Daniel Nester
Excerpts from The Adagia Project
1. Cleave to oneself at your peril.
2. The bad nodder always questions.
3. Deathly death adds up.
4. Fiery fire adds up.
5. Your oily El Camino?
6. Your oily fire-resting place?
7. Athena's lovecries!
8. The moon remembers; the doctors do not.
9. If you wish repeatedly to be cast, do so at another time.
10. Bad advice lasts forever.
11. It's sickly, it's beautiful.
12. Fatherland's fumes a living voice.
13. The changekings.
14. Before you go down, get up front first.
15. Simple things are similar? Simple as in being similar to God.
16. Simple graciousness, ad sites.
17. I finger fingers invidiously, my favorite favor.
18. Crave only tension, craven tensions.
19. Crave only made-up art.
20. Shapeshifters usually shapeshift with shapes.
21. The grand total of crazy? Just as crazy.
22. And this too will turn into nothing.
23. Toward the umbilical, a double-dare.
24. My hands always add the same numbers.
25. And a fabulous catastrophe is still a catastrophe.
26. Use your head with your head.
27. Curse your lamp and trade up.
28. My principles dim. Totally.
29. Sate and start moderately, then finish.
30. Tall into the cave. Practice here.
31. Tricks; impropriety.
32. Carry all ‘em with you.
33. Fortune's fortune advantage.
34. Insight always seems current.
35. Call a car. Add the cure.
36. Everything adds up to trivia.
37. A big actor whose fights end up bloody.
38. My father's script has become sour.
39. The bull's got a boner. The cow, then, can suffer or destroy.
40. It is becoming uncommon to remember.
41. I wear a villain's mask to fight other villains.
42. I forgot you slit my throat.
43. I sing along with those who slit my throat.
44. My own eloquence astounds me.
45. Classic graces speak classically.
46. Stir my mood, Manbody, then follow me.
47. Mature girls' sex.
48. Whereby fear takes the place of shame.
49. The outdoors favors the Wookies, not a large amount of antihistamines.
50. All the Furies in the house say yeah!
51. And he ran away with a tiny cinnamon bun.
52. The strobe lights wish they were cancerous.
53. The Feastie Boys play tomorrow!
54. Cum on feel my tart.
55. Them's furry jugs, they are.
56. A ton of croutons is still croutons.
57. Must have lame labia.
58. A whole lotta fatties.
59. And so many pale fruits out there in colleges.
60. The opportunity to reem has to be conveyed.
61. Sublime and solemn chat rooms.
62. And me? My uzi weighs a ton.
63. I'll admit it: My voice is my main accessory.
64. The ship dances with women on land, with men at sea.
65. The book of love's been pored-over.
66. Fortune's pixies.
67. Out of the laps of thugs; into the laps of toll collectors.
68. In a fakin' world.
69. Pisces repose.
70. No uses, not many, no opportunities, no dice.
71. If you like saxophones.
72. Aw, Kingman. Aw, fatty borne out of opportunity.
73. Many from Mineola scram.
74. The vine on the citrus, tempers flare.
75. Furry palms.
76. Relinquish your quips, and get my meds.
77. A man's deodorant to the sentences.
78. Um, escalator--could you quarter our sons?
79. For felicitous cads, jovial taxi rides.
80. A thesaurus with commentary?
81. A thesaurus with aloe lotion?
82. A mule for said thesaurus?
83. In gaudiness, sinuses.
84. For non-cops, belief in Vitalis's hair-color potency.
85. Sure, between sacred assuredness flows furry fountains.
86. Towards Felice, an influx of parties.
87. Busty Town Hall Girls Captured!
88. Man vs. Table.
89. Bad rags.
90. Men aren't truthful. Fingers aren't twistable.
91. Where are my friends, those other apes?
92. The purple-headed earth.
93. Illin' aliases, illin' learnedness, illin' boners, illin' thesauruses.
94. Dave's son is no Oedipus.
95. Get on my ass-bus and then get a load of me on the bus.
96. Give out your fire.
97.
98. The main column bears families.
99. Not everybody anchors.
100. Against stimulation, against dice, against the sounds.
101. Not obligated to have it, kept under mats.
102. A lion hints.
103. Jungian vulture.
104. Maybe Richard Gere's hairy.
105. The ass's umbrella.
106. The picky lane.
107. Set my compact discs on fire.
108. Tap that case. Case the Labradors. (I'm tired of cases.)
109. Sacred sin is hereditary.
110. Into the cuts and pores. Pennies solved.
111. One per sleepover.
112. For knobjobs, for sleep, for call girls, for sleep.
113. Of all of your ass's prospects, ______ .
114. Your index finger swirls in the air. Induce me. The booty line's a-waitin'.
115. Golden Earring records thrust onto donkeys.
116. Those demons go from here, sing a dirge.
117. These Helens make my tusk hot an inky.
118. Be candid but cover your instruments.
119. Beauty falls into beauty.
120. Mighty streams spurt from my generous fountain.
121. Corny all at once.
122. The warrior-animal's bread crumbs.
123. Yo mama jokes cloak other observations.
124. Which wolflike distance should gongs?
125. My missile died. I landed here on fire.
126. Weather mingles with mankind.
127. Mingle sacred with profane and you know what you get?
128. Up and down on high we go.
129. All whores go homo.
130. Obey money always.
131. The truth is simple sung out loud.
132. I disguised myself recently. See?
133. Gene Simmons sure is strange recently.
134. What kind of fool eats every
135. You're what they call an extra special jack-off.
136. After Prince's first 11 albums, ______.
137. A good September, a new conviction.
138. Of grades and juicerators.
139. After your bad ass ends, I'll write an essay about you.
140. Out of your eggs.
141. My questions satisfy no one.
142. The plants all over the place; drink up.
143. Anson Williams, where are you when we don't need you?
144. Give me your wildlife guides.
145. And to you I spank you in all colors.
146. Evita, char skills inside.
147. From the fugly, ingnorant fire.
148. Later. Enjoy and compare the proverbial exaggerations.
149. Put your feet where you want to live.
150. Between endings, the words; the offender's lap.
151. The aid bear chords.
152. Don't egg on tame comparisons.
153. Don't milk tame comparisons.
154. A similar ape smiled at me once. Once.
155. A can't-see-me-now cicada.
156. You've entered a True Pensioners Zone.
157. A number of nimble cocks.
158. Many knew of this very big sea urchin.
159. The trees are all the same.
160. A flame's fire is close by.
161. Paupers are people too. Sort it out.
162. All for friendliness stand up.
163. The liquor cabinet of our lives.
164. Get on the bus. Pay your fair. Hold on tight.
165. The ugly and the necessary.
166. Don't take my thesis away!
167. Each sphere practices to its own ability.
168. The king fishes for compliments.
169. The tartar is talkative.
170. And I ran. I ran. So far away.
171. Olly olly semen free!
172. Alien ice to go. You sing it.
173. All I am queers up your excuses.
174. Give up that birthday. Slowly.
175. This kid business comes to our senses.
176. I am generous with my sex to the point of godliness.
177. If more positive, cram and flambé.
178. No strongman faces two questions the same.
179. On life no life.
180. A monkey in my ass.
181. An ass inside my ape.
182. Inside my ungenerous ass.
183. Never cling to Neverland's wetness.
184. Words against death.
185. Love and death: together on one stage.
186. The camel eats off Formica countertops.
187. More sublimity, please!
188. There is no other word for intense (cf. Repo Man).
189. I'll add you manually.
190. Shave all around your hair, say fuck ‘em to their face.
191. Add up album sales, smile like a Transformer.
192. Take note of my pipe, take note of how I make charcoal.
Sampson Starkweather & Dan Boehl
Brazilia/Brasilia
Life is a lot like literature: you always know how it is going to end. Something to consider though: Texas is on the edge of a vast desert. In many ways it's the negation of people or persons. It's like a monstrous clap. It's an ocean. Just think of it this way: what are the stories people tell each other about New York and what do they say about Texas? My neighbor is outside in the morning mist with a hatchet on his belt, watering his fruit trees. He believes in Armageddon. It's the stuff of literature, the negation of who we are.
New York is a vast experiment in loneliness. You know the title of Lorca's masterpiece, Poet In New York was intended to be a joke, an ironic paradox. How could anyone be a poet in “Senegal with machines”? Geometry and agony. Where even the pigeons lack souls. Now everyone you meet is a “poet in New York” and the title has become a kind of flag for all these pitiful fools. We've become a skyline unto ourselves.
Last night Ryan told me the story of how he saved a guy's life by yanking the garden hose out of the car window so the guy didn't carbon monoxide himself to death. There were other people standing around the parking lot just watching the man suffocate in his Escort. Then the dude's brother showed up and started cursing everybody for being there. He didn't have on a shirt. It was that summer heat that makes everybody crazy. I'd like to think I saved your life once, but I may be in the process of letting you die.
Remember when we met in Philadelphia so I could save your life. Remember when we drove to some dinner to get a weird beer and a coffee each. Remember when Cori and Paige got out of the SUV and walked across the parking lot as we sat in the back, locked-in from the inside. Helpless, humiliated, at the mercy of. Remember how in that moment, relegated to mere characters of our own lives, we heard the voice-over of an omnipotent narrator sum it all up: As adults looked on.
I saw a fiction writer who was a real weirdo. He came in, read, then left. I asked him to sign my book and he didn't know what to do. I told him to sign it "I carry you in my heart always, like a cherry blossom in bloom" and he said, "can I just sign my name" and I was like "sure". His stories are about bad people failing. I saw him before. He is good, but not transcendent, like looking at dirt in a microscope and on the bike ride home I realized that fiction is like sports.
This is the problem with fiction. It pretends to be real, or is predicated on the idea that there is a real, always attempting to get you to believe. In short, it's bullshit. The problem is language. The reason poetry works, “"real”" poetry, is that it has no pretensions of being real, it doesn't care if you believe, it doesn't even believe in it itself, it is, or rather, it is just… language, which, only on its own is perfect, believable, which is what Spicer meant by the absolutely perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary. Don't get me wrong, the poem wants, it wants more than fiction, worse than any starving baby, and goes on, screaming, quietly like a wave in a vacuum, its want, always traveling, internally, monstrously, for lifetimes, infinities, unrecognized, alive.
Remember when we invented the underground. And a pact against above-ground pools. How our anthem was “"Air”." I was reading Harpers and the two phenomenons converged in my mind like a plane that plunges into a cloud and never comes out the other side. It was based on this passage: Still, the hummingbirds come, each day more and more. Within their small skulls rest maps of a nectar trail that reaches from Alaska to Central America. They know more than we are likely ever to learn of the ground, but we barely notice them as they violate all borders and make love in the murderously dry air of early summer. It's true, people don't know shit about the ground.
Oh, I remember the underground. I am still working it, in many ways, from above. The ground here is frozen and hundreds of pipes broke last saturday. In the middle of the night, I put a clamp light against my hose spigot. The dog ran from me then, her eyes just pieplates disappearing in the darkness.
My nieces asked me where the soul is the other day, and I haven't been the same since. Instead of a raise, my job offered to get me a new chair, in the form of one of those giant exercise balls. As if I don't realize they are actually saving money by buying me a plastic ball for a chair. They probably read some study saying how these things increase productivity and alertness, like how the entire work world has had coffee shoved down their gullets since the 70s. But I took it. Those things are supposed to really strengthen your core.
Instead of a raise I got an extra job. And all those diet cokes. But I was thinking the other day about how I have a comfortable chair, something they never gave me at the museum. It sounds like you work at clown college. Renting text books is supposed to be the next big thing.
I've been thinking about how to end this book. You're right, that last poem about the plastic ball and the soul can't be the end. Not that Mylar doesn't capture the ethos of what we're after. The perfect way to say hope and despair at the same time. Fuck acceptance. At least the kind that anyone could ever know about. I want to say knife, and you start to bleed. I want to say what Nicanor Parra says after every reading: I take it all back. Maybe we should accept it--— this book will never end.
Someone told me Mickey Rourke was playing a villain in an upcoming superhero movie. I don't remember which one because my eyes glazed over as I thought about Mickey on the street, Mickey getting his face punched in, Mickey with his Chihuahua and his paintings of Chihuahuas, how his career was over because he pissed off everybody that loved him.
Today is the day I am supposed to hear back about the job. I feel like I'm going to explode, like my insides are made of confetti, or maybe implode like one of those buildings that conveniently caves-in on itself as a crowd of people with nothing better to do than watch behind yellow tape, or what is it called when all of the air comes screaming out of a balloon and the balloon flies around the room, puttering, panicked, rapidly growing smaller, until there's no more air left and it crashes to the ground, a puddle of bright-colored plastic campaigning for the single saddest thing in the universe. Why do the best things never have names?
I told my mom I'm scared because I put all my eggs in one basket. She said all you can do is put all your eggs in one basket, that there is always only one basket. She's right, life is like Mickey Rourke--—have you seen his face lately—--all there is rising and falling. And yes, there is the quick panic between and a wonder which only ends with death, but we are protected. I'm telling you this shit isn't skin, it's mylar.
We've always eschewed the sentimental and the overwrought. The Rocco of language and the easy tricks. But now that my life has broken open and I see all of my past like an adolescence, I am entering the dawn of nostalgia. Littered with dreams like the laundry blown from the line, the empty parking lots in front of vacant and snow covered malls, the daysky an ashtray to fill with smoke. Somewhere in there I am a kid, and Anna is a kid, and somewhere there we are untouchable and unknowable to each other.
I used to play tennis with this woman, Brandy, and she always played in jeans and a v-neck t-shirt, and she would keep the extra balls in her t-shirt. Then when I would pick up the balls she served they would be all damp from her breast sweat. And every time I picked up one of those damp balls I would think of this line you had in an old old poem where you talk about how kissing someone for the first time is like the smell of fresh tennis balls right out of the can.
Remember when you signed your book “"never stop fucking me,”" it was funny, yes, but I knew what you meant, about getting inside someone, about infecting them, about burning their insides, about making them write better than they humanly can. That's the thing, I want to write poems where afterward you feel like I've just fucked you. Not in the way people say the IRS or phone company fucks them, but in that way when words won't come, when you feel utterly empty, an exquisite husk basking in what just…...a vessel that may just float or blow away at the lightest touch or breath or breeze.
Yesterday the new employee, who was a librarian, talked to me. I said I write books and she asked about what. I said, teenaged witches, texas after the gas runs out, pirates, and self-improvement. Then she said, "“I am so glad you did not say the human condition."”
“"Realism has no place in publishing.”" Next time someone tells you they're a realist, tell them publishing is the business of dreamism then slap them in the face with your Michael Jackson glove. Remember the maniacal girl in 2666 who said only storms and the Aztecs were real. I'm starting to understand what she meant. There are only two truths: Richard Prior and white sequenced slap-marks on the faces of realists.
I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep so I took a sleeping pill. We were kind of in a dune buggy. I was driving and we followed the tracks in the sand. At the end of the tracks were two aged people in a dune buggy. One was you, and the other was me. We had been there for a thousand years. It was not a nightmare. It was one of the realest experiences of my life.
