Plasma by Barrett Watten
A paradox is eaten by the space around it.
I’ll repeat what I said.
To make a city into a season is to wear sunglasses inside a volcano.
He never forgets his dreams.
The effect of the lack of effect.
The hand tells the eye what to see.
I repress other useless attachments. Chances of survival are one out of ten.
I see a tortoise drag a severed head to the radiator.
They lost their sense of proportion. Nothing is the right size.
He walks in the doors and sits down.
The road turns into a beautiful country drive. The voice isn’t saying something, but turning into things.
Irregular movements spread out the matter at hand.
My work then is done.
His earliest dreams were prerecorded. Pointing a finger at a child in the act of play.
Light grows from the corners of the state map.
The universe is shaped like a hat. I lose interest and fall off the bed.
Tips of the fingers direct the uncontrollable surface.
The dim-witted inhabitants fuse with the open areas. All rainbows end in the street.
Subtitles falling in show water rolling underneath.
The question would lead to disaster.
A person is set in motion by a group of words.
Running water and filthy glass lose the ability to reflect. Blindness is always surrounded by a variable.
They blew the whole thing up and were presented with a fragment. An obvious mistake.
The tennis courts are of different pastel colors.
Civil servants guard the unclaimed packages.
Horses coming out of the sea keep the eye jumping. Background lightning is for this reason always varied.
The sun sets through all weather.
Otherwise the damage already shows.
The telephone rests on the range of inattention. The telephone book is complete.
Grey alphabets light everything else in grey. Black designs make a simple logical twist.
Power of taxation is supported by a well-paid armed force.
He never arrives in his work, because he is already there.
The flag bends on its hinges. A woman walks through the window glass. A rock argues with the door.
The voice spreads out, fighting with circles. The object in descriptive writing is to disappear.
The roadbed tilts upward, devouring detail.
We eat the most agreeable mountain, the words themselves.
To suddenly turn on the crowd would be suicide. The map retains its sanity, almost past the use of anything.
My ideas will change in time. Now that you know what the words mean, you can leave.
I must force myself to breathe. We must be prepared to abolish this way of life.
There’s no traffic. The traffic has stopped.
Dreams are an accident of birth.
I was normal. The music suggested the leg of a chair.
The grey scale makes painting vertical. Evidently we are dead.
The burden of classes is the twentieth-century career. He can be incredibly cruel. Events are advancing at a terrifying rate.
He thought they were a family unit. There were seven men and four women, and thirteen children in the house. Which voice was he going to record?
That’s why we talk language. Back in Sofala I’m writing this down wallowing in a soft leather armchair. A dead dog lies in the gutter, his feet in the air.
For the artist the moment of seeing can also be one of revelation.
When you’re perfect, people can’t wait to pick you apart.
You and I are always going in opposite directions.
I remember the eerie devastation of an explosion that never happened. The embarrassed percipient is changed into a field.
It fades and has an edge. My public works extend over years and cost me much thought and anxiety. Inside my mother I make a fist, and then I figure it out.
Thereupon he sailed for home. The rock is the ideal in the world of objects. The mind must merge with the universe, or succumb to it.
Anything specific he says is by way of an example. Two hours later he comes back to his point.
A zigzag line is notably the graph of an enraged neurosis. Constant attention makes every square inch of the wall a horrible fact. When columns rise out of the ground, his emotions are engaged.
Chaos has been variously interpreted. It may mean “a yawning gap.” Thank you very much, the source of all life is hunger.
How to understand things you have names for? After the demon of fear was released in 1789…now it’s 1923. Now it’s 1975.I had over-anticipated the event. I don’t understand this idea of construction.
But there is another level of complexity to ready-mades. Which gets us home if you talk poetry. You can say what happens and have it be a part of that.
If you want to say yes, say yes.
The experience of the cemetery is inexorable. Looking at the landscape’s variable browns and greens.
The mountain is such that it makes its own weather. Meanwhile it is being spoonfed with a wheelbarrow. That makes it more like a vacuum. The rock itself is awful looking, an egg which petrified before someone forgot to throw it out.
Poets have something wrong with their eyes. Later we come to be comfortable with them.
Art instead of being an object made by one person is a process set in motion by a group of people. Anything one says comes back eventually as a mistake. There’s no use in keeping accounts or records. If it’s a good idea, it results in a permanent change.
Everywhere there are spontaneous literary discussions. Something structurally new is always being referred to. These topics may be my very own dreams, which everyone takes a friendly interest in. The library extends for miles, under the ground.
My demons are gone. I haven’t thought about it yet, but I intend to pull down the pyramid, once step at a time.
So I’m inside a Jackson Pollock painting which is a house of ordinary structure but increased affect. The floors are copper and blue, there is gold twill in the green rug hanging from the wall. A displacing effect, like oil over glass, pushes every object outward. So the edges of things stand out like drip lines of paint.
A telephone pole is an edited tree.
The natural gas towers extend down into the ground. His speech is clipped, a short pause before each phrase. The frog is about to jump into a bowl of cherries. New Mayor: “No conflicts!”
The waves beat against the shore.
The lighting is important – night outside, a high contrast interior. An egg within the unknown. Conflict will take place among three unrelated individuals. The curtains are drawn, wind like boiling water.
The mind is not concerned with persons.
Exclamation point, question mark, three dots.
The argument is elastic. It ends with a physical description of going up stairs. “I certainly wouldn’t try this carrying anything.” He pulls himself out of this world, a moment of relief and panic.
The whole man is a concept, waking to sound.
Into a falsely centered chain of command, she’s leaving permanently. Obviously the brain will make the best story it can out of the available details. I have only to pick up my bags at the station, and they sure are there.
Such is night in the mountains.
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