Wednesday from Light
for Booker
apples and onions and violins and pesticides and when viewed from a bridge the horizon is only half-constructed the knife an ape selects for gorging is the blade choosing its hand various timbres of icy water sing across the bowed fibers of our skulls and the smell of sewaged seaspray fogs as the roaches as we are now called we the worthless are swept down into falling off our legs now running upon the air between the steel and the water and someone's just learning how to count us the forty-seven percent the ninety nine who is it who counts my beautiful boy he is learning as he goes please don't push him off the helicopters need trust between them before they can make music and so if he is to fall at least let his curls hear the quartet how about our sweet beginnings and chopped vegetable tears plucked from soil to lighten the load the roman road yes it's a load we load to unload and unload to load it's a logic and we share it with our peelings the lacrimal bone is absent from amphibians or maybe it's just tardy or wants nothing to do with tears at all maybe it's trying to get out of the water or maybe any more would be an unsophisticated superfluity and you are similarly disinclined to travel beyond the elegant sufficiency yet you made it this far and so let's exchange gratitudes they sure scissor paper platitudes and stony attitudes what there is to say here that is never desired to say is that it's not the bullet that kills it's the hole it swallows every moment before it and when I say I love you I mean that I desire the chance to elaborate and that is to say that I wished you would never have to learn that the hollow is the only part that doesn't hurt to cross the event line is a cold release from time so I wonder is emptiness employed or unemployed how are we to count that so I wonder is love conflation or expansion how are we to feel the sound as we count our way through the choppers to forge our horizons
"you're taut like a thriller, but how are you organized?" the rock asks the river
Patrick Herron is Senior Research Scientist and Lecturing Fellow at Duke University, Durham, NC, US. As a poet, Herron was an early adopter of copyleft for literary publishing, an inventor of retrieval-based poetics in the 1990s (later and more widely known as Flarf), and is also the author of several volumes of poetry, including Be Somebody (Effing 2008). Herron's poems and essays have appeared in a number of journals including Fulcrum, Jacket and Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse. Herron is the creator of His 1999 new media art project, p r o x i m a t e . o r g (http://classic.rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/2219/), was the first poetics website added to the permanent collection of the New Museum, New York City, US. At Duke Herron has recently created the Text Mining Laboratory and is a member of the faculties of Information Science + Studies (ISS), Computational Media Arts & Culture (CMAC) and the Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA).