TO THE READER

Bob Perelman

Originally published by Tuumba Press (Berkeley, CA) in 1984.

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THE UNRULY CHILD There is a company called Marathon Oil, mother, Very far away and very big and, again, very Desirable. Who isn't? back connecting pure dots, Fleecy intelligence lapped in explanatory sound The faces make difficult. Learn the language. That beautiful tongue-in-cheek hostage situation: My mind, up close, in pjs, and I use it. Wanting to fuck an abstraction nine times in a row, Continuous melismata, don't stop, don't stop, no name, no picture. There is a series of solids, mother, Called people, who rise to the single, transparent, unobtainable Solo windows mornings, afternoons, And there are military operations called Operation Patio, Operation Menu. It is individuals who finally get the feel of the tenses. So that it may snow, has to snow on the muddy corpse. There is a boundary, mother, very far away and very Continuous, broken, to interrogate civilians, the self, The text, networks of viewers found wanting a new way To cook chicken, why not?, to kill while falling asleep. There is the one language not called money, and the other not called explosions.

SEDUCED BY ANALOGY First sentence: Her cheap perfume Caused cancer in the White House late last night. With afford, agree, and arrange, use the infinitive. I can't agree to die. With practice, Imagine, and resist, use the gerund. I practice to live Is wrong. Specify. "We've got to nuke em, Henry" Second sentence: Inside the box is plutonium. The concept degrades, explodes, Goes all the way, in legal parlance. "I can't stop. Stop. I can't stop myself." First sentence: She is a woman who has read Powers of Desire. Second sentence: She is a man that has a job, no job, a car, no car, To drive, driving. Tender is the money That makes the bus to go over the bridge.

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Go over the bridge. Makes the bus. Tender Are the postures singular verbally undressed men and women Assume. Strong are the rivets of the bridge. "I'm not interested, Try someone else" First sentence: Wipe them off the face. Not complete. Bold are the initiatives that break deadlocks In the political arena of sexual nation states. A bright flash I, the construct, embrace all my life All the furniture in Furniture World, U.S.A., All my life on tv "first thing in the morning." My head is, somewhere, in my head. Say, threaten, Volunteer, want, all take the infinitive. First sentence: The woman's clothes volunteered To mean the woman's body. Biology Is hardly the word. No irony, no misleading Emphasis, just a smooth, hard, glossy desktop. The President was "on the ceiling." He could watch himself face down the faceless forces of history. A nation's god is only as good as its erect arsenal. It's so without voice, in front of the face, all my life I, In corners, dust, accumulating rage breaking Objects of discourse. "Why use words?" Smells from The surrounding matter, the whole tamale. "I have no idea" "I use my whole body" "Be vulnerable" First sentence: They were watching The planes to fly over their insurgent hills. Second sentence: Their standard of living We say to rise. No third sentence.

A HISTORY LESSON I wonder whether "States" in "United States" Is a noun or a verb. The clothes of my Charmed wife I see before me, as the phone Rings and rings. In the beginning, to set The record straight, was a mother cooing to a baby. US: What a wonderful audience To put up with all those dead people. Push all the right buttons so we won't Get blown up? Give the person back to the baby. The higher the ladder one mounts . . . cancelled. We receive many helpful suggestions Every day . . . The best of luck.

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On high, money assumes a human look, Like a face, that fine line Between want and need. "I use my whole doctrinaire Vocabulary, praxis twice as hard And rhetorical as a shotgun in a pickup. Today's date, sigh, a heavily feathered Paperweight crammed down the group esophagus For pleasure. Your bored longings-That's how money is manufactured." A coy little cog beneath the Democratic Party (Save the last dance for me) was born, And now, suspended in a jar of methadone . . . The United States unite into a fist standing tall, Nothing to do all day but make war, this is not My idea of a place to live. I'm willing to look The text in the face, but am unable Not to stay all the way outside, speaking In infuriated detail. I'm a decal, you're a decal, unless . . . Walter Mondale? Sappho? Separate The living from the dead, right? "If you say so, dead man"

PROBLEMS OF EVERYDAY LIFE . . . cancelled. I eat my words And fall asleep. Sometimes there's a period, Sometimes dots to connect, and sometimes A blank. Bikini briefs and atoll. Sometimes big flashes, big puns on light, On flesh. Cherubs spill out Of 2-D theory. We are fini, Lola, Kaput, my vegetable scrubbrush. Take a very large number and be seated. Boneless breast of plot, clock As male archetype dozes, blazes through, Pillar of living fire. All is calm, all is bright. Dishes washed and dripping in the drying rack. So long as it is there, it holds the heavenly love, That's what it says, Aphrodite of the heavens; Here, turned harlot, used words, Aphrodite of University Avenue.

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Half a face, call 651-2524, tours, chariots. Now I have to wash my hands.

PICTURE Picture (see, control, dominate) a Phallocentric lawyer dominating a Snickers, Milky Way, or Mars Bar On Market Street in the spermy light Of day. "I couldn't care less" I'm not going to get off his case Until the subject, a 10 foot tall ogre Sitting at the conference table, changes nature. Unknowable, domineering, ravening, question-begging, lifeDestroying, tune-mongering calliope. Always At a moment's notice, water's edge, eye Hems its own parade, sinks into past. You can't believe What you read. "I wouldn't if I were you" For only in this way can the poem Be returned to the mind (a mouth). A man's large, erect penis and a woman's Larger, more erect penis, these are the strategic materials For the in-touch scenarios of people Who husband the earth's increasingly scarce Strategic materials. The mighty engine Mounts the throne, of egg and semen made.

DON'T DRINK THE WATER, EAT THE FOOD, OR BREATHE THE AIR My perfect life is being spoiled By this shitty army food. Radioactive Waters mixed in the salad dressing are discoloring My perfect pornographic page (the real thing), Its thighs geometric, meretricious. Torn-up grandmothers in El Salvador My beautiful sky don't touch me or it'll go partly cloudy. Envelope-language means nothing. Tear it open. A number of other lives. Tears, cheers, applications. So now you have a perfect one inch vegetable word generator in my head. It thinks. Stupid baby grown up extremely accurate.

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Lob the applause meter right into the mens room at the Kremlin. It is perfectly reasonable to be so annoyed With the lack of respect one receives from the media (Institutional acronyms spread putative paper legs To a trillion dollar wind) that one thinks Of the five hundred thousand dead communists In Indonesia in 1965 as sick caribou Culled from the herd by the skilled PBS wolves. This thin tundra snow makes a perfect backdrop.

MENTAL IMAGERY My grandmother grew up on a farm Somewhere in my mind. Estonia, I think. There were no people there, only me. Where once were vaginas like Bibles And penises like bookmarks, now groups Of chemically hounded hunters and gatherers Huddle around the tube, a combination Digestative and glory hole, glowing In a permanent rightwing fundraiser (The structuralist stunned in the tub, The tide of signifiers (resumes) rising). Now there is nothing wrong with having A baby, though a few strategic needs might place Childcare on the back burner. Somebody Wants nobody in particular's oil. I want To talk. Tumultuous applause. I want everybody (Letters literally burned into wood) to be home. Unclean thoughts attach to counted bodies. Here I am, man's clothes on a woman's baby. The brain is a reducing valve, one That doesn't work, watch. This salt shaker (My features, irreducible) Won't leave here without me.

A PROPHECY What's true? The men get To push the buttons. Doors

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Slide open. Get off, You and all your options. The condemned populace Spills its guts in the aisles Of Safeway. Rings of torture Surround Toys R Us. "I use my whole body" Like clouds Through a relaxing rolodex After an off day, Tones of violence make words The whole truth and Nothing but the truth, So help no one in particular the smell Of grassy mud. The clear idea With the variable treaty Prepared to blacken The page with a single word. Sunshine, the visionary's thumb, look, He's staring at it. The brain is the event Of its life. What are you Doing here? Many stiffs Selling theory, slowly, slowly (one drop would save me) Breaking down, as walls Guarding private fact echo. "Without a precise time frame Or sequence of images, we're At sea here, Mr. Perieulomon, But we appreciate your concern. One drop would save me. I use parts of my whole body, I part with the curtain, The story. Reason would never-So help me 30 year old Quarry lake where telegenic Teenagers shyly fuck off camera (These same kinds of decisions Also face vastly inferior

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Russian computers) -- never think Of looking for me here. What's true? The same Words spread, jam, placebo By lethal injection. The condemned sky fills with F-16s. Death squads below the milk and blueberries. The face drives, the vehicle Heads. Self-fed images Of triumphal satisfaction relax Into the steady stream of vaccinated virgins. No verb out without a noun after dark. The method of ownership Acts through a medium, tissue, flesh, Paper, reason, and over and over, In front of the tube or above the gas pedal, A desire to dominate, To come, to be loved, wonderful, Arriving home, no, From the supermarket, no, sky Filled with rain, F-16s Under compulsion at the end of order, Say it in order to have it Said, the fall of capital, Meaning heaped up Only in bodies. Will there be enough to eat after? The store, the flat tall tale, Sans want, sans need. The ideal factory would be small, furry, libidinal, And not need a roof? Yourself? A national anthem is a shot In the arm, rosy, infected, At a point of no return. Down the hail from The Frozen Woman, across From the Dyspeptic Man, Above the Quiet Couple, and below The Ideologically Fun Party--

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Sounds like, could be, But is anyone some one Place? Help is on the way, Loss and confusion.

UP MEMORY LANE Give yourself one point for each time sense data mount Up and suck you through the window. These Single things left over from dream ovens. Water makes a pretty picture. date 2nd the on woman the of image sleep the said you love I water aren't people. pore every from love Radiating Why am I doing this? Asks Dobie Gillis, performing (imagine Andre Previn Conducting Brahms on tv) cunnilingus on Annette Funicello (You'll hear from my phallocentric lawyer). Because you want to, Need to literally like your own other. life of facts the smear Words desired you If. through real Air weighed body your if equally word Each matter wouldn't direction then thought your as much As But I've made my mind a land populated way this in only for sound demons relations By Can the poem enter the mind without stopped effectively being and itself Disguising

SCAPEGOAT Scraps of dogs in head, bacon. A big metal Think tank cracks a smile, rolling down Windows to shop a quarter of the day away To restore order. Walls call collect. Spectators identify with the special effects (Hear them barking?) as a beautiful industrialized Woman, one in a million, rolls down her Window and drives over to your ad. My hands (Welcome to the human race) are indefinably far

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From my body. Rocky punches insurgent meat. He'll lose. The withered plot thickens away. Bitches of the World, unite, untie! Male presences, change your own diapers for a change? Public buildings every ten or so blocks, solar, no doors! A poets theater in every town! Equip the stages with trampolines, but no p.a. systems, No clocks, no extraterrestrial clues to meaning. Back, earthling, to your partially eaten Language tamer. Would you buy a used concept From yourself? Then speak. A sentence (here We go again) whips itself into a frenzy of obvious Obliterated social life. It's hazy & cool today. The subject emerges from the rubble, ribbon, Having survived, socially, partially eaten.

JOURNAL DES DEBATS Another bumpersticker for peace. Another Terrorist attack on the Word Bank. Terrorist Is another word for entertainer. Entertaining A numb mind is another bumpersticker for peace. Alone on the court, a grandfather studies His foul shot, and makes it. Why should "impotent" mean "Unable to maintain an erection"? One doesn't "own the world," one owns "Everybody else," plays a zero-sum game Of squash, and stimulates one's wife To orgasm (like learning to ride a bike) With one's Weimar Republic sex manual, Which led, without pause for thought, To Nazi eugenics. People are now (still) alive. He'll suck, if you can get him started.

PAPER No progress A dramatic monolog

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At the moment of orgasm? God of xerox, God of blame, Is your name The same as mine? Destruction from within Begat sentence upon sentence Born to it A fantasy blocks out Colors in The sun-noun By the mental associations Formed and bothered Here, both in my Mind and body and in Conjunction with . . . Presenting . . . As told to . . . Are you me? It's so tangible it has Talked day & night, Hurts and offers You a place To stay for the rest of your life Takes off shirt by river Gets carried away Gets put into warm delicious Baked into nursery rhymes Triangles, slaves Not funny No feeling, so very far away In a room, a cavern It was like learning

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Another language only To find that it's the same One face way close now Relates to objects I'm afraid You've got to Drive em And wash em And show em that You love em Not a complete sentence Afraid of the veils ripping Afraid of the air burning Isn't it funny, There is a Pacific Ocean, But no self? Sounds like . . . A picture of a head Stares and would Speak but there are words Printed below on the paper A common commodity And naturally You understand . . .

WHY USE WORDS? A boatload of coruscating grunts Arrives on Mars. Coruscating-Think of a waterfall. Think of An island paradise in the bank Of the brain, think of jeeps, sand, Native women, capitalized flesh, think Of history as a communicated disease. The deathbed scene in Camille. Cleared to land. Slash and burn. Think of photographed water, Freely falling over a protruding lip, Sparkling against a background of dead

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Dirt and rocks slaving over the scenery. "You take the boy delivering the tortillas, Lock him in a room and beat the shit out of him. Then you've got two more names. Of course I'm just Imagining it." I speak my whole life Spread out against me in a collection Of manipulable objects, all with realistic Colors, prices, and accurate names. "I'm in love, I'm in love, With a beautiful gal . . ." The image here Is of a man eating chipped beef On toast. Lines (greying red) appear In the clotting medium . . . We study these. Those mental patients on Grenada Were so paranoid we had to Kill them accidentally. Now we turn to study The gods. Remember Mars and Venus caught In that net? My doily is glowing a vicious red. To sum up: Jack has got to find The robbers' gold with the help of the dispossessed Animals before he can go back home And help with the chores (blindly chopping wood) He used to find so hard and harder to understand.

"U.S. SEEKS NO BASES IN S.E. ASIA" A lot of people live here: See: big Smooth car skins. Personally I don't, not. Pick up the bumpersticker And place it on the group. For only in this way. Braided wood, hanks Of memoirs walk a horse. Tidal disclaimers. It's awfully unrealistic. Pick up the paper. Naval guns Butter up populace. They think up the place they'll go. A picture of a man speaking.

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The poem, the thousand year itch. Radish seeds thinned out In full light. "Don't read it to me or I'll fall asleep" As an ant crawls on weathered wood. Sit back and watch jets. That fine line between want And need runs along the bodice Of Guatemala reflected off The polished desktop too deep In the background to show up on tv. In books, the prisoner writes in blood. Off the face. For only In this way can the store be lit A dead interval before a decent burial. Figures at the apex wearing Some clothes made by some Other people wearing some Other clothes. "What are you Trying to tell me?" Pieces of paper hold All the cards. People, That word again, go home and shut doors. Sex manuals, Christmas decorations.

EXCESS Sometime around midlife, wishes Gather to a locus (place) (Take off your clothes and place Them on the floor) "Be vulnerable" skin softly Switching tense (anything but that) Go back to gather to a locus (Remember who you are) (but who Is that white vegematic on the counter Of the redone dream lover's Former mansion of a life?) Go back To gather to a locus (memory: place)

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(Place your mind in the refugee camp) Go back to wishes gather To a locus and begin to deny themselves Nothing, not the slightest Particle of certainty, vanity, face, A vast (18" wide) and towering (72" high) Perception (12" deep) of what is (there), An ocean (mind) enraged, distended, Swollen upright darker and colder green Than tantrums or language, "I don't Know you," every rock on this tired Uterocentric earth of language In place, wrong, and to be Read into the directions By continuous Approximate units of time.

STATEMENT The universe is pronouncing sentences, Nostalgic, what tense, and what Person? I am here, was about To say, wholly in mind and body . . . "You've had enough, buddy." The Pentagon inhales the mystery religion Of its hydrogen bomb, fried regions' Penetralia in recompense for attacks On theory or shy good looks, orchestrated To an overall bland finale To logic-stories. If you lock yourself Out of your car and you Have left the motor running And the car is in gear, moving Away from you (this is not a test) Then you are still not Without transportation, which is The point. The dreaming senses (wake up and smell the burning rubber) Reflect upon the sounds in the word Water, by image or death or reason. No place exists even once. Even before

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Birth, earlier made-up syntax Could tell you apart From a thing or two, nothing waiting in the wings, spiritual placebo plus The actual problem of dying. Common sense to speak after Learning the talk, but now Come the interesting actual horrible Mass concatenations. Think for awhile, Not as a delaying tactic, and Don't implode. So, the sun comes up, Agreed? Not as some thermonuclear Game of chicken, not the word, not The movie. Hot water, chicken soup. Unworldly broken creditcard, one hand, Two hands, three, four, five, and so on. The Marshall Plan and our subsequent Arms build-up was aimed at keeping Europe From going neutral. A body, Off the page, going native (how many orgasms can a paper tiger have?). An occasional postcard, without writing, but Lands & Peoples are none of anybody's business. Can you imagine having Your body all its life. Conscious, as a kind of record player Of group life lived in the same Place with people who you found So fascinating that you learned to speak Exactly the same language, plus personal Surmises, sunrises interpenetrating Dreams with real-time gargantuan Optical dimensions of the trees Outside? In Guatemala in 1954, Arbenz began to expropriate unused land, Offering United Fruit exactly the same Low figure United Fruit had given Earlier as a base to calculate taxes. At that point, the CIA intervened. There is a line, and it makes a picture, A death's head revolving under strobed News reports told to the excess orgasm

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Skimmed off the xeroxed jobmobile With distribution clear to all Campus bookstores closed weekends In a blinding drizzle of tears, one Each day for life. "You won't Be needing that." No effort Of attention is ever wasted, vistas Of sand, the one second it takes to memorize oneself on into story, Pacified body asleep. No agreement Without understanding the words are Lawfully wedded illegal aliens Tried by a jury of dazed responses Splayed onto aging freeways, armed With feelings that would choke a horse, A thing with a tail, hanging down, Relative to the greater mass of the earth. The universe has spoken in here Until it is many mornings ago That I say this now here, Orange there, told apart by the transoms In memory wash breaking over Body, water, different durations. A crushed mind retains Color, colors mingled in mindless Alliances. The only thing standing Between the Beverly Hillbillies and annihilation Is not now and never has been 30,000 nuclear bombs.

INSTITUTIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL APPLICATION Is this my ballot? This Plastic placemat (don't stop, don't stop) Showing a man and a woman In a refugee camp listening to a loudspeaker? Eleven million children (picture it) (Don't stop) standing on the surface of the earth (Scarface) looking at a lightbulb. The plot? I don't know you. Second mortgages, pallbearers

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On a roll, seeded lawns, It's lights out at the fetish factory. Think of these modified nouns (this luminous egg Is your body), selected and torn to pieces Of these modified nouns, as the Orgasmic (that word again) drumroll (Look out the window) (his phallocentric Truth goes marching on) leading to A giant phallus (male walrus) Sworn to uphold language (your museum or mine?). Day: cars; night: trees, No original word, many Per body, father and baby Cooing back and forth, mother And son talking.

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