bartleby recomposed decomposed
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Issue 2:
econo
/
magick
A
h
, B
A
r
tle
B
y
!
edited and designed by
Brooks Johnson
In the Winter of 2009
eightskin press
is nomadic.
brooksjohnson22 at gmail dot com
no more than 5 bux
or good barter
Ah, Bartleby wishes to give special thanks to the tribe, la fa-
milia, and the invisible hand for their love, support, guidence,
and assistance
Contentsl
Dead Letter Office
7
Farid Matuk
9
The Good Object
The Good Object (ii)
The Good Object (iv)
Jamie Renee Smith
12
This Now Seen
Joe Massey
Eric Ratzel
13
eye begin
postscript
Walter Franceschi
17
Four Poems
David Baptiste-Chirot
19
Haunting Questions Hidden in Pain Sight/Site/Cite pt. I of III
Cralan Kelder
25
[Outside]
[SomeTodayThoughts]
[Outside of Bremen]
Jean Shiki
Shannon Tharp
28
Practice
Leveled
Proof
John Latta
33
Rasp and Duty
Jumble and Balm
Fracas and Quill
eadLetterOffice
e boy with fabric
draped upon you,
this is you without
stress fractures. is what
the picture of the mus-
cled man says to me. is
that man real? i mean is
that picture authentic?
it gives me a sickness. is
even cocaine real?
.
W
hen men yell they are
not gods. yet this is not true
all the time. my verb is not
always a god. which is un-
true.
i have a rubber t-rex beside
me. this is my new charm.
ganesh is out, t-rex is in. like
bombay vs. mumbai.
like an upset restaurant
manager. change your
clothes. change your idyl.
poems are nothing I prefer
to eat. profit is not a poem.
poem is the promise of
bounced check - the conver-
sation just after. the petrified
gar fish. gnurled is the road.
i cleaned out my car and
found six knives. all new.
each time I went hunting
I bought a knife and lost
it in the car. a car full of
knives will sell.
a man and a wife and a
third wheel, all in camo-
flauge winter gear, came
to buy my car. they ar-
rived at dusk in a truck
towing a flatbed. she
chewed a straw. they
are in the dirt business.
they kicked my car’s
balls and rubbed their
hillbilly diks on its dik.
they did not buy its sex
and the lead man called
me partner. he was huge
and country and america
scared me like it does. i
cannot compete. i wanted
to sell my car very much.
i want to keep my castle.
i have the best place in
austin i know it. fight
fight for the roof. i sold
my little press today.
the one i bought and
learned to use. it’s going
to florida to ambitious
young people who paid
too much for it. i love
them.
so the hiks did not buy
the car. but there is
albert in houston who
says consider it sold. he
is overpaying me sat-
urday 9am for my car’s
corpse. delicious is my
pocket of money then.
saved is my hyde. let the
new year come on our
alabaster chests. let the
era of the altima begin.
year of The Groan.
kiss me honey the war’s over, and we do,
though the confetti in our mouths will make
a mess of it and the peace is over elsewhere,
so cry with me honey, and we will
because killing is bad and living is good
but how safe must we be to think this? ten
thousand of Joe Stalin’s boys gone every day
x into tank grease, into
snow
of their war without most of us crying about it
and God didn’t sit back either,
he sent his boy too,
so do we keep kissing and crying
or be like God and Joe and chip in?
The Good Object
Farid Matuk
people are rattled when their
money is mute. they put mus-
cles all over their minds. the
poem is the vein in the mus-
cle on the minds. bones are
something else like rules. they
are the american fact of size.
screaming men are american
let’s ignore them all night long.
my neighbor gets an electric
guitar so i die. stabbing me
while i type to you and i have
no beer and it is too cold to
walk. but it won’t be like this
forever. t-rex is here. t-rex is
right here.
loaf,
s
Dear S,
To respond to yr letter in part:
Yes, the muscled man is real.
Authenticity was invented by the
muscled man. Love it. Cocaine...
not real.
Mexico, which we understand
is only a short distance from yr
city there in Austin, is currently
being over run by powerful and
well-armed drug cartels. Oh
dear! The prospect of having a
failed state on the United States’
southern border is a frightening
one for many. One small town in
Juarrez, we hear, has surrounded
itself with a moat and century
outpost in order to protect itself
from the barbarous cartels.
Yr vision of America is fright-
ening too. But yes, as you say,
‘visions are good’.The muscled
man screams.We prefer not to.
Simple, right?
A.B!
Let us take as the universal maxim of our
conduct the right to enjoy any other person
whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure.
—Marquis de Sade
The Good Object (ii)
In my dream rage was a small couch
innocent block beast I quartered by hammer blows.
There were vast peripheries,
savannahs where little people clumped as pack mules
passing around their burdens in canvas sacks.
And so it is outside and downstairs
among people who care for one another
we make daisy chains of mules,
daisy chains of mules that kick backward.
A black luster on my shelf.
Gunman, man-at-arms, my dream
of killing is my dream of you
as my better hand, my best
governor, broker for me an Alamo
to take, an exit ramp I’ll come down
as a dune, a cactus and a thirsty city-finch,
a window washer after my money
and one of these bright girls hopeful
as the pearl handled Derringers of a pistolera,
a bad, bad, mean-’ol woman pistolera, shooting
up the dusty town, fulfilling the surrealists’ dream-
art as a kind of man ambling the promenade
aiming at the neighbors.
The Good Object (iv)
My mother’s best jokes
are of old whores – my favorite
had worked the canals of Venice and so,
though retired, out-swam an Olympian. Hitler
said “My eyes were like burning coal
and all was darkness around me” of the pain
his young,World War I soldierhood
suffered in the British gas. Questionable
Bhumibol, the Thai King, our friend,
explained his people’s wild love for him this way:
“You have only a gunmen,
shot your president, died in the street
and your child will go to bed
with your dream.” The joke’s
in how the facts are ordered,
though sometimes I’m with Luther
who allowed it wasn’t only
our works and our will God hates
but us and the idea of us.
A prurient smile known in wide-laned boulevards wanes in lacking the light to
tired eyes
Seen waxing flame that was embarks how go after-journey you will where
Pestilence this, all untorn and dough-rolled beatification
Stomping up and down in muddy boots the streets leaving about clods
Like sifting fog it stomps to shake down figs already rotting sweet sticky purple
fly-filled blossom like a giving kiss and empty as the bowl below to catch
And gaiety today nodding murmurs without teeth in that dandelion light in that
time-smoothed old growth corner where even soon creep quiet weeds
(You must they leer to slide into the shadows flatten and suspend your weight
like fire):
Unshoulder like six gloved bearing hands in lavender your load;
let drift through low humming swaddling fog and ice; sigh; curl in the lap of the
sea.
Beasts that ring and gold were play through beams also gold and hard to catch
I billowing white in coat wide and airborne in gull wing form wide as my seeing
We and hang arms tendons pulling cliff face the sun to trickle down bronze
smoothing
Many ways to pass the time that will and will with last half-thought a promise
High-hat thumping near sleep sounds and tastes now soon forgot
And pitch that strolls in broken range nestles in to find a close to home
For drift billowing white in coat the scattered we thoughts billowing down flat
wide to land and wide the land over we drift gloved dots sea fire clods about like
sifting fog
This Now Seen
Jamie Renee
Smith
Poem
a show on an earth
flea circus it takes a mind
at rest to see it’s own fleas
bend low over their sleep
trade attentions:
gold epaulets
my captains – they’ll suggest your dress
we ask a far flung stillness
we ask a deep in-moving stillness
down goes the lead sounding
of the lake, dead to its silt floor
and up come the dust plumes
INVENTORY
To think thinking’s like this landscape
stroboscopically stretched across
a bus window.
The accumulated articulations ravel and unravel.
The glass becomes a palimpsest
of eucalyptus
torn into a barn, into train tracks, into clouds warped
into a mall parking lot.
At a red light,
an egret stalks the perimeter of a puddle
in grass overgrown
around a pink,
condemned motel.
Joe Massey
AUGUST
In its lengthening
glare, dawn submerges
a dream’s wreckage.
The mock orange
outside the window
flexes with weather.
Some semblance of quiet,
or near-quiet―
not quite silence, as if
silence ever is―drones.
A memory of a face
I remember forgetting,
how it sinks again
behind my head―
this shadow’s palpable black.
IMPASSE
Our senses
snag against
the world’s burned,
blurred lists.
To bring it, the
radiant debris,
into coherence.
To collect
and recollect
what cannot be
apprehended,
only mended
again and again.
In that act
we’re attached
to some kind of
ground―some clue
of an actual world―
never quite
beneath our feet.
POEM ENDING WITH A LINE BY RYAN MURPHY
A child’s sidewalk
hieroglyphics
fade with the late afternoon rain.
In patternless patterns
dead leaves adhere to pavement.
My mind’s static under-
cuts muzak
wafting from an open café door
as an old man stumbles past
talking to a broken boombox
on his shoulder. I’m lost
in a surgery of thought―
and the toilet is running,
and it’s autumn all at once.
One.
our beginning begins
as it never could
without reflection
or any other kinaesthetic
agitations of disembodied action
to begin again
& this time w/o reflex, really!
we’ll sort by nose & eyes
knowing only by gnosis what should’ve been silenced
as it is said;
that is, only showing
the deadened end
begin again
I could envelop a week
souls weaknesses
in amplification
into pure volumes to make
your two yearly ears bleed blood...
a passage from out
must begin within,
so I say again,
“being, begin!”
Eye Begin
Eric Ratzel
PLEIN AIR
As if ink could speak
like this blind spot
interrupted by a breeze
seized in seizures of color.
Is there anything here
to say we’re anywhere
at all? Blink and
focus on the cracked
concrete wall
left over
after the demolition
of a scorched Victorian
mansion. Follow
the phrasing of the
picket fence
bent back
by foliage
rich with thorns.
Two.
an epochs passed since to-be was judged as that which is, and never will be
yet-to-be--an ocean lapping membrane foam map underwater table rocked
w/ crags still soft w/ liquid airs life breath, breathed cleanly & necessarily
in a biological story we mistakenly shape out minds into brains with, so
let’s begin again...
Three.
w/ my desire and lies I see nothingness
desire: b/c its object is wholly futuristic
forever not what-is
& lies: b/c its object, the not-is, is never
unless, by some mistake, I speak truth
but the is of not-is, the being of that which isn’t, is still
just not falsely, just not now
we can begin to see then how in grasping a fully passed past or not even
inchoate future I mistakenly professed the truth of lies & desires; the
sphere of unadulterated nothingness
this is stepping in, so I say again, “begin, begin.”
Four.
the uniformity of the eye knows no thing, but the order
the human form
of formalized god, projection, and light behind
casting a hood inward to fish for
in a hole of flux; were you expecting trout?
I expect me
& as you accept my expectations
I know
I know your wind carved face
is no more a sphere than mine
no more this than that thing I once named myself
(its eyes, bleeding from sun sight
its hear pumping new right & red tears)
Five.
my father, knowing the full content of god’s head,
mutated sight into electrical variants passed
through thin air to another eye before a blink blinked
some say, the ascendancy of man’s touch supplants the power of mystery,
but we, you & I, are not those men
& if we were, we too would be shrouded in myst
perhaps we are,
but a self-affirming god is anything but mysterious
& gold and politics speak of their own historical powers
but god
but you
but me (but her, but he)
say nothing of ourselves
for our transmuted souls are essentially another
if we are mysterious we mustn’t know it
(the god of jews, has & had & will ever only have historico-political power,
the power of gold and reproduction, the ripeness of spontaneity never coming)
the non-knowledge of myst makes conscientiousness a hymnal
because my essence is unsaid
out of its darkness pours light
light direct-
ion, lunar lay
silver lumen
moonray. I’ve
begun record-
ing her fazes
the quiver &
stone mile;each
buried smallish
ly in tyco -
underskirts and
tranquility post-
corona could
bury it too in
casual shadow,
or as we might
say light en ab
sentia. Her
daughters nether
crevice underneath
it rising as a moon
@ twilight. shed
to find gold woman
toiling happier
more better than
mary, for my mother
Postscript
the moon
among tree branches
a strange fruit
Walter Franceschi
A girl is putting lip balm on
her lips in a cold
november evening.
train passenger:
baldness
on his November
head
bathroom windowó
a frosted
woman
behind
Haunting Questions Found Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite
part I of III (To appear in serial in Ah, Bartleby! III & IV)
J’ai trop a ecrire, c’est pourquoi je n’ecrire rien. —Stendhal, Journal, 1804
Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or
for having them.A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I
write that it has escaped me.—Pascal, Pensees, #542
“Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself”—Paul Celan
“If you would create, relax before moldy, wet walls and feel form shaping out of the
chaotic patterns.”— Michelangelo
“The most beautiful world is a heap of rubbish tossed down in confusion.”—
Heraclitus
“A final glossary, therefore, cannot be made of words whose intentions are fugitive.”
—William S. Burroughs, Junkie
for Petra Backonja
I find in thinking with what a Conceptual Poetry might be, that I’ve begun
with a point of view of paradox.That is, considering the conceptual to be the
absence of a material object, a conceptual poetry would be the absence of
the poem as a “realization” of its “idea.” If “the poem” as an object is not to
be realized, in what ways may it then be said to “exist”?
One may also ask—since language is the material of poetry, if one is to create
a conceptual poetry—does this mean then that the absence of language is
involved? That the poetry is not in language, but found elsewhere?”
The predominant view of conceptual works in art and poetry is that it is
written language which becomes fore grounded, most often as the “real-
ization” and presentation of various directives, with their various forms of
pre-conceived constraints, and sets of instructions.Yet does not the written
language itself, as an object which “constitutes” the directives and instru
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