"NEAR THE ARMISTICE LINE

Mountains had steep valleys;
Why are the two dim flags of different colours standing
On the submits of Mt Têbêg with majestic ranges?

Mountains and the river stretched into distant views.
In the valleys where the dear mother-tongue encircled
Is viewed a watch-box of strange alien soldiers.

Both with bloody eye-balls
In the village where terrors quietly screened by walls,
The river was flowing with abysses.

Only there were inevitable compromises between lines and lines,
Yet they were not obstacles set up in reality.
In front of passionate eyeballs and decorated joy,
Sun-flowers stretched along the luxurious rails of the sun
Even in this area where controversial warnings brooded.

From the day when the gun-smoke flamed there dimly,
And the roaring of guns resounded in my tiny heart,
The spot was really an alien space to me.

The line was an unexpected demarcation,
Called a boundary line; the area of indignation,
Where the human history challenges against me."

--Yong-tê Gwôn

Nowadays a "generation" is (1984) about 5 years: as defined
by the minimum age difference necessary to render the music
of one stratum unintelligible to another. I'm not kidding:
this is a matter of languages, for those who have no need or
knowledge of formal English. To be young and without a music
...who could endure it? who has tried to? The best of us learn
several, like polyglots, and achieve a degree of cosmopolitan
skepticism about genres--but to do without any, that is a poss-
ibility which demarcates the real desperados from the poseurs...
without music, you create more consciousness continually,
though it might seldom achieve self-awareness; you make up names
for the things you feel and otherwise might only have correlated
to groups or songs. I don't say: Silence. It takes maybe years of
music withdrawal to merely conceive of Silence, I'm beginning to
realize. At first you hear the static of your momentarily disconnected
channel......And this goes for images as much as for music; moreso,
because we trace out images where we don't think of music (we then
are just impatient to be listening to it)--our whole culture is a kind
of semi-collectivized, semi-personalized hallucination stream--i try
to imagine having my eyes replaced with radar, or infrared...to
see.

"As a space, the present has been oversold." -- William Gass

Insomnia is the first distance; and all distances--are degrees
of insomnia. Tinctures. Ink.

It's not enough to dedicate myself to the future that should
have been...

Loving without being loved is a miracle of levitation--a horrible miracle.

Revenge. Murphy's Laws: a revenge that didn't work. The motives
of revenge and of excellence are the same; only with one, transcen-
dence is an evasion (the need for confrontation) & the other it's
the solution. Thus the pressure of society against individuals
produces crime and art. We cannot know what an art without
society would be like.

"The poet struggles to keep his words from saying something,
although, like the carrot, they want to go to seed." --Gass

Long Bets--a great idea, but you have to have money behind your
prediction. Which sucks--how many prophets are also successful
capitalists? You can have my prediction for free: The Chinese will
colonize the Moon.

There's no "litmus test for poetry", of course, but i always think
of that anecdote from classical antiquity wherein someone hears
a poem, & asks that it be repeated over & over, "so I won't die
without having memorized that poem". --In an age of mechanical
reproduction, one can devise a hierarchy: poems you'd buy the
book for new...poems you'd check out the book from a library to
xox...maybe even: poems you'd copy out by hand (i remember
typing out all the Rubaiyat for myself, once upon a time). Nowadays
you more often see this passion in song collectors. And
such. --Would you buy that poem on eBay?