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.

redhead (this is by no means a literary production--i am barely writing this)

my eyes hurt. my teeth are throbbing gently in the gums. i feel very heavy. and i'm starving. i can't talk to anyone--i don't deserve to talk to anyone.

you know what dylan thomas said. they used it in 4 weddings and a funeral. i don't feel like that. it's possible i just don't have the capacity. it's possible i'm doing it again--pushing myself, testing out how far i can go before i break. but i've never broken yet. which means i've never gone far enough.

stop all the clocks. i don't feel like that. i mean, i want to know. i want to break.

i broke once. on the street corner next to city hall. it was kind of like something out of lermontov. this is why a hero of our time is one of my favorite books, even though i will probably never read it again.

i broke a little in boswell's.

i broke in controlled swells in the bathroom at the california theatre. i guess that doesn't count.

i'm so sorry. i hope you know how sorry i am. i hope you know how extremely sorry i am.

interests

1.

hell or high water

on the twelfth day o' december

i'm with you in rockland,
carl wethers and
lillian shapiro shapiro shapiro

and william h. macy

and that guy over there the one standing up
on a promontory strafed by the wine-dark surf.


it was screaming all day long
into the rain

there was no matter, clarice--
you already knew she was going to die.

(twelfth day o' december.)

shut up and take it like
it was meant to be taken.

stop whining like a little rat dog
with its little rat tail in a little pink purse and the tail thumps the sides.

(twelfth day o' december.)

glass eyes and a clockwork tail
that thumps on the floor.

(twelfth day o' december.)

thump thump.
thump thump.


2.

it likes to be stoic.

it makes itself a daisy chain out of fucking daisies
and little hopes and dreams and a dress with an apron.
and it's like ooh i'm so stoic check out my apron.

god damnit i want it to die
i want to hit it over the head with a frying pan
and make up for 24 years of lost time.


3.

GRAUGH AUGH MRAUGH AURRR CRAAH AURDGH MORGGRAH

I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND MIKE McCLURE.
I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND SADIE HAWKINS.
I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND DAYS OF OUR LIVES
LUCY SNOWE
JIGOKU HEN
THE REAPERS WITH THEIR SILENT SWINGING
OUR HUNTING FATHERS
WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON
THE DAY THAT LADY DIED
SKETCHES OF SPAIN
WINTER WHEN NO FLOWER
MISHIMA'S ST. SEBASTIAN
RED SCHARLACH
AND THAT GUY IN SPIDER-MAN WHO WAS MADE OUT OF SAND WITH A FIST LIKE A BOMB.
YEAH, I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND, BOMB-FISTED SAND GUY.

4.

neophyte angels with tongue-twisting names
on the sun-cracked streets of laredo looking for a bit of play
space space


dendribium orchids
and dendrobiums and phylliums and ondridiums

concupiscent
on a scented pillow
like something out of anne rice.

fuckin' music, papiols, come.
play on, bitches. play on.

(twelfth day o' december.)
to have a billion-track mind.

jimmy cracked corn and
unleashed the dogs of war and

his eyes were green as leeks.
and yellow cowslip cheeks, lady,

i barely knew ye.


5.

she was so beautiful and so talented.



where the hell is that fucking music?

blah blah-ologist

it interests me nearly that van gogh could know the potato eaters for a masterpiece. (because everything i hear, see, read, taste, smell or touch--everything i experience, in fact, except for pain--gets processed through me at an alarming rate--i'm not bragging; it is alarming; i continuously have to go back for obscure pieces of my comprehensions that i didn't realize i'd absorbed in order to get to where i've got, consequentially my ratiocination is not so much full of holes as just soaked, you know? jumbled? doing something quickly doesn't entail doing it well. anyway, because of this, finding out about van gogh means something to me, and i recognize that it's something not necessarily intrinsic to van gogh. like janie with her meshes, i'm checking it out.)

i realize that a lot--most--of the things that are on this blog are crap. they aren't always unnecessary crap, i guess, but they lack dimension. i write them because i think someone would like to see them, or because they relieve a piece of consciousness that sits heavier than a denny's meal on my insides (i do like denny's; i just don't like how it makes me feel). poetry's hard because it's like singing: i have to superintend the feeling. the process is by no means obvious. and every once in a while i get it, but most of the time i fuck it up.

my point is thus: i'm no van gogh, but i know--i'm fairly sure--that the "dream leaven and dream" poems are, not good, but the best i've done thus far. it's quite possible they're not publishable. they don't make any sense; they're overly self-involved; the words in them are like stones in a field under the jackhammer (but, you know, less good than that would imply). hopefully they pass the point of comprehension without being incomprehendable. what they mean is a flavor, a texture, something past the point of "meaning," right? but they're furry, like a lollipop in a couch. they're improper. they're not good. they're too personal--they're like laura riding's in that sense.

i have no idea, in short, how to quantify the fact that i believe in them more than i do in other stuff i've done. even ed wood, even that "facets IV," which i like alot, is just goofing around. i believe in "facets V," but you can't have that without the first 4, and 1 and 2 are playthings, and 3 is overly, stuffily portentous.

i did some poems before i came on here, after i'd...gotten mused, i guess (did you know that v has a wonderful plan for your life?), and some of those were good. but i abandoned them because i thought that they were too traditional. can you stand it? of course nothing exists in a vacuum. millions of people more talented than i have things to say. if i can't run with the curve, i'd probably best get out the kitchen (way to mix a metaphor).

i don't know. i just don't know. (i'll have to take it up with my sales manager). h.d. meant every word of "helen of egypt." but niedecker might not have meant every word of her thomas jefferson poems, and those are just as beautiful.

the point is, it's okay if my poems are unacceptable. i'm not saying that's what makes them great, but i'm taking leave to believe in them--only a select few, however--despite probably-deserved rejection. does that make any sense? maybe i only believe in the state of mind i was in while writing them? self-doubt, with bells on, ladies and gentlemen.

heimat

persephone redux

1. english breakfast

i said i hate to beat a dead horse but i'm freaking lying. i love it. i can't get enough. i see a dead horse and i just go to town.

2. whiplash

i like ice cream but it's more a second date sort of dessert. first date dessert is like pussy. no, it's like vodka. yeah. it's the drink you have after you get home from the date and go oh my fucking god what did i just do?--that's the true first date dessert. you savor that drink. pussy's, like, a third date dessert.

3. i love you, vicky/vicky, i you love/you love vicky, i

when picknicking in the park an effluvia, an excess of fizzy drinks is necessary at the outset. to defray the expense i reccomend a pencil sharpener, a wallet, a lava cake, some dark receptacle. a train tunnel, maybe. sometimes i'm at work snapping on my latex gloves and all i really want to be is one of the tongue depressors in the jar on the counter, all wooden and ready for tonguing.

4. player

hold me down.

5. in the sky with diamonds

lately i'm not half the man i used to be. fortunately this isn't a problem because people want me to be this other guy, this new man, who's, like, basically equivalent to approximately one half of the former me, so it all works out. i think. i'm not great at math.

broke drone prayer

PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE

words without thoughts

poor v. that's sort of the gist of what i have to say on that subject--that to a certain extent, despite personal ineptitude and undeservingness (nice word, there, c), i've taken part in orphic riddling, that to orpheus, eurydice was no more than a means to his end, to a certain extent. if i were better with words and concepts, if my understanding were stronger and smarter than it is or ever will be, i could maybe hope to express what is almost assuredly my guilt in the matter of v...that it's not fair, not right, to subject a living, vital being with its own problems, its own thoughts and feelings, its own meat, a being i only fleetingly touched and that not for long, a being i was never honest with, one that barely knows me, and one that ought not to have been drawn so deep into myself, one to whom i am completely insignificant, a brief codicil at the end of a rather uninspiring chapter (possibly--i'm not sure what a codicil is), to the incomparably inane burden of being the augustinian signifier around--against--which my "poetry"...uh, revolves? mechanizes, maybe?

v, i manipulate a you that i have no right to claim even exists. and it's creepy. and i feel bad about it. but i keep doing it. so maybe i shouldn't even acknowledge my guilt in the first place, right? if my life were hamlet, i'd be claudius. guilty-ass claudius. i'm not sure what to do about it. so, heh, maybe i'm hamlet. and it's possible i see myself as protesting too much. so i might be gertrude. or i might just be crazy, and ophelia, or a dumbass, hence polonius, or, hell, all of these options sound accurate to some degree or another, so i guess if my life as v's manipulatress is hamlet, it's basically a one-woman show. the point is that for the pitifully small amount that it's worth, i acknowledge my guilt as regards you.

what a crappy point.

specificity

persephone redux redux

1.
what's not to love about the red cresting the hillsides--the way the poppies, those tonal glories, set each other off like bells clustered in a steeple, shivering from one shape to the next, residual as income, the distortion of a carefully healthy formality of sorts becoming pellucid, volatile?

2.
close the window against the sound of the wind, lupus-waldsworth. scythe through its meaning like a dark red reaper swinging.

3.
pressed into the stone, that sound: a shot hart's blood creates the location of the new steeple. vellum. things are living and dying in that wind: the sound of bells, the sound of bells cresting against the window like waves.

4.
shivering, residual
from one stone to the next: lime, slate, mica, ore, cedar.

like water to water,
red runs into red.

5.
a dark red god breathes rust into a soft red bowl.
six seeds between slow white teeth.
the poppies shake, pellucid, volatile.

first attempt.

persephone redux

1. still life

with a pre-raphaelite coloring, a sheath of copper-red hair
arrested mid-bound, smiling on her face like an ad for butter
weather flung around her with an over-arching deployment of sheer blue joy
those pink arched feet mid-bucaholism, poppy petals raining down
red as juice from where they'd been flung overhead by pillow-soft hands.

2. enciente

it ripped the canvas.

III. misfile

but there was no data.

4. reconciliation

facts rubbed against words like mint leaves under a pestle.
she could stand this.
watching granite creep closer.
dust rubbed into her shift.
and enraged dark.

5. every valley

six seeds stained her lips.

and/or void

st. exupery is something else. i was reading flight to arras in the hospital while my dad had heart surgery, which kind of screwed the pooch as far as appreciating it went, plus i was too freaking young, i think, but night flight's just blowing my mind. s-e flows from image to image in a manner that is like skin over muscle, or real skin over imaginary muscle. it's a little bit like dissonance, or richness, or richesse (which might not actually be a french word, but it's taken on a slightly separate meaning from "richness" in my head and so i'll use it, realities of the language be damned) in music, copeland or turandot being the examples i have in hand, where these harmonies just freaking become not lines but great piling swells (think "pines of rome" but less ganked from butterfly and with less freaking birds)--moments in which music gets the piles, that's what i'm talking about. and s-e does it with his writing, creates that feeling that your brain is swelling like a double-time melon and eventually will burst in sunset colors...creates that feeling that your heart's about to explode with the sensation of it.

that's a pretty awkward description. first of all, it may not be applicable to people who can actually experience emotion about their real lives (if such people exist). but more importantly, it just doesn't do its job (of, you know, describing). it's not a feeling of explosion, it's a feeling, maybe, of inward hum--an effect of resonance. yeah. all these things (notes, words) on top of each other create a...an arch, yeah, each object (stone) in tension with the other. something. the point is it's awesome.

and, hey, to bring it back to meam, the point is i don't know how to do it. and i should work on that. ashbery knows how to do it (i get the feeling that it's a different sensation for different people, hence the feeling created in me by the poets and authors and musicians and painters that i love gets created in other people by different poets, authors, musicians, and painters)--puccini always does it (to my mild shame)...then there are these things that do other things to me which aren't quite the same but are equally awesome. however i think i should stick with working on the first effect. now i've gone and confused myself, and should probably just quit while i'm only mildly behind (in self's comprehension of what self is writing, not in the comprehensibility of what self is writing, which i'm sure is pretty much nul).

it's a picture of a borgia

expense of x/

it must cry heigh-ho
for two, pellucid two.

/waste of y

it isn't really my fault, cuz hello last time i sang the body fuckin' electric you plugged your ears. bitch.

is x1 y1'd; and

bored to tears with thomas edison, rodney dangerfield ruled the dirty city.

something something

last name was fuckin' dangerfield, bitch.
nothing electrifies my body but you pellucid two.
tumty-tum

i'm livin' in an empty room with all the windows smashed, won't you pick the pieces up cuz it feels just like i'm-a walkin' on broken glass.

not actually all that creepy in 100% real life

swingers
how to resist

that tiny bruise

if they were making a movie of jane eyre, i'd be blanche ingram

sorolla y bastida: valencia, two children on the beach
richard diebenkorn: cityscape 1 (landscape no. 1)

sorolla y bastida: corner of garden

for some reason i once randomly picked up a print of walk on the beach, i think because it was on sale. i like sargent--why wouldn't i?--but for some reason sorolla y bastida appeals to me slightly more, kind of like the difference between loving, i don't know, renee fleming and leontyne price (here i go again). bearing in mind, as always, that i have not the slightest information regarding what the hell i'm talking about, what i think is later sargent, with the brushstrokes and the incomplete hands, is not only awesome, but kind of up-my-alley (ahrem) awesome (cuz what can i say, i love the brushstrokes); however the sorolla y bastida, whose brushwork and method i am comparing to sargent's (possibly INCREDIBLY INACCURATELY) seems to use the light he paints in a different way. it's like with sargent you get your gray light but the gray light is kind of a counterpoint, almost ironical, to the joyousness of the figures he paints (i mean, even when they're, like, sallow angry people, they're always somewhat flamboyant, you know? taking a scrooge-like glee in their own sallowness and anger?). whereas with sorolla y bastida the light, though significantly less dusty-blue-toned than sargent's, vergin', even, on the cassat palette (oh, i said it), expresses, to me, something sad, slightly grim, somewhat in pain... the light's an isolating force. but this is based on two years living with walk on the beach and five minutes of yahoo searchin'. looking at that valencia painting, i'm tempted to think that maybe the isolation i'm talking about is actually just his painting of wind. on the other hand, the look on the little girl's face is just very inward. you know?
hrrranyway.
something about corner of garden reminded me of the diebenkorn. it's probably nothing more than the colors. but it might be the structure--or maybe maybe maybe it's the brushwork?

still like

still


like a place with a name. uncontested

and habitable.

sans

form.

sans


medium, sans


divisor, a



hole. with a cat in it.

frankly ridiculous

agony, agony, dream, leaven and dream

I. and dog will have his day

concave, pale
with loss,
veins collapsed on themselves
like shells:
pellucid, cupped, emptied.

II. a vampire lover
telescoped in and out,
it became the sand on a
somewhat grotesque shore,
grainy, legionate and wary.

everything rolled into one oversimpled
gaze, becoming like silhouettes
(red over black [black
over red]) against a satin backdrop.

III. said v may not have existed// / / /

red like hair,
hair scattered, reddened
over redgold.

according to the diary of pembroke
yesterday's middle is
today's end. in dirt. it was a riddle

without an answer:
he was in a forest. there was green.
gold light fell, fell, fell to the ground.

IV. ([dream])

when it is dead,
bind its wrists in your hair,

about the skin
that held in tidal blood,

as if indivisible,
it commands,

at the wrists, infinite
at the wrists, in your black hair.

V. acrostic

AGONY there are never to be two in meat// / / /only one

AGONY meat bound

DREAM in your hair

LEAVEN x = 2 pellucid 2

DREAM 1 x'd against pavement. a fetid yellow streetlamp.

precious

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream
1. typeface

it gives up questioning
the meat.
it eats whatever's dead on the ground.

2. a noteable source

a dish of kings:
liver and
fava beans.

tell-tale detrius: red,
its repository the face
of what's-its-name.

3. not to say i didn't enjoy it

(purple
over red)
pigeon-toed

over the graves of
some of our finest dead.
(red

over black) the object-rich
dirt: lightless earth
and the raw meat.

4. (dream)
your hair
about
my wrists,

lover,
when i
am dead.

blue veins
that beat
for you only:

tie their stillness
together, tie it
in that// /black/// / /river.

5. (break)
e questo?
songs piecemeal
in the wind--

e questo?
is it still singing,
precious?

e questo?
(wind against
a face)

e questo?
(pellucid
in meat)

e questo?
and this one?
god, and this one?

m'easjg;geska;

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream

I.

with irony as its mistress, agony as its guiding principle, it wanted to write something a little dark--a little off--with a soft glow to it, like a prom dress--on a beach, with a large drink--in siena, named after paint.

humbled in silver or glorious in gold, like a worked mask for a face: some kind of cheap ceremonial of death, things going into the ground and not coming out, and the psychological chicanery of closure.

II. foaming at the chops
yesterday
it asked little more from you

than a nod

for the pants
to come off,
vespucci.

III. schleppin'

insignificant details of the highway at night:

the crossroads

the indiscriminate meat,
the headlights

strains of meyerbeer on the tape deck,
the house on the left,
the mastabatory bag on the seat

IV. dream

i am full of pain

when i die,
i demand,

tie your black hair

about my wrists

wrap my wrists
in your black hair

V. from the diary of pembroke:

it loves it. and will love it. the ground is unyielding.

propriete

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream

with your hair bound about these wrists
jespeth.
it is demanded.

opened at diverse points:
the mouth, wrist.
the raw flesh riding
over the brittle bone
like a horse ridden
over a waterless plain.

why did its white salt take you in
if it could not draw you down?
sunset driven to the hilt
into the horizon's dirt--
why did not it drown itself
in the black river of your hair,
wreck itself like wind
against the song of your face,
open itself like splitting forms
against you?

it gives up questioning
the meat.
it eats whatever's dead on the ground.

everyone steals from puccini

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream

1.
i did have a vampire lover once. he came out of the night with blood like rubies on his lips, blood glistening on his mouth like micated silt at the bottom of a wine-dark sea. he liked to kiss me on my pulses. and he brought me white roses. my purity, he said, attracted him like a death's-head hawkmoth to a vestal flame. anyway i slept with him. but i was drunk when i did it.

2.
since all forms
broke.
loosed

like oil
from a split lamp.

3.
the apocryphal pembroke was, it has been determined, in a forest. moths and serpents abounded, apparently; the green trees and the dappled ground were both present as was requisite. lupine bloomed exquisitely* and from tree to tree hanged strung spanish moss as if it were catgut spun out and slack on a lute's rosewood fingerboard. he wrote thus:

with the world as my bier.

he was crazy; the squirrels ate his parts. but my eyes are raw for him.

4.

it demands of you:

wrap its wrists

in her black hair

when it is dead.

5.
[excitedly]
...sent to me from Heaven
Straight from the throne of Glory,
Take one last and careful
look At its poor face!
That its memory may linger,
One last look!
Farewell, beloved! Farewell, my dearest heart!
Go, play, play.

all my trials, lord

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.
when you look at it, capital R is a pretty character. i wish i were less of a failure at everything. whinety whine whine.

i develop my own vocabulary

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream

we went walking in the supermarket
with walt whitman.

there were peaches.
there may have been innuendo.

it's a big world.
it was a good time.

low res

candyland

the way sweat
glistens
on the lines of a palm

etched
the press
of a multifaced
coin

i will buy such
things
i know not yet
what
they are.

caught fire white fire

from the diary of pembroke:

...leads, in its execution, to an excess of self-reflection. the seeds of my madness are in fact contained in what i can finally describe, at this late date, as the parameters, the x and y axes, if i will, of said "it": the heterocletian phylogeny of ex versus for example why, the infinitely split horticulturalist of the mind for example, the house of wax for example or for example the ecumen of the encepalopath.
i continue to think i shall die, because i have been made according to the parameters of meat. however it is possibly a vain comprehension of said existence to insist upon its period. instead it may spiral ever-inward like a pinwheel, gaining on itself.
i am rotting
as i speak

the sorrows of your changing face

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.

facet

they cut diamonds into several different shapes.

the slice of an orange is sensuous.

careless

now
we called sam, ron, dana.

now we stopped
for beer

her father collapsed
on the floor.

now nothing.

now left
and yeft.

now i had no heart.

now it was mine
to give and she didn't need it.

there's a dark-furred beast lying out there.

constellation... i now know the meaning of constellation.

communism

song of soloman

left and right, left and right,
we could go on like this all night.

death comes on those who don't fight,
am i right? am i right?

didn't screw my harlot's parts
on for people without hearts.

crawling in my underwear:
i'm the sheep and you're the bear.

creepy-type people and the sounds that make them sleepy

you know how little there is radiating off this thing? it's like dark-ass matter. it's like a play for one, a play for all, you know? it's like eyewear.

i hate my life, gosh it. and that truth cuts like a knife. into a
melon.

i rage against the dying of the light.

i've totally lost my way. yesterday i watched eleven hours and twenty minutes of t.v. by the time someone dug me out of there with a knife i could barely tell left from right.

i'll tell you what's fierce. pride. yeah. and gum. when you've chewed it too long.

fragment me, bitches.

euthanized on a table

shostakovitch. it's what i say to war--
shostakovitch said it all before.

eleven hours of t.v.
in front of me, in front of me.

i'll tell you what else is red:
the beast with two backs.

christ! christ! christ!

we were running from the middle of the road to the sides (left and right) and then back to the center again, sort of in the manner of a wave from a physics book: maybe a, um, a redshifted frequency. just peakin' and troughin'.

i was fucking bawling by the end of snow falling on cedars and it wasn't even a good movie.

normal people, everyday people like you and me find money to feed their habits.

death's pretty imminent, yeah. we look up and the sky is blanketed with night, people, and fucking stars. doesn't this stink of unwashed metaphor to you? in the poems and songs, the stars come out at night--

a manifest of destiny. stars come out as we say they shall.

a picture and some memorandae

things to remember to see: bring me the head of alfredo garcia.
things to remember to read: lorca, st. augustine, hart crane.

wow, the sunset just shot me through. hey, like a peckinpah character! this sky is mad! and high!

i haven't been thinking poetically at all recently, which is why i haven't been writing poetically. fortunately, like tobias and the cut-offs, i'm back on the novel. oh, couden, silly, nobody cares about your novel. there is officially waaay too much junk food in my system right now for anything to come out of it that isn't crap...

nothing nothing nothing

"constellation" connotes something absurdly mystical, childish, or philosophical, though it's definitely the mysticism i object to most: i'm not writing about any universal whatnot, covered in timeless obscurity, bending under the weight of its own archetypes. a graph, however, assumes a pre-created continuity, which, though slightly more satisfying because not overloaded with sky, stars, space, infinites, universal truths, and seventh-degree removed physical mumbo-jumbo, is, from my perspective, which is generally the one i attempt to write out from under, pretty much entirely inaccurate. (i mean it's possible that, like dirk gently tells us, "insert dirk gently quote that has something to do with the interconnectedness of all things here," and so there is a graph, but i have no knowledge of it, hence the above "my perspective" thing.)

i'm talking about the interconnection of factors. yeah. factors works. there was something mentioned in lit 101 about this, something i didn't read, something to do with rhizomes, maybe?

man i gotta go back to school. i'm like isis searching for her husband's parts, except i'm not a goddess and it's possible there never was a body.

words create a picture and you can then look at it.

post-created

a first try at constellation

later, the sole of my foot
rubbed raw against the red leather of my shoe-sole.

the blood in the underwear
looked like a rorsarch inkblot, a fearful symmetry.

earlier, i was raw
before you.

not wanting to turn into
a cautionary tale about the dangers of walking at night.

you were the catalyzing agent
in this love that runs on its own--i apologize.

earlier i had not eaten.

in a dream you hooked up
the back of my dress.

earlier you had the profile
of a handsome cadaver.

later the whole thing remained
incomplete

happiness

a wordy poem

but the fragilities such joy is based upon
are in themselves so lovely:
a constellation of equations spread exact
upon the so-finite space of one graph:

it is itself a space of fine permeation.

i would have never known this
if i had not been in it.

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.