These samples are from an ongoing creative journey, done in dictionary format, and collected in the limited edition works Dissociative Fugue and Devil’s Wine.

poem: n; 1. these are constructed for the elimination of the ghosts of experiences. they are burials, the final rite performed for the life cycle of a personal experience. when i don’t make these poems / give these dead experiences a proper burial, they seek me out and haunt my days until i bury them properly. 2. these things i call poems are recollections or rather attempts at reconstruction of the time i spent before i was anything, the time i spent on the tightrope. i fell off and was born and this descent is what i call my life. 3. (un?)fortunately the poem is only aptly defined by what it is not. language that does not dance or vibrate, that does not have a radiance glowing within it, that does not humble all, that has forgotten humility, then it is not a poem. 4. a ladder. 5. the purpose of a poem is to demonstrate the futility of expressing the inexpressible; it therefore by negative example demonstrates the presence of an inexpressible realm, a realm transcendent to thought and language. 6. if people are more interested in you than in your poems, they may be poetically illiterate, then again, you may just be a bad poet. 7. poetry cannot be written, it can only be approached with words. a poem then is an approach. it is the poet’s approach towards poetry and it is poetry’s approach towards the poet. 8. my poems must first be read literally, for the literal interpretation are the columns which support the metaphorical architecture. 9. the poem is held up before the eyes. reading is the ritual which enacts this holding up before the eyes. the poem is to be looked through, beyond. the images, the metaphors, the words, the letters – these are part of the physical entity which must be looked through. these parts of the poem represent any physicality, any existence that must be looked through. we look through the poem into poetry, into the silence which supports all physicalities, all constructions. the page represents this, the page as an approximation of another dimension which supports our dimension. poetry is then a looking; but this looking, as everything, is only a metaphor for what is, for the poetry that is. 10. the poem must exploit the weakness of language. one must lay a heavy burden on the language, a burden it cannot possibly bear. the language will then buckle and collapse. this buckling, this collapse, is the poem’s body, or structure. 11. i will speak with a poem, or listen to it but i will not anesthetize it and cut it open. 12. there is no faith in the poem. from those one would expect such faith from most there is suspicion and even hostility towards the poem. i take this to be caused by a misunderstanding as to what a poem is to accomplish. in the end, a poem must fail. when the burden of what it must carry is increased to a maximum level, language crumbles and the poem is testament to this weakness, this failure. this revelation of such failure is precisely what the poem exists to achieve. in other words, the poem must always succeed in failing. the hostility of many towards the poem is then directed towards the failure of the poem, which is viewed not as being a success at all. such hostility is analogous to hating a bird because it cannot swim, because when it is held underwater for a long period of time it drowns. 13. in the same way that one doesn’t stare at a guitar string but in-stead listens to the music it produces, one should remember that one should go beyond the poem and listen for the sound it produces. a poem allows for the language to vibrate and sound. unfortunately, in many things that claim to be poetry there is no vibration. to show what i mean, i will take as a simple example a part of my poem "gift bridge"

beneath this bridge

for your footsteps.

in this example, the vibration is the sounding of two readings i) (i am) beneath this bridge (and) i have wept for your footsteps. ii) (i am) beneath this bridge (and it is this bridge which) i have wept for your footsteps. as well, within reading i) there are two sub-readings ia) (i am) beneath this bridge (and) i have wept for your footsteps (which are unable or unwilling to weep) ib) (i am) beneath this bridge (and) i have wept for your footsteps (which are not here and which i miss). it is this vibration of meaning which is poetry and it is this which i try to achieve with my poems. it is for this reason that my poems should be read/looked at instead of read aloud. only visually can one go back and re-read the poem with different emphasis in order to explore the possible meanings which have been built and intended. 14. considered from the human side of language or the human language faculty, a poem’s only function is to lead to poetry. considered from the side of poetry (or language) a poem’s only function is to withdraw into humanity. 15. the poem is intrusive in that its novel possibilities, or metaphorical disruptiveness, create in the reader the belief that such a thing is possible, that such a thing can be strived for. whether the possibilities the poem presents are possible in reality is irrelevant because for the reader it is possible and therefore potentially realizable. in other words, the poem presents things one can live towards. 16. a poem must be attended. 17. a banister. 18. the poem is an act of illuminating the human-moment, which is, the rupture which resulted in the language faculty existing apart from language. we exist in both places. only in the poem do we stand in recognition of our condition. the poem acts as a precarious bridge. the poem illuminates poetry, which is, the human relationship to the abyss or to transcendence. such an abyss, such transcendence can be represented as the space, the silence around a word. (to extend this analogy) we think, for instance, that we (and our creations) are words. however, there is a silence which bears and separates our words. and no matter how many words are in existence, this space, this silence, can never be filled. it is the illumination of this space, the sounding of this silence which is in every thing and moment of our human being and which is poetry which is the poem’s task. 19. in my poems, any success is illusory, is just noise. instead it is the failures which hold the voice, which do all the talking. 20. i am buried deep beneath the poem. i am tangled in it roots. if you were to find me it could only mean that the poem has been unearthed, destroyed. 21. a poem is a human arrangement / negotiation with something inhuman. 22. the poem’s only power, its only value is its unsettling ability. it is the task of others to find comfort in this unsettling. the power of the poem’s unsettling comes from the agent it employs to do its work, this being the one thing every person allows into their deepest confidence, the one reliable friend they have: language. 23. i create windows, not mirrors. and though it is true that as it gets darker one may mistake a window for a mirror, or use a window as though it were a mirror, this would be your doing and not my intention. i create windows; it is up to you to consider them for what they are and to look through them for what exists on the other side. 24. in the poem i want to reach the point where the what of saying and the how of saying are identical. 25. an extreme narrowing which anticipates (or, pre-figures) a (semantic) broadening into the continuity of language (thought/ being). 26. what is important (in speech) is not what is said but where what is said breaks, slips, is ambiguous, asemic. these distortions and fractures signify (are ways into) the meta-speech which is usually obscured by speech. in my poems, through extreme examples, i wish for this phenomenon of everyday use of language to be experienced and recognized. 27. the poem is intelligible only to those who have placed themselves in situations similar to the conditions in which such words sprang into existence. — I. Berlin, on J.G. Herder. 28. negative poetics is an attempt to express not what language / living is but what language / living manages not to be. 29. the word poem has buried in it the notion of positivity (po). it might be better to rename what i write as noems (a neologism coined by Paul Celan) allowing negation (no) to replace positivity. as well, the word noem suggests the term noesis, which is apprehension (mental grasping). apprehension itself suggests more than a mere grasping – there is the associated sense of fear or uncertainty and the necessity of it all as suggested by its etymologue apprentice(ship). 30. in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari one might say that in my poems i have created a minor use of a major language... a political act – perhaps the only politically subversive act available to a writer. 31. the fact that the material used to create a poem is a common material used/abused by everyone for everyday, practical ends is not only an obstacle for a poet, it is also the reason a poet must exist. 32. the poem is always only a beginning. to insist that a poem is an end betrays an inability and/or and lack of desire to proceed. 33. an inkling. 34. the essential is too quick and too powerful for words to capture. for this reason a word, or at most a phrase, is the minimal unit of containment for such a transcendent experience. therefore, if one seeks poetry, it is more efficient and one is more likely to succeed by interrogating a word. 35. when confronted with the chaos of everyday reality, with the time-worn panic of individual subsistence, it seems miraculous to find a region of stillness which has been created in the midst of everything and which is stable. 36. to build a poem, to clear a poem, one has to leave oneself, leave one’s home. this is a risk for the reason that you may never return to yourself. the materials for poems can only be purchased with risk. in my country poets live indoors and never leave their dwellings. they toil and produce nothing that could ever be mistaken for a poem because of course, poems are not an indoor phenomenon, their essence deriving from something that is outside, something ecstatic. 37. "the first language for a new range of experiences" — Nietzsche. 38. when speaking of poetics, of poetic activity, success is failure and failure is success. 39. the poem is not an abstraction (such as love, truth, etc.); a poem is a manifestation of the necessary conditions such abstractions require in order to exist at all. 40. "a poetic image only really speaks to one once it has been accepted as a psychologically privileged moment of exaltation" — G. Bachelard. 41. the poem is a proxy war. 42. a poem is my mind after it has fallen in the snow. 43. "it is not easy to understand unfamiliar blood" — Nietzsche. 44. the poet creates a complex entity, an organism of generality which is encountered by a person, by the ultimate singularity, and is too much for that singularity to bear. so much generality is necessarily overwhelming – an ocean of crashing waves and unpredictable currents and advancing and rising tides promises only disappearance, disintegration and dissolution. it is a poet’s task to ensure that this promise is kept. 45. my obsession, my theme, to put it crudely, is the contaminant, the imperfection which i suspend in the formless solution of my time and it is around this that a poem crystallizes. 46. poems come from the place that questions claim, falsely, as their birthplace. 47. a poem is written in isolation, in that hushed homecoming where the world in its totality recedes into recollection and then into nothingness. but a poem that remains in isolation cannot be a poem. a poem is a promise to return. a poem may not succeed in its return and its various modes of failure can be successes of a kind. but in order to be a poem in the fullest sense it must make its way back into the world and the world must at the same time notice and recognize that a promise, a difficult promise, has been fulfilled. 48. people are generally repulsed by a poem because they are resistant to the compulsion, the necessity, with which poetry challenges them.