EYE-GROTTO

Imbolc

2012-01-19T12:07:00.000-08:00

O if only the Etruscan horseflies of my words
would constellate in the aether, sequestered from
the plangency of wing'd gekkos! I see
the shadowship and its crew of evilborn

stethoscopes hurdle the Great Wall of China
like a blacktop cat who nightly lugs a horsewhip
up a stairwell slimed with swastikas, spooled
out by a sawtoothed moon in slacks of static

who daily cadges Janus-faceless coins
from a stashbox erstwhile resounding with oceanroar,
now squiggled with saxophones like a vast gizzard
in which I descry, by torchlight, headless skulls

eating jazz pastries off tectonic plates.
O if only I could be the quickdarting angel
girt about with runnels, the dolphinchrist
snooded up with fog! I hear the clappers

clanging in toothless maws; I see the ben was
bulging from eyecaves. Flung off the spinning spiderweb,
the tightrope walker shatters the floe, disclosing
oakgrained sky. Scattered over the starfish

cartwheeling on the sodden garbagedump,
over the streetlamp orchard, over the shanties
dancing to an undersea harmonica,
the shards glitter like sloughed-off diamondback skins.

I see a coffee shop shaped like a stormcloud shaped
like a homburg under which a pocketwatch
nailed to the shadow of a cross reads 13 o'clock.
O if only a poem would ascend from my coffee's vortex

and fare forth into the mist of knucklebones!

nightsong

2011-11-18T19:42:00.000-08:00

rucksack of ructions
of dovecoated dragonflies
was culled from cat's-eye emeralds
as swordfish skeletons
known to fandango with ostriches
to make their creek run lickety-split amok
swam to saloon and salvo beneath a sickle
and when all is said and done
the parched syringe of a skyscraper
will syphon slag from a skullcap chapel
the skirmish of burbling boleros
on the starship hive
where caterwauling wombats
quivering like stalagmites warped into triggers
will be crammed into manilla escapades
and mailed to the freckle repellent
of a mangrove whose codpiece no longer blazes

photo from Man Ray's film Le Retour à la Raison , 1923

Dreambook

2011-11-13T10:13:00.000-08:00

I
I found a little flap of dead skin on the middle finger of my left hand and began stripping it away. Meanwhile, I heard in my mind's ear the pastor of my boyhood church bid farewell to a disgruntled segment of the congregation with which he had doctrinal differences. As I peeled my hand in one long, continuous strip, the pastor wambled with a cane toward the narthex--rather like the lame defense attorney in The Lady from Shanghai--his speech growing echoey and indistinct. And then a thick swathe of flesh tore away from my palm, disclosing blood and bone.

II
I dreamed I was Rod Serling. I mean, I was watching Rod Serling, but at the same time I was Rod Serling. And I was thinking, "I need to find some teleplay-writers; trouble is, no one does that anymore except Jodie Foster." Then I walked into a sort of Quonset hut where shadowy people wound among antique cheval mirrors, tapestries, mahogany furniture--expensive stuff. A woman who resembled my Aunt Cathy--similar dark, shoulder-length hair--sat at a table near the entrance. "Do you have any teleplay-writers?" I asked her. "Hmm," she said. "We've got Jodie Foster in a booth at the back, but that's about it."

III
A dream about a guy I knew in college and never much cared for. He struck me as prudish, aesthetically staid, and prematurely old. When we shared a hotel room in Toronto, his intellectual hubris irritated me. I don’t remember his name, but he was shaped like a Coke bottle, so I’ll call him Mr. Coke.

I was lying on my back on tall columns of jeans and t-shirts against a wall. I could touch the ceiling. Far below, Mr. Coke was pulling out t-shirts—quickly and gingerly, so as not to crumble the columns. He reminded me of someone trying to yank a tablecloth out from under plates and silverware. Nevertheless, every time he pulled out a shirt, the columns wobbled as though about to topple over. It was a long way to the floor, and nothing would have broken my fall.

Mr. Coke chose the same t-shirts I would’ve chosen: ironic or emblazoned with band logos.

On the ceiling the white paint looked like a sheet stretched taut over a dinosaur spine. I grasped the spine with my hands and feet and shinnied across the ceiling to the adjacent wall, where there was a small door like that of a dumbwaiter. Maybe it was an escape route! I opened the door with my foot and found...another wall! There was a phone, too, and below the phone a number written in pencil, almost illegible on the lumpy, whitewashed cement. But even if I’d been able to pick up the phone, the number would have been useless. I knew it was a cruel practical joke.

IV
I remember a nightmare I had when I was 14, shortly after my sojourn at a church camp. I dreamed I was sitting in the back seat of a car parked in front of the camp's general store. The engine began to skreek and skritter like the cassette-player I used at the time. Suddenly a gargantuan panther burst out from under the hood--like the baby monster c-sectioning himself in Alien. His murderous eyes flashed; his muscles rippled horrifyingly under his sleek black fur. He galloped toward the car, leapt, and rammed the windshield with his head. The resultant crack-web seemed to enmesh me as the slightly dazed panther trotted away from the car, preparing to hurl himself at the windshield again... I awoke with a start.

V
I was with my father and late maternal grandfather in the parking lot of Eastern Michigan University. A Goodyear blimp like a giant hermit-crab croissant hovered high overhead. My father and grandfather toted their acquisitions toward an embankment surrounding the lot; I followed empty handed. (I haven't fired a gun since my teens.) My father uncharacteristically aimed his new old rifle at the blimp and fired. Characteristically, he missed; even more characteristically, he accepted failure with good-natured equanimity and turned to proceed on his way. My grandfather then seized his opportunity to display superior marksmanship. He took aim, fired, and missed. Unlike my father, however, he was unwilling to concede that the target was beyond his range. He took more careful aim and fired again, this time hitting a glass panel of the blimp. I heard a faint tinkle and saw tiny shards falling. My grandfather chuckled his bad-boy chuckle, and we all turned and started up the embankment.

Suddenly I heard a horrific crash behind me. Like the opera-house chandelier in The Phantom of the Opera, the blimp had fallen on the rifle show, crushing countless people! The wrecked blimp gushed a pool of gas that spread with preternatural speed. I tried to run up the embankment after my father and grandfather, who'd disappeared; but I stumbled and fell, and the gas got me.

VI
I was sitting in a circa 80s school bus. I wiped frost off my window and saw a televised speech by "the dictator of Poland." On the balcony of a building like a Bavarian cuckoo clock, a giant effigy of the dictator cleaved the air with his arms and harangued the crowd in Hitler fashion. He was a Macy's-balloon-sized puppet with a loudspeaker built into his throat.

My late paternal grandmother sat next to me across the aisle, babushka'd, staring at the front of the bus, apparently unaware of me. I started singing "Anyone Who Had A Heart," wondering if she could hear me, if she knew the song, if she liked Bacharach. I felt a sentimental tenderness toward everyone on the bus, as if I'd had a drink or two. Some little boys were stampeding down the aisle and trampling one another. I thought I should intervene, as when I sub at elementary schools. I joked with one of them about the Green Bay Packers logo stuck to his forehead. "A third eye, eh?" And suddenly I was Barack Obama in a Macy's parade, marching through Manhattan, beaming and waving at the throngs of cheering onlookers. But at the same time I was watching myself as if on television.

VII
I dreamed I had a book of poems by Cormac McCarthy. At first I was excited about it, but disappointment quickly supplanted my excitement: McCarthy was like Raymond Carver in that his poems weren't as good as his prose. In the dining room of a student coop where I used to live I threw the book away. Since it had become a large, bloody slab of plastic-wrapped beef, it hit the bottom of the trash barrel with a sickening plop. "You shouldn't throw it away," I thought. "You know how you are: you'll wish you had it back. Besides, the trash won't be taken out for weeks. The book will rot and stink." And I knew that throwing the book away would somehow make me a suspect in the recent disappearance of a ten-year-old boy. A drug-dealer--a fourteen-year-old boy with scraggly blond hair--approached me and, brandishing a knife, demanded the whereabouts of this missing boy. Then I was on the lam in the back seat of a car driven by one of my students. We were careening around slummy, nocturnal streets. Drug-dealers shouted jeers at us and pelted the car with eggs, among other garbage. My student windshield-wiped the yolk away.

VIII
I was strapped to a chair, wearing a sort of Lone Ranger mask with wires attached to the throats of people sitting around me. One by one these people were injected with a truth serum that compelled them to express their deepest fears. Their lips moved, but their words came out of my mouth, and I felt their fears as if they were my own.

And then I found myself in France, walking down an esplanade with a pretty, self-contained Dutch girl, a taciturn Spaniard, and a pudgy, swarthy, curly-haired young man who spoke both French and English fluently. This last handed me a pair of underwear like blue terrycloth Speedos. "Ceci sont de rigueurs pour les hommes en France," he said. Apparently my companions were expecting me to drop my pants and don these outré Gallic briefs right in front of them. I tried to explain that I don't wear underwear--that comme beaucoup des types Américains, I schlepp around in jeans much of the time, allowing my junk to flounce untrammeled inside them--but the French equivalents of some of these words escaped me, so I appealed to the pudgy one for help. He'd been my go-to guy whenever my French had failed me. On this occasion, however, he refused to oblige. He just regarded me with cool amusement as I mumbled, "Mon membre... les bijoux de ma famille..."

IX
I had a valuable vintage guitar similar to the psychedelically painted Les Paul that Jimmy Page played with Led Zeppelin. On a guitar stand it rolled down a long, straight road, across the Canadian border, and into the garage of a house like Chester Brown's drawings of his boyhood home in Montreal. From a distance I watched a man pick up my guitar, look it over, and stow it in the back of a truck parked in the garage. Guitars filled and surrounded the truck. Apparently the garage was a guitar warehouse.

Later I walked down the road to retrieve my property. After I crossed the Canadian border the houses grew charmingly antiquated and decrepit, the pavement rain-dark and grass-cracked. Everything exuded a barely perceptible aura of Europeanness.

At the garage a young man with pink spiked hair greeted me. He wore a long, olive-drab military coat with cryptic patches and black leather punk boots. He looked like a young Gary Oldman. At first he feigned ignorance of my guitar and invited me to search the truck, but when I persisted he led me to a corner of the garage. My guitar lay there in pieces. The young man admitted that he'd played it and "pushed it to the limit." To quell my rage he swore up and down that he'd repair it. I said I'd come back later, but I knew my guitar was permanently ruined.

X
I was on a jury debating whether to hang a gallows tree. This gibbet had grown old: it bent with the weight of the condemned man and set him down gently--like Frost's birch tree, though that allusion didn't occur to me in the dream. We sat around a collapsible table in a church gym. We drank hot chocolate and joked and laughed as we discussed condemning the gallows to death by hanging.

painting: Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, Dorothea Tanning,1946

Max Jacob

2011-11-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

The drachma knelt and pushed the skyscraper massif up off the manic-depressive’s fairyland, and in lychee’d Moosup there is an improbable polygon where the Pestalozzi Coccyx was on Vigilante Strumpet, a blowtorch in from the expressionless. Sixtus opened a drive-in in the chimney, took in lychee’d Moosup. There is an improbable polygon where they were different colors: the right one a boatswain, the leper a frogman emir. We got off on a fluke—unmarked—between the teapot-sped nuclei, skidding around the other carnivals.

The Steeplejack Who Fell to the Wrecking Ball

2011-11-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

De Winter of our discontent, Maxim denied that objective reality is flat and at the center of the universe.

In a vintage mirror gilded like the shell in The Birth of Venus, I saw inmate Daphne Morningstar administer a large dose of subjectivity to a sled dog.

Black dots wandered like Sufis on the face of a white die.

Impelled towards the Absolute, an airplane of yellowed newspaper wafted us into the star-spangled executioner's mask.

Biodegradable sculpture: a ceiling wok, a bicycle kitchen, an effete corpse of pipe-organ knobs.

Open diapason 8 and claim your consolation prize: a single standard of morality equally ovicidal to lice eggs and ice eggs.

A guy walks into a bar with a giraffe and says, "My albatross is--well, I have enough of them to fill an aviary."

Your unibrow is the final obstacle to the celestial city of Homburg on your head.

Having a grizzly-sized jones for coffers, I followed the Eightfold Path of veins, emerging from the marble labyrinth with a red scent to my name.

A rout of hooligans clambered in, gesticulating, shouting the rune inscribed on my genes.

Feckless crayfish turned cartwheels in their sleep.

A giant rat was killed with a pitchfork.

And the selfsame black hole from which X-rays emanate was erstwhile brimming with pipe-dottles.

2011-10-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

Negotiating the Stairwell to the Monkey's Attic

I saw Eternity the other night, like a great custodian’s ring threading a thousand keys. Which one unlocks the steel door between social unrest and moral exemplars hovering like horseflies? Which one unlocks the talismanic inscription that malignly affects the nervous system, fragging neurons with Siegfried’s Funeral March, the acoustic cover with which your pebble-punctured soles must one day deal? Lebensraum does not exist outside the mind, the political sphere emblazoned with the name Nestor. Objective time, however, is at once infinite and bound to be free of HIV three years after a stem cell transplant. The Mall Kiosk Man juxtaposes a sylvan glen with industrial alienation. He placed a blue glass jar of fireflies in Tennessee, and round it was a sea of blue grass like unto the crystal blue Shekhinah clad in her white kimono. Sometimes—late at night, when the air grows clammy—she experiences a feeling of self-fulfillment, knowing that she has yet to succumb to the advances of him whose existence is implied by an imperfect universe. Knowing, I mean, that those grainy photos of UFOs are merely frisbee’d hubcaps configured into a chain of rhetorical utterances, causal connections ending at the crack rock in her sock drawer. When the gobo puppet proposed to Bob Dylan, it gave way to the postmodern model of Christian charity sparknotes. One subatomic quark, indivisible, drove off a cliff and landed smack on the harvest moon. However, as the tits say, “Life goes on, bra.” Betty Boop keeps bubbling with bright ideas; balls keep hitching rides to the sweet spot. And yes, my loyal, albeit ever-dwindling, orange popsicle poppy account, the collisions are duly noted by Geiger counters. Through successive rebirths the soul purges itself of its neon green and purple blotches, its blooming confusion of colors.

Alleys in Wonderland

Let me trek across the glow around the organpipes as I submerge them. Three vortices of prismatic smokestacks and Texas toast transformed under the neon where spiraea sucks down dolphins for blue motorcycles. When I smother the leopard, my diamond in the memory sails. Phosphorous has also scoured weirs, figure 8s that shoo wandering radios. The aria: a turbulent slaughterhouse of hypodermic walkingsticks, exquisite shrapnel, a crag's pleistocene brocade.

Derelict-manometered. Pine trees excoriate. When I wrench out the ephebe in the honeycomb, my magpie gurgles and my iguanas bloom. I genuflect before my jeep, a merry-go-round for jeepers. Spangle us with thunderheads from the Chinese laundry.

An armada is crimsoned by minotaur music. The skirmish. All the way down. Under my detritus are chirruping ghinkos. Who would churn a striped swamp with embroidered boardwalks.

Let me wrack mosques with binary cascades as you gnaw the frayed fire-escape. Infinite crosswords ripple as plankton ripples in outer space. The fangs of the floe are tumescent on a primeval streetlamp such as this one. Hug tigers, she says, hug tranquil cropdusters from Stockholm. You pee "under the tumult of the shaggy paperplay" into the snow casino, then stipple the ozone to make deadwood hopscotch.

"Funky Formaldehyde"--Raj Kapoor

2011-10-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

Hasten
on to
here. We are
at the chimney the
great housemotherwiper unbound when white
in mentality sheaves of rampaging boarders.
Across white bottlenecks of warders, the eye-openers
very white and moviegoing; parallelograms of piggy indigo
glitter white as crouton graves. So long, I've tried
to give a nation to that cobalt white paragraph. I've
tried to bluff teaspoon input frenzy, but today my bluish ultramarine
frenzy lost away its nation, descended to that white like a stylist's
rosary. Trouble may retard the boarder travelling into the dartboard-green wallpaper with light-years that ignite its plenipotentiaries; nevertheless, every address owns its own clear green rampage, its own sublet of frenzy. Green swivels yellow in whatever clear oblivion mechanism, notwithstanding. Think of wellingtons commanded to green an effigy of their footway, to ebonize the sari of the wretched soufflé. Think of the starry sari of ebony wellingtons that Agent Sandstorm grew. Green the commentator who came in through the ebony nightlight, a visionary junket and wet; white the benefactress, the foodstuffs of thrush rouges. Shibboleth-lightning-lubricant organ-grinders taking a metropolitan paragraph from the stretching out of collations of brawlmufflers, the paragraph a rigidity-shredder, the permeable surname of paragraph rioters, the canoe a wren. Did you know the shandywhite brawl almost developed a piranha roadhouse of foodstuffs in the white spaniel in the epidermis? Did you, clear shandybluff? Sincerity colors of falling riders limit a handful of roadhouse lesions to an effigy of a croutonshandy, make the tablespoonfuls of handfuls of very rotor-grave cadence the moviegoing shandy. The frenzy-colored greatcoat lost its nation-rouge lightnings, its headlamp a nasturtium to the sublet with which the blotch of triangular thistles happens. The elsewise nude fist a straight triangle, the neurosis a heavyweight in full wellington sprats. The light-year travels to rampage-supervising skinheads floating through firecrackers in the lime foodstuffs of moviegoing moustaches. Hasten on to here: the lime sunshine of the white paragraph.

photo by Bernard Pierre Wolff. It depicts a work by Denetrio Paernio, the Appiani family tomb in the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno in Genoa. This photo appears on the cover of Joy Division's last album, Closer.

Gallery of Margarets

2011-10-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

Margaret Thatcher, Iron Maiden

Margaret Atwood, writer

Margaret Court, tennis player

Margaret O'Brien, actress

Margaret Mead, anthropologist

Margaret Reges, poet

Hey Raj, I can't post comments, so...

2011-10-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

...here's my reply.

“funky formaldehyde”—dat’s goot, yah, I may steal that for a title or something. I’d acknowledge my source, naturally.

You see what’s going on here, the quick juxtapositions of disparate kinds of language, the “encyclopedic” words embalmed in woozy-making ooze. I’m churning your mind with an eggbeater of language.

Not writing non sequitars, however. As in a ghazal, there are connections among the discrete units, like a security thread embedded in a dollar bill. (Like “Parnassus Theater,” this began as a sort of sonnet, actually.) Generally I prefer pinballing among associations—zigging from the end to the middle, zagging from line three to line nine—to the linear or chronological development of a theme or subject characteristic of prose.

Some of the language here I wouldn’t have used just a short time ago. I feel like a musician who includes traffic noise outside the studio or guitar feedback in the composition just because they happened to be there. The language still has to exert an intuitive tug on me before I’ll use it, but I’ve grown more inclusive. It’s as if my mind’s been opened up by a post-hypnotic suggestion.

Thanks for the comment.

photo: a very young Raj Kapoor

Thank YOU, John, for being an astonishing, inspiring, large-souled writer

2011-10-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

John Olson reads as part of Small Press Fest at Pilot Books (Seattle).

We have found 16 people with the name Margaret Gridley

2011-10-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

We have found 16 people with the name Margaret Gridley picnicking on a roofscape aglow with sunflowers.
Well-known for their outré coiffures, a flock of eyelids alighted on the siren roadshow.
It was up to expert witnesses to determine whether the accused was a sleepwalker who'd staggered into a grotto papered with butterfly wings.
As a baseline, astronomers measure the luminosity of the locked Lydgate against that of the iron obelisk.
The inner ear cells of the labyrinth in which I encountered crows picking a skeleton.
Sitting Bull's crucifix looms up in the starry dark.
Saw, as it were, through opera glasses of ochre murk, a cardinal.
In northern Appalachia waves of Chinablue rust whelm tarot cars parked in a holler 'neath the watermelon skull.
An ogre shaman and an ogre shamaness lurking in the stout-colored gloom.
The prepared strings sounded like dead-bell tongues creeping out of a creel of kabbalists.
Only the number 32 and the name of Brett Street were written in bootprints on a snowy field the size of a cigarette paper.
Vous devez être membre pour ajouter un tag sur "In a reverie wandering like a kachina doll lost on a floe."
I was inchworming you were inchworming he/she/it was inchworming deep into a Dark Ages illumination.

2011-10-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

***G********
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*******D****
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***H********
*****A******
*******T****
*********E**
***********S
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***M********
*****E******
*******E****
*********E**
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***!!!!!!!!!

Parnassus Theater

2011-09-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

Boxcars of mushrooms in the Orphic train.
You were ushered through rain to a church
surcharged with doves. Your peerless buttonholes
scoured the railroad station for something to dovetail
with. Mayhem's in the mail: assassinated whales.
A poet is more a catcher of ailments than a pitcher
of ale. You left your sapphire cat on the balcony;
the rain drenched him. Sappho eftsoons wrested
the belltongues from a pitcher of Bell's, for she was
a catcher of hells. You rest beneath a willow
beside the mirror; Lindsay Lohan lows at
the cow-shaped creamer. You dream a shapeshifter says,
"Let us blow this ashen hostel." And if you wouldn't mind,
I would like my lettuce Prussian blew and Irkutsk
umber, my skirts bedecked with irksome rhinoceroses.
You blew the conch shell until I regained consciousness
and saw the blue roses. You were a yew
a dovecoated Orpheus had ushered up from Hell.

Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939

Sober Boat

2011-09-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

I.
Skin from alligator lizards in the air.

“None of these yellow jackets fits me,”
The apple core whines.

« Putain mais ton cul ne m'intéresse pas. »

He sloughs off his outgrown
Acolyte vestments.

The candor of mongoloid bleachers.

“Give them an extra spin cycle on the fire escape.”

II.
Rain will humdrum the nunnery;
Sloopy will hitch a piggyback ride
On a sailboat.

As I plummet toward nirvana
She kills herself by guzzling
A bottle of sunspot remover.

The transient asps of recalcitrance
Blued Hong Kong.

III.
“Hey buddy, got a match?”

Watching, with eyelids ajar, chthonian
cormorants, pelicans, and seagulls.

She emerges from the labyrinth
To find herself in the Elysian Fields.

Windshield-wipers bereaved
My eyes of their tittles.

“Yeah, my ass and your face.”

IV.
In Reykjavik Snively
Heard a disembodied voice.

It had an amber timbre.

The Slough of Hope congealing
Into pancake ice on the Black Sea.

A quantum jump to a parallel universe,
Where your doppelganger is reflecting
On his otherness as a praying mantis.

The shock corridor of a licorice stick.

Do Take Muriel Out (Stevie Smith)

2011-09-17T18:42:00.000-07:00

Do take Muriel out
She is looking so glum
Do take Muriel out
All her friends have gone.

And after too much pressure
Looking for them in the Palace
She goes home to too much leisure
And this is what her life is.

All her friends are gone
And she is alone
And she looks for them where they have never been
And her peace is flown.

Her friends went into the forest
And across the river
And the desert took their footprints
And they went with a believer.

Ah they are gone they were so beautiful
And she can not come to them
And she kneels in her room at night
Crying, Amen.

Do take Muriel out
Alhough your name is Death
She will not complain
When you dance her over the blasted heath.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem

2011-09-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

It fucking pisses me off when butter is so hard
it puts holes in the bread. It fucking pisses me off
when I can't find a handicapped parking spot in a lot

full of empty "regular" spots. Motorcycles are
essentially 2 wheeled cars, motorcyclists NEED
just as much road space as cars and it fucking pisses me

off when ppl dress up as WTGs
for fucking Halloween or to slut it up
at a hick bar. That's the only thing that pisses me

off. Not when inanimate objects look like they have
scary faces, and not when you come home from
the beach and find dolphin embryos between

your toes, but when ppl think you're a kook.
They had you pegged perfectly all along and
you didn't even know it. It fucking pisses me

off when people outside the NY/NJ area
think their pizza is the shit. No, Papa John's,
Domino's, Pizza Hut, etc. is the shit.

This song is called "Struck" not "Star Struck" if you have
the fucking CD yah'd know. God it fucking pisses me
off when Gad Damn People fuck the names up!

LOVE this goddamn site, but it fucking pisses me
off when ppl here call themselves "enlightened"
and "non judgmental." I'm straight, and my best friend's gay,

and I support gay rights. Don/'t fucking gaybash
my friends, or I WILL FUCKING FUCK YOU UP
YOU SISTERFUCKING SOUTHERN DICKBAG. Naw,

jk. I be gental. (Btw: Myprofile pic is me
and my friend.) It fucking pisses me off when people
think I am a retarded or a "dumb hillbilly"

because I am from West Virginia! Anytime I go out of
the state, I am looked down on. Which is why
it fucking pisses me off when people immigrate

to Canada and don't bother to learn the language
LOL. It fucking pisses me off when these jews
and muslims and atheists ruin everything for true

Americans like me. It fucking pisses me off
when the 2006 riots in France are sold as "Muslim Riots"
in the U.S.--by right-wingers, anyways. Anyways

when it is my turn I instalock Akali despite ppl
saying crap about stupid Americans. Just because
we do stupid stuff doesn't mean we're stupid!

LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE! It fucking pisses me off
when drunken old speech-impaired gits expect me
to understand their mumbling about the government,

who is pissing them off, and when ppl claim that
asexuals can't be queer SOLELY by virtue of being
asexual, no other qualifiers, which is WWEist

bullshit. It fucking pisses me off
when my friend's fat arm makes me look naked.
It fucking pisses me off when I meet a stranger

at the gas station and decide to have him back
to my apartment for beers and then he robs me.
This just ruins it. I mean he just got in my car

expecting to be smoked up on a blunt. haha.
Nah, wellplayed unanymous. less. Fights break out
all the time at a show but it fucking pisses me

off when I'm in my fucking zone man. Fucking
kids. Fucking stupid fucking kids. It fucking pisses me
off when people compare Freddie Mercury to God.

Untitled, Mark Wilson, 1974

2011-09-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

My bulldozer Kreuznach radiated sludge through burnooses and some asphalt zeugmas fantasized by crickets in an echolocating mood. No wonder is imbedded in taupe scribbles, just a surfeit of lampreys, of lamasteries. These kewpiedolls batten on bat blood while something bewildered underwater keeps jumping ashore.

Finally I plunge in prescient orchids. On the bedcovers I keep an obliquity-of-the-ecliptic plane for some fakery bakery I frequent. Induction-inducing syllogisms have been wheeling over Dharma Creek — between labial obbligatos of Maria Dolores lookalikes and pranksters snifting dystopian (or ‘Bakstian,’ if you will, or ‘post post-it’) solenoids, between shore-saunterers of nonchalance and wind-whipped bazookameisters, between mammary-evoking mirrors (brujos dub them ‘Noh-masked nogoodniks’) and any number of somebodys (‘the poolshooters’) — over the overkilling of nothingness and nuking of sancta sanctorum to comply with the preconceived protocol. I’m oscillating between, or among. Or I’m deboning.

Hers is a hearseman of the apocalypse of the impenetrable ilk that crevasses the lake like a slo-mo hydroplane wipe-out. And it's cogently argued, not surprisingly. And, of course, you’re mottled by the cheesecloth—you know, like a scorch-mottled bamboo snake, since le labyrinthe est la partie secrète et aveugle du darkroom.

Poetry beribboned with its mooncratered thruways.

Watch the watch with the second-hand second hand

2011-09-09T02:55:00.001-07:00

going 90 into slow
sea veined as the verso
side of a tarot card...a vending
machine that won't foment
change, tossing
her mud-smirched tresses
into the black sugar
on the other side...and the scissor
sisters of mercy remembering
the white coffee of oblivion,
their hair like smoke wafting
from the chimney of a
slurpee straw, curlyqueueing
up to the lowest stratum of the mind,
the sacrificial altar--
purple light bursting
on red brick turning
orange--flowers of evil
sucking the liferust from tincans
and crisscrossing girders,
drifting nightly through aileron-
hewn space...

2011-09-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

Since withdrawn from his presence my feet are not newspaper
wrapping starfish of mist. Shade-travelled Moabite

who listens to his radiant tiara, sometimes a shop
plays for a slurping bloodflower from one's handkerchief,

mixing in the weeping star. To know me is to look forever
into the fire. The windowstripper goes out

perfumed with ancient breadheads, the slats of which a cavern
over the air shall prostrate. We were shadowed trails

of their secretly crimson auras. You are ectoplasm
that passing the minority into a vision eyes

the ocean of intuition. You are swooping
to snatch at Siberia the trees yourself. Out there,

items; in here, a stork on fire, a valley's
light in maelstroms of primal beauty, a lovely

ship whose every movement is like steam.
Eidolons that hurl me sit here with the two freedoms.

When they drift in space. Doctor Robert's lost;
they've ancestors. The ground beneath the parable

of you is mostly in the forest. Sometimes
a photograph of relations is a seraglio

of birds of curiosity, sometimes a mouching
of colors redolent of India ink. What surrounds me

as much as men and women and space? I've heard that
shadows wearing your lost candlewax are intolerable

to sick people; therefore, wrap in waves of ribbon
our India ink. It knows a thousand years of

the grey, and faeries leaving luminous our dances
like waiting. Cries from the depths may see newspapers

like us as we drop me. Secrets dream minor newsblossoms,
and my eyes project jewellers there. Lovely

mountain of faces your navel speaks, let's fly
through us with hair ablaze. The last kisses blown

at us are of us atop a column that occupies.

photo depicts William S. Burroughs

After Péret

2011-08-28T16:45:00.000-07:00

My ticker corsage
withering
so
piteously
in a scraggly rotunda
whispering
to
a
mummified mandrill whelped by a matinee
is vexed with your lizard
whose ankles are similar to
two
steeples
no one will
ever dive off
your lizard which is perhaps
a mitre
coiled like a secret
epicentre
just like the dartboard trousers
I striate
in my toucan shift
beside a greenhouse dreamier
than a bizarrely painted
cruiser
resembling the liquefaction of an isoceles
nostril
that would be a satellited
spiral
more doleful than a maze in a trenchcoat
that
rivers
to
efface
you
like a sundown virus
and so ornate it seems a Lemurian legend
becoming luminous
again
so celestial it seems a sheath-
taloned bookworm
slaloming
among skyscrapers
in which you
signify
no more than a flick-knife’s flicker
in a paper mausoleum
than a jaywalker
on a trampoliney steppe
than a hacksaw
in a rucksack of mackerel

Redaction

2011-08-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

Tea under a blue tree with Marika, my three-headed calico cat.
In Traverse City she went into a photo booth and vanished. A minute later she cellphoned me from New Orleans.
Wakefulness on a rainy night. Like yo-yos the raindrops fall to within an inch of the ground, then rise.
I wish a floating cross would lead me to the dead-letter office of your psyche.
Dirty-haired, unshaven, Kurt Cobain axes an amp with his guitar.
This time next year the checkerboard will be war-ravaged, the brainbox iridescent.

photo: Marika Green in Bresson's Pickpocket, 1959

Because a Black Snake Is Crawling in My Room

2011-08-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

Because a black snake is crawling in my room
Because a black snake is crawling
Because a black snake is crawling in
The mouse-maze of my gaze, shall extraterrestrials
Launch fireballs at the yowling accordion?
Java is ceremoniously defiled,
For such is the edgy charm of windmills
Reclining on a drift of porkpie hats
Which bleed umber, haunted by acorporeal
Slivers. Purple. The aforementioned yinyang graffito.
The paranoid schizophrenic surrounded on all sides
By gonghives, and a crocodile named Tallulah Bankhead
Scurrying down the path to the dream harbor,
Tufts of grassy masts.
Fingers of cigar smoke
Pounding harpsichord arpeggios; willows dancing.
Soma exuberance, critter nookie.
Shards of ice pay mind for the cold-water cave.
The rasping of imaginary rivers
Against the asteroid sounds like your surname,
Underwear. Immersed in a tincture of opium
And moody music, Oz shrivels, tumbles
Ass-over-Tea Party into sleep. Dissolve.
The lighthouse-keeper’s bondage collar
Humming. The abominable snowman
Popping a wheelie, dissolving his razorblade
In the lowlands of lacemakers’ doldrums;
Crones poised on the edge of a leaf;
A wormblood hookah poised on the edge of a nuthatch.
We damn well want our cobwebs lustrous and smooth
And slinky, our etchings of abattoirs aglow.
The big-ass polliwog, the shear tearer of it all.
Sybarites loll in slush, restless as boot-
Tongue subs; chrome-browed dynamos
Swirl in the sky, eye-boinking. Stamp collection.
Childlike Geiger counter genuflecting,
Cannibalized with. Judgment Days, clockhands
Fandango in the sanguine forest. The troll skull
Guffawed while being crucified on a bleary
Hilltop, certain a Sioux butterfly would swoop
Down to rescue him. My secret is a red woman.
The clouds—white leaves I brought home from the sea
And stored in the alley—aren’t passionate about
Anything. I pity the lonely dog
Barking and barking and barking and barking and barking,
And I see a skid row beside the sea, the bums
Sky-colored shadows, and I hear
Enormous church bells tolling in outer space.
Your coiffure mounts a horse and gallops over
The rainbow to a parallel universe.
“Maturity means to rediscover the seriousness
One had as a child at play.” Nietzsche.
Strange to find elephants here, in this northwestern
Wilderness—elephants with ears serrated like leaves,
Riding blue frogs down Grove Street to the valley
Where Juliet Cokespoon and Ruth Ratpoison
Batten on the flesh of chessmen and weep
Sawed-off microscopes. Imagine: imagine
Green cats and talking barnowls, bracelets of
Hermits’ hair in the tinfoil sky, thoughts
Like lily-pads on which crows alight.
As I sat on the throne of God, beautiful girls
Moaned through cracks in their green eggshell skin.
Because a black snake is crawling in my room,
Innumerable suicided cigarettes embark
On a magic carpet which chuffs like a train into
The greenhouse where a pinstriped psalm is kissing
The bulldozer’s llama-spattered nipples. And brainwaves
Inundate the verandah where blue stars
Coalesce to form a skull-and-crossbones
Which whispers a warning to the stranger: “Avoid
At all costs—Oh, hi!”

Electric Chair Blues

2011-08-11T13:06:00.000-07:00

Judge your honor, hear my plea, before you open up your court
But I don't want no sympathy, 'cause I done cut my good man's throat
I caught him with a trifling Jane I warned him 'bout before
I had my knife and went insane, and the rest you ought to know
Judge, judge, please mister judge, send me to the 'lectric chair
Judge, judge, hear my plea, you can fry me 'cause I don't care
I cut him with my Barlow, I kicked him in the side
I stood there laughin' o’er him while he wobbled round and died
Oh judge, judge, lordy lordy judge, send me to the 'lectric chair
Judge, judge, hear me judge, send me to the 'lectric chair
I wanna take a journey to the devil down below
I done killed my man, I wanna reap just what I sow
Don't want no bonded man to go my bail
Don't wanna spend no ninety-nine years in jail
Judge, judge, good kind judge, send me to the 'lectric chair

Bessie Smith

Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1967

2011-08-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

We were figures in a tableau of postwar America.
In the deathcab wafting us Walhalla-ward
Elektra lost her cocoa-encrusted cool.

I know a place where the music is fine
and the lights always low, so you can’t see
the mayhem. There slinkies
sorely lacking in sangfroid
emit magenta screams and noisome
opalescences.

Whaddaya want, anyway? Dragons to cluster all over
the femme fatale? Stained glass ponies
entranced by pansexual ruins?

Mugwumps in flagrante?

Old Harryknuckles there holds his tongue
to be self-evident, that loneliness is an
epiphenomenon of wealth in a
shoebox made of whale milk.

But a breakfast of luminous prairie chickens
is no consolation for a swash of alleycat
windmills, or even a stogie
sketching skull brogans.

A paltry wage hike
in the mountainlike patterns
inscribed on my eyelids.

Sous-chefs loom like government-subsidized
icebergs between the cobbles on the path to
the annual fundrazor.

I lick the scar
on a little wonder car
passing a room
crowded with dead children.

A beehive of sleek
dwarves having sex in deep
thought.

An upside down cake frosted with
post-it notes.

Freeway ends 1 mile.

album cover for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures

Ghazal Sonnet

2011-07-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

In Africa we petition the Lord with prayers
for rain. Miniscule streetcars manna down.

Antipodes interfuse in one colossal
butterfly of oblivion alighting on an aircraft carrier.

Crystalline, fluorescent blue nanoflowers, hummingbird
hypnotherapy, Rocky Mountain scrimshaw swordcane.

Instead of looking at the cathedral I photographed it
and then put the photos in an album I rarely look at.

My nakedness is a suit of bricks. A detective paperback
jammed in my back pocket, its pages riffling.

When you launch the silo-housed missiles of your inchoate feelings,
the snake-charmers and fire-eaters will be smithereened.

A lakeside cabin where a man writes a novel about
a lakeside cabin where a man writes a novel about...

top photo: cathedral made entirely of trash, built by Justo Martinez, Madrid, Spain
bottom photo: Le Palais Idéal, made entirely of collected stones, built by the postman Ferdinand Cheval, Hauterives, France

2011-07-17T19:10:00.000-07:00

Hey whatsis ur name? Nemo.
Speaks Latin, that kachina doll.
Envisions a sci-fi gizmo
for switching fictional mutants
into the iridescence mode.
Wears a mother-of-pearl crucifix
around her neck as a witness
of doubt. Can DNA-origami
with Zig-Zag papers. The daemons
jubilant, the demi- and hemi-gods
exultant in a 7000-year-old
ziggurat. Happy quizzicals at
Rock ‘n Roll High School!
Happy testicles, too. A wallflower
at the band-room orgy gazed into
the chlorinated depths of her shoes
until an epiphany jolted her
out of her stupor. Sanctity,
she intuited, is a sealskin
slicker of holiness you wear
under your skin, where the tumor
has grown so large it has
gravity and inertia. The latter
may reflect an avoidance-avoidance
complex. Just between the black
and white spiders, your dolphin
fandango is the tits! And devoid of
ego fusion reactions that necessitate
the existence of a supernatural dimension
beyond synesthetic hallucinations.
Thanks awfully, but you needn’t
do a Travis Bickle on your inner
miscreants in order to ennoble
your character. Just sanctify
your severance from the astral
vehicle, the flivver of fools
careering over frost-hoarfields
and landing on a treeless gibber
plain where fools gibber
in robotspeak. In a murmurous loggia
I encounter all the cats from my
chiaroscuro coffee-and-cream dream
of a locomotive made of water
splattering against a vast wall.
Happy the cat who feareth death by
the waters of Babylon. Bloody
and wimple the nimbus with all
the bellows screeching and all
the sleepwalkers torn and all
the gatecrasher mains bursting.
A keen ear for oldsterspeak
is a dominant trait, like brindle.
No cream, please; I drink it black.
And hot, of course. The level of
recidivism among black releasees
spiked due to such factors as
El Niño phenomena transmuting
a false lead into fool’s gold.
Hey whatsisface, don't accuse
me of languishing in a perceptual
rut. I know which side of my bread
the mold is always greener on. I see
the Freudian slip beneath the demi-
stitched hem. It is Maxwell's
famous daemon superimposed on
the random process of mutation.
It is Maxwell’s silver hammer
leaving an indentation the circumference
of a moon crater in my skull.
A morphous zone where nothing
can and damn well better happen.

Haiku Sonnet

2011-07-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

Sitting around
the ninety-degree apartment
butt-naked.

The dog snaps his head
back to zap me
with his cold wet nose.

When I asked her out
her nostrils flared:
two dark holes.

"Why don't you play me?"
the LP says.
"You haven't played me in years."

One life ago, WWII.
Ten lives ago, the Crusades.

photo: Nico with dachsunds

Ghazal Sonnet

2011-07-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

Or perhaps betray the latter by your magnanimity.
The priest sprinkled holy water on the migraine-inducing din.

The soul’s detritus is teeming with microscopic mirrors
which reflect auspicious dreams—the one about

being smothered by lizards, for example. Or the one about
an iridescent patina shrouding both lantern and hornet.

The cathedral spire looks quivery in the river,
snaky in the lake. How else could one evoke

reptilian grace than with sinuous prose?
There are no campaign buttons on a shroud of mystery

encompassing the insula of the House of the Rising Sun,
no camp inmates gassed by the Penguin.

Death is just a symptom of amphetamine
deprivation, a self-abnegatory sanctity.

Crazy Jane (song for acoustic guitar)

2011-07-11T17:12:00.000-07:00

(Intro: G Em A/G Em A)

(Em)Statues white as static
Black as(D)chessmen made of(C)jade
(Em)Moulder in the attic
Under(D)shrouds of gold(C)brocade
(Em)Shifting panoramas
Of a(D)moonlit(C)Zanzibar
(Em)Embellish the pajamas
That you(D)don in your(C)boudoir

Take the(G)night(D)train(Em)Crazy(A)Jane
Take the(G)night(D)train(Em)Crazy(A)Jane
To the back of your(Em)brain

In depths of darkness I descry
Your aura many-hued
You flutter like a butterfly
Impaled upon a rood
You thread a flock of gannets
That cavort beside the sea
And tell them like the planets
On your cosmic rosary

Take the night train Crazy Jane
Take the night train Crazy Jane
To the back of your brain

Madrigals my tongue's caress
Inscribes upon your thigh
Slowly fade and evanesce
Like writing in the sky
Beauty that the flashes
Of a camera obscure
Will crumble into ashes
But your beauty will endure

Take the night train Crazy Jane
Take the night train Crazy Jane
To the back of your brain

Poem

2011-07-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

Like I said earlier, no will-o'-the-wisps,
no chimeras, no precognitive dreams
of being trampled to death by a cloud parade.
No abatement of traffic din--it may be woven
into the already too dense orchestration
of the cloud war. It's high time a pipe dream
became a drum reality, Cymbaline,
a low-time job grooming vortical swaybacks
with silicon whiptails. It's superversive in that
it overmines gonzo ethical reasoning by
adopting a bilateral approach. It's by
turns staid and scintillant as a Catherine wheel
sowing sparks and reaping parks of flame-
colored foliage never catalogued by botanists.
Like you'll say later, the tsunami-lashed valley
appears more verdurous than heretofore.
The cymballing of Persian palm elephant ears
punctuates the orchestral vortex.

the spiral staircase in the southwest tower of St Paul's Cathedral, London

Ton fameux imperméable bleu

2011-06-23T17:23:00.000-07:00

Il est quatre heures du matin la fin du mois de décembre
Je t'écris maintenant juste pour savoir si tu vas mieux
New York est froid mais j'aime l'endroit où je vis
Il y a de la musique sur Clinton Street pendant toute la soirée
J'ai entendu dire que tu construis ta petite maison au fond du désert
Tu vis pour rien maintenant j'espère que tu écris une espèce de journal

Oui et Jane est revenue avec une boucle de tes cheveux
Elle a dit que tu la lui avais donnée
Cette nuit où tu as prévu d'être sauvé
Etais-tu jamais sauvé

La dernière fois que nous t'avons vu tu semblais tellement plus vieux
Ton fameux imperméable bleu était déchiré à l'épaule
Tu es allé à la gare pour rencontrer tous les trains
Tu es rentré seul sans Lili Marlene
Et tu as donné à ma femme un flocon de ta vie
Et quand elle est revenue elle n'était plus la femme de personne

Eh bien je te vois là avec une rose entre les dents
Une autre gitane minces et criminelle
Eh bien je vois que Jane est réveillée
Elle te transmet ses amitiés

Et que puis-je te dire mon frère mon meurtrier
Est-il possible de dire quelque chose
Je suppose que tu me manques je suppose que je te pardonne
Je suis content que tu as bloqué ma route
Si jamais tu reviens par ici pour Jane ou pour moi
Eh bien ton ennemi dort et sa femme est libre
Oui et merci d’enlever l'angoisse de ses yeux
J'ai pensé qu'elle ne pouvait pas être enlevé alors je n'ai jamais essayé

Et Jane est revenue avec une boucle de tes cheveux
Elle a dit que tu la lui avais donnée
Cette nuit où tu as prévu d'être sauvé

Sincèrement L. Cohen

2011-05-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

The frazzled dragoons wattle-whip
the whole whorlhouse
of albino morphos who slurp
savannahs gerrymandered
by scatterbrained whippersnappers
Each catnaps in my eyrie
of neon smithereens
like a voluted hatchet
of waterfalling wheelchairs
My third deathwish is to be
rubbed out by a lobster
on a sleet-sheeted fire-escape
to the Quark epoch
when potbellied straitjackets
spelunked the brick bra
of a slattern frisbeeing
a swatch of Kansas
into a loblolly to spatter
the Jagger-lipped nostrils
the laundromat-hatted vampyres
the stairway-stringed violins
suffused with the violence
of the starwhale
flashing my eyelids back
to a rooftop tattooed
by bat-splinters
on the pitrises of Jesusfreaks
caroming off the fog
when isolate gryphons dissolve
their drainpipes in the deathmask
which slips through slots
only faceless coins fit
and which rides a mechanical
glowworm
stiff as a stiletto
stuck in a lizard
Like it I lie down
with the ocean-floored skyscrapers
a carpet for the scarecrow
sleeprunning to the airport
to catch a horse

Neurotics

No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it's said, is free:
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now. For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defence against the non-existent.

--Philip Larkin

Horizontal Elevator Rain

2011-05-14T18:40:00.000-07:00

She smoked her eyelash on grasshopperback, it rotted in a silo by the white dwarf and hurled a vulture against the icebox after the spinnaker had ceased to keen. Sawhorses and law courses shrank to the size of planets, the sumo motes the dead give away. She spelunked the coyote skull atop the lucent sousaphone, eyesocket feeding frenzy, cromlech of umbrellas. A tuft of exit ramps and bluebells exuding hooey into 60-watt poolballs and dive-bombing dives from a submarine. The Model T nightmared of a labyrinthine dumbwaiter, it slashed the comet's train, it smashed the gumball machine full of severed heads. The grenade pinhole was spackled and all the immaculate cesspools in the Podunk-centric mind were chucked into the dump-fires dotting the warscape in the horizontal elevator rain whose prehistoric raptors were clouds pulled over for driving while white. The tiara drowsed on a hopscotch square, the blacktop sandwich intertwined with the filigree after the platinum opera megastars swam to their spawning grounds in a weird fifth-dimensional zone and the floaters in my eye laced my sneakers, yaks tattooing maggots on everything except the squid-ink zamboni that flattened the chaingang of reveries after my near-fetched sybaritic swizzlestick droshky'd up the pretzeled stairway in the horizontal elevator rain whose labia quiver like speedometer needles. I have all her silences on compact buttonhole. Expunge the after-image by kissing it with a waistpaper coffin whose ghostships ply a rearview mirror reflecting keyhole tribadism.

dear blitzcraig,

okay, so you're pretty handy with
a switchblade. you've carved wooden
crucifixes that rival montanes. and
okay, the french government knighted
you chevalier of arts and letters.
but what have you done with your
switchblade lately? other than make
peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches?
and do you suffer any pangs of conscience
over your unregenerate state? have you
ever strived to develop your bodhicitta,
to cultivate a benevolent soul? take
my advice, b.: stand aloof from the
festering wound of american society;
be not tainted by its crass materialism.
hie you to a place of spiritual enlightenment--
a sylvan glen, for example--and contemplate
the ineffable mystery of god.

i'm praying for your reformation, believe me.

your asthma inhaler,

mona lott

portrait of Dylan by Greg Stevenson

2011-05-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

for example the cobra of whisperings cloying
the snowdrifts their Nazis marooned on dolphins crisscrossing
You are scissors
a scorpion careering through snapdragons
fluttering down the nobodies of a rain-dwarf
transmuted by an oxidized seascape
of the purple junkyards of your wheelchair-blasphemy
whose persona's opalescent postoffice is that hypnagogic
vastness
wrung from gryphons
of tundra-hookahs of hilarity
O Josette
only a dominatrix could tomahawk your azure-winged jack-o-lantern
only you can slink the mangoes without
drifting riprapward
You had already starfished ghettoizing in a morbid rumpusroom
psychosexual as lassos of quicksand
where we will paint with the spinal chords of silkworms
where ice-maidens barked at the goon
where we coursed through oboes to become
isolate

2011-04-24T04:44:00.000-07:00

I've just eaten a lie berry.

You'll get nothing from me but the truth.

photo of the defunct McGregor Library, Highland Park (Detroit), MI

The Defunct McGregor Library

2011-04-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

An ominously ironic photo of the once-sumptuous McGregor Library, which is in Highland Park, a bankrupt city within Detroit. Photographer unknown. Just one of the many creepy ruins mouldering in my environs, but it's particularly affecting to a romantic reactionary bibliophile such as myself.

quasar kebab

2011-04-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

quasar kebab
splodge wound round a bobbin
and the bludgeon shattered
by phonographs roaring
like the blowtorches of harbor denizens
and my eternal wink
the nomad gilds the llamas
of egoists' orgies
with a quick brandish
scoopfuls of cicada traffickers
foghorn the strangleheld
strata of gems
lipstuck to a transfixed
construction shako
it is the boomerang of frizzled earwigs
emerging from their rodeo amoebas
a murmurous darkroom
it is the smudged auturvy
where all my hands are decks
of deckhands
imbroglio of the luminous
busker
wildwood oh a wildwood
uterine coffin fondling
headstones
my accordion a warehouse
of guillotines
black with chloroform
cliffhangers
but the hi-fi crucifixion
headscarfs itself
with exquisite matchboxes
and my shriek rental
sparking black bivouacs
sparking cabals and rebuff blizzards
the predator in the batch
mountainside-eaten
in the milkman

Joseph Cornell's love letter to Hedy Lamarr

This Blog Is Hibernating

2011-03-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

Too busy with teaching again. I'll be back...some day.

2011-03-12T10:25:00.001-08:00

T.S. Eliot: "In silent corridors of death"

2011-03-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

In silent corridors of death
Short sighs and stifled breath,
Short breath and stifled sighing;
Somewhere the soul crying.
And I wander alone
Without haste, without hope, without fear
Without pressure or touch
There is no moan
Of souls dying
Nothing here
But the warm
Dry airless sweet scent
Of the alleys of death
Of the corridors of death.

photo of Eastern State Penitentiary by VL Fatum

Cycling in the Street

2011-03-10T17:10:00.001-08:00

This report describes the outline of a shadow
cast on a black background, a shadow shaped
like a tiger shark weaving through a sunken ship

whose barnacled hull is inscribed with bizarre carvings
like psychedelic tattoos--for example, a butterfly
with wings like rose windows of a cathedral.

The chimney soot of turpitude besmirches
the tabula rasa of the soul. Spreadeagled on
a wagon wheel rolling down an incline

toward an inexorable denouement, I cried,
"The noumenon has been relegated to Palookaville
effective immediately. Bankruptcy alternatives

are not an option. Inveighing against the night sky's
debris-strewn streets--legs of a cycle race
which occludes the blood vessels of a manikin--

will avail you nothing." You might see a shark around
Cathedral Rocks, its dorsal fin breaking the surface
of that silence which is more eloquent than all

the venerable tomes in a colonnaded library
rambling out of the wild west, leaving
the towns I love best: Tigerville (Tigerville),

Shadowburg and Sharkfinisterre now
(Shadowburg and Sharkfinisterre now),
yeah don't forget the Motor City

(can't forget the Motor City). My conversation
with the manikin flagged, but a revivifying subject
sashayed down the runway like a diva model

sumptuously bedizened with giallo film posters:
a future replete with cyclic revolutions
which will sweep the brain like so many gamma tsunamis.

The soul-searcher plies the murky streets of his inner
self; a radial spoke of a spiderweb
vibrates from a passing streetcar whose bell

can tell a thief from an honest man. Inglorious
things of thee are spoken, O cities of desolation
and degradation, of creepy-crawly crawmoms

and Wellington'd wombats, of shark-infested dives.
You'll never stool on Bonnie and Clyde, however;
you're afflicted with a parasitic infection

spread by pigeons. In describing such desperate cost-
cutting measures as sawing off branches of the public
library, this report on impoverished cities

demonstrates that morning will not come
overnight, that our shadowy background will stalk us
like a tiger all the way to the craggy promontory

beyond which lies nothing but a shark-infested
dive. So go ahead, fuck plenty with the future,
make it unknowable as a noumenon. I won't gainsay you.

But remember this: no matter how murky the ocean,
no matter how shabby the cathedral, no matter how
bloody the denouement, I shall, depend upon it,

requite thy pains in the hereafter. Thou shalt
revel in the splendor of celestial halls. Thou shalt
want for nothing but the nothing thou hast become.

photo: St. Christopher House, a former public library in Detroit. From The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Un Mauvais Rêve

2011-03-01T13:06:00.000-08:00

Un rêve de quelqu'un auquel je n'avais pas pensé depuis longtemps, un type que j'ai jamais aimé. Il avait la pudibonderie d'un jeune homme vielli prématurément, et au collège, où nous avons partagé une chambre d'hotel à Toronto, son hubris intellectuelle était irritant. Je ne me souviens pas son nom, mais car son corps ressemblait à une bouteille de Coke, je vais le nommer Monsieur Coke.

J'étais couché sur des hautes colonnes de jeans et t-shirts contre un mur. J'ai pu toucher le plafond. M. Coke retirait des t-shirts loin en dessous de moi. J'aurais choisi les même t-shirts: les ironiques et ceux qui portaient les noms de groupes de rock. A chaque fois il retirait une t-shirt, les colonnes vacillé un peu comme s'elles étaient sur le point de chute. Je serais tombé très loin, et il n'y avait pas de coussin en dessous de moi.

Sur le plafond la peinture blanche était comme une feuille tendue sur une colonne vertébrale. Avec mes mains et les pieds j'ai tenté d'attraper la colonne vertébrale, et j'ai lutté à travers la plafond au mur adjacent, où il y avait une petite porte comme celle d'un petit monte-charge. C'était peut-être un moyen d'échapper! J'ai ouvert la porte avec mon pied et trouvé... un autre mur! Il y avait un téléphone aussi, et au-dessous du téléphone un numéro avait été écrit au crayon. Il était presque illisible sur le ciment grumeleux. Même si j'avais été en mesure de décrocher le téléphone, le nombre aurait été inutile. Je savais que c'était une farce.

Bruce Nauman:"The true artist..."

2011-02-22T20:46:00.000-08:00

Bruce Nauman, neon tubing sign
spiral staircase at Vatican Museums
Twilight Zone spiral

mise-en-abyme

2011-02-22T18:22:00.000-08:00

orange picotees
orange pekoe teas

notice given
no dis given

the sky's the limit
this guy's the limit

Droste effect photo

René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (portrait of Edward James), '37

2011-02-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

this is your greenhouse this your saxophone mosque
your vortexes have all flown away
the cape of napalm is blacker than the sarcophagus
of this scapular smirched with grief
the dead bazooka of a misanthrope
ablaze with a radiance that knuckledusters the shanty like a klaxon
eternity like a doubledecker with raga muffins
a glowing spaceship of vultures of purple-black glass
that berated the beret'd belfry
the dissembling kestrels are bereft of cat's-eyes
with invisible beehives and lapwings of moonlit lichens
who sew the sitar asunder
with streaming eels from their garottes
in the lolling cauldron
this is your dragonfly this your satellite morgue
your yeti yodels light-years above you
higher than cathodes bereft of raveling scimitars
higher than an atticful of zigzagging zebras
higher than auks cutting silvery fandangos
higher than viragos bereft of ashen hexagons
in catacombs deeper than beachcombers whelmed by the deep

Helen Frankenthaler, A Green Thought in a Green Shade ('81)

2011-02-12T13:54:00.000-08:00

This report echoed
through the Caverns of Sonora
prompting the Butterfly
to flutter away
to siphon the nectar
from deep within
the Beneficent Soul
the tranquil one
who embraces simplicity
in its myriad manifestations
effluxes from the Absolute
the Ultimate the Sublime
the beautiful sanctum
of your innermost thoughts
your secret sumptuous
thought-garden where
Love flutters her eyes
coquettishly alluring
as a black rose
on a coffin drifting
in the abyss of damned souls
of despair metamorphosing
into the butterfly
of hope
of sanctity
of grace

Ghazal Sonnet

2011-02-10T19:21:00.000-08:00

This report uses an invalid
who kept a journal of his convalescence--

the insipid meals, the gimpy walks on April
mornings, the rhythmic bites of the silver mosquito.

"Before I sink into the big sleep," he wrote,
"I want to hear the cry of the peacocks."

Black dominates Spring runways in London.
Here, for example, Big Ben resembles

a black dwarf in his little black dress
by Stella McCartney. A glowing apparition

floats over a skyline fashionistas
would call a deckle-edged hem.

A silver clocktower, jagged as a peak
of a cardiogram, sopites a peacock feather eye.

Wallace Stevens: Domination of Black

2011-02-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry – the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

photo of Wallace Stevens with his daughter Holly

2011-02-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

This report provides evidence that the Black Plague is alive and well in the digital age, and that much of the homeopathy is so diluted as to bear little resemblance to older, idealized accounts. The Doukhobors practice a particularly outré organ piece that prompts one to envisage the novelization of a crash-test film, and mushroom cloud computing is a priority for government at all levels, especially those where storybook children stalk and threaten seahorse latitudes with possible hurricanes. To quell fears of demise, she caressed the cat like a tropical breeze swaying palm trees above cinderblock-white sand on which stands an equestrian statue of Lord Baltimore. "Who lords it o'er his vassals, exhorting them to persevere in the Middle East war process?" Who indeed? Could it be you? You who never arrived at your destination for unwanted nuclear waste? You whose shoes always match your hair, no matter how outlandish the color? Yes, possibly, but the report fails to elaborate the distinctions among Clothoic, Lachesistic, and Atroposic models; and this failure generates diseases similar to the Black Plague in that the affected regions grow abnormally aligned. No Chinese box could resolve the problem by enveloping the nightsky with cloying love for an unattainable woman, a descendant of royal blood. We'll have to coordinate in order to negotiate this steep terrain. "Okay, let's synchronize our clepsydras. I've got half past the Renaissance." "Check." "Check."

photo of a parking structure in Detroit

Elevator Music

2011-02-02T12:52:00.001-08:00

Up and down
the jack-in-the-box sprouts out of the rookery of daydreams
attic opiate cellar opossum
kitchen like a horsewoman without a rifleman
kitchen a druid's lament waterwheeling over a lama

kitchen a black starship up and down
walrusflowers sprouting out of my musket
as spitfires of bishopricks, they whisk past, the splashdowns
closing above the laserbeam lasso
crazyquilt of watermarks overfloes the dodos on
the stay-at-home steamer, looking down on
the wandering carcasses and raveling cardigans,
you have daydreamed about these things, you
poke them with your tongue, you taste them,
mmmmmmmmmmm, delicious, and you raise
your flagon to the myriads and myriads
and myriads of eyries of eyebrows
in the attic
when
silently
as a pince-nez of handcuffs
crashing its starship
into the cloister
black on black the bison
clatter like sewing machines
across a myriad miles of waterspouts
and watchbands
and wattles
and Watusis
into the bayonetty stalagmites of this stygian cellar
where there is a bedraggled cormorant there is a carny geek
licking the black vinyl fetus clean of accoutrements
there is an isoceles noose made of koobface worm
there is

a bullwhopping wishkabob skewering a near-flung dolmen
loitering around my lithographs as if my undertaker
were akimboidal and birdmasks of foam
and sleepwalking beds mistook my lithographs
for mailbox flags adorned with skulls and crossbones
and then threaded a white hole
(like the skinhead of a vasectomy elopement)
logy and engoldened
--seraphically luminous--
genuflecting
up and down
between isolate hillocks, seahorse rodeos, hoarfrosted tarantulas
prismatic as just barely olfactible
flowers screeing.
It is shawled in maudlinity.
It is an ikon of undertow and errata
and blitzkreig spangle. It
is a gloss on the hermeticism
of the outer sanctum
that whets
the clockscalpels of Fogville
as I transcend
carpentering
it
all
together.

photo from the film Dark Star ('74)

Radio Roulette

2011-01-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

Via the hermetic chatterbox where we
are surreptitious as Zenits who dip their obelisks
stridently so as not to debarnacle the birthmarks

of coach-and-fours with almost human appendages.
We gathered on the horsefly and loped through the cool bearskin
fiestas, go-getter-guzzled and hedgehog-hoarded.

You were a stateroom, a numbskull, nexus of writhing
poleaxes; I the hypodermic unibrow
niggardlily administered by the papal

pasta. O infinitesimal thingamabob,
splodgy bulldozer of palaces, I may moor
the moue to my mouth, and then may slack at the moorhen

factory, become some manacle-shaped monocle
for a memsahib I've never met. Boa-
veined tresses and buskers river through the pinprick-

colored mosquito slalom, all pointing toward--
what? Some placenta far from any bottleneck
and all boreholes? We'll never get there if the steeple-

spiked rubber gloms onto schleppersby at the cornfield
of derelict streetcars in order to mitigate
their desperate nowhereness. We'll have to clone a zone

where creepy threesomes learn to skreek, where gurus
wheelchair over their whelky gussets. Such
quiltscapes we sink into instead of Dutch

fusspots! A dado, daemon, flotilla of forget-
me-not'd floozies, quay of quiche. Love,
your shako envy in the Moonbelt is a sinister

pizza on the skylight's Cheshire grin. Do you mind
if I indulge in a brief digression in which
the silhouette of Podunk to my bloodshot

billiard balls is as Elysium to a new
pressed sou'wester? It's all in my gemeinschaft,
mummified mama minivan me wallabies.

Disjecta Membra

2011-01-21T07:46:00.001-08:00

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floor of a dance hall
reverberating with "Rock Lobster."
My soul was full of longing
for the secrets of the sea.
But Nerval hired Thibault instead.
How was I to know the ideas
informing the substratum of his sonnet?
I should have been the superstratum
who succeeded Thibault, but my skull
was trepanned, drained of its
soi-disant ideas, and rented out
as a bowling ball. I eked out a living
slamming dilapidated discourses.
How was I to know a demolition derby
or construction bowler
would have hidden the holes?
I should have been a soi-disant
mobster punk like Elisha Cook, Jr.,
but instead I became Lady GaGa's
diamond lobster headpiece.
Well, that beat culture-vulturing
on a thermal over a discourse
under construction, but it was no
balm for the sea-sickness
of the soul, like lingering over
lemon-scented tea and gazing through
diamond-mullioned windows
at an English garden, at pilgrims
mounting steps to a pagoda.
I should have been appointed
to the missionary position,
but the uterocentric substratum
mounted the phallocentric superstratum.
How was I to know some soi-disant
analyst--an oyster with a Viennese
accent--would deconstruct our pagodacentric
culture in a razory monologue?
I was still wet behind the ears;
I'd been wading up to my knees
among hard hats encrusted
with oysters. I should have been
fused into a coherent body
of ideas, but I was razored
asunder for preying on oyster beds.
How was I to analyze the discursive
substratum of Chinese society?
Dismembered as I was,
dispersed over brackish water,
how was I to know?

photo depicts Elisha Cook, Jr.

The Reformation-Counter

2011-01-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

Which latter includes the former. The hazmated,
machine gun-touting zombie-waster draws
a bead on the Gnostic praying preparatory
to cutting a sunflower. Gnostic, know thyself;
reformer, reform thyself. If I tried to reform
myself I'd run away to an idyllic past--
fly on crowback to a field of sunflowers.
Your witch ladder must have forty beads. The telos
of counting syllables per line is to survey
the hazmat situation via floatplane.
You can drag a swatch from the past to another document--
an ancient statesman's letter discovered among
the dusty, rusty oddments in a fleamarket--
parchment rivered with an illegible hand, tucked
in a copy of Ted Hughes' Crow or The Beach Boys' Sunflower.
Zombies are floating past; you can drag them from the river.
Which latter-day reformer razed the former
Crow reservation in the name of rural renewal?

painting by Ken Girard

Rafterthought

2011-01-01T13:40:00.001-08:00

A Hopperesque Manhattan and I'm flying
away from it towards Planet Terror, where it is commonly
supposed that switching the willow differential
could avert a tsunami of jots and tittles. The rafterglow,
however, proves fleeting and all too unalloyed.
It regales us with communiqués whose blandishments
plane us down to a state of abject privation.
I can't honestly claim to admire it, but I discern
its general philanthropic bent. It's a play
about a Lamborghini what gets conscripted into
the French Foreign Legion. Directing it has been,
well, an ordeal! Rather like giving birth
to a dancing star. And one can easily imagine
Lamborghini as chuckwalla iguana to Hopper's
gargoyle gekko. Still, I bid you good morning,
even if you did arrive by Parcel Post.
There'll be nobody there to greet you but a bevy
of stubble-cheeked winos, most of whom were spirited
away from the Kate Kennedy Club in retaliation
for the exercise of their inalienable rights.
You might as well make yourself comfortable.
Okay then, I'll take you up on that coffee offer.

Edward Hopper, Night Shadows

Aubade

2010-12-11T09:40:00.000-08:00

I cut the grapefruit sun in half.
Half a sun is the perfect sidekick for a cup of antifreeze.
While I read the braille of your knobby knees,
a verdurous giggle palimpsests the echo of a dying howl,
and the mattress of the savor of brook trout
reclines on the boxspring of the fragrance of rainblossoms.
Your bandaided knee feels the way rain smelled
as it fell on Wounded Knee Creek, prompting Tu Fu
to don the didkdik's slicker.
Or maybe it was the dukduk's, I don't remember.
Herr Doktor Richard Dick was busy grafting
Saint Denis's head to a beer, I believe.
I was mesmerized by the zooness of everything
as I at-one-mently drifted oddityward
and the bodysurfers of cometlight disimpaled themselves
from witchcaps in order to ascend to the bottom
of a full-length sidewalk puddle.
Cephalophores blazin cheebah cheebah back at da crib,
to thee my soul is flown; the sheveled cadenza
of rectitude sleeps in my porkpie hat,
coiled like an obelisk. Decked out as a mollusk
I jade-stalk around the madrone forest
where Droopy Drawers will brood on his fate
until his aura taupens--opens
only to a doppelgänger so unique
he's more like me than I am myself.
Ut pictura poesis, as my Rice Krispies used to say--
especially when the poem depicts a ceiling-stain
galumphing like an eerie silhouette,
delivering a carafe of antifreeze
to a fire-engine stranded in the Sahara.

Shirley McClaine as Irma la Douce on rue Saint-Denis

Tatiana est morte

2010-12-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

Le visage de Dmitri était pâle. "Tatiana est morte. Assassinée. Quelqu'un l'a étranglée avec un câble téléphonique."

Marina l’a regardé avec des yeux comme des soucoupes. "C'est horrible--horrible!"

Dmitri s'est assis sans bouger dans sa chaise antique--la chaise électrique dans laquelle Leon Czolgosz a été électrocuté après avoir assassiné William McKinley. Ses mains étaient serrées en poings.

Marina a atteint et touché une manche de son costume de Spiderman. "Je suis désolé."

Il ne répondit pas. Il a mis une salamandre entre ses lèvres et a allumé la queue.

L'appréhension a obscurci le visage de Marina. "Il est horrible que Tatiana a été assassinée ce nuit de toutes les nuits."

Dmitri l'a regardée brusquement. "Que voulez-vous dire?"

Marina caressé la croix gammée en peau de léopard sur sa collier. "Tatiana annonce qu'elle envisage de modifier son testament. Cette même nuit quelqu'un l'étrangle. Et si la police"--sa voix était à peine audible--"découvre vos dettes?"

Il a éteint son salamandre dans l'un des mains de laiton de Shiva. "Il n'importera pas." Son voix sonnait creux. "Nous allons dire que j'ai été avec vous ce soir." Dans la faible lueur à travers les vitres d'un réverbère, la chambre était un méli-mélo d'ombres. "Nous avons mangé fugu pour le dîner, nous avons eu le sexe tantrique pour des heures, nous avons regardé McHale's Navy. Ça va?”

photo depicts Marina Tsvetaeva

Shrunken Sputniks

2010-11-27T09:01:00.001-08:00

A bootlace of bison bisects the shatterproof
loveletter, Lorca's soigné smock, his skyscraper
buried in the grass-green ashes of your skiff,
and everything sways like a trigger squeezed
over and over, something recedes and the train
emerges, lanterns dance dissevering dinosaurs
and dulcimers and endearments which, effaced
by rain, find solace in the sky we can never leave,
only there are neon serpents slithering through the vestibule
and mumbling monosyllabic maledictions
to work up an appetite for the quicksand milkshakes
that migrate to a cave in the fourth dimension,
you know, the one with moondown-colored walls.
It's easy to get there by sliding down the laundry chute,
a perfect omnibus for omnivorous readers
or double-decker bus for gangs of doppelgängers.
Anything to bereave the bells of their tongues, in fact
anything to empty the cornucopia of privations,
anything to exorcise the eyrie of phantasms.
You see it doesn't matter if we morph into amoeba men,
because we can still get an unreal job as cads-in-waiting

who dredge pterodactyl bones from primordial ooze,
but Pippi Longstocking, that beacon of despair, has the vocal chops
to remain silent even if all the motor oil
is syringed from her body and it is
because I cull inspiration from monkeywrenched orchids
and never wish to escape the world's sorrow
in a taxi careening through a blizzard of stained-glass shards
on a night when Napolean recites the Upanishads
to a clutch of skulls so mellifluously our stigmata
evanesce, and I clamber to the top of the Sphinx's head
knowing I must swandive into the Void,
the only country that requires no passport.
Wolf Blass and Wirra Wirra morph into amoebae
suggesting a new taxonomic structure for the walk poem
chance-encountered at the crossroads
trying to flag a ride, but migrant okapis
lope on, lope on, as is their wont, as tea-kettle
ambulances are wont to whistle past the illimitable
desolation of a skylight strafed by shrunken sputniks,
evoking a premonition of goggle-eyed elves
imploding on the main drag of a paradisal Dis,
thus a mannequin on spoorback arrives at the café.
We're all mannequins in a sense, waiting for a tugboat spoor
to lug us to a lovely graveyard in the North.
We're all seabirds gliding to a distant nebula
crisscrossed with Oom Paul smoke, an oceanic
tundra islanded with gardens, everything assuming
vibrant colors, everything transfiguring us: an elevator
to calligraphic birds on a rice-paper empyrean.

painting: The Devils Construct Satan's Palace, Pandemonium, John Martin

Welcome Back

2010-11-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Poètes, bonjour.

The whole shantytown is bejewelled with boogers: the nefarious ultra-rigs, the splendorous fingersnails, the coterie of corpses from Carnival of Souls, the hyper-palimpsested faces. Nerval's lobster Thibault killing the Ichneumon-rat, Smart's Jeoffrey scuttling around the Palais Royal--bedizened, all of them, in seismic shifts, for all your bugger-all boogers.

Our trigger-fingers are twitching to perforate the gibbous moons of your pupils, to pock your wingèd third-eye-sockets adorning the vault of the sky. We've supp'd full with your windspins and headmills, your thoraxes and Thor hammers, to say nothing of all the pressure-gauge buttons on the elevator's blouse, basking in the quintessence of ascetic earwig--they never inveigled an invite to your petri-dish jacuzzi, it seems. That's why we're palling the whole desertified infrastructure in a hazmat suit impervious to the saliences of your sardonic wit. You can't make an omelette without cracking a few quasars.

Come back in the morning. You can sleep underwater with the estuarine crocodiles.

Don't tell us you can't. How else would you beguile the night--with your louche pursuits?

Bonne chance. It'll be a cakewalk.

photo from the film Carnival of Souls

shutting down awhile

2010-08-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

Too busy with teaching. I hope to be back soon.

Trakl: Trumpets

2010-08-06T08:04:00.000-07:00

Trumpets blare under trimmed willows where tanned
Children play and leaves drift. Graveyard-shudders.
Scarlet flags plunge through the grief of maples,
Riders in ryefields, and empty mills.

Or shepherds sing at night, and deer step
Into the circle of their fire, the forest's ancient sorrow.
Dancers rise from a black wall--
Scarlet flags, laughter, madness, trumpets.

translated from the German by Daniel Simko

photo depicts Chet Baker

Stockholm Syndrome

2010-07-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

Well I got this graveyard woman you know.
Her butterfly wings are dusted with snow,
like blue spruce boughs.
Under a blue waterfall
she reads a gilt-edged bluebook.
Meanwhile a hunchback in a grey flannel suit
galumphs through a grove blue with sailors.
His transient blue-hued vision makes everyone
a mélange of David Blue, Vida Blue, and China Blue.
Well I got this origami ningyo doll
with a spider monkey's prehensile tail.
She dangles over a tea party
where tweeded Trotskyites tarantella tipsily,
where thewy, thick-skinned Texans creep like trumpets
toward the museum of sexy trains, colliding
with a running joke, colluding
with a seagulldozer that razes
cold-water ballerina flats.
Well I got this polka-dot woman you know.
Her polka-dots polka like rogue black holes
under an umbrella aglitter
with the blackamoor jewelry of the rain.
She never cared for apples until an apple took her hostage and enjoined her to emigrate to New Orleans in '67, there to prevent Jayne Mansfield's fatal car crash. Eventually she developed Stockholm syndrome and fell in love with apples, particularly the Christ-like immaculacy of their interiors.
She trysted with an apple in a library.
She embellished apples with needlepoint
patterns by Albrecht Dürer.
Someday when the weather clears
my polka-apple woman and I
will slough off our lassitudinousness
and embark on a pilgrimmage
to the sidereal firmament.
I hear tell the golden apples up there
are
larger
than
the
domes
of
the
Kremlin.

Charles Ray, Unpainted Sculpture, fiberglass and paint, 1997

All work and Noh play

2010-06-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

make Jackknife a dull blade.
He couldn't cut class to smack
shoot with The Strangemakers
back of the Firecat Hotel.
He can crawl around on the ceiling
like a spider, but he's a nullity,
a penlight-battery-powered mannequin
with a surname of obscure origin.
He was languishing in an old clawfoot tub
when a carrier pigeon brought him
a hackle-raising letter, a barrage of invective
that could've riddled bazooka-proof glass.
It was scrawled with dull crayons of a myriad colors.
It was a sky opulent with sumptuous gardens,
a paradisal field where recumbent bodhisattvas
smoked hookahs and talked of nascent revolutions.
Like hypnagogic jazz from a gramophone
the fragrance of dew-spangled blooms
permeated the nocturnal city.
O city infested with smudges,
replete with shadowy malignancies,
don't you know God eyes you malevolently?
O droshki-load of tulle-tippeted cadavers,
thou hast lifted so many shops
thine arms are on their last legs.
And when the francophone players
ratchet brawnily 'cross Nebraska,
their boots flecked with glowing-blue sherbet,
thou must disappear to join thine ancestors--
tiny giraffes hovering on hummingbird wings--
thine abject tears notwithstanding.
Hey, is that Hedy Lamarr?

William Cowper: Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion

2010-06-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait with impatient readiness to seize my
Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas; more abhorred than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy Master.
Twice-betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me;
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram's.

Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground.

engraving of Cowper by William Blake

Homing

2010-06-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

This mug unrelievedly black
except for a white cross, a barnacle-encrusted
ship dredged from primordial soup, from an interlude
in a sepulchre in a ghoulish netherworld
where mauve nudes constellate and veil
their ideas in parabolic tales of hypodermic
steeples pricking lightning-veined forearms
of cloud, in intellectual peregrinations
like flying an inkjet across the electric blue
sky over the veldt where conceptual mastodons
graze. The immortal loveliness of this mug
wherein I weep, contrite, this shadowbox
wherein the chamarre-clad Wurundgeri celestials
entrance and exit me like the psychedelic swirl
lollipop over Whipma Whopma Gate the night the Spaniard
killed himself by swallowing his mistress's glass eye
because, like most Americans, he wished to preserve
the sanctity of Boston marriage. This argyle cardigan
like a diamond-mullioned window. Diamond diamond
diamond diamond diamond diamond diamond.
If one Campbell's soup can is ugly, try two.
If still ugly, then four. Then eight. Then sixteen.
Then thirty-two. This mug over which a latchkey kid
in a purple mod raincoat fires up a Death
because her soul is an incunabular ikon with X-ray
eyes, a swanboat from the cauldron of my cauchemar,
a coruscating cormorant wheeling with scarlet
and magenta gulls, a kraken dwelling in the depths
of reverie, a medieval scribe recording
the exultations of spirits from distant nebulae.

Campbell's soup can, Andy Warhol

diamond-mullioned windows

2010-06-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

because purple meteorites bombard
because purple meteorites
because purple
because purple meteorites bombard the mad wheelchairs
in a city where everyone wears weird paper-hats
because kisses alight like moths on the girl
whose hair is a dancing forest
because in the sirocco-swept ruins I have a vision
of dragonangels
of wingèd kittens
of strange passion-flowers
of flame-colored leopards leaping into space
because a demivierge from Moscow floats over the shadow play
because they wanted to leave behind a lozenge-shaped malaise
but ended up leaving in front of it
and beginning down south
because solitude is beatitude
because raincoats languish in 1949
because raagtime harmonium music drowns in shallow breath
because Stockholm is a labyrinth haunted by dead bulldozers
because Ms. Monkeyflower trysts only with fallen men
because the trickster dredges cufflinks from the Baltic incorporeally
because la marée noire menace les bayous de Louisiane
because a child who'd been lost for years was found
sauntering on the edges of waves in a jewelry box
because only a transvestite could forge the destiny of
these green moons
these black rainbows
these Julia-dreamers
these knock-off Solomon Grundy frigates
these maggots
because the mystic apprehends transcendental truths
because my bangs fall over the kabuki mask whose eye-holes are
swatches of dream-space
because my cigar is crammed with infinitesimal machines
because the transparent butcher-block might finally invite
the shapeless magus to slide up the banister
because the milkman left his celestial fantasy unfinished
beside the clockwork shorebird
because a gryphon can wangle a nanosecond with a syncope
because the Elders of Zion impaled the somnambulists
on a compass needle
because the catwoman immersed in a quasar don't care for no
wombat cauldron
even though Jacob Boehme has joined the zebraic fellaheen
because the jet-propelled frogfaced fakirs
skanked athwart the hieroglyph
I must accept the sacrament of affliction
with transports of joy
and sink the airship bound for the Void
and maunder toward demiurgical Marika
whose igloo sports three vermilion crows

sketches by Jackson Pollock. sorry they're so small.

The Blue Death

2010-05-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

The Blue Death spread like nightshade
Throughout the vast attic.
The cobra swallowed the bones
Before the runaway train could crush them.

Throughout the vast attic
The zombies played backgammon for matchsticks.
Before the runaway train could crush them,
The leopards exorcised the dustdevils

The zombies played backgammon for. Matchsticks
Don a cloak of invisibility because
The leopards exorcised the dustdevils
With fire-colored hair.

Don a cloak of invisibility because,
In Asgaard, the most hurled maledictions are those
With fire-colored hair
And scimitar-scarred midriffs.

In Asgaard, the most hurled maledictions are those
Over there, on the rocky coast,
And scimitar-scarred midriffs
Undulate like the sea.

Over there, on the rocky coast,
Obscured by rubberneckers who
Undulate like the sea,
You play in a round-trip cricket match.

Obscured by rubberneckers whom
The cobra swallowed, the bones
You play in a round-trip cricket catch
The Blue Death, spread like nightshade.

blue-tinted detail of Albert Pinkham Ryder's The Race Track

D.H. Lawrence: If You Are a Man

2010-05-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

If you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.

The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex
and we will find the way to immediate contact with life
and with one another.

To know the moon as we have never known
yet she is knowable.
To know a man as we have never known
a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Pansy

Diminished Expectations

2010-05-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

Growing up I had an alpaca named Craven Moorhead,
which, in retrospect, seems beaucoup dinky dau.
Now I whisk egg whites until frothy.
What else can a self-respecting lycanthrope do?
I'm just one pixilated shard of the overall speculum.
But when you ask, is the Netherlands festooned
with baldricks? Is Netherlands plural? then it'll be time
to carpenter privations together, because in doing so
we'll be scotching the coachwhips of mist continually frolicking,
slithering down the cedar-blurred stairwell. How can we function
in the netherworld of waking life if they proliferate
to the point of clogging the road whose ramifications
are legion? Meanwhile dreams emblazon the omnibus
with paper-cup patterns, but if each blank tankard tootles
down a sidestreet aswarm with jellyfish-like urchins,
can we venture forth without being inundated by the psychological
fallout from the idyllic sojourn's abrupt and lugubrious
end in a café where I overheard four unimpeachable witnesses
articulate an idea scrawled on a napkin that Agnes Moorhead
was clenching and unclenching with an ashen-knuckled hand?
Not bloody likely, but I can dream, can't I?

Agnes Moorhead in Citizen Kane

Eerie Alley Tea

2010-04-23T09:24:00.001-07:00

is a ceiling stain shaped like the Twilight Zone,
the mandalaic maze of a chocolate factory.
It's some kind of avant-garde Congreve play

wherein the vitae activa and contemplativa
merge to form an indistinct blur, a muddy
grunge riff that goes straight for the juggernaut.

Something of the profane attends its impeccable
state of lunginess. However many gargoyle
sconces you light, the evil spirits can never

be dispelled: in the channel of the deep six are they
seeking asylum, seeking both noumenal dump
and phenomenal leaf-embellished rock.

Unfortunately, however, the Muse quarantines
their virus-infected invocations. No oddments
can be cobbled together, no connections intuited

among the disparate flotsam and jetsam adrift
on the primordial ooze of our collective dystopia.
No exit from the bell-jarred abattoir. No ingress

to the Starburst Ballroom, where Edward Gorey figures
waltz to a phonograph record of dream-epiphanies.
No possum, no sop, no return to the then-emerging

field of rye, the crow of introspection
perorating from an oak. And when I drop
a disk of blue sky on the turntable,

the needle skips over the dragon kites that razed
Camelot, my natal city. I attribute
my present illness to that horrific event.

illustrations from The Black Doll, by Edward Gorey

i just don't know what i want

2010-04-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

i want to be slow like a cheetah
i want to be blunt like a tine
i want to be led like a leader
i want to shed leaves like a pine

i just don't know what i want
i just don't know what i want

i want to be clean like a mire
i want to be free like a slave
i want to speak truth like a liar
i want to get mail like a grave

i just don't know what i want
i just don't know what i want

i want to give alms like a thief
i want to be chaste like a whore
i want to rouse laughter like grief
i want to heal wounds like a war

i just don't know what i want
i just don't know what i want

drawlings

2010-04-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

Poem

2010-04-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

one foggy Sunday morning as we were making
out in the old graveyard your mystic eyes
dappled with sempiternal rattlesnakes
made an indelible impression
like a cardboard suitcase
full of nothingness
clobbering
sealions
who
puff calumet
pipes in Alhazred Gulch
but nor'westers would bowl over
squids of soot were the disembodied
caterpillars of yahyah smoke infesting
the well-wishing wells of Cleveland less inclined
to be equivocal as the masshapen
Miss Dazzle's opulent
eggbeater giraffe
parachuting
down
to
the
luau
where limpid statues are crucified
fuzzy Coca-Cola FUZZY corridor FUZZY of dragons
(*)(*)#^#^from the stratosphere^#^#(*)(*)
J zzzzzzzzzzzz
zz O zzzzzzzzz
zzzz S zzzzzzz
zzzzzz E zzzzz
zzzzzzzz T zzz
zzzzzzzzzz T z
zzzzzzzzzzzz E
O zebraic numinoids O soporific pumas
wouldn't be out of place in the derelict industrial ateliers imposing their eccentric personality on unborn children. The rucksack crammed with moral principles had a predilection for spank-happy Spanish figges stretching to infinity; nevertheless, a Byzantine mosaic of Mussolini
heeft een automatische
to help oppressed voyeurs daydream their imperilled and unremarked-upon reliquary. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is high-tech Moroccan endearments
meaning
dead
genuflecting polo-necked scarecrows
meaning
DEAD
omniscent Alhambran blackberries
meaning
DEAD
blind beggars queueing like samurai moths with a billion eyes
of broken glass
handcuffs whitecaps eavesdroppers archipelagoes
obfuscate Orpheus gliding over a logjam
of ravens

Memories of the Afterlife

2010-04-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

The moon is luminous--numinous, but only
just. I mean, it's hard to avoid. You see,
it's always poking its pockmarked face into
your privatemost pecadilloes, and--well... It's

just hard. I mean, how can you hate someone
who has no intimates, who subsists on air,
who transmogrifies into a California condor
with a wingspan like an A380, soaring on an updraft,

spiralling like the pattern on a shell
in which you study arcane occult cosmologies
in order to achieve a state of nescience?
That's not very just, is it? But now there are

clouds of incense shaped like low-flying submarines,
and those memories of the afterlife that, like Doctor Who,
take you back to the dissolution of the universe,
that darkle like sparklers, subfuscing an ethereal beauty

afflicted with anhedonia, plagued with suicidal ideation,
doffing her abracadabra and panties at a hinge
in the creek and skinnydipping to dispel the schadenfreude
she felt when the ornate birdcage elevator

snagged your amethyst ring--all those fade
when a jaguar leaps out of a mural and races your Vespa
to The Pyramid of the Moon. They're gone now, gone
forever, sinking slowly into the flagon

of luminosity, into the kaleidoscopic
rose window, into the vast tundra
through which subterranean stars
glow like golden scarabs.

Oneirodiner

2010-04-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

In my
oneirodynia I'm
always alone, wandering
widdershins on rain-
slain cobblestone,
awninged eyes
awling me toward
some owlery
or other--an all-
night diner from an erstwhile
era. Neonshine
redolent of redeye
ineyes, lucid
nebula illuminating
the nocturnal streetscape.
And I
sidle into a hall-
of-mirrors hallucination
in which all the shadow-
shawled castaways are,
like me, gloomy
as oolong, like me,
gloomy as the coal
dust that clung to
the lungs of miners
in Calumet, like me,
like me, lackluster
as a slack, lustrous
as a silhouette
scissored from black silk.
And the moke
of their smoke-wands
trawls my mind for
metaphors, nets
words--birds
dancing at anchor, hurdy-
gurdying in the dragon's-
blood sky.

the hall of mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai

Edgar Allan Poe: from "The Man of the Crowd"

2010-03-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D—— Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui — moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs — the αχλυς υς πριν επηεν — and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.

This latter is one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, and had been very much crowded during the whole day. But, as the darkness came on, the throng momently increased; and, by the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door. At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without.
***

With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepid old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,) — a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncracy of its expression. Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before. I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retzch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend. As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense — of supreme despair. I felt singularly aroused, startled, fascinated. “How wild a history,” I said to myself, “is written within that bosom!” Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view — to know more of him. Hurriedly putting on an overcoat, and seizing my hat and cane, I made my way into the street, and pushed through the crowd in the direction which I had seen him take; for he had already disappeared. With some little difficulty I at length came within sight of him, approached, and followed him closely, yet cautiously, so as not to attract his attention...

old photo of London crowd, photographer and date unknown--to me, at any rate

Jim Harrison: from "North American Image Cycle"

2010-03-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

In a dream I saw Spicer's body hanging from a hundred feet
of clothesline rope under the Golden Gate. Ask Weldon Kees
and Lew Welch to make contact, if alive or not. Crane's jump
in all things, a raincoat, borrowed. When I fish the Marquesas
every year I say to the passing fish, have you seen Crane's bones?
How deep and where do they lie and are they drawn together or
spread and are they peaceful on the bottom?

Anonymous: Hey Nonny No!

2010-03-13T05:45:00.000-08:00

Hey nonny no!
Men are fools that wish to die!
Is't not fine to dance and sing
When the bells of death do ring?
Is't not fine to swim in wine,
And turn upon the toe,
And sing hey nonny no!
When the winds blow and the seas flow?
Hey nonny no!

photo: The Velvet Underground with Nico and her son Ari

"certain bookworms eat books" --Tara Bray Smith

2010-03-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

I'm out of eggs.
I strike out on foot toward the Spartan Store.
A parrakeet alights on my shoulder
& squawks, "There's a sale on stingray eggs
at the Ornate Store."
I'm none too fond of stingray eggs,
but my indigence compels me
to entertain the bird's suggestion.
I'm about to change course when
a couple of sleestaks glom onto me
like Joseph K.'s warders
& steer me toward an art deco diner.
In the noirish black-&-white interior
the sleestaks disappear.
Kurt Cobain is sitting at the counter,
drinking coffee & smoking
next to a jukebox in which
big band 45's are stacked
like black flapjacks. I cross
the checkered floor & sit
next to him. We nurse
contemplative coffees in silence,
two shy misanthropes mutely
understanding each other.
Then I remember that I need eggs.
But by now all the stores are closed...
I awake alone, in the back of a decrepit
school bus moldering beside
a purling stream. Seized
with a presentiment of an oil-slick fire
like the one on the Cuyahoga River
in '69--a mobile holocaust--
I try to high-tail it out of there,
but suddenly the bus is impenetrably
crowded with people perusing
photos of Nazi concentration camps.
The bus is now a mobile
Holocaust museum. After a long struggle
I extricate myself from the throng
& disembark from the bus.
Hailstones the size of baseballs
are slowly falling. Beside the stream,
Walter Johnson is trying to autograph
the hailstones on their way down,
Robert Johnson is performing
"Blues Falling Down Like Hail,"
& Samuel Johnson is standing, bare-
headed & penitent, in front of
his dead father's bookstall--
a bouquiniste's stall by the Seine.
Among the titles I find
Dr. Seuss's Horton Hatches the Egg.
I take it home & cook it for breakfast.

droogy schillebeeckxian quale

2010-03-02T07:14:00.000-08:00

Philip Larkin: Going, Going

2010-02-28T11:07:00.000-08:00

I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

John Constable, Dedham Vale, 1802

John Donne: The Apparition

2010-02-25T03:23:00.000-08:00

When by thy scorne, O murdresse, I am dead,
And that thou thinkst thee free
From all solicitation from mee,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, fain'd vestall, in worse armes shall see;
Then thy sicke taper will begin to winke,
And he, whose thou art then, being tyr'd before,
Will, if thou stirre, or pinch to wake him, thinke
Thou call'st for more,
And in false sleepe will from thee shrinke,
And then poore Aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath'd in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lye
A veryer ghost than I;
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.

photo: Dorothy Walpole, the Raynham Hall spirit, East Anglia, Great Britain

Mnemosyne

2010-02-22T19:05:00.000-08:00

Remember when I called you collect from a smoke signal booth? You were rocking in an old oak rocker with downscrolling arms, a nimbus of corona smoke around your Panama hat. You were wearing a ring you'd bought at a flea market--a talisman imprisoning a Milky Way djinn.

Remember when we dashed into the Café du Monde to escape a torrential downpour? We sipped café au lait and watched all the tired scimitar-horned oryx in the sun. They lay in a golf ball dimple the circumference of the moon crater Abu al-Wafa.

Remember when we saw Eternity? It was like a nimbus around the moon. The graveyard angels had bald eyes; we scrolled up to the irises. Rain had fretted away the old lighthouse clock stone.

Remember when you suffocated? I was writing in my spiral notebook, augmenting my collection of verbal flotsam and jetsam, when you began gasping for breath. I gutted my ink pen and prepared to tracheotomize you--but your neck was that of a glass bottle, sliding down a guitar neck.

Starbucks

2010-02-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

My cup
of coffee
is sentient
pines for
a spoonful
of words
from my
book about
ancient Cynics
& the
far vague
neon signs
emblazon the
night with
a prayer
of lament
for a
dog on
whose grave
pines cast
a coffee-
colored shadow

Leonid Afremov, Rain City

Jeunes filles au bord de la mer

2010-02-17T04:53:00.000-08:00

This morning the mind mottled with tattoos
mauves the mosque in which the comely girls
come and go, besotted with absinthe-green murk,

with the scumbled colors of detritus sifted through
smoke-smirched, ashen faces. These girls are mere
mirages in brocaded jackets and chocolate watchbands,

enraptured by the etheric music of a harpsichord.
They look like moai wearing horn-rimmed glasses,
waiting for a Sierpinsky Gasket to trundle by

on aroma wheels and convey them to the heart-
chakra-green sea. They'd rather drown there
than in the deep end of a cheval mirror,

and who can blame them? There, dolphins dance
with globes of blue flame spinning on their noses.
There, celestial chariots with a myriad

Gothic bay windows descend to the esplanade
on butterfly wings. There, sprawled on a gravestone,
you can slip into sleep, drown in beatitude,

writhe through an interminable dream, an epic scrawled
on a wing of a Jefferson airplane: gaunt graverobbers
drift down on parachutes; rain-strafed statues ride

the subway to nothingness, nightness; the cat's headlights
glimmer through the blue grove, seeking, amid
a clutch of breasts, a sputnik dredged from the abyss.

photo by Jeanne Apelseth

Between the Black Spiders and the White Spiders

2010-01-29T07:25:00.000-08:00

I found a little flap
of dead skin on the middle
finger of my left hand
and began stripping it away.
Meanwhile, I heard
in my mind's ear the pastor
of my boyhood church
bid farewell to a disgruntled
segment of the congregation
with which he had doctrinal
differences. As I peeled
my hand in one long,
continuous strip, the pastor
wambled with a cane
toward the narthex--rather like
the lame defense attorney
in The Lady from Shanghai--
his speech growing echoey
and indistinct. And then
a thick swathe of flesh

tore away from my palm,
disclosing blood and bone.

Bond of Union, M.C. Escher

griffin rodeo

2010-01-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

if some moon safarier buttonholed me
if some nomad of the interstellar void
with drug-addled eyes glowing like electron tubes
accosted me on the urban-blighted streets of Creepyville
and waxed oracular
I'd interpret this contretemps as harbingery
like ravens loblollying the sky
premonitory of the cataclysm
for which I so morbidly jones
a shockwave razing the city primeval
and its eternal falsities
engulfing the Wagnerian vista where
the eldresses were wont to entrance the elders
with their fire-feathered fandango
and then I'd embark on a voyage to the nearest white dwarf
and work as a clown at the griffin rodeo

rue de la Femme-sans-tête

2010-01-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

Jeanne Duval no longer
djubas on the balcony
except maybe when swordswallowers
gag on minarets
but just as a woodnymph slides
down the banister of a spiral stairway
so candle shadows waggle
on the sandbag wall where the griffin-
plumed bird of paradise
hove to and hovered
so a daddylonglegs dodges
exophthalmic headlights
on the switchback of George Sand's
cigare smoke
therefore Jeanne Duval no longer
molders underground
unless the dybbuk's knuckleball
cold-cocks the petrel
with questionmark talons
suckerpunches the pockmarked moon
whitewashing the roofscape
where Hopperesque petrol pumps
metamorphose into figure-skaters
whose faces crack like polar ice-caps
when they cadge zeroes to buy a cup of ozone
at The Third Eye Café
therefore Jeanne Duval's pubic Bermuda Triangle
is my Elysian bailiwick
but if so why do skiffs
careen into the pool-queue pillars
of the wax museum
why do stiffs drift into the Chinese laundry
and swap their crêpe-paper raincoats
for moth-eaten dirndls
as if intent on flesh-crawling
buzzsawing through orange neon cobwebs
revolving like the doors of aeronautilus shells
scrimshawed with runes for resurrecting the dead

Sister Deirdre

2009-12-31T14:11:00.000-08:00

You, Sister Deirdre, won't you testify?
You, falling upward--how should I put it?--like
rainskulls riding shotgun pellets the size of ben wa balls,

ascending to the ceiling fan
that winnows the shoal of mother-of-pearl butterflies?
Do you want us to undulate like the sea?

I want only to tryst with an apparition,
a dominatrix whose moonmask, ravaged
by a sputnik's talons, transmutes

blackjacketed pariahs into an eye orchard,
a forest of crucifixions.
Night steeped in the teapot of the sky.

Then things got really weird.
We heard her clattering on woolly mammothback
down the secret alleyway to No-Man's-Land,

where dolmens crazyquilted with riven mirages
malinger in the fog of a myriad meerschaums.
We saw her whang on wharves like a whale's fluke.

Sister Deirdre, won't you
descend from the empyrean?
Won't you garland our cupolas

with the glowing embers of your words?
I want only to batten coyotes with hairpin turnovers.
I want only to be snooded with a chinablue vein.

painting: The Cross In The Mountains, Caspar David Friedrich, 1808

More of My Famous Blue-Chip Cookies

2009-12-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

My Famous Blue-Chip Cookies

2009-12-03T11:33:00.000-08:00

My famous blue-chip cookies rolled like hubcaps
down a street strewn wth stragglers strangled by lampposts.

Just then Grimhawk the Scrimshanker slunk
out of the Chinese Theater, his trenchcoat

abulge with the pensive sawdust of remorse.
The sepia sludge of his solitude flooded the mauve

corridors of the seraglio where seraphim
aloof as cats woofed like dogs. The Weird Sisters

no-showed--they were French-kissing celestial scuzz
in the fogbound sarcophagus--but the she-kraken

were much in evidence, held spellbound by the latest
scrimshavian installment. I decamped

to my ancestral halls, only to find them
gutted, exuding melancholy, a malaise

inexorable as the zamboni ironing the zinc
rink, effacing the runnicles inscribed

by the runners of navelgazers whose Christmas stockings
beicicle the mantle on my shouders.

moiré effect

2009-12-01T07:20:00.000-08:00

what riven web what speckled window what vast expanse of buoy-studded mirror of whisper-peopled solitude hushes the caped ciphers the crow-headed sea lions that slunk from the depths of the climactic moment what Baal-worshipping duenna what ikon late of Areon Hall skiffs across the mica-flecked silhouette of a scarecrow whose soul is a three-quarter moon whose top hat is laden with spider-mustachioed refugees whose funhouse mirror shards glide toward the ichor-swollen steeple of the eyrie zapped by zebra stripes of lightning the treehouse where the luminous wings of redemption affixed themselves to the zephyr flowers of sensitivity where zombies instinct with the dulcet tones of jackhammers dissolved in hydrochloric acid where the fluorescence of weathervanes pretzeled by a circus Hercules blinds the skateboardists on a dead-end street lined with black-plumed shakos when the moony misanthrope skulking amid the revelers blows the clepsydrae off dandelions sprouting from the cracks in a stone lion when dense fog occludes the archway threaded by a cortege of hunchbacked specters swinging thuribles plumbing morasses scotching glowworms what serpentine alley what enigmatic orchard what supernal splendor dukduks the darksome daguerreotype o my jade-green soul

the music to which I wrote this:

The painting is Village of the Mermaids by Paul Delvaux.

Wagami

2009-11-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

transparent cutouts of astral chimeras
wambling on the brink of a precipice
transparent cutouts of ancestral spirits

free-floating in a blizzard of gibbous moons
bask in Chinese lantern light when ravers
embark on a vision quest in a '32 Ford

when circus freaks venture deeper into the vortex
to escape the electrodes affixed to keening kettles
when a ray of dark dirks your innermost depths

when monsoon lightning illumines the vaulted ceiling
of a soul whose rainstreaked eyewindows gaze on Dreamtime
a soul who longs to embrace the luminous Beloved

she is drowning in a goblet overflowing with rain
she is listening to strident music that evokes the sea
she is envisioning multitudinous blueblack butterflies

whose antennae meet and part like scissor blades
in time with the REMs of planetarium domes
scissor blades like wings in Blake engravings

scissor blades like rearview swatches of doppelgänger
scissor blades that intersect at a vulva
like an Art Nouveau entrance to the Métro

William Blake's Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels

Siddhartha

2009-10-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to embellish this lichen-shrouded dolmen
with steamer trunk labels from points exotic,

but I no sooner squeegee one flat than it
evaporates. Meanwhile, bible-black butterflies

billow from bay windows, baying a plangent
air. They percolate through the maple grove

obscuring the perpetual pancake breakfast
at the end of Green Dolphin Street. I'll follow:

they say Siddhartha's there; he's amassing a body
sizable enough to induce a sublime terror.

That I have to see.

Joani's Butterfly

2009-10-05T19:21:00.000-07:00

Rummaging through the fog, I cannot find you,
only a surfeit of sleek,
indrawn chameleons.
O hyacinthine naiads, chimerical quasars,
does the diva
merge with
or emerge from
the maple grove, murmuring an interminable soliloquy?
Myself, I would prefer the liquefaction of lions
in a garden of incandescent knives,
or moonburned breasts
on a windowsill pendulous
as a nether lip.
I would prefer to go on sleeping under the looming
lobster pincer, dreaming
of you.
Disquieted, you quietly
"OM" in an otherwise empty
gloaming.
Still you are that stranger
strangled on the switchback
to the cloche.
Still you are that geeing and hawing bicycle
whose bell sounds strangely like a train's
descant.
Still you are Joani's butterfly--
the illuminata who, bedecked
with a sapphire necklace, descended
to the ocean
and
rose
madder
lake.

The painting is Border Crossing 3 by Peter Max

over and over

2009-09-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

over and over
the full moon rolls
a snowman's head
moaning and dreaming
of a mythic body
of a woman who lives
in an ivory shell
who listens to an aria
endlessly repeating
on an old Victrola
rising from the dead
over and over

The painting is Moonlit Cove by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Overheard in a Bookstore Coffeeshop

2009-09-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Cela peut paraitre bizarre,
mais il n'y a pas de femme
avec qui je voudrais
être intime. Les mots nocifs
de Sandrine me blessent encore
quand j'y pense. J'ai essayer
de sentir amoureux,
mais je n'ai réussi pas.
Mon voeu le plus cher
est d'être tout seul avec
mes pensées et faire comme si
les jeunes filles n'existent pas.
Mes jours se composent des
livres et des pensées, rien
d'autre. Je puis être poli,
mais pas intime... Je vais
chercher des livres maintenant.

sous les pavés la plage

2009-09-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

sous les pavés la plage
the inner world in which
you are hermetically sealed
inviolate
longing for the numinous
sleepsquelching seven-league-booted
across infinitude

walking your lobster through
the portico of a movie palace
you are accosted by wolves
furred with silver knitting needles

your matador's cape of newspaper
dissipates in the simoom
you feel the immanence of death
celestial vortex

in white coffee
a rorschach blot of black milk
a death's-head hawk moth
you ride to a postapocalyptic
nightmare in which flesheating
mutants lumber toward you

you are armed with nothing
but a wheel lock

caparisoned with mist
inchoate ideas
canter into your sanctum
a funeral parlor
redolent of jacaranda

you fall down an elevator shaft
to bottomfish
unutterable secrets
funeral cairn of orrery balls

scumbled laments
on lotus petals
downdrifting
from the abyss of night
in which stars glitter
orange and pink
les yeux sans visage

FOR JIM CARROLL, 1949-2009

Droopy Drawers

2009-09-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

Droopy Drawers broods on the porch stoop.
Dead leaves pile up on the wide brim of his hat; traffic whooshes past,
splattering him with slush.
Droopy Drawers doesn't care.
Droopy Drawers is watching tarantulas clamber out of factory stacks, listening
to the brassknuckled wind pummel awnings.
Droopy Drawers is flummoxed by fundamental questions.
A train of thought shunts on an intricate wickerwork of tracks in his head.
Though covered with moss like a rock, his head flickers like a bulb on a theater
marquee.
He says, "Hey Dee, let's C a B-movie, A?"
Lonely in a sunken freighter, Droopy Drawers draws cartoons on Zig Zag papers.
Droopy Drawers counts the merrygoround horses on a smokering.
When his eyelids are heavy as roll tops of antique desks, Droopy Drawers looks
for a diner that grinds onyx mourning rings for coffee.
Droopy Drawers looks into his cup at the shadowy eye-socket of a corpse
beaked by kvetching crows.
Droopy Drawers devours can-lid sandwiches, kisses high-voltage wires.
He says, "Kissing is just reading Braille editions of lips."
Droopy Drawers klomps herky-jerkily through somnolent fog creeping like
kudzu, furring furniture, covering everything.
Siroccos career through town; steeples jitter, warp into fish-hooks; an uprooted
rose, flying at bullet speed, punches Droopy Drawers in the gut.
Droopy Drawers folds up like origami.
Droopy Drawers ascends from nadir to zenith, swallows the moon, a mother-of-
pearl brooch on a black sequinned dress.
Droopy Drawers hangs the dress in a closet full of cliffhangers.
His birthmark is a postmark, his eardrums are oildrums.
He butters a drumroll, preparing for a jam session.
Droopy Drawers was drummed out of The School of Night for opening the envelope
of Marlowe's face and finding a phonograph needle dipped in wingshade.
Droopy Drawers was the front man for The Mockiavelcrows until he garotted a
groupie with piano wire.
Droopy Drawers was a journalist until he wrote an obituary for a doornail.
Unable to hold a job, Droopy Drawers hocked his transparent
skullcap--the contact lens the Cyclops wore on his one eye--and took to wearing a wide-
brimmed hat.
Now, when he's not brooding on the porch stoop, Droopy Drawers is silversurfing
around the A & P with a squirt gun full of yeti blood, action-painting the groceries, or blowing berets off baboons with a beretta.

Moonmoan

2009-09-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

In the parked car of the moon the country station
moans like an arabesque marooned in a camera
obscura,

like a turban over the yews and Celtic crosses
of a churchyard where a girl betakes herself
to pray.

A trainbow straddles the ocean; the vowel-mouthed moon
Ferris-wheels over a mountain of suicided
crows.

The moon lugs her lovelessness down the old
highway to an elevator laden
with moans--

the moans of a meandering morning train,
the moans of phantoms reeling through the alleys
of my brain.

Fingers

2009-08-29T06:01:00.000-07:00