The movie is broken (after Lynn Behrendt’s first book titles – as suggested by Google)
Of course lions dance, my bright little star
You’re still single
You can pay me back in gum
You can call it love or thunder
Her pearls drink milk in the dark
Can Calphalon go in the oven?
Can call of duty zombies be beat?
Fake calla lilies and fake chickens
Sleep lyrically wraps spring
Her lupus, her Lucky Strikes, her lumineers
She is branded by luck
Luminarc, landscapes marketed by radiant mystery
Luminous fish effect, whiskey park, wheelworks
A tiara of molecular substance
Which is bigger? Better? An example of
Is Kevjumba a heterosexual bear wrestler?
Is Banksy Jewish, gay, white, black, pregnant or contagious?
Is beer vegan?
Is beautiful a curse or a noun?
The hard part of Burgundy is beach bum tanning on Stranger TV
Burnout lasers: a synonym for skin, a southcloud
The Beautiful Soup Theater Collective
The odd rubies in female interest, infectious diseases, frostwire
Otterbox and desert cities
What’s another word for Sunday?
Idioms, Iditarod, the ideal weight of her identity
I need some prank, I need cute hair, I am Number 4
I used to be fat and I had a dream that I was love
From Prada to Nada
I pulled a muscle loving you
Basement wilderness, the warpwoods, horoscope
The ethnic aesthetics of consumption
I really love my bank commercial, I really like you in Korean
Long words, light periods, lame jokes
Birth control running shoes quotes – this is why we’re fat
Her bones begin this sentence
Tattoos, abortions, ma pêche -- How expensive is Plan B?
Her vocabulary is made of metal and foam – her vocal range was like a farm
Heated driveways exhale in Tokyo
Which elements can expand their octet?
Can you freeze milk? Can you get mono twice?
You find yourself in a room, but you forgot the blueberries
You find a ticket on the dash and you collide
You find yourself in the middle of a frozen lake
She eats a way back burger
Spasms splash succulent surgery fusion suction
Maplestory
Greek letters sewn together wrong
Her eyelashes were sewn on
Books nurse scorned timber, beloved as the sky
Scorned Woman Hot Sauce
The gold he sought in translation
Throwing knives and throwing up blood:
there’s a wolf assassin in Togetherville
Parts of speech pitchfork sets of attraction
Perfect harmony performed by intruders
Personal Christmas ornaments, personality disordered
Personal oxygen bar and oracle
Inordinate ladies origami-ed together
The anatomy of angels must be comprised of plant cells
What is an “I” word to describe you?
Hourglasses and alcoholics and errata
Organisms that reproduce asexually have the ability
for their exoskeletons to benefit agriculture
Is this poem an event that decreases the behavior that precedes it?
Event mining, the mimic octopus
This sentence is camouflaged in adaptation
presocial and post-colonial, mockery and hybridity
Darkness symboled in lyric, her sadness splitscreen
Splice comma splice, sunlight in miniature
Splintered adjective, splintered light, splintered angel
The history of wood is bone
A soundtrack to sincerity, broken white lines
Cohesion and coherent light
Poems are temporal oscillations
His breath: a monochromatic light, a temper trap
The sun over a New York deciduous forest
The sounds in Shrubland: this sentence and its soundclouds
Lyrics soaked with screaming, snoring, throwing up
Insects, questions, birds, things
Some of us never die
Some odd rubies came running
Some quadrilaterals are rectangles
Drug antagonists, property anxiety, some weirdness termed “fundamental”
The physics of solace, theories entangled in their jumping
I am your radio slave, your repairer, your radiation pressure noise
I am your radiant history of the sea
Irradiance, their ashes as seen on TV
Summary, Sparknotes, text, gavotte
Walk to class at a constant speed
Do your scars wait for god? Or makeup for monsters?
Or you for my theory of the dead man?
If you were meant for me, then you won’t feel a thing
You wanted to be a memory
I cast shadows in your interrupted lyrics
Saturdays flirt in Italian
Shoes and skin sleep in a Tokyo hotel
Apricot scatter, obituary obscura
Scattered order adjusts terminology
Muscle, fracture, asymptote, angles, exercises, strategies
These lines strain at definition
Thrust fault, thoracic spine, mountain goats, love chords
Throwing and thinking inside a cathedral
The yellow pages tell her that this is the year of the rabbit
Evershade, explosions in the sky
When the phone is an experiment in international living
Is aspirin a verb? Astronomy?
Performance art as an intervention in probability
Her beetroot utopia, a sheltered logic for pigs
Silvercyst, oatmeal, gold in suspension, osmotic pressure
Underworld, undertone, underoath, undercovers
Under the pressure of darkness
Suspicion, dishwater, silk, spinning lights
His shoulder blades under spiritual construction
Alcohol and ghosts: Spirits-A-Go-Go
Animal spirits are a bestiary of the commons
A bivalent chromatin structure marks
Does she make pearls in her shells?
Her oyster ligaments draw and dredge
Look up in your dream dictionary shutters and sunlight
An intolerable blue gloss on his marvelous arms
Morning glory, the morning after pill, sickness and ratings
Endless engagement rings in their enchanted leaning
The entropy of dogs, their uncertainty principal, their fortunetelling gravity
Our dependency on code and the color blue
on the unreachable, unreadable calendar
Wait for the Royal Caribbean unicorn attack
Oranges, orchids, roses, origami, order, origin
Our sorting technologies appall
They’re swaggerific, capable of swallowing a knife
Swallow your gum, or swallow the sun or stones
a fishbone, a tooth, a pint of blood, a battery
until your ears pop, dagger vomit, ear heart
Cherry blossom the hollow
Get on the Peter Pan bus
Bring your frost emblems and your prehistoric terror
Microtonal Accidental Font (after my own poem “Microtones” – as suggest by Google)
A variable that is manipulated by the scientist in an experiment
Structural adaptations that equal character
A variation on the powers of 10, or for the word “sleep”
Let’s swap veins
The calculus in a Korean folk song or a Shaker melody
Kernel sentences informed by Rilke, Hayden, Paganini, Denise Levertov
Musical chairs, missionaries, mac n’ cheese, mimosas
Servitude to moonlight and the morality of rain
Monogamy interpolated, my monolingual fears
Formula closure, mono sets, quantile and convex functions
Monologue, monotype, the likelihood ratio for love
Anthropologists are participant observers, revelators
The autobiography is also an alphabet game
Martyrology, dust canters, horseradish, cloudy eye
Leap over your own meals
Horse chestnut extract prancing, funny or die
Ladybugs, the ground folds up with meaning, flaxfault
From pimp stick to pulpit, memory foam remembers
The shattered sun hoards artifacts, we celebrate islands
The ascent of money as a character in world history
Ascetic glitches, ascension packs a punch wrapped in tissue paper
Easter Egg Island golf course, zombie tourism
Are we really protected from accidental deletion?
Even the flowers these days are professional
Remember that time when that fat man was dropped?
Thatched, that free thing softly under Christmas
Fountain texting, a thesaurus cracks open in the wrong hands
Our Atlantic senses fail, that intolerable gloss
That skinny Scottish mist, the sea burns with forgetting
The codeine seas, the grasslike uncertainty in sea monkeys
Glide density, dislocation models crystal grain boundaries
The motion in metals, in brittle fracture
The sheer force of a reckless bureaucracy
Arcane prankster munchies, aromatherapy as a substitute or London
The belly becomes the crib, a basket of sun
Lyrics hang around your neck, your handwriting has no tears in it
All arms around you, Halloween Alaska
Inkheart, godfont, pleated with Pleaides, skindex
Poppies know the pleasure of being robbed, of flinching
An invaded suffering, obscurity, open water
Please touch my museum, our hands are oracles
In operant conditioning an organism learns
Skin splitting open, the structure of infection
A template of classes, her cirrus dress
The sun warms the earth by convection
Constellations by constructivism
Demotivational, decorations darken a room, demonoid
Breast cancer defines its own accessibility
Why isn’t there a love defibrillator? Insanity benefits technology
Define “irony.” Define “leadership.” Define “culture”
The defenestration of this poem in relation to others
The midline of the body, paper buttons, plateaus
Pies and Thighs, Crimecraft next to the Piercing Pagoda
Cartilage or orchid, zombie spacecraft or wasting syndrome
Does god choke on these situations?
Text citations for “Silence: the Musical”
Voodoo and the brain, loss is a voice recognition system
Tangled news of a distant ascension
Which voices are never used in cantatas?
Arousal theory, a family of words, eyelashes both positive and false
Dichotomy in falsetto, prophets in pretense and forensics
Feathering her fear of long words are:
clowns, heights, god, death, failure, snakes, intimacy, plastic bags, plane crashes
There are plenty of fish at the Hunger Games
Summoning small continents, backsplash burn-treatments, seabelly treasures
the speed of thought, the space taken up by an object or a window
When a spirit takes over your body
Overspiritualizing over spilled milk, a moonless heartbreak
her spiral curls, how to cross over spirits, the light over Norway
Spirit jailbreak, grace wasted on excess capacity, slanted
Lamentation an idiom for fitted sheets, fortune cookies, retraction
Turtled to death, the bejesus twist, smokewagon
Threadless, a foreign object circulates in the blood
Fish an animal, fox a dog, frog a reptile, fetus a person
Double spaced food poisoning, the structure of this space
Avalanche, indigo directions, how wind is a discography
A funeral of hearts, cypress cognates, crooked vultures
The pleasure of objectification is an invalid
The chanterelles have changed their address
When Nietzsche wept and New York was Irish (after my own poem “An Envelope Full of Music/A Contingent Event” – as suggested by Google)
When not to use a hand sanitizer, or go to China, or order fish
When notating pitch, when notated music was invented
Notational velocity, notated clothing
Cheap flights for Chinese New Year
The execute permission was denied the object
He expects her to chase him, that Gregor Mendel
Year of the Rabbit, reddish brown
Reddish urine, reddish brown hair, reddish egret
with textual evidence:
lamp, paper, theory
Technique Tuesday
Florence and the Machine flourished in copperplate
Or a few dollars more, or a woman like you, or a gringo like me
or a reasonable facsimile thereof, or a beautiful nightmare
Hero or tyrant, law or theory, look or touch, a grass or a tree, a skill or a talent
Evening dresses, everyday food, Eventbrite
Sevendust, small animals walk through their definitions, bodies found in a trunk in Arizona
Bodies found in a hollow tree reveal their motion in water
Cry for water, a silvered oiled glory
Traces of your friends fracture and the favored mind
When your computer sleeps and notifications appear
When will a crocodile eat the sun?
When a couple breaks up, when cows lie down, when a single syllable cannot be solved
A comparison of two numbers by division
When prose accommodates action
his composition would almost always end with a hero, smoking
An atmosphere of bones and notebooks, her Venus bones
A synonym perceives itself as warm and caring
It’s always sunny and deductible in Philadelphia
When a wedding is like a jungle filled with candy
Aerobic respiration over the sea, chaos is a way to acknowledge her partiture
An orca pulls a Sea World trainer to her death
Harm harmonizes with her hair
Trail patterns, manipulations
Her mouth without tears like a party favor
Paralyzed man implant, the shape of hands
She bathes in snakes and snapdragons
What is the prince’s name in Snow White?
Leopard Ice Cream predicts that some reality shows are entirely fake
Expressibles, extreme couponing
Use “homemade firearms” in a sentence
Benign positional vertigo, an album of competitive advantage
One of Satan’s autobiographies is called “Ice”
Collective bargaining for nouns
Prayer collects blood from the head and arms
Collect tropics, transient failure, the disease that slips inside pictures
Cherubs are born and then they are rented or bought
A thousand clowns and the way each one will die
What is that thing next to your blood vessel?
Things that end with the letter D
Engadgeted and enchanted, her heart enlarged by blonde matters
Enlivened by the mystery of rock powders
She is a borderless blonde instrument
Fat calculators, magic calculators
Salt glow hives, hidden object games, sallow and inappropriate
Pandora’s bracelets, cloud virgins, sea rays
The Swedish coastline sways in the summer breeze, septic
Drowned wolf swag, their auras wickedly melded together
Atonement rises like a mystery vacation
River salon, there were slots in her decisions
A traversal creates pairs of slipping fish
Chariots pale as character actors, the orientalism of living things
Types of turquoise and the misuse of spiritual gifts
Behaviors of the gifted and their properties of gold
A skilled use of hydrogen, the misery of bubbles and time
An experiment with magnets and eggs at a science fair
What to do at home with light?
Christ recycles minerals, Siamese fighting fish work on memory
Patterns of arrangement, grain the size of lyric
An emergent severity index
Dragonoid chance, de-Cocteau this caring bridge
Complete the table for this metabolic equation
Wooden hearted poems canceled in full episodes
Notational velocity, paper defines her blouse
The stars test drive our hearts, wind daylilies into the body
Beach holidays border on nutrition
She talks like her body temperature is below normal
Massage her like burnt oak, to build a fire of verbs
Absent from her own soliloquies, she pleases precisely
To be played with almonds, a bee playing cards
Bet played fame by size plus attitude
Threadless milk cake, an apartment in a meadow
Dispersion, availability, flour spreads, firewood forecasts accuracy
Flammability, five dreamings, five fingered death punch
Five women wore the same dress, willow wished
Spiked heels and eggrolls, seedpages
Cut an orange into five quarters
What is normal saline? A patient climbs the stairs: starfall stratosphere
Antecedent consequence, crows fly, a cold front passes, unprocessed items
Firearms as a collection of nouns
Process Note:
These poems began in 2011 with an investigation into John Cage’s adventures with chance. I was working at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and we had a small museum, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, with a regular exhibition called Reading Objects. The idea of the show is to explore and expand on what is traditionally said on those little cards next to paintings. So we were presented with an array of visual work, and could pick pieces to write about. I decided to write something to accompany a musical score by Cage that was to be part of exhibition. I wrote something, and I came to hate it. This poem was displayed next to Cage’s score. I felt I didn’t nearly go far enough with the poem to really engage with Cage. So I started again by researching Cage, and I also spent time with Jackson Mac Low’s Representative Works.
Around this time, I began to really notice and found myself entertained by the way search engines attempt to anticipate our needs. I began to slowly type lines of poetry (eventually working my way toward entire short poems) into the Google and Bing search boxes, and laugh my way through the list of wrongly anticipated results that appeared underneath my search. I began to make poems out of these (wrong) search results. At first, I thought I was adding chance into the poem, but I came to realize it was just the opposite: these search results came from the zeitgeist’s algorithmic desire, not my own, which ended up expanding the possibilities for the poem. The poetic “I” dissolves in this desire.