THUGWISE CAT

unravel ... blanche. bastion. bulldog." The second part of the poem, however, begins to
flow down the page, though it keeps true to its laconic core:
"fraught
fought
smatter
the finger
smithereens"
The humor harbored within this poem occurs in the way the lines in the first part are
minimalistic and sharply punctuated, and how they contrast on the page with the free
falling words that are also jolting for their terseness. The vacillation between abstract
language and more concrete imagery, too, creates a tense tango between the
reason/emotion polarities.
Moving right along to page 27, we encounter "tenebraed to an Enameled Latency," in
which we have a compact capture of Hinge Theory in action. Here, "collapsed
vernaculars" exist in hives, and are recklessly "wracked." Indeed, one could say that this
piece of verse is Hinge Theory in poetic code. The "mantis of jeopardy," upon kissing an
oblong (of course), "trawls pearls of
dismissal across confiscated skies." Perhaps these pearls are the fruits of the
mining/importing/exporting process, and the skies are the origins - the territories mined -
of the pearls? The mind giddily celebrates the possible permutations and infinite
interpretations offered up in a Heller omni-verse.
"tenebraed to black," on page 38, is the ying to the previous poem's yang. Not only is it
four and a half pages long, but it furiously hurls forth, paying homage to the color black
('black is color's barometer"), with manic meditations on this misunderstood hue,
interspersing quotations from Rimbaud, Wittgenstein, Klee, wildly weaving in italicized
quasi-narratives, and splattering a stream of subconscious associations across the page
like Pollack paint, becoming just as layered and dense: "mournful melancholic cape
swaggering juju broth admissible annihilative churly warren-breasted perfume..." Black
is "infinity's gangplank," it turns out, whose "smoke cinder ash" lead to "geometric
meltdown."
After recovering from this frenzied romp, we retreat to the poem on page 44, which, it
must be said, offers only slight respite from the madman rantings on page 38. Here,
"tenebraed to nothing" is a trippy tribute to emptiness, "to the not that is not." It is
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