A Misread

A Misread by Peter Ciccariello - from the Whalesound archive read by Nic Sebastian http://whalesound.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/a-misread-by-peter-ciccariello/ …

#40reasonsforsilence

#40reasonsforsilence is a Twitter poem that was uploaded in sections from July 9th to September 3rd 2012. The poem is a Sapphic exercise in disambiguation exploring the idea of consciousness being digitaized bits of unrelated experiential data with the unique ability to create cohesive memoratic strings of meaning by data mining the subconscious.
 
From the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy - 

In the Principles of Psychology, i. 9. 239, James wrote: ‘Consciousness… does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…a “river” or “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.’

http://www.answers.com/topic/stream-of-consciousness#ixzz25QKs4Jp7

To access the poem online, search for #40reasonsforsilence on twitter.com
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1. Dishware is problematic. Choose a bowl that is not too dogmatic, one showing a certain latitude of remorse is best.

2. When walking, allow your mind to inflate, the effervescence will determine the degree

3. When sitting for too long, allow your lungs to experience economy of hasty judgment.

4. Choose words randomly; allow them to adjudicate their own meanings.

5. When all seems lost, remunerate and sit perfectly motionless.

6. In the midst of large crowds, watch something slow on the periphery

7. Thinking of those things too often corrodes whatever remains of your confidence

8. Solitude is valuable especially when one ponders Ideality

9. When listening, listen. Think of a teapot, slowly lift the lid.

10. Losing your concentration seems endless. Find it in sunlight on water, or birdsong, remember not to fret.

11. Let the tool speak, become friends , then you can work together.

12. If your being has feathers, it is not inconceivable that you could fly.

13. Opening and closing my knife was an allegory for missing meditation

14. One leaf of kale is a novel.

15. I am waiting for something to come out of the woods.

16. Yellow burns.

17. When watching darkness, make believe you have insidious intentions.

18. If you choose, you must accept. If you do not choose, there is always something to fall back upon.

19. Morning, after assimilation, requires protracted strategies

20. When seeking to identify shadows, it is best to turn your blind eye.

21. Flight and dream are interchangeable , use them in the same recipe.

22. Love will bloom like any other yeast or mold, held aloft by painfully delicate stems.

23. Never forget to be grateful of the cacophonous awakenings.

24. When walking, as in resolution, be the next step.

25. As darkness settles in, remember how all things die. Imagine all before you.

26. Fire changes everything.

27. The faint pink glow settling into yesterday is your child self.

28. As you possess, you imagine catastrophe. It is wiser to revise, .

29. Fading vision is n opportunity to be acuity.

30. Always hold love in a pocket.

31. Rigorous foreshadowing leaves you vulnerable to logistical issues.

32. Listen. Then listen again.

33. Seeing is not vision, not a sequence of physicality. Seeing is a contract between what is and what is not. It is best to generate different eyes every time.

34. Keep synchronicity close. Allow chance and accident to call to you. Do not be afraid you have done this before.

35. There are three reasons not to give up. Crepuscular memory, action potential, and a small child’s laugh

36. When sitting soundlessly, heal all wounds.

37. Bring mystery, bring effulgent ideas, above all bring the clear and unmistakable ping of falling water.

38. Forget, is not possible.

39. Try calling things by other names, reach out for phenomenal outcomes, let providence coalesce and congeal your yearnings.

40. Never act without benefit of anterior observation, keep at least one possibility in your pocket, love is like this, coddle it with your hurried breath, let it live, let it ignite you infinitely.

Albert's Landing

I've taken to swimming Little Albert's Landing,

From jetty to jetty in the late afternoon sun.

I can do it one way,

In one hundred modified backstrokes,

More or less,

Always keeping the sunlight in my face

And the empty hill that cradled the Bell estate on my left,

Gardiner's Island out across the bay on my right.

Literally no one on the beach or in the water for that matter

Except me, thousands of sand eels and wild-eyed baby blues,

A family of piping plovers pecking at the tide line and an osprey circling

And waiting, waiting, waiting.

I listen to my breathing, then, as I swim,

I listen to my heart beat, the sound of the water as it swirls about me,

The bright light dancing on the water,

Free-floating in this eclectic sea of hope, even as I struggle to accept these forces

That bind me to this earth,

To this pulsing sea, to this surging life around me,

To my own cell of pain.

Later, lying on a flat rock, giving my back it's heat and hardness, yes,

A man can be blind in so many ways,

Leaving his life to a future that will never come,

Circling and waiting, waiting, waiting

While all of the world pounds and swells beneath him,

Calling his name softly in its profound eternity.

Mud

The intertidal smell of mussels opening and closing as the skin pulls back. 
The black mud speckled with piss clam tunnels. 
Boys with flat sticks wiggling bare toes, a jab and thrust, clams in the air.
 Jabbing and thrusting is what boys do, piss clams flying through the air. 
Fiddler crabs peering out sideways from their hideouts. 
The boys scurry sideways to mimic the crabs, throwing long ribbons of seaweed at one another, in their hair, slapping their faces, flying though the air.

There were girls here the night before, girls and music. 

The boys swirled through their faint, sweet fog. 
The scent opened something hidden. 
The deep inside them mixed with the fog and doors opened everywhere. 
There are not always enough locks or keys to go around. 
Some of the doors are closed forever. Some doors are hanging off their hinges. 
Someone said once that everything has been thought of.

The boys think of these girls over and over again, they think of almost nothing else, they dart here and there after fiddler crabs as the bright light beats down on their bare skin and they think of girls. 

To stand on the water, to stand in a boat in the water, the salt drying in white streaks on their skin, their skin that longs for the girls hidden in the sweet, dank mud of desire before they even know it. 

Before they even know it they are thinking of girls again and again, even as they are covered in mud and seaweed and laughing sideways at each other they are still jabbing and thrusting though the sweet, sweet fog again and again and even, again.

Today is your advocate

I encouraged everyone to invest in you

Long ago we were a migratory phenomenon

So in love in dark little simultaneous conferences
And hot steaming bubbles of automobiles

Thrilling to far-flung places armed
With metaphors for social responsibility

We were a phenomenon known as ‘immovable minutes’

You circulated five million stolen moments
Capable of communing instantaneously

With what we were soon to be

I miss you; you left so suddenly
I still have all of your once-fringe issues

Rammed like a disease down the throat of your barometer

It’s a universe unto its own, all right
As I dreamed again you were dawning next to me

“It’s all about flow,” you said
Announcing the delicate technology of your luminous hips

A C T I O N P O T E N T I A L

take this moment for example
open the gate the flood of doves frightening
us like frozen little children
as if there were no mothers in the world
and I would ask, if I were there

    how to stop this death by holding
it's bleeding head under the tap?


watching you again for any signs of life
or distracting aromas
binding your hands behind you with
trans-atlantic cables

[another sun comes up]
[another goose is cooked]
[another letter lingers]
[reaching back]
[further]

remember at that moment

don't get distracted


remember losing this moment
as if you lose your keys or your last breath
unlike any other
we could spread it out like jam across a thousand loaves of bread

but there is no way

you could make
this army of  little children that we are
stop this apoptotic death
from penetrating
the glassine skin of our own history
 

I am here

I am here

Not quite a man then 

Stubble on the head neck
Awkwardly shirt off sun towel beach world

I am here years; then rain water on MacDougal Street
Front of Café Wha
Disintegrating newspapers sound from in/out
Looking for your hand

I am here uncorking a bottle of King’s wine
Small hill, golf course birthday dream
You are full with the roundness of spring flush

And I am here again with Robert Frost’s walls
The cowbirds are the only visitors
Save a lone chipmunk lightening speed
Having seen the shadow

You away, always away, always always
The yearning, the soul
There is a kernel of everything
Inside everything, inside every kernel there is everything