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Three 
​by Daniel Nemo

Will I Be Still the Hero

Lately I see things
fade to a dark shade
till they wear through 
their own orbit.

What strikes my eye 
is an altercation of fluency.

Part concomitance 
of form. Part vacuum 
that sucks me in.

I am stuck between one 
and zero cropping 
for myself 
a place in nature.

The answer 
to form 
is the formless--

substantive 
rather than rhetorical, 
factitious.

The lake which is dark 
is the ceiling of a memory. 

The time on the water 
drinks the water.
Function without 
intentionality. 

I take this what 
voice speaks out

that it have simply 
in mind to exist 
outside the occasional, 

one and the same 
ordinary act of speaking,    

else not think of 
one who wouldn’t 
know then  
or nor would I.

I dream of another end.

It was never for ever 
for certain.

Mirror Language

The poem grows a little every time you read it.

New centers of reality are rendered 
somewhere else 
                                        across 
                                            the adrenal nucleus
like a grid painting.

The wind rises: 
exuberance. 
Warren of polymer dots        warp-bubble feathers  
fall upon the lake.

Ghostdance 
vertigo.  

What will you do 
when the gods forsake you?


              Far off,       long ways you must stop 

                   and think over: all you 
forget a language, because 
           wrong, a language forgets you.   

Don’t words 
articulate  
               the sky and land in unchecked sliding
                                        fragments fusing a suspended 
state,

turn around, 
they disappear…

                                             Did you not know 
                                                   in translation   
         
one becomes less than a person more than a person
ever was   
                             of whom neither remembers
                    nothing. 

Is this the limit to the poem?

Manifold

With the hands close to the body, breathing evenly, 
the performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem 
but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity. 

In on the con– 
conscious. 

A near uroboric act.

Or else take it in simply
by reading—reading as searching 
as being the act   

that splits the mind   
and sets it in a state of conflict with itself,
verging on untemporary--




until pieced back 
in the only medium you experience:
one that has transitioned from another,
light coming through from a high window 
out of frame.

And, at the most quiet.

        All the dead poets you love stand in the empty yard. 
    Their arteries like yours are weighted octaves 
           which truly receive time.

                  All time already exists 
         in you. Both past and present
held together at once by a now in process 
       yet the story remains something hunting for—to let go, 
  let it be told,

      so tell it,—let go of--
you deliver the news to no one 

      and know there can be none 
            made of any substance…

                           Sensors monitor the body as star-appointed witness, 
                                       venture out extragalactic, 

                     stelliform… Things aren’t everywhere welcome 
         so much as deliquesced. 
Reincarnations of the line’s 
change-language compass
seem whole here 

in a world, 
a mind sectioned 
by arcs and aural circles 
where sense-objects burst wide open 
around living grains of magic. 

Decrust—and the breadcrumbs stick together. They’re atoms coming at reality 
in light of a new survey. Fotomontaggi: a fresh loaf pops out.  

Notes:
  • The performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity – in reference to Charles Bernstein’s introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word
  • In on the con—conscious – in reference to In the Future, by Rae Armantrout
  • Reading as searching as being the act – in reference to Leslie Scalapino’s introduction to Of Indigo and Saffron, by Michael McClure
  • The act that splits the mind and sets it in a state of conflict with itself – in reference to Eros the Bittersweet - An Essay, by Anne Carson
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Daniel Nemo is an Amsterdam-based poet, translator, and photographer.
More info at www.danielnemo.com
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