three poems
Tamas Panitz
Read to Kill
Based on contraband, based on stealing fire, based on the thrill of nothingness I could consider paying taxes –– if reading is all you want and maybe a little tidying up. But as it is each night a new piece of shit falls from the hole in the sky. The vast arms that encircle us with their discontinuities remain unable to reach me aside from the occasional caress.
Fragments of fragments, one must recreate oneself in the image of conscious activity. When I leave this town, I'm stealing your bike-rack and putting my broken one through your windshield. It's like I told the cops, when I'm reading don't fucking talk to me.
Against the Outdoors
I deny utterly the reading, writing, and the comprehension of poetry outside. Poetry has nothing to do with the outside. As soon as you go outside you are in the Western Tradition. The Western Box. Any supposedly fresh take or development of that ground is instantly and obviously tainted by its underlying materialism. (Materialism [or Positivism] is that concrete relationship to the world which supports the sciences, and does not have anything to do with the material world, much as its conclusions may impact it.) Isn't it curious that those who envision a 're-wilding' of men and women also insist on deep draughts of the outdoors. If I am ever outdoors, and I do not say that I am, have been, or will be –– I will be certain to have first assumed the spiritual grandeur of that primordial being who in the Vedas is named Ka, or "Who", and from whom all creation is at various times given birth, to the surprise and resignation of all parties.
James Dean as Amelia Earheart
No one can pretend to be who they are
for even the shortest amount of time.
It unfolds an extreme verity
to run with that herd of mice
down the slopes of sleep
with the dancing horses
that trampled their riders
I can't wait to see the faces
on the cake girls' faces
once a setting is prepared
and the cats can crawl forward.
Whenever someone dies
me and my ghoul gang will be there
watching the pornography of their things
groping with crawfish in the lazy river
of what praxis voids.
People with no taboo against drowning.
People without advice. Erogenous zones
impossible to perceive as genuine.
The phantom of the opera. The phantom of
architecture. The phantom of the body endures
the body's catcalls. Along the catwalks they discuss my fate
rich with oxygen and unscaled drawings
that are a lorgnette against my ruin
the better to impress longshoremen,
with intense ease that seasons the grass.
I'm having a brain attack just trying to reach you—
a fulfillment unheard of around here is absolutely turning heads,
and not necessarily in a good way, either.
It's the experimental reverence of the blind.
It's the magic mushroom, or whatever.
It's James Dean playing Amelia Earheart
after her crash in Madagascar,
to say: we will rise from the dead and the gas stations
that mark the three days of absence
will become as insignificant as the earth.
For everything is yet to be built,
and lo the wind is whistling between one thing and another.