in this family, we go grey early

I don’t even get out of bed for less than $35/hr.

foreigners in his blood

merrily throwing shit at the canvas.

Buzzard presides over power outage.

I’m a good liar & it’s hard to change

me & Jaroslav Hasek burn it down

a smell is something you live under

there, I said it

Sir Meltin’ John says

the toxicology results came back

coming down with an eye infection

but I speak fluent laryngitis.

Tell a story about finding a driver’s license

it sounds like they’re screaming “sig heil!”

They ignored the blood telegram

revelation: legendary Canadian politeness nothing better than hostility held in check

the goal is to defeat consideration

he made time to get away

when the going gets tight, the tight keep right

the blood transformed: erection

the minx: a sphinx in your meninx

he was one act away from barbituration

salmon origin majestic

a shaky optimism is permitted

tooth derail

begin by playing with their oboes

the persistent ghosts of old selves manifested in a familiar sound

the poet just aches to be dialogical

indeterminacy solves nothing, that’s all

—night of the coffee vampire!

No, no, don’t switch it to phono, might blow the mofos

a stranger comes out of the night, saying, “got any zigzags?”

The symbolic beard!

This is not the time for editing, so don’t listen to me

Erin’s beautiful drawings.

He says “I don’t want her, but I want to look at her”

she’s like the village bicycle

she plans a graveyard picnic while I dream

the answer is “or not”

omega omen & oh, man Oma

stop scaring myself

same old earwig infestation—chaotic, disgusting

I am slowly going crazy / crazy, crazy going crazy

the endless recurrence of the past

the sky was haunted by staggering nimbus clowns

—

I’ll be posting one to three Aleatory Accumulation Anti/Ghazals per week for one year.

These poems were composed in the following fashion: lines were written longhand on sheets of paper in a notebook—rarely more than one line per day—until 230 lines were gathered, at which point the notebook’s pages were cut up into individual lines. The lines were placed in a hat (a gold baseball cap, of which George Bowering once said “that’s the ugliest hat I’ve ever seen”), drawn at random, glued into a notebook in the order they were drawn (including the titles), and transcribed to computer.