by: David Perry (Header art by Monika Lin)
David Perry is our charming guide to and through our current shared and fractured moment. Disjunctive and elusive, Perry compels us to keep up with his moving meditation, his wily jump cuts. “We go under/ a quick while…” But what counts is what happens when we come back up, to breathe and look once more…
THE DIMINISHING TABLE
Just because this
phrase is broken
your sense of it
receding like David
Hume in history
doesn’t mean you
can’t lick my ear
OR: a treatise on
the new empiricism
the really, really
new one, the one
with the neuro-
and the geno-
and the nano-
and the crypto-
The one with us
in bits (“not so
new, really, not
really new at all”
goes a prime
insight of the same
with so much memory
at such speeds
That reason is
and ought to be
only the slave
of the passions
scanned, fed,
medicated p.r.n.
to optimize
Optimization
itself, us, spread
overhead, a map,
a Polaroid, the Falls)
on the ratty-ass
garage-sale wood-
print cushion-top
card table’s 2002
cognitive science
textbook beneath
stacked self-imp-
rovement guides
and though you
don’t really dim-
inish, you do
Search Me
I don’t know spoken
with right emphasis
right tone? Notes
no codes just us
in conspiracy
to welcome no state
in which we may
or may not know need
nor care of deep
desire but in little
dashes assume days
gone fiction/non–
fiction/fiction/non–
for we are surely
persons of interest
yet not at all in
our places in what
intelligence worlds
where we grow
uglier stupider
as the even yet
uglier stupider ease
their ways among
us we look back
aghast at the city
struck down
enveloped
in a cloud where
forms shall trail
and freeze us now
in our current gaze
fixed toward our place
stream stop stream
HOW TO DIG
if we ask first
face falls off
ten chilies
tipping fingers
no need
to emerge
in orange
can’t take
thinking alone
can’t leave
trace science
assigns noodles
primacy of place
cable in mud
past-time says
send help
but it’s us
now to future
breaking news
war we say
this version
of attention
removes concern
sorta warbles
we go under
a quick while
get spot-welded
meet for lunch
David Perry lives in Shanghai, where he teaches in the Writing Program at NYU Shanghai. He is the author of one book of poetry, Range Finder, two chapbooks, Knowledge Follows and New Years, with poems, reviews, and the odd prose appearing here and there now and then. More at davidfperry.com, Pyramid News Scheme, and 明明不白白.
Header art is entitled, “GoKart Racers #1,” 2009, from the “Child Palace” series. Acrylic, ink and resin on wood panel, 40x40x5cm. Monika Lin lives and works in Shanghai. More information: monikalin.com.
