1. |
Tape Rules
00:41
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While I wind magnetic tape
I accidentally think
and am no longer doing just what I’m doing.
Why does unravelling the reel one way
here
make it turn another way
here?
Does tape do things specifically?
Now,
holding the 1/4” strip in my fingers
and having thought,
I have to consider
tape rules
and anything rules.
I twist the strip
and watch the tape-rules working:
a part further down the reel
has twisted too.
this is the tape’s way of doing.
But this way is like anything
that always happens,
like waiting ending in sleep
or people being inconstant.
The anything rules prove themselves:
If I sleep, I will wake up unfinished.
If I wake up unfinished, I will soon sleep.
The post-instant rules. They are made of death.
Tape rules are made of important stones,
matrimony and it’s consorts,
dream animals,
elected officials.
They come out of the stomach,
out of the hands,
asymmetrical and specific,
resembling you.
They come out right now and right now,
the sense of it unidentical to the knowing it,
the seeing it comported by the sense of it
the understanding not gained but redepicted.
While I wind magnetic tape and think
a yellow light crawls the room.
It is passive-aggressive and runs yolky on the walls and through the plastic
walls of the bottle on the table.
When I recognize who the light is I instantly forget the worthlessness of questions.
Are the walls of the bottle plastic or is the bottle plastic?
Does dissolution happen outside?
What are the rules for how it glints the liquid?
For the rubber band beside on the table
who’s form reminds me of the tape I was winding earlier,
and also of other things
that I won’t say?
Think the rubber band has two sides.
but it has none.
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2. |
Justice Rules
00:41
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Someone approaches you
on an empty city block
looking like need
and starts telling you the story.
Says his name is Justice.
You go to buy Justice food
at the corner store
and then something in you feels destructive.
You don’t understand what you’re doing at all.
You look at Justice standing in the paltry yellow
light between the racks
in the corner store
while he waits for you to leave
and you think he hates you now
for standing there in the doorway
watching,
watching him waiting for you
to just go, so he can do
what he came there for.
You should get out of there.
It should be the full moon
which means destruction
and you should believe more.
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3. |
Them Rules
00:41
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When I was talking to you earlier today
I accidentally slipped
ended up behind a wall.
The wall was my face
and then it did the being there
with you
for me.
Now, for me, saying a face was a wall
evokes the dissociative effects
of a bad head cold. That’s really not what I’m talking about though.
I guess the head cold
could be a parallel analogy
but it’s too literal.
Nothing literal works here.
So that’s what happened.
I was no longer doing
what we’d been thinking of as talking
but instead was doing watching.
I watched
and the thinking-of rules were evident.
The game-and-ritual rules were evident.
Here, maybe this will do it: try and imagine
someone dancing
full costume
a ceremonial dance
full of meaningful gestures.
Now imagine their thoughts in that moment,
and the same-timeness of those thoughts
with what you can see,
with their eyes shooting significantly back and forth,
with the slow-rising knee,
with the limbs
in one-minded, immaculate accord
with the shifting tempos,
and the severance of the two
itself likewise simultaneous.
Does this work?
Maybe not.
But I’ve been watching
while you passed the ones
going away from you on the street
when you recognized instantly and accidentally
not only
the familiar
methodological body
but the familiar
arbitrary mind,
like the gooey insides of some strange
spotted shell
that don’t repulse
but rather remind you
of the taste of warm milk,
of being awake before your parents,
and the light at that time that you notice now
only in memory,
of original deviances
the meaning of which you notice
only in memory.
I know it happens. I saw you.
You put your ear to the shell
before you could even think about it
out of the fear of forgetting anything.
You put your ear to the crack in the wall
where your confidant has whispered the nights away.
This time a worm crawls into it
and your powers of perception
immediately become
inconceivably greater.
When I was talking to you
earlier today
I slipped behind a wall
and your hair was brown
and cut into a mullet
and your eyes were brown
and your face had yet again changed shape
because perhaps you’d been
limiting your nutrition again,
and your brown eyes are looking at me
like someone trying to make out the lettering
on a street-sign that’s too far off.
Doesn’t matter your vision’s 20 20.
We’re trying not to be literal here.
The question is
what can I mean to you?
but that’s not my question.
The question is
where are we going together?
but now
what looked like a street-sign
pointing to your yearning exploded
is, on closer look, just an advertisement
for someone else’s life.
When we were talking earlier
I noticed you’d really made your hair
into a kinda severe mullet
just like you said you wanted. It reminded me
of something, and right in front of you
I went down instantly
inside.
That morning when I rode up the road
with the skinhead boy
in his pickup. Windy road by cliffs
Water to the left. He had dense blue eyes
and the devil’s numbers burned into his left arm.
Told me of the death-magnetism
of the bridge we were crossing:
car and human parts
wrecked below us on the cliffs,
equal parts jumpers and crashes.
As a kid he would come awake at night
alone on the bridge, his clothes
hung over the branches of the trees
behind him on the way down from his house,
at the hour of non-distinction
between the water and sky
a tiny pale body.
Certainly the rocks were jagged.
Certainly there are
the bridge rules
and the stories of their origin.
Skinhead boy says we can all make up origin stories.
Take the mullet- it’s a thing now,
but where the fuck did it come from?
So I say some guy’s hair was getting in his way at work,
but his girl loved that long hair,
liked to pull it when they were fucking
or whatever
so she just grabbed a handful at the front
where it hung over his eyes, you know?
and just chopped that off
but kept the back.
Origin story. The first mullet.
Origin story: The fantasy of drowning contently:
When we were talking
earlier today
the eyes of your pale body looked for me and asked my rules
as if they could be yours too.
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4. |
Viewing Rules
00:41
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I’m behind him
and he doesn’t know I’m watching him.
This is one of the good positions of life.
He stands making a moment of himself
at the overlook fence
at the Griffith observatory.
He gets that Ahab look on him
and pans his whiskery visage
like a lawn sprinkler
and grips with steely knuckles
the fence that separates
him
from the view of L.A.
as if the wind and rain were beating
and his vessel badly fated
and the sun
wasn’t shining gaily on the tourists
in the vicinity
one of whom just said
now I don’t have to be funny again for another year!
But I didn’t see anyone around him laughing-
two of whom are the old ladies
that I joined on this bench
and one of whom is me.
I’m actually lying a little bit now though. I was there for the view too.
Can’t say what it’s like,
so say “the view of Los Angeles”
and fail.
“Los Angeles”
is to fail.
I guess I already knew this rule
when I sat down ,
which is why I chose another’s blindness
as my viewing’s subject,
and settled on the bench
to commence failing through him
which is more comforting
than going to the fence to look myself
and there playing out
my inadequacies of sense,
as always.
On the bench, I fail through him
for a while.
Then I pan left
away from the viewing-man
and there’s the fucking Hollywood sign. That means leave,
so I walk back down the dusty hill.
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5. |
Crease Rules
00:41
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Why when you put them on
this way with this bit
pulled this way here
does it go on like this here
and end up creased beneath your heel here,
from then on
crinkling a little in your psyche
pressed on you by the weight of you
in your each step?
Then you stop and fix it. You untie,
pull this bit back
flatten the crumple
and see your thinking change
accordingly.
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6. |
Mouse Rules
00:41
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Things happen when
you force sleep on a lit room.
Day going while the awake
under the light.
The rustling in the walls
and from upstairs where
we always joke
they’re throwing the dog
down a bowling lane,
when it crashes, skids on claws,
they yell at it.
Do the claws know the difference?
Do the little ones in the walls
share my thinking?
The day is different later.
Someone revs a motorcycle
from the other side of a park fence.
They’re playing softball
and the light is fast. It’s so fast
that there is no light.
Unyellow
unlike the yellow light
that catalyzes midday dreams.
Do the little ones feel its sag on them
when they come rustling out the walls?
Is the yellow light for them
when they die in the traps we’ve set?
That’s probably what it was, really.
She probably died slow, caught on the nose
flail around, then that ends, and only little twitch
and slow choke. The image went out
of the little corpse
and into me
and then I went to sleep.
Things I’ll never know about happened-
a cockroach that changed size
moves across the wall.
I touch it with my leg from the couch, fifteen feet away.
If it grows, then so do I
(I know the dream rules)
Then I told someone about it
and have been waking up ever since.
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7. |
Face Rules
00:41
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I walk into the Bar Nirvana
because those are the joke rules
and my legs are tired
and my eyes are tired. This part of the story doesn’t matter.
I ask the Japanese bartender
which is the cheapest beer
and she gives me Sapporo,
which I guess is the piss beer
of Japan.
She looks at my ID for a while
because I look younger than I am
and have, since I failed to grow a beard
at sixteen. The man seated next to me
tells her ’92 makes me 23.
24 next month I tell him. You must feel real old he says.
Not really I tell him. I take out my wallet.
There are five faces in there.
Four are the same.
I take the four same faces out
and hand them to her.
Abraham gets folded in half and goes back away.
This isn’t something I do often. Sometimes with dad, who drinks me under the table.
That doesn’t make this important though.
Bartender face across the bar is thin now
but the way she looks at me so earnest-eyed
behind the transactionary smile
means she’s been a mother:
gained thirty pounds at some point
had morning nausea
and craved raw pepper corns.
I feel young now. I don’t feel real old.
She takes the four faces and puts them
in the register.
In go the greedy little eyes and the white wig hair,
the stoic three-quarter turn,
the white skin inked
in dulled green.
Four times
in goes the face
the one that becomes a mushroom
if you fold it just so.
We say before we fold: George Washington
We fold and say: mushroom.
There’s a tv in the bar playing a college basketball game.
Oklahoma-Kansas. Three overtimes.
Best game of the season they’ll say.
I look toward the points of colored light
flitting over the flat rectangle on the wall
but what I see
is the sweat
coming hot
down the faces
of the boys, and I see
the faces
of the boys.
Phone rings in my pocket
and I think without realizing I’m thinking
“it’s you”
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8. |
Digestion Rules
00:41
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What is it that’s changed
upon ingestion
of three-quarters
of this cake donut
I’m eating?
Was it just a metabolic thing?
The fact that I’ve been eating too lightly
and drinking too heavily?
Or is it something to do
with my being alone?
That explanation must preclude
the cake donut, the metabolic theory
that I woke from the dream this morning
to something untouchable
in each specific sense,
woke to my body specifically
and the body’s adjectives
shriveled uselessly into themselves,
chunks of the world
in the world
without origin or context.
(this last most apt phrase’s being stolen
is, of course, totally appropriate)
or in terms of memory: the city lay down
off the mountain, to our left, a spatter of glint
in the dark like wet grass in the too-bright
and you’re at the right angle
for seeing spectrums
in simple happening.
Gatlinburg, my grandfather says
and points a leather finger
down through the dark
at the patch of lights
off the mountain-
the one we’re walking towards,
that I’m trying to make you see
as a wet field
in the slant-hour of the morning
because I think that image
may have something to do
with the untouchability feeling
and maybe the naming of those lights
and our walking towards them
has something to do
with eating the cake donut,
with bringing the out in
and changing the world
inside my stomach.
Are you not seeing it? Makes sense.
I’m forgetting the main distinction I was banking on.
Do we at least agree on the Like Rules?
maybe the likes aren’t meant to operate
on all these axes at once:
real night
imagined morning,
real town in Tennessee
imagined glint of leaves of grass.
What a fancy philosopher once said about Tigers in India
might apply here:
(the same friend who said
the thing about the chunks
showed me this, of course)
“There are two kinds of Tiger Rules”
Thus: Gatlinburg: the patchy weeds and floral stubble
growing on the island in the middle
of a big two-way road in Louisiana
Thus: Los Angeles: my each untouchable sight this morning
before ingestion of three-quarters
of this cake donut
Thus: A tiger in India: the words a tiger in India
This is something that’s always been despite constant misrecollection
of the rules that constitute it
: the cake donut conditional on you this morning
or
: conditional now and always
and so always as it has been exactly: alchemical.
: that is, there are no Tape Rules.
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9. |
Dream Rules
00:41
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Shells cling to each tree
all the way down the line
because it’s the still cool night.
The trickle sound of the late ones
pushing their fat
slick bodies
up from the dirt.
The crunch of abundance of them
juicy under our morbid feet. The trees in rows,
but was this a gardner’s intent
or a thing that the trees do themselves?
Don’t some do that? Am I making this up?
Do the ones among the roots
care about the lines?
No image down there-
their eyes are closed.
No sound under the ground.
No cairns or etchings
or meaningful mosses
or howls of sign-wolf-
no starting gunshot-
no astrology in dirt
no shinto in the shell.
what are the rules of shells breaking?
what are the caring rules?
Their sound blasting like silence now so strong and constant
that the moon must be yellow and enormous- tonight one thing
elicits another.
The cool air like water like nighttime
your feet like children’s feet
your pity like your mom’s pity
The humming sawing song moving
like grass under inconstant wind
seen from far off-
green to lighter green to green,
your weight
like the unflinching
sky because adjectives exist only in dreams
and gods only between trees that grow in lines.
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10. |
Whale Rules
00:41
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It wasn’t the same day
that I took the piece of charcoal
from the barrel in front of the glass shop
under the Hewes J train stop,
but it was close to it, I’m sure.
Or maybe I had just found it earlier that day-
but either way, I had it in my jacket pocket
that day we walked by the glass shop
and I took the piece of charcoal.
I doubt it’s that important, the sequence
but maybe it is.
The charcoal, for sure, is long gone, and, looking back,
wasn’t much more than a sign
pointing toward the object in my jacket pocket
and what happened to us that day.
It had the raw edges it should have had
and the rough shape of a continent,
so I said it looked like a whale.
It was rusted orange where it had to be
and was in my jacket pocket,
and we’d talked about whales recently,
so I wish you could have seen it.
I lost it. Or gave it up rather.
It became part of a deal I’ll tell you about later,
which went down according to rules
we’ll talk about later.
I went on without it for a while
going in and out of my house without it
and in and out of the parts of sidewalk with the sun
where it’s better now that it’s cold
without it
and went to visit my mom at her house without it
and then I was no longer without it.
It went down into the tar pit
where all the dulling things collect:
whales, torn ligaments,
alone moments with inexplicable feelings,
sex events that fertilize the dreams that themselves then crust
into the dream fossils
all silent, not even the death gurgle of real muck.
The next time I saw it
it didn’t look like a whale anymore.
It hadn’t been thought of like that for a while,
and it had human teeth now.
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The Cradle Brooklyn, New York
music of paco cathcart. brooklyn, NY.
for booking/whatever: pkcathcart@yahoo.com or
646 220 3328
i also engineer for other people/bands. hit me up for that analog natural jank.
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