bawd to an ewe lamb

i. SINPATICO

i was too full of SIN for fetishes.
even the localization of desire to any specific within the generally conceptual was without the scope of my VICE. so i kept it (desire) whole and slowly writhing like a giant pink baby echidna parade balloon, knubbed and lightly haired and rubbed with unguents to keep it slightly glistening.

until you came along.

then there was this giant pink nascent echidna balloon versus the black-haired red-lipped parade balloon that in me represented you. if there had been mud enough and handlers' skills, these two enheliumate structures, lady, might have duked it out for my soul in a wrestling extravaganza.

but what i was really hoping for was a great swallowing, either by you of the echidna of my desire, or by the echidna of you that you might wear the face of it, a localized suspension (because in midair), an apex of its focusless name.

OH HELL OF MY SOUL, this treatise unbreach'd,
this tract unfurrowed,
this torch unburned,
this potato not yet mashed and check that ain't been cashed.


ii. FACTS

the echidna has an unusually large thrombosis, which is the part of the brain responsible for r.e.m. sleep, recycling, and waking dreams. it is the most evenly-distributed metonym in all austria but bears its eggs in a pouch and feeds them off milk patch-holes. when just hatched it looks like something that forcibly burrowed its way out of painter francis bacon's gray and slimy brain--athena, but without either zeus or the looks. it's ugly, pink, and damnably formless.

i remember seeing you before i knew you. it was the flop of your thick hair, the way you held your chin, your glasses, and your walk that were most remarkable to the uninitiated. the eyes, smile, and voice remained secreted into patches i was to know only later when i sat next to you kind of by accident and you ate a salad.

i don't think you know i write this stuff. is that why it's all online? do you hate me, five? does this count as history?


iii. SOFT WITH REFLECTION
niether the honey nor the

the pink desire wields little arm-nubs
against the cold and post-egg world.

like winter on wallace stevens' brain,
i am weighty, airless. there are various
places at which all things touch down,

SIN, for instance,
SIN,
SIN,
or SIN.


iv. IT'S COLD AND I'M STUPID


v. NOTHING IS RESOLVED BUT THIS:

lover, you...
lover, you...
in the couch the kittens mew.

did you and my desires touch?
not so much.
not so much.

i thought love would be a grander thing.
it's nothing but a deepening.

an opening of black and red
when you were gone, my placeholder.

like yours, lady, like yours

gravum recordum veritavum

i'll give you a dollar for every day you don't touch me,
in vitrus aquibutes or otherwise,
di ceste beronicus tua. if you know what i mean.
soft-skinned. yes, like that. don't just like that.
you are the tigris and wild-ass euphrates
of my soul, o my vamparbicus alfinza voe muliarbibus.

even the earth rebels,
o my sole mio.
under our love the ore flows.
in questo voi siete non voglio
non vedete senza ricardi
tuo, tuo mein angelo mio,
mein scapulum,
mein scapulorum.

they whose names begin with letters in mind

rough pasturage

it was dumb to think
i'd ever take the impression you
made on me,
vanna,
sitting on the couch upholstery
with someone else's children,

staring at the sargent
printed on the wall and
thinking of something. i told you
i wrote a paean to someone walking
by the other day and you nodded.

i will keep you safe.
i will keep you hearty.
i will have you drink ten gallons of warmed milk
at each breakfast if you will just look at me.

one song...glory...one song...glory...one song...glory...one

somepath

mr. director i
honestly see myself as
fierce, proud, and racy enough for
daytime t.v.

if you have a cat and
you put the litterbox in
the kitchen there'll always be
crap in the kitchen.

i liked scanners because
it was so meaningless within
itself. you have to craft a meaninglessness
like that--

not unlike god, with a mealworm
in the palm of his broad hand, on the
first, second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth day.
that shit's inevitable.

tireless and functionless

sympath y

swaths and tracts;
desire in all its facets.

it is uncleanly. there are shores
upon which its small barque breaks.

simple gold and its complexity
of artifacts. there is no left to this black and red center. it says do it better. it holds, it holds, it holds, and what it has it keeps and loves, pointless and denizened with fragments:

the cold, the hot and, past everything,
the lovely in its agon y.

schlaf, mein kind (spelling open to interpretates)

sky the color of

rust, a slightly rotted
end to day.

look upon that brown, heart's child.
some day all this will be yours:

the creature feature,
the cractal fractal,
the imp, the seed,

such an expanse, an expanse
of such things, and such, such stuff.

one acquainted with the

a knock drifting

i keep opening my eyes and seeing
a long bird fly backwards across the windshield vertically
in the blue dusk.

it has to be more than one bird because
we are travelling, away from
where all long birds go at dusk, apparently.

it confuses the notion of circularity
at least, repetition a visual or heard match
of sensation on sensation, nonextant--

nothing's ever the same, is it, not even
two birds flying to the same place through the same sky
seen from the same car.

wrap deep about me twilight and deny
and deny that sense, that sound or sight, ever does less
or more than keep me safe.

i have to go back to school. eurydice reminds me of how much i don't know about lit theory and, well, just anything.

to iii

thoughts ran low in your head, like,
post- of its equator.
there was a great deal of color
in them, and much wisdom,
ordered and spiraled fractal-like.

on the surface you said, like,
"you know, the thing,"
and we didn't know,
but then you'd smile,
we liked you a lot.

eh.

on the subject of eurydice:

she's the perfect object of woman, and i'm not just saying that. though it might be interesting to see what that woman grecian scholar olson so liked (and with reason, with freaking reason--she's fabulous) has to say on the subject of eurydice, as far as i know now, as far as i can tell, it's impossible to pin a face on eurydice. in the course of her story she does one thing that can be framed as an action not precisely thrust upon her: she runs away from aristaios (who, gleaning from wikipedia, was most firmly associated with beekeeping in virgil's georgics, the last fourth of which was about beekeeping and was where the whole eurydice running away thing came up), one assumes to preclude her rape. then, not unlike cinderella in the jump-rope rhyme, she steps on a snake and it bites her and she dies.

i'm not saying it's not a complex metaphor. apparently there was an orphic cult, which i (possibly inaccurately--i didn't get very deep into this olson-lady-with-the-myth's book) took to understand as a school, of sorts, of, in a sense, either more or less concrete, aesthetics, which means to me (again possibly entirely inaccurately) that the myth itself is extremely bound up in its own metaphor; in other words, the myth was there to serve a purpose, give locus to a previously unexpressed shared opinion (which are such thin words to embody what i'm trying for)--airy nothing/habitation, name, location. as opposed to its just existing for people like cocteau to grab down off the shelf in 19whenever and slap a poetics onto, it's a story steeped in meaning, with a long tradition of half-representation or the visceral match which might be called metaphoric device. and i'm not saying it hasn't changed in meaning, obviously. as with shakespeare (romeo and juliet die for disobedience/romeo and juliet die for love/romeo and juliet die because they're so freaking young), time and the individual and cultural perspective have gotta change the context.

but it's still impossible to plug a face onto eurydice. i once read a review of sabrina that pissed me off immensely in which the person said it was sub-par as a hepburn movie because there were too many characters that underwent cinderella-style transformation (not just audrey but bogie as well). and okay, that still pisses me off. but it might apply to eurydice: giving her agency makes the story what it isn't (i mean, if you replace cinderella-style transformation with agency, and bogie with eurydice, that's how the above-above applies to the above). it makes the story orpheus's, almost solely. eurydice is the thing he's got to drag up from out of the dark. it leads him to ask himself whether or not he ever knew her, whether or not he ever wanted her or even saw her...it's possible for him to ask himself these questions because he doesn't exist--or because time has gone by and now she doesn't exist either.

someone pointed out that petrarch made a killing off laura much as dante did off what's-her-face--that it was the inaccessibility, rather than the person, or the petty emotion of lost love, able to be tamped down into lines and phrases, rather than the ladies themselves, or the versions that survived inside the poets rather than any outside source of light, dark, joy, or suffering, that made the poetry. and the whole eurydice thing to me pretty much accurately describes the utter subjectivity of that poetic source. maybe a person can't help but eurydice a lost and silent love. i don't know. it makes for pretty good poetry though.

cocteau just stuck that guy in EVERYTHING

eurydice

don't let her go
into the deep blue.

already she is losing
even the semblance
of flesh.

don't let her leave you.

who are you
without she?

what be thee
without her, thy mistress,
dark, soft-eyed goddess,

with hair black and full as a lightless lake?

from moment, even,
to moment,

the word's not the same.
don't leave me, you, you say.
don't leave me, love,

don't go (don't go)

pic of jack/poem/pic of sarges/diatribe

my mom gets mad at me when i write or say anything negative about myself that i am thinking. it seems she doesn't understand that for me any experience able to be put into language in any form is fair game because there's so much untranslateable into and from the meat darkness. in fact i'll go crazy and specify: conrad wrote heart of darkness which i read maybe twenty pages of before losing in which he gave to these nonverbalizable parts a local habitation and a name namely i guess the congo but inside the self it's there and lurking hence the "heart" part of the title i'm guessing. none of this is in fact particularly insightful it is in fact old and tired but to feel it inside and apply said words to said phenomenon is like a pool and you've named the pool rim "pool rim" and inside is the damn signifier staring at you possibly with the correct pool until you're blue in the face (because the water makes you look blue): it looks like you but if lucky you can see something move in the depth. s. do i know how to construct a poem or what.

some thing. something so mething HATE
some thing something some thing DATE
some thing something someth ing LATE
something somethi ng s omething WHAT?



i keep tugging at myself and tugging and tugging. were i a sweater i'd be completely stretched out of shape and at least partially unravelled. i think this has partially to do with the fever. partially exhibit a is myself on the horns of a dilemma. how much apology is allowable? does warm face and cold hands spell beth and beladonna to everyone? how do you spell "beladonna?" is it brave to put my name to this offense, or ungrateful? how do you spell "offense?" is that a small gnome irish jigging on the keyboard or is it the sound of two hands typing? am i a remotely reasonable facsimile of a person, or does my subjecthood resemble the michelin guy as closely as my body does? daddy do i want a drink of water?

i'm really sorry; i'd keep saying so but it's pretty much totally self-indulgent. i'm sorry for so many different reasons: 1., i was wrong, 2., i knew i was wrong when i did it...hence 3., it's not an action i can look in the face and say "it was really a mistake. honestly, it was a mistake," because unlike most of the wrongs i do it was no mistake, though i can't say it was a machiavellian-ly-plotted maneuver because otherwise i'd have found some way to put myself into the right before doing it, at least in my mind. i don't think i've ever been this wrong before.

which, frankly, now that i've admitted i feel better about. i'd like to think that i'd feel better about it even if the affair hadn't somewhat blown over because the person in question is being so inordinately understanding (and by the way when i try to put myself into her perspective what i get is this, like, furnace-blast of thinking about myself "what a fucking jerk, what a fucking jerk," kind of ad infinitum but gaining in violence). but it's probable that that level of moral distinction doesn't exist in me... MAN, do i have to stop writing about this, before the huge crap-pile of self-obsession that i like to call "honesty" at last succumbs to the force of gravity all over me (ohhh yeah).

h- to the -uzzah. nothing should be able to soothe the wrong i've done. but it can. and that's stupid.

i wonder how many first grade time capsules there are out there that have been destroyed by war, development, deforestation... i also wonder if the warmth emanating from the back of my head is approximately equal to that which would be generated by a small long-haired cat sitting on the nape of my neck. i'm guessing no. must...put...down...internet...

sonnet

ancora

if that this simple syllogism will serve, then so:

my heart is like one of those figurines inside a snow globe.
it is on display but it is not easily touched.
also it is preserved inside fluid, possibly thicker than water,
and there are snowflakes made of a separate substance probably some type of plastic.
to touch my heart ergo requires breakage and spillage:
the equivalent of shards of glass, swimming in fluid,
possibly thicker than water, and white flakes of plastic
of some type, a definite no-no on the rug in the living room for instance.
when the shell's broke it will be exposed, yes,
touchable, naked, slick, still, mute, and totally
alien to its environment. possibly you'll still have a desire
to shake it and see the flakes moving about.
but the thing is it's solid, and therefore a mystery,
so you better be damn sure you want it. the end.

immensely proud

my mom gave me boots for christmas which i haven't yet stopped wearing whenever possible, and my dad just burned his fingers on a soup bowl for me. i am one lucky bastard.

escalator

des droigts du sang,
des petits droigts, du escalier.

glass and brass
it curves
black stripe
down from
top.
check your ticket,
man, here's where it stops
and you get off.
a possible metaphor
for
someone you met going out the door.
kill me kill me kill me ere i leave this glass and brass emporium of stuffs all gently gliding round like swandown on a breeze what?
it's a metaphor. calm the hell down
before i kill you.
(how many organizational intents
ride this poem, class?
stop picking at your labia, clarice,
you're not getting to me
[my delicacy, hold me] *pants*)

*throws fire extinguisher
through plate glass window
as metaphor for the
depressed body*

*rhymes*

*and escalates*

who the hell knows anymore?

down at the sunset grill

i'll titrate your vowels, parsimonious bastard,
drop your dang words into a beaker so exactly
you'll be breathing gases straight through the cold snap.

don't you tell me what you're doing with that old piece of booty--
dubloons, vera quartermain, dubloons and carrion thighs
in the hold down under.

elevate the cornice stone, you sap,
and check out what's underneath: a catalog aria, a hill of beans,
my motherfuckin' love, as so:

i love you vera.
vera i love you
i you vera love.
helas my love to leave you (a)
be eth no less than death-- (b)
i know it shan't bereave you (a)
but i shall feel it, struth. (~ b)
my love for you's like roses (~ ~ a)
twined 'round a garden gate: (c)
those thrusted pointed palings (a\c)
too little known, too late-- (c)
or never known too early, (d)
or somewhat known a bit, (e)
or known a tiny smidge, (e +)
if you had my kind of heart, (> d)
baby, if you had my kind of heart. (= > d)

spiky quince is in its blossom-time
like my heart for you.

thickety hell hell!

as advertised in vainglory by myself on myspace, by some crazy chance operation i got a week on no tell motel--i just googled myself (last time ever, swear to god), and saw my own name on the "upcoming" page or something and it was so freaking exciting i nearly crapped myself. too much information? yes, i thank you. january 29th through, um, five days later, for all you me's out there wondering. nothing that's not already on here. i'm such a dumbass, i should change my name to dumbass.

i don't know who's picture that is. but it pretty much expresses something. i'm pretty sure.

verbal ycosis

polonius 101

buck up, kid.
life's tough but you're tougher.
we all make mistakes,
but they're mistakes we can weather.

hold that head high
and get on with your life.
what fun would it be
without trouble or strife?

your nose to the grindstone
and your hand on the wheel,
don't keep thinking so hard
on what it's you feel,

cuz that kind of thing
will just clog up your engine.
if you want to go smooth
all that guilt requires benchin'.


hamlet 104a

requiring the spirit made flesh to do otherwise than repeat and repeat and repeat itself is basically nothing more than an exercise, like turning tricks on street corners, skinning cats in several differing ways, and adding one part flour to every two parts butter as directed in christmas cookie recipes. it's impossible, of course, when your hands are tied behind your back and you're on your knees slobbering at the cock of one of fate's harbingers in the form of a woman who you done wrong, so wrong, so wrong, but it's an exercise. like stairmaster. you apologize and apologize and possibly apotheosize but there's nothing wrong with that, not since yesterday.

i want
to tear
the skin
off words.

delve deep,
o body.
i'll shroud
you.

quick poem 2

heine on his best day
wasn't half as great
as a real good neck spray.

rhetoricus

ruhe, meine seele

all the leaves on the trees
are wrong.
the winged birds
are wrong,
and the white and gray clouds
are wrong.

the waves are wrong.
the grass is wrong.
the rocks and stones
are wrong, wrong.

it was waiting in my mouth,
viy,
and you never took it,
on my lips,
and you never touched it.

the mind is wrong.
the flesh is wrong.
the mind is flesh,
and the flesh is wrong.