wake up, rod

so here it is: the terrible & the ugly. enjoy for twenty years nothing but needles i. hospital gown it's never quite as clean as television-- rolls of tape on the floor, the sound of rubber snap the sound of mistake, the sound of collapse but and now I've got the light on her now looking at wrinkles and her nakedness which comforts as if to say I've been there before and I'm going back. ii. electric paddles the pipe in the throat is the wrong sort of pipe but is there to do the breathing like that unnatural resurrection she twice performed on my goldfish. but now it is my turn to arrange the pellets, filter the water, breathe. iii. and I won't rifle through her purse till she's long and clean and dead. iv. transfusion the difference between iodine and blood is the belief that you aren't bleeding six needle pokes and four nurses and I'm still unconvinced we're made of the same stuff but here I have this finger and this nose that maps the differen...

I gave myself an assignment on top of an assignment. I asked my friend Joel if he had a psychic wishlist. I meant a list of material objects that he didn't have written down, but he took it to mean a list of abstractions that he wanted to embody. I immediately ganked the list and started writing a sequence of mini prose poem fragments around each one. Some of it is about him specifically, but those moments are diffused into a larger meditation on our insufficiencies as people to connect with abstractions and the insufficiencies of language that result from/cause this state. As for the omission portion of the poem. The actual abstraction that he wanted to introduce into his life are erased. Replaced in each case by the following symbol: [...] All in all it was weird and hard to write and probably not done yet. But here it is anyway. Cheers. -B. book of joel a list of want i. [...] no common ground, no quarter, no hope of surrender; in each clap of thunder is the name of god. ev...

this will likely be edited again sometime in the future. the story keeps expanding, even when I don't want it to. how I really feel about you we were on our way, halfway to fucking Santa Fe, Óðr in the back slurping beer from a beer helmet, mead from a mead cap, cigarette ashes hitting blacktop like finger cymbals. you were a gun made of beef jerky and uppers. a Buick full of errata, mise en scène, some said the objects were more interesting than the dialogue. later, alone in Arizona, adjusting the seat of your pants, the cell signal dropped out. hailstones, bidden from nowhere, fell on the sand. your adam’s apple, caught mid-word, stuck against the skin of your neck.

This assignment is simple. Write a poem in which there is a serious omission. You may re-insert whatever you have omitted from the poem as long as it has been missing for the majority of the piece. These instructions are open to interpretation. You are encouraged to mindfuck them. Cheers & Happy Tuesday. -B.