<SACRED BLADES -- PART 2>
I came upon a realization today. Often times, certain bits of new knowledge are discomforting, and todays particular awareness is hard enough to admit to myself let alone commit to paper and share with anyone else. Be that as it may, it was in the final few rings of a fragrant C.A.O. LAnniversaire that I realized why I originally took up cigar smoking (a few solid years after abstaining from all substance abuse). Up until now, I merely rationalized it as a harmless vice, a non-addictive distraction from all minor concerns of the day. Perhaps true, but unlike alcohol, I didnt begin to indulge in this ritual with the idea of escaping my father and the ruined life hed stitched me up with. This time, my acutely attuned olfactory senses craved the lingering aroma of burning tobacco seed for some other reason-- not so much because it removed me from the present, but because it delivered me to a past when the world was clean and my cigar smoking father was my only childhood idol. I havent seen him in three years, and it wasn't until today that it dawned on me that cigars somehow bring him closer, and myself back to a childhood when everything seemed possible and I still believed in heroes.
I suppose this can be considered as some unwary addiction to the fondness of fair memory, but my immediate past is so junked up with horrors and personal wreckage, this slight memory tap seemed a way to get myself back to some purer feeling. The desire to light up merely becomes a way to bring on a memory of my father that isn't unbearable.... When he was around, Id drink excessively to blot him out. Now that hes gone, I light a premium cigar and set to simple dreaming.
I hate acknowledging this weakness, but Im convinced that Im right. I used to hate the smell of cigar smoke when I was a child and now smoke willingly. Its a strange thing to admit, that after all this time, my father still has some sort of hold (no matter how insignificant) or tarry permanence in my life.... And while I think Ill keep a few cigars in the humidor for when I feel a little lost or alone, like some unloved orphan lost in the big blue world, I dont think these are memories Ill want to wallow in on a daily basis.
Im ready for the here and now, so its time to let the smoke clear
once and for all.
Um... excuse me, I left my soul at the door.
Oh, yes... and this black crown is for you, sir.
The body is rent, and all beauty is born in struggle.
Eyes without light drain pools of color, soul floats.
Duality is a transparent dagger, faux blades fading into inattentions--
the clouds like loose corsets draped from the waists of women,
a bouquet of faces, the egression of eyes.
The sky is a marvelous bandage, raining smiles and the graceful interlacing of
bombyx wings, the material of heart..... The pink star swings us,
we are so beautiful.
=
The wind rings like a metallic curtain
and your breasts quiver like two tears,
like warm snow melting in my hands
stripped before God
in esculent divinity,
we move into a rosary of stars,
heliotropic, the delicate gears of spirit
disappearing into a powder of pale dimension.
Our beautiful construction concedes the rock,
a crucible of used rubies,
earth-dust caking violent armor, axes
sexes in asbestos,
mirror eyes full of upend tears,
the imperceptible specter of sipped
rosecup hips as the birds skate vertically...
The sun hallucinates through the stained gloss of my hollow eyes, silk dreaming in sheets like pages of pink paper. She overtakes the pure morning air, a body of black moss more apparent than real, her hands holding my stones like childhood muffs. Her heart is a bottle of blue perfume. Trays of shadow slide out of the sky, water splashing off the counter-top. She wears a necklace of chipped tears.
Shades of forgetfulness spill with careful intentions. Ours is a hinged minute, reabsorbed into cool sighs. I shrink to a single expression in the nimbleness of new light, the revolutionized air and bleeding machinery of satin frolic. Liberty speaks to us with such a human color. My mouth spits itself into red pieces, begonias and monstrous vegetations. So Ill wear the emerald hood, bent over for the Last Judgment, an ovum of desire doing a handstand in the raftered airs before an upward gust of January wind can conceive an equivalent divination. To express oneself is to pull the trigger--
white and elegant. I turn toward forever, looking for a clock to punch.
My heart is a silver sachet, a stuffed God pocket.
So what does life want from us?
Human consciousness disseminates itself in an explosion upon the senses, an experience of perfect meanings, the heaven's a crepe of innocent kisses, love coming on tip-toes.
Its cold, but fun to watch the match die, its ever-changing shapes exhausted in disheveled glances that migrate to efflorescent memories, old delirium.
The Lord has retired to the rompous room
with Marquis de Sade, his phosphorescent fingers
cracking open the darkness of mortality, the fringe
of which is only hinted at.... Do you see the tiny acrobats
the lavish viscera of girlish trees, red as zinnias
bleeding from jinxed eyelashes pretending not to wound?
The balloonist swims in despair, in a weather not of his own hot air...
The sky is a mirror and the stars are coral bits. Clouds reef the natural necessities of impossible space, a human roof of a house built from the inside out. The walls are wings and the flowers in the window pots are made of paper, gestures branching out into the imperceptible paleness that lands....literally, on your lips.
So I lift myself out of your sentence which renders me transparent. Your hands are made of silence, and I can only manage such a tenderness once, immaculately abandoned.
I push on into the cool light air, alone and unarmed with only a song in my head, Sympathy for the Devil, by Charles Tex Baudelaire. Spontaneity makes a fool of time in some grand way that I do not understand, parachutes in the rain suffering the same fate as slow revelations drowning into my monocle. Possession brings me back, composing momentary purpose as the day develops before me like a nude Polaroid.
A certain studied elegance gives meaning to all things unscripted.
Blades of grass turn into crystal, thick hair coating a banner of ruins. My eyes trace the night, its fallen images advance and subside within blue temples, a murmuring pool of somnolence beneath the white fabric of purity silencing conspiratorial whispers.
=
Each moment holds me alone in its absent waiting room
with walls of polished sorrow
my head still ringing, searching for the antidote,
cocaine roses disarming the trees--
flaming teeth devouring the lily beds, tallies in tense.
Heart of paper, pale and precious senses printed on the price-tag below.
Your wings mingle and wound,
aerated, the minds wind gives shape to the blood
an outpouring mound-- savage & cataract,
a marvelous prostitute that poses for yr pleasure.
10:19 p.m., 1/3/00. Recording the statues progress,
we perhaps discover a representation that is more accurate
if we look from behind ourselves, a backward glance that seems
to perfect lifes meaning and illuminate the magnificent assembly of self
like little else can.
My eyes are absorbed by the rapid expansion of unnatural light,
as I stand motionless upon this earth before me,
on times subtle equator that has hashed out my contract,
my very conceptions recomposed in the accomplishment
of a wish...
Desire is an illusion that stops us from living, not drive, but habitation
borne of weariness and the faithful image of ourselves unsatisfied.
These are counterfeit shadows poignantly conforming
to our own interior paralysis-- it find nothing better to do
than imitate our inhibitions.
So here I stand, symbolized in this enigmatic form, a statue
to which no valid interpretation, in spite of its singularity
and lavish detail, should seek understanding. I am immobilized
when removed from any doubt about the effects of my wax:
the transparency is in the words
That drool down the page like the candle drip of a dying flame,
craving to lend some light to all meaningful substance, masked
in the need to deny its possession of truth, beloved
for scrutinies and the continual sacrifice of acceding to sight....
A lyric talisman.
=
I am deeply grateful to be alive, w/in the mise-en-abyme. h.b.d.d.
I stare with absent eyes, my head a rosy globe of mangled nerve-endings, dead idealism and half-hashed philosophies.. The bodys betrayal of spirit (the mortal rub) keeps me weary and uninspired. My heart is a discarded archive emptied of all valuables, existential vitals. I feel departed and dissolved, though not quite broken. Decay invades-- depression the most mundane of human habitations. It leaves the soul frozen, untongued after a grieving scream. I bleed bloodlessly, strangled in the uneasy light, martyred in a debilitating bitterness thats impossible to spit out. Starvation is a state of mind and its bitten my intemperate head.
I settle upon a mental mantra, the supremely relieving and liquid visual of a woman's hairy flood pouring all over her holiest of holes (vortex of all vortices).
My mind then turns to Shelley's loaded ode, the images indeed having the ability to cause any chick a moment's indecision about its sex-crazed creator. It doesn't matter though.... Byron still loves you-- eternally yours in the barbarous tasseling of dawn.
To settle the mind upon some permanent shape is all that brings me a sense of relief. Skull dusts smoke this bitter rune and the cool damp air does little to cleanse my soiled conscience. Black thoughts dangle like clouded mallets-- the migraine echoes that define each slackened rib-thunk into extinguishing beats.
All tenuous meaning cedes to a strained vacancy.
=
GGB: Theres something about a butthole.
Everyone's got one, but is it a soul?
LORD: Ginsburgs covered this, but I say, No.
Its merely someone's holy soup bowl.
One seldom looks to the Lord when attempting to unriddle lifes deepest mysteries.
Its somehow sad.
Seek, and ye shall ever be enlightened.
After much turmoil, having now found some good measure of spiritual solace, I have resolved to maintain (or regain) the well-being of my body. Life is just too damn important to me now. Imagine that.
Sex is the bodys quintessential act, and a physical need that never stops craving. It seems to me of some importance that a spouse remain enticing to his partner, and though this perhaps appears a superficial reason to maintain one's corporeal edge, for me it merely adds to the an existing list of reasons why one should improve his health.
I havent even considered the idea of physical reconditioning since beginning my recovery from alcoholism, in part due to an appearance that on the surface looks youthful and fit. But my body (and face) has always appeared of a more tender age than its actual years, a fact that I initially became aware of during my first sexual experience, more than half my life ago. She was an exceedingly mature French girl who waitressed at the place I worked summers, and though not quite as old as I at the time, her full curves and generous hips moved in full bloom upon all my trembling innocence. I was so fucking nervous that I managed to hold out like a pro (which seemed to successfully temper her earlier attentions concerning my lack of any perceptible pubescence). She had a beautiful scar under her left breast (a tawny-tipped C-cup, if memory serves).
Ah, to roam the virgin forest....
Why am I thinking about this?
Im a married man-- with a woman whose beautiful love never ceases to leave me entranced and vastly satisfied.
The point is, I desperately want to live!
& its important for me to take care of myself
(physically as well as spiritually)
so that Ill be around to share an entire lifetime with this angel
the one whose wings beat conclusively,
all within my consummated heart.
Odysseus squints, the sun kindling
His visions atop a sodden coppice;
he smiles to himself, a lone figure
sparking into the sky, a blue-tiled lounge
above the cordate leaves, like an eiderdown
of hematin ash that chars his silvered pose.
Only an overdue sleep among the moonseed
can palliate his living fire; set to a nod,
his eyelids close a retiring rose.
=
I spent the day collecting back-due gas accounts from aging baby boomers.
Most attempted to rationalize their failure to make a timely utility payment by citing the hectic demands of a busy lifestyle--soccer practice, antique shows, tanning appointments, ski trips and endless shopping mall sprees. The way I see it, these people are no different than the trailer park slobs of Lakehurst-- common deadbeats, one and all. But I cant help contrasting the family dynamic in most of these yuppie homes with the atmosphere prevalent at the time of my own upbringing. Today, a slim but wizened babe in a designer jogging suit ran to the Expedition to find a checkbook as her
husband prepared pancakes for the children in their hardwood gourmet pantry.
I have to admit, he was one of the gentlest souls I've ever met, humming you fill up my senses as he attentively stirred a slackening batch of Aunt Jemima biscuit batter. I couldnt help but wonder what kind of corporate animal this guy must become in order to generate such a palatial opulence with which to surround himself and his family....
My greatest fear is that I will be unable to adequately provide for my wife and two sons because of some inner-lack or emotional deficiency Ill find myself helpless to elude (like the memory of my father on Christmas Eve, whistling Deutschland Uber Alles
as he stirred himself another cocktail).
=
My little cup o joe is screaming for creme and sugar.
Marysa!
....and dont forget me when Im gone
but let my words remain,
a trace of air to mark my place
like no dead marble can;
words of human shares consume
no vellum membrane binding,
but ether in a poets mind
delivers truth to endure time--
no centuries of dust, but a moment that must
radiate and not deny,
a light that hides the sky inside
each velar phrase we cry...
=
Collecting in Asbury Park, and not one red government cent to show for my efforts.
A prostitute walked up to my car as I was finalizing some HEAP remarks on the lap-top and asked me if I was looking for a good time today. I replied, if I were, I surely wouldnt have gone to work. She didnt get it, and asked me again. I politely declined her offer and pulled up the block to complete the customer account I'd been working on. She wore her poverty like pearls upon an Oscar nominee as she strode away in red dimestore shades.
Every once in awhile when Im working in this town, Ill recognize a face from my stay in the psychiatric ward. Theyre usually wandering around, muttering unintelligibles or simply drooling into their soiled rags. Im one drink away from them and it scares me to realize how close I came. There is no existence harsher than street-life, where one is alone, unloved & shunned.
They look like movie leftovers from Dawn of the Dead, the sad bastards...
Normalcy merely amounts to the acceptance of a commonly shared disease.
The worlds inherent insincerity troubles my sleep.
=
I am a spectator at the flowering of my thought.
-- RIMBAUD
Winter limped in
on quadriplegic limbs
my senses long cultivating a coma
in the whiteness of snow just so my transcription
from the hollow subconscious
could retrieve prophesies,
stunned mortality
or the incidental reflection intended to postulate a new universe.
Ive heard of crippling depression,
but to believe
my heart has all the metaphysical glamour of a rusting weathervane...
bottomless despair of an emotional distance
I cant quite escape;
so I go on muttering to myself
in the narcotic absorption of a colorless dream.
Intrinsic human virtue,
cut-up
matters of
pain-killing sacrifice.
What is there
when one's heart brims over,
the sumptuous bloods of an ebbing dawn,
all fear having sunk with the sun
in an already satisfied East,
the cruel glow commemorating deceit
is a dull afterglow thats been dropped in the release
that grants you a warrant of removal?
It all good-- all for the taking in the rosy prospects of the sun:
All of life, visible or invisible, exists in the strain of a relentless duality
(and vice versa).
This is a realization that makes it necessary
for me to reach back (as it were)
and smother a storm its mirror image, and all that.
Sadly, we invent our own cages-- picture frames with our portraits inside,
brass ovals that keep us stationed on the shelf,
gilded in a gutter of second-hand sunlight.
Tautologies and tankers of majestic verse concede me an impersonator;
Im sittinon the back deck figgerinme Mad-Libs
for all the unanswered questions, but my eyes are tired
under a colossus of interior landscapes;
This,
I have found,
is nothing
but the truth.
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=
Its beginning to seem clear
that this project is winding down
into a fine, nonsensical chaos.
Bob, Carol, Ted & Alice
Tinky Winky, Po....
pitching pennies of senseless eloquence
as I decline-- all tits and ass,
whips and showercaps; cunt-struck,
like Missy {whose tongue never lacks}
jes looking fer a name to drop... anything to help
a poem
But I can take some comfort
in the fact
that my altered id-go will never
pen again,
no more guilt by association--
the disease youve made of poetry.
Besides, you hold the germ to close
on precious breaths,
a collectivist chant
malodorous and rote
@ St. Marks commun-
al book burning,
as you huddle low in the mellow
spread of light.
Is this all poetry can be:
Infants reciting sweet nothings
of some weakling,
bad skin, rotten teeth--
the not so great unwashed,
souls & buttholes,
the whole world intent on wasting my time?
Excuse me now Richard, I have to take a shit....
and well, thats poetry too
I suppose.
--Starless Sneech
Sadness sheets the ardent rose in hails of heaviness, unable to express my once loving heart in buds that, through lonely eyes, could bloom into angels-- my spirit from the vine alive with every ornament. But this definitive gaze cannot bear the unexpected thorns, nor my heart, all of loves subtle abatements: Heres a canticle to all who subside in mortal sin, such acerbating sorrows...
The primal present
a serpent of excess,
O exquisite fables
thrown into the sea
without deceptions
or malignity in me,
I promise always
Gospels and reverie...
The sacred boundary,
a heart stricken by grief,
infamous in oblivion and the crosses of passion,
transparent and bitter, its black delirium.
Two silver willows,
penitential souls
spun from dust
into the winds
like the Holy Ghost,
crucified in the unintended moment
that hosts an impenetrable disunity
disconsolate in the tantra of pale expanses
& disclosed in a tear, healing immaculately.
The body of Christ is a prevailing lilac on my grave.
It doesn't happen very often, so I found this incident to be worthy of a blade.
I had the strange fortune of being hit on by a twenty-something year old bibliophile at the local Barnes & Noble this afternoon. I noticed her staring me down at random intervals over the bookcases and shelves until she finally came right up next to me, pretending to thumb through a D.H. Lawrence. However, I was so preoccupied with the fact that there are no less than three glossy publications of Kerouacs best known novels-- thats three different high-brow editions of exactly the same title, by houses so exclusive they publish little other than the dictionary these days.
Well anyway, this chick was composed entirely of legs, endless stems that disappeared to within an inch of ready space before slinking beneath her hip-length leather coat.
Her shiny black platform boots raised her gaze at least an inch or two higher than mine,
(and considering my height, thats worth noting) a fact she flaunted for all it was worth.
Suddenly, after an initial courtship of shy smiles and hidden peeks, she asked,
have you ever read any of these?
I put down the penguin edition of Dharma Bums, and looked up at her helplessly, feeling lost and a little surprised. No, I've never read any of those books; why?
Oh, I dont know, she replied, hiding inside her long brown hair that disappeared into the sorrel patterns upon her form-fitting cloak. After a few more furtive glances, she then abruptly asked, so do you have a name?
Mr. Married, I replied, and then thanked her all the same.
Her face grew slightly erubescent from embarrassment. Feeling the need to rescue her from the situation, I recommended Lautreamonts Maldoror, which I nimbly plucked from the L section before her, thinking shed be relieved one day that I had decided to decline (I mean, whats she to think after having read a bit of that foolish brutality?).
See you, I said, and then left to check out.
AGNI
What do you have on tap?
A corpse formerly known as _____________.
(insert yr face here)
A semiotic abjection, the sermons flawed and ghosted:
a foundation stone exposed
as an inescapable dream
(condensed into the purified image of itself)
as wildflowers dope the sky,
my eyes like lozenges oiling to a transparency
for a dimes worth of beauty,
heart scars lighting the sky
like invading nations that flow from my wrists--
MY LIFE SPILLING HELPLESSLY THROUGH MY FINGERS,
cold coils wound into the indelible nails of darkness
for a victory carved in bone.
I exist now on a drug called hope,
having spurned all fragile certainties,
chopped down in the clear-cut
deities carved from under tongue,
rotgut and winged-heels
soot-laced against wakefulness,
the souls candle of ambiguity.
Hunger is the bait with which to hook an early grave,
my spine lies in a penance of weightlessness
w/in its bountiful shroud, the body dissolving into a host of faith,
warm veins vanishing in an inflorescent rain.
=
Rule # 1 for my new millennium health program is to remain a strict vagetarian,
alive on a diet of nothing other than pure cunt.
Well, you wont get far with your poetry.
--POUND
=
An odious TV interview w/ Wynona Ryder pollutes the air in my post-midnight abode. Shes a dirty bitch, hawking a new movie (in which she doesn't even expose her fun bags) through glycerin eyes, recounting her interminable five days of horror in some cushy Hollywood dry-up for tortured stars.
Shut-up and shave your lap you rat bastard!
=
Cool Hand Luke, hie on Mad Dog 20-20
Sunlight pours like a latte upon my peaceful morning table, an...
*Oh, cmon.... lets start over here*
Inconsolable gods cast of daedalean slate
bestow an inborn kiss, raised in oblivion
as the Eucharist died upon dried lips,
a crimson rinse-- an emotional strip-search
for circulations half-surmised, moneyed
as I sold my kingdom for a six-pack.
Nothing remains of my former weal,
huddled in oblique silence-- a head shot,
fractured gestalts enlacing merciless tar plots
(pilfered portals on the convicted catalpa)
grounded to taproots that are knit
into the bones of seductive contemplation.
These detuned amulets will ever seek a higher ground
in the elegant chords within a temples ascetical tension.
METAPHYSICAL GRAFITTI
The only thing after death will be a mudless evolution,
A resurrection so distant to our existing divine presence
As a poem ushering consequence to the humble slug...
So prepare thyself and spirit for the long haul-- its not over (even when its over).
=
Rain falls like loose change from Gods hip-pocket. The early peonies lean toward the warm memory of the sun in the misty cool of a premature Spring. The streets retain a terroir of my childhood being, unchanged and waiting to catch up on the emptiness of the moment. The softly humming precipitation drenches everything all at once. Why hasn't familiarity ever been able to offer up comfort and strength? Walking on the water always seems to return me here: The Lord's Season in Hell.
=
The worst danger for an artists work: assimilation. And this is a country of highly refined assimilation mechanisms. To make like (how I hate that trait), to leaven, make digestible, democratize, ultimately strip of individuation.
Art is to isolate.
Poetry is always using words you dont know...
--Clark Coolidge
Here is a man who takes great pride in the fact that his work is ignored, so the beast in me saw fit to quote him. From a link at CUZ Publications, Im surprised that inbred group of cliquish New York assholes found anything in Coolidges notebooks worth quoting. But hes right-- ART is just another form of entertainment with all the hierarchy and wall clawing of big business, the church or government. Where he is wrong is in the assertion that we must find a form to accommodate the mess. In doing so, the isolation (an artistic pact with nothingness) that he craves is lost, swept up in the noise and dust, the filth of lesser souls.
Perhaps it is time to have something like affirmative action for women when it comes to rape-- a swift legislative measure that would call for reduced penalties (and perhaps invoke a sense of downright encouragement) when it comes to women who go out and commit rape against men. Afterall, men have been using women like whores for years, so now it is time to put the U-N-T into CUNT. If I were a chick, with all this shit out now, (viagra and milagro etc.) I'd be at the bar dropping fuck drugs into any unsuspecting pricks drink. Maybe I'd lace it with some Rohypnol, which would reduce his bodys energy to a state of limp myasthenia, (affording me the rare ability to kick a 200 pound mans ass) but still keeping his cock hard enough to cut through glass. Cmon grrrls, lets have a little fun....
=
Again, my fingers are running numb in the vicious bi-polar chill as, half asleep,
I pull
up to the Palmia Emporium which appears before me, as in a dream, like some
delicate oasis
in a desert of concrete and irregular tensions unstrung from bodies wasted
in defeat.
The proprieteur peels off 4 crisp Bens, and I hand him his monthly receipt,
my eyes
rising in elegant chords of vision that tiredly strum the shelves in glowing columns
alighted
by forbidden divinity and ancient terrors that no longer appear to reveal my darker
passions;
But others-- they still come to this place, their last few pennies spilling from cracked
palms....
Night-Train to nowhere, Thunderbird for $2.80 a gallon-- love and respect for a prayer, my brother.
=
My fruitcake boss is a disgusting little man. I'd love to tell him to stick his thumb up his ass & sing Brown-Eyed Girl.
I passed Finnegans pub on the way to breakfast with my older son today, and knew if it werent for my family, I'd have made the quick turn into the bar and probably stayed there all day. I realize Im a ruined soul in this way. Theres nothing I'd rather be doing with my day than finding some dark corner of the world in which to slip out of my skin, pouring like wingless angel from the damage of myself into a purified child once more. Ive realized today that this craving will never leave me-- Ill always carry the sickness around with me like a curse. Its written all over my face.
The trick of the sobriety game (and Im not rehashing here for the sake of it, this is something I find myself needing to relearn on a daily basis) is to find enough meaningful moments with which to occupy one's time thatll outweigh the value of any past lives rarefied in intoxicated transcendence (which on their own, will beat out nearly anything time can offer). The hard part is not giving up drinking. Too much emphasis is placed on initial abstinence in Alcoholic Anonymous, with their 90 day chips and intensive early treatment schedule. Shit, I was way too scared of the world I had made for myself to slide into it after such a narrow escape. No, the challenge is not the quitting, but in never starting up again at some later point down the road.
So today, I managed to continue down my straight and narrow road. I looked in the rearview and smiled at my son. Hes the best reassurance I could ever have.
Hes my guardian angel and the father I never had.
Daddy, do you think Godzilla is bigger than heaven?
Sometimes Troy, but not today....
I reached back and tickled him as together we pulled into the parking lot of the diner, safe and sound
=
Im running out of time, my pen no longer wet
and youre left perhaps with little more than a clear portrait
of my fingernail. No matter though-- I live by minutes
decreed and my death has been appointed in silence,
finding my way back in a light the stars hold open for me.
ARTIST = ADDICT
Not sure why this is true, though Im sure I posit several theories in my own work that Im not even consciously aware of. Ode to Joy, that moment of removal in a childs imagination when he is able to outrun his torturers-- all the pain of living. Take note that this joy is discovered in a moment of intense escape, a striving to stay alive thats wrought to the brink. I think all of this supports the above, bold-faced claim (though Im not going to go into this further here because it all seems too familiar to me).
I suppose I should mention that Marysa and I watched the film Immortal Beloved
this evening.
=
Father of Troy
Z )( 6th = conscientious worker, moody, hyper-sensitive; a worrier, at times may completely lack hope or courage.
Needs to develop self-reliance. AVOID INTROSPECTION.
Moon completely detached-- no aspects to other planets.
Nodes of Moon: Striving to make a contribution to society, kindness, generosity, opinions may fluctuate. (Never-- ed.) Emotional level is high-- intuition and imagination are powerful.
SATURN: May have secret enemies. Psychologically needs isolation. An afflicted sub-conscious. Pessimistic, self-inflicted melancholy. Love of power. Cold.
{Edited from an Astrological Star Chart created
by Alice B. Talkless for Lord Dermond, 5.27.64, 9:22 p.m.}
Art Alone Endures.
My brain, yellowed and irregular
like a kernel of popcorn, half-popped--
the hard brown center, impenetrable
and buried on the bottom of the bowl.
The cut on my arm shines like a tattoo,
a blown rose or heart with mom inside,
a thing that opens me more than my face;
a glowing flesh cut-out of inconsequence.
The greasy streets deceive me. They have
nowhere good to go, the dirt and stone
finds a place for my musings, the bruised
absences that are scraping along the curb.
The sky inside me like a blue linen shroud
that contains nothing to explain it, the stars
a multitude of eyes that drop like confetti,
pasturing in a wasteland of captive tears;
I fall through the bottom in a terrible stain
upon black thorns waking. Lingering salt
at the bloody faucet, the blades obligating
a main pass to mass pain; the flowers are
broken inside the glass garden, shards
of sunlight hankering, decant-- my eyes
surcease, dangling from the optic string
with which I've hanged myself blindly .
An inviolable Chi-rho crosier leans in a corner below.
Lord Plentiful Reflects...
I went to see the therapist, the-rapist, that is.
Walking down the block counting phlox blossoms in my head,
2 white for every purple or red.
=
Winter blows; the air feels like old age.
Writing is like putting an overdue child to bed, irritable and vastly in need of sleep.
I could always think (and later, drink) my father under the table; hence, I've seen
the stubbornness of things.
Is it ever possible to arrive at a meaningful summation, some blue conclusion?
What will be written on the first page of forever?
God sneezed, and then there was endlessness.
The space of white light between thought and expression (the cog and wheel) exists as an invisible shine, the spoke tint stones blessedly imprisoned within us.
Drug addiction is the modern equivalent of cannibalism, a self-absorbed feast.
Pink-pearl internal shell, mother earth is releasing the sun.
Consumed in the hugeness of space, a silent voice carries us from womb to ash.
=
Where the hell has my Springtime fled?
EPIGRAMMA LXIX
Blood red tulip bulbs pressed
between the pages of my soul,
infinite nods hiding finite holds.
=
V: But dont you think poets can learn from one another?
R: Only the bad poets....
Its true. If there is anything you are trying to learn about your own poetry from
the written remains of another, youre a fraud. There is nothing a poet need learn about his own soul that doesn't come from within (that doesn't already exist in the pristine state of his unique and divine consciousness). Anything less than a complete awareness of this fact is exactly what has brought us to the post-modern (post-quality) state of communal versification that has largely failed to capture the publics imagination-- beatniks, spoken word cliques etc.
Poetry is an emotion resulting from one's individual vision, a pearl shot through the eye of one's own solitude. It is subject only to the scrutiny of its creators conscience, served up in a tall cool glass of memory-- a potion of singular clarity like absinthe sipped under a narcotic sky, definite and menacing. It is redoubtable, and resists all attempts (usually by other poets) to reduce it to dogma. The poets mind impregnates his words with revolutionary ideas cast from the fires of his mind. It is a divinity that that shares by allowing others to partake of the beauty of a poets own discovering,
a tangible countenance that illuminates the world through its eloquence...
THIS IS THE ONLY POETRY OF PLACE!
To find joy in the simplicity of things:
(Reasons to stay sober)
A gust of warm air over the melting snow of mid-January.
Noticing a trace of a suntan on the face of someone you love.
The certain moon rocking in its solid cradle of bone.
A complete day with nothing to do and no one to see.
The entire month of October with its memories of past love.
Getting your heart to look just right upon the page.
Being alone when its not the only choice you have.
To be the father of a son whos too young to see your faults.
Classical music during a thunderstorm when the electric is out.
Sex in the Summer and the smell of Coppertone lotion.
Seeing a woman naked for the first time (and each time after).
Lying on the ground and staring at the sky, watching clouds gather.
The first inkling of Spring, when the earth opens up and smiles.
To actually find out, after many years, that you truly are lovable.
Knowing theres always someone waiting for you to come home.
=
I realize the above list is tantamount to the cheap sentimentality usually found on Hallmark cards, but it helps me to take a little inventory of the things that actually keep me going when it seems easiest to slide back into patterns of self-pity and destructive indulgence.
Basically, were it not for my family, I'd be dead. Who knew such joy was possible?
Never for a minute would I have thought that anything of my spirit was salvageable way back when. It seemed as though too much had been lost, that it was impossible to reverse the tides of misfortune I continually found myself drowning in. It truly wasn't until an 8 pound life preserver with an attitude (and full diaper) made me realize just how much I am loved, flaws and all. However, my sons are not here for
my redemption. I am their servant, for they have taught me all I know of joy.
Blue pills make believe, omniscience
the loose rattle of hands clawing out
a cool green silence (which is you)
at noon;
the fucking poem holds nothing
it is only emptiness, at best
a projection of all you could ever hope
to be-- a pissing contest disguised
in lavish atmospheres, a promise
it is only emptiness, regrets
a slow parade of disgrace, soft and sinister.
3o milligrams quell my shakes,
Im bathed in the fragrant, flower me up
lost in the massive human architecture,
toadstool seizures lulled to a hiss
in the screaming (thinking of you)
praise and prophecies
the fucking poem holds nothing
eternal whispers kept to receive,
(reasons to keep on living)
there are no accidents--
the red eclipse shovels rough magic into my senses
as I close the lid on this book of dreams...
Blood of the Poet
Language is like water, theres a seemingly endless supply. Even though its source has become polluted-- robbed of meaning and vitality, we rely on it to live. So where does this leave a poet who attempts to peddle by pushcart his special brand of bottled spring? A drop in the ocean.
One's gauge of a writers value seems to come with the loaded question, are you published? This used to be a real thing for me-- getting published-- until I realized: have you ever noticed how many books are on sale at auctions or at the public library for 10 cents or less? There are currently more books published than all the people on the earth could ever read. Every emotion and thought that originates in my brain has undoubtedly been explored somewhere before, probably in a depth and with an erudition beyond my capabilities. So why bother?
This cry for love that I call my poetry should continue to go unheard.
Perhaps in time, Ill begin to see how I came away from it all, changed or made whole (if indeed turns out to be the case). But as for the human connection-- people responding to who I am, its a lost cause. Ill bring it all into the ground with me. To write is futile without you. These poems are part of me, carried in my heart like solemn beats-- the blood of my being. It is dependent on nothing or no one until Im foolish enough to write it down.
Let it all die... Ill leave you alone. I promise.
However, I am thirsty as a matter of ritual.
Love is the water that Jesus walked upon, but when the water fails
and one falls into seclusion, it is still love into which one falls.
--Richard Hell
& the world will never be enough until your own soul tugs
at its gravity, an ascension-- the sky coming alive
in the solitary light of a beauty felt inside
one beating heart.
=
I want to take every great piece of ART
and improve it with vulnerability. An urge...
Vulnerability is the only emotion (if we can call it such)
that hasn't yet died in me.
ART is a disguise,
though vulnerability remains visible:
Portrait of the Artist.
The ideational entity of my own suborning has fallen
prey to insincere expression, dialectal failings.
On my own, I slip out of holes--
interior diameters of my own consciousness,
a dreaming in skin.
The dim light of indecision is my only absolute,
hollows flagrant AND darkness true;
I still want to die here.
I am envious, not of what I know I do not have the ability to be,
but that which I've not the mind to conceive.
Its time for the world to honor itself
with silence.
The inoculative power of dream,
the theraputic possibilies of removal...
Words to wound with,
a bloodied blade
bathed in a voice of red;
there is nothing else
Born too late,
emptied into an era
of silence.
The sentence is a measure in time.
With every word
I will appear...
loose smoke.
Failure is the stuff
of sustenance.
To destroy myself.
Consumed by a youthful darkness,
I stagger to the Unaging Muse.
Poetry is the irreducible culture.
World without blade,
unsheathing the dream.
My clock stopped beating
January, 1893.
So Im wondering: Have I managed to wear it through? A good friend once told me that all ART begins in loss, and no explanation of the mission has ever made as much sense since. But once things lose their clarity (a perception focused on its continual
loss of perceptive capability) we begin to outlive our minute.
The rose is opened.
Most artists never seem able to escape the primal forces that have originated their individual myths. They seem merely able to enhance it, a new twist here and there, but generally continue to produce remnants of themselves from the same set of emotional circumstances (haloes of gold from nagging ankle weights of dun slag) over the course of a lifetime. Look at Burroughs, never quite able to shake the disease.
Maybe Im fooling myself into a sense of false hope, believing I can actually beat
the mark inside, (to quote the above victim) or perhaps its simply naivete on my part,
the kind borne of an idealism that seems to be essential component of the addict/artist, and his or her frustration with life as is.
But lifes too short and I've spent enough time trying to figure things out. Theres a certain noble beauty in living the unexamined life, with no personal stake in how the nature of things determines the soul and its outcomings. In many ways, I feel the victim of my own manipulations. The poet wants to escape his own self-created metaphor. Perhaps he has, and the record should momentarily reflect this (like some top-secret document on Get Smart that self-destructs the moment its discovered by unsavories).
How long can a rose remain in mind
and still remain a rose?
Can we also let the record reflect that this text is the product of a highly fragmented consciousness, as I am summoned away from the typewriter every third sentence in the
name of domestic duty, having long ago lost the ability to concentrate on a single thing of interest to me for more than five minutes at a time. Over from without...
Image is the beatification of consciousness .
A poem exists in a dimension of space,
without walls
composed only of the energy of its meaning
& the impulse of its grace.
The poems always write me
until Im left undone.
Meaning lives in the poem before it is experienced by the creator.
If I could compose a perfect poem, I never would.
=
Thursday was balled up with the confusion of sleet
turning dull weathervanes into peacocks of crystal,
but for the glassy eye of the sun, smudged in bloated indifference
over the whole affair, it was a torrential unveiling
in conspiratorial sheets.
So I committed myself to the memory of Spring,
to the virtual image of cold flames vainly escaping
the frozen fabric shrouding the ground,
rosebuds like lit candles disseminating a human form
in the contemplation of impossible days.
There is nothing here except being here,
theres nothing to do but to let things die
perhaps clinging to the purer air,
the bleached-out resin of a pane of white sky
as an evolving iridescence of soul dissolves.
A finger poking through cellophane (morning light upon my waking eye)
the blank expansiveness of air
empty linen,
lulling wings SET FREE on Leighton Street.
Threw down a tattered copy of THEE MANUAL OF DEATH by Marl Cox
(Sex Therapist)
and a/rose into the waiting fragments of
BIG KISS in veils of tear--
I wd. like to introduce myself
fallen into sleep,
where the beautiful water rolls against the virgin belly mind,
duality of the bloody sunset
(another idea Ill have no idea how to act upon)
where I need to be locked away for your own good,
chained down to a solemn promise of emptiness....
Epithalamium whispers, delicate words
demented and fading into silent thought,
snow falls.... opulent eyelids blink-
ing extinction on the morning landing of
my skin (the infinite stillness stands alone
) passion
illuminating so much that means something
escapes into the invisible.
--Starless Sneech
Atmosphere composed of irreconcilables,
only beauty lends perspective.
Language is the only medium capable of the intimate replication of soul.
=
Sky of watered silk
dead cherry stars
pit over to suicide
a saint moves
motion in a black-eye void.
Condemned to the Court of miracle,
mote/shun
surfeits of hapless glory
minding out the aesthetic of isolation,
a dosage
prostituting emptiness
in prayer,
the superimposed flesh of drea-
ming
my cells weaken
split
divide /conquer.
=
A return of memory accompanies the purity of FORM.
The possessed essence:
an inescapable expression that transforms itself
through the apperceiving lens of singular human divinity,
i.e.; Gods Eye, the abyss is straddled
as it is filled with grace, immemorial.
=
What saith you, mi Lord?
The poetry gum shooting plaster
bullets splitting apple bosoms in/two
lilacs having mastered themselves up a darling dream
marble of feminine thighs, strip casting
heads of hair
throwing my doll ball against the drainpipe,
animation schlep through hell singing
piss stained concrete concerts of the west wall,
aconite remedies levying rum breath, huge dusky head
and stillness, light on leaves
silent wings retrieving twilight something
we may grow to love (for a moderate price).
Velvet shovels, svelte vowels... ack aack aaack
Alack! Its real! Mon couer etre nu
I have struggled herein to kill you.... Cloud flue on pink
fluent god-lunch begot a fruitless moon,
vain imaginings sleek as whore tongue
scrolling endlessly on the bony surface, moon-head
Baudelaire skull bursts and scarflower
hung high movies light the artistic culture,
the horror of its own admission.
Summer in the trees!
It is time to strangle several bad poets. --K.K.
My flowers are cracked
red lips pinned to a chest
I am broken.
The Scientific American
asserts that falling
in love is purely bio
logical, a function of genetic
necessity. It claims
that poetry can be cloned,
if we study the patterns
if we study the rose.
=
The window is entered, glassless and evaporating. Stars fall like tumescent spears into a ring of fur. Rain doors. The matter of the weather is inflected with the speech of bodily atmosphere, the suns expressive essence upon the refraction of eyes, the bloodless tinge of skin. It is reality transcribed. It understands what it consumes of the human connection.
Dreamlife enters the sky like an invisible spectrum, jeweled lightwaves shimmering in unlit pulses. Here, the atmosphere is the blood itself, the interior of skin, heartbeats, a fueled magnitude that translates the spirits hidden dispositions into oviparous solutions. Astral shapes in deliquescing alluvion-- the ingredients of a dream are swilled from my boreal chalice.
=
through or
separate spaces
indications
pointed places
indecisions
thought nor.
Thinking about what Ashbery wrote: writing about how writing affects one's writing-- the austerity of the almost empty mind and all (the flasher in the maw poets...)
Again, the performance of the poem is played out primarily for the poet himself,
a linguistic engine sparking from the memory
of its own becoming.
=
Cool blue, the air a snowless glow
inhabiting the space between nipple and spine,
forgiveness gasping in the abeyance
of tangling absences, my precious disease.
=
A parable of dim figures beneath the child-proof cap of the sky
pill bottle whiteness, aspirin sculptures of Chinese poetry,
not caring where the words fall, leaf after shambolic leaf.
I promise here, its not too late.... I've not spoiled everything,
I've not made a sham of everything! Who then will carry
on my idiocy? Who will make the mistake of unflinching perfection,
the inexorable image ashamed to live past its own mortality?
Villon, Nerval, Artaud.... man, those frog fuckers knew how to live--
embossed thought held in the ponderability of every new decadent stare,
every living legend to be, a vision dreaming prince wrapped in leather.
Im the last one left, and I have forgiven you! There is no one
to relieve me of this burden, of the intimate relationship
I maintain with personal virtue, looking for the center of beauty
but lost in a cold and pitiless pile of disconnected leaves.
IN THE CUNT TEARS
No place other than the skull,
angelus dome with the writhing pulse,
sunstruck God of heavens blue.
Let immortal treasure pour
from these wounds my blood has carved
in the heavy prescence of a soul.
The eternal node of glow, fear
without end,--no, inherent--no,
unneeded now in the moments light:
I watch all trepidation die
and empty from my eyes, the inevitable
and restless drama of mere things...
I am the first man,
and the awakening world assumes
its furious eloquence in tender hues:
swirling shapes, shifting densities
relentless and tortured intensities
burn the ordered orchard of my heart,
the first apple unfurled on the gnarled barb!
I pour a morning sleep over the
sky, the stars, and light anew....
-Lord Dermond & Gregg Glory
A Collaboration of Purest Evil
Happiness is a heavily scented axe.
A credulous shadow lengthens
an elegant orphanage aglow
as I walk arm in arm
w/ orange paraphernalia,
an indigo burn on the heel.
Flowers of stone,
the paternal image:
Ive learned myself well enough
to love,
even the sentimentality that offends you.
Only admire dead artists:
those who have become as one
w/ the earth,
the reality of dirt
is alive and removed from airs
lacerating lack.
I sift the daylight thru a grimace,
the naked beach pushing at the sea...
Is virtue a mean of liberation?
Is it really?
I am lost out here, dripping in the wind,
a consciousness despised
by all it apprehends.
The sun is a dead pill,
the skys stubborn impulse
is to shut down,
live in the light
of last nights palliative sunset.
It neither saves nor inebriates--
a black glot alighted,
elegant over delphinium blue,
fluid as a tear
dwindling down the cheek
of the horizon.
Ive been told of late
that my passions are a black hammer;
no exemplary star,
but a gavel upon and beyond
the pale of common decency.
BUT, IS THERE NOT EVERY REASON TO REJOICE
IN THE ATOMIC BOMB OF INDIVIDUALITY?
A commitment to eternity:
and you, with a demotic download
that amounts to a contemptuous sob.
Endlessly reticent,
and without resentment,
the voice of my thought
escapes prefigure...
=
Marysa,
for the love of whom I'd slash my wrists,
or make a stab at eternity.
The struggle to create something singular and meaningful
from within, against the demands upon me
for every imaginable inanity and whim
has begun, from inside, to wear me thin.
The scene around here is farcical.
=
Inexorable thunder of heart,
laughing sky, invisible deities.
Reflections.
Mad openings, halo light
loves caressing
hopeless strings
to inexpiable sleep.
Heart of warm stars
death is afraid,
dressed in white.
I am losing my fucking mind in here...
Somebody better cut me loose
cause I cant take another minute--
not another fucking second of screaming.
GODDAMMIT IT SOMEBODY KILL ME!!!!!
Half alive on Honey Locust lane,
I twist the sullen daylight,
pour it thru my claws...
transparent thoughts,
a removal into truer imaginings.
My head hurts in the haze of expectations,
your tongue is the tar in my heart,
vile libations
of memory;
its time to close up shop.
Call it love? I am your urinal:
let the filth of your past wash over me,
claustral,
moonstruck blood cells
set to
SELF DESTRUCT.
It is the slight imperfections in those things
we find beautiful
that are interesting,
unstitched emotional investments,
stroking the bulbs,
in stillness,
words remain:
delectable mums.
I want to write a novel to begin with the following lines: I caught my father fucking the school secretary when I was 10. It looked like two pigs in a tussle over a fumbled
Milk Dud.
The singular consistency of life is the arbitrary-- the random nature of things.
Once you realize that nothing is really real, you have stumbled into reality.
Everyone's waiting for the savior, instead of making it mean.
Lies are the ties that bind-- people are so damn quick to drink the
Kool-Aid.
=
A presaging fear resides in my marrow: that I am the sniveling shit my fatherd always
marked me for. Somewhere in my core, I truly feel like a substanceless,
gutless shuck.
How will I be a real father for my two boys? A body of gaps and absences,
a soul wormed with holes.
How will I ever explain the choices I've made in life?
There is no excuse for so much of it.
How can I shield them from the pain I carry on me like infected skin?
Innocence should never have to look upon such sin.
I cant escape the feeling that theyll grow up to hate me, that Ill inevitably let them down. It seems inevitable. My father hates me, and it took a long time for that fact not to hurt.
What dagger be there to give my sons to slay the fiend within me?
I explained to Troy what poetry is last night, since hes obsessed with my books of particular verse.
After I explained that it was saying something beautiful with words, he recited,
and I transcribed into stanzas, word for word.
STARS
are like diamonds
of silver and gold.
I love a sky of all dark
and little light shapes,
a rainbow of different
colored paints.
TROY (aged 3)
=
I dont think I can live through another winter.
Everything is perfectly grey. A lifetimes as short as the longest day.
The weather is an unendurable emotion. It is not love.
Maybe my mood would be different if the snow could rise into the sky
instead of its downward pull.
Its hard knowing that relief is only a bottle away-- right down the road, just follow the neon glow. The wait. Waiting for the weather to lift. Waiting for the isolation to melt. Theres nothing else to do. Its moments like this when I'd really have to say that lifes just not worth the wait. Unable to compose my moments of beneficent alone, my spells of lit contentment come far too seldom on their own. I always seem to be waiting for something more. Making things happen (that are livable) is something I seem to have no talent for. So I write. And wait.
Slicing my lip,
a sumptuous revelation
exasperation, rising rain doves
into a cloud....
all the worlds a page,
so, heres how it ends
=
The black mask hovers
a one-eyed horse,
epistolary bruises grounded in love
vicissitudes
in the moment of clarity
Im the spectator at the gate,
a stranger in the gallery...
To sleep as the night sleeps
wounded beauty
against all suffering
poised on a pained
vaulting image,
an inward turn.
Survival urged
internal injury;
I smile with a Dubuffet shine,
The charm of vulner-
ability,
Assassins of my orchid scorned:
Returneth me unto Paradise.
IN THE PRESENCE OF MORTALITY
Hot on the heels of a senseless imbroglio
parked the terrace on the banks of Wreck Pond,
everything is empty;
I inhale a black TAB (25/mg)
to uncover some invisible aspect
of negative capability,
a Keatsian claim to flame.
Con-
tinual
gusts with a passionate hand,
poly-vocable wails peeling against the wallpaper
that passes thru my windshield;
The trees rise into the sky like blooming umbilical cords,
lavender lifelines to the heavens
sustaining grace
a glittering hail of ice-lit sympathies.
a leap into the abyss
has caught forbidding looks,
Despair burns in my throat,
a reverence for reticence
holy erasure,
a wing of nerve.
THE HOLY ALLIANCE
Into all things from which all
Things come, the Elysian flame
Is ever made supremely visible
After death; the sovereign stone
Of onyx chips itself into shale
Through the abnegation of will.
Sculpting into harmonic tenses
Rendering expressive detonations,
Symphonies of screaming senses
In the blaring fires of one soul...
A note for note blast of existence
Baring all in elemental liberation;
Slung from the rough tongues
Wail, no mere semblable of a god
But true God, hammered from all
Passions paradise in bloodied lips
Of living stone; the body of Christ
Rises into Heavens aerial kiss.
=
I hold Joseph close to my soul, his little koala-like claws digging into my chest.
He has the strength of ten lords, pure & undamaged. As I give him his bottle,
it is really I whose hungers fed. He pours pure radiance back into my hollow insides,
a something vital that had been stripped out of me over the years of viciousness.
He looks up at me with eyes the size of sweet olives, and smiles.
WhAts the problem?
Self-pity is mine enemy
Filial fingering in the darkness...
I feel nothing in front of me,
The waves of an ocean mourn and preach.
Apollonic embrasure sun feels disgraceful,
Lashing into empty backdrafts;
Agonizing self-projection is a fallacy
That fails me, as it fails poetry--
A sparkless artifice, its deflation I willingly wear
In ugly inner-tube soul floats
Of fake language beckoning attention,
Costume jeweled on my velvet lapel.
But I want to hurt, not share--
To live to crave once more, conscience fortified...
Who wrote that the clouds are unfit
for our endless adulation?
Imitation is suicide, and I only wish
reality was able to enact that fact.
An eclogue expires
The exiled escapist.
~This has been a paid Public Service Denouncement~
My wife is upset. She says I've been lapsing into spells of madness.
Go back to Dr. Lo cause youre insane, she screams as she slams the door behind her.
Shes definitely convinced Im beginning to lose my mind, which Ill admit has
become more fragmented and paranoid as the winter wears on.
Its a rough scene, the world of people. When they respond to me with nothing other than abject hostility and irrational threats, I immediately go into shut-down mode--
the instinct to fight having long ago left me. Liquor stains.
My mind snaps into splinters and everything appears severed. Marysa blames the poetry, which has been burning off the typer 4 or more pages at a clip. Paper cuts.
But the reality is, people seem just too intent on hurting and petty selfishness.
Everythings BLACK.
I sit silently, alone in my house. I've finally cut everyone off. Cough syrup burns in
my gut as I reach for the phone. I call Dr. Lo and request an emergency appointment after his machine beeps into my ear. I pray in vain for a pill to help me sleep. The whole house feels hollow and quiet, the post-midnight darkness my only companion.
Intimations of mortality,
A thanatopsis
for the lonely...
Fiona Apple fucking
the microphone
VH-1, 4 a.m.,
dreaming whaleseye
lingam baby pink--
a dark fierce sleep
petrified-- non form
beautiful orange funeral
SLEEP sequiturs
once past.
Standing alone upon the marbled narthex
in bars of light
defiling spatial displacement
cubes of lilac,
temporal screams
the abusive stain
of domesticity....
Statuary,
opulent anemia,
moraines of elaia,
staled on nude truth under apple lantern moon,
a prairie of raining eyes,
inherited affinities
domesticity,
malefic blackening & beautiful, O so beauti-
ful...
A diapason of angels
*mid-air*
loose garments in the sky
draping mesenteric opsonin,
drops
over un-
even waters bending blue
delicacy.
BURNished MInd
burning up the burlesque heavens,
great taciturning (a/form of therapy)
Silex headlights
hallowed ascetics,
mineSOULed incarcerate
bloods wings,
mesmeric paceS
hEDGE rose
lyric aroma,
bowed slings
A white SUN/day
sHARP light ascENDing skys
seRUM, a yellow enfance..
Junk-heaps of light,
the illusionist adrift....... in juniper leaves,
evangels swoon
over a kyrie eleiSON
sea,
elegies, 1/5 of Orphic gIN--
suicide is the instinctual process
of ten-thousand departures,
a continual crEATion
that dies into birthING, in-
to ACT.
In the manic collapse of language, all things appear in form.
Poetry is Phobia.
Becoming and possibility are human solutions to the problem of nature. Thought without expression languishes as wasted energy. Absolute thought acquiesces to the temptations posed by language, the utility of the image.
Opacity is generally beautiful.
How does the consciousness maladjust itself when it knows no other realm?
It is the inherent imperfection of things, of nature itself, that obsesses humans to make ART. The struggle to bring order to the universe is primary, way before any need to tell humanity something special about itself.
Mental inertia is the substance of ideas.
I want to begin at the end.
=
pangs of death,
hideous palpitations,
exigencies of utter non-
life, nil to the Xs
refluxes of nothing
the mouth of be-
coming nothing more
than the flaying
on his joy-
less deathbed.
True reality exists in the imagination,
more beautiful and real than any scene.
Everything is blessed,
the soul is absorbed into attraction,
the induction of desire and will,
life borne out of an obsession--
all the rest is the filth of madness
& routine black therapies,
soul-emptying, the unusable body
rid of being everything at once,
invented from without, hollow
gestures in covetous claw.
Gouges in the absolute cold,
exposed to hungers w/out bound,
infinitely fragile, our miserable bones
dispossessed of vitals,
the soul distended, blue like an acid blot
with the ability to burst
tears upon the impossible sky of idols,
miniature corpses of every possible means.
=
Its been said that Einstein couldnt tie his shoes.... Ill be satisfied when Im unable to walk.
Anger is trapped energy, unable to find release or resolve.
It cannot reconcile the problem of nature.
It is innate negativity.
To lose all the feelings that are too unthinkable.
Unthinkable feelings beyond expression, infinitely restricted
infinities of restriction.
The best poetry is a soliloquy of pure consciousness, inner-dialogues...
the confusion of the body aborted
or merely as an hollow theatre.
Repose is the only creative state, and this means physical,
the rest, a collison of consciousness with space--
the resultant clarity
a lighted escape.
Torment results from the bodys physical demands
and the unanimous incredulity of others
whove let their spirit coagulate
(in terms of shared thought, shared spirit)
Only the solitude of the internal life,
inner thoughts surroundeded in form.
from the void
an existence remade
from the black powder ash
of the Father,
having died alive, this child.
Thursday, 10:24 a.m., having played hookie from work,
sternly refusing to battle the traffic jams and tired routine,
I sort of feel an inner serenity.
Now, if I could only figure out a way
to get paid to pour my heart all over this page;
but for you,
dear reader,
Ill gladly do it free.
I hear my family calling me from the other room.
Their smiles and gentle laughter are the only things that save me
from the blood and guts chronicled herein.
I owe them my life, everything--
my love
and my heart.
I just got back with Troy. We bought his mom her birthday cake.
Lifes just too short not to celebrate...
Dont worry, I've saved a piece for you.
AFTERWORD
Like any addiction, all good things must come to an end (one way or another).
Indeed, we have reached the end of the path. Our journey is over, a trip weve largely traveled in mutual exclusivity these past fifteen years. Rarely have we bumped heads, instead choosing to wrangle over means and methods, as we pass lashing glances in a crowded bus station.
The fact is, the muse is dead: a mercy killing on my part-- one that will keep any future bloods a good distance from my hand. Routinely, when caught in the grip of one of these exorcisms I choose to punish myself with, I deprive my family of the best within me, and that just will not do. The fact that I receive astonishingly little in return from those for whom these works are created (myself included) is of minor consequence when considering my decision to give up the pen. The love I've found in my wife and two sons is deserving of better than the scant attentions I afford them when trying to rescue these few things and bring them into the clear.
I will live on in lordly repair. My father will one day die, as my mother dies now, and Ill no doubt have little more in the way of answers than I had when my ass was first slapped in the delivery room (though always looking for that warm womb to crawl back into).
My body will ache and always exist in pain as a certain reminder that Im still sober....
And remember, the lord loves all (even those who cannot begin to conceive of all
that word means).
Go lovingly....
The mind becomes momentary in Symmetry
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