Girl on girl action from Mrs Halliburton.


Show your colors. (via M*tafilt*r)

' "The modern state," said Constantinidu, "deludes itself into thinking that it can protect God's life simply with police measures." ' --Kaputt


"Our window man has become a virtual millionaire with an average of about 20 windows to replace daily. " --Baghdad Burning


“Duration of an Instant”

A narrow walk, and down is up, now;
disastrous skald, and down is up, now.

Woods full of scorpions. Ruby trail
for ailing Whig; and down is up, now.

Trial upon trial: crimson companion
clips bright Algol, and down is up, now.

Narrow a shadow falls, through such mists
as scalp a rock, and down is up, now.

“Arbathiao”

with sickly actors and Cibola
crawls this rain

a brick indoors, and thus my own attrition
gray morn of a war

still Mongolians, still iron
ungodly hour, lipogrammaton, gun

disastrous lungfish
has no lamp

Pallid Mountain to ruin
and clouds coil across sky of Ubar

So long, Mr. P.

“Agathodaimon”

To sing is to arraign against wind’s sough
A bluff with as fantastical a fury.

I harrow fathoms in my turbid story,
with stony light and stars of civic Lilith.

Who can slog through lucid swamps for long
And not turn mystic? Sling a mystic’s wrath.

In rain as light as silk i walk and sing,
Against no solid balk, only bald shadow.

Ruin of what our nation had, and slag
Of all tomorrow’s tors, this worst of drugs.

Big Christ, who always knows a trick to win
As pinball wizards rip down Fand’s mimosa.

I sing and lurk in lands without a flag:
By walking it is road’s own bricks i honor.


'A frozen mountain stream, crystal fringes hanging from the rocks, chains of cold lace--this made me aware of what poetry really is: living emotion, rendered in a form allied to ice; flowing, elusive, imprisoned in something hard but transparent, colorless but reflecting all the colors in the rainbow.' --Thr*shold of Fir*

“Raucous Profound”

Touch my art, in raining dark;
thirst as Vlad in raining dark.

Chapbook kingdom, disastrous,
winds thrall vap in raining dark,

patchwork songs. What yawning void
strains this coil in raining dark?

Autumn martyrdom whips out
spoils of slag in raining dark.


'I shrugged. "Peace on earth through reason and order no
longer has any appeal to the imagination. That possibility has been rejected." ' --Hella Haass*, Thr*shold of Fir* (1964; tr Mill*r, Blinstrub 1993)

A Salam Pax sighting. (I got his book now.)

Orion.

"About a ton of Mars falls on the Earth every couple of years, so if Mars bugs pose a threat to Earth life, it is too late. They are already here." --David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets (2003)

Golf mysticism.

“ANSWERING A QUESTION IN THE MOUNTAINS

I

I went into the mountains to interest myself
In the fabulous dinners of hosts distant and demure.

The foxes followed with endless lights.

Some day I am to build the wall
Of the box in which all angles are shown.
I shall bounce like a ball.
The towers of justice are waving
To describe the angles we describe.
Oh we have been so far
To instruct the birds in our cold ways.

Near me I hear a sound,
The line of a match struck in care.

It is late to be late.

II

Let us ascend the hearts in our hearts.
Let us ascend trees in our heads,
The dull heads of trees.
It is pain in the hand of the ungodly
To witness all the sentries,
The perfumed toque of dawn,
The hysteric evening with empty hands.
The snow creeps by; many light years pass.

We see for the first time.
We shall see for the first time.
We have seen for the first time.

The snow creeps by; many light years pass.

III

I cannot agree or seek
Since I departed in the laugh of diamonds
The hosts of my young days.”

--Some Trees

“Bhopalimony”

And rapturous strain wodwo
gallant woods and swamps hibakusha

And faithful avid of gold warm nook vocal
through orchards now sylph

Wanton path
a happy man tamarind

A talk with Ligotti. (via M*tafilt*r)

Byrd says. (via Truthout)

“Wasa Wasa”

As this multitasking wasabi yoga
Brings down, aroma

Of myrrh blurs, an indigo goblin
Follows up with goblin’s blood.

"The way a lot of liberals respond to suggestions that devoting some energy to revitalizing the Democratic party's rural roots, you'd think that doing so required repudiating some of their most deeply cherished values -- rather than, in fact, simply living up to them." --Orcinus

“Tblasdayck”

In a rooky wood
i found my ray swam this vugg

food to divs
and disarray, for many a moon

holy city in ruin holy flatiron
lungfish down this clang lingo

Aradia instill my pumpkin
till cym and bal and om Gucumatz ions


“A gallant lineage, long in fields of war
And faithful chronicler’s enduring page
Blazon’d; but most by him illustrated,
Avid of gold, yet greedier of renown,
Whom not the spoils of Atabalipa
Could satisfy insatiate, nor the fame
Of that wide empire overthrown appease;
But he to Florida’s disastrous shores
In evil hour his gallant comrades led,
Through savage woods and swamps, and hostile tribes,
The Apalachian arrows, and the snares
Of wilier foes, hunger, and thirst, and toil;
Till from ambition’s feverish dream the touch
Of Death awoke him; and when he had seen
The fruit of all his treasures, all his toil,
Foresight, and long endurance, fade away,
Earth to the restless one refusing rest,
In the great river’s midland bed he left
His honour’d bones.”

--Rob*rt South*y, “Th* Last of Th* Goths” (1814)

“Tan of Applack”

Upon touching’s summit no words
could satisfy frost

spoils of Atabalipa
but most by pillbug

on twinkling pinions hid from wind and mountain
liaison

lark who from
and now by thymy banks paradox

snows through all origin and
and now through shadowy paths touch nirvana

“The tide of darkness now is at its height.
Yon lily-woven cradle of the hours
Hath floated half her shining voyage, nor yet
Is by the current of the morn opposed.”

--Thomas Lov*ll Beddo*s, fragm*nt from “Th* Last Man”

“When William Butler Yeats and his wife visited California, his wife, a medium, had a series of occult experiences in Los Angeles...from which his extraordinary volume, A Vision (1925), was woven.” --C McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946)

“Win Cash!”

Our Swan King, off duty at his ranch, vacuum
Awash in poppy, finds dust sinful.

Prying at a florid scab
Without irony.

Wondrously
Toot addict of Big Christ grout.

Bright spot.

In thankful days.

No armor for our troops, but a yacht for Top Chimp. (via Atrios)

Inat.

Spanish translation of McCourt’s ‘Tis: Lo *s.

On my victrola- Mingus: Mingus Ah um.

Recoil from what natty pumpkins say. Go back into study of colors, old songs, truthful books. Past days had such wars, tyrants, and bad art. Try not to run into cars. Strong thoughts. It is gray but not cold. Icy gnashing far; dying in Iraq. Put that in your small songs. Nobody knows your faction.

“Choking Hazard”

Phan fu tom ry cant
in this round room fools inhabit walls of sand

my glass grows dim with rain, ritual
cannibalism with gold

Ophir chill.
my occupation is long taiga

phan ey tom rie morth;
dango road

Not only is "Abraham, Martin, and John" on that album, Dion also sings "Purpl* Haz*"...

Tri*bflug*ljag*r.

"But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile?" --Hart Crane (via The Nacr*ous Oughts)

SMART-1. [R NOT US.]

“Paint You Hands With Maroon”

Fall in Carcosa:
Mists drift across a diamond.

Cars void of occupants roll and growl
Forth gray’s word;

Diwn scorch, collaboration fills our crystal
Barroom with zonda

Fronds. Carcosa aliquot
Blows holy.


“0% APR”

Coil rosg, druidicals bijoux firm
Phantom fury slack.

Inform our cosmic civil war, Gray.
Much logic

Much smoking mirror. Gibbous
Chalkydri hazaj

Bling hazaj amid tumulus rock
And Rolaids a maskful cairn

Taqiya
Would bring us topaz portal out of chaos.

Amanda Ros again. (via M*tafilter)

Tomb found.

“CANZONE

Until the first chill
No door sat on the clay.
When Billy brought on the chill
He began to chill.
No hand can
Point to the chill
It brought. Where a chill
Was, the grass grows.
See how it grows.
Acts punish the chill
Showing summer in the grass.
The acts are grass.

Acts of our grass
Transporting chill
Over brazen grass
That retorts as grass
Leave the clay,
The grass,
And that which is grass.
The far formal forest can,
Used doubts can
Sit on the grass.
Hark! The sadness grows
In pain. The shadow grows.
All that grows
In deep shadow or grass
Is lifted to what grows.
Walking, a space grows.
Beyond, weeds chill
Toward night which grows.
Looking about, nothing grows.
Now a whiff of clay
Respecting clay
Or that which grows
Brings on what can.
And no one can.

The sprinkling can
Slumbered on the dock. Clay
Leaked from a can.
Normal heads can
Touch barbed-wire grass
If they can
Sing the old song of can
Waiting for a chill
In the chill
That without a can
Is painting less clay
Therapeutic colors of clay.
We got out into the clay
As a boy can.
Yet there’s another kind of clay
Not arguing clay,
As time grows
Not getting larger, but mad clay
Looked for for clay,
And grass
Begun seeming, grass
Struggling up out of clay
Into the first chill
To be quiet and raucous in the chill.

The chill
Flows over burning grass.
Not time grows.
So odd lights can
Fall on sinking clay.”

--John Ashb*ry, Som* Tr**s (1956)

“Frisk Not”

A stark fist of approval nails you
Snail acid crystal in mansions of charcoal.

Hamtaro garmonbosia
Through night to thing frith.

And it’s hard
Mutiny has its argot:

I want to down cold grow crystal scorch
If a moon say aught, Altair,

In its cold pallor;
In its astroturf and solitary church.

A union of sorts.

“Sky Land Ransom”

Slimy main laps at Karnak,
Rightful mood with dimming light.

Long ago, words had carats,
And a bard could ply Latin.

I carry my own asphault
Through an orchard of abort.

Hush hush, no sign in sight, no
Ghost survival hazards this.

Cloudburst of glad thwarts gawking
Cataract of ruin will.

Follow a smoking mirror,
Follow a child hungry wolf.

So much i would put away:
Draftworthy fandango iron.

Virginia Opossum, blink
And miss our rainbow sigil.

Holiday. (via Und*r th* Fir* Star)

Sad.

Still unknown?

"Amayxoya"

Torpid Sunday, aorta
Hardly glubs, polka

Of doom, ghost brinksmanship fails, a katydid
Squats as osmium in anagram

Gray raga
An aroma of Satan

Contagious Christians
Carry, crisply stars unfurl within basalt

Sorrowing;
And i find my only lackwit sky

A story without skuas
Flashing, and i look up in vain for a cloud.

“Vain are thy Hopes, to scape censorious Eyes;
Truth will appear, through all the thin Disguise:
Thou hast an Ulcer which no Leach can heal,
Though thy broad Shoulder-belt the Wound conceal.
Say thou art sound and hale in ev’ry part,
We know, we know thee rotten at thy heart.
We know thee sullen, impotent, and proud:
Nor canst thou cheat thy Nerve, who cheat’st the Croud.”

--Dryd*n’s P*rsius, Th* Fourth Satyr

Two Thoughts on Umbrism.

On my victrola- Rav*l: Gaspard d* la Nuit.

What to Look Out For (scroll down to end). (via wood_s lot)

“Luminous Toxin”

Gigantomachia did again
Tank and stark
To small tasks school this
Sinking bat. Odious wish, idiotic

Pain: ogham was jilt and it
Wasn’t only skua balk
In adorn
Is sticky part gray sky stoop lotus

Ask smash basalt ills
Slant at dark isthmus, skimpy as usual, scorn
Thickly robotic collar
Slick storm what ring aspic osmium
Binds snap skin

“The first professional kyoka [humorous tanka] poet, Nagata Teiryu (1654-1734)...gained fame with one especially apt verse; when a Chinese-ink merchant from Nara presented the court with an unusually large stick of ink, Teiryu wrote these lines;

‘Although not the moon,
It has risen so high it dwells
Above the clouds;
I wonder what reason
There can be for this?’

[romanji text omitted] The entire interest of this poem stems from the puns on sumi (‘to dwell’ and ‘Chinese ink’) and on yuen (‘reason’ and ‘lamp black’). This display of wit so enchanted the court, even the emperor, that Teiryu adoptedthe name Yuensai (from yuen, lamp black). He soon gave up his cake business to devote his energies exclusively to kyoka, publishing his own verses and correcting those of other people.”

--World Within Walls

'As soon as Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria threw himself on his knees, seized Stalin's hand and started kissing it. When Stalin lost consciousness and closed his eyes, Beria stood up and spat.' --Khrushch*v R*m*mb*rs

Abysmal Atlas.

Inquiring mind.

“A Lost Color”

To talk about dank mulligrubs, sad moods born of long brooding upon immortal wrongs. To talk about soulful old music, that allows anguish to go skipping away, though it should crawl back to us again tomorrow. To talk about a politically-out faction, possibly hit by a con job, still mad, still not giving up.


How to talk Ham-Ham.

“The purity and stability of language, too, on which you found your claims of perpetuity, have been the fallacious dependence of authors of every age...as if the language ever sprang from a well or fountain-head, and was not rather a mere confluence of various tongues perpetually subject to changes and intermixtures. It is this which has made English literature so extremely mutable, and the reputation built upon it so fleeting. Unless thought can be committed to something more permanent and unchangeable than such a medium, even thought must share the fate of everything else, and fall into decay. This should serve as a check upon the vanity and exultation of the most popular writer. He finds the language in which he has embarked his fame gradually altering, and subject to the dilapidations of time and the caprice of fashion. He looks back, and beholds the early authors of his country, once the favorites of their day, supplanted by modern writers; a few short ages have covered them with obscurity, and their merits can only be relished by the quaint taste of the bookworm. And such, he anticipates, will be the fate of his own work, which, however it may be admired in its day, and help as a model of purity, will, in the course of years, grow antiquated and obsolete, until it shall become almost as unintelligible in its native land as an Egyptian obelisk, or one of those Runic inscriptions, said to exist in the deserts of Tartary.” --Washington Irving, “The Mutability of Literature,” in: An Evening with Irving (1907)

"POEM FOR TYRANTS

sentient beings are numberless--
I vow to enlighten them all
--the First Vow of Buddhism

it seems I must love even you
easier loving the pretty things
the children the morning-glories
easier (as compassion grows)
to love the stranger

easy even to realize (with compassion)
the pain and terror implicit in those
who treat the world around them
with such brutality such hate

but oh I am no christ
blessing my executioners
I am no buddha no saint
nor have I that incandescent strength
of faith illuminated

yet even so
you are a sentient being
breathing this air
even as I am a sentient being
breathing this air
seeking my own enlightenment
I must seek yours

if i had love enough
if I had faith enough
perhaps I could transcend your path
and alter even that

forgive me, then--
I cannot love you yet"

--Leonore Kandel, Word Alchemy (1967)

Original manuscript.

“The period when the kabuki spirit flourished most conspicuously was probably the last thirty years of the sixteenth century, and the outstanding exemplar was the ruler himself, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Not only did Hideyoshi rise from humble origins to the highest power in the country--amazing even in an age of warfare and upheavals--but he deliberately defied the established conventions in every field. Like other parvenus, he delighted in wearing the trappings of the old aristocracy: he took the name Fujiwara and had himself appointed as the kampaku, or civil dictator, recalling the Heian court. He threw his energies into mastering the tea ceremony, the austere medieval rite, but enjoyed it most in the teahouse he built of solid gold. He also took pride acting in No, choosing the most difficult and lofty roles, and had special plays written at his command in which he performed as himself, a hero of legendary prowess with divine attributes.” --Donald Keene, World Within Walls (1976)

I may try this.

"I was chunky with carbon"

Boil.

Spy who sat with Arafat.

"O thoughtless mortals! ever blind to fate,
Too soon dejected, and too soon elate!"

--Pop*

Plaintiffs.

Using Phosphorus (scroll down to end).

"The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in Fallujah, and we're going to destroy him." (Oh, him.)

Thinking of this also.
And this.


And, uh, this.

"The day was not all destruction. As the Marines fought their way through a town seemingly empty of civilians, it was a surprise when the troops leaped into a house during a firefight to find a confused and elderly man seated on the front porch. He was dressed in brown pajamas and he was alone. The Marines gathered around him, with the bullets zinging past.
"Afwan," he said in Arabic, the word for "excuse me." "Afwan."
The Marines moved on and left him standing on the porch."

--Dexter Filkins

VIII.

Pallid choir, irrational night
dumbfounds you in your ennui waltz;
forks will nonplus your languor myrrh
with roughshod jib. What’s this posh thing?

An abyss ago, basilisk
moons spool loops, and kinky rainbow.
Six is all: without indigo
nor toatsy warmth in our top kiln.

It is Obviously Gods Will kiln
runs cold. Quaint thoughts fly. Cryptic pain
but rightful mood. No pinko night
nor high comma snips this rainbow.

Drink rot stool agar for your mind
tricks. Urban patrols a good thing
too long coming, will carry us
in mushy arms of basilisk.

IX.

Marrow of union stalks this glass
circus, and sanguinary waltz.
Paint it with your last indigo
and know what is taught by glum myrrh.

Nor camps nor avail not myrrh
callings in a stark waxwork kiln.
Starry wisdom waits a strict pain
dulthood moly along world mind.

Abstract lights and stall immur us,
running in glamour’s indigo.
Marrow of no tomorrow; thing
is, you find but a husky night

facts, fnords. Widowshins-dug rainbow
is mokita in our first glass.
Pounamu paths cross basilisk
crisp whisking cola umgang waltz.

1101-1108 04

"If you have to take away masses of men from all industrial employment,--to feed them by the labor of others,--to provide them with destructive machineries, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the country which you attack,--to destroy for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;--and if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the living creatures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay--what book of accounts shall record the cost of your work;--what book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?" --John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (1866)

On my victrola: Swingin' Creepers.

Mullah Chin is In.

VI.

A Caulaucauch franchising thing
Rorschach all in vain condign pain,
sonorous and it abhors us
and talks of quashing our rainbow

kray in the giln afraid rainbow
afraid dark afraid of grad mind
of odd of far and bury us
in a loud cocoon of dull pain

no buying this franchising thing
again but did and basilisk
with all blown off limbs now you waltz
Caulaucauch Fallujah blood myrrh

walrus light i am a black kiln
burning. I am bad indigo
and i hunt glowing city night
and hurt with city ruin glass.

VII.

Who’ll rip pour out a part full glass
rip rank rump that shark our rainbow
domus for rip hardly jump thing
that shark carbolic brainwash waltz

road to utopia lost mind
how in this acrid crimson night
dry hump that shark with glimflash myrrh
and a brush of my basilisk

wisp crystal stars imprison us
black box bump that shark indigo
hidalgo Caulaucauch a kiln
tanks roll and talons hold no pain

rhost turmoil chump dump that shark pain
in a halcyon dawn that glass
has caught gold shards of and flings us
ash blain and rind pump that shark mind

His work is finish.

On my victrola- Patti Smith: Dr*am of Lif*.

IV.

So hist’ry was too hard for us.
In phobic orthodoxy night
lungfish in solitary pain
pray hilarious basilisk

and limp a waltz, and limp a waltz.
Faith gray as Garland playground glass
joins blood musk and carrion myrrh
turgidly. Find a chirg rainbow

in this. Flooding out of my mind
all cark and will, as from a kiln
its radiation, and what thing
i hold i know not. Indigo

birds sunk only by indigo
shot, total war and both of us
stuck in a world of stupid pain,
in a room with a basilisk.

V.

Wrung a solitary rainbow
out of my agonistic glass;
i shall shut up in a room myrrh
floats, allow softly shadows waltz

around blank walls of a dank kiln
in this ignorant trustful night.
It is a vivid blurry thing
i carry and mold in my mind.

Practicing today not to mind
all acrid trials of indigo
in sunlight waiting, allot myrrh
for this coming witch-watchful night.

Fathoms, if our faith wink nil, kiln
and shill of kiln, hazardous waltz
to a sand of gound srinding glass
hand in hand with wasp basilisk.

Think again. (via Talking Points M*mo) And looky.

"My other bicycle is a pipe bomb."

Ditto (scroll down).

Mauna Loa anomaly. Soon, Dubyastan will not worry us worst, i think. But who knows?

It's only our world's air.

"It is too plain he has betrayed his country.
And we're the wretched tools by him marked out
To seal its ruins -- tear up the ancient forms,
And every vestige treacherously destroy,
Nor leave a trait of freedom in the land."

--M*rcy Otis Warr*n, The Group (1775)

On my victrola- Bjork: S*lmasongs

II.

A long insomniac rainbow
in our dark rooms, in our Kurd myrrh
lit by talking pumpkins, and glass
throwbacks. Cling not to fossil night

nor clang of schism. Unwar mind
must outskirmish that basilisk
in which pain snowy bright with pain
paints its horizon a lost thing.

I’m too old for drafting. Blood thing,
and blind truth stalks a picnic kiln
and griffin will waltz through this pain
and aroha fling its rainbow.

Softly, a sound of giddy myrrh
amidst triumphal Big Christ waltz:
thus occupation throws shard glass
in historic Portsmouth’s blown mind.

III.

Slow walk in a sad basilisk
rain. Victory catsup daubs us
with crimson on our indigo.
Satans minions fill this loud night.

As a burglar swoops during night
so has losing taught ilka thing
a phiz for ruin. Happy myrrh
cloys, it is far from wights in pain

as napalm burning from rainbow.
Satans minions, which is us. Kiln
food; arrows aim of basilisk
all around and a road thin glass

or mid Atlantic a thin mind
sinking. Void of stars indigo,
still many whirl that starry waltz
harmony which is not for us.

I.

Fasad al-zaman drums this waltz.
What’s a hobbit to do? Black glass
holds gazing cassowary mind.
Or: collusion is a rainbow.

Night sound of downpour. Stubborn thing,
a corny dog’s lost waft, and pain
stood. Aloft through curtains of myrrh
cantrips wing in occulting night.

Tomorrow won’t understand us.
Far from our folkish basilisk,
and our uniform indigo,
high sun and smog-swirling war kiln...

Colors solidify through kiln
action; allow only a waltz
and many will trip. Pity us
who found our Wyrd in indigo.

Remark.

Hints.

' "Their cruelty," I replied, "is made of fear; they are ill with fear. They are a sick nation, a Krankesvolk."

"Yes, a sick people," said Munthe, tapping the floor with the tip of his cane, and after a long silence he asked me whether it was true that the Germans were thirsting for blood and destruction.

"They are afraid," I replied, "they are afraid of everything and everybody; they kill and destroy out of fear. Not that they fear death; no German, man or woman, young or old, fears death. They are not even afraid of suffering. In a way one may say that they like pain. But they are afraid of all that is living, of all that is living outside of themselves and of all that is different from them. The disease from which they suffer is mysterious. They are afraid above all of the weak, of the defenseless, of the sick, of women and of children. They are afraid of the aged. Their fear has always aroused a profound pity in me. If Europe were to feel sorry for them, perhaps the Germans would be healed of their horrible disease." '

--Curzio Malapart*, Kaputt (1946), tr C Foligno

“XII.

We made all possible preparations,
Drew up a list of firms.
Constantly revised our calculations
And allotted the farms.

Issued all the orders expedient
In this kind of case:
Most, as was expected, were obedient,
Though there were murmurs, of course;

Chiefly against our exercising
Our old right to abuse:
Even some sort of attempt at rising
But these were mere boys.

For never serious misgiving
Occurred to anyone,
Since there could be no question of living
If we did not win.

The generally accepted view teaches
That there was no excuse,
Though in the light of recent researches
Many would find the cause

In a not uncommon form of terror;
Others, still more astute,
Point to possibilities of error
At the very start.

As for ourselves there is left remaining
Our honour at least,
And a reasonable chance of retaining
Our faculties to the last.”

--Aud*n, Po*ms (1930)

"...white liberals have become people of color." --Rob*rt Oscar Lop*z

"As I sat staring at the woman, the horror of the war came back to me- the days upon days of bombing and shooting- the tanks blasting away down the streets, and helicopters hovering above menacingly. I wondered how she would spend the next couple of agonizing days, waiting for word from her son and husband. The worst part of it is being separated from the people you care about and wondering about their fates. It’s a feeling of restlessness that gnaws away inside of you, leaving you feeling exhausted and agitated all at once. It’s a thousand pessimistic voices whispering stories of death and destruction in your head. It’s a terrible feeling of helplessness in the face of such powerful devastation." --Baghdad Burning

"All Along the Watchtower

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl."

--Dylan

March of Folly.

On dit.

"It is a fearful and tempestuous time,
The concave firmament, the angel's bridge
O'er the world's day and night, is visibly
Bowed down and bent beneath its load of thunder,
And through the fiery fissures of the clouds
Glistens the warfare of armed elements,
Bellowing defiance in earth's stunned ear,
And setting midight on the throne of day."

--B*ddo*s

this is a calamity, not only for us, but for all humans.

The Age of Shrinkwrap.

evening after this
morning i ask the not yet
bloom song celebrates

and her wine for me as through

deep sky a strange star relents

11 02 04

A tale with a moral.

Blake as Johnny Cash. (Can't wait to see the cover of the movie tie-in edition!)

Elsewhere...

This Time We're Watching.

Saved.

“Christmas Night of ‘62

The wintry blast goes wailing by,
The snow is falling overhead;
I hear the lonely sentry’s tread,
And distant watch-fires light the sky.

Dim forms go flitting through the gloom;
The soldiers cluster round the blaze
To talk of other Christmas days,
And softly speak of home and home.

My sabre swinging overhead
Gleams in the watch-fire’s fitful glow,
While fiercely drives the blinding snow,
And memory leads me to the dead.

My thoughts go wandering to and fro,
Vibrating ‘twixt the Now and Then;
I see the low-browed home again,
The old hall wreathed with mistletoe.

And sweetly from the far-off years
Comes borne the laughter faint and low,
The voices of the Long Ago!
My eyes are wet with tender tears.

I feel again the mother-kiss,
I see again the glad surprise
That lightened up the tranquil eyes
And brimmed them o’er with tears of bliss,

As, rushing from the old hall-door,
She fondly clasped her wayward boy--
Her face all radiant with the joy
She felt to see him home once more.

My sabre swinging on the bough
Gleams in the watch-fire’s fitful glow,
While fiercely drives the blinding snow
Aslant upon my saddened brow.

Those cherished faces all are gone!
Asleep within the quiet graves
Where lies the snow in drifting waves,--
And I am sitting here alone.

There’s not a comrade here to-night
But knows that loved ones far away
On bended knees this night will pray:
‘God bring our darling from the fight.’

But there are none to wish me back,
or me no yearning prayers arise.
he lips are mute and closed the eyes--
My home is in the bivouac.”

--William Gordon McCabe, in: Poetry and Eloquence from the Blue and the Gray [The Photographic History of the Civil War, Part Nine], ed. Francis Trevelyan Miller (1911)

"Peace rules the Day, where Reason rules the Mind." --William Collins, 2nd Persian Eclogue

Japanese CD Singles. These are the cutest packaging--i don't even care that i can't read the names of some of the bands...

You might say this is the "story behind the story" of The Rule of Four.

A wonderful set of links.

“Xanadu, the Gate Shattered”

Gossamer these days
And passing-bright, & also threatening rain;
And silent in the little things,
And full of raging fury for the rest.

My reach is a desire not to fall,
And i am ignorant how exactly far
This paradise of guns & shouting goes,
This neighbor & the gossamer that holds.

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

10 27 04

Listening to: Bartok- Cantata Profana, plus Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta

“And the lonely Fomalhaut
In the dark south, paces low...
Stretching toward the kingly one
Dusky, dark Aldebaran.”

--Teasdale

"After I was brought from these long and doubtful thoughts and phantastical imaginations, and remembering all those marvellous divine shapes and bodies which I had personally seen with my eyes, I then knew that they were not deceitful shadows, nor magical illusions, but that I had not rightly conceived of them." --Mclean's Poliphili tr (1986)

Map of Pluto. (Still a "planet".)

If "Right" & "Left" modernisms, why not Right & Left traditionalisms?

Samhain Page.

"At the moment, I think we're getting a pretty good idea of what Trotsky felt, looking at Stalin." --Jack Womack (via William Gibson)

Blackboard Poetics.

Geof makes some useful distinctions.

“...I received [these poems] at the Hands of a Merchant, who had made it his Business to enrich himself with the Learning, as well as the Silks and Carpets of the Persians. The little Information I could gather concerning their Author, was, That his Name was Mahamed, and that he was a Native of Tauris.

It was in that City that he died of a Distemper fatal in those Parts, whilst he was engag’d in celebrating the Victories of his favourite Monarch, the Great Abbas. As to the Eclogues themselves, they give a very just View of the Miseries and Inconveniencies, as well as the Felicities, that attend one of the finest Countries in the East.

The Time of the Writing them was probably in the Beginning of the Sha Sultan Hosseyn’s Reign, the Successor of Sefi or Solyman the Second. Whatever Defects, as, I doubt not, there will be many, fall under the Reader’s Observation, I hope his Candour will incline him to make the following Reflections:
That the Works of Orientals contain many Peculiarities, and that thro’ Defect of Language few European Translators can do them Justice.”

--preface to William Collins’s Persian Eclogues (1742)

Listening to: The Electric Prunes- Just Good Old Rock and Roll

“Fragmentary Stars

So wide the wells of darkness sink,
These, having their own light, that are lost with the light,
Appear, immersed in mournfulness over the night,
Like things that in sleep will come to the mind’s brink:
The bright Aldebaran and seven that hover,
Seven wild and pale, clouding their brightness over;
And the flame that fell with summer, and the rose of stars returning,
Like tears piercing the sky,
Glittering without cause, for the piece of a legend,
Wept I know not why,
As none can say,
As countless they weep
Ranging without fold beyond the order of day--
The brightmost, the forgotten,
Gathered only of sleep,
All night upon the lids set burning,
Shaken from the lids of morning.”

--Léonie Adams

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

‘Out of Darkness

Out of darkness I come, a woman.
I carry a child, and have forgotten whose it is;
Once I knew.
But now there is no longer any man for me...
Behind me all of them have disappeared like rivulets
The earth drank dry.
And on I go and on.
Before the day I must be in the mountains, and already constellations fade.

Out of darkness I come.
Through shadowed streets I walked alone,
Then sudden, lunging light with talons ripped soft blackness,
As a panther fells a doe,
And a door flung wide spat ugly screams, demented howling, beastly cries.
And men rolled drunken in the street.
I shook them from my skirt as I walked past.

And then I crossed the empty marketplace.
Leaves swam in puddles where he moon was shining.
Emaciated, greedy dogs sniffed garbage on the stones.
Fruits rotted squashed;
An old man dressed in rags still bowed his poor, tormented strings
And raised his thin, discordant, mournful voice
Unheard.
Those fruits had once grown ripe in sun and dew,
In happy fragrant dreams of loving blooms,
But the whimpering beggar
Had long ago forgotten this, and thought of nothing but his hunger and his thirst.

Before the palace of the mighty I stood still,
And when I trod upon the lowest step
The flesh-red porphyry burst cracking underneath my sole.--
I turned
And gazed aloft to barren windows, to the midnight candle of the thinker,
Who pondered, pondered, but could not invent redemption from his doubt,
And to the muffled lamp within the sickroom, where the patient would not learn
How he should die.
Beneath the bridge
Two horrid skeletons disputed gold.
I raised the gray shield of my poverty before my face
And passed them by unharmed.

Now, far away, the river whispers to its banks.

And now I stumble forward on the stony, stubborn path.
Jumbled rocks and thistles wound my groping hands:
A cave awaits me
That conceals inside its deepest crack the bronze-green, namelesss raven.
I will enter
And crouch down to rest beneath the sheltering shadows of his giant wings,
And listen, drowsing, to the silent, growing word my child speaks,
And sleep, my brow turned eastward,
‘Til the dawn.’

--Gertrud Kolmar, Dark Soliloquy

I love the smell of theocracy in the morning.

“GUCUMATZ”

sleek Down bug pasta Walper
Nor outer (want.) scape
End moodnust

The very the very sryctal of the this

Crystal thus, nor pungent flint spark grow.:
And fur’s a river i crave
Out of achnavale
Pungent circle stomp fallen from carge

The lost teachings of Dubya the stall cheatings

Stop being
Greasy fingered we will mostly froulish bling
Gossamer victory catsup star
Radint bug pasta
And like gulf

Radiant onset zero
Be bilge slag slack then
And after
To puree integer grow.?
Walper sleek cat cant, eremald kit
?fallen from stall teachings of (bug) pasta stomp
Sryctal fathoms it’s
Not realc it’s
Mandess throbbing sryctal take.


10 18 04

“And if thou ever happen that same way
To travail, goe to see that dreadfull place:
It is an hideous hollow cave (they say)
Under a rocke that lyes a little space
From the swift Barry, tumbling downe apace,
Emongst the woodie hilles of Dynevowre:
But dare thou not, I charge, in any cace,
To enter into that same balefull Bowre,
For fear the cruell Feends should thee unwares devowre.

But standing high aloft, low lay thine eare,
And there such ghastly noise of yron chaines,
And brasen Caudrons thou shalt rombling heare,
Which thousand sprights with long enduring paines
Do tosse, that it will stonne thy feeble braines,
And oftentimes great grones, and grievous stounds,
When too huge toile and labour them constraines:
And oftentimes loud strokes, and ringing sounds
From under that deepe Rocke most horribly rebounds.

The cause some say is this: A litle while
Before that Merlin dyde, he did intend,
A brasen wall in compas to compile
About Cairmardin, and did it commend
Unto these Sprights, to bring to perfect end.
During which worke the Ladie of the Lake,
Whom long he loved, for him in hast did send,
Who thereby forst his workemen to forsake,
Them bound till his returne, their labour not to slake.

In the meane time through that false Ladies traine,
He was surprisd, and buried under beare,
Ne ever to his worke returnd againe:
So greatly his commaundement they feare,
But there doe toyle and travell day and night,
Until that brasen wall they up doe reare:
For Merlin had in Magicke more insight,
Then ever him before or after living wight.”

--Spenser

Even Molly Ivins is using the "F-word" (Oct 14)...

“Fahrenheit Vampire Mystery Cat”

Through precise crystal
The crowds grope in a ragged circle
If he/ the poet (the end of this) may tell
It never tempts the serpent

The serpent
Folk whose greasy world mocks mine
Each morning in chaotic circle
Winds dark & pungent whirl splay can’t do crystal

It circle
Beltane hold crystal
Hands morning precise serpent
Crowds crowding

Ragged chrome poet, away through the pungent
Grope of black serpent
Having never emerald crystal
And never cat will come. Break circle.

10 17 04


Listening to- Digital Moonscapes.

Recent pic of Saturn.


“Clouds

Down the blue night the unending columns press
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon’s hidden loveliness.
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth,
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
And men, coming and going on the earth.”

--Rupert Brooke


...It's kind of like a public referendum on Gravity: seems, half of us don't believe in it. But you know what? Even if the vote goes the other way, things fall.

Fortune is a River.

Narcocorrido.

transl: La Llorona (Mexican folk song)

All is pain for me, Crying Lady,
Pain or pain’s sweet respite;
I wept to see you yesterday,
Today I weep for having wept.

I saw you in passing one day, Crying Lady,
As you were leaving the church.
So beautiful a blouse with lace
You wore, I thought you were the Virgin.

To the highest perch I climbed, Crying Lady,
To see where you could be found.
Such was the pine tree’s tenderness
Crying Lady, it cried too.

At the failing of the light, Crying Lady,
Every day I wonder:
What use is this bed of mine, Crying Lady,
If it never belongs to you?

Indigo Lady, Crying Lady.
Lady of Indigo Tears,
I wept to see you yesterday;
Today I wept for having wept.

A letter from across the sea, Crying Lady,
A siren did send to me;
And she rebuked my faint heart, saying:
To suffer is not to love.

All is pain for me, Crying Lady,
Pain or pain’s sweet respite;
I wept to see you yesterday,
Today I weep for having wept.

Indigo Lady, Crying Lady,
Celestial Lady of Sorrow,
Although it may rob me of life, Crying Lady,
I’ll still be full of love for you.

10 15 04

Take the Pledge.

A subculture that adopts the 260-day Mayan ceremonial calendar (“tzolkin”) & considers themselves exiles from a planet that with that length year (e.g. 23 Librae b)...

“Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past, their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honored place;
A moral warfare with the crime
And folly of an evil time.”

--Whittier

“Oblique Rain”

Tzompantli at, from champ stop
Going carbonaceous dreamhenge now says he.
Instant Mutiny

Potemkin village idiot we

Bell cat mice
Drones don’t leave & orange cones
Simmer down at once down home torture cake walk wreak have.;
Further disaffected gibberish

Of dream folk their lies

Winds greasy
Four hundred rabbits, the mole
Star tell gram garden of wildebeests
Ice lines rain
Swirl gutter clawing for purchase under swill...

Tziompantli glad end
To not face to not
Know this mutiny for what
Fact avalanche vile hope penetrate
Spiralling Maremma acid bonus map
Of Middle
Earth kitty klingon
Streak Tzompantli inner wound
Ice nine sleepwalkers vampire witch queen

Edge. Live Bleed longer
Or anyway puree, feel as if you had!

10 14 04

“George [W.]’s first English assignment [at Andover Prep] was to write an essay about an emotional experience. He chose his sister’s death. He struggled to find the right words. He wanted to write ‘and the tears ran down my cheeks,’ but he had already used the word ‘tears’ several times. So he turned to the thesaurus his mother had given him when he left home. He searched for another word for ‘tears.’ He wrote: ‘And the lacerates ran down my cheeks.’ “ --Kitty Kelly, The Family (2004)

“Delivery Failure Notice”

our children is learning to die
the lacerates ran down
in khaki, in flannel, in black
the lacerates ran down
with fancy toys, in the broken streets
the lacerates ran down
& their cries is not news
the lacerates ran down
their blood is not news
the lacerates ran down
their pain counts for nothing next
the lacerates ran down
to the immortal
the lacerates ran down
glory of Donald Trump’s haircut
the lacerates ran down

09 28/29 04

Today is Vergil's birthday.

The Aeneid Image Gallery.

The Laviniad (a sequel in English).

“Exile in Noywynd”

--NHHHHHHH. A dull roar flooded her mind. --NHHHHHHH. When she thought that she would probably puke no more, she reluctantly unlocked the narrow door of the jumbojet’s restroom, & staggered to her seat down the rock-steady aisle, brushing shoulders & sleeping heads & hats along the way. There she resumed her headache-beset perusal of an old issue of “Sporangium Fetish”, the one where the prize-winning poet had sent his last published poem under the strange alias Flel
Osta. (It wasn’t much of a poem. It started: “PPPP. PPP. RRR. RRR. LM. SSS...”)

She had anagrammed out: Lost Leaf.

As a journalist of some experience, she ought by now to have absorbed enough background to confidently approach her subject, who by the usual rules of the game would have prepared the shiny translucent mask he wanted the world to see; & thus the only awkwardness would arise from the necessary pretence that they were both making it up as they went along. Not this time. Instead, he had proved not only impossible to reach directly (as if a hermit of some silicon- & wire-bereft era!), his very umbilicus to the literary scene, a perpetually stoned publisher whose pigeon-hued dreads made him look like some prankster had dropped a mop atop his hapless dome, --refused to divulge more than the bare name of a coffeehouse where he “might be found”; & her determined research at last had produced but this junket to a crumbling back-province capital where at one time, according to an old phone book (not verified by any data on the Net) a place with that name once existed.

Almost at one her gorge rose anew. This time, with bemused resignation, she availed herself of the bag on the back of the seat ahead.



The “Golden Pilbug” looked a lot older than it could possibly be. Situated in a strangely timewarped block amidst all else renovated yuppie playground & overchromed boutiques, its letters barely showed through the grime; & she doubted whether the marquee’s “Live Jazz Tue” belonged to this staid & jazzless decade at all, much less the Month of the Fiery Dragon.

Inside it was very dark. Indeed, it smelled less of constant steeping in the vaporous byproducts of injavination, than of a strong old-warehouse mustiness quite the lair for a day-hating pillbug, & she made a mental note to set the poet at ease with this tortuous witticism should the chance allow. She almost fell over in one place where the floor dropped without warning. Cursing the bravado that’d made her leave her cane in the hotel room (a standard roboticized superhotel she’d instantly forgotten the name of upon turning the corner), she clambered up the stairs to an even darker balcony (presided over by the faint aura from a string of magenta Xmas
lights that climbed like ivy up the central supporting column) & hearing voices further up. No one would know anything, of course. Even if they did they wouldn’t share it with an interloper...

A scattering of seedy regulars were already lounging & smoking around on the secondhand (or even roadkill) livingroom furniture, the arms scored by burns like Paleolithic calendars, & the proud shelves of books as scrambled as if a tornado had ransacked them. Towards the back a couple of ambery lamps limned the waists & shoulders of a small knot of onlookers surrounding, she saw as she came closer, some ricketty chess tables. Silence reigned, emphasized by a low mutter when temporary triumph would from time to time require the Black player to take White & vice versa.
She scrwed her eyes up, standing a respectful distance back, & tried to take her mental image of a yellowed newspaper photo (sadly pixillated on her laptop monitor’s screen) & run it forward in time some sixteen or seventeen years.

The effort threatened to bring back her migraines. For fifteen seconds, her vision flattened & spread out horizontally, while she swayed in the gloom with a familiar anxiety. Nobody noticed.

With a shrug, she reached into her shoulderbag & removed a small square of handmade paper. On it were numbers dictated to her by his publisher over the phone (beaten down at last by her persistence, or else the rising of his own despair). It was, he told her, a Magic Square.

“What’s a Magic Square?” she’d blurted.

“Something geniuses used to make in their spare time,” he said with a sneer in his voice. “Your computer can do one in less time than it takes to ask.”

Was it her fault a computer now had gained the World Chess Championship?

One of the older men cursed oddly. She decided this had to be her quarry.

“Can I have the next game?” she said brightly, with a clench in her diaphragm only just inaudible.

“Five dollar,” he growled, after a moment of awkwardness unusual in its intensity even in her history of buttonholing junkie pop icons & terrorist tsars-in-exile. She realized, as the loser stood & shuffled off, this man was not so much old as broken by long misery, with a look she had almost let vanish without registering, it was so piercingly pitiful. She had seen this look in refugee camps along shell-cratered squabbling borders, & in cardboard shantytowns under the pterodactyl wingspread of freeways, but never on a face that had graced more than one national magazine cover; a rewarded, an educated man...

His agile fingers belied the deadness of his eyes. Before she was quite oriented to staring at a horizontal surface, the two armies stood arrayed in neat ranks. Some of them came from different-sized sets.

He held out two freckled fists & she chose the right. She got Black, so he rotated the board in one smooth motion. His first move, Knight to Queen’s Rook Three, she had never seen before in any of the books.

“What’s that shit?” she said softly, almot without the question inflection. Might as well plunge in.

Annoyingly his eyes rose no higher than her cleavage, then fell to the table with almost a thunk.

“Durkin’s Attack,” he said at last.



About the middle of the third game, she drew the square of paper out, & laid it beside his resting hand.

“Nice paper,” he observed, & exchanged a Bishop for a Knight. She knew it had struck him, though, for the move he had made was clearly inferior to a retreat. She smiled. there in the smoky dark, for the first time.

“Jasper?”

“That hasn’t been anyone’s name for a long while.”

“You’ve hidden yourself.”

“Deus absconditus.” He appeared to lose interest in the game, to crumple with the weight of being personalized. “I paid all my debts.”

“Karmic included,” he added.

“I only came to talk,” she said with a little more forcefulness.

“Good. We talk. We’re talking. We will have talked.”

“Do you have the time?”

“I’m here every day. This is my job.” He waved an arm vaguely at the books & the now-withdrawn gaggle of spectators, as if to indicate a whole world. “Five dollars a pop.”

She considered this, a puzzle akin to some of his famous puzzlepoems, that only made sense when you read them vertically, or at an angle, or taking every third word.

“Instead of poetry...?” she said.

“Poetry never paid. Not even for the Greatest Living poet,” he spat, with such selfdirected scorn she had to wince. Her temples throbbed, & she hastily scrambled in her purse for a pill, while never taking her eyes from his face. She saw a sandy haired man of later than middle years, fading to gray but his expressive face unlined & set in a melancholy grimace, his trimmed goatee disheveled by frequent nervous fingerings. He wore a scarlet suit that had been carefully mended over & over, till it had become a sort of patchwork quilt of slightly unmatched reds, like a painter’s monochrome color study.

“I would have sent you away at once, if not for that Saikou,” he said mildly, noticing the tears in her eyes. (They were due to the headache, but she didn’t need to tell him that.) He pushed the gold-threaded paper more fully into the lamplight. “I loathe & despise journalists. --Simplifiers!” He started to replace the chessmen in their home bases. She touched his arm to stop him. The game hadn’t ended. Was he running away?

“You win,” he said, & shook her hand.



He told her, not his own story, but the story of Poetry.

“A lot of this will have to be condensed,” she arned gaily.

“Let the idiot box crunch it,” he sniffed. They were midway athwart a huge latticework bridge, periodically deafened by passing trucks, & constantly slapped by blowing spray. It had just stopped raining, on one of their rare excursions. Apparently he wanted to give some of his more acerbic appraisals far from the tender ears of his board cronies.

“Everyvbody puts down Tennyson,” he resumed.

“Who’s Tennyson?”

Up ahead, beside his stalled tow truck, a driver was coughing violently. As they drew nearer, he eructed the parts of a dismembered green frog.

“Looks like that one indulged a bit too much,” observed the poet.



Sometimes she was confined to bed by her illness.

When she returned, he was always surprised. And happy. She couldn’t help noticing that. But he resumed without acknowledging the lapses, every time.

The weeks passed, & still he hadn’t talked bout the reason she was here. They sat in the dim bulb’s glow, where the chess fans had learned no moves of interest to them would be found, & now stayed away.

One time he stared hard at her (following a tremor that knocked over three chesspieces) & asked, “Is it that bad?”

“I won’t die, if that’s what you mean. I only will become more & more useless,” she answered in her usual way.

That was the last he mentioned it, though from that time on, he seemed less embittered, indeed almost tender in his lucid exposition of mysteries she could have done without. He should have gone into teaching, she thought at one point: that would have saved him. But for his pride...

And every day he checked the coffee house mailbox, as if expecting a windfall promised in a dream.

By this time he had reached the mid-Twentieth Century.

“It’s heavy going. You won’t like it,” he smiled.

“It’s where you come from.”

“No, it’s what I’ve resisted all my life.”

“Same thing.”



She knew he was dreaming of her dark hair & thin pale limbs, quite as certainly as if he had placed a poem about her at the end of his unauthorized Selected Curses (for she was psychic, a little). Against all her professional scruples she was wondering how to turn this to her advantage, when a particularly severe attack put her in the hospital for a month. From there she instructed her liege-corporation to reimburse him automatically for the money he would have made
playing chess & winning every game, & booked a rocket flight back to the home country. It was time to wrap up this assignment.

She as lying half-propped up in bed with her fingers twitching at the console, often having to redo whole lines, which reminded her unpleasantly that at one time she’d been a typist of 70 words per minute, when the phone rang with the sound of an Amazonian parrot.

It wasn’t Jasper, but his publisher, Stramonius.

“He wants to know, like, when you’re coming back to finish the E ighties,” said this estimable personage, whose real job was tending bar on one of the Permanent Barges. “Is he in love with you?”

“With the sound of his own voice, possibly. On the other hand, he might just have a few scores to settle with the Eighties. How the fuck should I know,” she snapped & hung up, then instantly shuddered when a wave of remorse collided with a counter-wave of vertigo. The resultsere unfortunate.

But the ad the ad! she kept shouting mentally, through a long fugue of eyeclamp red & no no no sleep.

When she awoke, with perfect clarity & no pain, simply an immense languor...she remembered what she had seen.



The owner of the pawnshop held her little computer ith no more gentleness than a butcher with a cow’s head. One that had just been knocked to the floor.

“This gizmo costed two grand?” he leered. “Naah. I’ll front ya two fifty.”

She glided to the case of handguns, & indicated a blunt swollen-looking one the color of weathered stone.

“That’ll be seventy five dollars in addition,” he said briskly.

The ad had read: “Pretentious old fart longs for beautiful maiden in black to end his charade. Determined & amoral only, need apply.” She’d circled it idly one cloudy afternoon, when even the intention of standing up had made her retch. Then, for days afterwards, shivering to hear the poet’s voice match those marks on the page.

In New York, she’d faxed a reply, in several ingenious ways suggesting a very diferent identity. They corresponded regularly for half a year, with growing confidence, on his side that he had found a way out; on hers, that she had found a way to help him after all.

Their appointment loomed, a Rubicon without water. She rode the subway to a nasty, polluted winter park where the wind had pushed drifts of rotting leaves into long sinuous glyphic patterns & nothing remained that could move of its own volition.

He hadn’t changed, in suit or demeanor, since the time of that abortive article. She couldn’t tell if he was fooled by her disguise or grown hardened in his self-absorption; he greeted her with drab manners, apparently much rehearsed. They walked in silence. In the distance, a two-headed angel statue tried to merge with the mists.

“Once more, O ye Laurels, and once more,/ Ye myrtles brown--” he kicked some leaves, “with ivy never sere./ I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,” wrenchingly, to one who knew how he felt about words. He threw them to the opalescent sky, to the unending wet pavement, with a wild verve wholly unrelated to joy. “Shatter your leaves before the mellowing YEAR!”

Then: “You don’t know, you can’t imagine what this means to me.”

She thought she did, & could.

“I’ve been dreaming of this all my life.”

“Longer than you were a poet?” (forgetting she wasn’t supposed to know).

“Much longer.”

When they came to the bridge of the island, he hesitated.

“You did bring wha I asked for?” as if only now beginning to think of dying by gunshot wound, as an experience.

She showed him, queasily, as if revealing some organ of intimacy more secret than genitals, more terrible than a vampire’s teeth. Its concentrated weight unbalanced her walk. She wondered what would happen if she toppled into the pond, but they reached the artficial island without mishap.

“The Gazebo,” he indicated. She finally realized he had shaved off his beard & this, she had been unconsciously aware of all along, made everything wrong.

She thought of protesting they were still within sight of the road (though hardly likely to catch the notice of early morning commuters, mesmerized by the drone of a dozen interchangeable deejays), as in keeping with the role she’d been elected to play, but it grew more & more threadbare with each moment of falseness. She sighted down the barrel before he told her to.

“Jasper,” she whispered. He jumped.

“What? What? Did you say, ‘Jasper’?!”

“Bang,” she said, pulling the trigger with three fingers.

He fell with a horrible snarl on his reddening features, of baffled rage, of betrayal, of grief, but he couldn’t speak a word before the drug carried him off into legend-laden darkness.

Later, she thought. Later he’ll have plenty to say.

And will it be poetry? Who knows?

It was all she could do to try.

(1994)

Et invenitur in omni loco et in quolibet tempore et apud omnem rem, cum inquisitio aggravat inquirentem.

Rosarium Philosophorum (1550)

(‘And it is found in every place and at any time and in every circumstance, when the search lies heavy on the searcher.’ --quoted in Jung’s Philosophy and Alchemy)

#

Pangngae. (Not Pangaea.)

On Not Translating Hafez. (via wood_s lot)

‘XXV

Thrips appear to adhere
to joints, to the base, to napes,
to the underface of numerators on foot.
Thrips and thrums from lupine heaps.

As the lee of each caravel, unraveled
without Americanizing, snorts loudly,
carriage perches collapse in a calamitous spasm,
with a puny pulse unfortunately given
to blowing its nose on the back of its wrist.
And the most high-pitched sopraneity
tonsures and hobbles itself, and gradually
ennazals toward icicles
of infinite pity.

Spirited loins wheeze hard
on bearing, dangling from musty breastplates,
cockades with their seven colors
below zero, from the guano islands
to the guano islands.
Thus the dirty honeycombs in the open air of little
faith.
Thus the hour of the records. Thus the one with a detour
to future planes,
when the innanimous gerfalcon reports solely
failed silence-deserving crusades.

Then thrips end up adhering
even in trap doors and in rough drafts.’

--Vallejo, Trilce (tr Eshleman)

Playing Indian.

“GHOST-CRABS

At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,
To the sea’s edge. To begin with
It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.
Gradually the laboring of the tide
Falls back from its productions,
Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.
Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
They spill inland, into the smoking purple
Of our woods and towns--a bristling surge
Of tall and staggering specters
Gliding like shocks through water.
Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.
Their hungers are homing elsewhere.
We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.
Their bubbling mouths, their eyes
In a slow mineral fury
Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,
Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe.
Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions
With a gasp, in sweat burst, brains jamming blind
Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding
Staring
Thickness of silence
Presses between us. These crabs own this world.
All night, around us or through us,
They stalk each other, they fasten onto each other,
They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,
They utterly exhaust each other.
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.
They are the moil of history, the convulsion
In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.
To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.
All day they recuperate under the sea.
Their singing is like a thin seawind flexing in the rocks of a headland,
Where only crabs listen.

They are God’s only toys.”

--Ted Hughes, from Wodwo (1967)

Online Eunoia. (via Mad Ink Beard)

Persepolis signing as a comic.

"A great war leaves the country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves." —German proverb (via Love During Wartime)

Peaceweaver. "Most critics agree that the peace-weaving process is an unsuccessful undertaking but in order for this term to come into the Anglo-Saxon lexicon the act of uniting two kingdoms through marriage must have been successful at least once."

"Poetry: a language without a homeland." --fait accompli [hint: see the foregoing]


The Shadow Tractatus.

While Rome fiddles.

"It would be as if Ahab were put out of action but Starbuck, that most decent of men, still felt compelled to follow his captain's commands to the letter."
--Cahiers de Corey
Yeah, well, from the standpoint of someone else on the ship, it does indeed matter whether the captain "knows a hawk from a handsaw" & is willing to sink the whole ship in the process...

Bern Porter Lives!

Izzy the Bootblack.

“Murder on the Surface of Titan”

Outfox balefrost, Dragoman.
Imbibe owlish ebony.
Consort with dreamfolk who wage
Great moth of undoing here.

Orchid mists summon askew;
Comes the blind fury cerise.
A seer’s oblong feldspar
Badtz Maru do the rainbow.

The whiteness of your smile bleeds
Evil vampire witch queen time.
Out of shards, out of shadows,
Balefrost comes the blind fury.

10 11 04

A paradoxical Scholasticism is still Scholasticism.

"In the 1980s, the script to this movie [Casablanca] was sent to a readers at a number of major studios and production companies under the film's original title, "Everybody Comes To Rick's". Some readers recognized the script but many did not. Many complained that the script was not "good enough" to make a decent movie." --Tom Laughlin

Lovecraft en espanol. (via Blindheit)

‘Roller Coaster

For half a century
Poetry was the paradise
of the solemn fool.
Until I came
And built my roller coaster.

Go up, if you feel like it.
I’m not responsible if you come down
With your mouth and nose bleeding.’

--Nicanor Parra

“Let us take, for example, Flora, and see how a game of lawn tennis would be managed. The very slightest blow of the racket would drive the ball a prodigious distance before it could touch the ground; indeed, unless the courts were about half a mile long, it would be impossible to serve any ball that was not a fault.”
--Robert Stawell Ball, Star-Land (1899)

There’s a show where newlyweds volunteer to have their home-to-be completely redecorated by a team of resourceful pro designers. The lovebirds return from their honeymoon for a big surprise. For, all they get to keep from their previous possessions for sure, is a single “protected item” each. Anything else is liable to be radically refashioned, given away, or simply fed to the woodchipper...

I see in this, as so many--if not all--of the so-called “reality shows”, whether by accident or design, the heavy hand of the totalitarian agenda at work. We are to accept without question the decree of the collectivity, as embodied in interchangeably telegenic “experts”, even in such matters as formerly were left to personal discretion: our vaunted “individuality”, however, being symbolized by one pitiful relict item--like the “flesh-strips” which guaranteed the humanness of the cyborgs in Moderan.

Elsewhere wardrobes & whole bodies are likewise being subjected to complimentary “makeovers” (& they don’t even keep a “protected feature”, either!)--our pleasure in watching this exercise in voyeuristic disempowerment, is really not so very far from that of the Roman Circus, where the stripping away of dignity, & then life itself, became the daily fodder of ever more demanding citizen-consumers flush with imperial hubris.