Joseph and Tammy

As the spirit moves me

so will I move…

Dreaming of Tammy, Tammy Sincavage

All the things we will do

My name is Joe, Joseph Sincavage.

Tammy’s a cousin, not through blood.

          We go on drives

          through the windy back country

           The sunlight is dappled she

           cooks me

I don’t read the paper, I keep my house neat, I walk late at night, back and forth on the street. Everyone knows me, I have to remember that.

Give me a list of chores and my afternoon is full. Downtown’s half dead.

But I love to go in the stores. Pass my eye over the goods. This is what

is available. I just want know

what is possible. What I can be I must. I’ve

always loved that.

No Stalgia For

See it like this

the morning where the evening

and its tendencies unravel

are relived.

If in this morning--shame

glots the chest--as if no one ever drank--evidence, evidence—

if in this morning there should also be weather

then it’s already over. You’re finished, you morning

if the wind blows

  orange

across the mad rational hulk of your buildings

the non-human context of your beach silence,

coming from nowhere to nowhere

—see, like this

and if not? Still missing Them

things about them times with

their families

-- ah god--

everything gets tossed, it’s the commerce of just

the lowest prices

No stalgia Three

“We don’t even have the land   

 live off?     we’re cut off

So go back home @ night ends and eat a slice of pizza pie

On the couch in the t.v. blue down low

Volume don’t wake parents what is to be done

With the bundle accrued through the day

no system can unify

a mess towards purpose

Layers and contradictions, because

We wouldn’t even want to

We want to be painted

board in a hall wood and dust, maybe

And time

feeling lost time passing with no

Transcendence through art o god juts so bad

Speak to wish clearly, to hew accurate a picture that

Feels it is so there

No stalgia pt. 2

Leave    it is imperative   but

where
and for what and
 also just plain how-- 

  impossible, the questions left behind

the name in a dream and his story

that windy back

porch the semi-shut-in sells dope off

with a just-so laconic pose

Suddenly stands     for everything

Ever  tried  to be said  to be raised

just as quickly

discarded once perspective

shifts even a little

car or a train

window I’m always looking out of

a back mountain

road getting high

No stalgia #1

 Driving down the high spine of the little world,

world that curves still the focus

made body in the proximity of

possible doings never come to pass

an ache that race

that race to where

alway

s lost so palpable lush vegetation

attitude that serves that severs

unity to a value reduction a

value to be extracted, only value

in the use, the passing the taking of

the motion like

not important the quiet town

ies

carpel tunnel stance and quiet rendering thereof leaves

 manifestly apparent

not going to happen not ever

never happen leaves a spacethe leaving

now

only bare/vision

the weight of town little and dirty

wintered and bare lots of

mega stores have cropped all other commerce

Can’t / doesn’t anyone see the ring of over

Walking through streets

in the night trying

to conjure or find

fading unanswered

asking of our question are we 

D I S C O N T I N U E

Discontinue

          

          catalogues record the days

Half discarded way full of blank

     unnamed arise and fall away

They wait are they called on

Space in private intrude not better

Walk this we as if full with arms

We drop socks pick to stoop

And grab ourselves in fits

Comedy sheds

Blunders all the evidence

So sad yes lies in thought

The flood of feel you coming

From the catalogues: a

Spontaneous chaos advocate the of

Improvisational legends made

These thoughts that arise in arbitrary grid

Are pulled away

The color is red, the image: a

Bellows. 

Unknown

Unknown

Condition Interruptus

Falls like snow on the silent evening home where when

Faced with the view of all possible actions we avert our eyes or

do not choose an expression to read in

all that misspent money or retrospect chose not

choice with our proximity constraint now broken

remains our interruption

pulled for scrap

value now highlighted now thrust

into away the center from stage

strange grammar

the days feeling the

height of falling the land appears just the best AbEx you ever saw

but it tells of none smaller

material

the material of your day s was how and

the refractions of light inside these walls of

falling            from

higher than the birds to land soft in

this breast on this day

 “I have to get out of this”

the result not conclusion

sending it back out in refractions

(never) changes

it self is under where the action

is not sleeping but not moving being

but not opens to

gather the strands

yanking them from the throat

down to the guts

‘it’ becomes relationship and ‘we’

becomes just becomes

some becalmed story

put to sleep

never more lovely than

more lonely

then more lovely

than

material

material generating generating material couture

empirical excise cannot fight

techno-gig

runs without thinking

come on un

zip no lip

synching professionalism and pomp

other p words fit

my platform haven’t you noticed

we’re absolutely in it there’s no

question the man sweetie wasn’t

trying to scar you drunk

he's just and doesn’t know

this child is over

there by the pile of hammers Daddy

shouldn’t yell so maybe

 that’s not true

You make words with

your big hammer:

Human services human. Etc.

Over and again story

of my life mine

the be/st  (a)

       lets do property hop

        a train lets you go

        vroom 

I n t e r r o g a t i o n

smoke scrambled a picture ascension hung over the line between new form and notes a not sufficiently developed distanced ironic mysticism this theory is a toy-child whose body isn’t even anymore people want pizzazz and pizza want to read with a drunk on a tear slips down the face of the statue of nobody doing the busy busy doing the popular activity hereby reproached simply by mention what the intention are you thinking you think you are writing

you look off into the sky while typing the words is there any beer in the fridge for a potbellied narcissist who sweats pages of proto-narration congealed into this gloop of a sauce but a casserole won’t wait just serve it

that’s your pitch whose talking stop butting in that’s final she’s walking fuck this fuck that revenge must be hot you have to get revenge fresh from the market that morning

now we can’t get back in the garden of forking paths the walls are made of fog the rocket ship made of logs somewhere somebody please she can’t reach her arms are that small and then we abandoned the she voice to find animals in the sky very worthwhile and logical they make a lot of a sense totally whose brain said that to a dog and a fly at the same time both replied you’ve got to be kidding but they rsvp’d regardless sometimes you have to play the game SHE was in the broom closet drunk on vitamin water and you were enchanting in your hoop skirt 

ID entity

 shut up faces of places we go we are tired of trying to board my presence we don’t mention you crying you envy that edge for to keep it from coming to bear on the matter the pressure disaster swelling above the crowd the swelling crowd bearing on their hands a hard rhetoric a cask draped in the black banner provided its note through the new tone mounted in fear pressing down harder trying to fit the lips of the process over the sex of the concept how irresponsive regardless heartless wish it had never started.

WEnare the face of places, tired we flip through the catalogue of instances try and find an situation that will fiT the mood Fit to feed computing machine bleep blop a punchcard pops out your mouth the langage of pressure the invisible presence a-a cream IN visible creams hard bearing there where they’re revolving in the center where all the threads are blended the crowd gathered Under the grey half dome Under the giant tRemors begin irRepresSible not thoughtS exactly an image you can Run with - why has the crowd gathered

                        They / upset / something (are, about)

       - Why has the helicopter / (arrived)

Private security

In one of these buildings perhaps in a suit e

The target trembling / (hiding) a function

ary ultimately a chain of puppets; )

that is what  one pulls back

                                      the curtain  reveal a tower high as justice

all types / motion / happening (of, are) helicopters garner attention with their roar the little droplets

glisten

pouring from their bellies, look see the muzzles poking out

the sides gleam like camera lenses they are ready to take pictures

                        The crowd is passing a small box

            around in pah there upstretched hands s a picture on the box, but we can’t make it out. Goodbye.

New Poem

Associate

Stoners and welders burn through the pot black space a light left slug trails? It gets under your pants. It burns. The form of the face hidden in the open sex impact we feel land we flee tour-selves.

We must have got lost, this place is not where we left. Everything is bigger or smaller than it was. Ratio between the now-size and the past-size:  adjustable relation. As we ration the memory of our lovers gaze breaks in the face of (this) gathering mass hot like melted iron (abrupt redaction).

Interrogation 4

The days soft from deluge rain

the deluge spent the beautiful day

in the cavern dream

echo of music

I no longer follow

The last cry of an animal the sound

n my ears looking over the bad poetry

such dumb, rough tongue as not fit for metaphor

the exaltation of decay

a day-dream of No

Consequences

and the outside world

wear cold splendor belongs

to anyone more spot on,

more talented than yourself

Intelligence, such as it is,

self-pitying and grand

 this is o.k.

this is people

grist for the mill.

The insinuation: being.

This mess is dirtying,

but to become more seems half-

a raggy chew
toy with

this navel

gazing

Consequence: 

Interogation

Interogation.3

I.

How many sets of dusty books do we have to dust

Off to get at

The whole picture—all at once—

Large, perfect, far, as well as detailed, segmented, close

Hot?

How much quiet is there to be measured

against the protestations of the shit-storm?

            Like, not to castrate them, dirty-apple cheeked

Angels, no—but can we discover exactly

How many hill-people die rock-unlifted by the

Human hand of the mainstream/media/society?

Why do I feel it is my duty to ‘discover’

                                    the ‘secrets’ of these ‘books’?

Here is the secret: this city situation

Abuts the extremes, so to see

The brokedown baglady pour water

On her stuffed-full-of-shit plastic bags,

--To wash them—

            Makes me feel very my my relative class

            As—well as what it is—

            Even my hair feels like class, as it swoops down my brow.

II.

Indirectly, we’ve come to one of the major components

One of the basal ingredients underlying the foundation,

‘like unpressed pulp to the dusty books”—

Indifference. Indifference 

lies in these lines.

The writer thinks and writes about ‘the poor’ and about class all day,

But despite reaching chilling conclusions, does not move to challenge—

Only really wants to keep on getting stoned at night, and then life’s alright—

So? That’s how indifferent indifference is: even when I care I don’t

Do anything. It doesn’t bode well.

What does though, these days?

III.

Inadvertently, we’ve come

To a basic factor in the personal calculus of ‘the writer’:

The connection/separation between ‘the world’

Created by their writing,

And the ‘larger’ outside/social world in which they live…

So? Well, ok. Just saying.

To write draws in and destroys the world.

Making ‘a world’ on paper. The paper world mirrors,

Mocks, cat-calls, questions the world ‘outside.

We are perilously close to a whirl-pool scenario

With this type of relationship. So many

Writers are drowned. They just don’t know.

Oh, they know. They know. They. Know.

Interrogation pt.2

This piece, a companion to Interrogation, was compiled using a method I quite like, whereby a previous work has chunks of text (no longer than a line) randomly moved around and mixed up, over and over. After the blending, harsh edits are made, and a pared-down, 'new' poem emerges. Previous Butchered Switch poems employing this method include H O W L and Mynifesto. Enjoy!

Interrogation II

Here is how the world ends,

everything  speaks:

The deform tree,

the angels,

that secret  home.

The touch burns our focus

wavers.

Taste that man-specter

whom defect works to speak to.

But where’s the home?

Maybe in ‘stone.’

A personal rune:

the stone wafts poetry.

Error my poetry.

Tree: the empty form.

Revolve upon us

Tree,

we keep sucking.

N T B T

At what point does jump that won’t end become flying?

Point of light / order playfully settles on the shoulder of the day

an action of rising: the day assures itself by sketching

on a page in the book of days: an artists graph-- 

Not To Be Trusted. Well, certain avenues of clearance are open.

Riding the bus of a morning with a dogged feeling,

of a sentiment not yet conveyed to myself the best of abilities.

Sitting forward quietly watching insurance ad copy swim

into focus on those banners they drape in the buses in now—

“A busted pipe in 4A can turn into a flooded ceiling in 3A.”

The unavoidable idea that in the city you begin

to see: ‘Mayhem,’

            advanced peopling--horizontal, vertical, motorized--

            makes it impossible to foresee all the shit that can drop on you

            through no fault of your own, save proximity.

Then the radio cuts in with

“due to the president’s visit traffic patterns will be spontaneously

adjusted and road’s blocked off throughout the day.”

And I just start.

Trafficking in the gentler mayhems.

Being in the bus, being a boy, submits

to the vast wash of

the heart at the heart of the crocus—the roots, the weather

the vital bus—

          ascending and descending

               uptown and downtown

                    all at one and the same time.

My sweatpants are whistling.

The bus is filling.

Today all the people are real

Interrogation 1

I have no tradition

I feel lonely

          I must build and rebuild

my personal everyday

          but the continuity is not here simply quite simply

this personal devolving 

            conscious: lingering

doubt: What do I want?

           As a hetero-white American man without defect, I don’t think 

I’m supposed to even ask. I have

          everything I have.

Right but maybe

          maybe you’ll say I shouldn’t feel guilty

Or maybe you’ll think ill of me for being self-pitying.

          What are you talking about? 

What is the underlying organization?

           That specter

That personal

           expansion that comes with music: poignancy

The central message that appears and fades is stronger unnamed.

The individual plays in a small black room inside a large white space

We reform and deform and the angels and

            the chariots and the empty form 

revolve invisibly about and impose themselves upon us

and we keep sucking this bottle keep trying to get laid

            and the band plays the music and the smell wafts

and there is a lonely reference of the past

            poet riding his horse backwards into the brambles

and the speed increases and everything runs better with grease.

Hello I’m speaking. 

            Not the poet but his work. This

accretion of script that doesn’t really cut it.

           Cut it up put it back together

go on saying this trying to get to some next level, not beyond, simply next,

 Here is how the world ends,

           everything we want but no notion of why or underlying system.

Maybe there is no better way

          beyond the ‘stone’ of a referent

a personal rune: the shaking,

          soft stone rising out of the loam

spitting secretions and

          desecrations with no mind but such force

the hot stone to the touch burns

           our focus wavers but the stone remains 

Works for Paper 2011: 1

I drank some cokes.
         My in ran out.

A dog barked its shin.
         My in ran out.

Mather left Father.
         My in ran out.

The shed got a text.
         My in ran out.

The Mirror drew a picture.
         My in ran out.

A) Yearning for form?
         My in ran out.

B) The first instance?
         My in ran out.

C) The transubstantiated form of the arch?
        My in ran out.

The jingling tip of the fools-cap bobbles.
        My in ran out.

Standing before the king the fool.
        My in ran out.

The fools realizes his clothes smell heinous.
        My in ran out.

For how long have they smeln?
        My in ran out.

At last, my ink ran out of ribbon.
        My in ran out.


A) inchoate B) anomalous C) logo

The Vivisected Untitled Animal Poem ?

We here at the Butchered Switch offices are proud to unveil the first in our newest regular feature--the Vivisection Operation. Switcher Andy Dieck of Brooklyn sent in this piece, which is a vivisected version of the recently dropped Untitled Animal Poem ? .  We find his lines vigorous and overall his choices have revealed new and suprising depths to the text. 

If you find yourself spurred to vivisect a poem please feel free to send it in to the offices by way of our email address found in the profile above. We eagerly await any submissions. 

               -Thank You, 

Enjoy. (Note: this post was guest edited by former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleisher.)

In the dawn in my boat, I go to cover
the sound of the dead
 women ripping each other off.

That song we sang until
we forgot it forgot us kiss.

his henchmen set up
camp in my yard

The pen I picked up
was different from the one
I put down.

Who keeps saying that?
the crow and the people

people lose all interest
you’re not a character, you are no depth,
Deux Machine all up on that string
drop the chorus in on tethers
the story goes like this, he doesn't get the girl.

 Years later the Bruce Willis's roll up,
to get filled in on the backstory.
pull the sheet off its cage. It looks like a vulture,
hunched over a game of solitare. Smoking,
the parrot soliloquizes the explanations.
this function is its cage.

Untitled Animal Poem?

"The mind is exactly this tree that bush
without thought or feeling both disappear"

      -Ikkyu


The pen I picked up
was different from the one
I put down

the crow and his henchmen set up
camp in my yard

get out of your way  cries the parrot

bah cries the goat

people lose all interest

and in the dawn I go in my boat

I don't know how to use

that song we sang until
we forgot
to cover
the sound of the dead
 women ripping each other off

they're quite comfortable there

I saw your wife go
in the dawn in my boat

the song  forgot us kiss
off kiss off cries the parrot

quick read the headlines lining its cage,

to get filled in on the backstory
pull the sheet off its cage

the parrot soliloquizes the explanations
this function is its cage.

your not a character, you are no depth,
Deux Machine all up on that string
drop the chorus in on tethers
the story goes like this, he doesn't get the girl.
 Years later the Bruce Willis's roll up,

a parrot and a goat,
the crow and the people

The dawn in my boat, I go.

Who keeps saying that? Is it that parrot?

Catch it mid-day and it looks like a vulture,
hunched over a game of solitare. Smoking.
Turning the screw.

Superbowl Success

I was in a bodega buying a can of calimari with dimes and while waiting in line my attention was caught by a figure speaking on the little tv over the counter. It was a former football quarterback talking about winning a super bowl, and the implications it had on his life. He was, how can I say, very earnest. The portion of this poem that is dialogue is taken fairly verbatim from his musings.

I was struck by a few things, one is the simple observation of just how important the superbowl is to people. Secondly, I was amused by how seriously this man was talking, it was as if he were giving a moving affirmation of the institution of marriage, except he was talking about what it feels like to kick ass at the ultimate sports experience in this country.

I also thought how much his tone and conversation, very self-satisfied and moral, mimics the attitude of direct-marking and business language, which boils down to the idea of to the winner go the spoils. Here was an exceptional individual basking in and contemplating the meaning and implications of their fantastic achievements.

So, take it for what it's worth and enjoy the game.

Superbowl Success

The blue glows on the bottles and patrons in their rows

On mute the tv mimes the sports dance

As the thrum of this sports bar setting dims to silence

You in your stool elbow deep in the peanut bowl

are brought ever closer to an unwanted confrontation

the weirdo across the room has made eyes at and is coming towards you.

But do not fear nor look away from this strange man

Who speaks too loud red face set around too white teeth

You are so alarmed by this intrusion into your personal space

You don’t hear what it is he is saying at first,

but pay attention and be warned:

his voice will disappear you

into the pampas of his shoulder.

For he is an adman and a caffeine junkie

It is his turn, to explain, his subject is success and fame:

A black sound stage a large man with a withered cheek sits wearing a cream colored suit, holding his hand in his lap nodding in the viewers direction, where the interviewer sits, asking questions telepathically—or the large man is just rambling on in that free-associative, filling time, bridging way like tv personalities do. The well-groomed former tight end at the start of his announcer’s career. The quarterback who broke major passing records at the super bowl, ruminating on the import of the ring:

‘I don’t act any different now then I did before it happened, I still

get up in the morning and go to work, but I don’t know, it seems like

people talk to you differently. They use your name. Talk about you differently.

It really changes your perspective, because you are brought into new levels,

So you can view time open, an empty stretch fading out of

The picture you have ranges but

When you’re a kid you think fixedly

‘I want to win the superbowl.

The time on the field so much outweighed

By time off, a guy has to build himself

An exit strategy, set something aside

For the years of his dotage, and

What I’m saying about this ring is

That if factors in that equation

I don’t even know all the ways how.

Your only chance to have it not

Kick your ass

Is to ride it out to completion. 

Subway Writing

to turn and cook the meat we got married
after a week new start new life

i woke up and i was 35 only the poor are glad
to be alive youth culture
hip vulture Lars the strongman downing whiskey
he burps and laughs you'd never guess
that he was sixty the hobo
is not homeless
he plays rhumba on the subway all day for change
a culture warrior in a spurned war when will fortune turn


the page made mistakes  it was not over
when it was full i was not
serious when i called you
fool forgive me
let us drive through the clouds
with the radio turning changing jumping strangely
enough is enough is strangely enough


the cat feels pensive paused over its water bowl
sound in the hall a shadow in the mirror
I did not see who it was but no impression has been clearer
it was a failure kicking around playing at being a demon
you know its that season that flavor that taste of
sawdust kicked up on a bar floor swept up out of a corner
the cat died where I lay and cried but
the demon came back for more to understand


go back and cross out every fifth word
if that does not work close your eyes spin three times
tape paper to your forehead and look in the mirror
the subtle transfer occurred with out being seen
see an order had been activated
called dynamics and harmony of aesthetics and action
a stage and a play and it revealed the magic
as  god were looking over your shoulder looking with you and
approving,


as if a circus had arisen on the street as if wind
blows through a sheet and we release
our kundalini by breathing right
and minding our manners and making sensible purchases
and raising kids and watching what we eat
the taste is both sour and sweet
the treat is to be free and run no more after any one thing
and even to die creates no fear in no man


we've gone as far as we can which is eighth avenue
for certain new yorkers the fulcrum of the universe
and here we parted and sighed and our sighs rose
and we rose on our toes and our lips shook hands openly soonishly
your hair rose when the train passed it hung there twirling.

'His palpable is tiredness'

Those work is based on an encounter i had that revealed my position in the power hierarchy: it was a simple encounter, me trying to squeeze past a waiter in a hallway.

His palpable is tiredness

A wall with no middle,

Lock with no hole

Eyes in another universe

We can only see past

Each other even though we nod

Hello, this hallway is narrowing

So we have to slow dance past

One another even as he heads

With his bucket to the latrine

I am leaving this karmic omlette

Resides in reptile eyes

That though we are innocent

We are none of us clean

At least not me, I feel so

Dirty, what did I did

eat garbage 

dwink gasowine

Subject Index pt.1

Subject Index; 

this is the title of a new sequence of process poems taking the subject index of a marketing textbook's subject index as the inspiration.

S

Safety

Contest

fluctuations

Forecasts potential territories

Sales branches

Sales era

Sales force

Compensating culturally diverse computer

Managing

motivating

Performance evaluation

Recruitment and selection

Size of training offices

Salespersons sales promotion(s)

Methods opportunities and limitations in

Soft drink trade sampling

Satellite television service scanning environmental

Decision making scrambled scripts

Search seasonal products data

Distortion and

Consumer buying behavior

Selective self-interest

Self-regulatory program seller

Selling personal selling agents

Sentence-completion tests

Service(s) characteristic of classification of exchange of marketing of nature and characteristics of organizational buyers sexual harassment

Shareware

Shopping centers

Shopping products

Short-range single-line

Single-source variable site locations

Situational factors and situation analysis

Social activism social class behavior

And purchasing as philosophy

Defense issues in ethics impact proactive strategy

Soft drinks special-event

Willingness of images store specific storyboard

For straight alliances competitive

corporate strategy stratified subculture

Sugging

Under the guise of matching

In sales courts

in sweepstakes