As soon as conversation leaves the immediate context,
and lives of the speakers, it becomes radically falsified,
and as if we no longer talk together, but clash in our mono-
logs that are really directed against the television-drone
in our heads--and all too often, too, this happens even
as we are trying to talk about each other, and ourselves.
Or if one of us has managed to cleave to a system, that
system really exists in order to interpret the chaos of
television, not the lesser disorder of human lives--which
require no such Procrustean orderings (in rooted times
fanaticism has a different cause: attachment) to make
a little bit of sense. I cannot, though, cross out all my
poems that merely reply to noise. It would leave me with
almost nothing. But i can watch myself for this falseness: in
real time.

Practices when the self is opaque, must be different
from when the self is transparent. Improvisation becomes
unreliable; mindfulness, transitory. Then rituals and other
dualisms are useful and necessary. I rely too much on
my self-image of transparency: and so incur the violence of
the invisible while pretending to sight.

“ ‘The general conception of unconscious mental process
was conceivable (in post-Cartesian Europe) around
1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable
around 1870-1880.’ “ --Whyte, The Unconscious
Before Freud, quoted in Koestler, The Act of Creation
(1964)

Intoxication: that slave’s democracy...

Art is the only place where being infinitely distracted can
pass for productivity.

   ”POETS OF NO HOLOCAUST”

  It hurts me to hear them
  they are so fearless
  and so much at home in this world.
  Sad when their plans fall through
  or a toy dies;
  i swear at every poetry reading
  i won’t reach their age without my own blue number.