You butter your own bread you…

This is the start of a sequence from one of my first books of poetry, entitled Selected Collected 2009, which I printed less than 10 copies of at a Kinko’s with spiral binding during Christmastime 2009.

In 2021, after self-publishing my novel, I used this sequence to create a short book to practice better book formatting, consulting the canon of book design and planning out the cover more consciously.

It’s probably not very good poetry, but you have to give it this – an AI litbot would never have written it. Only a human being can write very bad and strange poetry like this. And say it in the way I do – really if there’s anything in the lyric sequence it’s the voice, the long you pronunciations, which is somewhat represented on the page by the odd doubled you phrasing.

In April 2024, after publishing a new book, entitled Preliminary Notes Of A Prophet Delusion: Theory and Practice, following this Loosely Connected Yous publishing exercise, I realized that I should do one reading of it for the record, because it was now or never, then or not at all.

And it’s true, I don’t really feeling like doing another reading of it, and although even since April 2024 it’s probably not the way I would read it today, nor is it the way I would have read it out in 2010 – yet the loosely connected yous sequence has held a perennial appeal after so many years, as if it were lodged in my body, some ancient Druidic rhythmic device perhaps. Maybe revisiting it now will lead to something better I could make, or someone else could make. That, anyway, is always the hope of art. In this case, as in spiritual matters, where only the single individual exists, here it is truly only one reader who is sought, in the way a unique utterance always requires one voice.