Joshua Clover

Three poems

Triple Sonnet

        I come across the paving stones

The brief capital of disturbances.
And within that city lies the city
Utopia with its little sojourns
And orange sodas, Utopia with
Its watermelons and televisions.
Inside, city that holds the happiest
Disturbances of my youth behind gold
Façades. Staggering up from the river
Full of forget in the flare of evening
One sees a city where the negative
Held its court. And inside that, city which
Is little more than a theory of red
In everyday life: red suburbs, rouge
Of nostalgia, series of scrawled changes.


        Under the paving stones, the beach

And so on, as one always arriving
Out of the faraway-far. The city
Where we rose slick into the rude rafters
Of the second story dazed after sex.
Inside that hangs the famed Somnopolis,
Purenight city leaking Seconal light.
Within is a blue unfinished city
Begun in dreamy cloudless gesture made
Dusty by the millions. City which is
A love letter. Interior to that,
City emerging naked from the white
Indifferences of winter. City
Once hidden in the library and now
Drowsing in the sleep of the collective.


        Beneath the abstract lives the ephemeral

You cannot remember whether, at this
Corner, years before, you turned left or right.
Inside this immanent sigh, a city
Under the sign of the Ferris Wheel,
The bullet-pocked clocktower. A city
Upflung from notes sprawled in the cool
Margins of the ghostly, the great cities.
City about nothing at all: it will not
Speak of me or others, of love or youth
Or anything else. And the city called
The Antipast toward which you travel
And travel, where rain is falling across
A grammar of skyline, rain is filling
The April air with silver quotation marks.


Early Style

Ruins is utopia

From the perspective of

Before melancholy

And sex at the level of

Language promenading

Around the littoral of first

Failures of the codex

Colored morning

Pointing out over this

Being being being-left-empty


Whiteread Walk

Monumental the lacunae between illbiquitous promenaders down to the Square past the Open 24 Hours as social forms of grieving we are prohibited this is the remix the new glitch has been recalled melancholy of luscious Pictober the fall of the phenomenon into the iris back with another one of those Return of the Flâneur as hardcore Autumnophage echolocation always places you in a different country the cure is beats per minute bad year in Brooklyn Bombs Over Baghdad the negative needs no introduction and/ or here we go!