The Text

The text rolls out of nothingness, a

rug dug from under linen, rolled from

out of the numinous white, the bed's hallow'd

envelope; text unspools like cellophaine

made visible in refracted fluresce, not reflective, just

shiny, and smudged by finger prints, fingers

pulling the text between our hearts and the poisoned air;

the text covers a blankness; the sketched and

unworded freedom of the actual coalesces to

the lumped architecture of description, pauses spanning the

distance between black collumns over

milky seas of opaque and unchallenging liquid bone;

we weave as no spiders can; we bridge between

empty and endlessly moveable points with

fabric merely cast against the day as shadow, our

meaning threaded from the material that surrounds

our hearts, the darkness of the cavity of breath and pumping blood;

the text stands in relief, in contrast, with what

it emulates, the reality that it can only say; it's the border of

opposing shades; the juxtaposition that allows sight

submits to our vision order: small, black, regular lines,

crossed over each other and split until the

violence of words forces them to cry the prison of their forms,

disharmonious, yet linked and classified,

their forms, like ours, implicitly unsatisfied.

Disgust, the mundane, and my other favorite things

Hey there all (however many people that may be), this is Tyler, once again breaking that poetic fourth wall to talk about some stuff I find important (i.e. fun).

This post is about style, as much as it applies to my poetry. I've already gone all formal with the sestina, so it's time to discuss my handling of my more commonly free-form writing. It's like my writing theory, but without all of the validating jargon or high-minded philosophy of "good" poets.

My theory of style comes from the practical tendencies of my writing: sketching what I see and journaling my perceptions into rambling free-verse vignettes. Most of my poems come from organic diatribes, and build themselves out of lists of perceptions, like diary entries about the things around me, and inside of my head. I write this way partially because A) I'm not terribly organized, and B) even if I've got writer's block, just by writing whatever comes into my head I can get out material and practice descriptive techniques without necessarily worrying about if the "poem" is "good". Often, something cool or useful will appear, if not the skeleton of a viable poem. This is why, if you have writer's block, my advice is to write anyway. It's important to take breaks if you're at an impasse, but practice is important too; you'll find that discovery occurs even when the muse isn't in the mood.

So, from this, comes a style I characterize as the "mundane". That's not to say I prefer boring things, or things that lack descriptive energy; I rather find that the "normal" (a misnomer, but useful for explanation) contains amazing qualities of universal humanity packed within the unique characteristics of personal experience. I liken it too Virginia Woolf's prose style, where everything that affects perception, from the hugely consequential to the smallest particle of light, is important and colors life, contains meaning. I try not to be so high-minded about it. It's the mundane, after-all; it's the soaring highs and the caked shit with which people deal.

Which brings me to my next step: disgust. Parts of "Tired Tyler" illustrate this best, but i want to say it here: I find the gross, or disgusting elements of life to be incredibly rich in descriptive power, and not in a sense of depression; the grotesque in life is there, all the time, a universal equalizer reminding us of our humanity, our organic bodies, and the freedom of imperfection that surrounds us. Did I mention how descriptive gross shit is? Nothing polarizes quite like the broken form of a partially decayed raccoon, it's intestines burst and trailed in the zig-zag impressions of the tires that killed it. We see these things, and we see them everyday. They are a part of our lives, yet we often ignore their power.

So, yeah, that's sort of the style I'm attempting to build right now. I phase in and out of it. My inspiration is partially due to a friend of mine (a quite talented playwright whose name I haven't asked permission to mention), and partly due to writers who exemplify the grotesqueries of the real. Sylvia Plath's anger and venom will always affect my writing, and the work of Patty Smith (both in and out of music) speaks to the style, as well as William Carlos Williams, a nod to Chuck Palahnuik, of course Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon (see "The Through-Trajectory") and many others. Thanks, and now to go write some poetry.

Portrait of a Room: Further Sketches

The curtains let light through,
yellow, and then blue
as morning's hungover glow
moves towards afternoon's
guilt-laden bough of low-shadowed leaves
and into evening's angled eaves, and I
angle my arm, tragically bent
and lain forlorn
across the right plane of my face;
my only supine position if formerly drunk,
each time, for a minute or two.

Winter Walking

A fire goes out in the sky;
stove of the firmament, your
extinguishing embers seethe
cords of smoke, viscous as
rain swollen and gorged with heat
like steam from black knit caps
or the ghost of breath: the soul's
proof manifest as a cloud.

All fixed points blur
into gray and mud that
flood rough-shod canvas shoes;
they show sodden socks, unless
awkwardly shuffled steps
hide the slowly fraying insoles.

The rubber wears an asymmetrical
abscess where I walk unbalanced
by my Guatemalan book-bag
dully faded red-black zig-zags
swing the scholarly weight
of paper, spiral bound, glued to boards,
or scratched black with ink; sorry,
swung, not swinging anymore.

Portrait of a Room

A six-pack of beer
bottles
glints white light from
florescent
to brown glass
like super-heated sand.
They taste
soapy
as bubble crusted suds
though more drinkable
than
organic shampoo oils or
milky run-off,

more drinkable than the
uneven, un-liquid air
that steals free-passage
from
red-streaked lungs.

Red floral curtains reveal
the amber tinted blue light of dawn
seemingly suddenly, though night recedes
slow; night hides its deep in deeper
depths under waves of gray and blue;
the rattle of rain breathes a grayness
of sound, and
I sleep finally, too late to hear.

Spinal Column

Ever get uncomfortable
with how
your spine shifts
and bends against the back
of hardwood panels
or bars
straight-laced through
boards
set to hold you?

The slither of
scoliosis flowing its
serpentine coil, contrary
to popular notions of posture,
seems to loom.

Are your vertebrae
aligned like
textbook skeletons
diagrammed in
a pristine, sterile death?

Like a bust bearing
standard
of classic cylindrical stone,
alabaster, your column rises
never quite at
right-angle to ground or sky;
your awkward bone-knobbed tower,
bastion of nerves,
bundles its twists
around
the orbit of your soul.

A Call Before Noon from Someone Unknown

Buzz burrows
through pillow's squashed gauze,
eats, erodes,
follows a jagged flow
like lightning through
the unlucky, the struck,
and the buzz
winds, whines, wracks
the bed
with rhythmic spasms.

The electric-blue
flare
of my phone's face
relates clues, numerical,
numinous, and
collected from other
than my eclectic collection
of close friends.

Recognition is faint;
scant energy, lacking
caloric reserves, recedes.
Query: Answer a call before noon?
No.

Tired Tiresias

Ok, so before I get this one up, just wanna let you guys know, this is only kind of a part of the "Tired Tyler " series. I decided to go with a different, more classical point of view, that of the blind prophet Tiresias. Enjoy.


Tired Tiresias
can't see why
he stays stewing
in the black-brewed broth,
opaque as cloth
draped with elegant weight
over eyes, why
only his own fate
seems sealed
beneath barrows unperceived
but by tiny, clawed things,
where he kindles
the secondary light of second sight
shed on the darkling inner-shell
of his soft head, why
when terror of dawn, of
loam-packed lips open
to an impatient sky, he
can't scuttle away
on spindly spider-legs
into the obliterating heat
and squeeze
of wheezing earthen kilns,
to be magma-lapped and wrapped
in molten coils, but
he can't leave the words
behind, alone, and unloved
in the shallow hues of prophecy;
the shadow blues of future things
keep him rooted, blind, and strange;
banal and deranged.

My tendencies: a primer on the sestina

Hello again everyone (i.e. me). I hope your poetic yearnings have not dissipated in the face of all of these words.
I'm going to bother you with a non-poem (though poetry-related) post about one of my favorite old forms, the sestina! I'll be posting a bunch of pieces in this particular form, and I thought that it would help to have a little discussion of the style for the sake of comprehension, and in case any sadomasochistic writers out there want to make on of their own.
The sestina originated as a 12^th century French form of poetry, invention of which is usually credited to the troubadour-poet Arnaut Daniel. The sestina employs a very specific set of six repeating end-words in the place of normal rhyme over six stanzas of six lines each, and a two or three line optional (traditional) envoy (also called a tornada), containing all six words.ⁱⁱ The order of the six primary words at the end of the lines of the first stanza, 1 2 3 4 5 6, decides their order throughout the rest of the poem. Word order moves according to lexical repetition: the last end-word of the previous stanza ends the first line of the next stanza, the first end-word of the previous ends the second line of the next stanza, crossing back and forth in a 6 1 5 2 4 3 order, based on each preceding stanza.ⁱⁱⁱ Envoys vary greatly in execution. Traditionally, the sestina utilizes syllabic meter, usually decasyllabics or iambic pentameter in English; though metrical requirements are often discarded (I intend to experiment with both strict meter and line variation).

Sestina end-word order for each line of each stanza:

Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3

Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5

Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4

Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2

Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1

Envoy: This depends on preference, or the wish to include an envoy. The envoy has two of the six repeating end-words in each line: one in the line’s middle and one at the line’s end. I like to return the form to its original order: 1-2 in line 1, 3-4 in line 2, 5-6 in line 3, though some use 2-5, 4-3, 6-1 or other orders.

Additionally, the six key end-words often form a thematic group, rhetorically suited to each other as parts of a common idea or related ideas.
Now, when you see a poem with the tagline "sestina", with all of those repeating words, you'll know what's up, more or less. I also encourage you to try on out for yourself! They're fun, and once you get going, not too difficult to bring to fruition (in unexpected and oddly satisfying ways).

The Through-Trajectory

I walk through you

as through

a slanted doorway, canted

to the left, leaning windward; I

spit your bitter fluoride flavor

as foam into the sink.

My glasses form

small refracted lenses

in the sputtering drool of rain;

they shine like liquid polish

in prismatic, bleeding light,

dissolving orange and

webbed with purple bruise.

Gravity bends with the weight of wet air.

It illustrates the steep parabola, the

wind-muddled obtuse curvature of rain's

brief suspension in air.

We missiles, we of inevitable trajectory, bound

like the year-soaked metal shell

of insensate armaments

to pitted landscapes of low-altitude, we

meet at lines of perpendicular descent,

you and I.

I pluck the torn

filaments

of sound and light

from your pyrite halo

of hair.

Steam streams from you

like divinity stealing

into the vaporous shine

of a street-light.

I blow through you

as shrapnel, as black bits

and bone splinters and

debris dusted red,

right through,

finding

the space between your motes,

amongst gently resting borders,

in the wavering punumbra

where your gravity

warps fissures, hollows

a constellation of tiny no-wheres.

Time slopes, spirals, gains momentum,

and funnels us, like my spit down the drain,

to temporal sea-level, the last transitional plane

beneath the mud's gooey suck,

and less-soft layers of earth.

My new leather shoes

split and swell

prematurely well-worn

by water. They match

the mud's matte-brown hue.

My heels dig shallow divots

as I wade through.

We enter into a dive, like a contract,

a blood-pact, even as our blood

blooms its sanguine cloud behind our fall

as a jet-stream in sunset, and

we scream with the suicidal coupling of eagles

into horizon's final flare.

The Coital Rose: a Sestina

I decided to give up the ghost,
call it quits on the rose
of romanticized hearts on fire,
just like cigarettes forever pre-coital,
I miss them in pangs like scarlet
rivers running South of the border

gather steam, roll over a border
town, the diminished and dim ghost
of desire. Spring unrolls like scarlet
runways for the few that smell of rose
petals in the dead littered coital
fan covering beds, begging fire

to spark its red dryness, fire
falling back like petals at bed's border
of blanket and body and in coital
margins wandering like young ghost
writers, scaling the hills that rose
as the morning band of scarlet

frosted the tree tops in scarlet
rims like the forest caught fire
in a ring dilating, like a rose
slowly blooming sunlight borders,
a wreath lit by the holy ghost
that burns as hot as coital

fevers fueled by the lack of coital
exchange, cheeks burn scarlet
like a Southern bell's ghost,
and immaterial as fire.
Creased lines denote the borders
I've crossed in retreat. A rose

has thorns complicating the rose,
barbs to mimic the coital
pain of mortality, it's borders
clear after acts of scarlet
life propagating like stolen fire
of god's-become cultural ghosts.

I court ghosts with the holy rose
of spiritual fire, approach coital
acts of rich scarlet, forming, everywhere, borders.

A quick introduction before I disappear behind the poetic veil

But not really. I don't want to bother anyone too much with my direct presence, but I thought I'd at least say hello before this poetry stuff gets too heavy. My name is Tyler. I started doing the poetry thing long, long ago, and it looks like it's finally time to get it in a blog of its own. I've always avoided making a blog; I felt it was cliché, or that it would cheapen my "art" in some irreversible way. Naturally, I was just being pretentious; now that those conceits have fallen away I will present to you, the internet, what I consider my "work". 
I don't sleep a lot, but I do write a lot about sleep, and I write a lot when I should be sleeping (hence, the blog's title). Like I said, this blog is supposed to be about the work. In my philosophy, an artist's work should be able to speak on its own, stand without direct reference to creator or context, or else it's not doing its job. These are big words. Every so often I will peak out from behind a poem, give a blurb or two, and recede once more into the poetic miasma. And who knows, maybe I'll feature some of my favorite poetry, or better yet, some things from people I know (especially if I'm feeling lazy), but the primary focus will remain my personal creative output (such that it is). Thanks for bearing with me. Next up is a poem: The Coital Rose