Thursday, April 1, 2021

Selected Works, Joe Hall


Da Fugue Zone #50: The Machine Zone #1-50

vomiting gold in a turning wheel where production soaks production

fire, fog echoes in spheres through metal stencils trilobites 
pour jacked dads of Cornell, blown warp whistles 

to uproot lives to star-maps they can read in an aleatory frame stream
Buffalo’s isles lean over

a nail salon in Lowell, I wake up, stumble, my baby meat
explodes—lo! styrofoam comets

in the eyes of an AI sun of a hostile workplace of mist lime hums
spreading sidewalk, all we have to do is work

unto sadness, unto a fossil of nerves flaring through cell walls
brittle web of mist in an engine heavy enough

to haul off what you know, vomiting gold during the Friday crush
sliding calipers, weeks 

rolling waking in union of I don’t know what 
someone shot off the valve of your articulation

put the joystick down, was it a kiss, rosy, or hand or toilet
erupted from the lake?

in the net of their life, knots pulled twice, oatmeal-clogged 
key-lime lights, staph-infected tomorrow

flaming trains flung into the roundhouse--you say who counts these hours
whose whole notes billow

into the city’s concrete ventricles, debt plunged into debt 
doesn’t find a seat for our damage, absence

inside and inside absence fists stressed muscles squeeze
you called your own in a trail

down plate-glass, diving to my second job
under the sun’s swelling yolk 

in this drunk cask of lights, a herniated fabric where new bills grow
don’t let these letters see

don’t stop vomiting gold



Da Fugue Zone Vol #3 w/line from Xie Xiangnan 


wheel of fog turning no fog or planet purple-red
riparian wedge regressing where
production soaks production in the middle of
a tense wheel turning mauve
jet does not soak production in the
middle of immunized money
dome stapled apples with
dimples rippled intaglio clamor amor or
phased dilation, wheels turn 
fog glimpse through oxygen or metonymic ice 
floe, this chain requires
the previous chain to say 
I am not a chain, heavy upon no fog or 
planet no



Da Fugue Zone #21: Vomiting Gold

flour mist floor transition woke the hell in me, vomiting gold and faith time
couldn’t touch you, vomiting gold, cask of stars and stalker baffling make-up, woke
each time wandering what am I doing, streaming mists, slack shifts, lurch
where did this gold come from, vomiting gold, it hurts 



Da Fugue Zone #62: The Great Beyond 

I’m glad the gas pump tv is fumbling with
my buttons today, no matter what it wants

I’m glad my damage is in a boat in 2014 
and you are sliding in a turquoise lens down a snowy hill 

I used to want to touch the engine
now I just want to sort the images

but I can’t take the gas pump w/me
can’t wait to see what it will say so I get on 

Buffalo Free Rapid Transit, take a dim seat
between a boy, a fox, and a sack of grain and the train

tumbles through Buffalo’s ice and sudden fields
of winter corn, I see you on your bike w/yr yellow

hat turn left into a narrow street as the train leans 
the other way and though I know the next brass landmark

that place that demanded this poem that began to be
is not real, that Buffalo Free Rapid Transit flickers

like a flashlight, almost spent, and the damage
is sinking, but is not sunk in a boat in 2014

in a body of water much like a mind
what has the gas pump asked you to do

in Da Fugue Zone #62



RESTING QUARTERS


could the sweet pill of the middle 

note branch & you like a fountain splashing into the well 

of yourself, I closed my eyes and tried to feel 

the signal of the hand about to touch 

my temple, this house

made of burdock, the cream of the root

this wound made of burdock

this wound, the miracle of endurance

skin pitted and drying against its seed

every night, the angel of thought

to follow a path shaped by footsteps alone

D in triplets, synth like woodwind 

that’s where we saw them: in a round

bed of woodchips working but not really

you said you could feel my hand

resting on your belly

with all the notes, but not the order 

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