Excerpts from Jared Joseph’s poetry manuscripts, Yizkor and Il enjoying muselé in général but feel dread, finalists for the 2015 TS Book Prize.
from Yizkor
NOW I AM A MARSUPIAL
Daring in piles of birth
Pouches
The wreckage is regenerative.
There are scattered brain cells
Sure-sells generating movies
This film my life is
A B-Movie.
This fascia is Vaseline
This body skin
Holds together the padded actor
I kickbox to save my life.
I kickbox my wife my way
I kickbox my way into a million dollars
My way is heralded.
My way is the new way
My natural new way is law
Is heralded the primordial
Clam soup
The pearl-tongued clams resemble diamonds
diamonds
diamonds diamonds
diamonds diamonds diamonds
They are pearls.
The pearls come reassembled
The pearls are come
The come assembles dollars.
I’m coming on camera on a million dollars
My pheromones are Chanel
My moans are Bengal tigers in Chad
Italy space & time collapse on my cock & i come
I come to in my dream of a million dollars
I suck global dreams in my intl. dollar dreams
I’m living the dream.
I dream in your instructions
I dream in this instant
I dream in your initials
I dream in instinct zoos
My dream fund is funded by a million million dollars
Of funloving
I simple, I have to come.
I simply funlove the girl i love
I simply rublove the boy i love.
In the marsupial glove we hide & make love.
We make love in the hide on the TV
In the TV TV
There are levels of watching
Awash with whatever
Disintegration awash with win
Wash of eros & Vaseline
New bodies with winbirth or
Are our stuntdoubles of each other
Of the time of our life we’re having
The time of our life recklessly hours
Wading under the grey Chanel
Clouds of the beach
Over the beach
Refuse in the trash
Heap of eros
Everyone go inside & channel!
It’s yoga time!
& everyone comes inside.
everyone comes.
everyone wants to come in the mirror
Everyone come & go!
Parade private cunts
Across the stiffy of sand
SUCH A SUN
the pencil-sharp part performs the ground
the ground performs sand the sound doesn’t
the sand doesn’t hold writing long
the sand beckons writing
the sand beckons after traces.
i walk a signature along it
i walk a leashed signature along it
the sand doesn’t hold writing long
i repeat my themes upon it until I
repeat my themes upon it
i till the whole morning underfoot.
by night i walk heavy upon the perverts
the sky light perverts in the dark
they search the brief sign in the eye
their eye oils brief signs in the eye
i don’t give it i don’t sigh
i sigh to myself.
i sigh to myself verbs
a lip-song held trip-wire
tight
a throat-song or chokewire game
Where’s Cheryl.
the thing about Cheryl is
Where’s Cheryl.
i hear a love man talk about Cheryl
i hear a lone man talk in love about Cheryl
the thing about Cheryl is
Where’s Cheryl.
Cheryl doesn’t hold out long
Cheryl doesn’t hold writing long
This line repents & is not about
Cheryl’s death
Cheryl’s death is all about.
The end line lies about the table with vermouth
the table is sopping with vermouth
this is the end of vermouth
the end is vermouth
drink death down the gullet!
death to vermouth
long live vermouth
long it lives in the mouth
& other mouth vices
& noises
& other animal-making
Now i am a jaybird.
i live among the copies
behind my life is violets
THE VIOLETS COPY IN THE BRUSHGRASS BEHIND
the violents copulate & brush behind the scrub
we fuck & fall away like brushstroke
Cheryl & i
brushgrass like an oil painting
brushfire we fly away the waitress
the waitress with child
the waitress scatters us away with glasses
vermouth glasses & ghosts.
pink lady stains from a pure clear mouth
a strain mouth pretty pure
Our beaks are black.
dark our beaks at our backs
are our black tails hedged & angled
we wrestle with the angles
math across the door & lambsblood
we spill the oil & the bread
we get us wet
we fill us with what
with what
fill us with what we want.
lord give us strength to copy
fill us with what we want
we want
to copulate in love
to violate to blank
to violet.
to violet
to copy in love
to xerox the deity
xerox the deity
Where’s Cheryl.
she blisses at the slightest provocation
she’s blissing on the ground with others like us
like us, i am on the bough with others
others like me
brothers mothers
nothing the others
as we utter with pleasure & ruse
repetitive herds of blackbirds rue
as we utter with dainty want
it’s us we want
we want us.
we want our daily want
us we utter with deity want
give us our daily bread
give us our olive oil
pus the violets
boil the violets
now i am a jaybird
Now i am a giraffe.
i step lightly under tall trees with cloven hoofs.
the tall trees with the cloven hoofs.
the tall trees with their morning dew clause.
they froze one day to give to me
i have a mind.
i have half a mind to munch these palms.
the other half gallops under fruits the day long
in a forest passage of date palms
i ride under the sugars of the palms’ dates.
the sugars are natural & inside.
the sugars are & inside
i don’t turn around.
i don’t fuck around.
i gallop toward & the passage grows with my distance
i gallop toward & the passage grows as my distance grows.
within my distance the passage grows.
it grows.
if i turn around the distance grows.
groves fold, fall.
i turn around
We went on a date
I was predating on
More girls
now i am a giraffe.
i step lightly under the tall palms with my long yellow neck.
the tall trees with the long yellow neck
browned in the sun.
the fruits leaned one day to grow spots.
bluish-purple spots with bristles around the spots with natural & with sweets.
like my tongue 20 centimeters long
i eat the spots.
i like my tongue long.
i eat the spots despite the holes
the holes are pits where the trees will grow
palming through the soil a distance will grow, grows
they grow from my distance, the way my distance grows
in a desert passage there are perennials.
high desert perennials.
Hi, desert perennials!
there are sweet desert ephemerals that grow old that grow low.
that grow low.
there is innumerable cold
close cold
i close.
i close my eyes that by law closes the distance & makes night
makes night sigh.
long blooming yellow flower marches through july
like my birthday in may.
what the fuck is a giraffe
mama, what the fuck is a giraffe?
my heart is a giant glint.
my heart is a raft.
a giant raft is from where
the skin graft comes.
the skin graft floats from the giant raft
the giant raft stuck on rocks like a pier in the desert
it’s cold enough to snow.
there’s enough cold to grow snow!
i grow low.
the dates are post-.
the dates are most munched &
Less girls.
You are a giraffe.
The world is inappropriate.
You make it so.
Your spotted skin like fois gras.
You are a giraffe.
You are a giant raft on faux grass.
You are the skin graft from the babboon’s ass.
After much sun damage you are more than faint liver spot
on the verso of the vellum.
Too much rain on the long leather.
Ten elders stretched you a long distance.
Your hoofs hammered with hard feathers.
Hard levers & hard feathers.
You are a giraffe.
Close your eyes & close off.
Go to the desert
they call me Dubstep Lightly.
my first EP was Tundra Rub.
the refrain was what the fuck
is a giraffe on Passage Palms, a song.
i live in Tel Aviv. I speak a few tongues.
they lengthen my one
i munch foie gras on faux grass all day long
on golf lawns.
i like it long.
there are more girls than bombs.
there are more girls
Less bombs.
there are as many dates on the palms
as anyone
i swan & sway
i, wanly, say.
i, like fronds, have no issue.
i have no mom.
my brain is as pink as my pink gums.
i tissue & go.
this city is a dew clause
you know, law?
i close my eyes & the lights don’t.
they don’t stop.
they don’t go lower.
they don’t grow lower
but they don’t grow.
[Acknowledgments: large and ample thanks forever to Delirious Hem, No Time To Say It, and The Claudius App for publishing several of these poems individually, and to Strange Cage for publishing the chapbook mammal, in which all of these poems appear.]
from Il enjoying muselé in général but feel dread
[126]
is your own erotic sense
hot? i mean are you hot
are you like a florist
moving through hothouse
flowers against the weather
a photo of air & green
very often very little red in the structure
of an often flower sometimes the petal
structures are the hot holy secret plastic forest
you are skinning for me to wait to die.
i am taking my bloodless time but.
but truly working on it in the given stress.
of living in this alms giving off an atmo
sphere give up your atmo
sphere this place
it’s either vol 1 or 4 i can’t
remember it doesn’t matter
the universe is made this way
of many atmos
of who will split atmos
i can’t quite give it my atmos
i can’t give really any thing at all
[123]
& if that
laughing
doesn’t
sing
Momma’s gonna
buy you
money
[228]
it is worse to be long, than it is to live
Rank’s open pages hiss
Rank’s open pages these
these open pages jizz
his is a mine for years
this book I cover only kisses his
[209]
But Tom I am so fully careless.
Persuade me that some time inside America.
It’s like correct motions, however my dress underneath
My knees
But Tom you mottled girl aren’t waterproof.
Aren’t water-proofed gardens in your hands
In your hands so tall you cheated oh I’m sorry.
Persuade the floating disc to hit my face
In the face, my student’s face that I persuaded
To tattoo my face, I talk to someone.
Someone’s interrupted, intimacy muttered, aloe into someone
Over here, who goes like that, Jesus is that my car
I want to make sure to care you out of jail.
Tom I constructed you from Dahl, a black girl
& a hand behind the back that seems a lot
of dusci, your name the towel that protects me
‘gainst the poison sumac disco swarming in the gentle,
Less gentle breeze, touch your students, that that swarming
Is everything just discus to you, Tom? America
Should have been cars on that kind of
Trust bungee tied between two trees & if
The car doesn’t hold it explodes, so does the river,
[225]
7 thin zeitgeists in my hand
wallop & limp from the well
my lifelong is pretty line lifeline pretty long Pretty & long
the songbird isn’t toothfloss
Mamma’s gonna buy you a garden plot
pot to put your life in, elder bones
singing by the creak the flowers yellow security cameras
camouflaged among the flowers to record my finish
i imagine fetish sprouting from my bones
carry a finch to me to Elysium.
i will chainsmoke the attempts upon my life.
i will chain a smoke upon the waters
i will make attempt upon my life
& succumb to glass fits, hard embroidery
difficult houses, snakes of passing
wicker lashing tongues do not brocade the
barcode’s pretty coming
did we come, mine hand, did we
we did
we did duh
7 zeitgeists for my house
My house doesn’t live in this country or bush.
He drinks Aquafina & tastes river
[Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Brandon Shimoda for raking some of these poems into new poem fragments in his journal Ancients beautifully.]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jared Joseph is boring.
AUTHOR STATEMENT
“I am one hungover, hungering that is, one repeated in hunger. I suffer, that is, one repeated in suffering. Suffering is not over. I perhaps am so condemned, that is, one repeated in the chain.”
“I labor in the work of Paradise and yet, as yet another in the linked and sometimes discontinuous passage of his life. And to labor with life is to labor with a system correction, that is, a correction that is systematic of his own experience-like eraser of experience.”
“And so to labor with life is to labor within systemic correction of experience proper, his own, like an error, like an eraser of experience that will be, of the life that once will be. It is a construction projection of an Irish goodbye, of an experience-eraser, it is a construction project of a new sense and of a new form of social experience we are getting along and see how they shrine the word together.”
“Then the work in the work of Paradise is not a work of art solely but a correction of experience-pain, it is not subtle.”
“I persist in, this but, not as a writer nor an artist. Or at least not alone, I am also Jared, not that alone, but as a lender of experience, as a laborer in experience; like a laborer that experience-pain fully tries to go correcting the erasers from his road in the experience of censors.”
“Like we are separated, we are repeated. Repeated that, that rite, that rite tries to impugn individualism, and the illicit winnings of the individualists. Individualism is the excess that the terror ‘gainst death desperate ‘spects to pitch against the face of life yes, look-persist on this, permit me if : go against the putrid man.”