John Lowther

John Lowther’s work appears in the anthologies, The Lattice Inside (UNO Press, 2012) and Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama, 2003). Held to the Letter, co-authored with Dana Lisa Young is forthcoming from Lavender Ink.

***

Identity failed me.

While some accounts are really lyrical and interesting and evocative, most of them, I think, are fantastically banal and boring.

I want to be brutally honest about this struggle.

It’s not a categorical thing, like you would expect.

It would have struck me as shallow and hypocritical.

Life just wasn’t the right environment for me.

Characters constantly restated their motivations.

To insist on making things perfectly clear is stupefying and reactionary.

The wealth of available information has not made most of us more, but less enlightened.

I try to make myself clear.

I’m not a real person yet.

                        *

 It serves as a placeholder for something better.

It is a trigger experience waiting to happen.

It is a schema for action and comportment.

It’s not in the mainstream pop world either.

It is a demonstration, not a deduction; a depiction, not a proof.

It doesn’t interest me personally, but I think it’s a good thing.

It was a seductive piece of business.

It fucks with the fabric of time.

It keeps me interested and charged up.

It must do.

It is an ancient enterprise, and an on-going one.

But I think the most interesting thing about it is its unpredictability.

                        *

 Yes, desire is an illusion premised on misrecognition; an empty, baseless surplus over being.

No Almighty gets out alive.

Yes, yes, language and wording.

Yes, weʼve been buggered by Arabs.

Yes, I would feel even more super, insanely lucky and blessed if I had a trust fund.

Yes, this is direct.

Yes, yes you can.

Yes, I think I may finally have that stalker I've always dreamed about, the one who proves you've finally made it.

Yes, but iron is always there, can't miss it, easy to detect.

Yes you too can have butt paste.

No one's stopping you.

Yes absolutely.

                        *

 The intellect isn’t connected to the pelvis.

My library is an archive of longings.

Suddenly I understood all the fish jokes.

There is the appeal to unstated premises.

Understanding is not free for the having.

Mishaps with preserved brains are not uncommon.

My monkey made you this potato salad.

If nobody sees it, it didn’t happen.

But this too, stated abstractly, is worthless.

You need somebody there as a lookout.

Creativity depends on the suspension of defeat.

You get to taste your own poison.

There are childishness, stupidity, lack of wisdom, fantasies.

The list, though not arbitrary, is not exhaustive.

Insurrection in thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

                        *

 It’s so stupid.

It’s not knowable.

It’s its own thing.

Its unpredictable, unforeseeable tomorrows await it.

It seemed embarrassed, worried about its own authority, concerned about lapses in its logic.

It never rests, day and night.

It’s always there, in one way or another.

It’s a pop culture paradox.

It’s a piece of shit.

It's the opposite of entropy.

It's the epitome of perfection.

It's nothing more than a rubber band, the size of the top of the barrel.

It's like how spaghetti westerns are the purest type of westerns by also being some of the least original, the least authentic.

                        *

 Note on the Text

These 555 sonnets are made with found lines and precise measures, a database and text analytic software. I crunched Shakespeare’s sonnets for word, syllable and character averages and these are my new measures. The lines’ oddities are their own, the arrangement is mine. After the text analytics and data entry, many ways of assembling are found. I hold to the turn (when I think of it) and that sonnets are poems of a certain size, but little more. Something in excess of the lines pass through, it’s that I’m chasing.