Braille

by Bob Perelman

Book by Perelman, Bob

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1975

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

PROTOPLASM

 Thoughts sandwich with pure lust and beauty's in action when the beasts attempt stasis. Thorns are allowed to exist. The green beans steaming are themselves cousin to the good news they've been trying to give away. And whose body doesn't tremble with good night kisses, pebbles relaxing, confronting the amoeboid calendar.
 The picture we've been showing each other, the photographs of large numbers of people, serve no purpose. As if we weren't private enough. Too sensitive tot he cut of our diaries to bask in the blank pages. Let me lead you gently behind your next thought.
 The great slipperiness as our millions of pieces untie before a pleasurable one, let's be ready for that. We have hair, we drink, we break back down into little chunks. But we've already lived forever.



THE SOUL

 The soul is pretty enough to ear ice cream, watch sexual intercourse on tv, root for the cleveland indians, and scare itself interpreting phosphoric traces on the retina as fingers of its long lost enemy. The soul inhabits carbon, not phosphorus? It pops into matter at conception? Then does the body, grown, respect non-human, non-organic matter? Does it seem full of souls? Maybe the soul is just applied to the body by a harsh snap of the father's fingers which causes the progressive libido to coil back on itself, suck its snake tail, and manufacture rainbows and other accouterments of extra-terrestrial survival? We'll find the answers soon enough.
 The soul respects the earth's effective ego. The ocean is the sounding box. The scale of discipline is what's staggering: perception varies from the core of the sun to a floppy violet to the buzz of old paths in the guide's vocabulary. 
 Let's define our terms. Soul: accumulation of gestures. Demon: compressed accumulation of suppressed gestures. Words: register of wholeness. Amen.



IT

 Repeat these words: LA CHIEN LES CHIEN CHINGA CHINGA LE CHIEN LES CHIEN OURUBOROS AUF
 Now live your life as a dog. Now live your life as a cardinal. Now live your one life as a diamondback. Now live your one life as a piece of coral.



YOUNGSTOWN

 When I was the world it lay heavily on my sight as dew on curving blade of grass curved human idea of forcing size to yield vigorous motion and sophisticated if you sit down at the piano sound without the rigor of laborious translation from ear to finger finger will be stogy nodule where the sun won't come in for a landing being the metaphorical infant it is all air time.
 When I lived in youngstown I had a coat that weighed three thousand pound with many darling glances to tell me how to ask not to know how to do it at one gulp of possibly burning intuition plus the needs drawing a bend on my head headline would read surrender at forked pass unless I took off that coat and shivered abandoning the six tasks I you she you we they like brushing away a fly flying away with your capital of warmth old man.
 When to the sound of mind I bring these words scattering them ahead of me in exact statement bingo! then attitudes jar and what else do you have except an attitude to shine said the anthropocentric sun sing said the line of song say these things and see where they put me get me revealed the crooked cries of bingo the large task.



FRESH TALISMAN

why do some words rise up to protect pure space
from the vagary of intercourse with nonentities 



INDIA

 How much does it cost the rest of the world to keep the letters of Indiana's name glued together and coloured green. First, there si the i-n-d-i-a, which should cohere fairly stably by now, bu adding the n makes for a whole set of erosions, indecencies, and unmistakable clues that the namers had imagined themselves in the wrong hemisphere. Then the a, which violates the inexact i-n-d-i-a-n by forming the inexact a-n-a, cousin to the even more tired r-a-m-a, as in f-o-o-d-o-r-a-m-a. The a-n-a implies a leveling of consciousness over a wide area. So, you have the search for i-n-d-i-a totally incomplete, and before anything of substance was initiated in the mind, it spread itself out insistently and destructively in an all is one howard johnson orange glow that is called health here, steel mills and and florida orange juice, but is understood elsewhere as violence, appetite disembodied, misspelled.



SONG

lullay my liking, my dear one, my sweeting, wake up,
you're more than equal to exact speech re- and tri-
vivified. And the direty corners can only be swept
so clean, even by sight's irritated photons.
 It's
no longer an age of transition, your prophecies
are driven deep into jargon, there is no standard,
so purifying the world you speak all day,
hours of air, more things fall.

Earth upon earth the lightning strings
clear onto another earth altogether. In the extreme
music, sleep and wake, the beast
says touch.



THE FORTUNE TELLER

 You can enjoy the body. You can enjoy the vision of particulars as well, creeping inward through your pepping outward, like a snake into home room. You may obtain prompt, accurate motion from your muscles, and, with practice, can desire your bones to point the way they do. With practice! It grows on trees, you can't waste it! Your spending it is it! Practical!
 There is information waiting when you open your mouth to lull the dog, or when you wake up inside the house again. And when you think, in the influence of gravity, sinking and rising at the same time, then there's a big kiss forming as you form your lips. So the time is not! The pattern of a lifetime! How meaning flies, roots, okays your next step! What wild shape! Congratulations.



STANDING

 Important nerves direct gravity. The voice helps. Continuity exists in the nervous system. How is nature?
 How come the eye makes room? Landward the nervous system. To the woods.
 Where the alchemy shows, shines. Light is purposeful: nope. The same smile doesn't mean it works as lightly, evenly, the spirit above the sound. In or out of the nerves. Articulating the earth, pulling it up, twisting, making stand. Fine.



THE WORKS

 Sky and earth, is that all? No, their deftness with material, to set being sliding and colliding. Against impact I thumb my cultured nose, I hear my noise, then I give myself over the the crash, breath knocked out, caught in the ability to talk. You can hear, can't you, how we're trapped at dawn on this carbon page? How the earth pulls the plug out and our brains thunder in our ears, a sense of important observations pulsing helplessly under our fingernails.
 If you know more than what I'm saying, then you can hear me coming toward you, spreading like series of pines up rocks. I roll on my side and beckon my mind, crooking my finger. The chihuahua in the backseat at the shopping centre is enraged again.
 Hooked up means sanded down means flipped over means dealt with by an aborigine means hello. It's all in where you look. On the line between sky and earth, using them both for reference. I get it. OK, folks, tuck some skin inside your skull and let's go to town. What a carbon privilege.



A 1

given the brain being an industrious
essay just beginning physically
un-inked and hopeful
and given the skeletal structure

rolling over and away from the heartbeat
galloping off ahead of the heartbeat
gambling and running back to wait for the heartbeat
Jim's I think drinking his heartbeat

always mentioning purple everybody's heartbeat
and given the cool brain riffing through
to the clear skywriting
also given this conservative

forming and reforming of the letters
'boys will you burn the leaves?'
this industrious thing
can't be trusted



WE SEE

 In the universities, in the supermarkets, in the language, everywhere society is spoken, we see people unable to dress themselves in human proportion, we see them fooled into cannibalism by sweet talk, we see them drawling on the beach, looking each other over, looking for fingerprints, yet at the same time they are clinically unable to identify their own assholes in a series of simple political mugshots, we see them irritated, searching...



FRANKENSTEIN

In frankenstein, blood did not know where to go,
random flushes and surges of energy to functionally
inappropriate areas. He was given some lovely lines
by the wandering impulse of nineteenth century
lyrical science: I was created by spasms
of very lively blue bodies. I see my soul crowning
the black well of an electrically charged heaven.
My body is a mess.



MUD

you have to have those
sweet elm roots belted
and the unicorn resting 
to act like the sea

bright kin I'm drunk
on foreign earth music
if only all the gnomes
grew to proportion
and stood at ease in the army of sense



INSTINCT

 Was instinct the face that launched a thousand ships towards the moon's shy visage? Or is instinct the ship the one thousand faces try to stay on? You try. Stay entertained.
 Ball the wall and face the continent. Ball the hand that signed a thousand paychecks. That's not my fence, why chase the squirrel? No skin off my teeth. No Ph.D. off my instinct.
 Can't you tell the thirteen year old to try? Please try your best. Get dressed and try your best.



P G

 The pattern barely surviving the life greets the air, greets itself growing on rock, and is forced to hang its head under eight tits. The bargaining attacks the background inefficiently. Love the lust kiss. That's not the story you sat on in your mother's lap.
 Magnificent single voices, mother, father, without refining gravity and all this doubt, you gather to no purpose, zero in, and do not manage to move in a direction.



THE NURSERY

 The best myth we have is the nameless pulse. When speaking I lose myself. That ship will never fit in this ocean. This & That, tidy up. I'm speaking of the extreme of effort. Now we leave it for a bluebell, plucked and growing from memory's fecund blur.
 Oh this is interesting. Down to the seventh of seven generations it guides the sun into the days of the week, ever apt to plunge into the sea. Trees grow in groves, and men take off their gloves to feel their thought, naked and transparent.
 Noon so soon. These divine swaddling clothes will have to be passed on.

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[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avuncular, conversational, and tuneful work. Perelman's debut is all you could want from a burgeoning poet, and I'm excited to delve deeper into his oeuvre, especially to see how his work embraces language poetry more deeply.