Scantily Clad Press, 2009

There is something to be said for being. A very state of whether to weather the rain or scrap it all for some type of beautiful head scarf. Not of the burka kind, though I’ve heard about feminist Muslim women their educated liberation under cover. To wrap a cotton blend of print about my ears and part. I don’t like how it looks or that I want it to look like anything at all what that is I only respond to after the fact. It’s bunched up tight and I prefer a loose fit. Sometimes it’s too casual and falls to my shoulders that do not carry the storm after all. And standing next by next on the Avenue the mannequins do better when handled. Campaigns forged, they want everyone to want to wager. A model blinking or some pot smoking in youth despite the clustered fist banging on a podium today drags sightlines askew.

But I drive too much too often or I would, albeit I could not possibly go about my business without which I don’t treadmill or pump myself or fill anything. I count items and feel like “emit a wince” as a phrase could fit here. (I eat ham.) This isn’t likable I lie to myself. I have no ready idea what you do and wonder about that. If I should connect a want with that. I have waited now oh at least a minute and nothing rose up. So I’ll go for the bottomless because it’s time for a sandwich. Now that that is done I forgot what came to me when I stood there for something. You believe me when I tell you it will have been a keeper.

Though the face mask goo promises to take years off a person’s look I’m not so sure what goes when this happens. An obvious choice you can bet would be tough to pick because there’s something to be said for no choice in that sort of caged bird type of freedom which everybody on the outside talks about. So when we speak of lack, when we do, we make empty rooms.

unitarily everywhere against

I know so very little when I think about it. I can arrange some information, sure. Let’s see what I do but in the meantime I’m not certain what that matters except that shouldn’t it? So now you know. But here’s something: apparently in Europe there are tree islands to break up the demoralization of people in cars on six lane highways. Perhaps this is already incorrect and I don’t mean to imply morals, rather an automatonic trance. Or it is an aesthetic which has moral implications. That implicit in aesthetic as definition is codification. The question is not strictly fair.

I’ll try to take my shower short but given the mask to wash it doesn’t look promising. And though I usually pee in the shower and find this uniquely satisfying I don’t know who you are in that dear reader sense of an audience as opposed to demographic or other type stratagem and as disturbing as it is to think of oneself as a target or maybe worse as not a target I can probably never know if I’ve offended rather than sing when no one can hear.

I need to return to Europe. Not to be sentimental about them because let’s face it they’ve had their impact. Nor to vilify non-Europeans which as much of a verb it isn’t. Imperative drive beyond a narrative we tend to stoke. Like you don’t hear about how Nietzsche was kinda funny.

When I wear the world I speak in expressions. There are coast lines and issues of nationalisms and waters that laugh as we try to write on them. And when they rise you can bank on who won’t be laughing then either. All the way to Mexico the beautiful. That is loaded I think but cannot know the implications or possible interpretations. Let’s make up a few. So many Mexicans coming “across” the “border” that America is no longer the United States but disunited? If that is the reading, it does not necessarily convey that I don’t picture this as mal. The very italicization of the Spanish is political. That there is ish from Spain in middle America takes us back to Europe. Though they didn’t go back or when they receded what they took and what they left like ocean and debris or imperialism never goes anywhere because in as much as it surges and sinks into sand and crunches shells and dead crustaceans and cannot be drunk as potable.

observable (to) fields

Metaphor is a subjugational device. I wrote that myself. Some people want to have more than two cents so they have taken it. But that’s mixed. It is a matter of putting in so they are stuffing me with their dirty little amalgams while they use up my fifteen minutes. Those minutes can be like dog years or cat lives or New York in which case they are most likely also money.

seemingly

I had a stiff neck a few weeks ago which caused me to swivel from the torso. Putting on outfits was painful and I realized the clothes I wear usually - pajamas and workout duds. I slide some jeans and a sweater on between the two for some out and about doings but they’re quickly relegated to the gym bag to hang in a locker or back into drawers at home unless it’s time I mean really time to launder things. It’s possibly obvious I would have hated Catholic school though some ideas like Einstein make sense. He had five pairs of the same suit supposedly he never had to use up mental energy on what to put on.

endow previously. Ordinary

(beings animate nouns)

There’s good reason to assume a posture of resistance. I fake otherwise. I like to appear as an open person. Arms hang by my side when I stand rather than crossed. Privately I doubt pretty much most of what I encounter (it’s either this or succumb succumb) I don’t say anything in groups where individuals speak and sit back, speak and sit back. I position myself stubbornly palms up in my lap. If I were to put lips together with motion and sound the ringing in my ears would increase rather than the waning I seek.

Knotty pine paneling lines the spaces where the chairs are fashioned in welcoming circles and there are types of teas available in the kitchen off to the side. Mint is good. Even if some like peach there is peach and they do like it. We fit community in in this way. Participants can assume what they want when they put their story on me if I am blank but I’m not. Nobody is even as much as somebody would wish it. Why would one become nothing is a telling proposition. Ok I have spoken I’ll say because I’ve already said and because you can’t imagine a person not ever speaking. Not even the mute. There’s been cave humming and parchment statements and I order out loud in restaurants.

I’ll mention collectibles. Coins and stamps and sports cards even clothing. I know a woman who rents a second apartment in an extremely very expensive urban location to house what she wears when she is not wearing it. This seems excessive and I think about what I exceed in. I will ask her what she finds too much so that equanimity can coexist with judgment.

extant imperfect

I’m drawn to the fire camping or in a fireplace I’m always poking at it with a stick or even part of an abandoned curtain rod and feeding it. Except hot dogs or marshmallows and chocolate I haven’t cooked this way. Ducks hang and twist in Chinatowns all over the world.

And it’s not the same here as everywhere when I get somewhere else it’s here again or still and then like stuffed animals partying behind a kid’s back or the Observer’s Effect if I’m in Tehran there’s a Gods Must Be Crazy element like dropping a Westerner in a desert Coke can it’s different isn’t it.

So after the shower I push wadded up toilet paper into my narrow ear canals and swish it up around those bends what are they folds or crannies that funnel sound for collection. This is to prevent wax build-up and waterlogging. Then I blow my nose in the other side of the wad and usually the paper is still good if I can manipulate it right for a swipe at the drain to gather the hair which varies in amount if I’ve shampooed or not. This is so routine as to be ritual.

At the gym I walk and jog as I said on a treadmill even though once I broke an ankle stepping off stage. There are televisions hanging in a row maybe ten of them so that you can be on one machine and see two and more screens depending. If I have headphones for my ears I can hear which I don’t because the sound lingers for me. Closed captioning competes with the scrawl along the bottom of some channels. There’s rarely a really good story to follow not that I stop trying. I don’t hold on except to see my heart rate.

I’ve never coined a term that I know of. Recently I read about Paul Crutzen. He won a Nobel Prize and five years later put out anthropocene which is gaining in use. It’s originally through fiction that I know holocene as the geological period we’re in now but we’re not now because we’ve changed everything and the rocks we live on. I had some initial worry when I saw the new term because I use holocene in conversation more than you might think. It takes a while sometimes for invented words to catch on and then other times lingo sparks and burns out before books can catch up. It seems there is backdating to this whether you want to say it began with the agricultural revolution or the industrial one.

hence, experience

Sometimes I might find myself in a situation. It could be something with a table in the middle or memory failure. Usually I imagine intention intervening or in a causal role or botched. I’ve been in clean and dirty airports but never a television control room. I don’t like loud noises. I try to carry earplugs for concerts and if I forget them I use bits of napkin often I can find some. When I walk through the woods in the dark I wear a headlamp but once on a big mountain at night on glacier it was actively volcanic at one point my light failed.

And hierarchy of eddies.

I feel lucky when museum guards let me take pictures of the exhibited. And then angry. There is a man who I sleep next to every night we live together in a house and our laundry mingles in baskets before and after the wash. Once he wanted a solid look at some statue and on a busy day that could seem too close. He grumbled when he got scolded. You can’t use flash.

There can be a transparency to the edge of a sign. When you stare straight into the core of representation it’s density of accumulation which is called thing or carrying. I know you know. It’s at the outskirts I make my way around but people speed up if you try to pass. So I get out. It could turn into a parade or other type of congregation maybe demonstration. When folks gather together or bump into one another in a crowd and there is a bullhorn. Of course if this can be avoided I do so yet there we are and then what is to be done.

Out in the street in front of a building it’s buildings we enter some days, others not. Not to mention those that don’t permit entrance or our intention. And the rooms. Words like inhabit. Repeat. Rinse. Needle pushing back into flax fabric must be thick if it is to take all that happens through. There are clock towers I listen to from a distance but don’t sew. My buttons fall off and the backs of the material show criss-crossed threads. Keys hang from my zippers. What they unlock is nothing like the bullet alone doesn’t kill. This takes the will of a hand at work.

Cara Benson edits the online journal Sous Rature (http://www.necessetics.com/sousrature.html). Her first full length collection (made) is forthcoming from BookThug. Her chapbook Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (BookThug) co-won the 2008 bpNichol Prize. Other chaps include He Writes (No Press), UP (Dusie Kollectiv), and Spell/ing ( ) Bound (ellectrique press) with Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Kathrin Schaeppi. Benson edited the interdisciplinary book Prediction forthcoming from Chain. She lives and writes in the analog world of upstate NY. Her online home is http://www.necessetics.com.