esmeralda

archduke 2

because i was good all day i took her out for a spin. revving for me, for me she took the pavements, because i'm good with her, good for her. before me who did she have? who did she have?

when i'm in her i know sometimes i take the curves too fast, i stop too fast, because i want to go. i want to feel her move. she's my secret, my witch.

sometimes when we turn my wrists cross above the wheel--sometimes, heh, i almost question who's driving.

one more color now

communicable

harbor, baby. it's in the details,
babe:

waving knotgrass.
early gray morning.

the shiny grass.

like a plough
against a stone,

like a stone split
against a plough.

endlessly furroughing.


with earnestness
trying to explain
what the fuck it's
talking about.

doing it and doing it

a history of collapse

navigate through
my several parts

o mind, o heart,
like a gondolier

under stone archways
on muddy waters:

bits of blue sky
and grey sky above.


navigate through
my several aspects

like physical anthropologists
in search of mayan gods.


navigate through the river of me;

unearth me. dig me out.

it must be here somewhere, under all this.

stand by me

this poem's dirt

5. this poem's dirt

because it was glassy and wanted wear
though as for that the passing there had worn them
really about the
same.
if you know what i mean.

glassy. like new york
at christmas
or was it fucking new year's?
when did vomit
become castronomic?

on the left hand of morning
lies evening sitting standing and lying again.
lying down. on the left hand
(it feels like someone else
it feels like someone else)

i can't, the walrus said.
i can't talk shit. i feel fine.
we all feel
fine.
yesterday was yestered.

sequester-ation and ration.
on the headlines drips black
ink because yesterday's veins
of news are to let.
yesterday's news is collapsing itself.

3. fibonacci

lay down your branch,
your rood, rod, and staff,
cuz they comfort me.

covet ye my people,
covet it all. it's up in there.
i want this to be over.

yesterday had a middle and end
but no beginning.
we sang about shit,

jenny lind, oprah, rosecrucians (sp?),
yesterday, wrongdoing,
like bullfrogs in the bullrushes.

don't touch me with that shit.
i don't want to be comforted by your fucking rod,
papiols.

4. gastronomy

highlights of the field trip included
grass, weeds, dirt, worms, core, iron, saffron--
which i was just MAD about--yesterday, and persephone
coughing up mortal meatsack.

narcissus, hyacinth, let's face it,
were they ever going to procreate anyway?
and who did put the bom in the bom she bom she bom?
what about the dip in the dip de dip de dip?

yeah, who dipped that?
need i metion that whole rockland thing,
or can i just leave it to small children, cherubim,
tannis root, and mercury rising?

on the left we found darkness and mist.
on the right we found communist-style glyphs:
someone's head and a day-old sun.
carved in stone.

emotion: can it get even darker
than diahrrea, that storm raging inside you?
you let it all on out now, you hear?
don't let that shit fester as so:

2. plasticene fuckers in mulberry courval (sp?)

twomp-headed angels in fat come on a ladder
and someone smears oranges on someone else on film.

where electric naked children sit on streetcorners
waiting for white heat and dredge rivers for unbroke bottles.

squeezing out juice, out juice out juice.
this isn't helping.

where ma and pa of paterson go left at the light
because mapquest said so: hedons, here we come.

where willie tyler and lester are often mentioned
on mst 3000. yeah, no.

1. scenic view

there's a vista inside me. it opens up like it's got curtains. grief's pure, man, uncut, 100%, and i was in love once. i banged my head on the pavement and i died. later, there was a man in a trenchcoat who threatened to burn me up like a fish if i said anything. earlier, there was a memory of primroses. like it's got grecian pillars: fibonacci. rock back and forth. encounter a marmot. don't say anything more:

synerjize

in rocklandisum

2. and cagney on the screen

romeo is bleeding. but not so's you'd notice.
hey, man. romeo is bleeding.

i wanted to be ute lemper, or beatrice arthur.
i wanted to be pam grier, and kim novak.

i wanted sticks and stones. i wanted huge rocks,
trees the size of city blocks.

tree bolls revealing mayan glyphs.
carved in stone but it was soft. ironic-esque.

jam handy to the rescue.
i'm jam handy.

3. in times of cholera

fog like pea soup in baker street:
hansom cabs, flickering gastric lamps,
holocaust.

freeze-dried mashed potatoes
in silvery packets, iodine packets, fork packets:
leftovers from spaaace. a seatbelt most of alll.

anyone could do this shit.
anyone could do that shit but would they want to:
dredge around in split-level infinites for some sort of

sludgemonkey. there's money to be made
in this business if you know which gastric
tract to line. i'm lying. i have no idea.

i got fucking peach juice on the bedspread
and they took away my fucking allowance:
prufrock, be afraid. be very afraid.

4. the yellow river

episodic? suuuure. whyyy nottt?
it's a snarky river of death
sludgemonkey. yesterday's liver is
tomorrow's too.

forget it. it's like
talking to a monkey.
gastronomy: study of planets
in a certain solar system.

at a certain time,
on a certain channel.
with certain aids to rambunctiousness
i've heard it on the radio:

broadcast this hamlet.
he knew a guy named yorick, and the audience
has to suffer for it.
itch harder pinocchio

itch off that wood. i couldn't go to the mall for a week
and they were having a sale on this shit i really wanted.
so watch it prufrock. you check yourself.
sunburn.

5. what happens to her happens to me (doo dee doo doo dee)

if you play this backwards
it says
WHAT THE
FUCK YOU
FUCKING FUCKERSON

FUCK FUCK FUCK
SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK.
we don't play
it backward
much.

keep yesterday on
the left-hand side.
opium. opiate.
unstable is my hot sauce.
unstable like my dredgemonkey.

FUCK SHIT FUCK
SHIT FUCK SHIT SHIT
keep it on the splitlevel, opius,
prometheus, we're sleeping on
this level. it's live-in.

cuz it's live-able.
give to me your poor,
your tired, your charted,
your batshit insane,
and that guy who keeps waving at his own shadow.

1. uh-hunh, uh-hunh

give me your nikes
give me your hand grenades
give me hand-grenade head over there
give me omission by threat of satan.
give me fucking rest mc resterson.

give me bitches
give me niches
give me niche markets
give me yesterday again
and again and again
give me pie and maybe give me marvin gaye
give me albatross
give me a wife mistaken for a hat
give me a list, a bowtie, a ten-inch snake
give me waterfowl.
give me hatdinger
give me hate
smack it around
give me leftovers
give me hangovers
give me wrongdoings
give me wingdings
give me bugles
give me stranglers pumpkins noodle
give me sweet exhaustion
GIVE ME GOLD
CUERVO OR OTHERWISE
GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING MUSIC PAPIOLS
FUCKING GIVE ME ANYTHING
GIVE ME NICENE CREED
GIVE ME ROSEMARY'S OFFSPRING AND SOME TANNIS ROOT
GIVE ME FUCKING FLESH
GIVE ME A LONG BOX, A BLACK COAT. ENLUMBER ME. PUT ME IN DIRT.
AAAUGH GRAAAUGH MRAAAUGH HHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRR
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWW

prometheus is my personal jesus

kentucky-fried poem

5. they hunted the snark for days. its image took on in their minds a red glow, fangs dripping and mass of dark fur and a bright bacon-esque eye. each one brought something different with which to do the dark snark in: a calorie-laden meat pie, a ruby hat, a kid on a leash decalled on the side of a bowl, a smashed up storage unit, a recalcitrant waistline, a bowling pin hollowed by gnomes.

basTET, icarus, lillian shapiro,
thoth, horace, robert de niro,
leonardo dicaprio and the girl who came back from napoli.

carmen elektra, carmen jones,
carmine, carbine, double turbo super-engine,
stella and the gay who gave her groove back,
grover cleveland.

i have a zit on my back.

4. the bowling god

MOLOCH MOLOCH MOLOCHI

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND THE IRON CELL CIELING

RUBY TUESDAY, WHO COULD HANG A NAME ON YOU ASIDE FROM "RUBY TUESDAY"?
DOES THAT MEAN SOMETHING? IS IT DRUG-RELATED?

MOLOCH, YOU'RE AROUND.

I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND, WOMAN IN THE DUNES.

3. with sand in your hair

windy like the willows--the feast of st. kermit
the blood on the asphalt and prometheus hanging off the cliffs.

fire fire, my heart, blood sweat and fat.

ahi tuna trembling at the touch
waiting for swallowing, that final consumation.

strafed by eagles.

the coroner seemed friendly, i liked him quite a lot.
if i hadn't of been a woman i'd never have been caught.
they gave me back my house and car and nothing more was said...

2. if you ever need a ride there be sure to let me know

tears contain pain-killers.
encepelopathy: a certain globality of consciousness.

the mind is a lonely hunter-and-pecker,
peckinpah on drugs on a soundstage with his sunglasses on at night.
scent of camelia, mung beans, drugs, drugs, drugs:
a menacing refrigerator.

ice her.
pack her in ice.
put her in the ice capades.

deep-fat-fried movie.
clackity clack: don't come back, jan or dean.

fat. fat fat fat.
they said her heart was weak in the first place because she'd been hospitalized for anorexia in her youth. they didn't say that precisely. i assumed it. nobody said it. but we were all very white.

1. minatory redux

frito lay. feed me with your brussel sprouts, cauliflower, sunflower seed...

liver.

blanche ingram has dark hair damnit

because sometimes i understand things about the way that i "write" in a sort of really really toned-down saul-on-the-road-to-damascus kind of way, i'm going to make a note as to a thing i just realized here and now:

repetition in my "stuff" functions, i think, in the same way that it functions in my mind, which is that it can be a blessing or a curse. that sounds stupid. let me try again: on the personal emotional level, repetition, i think, is the closest that a person can come to emulating meat in art, the actual processes of feeling-in-meatsack as opposed to what we think feeling means in words (i've made this point before, but i'm repeating it [heh!] because i don't understand it). like i think that the way forster described emotion, sometimes, was just as alienating as the way that, say, nora roberts describes emotion (and i'm not knocking nora roberts--i'm just saying that she is, more than other authors, within a genre, one in which she shines often, that uses certain types of description)--with forster it's alienating because it's too cerebral, too controlled, too intentionally new, and with roberts it's alienating because it's too cliched so that one's own personal experience comes as an actual surprise to one when one has something like what the books describe, right? i don't think that repetition comes in and fills the gap between over-cerebrality and over-reliance on forms. i think it approaches the problem of personal physical emotion from a different standpoint. and i'm too stupid to be able to pinpoint what that standpoint is. but the point isn't that--the point of this particular entry is just to say that this lanthorn is the moon, i the man in the moon, this thornbush my thornbush and this dog my dog. no it isn't. now i'm deeply confused and will have to start over.

comprehension of the power of repetition is something that i don't have much background or experience in trying for (hey, once again, i don't know what i'm talking about! who saw that coming?). from what i understand of o.c.d. (which isn't much), repetition's intensely comforting and just as intensely driving--i don't have o.c.d., but i get it, or what i think is it, to a certain extent. because my mind repeats words, phrases, melodies, ideas. like gertrude stein, i understand them as different each time the same word or whatever is spoken in my mind--they gain form, feeling, depth, in the same way, i feel, that my understanding of what is the body gains form, feeling, and depth: they become incomprehensibly deep objects. and i personally think that's a good thing--or not necessarily good, but true, and realer than either forster's or roberts' approach...though not necessarily better. i mean, the point of emotion-depiction-through-repetition is, in part, to divest what's felt of its cerebrality and its clichedness, but that's not necessarily desireable. it's just necessary, for me. maybe.

hmm. what i maybe mean is that i don't like these poems. they're stupid. they've gone beyond the point of the lorca poems, which were over-obvious, over-personal, and have kind of gotten into laughing idiot god territory. they aren't saying anything. there's no flow, no arc; at the point of the last one i'm not even playing with concepts. they're heartless; they're not t.s. eliot fragmented, but fragmented in an even dumber way. none of this may be visible to the naked eye. i should probably revise them. but they don't mean enough for me to do so on any but the most basely instinctual plan... (what else is new?) the point is that i don't want to be writing what i've been writing. it's trite, stupid drivel. but the repetition is driving. because i can only allow myself to feel a very certain type of thing, because everything else offends my sensibilities, and yet i have to feel something. god, that sounds ridiculous.

possibly the worst poem ever written

e questo

5. constellating

red scharlach, conan o'brien,
i'm with you in rockland.
mr. ed, mr. parker,
watermelon man, i'm with you. i'm with you.

i tried on black, black, black,
black this and black that:
a black coat and black shoes and a black hat.

i lost some cities once.

my fingers smell like cranberries.
it's a red smell, that cranberry smell.
it's so like candy (so like candy).

cogwheels, i'm with you.
tchaikovsky and nephew, brian littrell,
you, guy in the subway with your crazed violin,
e.t.a. hoffman, i'm with you in rockland.

4. x =

i tried on black all day--all day and night.
i have been to the chain store--and the other chain.
i have outwalked the furthest city light.
black dress black gloves black tights.
space.

it's the place.

i chased down emmet kelley, lillian shapiro
and william h. macey.

i gave my entire family problem gas.

3.

menotti, i'm with you in rockland.
i'm with you, prokofiev, and sartre, reluctantly.

freaking pour names down on me like sand, fill me with sandlike names.
libatum me, domine, something something...
in die illa tremendousness, something something.

over-arcing, the sweet scent of narcissus-white jasmine
riding the soft image of clouds at a summer sunset so that
pink becomes a smell,
transmutated into a time and place,
fixed down like prometheus on the rock.

blood, fat and ashes.

i'm with you in rockland sirius the dogstar
and cerberus, sisyphus and persephone and the
shades in the asphodel named as such. fertility and its overtones of death:
narcissus. white. with smooth petals. i've got you in rockland.

2. pantywaist

the smells of summer:
kettle corn, vodka, heat.
rich in color like camelias or
someone else's tanned shoulders.

reach down into it with mouth and
taste that fat. plunge tongue into it.
open it with beak and talons. repeat, god, repeat.

i have a zit on my upper lip.

i'm with you in rockland, anyone i know or have ever heard of.

5.
she's fucking dead papiols. lay off the tambour.

brahms

1.
the art of losing isn't hard to master.

did i do it wrong?
left left and right and then left again at the light.

commentating upon the process with a cork on the screw.
i'm the cool coper.

like a story: whither shall i follow follow thee?

narrative arcin' like nuit over the nile.
star-spangled and whatnot.

1.
to the waist: minatory.

rebellion open on pavement: the dark hand of the, left side of the, the dark-underbellied complement, the component of the./ /// ////

let x'd equal x'd. firestarting: drew barrymore with angelhair.
i can't get down on it.

--libera me, ma, pa. you hope that's a cry you're hearing in the night of your soul.
lycanthropy is the hairy man's excuse to stop shaving.

the moon.

2.
but it might have been indigestion. nuit. full-frontal. that barque of stars spangled across her funzones. god, i don't want to have these doubts.

havey-caveat. if you confess it it's like it never happened.
there is no it there to get down on, is that it? der rosenkavalier?

how godlike is the form she bears.

never interrupt me when i'm lunching.
head against pavement.

i made it out of clay. and when it's dry and ready,
shit is going down.

3.
break.

tender is the buttons. playa. hold me down.

steak sandwich. head against pavement.

what the hell have i done wrong to get this turkish treatment?
from the inside out lady. otaku and out.

will he ever come again? he will never come again.
to the greenwood, to the greenwood, to the greenwood, greenwood tree.

nuit: fucking materials.
pinprickin' like i.v. the absence of the heart to grow fonder of.
it's like it never even existed.

4.
i'm with you in
michigan
carl whatsis.

orni...

something something.

line here.

scoop out the seeds and that white stuff. scoop out all the clay.
...tologia.

5.
story arc.
because the ending is a filter. proust said so.

de kooning painted pink.--tologia.
maybe he painted the molly ringwald advance copy:
po tee wheet?

scritto in ciel e il mio dolor. -nuit

denn alles fleisch ist wie gras

head against pavement.
set your face. use your left hand. it feels like someone else...it feels like someone else.

5.
music, ho.

it's like it's slipping away. it can't do that.