BABYSITTING

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Joseph Goosey

1:40PM in our demilitarized portion of living
across of course
from a golf course
The wolves revolve
What insipid shit
gets contrived in the outliers

The International Monetary Fund
won’t quit playing games with my heart

Maggot Therapy
a decent title
for something but
where to put it

I’m hardly a grass fed species
and once
distraught
I tossed the salad of a friend
who cared no more
for the way in which I’d hurt him
than he did for the art in which I’d no choice
but to participate

Fucking strange
happenings
Sitting here at the table
of a soon to be brother-in-law
making certain his six y/o daughter doesn’t die
for at least four hours
as we occupy ourselves
in our own silly ways

Responsibility
Fucking strange

On this table is a math problem
The homework of a fifteen y/o
who has just had a shoplifting case
dropped
in North Carolina Juvenile Court
Congrats to her
I’ve never understood maths
Never intend to understand
how to go on in such daylight
y=a(x-int1)(x-int2)
y=a
is to me
a shitty piece
of conceptual writing

Jenny says it’s all in the process
Then we agree
It’s all in the head

We’re each in a process
of becoming The six y/o is doing a headstand
has been for hours
Talking to herself
about beverages
There but for
she keeps on saying

Last night on the phone with my mom
I listed the ways
in which the Catholic church
evicted the child
right out of a self
who was frightened
of asteroids
Mainly
their immediacy

y=a(x-7)(x-1)

Why
does Y always got to equal A

It’s not my responsibility to respond

Flushing may occur
just as anything may occur

A life so heavy
is not recommended for tissue so delicate
but here I sit
beside a novel
Don’t Try To Find Me
it’s called and appears
to be about a daughter and mother
who keep secrets from each other and more devastatingly
says the book jacket
from themselves
I am tired
of so much devastation

y=10/9(x-7)(x-1)

whatever that means
at least Y doesn’t equal A this time
unless A
is the solution
I’ll never know

A crumpled up note on the table
which I’ve now made not crumpled
because the preview was appealing
reads Sophocles says:
Don’t sleep with your mom
It’s either a poem
or notes for some honors class
Whatever Sophocles said
I’ve never known
Cattulus maybe
Another mistake entirely
I remember
when what filled my days was qualified
by some form of merit

Like
you are this or that
because you did
or you didn’t

Goddamn

Now I just sit in front of a screen
for eight or nine hours a day
simply to be told
things are important
when things are not important
for $13.26 an hour I pretend to care
All forms of work are a form of pretending

Labor
skilled or unskilled
paid or unpaid
like right now
unskilled
and unpaid

Grapefruit
is listed in all caps
as a contraindication of this medicine
for the cock
which I’ve stolen
off my friend’s kitchen counter

I figure any drugs
left on a kitchen counter
are fair game
and that he’d understand
the nature of this experiment

which might be
what makes us friends

An acceleration begins to manifest
by which I mean
watch out
for moving trains in this kind of century

Ellen’ll be here soon

For her I’m grateful
Not to spurt holy
all over your chest
all over your burning bush
I’m feeling a little saved

For all the hospitals in which I’ve stayed

One look out a widow
would make a difference

is a sentence
thought of
while looking out a window

It could be the rain
but windows allow me to imagine
I’m in London
Maybe
I’m still in the hospital
but shit
at least I’m in London and o my
How I’ve experienced
a decrease in motor skills
Exclamations
are rare
I like them
as though one does a lamb burger
Questionably microbial
I open to the first page
of a book containing the blurb
Chillingly plausible
I laugh
Inside and read a line
I’d kill
for a
what
in response

It’s been concluded Ellen will not be here soon or ever again
Inside her head she’s adopted the schedule of Anna Wintour

The fashion world is not OZ

The fashion world is the shakes
and cleaning the toilet with the shakes

I remain grateful but unholy
as whatever you think unholy

Tonight a friend asked me if I knew any good reads about Sophocles

I’ve another friend in high school who’s been banned from Belk
She’ll sum up Sophocles with a ukulele performance

I think all of this and I say none

Tonight there is cause for retreat

About the job market yet another friend said
The outlook is bleak
I agree
on all fronts

Next month I’ll be in Florida for a holy union
and to tell my psychiatrist the ideation sits around
as though it’s a bill I don’t intend to pay
until threatened
with disconnection of service

If this is to be about family
then it must also by default
be about aching

I say to the six y/o
when she selects for me which character I’ll be
while playing twenty twenty five minutes rounds
of Super Smash Brothers

She laughs as if she understood
all that about aching

With a couple of stuffed animals we make noises
I say yip yip spit spit yoshi yoshi woop woop

What I say in this context
Doesn’t matter for shit

woop woop

I aim to become more proletariat by the day
I miss
I mean no living becomes earned
Just waking up should accompany a stipend

Leaving for wine now

Leaving this open
for other creatures to scrawl their opinions

Forgotten dolls make way for forgotten everything otherwise

If Bowser isn’t the oldest
but has a bunch of children
who are you to say the children are not older

How do you know
Now theorizing
with a six y/o

woop woop

I’ve taken to reading the supposed classics
Littering
your childhood bedroom
which is also your current bedroom
with bottles

Woke at 2:13AM
Frightened
of where the bay had gone

I wonder
whether I could successfully hang myself
with the entirety of this curling ribbon
Don’t worry
Not that you would worry
but don’t worry
It’s simply a question
of logistics a question
of practicality a question
of ridding oneself a question
of redundancies

Too much asparagus
Too little piss

Too languid a lifestyle
Too petty a theft

I’m no associate
or adjunct
or operator
I can however
crash four wheelers
into such winding of vines

In the parking lot of the LEGOLAND HOTEL
I assembled the LEGO helicopter
It didn’t fly as far as we’d planned
You slept the whole way back
We didn’t fly
as far as I’d planned

I’ve been a terrible friend
not meeting the new edition to the fam

Being in your new house
now makes me feel myself
such an amputee

I haven’t cum in a couple of weeks
Don’t want to accidently have a baby with a flea

Documentation from FASTMED
States I’ve postpartum depression

Remember
We used to buy food
We used to buy food
You’d nap
while I cooked the food

For one I bought the Valentine’s special for two
The cats did the napping I was out of Morton’s

so tears it was

There won’t ever be anyone to talk to about individualized decline

No bog is too
but O yeah they so are
Once
confused and cut
by what I claimed was a dog
everyone knew
was imaginary
I received

THE LOWEST GRADE IN THE CLASS

I attempted to argue
that grades and what both I
as student
and Erik
as teacher
were attempting to do mattered
none at all
on the scale of global materialism suffering harvesting you choose
a verb or noun and shove it inside the throat

I offered to discuss
this crisis of faith
he called it
over a drink
a beer I said
but Erik who’d not simply given such a low grade
but had made a point
to declare he’d done so
as fact as if by
commandment
declined
Only coffee for me these days
he said
and maybe
that was the reason
he felt compelled to inform another person
how shitty they were doing
in comparison to their peers
despite operating
inside totally inconsequential bubble
and maybe
it was a reason
I decided to exit
My bones
screaming
you people

You’re not at all as fun as I’d thought

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Men with Selfish Centres

Posted on November 1, 2017 by DJ Huppatz

On the outskirts of one of the Milky Way’s
spiral arms, massively parallel POWER7
processors shaped a silhouette and everyone
knows what happens next: you couldn’t get
into modelling so got a job collecting urine
for algorithms. Now I know what it felt like
when fences put shepherds out of business.

Across the fuss, a corridor rolls onto another
corridor, then onto the freeway. Bundles of
selfish energies populate this fictional bit-
map, plain men in plain suits, plain men with
selfish centres driving biblical machines in
seemingly unstoppable motion. We have
spare fear stashed at the next stop, they say.

Once the data was released, we were angry
at the boggle of decimal excess, the worlds
wrought in cabling, the best red velvet cake
possible from all permutations. Our ghosting
awareness training alerted us to his thin white
skin, tanned flat as an icon. The Quran says
that a spider’s web makes the frailest home.

Elsewhere (not at all plain build), the name-
less 3.6 billion looked for food but found warm,
salted coral. Heat becomes bone, marrow, meds.
Where am I placed in this congested race into the
unknown unknown? Underneath this anatomy
there’s a jaded old avatar weighed down with
each pulse of unfunded cosmic consciousness.

Erotic robots have already sniffed which way
the wind is blowing, old fashioned pattern
recognition won’t cut it anymore and the
next lubricant shortage could see them back
in the fields picking strawberries. Thankfully,
aesthetic sensibility is not essential. Farming
and gardening are not the same as astronomy.

Alternative Facts, Bad Luck and Bad Timing
left us with an Amateur Hour Adobe After
Effects background and the sound of women
cradling babies in the ruins of a city in the Middle
East. Mostly there are too many pulses to process,
too much acid-wash rhetoric, not even my grooming
accessory can make up for the absence of poetry.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Ekan the Tiler

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Anthony Lawrence

Ekan called his work truck Morph for its ability to shift between function and elegant lane-changer. His dog was called Owl on account of her origin, O,O, and her ability to approach in silence. Naming his daughter was easy: Bubble Tree entered the world with data collected from her time inside the diving bell of the womb, giving it back in a new life filled with symbols in the notations of vowels. Ekan was named after Freider Nake, computer art pioneer, whose surname was reversed in the interests of syllabic extension and the music of iambic emphasis.

Ekan loved his work. Tiling married tactility to spatial awareness, form to grace. He could transform a bathroom from steam collector to a maze of colour-coded complexity. Commissioned to enliven a living room wall, he used the splinters and chips from a box of broken tiles to make the face of Jimi Hendrix. His other work was mostly basic as breathing: white tiles on a kitchen floor; a bathroom pebbled into antiquity with river gravel; a kitchen wall flourishing with the fleur de lis.

At school, Ekan had excelled at mathematics. He could count at a glancing blow off a shelf of tins. Give the boy a long number, ask him to divide it by 9, multiply it by 37, subtract it by whatever you threw at him and he’d respond before you could swallow. He could count swallows while running around an oval. He knew ancient names for numbers and numerical patterns.

Ekan was electrocuted when he drilled through the side plate of an old heater he’d been trying to repair for a friend who’d never held a hammer in his life, and who’d called out that yes, he’d turned off the power. Owl sat beside him and gave the lip-curl and snarl to the paramedics.

At his funeral they played ELO’s Can’t Get it Out of My Head and his mother talked of his love for the number sixteen. It rained. Leaves on the cemetery grass danced like orange beetles. An old girlfriend said she’d only recently found one of his letters, written in code she’d never been able to break. When a plane came over, alarmingly low, everyone in the carpark lowered their umbrellas and waited.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Asymptote (Palindrome in e: 27182818284590452353)

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Anthony Etherin

Infinite sets,
to unity,
present critical
enterprises,
over a map.

Ether—
I eat ash.

To me,
asymptotic
log is key,
logistic to a symptom,
eerie, at a shape …

The ramp-rise
(so vertical, entire)
sent crypts
to unite
finites in.


Note: This poem is an ‘aelindrome’, palindromic in the decimal expansion of Euler’s number, e. Thus, the first palindromic units, 2718…, parse the letters as follows: [In]2[finite s]7[e]1[ts to unit-]8, which reflects backward as, [-ts to unit]8[e]2[finites]7[in]2. This process continues to e’s twentieth significant figure.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

a moving permanent con

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Marty Hiatt

a moving permanent con
juncture moving in me
daguerrotype sprite
in 8bit landscape
whose nails are flakes
whose taut gauze of self
with shit for thought
sees other streamer ones
graciously cut thru stone
to relay what is common
trying to hang on
to the suns grey spokes
in the great among
trying to hang on
by a screwdriver
jammed into a power
socket and being held
thru the snoot
to the magenta eye
of the beamer
always bracketed
with no abatement
in one of them nested nets
by the arc station
which is also about
having a numb face
and hyperventilating
in a barrel and
a safe onward journey
and breathe normally
burn and run
abolish rhetoric with
mega exaggeration
a weak invincibility
miscoded as mercury
dodging the whipping systems
randomly configured each time
on vortex isle
veiled in stolen stone
to replace weight
of vanished glacier
get into it
double the verge over
to make time possible
in the big silent bag of gab
and acid and gas and nailbombs
and artificial macrobe meteor
shower against innocent ppl
pursuing their fixations
as we saw above
though the image shifts
as virus slowly covers the pane
crushing out that circuit
that stretched out the earth
given the boot by bot
which connex to prev.
im laughing with my feels
, bearing, in mind,
that the nearest exit
may open into a pyrex throat
choking on own saliva
tethered by a hooked
barbed chain of indirect
objects laid out on
york stone crazy paving
hence doomed to nullity
, the marble busts concurred
yet the more i read
the more i questioned
this story based on
the murders at spurs end
grey sheds emerge
from grey fog
minor yet total
forced back out thru
rare books and manuscripts
to the lives innumerable
oer horizon
where we go then
with wirecutters and signs
blown over, couches dumped
to block the completion
of any one grammar
as we saw above
like the partition ambit
of red-gold hair fire
recommending exsomatism
with no abatement
to us us who
piss on all posts
already pissed on
who plant new posts
to piss on and
take powerless naps
on lawnless lawn
thrumming with silks
then wake up
sortes rihannanae
sortes beyoncénae
come out pull out
feet high up in the ground
pay also with nonmoney
for the sacks of white
paint we like to drive thru
and the other things
we tend to name to become
as we simulcast our
unrequited love for domination
live on the incline
how it gathers at
a certain arbitrary point
to spazz with hetty the pink-faced
doe-eyed vacuum cleaner
while other paths led otherwhere
and the dust is air-blasted off
and the crowding chatting bodies
who violated each other into ppl
are etched into light
over drinks at opening
nth mercenary hailed as hero
selling jellyfish just his day job
rules of civilian slaughter
questioned by professor
of american global interest
studies romping in harrowed
open cold playground
had his uncle hung in 2013
after a collective hallucination
led to collapse of the front
other ppl in other buildings
go thru same process
of no moment
horizontal sludge-puzzle
always bracketed no
more than a symbolic
gesture propping us down
feet high up in the ground
while we mull our next
error, this one
minor yet total
to be laid out
in a play on
a stage in a
city on a planet
in the distant future
here are 6000 generations
of electronic devices
made of rare earth minerals
mined by poisoned baby
slaves for you to use
on vortex isle while
you wait, like notebook
and the ppl out walking
through games of debt and prams
who left megamart countryside
to be rug gitter filament
to present in this quiet
sprawling light momentous
field of indulgence
and courteously share toxins
to right our sadness
in the mild indignity of spring
and you move thru too
light as a soiled nappy
perched unspecial thx to splint
in its senseless breadth
sipping faces and bricks
and colour in the soft pleasure
of separation and bottlenecks
and disregarded local regulation
beak to button beak to button
and they have an organ
that snatches your life
and death and spits out
nothing but gauze letters spent
fuel tanks and decommissioned
satellites to which you
add something else
no the other other
mudding up my screen
showing mums anguish
returning from
commendation ceremony
thumbs hooked in belt
to word-dart
the dumb animal of you
half baby half washed-up
fuddy-duddy handled
with kid gloves whom
they taught to kill
with white vinyl love
and a certain taut
enunciation of success
in soft bunker of hatred
with vulnerable armoury out
back of the imperial garden
where lanced lion vomits
and what look like postures
are forms of survival
bodies configured and patched
all over with wily vacuums
faces grazed by black
plastic and rots condensation
fed cardboard and caulk
with side of human liver
sauce taking notes together
and taking notes apart and
scrambling to hand them on
to the mounted slumlords
running us down we
cannot wait to know
first exterminate
then negotiate
tombs strewn like grains
of silicon, marble-still
the welter of them
clinking where you are
in the exclave outdoor
studio, making ‘work’
before sense and after
edging fence
marks boundary
between trash and trash
but marks are beautiful
punctuating anywhere
in the open haunted still
near amenities zone run bare
as by cattle and lightly
trashed and open and wide
and covered in a thin
off-white shimmering
web of human trash
improving dust and dirt
with punctuation anywhere
for the gutted griefing-chines
adrift in total metaphor
waiting, like notebook
under moderate haze
of off-white human trash
spaced through the buss
paperback third gear
and other obliquities
held out of frame
or mounted over crossing
as homing missiles chase
each other some are
passenger missiles
service terrible
target random
but tickets cheap
we continue to respond
to the unprecedented
with staggered gossip
scared as catalogues
patient as construction waste
clinking down debris chute
toward photocopied earth
and its pitiless chains
engulfed in ppl heaping
up loss that gathers
vanishes gathers inside
a vacpacked latex sack of
body parts metal vents
plush pleats and dwellings
made of rain-dried toilet
tissue strung over fallen
twigs and rolodex implanted
near kidney field
dumb alive and bare
im times media
not write-protected
writing soft cream jelly
from land of darkness
forest of abkhazia
for surveillance cameras
i gift hardness
to the tender of scars
that are still wounds
and return the stare
of the escape chair
on the mezzanine
bail water bright into sea
hold anus up to cupola
hole that lets light in
speed up speed up
flash of mirrors then black

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Zeno’s Zero

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Tom Hennemann

(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

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

At Least Four Instances

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Jill Jones

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

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

A Hat

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Luke Beesley

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.

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged