Michael Palmer Poems

Write this. We have burned all their villages

Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
...

It is scribbled along the body
Impossible even to say a word

An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground
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He painted the mountain over and over again
from his place in the cave, agape
at the light, its absence, the mantled
skull with blue-tinted hollows, wren-
...

Who is to say
that the House of Tongues is not that place
where rats swarm around your feet
under blooming sofas
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In the Empire of Light
the water's completely dry

floating on a surface of itself
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The order of islands here
If you take it

will I give it back
at two o'clock
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The limit of the song is this
prelude to a journey to
the outer islands, the generative
sentence, waltz project, forms,
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[Let a be taken as . . .]
a liquid line beneath the skin
and b where the blue tiles meet
body and the body's bridge
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Plan of the City of O. The great square
curves down toward the cathedral. The
water runs out into night where the patron
saint still maintains his loft. He enters
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The Logic of Contradictions
A logical principle is said to be an empty
or formal proposition because it can add
nothing to the premises of the argument it
...