“I’d rather beauty wreck me than / only dream of having it. / And when I wake up remember” Malilenas developed out of notebook I called Numerological Notebook begun in late 2005 about money, love, the war. Malilenas is a series of 47 numbered poems with various links and doublings played out in a space of shiftingly intimate rhetorical turns. (Forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2009.)

For ten years, begining with Limbic Odes and later through the series “Relata & Anti-Relata” in Some Mantic Daemons, I’d been thinking about a kind of poem I call an ode, or dialectical lyric. This thinking, oriented towards a kind of string theory of the poem, always seemed to leave a remainder. Poetically, Malilenas is an attempt to work through the remainder.

2.

A sentence of from now on.

At the end of which a period of endings.

 

        A prisoner,

        a prison, and

        a notebook—

to extort ambiguity out of language

As payback for taking meaning out of life—look,

I double my sense and twin my desire

 

in case I lose one. But how escape?

the imaginary, captive of imagination, the real

a hostage of reality and meaning,

the appearance of significance

or value.

                As sentence

the now of the body forever

and over, as payback the passion

of a body for Saturday

take away Friday, as requital

the repetition of bodies as many

and with whom, for love and money.

* * *

14.

The hard share and necessity have

bloodied my lines with the blood

of other people’s words. No easy share

 

in joint misery snatched

and dispatched by hands

penned behind the back.

 

No easy trick.

No easy way out, violence

voiced by pens

gnawing into

 

our little notebooks—Sorry

we are that we can say no more.

 

Sorry, blood, sorry salt,

the language spent in excess

It’s always about the money.

 

Sorry spittle on lipstick of spasming lips,

Just go. The language spent in excess

even the breath broke

look

 

a poet’s corpus.

 

A palaver cadavers.

* * *

20.

A good notebook is the mother of the muses.

 

The notebook is the mother.

 

The writer who keeps a lover, the writer in love,

is one who cannot give up happiness

or the satisfaction of days that are really days.

And the lovers that succeed one another.

 

Dear Notebook,

 

        I give up. I forfeit. I

in resignation forswear, I

in resignation abandon. In resignation

 

I let go, lay down, in resignation

cast away, aside, behind me. I cast off

to the dogs, to the winds I capitulate

my capitals and my lower cases

 

of the lower lovers and the higher lovers

and all the relative others turning

in their levity and turning

 

in gravity. Cursive

mothers in levity father

words in gravity good

notebook in levity

blessed.

* * *

29.

For gain of insight I invested all I had

in yet another insight, no end

to the riches of labor, as long as I live.

 

So I’ll give you some time

in as much as I have time to give.

And someday meet again as strangers

with no end to beginning

 

past the future become bad timing.

And wait.

Wait, save yourself, or

save me, though I don’t bank on intention

nor trust in guarantee

nor agree on what things mean

 

in case, number or gender

meaning

well

with what I had.

 

Not an easy loss

not much at all.

 

I’d honor a debt in seeing to another’s interests

dishonored by the other’s interests

but now I am off the grid, column row and cell.

 

Free? to my credit, all my riches

are immaterial, no matter the mind

minting counterfeit affections

enough to buy a treasury of trust

whose notes bear no significance

compared to what buys a glass of beer.

 

Free? at least within the

measure of the poem even then

something to pay for.