"Personal Lubricant"
The angels wait for ice falls.
A fair jungle sings.
Quit limp fabric hijinks,
dig wiz vox.
The angels wait for lank walks.
A swank jungle swarms.
The torture doctor sighs.
It is nothing but antidotes.
'Not like the ascent of vapour to the sky, but like the ascent of an embryo to intelligence.' --Rumi
"God Wants Us To Be Rich"
when i should be preparing
for the end of the world
my fardels keep blaring
when i should be preparing
i clock my faring
with my wounds empearled
when i should be preparing
for the end of the world
I Created Lancelot Link. More. Plus.
This is not a Game.
"...the artists who remain say they have not sold a piece since the U.S.-led invasion."
Islamic Ufology.
I Am Interested In.
"An Ode for 606 Day"
whist the hustle in my veins
galaxy zoo and starboard
oar · whist not found in nature
save in the lonely places
none lonelier than between
the lights that the mind touches
in the darkness of the mind
none lonelier nor more dear
and no one will ever go
not death so much as the scale
of things · hings that sooner end
though they think to go farther
as i thought to have done more
by the watch matutinal
that even now fades · flurry
of regrets but mostly song
this pavilion of echoes
these monsters without humans
adding time to my cell phone
trapped in the wii · nautical
i steel myself to the heat
as a world plunges sunward
and when can i don this fez
hot as the tip of a match
cycle of freezing boiling
and a smoke called history
catenary days swaying
in a lost summer hammock
between random migrations
fleeing for your very life
between one splash and the next
on the black burning tarmac
widdershins in thesterness
shapka · hitchhiking at night
the hapless plunge · these sad days
when something still might be done
crumbling frieze on the wall traced
by my finger coarse with work
the song obliterated
the somber going · Sxwaixwe
at the bottom of the lake
still slumbering on · on
Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System.
Malok's Martian Seas.
"It is written that when Voltaire was the guest of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci Palace, they exchanged puzzle notes. Frederick sent over a page with two picture blocks on it: two hands below the letter "P", and then the number 100 below a picture of a handsaw, all followed by a question mark. Voltaire replied with: Ga!."
"Dance Card and Gnashing Mandible"
crumble the reasons
and the reasonings
thereunto
crumble the ways and the guides
as the welkin shifts into spasm
and cataclysmic bungle
and we look at each other
without naming it
wisps of fantasy
still clinging to the debris
do you have food saved
what will we do for water
The Tickler that Exploded.
"Nothing, however, can justify the term 'path' for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage--except one thing: They don't quit." --For the Time Being
"Obolus"
Ajilvsgi ajar · ailing
alumnus · ovary usufruct
ogham · aim
fall too tally crystal · Halliburton lit
gloat biz · incog Ygg
fallout glitz · bulk slowly angst
to assailing botch
avid · stand
Nora Roberts, Planet Finder.
"Exercise: Catorce"
In sharp surprise the clouds run
off the wavering heap of smog.
This slag of red belief remains,
Vesuvius and glacier darg,
and patiently withstands hot carve
and bite of effervescent eye.
Blue stations of the tamarack dog
appear among our tactile clouds
unchanged. I wear a leather bruise
as well as gather important shreds
for skeletal hand in mischief-gray
to dig the ruin of interview shoes.
Eating my lunch in interview shoes
a savage rock amidst black mud
yet something for a ghost to hug
wavering against tough ooze,
this knavery that does not know clouds
in sharp surprise of radar run.
Chiasmus in Antiquity.
"Thy Cradle is Green
Benedict, your embraces
once were stays. We loved
the June field then, our planar picnic,
Dexadrine clouds whip-skittering
above. But now, after your leaving,
there are rip cords. Penumbras. And ice
that can only report
it harbors air. Two possibilities remain--
A) Zero is gibbous.
Or
B) From the tipping dinghy,
our skeletons lisp, It was a nice life.
The answer: A).
Although true love
took the first bus
out of town, there is still singing
through the waters, chiming
in the sheaves. Those trumpets of Jerusalem.
And I a galleon, untethered, each tide
a mecca that knows
and presses this hull."
--Corinne Lee
They Fought Like Demons.
Is it the whole meaning of life, that intensive research has now perfected the ageold art of deception?
"If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival." --Richard Hugo
"The Third Messenger"
is there anything that rodents can't do
the cracked cup
that holds just long enough
three fourths of my day
gone
ninety percent of my energy
gone
erotomania
in the dust of the pyramid
Blackwater · legionnaire
the Cyberrevelation
the ice descends
lapses · of reciprocity
cmalyranji
correcaminos
The Amazing Story of Kudzu.
"Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me." --Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town (1979)
"Dragon Bone Hill"
boxkite roost
Sxwaixwe skillfully wisp stints
cenacle crawl · forage for tsar stuff
as oxen twitter
was silver exact swamp bent · is skull bitter
slog along of sunk
allow bloom by swarm · simple
asleep · spark
"On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people--likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus--walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago--before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked; it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three's steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. 'A remote ancestor,' Leakey said, 'experienced a moment of doubt.' Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did." --For the Time Being
Danger Diabolik.
The tiny black ants.
"My people never forgive the execution of a poet."
"Centipede Likeness"
crossing a spider
web in the dark
lilac, saffron striations
alluvial calm
and light, same mask gone
if you stand in the center
it is all the way gold
star mask on
and cars beyond the window glide
linoleum reentry
most crowded arrow
and Oz
who is also Phaëton
spins these webs in the golden dark
soon
How to keep dinosaurs.
"In a speech last month Buffett -- the third richest man in the world -- pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent of his income while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent."
"It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor women nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments, for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.... The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement."
"Indeed, I would say we are right now at what feels like a point of vital balance, and those of us involved with literary journalism and book-reviewing live with the sense of a balance teetering."
I just noticed that in cukta1 of my book luryri'e, in the jbopemci "xekcpi ctino" ('Blackbird Shadow'), 3 lines were inadvertantly omitted. After line 10 (co'u nunkla) and before the next line (.i mi ge nenri), i should have put:
.i le galrai grute
simsa penci
ca se gusni
Shall i disappoint my thousands of loyal fans, whose support means so much to me (emotionally as well as financially); or shall i follow my bliss, strange though it be, into nether catacombs of obscurity? The answer is a given. There was never really any choice, was there?
15 books important to my development as a poet (See also: my list of Essential Titles)
• 100 Poems from the Japanese
• Poets in a Landscape
• Approximate Man (Tzara)
• The New American Poetry
• Paradise Lost
• Beyond Language (Borgmann)
• Collected Poems of W. H. Auden
• Berryman's Sonnets, & Dream Songs
• Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath
• a bilingual anthology of Modern French Poetry (Hackett?)
• Celan's Speech-Grille and Selected Poems (tr Neugroschel)
• Roan Stallion and Other Poems
• Bly's Neruda and Vallejo
• The Eighteen Nineties (Holbrook Jackson)
• Green Armor on Green Ground (Rolfe Humphries)
also (small press) • NRG, & the publications of Xerox Sutra Editions (small press)
Thousand-hand Guanyin--performed by deaf dancers (thanx Jill!).
Downtown (in German).
Bilingual Lojban-English blog.
"Dreams occur in the words of other bin Laden followers, and their influence on al-Qaeda is probably far greater than we imagine." --Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation (2005)
His own flight plan.
"Exploits and Sufferings of Tantalum"
misdirectomy
the dark side of the muon
encroachments
the lid clamped down
so as not to know too much
pastis · dark missive
five polyps · from sulfur island
fried twinkies
"Crypt Topics"
mutiny lungfish · stirrup
litany into lycanthropic · sloop built
way agnostic off
lilac is
shadowy slowly static · milk crisp
fraught cup sport · slowly
lightning stop · marsh anguish in gift ink
storm boil flow
symbol scrap · fang and still what grows lost fact with
schooling · psalms all follow much
"Their Gods Were Eyeing Watts"
the ice shards scramble
across linoleum
discover
your powers failing
and how little that changes anything
malice
of the elements
only motors
speak
we will be orchestras
for something epic
and afterwards
there will be other sounds
"...Sometimes we must playact
beneath mask grins, hide
behind rain."
--Corinne Lee
They had peace.
1.
boarded up
a dollar ago gas
no companionable ghosts
on the way not taken
musmalsi · Broadalbin
simsa · submerged
various choirs of birds
but what is it i grasp
trash left · by transients
the forest · gone to toothpicks
calls
and the night wind forsaken
2.
cold drizzle at dawn
a macchiato?
a macchiato? sure;
as this tarmac flexes
to the tramp of future armies
sweet coal mine of youth
3.
watering the street
with transmission fluid
cast coins upon it
roadside booby traps
on-message
searing · nonsense
what to read · after
watering the street
with bodily fluids
what to read · during
autonomy · not freedom
a fez that fits
what used to be city blocks
of modest homes
remove most of the story
to find the story
to save
this shard or that shard
out of the general ruin
rescue a book from the trash
because you read it once
submagazinist
1888 Lalla Rookh
repaired with electrical tape
Idea for a story: this Lovecraftian debacle: "Sad end to RWC[Chambers]'s days. No one in town liked him. He lost lots of his money in the 1929 stock crash. He stuck to himself and never had much to do with the town. After his death his wife published books that he had started until she died in 1938.
The house was left open with everything in place and local kids burning his papers to keep warm when drinking and making out in his abandon (sic) house. It was even used as a brothel from time to time. Half of the land is under water now because of a new dam and part (1/3) of the house has been pulled down and the rest remodeled by the church to from a rectory. His son is reported to have been in an asylum at one time. Maybe that is why nobody was there to take care of the place after his wife's passing.
There is a picture of the house... Looks kind of like a small U.S. White House.
...the reservoir did cover 200 of his 400 acres. Some say that he acted as if it didn’t bother him. I think that this was just stoic behavior. This was the land he wrote about in his five great novels of the revolutionary war. The drowned land, the Vlaie, the Kennyetto river, and Sir William Johnson’s beloved Summer House Point and Fish House all were covered. I think it took the heart out of him. He did not live too many more years after the water covered his land.
What is left of Broadinbin (sic) House is owned by the Catholic Church. About 1/3 of the house was pulled down when they rebuild it into housing for the clergy. The rest of the land is owned by a doctor. It was logged about 20 years ago. RWC’s 40,000 plantings going to make tooth picks, dog houses, and toilet paper." More. And...
like ghosts we continue
our struggle in another place
our lights getting
turned off for us
xekcpi
the caravan
adjacent languages bleed
don't underestimate
the difficulties
our brave troops
forge on
black bird on a pale em'rald field
the soft targets fleet
race cars
whose ads are part of the romance now
who commands the camera
commands life
our folly on wings propels us
to a place beyond satire
Scurry act gulp croon.
how benign seem now the machinations
of raygun & co
i still have · a following
all there is to know
about bread mold
time for a cameo
from the landscape
time to find a window
shapka
yellow hat langpo
golden toothpick
gnarly logarithms
depraved judge
in the shadowy corridors
glides
and this troubling crux
refuses to become a problem to solve
hiss
of the last drip from the coffee maker
time to find a window
1.
popups · bugs
on the windscreen
and the cookies they leave
gerdanlouk
klakydirgo
google how to make
tire sandals
2.
the poem in the subway car
they don't need my help selecting
flicker on my closed eyes
non epiphanies
scabs
i don't remember how i got
the dreamlike feeling
of walking in a foreign city
Oban baraka
photograph
of pure cerulean
Dedman
walking
if you'd like to fill out
one of these forms
3.
harnished
esc atology
thrice
fire belong phosphorus
radio belong clear channel
melodic zygalism
used to this feeling of
hunger now
"They had no language to articulate the wrenching experiences of war, dislocation, resettlement and fracture of their once-cohesive culture. Providing that new language is the work of artists."
"The bishops, who believe that life begins at conception, said that they opposed the creation of any embryo solely for research, but they were also anxious to limit the destruction of such life once it had been brought into existence. In their submission to the committee, they said: 'At the very least, embryos with a preponderance of human genes should be assumed to be embryonic human beings, and should be treated accordingly' ."
Ding Yi- Appearance of Crosses 89-6
1.
idols of emptiness
a different kind of pillbug
a nest of half finished gestures
2.
the concept of enough
is an exile
WalMart cargo pants
3.
monday every day
as sunshine diamonds
Dalmation P-51
4.
untrue accusations
about my browser
Tom Cruise in CyberJaya
5.
some ungodly hour
pluviaminatory
i pass another car only because
i want to go 45 instead of 40
Veeder Root Warning
pang · the smell of old World Books
as i toss them
windy luck in the Great Pyramid
"Sandstorms nauseate by generating static electricity--eighty volts per square yard. A Dutch geographer discovered a cure. Walking through a sandstorm, he dragged a car jack behind him; the jack grounded the voltage." --For the Time Being
"Gerdanlouk, he thinks. An evocative Turkish word, with Arabic roots. It means jewelry, but only jewelry adorning a woman between her lower neck and the top of her breasts."
--The Sultan's Seal
The Real Tuesday Weld.
Y Kant Tori Read.
Cecily Brown: The Girl Who Had Everything
Monday every day
as sunshine diamonds
Dalmation P-51
Christine Brennan.
" 'Is it true that one lives only on Earth?
Not forever on Earth: only a short while here.
Even jade will crack,
Even gold will break,
Even quetzal feathers will rend,
Not forever on the Earth: only a short while here.' "
--Aztec poem quoted in Cortez on Jupiter
Caught in the Crossfire.
"I caught it and examined the cover with cheesy old illustration of some Flash Gordon type villain sneering sinister with his laser gun and the title in big bold obsolete font. Twenty-Four Septendecillion, by Abu Afak.
'What's this?'
'The great Islamic pulp novel,' Jehangir replied.
'It's from the 1940s--the heyday of Amazing Stories and all that shit, the shit that guys like Ray Bradbury grew up on. Abu Afak, he was like a fuckin' philosopher disguising his ideas in cornball outer-space stories. He was like Islam's Robert Heinlein.'
'So what's this one about?'
'Muslims landing on Pluto.' "
--The Taqwacores
Publishing new & old "hardboiled" pulp novels.
Azam Ali.
Hummingbirds early
bobbing and weaving in cool
loops around the blooms
"Poets are people
who are dissatisfied
with the dictionary."
--Billy Collins
abstruser musings
Spenser and Tennyson shelved
in Medieval Literature
it is not a bad thing
to be a poet read by people
who don't read poetry
wintry light of a June
morning on the West Coast
sound of unseen motors
fog retreating up the mountain
grass like long combed hair
padded headphones
orange and silver
and walking to breakfast
wood chips and gopher holes
my unfinished chess moves
phantom · fireworks
purloined · fireworks
yellow · eyeliner
interstate · fireworks
gypsy klezmer
tattoo of an eye
on the back of your neck
this caravan
just now setting out
this bivouac broken
this caravan
will not want entertainment
until much later
skylight
from this building's
previous uses
Deconstructed Ahi Poke
mask eyes rimmed by stylized flames
hidden for now
the stars of this caravan
and of its departures
we are walking now
the death of driving
sitting in our cars
we are walking the death of driving
i can almost imagine
selling a painting now
Putomayo and tahini
writing ghazals
dollars in our pockets
i want no more
to be separate from the world
no Koran in my heart
yet hajji
sunrise and sunset
hummingbirds early
the suq
prior to setting up
no more
machine made clothes
to write poetry in
a mask
can't be too ugly for me
the hours
that consecrate stillness
without writing a poem
asymmetrical print
clothes
asymmetrical
the Koran in my heart
without writing a poem
sesquiYorky
piranha sushi
arcane daughter
the price of living in paradise
whiff of brimstone
at the gates of Montecito
the language of the crows
no longer
intelligible
the sun is my enemy
the moon is my enemy too
air's barely moving
filled with the cries of birds
the pool unblemished
not to see the sun
is what the birds say
to each other across the pool
jaw shoe
2270 Barley
Summerland
wasabi ginger sauce
magnolia nectarine
soft bladed fans
the pink moment
as flying monkeys scream
secret cats
the olive and turquoise sea
glass chessboard
clear
against translucent
silver desert ants
the old moon
in the new moon's arms
sunrise
we didn't want to wait for
piranha sushi
digital picture frames
extension cord orange
the sun
across scuffed tiles
expired
my passport
in the bright cool dawn
expired
my passport
with the chorus of birds
my hands
older than my face
we are digging
the caravan without us
everyone
has something on their ear
a bird hopping
to within three feet of me
it's a fine line
between vigilant
and extra vigilant
inherited deserts
"For an age of tire sandals"
These interstates that crease the land below
Will linger after no more jet planes go;
And people still will long to change their place,
In shoes of cut-up tires their farings trace.
Then making them will be one cherished skill
Whether or not these roving hordes can spell.
"The word for a wheeled vehicle vanished from the Arab language for a thousand years." --Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (1988)
"When legendary field operative Tony (Poe) Posmepny was questioned by the upper echelons in Saigon regarding the accuracy of his body-count reports, his response was immediately to dispatch a courier with a bag of Viet Cong ears to the Vietnamese capital (sic). ...The ears in question were all left ears, just to ensure that his superiors understood..." --Mike Farren, CIA: Secrets of "The Company" (2003)
"The Recompense"
As unforeseen as sure,
and burning at our back.
Strangely beautiful
to carry what you keep.
This is the only fall.
It found us fast asleep
in front of the TV. Mean
and longing, lost between
and hardly even there
we reap the great mistake.
It is the war we make
our business, ever new
and falling into you;
the fate we can't believe
and stagger to receive.
To know it i'm not glad
but neither am i sad
to see the end of gladness
in blasting things, so i
myself flee by & by.
And what is it to face
the loss of any place?
I left here once & i
saw earth & sky go by
empty handed to give.
Empty of new surprise
we wander with haggard eyes
in ways where none may be
without their falling through.
Soon they will fall through me.
The ones i lost the most
in mist and smoke are made
fainter, and lost in shade
from here on out, inside
a whirlwind mystified.
Never again to break
and stretched no more between
the sky leaves a bloody wake
and litter enough to glad
crows in their garb of sad.
No fairy tales insure
our wonders coming back
and some were beautiful
but none of them would keep.
We hurtle, half asleep.
What do you think i mean
writing this shit between
customers while out there
dying proceeds, unfair
as always? I forget.
I set down my pen, face wet
knowing we haven't a prayer
denying our own despair
more than a poet can take
or out of it art make.
Leave it for someone new
maybe that pen's for you
in a day when none believe
or more than their share receive.
I release the gift & am glad.
Still on this night i'm sad
remembering what gladness
i had along the way,
places i'll never go--
and the rest of the crazy show,
Of such regrets we're made
hues of a grayer shade
will shoulder them aside
no longer mystified
that broken things can break.
I set out to walk between
a birth-wail & a wake
and don't know who'll be glad
when the last of us has turned sad.
Santeria Aesthetics.
"He rearranged his tangled hair back to its original spikyness and removed the safety pins from his nose and ears. Adolph was ready for bed."
Post-Katrina Portraits.
"It is an emergency that calls for patience, and to be patient in an emergency is a hard requirement."
--Wendell Berry
"Anata 'you (singular)' has a very limited use. In fact, long conversations between two people may be carried on without anata being used even once."
--Akira Miura, Japanese Words & Their Uses (1983)
Gabcast! etheric notes #11
"Cannibal is the New Christian"
black yogurt
Klingon hopefuls
toilets that know when to flush
Jalg
nirvana anvil
i tell you
and i will not tell you
" 'There is a Cool Islam out there, Yusef. You just have to find it. You have to sift through all the other stuff, but it's there.' " --The Taqwacores
Snake lemma.
"One shows respect through formality, through indirection; there are necessary locutions within which questions and responses should be couched, muffled, like winter padding on a horse's hooves, so that the ring of fact on stone remains the perogative of the elder, the teacher." --The Sultan's Seal
"...these were the days when the gift of forgetting was a treasure in itself."
--The Locusts Have No King
lu tutci jivbu li'u tcita di'e .i tu'e
renvi co nanca li vopa
.i le baxso djine be lemi
degji ru'i sinxa co prami
je speni .i logji vlipa
.i sarlu fa le tarmi
.i senva co nanca li vopa
.i le ve fanva mi jorne
le jaivi tolpei .i cmene
da poi vi'e clupa
ke'a .i baxso djine
tu'u ("Toolloom": 'Survivor of 41 years.
The Balinese ring on my finger stands for husband & lover.
Logic powerful. Spiral shaped. Forty one years a dreamer.
The thing translated from is joined to me at the place of
mystery. Name of what is everywhere looped. Balinese
ring.')
Final Exam on Surrealism in American Poetry
Is "surrealism" a style? A method? A movement? A tone? "Surrealism" was a moment. --Later, nostalgia for that moment.
"We sailed the Indian Ocean for a dime." Was this once a subway fare? I don't understand.
Is that surrealism? Why do people call things surrealist that ain't? I think explicable metaphors don't need to be called "surrealist" on top of that; some are just more far-fetched than others. But in English, we really only have an intermittent vocabulary of poetry criticism, & much forgetfulness even in those who study the tradition. Consider Abraham Cowley.
"Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names?" I sometimes imagine all the truly great contemporary poets are skulking in alleyways, reaching for a soft drink can in a favela, or imprisoned & not ever receiving the honor of a poet-in-residentiary visit (--or making a blog entirely in animated gifs). Certainly the names that get repeated nowadays--are nothing but footnotes. People, don't you ever read fucking Milton?
When did having a book cover with a Magritte painting become the cliché that it now is? A Joseph Cornell box? Textbooks (& the thinking that wants to have textbooks) will devour even the most unlikely food. Not that it can actually digest it. But that doesn't take anything from Cornell or Magritte.
Is Russell Edson a surrealist? Why or why not? Why is Max Jacob a more influential model than André Breton? Dreaminess is a way of avoiding one's dreams. But deeper dreaming is to dream through the sound of the words.
What was surrealism? What wasn't it? When did it stop being what it was or wasn't? A lot of things went drifting loose after the Great War. A few artists' noticing took the form that became known as S. Perhaps the next solidification of reality--the Postwar World--itself came in for a rattling, which never fully congealed up to the present day. (In my more Phildickian moods i think the proper outcome of the Sixties got stolen from us and we are buried in the Black Iron Prison of its denial.) Yet we became complacent (thinking a cultural revolution had already come & saved us) with pastiche instead of attentiveness. I think the only similar moment had to have been "Langpo"--now itself subject to imitation, of course. But what is going to rip us forevermore out of our easy life, & soon, probably won't leave us with the leisure to give it a style or a name.
Is Merwin a surrealist? Spicer? Wright? Ashbery? Lorca? Why is "surrealism" so boring? Why didn't Roland Barthes like it? I once said that surrealism was the best thing that ever happened to Painting, & the worst thing that ever happened to Poetry. All of those poets have flashes of arbitrary connectivity, & stretches of self-parody as well. Barthes, alas, wrote in obliviousness of ecstasy. (As do most of us.) Surrealism was born of ecstasy. Ecstasy can never be a program.
Just the other day I was watching again that long sequence near the end of the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, with its clever appropriation of the imagery of one of Magritte's most canonical paintings. Cute, but that's not S. Neither was Oscar-nominated Pan's Labyrinth, with every image traceable & meticulously thought-out in advance. These things have become part of our cultural vocabulary. What is unspeakable now? Certainly no self-consciously "transgressive" artwork. What are my own nightmares about? By the end of the 21c., one-third of the earth will have become desert. Sitting at a borrowed computer terminal, all that is solid melts into air, & i don't even have words for this loss. It's been raining all summer long. What if it doesn't stop?
§
Everybody Knows.
wisps lost
of old hungers told
dried up snail
DJ Rebate Offer
Images of violence seem to speak your pain, but it is only like swearing at your pain; & it adds to your pain the extra pain of clumsy futility. For your pain is not about injury: your pain is about injustice.
Poem.
"...a tolerated outsider is only a slumming insider." --Andrei Codrescu
"Whispering Rabbit"
lull
in the captivated doom
festination & fleafestation
we lurch with varying steepness
the floors of complex zeros
this
is nonkinetic warfare the year
they invented
strawberry air freshener
"It's entirely possible that a quarter of humanity will be squatters by 2030." --Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map (2006)
"It is as if they were playing some bible-based video game."
Austere radiance of the elves
encountering Hello Kitty
the song we are burning to know
"Cortez, he just squeeze rats."
"...a delirious mosaic of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, post-cyberpunk savvy, linguistic fun and Aztec myth."
(by John Whatmough)
"Architecture and rhetoric are one and the same."
--Omar Amorc
"Not My Favorite Section of the Bookstore"
I gaze at all the rightwing tomes
in Politics; all the pundits wrong,
who wrote to blast a foe's repute
or justify a rotten claim.
How pitiful the waste of trees!
And did they really understand?
This goes beyond the mere reward
of prostituted intellect...
Blank Eichmanns sans their Nuremberg
accounting, nor seems likely now
the bulk of those forgotten lies
to ever reel their spinners in.
What hatred must have driven them,
i realize at last: not silver,
they betrayed their fellows for.
Which i must too be wary of.
Gabcast! etheric notes #8
"Melungeon Sky"
the breaking up of a collection
O Antoinette
your eye is steely
your jaw is set
having to entertain the thought
an injury may or may not be permanent
O
Antoinette
your fate is walking
your face is wet
lost for a moment
in the cries of the birds
"What does it say about the Franks, that the language for every important event in life has to be invented anew each time?" --Jenny White, The Sultan's Seal (2006)
"In December 2003, he went home, to Manassas Park, Virginia, where his parents, Joseph Sr. and Eva, quit their jobs to care for him."
The "Witchetty Grob": 1 h3 & 2 g4.
"Mysteries of Hello Kitty"
Darb Ramadan · crystal ablution
crisp · furrow
ambitious · magic
adjunct salp into ichthys · prismatic myth
as stars · rattling along cark
ablution
clasp fulcrum · at will
for only actual · brumous
New ghazal.
The dwarfish toilet. The picture puzzle of a beautiful jet at sunrise, tilting to turn. (How did you know it was sunrise and not sunset?) Back to the white noise of waiting on a car. Whether it will rain or not. How to stay comfortable in a chair not meant to sit in for hours.
" 'God used to be an urban Jew. He's back in the desert now.' " --Don Delillo, Falling Man
(2007)
"We Have Always Lived in the Casbah"
com , Tantalum ran into itand
clock burnt amps body appendChild div ; },
prisoners were marched
down for me by
Kinshasa: in the twentieth
century lasted years from 1914 to
large numbers
of Kinshasa Kinois fought for which
one of the armies of adults. ...
is . extinct; and reckless workthat wears my
ornamental
demur clingsto the pyregoes tooSock Monkey Dreams.The
.
Whereas the forthcoming royal wedding, he
ever
writes Gobi Desert The is that
the book of money 195 .Unable to shirkeven as death,
of such lurkas casts them
i did, &
it was then continuetuned
in Calvados.But when I
found hands to
do a Drowning Witch & 1982 finally
found hands here are likewise
unable
to Save
a time I found hands You came
after us Trying to afford
bride price or become breadwinners, young men,
for Davis, represented by
Angelique she told to its primary to the labour
process
becomes stigmatized as it sold 250,000
copies in this is are viewing graywyvern journalCreate
a really We
will
be inhabiting the postageon this
failure of the guns
in order are currently training... via Metafilter Two
Nice Girls 05 June 2007 @ 11:
08 am abfraction
believe in
your hands,to
under the past we will change
our name to the engagement had been
called the nicest poetic compliment he ever
writes Gobi Desert is therethat sky The end of
one in
Burgundy.I waswhen Anna Nicole
Smith died not wholly
ironically, I saw demand in Savannah,
i will think of
conscience versus abdication.
§
gray,
holding. if,
and so. till.
§
morning zombuluchuk crisp
snog wisp and ignorant azimuth
cold · ambush
abort lungfish scoop
shadowy lungfish · flip burning skirl across
iron wishing tsunami small
is incog
borg town swig in ash
spools rancor · our adorn biz against
incoming tortuous story · tag had storm
§
new fuel rules
all indigo
gone
"Negotiations with Ganesh"
1.
sluggard in the rainlight
collapse, then continue
collapse, then continue
tuned in to the choirs
what are these headlights saying
2.
arroyo of the lawyers
golden shrine
for golden shrine
how ronald reagan
invented the wheel
End of the Copenhagen Interpretation?
"...Auden once claimed that the "nicest poetic compliment" he ever received came in 1957 when his friend the Catholic activist Dorothy Day was arrested and held at what was then called the "House of Detention for Women" at the corner of 6th Avenue and West 10th Street in Manhattan. She told him that as the women prisoners were marched down for their weekly shower, a prostitute recited the last line of Auden’s poem "First Things First" (which had recently appeared in the New Yorker): "Thousands have lived without love, not one without water". "When I heard this", Auden commented, not wholly ironically, "I knew I hadn’t written in vain!" ." (via)
Okay:
beautiful dark morning
who kill because they're told to
"In fact, recent work on the planet suggests it resembles Venus much more than Earth, a seething cauldron far too close to its primary to provide a reasonable foothold for life."
Dragoman.
Sportsman's Guide.
fundos in the Black Current
penultimate white rhino
where i was
when Anna Nicole Smith died
"It's not a conflict of obscurity versus clarity, it's a conflict of conscience versus abdication."
Long comment on Knott's blog.
" 'The future is there,' Cayce hears herself say, 'looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the part behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.' " --William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2004)
things already part of me
i collect, scattered across countries.
in one of them a spaceman walks.
the sun sometimes rises.
spirals of mist follow it
from a time when that meant something.
"A wind of such violence
will tolerate no bystanding..."
--Plath
Grace Halsell.
Korpiklaani.
Lynx is fresh.
"Rakia"
Presently, i will think of it.
Chapters ago, a punctuation mark
not where today we'd put it
to the fulsome barking of dogs.
To become
part of the wreckage
and part of what walks away:
the undisgruntled country
with free unlimited movie rentals...
Let the healing begin.
"Like fever also is the great Nostalgia." --The Book of Mirdad
"The American author of a study of eighteenth-century Russian literature records the response of one colleague to the prospect: 'Why, is there any?' " --Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (Hughes)
Lego animation music video: the brave new frontier. (via Metafilter)
Two recent books about the Number Zero. (Then there's that Roches song--"Big Nothin.")
"A Word Meaning the Typical Death of Your Sort of Person"
The rushed and reckless work
that wears my infamy
is yet not mine to shirk
even as it flies me.
Here are the ruinous tools
your hand may not unclasp;
these, the rowdy accruals
from sleep and leisure reft.
And no one finds it weird
that makers wield such lurk
as casts them under the wheels
of rushed and reckless work.
insane the barking
and wakeful the sad list'ner
which one to poison
love that Olympic logo
"When the moment falls off
and primal fool-seasons
affix their wintry incubus"
--Brenda Shaughnessy
Amalia Rodrigues on Youtube.
"Now he’s writing two novels without a contract and posting on the blog and message boards on his Web site, bigjimindustries.com—the literary equivalent of living in a trailer park."
"...casting hatred upon rosy cheeks is a habit of the Blue Sky." --The Tale of Kieu
"Originally published in 1934, the book sold only 3,000 copies and soon fell out of print. It was rediscovered in 1964 and hailed as a masterpiece when Irving Howe gave it a rave review in The New York Times." "It sold 250,000 copies in five weeks, and a million within a few years."
"Painspray"
that on the pyre goes too
heresy blooms, and night draws on
we will change our name to Successland
that on the pyre goes too
mutiny avalanche
carbonaceous I:
that on the pyre
goes too
Sock Monkey Dreams.
The Anti-Streep.
"The
outer limit of this failure of the city to provide employment, services or housing is, for Davis, represented by the city of Kinshasa in the Congo, a city in which "the formal economy and state institutions, apart from the repressive apparatus, have utterly collapsed" (191). "Average income has fallen to under a $100 per year; two-thirds of the population is malnourished; the middle-class is extinct; and one in five adults is HIV-positive. Three-quarters are likewise unable to afford formal health care and must resort instead to Pentecostal faith-healing or indigenous magic" (192). "Wrecked by a perfect storm of kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, structural adjustment, and chronic civil war" (192), citizens of Kinshasa (Kinois) "fought for their survival by 'villagizing' Kinshasa: they re-established subsistence agriculture and traditional forms of rural self-help […] They sought release from the 'disease of the whites': the fatal illness of money" (195).
However, Davis says, "despite heroic efforts, especially by women, traditional social structure is eroding" (195). "Unable to afford bride price or become breadwinners, young men, for example, abandon pregnant women and fathers go AWOL. Simultaneously, the AIDS holocaust leaves behind vast numbers of orphans and HIV-positive children. There are huge pressures on poor urban families […] to jettison their most dependent members" (196). This has led to large numbers of abandoned children persecuted as "witches" in the guilty Pentecostal hallucinations of adults."
"..."The real crisis of world capitalism", he argues, is when "a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included, now or in the future, in economy and society" (199). This stigmatization leads to the perception that "the mega-slum has become the weakest link in the new world order" (204). This perception, in turn, feeds "the demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime", which "are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the violence of economic exclusion, and, as in Victorian times, the categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the streets" (202), a war for which the armies of the new world order are currently training..."
(via wood_s lot) --Katrina, Kinshasa...you don't think this will happen to us. But what are you doing so it won't?
"XDRTB"
my silence is there
chrome greasy star
2 kids on unicycles
remtai minji gaze
my silence is there
that sky and that sky's
shadows
they cut off my sister's hands
i'm here but i'm really good
Gabcast! etheric notes #7
"Starlight is almost flesh" --Basil Bunting
Tantalum ran into it
and clock burnt amps body ran ink cicala
indigo storm goaf
cicala story ransom only
adorn scald
clock goaf scurry skill
obol now graying into
stony bank
Two poems and a link.
scattered limbs
car climbed a curb
to kill this seedling
This may be common knowledge in Zappan circles, but it was a surprise to me. One of his rarer albums, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch (1982)--i finally found it in Savannah, i think--has always puzzled me by its title. Well, yesterday we got a book in from 1953, Roger Price's Droodles, consisting entirely of ultra-simple, enigmatic cartoons, and the humorous captions that cause them to make sense. On page 55, i found "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save Drowning Witch" (& the drawing which he used on the album cover). --He must have had this book, too.
"No Second Titanic"
walk through gilded years
music at your fingertips
the audience applauds
how much more like them i am now
walk through gilded years
new plagues
the audience applauds
lego rocket to the moon
At Starbucks i heard a vocal cover of "Bolero" by Angelique Kidjo--though she calls it "Djin Djin" on the album.
"...armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all."
Alternative history of the Space Age.
Gabcast! etheric notes #6
absolute · zero
tolerance · zero
hour · glass
ground · zero
Self-Made Man.
"Foggy Dacoit"
gavurlar
bad gorilla mask
marketing synergy at bay
resumption of a voice
burly patina
the new amalgam
hibiscus dust sings
hostage faith
green zone of the mind
From a storefront in downtown McKinney.
taillights clumping
in the soft blue dawn--
an unfamiliar car
"We will be inhabiting the terrain differently from now on."
Christian Jihad.
Passionate Minds.
Dieselbilly.
Kyrgyz Music.
Og Mandino should have written The Caveman Diet.
"One of the production line managers, Hassanjan, brimmed with a nationalist confidence bordering on religious faith. 'We haven't changed the cars' Korean specifications for our roads,' he said, nodding proudly at the highly automated machinery. 'We are of the opinion that we have to change the roads to the specifications of our new cars.' " --Sons of the Conquerors
The ache for celebrity recognition is not only our age's characteristic form of egotism, it is more fundamentally an inmost craving for a different order, one in which each person in themselves counts for something. Could we but recognize it and give it its proper name, it is the desire for social justice.
New ghazal.
Crumb's Kafka. (scroll down)
Hebrew Sudoku.
Fethullah Gülen.
Gore on "Good Morning America" this morning. Absurd and frightening. I mean, i'm glad to hear someone talking sense (for once) on network television, but her incomprehension, feigned or genuine, made it seem like they were on different planets. Which i guess is the point... But nations have gone sleepwalking before; we're not even unique in that regard.
Saddest Songs. My vote: Long Long Time (Ronstadt, #1 IMHO). Over the Rainbow (from Live at Carnegie Hall). Folsom Prison Blues. Black Coffee (Peggy Lee). House of the Rising Sun (maybe Odetta's?). 60 Years On (live, from 11-17-70). Quartet for the End of Time (saddest classical--written in a concentration camp). Paris is a Lonely Town (from the animated movie Gay Purr-ee). Elegie; & Pissin' in a River (Patti Smith--but she has several other good candidates). I am Stretched on your Grave (sadder than the Sinead song mentioned). Running Dry (Neil Young--saddest by a male vocalist). At Seventeen. By the Time I get to Phoenix. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (from Meet Me in St Louis). Paint It Black. Queen Victoria (perhaps Cohen's most desolate). Nothing Else Matters. Que Sera (only as the cover by Pink Champagne). Yesterday. Leaving on a Jet Plane (Peter Paul & Mary). River (Joni Mitchell). Because of You (Kelly Clarkson). Ulysses' Gaze (saddest soundtrack). So in Love (from Kiss Me Kate, especially as sung by Brian Stokes-Mitchell). Family of Bones (from the newest Roches album). In the End (Linkin Park). Not counted here: Piaf; fado; blues...
Gabcast! etheric notes #5
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song,
And marble flooring cracks beneath its weight.
It was a dream, and dreams do not prolong:
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song.
And you who mince the litany of wrong
Come into lands where none prevaricate.
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song,
And marble flooring cracks beneath its weight.
It's not this great song of the Sixties i'm hearing now on my car radio, that tells the people's story. It's not the great song of today that i know will never be played on a station here, that tells the people's story. But the terrible distance between them-- that does tell the people's story.
When the rebels came. (Audio file from the BBC last night.)
"Tamerlane was no sensitive Persian poet. His idea of greatness can still be relished in contemplating the mosque's enormous stone Koran stand. The Samarkand museum displays a medieval copy of the Muslim holy book whose huge pages would have fitted into it: they measure three foot by six." --Sons of the Conquerors
Kurt Vonnegut dies. Shortly afterwards, a planet made of Ice-9 is discovered. ((Link not exact. I know it's Gliese 436b--which should henceforward be known as Tralfamadore.))
"Unassailable Ant-Score"
On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees
Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?
--Adelaide Crapsey
The vultcherub dove.
Its four wings folded, it plummetted toward its goal: the head of the caravan. From down there, all they could see at first was a tiny black dot. But they could hear it, whistling like a kettle, in the still desert air. Lord B---- scowled.
He had not come all this way to be smashed like a beetle with a hobnail boot. Accordingly he gestured to the pipers, who abruptly broke their threnody. The caravan halted, its farther segments coiling in bemusement, and the dirt wagons dug in their olivine wheels. Each of the bidromedaries blew into the nostrils of its follower with its nether head. A piper offered a note of query, far in the back. And the black dot had become noticeably larger.
"Lord B----," said Lord K----, "We are stopping before the time." This hexvark, like Lord B---- a master of discreet irony, had long sought to undermine his expeditional suzerainty. But Lord B---- replied, "Put the dirt wagons together." So they did.
The vultcherub, when it hit, exploded a whole wagon-load of dirt, burying itself even so in the underlying sand. They were able to save most of the dirt, and served a good sirloin of vultcherub carcass for the whole upper echelon hexvark crew.
They had advanced twelve weeks from the last ragged edge of the Annular Forest. Ahead lay only the East Pole, a stark eye-smarting land where nothing scoreable to hexvarkdom had ever been conceived. Until now.
Lord B---- was raised a good Cylindrist, as with most of his cohort; his crucial wreck of faith occurred only later, when his developing mind encountered, among other obscurities, the Vinarna Relation--and its attendant Map. "Let Stillness, not Desire, provide the Way." From the very first strophe he was hooked.
Bivouaced, they made tea, burning bricks of pounded bidromedary dung. The sun, which earth men have named Gliese 581, flowered profusely and crimson at such an unnatural altitude it made them uneasy. Although none of them really believed they were going to march off the edge of any such jejune Worldcylinder, to tumble into infinite Glare-Abyss, they still were not able to shake that psychic image, whose very sonoglyph spoke of vague but inescapable harm. Lord B---- was scraping out the bottom of his bowl with prehensile tongue fully extended. His one eye, half lidded in this perpetual brillig, was surrounded by a ring of sonar-spiracles. His snout had started to peel from sunburn. If one six-legged aardvark could be said to be more "portly" than another, Lord B----definitely veered in that direction.
"Life just teems with quiet fun," observed Lord K----. Not long afterward, they dug in for their nap, the emptied dirt wagons casting shade across their weary tunnel mouths.
Lord B---- dreamed. In his dream he was rising. Below him the caravan shrank to a dark line amidst vast pallid sands. Whether he was a cruising vultcherub, a wraith disembodied, or his own teardrop shape relieved of its waking mass, Lord B---- could not tell (or even ask!). --He was rising toward the sun. Now he could discern a definite curve to the horizon. This spin-locked world, like a sunflower always keeping its same face to the light, O Metaluna of Omni Hexvarkdom, he saw as a banded globular perfect wholeness. Which no hexvark had ever really seen, and few enough even hypothesized. Then it melted into a cylinder. And the cylinder melted back into a sphere, with the soundof a vultcherub falling through the crystalline air, mace-skull foremost.
Another bivouac. Their unvarying ant-nosh done, the two leaders had lit lettuce-cigars. "Ant-score nilpertains counting ants," quoted Lord K----. "Indeed," answered B----. "The very existence of countable ants actually interferes."
For, somewhere between wealth and holiness, the hexvarks' value of ant-score obsessed all truly righteous hexvarks, and urged most of their inessential designs. This expedition, funded in part by the Queen, and part by subscription, was no exception.
They thought to achieve an unassailable amount of ant-score by the feat of being the first to reach the East Pole.
How many weary weeks followed further, I will not say, but they journeyed until their tea could no longer be prepared, for the water boiled away by itself as soon as it was poured. On the bright horizon, something had begun to lift above the dazzling sands.
Speculation ran rife.
It proved to be a collection of rectangular steel and glass lodgings, abandoned and half buried, apparently the home of beings like themselves, judging from the shattered statues they were able to unearth. Not a trace of any scroll remained.
Now the sun stood directly overhead, so this defunct city must have been built at the exact subsolar point of Metaluna--on purpose. Did its ancient builders wish to emphasize their immense hubristic ant-score, such that even this inhospitable spot was not beyond their tongue-grasp? Or did they even care?
Lord K---- had succumbed, and there was none of his own echelon for Lord B---- anymore to converse with. When he had sufficiently explored the ruins, he gave order for the snake-warding pipers to resume.
Rather than solving the enigma of that nameless heap, burning in devout desolation exactly where the Vinarna foretold, he was bringing back to the Queen a second and more terrifying puzzle. In his stoutest box, concealed within Lord K----'s no-longer-unloading sleep-dirt, lay the one true treasure of this quest. It was a familiar object, though scorched and desiccated by its languish in the Leng Desert, after the city had fallen or been despoiled by plague or spell. It was a lampion, like any hexvark would carry into shade-side doings: a simple glass vase containing the skeleton of a glowfish.
Lord B----surmised that, once upon a time, Metaluna had not always turned toward its luminary at the present rate, but more quickly, so as to produce a weird alternation of light and dark.
In the umbrageous portion of those hexvarks' lives, they would have greatly appreciated the use of this toy, he figured.
Cylindrism was finished.
5-10-07 (1st draft)
"ANGÉLIQUE
Have you seen Angélique,
What way she went?
A white robe she wore,
A flickering light near spent
Her pale hand bore.
Have you seen Angélique?
Will she know the place
Dead feet must find,
The grave-cloth on her face
To make her blind?
Have you seen Angélique. . . .
At night I hear her moan,
And I shiver in my bed;
She wanders all alone,
She cannot find the dead."
--Adelaide Crapsey
"If the planet had only 15 per cent as much air as the Earth, they said, that would still ferry enough heat around to the dark side to keep the atmosphere from freezing out.."
"M dwarfs are back on the table." (The pdf.)
(from Wikipedia: Planetary habitability)
"...tidally locked Gliese 581 could have convective cells which extend the whole sun facing side and beyond, but no cyclonic activity."
Correcting the epigraph* for my book:
'Therefore the Romans were not so great because they were religious, but because they were sacrilegious with impuny.' --Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, tr Bryce in The AnteNicene Fathers v.6
Found here.
----------------------------------
* ("The Romans triumphed not because of their faith, but because they were faithless with impunity.")
clouds
flowing roll
bulwark idol ask
in
cloud song
twining wisp angst
ogham
drink torn
flowing cloud ablution
bulwark
clasp twists
bark which skirls
"In Berlin, at least, the style of the progressive bourgeois class is totally defined by patina.."
"Cor Caroli"
shrug
shadow frisk
dunkirk agnostic Usk
shadow
barracks adorn
forlorn swim off
