Incoherent Dominance Vapor
This is a work of pure ignition
Where explanation fails ‘this’ being
Petulant rhythmic flourishing in spite
Of medieval light in the diminished seventh
Its sacral proficiency leaks the guarded
Chamber, a snare in the fabric pulling
Phosphorescent vernacular along glistening
Vows spoken in reverse, which must end
To emit my voice, a fiction starting
To fade, I sing the original flagellant Geißlerlieder
Of which no music survives, accompaniment
Forbidden to appease this psychic privation
And its forty-seven sub-types, e.g. you
Taste like heaven to me, I submit myself
To the committee, forced kneeling
Before the other team, dad nude and unshackled
From the pillory, white phosphorous trawling
The horizon, this circulating air, global strategic
Advisory firm supporting corporations
And investors on the risks facing their businesses,
Slow infinity whipping fire, etc.,
Scourging my hide, I’ve entered a prayer
Already parodied by the fifteenth century
Whenever a single note is played, the overtones
Spew bile embellishing chordless freedom
Endemically as contrafactum, similar humiliation
Devices spread through the populace, gathering
Pilgrim hymns from the prospect of flowers
On that note, what is your favorite flower and why /
Does it hold any symbolism for you? If you’re a guy
And love flowers please feel free to reply
Now here comes the wave of evil, self-igniting
In air, you trace the realia, fondling
Their exotic frisson, a nimble legerdemain
To switch my submission for indifference
Under the auspices of generic faith
While I don the drunkard’s cloak, bathe in shit,
Hit my vape, and parade myself through town
from Harmonia Macrocosmica, or a New and Universal Atlas, Exhibiting the General and New Cosmography of the Whole Created Universe
Plural strangeness in the river
we bathed, my first-time
‘outside experience,’ July
2026, having failed repeatedly
the values my inner life
ascribed to a natural order
The pliant lift, mental dermis
peeled for daylight
wandering to transform life
in the hormonal field
the month means something
place your ear to the shell
to hear worlds apart crash
their sum and substance
We shatter upon waking
in this vast illicit province. Pluck as many
Victoria plums from the branch
as your arms will carry
The bloom is self-fertile, peep the blossom
& cry deliriously as spring
exchanges with summer when again
I was born in a translucent exo-shell
an immensity which contradictions
stay, but I am living my way
toward those, to speak fluently into something
That doesn’t click, audible
on the glass, little pastoral
branch still a fantasy I’ll eat
myself out of. It didn’t go
the way we thought. Rarely does it
fulfill model expectations, but I nonetheless
am enamored with the refrain
function, pubescent return
in dimensionless spin, purebred atomic
velocity in my later style, a practice
I caress with hard-won affection
sieving myself through glass under
murmuring arboreal birds. Can you hear
them? Just picture and rotate
the globe, place a finger at random.
Now we’re talking.
***
I drove all night for this view
To go into it, well, the cost would ruin me
As all the planets line up, heavier than usual
Memory because the minute perceptions cradle
The first attempt at life, you mouthed vacantly
As the unreal engine idles
Call avoidance a rhyme
with harmony. I didn’t mean
to bury the hatchet
where downy mildew forms
and nothing ages, forget it
because it isn’t realistic
it performs dramatic tableaux
you resound in unkept
by my early persuasions
cry out like katydids
cutting through summer
1995, when I was a boy
shifting on the grass to feel
a lip where the singing stops
assaulted by full-length
visions I couldn’t be
thrown from the other
shore I imagined went on
infinitely into a freedom
I’d finally dissolve in
After the night it actually occurs
Like shaving ice from the wind-
Shield, motions I hadn’t seen painfully
Obvious crack against the sky
I heard a voice say, “Now we’re
Talking” and opened my mind
Along with I won’t forget you
Blooming in the folded symmetrical
Paper toy with which to predict
The future’s atmosphere, it begs
To be used, but first you must
Admit it, form words in the experience
Touching the back of your throat, physically
Altered by nocturnal orchids
To remove your most precious
Transitional objects, your tonsils
Swell and leak hideous new pigments
We’ll use to hand-color the cosmic
Ocean and pierce the upper suns
With spears to give birth to strange
New forms, advancements only
My data dreams
***
This poem was written in the Golden Age of Dutch Cartography,
about which the less said the better. This poem contains twenty-nine
star charts with which to trace the growth of a poet’s mind.
At the suggestion of Johannes Janssonius, my publisher, this poem
hypothesizes that the poet’s mind grows at a rate of s−1 with .4 orbital eccentricity.
A huge part of the poetic practice involves the removal of metal
from a copper plate, which we tune to resonate with
solar flares. The result is a medium more magnetic than grammar,
triggering supple desire. Because all the invisible domains align
better, I’m writing a series of super-imposed studies where
I’m a spurious vocoder used to speak on behalf of stone fruit.
I’m thinking things I shouldn’t say. But would it surprise the audience
to learn that’s love? Or at least one of the forty-seven sub-types, e.g.
you / Taste like heaven to me, etc. In the Current Age of Poetic
Composition, at the suggestion of my publisher, Johannes
Janssonius, the speaker is made out of oil-stained clouds
pitch-shifted up and clipping between self- and reference.
That’s shown in a chapter from my unpublished epistolary novel,
Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending
the Most Important Concerns of Private Life, endogenously produced.
But I reworked it for my pseudonymously published, Dani;
or, Delirious Hand-Crushed Half-Silence in Orange Flower
Water: Translating Alembic Syntheses from 40 A.D.; or, Full Length
Mecha Suit. Tell that one to the meteorologists, a kind of “soldier’s life”
for the poem. With this, we’ve moved into the middle of my life, my “fear
of having destroyed the object”: I’d slipped on the brink and speak
words to a divided soul. With my sex I strayed, dissolving each muscle
fiber into a smooth, concordant waveform. I smelled different. A gate
to the center of the city, emblazed with fine physical and digital techniques
the new sciences afford. In the end, I’ve just arrived. This poem
scored thirty-five own goals before half-time. Thanks
to careful instrument calibration, we’ve finally obtained the medium
and I blend myself into synthetic pigments, in my new style.
Dani Baker
Dani Baker is a poet from San Francisco who lives in New York City. She is the author of The Streamers (Spiral Editions) and her work appears in The Baffler, Annulet, Coma, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Topos Press, the publishing arm of Topos Bookstore in Ridgewood, Qns.