"A Series of Ad Hoc Permutations, or RUBY Love-Songs" by Joshua Ware

Scantily Clad Press, 2009

#!/usr/bin/ruby –w

################################################

###############################

# The following program assisted (i.e. did NOT generate) in the creation of

these permutations.

# Furthermore, the permutations herein attempt to, as Deleuze and Guattari

write, “translate,

# transverse, reverse, and return to” the relationship between human creativity

and

# computational processes in order to complicate their “coexistence and

competition in a

# perpetual field of interaction”; they are non-dialectical creations that attempt

to establish an

# alternate plane of immanence, wherein the reductive-contemporary-

dialectical dialogue with

# regard to computational processes and human creativity can shift to and

flourish within the

# framework of the multiplicity and an operative violence: the chaosmos.

#

################################################

##############################

w = Array.new

x = Array.new

for y in 0..41

File.open("Ware#{y+1}.txt", "r") do |z|

w[y] = z.readlines()

x[y] = y

end

end

while true

puts()

for y in 0..13

z = x[rand(x.size)]

puts(w[z][y])

end

sleep(3)

end

Ad Hoc Permutation 1Ad Hoc Permutation 1Ad Hoc Permutation 1Ad Hoc Permutation 1

Methane skulks through a space

framing the picturesque:

a cagey absence.

She was told that legends resonate,

hum high-pitched tones.

Afterward, her weight

teetered before footfalls

and a white-tide baptized

release release

in a drowning pool.

As for the hub of humankind,

limbs heft cigarette ash

and forgotten referents heavenward:

a better way to seek closure.


Molten teardrops varnish the coffee table, the phonograph must be replaced

with lasers.

Moored in rip tide, white tide now crimson purl.

Comfortable fantasies splash and foam: coastline breakers.

Shadows cripple her twilight and give time a slight reprieve; with handshakes

and cobwebbed yarns, they hum folklore and fables.

Her body is skeptical of my motivations.


She paints the city with a widening aperture,

breathes and releases me.

Burning-skin chills

frozen breakers

sliced from the whelp’s empty cry.

Slide away through the foreground,

she says, the conditions are finally desirable.

We deliver life at a slumbered-pace,

calling, calling,

while conifers suffocate

somewhere between

synthesizer breath and what came before.

Direction, direction; again, again;

she magnets me to my portrait.


08) “There is no such thing as a…there is no such thing as a…”

In an effort to replicate legends that singe neon signs, she cries away young

ones never remembered.

I am driftwood: an ephemeral music. Or I and I and I: an inside made of

cigarette ash.

She looks beyond sight, she resonates.


Tell my family I am

spliced from the past

with empty fingertips.

Little toes, little toes

creep to corners

with a tin foil pipe.

During the drought

her rain forgets

breakdowns

and bounds through

a new American landscape.

Consider space

as a song colliding

through binary bodies.


As if she could slice computer screens from treetops, a digital gossamer and a

paint-by-number country, the sound of her dreams awakes distended.

She regards herself as an echo washed with lipstick-stained cigarette butts and

hurricane antecedents cast across memory and found upon the strand.

The sound of things, sometimes, is all that matters.

The shape of things, sometimes, is all that matters.


With a swelling mistaken for fullness,

she opens herself to the parlor.

Rivulets of water

swallow adagios.

Rather than music, dreams.

What is silence? Who knows silence?

A forgetfulness.

She knows what silence is: brittle fingers

winter wallow in drunken footfalls,

drinking them from the ocean.

An answer entwines in thought,

a song bleeds through her body.

A space once meant for canopied beds

will swallow our harmonies whole.

Ad Hoc Permutations 8Ad Hoc Permutations 8Ad Hoc Permutations 8Ad Hoc Permutations 8

She channels thoughts through slumber: arterial, distributive, contained. Pacing,

pacing a sleeping heart moored in rip tide,

the white-tide now a crimson purl,

puddles erupt in watery flames.

And so she sings:

I had bodies, lots of bodies, moving, moving, continually adrift. I ate the ghost

lost in contours.


Methane skulks

between the space

of thought and slumber,

paces a rhythm

of her sleeping heart:

a constant stream

of Virginia

echoing white-curdle tide.

How long have I slept? Too late, too late.

Magnetism hollows

baby-boomers,

encloses them

in candy-coated

measurements.


China carries water-baskets to my mother in a candy-coated tenement.

"an experiment, a repetition"

China carries water-baskets to my mother in a candy-coated tenement.

The land of Sheba melds with Virginia, chasing one another into a neo-Gothic

Revival.

Gables stare hollow-eyed into theory.

Chase the echo, the echo repeats:

Until I die there will be sounds.


02) Her diaphragm, overlapped, catches light inside leaves

lifts eighty tons

of ornate lattice work

and draws intricate shadows

with a tin foil pipe.

Breakdown becomes, entrenches classic form.

Computer screens

become amplifiers

and collapse binary waterfalls,

even for the vanished

and words left behind:

letters gone adrift

where cathodes collided

and the city does not sing.


Her stretch marks consider space: landscape within windows.

And from the parlor, adagios carry water-baskets to her echo, echo.

I and I and I: time signatures.


If my whelp’s temperament had been

a breath and released me

into mother’s silken lining,

she would have awoken

to flesh from wood.

Instead, she awakes, reduces, then expands:

a smiling reminder trapped in time that everything becomes

compact.

Fathoms below a sea change,

a sea quake. Ivory purl

dances for the moon, shines pale, liquid and fluid.

The anechoic chamber remains without

while the echo goes chasing, goes chasing.

14) And the wind turns into an emblem.


The shape of things lingers in the parlor. An echo, faint, reflects back in

railheads built from white-tide and roses. Crescent-shaped paint-drops circle

her penciled-hand, residue and mapped memories. Shadows grasp, gasp,

engineer themselves into obsolescence: blue collars and rusted beds. Common

freight breaks

open space with nothing to say.


If every object

hums for capital

down brambled sidewalks

you are you:

Quasimodoed toiling, toiling.

An ephemeral music crosses her.

A sound accomplishes nothing, she says.

Somewhere between

the honky-tonk and her body

cigarette ash sings.

As if it is a continuation

of luster: a dream-hue:

that hum above,

that hum above.


As if she could slice syrup with her tongue, down the depths a drowning pool.

Little teeth gnaw at bedposts, the mechanics of treetops.

Without them, life would not last out an instant, says the city.


The ghost a memory,

your face your body

scented with fresh cut air

is all that matters.

Or to unfound a nation,

an obelisk packaged

with common freight,

helpless between parlor games

and hallucinations.

Breakdown becomes, entrenches classic form.



that hum above,

that hum above.


Some experiments alter thought, or it was the thought that thought her possible:

these little matters leveling importance into floorboards and daydreams.

Eyelids took slow kisses. Whistles. Wishes. A logic untouched and alone,

buoyed.

10) She dilates. She contracts. She whistles. She echoes.

12) She writes anagrams and listens for a message in white noise.

Around her neck, light stains her skin, echoes.


Walden was a symbol:

foreign fissures,

a voice of lightening,

cigarette ash,

a cagey absence.

What was neutral splashed and foamed: coastline breakers.

Or her Cambridge breath

undoes red entwined with blue

and blue entwined with red.



that hum above,

that hum above.

I am a crematorium.


She unwinds strands of twine doubled around Parisian thoroughfares.

Methane syrups her tongue into an ornate lattice-work that sings intricate

shadows of jagged hips, phantom limbs, and dyslexic names.

An industry for the camera is not an industry of song, but a half-way point

where her lips burnish, wrinkle, and sweeten.

She knows the shape of things.

She knows what silence is:

Joshua Ware Joshua Ware Joshua Ware Joshua Ware lives in Lincoln, NE. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in

many journals, most recently in Caketrain, Dislocate, Laurel Review, Hayden's

Ferry Review, New American Writing, Packingtown Review, and Phoebe. He is

the co-author of I, NE: Iterations of the Junco (Small Fires Press, 2009) and the

author of the forthcoming chapbook Excavations (Further Adventures Press,

2009).

Cover by Jad Fair

Scantily Clad Press, 2009

"A Series of Ad Hoc Permutations, or RUBY Love-Songs" by Joshua Ware

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