Memphis, after two days in... where? this tour has destroyed my sense of space, time, and location. we were in Mississippi, that's it. Starkville Mississippi for two days. We really have to figure out how to make the shows work in noisy locations -- without destroying our voices. More on my internal issues regarding the challenges of this tour later, when I have time and don't have an early early call -- we're performing at a high school tomorrow, here in Memphis, then getting on planes because we have the weekend OFF!

San Francisco, yay. Two days and nights with no rehearsal, yes hotel but Roger will be there. Part of me wanted to stay on somebody's couch just to be in an actual home -- but sanity won out.

So in poetry news, I've been reading "Chemical Wedding" by Robyn Ewing. It's strange and wonderful at times, very Jorie Graham-esque (appropriate since she's the one who judged the Colorado Prize the year this book won) -- although it does traipse into dangerous (in my opinion) territory fairly often by valuing language over meaning, I feel that the best/only way to express certain situations, certain moments of madness or dislocation, is by letting go of traditional ideas of form or meaning or sense-making. And that, she does particularly well.

My goal is to take that destruction of language and form and hope to still convey emotion, at least, if not exact meaning in the same way that narrative or imagistic poetry does. So here's todays attempt at that. More later.

into the otherdark, reaching

think: poem as equation
sum/some ending, multiple
Xs and bilateral sequences
of meaning : therefore
irreducible, the least
/ what is distance, geography
of obvious absence, lack the
variable subject, solve for
similarity in style not to be
taken for conscious progression,
diagram + nonconcentric circles
= proof and is it God or the unread
introduction / pawn shop
logic by which survival =
connection, knotted vein, sure thing
exponent. mother squared, far.
purpled history, better left
and now: solve for crescent.
+ gap. synaptic stutter, fried wish for
hands calculation a certain smack
+ uncrooked intent the poem
narrowing (touchless) into binary
static reach tautmuscled into void
void void.