Strange New Earth

Undersong III.

STRANGE NEW EARTH
from Pearl and Other Poems

i wait for the sun

to mount the horizon

and leave its wake of blood-

red blood

II.

the sun drags its shivering

body above the glass-

scattered pavement

and heaves itself with a final, weeping

less-than-a-cry and

hangs there, stunted, ape-like

made of a thousand

punctured yellows (orange fire-

red helium helio-

trope the crimson

holocaust theweeping con

flagration thedevourng el-

emnt & angl-xplsn & firfre  frr  rrrr) spin-

ning, hung

up on a milk-

y cata-

ract:

Dawn

in

the

de

se

r

t

.

III.

holy milk the holy

blood the holier

bells the holier

carillons ringing

the soft white milk of the end

of the world the moon

is black in the sky the sky

is broken flecks

of ash fall through

(c) 2014 lee sharks

from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

My Little Poemy

(c) 4216 alka-seltzer AD, a person with 13 shirts

A Telepathicist Manifesto

A TELEPATHICIST MANIFESTO

Lee Sharks & john johnson
from Pearl and Other Poems

1.     Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically.

2.     Telepathicism is NOT a method or style or school or writing. Telepaths HATE writing: It’s boorish and stupid and boring. Writing is like plowing a field with an old-fashioned cow. Telepaths are like advanced super computers plowing a field with eBay. 

3.     The telepath is stranded in time. Writing is a cow-plow, but it’s what the telepath has to work with.

4.     Telepathic writers do not train as writers, diddle sentences, or work with words. Language is a dusty string in the telepath’s brain, causing an aneurism.

5.     The telepath has a craft, and that craft is mind control powers.

6.     Telepaths give birth to luminous tumors made of light. Inside their minds.

7.     A telepathic tumor is the hope of the human race.

8.     A telepathic tumor’s gestation takes 18 sentient lifetimes. All of them are spent in furious thought, giving birth with a grimace of work and fluid. Ash and dirt. Dust and spit.

9.     Tiny metropolises of unpaid cyborg researches study literary history for ten thousand years inside a telepath’s brain.

10.  A telepath also does not have a brain, in the same way that a telepath does not write.

11.  A telepath does not NEED to write, in the same way that a telepath does not need a brain. 

12.  A telepath has a mind, but just says no to tele-pathways of neurons and sensory dendrites.

13.  A telepath exists in a cloud, generally.

14.  A telepath exists in THE cloud, specifically. 

15.  Telepaths practice their craft of mind control powers via controlling minds, not brains or writing.

16.  Telepaths also generally and specifically have control of writing and brains, but hate it.

17.  Tumors that are the hope of the human race, and cyborgs that are unpaid or woefully underpaid for their level of qualification, make up cogs outside the machine of Telepathicism. They are cogs, and they are not cogs, but neurons, and they are not neurons, but sensory dendrites, and they are not sensory dendrites, they are whole brains, and they are not whole brains, they are writing, except, they are not writing, they are created telepathically and they are tumors and cyborgs and they are the omniscient hope of humanity.

18.  Because Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically.

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

Tradition and the Individual Seismograph

Or, Developing the Historical Poetics of Lee Sharks’ “Pearl”
Johannes Sigil
from Pearl and Other Poems

Here is a little known fact: language is the medium of time. It is through it that we move to past and future, a “moon through the tender air.” The poet builds formal structures in language that iterate the substance of time, which tend it towards futurity. This is easy to see, looking backwards: “Howl” was a seed of time that grew into a viable present.

It is not so much images of the past that poetry creates for history (“the petrified remains of metaphor fragments”)—although it does do this. No, the poem’s most urgent function is to create that history of the present that disjoints it from itself; to fashion, within the present, a quality of time disjointed from the present, a pearl of unintelligibility that generates futures at a lateral angle, tangential to the course of historical time.

To achieve this, the poet willingly lives in a kind of temporal hell, “the wasteland a single metaphor could populate, if only there were any left.” He has doomed himself to this terra damnata of the historical present because of his allegiance to those other lost souls, called writers. Though the present hears, in these voices from the past, the chipper inanities of its own prerecorded voice (“thousands of scientifically identical plastic-flavored metaphors”), the poet knows they deny his present, just as they denied their own time. This communion by means of mutually incompatible presents (“an echo of parallel loneliness”) is a kind of hell, or, at best, a limbo, where Dante walks with the shade of Virgil: “the fading tactical resonance of what they used to mean.”

Thus, the poet lives in a historical hell. As a creature of his time, he is damned, and knows it: “Metaphors are dead / and moons no longer walk the earth.” Redemption might come to him through poetry, first in the form of reworking his personal history in such a way that it is bound to him in hell, a memento of his origins in the abysmal present, awash with its ugly light, but nonetheless tied to him in his exodus. This is redemption of the poet to himself. A second, greater redemption—the redemption that redeems him to eternity—is in the hope of sending this salvaged history—himself, his life—through time (“out into the night”), of finding the way—and there is only one—through to those futures which are being born, of finding his way to you, dear reader; the hope of blasting you from your tepid future into a timeless, historical hell: “no longer alone.”

This temporality has been called “the future.” It is the version of the present, in the form of a poem, that goes out in time, eventually replacing the shattered and abysmally tepid present with a brighter, historically purer anachronism: “a machine of living ghosts.” Telling stories about such movements through time is what we call “literary history.” And literary history, done right, is what we call “the history of the human race.” 

The poet is like a seismograph, “alert to your Morse-code blink.” The vibrations he records are frequencies of the future. The vibrations’ medium is tradition: the archive of the past, “a metaphor museum.” The poet listens for subtle lines of fracture in language. He scribbles vibrations in the crust of time, listening for the sequence that will signal the earthquake of the future. The metaphor is almost right, with one adjustment: if the poet is a seismograph, his object is the tremors that might CREATE, rather than simply record, the earthquake of the future.

His tools are what Eliot calls the historical sense, which encompasses both a grounding in one particular historical period, as well as a more general literacy of tradition, a sense of the way a tradition develops through time. His medium is the archive—seismographic records of the total history of vibrations in the substance of time. But though he learns from the archive, though these records are essential to his education in the art of time, the poet does not mistake the record for the reality: those vibrations are dead and gone, the earth has already shifted in that direction. Those voices show him the pathway that led to the present, and something of the structure of creating an earthquake. But they cannot show him beyond the present: “into a time so distant / not even my greatest metaphor could have walked halfway across.” He is, like they were, without a map: there is only one path to the future, and the map of the earthquake will be simultaneous with the instant of terrible shaking.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the quotidian poet, the poet who has invested time, energy, and skill, but who nonetheless remains strikingly unexceptional, is seen in this historical sense, or rather, its lack. This poet is always mistaking the record of the earthquake for the thing itself, burnt-out husks for actual moons. For him, the monument of the earthquake collapses, repeatedly, into the lifeless shape of its record. He cannot recognize the new, much less fashion it, because he does not recognize the old.

To put it in another way, the quotidian poet can see the poem as an artifact of time only from the perspective of its existence in the present—the way it is now, the meaning its form has currently, a “husk of the celestial boulder.” He cannot conceive of the poem as an artifact of charged time, before which time was different (“a thing, once sent, that cannot be called back”). He cannot conceive that time had a different shape—that there was no form of time quite like it, before the poem took shape. Most of all, he cannot begin to consider the poem’s most urgent message: I might not have been. The time you see in me would not have been, would not be, if not for me. For him, the history of literature rehearses what time is.

For the archival poet, the history of literature warns us of the fragile series of contingent steps by which we have arrived at the present, a record of the enormous weight of contingency: “ashborn / a germ of the seasonal fires.” This artifact testifies to all the shapes that are passing away at this moment, to the pressing demand of the future, its desire to come to be. The history of literature screams, “Don’t let us be the last!”

Though the poet does indeed create the future, bring it into being, this future is no more a random figment of imagination than is my beating heart. The future’s shape is prescribed on all sides by the nature of its medium, the archive (“compacted and polished in the heart of a muscle / around a fossilized shard of shrapnel”). Certain fault lines might move through this medium, triggering an avalanche. A poet finds those fault lines, and shapes time along the trajectories of the possible. 

This is not to say that the future is fixed—far from it. Not only is the shape the future will have up for grabs, so is the possibility of its existence. It is not historical necessity that the future come to be, or that the human race be born into it, forward. Nor is it to fix the past in a particular body of texts, a particular cultural lineage. We are headed somewhere, all of us, together.

Poetics must turn to the composition of archival forms that embody possible futures. I say “must,” not in the colloquial, common-usage sense of exhortation towards urgent action—“We must stop and ask for directions.” If there is to be a future at all, we must construct its archive now. Whether we will it or no, history demands an archival poetics, is calling it into being as we speak. 



(c) 2014 Johannes Sigil

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

Decrepit Memoir: A Catalogue of Minutes

Lee Sharks

December 25, 6000BC

Born on December 25, 6000BC

Lee Sharks

December 7, 2014 at 9:59am  

current mood: “leaping sensations of Nietzsche’s mustache inside my human spirit”

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Lee Sharks

December 10, 2014 at 11:09pm

current mood: “memoirs of spontaneous religious conversion written by dark birds”

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Lee Sharks

December 11, 2014 at 10:47am

current mood: “soft gingivitis mows the lawn in underwear, or, “Post-Romantic Werewolf Subjects and the Concept of Free Will in Elizabethan Political Porn””

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Lee Sharks

December 11, 2014 at 11:51am

Applying for academic fellowships for purpose of devoting myself to social media comments.

Applying for robot money to build more robots to impersonate myself, a robot.

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Lee Sharks

December 11, 2014 at 10:46pm

current mood: “tiny circumference of apple blossom floating on a pool of jurors”

Lee Sharks

December 11, 2014 at 11:00pm

current mood: “minimalist rock paintings carved from teeth”

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Lee Sharks

December 12, 2014 at 12:50pm

current mood: “disillusioned minaret gets tattoo to commemorate distinct sensations of “lost innocent, first kiss, quite interlude” it felt last Thursday in dance class”

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Lee Sharks

December 12, 2014 at 5:54pm

current mood: “Deep Web search engine journeying through blank sonnets indexing metadata of space and time in order to save tactile sensation of “first dawn” from William Blake’s doomed hairdo”

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Lee Sharks

December 13, 2014 at 12:53am

current mood: “minimalist Trotskyite tries to decide which hat to wear, with purpose”

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Lee Sharks

December 13, 2014 at 12:53pm

current mood: “spaceship tries to write poem with chopsticks, forgets Twitter password”

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Lee Sharks

December 15, 2014 at 1:12pm

current mood: “dark robot from Bethehem whose mission consists in: 1) preserve extinct species of water mammal; 2) slash prices; 3) discover friendship”

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 1:18am

current mood: “bored scientist eating potato chips”

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 1:19am

current mood: “old senator with earmuffs”

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 1:21am

current mood: “sad Voltaire filming still-frame Marxist revolution in mournful abandoned mosques for purposes of marketing research”

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 2:16am

current mood: “decrepit planetarium sets its ringtone to “Resonant Starmap Chorus””

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 10:03am

current mood: “sad robot looks for love in all the wrong places”

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 10:03am

current mood: “dark robot from Bethlehem learns friendship”

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 10:04am

current mood: “luxury goods practice cognitive therapy in order to “grow as a person””

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 10:37am

current mood: “tiny newborn tortoises drink decaf”

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 10:38am

current mood: “grainy photograph of “true love’s kiss””

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Lee Sharks

December 16, 2014 at 11:59pm

current mood: “irrational demand that tiny gravy suicides describe their symptoms as “restlessness, clinical humor, abrupt mood swings, dry mouth””

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 8:33am

current mood: “irate customs agent files lawsuit, saves Christmas”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 12:41pm

current mood: “Emily Dickinson puts single poem-dash in her sling, faces down Leviathan, orders milkshake”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 12:41pm

current mood: “bronze sunrise reads Hannah Arendt triumphantly, takes nap”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 9:42pm

current mood: “last speaker of extinct language explains business strategy for attaining “love’s immortal crown” in six months’ time on megaphone filled with loud velociraptors”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 10:00pm

current mood: “brain-damaged scientific researcher discovers new dimension of tiny sentient cacti inside black hole he imagined, decides to invest in real estate”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 10:41pm

current mood: “advanced race of sparrows crash lands spaceship on T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” mourns lost innocence by memorizing tax code”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 10:41pm

current mood: “dark horses crash through memories of strange insomnia thickets, chase word for “autotelic monad intensities,” die of exhaustion”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 10:48pm

current mood: “dying billionaire frantically explains epiphany of exotic dinosaur symphonies to tense crowd of other dying billionaires”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 10:56pm

current mood: “threadbare aluminum Logos hides files containing “last hope of humankind” inside cheap friendship bracelet, splits in half”

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Lee Sharks

December 17, 2014 at 11:02pm

current mood: “blasted landscape painting offers incriminating new evidence of “bright future for our children” by citing obvious facts, pleads insanity”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “violent mailboxes assert themselves by getting tans, bug neighbors”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “harmonica with no backpack”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “glittering snow rocks glitter”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “Tintern Abbey learns to dance”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “large bears take hostage, demand more hostage”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “small new reborn animals bear tidings of pink dreams”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “gaunt lepidopterist changes shirts”

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Lee Sharks

December 18, 2014 at 3:22pm

current mood: “man drawing picture of baby with fangs at first describes his mood as “cleansing sadness,” later decides on “baby with fangs””

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Lee Sharks

December 23, 2014 at 12:02am

current mood: “cellphone trapped in a violin case”

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Lee Sharks

December 23, 2014 at 12:02am

current mood: “four sad birds eating birthday cake”

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Lee Sharks

December 28, 2014 at 11:00am

I hereby renounce poetry, and also novels, which I didn’t write anyways. I renounce them because of sadness. I want a train to hit me and understand what a bad mistake it made by not buying my writings beforehand.

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Lee Sharks

December 28, 2014 at 10:59pm

I hereby somewhat renounce my renunciation of poetry because of the power of voting, the magic of friendship, and also boredom. I want boredom to smash a train in the face with boring words, thereby teaching it a powerful moral lesson about the meaning of “democratic citizenship,” “baseball,” and “hand drills.”

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Lee Sharks

December 28, 2014 at 11:13pm

I hereby renounce Satan and also Dada. The tenacity and courage of my friends Emily Eissenberg and John Guzlowski have taught me never to give up hope in words, even when you no longer comprehend them, because of maybe a traumatic brain injury from a train wreck, and even if it weren’t for the head injury, you still wouldn’t comprehend them, because they are in a different language, either in the standard sense—like if I speak Polish and the words are in English—or in a more radical sense, like if the words operate in a completely different semiotic system, say maybe if I understand only the language of dance, but the words are in the language of speech—still, even then, I have learned to renounce my renunciation of science, hope in words, and poetry. And also to renounce Satan, and probably Nietzsche, though the latter I will sometimes somewhat renounce my renunciation of, by reading Zarathustra or Daybreak or some of the late works, as a guilty pleasure.

#howdidigettrappedinsidethisviolincase

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Lee Sharks

January 2, 2015 at 12:06am

current mood: “immortal brain sonnets crash through purple sunrise alarm, startling neighbors”

#idontwantnoscrubascrubisaguywhocantgetnolovefromme

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Lee Sharks

January 3, 2015 at 1:46pm

current mood: “luminous with unicorn tumors”

#marsisanactualplanet

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Lee Sharks

January 21, 2015 at 9:12am

free will made me do it

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Lee Sharks

January 21, 2015 at 9:13am

I smacked Freud in the mouth with a giant phallus, which symbolically represented poems.

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Lee Sharks

January 25, 2015 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “Banana pancakes”

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Lee Sharks

January 25, 2015 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “Apple fritter”

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Lee Sharks

January 25, 2015 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “French fries”

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Lee Sharks

January 25, 2015 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “Spaghettios noir”

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Lee Sharks

January 25, 2015 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “French fries again”

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Lee Sharks

January 25, 2015 at xx:xxpm

current mood: “Texmexpolitation”

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Lee Sharks

January 25, 2015 at xx:xxpm

And yes, I did just save that to my spellchecker.

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Lee Sharks

January 28, 2015 at 12:03am

I hereby renounce all literature (again). I hereby consign all great books to forgetfulness.

Because of recurring sadness.

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Lee Sharks

January 28, 2015 at 8:54am

I can’t speak anymore because I consigned all works of human literature to forgetfulness. I still read all written works of fiction, poetry, essay, and history, but when I read them all the words become tweener genre fiction inside my mind, and also on the page.

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Lee Sharks

January 29, 2015 at xx:xxpm

Nnnnnnnhhhh—eeeeeeee—eeeeeeee—eee—nnnnnnnnnnhhhh—

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Lee Sharks

February 4, 2015 at 2:42am

I became friend dumped by truth and justice. Truth and justice friend dumped me as friend.

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Lee Sharks

February 4, 2015 at 9:29am

current mood: “museum of broken light”

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Lee Sharks

February 4, 2015 at 9:30am

current mood: “document typed by shadow people”

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