Most dark, but only for now. Faith, folks!

"ii.

Rivers bring down. The sea
Brings away;
Voids, sucks back, its pearls and auguries.
Eagles or vultures churn the fresh-made skies.

Over the statues, unchanging features
Of commerce and quaint love, soot lies.
Earth steams. The bull and the great mute swan
Strain into life with their notorious cries."

--Geoffrey Hill, "Of Commerce and Society, III." (1959)

"...Charles Mingus wrote about afternoons spent in his youth, watching Sam Rodia as he went about his patient, complex work of building, transforming, tearing down then rebuilding the bizarre spirals known today as the Watts Towers. ...Years later...it struck him () that Rodia’s Towers was much like the impulsive but meticulously structured music he had just been playing--that is, was a resourceful and vital work, an invention for freedom and transcendence." --Mikal Gilmore, in: The Watts Towers of Los Angeles, Leon Whiteson, 1989

'Mussolini spoke like a peasant from Romagna; he uttered the words: problem, Mediterranean Sea, Suez, Ethiopia--as if he were uttering the words: card game, Lambrusco wine, riot, Forli. Lord Perth had the accent of an Oxford undergraduate who is distantly related to someone in Scotland--the accent of Magdalen College of the Mitre Hotel, of the Mesopotamia Island and of Perthshire. He uttered the words: problem, Mediterranean Sea, Suez, Ethiopia--as if he were uttering the words: cricket, Serpentine, whisky, Edinburgh.' --Kaputt

'I would have liked to say to her: We shall talk about Italy. And besides who knew whether Italy really existed? Perhaps Italy was a fairy tale, a dream; who knew whether Italy still existed; who knew? Nothing existed any longer except gloomy, cruel, proud, despairing Germany. Nothing existed any longer. Italy, indeed!'
--Kaputt


"Shiny Windlass"

Follow a pillbug
through blurry dim Carcosa.

Choir of moons wassailing Ragnarok
with toom word,

spiralling argonauts who fall without joust.
Mournful in this frost

cars plumb our schloss osco sky
swart opal

as if railgun of Odun bound faith
solitary mound and storp and dying sky

"Thrift"

A squalid abyss of light
follows, wolf
to my planward thoughts; and Xanadu
flows frigid music.

Roiling coiling marrow-road of magnolia
without a thirst in this world
or door to carol:

what song thrusts past shadowy my way
full of frith
and swift, tumultuously craggy argot?


“At a towering concrete crucifix, planted between the church and the street, women with upraised arms pray indiscriminately to ‘Jezy’ (Jesus) or to ‘Bawon’ (Baron Samedi), the Vodou god of death and sexuality. For many Haitians, Jesus and the Baron are the same divine person sharing the same cross.” --Donald J Cons*ntino, Vodou Things (1998)

Th* Unconscious Civilization.

Almost a R*volution.

*dgar G. Ulm*r.

I want to watch Top Chimp try this, if God is so big on him. (via M*tafilt*r)

As my significant half points out, the Carpenters' song "Goodbye to Love" is a kind of zoomar: its composer Richard Carpenter has admitted being inspired by the title of a fictitious song in the 1940 film Rhythm on the River, in which Bing Crosby plays a composer who has a hit song referred to, though never heard, within the film.

"Abtar Ibtida"

Putrid pathways sang a glitch
rollchair stock is up. Faring dragon

if Dubyabacks go to Norad arroyo
now, iron rook

at acornfall star.
Support our insanity, O lungfish droog.

My soul is my own
raghdirst. Crystal tobacco

and orthography kills and acid
storp pidgin.

"The Wind Suffers

The wind suffers of blowing,
The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living name.

As stone suffers of stoniness,
As light of its shiningness,
As birds of their wingedness,
So I of my whoness.

And what the cure of all this?
What the not and not suffering?
What the better and later of this?
What the more me of me?

How for the pain-world to be
More world and no pain?
How for the old rain to fall
More wet and more dry?

How for the willful blood to run
More salt-red and sweet-white?
And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

By no other miracles,
By the same knowing poison,
By an improved anguish,
By my further dying."

--Laura Riding

Download a pdf of my IPOMO*A at this location.

Whit* Mughals.

On my victrola- *ast Asia Trav*logu*.

A horror-w*st*rn-romanc* nov*l: Th* Cowboy and th* Vampir* by Hays & McFall.

"But the longevity of modernism does show what happens when the prophesied resolution of drastic social and psychological anxiety is postponed--what unsuspected capacities for ingenuity and agony, and the domestication of agony, may flourish in the interim." --Susan Sontag, Und*r th* Sign of Saturn (1980)

‘Dream of Evil

A gong’s brown-golden tones no longer loud--
A lover wakes in chambers growing dimmer,
His cheek near flames that in the window glimmer
Upon the stream flash rigging, mast and shroud.

A monk, a pregnant woman in the crowd;
Guitars are strumming, scarlet dresses shimmer.
In golden gleam the chestnuts shrink and simmer;
The churches’ mournful pomp looms black and proud.

The evil spirit peers from masks of white.
A square grows gloomy, hideous and stark;
Whispers arise on islands in the dark.

Lepers, who rot away perhaps at night,
Read convoluted omens of birdflight.
Siblings eye each other, trembling in the park.’

--G*org Trakl, Song of th* W*st (tr R Firmag*1988)

“Mirrabooks Crosshairs” (for Ashb*ry)

Of good conduct. Visit snap
snarl, and pry
primly at its principal focus,
as if curlylocks.

Snarl and pry
painstaking indignification flicflac
as if curlylocks,
waving croons.

Painstaking indignification, flicflac
of good conduct. Visit snap
waving croons--
primly at its principal focus.

Yay!

A cool flick for our gnarly days. And this. And (o boy!) this.

"Moral Thoughts"

I.

Ashblack promising Moloch
in Arcadia
wit mimics.
up to can't toOf/- tubular muon bulb
twilight trail, Xibalba calx
this bright sand
twilight trial mockingbird carn Karnak
ival sand bright this
my infamous visitors to talk

II.

Virgin light
blackbody was this institution of faith,
Fallujah from Abraxas
gunman sunfall up;
origin Taproban. Abolish
this spasmodic dust in a spin of blood goo
in my mind
counting by four fours air color is Maya,
sky is pallid cannibal.

III.

Thalassa pours within Agharta
gray wizard karma
gray radix
blackbody was this institution of faith.
Through morning's corona myth
i ply aloha
my kiln and lorn gift for all mankind:
Aradia diary bot
Pallid Mountain pain

IV.

Mask, maskful thunk, contrapuntal lair
is my will
and clarion of arbitrary sigil
swallows it up with a rank
fathom of abort.
Blackbody was this institution of faith
folly, wry
at its buzzardly agon
shard of protocol rough mask only.

V.

Mystic buck
organisms sows which can grow within us
laggard soul as food
clan of a tap, scarf Mount Qoph
cannot look outward. No wolf
lost sorrows, which want to always turn opal
and hobbit,
blackbody, was this institution. Of faith
allot to it dark mask a lunar.

VI.

Fanciful awl's nub,
a portrait of a woman
riding in a shiny black hot rod
through this kiln.
Follow ruby toad,
follow iron
into Iran shit
and Arbathiao slips a scarab
burning with wry Algorab.

VII.

Blackbody. Was this institution of faith
in Latin
lit? Swirling Isis
and our dying tarry as cargo
pyramid's torpid daimon
blackbody was this, institution of faith.

“Ahriman”

Prior-to-dawn fog (java
occultation) so

“Maintain Carnival” gandom runfight
crismon idnigo puslation (it’s basic)

Parlacy
of faltisanship--group a wants to stand (dark)

Crofit for ponstraint without, but that
; ad (Aradia)

Onslaught; fol-
(unkind light in dold cays) lows cold

Rocklop*dia Fak*bandica.

“Akpuon”

Turbom*ssianist gulls irk
abort solid imgrat, d*ath
as is; will
rat snood fib us stomp.
Agaric mull Iliad flop, Oscar rip
gray ikon. Bad obol go.


“Ialdabaoth”

High comma plains drift Dallas
Christmas in Fallujah black coral

Thishful winking or-
chid ambit bad control rush angst and no way

Loot lost back
it is tribal sign

"There is no next big thing." (Yo, bards!)

I long for old days past.

Still making dough as worms gnaw on you.