(i)
between first midst and last
will we ever arrive
closer to the centre
of oblivion
infinite baby steps
against motion
the paradox of toys
being taken away
(ii)
in second childhood
further growing pains
immeasurable still
razors closer shave
till the stand still
of middle age
neither halfway
or halfway
(iii)
the countings down
to empty sets
with nothing left
over and above
divided by any
line of parallax
a vintage toy train
stays its track
how do you fend off the sea
it will be here if not ever
but as your fever
or your shadow when you stop
breathing
do doors open as they did
does your hand feel the same
in the night
it’s not necessarily a question
of listening quickly
or slowly
there’s a fluorescent glow taxis are helpless
ancient women discuss
meanings the lines across
their cheeks
the junk is cast
plants are broken
shake hands with destruction
walk into the place marked with
gold and dung
if you gamble with fortune fences smirk
the mulch is full of earwigs
a group of men look at the broken road
as if it was a puzzle
that will take days
the night has its cloud face
buildings are illuminated
by tricksters
the avenue fills with splendid proposals
lollies on sticks avidity and cream
there are three creaking noises
in the morning
and at least four instances where the room was busted
by night’s computer fire
you start with
a humble shell
men talk to you they come and go
this corridor
becomes a question
perhaps you miss your moment
so, leave by the stairs
the caretaker watches you children swing outside
someone shines a torch
on the code
envelopes slip speech crackles
everyone has a theory
bark showers down from clouds
bricks get bitter
I had been walking for 10-15 mins without a hat. Inside the hat
I was able and was able. Customer accounts. Phlegm of coat
rack hardened around my shoulders. Amuck this gunky, silvery
circumstance, I made a decision, or it, it was the dec tha ma!
The made, ago. Idled another coriander blemish. Awning. Team,
to ever, day, docent. Soup with three full. Or stopped-up chicken
cougher? Arp. I had been walking alongside water lilies (you can!)
too! Have to(o) take me till I walked into the early 20th century and
spied Arp up in the late, by it. MoMA said warm itinerary. I have it.
/
facts seem to alter w/ an altered voice
as one counts capital backwards / i didn’t know
it was raining / dank advancing
comfortably as fish to the various electric musics
that echo thru the deep state
/
polished spherical men playing windy clouds
are all mad / senators ambassadors
rank w/ leggings they litter the centuries
/ death walks behind dark cars / the royal party of new
arch opera has taken five
/
we’re all squeezed rather tight / damp & massive
a thunderous sun shines on my left
/ dank green links jam / mica-glittering w/ a thousand eyes
the vast murmur makes
no sense of the behaviours of
/
these people / whose land isn’t a nation but a family
quarrel / who govern fortunes / twenty+ mill
it’s nothing to do w/ me
little electric teeth & eyes i keep
forgetting that i come from another planet
/
it exists only as a sphere of heat / conditions
were a bit adverse / fantastically
i wore a frozen pond facial mask to protect my lashes
from infringing on the law of cultural
embargo / mindspeech is the only thing i have to give
/
the other workmen here / a swarm of fleas
plank together / i ask the pinkish colour to my left why
/ annoyed by my sense of effeminate intrigue
& having said he & his the dank man
answers we use the blood of ironic animals
/
i was trying to speak insipidly / face all webbed
yet everything i said seemed to take
on a double meaning every tooth seemed to have thirty-two
meanings praised by poets establishing lunacy
in a no-doubt age / ungrateful
/
power has become so subtle & complex a thing an
augmentation of character gives reality success
/ nothing succeeds authority
as surely as the sun even as i think this
the world’s sun dims / rain spatters
/
it’s expressions are political not poetical / casts
a shadow about your mindspeech
not only insane but stupid
/ looms in a dank snowy jumble / my boots
crunching on thin bits of moon litter
/
what is a friend in a world where any friend may be
a lover at a new phase of the moon
neither man nor woman / neither & both
cyclic & lunar / metamorphosing under the hand’s touch
we were both still stiff / changelings
/
in the human cradle / i woke & heard now ticking
thick & soft / that day we skirted was
a result of the elliptoid orbit / a slow bleeding away of light
into dankness about the size of a fox
/ can’t count on any sun to dry things out
/
night got severe / i lay awake in a queer kind of ship
loud w/ rain you had a bad night
what happened?
ahead of us below sealevel lay twisted silicon
valleys / black cindercones /
/
i insulted him deliberately / belly-screaming frozen rain
the machine conceals the machinations
that obscene heads perform in public / my temper
cooled / the sound of the wind seemed like the sound
of the wind / lukewarm & uncommitted
/
proud umbrageous men come out of stasis
applauding my quickness to reply bright-eyed
in such a drenched public
ruled by fog & fear / they can’t
keep all their offices straight / over in Internal
/
the historical equivalent of a prime minister
wilts like a radish leaf / the crowd in the bank are content
but i am alien / bored / sweating like ice
somewhere on a dark web
in the sun / i fail to appreciate the event
/
what one is after when farfetching is
control over communications
the government can check not only act but thought
they fly in machines like cars /
i am talking of some crazy murmuring
/
lie / several inches of sound
dead white under grey-blue skies that swallow
/ a great hoax cooed & muttered
& i held on to my point
of abstinence / for us to meet sexually
/
both in exile / would be for us to meet once more
as aliens / the possibility is awesome
would take time & money
& all traffic is on runners in the winter
anyway / frankly asked i can’t
/
not impersonal & not only political
it’s individual it’s personal it’s both / more & less than
we & they / i & it / i & thou
not political not pragmatic but mystical
not a body politic just a mystic bot
/
on a mobile / i write to be writing
in little transparent boxes / the light of my mortal
vanity / the nearest to crisis
that our sexual desires brought us in the cut-up
night was an old word for shadow
/
the trouble is of course is that he is
troubling in his curious fashion / strange
to be spread & to never know the sex
i was afraid i would laugh at my own alien gentleness
/ my ambisexual face
/
during long heavy talkative parties w/ cubed hyperfood
my soul’s a frozen barbarian / is considered
execrably vulgar for talking business while eating
my averted face is mostly sand & rock but nobody’s yet
explained me away as a ghost
/
ignorant of the uses of zero
members of regressed societies can’t mindspeak
i began to feel like an athiest praying
deaf & alone in a universe filled solid w/ small stinging
grey matter i walked on / home to my island
/
dank shadows under cheekbones looked
like what i looked like
no amount of shock awe terror disturbed
luck running / turned out the light
sliding into sleep as a swimmer slides into dankness
/
the holy wingless flowerless world thickened
brightness was gone leaving nothing
no sky no horizon no shadow / the illusion was so complete
i had trouble keeping my inner ears from turning
into black tentacles
/
the President was obstreperous
his lunatic business of artificially created orgies
locked up all the stars / as well he might
total interstellar love-life gullibility / it’s not just
a stupid joke i know
/
how sunsets in autumn fall
on their side / how rivers cease to love & rocks
make a virtue of self-love / lit
is the left hand of dankness & dankness
the right hand of lit
/
insofar as i can love / i tried sending
slick blue stuff / recalling what my duck had told me
about the occurrence of dream-messages
among pre-telepathic peeps
but it didn’t work / the new is tricksy
/
scrolls up trees from the flaw of the south
makes banks shudder / it snows
surprise & pleasure
still brooding / how can you doubt
random mutation / the chancier the betterer
/
autumn was facing my sexual cycle as it hung out
of an extreme drain / dank energy
necessitating a sort of collapse
nobody & everybody was responsible for
my fog-ridden hills & beaches / i swiped anyway
/
smoke panted from fiery mouths
the afternoon limped like last night’s glacier
b/w two monster volcanoes
b/w us rose love
sugared & w/ paraverbal speech
/
glitchy / we screw on thru space
among great lumps / ravelling & unravelling
long & late / till dank
in other worlds in other words
out among gentle complexifying stars
When I seek, I look, look, look …. – Benoit Mandelbroit.
The Mandebrot set is not an invention of the human mind: it was a discovery. Like Mount Everest, the Mandelbrot set was just there. – Sir Roger Penrose.
C’est l’infini dans le fini – Baudelaire.
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of science and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say…. something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand. – Paul M Dirac.2
… the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science …. – Wordsworth, of poetry.
An eye, a camera, binoculars, an easel, an equation?
A cauliflower blossoms microscopically into smaller
and smaller florets, a coastline magnified unearths shore
within shore.
A mirror is sometimes a rabid dog,
a glockenspiel tinkling insight, a simulacrum of a past.
One memory fertilises another.
At school ‘un crack’,
‘un taupin’3. Where some saw runes stuttered across the page,
hazed by miscreant radicals that altered meaning, he tweaked
the co-ordinates of the triple integral and opened the slumbering sphere
like a water lily. The prize was his.
Keppler sensed the planets
defer elliptically when they turn their orbits back toward the sun,
became the young student’s comet.
First aeronautics, but no reef
or strip to earth his interest. Then, on a visit with his uncle,
a treatise rescued from a wastepaper bin, English words piled
into a histogram: those used most formed lofty citadels,
the barely uttered plunged into a weeping trail begging for larynx
or glottis─rank and frequency made cousins. He intuited
such shapes in unforeseen places: islands in an archipelago,
the populations of cities, income and wealth ….. a dissertation
of his own, a career that bequeathed him the parenthood
of the “tails” he found undocked everywhere he looked.
Hallowed Harvard, he noticed in a corridor a blackboard chalked
with cotton prices–his word clusters morphed into a new theory
of finance. After the attestation of a century’s evidence, the old model,
one of smoothness borrowed from the physics of gas, ruptured
by the discontinuities he discovered–risks lurking in the vapour─
familial patterns from years to months to days.
But those princes
would not grant him a mantle until years later.
In an IBM laboratory unshaded by academic towers,
when research was its own forge, problems
he could not visualise, wood and trees interchangeable,
bramble upon thicket, one’s branch another’s trunk.
The swirl he observed settled into passing predictability
but a replacement stability percolated all the while
beneath the glassy surface, ready to assert itself.
He sketched, painted, lit, exploded and scaled them
with a supercomputer, discovered spirals, curlicues,
beetles and seahorses weft by tendrils and filaments;
descending like Dante into the higher fractals of their being
he saw them reproduced: piccolo to flute, soprano to tenor.
At first he suspected machine malfunction, but looked
again and again and found them set indissolubly.
His thesis:
we are beholden to what we see (if only fleetingly)─the comet
moves on; his legacy burns in the metered sky like Keppler.
It’s raining now so I won’t see
Jupiter, Venus, and Mars.
They were to be in the vicinity
of the quartermoon tonight.
Celestial happenstance, the paper
said, and not to reoccur
’til after my body’s dead and gone
back to where it came from.
Infinity, I guess, but then,
I don’t really know. I have such
trouble with spaces. Consider
the heavenly bodies. They seem
to be somehow akin to the organs
packed inside me. I have no better
idea how far it is from Jupiter
to Mars than from a kidney
to my liver. And what about
the gall bladder? Where’s it at
and how long does it take to get
there from thyroid gland or heart?
What’s in between all these places
like Neptune and Uranus,
lung and epiglottis, Saturn
and cerebellum? Is there a relation
or do I need a chart to find my way
from Mercury to the larynx?
Do I pass my womb on the road
to Jupiter, Venus, and Mars?
Maybe I knew when I was a baby
swimming star in utero,
but I’m outside now and don’t remember
if Pluto is tangent to vagina.
I should ask an ovary, or testicle
if I had one. Excuse me, please,
but can you tell how far it is
from the cervix to the moon?
When I came down the birth canal
I missed a crucial turn
and lost my sense of distance
in the breech between head and feet.
Gwyn Hanssen Pigott 1.1.1935 – 5.7.2013: after her work ‘Bright Shadow’, 2011
for best, it seems you have taken mother’s bowl
the one she keeps her olives in, the tall green vase
in plain alchemy white, given me by second son
when shadows fill cups and bowl and at times the light behind
a beaker stands at just right height, a clustered
symphony redrawn on tissue paper to lightly
weigh and turn
too easy, she demurs
to move still life, exhibit what is left
influences and dynasties, ceramic pots
and paintings, sculptures sotto breath
you tap a finer language, pots or shapes
unadorned perhaps but limitless to what
they can intelligently say, assortment spread
seemingly displayed as simple but there is
a common thread–
I can see mother would enjoy her wares
displayed just so before she too moves on, her gaze
distracted by another’s work falls low
and shadows fill her olive bowl
gallery-hung for all to measure light
when bowl empties at an alarming rate
when porcelain ties translucent night
that hangs there–
three dimensional jars and jugs
play music just like glass, clusters
viewed as if to channel light
sounds of awe soaring from her throat
connecting her to music that she thought lost
of another time
1.
Some people have birthmarks like the outline of a continent, or stretch marks like tube lines with no colour code. I have a scar on my wrist in the shape of an earwig, with a thick ridged body and eight legs from the four stitches that cross it. When I’m cold it’s white and stands out from my skin, when I’m hot it’s pimple pink. When I run my tongue down it, my mouth notes smoothness and strength but the scar tissue of my arm feels nothing. The skin on either side tingles just with the proximity of breath, extra alert on behalf of its dead neighbour. This is my map of the line between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all.
2.
I remember novelty puzzles from my childhood, where rather than a picture on the box that showed what your puzzle pieces would come together to complete, there was a picture of something nearby to the scene of the puzzle – a clue, but not an answer. The bruises and blotches on my skin follow the same logic, they’re a map in reverse, a map of the places I shouldn’t have been recently.
3.
My face is pitted from teenage acne like an apple that was pecked by a bird. The doctor said it wouldn’t have scarred if I’d left it alone, it was the fussing and squeezing that made marks, but I always found it hard to let things stay inside me that I didn’t think belonged. Now, when I smooth a mud mask across my skin it dries to a lighter colour, but stays wet and dark for the longest in the centres of my cheeks, the curves of my nose, the corners of my neck – a map of the places that I could have been prettier.
4.
It never seems to me like the stars are in the same place as the last time I saw them, and I can’t ever find the shapes I’m supposed to outlined in a dot-to-dot. The freckles scattered across your back are my map of the night sky printed in negative. In the mornings when you’re still asleep, your body turned away from me, I search for constellations on your skin.
Turn
your spiked skull, follower
of the sun,
your scaly throat
coughing seeds to catch a slim wind.
Seeds as light as sun rays
yet weighted
enough by gravity
to never quite be air.
Blonde granary, your thorny ruff
a blighted scarf, a seed-stash,
in the jungle we call a garden
down a bank under telephone wires
you cut
a strange figure
your seeds alone
spinning
into their own eternity of green.
Eviction of the spy agency; what a bond of trust!
The kids are fighting over cheese.
When the golden fog appears, influenza.
The last dregs of lager on a humid day.
They say they adore how predictable I’ve become
since direct democracy and the release of the algorithms;
surveillance for transparency. In the interest of.
The legs have gone soft.
I will negotiate with the dear leader.
Kerosene on the mountain.
New turtle spawn trudge their way to sea.
(Q.E.D.)
To speculate on compound vision, the world reprizes: one and one is one. Each arc of a lover’s conjecture creatures toward incendiary light. The soul’s algebra draws upon an angle of landscape at once perishable and precise. We sup on the circumference of a single Brain with warm Logarithms for Drink. I admire the turn of a plump Binomial Theorem flush in your hand. Furnished with concave witness, we talk hesitating fractions, intercede in hunger’s ratio with iron buds. This ear’s more than average, less than storm clouds with their pressing sleeves. What was omitted by mistake? What proofs made Area the shore? The consternation of bell curves in gulf-stream forecast. Neighbourhoods airing their heat as Climbing seconds play. Copies upon copies in satisfied labour, suckling on leaves of chiffon. Curtained diameters soon become mouthy in a degreeless Sovereign noon. You knew that each syllable was reversible; sprung forth swift regardless. Tiptoe Amherst, court your meteors wisely. Neither the Day nor the Tongue remembers the process by which we first became series.
Going bitch-kegs at it
After our Demon Tweak
Seven thousand pistonlicks per second
B.now I have stolen my own weight in pork products
Reader, self-annihilating and semi-devine! Do this in memorium of me.
As revenge against the ones who gave us a taste for infinite things
All our love of Australian Aeronautics
Is concentrated in the corvid crow corby
A kind of songfoul and airborne Satanic Pastie
Half Cornish Half Irish me ma
Has a taste for Scotch Greys
In the Celtic League it maketh me
A treble cleff’d bastard
Familiar t’all loyal
To not
One.
Fornication aplenty
Of Lies? A great cov’rage
Barbarism we try and we try
Unlike Juptire we want to effect a more delicate lechery
Appearing to Leda as neither Bull nor Swan but as a declasse Candy Baron
Having a vivid little roister behind the kirk at Bellbrae
To make mushrooms burst on the side of the blood oven
An organical democracy where every cell might think for itself
And is at war with every other.
In this messy era of the rule of the South Gundagai Molls.
Giddy up.
I’m not.
I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.
Describing.
And.
Sundial.
Three nine seven one five.
Drei neun sieben nul funf.
And.
No.
She spent her childhood in Hamburg.
She spent her.
Five zero zero zero one.
Plus.
Funf nul nul nul einz.
And.
Not describing.
Zero.
Or.
Even the most ingenious.
Alone.
More alone.
Moonlight.
A leap year.
And.
No.
Strike that.
No.
Not that.
The other one.
The next one.
No.
The power of.
Of one.
Accumulated.
Of property.
Of winning.
Of one winning.
Of having won.
Repeat.
She spent her.
Accumulating.
No.
And.
She spent her.
Sechs sechs vier sieben fünf.
Six six four seven five.
And.
Next.
And.
A graph.
A history.
A technical development.
March.
She spent her.
June.
Moonlight.
Accumulating.
Even the most.
Alone.
One.
Gas mask.
One.
Day.
One.
Skeleton.
One.
Month.
One.
Photograph.
One.
Year.
One.
Toilet chair.
One
Century.
One.
Radio.
Two.
Day.
Two.
Preceding.
Two.
Digits.
Two.
More.
More.
In Hamburg.
In Harburg.
She spent her.
Inventory.
She spent her.
Childhood inventory.
Her in.
Her nnnnnnnnnn.
Next one.
Five zero zero zero…
Plus.
One.
Not one.
None nnnnnnnnnnn.
Not one more
than.
Neither.
And.
At the end.
At the &.
In Haha burg.
In the end.
Nnnnnnnnnnnn.
Not describing.
Not.
Not who.
Aware.
A warehouse.
A working method.
Not her.
Other one.
Other next.
Three.
And.
Nine.
And.
Seven.
And.
Not.
Absent.
Still one.
Not a still one.
Not a Leibniz.
One.
Nnnnnnnnnnnn.
Answered.
She was.
Born.
She was.
In Munich.
She was.
Not.
Nine.
Nineteen.
Nineteen forty one.
And, &.
Strike that.
Discount that.
For the sake of.
For the.
No comment.
Three five. Three five.
Zero zero zero.
One.
Next one.
For.
The sake of.
His.
One five seven two eight.
One five seven two eight.
One five seven two eight.
Story.
And.
Not.
Describing.
In Munich.
In New York.
In Hamburg.
One thousand five hundred & ninety.
Thous. And.
Dead.
And.
She spent.
A leap year.
Alone.
And she.
A bend.
A band.
Good.
And she.
Soon.
A white
band.
On a
white.
Evening.
And she.
No.
Or not.
Even.
No one not even.
Even one.
Less or.
Beginning.
Et
cetera.
And.
So on.
Young men 18 to 35
caucasian defendants naked or partly clothed
variously posed Statue of David style
around the yard and inside the judge’s home
bending over aluminium cans shot from behind
in positions amounting to forced labour
A light spanking for minor violations
or misdemeanour citations for example
Person A: marijuana Person B: traffic
The paddle appearing in 4600+ photographs
under pretense of documenting community service
and identified by multiple witnesses as belonging to the judge
was deployed for personal gain
in return for an adjudication of not guilty or dismissal
(do not destroy or otherwise dispose of this paddle)
To the charge of using the robe for benefit
Cross County District Judge Joe Boeckmann answered
I do not want to speak on those matters and stepped down
Shelba Ward lifelong resident of Wynne Arkansas
interviewed while shopping in a downtown thrift store
said everyone knew his court was like a TV show
He’d talk to them like they were a dog
then give them his number
she’d grown up with him even hired him a few times
Mayor Bob Stacy said it was sad to talk about it
sad for him sad for the victims
sad for the city with a smile
Taxpayers had been deprived of fines and fees
but revenue was through the roof now
it was a good day for the Delta
A paracetamol tablet
won't hurt
you; it will alleviate
your aches.
That white tablet’ll
move down
your GIT and swiftly
disintegrate.
Within an hour, it’ll
virtually all
be absorbed into the
bloodstream.
The [paracetamol]-
time plot will
reach its max
then
drop by half-
lives.
The area under
the
curve will
then
capture the drug’s
kinetics.
Particles will’ve gone
through fine
branches straight into
most tissues.
This paracetamol
won't hurt
you; it will alleviate
your aches.
It will metabolise
in your liver
to produce inactive
metabolites.
The chemicals will
move between
two compartments:
blood & urine.
The [metabolite]-
time plot will
reach its max
then
drop by half-
lives.
The area under
the
curve will
then
capture metabolic
kinetics.
Within a day, it’ll
virtually all
be excreted via the
urinary tract.
There will be nary
a trace of the
paracetamol left in
your system.
Your pain will’ve
become
a distant memory.
There is the set of living creatures in the house with two legs (all humans?), those with four (dog and cat and an unknown number of mice and possibly rats), those with six (an unknown number of insects), those with eight (an unknown number of spiders) and those living creatures in the house who are not known to the writer and whose legs have not been enumerated. Centipedes? If we count creatures that inhabit or visit the back yard, there are also varying numbers of birds (two legs). bats (two legs) and lord knows what else. Over and under ground.
There is the set of female creatures (one human, one cat and an unknown number of insects, arachnids, arthropods etc.), and the set of males (two humans, one dog and the smaller creatures as before). Among the smaller creatures, possibly other sets.
Two sets of creatures living in this house don’t overlap. The set of creatures that barrack for the Dees and the set of creatures that reread several of Jane Austen’s novels every year. The set of creatures that have killed another creature in the previous month does not include either of these sets, but includes a four-legged creature and at least one female, along with arachnids and other small creatures. The set of creatures that have died in this house in the past month includes one creature with two legs that did not barrack for the Dees or read Jane Austen: an Indian collared dove, gender unknown. It lies in the compost bin shrouded in jasmine prunings, overlaid with scraps of rotting food. Also several mice, four legs, gender unknown. If you include the residents of the compost bin in these categories you could probably add several million each to the categories of male and female plus another category which you could call neither of the above. Numbers of legs unknown. The numbers of killers unknown. The numbers of creatures killed also unknown. Both these sets in the millions. And as for the set of creatures that exist within the bodies of other creatures: doesn’t bear thinking about.
The number of creatures running around on a wide area of grass pursuing a ball, as shown on the tv in the house: thirty-six, all two-legged, all male. Plus a few more adjudicating or sitting on the sidelines. The number of creatures packed into the stands around them: approximately sixty thousand, an unknown mix of male and female. The number of creatures watching the tv on which the game appears: three, all of them with two legs. The number of creatures in the room who are sleeping: one, male, fourlegged.
Although the set of creatures that barrack for the Dees and the set of creatures that constantly read Jane Austen do not include the set of creatures that have killed another creature over the last month, both sets are included within the set of creatures large and small that have consumed part of the corpse of another creature within the last hour. Pig, never resident in this house. Its flesh, packaged, carried into the house by a creature, two-legged, female, reader of Jane Austen. And stir-fried. And eaten.
“From where did topos theory come?” that is
the question.
Usually God
Alone
poses rhetorical questions
that answer
themselves unlike
logic.
Also: self-answer, self-slaughter.
It came
from an unblessed contingent confluence
of algebraic geometry and category theory
given further decisive impetus by P.J. Cohen
who developed the technique of forcing to show
the independence of the continuum hypothesis
in 1963. Luckily
no one was writing
poetry that year; it wouldn’t have come off well;
what poem can compare
to something like that? Still.
Forcing is when you take a duck or goose and ram
fat and grain down its throat many
times a day till its liver deduces itself foie gras. Yum,
yum! and iff you kill less than 50 birds a month you get
a bonus. Now there’s a wff. Cruel? Perhaps, but
is there any other way to prove
2N0 ≠ א1 [or at least that that ain’t necessarily so] ?!
Element by element we force by conditions
a gavage of Being
to accept a generic extension that no
longer ratifies the semantics of the ground
model. Law is veer. Live liver dead duck. Booty proof.
These days
it’s all about Cartesian-closed categories with subobject classifiers
oh yeah.
O geologies of the infinite which burrow down
through uncountable (this is a terminus technicus fyi & btw)
infinities to smaller and smaller kinds! What is the smallest
infinity there is? Is it smaller than numbers? Where’s there? Where’s not?
Too soon to say they say
but we do know for every object a
there exists an object p(a), object of subsets of a
and a monomorphism that maps the Cartesian product
of a x p(a) so for every object b and every
monomorphism onto a x b there is one arrow and one
alone that, etc., etc. This is the net, this is the krill,
I am
in a state of permanent becoming
a complete Heyting algebra
a sheaf over a topological space
a more general categorical structure
an embodiment of a correspondence
between the canons of deductive reason
and a divergence of grammatical functions
uniquely determined by the values
given to their arguments by choice
I thought to
write about the ocean
I had been
thinking of places of aloneness
enclosed places
come and go as I please
write about
the ocean
address what
she said
−sovereignty of
mind
capacious darkness
flat light
liquid of living
and dying
things reflecting
in more darkness
space and matter in
between fluid skin
becoming airy
thinning out
things in between one
thing and another
surfaces change and
mix
restless folding into
each other
On the news:
the body of a woman has been found.
I am disarmed by the neat calculation
of her personhood, as though
she was human minus mind
divided by immaterial.
My child asks how they will remove his tonsils,
looks at the cut on his hand and feels
he is opening up dangerously.
The surgeon will use—
I am lost for words; how not to frighten him.
Tweezers? he offers, and it sounds less like cutting
so I say, Yes.
At night he sees venomous toads
piercing him with spears:
a liminal translation of the frog in his throat
that will be executed;
or, is he thinking of creation?
After the question about the tonsils
he asks me how the sperm gets into the egg
and I start to say,
When a man and a woman love each other very much,
but I recognise in his surprise—
in my desire to answer with
cartography or mathematics—
a wilful misdirecting of us both
away from
the dark lake of his dreams.
i. of fullness
fill me up on foreign words so that I might,
in meaning,
feel full.
and play me music, absolute; though map-less,
goes farther
still.
ii. pointing
your largeness larger, larger than, larger than large-less, ab-largely, ab-ending, loosely
large but largenesses-extra leave this largeness less than large, in moreness large but
lesser so, by largeness large
by largeness larger
by largenesses larger
though a-largest, dis-largest
by largenesses larger
and
inter-;
ad-largeness but ab-largest;
though extra
though hyper
though super
though
inter
and
pointing
pointing
always
pointing.
iii. mud
red
seen it
see
saw
through the mire
on foot
on thong
itchier, still
pinches left
right foot, no
I see a tree’s tree
timber, timber
knots and limber
Jordan 4 Arian;
a carving that speaks
of falling silver
humidly; a lofty light
a madness drove them in
a madness drove them in
they catch the caught and never fear
see to live another year
seek the hunt, the catch is near
more rusted ‘shrooms, Aerogard forgot
all stuffed behind the mounted rot
and pondered more and bearing not.
Cordite is chuffed (once again) to announce that, joining Rosalind McFarlane as Commissioning Editor, Collaborations, Amelia Dale and Joan Fleming are joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as Commissioning Editor, Experimental Literature and Commissioning Editor, New Zealand Literature respectively.
Amelia Dale is the ‘author’ of the book CONSTITUTION (Inken Publisch) and the e-objects Tractosaur (Troll Thread), METADATA (SOd) and Grumpy Cat 2 Reads Sanditon Chapter 2 (Gauss Pdf). She co-edits SOd Press, and is the poetry reviews editor of Southerly.
Joan Fleming is a poet living in Melbourne where she is working on a PhD in ethnopoetics. She is the author of Failed Love Poems (Victoria University Press) and The Same as Yes (Victoria University Press).
