Orphic Measure #1


It can only be unbound to the
extent that it is measured.
It is a dizzying transferential constellation.

Avatars in my dream and avatars in the park—
	     Avatars of me and of what I am not sure…

The domain of experience crumbles
under the weight of Philip Whalen’s dharma inheritance.
I’ve lost sight of the so-called drive, 
overcome and governed by the enlivening present.

The swagger that appears with a kiss on the forehead.
             Blockage is an asset in a system of injuring inconsistencies.
Competing desires desires competing to somatize
but also to transmute,
the cessation of play the cessation of thought the concentric is… 


  




  
Orphic Measure #2


Reduced capacity for
Induced by rot
The scaffold activated at every point of contact.

To rush to relish.

My surrender to mist,
less noble than adaptive.

A pair of sizable low hanging balls
becomes a problem only when another’s subjectivity is underdeveloped.

The form of the thing conceals the root of the thing:

Beholding an egret with a near clinical rigor.
Bathing in thickened repetition 
by which I am transfigured.

Squishy transference…
the meat of it all.






















Orphic Measure #3


Aimee tells me that the intervention was
to place her in the symbolic that’s why
they got her a library card.

Red tulips saturated with connotation
cannot function as a drain.
An image composed of several elements
should be understood as such.

Anti-cathexis:
sand is a variable
sand is always a variable 
a variable is not a compulsion but neither is it experience
only experience is experience and only a library card grants one entry into the scaffold.

I incant and I observe
I build a drain for the soulless part of the psyche.

To loose sight of the libidinal
(in this case)
might serve us well.











  

Orphic Measure #4

I devised a game.
Lower the threshold until reciprocity
becomes moot.

The mechanics of such a thing were beyond me.

Slurp it up until it’s taught 
then lop it off intra-communally.

Grazing for something capacious her sights were set.
Individually each clinician was surprised by the crispness of her affect
collectively it was precisely what they had expected.

Her state of being opens itself to me and I to it:
the bidirectional song and dance
slurping up the silly swarm,
brackets impede eroticism.

A poet and a nurse practitioner walk into a bar… 
What for others is sublimated for me is not.










  

Orphic Measure #5

Which is more deeply fucked:
Meeting urgency with urgency or meeting urgency with stoicism?

Stoicism can be erotic,
but so can a boot to the groin.
Repetition thickens into churning.

Constantly speaking about it in terms of geography.
Things at the center are placeless
             and floaty.
One element is the girl another is the tulip.

Ekphrastic seeds don’t birth but they gestate.
Endearment induced 
by the presence of geese.

We ought to make music
in spite of the sentence.
The temporary merging of psychic lives
this way becomes possible.

None of you will ever know
what I learned from Bob Perelman
and neither will I.








  

Orphic Measure #6

We stumble over each other because we lack curiosity
and the knot remains a knot because we lack curiosity.

Gestation is endless until freed by repetition.
Silly people will always be preoccupied by ambivalence.

The bad element and the good element
the external element and the internal one.
The pleasure of the back and forth isn’t novel but it
hasn’t yet been harvested 
not in this relation at least.

The goslings were birthed and raised next to Stow Lake.

Noah comes over for dinner 
and a vase of chrysanthemums a vase of buttercups
becomes the mediating variable.

Reframed in terms of geography:
you wouldn’t want to live in a spa.








  

Orphic Measure #7

You block the thing you simply block it.
You put your body in its path 
and do what needs to be done. 
You absorb what you’re meant to absorb
and it jiggles where it’s supposed to
but the function is remarkably simple:
it’s simply about blockage.

Producing distance between self and system is a relational habit,
it is also helpful.
If undiscerning you become 
beholden to a quince branch.
Spryly scurrying towards equanimity.

The knot remains intact
until curiosity pushes through,
producing a dehiscence…