Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013), Metropole (University of California Press, 2011), Green and Gray (University of California Press, 2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (University of California Press, 2002). He teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison and lives in Berkeley, California.
I bypassed all the compromise,
The first ten problems of speech
And the latest, the sharpest, the contest,
Then began, having already fallen,
...
To remember people in the act
Of speaking is to love them
And not the turquoise substrate
Redon supposed was all there was
...
Control has been candied and exchanged
So many times it feels like the night
Of the day, a troubled ride through
A beginning whose motor announces
...
What follows is terms and classifications, the West
Of speech congratulating itself within
A system so complex there's no way not to be
Effective. Just as they had planned the streets
...
An away of practice the other is
Like a river out of acts the other is
Hapless, unheard, with marks upon him
Having dallied in tarrying unwisely
...