Pound Laundry (Red Dragonfly Press, 2020) www.reddragonflypress.org /2020-titles-pound-laundry

Pound Laundry Selections

Wh at is the light?

I

Master of words and spells

Blue in Theran murals

Judge the wisdom

How is it possible?

Norse and Gothic

Shall the Scot

To take as one’s own

Skirt fauntleroy curls and velvet

That conscience and consciousness two words

Silk with Wool

On equal footing

Borrowing piecemeal

Green pants and butterfly collar

The Blessed Suso

Proceeding by analogy

That in general

All those platitudes

Desire is the essence

Absolutely necessary

Less analytical

Rewriting the history

Past and Present Unto this last

Art should be independent

Above all avoid vagueness

The disrobing of goddesses

II

In the beginning

The terror of millennium’s end

The scientists of love

Love in saecolo

Quibbling over details

Dante was his Virgil

Seven years before Armageddon

What a fantastic philosophy

Those first eight years

Religion Tradition Authority

Nothing supernatural about it

Ghosts in the machine

Splitting dialectic hairs

To the proposition

Fantasies of a more perfect language

Long preludes and prefaces

Zarathustrans and genealogists

That the man he’d never met

Suffragettes suffering

Of no interest whatever

Like to unlike

Like father figure

Interest the intellectual name of love

Having had it

Willing oneself to disappear

Land of the flea

To feel like a man

III

An undistinguished unity

The bourgeois individual subject

Both comic and dangerous

Condense. point. Juxtapose.

Better instead of lunacy or faith

Shall the infinitude of the private man

If indeterminacy gave cause for hope

Transitions not oblivion

Father Parmenides

First gone the measure

A fine bitter tongue onto him

Reproducing the world

Not words set to music

Vapor trails in cloud chambers

Self realization / self possession

Modernity a different animal

This universe one turn of phrase

The sudden shift from something to nothing

Make it new plain English

Somewhere south

Robespierre to Roosevelt

Cancer in the eyes

The melodramatic chopped tone

Honest weight no springs

During the war to end all wars

What is it?

IV

Timor mortis me perturbat

The gang over at New Masses

And that one’s problem?

Given all this time

So the three of them

V

in the fall

Mnemosyne his true Penelope

Poets Lovers Lunatics

Tales out of school

Washed up

Flotsam and jetsam

Radiant instances radio corpses

Theory given the lie

What are you, box?

By the dead comedian’s grave

Maybe it was Aristophanes

Coda: After the thermal devices