this poem is an attempt to hold on to the slippery nature of slipperiness, smooth action, like and unlike a chambered device  admitting machined parts just so. are we machines?

"turning
 always turning grace
 and smooth thinking
 how slipping serpentine between snakes
 scales and forgetting school
 just swimming as one

 washing water with water and always forever
 turn."
 

this poem is another desperate attempt to cling to a fleeting sensation that someday something will justify the awarding of a single point, but it's not today, but it's something like a precious hope for the future, for a tomorrow where the score counter finally changes, a hope

"i made a practice of saying no instead
 closing my eyes and heart too and doors
 the hundred fish i did not catch because."

"ten months of this and a large bird
 waited to look at me like a shining stone
 lost humanity for the better
 the passages remained quietly shut."

"how long i wondered must i leave
 these silences sustained forever
 in white hoping for something grey
 on black horizons."

these poems, this poem, wants me to know death, to remember to love -- well, i swiped live, but yes love too. human love, human mean. human mean wrong all the time, but human mean like poison poison. this i know.

"poison airs
 we have no direction
 onion soup feed and remember
 magma flow."

"eleven eyes
 look and kill
 for the killer."

"we sell poison we know
 human mean."

this poem is a reminder that three words can be enough. it's got everything!

this poem is a reminder of the right attitude to have around curiosity.

"pose questions
 and body answers.

(written from memory) this poem is a reminder to myself
to look and see
and look again until i see again
and look again and again, and again and again (again)
and again and again and again,
and again and again and again and again,
and again (again) and again and again (again, again) and again again,
and again (again, again) and again again (again),
and again and again (again, again) (again)
and (again) again and again and again and again,
until i see.

this poem is a reminder to myself to look and see and look again until i see again and look again and again, and again and again (again), and again and again and again, and again (again) and again and again (again, again) and again again, and again and again and again and again, and again again (again), and again and again (again, again) (again), and (again) again and again and again and again, until i see.

"i live in a city and in a city skyscrapers
 clouds and traffic
 water and people
 and you and i
 and pigeons and pigeons
 and peers and peers
 and cement
 and streets
 and smoke
 and steam."

"but if we look without seeing
 what we see
 what will we see?
 what will will we see?"

a poor reminder to myself that waste is as inevitable as the four hundred longing fish in the sea. the fish will die, the signal fades, what we kill we kill. waste, waste, waste.

p113 of The Impossible Reversal describes a certain perspective by Georges Bataille in which an ever-present "plenitude" always leads to the inevitability of waste, and that the only outcome for such plenitude is that it will "[be] squandered in useless pursuits of art and ritual, [or] build into the destructive force of murder and war". cast in this light, waste -- art -- is the only way to stave off the devastation of unavoidable plenty.

"i cannot shake a wasting
 feeling all our secrets meaning
 when we come to kill, and find
 a wasting feeling signal reeling
 in our dreams four hundred longing
 fish when all is said and done
 and wasted, by the sea."