"Military-Humilitainment Complex" (Meredith)

For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark
Fast as windy flame devours,
For the thirst of our nature brine.

The love is here; it has but changed its aim.
Where a robber raven's tale
Joined along the plains of dew,

By serpent Apollyon blest:
For flash, much more for push, of arms.

09 09 04

"You know, sometimes you have to lose a lot of Q-tips before you realize you have a hole in your head." --Cintra Wilson

"As I thump away on my delete button each morning, I find myself pausing at the poem that says it will rid me of poetry, and I often feel I'm being offered a glimpse into a kind of M. C. Escher print in which the iterations continue on forever into some golden braid of mist and meaning." --Pantaloons

Brush Up Your Censored. (via wood_s lot) --I have to say, this is the scariest list YET.

Losing America.

'Well? Does the pallid metalloid heal you?
The civic, incendiary metalloids,
bent over the atrocious river of dust?

Slave, it is now the circular hour
in which your two auricles become
guttural, quaternary slip rings.

Mr. slave, on the magic morning
the bust of your tremulous snore
is seen, at last,
your sufferings on horseback are seen,
the good organ goes by, with its three handles,
I leaf, month after month, through your monochord head of hair,
your mother-in-law cries
making little bones out of her fingers,
your soul bends passionately to see you
and your temple, momentarily, marks time.

And the hen lays her infinite, one by one;
the earth comes out beautiful from the smoking syllables,
your picture is taken standing next to your brother,
the dark color thunders under the bed
and the octopi run and collide.

And now, Mr. slave?
Do the metalloids work on your anguish?'

----Cesar Valleo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry, tr C Eshleman (1978)

The Fourth Turning--in 1997 i thought they were exaggerating.

An engine that runs on coincidence.

Words i picked up: "dykon"; "post-ethnic" (about a person of indeterminate race).

Listening to- Bebop Deluxe: Live in the Air Age.

"The lipstick is coming off the piglet." --The Jim Side

A Mire of Words.

(Dowson & Auden)

Days yet unlived, I almost lived again;
Our wobbling way: there's a white silence
We gather and entwine.
Only I have no work
Lest the loud anguish of the waters should efface
That last landscape
Neobule, fain of sleep,
Theology and horses, our home become
A place of shadows utterly,
Inscribed on skies, escarpments, trees,
Just a little longer,
With the yearning unicorn;
That I may tell it like a rosary.

09 07 04

"Instructions in Emperor Worship" (Riding & Tennyson)

To make the day an hour longer.
With self-wrought evil of unnumbered years,
Yet nothing runs like prey.

You flash and lighten afar:
You lone survivor on paper,
There, while the rest were loud with merry-making.

The poppy edifices of sleep,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
At the dissolving border,

Get thee hence, nor come again,
Where wing on wing folds in
Short fits of prayer, at every stroke a breath.

And you may write it as it seems,
All in a fiery dawning wild with wind
Amidst seeming speed.

Because the scale is infinite.
One shivering midsummer
The parrot in his gilded wires.

Will rise the secret, will flower up
The weight of all the hopes of half the world,
To the perilous margin, moment.

But till this cosmic order everywhere
What feel and fragrance?
Springing alone

if I perhaps such same fatality
Or else I dream--and for so long a time,
That strangeness is not strange.

Then, on a golden autumn eventide,
As it will lie unread,
Let visions of the night or of the day

The reasons, then, of this one, that one,
Come not, when I am dead,
To know how poor, how less than full

That most of them would follow wandering fires,
And no new harvest to fraction sowing.
Heard on the winding waters, eve and morn

Whose grace goes out in utmost rings
Upon the last and sharpest height,
A thousand years and more

And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald
And words below a whisper which
Before us, and against the chapel door

Hunger went.
O me! what profits it to put
Call within call

Receive, and yield me sanctuary, nor ask
Because I sit here so,
I am but as my fortunes are:

The shallow terrors, waking never far.
And all at once should sally out upon me,
Claim the conjectured corpse

This conquers: hide it therefore; go unknown;
For loyal prophetic heat
With promise of a morn as fair;

Whether the plight more ours,
And soil'd with all ignoble use.
Aura of tattered hopes

Be merry on earth as you never were merry before,
The immeasurable areas of distress
And each of them is wholly arm'd, and one

The wind takes, not the earth,
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
One flower I saw, one I didn't,

And left me gazing at a barren board,
If this be I.
That makes me maudlin-moral.

To their momentary finish in
A ghastly something, and its shadow flew
To this awakened not forgetting.

Forever and forever when I move.
Glory the mirror and the beauty;
And, making there a sudden light beheld

The upper air usurping
And others' follies teach us not,
The dogs still bark,

Waiting to see me die.
Or were otherwise insane,
And moving thro' a mirror clear

All that was like enough to now
What is it that I may not fear?
And dear the evil name;

Beside the never-lighted fire.
The reason of the saint that he is saintly,
About the flowering squares, and thick

Nor speaking coruscation
The snake slipt under a spray,
An hour was taken

Go by, go by.
For love of hell is empty
If any care for what is here

There is much that we have not to be.
We stumbled on a stationary voice,
I know

For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.
There were never covenants:
O there above the little grave,

Love has no elsewhere.
But that remorseless iron hour
And the ventriloquist gulls,

We saw not, when we moved therein?

09 04 04

Become a Member of the Elephant Art Club.

The Cure in Mexico.

$125 for a first edition Farewell to Arms? Hell, the dust jacket's worth that much!

The Devil's Bookshelf.

Song covers & centos resemble each other in communicating indirectly, by the arrangement rather than the ostensible content.

If Dubya wins i think i shall give up the letter "E".

The artists i like are too prolific for my budget! Elizabeth Hand has a new book, Bjork a new album--& me, the same old shortfall.

The opposite of selfpity is honor, not self-esteem.

Listening to that famous scene in Double Indemnity, it occurred to me that those who are looking for great American poets, are looking in the wrong places...

(Tennyson)

I was cut off from hope in that sad place,
Lost in the quagmire?--lost to me and gone,
There kept it, and so lived in fantasy.

The sad mechanic exercise
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
In lieu of idly dallying with the truth,

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
The sound not wonted in a place so still
Such waste and havoc of the idolatries,

The narrow street that clamber'd toward the mill.
A long melodious thunder to the sound
And lost to life and use and name and fame.

09 04 04

"DRAWN BUT NOT SKINNED; A Cento by Jeff McMillian

Tonight the mean winds of November
have begun to blow Indian Summer away,
pointing you north and north against your will.
North is easy. North is never love.
Without a shield of hills, a barricade of elms,
one resorts to magic. It is called breaking out
of the ground and it is done by force.

On the wind like something out of Leviticus,
a bat quivers across the porcelain of evening,
deep horror of eyes and of wings;
more come in watery flocks,
each one woven to the other like bubbles
in a frozen pond.

The dance winds through the windless woods.
Fires started by lightning make up the telling
of men: we were the fine shavings of sheepskin
mercy and love were not.
We for whom grief is so often the source
of our spirit's growth, whose veins Death
the gardener twists into a different pattern,
wonder, "Out of such numbers how will I be noticed?"
Whether caring accomplishes anything is irrelevant.
Every angel is terrifying.

It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life,
and this is the key to it all. There is a wisdom
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
It is all you have and all your father had
and all your brothers. We live in
an old chaos of the sun, one sun,
one journey here and everywhere,
of that wide water, inescapable.
At evening the diminishing of the dance,
no, not night but death, makes constant cry:
Disturb even a seed sleeping and you harvest stones.
It is called breaking out of the ground and
it is done by force."

(Shakespeare)

Insulting tyranny begins to jet
And bury all which yet distinctly ranges,
To villainy and vengeance consecrate,
To desperate ventures and assur'd destruction.

And caterpillars eat my leaves away;
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Never was such a sudden scholar made;

To nothing but despair. A thousand knees
Rot and consume themselves in little time.
With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd,
To second ills with ills, each elder worse,

But I will sort a pitchy day for thee;
Which is as bad as die with tickling.

09 03 04

"In the Forest of Estrangement"

our knowing of the rats
and that stark gnawing sound
at night
not to call it what it is

too long afraid
till all is scary and wrong
all but this phony flag
as if it could hold us

apart

as if it could
in storm or ruby flow

09 02 04

"The Revolution might write sestinas about us, but never vice-versa!" --Martha Zweig

Ecstatic Permutations.

"Gender Characteristics

so we had a few drinks
and I was telling him stuff about
my childhood and after a while he said
that sounds like penis envy to me did you
ever wish you had a penis and I said no
but I wish I had an ovipositor so I could
parasitize my enemies and infest them
with my larvae and he decided
to sit somewhere else
in a different bar."

--F. J. Bergmann