West of the Heart

1. thaw the wounded

2. carry the portraits out into the sea and rest them upon the breaking wave

3. destroy the capital with picturesque caress

4. mention the inexplicably famous

5. dredge the lightest bunches (ASAP!)

6. burn the symbols as soon as bone starts to become apparent in them

7. decrease the drama to the point of gesture, phrase, a weathered and weathering yard. 

8. descend upon the living sound of propriety

9. gather the weight of not having said and place it upon the prettiest graves

10. organize and dispense an imperceptible the

11. perfect the ground

12. motion at the shore (as if familiar with the families there)

13. restore hunger analogies to the feast scene which has no before and no after

14. demand to see the sleep that has not been earned

15. motivate the habitually sick

16. sing the lack of anticipation upon which we are most certainly impaled

17. recall Mother

18. disconnect the vaguer images from one another and from the way in which we get on with it

19. determine the cause of the cause

20. facilitate the ways of children

21. earn what is needed for remaining beneath the sky

22. set the famous criminals free

23. force the unmonied nudes into view (and so, into wealth/evaporation)

24. urge the animals to retract themselves, their lack of standard grammar

25. rouse the allegedly unpregnant from their unfathomable slumber

26. make the beautiful go to work

27. distract the keepers of the calendar and, when they are distracted, detach and destroy their unforgivable hobbies

28. people the pin-prick this evening alone makes in the atrophied muscle of common sense

29. grope and ogle the money machine

30. make a list of things to in case of consenting adults

31. profit from the simple inability of a given body to own the breath it absently rides towards its own concept

32. get the fuck out (i.e., get to fuck)

33. develop humble obsessive donors

34. locate the words with which the deaf-mutes are never done thinking

35. mass-murder the animals with overly smooth minds

36. place a hand upon the brand-new gash in each picture--not to stop the bleeding but to know it is true

37. prepare the eyes for the oncoming absence of voices

38. nibble at the warm stone of what has been

39. mourn the continuing success of the Snack Area

40. indict the misleading absence of spontaneity following each and every serious injury

41. understand nothing but the trap in which these many fine bones are inextricably lodged

42. produce a striking likeness of any one unproductive moment

43. be mindful of the ring-card-girl-prose in oneself and in others, and be ready to make the difference a fateful myth

44. listen to the involuntary gatherers wishing for an impossible poverty

45. bless the bait-shop employees who remain unopposed to an on-going radical renovation of the idea of what is to be caught 

46. collide with the hidden zoo and act surprised by the amount of unnecessary sleep hidden therein

47. picture the dirty dull scissors at work in the seeming

48. refuse to pay the suggested amount

49. tremble with the hunger of cameras fixed upon a spot incapable of becoming predestined

50. oversleep

51. distribute faulty prevention devices

52. establish eligibility for the death penalty 

53. clarify a morning posture

54. sing of eyes freezing, thighs giving birth, what have you

55. overestimate the degree to which the new scene, the scene that is just now being written, is fixed

56. overestimate the degree to which the new scene, the scene that is just now being written, is broken

57. lament those who are already on the way

58. postpone, for as long as possible, moving in to the sentence that is never not under construction

59. insist on the sad waste at the heart of all honest work

60. bury the elderly in the laughter which heals each instance of prayer

61. require the intellectuals to attend indoor night-time drug-taking picnics

62. complain about the way the various escalating dangers seem to conspire

63. nudge the drowsy lumberjack

64. adhere to the faint golden grunt (even when it dips into where it comes from, where it can't go)

65. use the definitive article to make a broth

66. confine the untoward

67. polish the pre-birth emotion until it does not shine

68. mourn the health of the debonair

69. drudge the nowsy mumblejack

70. control the urge to farm

71. suck the body part of an other until there is a new feeling of closeness

72. offer help to the dying

73. embarrass that which abstracts itself from the secretly intentional clash of heads

74. endure the baby-sitting which knows no names

75. rehabilitate the truth tellers

76. devalue the circus tender

77. practice saying something

78. scrape the forgotten music from the great stadiums it accidentally built and failed to keep up

79.try to fluster the bulk of language with the idea of buried faces

80. discontinue the breadth of applicable horizon

81. lance and drain the churches

82. define the deceased

83. derive the trajectory of absolution

84. attack the display

85. let yourself "go"

86. pray for the institution of a consistently glancing blow

87. mimic the open area

88. elaborate the impasse from which each orgasm seems to shrink

89. look for what's left of the portraits on the shore

90. post signs indicating relevant battlefields

91. expose the most casual technology in the world to the logic of its various fictional aftermaths

92. make the faithful look at us

  Ed Macauley died today. This is a fact that I know to be true because I sent the following text message to my friends: “Ed Macauley died today.” His death is a fact and, being 83 years old, it should hardly be taken as a surprise. He was born in 1928 and he died today, November 8, 2011. These are facts. Both his birth and his death happened in St. Louis, Missouri, and really, most of his life happened in St. Louis. That’s a fact too. It's also a myth.

I met him once. My hand in his--something like the feel of an old envelope rubbing in the middle of my palm. Maybe a line or two. “Nice to meet you,” or “a pleasure, sir,” or “Hi Ed.” That was that. Four or five seconds, maybe. A handshake and a hello and now this, his death. Maybe there was a wheelchair too. I don’t know, I can’t seem to remember. I hope there wasn’t.

Places I could have gone (or stopped) on the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System: 

Indianapolis

Chicago

Louisville

St. Louis

Cincinnati

Peoria, IL

Memphis

Kansas City

Tulsa

Wichita

Salina, KS

Denver

Ogden, UT

Salt Lake City

Reno

Sacramento

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Redding