as i ran around angel island a wasp several times planted its stinger in my thigh
I couldn’t tell whether I was uninspired or out of breath
lists were open in every tab of my browser, “kill this / kill that” and
with my pointer finger I said, “I’ll take all comers”
except for the chewed paper narwhal hanging from the ceiling
I went to the porch and expressed my distaste for the art
which turned out to be a wasp’s nest—how embarrassing, right?
no, god can only make a tree, not compel me to enjoy it
one of my open tabs a critique of the racialized rhetoric of invasive species
every few lines a line lurches further rightward
i take two and make a tab: “species ceiling: one californian
scientist contends that we have reached the end of evolution”
if you say i have written a poem without science and I write in answer
science is outside the purview of this poem about discourse, well?
on writing
Pay to the order of ****** Properties in the amount of *** For: rent for *** **rd street, apt. * rendered
for you here like a character in a Poe story in a then not yet outdated device which also alludes to
contemporary concerns about privacy in the digital age
do you ever feel uneasy when you type a phrase—poetry in the digital age—as if compelled—
something about the way it scans, word choice just so and it enters the popular vocabulary, sometimes
for its conceptual blandness
but also
something a priori has become something a posteriori except that when i start to type posteriori i
haven’t yet arrived at the t and autocomplete insists on positionality and i think of it as a friend who
knows the habits of my mind or the contents of my major (desiring, after a fashion, to finish out
contents as conceptual or contemplation and, bizarrely, containafter)
but maybe i’m confused about the actions of reason and about necropoetics as a discipline. i mean
genre. i’m not properly accoutered for the action of reason. i have an acute case of not being reasonable.
it was years before i emerged, increasingly though intermittently, from wearing motley. would you
vituperate me as most responsible for taking the last draught from the well of democritus? p’shaw and
good day, i’d like to say to you but you are my boss and my vocation
and the raiment of the writer’s curse is if anything more obnoxious than the motley fool. two types of
a few more you’ll see in the vielle cour. i couldn’t say as i was unruffled at the vacation of that verdant
campus, not by the turkey or the deer, which lingered longer, hopping blithely over imaginary lines
of property but the surcease of the sybils, the swedenborgs, even the swammerdamms, so much more
marketable, who fell prey all to the intensification of the actions of capital, a system which shares its
origins with the system called writing
Z. Tuck