Two poems by Jasper Bernes


Nine Pools


   All of [architecture] has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a
   mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that [the city] resembles nothing
   and is only formless amounts to saying that [the city] is something like a spider or spit.

—redacted from Georges Bataille

                      @

# A ‘wet flame’ < a patience < clear so it’s hardly there. . .

clear as a rule breaking follows < sleeve of sleep the
last sublime > tame > leaves outup to . . .

A pool is a loop > water turned to evidence turned stately
like in a mirror is itself < in reruns < unrefereed

shot of film cells shuttling through the reels < sunbursts

in a glass of wine raised to power of nothing in particular #

#On the last day of the millennium > my lover’s lover and her ‘his’

drift an < imitation ice-cap on its surface> half flag < half flame
half of all other endings happy #

#We out our throats with sympathetic liquids < sunder our secret Z#

                      2@

#One can transmit talk< but not measles, by telephone
In this way > nothing you say means exactly nothing

Depth (0) <> Surface (1) <> trampoline the tensed edges
fling into low dull orbits > waste water waist deep in teen freeze. . .

Among the sensations >Mr. Fix-it > with the gleaming hammer of Use#

#As figure the pools like sloops bobbing in slop

As ground slowest evacuation

As time empty of content < sex the whole universe insides

privacy as punchline to a collective joke it words us as—sewage, usage, swim#

. . . from its surfeits < cinemas hammer the decimals of
double probabilities < live 1’s > read-only redoubt <

singing trouble evens the odds < singing
evening is > the last event

                      3@

And leaving the Pain Institute in a hurry (in form of) 1 cup of ego solution and tbsp.
Marx salt
Undersecretary Interrobang
might toss in the face of egregious non-compliance

)And having fallen into a K-hole
Having what war is not an error in water
Which in general is what we talk about when we talk about talk knotting at the ankle

)Shape of an I-shaped eye: form which suggests
Falls from great heights full of impact-implicated morphoses
Loss consoles in the form of form itself(

)Where form means 1+ bodies
Having managed through force of desire’s escape
Velocity to slam back into earth(

which is the general propositional form of self

                      4@

If water then civilization
A sieve history pours

Resorts restore the war its glories
Bikini Atoll’s irradiated soil and coral
Lets the sun ladle noir over excellence
Blood erodes slowly

Wearing nothing less than nothing’s
Greatest accomplishment

‘Bombshells’ in whom the total
futural volupt of dead sublimes steps
through the holes in the production code

Under every pool’s cool zero a dead one
A pure desert nothing can refresh
And it does

A voice dives up from it
An it dives down
This is the exchange rate
This is For-What-Its-Worth paging Come-What-May

Eyesprain and glittery triggers pile
the festal surfaces
a diet-craze feeds

You can walk on it
You can call anytime you want










Day Job


From Premonition Point, at century, sexed lights
darken which buildings were war, are.

Lawsquare and finish, blossom knots.

You can tell by following the ones bigger than at-once
(bloodstone, healstone, tooth) to the sorrying-block.

Oh, you’ve been noticing again, for real
like a third nature, like some kind of galactic
bone structure, a fingerprint on the princely marblefloss.

And the rickety databases, like kelp beds,
sway and yawn, offset by the roving coastline
you keep moving against, sunspikes
through the partially demolished
Ambassador Hotel. True and false.

____

My big white car’s a small black scar for sure
for every non-future peek-a-booing through the orphan mists.
I climb into the Haz-Mat suit with her.
Made a civilization, watched the ants
irradiate the pages of Why I Am Not a Christian.
Steak dinner. All-you-can-eat-crow. Mirrors
that walk, that festoon the topiary
heavens with public privacies, exo-affect.

____

Me too, you. My if-feeling and my or-feeling
labor in a synecdoche of shade, so a theorem results,
that bacterial time and intensive time in the coiffure of red now
might require measures too mean to intend.
I’m being rational, though, which doesn’t really make sense.

_____

We put on our compu-flesh and wait for
instructions from our remote correspondent:
homo negativa, eros degree zero auto-immune removal trees.

______

Nerd modernism. Wingless panoramas. Light, of course, and the wineglass on the plate the only clock. A tissue of collided gazes from which a room emerges, floor and far wall skewed so as to provide a maximal view.

______

Meanwhile, in the historical, methane
filling the pantry where Sirhan Sirhan
whispers something to his gun. An anti-Sinatra moment.
You too, you too.
Hello, Ike. Hello, Dick. Hello, Ron.

Run.

House: body with its insides adjusted
Apartment building: birth collage.
Office tower: a squad of artists hiding the blood in micro-vials.
Street: without concept: air.