ABSTRACT

COLLECT

by Jacob Carl Harksen

This collection of poems seeks to explore the individual’s relation to the self and others, and between the lyric “I” and forms of collectivity, under the duress of 21st-century capitalism. The poems respond to certain political and economic pressures, including namely debt, and assert that poetry can be a meaningful aid in, if not site of, resistance to those pressures. The collection seeks to enact in poetry a political content, which is typically the province of a highly theorized discourse, by direct treatment of the lived world of feeling and belief. A narrative arc is developed over the course of the collection that tracks the radicalization of those feelings and beliefs in the life of an individual as they attempt to make answer to the pressures of capital in a variety of modes and forms. COLLECT

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of English

by

Jacob Carl Harksen

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2013

Advisor: ______cris cheek

Reader: ______Keith Tuma

Reader: ______Catherine Wagner



Jacob Carl Harksen

2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

the fox……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1

Dinghy……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2

State of the Union……………………………………………………………………………………………………………3

* White Flag……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5 swell………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………6

State of the Union……………………………………………………………………………………………………………7

Portrait with Avocado……………………………………………………………………………………………………..9

State of the Union………………………………………………………………………………………………………….10

* White Flag..………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...12 love song………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………13

Diamond Rings……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..14 slow song……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..15

State of the Union………………………………………………………………………………………………………….16

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….17 debt locker…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...18

State of the Union…………………………………………………………………………………………………………19 swell…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….21

Haute Couture………………………………………………………………………………………………………………22

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….23

State of the Union………………………………………………………………………………………………………….24 hold……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...26

iii lend and borrow…………………………………………………………………………………………………………...27

State of the Union………………………………………………………………………………………………………….28

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….30

As I Said to My Boss, …………………………………………………………………………………………………….31 redline………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….32

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….33 land……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...34

Take Care……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..35 cave art………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...37 swell…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….38

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….39

Self-Portrait as Richard Nixon……………………………………………………………………………………….40

State of the Union………………………………………………………………………………………………………….41

So Long, Castro……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..43

Lecture, March 18…………………………………………………………………………………………………………44

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….45

Statement……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..46

State of the Union………………………………………………………………………………………………………….47 hotline………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….49

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….50

Ahoy Anarchists……………………………………………………………………………………………………………51

Fuck Cops……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..52

Ahoy Punks…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..53

iv Another Cop Kisser……………………………………………………………………………………………………….54

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….55 fire season……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………56 zero……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...57

State of the Union………………………………………………………………………………………………………….58 swell…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….59 account………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...60

* White Flag………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….61

Ahoy Outlaws ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….62 collect…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..63

Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………64

v

the fox

they will hunt you out of every hollow place

they turn dogs on you they are the dogs

and sometimes you have to put a dog down first

1 Dinghy

The thing was, she said, she’d never been made to love being made love to. The warm fuzzies spiraling out of control, what I said back was psychobabble and intimacy and trial and error and so beautiful really heartfelt shit because the thing is, I said to her, they will always be trying to fuck us and it’s just unbearable if you can’t find some enjoyment once in awhile even if it’s just to fuck them back. And she hates it when I get political so she just said uh huh and huh and so I’ve been reading Rilke, these dinghy-dicts or whatever. Yeah, I said, it means something like thing poems, and the thing is they are like little boats so I didn’t correct her, I just imagined them folded up like the paper hats kids make out of newspaper, or something more complicated like origami ducks, each one with a candle on its back, drifting on a pond until the wick burns down and ignites the paper and the little ship sinks and fizzles out. The thing is, even if I had said all that the difference made would be nil. We talk into each other like calling down a well. Hello please accept this thing I call my identity and allow it to echo around in your mouth for awhile. Pick up and we’ll chat. I’ll sip you through the wire like a silly straw of indefinite length. The thing is, I know it must be hard for you to determine exactly how I am saying this without the use of my voice.

2 State of the Union

Mr. Speaker, it’s a privilege to approach our country. I thank you for your Congress. I want to discuss important issues. We’re off to a good start, making a new

President. I came to take an oath I pledged to honor greater resources. An artist could picture warning signs: prices, the stubborn budget surplus a military at peace with technology. Revolution concerns a picture complete of itself. A picture to solve the problems of Government—some but not all. Government crowds work the private economy on a limited philosophy. It is very responsible. And then when money is still left over it is counted in dollars but measured in percent increase. Education is not my top priority

—education is my top priority. Reading is learning, right. I like teachers so much I married one. Dollars do not always make reform.

We will not run the Federal Government on results. Measuring is the only way to know and I want to know. The logic of basic math. That’s the whole idea.

Choose between buying food and all $2.6 trillion. Yr insurance company doesn’t care and won’t pay. This President gives hope to serious disease.

3 Our prayers are a cancer to Congress. The New Freedom makes our society more welcoming. I’m requesting $5.7 billion in increased pay and benefits and health care and housing. We owe it to I. A billion faster decisions will improve our accelerating cleanup of toxic treasures. Government cannot be replaced by volunteers. Good people itemize or not, deduct for compassion a prison to fight illiteracy and other difficult problems. With us tonight is the Street. I’m aware the Street’s a Democrat. Let the record show— big time. Earlier today I asked John

Ashcroft to end racial profiling. We owe our grandchildren in debt. We have all the debt that is available. We need to sell our farmers for a trillion dollars. That is one trillion additional reasons you can feel comfortable supporting this. And we still have Yogi Berra. We have choices. Let the people spend their own money to throw darts at a board for tax relief. I didn’t take a poll or formula the cost

I targeted everyone who pays in grief. That’s real money. My attitude is achieving dreams. Government is the people’s money. Hard work sends a terrible message: “You’ll never get ahead.” Millions of additional Americans will be removed from the rolls entirely.

Well done, good and faithful servants. 4 * White Flag

When the first true realization of the debt I would owe was known to me, I doubled down. What’s another ______when you already owe ______. My mother taught me it was impolite to talk about money. I think we believed this because we didn’t have it, or when we did, it was the negative money of debt. But when you’re poor, you know you’re poor, and you know you will be in the future, if you should live to see it, so why live like you’re poor now (you are) when you can pretend not to be, when it’s so easy to say yes to the money the banks hold out to you, or the government, or both. I took the money, and I’m still taking it, knowing this will end badly, as it always does—or maybe. Maybe I can hold out long enough to die first, or long enough for the whole thing to collapse (and maybe it will), or long enough to run (and maybe I will). There are degrees of debt. I am collecting them all.

5 swell

let me be your subprime domesticant, tumescent

irascible in your hour of need-erasure

the highest plateau of being is an unremarkably tarnished

silver platter whereon dutch still lifes

go on endlessly competing over who can unspool

the lemon peel finest who aura its translucent

pith best

6 State of the Union

Fellow citizens, our war is civilized danger, an hour of shock and suffering. 4 short months, tops. The flag flies again over our embassy at Guantanamo Bay.

Terrorists welcome. Today we welcome the Minister of Progress to our coalition. When I called the troops to action, I did so with courage and skill. And even on mountaintops and in caves you will not escape this Nation. Semper Fi, my love. Our cause is just. Our country will forget the debt.

Our cause is just, and it continues. Our discoveries in the depth of hatred diagram detailed instructions for surveillance of American cities.

What we found confirms terror is only beginning. Tens of thousands of thousands of hundreds of thousands of trained terrorists are still at large.

The entire world a battlefield, freedom must not allow it. Our nation will be fast in pursuit. We will put out of business a dozen countries. The terrorist parasites threatening our friends have been pretty quiet, but we know their true nature is missiles and weapons. The bodies of the dead, this is the civilized world. An ax is evil. I will not wait while dangers gather. We can’t stop if we stop now. Temporary history is our privilege.

7 I join the people in applauding my party. It costs a billion dollars a month because while the price of freedom is high, it is never too high. Whatever it costs our country will pay. America is no longer protected by vast oceans. We are protected only by vigorous funding. Citizens light a match. We will defeat this recession. America works, so my plan can be summed up in one word: good. I was so proud. The way out of the factories is to vanish into credit. Prescription drugs save all the lives. To risk losing everything must be the highest standard of commitment. You and I will work the farm among minorities and encourage the good work of faith. The true character of material is magnificent awe.

Comfort crisis, it was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our history of goods. If it feels good do it. Let’s roll, Freedom Corps.

8 Portrait with Avocado

When I think of you now as you were then holding a halved avocado at midnight and sitting at what was to you a stranger’s kitchen table in Portland Oregon lifting green spoonfuls of avocado flesh to your lips and carefully working your way around the pit until only the pit was left sitting in its little boat of rind like the pearl in a shucked oyster—what I do not think of is you sitting there in your royal blue underwear with your legs crossed and your cheeks flushed pink and the rest of you warming the atmosphere all around you with your skin all pink to the touch and your hair let loose and just your toes now getting cold and though I love this image and have carried it everywhere since then it is not what I think of—instead I think of the avocado and how horribly out of season it was for avocados in that part of the world and how it must have been picked very far away and traveled so far to be there and how your satisfaction and my pleasure in seeing it depended on that labor. Afterward I rolled that pit in my palm and thought of carrying it but didn’t.

9 State of the Union

Mr. Speaker, every year we meet here in this chamber. You and I, we have to save millions of lives, and I reckon we cannot ignore our problems.

Our first goal is clear: we must have a job. Our nation needs the sign that says “Help Wanted.” All this extra money should do it. Relief is for everyone. You promised. Show some discipline, DC. Spending paychecks is a model skill and innovation a pace of discovery that dictates coverage and rations care. Low-income bureaucrats and lawyers commit to new drugs, happy the way it is. Just like you, and your drugs.

No one has ever been healed by law. The goal is clear skies and healthy forests. Catastrophic fires, burn away. A simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen producing only water, wonder-working power in the idealism of the people. Americans doing the work of prisoners shelter battered companionship. The Freedom Corps is enlisting and focusing on the most vulnerable citizens. Children of prisoners will fill the need.

Hopeless crowds reduce all the richness of life to a single desire. For those already addicted, the fight is for their own lives. Too many cannot get it.

10 You never think it could be you. The miracle is: it could be you. The weakest among us end as the object of an experiment.

I set a high standard for humanity and a law against cloning confounds our calling as a blessed country. Ladies and gentlemen, seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many. $15 billion can defeat the manmade evil of international news. There’s never a day when I do not receive reports of this global war against scattered networks. The war goes on, and we are winning or otherwise dealing. Let’s put it this way:

Buffalo, New York is a ballistic missile. Our intelligence disrupts the FBI. Analyze this. We will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of free people.

The gravest danger facing outlaws is the 20th century. A world at peace and a world of chaos, and we accept this. 108 inspectors were sent on a scavenger hunt for hidden jobs. The dictator is deceiving. But why? Your enemy is not surrounding your country; your enemy is your country.

11 *

There is another thing we believed: that a college degree was an inherently good thing, not just another good, like any other, and that any cost in obtaining one wasn’t really real, that the debts would take care of themselves, because degrees meant jobs then, like magic. This was 2006, and everyone around me still seemed to believe in the same fantasy economy. No one in my family had ever done this before. I remember only one person, overheard in passing, who cautioned against debt-for-education, and I remember, too, dismissing his warning, because what other choice did I have? If I wanted to go, I couldn’t pay my way alone. My costs weren’t as high as they were for others, but they were high enough to mean loans. And I could go—I had that privilege. I believed, because everyone did, that a degree (any degree) would allow me to close the cycle of debt in my family, even if it required some debt up front. The possibility, or rather, probability that I would only end up perpetuating that cycle never occurred to me. In fact, quite the opposite was true: I had been trained to think the only possible means for me to exceed debt and poverty was to go to college, or join the military. Our town was a Navy town, and the government made a similar promise to many of my friends (and it goes on making it to more and more and more young people every day)—give us your service (the right to commit your body as collateral in this or that war) and we’ll give you an education. Does anyone still doubt that there is a connection at work here? The more we go to war on other people, and the more expensive education becomes, the fewer choices you have, until it’s just fight or be bonded, or don’t go at all and see how that works out for you. When I try to explain how I got here, why I made the choices I did, every explanation comes to this: I never believed I had a real choice to make. I never felt lied to until 2008.

12

love song

grand, baby, baby ain’t it grand, baby grand ain’t it grand baby, baby grand

who knows how to make love sound? here let me play you

13 Diamond Rings

A woman I loved got engaged nine seconds ago and now my options are to like this fact or comment upon it but what to say. Dearly beloved I have so many objections—they make me really objectionable. If someone could just come over here by the cake maybe shove my face in it for me, we can all get back to the open bar. Make sure you tag me in this photo of everyone doing the electric slide!

Without a taste for champagne another toast becomes unthinkable everyone thinks you’re a dick for leaving your glass on the table and you are. You don’t deny it. She’s reading cards out loud uh oh and mine says Baby tie this string of diamonds around your ring finger at night wake up in the morning and wonder what it was you wanted to remember. She shakes the envelope but it’s empty, just words inside, and I bow out.

How many times did we really even speak? I mean it wasn’t many and that was years ago now, but I still remember your middle name. Marie, or Dawn, or whatever. I could look it up, whatever it was.

14 slow song

open the tap

on the box of wine

it’s a two-

step process

it’s a dance

number

it’s on a slip

of paper

does this say

Public Enemy

tell that computer

i have a request

15 State of the Union

Mr. Speaker is called to service in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the violent they are more secure.

Analysts are examining lists and patrolling our coasts and borders. Tax relief is a prescription drug.

The terrorists are plotting to reform education. Twenty-eight months have passed and the danger is comforting.

The plot to disrupt traffic will not expire on schedule. The terrorists started it. Two-thirds of cave art is chemical or biological weapons. This month boys and girls are back in school leading raids against thugs and assassins.

Sir, America stands with you and no one can doubt the word of America. You cast the difficult votes of intelligence and I want you to know: America is proud of you. Let us be candid about all the facts. May God continue.

16 *

The first two years I was in college, I didn’t even keep track, in any serious way, of the accumulation of my debts. It was a hopeful time. I signed whatever papers I needed to at the beginning of each year to stay in school, and went on about the business of being educated. The first time I really sat down to find a concrete number I could assign my total debt, I needed someone from the university’s help to track down all of the numbers and all of the constantly shifting lenders to add it all up and project where I would be at the end of four years. I had no way to process the information she gave me. That’s what the number was—information. It was… totalizing. That’s the best word I can think of to describe it. My mind rejected it, refused to take it in as memory. When the paper with the number written on it was lost, the information was gone. I probably destroyed it. Our imaginary economy (what we thought the economy was) had folded. I saw this in motion as my loans changed hands. The banks could get rid of my debts whenever they wanted, but for me they just continued to accumulate, viral in their ability to replicate and spread seemingly on their own, by their own logic. It hardly had to do with me. I found it difficult to think of it as real.

17

debt locker

seeking a mathematical truth i tripped over

a vault made of glass it contained a record of debt

i couldn’t open it but i could

climb inside

18 State of the Union

Mr. Speaker, gather us in the branches of Government. We’ve been placed with sovereign commitment. The state of our Union is blessed by purchase. We see a little gray in the mirror and we ask the question: what will be the state of the choices we make together. Let us do what Americans have always done and steward the past to history. We must keep America the leader of appetite. The bipartisan enthusiasm is clear: dollars must be spent or left behind. A diploma is a ticket to better junk. Justice is held back in class and to pass we must make care more affordable. The low- income workers in every poor county are nuclear energy. Four years of debate is enough to pass for a proposal.

Jobs are an archaic, incoherent code. I’ve appointed a bipartisan panel to examine the code from top to bottom. When the recommendations are delivered you and I will work at fair value. We should invite our drug dealers to join and save Social Security. 45 million millions is a fiscally strong message.

About 16 workers benefit in today’s world. So here is the result: in the year 2027 the government will somehow be afloat and by 2033 be collapsing once and for all.

19 All ideas are on the table. I will listen to anyone who has a good idea to offer even lower income minds. There is no change for workers. Here is how the idea works. The money you earn is taken. Your earnings are eaten up by Wall Street. Life is a commodity America will continue to deliver.

We will pass on freedom and on fear. There are still governments but their number has declined. We stay offensive until the fight is won.

Abandon ambition, ye who remain. We’ve declared our intention to move in the beyond, the ultimate end of government, remember.

Casting your vote is the most powerful myth. Farewell, Fallujah.

20 swell

i put the piano under water to let it swag on some deep blues

while in another cavity of the heart i power a barrel organ at full throttle

can you picture it my tiny dancer twirling on cue i curtsy like a patsy

any body’s beast of burdens

21 Haute Couture

I spent the weekend pulling long strands of your hair out of the velcro closures on the messenger bag and just like that

I’ve indebted myself to the hip, so blasé cool, so passé chic so sick with it. I am the illest motherfucker alive and I am wading in this shirt, just trying to keep afloat on the rising tide of your preference for intellectual types. The essence of study is stud. Please put me down the moment I am injured by which I mean the moment this electric yellow sombrero goes out of style, but not a moment sooner. I’ll buy anything to feel like an outlaw, is the dirtiest thing I can think to whisper in your ear. I have this closet full of identical disguises and each day I present myself to you as a variation on a theme for which you are rapidly losing taste. I survive your distemper by the slimmest margin of error. To you I am an accounting disaster, a catastrophe of debt. I call to ask if you are happy with your service, and you say, I don’t want to talk about this.

22 *

English departments had sort of anticipated the collapse, but then we have always been a more or less fatalistic group of people. The death of whatever is always impending, and we’re always losing, and no one is ever caring, and so on and so forth. But this time, the bottom really did drop out; there really weren’t any more jobs, and there weren’t going to be any more, either. It was easy to turn in anger on the professors that refused to retire, but then we understood that even when they did, their jobs weren’t going to open, they were being deliberately emptied, replaced by a contingent pool of adjuncts and temporary, “visiting” professors. The logic of capital was never going to admit things like tenure forever. And adjuncting is nobody’s dream. Adjuncting is teaching reduced to bare labor— indentured servitude barely concealed—not even nice work if you can get it and why would you want to? The only way to compete with this shift, to oppose it, is not to participate in it. It persists in our desperation for work. Now, with any job, we are made to feel grateful for the opportunity to be oppressed, because we would rather be oppressed than dead. I have never had it in me to feel this gratitude. I am a bad worker. I can never pretend for long.

In the six to seven months following my graduation from college, I couldn’t get hired as a dishwasher (on more than one occasion). My fulltime job was applying for jobs—and I applied for everything, everywhere that was hiring and most places that weren’t, from Bellingham, Washington to Bend, Oregon. This is the sum total of my results: I interviewed for a job transcribing conference calls. I got a note of encouragement when I applied to be the food writer for a weekly alternative magazine (paid, mostly, in food). I interviewed for a job driving cars in and out of railway shipping containers—they needed someone thin that could drive a manual transmission, and on the day I interviewed I waited with nearly 100 out-of-work contractors for one or two open positions. I interviewed for a job with a magazine that paid the equivalent of an adjunct’s salary. In the final round of interviews, inspired by some personal confidence with my interviewer, I remember saying that I thought I would be more grateful for the work, probably, than the other candidates, needing it as badly as I did by then, having exhausted every other avenue. I don’t believe me either, though at the time I really think I might have meant it.

23 State of the Union

Tonight we are comforted by a life of privilege under this dome.

In a system of parties, I will do my part. In the hope of an easier life, we shut ourselves off from danger. The only way to protect our people, the only way to control our destiny is to dismiss that goal as misguided security. Dictatorships shelter democracies. Lonely democracies.

To seize power, murder school. The terror is hope. Allow the violent to inherit the Earth. But they have miscalculated: we love a fight.

If we were to leave, they would not leave us alone. Signal that we no longer believe in our enemies. America rejects the false nation.

In liberated death raise up democracies and face down the call of networks. We have killed many leaders. And for the others, their day will come.

We remain a fine President. Our work is brutal. But that brutality has not stopped the drama of the election. I am confident in our plan. I am confident this is the road that will take us home. But those decisions will be made by our commanders. I will continue to seek your good advice but second-guessing is not a strategy. To speak with candor, death and prison means little to our nation. In a maze of streets, a letter could just as well be 24 addressed to whoever. The only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their freedom. We hope one day to be the closest of friends. Patriot act to connect the dots of the conspiracy. Surveil aggressively the previous presidents. I have approved the use of that authority. The program is to hit again. The only alternative to America is a more anxious freedom on the march. Our generation is a long war. The envy of the world is preeminent, but we cannot afford to be complacent. Keeping competitive begins with keeping money in the hands of workers. To be good stewards of dollars is an impossible choice.

And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to unstable parts of the world. We must replace the Middle East by 2025.

Luxuries are revolution, right.

25 hold

can you connect me to the halls of government or wherever the money comes from and/or wherever it goes everyone feels better with another 0 a little more of that nothing between the bottom of the paper and the top of the floor how many nothings i haven’t got i dial 0 until the operator picks up and say it’s you I want to talk to

26 lend and borrow

the people want jobs but there are no jobs which is ok with the people the people want money and there is plenty all over the place give us a diamond big as an apple just once lord ask and you shall receive let us help the rich give their alms to the poor lord let us borrow your flaming sword

27 State of the Union

Madam Speaker, each of us is guided by our own standards, called to serve the same prosperity, to spend the people’s money against all evil.

We’re not the first to come here. Our citizens don’t much care who we are when there is work to be done. Our job is to make life for Americans a business. The appetite of government is of special interest. When not even C-SPAN is watching, the worst bill arrives on my desk. The time has come to end this practice of entitlement. Everyone knows the character left behind is stuck someplace struggling to afford health care. When it comes to health care poor children, we cannot afford the health. Income will level the field for those who have no health at all. The Tax Code is the State. The State makes all citizens federal. I have asked the Secretary of Humans to reduce costs and medical errors with better technology. Lawsuits pass liability in all we do.

Decisions are not made but violated. Drug smugglers enforce the worksite. There’s no excuse left for violating the law. We need to uphold the great tradition of status with animosity and without amnesty. Join me in pursuing a great goal. To reach this goal, we require 35 billion gallons of gasoline. Achieving these goals will

28 dramatically reduce our oil, but it’s not going to eliminate it. In environmentally sensitive ways, we find ourselves debating the course we have followed. Life since 9/11 has never been the same. This war is often measured by the things that did not happen. We cannot know the full extent but here is some of what we know: America is still at war. These are not idle words, whatever slogan the chant purposes. Intelligence is a decisive ideological struggle. What every terrorist fears most is freedom, right.

We have been sobered by the enemy’s fierce reaction. This is not the fight we entered, but it is the fight we’re in. It would not be like us to leave. Let us resolve toward carryout. This is a decent country and resilient too. See you next year.

29 *

Cue dark night of the soul. Cue renewed interest in what the military’s whole thing was about. A steady cavalcade of recruiters had called me in high school promising that there were writers in the armed forces, too. Now I wondered what else I could do—maybe something involving jumping out of planes, I thought—I didn’t want to shoot anyone that didn’t work for a bank, and I didn’t very much want to write anymore. The letters from my lenders were growing more persistent by then, so that my one great concern was whether the military would pay those debts retroactively if I agreed to do whatever. I interviewed for another publishing job. There was some confusion and I didn’t, it turned out, have the particular skills the publisher needed. I was then, I think, about 24 hours from enlisting in whatever the fuck, I didn’t care anymore. And then a call in the morning that the publisher thought he could use me after all, if only for a few months, and would I still like to yes I would.

30 As I Said to My Boss,

because I am always apologizing, Tim, I said, I am only a breath away from disaster—I am courting disaster at all times, I keep it with me, folded in the glove compartment, and we go riding out that way disaster and me together over the country from one end to the other, collecting more bad luck as we go, and nothing has happened yet so I am overdue, but have witnessed plenty and felt disaster come close and breathe on my shoulder in line for a cup of coffee, felt its look pass over me, and saw it hover over some others and was afraid for them, decent people with kids maybe that still dream of things that can’t be bought, and I wanted to hide from them the ugly fact of our buying and selling absolutely everything there is, but it was my turn to order, and I did, every time, and I don’t want to stop, Tim, so please keep signing my paychecks and let me go on working here another day, because what do I know about disaster, other than its name.

31 redline

what i will lie down for is your machine love your finely geared sophistication

i will lie down as my own stunt double whom i do not pay any benefits, knowing

we will not retire but break down and abandon our body beside the road

the police will come and mark the time, and later they will take it away

32 *

It was vanity publishing in every sense of the word vanity. We made books for corporations and very wealthy people. They paid us to make x number of books appear, books that would flatter them and whatever particular stories they wanted to record as history. We made these books, uncritically, because we were paid to make the books uncritically, and we made the books, uncritically, because they paid us to and we told ourselves all kinds of things, I learned, to pretend to gratitude. I loved the people I worked with there, and we all shared these reservations, but I was easily the least adept at playing along. I was hired to work on a three-volume autobiography of a billionaire and his family. My billionaire would send a mountain of other people’s books, the images he wanted to reproduce in his own book marked with cryptic notes referring to vague family anecdotes of questionable historicity. My job was to secure the rights to use the images, and write captions based on his notes to accompany them. The first volume (the only one I would ever work on) was a grandiose picture book, and it told a version of American history that centered on my billionaire’s family’s various exploits with George Washington &co.

By the end of my time with the publisher, I was ghostwriting the book full time based on circular interviews with my billionaire, research trips to his family office (literally, the office that ran his family), and long, questioning phone calls with my billionaire’s assistant. I was being paid the equivalent of three adjuncts’ salaries. My billionaire intended to distribute his book to libraries around the country. My billionaire believed his book was factual, as though by paying for it, history was whatever his money said it was. I thought of this often. I was at this time having a handful of panic attacks a day, and not knowing what they were, thought my billionaire and his book might actually be killing me. As my contract neared its end, I told my boss I had been accepted to graduate school for creative writing. He thought I should accept, though he offered me the chance to stay on permanently. I thought of my billionaire, thought of all the billionaires that would follow him, all the corporations, I thought of my job and all the time I had already spent glorifying wealth, and how much more wealth I would have to serve. I thanked him for saving my life, and left.

33

land

in the morning, on the highway outside of town frost on the high grass and the brittle weeds the frozen fields that will thaw in an hour, then freeze and thaw all day, as the shadows pass winter spring winter spring spring. the light painting the porch pillars of the brick homes pink. the land is a pair of secondhand boots— i try them on. i imagine waking early, packing a lunch, filling a thermos for the day shift at the nuclear power plant. i like to think i could last, but my hands are always talking. this is the only work i know and i go to it. in the morning, on the highway outside of town i see lights in kitchens already percolating.

34 Take Care

I’ve never really been one for the preservation of money

when i get it, however i get it, i get rid of it. i wash my hands of money and bury them in whatever i can buy.

I be yelling out money over everything money on my mind

i will mortgage the ground from under my head, after the home is gone, after all the things inside it are gone. i will sell people always ask how I got my nice things

real estate in the empty space of my lungs. It takes so much money to be in poverty that i don’t expect to ever pay my debts. and really, I think I like who I’m becoming

When i take the white pills i am no longer capable of feeling, how do you say, fear. The range of my responses is limited there’s times when I might do it just to do it like it’s nothing

to fight or, well, that’s really it. Before the circumnavigation of my brain, i was also this way, but when i take the white pills and I say hell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah, fuckin’ right

what is panic i don’t remember. i’d like to sleep seven days a week and never work. Poetry doesn’t make

35 all of the little accents that make me a king

a prescription, either name brand or generic no matter how much i take. For what ails me is many ills, not the least of which

I guess it really is just me, myself and all my millions

is this chronic capital malaise. When i take the pink pills i can eat and when i take the yellow pills i can sleep.

36

cave art

the walls lined with mammals and/or other consumables

it’s not their differences it is their number we mean to value

37 swell

who assign this diss track to? everyone fuck, everyone, bum rush the stage

i mean bums, yo bums, rush in a wave of uncounted population

a commons is called into being wherever two or more will gather

the shopping mall befits the crime humanity fashion statement

we are graphable equations two by two we exit the ark

38 *

The real question, it seems to me, as it pertains to work, is not what are you willing to do to survive, but what can you do to live? The retreat back into the university system forestalls, for the time being, the question of my debt. It goes on accumulating, spreading, but I’m not being hunted in quite the same way. Leaving my job to be here, to reenter the system that originally preyed upon me, was like an act of surrender. I couldn’t live with my work. And this, certainly, is not leading toward any better work. There is no reason to hope that it might. Because part of the problem, in the end, is work. It’s not always a singular event that radicalizes belief; sometimes it’s years of slow pressure. This, actually, seems to be a common condition of life in the 21st century as it is lived outside of wealth. I think everyone, whether consciously or not, performs this math at varying points in their lives and decides whether they’re willing to go beyond the law, beyond “work” as such, in order to live—not just to survive, but to live. I was offered new loans when I entered graduate school, and I said yes to all of them. There was no way I would ever be able to pay off my debts anyway, so why not commit to it? Why not turn what at first looked like surrender into something like an ambush? War in the 21st century is no longer the exception (and it may never have been) but the norm, and war is always closest to those outside of wealth’s sheltering embrace. Debt is just another front. The more we go to war on others, the more we go to war on our own—on drugs and crime and whatever—the more prisons we need, and there is, disturbingly, money in that. So when you find yourself in a debt so deep no legal means can free you of it, you can outlaw, but if they catch you, somebody still gets paid.

39 Self-Portrait as Richard Nixon April 30, 1973

I have serious questions about the integrity of the I

To address those questions last June 17 I was in Florida Because I believed the reports because I had faith in whom

I discounted the stories of my campaign True the charges were false I was who refused to tell the government

In the final analysis this office is all persona

I accept the resignation of the public It has been my privilege to know whatever It is essential that rigorous standards be observed but also that they be enforced by some of those who appear to have been looking back

40 State of the Union

Seven years have passed since I first stood before you, and I think it’s fair to say we showed the world the resilience of self-government.

That is the purpose of this body. The meaning of our oath remains our charge to keep. Prosperity elect us. We have unfinished business.

The philosophy that made our nation great is the collective. We must trust the money to grow. At kitchen tables across our country, we can all see that the bill is growing. I’m pleased to report the IRS accepts both checks and money orders. If any bill reaches my desk, I will veto it. Next week

I’ll terminate the government. People are often snuck in at the last minute without discussion or debate. I asked you to stop slipping into committees that never even vote. If you send me a bill, I’ll send it back to you. Tomorrow I will issue an Executive order to ignore any future Congress.

I propose ending the bias against those who get their private millions. Schools are disappearing at an alarming rate. Let us liberate poor children trapped in public schools. I thank Congress for approving Peru. And now I ask you to approve Colombia and Panama. These agreements will give us

41 better access to the finest drugs. Tonight the armies of compassion march stronger. We must find a sensible way to deal with people illegally, and it must uphold our highest ideals. This is the business here at home. Let us do business, God. Bless America.

42 So Long, Castro

When this one’s over someone will be waiting to lecture me on the evils I haven’t acknowledged in your regime. I’d be glad to know whatever I missed by being born on the American side of 1988, in Iowa no less, where they hate a red but they do love old cars, and cigars, and a really good pork sandwich, on which I think you’d agree. They love their farmers as you say you do, so in terms of pure aesthetics I think you’d have a lot to say to each other. For instance on the subject of car parts and where’d you get them. You could talk baseball, something else you know. Something transcendent. We tend to give so little when it comes to ideas that the recognition of a really good curveball isn’t nothing. We’re on either side of a tremendous outfield fence, refusing to throw back the balls that land on either side. I think that about sums it up. Except we’re in your field, even tried to take it once, from what I understand, but who’s counting. You have stayed like a distant and estranged relative on the fringes of my field—Uncle Castro—everyone’s got one. I delight in wearing the jersey of the Chicago Cubs shortstop who shares your name because I take pleasure in this dissonance. Before the game can start we all have to stand and take off our hats and sing, and some people probably are thinking of you and thinking you’re probably dead by now, or they hope so, and thinking how proud they are to be here, under this flag and no other, but I’m thinking the only flag I ever felt like pledging my allegiance to is white with a blue W. It’s kind of a rare sight.

43 Lecture, March 18

142 years ago, I tell them some fucking asshole on a horse no doubt gave an order to fire on the crowds in Paris and the Commune was born! No, first his men ignored him for fraternité with the mob. Somebodies pulled him down from that horse and knocked his hat askew on his way to being shot and killed and rightfully so, I say. Then the Commune. The government wasn’t going to allow this rabbled city to keep like four hundred cannons gathered together there. But the people paid for them. They owned them, were asserting their ownership of property they paid for, just not exactly the right kind of ownership, apparently. They didn’t get the joke. Maybe there is no joke. Rimbaud apparently did not think so. They didn’t take the bank and it cost them. We get that one they said. But that one’s not oh never mind, just remember.

44 *

I see these things arrayed against me, against everyone like me, and I don’t know what I can do. I am playing a high stakes shell game with my life, with my ability to have any kind of future not determined by either a lack of money or an abundance of debt. If I had zero dollars in my pocket, it would be more money, really, than I have ever known. I go deeper and deeper. The longer you’re under, at least, the more time you have to think of (or wait for) alternative solutions. I say, “wait for,” because for many of us, things on the surface are wildly out of our control—even a lifetime of subsistence living couldn’t cancel our debts. You pass a certain depth and begin to feel like the bottom must be closer than the surface, so you may as well keep going, and hope something happens in the intervening distance to change whatever’s going on up there, up in the world of positive accumulation. Whatever’s down there, at the bottom, you don’t know what it will look like, but you know how to find out. And you know that when you get there, you won’t be alone.

45 Statement

Is the only collective, collective relief? I lover myself in dollars like richest Eve. You can strip me naked but you can’t take the dollars inside me.

This is not a transaction, I said. But you are for sale, the students said. Show me your wallets, and I’ll show you mine. Can we get on with our lives now? It’s not for nothing I am doing this. Who do I have to fuck around here to stop paying dues. The job I want is utopia.

Before tattoos I was also marked this way a subcutaneous membrane of pale green. Go ahead. Just try to repossess my skin.

46 State of the Union

Madam Speaker—she’s around here somewhere but frankly, who sent us here. You don’t need to hear another list of statistics to know crisis because you live it every day. You wake up and sleep. You thought you’d retire but now the business is real, and it is everywhere.

I want every American to know: we will rebuild the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems exist in laboratories in factories, in imagination. We possess what is required. Now, if we’re honest we’ll admit the blame is the market.

Our survival depends on eating up more debt. We have lived through an era of short-term gains where we failed to look beyond the next payment. The next election became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy. Gutted for profit, people knew they couldn’t afford banks, loans put off for some other time on some other day of reckoning. My agenda begins with the money in pockets. More than

90 percent of jobs are quickly broken promises. Get it right. Nobody messes with the Inspector General. You should know that the money you’ve deposited in banks across the country is now ours. You see, we are creating a new economy. Wall Street may buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet, and yes probably that would be unpopular, I get it. We cannot consign our nation, but we can try.

47 In a laundry list I see a blueprint for our future. There are no dollars or common prosperity. A twilight struggle for an American on the Moon still shapes our world. Government is catalyzed enterprise. It begins with energy. We invented technology. Well, I do not accept a future beyond our borders, and I know you don’t either. It is time for America again. We will put Americans to work making billions of bills. But to save our planet, we need to make clean decisions. We should practice, but this is America. I suffer no illusions that

Teddy Roosevelt will teach us to improve and that is why this budget creates new teachers. Not one single dime will close Guantanamo Bay because value doesn’t make us safer it makes us torture. It’s easy to be petty and trivial, but inspiration often comes from those who are. We are not quitters. That’s what she said. In the future, we will part ways, but tonight the point is we do not quit. We perform.

48 hotline

if you know the party’s extension dial a politburo red * for comintern or else just intern no infomercial and no telethon would accept this call the bank menu has its directory for a rotary phone and yet no option for bricks nor message-in-a-bottle and these are my methods of calling bright * when was it i last heard a voice

49 *

I can hear the counterargument already—I have been hearing it for a long time—educate yourself in something profitable. Putting aside the question of whether this is even a possible choice, let alone a meaningful one, is this really the argument we want to make for the systems we have? I chose not to accede to these terms, and whatever else can be said about my conditions, I did choose this particular aspect of my predicament—the object of my study. But I chose poetry (or was compelled to) because it had nothing to do with profit. Nothing is separable from our system of capital, but poetry, at least, doesn’t even pretend (anymore) to end in profit. How stupid, you will say, to choose that, to amass debt for poetry. Maybe. But no more stupid, I think, than to amass debt for what you do not love, for something you aren’t really willing to amass debt for anyway. Which is to say, no more stupid than debt itself. I accept the inevitability of my debt in the present, and the part I played in contributing to it—this is what I was determined to do, and these are the consequences. But when I asked how far I was willing to go for this love, the answer was easy. I would go at least as far for love as I would for hate (this is perhaps the most basic principle of revolution, as I understand it: to go as far for love as you will for hate). And what I hate is money, or you can call it capitalism. I would go at least as far to preserve what I love as I would to destroy what I hate. The answer to both questions involves debt. The answer to both includes fugitivity. And fugitivity, as you know, usually ends in death.

50 Ahoy Anarchists

I’ve been thinking that the true medium of power is language because even in solitary confinement the absence of any explanation for the force exerted on the body is its own kind of statement. White space is a rhetorical question except insofar as it can be answered or just colored in.

So I’m taking advantage of you. But I mean to do it gently and with pained explanation. Do you like that sort of thing? In my line of work you’ve got to be discreet. Language is the communicable disease. You have to get tested for Helvetica. I’m speaking this in serifs but I don’t know of any barrier adequate to withstand advertising’s inevitable cooptation. I don’t care how neutral are the Swiss that typeface is an act of high-modern neoliberal capitalist corporate violence and an affront to passive resistance. Language getting beaten senseless in submission it’s a lot like Dostoevsky’s dead horse, ad infinitum at minimum.

To say I believe in the possibility of revolutionary violence is to do as any good boy would do. Sometimes you just have to blow shit up. Sometimes you get out of jail free, but that doesn’t stop the jail. Hi, pigs. I am a pig, too. This is my snout thrust through the bars, just oinking away.

Consider this a formal request for transfer to Guantanamo Bay where the party never stops. The theme is systemic political failure and stupid hats. I raise an orange traffic cone to my head in love with the stupidity of my own gestures.

51 Fuck Cops

My daddy is a lawman. My daddy is a law enforcement officer. My daddy is a police officer. My daddy is a cop. My daddy is a pig. My daddy keeps the peace.

Fuck the police. Fuck cops. But not all the cops. Fuck law. But not all the law. My daddy needs some law (he is a cop) and I need some law

(I am not) because my daddy loves sheriffing and I love outlawing in petty ways. I love the option: out law. Fuck not that. Fuck cops.

52 Ahoy Punks

Smash me a courthouse and call it a fire sale— everything must go including especially everything made of glass and every gilded thing. Dibs on a gavel, and one of those fly black robes.

The crowd moves as a chorus line, a great act of spontaneous musical theater, everyone’s a part.

Come on down. It’s the easiest thing in the world you just go in through the window and take what you need looting is the sport of kings—and this is true historically. The cops are with us, they just haven’t figured it out yet.

What do we want? And when do we want it? The theory is, where there’s one broken window another follows down the slippery glittery slope to anarchy. Glass is then our mortal enemy, our political impediment on the path to brighter, freer sneakers. Who says sneakers anymore. What we want is kicks.

My legion of impeccably dressed provocateurs, tattooed freaks and slam-dancing punks, we require no philosophy to justify the smash-and-grab, though I am freely espousing just such a theory, in any case.

53 Another Cop Kisser

This little piggy loves to kiss my likeness and this little piggy loves to kiss my I and this little piggy loves to kiss my me and this little piggy kisses aggressively, because this little piggy loves to extract confessions and this little piggy loves to kiss the top of my head in benediction and this little piggy loves to kiss my eternal soul and this little piggy I tell to kiss my temporal ass and this little piggy loves to kiss for money and this little piggy loves to kiss at current market value and this little piggy loves to kiss on installments and this little piggy loves to kiss with interest and some little piggies just love to oblige.

This little piggy goes to kiss me but the theater usher tsks and the other people all say shh and this little piggy goes to kiss my ear but sucks in instead and my brain deflates like a tire and all my thoughts are gone and this little piggy goes to kiss me in a phone booth but the phone rings and I answer and say yes, I will accept the charges and this little piggy goes to kiss me in my orange jumpsuit but the lawyer says objection and the judge says order and they are already taking me away and this little piggy goes to kiss me but first puts on rubber boots and gloves, hip waders and a gas mask and this little piggy goes for my tongue the moment I open my mouth and this little piggy goes to kiss my photo in an old yearbook but can’t find the page and this little piggy goes to kiss my name but can’t remember how it’s spelled and this little piggy tries to resuscitate me with mouth-to-mouth but settles for just kissing me instead and some little piggies will kiss your eyes closed when you’re dead. 54 *

I once wrote a poem in which I said, rather cheekily, “To say I believe in the possibility of revolutionary violence / is to do as any good boy would do.” But I do believe. Violence is impossible to deny (like suffering), but it isn’t, by itself, revolutionary. Revolutionary violence is an act of survival, what we require in order to live and, sometimes, in order to live with ourselves. To say I believe in the possibility of revolutionary violence is to say that I believe in the potential for violence to mean. If collective violence is objectively political, individual acts of violence are not, but they can be—they require interpretation to make them so, to become political. This of course points out that acts of violence are claimed and rejected all the time, contested by competing interpretations that seek, alternately, to elevate them to politics and to strip them of political signification, to degrade them to base crime. So that the interpretation of crime becomes a meaningful activity. So that crime itself is meaningful, even when it is aimless, without intention. Indeed it is crime that opens up what I value.

55

fire season

purge the mansions

but not before

we sweep them first

56

zero

pull the plug and drain the bank debt is negative liquidity all my assets are tied up in the bedroom it’s standing room only in here

57 State of the Union

Madam Speaker declares time gives information about the state of our Union. 220 years of war and it’s tempting to look back and assume that progress was inevitable. But when the Union turned at Omaha, when the marchers were beaten bloody, the future was certain. Time tested our divisions and our hesitation prevailed. Again we are tested. History’s office rocks on the verge of collapse, deeply in debt.

One in 10 Americans can work. These anxieties are the reason I ran for President. In the letters I read each night, the toughest to read are written by children asking why change has not come fast enough. Some are angry the bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded.

They’re tired of the shouting and the pettiness. What the people deserve is Democrats and Republicans, the numbing weight of our politics.

I quit. We all hate it. I hate it, too. I thought I’d get some applause. But for every success story there are other stories. If there’s a party let me know. Let me know. Let me know. Peace, God.

58 swell

train your moped eye on a bipedal motivational speaker

you know i like the danger a dog yipping ferociously

i’m sure you appreciate it would be a criminal offense

it is dangerous accomplicing paint can somewhere hissing

buy a bunch of shit paintings and write all over them

bit of a legal gray area a slight oxymoron maybe an oxford moron

i guess he became my friend it was a spiral and i just fell in

sneaky music in a bank of elevators and glass cases

i’m not doing anything i’m not doing anything at any time

59

account

when i close my eyes i see what this other self leaves painted in my caves— scenes of unremaindered violence nothing left over in the redistribution of the little resources we have into what we would turn them. take five fingers and make them carry. make good fist. the way he walks in to a bank and says give me what i want. or i will find another way. i didn’t put him on the run, it was another law of physics like heat and force. when the glass doors open i won’t leave here alone.

60 *

But I have not, as of yet, needed to rob a bank, or stick up some rich person, or loot their home, or whatever, simply because my desperation to live has not exceeded the tenuous means by which I secure my living, not yet. That day may come, but for now the government and the banks do not catch on to this little game of mine, and as long as the loans keep flowing and nothing else changes, the outlaw course will probably stay a backup plan, an intriguing possibility that, I have to say, grows steadily in its appeal. Because outlawing is, after all, not about survival, it is about living. I suppose what I am doing by taking all of this money (very slowly) with no hope or intention of paying it back is only delaying the inevitable real crime it will, in the end, necessitate, that it will leave as the last resort for me to live, or it could, I suppose, be called stealing already (or maybe it’s “embezzlement”), but really, it’s a petty kind of outlawing at best. It requires more interpretation to read it that way, and more still to have any relation to an act of revolutionary violence. Real theft, though, that’s getting somewhere, and there is a way in which I still hold onto true outlawing as the most hopeful option for when the need arises (not as a backup, even, but as a primary choice). I wrote a different poem that tried to say that, and its reception among a small number of poets was, well, timid maybe. They seemed to take its claims figuratively, and tried to read the violence it proposes as something other than literal, as something other than statement and promise. But I am always trying to write a poem that is a promise in the world beyond mere language, that is a promise in the body. I am always trying to write a poem that eats the rich.

61 Ahoy Outlaws

Take some comfort in knowing you can always buy a gun of any kind from any place at any time from anyone.

Don’t give up, my desperate friends, for I will not give you up. Good cop or bad cop, no matter what they slide across the steel table, nobody talks to the police. They do their job, and we do ours which is no job, which is not job. This we do for love and because. Why kill yourself before you try stealing back a little pleasure, a living wage. Moral bankruptcy I can live with. Whatever part of the brain pities the rich

I don’t have it. I will be a discriminate criminal in this respect. I will be a dead outlaw and happy before a poor sap, a sorry sucker, if it comes to that. This is a choice most of us make. And sure, in prison they’ll feed you and clothe you and Jesus will come for you and they will teach you to write poems, but they’ll never take me alive, because I won’t be anyone’s profit. Nobody move. I’m all tied up in this awkward bow.

62

collect

when i reach for the phone what i find is the knife— it slips open with the same clarity of precision— a satisfying click.

i said i wouldn’t do this, but this is a stickup—now get your hands up wherever you are.

—i’m going to have to call you back and you’ll have to accept—if you have any hope of ever getting your money back this is it.

63 NOTES

Pages 35–36: The lines in italics are lyrics from the album Take Care, by Drake (Cash Money / Universal Republic Records, 2011).

Page 54: The poem, “Another Cop Kisser,” is after Steven Zultanski’s poem “Cop Kisser,” from his book, Cop Kisser (BookThug, 2010).

Page 55: The line, “Indeed it is crime that opens up what I value,” appears in the poem, “Typing ‘Wild Speech,’” by Dana Ward, from his book, This Can’t Be Life (Edge, 2012).

64