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By series: Bridge St  In Yr Ear  Ruthless Grip

Recording Over (for Brian Kim Stefans)
I might bask for a moment in the departed
and what's left,
when gone for a moment, and gone
for good. The quick traces
left in the falling
wake;
the bedded pause,
light up and fade of lexical access throws off false positives,
                          for when subjects "recalled" 40 percent
                          of the critical lures that had not, in fact,
                          been presented, it was due to their
                          being activated, or primed, by others
                          related semantically, with rates
                          of false recall at 55 percent. The genuine
                          intrusive memories of the first group
                          and the pseudomemories of the second
                          group are both experienced as involuntary,
                          vivid, and emotionally evocative. That is,
                          genuine memories and pseudomemories
                          of trauma feel the same, but one is historically
                          accurate and the other is not.
Carried the crates into the back, under the extended eaves,
each slat let in a broad channel of air
to cool the flies gently drawn across the table,
slowly spreading as if tiny air postulators
spinning in toward the moon,
a pile of moons-I mean the fruit,
fired in idealized shapes.
There are structures in the mind
beyond emotion, which is very hard to fake, beyond delight.
You are beaming beyond eros and the actual stuff,
mohair and camel hair,
that singed lamb smell, ephedrine dried,
                          clearing space for another dream of 4-story
                          houses individually altered and augmented,
                          arranged to individual tastes that foster
                          passionate and loving elective affinites
                          via equitable proprietary shares
                          exchangable transnationally and governed by 12-member
                          rotating boards who focus on common local
                          interests and have the option, as now,
                          of DVD players at Target for $44.97.
I said I would read "Stare into the Common
Joy" if I did this, and here, peering
through the poor circles of an invented scrip,
$5 co-payment. Filed
down to cart height,
sticking to the stamp,
bursting into code,
feeling for the lamp,
I cast aspersions toward complete kinesis,
but still lay prone to mastoid insult,
salinous and sodden. The air
makes clear the lost tenting space;
aestheticised passing out astonished
little helps, the fairest things
vanished into unclose
smiling air, rotting bosc.
Into every vacuum seethes someone
willing to make tiny, horrendous
orders, the flow itself
blotted lightly,
only, when un-
coagged, to thicken again at the first sign of movement,
as if to exhaust itself had been a posture,
an exceptional position it does not occupy,
                          as with the installation of the 'interim' governments.
                          Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan (which is not an American colony),
                          with whom I have been compared physically
                          at work as people have tried to come to terms
                          with a decision made for them as citizens,
                          was a top adviser to the El Segundo, California-based
                          UNOCAL Corporation, which had been negotiating with the Taliban to construct
                          a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan
                          through western Afghanistan to Pakistan, where I haven't been and can't go
                          though relatively free.
Tosses thoughts
like incarnate tennis balls,
pompeiian
ash come
to life,
rushing up too much
too easily.
Porters
walking tragic,
shiny buttress flies,
mirrors under buses,
papers under flies,
      We trade speeches as the B61 blows by
      on Bedford. I stick the speakers
      on either side of the mic
      and cover the mass with a towel,
      losing the pans.