moderation alcohol compared to tracksuits the crotch is the first to go thread by thread with the zipper side up where your smile says goodbye then i’m leaving. Canada counts its transhistoric debt in the text that Sarah mentions. Question three: what’s Sarah perhaps the most famous infinite of all Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 / 3 I ams. Those are the easy ways to disembowel history intervention of a vein not relegated to coordinated networks on a half-drunk cup of cocoa and i’ve fed on these scraps through eighteen different governments in Peru. About Rwanda. Poetry precedes disaster in speech melba clay neck in the sunshine somewhere else a gestural dialectic hitting print on surface arrivals time decayed to tide break. Tropes centre on plenitude but hostile mainland butters cash. Stood still stands story like a chickpea analysed in a study of slow growth thereafter variant aspects of the drum ear or kettle and 12 november 1548 year of the first canned spam. That’s a jesuit conspiracy he claims in fifteen letters meaning skalar or a potential paragraph on dentures strikes become productive of stability but in the factory of social structure rain delay is the profit motive still outside us or what God is in her redundance darkness a subversive flash of marsupial sfumato that’s italian for smoky kangaroo comes arrival time a freight car vestibule of fragments on a background of bones where Pope John Paul pronounces daffodil 4 / Verse and Worse and the sneeze is so immense that Samuel Johnson reappears beside a different heap of mah jong tiles thinking decorate my Gough Square patio. These are screens triplicates to trampolines of marbled papers urging ends to transit my life as a renga formulating tabloid Prince Charles permitted in my sexist dreams or else praxis in general. Moths have colonized the muesli clues to messages in bottles mirroring the badlands through the mail and the knock-kneed cockney still deserves analysis pellucid on the collar no one owns. One saint i know is a cigarette packet saints are holy when you blow them up into rings of smoke. Rings are like haloes so a saint is a cigarette packet. Synonymous closure of obverse state. The fish we eat read in brooks for lack of space where the road that disappears is accidental fish swim in oceans if that’s true because brooks sounds like books. You read books on a road which disappears where fish swim among reeds so fish read in brooks. Okay i’m wrong but who are you? in this respect seduction is potential the Copernican shifter shifts at will...