From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (5)

I am guardian
settle there
settle where
I am, guardian.

That wealth or comfortable living of necessity
means remoteness from
the lusts, the mess, the truth of life.
That you cannot,
from science, make art. That light is describable,
or Shakespeare; or prose
prosaic. That there was a fresh
tenderness to the fucking. (Which isn’t fallacious I agree
but then to define is subjugation, if as well
to question; moreover to define
is to give synonyms, so to diffuse precision
with false equivalence corrupting the commensurate.)
That you
are the reason I cannot sleep, or it is not difficult to say
that which is difficult. What could be called
the labelling of still truth is art
or an art, for the perspective in the phrase is wrong:
truth is the pondskater, labels
the rocks thrown — still except you pitch them. What art there is
is to make the truth look still
by the beauty of your label, of its arc, which
in the moment it misses close, has the skater
appear still, because the label in the moment of eclipse
takes your attention completely. Then that figuring
is not disfigurement. That he hasn’t striven to say clearly
his thoughts, whose difficulty seems in the work (prose, poem)
constructed element of its communication, rather
than the element communicated on account of construction
which it ingenuously is. 
That this will take effect.
That it will affect you, or hold your eye.
That to think is to insist.
That style
will make a novel; that she wasn’t
careless to fall.

(Those men are dead. Nothing to return them.)

                              To start —
What noise does the heart make?
Lubdup lubdup lubdup lubdup. Its fate
dumbly to incant.
                               I slept and slept.

That life is long. That life is brief.

2007

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (4)

That the scale of the earth
is graspable. Or to follow,
that space is. That livid pre-empting anger,
lamplit choler,
ever helps. That it was not your fault.
That in space everything is not dark
but floodlit; in deep space, the nearest star
a fading bulb,
ships would look like cities from the redeye.
The rant is lapidary.
That to bequeath is charity. That that
which we want there to be something more than
is not enough.
That sex is the orgasm, or church
for worship. That the blastocyst is alive
or dead, human or inhuman, sacred or a splat.
That Look after the pennies
and the pounds look after themselves
(other way round). That anyone
but you remembers your embarrassments.
That there is no noun
for the emotion gone through on seeing a sweet child
or animal: the feeling is love, but incipient
and instantly conjured, if not
instantly lost. (Is the wish to savour
innocence sinful?) That originality warrants
praise. Or that helicopters
may defeat locals in their own country.
That fantasies of parenthood are confined
to women. The notion of genius clings
is not fallacy, and well put. That the way is tried.
That coffee is not soluble ire.
That the lies we tell ourselves
               I tell myself
are unnecessary. That you are listening or that I pray.

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (3)

That the scary thing
is the puppetmaster, the devil overhead, not the millions
or thousands of us
jerking as he yanks. That I contradict myself
sustainably. That shtick doesn’t mar
most artists, or is not the commonest
reason for art’s failure. That suddenly
it goes cold. For thinking about the dead
is a way of thinking about death, and about
dying. That angels are commonly
apt synonymy (she sang like an angel) 
if you have never seen one (well?) –
it’s merely that the word’s
beautiful. Like orchard.
Like sloe. Or you, aptly deployed.

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (2)

That demons and vampires
and werewolves are not
people imagining other people.
That always
is ever true. That the internet is full of porn
whose deliberate focus
(barely legal, schoolgirls, cheerleaders, teens)
on age is the calculated intervention of cigarsmoking
rottentoothed bad guys
in ivoried wheelchairs behind sequoiawood desks,
rather than blank betrayal of the substantial
market there is for pictures of naked lookalikes of your daughters’
               friends,
and that paedophile hysteria isn’t one expression
of men’s guilt
for uncontrollable lust to force experience
on innocence and for hard revelry in the act of defilement
of innocence that wanted it.
That the Iraq War could’ve gone right
given the men who were in command and their reasons
for waging it. That ends are more
significant than middles; that Hollywood scripts
are more than devious or not so devious
exercises in excusemaking for spectacle: that this is a bad thing.
That sentimentality is popular because it is false.
That love is not knifesharp. That it can
silently be willed away.

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (1)

‘Most things are still in the dark.’

Just to begin, that historians
are scholars of lost news.
That interpretation of art is not emotional response.
That any pear overseen to ripeness
when bitten will be ripe. That many films
are loved for much more than the beauty of their actors.
That beauty
is not insult, nor ugliness pain.
If we are responsible for meaning and not for life
unless in conception,
that life has meaning, or that death
is the second mode of life, the off-switch, rather than the 
             condition of there being no choice and no switch.
Life is sensing things (over all oneself), and through this
knowing. The end of life is the state
of having lost all that. That poetry explains love.
That skill saves us, and
that ignorance is perturbable rather
than just malleable. That destruction is at all
contingent. That love and obsession are different, or labels
dissoluble from things they mark.