"how am i doing"

[Alan Sondheim]

"how am i doing"

how am i doing
you're doing fine, why do you ask
i don't think i'm doing fine, there are too many people against me
online or offline do you think
everywhere, there's no difference now, the world's increasingly porous,
just look around you, reality's a hack, online is open-real, reality is
open-source
you're upset about quantum mechanics
it's proprietary, depends on the economics, what you're looking at,
research programmes, that sort of thing
but you're doing fine
as long as i don't think about these things
and your work
piling bodies on one another, species, devouring landscapes
all this talk about your work
is meaningless when species are disappearing at such a furious rate
they're open source
they're closed source or open source, it depends on who they are, what
they want
you can't mean they're mouthing information
exactly that, meanwhile they say i write too much, that it's all the same
is it
not if you look closely, but every human has only one good idea and i've
had hundreds
can you name some
sure, neitherness, defuge, immersive-definable hierarchies, the ascii
unconscious, jectivity, the same old things
rubrics for other things, jettisoned language
or ideas i struggle to express, some unnamed, some in moving images,
video, motion picture, online directories fraught with peripheral
nomenclatures, one's peril, another's perl
so the pun
so the pun slips not from one register of language to another, but from
language to elsewhere, unspoken, the foundations shaken, as if there
weren't any, as if their lack were manifest on the surface
you're saying embroiled, roiling, boiling
or motile in a brownian fashion, quantum and irretrievable chaos
but back there on the surface they're talking about you
too much of it, yes, too much the same, not enough zing
they say you're a nice guy, too
preposterous poppycock of the fairways, assorted fructose, you get the
picture
the sweetness of it all
yes, the sweetness of it all

_