they pull, they are free

anabasis means a journey inland from the sea, according to wikipedia.
things that in a touchingly wierd way have something to do with each other:
bring on the empty horses -david niven
horses in my dreams -p.j. harvey

this is a picture of constance bennett. according to niven, she gleamed all over.

just wild beat communication

am i careless? am i stupid? am i just scrabbling 'round this darkness with a blunt instrument hoping to score some kind of points like in sports?

my brain moves at, like, tortise-speed, and that may be an insult to tortises. because i'm self-obsessed, and if there's any way to get around that i don't know what it is. over-honesty is freakin' painful to the observer, the one who's being honested at, because abstraction is less consuming. and frankly i'm on abstraction's side. but i can't seem to get control of myself as a "poet."

i have a working theory, don't get me wrong. the theory is that if i reframe and reframe and reframe this one noun that took place, like, three years ago now, it'll eventually end in some kind of surgical-style comprehension. but that's a joke, a scaffold, by now. the single noun extends outward, aquinas-style (i think), proust-style, until everything references it and it references everything.

which is fine. it's not horrible...it's not ridiculously horrible. it's not horrible past all comprehension. but what significance it has in the context of anything beyond the exact limit of my own skin is less easily defined. and until i know if there is a justification for its existence, i am so freakin' selfish.

this is not whining. it's just cleverly disguised as whining.

take care of this house

from the diary of pembroke:

acrostic
CRATCH
BRANG
WRAEP
REOTH
CONNOTATION

my dreams revolve around bark, squirrels, v of this, v of that.
lupus-waldsworth hasn't moved in twenty four hours.

this may be my fault too, for making him of flesh.
footnote: we all starved to death.

these poems are not math. i'm sorry for that.

(as the ascent beckoned)
1.
i saw a white-haired man escort a white-haired woman
from a catholic church with large wood doors.
the cross on the brown sign outside was white
and the inside was lit bright with gold light.
i sighted one tiny sliver of the life
of this woman and man with hair of silver-white.

2.
what the hell good does this shit do me? what meaning meant it to extrapolate? am i like the reaper with his scythe sheathing bits of golden meaning into bales or something? do i pile golden bits around me until this obscure opacity of flesh collapses under the pressure? death? sex? the red and the black of meat and bone dark?

one angstrom of catastrophe does not make a man culpable for his lovecraftian weavings on paper or in plastic. it must be several. and i have a paucity. folliculous!

3.
it is a push or a pull against what must be death.

(the sound of waves).
(clarice, my delicacy, clarice)

it must be thus, or we're left with love.
and--christ, and nothing but.

4.
AS THE ASCENT BECKONED, BITCHES
AS THE ASCENT BECKONED
AS THE ASCENT BECKONED
AS THE ASCENT BECKONED, BITCHES.

5.
spendthrift.

brown head against plastic desktop.

with irony as my mistress.

i wanted to write a dark poem.

it's a constant tautness, isn't it? isn't it? isn't it?

bete noir

from the diary of pembroke:

everything continually comes to the point of total illumination, and then, as though controlled by some massive and unseen machinery, it stops and flows backward into dark inexorability. so that, if i am ever asked to account for these things i have done in the light of day, i am close to certain that no reply will be forthcoming in my mouth. there were reasons that i did them, god what reasons, but there is no answering for them. my state is such that, though i have spent years in this forest, during those hours between sunrise and sunset i am unable to describe a single tree, shrub, blade of grass...

under these revised circumstances, almost any door in the world is open to me. but i step through none. this is reality at its most supervised. lupus-waldsworth seems to have burnt the squirrelmeat again and requires assistance.

lovecraft

the sound of a knock drifting

i saw a bird flying low
over the freeway in the purple dusk.
it looked something like
a storm-tossed frigate in a painting,

or something else
moderately large and
taut against a pitching wind:
possibly a plastic grocery sack.

wrap deep, wrap deep around me, deny
that form or sense have any meaning beyond
what i can give them. block out
this pounding and this horror at the threshold.

f.5 (irony soundtrack)

when the night has come / and the land is dark / and the moon is the only light we'll see, / no, i won't be afraid, /no, i won't be afraid, / just as long as you stand, stand by me, stand by me, darling, darling, stand by me, oh stand by me oh stand stand by me stand by me stand by me stand by me stand by me

f.4

red-headed on wetted asphalt, segmented.

f.3

an intensification of urge to synthesis: the sound of waves.

f.2

the little wet things.

f.1

veronica.

facet v

crunk.

each segment stratified, constellated on the ground.

the thud of the door against the doorframe.

the five pips are dried prior to being sealed into an envelope.

even ed wood, even under the waves, leviathanate, lost to it.

facets 5 of 5

dissolute on the branch--compounds reconforming wantonly, segment on segment, juices intermingling, taste shadowed rich with rot, the green and white pledge blossoming on the skin.

the startled awakening of the garage door's grinding machine sounds.

ed wood's pulses throb; he spreads out his hands and it sucks at each finger; his throat is taut against it like a bending red stem.

an orange is rounded and meant to be handled.

o res mirabilis! manducat dominum pauper, pauper, servus, et humilis.

facets 3

the hushed lop of substances on the carpet.

there's a semi-carrionate taste to the over-ready citrus.

even ed wood, even where the sensation touched him, the skin of both his hands and his lips, his legs, below his skirt.

its membrane so fine.

when he looks into your spanish eyes, and the world seems so beautiful tonight.

facets ii

he's loosened up his buttons.

a seville orange is red with its own juices.

ed wood went down into liquid like jacques cousteau and hardly came up for air...but was he desperate or greed-filled, what was he throbbing with.

the rain-thrashed branch--the wet black bough and the flowers on it.

the bright, labored hum of water in the faucet.

facets

the segmented fruit, dropping, rotting on the branch itself.

dispatches of sound from everyday life: the discontented stretching hum of the old computer fan.

he's bringing sexy back.

ed wood crossdressed--can even he be trusted?

the bright orange fruit.

carnis angelicus

most poetry, especially modern poetry, used to annoy the shit out of me. the same went for opera--i distinctly remember thinking that the stuff would sound okay if the singers would just stop vibrating so damn much. i guess a person builds up a tolerance, and eventually the stuff that was too strong for them becomes the stuff they can't get enough of.

as always i wish i could break things down further. i wish the match between what i feel and what i might feel were stronger, more exact, more perfect. the fact that i never tire of restating, reforming, re-arriving at this hope comes as something of a comfort... or it means that the hope is a blanket covering for a mass of unknowables that my weak brain x's as being within each other's scope...

blather blather yammer yammer rubies rubies lips.

facetus 5

facetus 4

the king's men tracked johnny like an animal.

let x equal x. let y equal

skeleton/meat on.

words without thoughts never to heaven go.

facetus 3

if x or x1 is in part or whole y, let x or y be x or y, or let x not be y if y's being is not quite part of x--let y be x'd.

we are not skeletor, for there is meat on ors.

over-protested.

johnny, side red with blood, drove his mare deep into the woods.

facetus 2

we are not skeletus, there's meat on us.

let y equal or not equal x or let y equal part but not the whole of x--let y "equal" x--let y be x1 or x, or let y not be x.

the king's men hunted down johnny and shot him in the side.

what's for rememberance is rosemary, apparently.

facetus

let x and y be equal or not equal.

johnny was hunting the red-tailed doe on the king's preserve; he shot her and brought her to ground and ate her.

we are not skeletons; there is meat on us.

something something quietus make.

con carne

temptation by tom waits

1.
i can't resist.

2.
there were fools who lasted about three months on that trip before disease or starvation killed them: pembroke, to whose diary we are indebted for the details, lupus-waldsworth the surgeon, and tripnose, the minstrel. except that he was killed by squirrels. they went for the nuts. pembroke, i find, spoke most eloquently for himself and lupus-waldsworth, however, when he wrote the following on the twenty-fourth of november that year:

v v v v v
v v v v v
v v v v v
v v v v v
...this v, it is a fever of the brain, a cypher from which all else hangs, all else hanging over-saturate and supreme, gloating, glowing, spinning, rotting... the innocent apex, the crux of most salvation. on a doily.

he was raving by that time, you see. six months later the body was found. nutless.

3.
don't be ridiculous, clarice.
you don't want to put that there.
(my delicacy hold me)

*pants*

*defenestrates depressed body as metaphor for fire extinguisher*

4.
for instance, we only have pembroke's word for it that lupus-waldsworth ever even existed. or v, for that matter.

untenable:
stained glass
sans lead.

5.
there was a body
on a sidewalk.
there were shapes and sizes.
there was a breathing.
there was a dripping.

facet 5

the soft mask of skin.

the touch of a cool hand at dusk.

niether the honey nor the

facet 4

wet like fruit.

each segment rounded, polished like a jewel.

they cut off the skull to let the brain swell.

facet 3

something tapped, sinuous, strenghtened with duct tape.

head in the corner crying long red tears.

on the floor a man is lying, he is lying side by side.

facet 2

redesigned with new contours.

the lace and leather set's bete noir: the red and blue, indomitable x.

a l'instant, the smell and smack of wet city street.

facet
cold and windblown like the scent of your hair.

saltpeter.

the honey, the bee.


(i think this facet thing is formal, in the formin'-est sense of the word; it's a little bit about that borges story where the mystic decides to dream a man into existence, but while borges' mystic dreams a progress starting with a flesh heart and moving on to other parts, eventually creating in a sense himself, i'm doing something else...and will end up with a man nothing like me. because frankenstein sure managed it. or maybe i'm just making up an excuse to write really short poems.)

facet 5

by the pricking of my thumbs, something tiny this way comes.

asphalt on windshield. love and love and love.

facet 4

to aid in precision of placement.

x'd across pavement.

facet 3

there is a dark-furred beast in that corner.

someone in ed wood's house was a cross-dresser.

facet 2

the traditional bride wears at her wedding things old new borrowed and blue.

a face goes through a windshield at x miles an hour.