Mars Needs Plagiarists.

"Schlegel, who is an aphorism himself, says: 'It is a sublime taste always to like things better when they’ve been raised to the second power. For example, copies of imitations, critiques of reviews, addenda to additions, commentaries on notes. This taste is very characteristic of us Germans whenever it’s a matter of making something longer; and of the French when it promotes brevity and vacuity.' " --via Hotel Point

“Tear Me a River”

Prepare thy shadowy car
Prepare thy shadowy car
For tomorrow a rebus
For tomorrow a rebus
Thy shadowy rebus tomorrow
Prepare for a car.

My fardels outrun the thieves
My fardels outrun the thieves
Echoing to the battle’s roar
Echoing to the battle’s roar
Thieves outrun the battle’s fardels
The roar to my echoing.

Fardels for my car a rebus
To outrun the battle’s tomorrow;
The echoing roar
Prepare thy shadowy thieves.

10 24 04

Halloween Costume.

Invisible Allies.

Freedom on the March. (via Cahiers de Corey)

Open Letter.

“Ode to the Ruling Class”

Think not that those who exult in art
Are in purlieu from thy Nile
Thou breakest not the candle
Sleep chrome walkers of the tenable facades
For Samhain
Sing, pure mutiny ebbing
This ink slag
Avalanche of myth;
A lurch of lungfish that thou tellest only
Crystal age in shimmering heat coil
Iron America
Thou hast created of iron morning.

There is no grip save scabbard
Most swift greed
Who have believed and whose cats have the Nazi
Clandestine emblem
Tattoo’d shimmering hop toad
Would ye take it by the Salii
And wherein we have revealed plain white cobweb
Sunk beyond
Sun of blank corucating music,
Puree in the bitter tomb?
Underneath our curse
A folk whose streak the night itself afflicted

Call Moloch
Thy august circle
Which seven lean were eating & the freedom
Ran ruby
Red in the adopted vap
Thus have we revealed it family
Took place in the fifth slag abolish
In the rain of dope
Moloch calx
And those with thee chrome mankind
And when he provided them with Xanadu
Rim ran white

Planet aborted
Between them save avalanche mimics
For tomorrow a rebus
And a perfect, intricate, demented pyx
On the acid shore
Azaleas
By the acid and the olive drab ingot
A sea of flowing amber
Leading edge of avalanche angel
For Samhain
Don this sable robe
And quaff more bitter coffee

Today the avalanche calls to us
Our star & the end of secular music;
Mutiny winds its Etna
Up, thy mind
Is ice & lunar
Black & white alone & compulsive charade.
Appeal to the homeless day for food.
This chamber
Is only an idiom.

10 23 04

Listening to- Boys for Pele.

“Theory of Witchcraft”

Moronic jelly of war:
I yell at the TV lies
And cast ballots against thieves.
Is this my froth delusion,
That i have nothing to fear
Myself, but the soar of oil?

Defendants poured burning oil
In some earlier dive’s war
Down, ouch. Amethyst fear
Of the unforeseen, what lies
Past latticework delusion:
The work of germs, rats & thieves.

What use scorched earth to the thieves,
A fiery fountain of oil?
Man’s serpentine delusion
Will not soon free us of war,
Nor destroy these sacred lies:
We are beholden to fear

And it is our own deep fear
That made us resort to thieves
Because we wanted those lies
They told, as much as the oil
Was the promised goal of war;
We needed strong delusion

Attacked by strange delusion
And torn by forbidden fear.
Seraphim fell in a war
Our fate hung between two thieves
The furious fangs of oil
And a fog world built on lies.

Illunar moon, tungsten lies
Do you even delusion
Flicker in the lamp of oil,
Read graffiti scrawl of fear?
The innocent are task thieves
And that peace was a lithe war

That only lacked flames of war;
So we pray to royal thieves
Godzilla saves us, the fear
Anointed with lungfish oil
And half broken delusion.
Vampire in the crypt of lies

We are reeling, we tell lies
Against our will, gear slime oil
Nary a chance to grieve thieves
Whose best dreams erupt in war.
I too feel the pinch of fear
But i refuse delusion

And most of all delusion
That i can escape from war,
My feathers from slick of oil,
My taste for delicious lies.
My fardels outrun the thieves
A refugee from fear.

This device i snatch from fear:
At dusk i believe there lies
A way to subvert the war
T’ward lesser strength delusion.
The city is born of oil
And emaciated thieves

Who then could cease being thieves
And return slag delusion
To its skull home, dagger lies
Unpicked up; & risk no fear
Of walking away from war
Or of living without oil...

Was a time we had no oil.
The dark was a rune for fear
We stayed inside delusion,
Hovered the payoff of thieves.
Snap, fling, vote the book of lies
And let the rain seal new war.

10 22 04

Close Up.

Ha ha! i just got Grenier's Series (1978) for a dollar. (Only 600 copies of this one, baby.) I take it for a sign.

"Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Universal Soldier

He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of 31 and he's only 17
He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an athiest, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,
he's fighting for the USA,
and he's fighting for the Russians
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy
and fighting for the Reds
He says it's for the peace of all
He's the one who must decide
who's to live and who's to die
and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have
condemned him at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war
and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war."

"Westchester Address"

env pig iron eon ment
sweet wit ness hout
gl ligh gh t oti ose

10 25 04

“For the Wittgenstein family, the summer of 1915 was a time of both prosperity and unease...”
--blurb on Danielle Steel- Echoes (2004)

“...The appalling Forms appear,
And the great deities who hated Troy.

Then verily all Ilium seemed to sink
In flames, and from her base Neptunian Troy
To be o’erturned. As when an ancient ash
Upon the mountain-top, by axes hewed
With frequent blows, the peasants all contend,
Eager to overthrow it; all the while
With each concussion of its top, it nods,
Threatening, and trembling through its leafy hair,
Till vanquished by degrees, with many a wound,
It groans its last, and crashing down the cliff,
Drags ruin in its fall.”

--Cranch’s Vergil

A Langpo Dossier. (via wood_s lot)

In Advance of the Landing.

"I sometimes in my wilder moments consider myself the leader of a government in exile." --Leonard Cohen, quoted in: David Sheppard- Leonard Cohen (2000)

Marla Olmstead. Her website.

"Thief of Baghdad"

gne clo iss uds
fr pir ee acy dom
twi st li ar ght
ho pur gl ple ow pe

10 23/25 04

"A Defense of Beauty, Who Needs None"

Brogham om bro smitten
leum lino spec (ne shi)
kle ham bur broug glar

10 25 04

"The Left Hand of Blog"

Thunar, narc, hunt carnivore
Or para tho dox dachs dox
hund: five hund thou red rum sand
ba deb Ka acle.

10 25

Ars scissendi. BIrusaqh. IrCheaqney. Bwuarsh. Chweaneyr. Psy con cho cret tic ism.

"Ante la puerta

Gentes, palabras, gentes.
Dude' un instante:
la luna arriba, sola."

--Octavio Paz ('"Before the Door": People, words, people./ I hesitated a moment:/ The moon above, alone.') in: Wm J Higginson, The Haiku Handbook (190\85)

The Long Walk.

We had a record in of “Poems and Songs of Middle Earth”--some of which is apparently in Elvish!

In the middle of a student’s rather ordinary paper occurred the mysterious phrase “cow orders”. It took me a bit to realize he had intended “cohorts” (i wonder how he came up with this uncommon word?), guessed at the spelling, then accepted Spelchecker’s suggested emendation without a thought.

Alternate History: the Vietnam War never happened, & by this time we would have had a man on Mars & a base on the Moon...

“It is not, I protest (to myself at any rate), a mere weak-knee’d sort of escapism. I attend, rather, to my own business, which is the completing of a book. A book, I remind myself, may evoke pleasure; it may, at least possibly, turn out to be permanent; and either outcome is more than ever even the most ardent statesmen have asserted as to the special war they fomented.

Cheered by these inspiring reflections, I continue with my writing; and the war, that inconceivable huge horror, becomes only a slight, disegarded annoyance now that writing drugs me. I have lived through too many years to expect human beings to behave rationally; and the war, as yet, stays endurably remote, in its more violent aspects, from tiny Poynton Lodge and my adjacent sedate seven acres in the Northern Neck of Virginia.”
--James Branch Cabell, from the introduction to Let Me Lie (1947)

Spicer, in admitting he was making stuff up (After Lorca), was the first honest translator; likewise, in affirming our multiplicity, we become more honest than when we were pretending to play but one part on a bare Noh stage with only the stick tree of intelligible History standing beside us.

Poems solve nothing. What we need is Witchcraft.

Not subjectivity (all higher animals have that) but subjunctivity is what marks the ineluctably human. Our imagining, & our desiring, to have things otherwise. (Is it surprising half the country’s in a state of terrible denial?) Subjunctivity is to us what dug warrens are for the rabbit, & the great migration pathways are for monarchs: a rigor & a refuge. So far from being the “naked ape”, we make all creatures else seem naked, next to our intricate mantling of mythography. --And i think the imagining came first, & only afterwards led to language. Because we wanted to weave something still cleverer, than what we could manage with the weaving of our hands.

‘Belief is like love: it can not be compelled; and as any attempt to compel love produces hate, so it is the attempt to compel belief which first produces real unbelief.’ --Schopenhauer

“When Poliphilo is overcome with physical attraction to the architecture he sees, he admits to having sex with buildings. At least once, he claims the pleasure was mutual.” --The Rule of Four

“The Great Game”

Salad days of vampire,
Warp for which a people longs,
In the black scripture told.
Halcyon dawns of autumn
Fracture my sense of ingrown wrongs
In the black scripture told.

These are the taken tokens
Fires by night & deals awry
Wandering fires i answer to
Like a drudge with random songs
In the black scripture told.

Tithe or crimson fathom
Stars that the legionary names
Dying far from comfort
While the laughter rings of throngs
In the black scripture told.

10 20 04