{"id":5252,"date":"2015-08-27T16:33:25","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/wordpress\/?p=5252"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","slug":"black-champagne-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/black-champagne-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Champagne"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Contumelious Carter says: The American Revolution was an unnecessary war.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/span>Flagrant casuistries<\/em>\r\n\r\nBy Gregg Glory\r\n[Gregg G. Brown]\r\n\r\nBeware of a spying gaze in the blind wall:\r\nThe Word is bound to matter\u2026\r\nDo not set it to profane usage!\r\n--Gerard de Nerval\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'epie:<\/em>\r\nA la matiere meme un verbe est attach\u00e9!...<\/em>\r\nNa la fais pas server a quelque usage impie!<\/em>\r\n--Gerard de Nerval\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Albatross<\/h2>\n
Last Tuesday, for kicks, the cachinnate sea-crew\r\nDowned an albatross, a vast sea-bird,\r\nThe indolent companion of our wake, who lazily traced\r\nOur ship's slippage through bitter breakers.\r\n\r\nOnce deposed to the common planks,\r\nThis king of the wild blue stumbled in shame,\r\nPiteously dragging his white infinite wings\r\nLike chalky oars unmoored beside him.\r\n\r\nWinged voyager!  Now dementedly frail!\r\nO royal one!  Now splay and exposed!\r\nOne sailor crams His Highness' beak with a burning pipe;\r\nThe next limps and mimics this cripple who soared!\r\n\r\nThe Poet is one with this swift prince of the clouds\r\nWho haunts the tempest and mocks swart archers:\r\nExiled to earth's low hoots and threats,\r\nHis giant wings hobble each inch of his step.\r\n\r\n--Charles Baudelaire<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Intro<\/h2>\n
Dear Reader:<\/p>\n
Let me elaborate (without belaboring) my point in print. Let’s say one questions the status quo: Hey Quo, what’s up with that, yo?  The question, by its very nature, throws doubt upon the validity and durance of the status quo, or things as they are.  Maybe things should be arranged otherwise, maybe other arrangements or interpretations would be more penetrating and correct, or would open avenues of action that would be grander or more satisfying.  Questions, in this respect, are like headlights that can help us sketch out the dimensions and “give” in the fog that surrounds us.<\/p>\n
What questions, in and of themselves, cannot do in these circumstances is prove anything about the validity of the status quo one way or another.  Because one can formulate a question about the status quo does not, in itself, undermine things as they are in any way.  Hey Quo, are you sure that the ground is under my feet?  This question does nothing to remove the ground from under your feet–it is simply a question–a question that can start a process of discovery that itself should be questioned and not simply assented to because it undermines current understanding.  This is what I meant about “questioning the questions.”  <\/p>\n
A question is simply the first step  on a path that may eventually lead to the heady heights, and vast new perspectives, of disproof of the status quo;  but the question is not the map, the donkey, the traveler, the sweat and the path all in one.  The ground under your feet is solid until physics comes to eventually prove–through assertions and demonstrations (the sweat and donkey, etc.)–that in fact the ground is mostly made up of empty space between those tiny head-spinners, atoms.<\/p>\n
Questions start the discovery, but the doubts are only worth paying attention to when evidence begins to solidify their guesswork with a bridge to a new reality, a new solidity.  This goes on forever and ever, and even our views of bridges past begin to be swallowed up in the present fog and our next new journey can be to re-tread the paths of discoveries “past.”<\/p>\n
But then, what is Time, really?\n<\/p>\n
\r\n\u2014Gregg Glory<\/em><\/strong>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Political Education<\/h2>\n
2004 matured me in \"one fell swoop\"\r\nfrom deranged nerd to poised politico.\r\nThe Public Library lions lean meekly on their paws,\r\nthe spirit's menace, but not a doit\r\nagainst the grinding real-politick of Kerry's crash.\r\n\"Let the repugnicans run things from here on in.\r\nThe people'll be fed up by 2040 or so.\"\r\nSo much for plots and plans. \r\nThe streets were picked clean\r\nas a district attorney's grin.\r\nSniggering drunk on cheap gin,\r\nI watch the awkward, waddling, ludicrous,\r\nheart-felt and foible-filled ANSWER's parade\r\nfloat down 5th<\/sup> avenue, the partisans a pastiche\r\nof president-haters and cranks.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Events<\/h2>\n
A low, scornful comedy,\r\nPolitics forgets man's nobility and grace;\r\nEach actor on the scene is given\r\nA monkey's scornful face.\r\n\r\nPolitics is misprision,\r\nGoals the only good;\r\nAn opposite to ethics' missions\r\nWhere the Way is weighted All.\r\n\r\nWho knows themselves knows this well,\r\nNor loves the news' intrigues;\r\nStark farce and frighted faces,\r\nDumb noise without a bell.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Lesson Plan<\/h2>\n
No \"Grand Design\" marrs my mouthings\r\nwith a dictator's mania for perfection.\r\nLet what clues there are assemble themselves\r\ninto some workaday conclusionary attitude\r\nor not.  Man's a pattern-recognition device\r\nscanning horizons alert on his hind legs\r\nfor threat or profit ever since we left\r\nthe high cradle of the trees.  \"Rock-a-bye baaay-bee\u2026.\"\r\nWe call on God like a waiter when our intuition sours.\r\nThe least we expect is that He'll take away\r\nthe mess we've made of our plates;\r\nslashed lobster tails, cold soup, \r\nnapkin blazed in butter or blood.\r\nHow many settings must we sully in our time?\r\nSmall fry sizzle in the stream, bearing the emptiness of air\r\nto eat gnats;  so we leap and gulp\r\noff-balance, out of our element, full of longing,\r\nblind mouths open with prayer or gossip.\r\nJob managed both, but suffered unduly because\r\nhe gave a damn.  I see you there;  my horizon's\r\na page edge, these words my birder's net.\r\nThe best eating never flocks, but steps singly\r\nto the trap.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
State of Emergency<\/h2>\n
I've seen scrawled by the chapel door\r\n\"All's fair in love and war.\"\r\nNow that every heart is fed on hate\r\nThe worst hunt down the great\r\nAnd ambush keeps the score.\r\n\r\nSweet chimes ring the schoolyard home,\r\nNo tattle of Chechnyan children comes;\r\nTo keep their captive guests at peace\r\nBrave tales are told in a darkened space\r\nOf the rock and the dome.\r\n\r\nNor love nor war are at our door\r\nBut assassins at the window sash;\r\nA knife that flits in the flesh\r\nTroubles the unhealed gash\r\nForevermore.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Pomp and Present Circumstance<\/h2>\n
Bad poets write the cowardly words.\r\nBolshevik importunings crowd the square:\r\n\"Hitler, fascisti, retrograde!\"\r\n            Crow the opiated opinion-makers,\r\nLoudly lulling \"the masses.\"\r\n\r\nChildren doodle decapitated presidents\r\nUnder the mildly smiling instructress\r\n             Stitched drip by drip\r\n             To the federal nipple.\r\n                  \r\nWitticisms stripped to shitticisms.\r\n\r\n\"The world is not as once it was!\"\r\nCry the fanged bunglers\r\nSullenly sipping tomato puree\r\nWhere once the blood had come\r\n             fast and rich and fauceted.\r\n             \r\nFighting a ragtag rearguard action for culture,\r\nNo fine-spun sensibilities appear\r\n              Delicate as Charlotte's web,\r\nAs human as rumor\r\n\r\nThat clotted democracy yet,\r\nMatted and mottled with muds, might yet,\r\n               Yet might be, might still be\r\n               \"Some Pig.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Niggard Heralds<\/h2>\n
The inverted bodies hang themselves,\r\n   Interpenetrated, peeled\r\nFor us to write riven songs upon their skins!\r\n\r\nSullied sufferers hang themselves from a glass cross\r\n   200 floors toward heaven.\r\n   Bitter Christs!\r\nLoudly you fly from flames to the asphalt,\r\nAbsent-minded of your mission:\r\nYour religion has not yet arisen.\r\n\r\nWe may yet decide to be extinguished.\r\nThe gossipy mendacity of the Left\r\n   Aligning with bin Ladens\r\n   To win the miniaturized\r\nBickerfest with the neighbor;  neighbor\r\nSame as them, hung from the cross the same.\r\n\r\n   Orange flares\r\nLine the flyway to infinity\r\n       Or incineration.\r\n\r\nCoda<\/strong><\/em>\r\nHere's a brave man, indifferent to kicks,\r\nSomber under DC's browning ferns,\r\nReady to kill the willful killers\r\nAnd treat his countrymen, confused\r\n        As the winter-wind infused weathervane\r\nLike a drunken beloved.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Black Champagne<\/h2>\n
Alertly lifts the martyr's rifle--\r\n\r\nAgonized prayer\r\n                        awaiting\r\ndivinity's hit.\r\n\r\nGod never talks to the dogs,\r\nthe dogs never stop barking.\r\n\r\n\"I remember her blue burka;\r\nRough cotton; wife.\r\n\r\nThe trigger invites me....\r\nAnd I see you, mad and scrambling,\r\n                        insipid\r\nin your freedoms.\r\n\r\nWhen God God God\r\n            crushes you\r\n                      I shall rise.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Crosswinds<\/h2>\n
The sails unsettle in the wind\r\nFinding their invisible origins--\r\n\r\nSmall fear goes out along the lines\r\nTremulous to the masthead,\r\n\r\nThe masthead bound with iron\r\nAnd set into the leaning keel\r\n\r\nTranslates each impulse into action:\r\nTo one action, always the same: forward!\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Dead Odalisques<\/h2>\n
Snaffled cuffs link our hearts in chorus--\r\nOn baffled dream-seraglio of houris--\r\nOh never to awake from this bout of sleep\r\nThough shadows squander themselves and sunlight creeps.\r\n\r\nThese eves are deep that shelter lonely eyes\r\nTurned inward, bitter till self-horrified--\r\nThe odalisque tamed by dusky charms\r\nUntongues the timid with her beckoning arms.\r\n
Daniel J. Weeks and Gregg Glory<\/h4>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Fake Eagles<\/h2>\n
The Smithsonian's dusty trumped-up American Bald\r\nGlares glass-eyed from its cement stem\r\nFlightless adherent to its typeset caption\r\n\"This specimen typifies...\"\r\n\r\nWhite-cloth greatness fitted to a character-trait--\r\nGestures grand enough for \"something\"\r\nParodied into \"plausibility.\"\r\n                                        Daring airs\r\nAre glass-encased, and grounded goes the mobile soul\r\nOnce limber and viscous as a spiky rose.\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t        All's choral,\r\nCollegial lean-togethers, mediocre ochers\r\nDetailing a dulling sunset--\r\nNot the hazardous edge of new dawn,\r\nClouds, clouds \"by the skyful,\"\r\nThe wee eye a-glitter, an observatory dome\r\n              open to the cosmos\r\nAnd more.\r\n\r\nThe great green agate door of Oz\r\nStands pried wide, stoppered open.\r\nShall we fall into the verdant velvets,\r\nEat the wheats sizzling in their millions?\r\nCome, here's my hand,\r\n\t\t        toad-wet, willing--\r\n\r\nHere's the heart-mouth pledge--\r\n\tand the plunge, the plunge\r\n\tthat mimes the promise mum.\r\n\r\n\tDown we float\r\n\t\tcareening reagents\r\n\tripped to splinters\r\n\t\tand sailing anyhow onwards.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Congress sick with second guessing Jessies<\/h2>\n
Congress sick with second guessing Jessies\r\nNo firm hand on the tiller\r\nNo mettle in the men left at home\r\nOnly an orgy of angst\r\nBelittlement of betters\r\nTwist turn and angling for advantage\r\nSmall speech of exiting\r\nNo largesse of existing\r\nNo reasoning among the sissies\r\nJust the vile knifefight for the voter.\r\n\r\nThe troubled insincerity of these actors in the round,\r\nThe corpulent self-indulgence of the American Left.\r\n\r\n\"The president proposes, the congress disposes.\"\r\nSay the vivid idiots\r\n          believing themselves\r\nMeaty deities in monkeysuits.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Dime-Store Mores<\/h2>\n
Carloads of laughing fatsoes\r\nFollow Rockerfellers to the rallying grounds\r\n                        \r\nLaughing falsetto\r\nApropos of nothing.\r\n\r\nContumelious Carter, crass gasbag,\r\nPats the padded DNC box-seat for Lordly Moore\r\nSmarming his way to fame\r\n                         On lies and mallomars.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Dim NIMN<\/h2>\n
Saddam's boys, fed lion's hearts\r\nAnd bad philosophy, were sent into the rape room\r\nUnder P.S. 106, Baghdad,\r\nSame ground that saw a Ninevah arise\r\nSame wide-eyed folks that made\r\nA few of civilization's unending things,\r\nSet golden bird upon a ruby bough to sing.\r\n\r\n\"Not in my name\"\r\n\tshall we set, we\r\nThe people of Hamilton and Adams\r\nNot for such names, nor for our own,\r\nForgotten since our civics' texts\r\nHave gone to rot as assuredly as Rome's poems\r\nBurned by Visigoths to watch\r\n\"Vandal Idols\" on a commandeered TV\r\nin the fumbled coliseum.\r\n\r\n\"Not in my name\"\r\n\tshall these be set free.\r\nNot by us, the people of Lincoln and Paine,\r\nNot with our bullets of inalienable rights,\r\nNor our hatred of tyrants,\r\nNot by our strength, our success,\r\nNot by our sure hand in a selfish world,\r\nNot by our open palm\r\n\tshall these be set free.\r\n\r\nThese same who crouched in a shit pit\r\nOr were shot for sheer sport.\r\nPower plus a few roaring lies\r\nAnd arabist France is your firm friend,\r\nScoring oil off of marsh arabs' misery,\r\nBreathing grievance and flattering tyrants\r\n\talone in their ego-lovely\r\n\tpalaces of misapplied plaster,\r\n\twalls caulked with exquisite fear,\r\n\treal memories of friends, father\r\n\tor sister suddenly dragged out at 1 AM\r\n\tand shoved into the State's Mercedes\r\n\tand returned in ribbons,\r\n\teyeless, legless, earless, hymenless,\r\n\tor not at all\u2026.\r\nThe fear of faces too used to fear,\r\nSame faces Stalin made in Russian clay\r\nHolding his neighbors' feet to the fire\r\nOr cinching raw hands in unforgiving wire.\r\n\"Not in my name\"\r\n\tshall these be made free.\r\n\r\nSame Saddam, god-damn,\r\nWho put a hit out on a retired president\r\nAnd called Kuwait his \"13th Province,\"\r\nShattering desert quietude with lies,\r\nLiving detached as a NYT op-ed writer\r\nFrom the eternal verities.\r\n\r\nSame Saddam, god-damn,\r\nWho paid suicide bombers' families to live on quince\r\nAnd retire to palm-shaded villas\r\nAfter sending Sonny on to see Allah;\r\nSame suiciders who put a two-fer hole\r\nIn New York's presumptuous skyline:\r\nFront teeth fell out square with 3,000 lives\r\nAs jerks in Jersey City cheered\r\nAnd Palestinians rah-rahed in parade,\r\nMaking Gaza glamorous once again,\r\n\tfull of light, full of hope, full of song,\r\nAs know-nothing Americans knew, just knew\r\nIt was all our fault anyway;\r\nNot even giving gashed Jihadis\r\n\tcredit for their kill, not really.\r\n\r\nSame Saddam, god-damn,\r\n\u2026. I can't go on without respite, without tonic,\r\nA cool cloth for my lips, hot cotton\r\nLaid on my ears, much abused,\r\nCarbon darkness for my eyes, my eyes\r\nThat see in seemless verity\r\nOne nation, under God,\r\nRiddled with raconteurs of the Apocalypse\r\nWho never missed a payment on their Saab.\r\n\r\nAllah, Allah, Allah,\r\nForgive these few, these free,\r\nThese blind men holding diamonds\r\nWho think they're weighted with bricks;\r\nForgive these few their compassionate disaster\r\nWho see sorrow in a tyrant's swat,\r\nHow sad his up-bringing must have been;\r\nForgive these few their huddled asses\r\nWho buy the pap and propaganda \r\nof the feckless press.\r\n\r\nAllah, Allah, Allah,\r\nSear me with second-sight enough to see\r\nWhat comes of free people with no will to be free;\r\nWho shrinky-dink and containerize the globe\r\nAfter pacifying panzered fascists,\r\nWho set the Technicolor sights of Hollywood \r\nin every human eye\r\nAnd take air-conditioned flights\r\nTo the winds' four corners\r\nAnd hear half-good English spoken there\r\nFrom some kid wearing Adidas\r\nAnd yet do not believe\r\n\tFallujah's on their subway stop\r\n\tor Kabul is come to Washington.\r\n\r\nForgive these few, O Allah.\r\n\r\nAllah, Allah, Allah,\r\nWalla walla walla\r\nWashington\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Red State Prayer<\/h2>\n
\nDear Lord, help the heathens to keep their federal mandates off of my state. Please, Lord, let them become aware that just because the federal penny flows from the blue states to the red states that that does not give them the power to make us join their progressive coalition of the bribed and the coerced. Please, Lord, let them blue staters realize that before that federal penny flows from the blue states to the red states via Washington D.C. that penny first flows from our backs to their banks. Please, Lord, I am tired of doing the bidding of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Hillary Clinton, and Ted Kennedy, and unelected judges who pick up the legislative pen that able but lazy legislators have cast aside in favor of windsurfing. Let not the least accountable branch of government hold sway over the most accountable. Oh, please, Lord, I beseech ye.\n<\/p>\n
How God Hates a Freeman<\/h2>\n
How God hates a freeman.\r\nHow suffering is his every rainbow\r\n--Even when we poor ants\r\nFind some infinitesimal way of being free\r\nHe sends a scourge, an insanity amongst us\r\n            --Sudsy heads in turbans\r\n            hard hands anxious to cruxify\r\n            ready hammers and shiny nails\r\n            suicide bombers in clean veils\r\n            no dirt under their fingernails\r\n            ready to make love to God\r\n\r\nThe God who, ironically enough,\r\nIs killing us in black batches,\r\nBy blood-mouthfuls, killing\r\nAnd shaming us with his sharp scourge\r\n--so clean, so new--\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
To the Red Gates<\/h2>\n
A bold bolt of rose lightning\r\nBids me sizzling its chosen bowman be,\r\n    A filial Philoctetes\r\n    Despite of our history.\r\n\r\nSo few know the maiming game\r\nHalf so well as swollen love can tell;\r\n\r\nKnotted lots of condemned confederates\r\nGo rolling down the slay-yard line,\r\nConveyered to red hell and devastation,\r\nAgain.\r\n           What redeems the fugitive from his red pen?\r\n(Funny, nes pas?)  How escape the mirrored Mall\r\n    to slow roast in the hopeless Wilderness \r\nAgain?\r\n\r\nMonet's mash of fabulous figments\r\nhand-ground to red renown....\r\nCezanne's carnival of pink icebergs\r\nsailing house-high intra-Ardennes....\r\nBeethoven's beaten TAA-DUMP,\r\nor Baudelaire's lurid la-lahrrr....\r\n\r\nAll are the agony of gangsters\r\nThrottled or thrilled by moment's one consciousness,\r\nExhorted from the dumpy swamp\r\nThat beats and retreats in the fetid chest--\r\n\r\nO soully broken brothers!\r\nTaken in angina and angst, past mists\r\nTo see pantsless God Our Father\r\nAnd never again live well as worms.\r\n\r\nHis love has hoovered your harrowed bowels, \r\nHis meaning's memes flay mincemeat from your lives, \r\nEmbattled brethren of the happy pit, \r\nGiggling piglets skinned in velvets\r\nWanton wannabes\r\nVoltaged with vim,\r\nSummed nothings who see\r\nThe glory of Him.\r\n\r\nAlpha and Omega, faith precedes\r\nPhantom efficiencies of famine and feast, \r\nTrust in the somethings our nothings provide, \r\nVomiting vacuums for lebensraums, \r\nAching for spaces no spaceman divines,\r\nOnly    oh   aum   ah   oh   our   holy   um\r\nCan freight the frigate\r\nWe sail to red gates\r\nThat frame the lonely bowman\r\nAsleep in zero's nonman's land\r\n\r\n triggerfinger itched by lightning\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Blind Homer<\/h2>\n
Blind Homer\r\n           in his handicapped parking plot,\r\nDriving eye-dog at the steel wheel,\r\nSteel will in the passenger's seat--\r\n           Homer who haunted the agora\r\n           Shilling for shekels\r\n                      his white whale tale.\r\n\r\nSuperman in his icy citadel\r\nPacing the slatted blanks\r\n           that mirrored, then hid\r\nHis moroser meditations.\r\n\r\nSoulful foreign exchange student\r\nPutting on parsed phrases of a play:\r\n           hanging a mirror-frame in\r\nstage-space, \r\nAudience made the mercury backing \r\nTo a soul in self-discovery.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Joy of Bastard’s Desiring<\/h2>\n
 <\/span>    for Ken Bastard<\/em>\r\n\r\nAn artist, \r\n\tthat vast patchwork of fictive facts\r\n\tmade irremediably human\r\nLies swacked to the black mat \r\nLies swacked by bilious bastards--\r\n\tHearing only the thin singing\r\n\t\tof virile virtuosos.\r\n\r\nCrucified, rechristened,\r\nHe takes blamelessly the name \"Bastard,\"\r\nOwing no allegiance to parents, prophets, persons,\r\n\t\tor miserly precedent.\r\n\r\nAlone as only\r\n\tin that thinnest singing\r\nHe rears and raves\r\n\tSwinging pennants of pigments\r\n\tFashioning each fitful color with fidgets\r\nTo one indelible enamel\r\n\tAlive in our mammalian minds.\r\n\tRip of fittest tethers in tattered weather\r\n\t\t\r\n\tand off--oof!--go hallooing balloons\r\n\tby blistered brain's lightest excitements \r\n\tshaped-- sheer veerings and vanishments\r\n\tinto empty Empyrean blues....\r\n\r\nBrushwork unbowed and bronzed,\r\nBlast after melodious blast\r\nBlessing bastardly the seeming serene\r\n\tUntil all the thumping nothing\r\nIs singing--singing unremittingly\r\n\tthe \"Joy of Bastard's Desiring.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A Supposery<\/h2>\n
A suppose is a suppose is a...\r\nLimber lasso of Tea Leonis, looping and limpid.\r\n\r\nHere I float ... forgotten and talentless\r\nAmong numb unknowns of words, spermy words\r\nFishing for finishes....\r\n\r\nEach word a weight to sink the bait\r\nWriggling its links of heartbeats.\r\nNo knowing comes to caustically swallow\r\nThe proffered oblations of ignorance\r\n               --Stiff wicks awaiting enlightenment.\r\nIgnorant divots flay my driving field,\r\nEach divot devoutly a prayer\r\n               To drive true\r\n               To some teleological terminus.\r\n               \r\nO Tea Leoni\r\nKnow my unknowingness,\r\nParse my pickled presumptions\r\nAnd inscribe a prescription under each eyelid,\r\nSome fluff of a fluttering antidote.\r\nStop these filaments of questionmarks\r\nSwelling my throat like a feather boa,\r\nFashioning incertain alternatives\r\n               In my make-believe brain,\r\nAggrieved and giveless.\r\n\r\nO salv\u00e9 salv\u00e9\r\nMoisten and close, clock and lock, \r\nThe click-if-click of my soiled supposery\r\nChurning mud-dumb propellers\r\nIn bayous gone by\r\n                     O salv\u00e9!\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Picasso’s Crooked Eye<\/h2>\n
Picasso's crooked eye,\r\nDavid's damned obscurities,\r\nSartre the industrious communist bee,\r\nBug-eyed with his private hoard\r\n\tof existential agonistes,\r\nRiviera's raucous mural, florid\r\nWith steel trains and a lemon Lenin \r\nas glossy as a saint,\r\nThe same a rigid Rockerfeller\r\nRipped down and paid for. . . .\r\n\r\nEach artist riffed rich in angst and happiness,\r\nLoving their foamy social dream\r\nWhere each man's crowned a kinky king\r\nAnd none are ugly laborers for greed\r\nOr any vice but the \"people's need.\"\r\n\r\nIf in their Hilterianly lonely, limpid dream\r\nAll others would but see as they had come to see,\r\n\teach in his private dignity\r\nGrinding his eyes to the one measure,\r\nThen all the world's woes might be\r\n\tfrozen fragrantly\r\nIn one sole mosaic triumphantly.\r\n\r\nBut none submitted their prim, their vetted\r\nVision to the communal tribunal,\r\nNone tum to the others' ta-ta\r\nDespite the goal's profound, golden nobility,\r\nDespite the day-laborer ferrying gigantic acres of canvas,\r\nHis kid sick in the back of the hurried truck,\r\nDespite the crazy fees for \"inspiration\"\r\nThat denied the doorman his cataract surgery,\r\nDespite the weak, the infirm, the shirtless and shoeless\r\nWho would never enter this centrally air-conditioned \r\nPalace of art to peruse this exact masterpiece of \"solidarity.\"\r\nNever would the mooing millions, unwooed wards\r\nOf \"the true light that puts Italy's afternoons to shame,\"\r\nSee this feted aesthete's tribute to their \"viral virility,\"\r\n\tDespite, despite, despite,\r\nDespite the pie-eyed ache for Paradise\r\n\tthat moved the pointillist-precise camel-hair brush\r\n\tover the worker's sable-shiny\r\n\teyebrow in the union pantheon.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Slaves of Glory<\/h2>\n
The very astonishing hour has come. \r\nThe very astonishing hour indeed! \r\nGreen Heinekins, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas  \r\n---Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening. \r\n \r\nHosannahs invade the empty windows,\r\nspurs of blacks, mysterious \r\n \r\nAs the tender invitation of the body. \r\n\r\nBright, alcoholic after-haloes sift \r\n               Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips.\r\n\r\nSobriety has entered us\r\nAs mourners enter a white church.\r\n \r\nEnough of this pathetic quietness! \r\nThis simpering, dog-like wish for 'temperament' \r\nThe madness of faces full of 'sound judgement.' \r\nI forgive all disasters, all accomplishments, \r\nEvery disguise that announces 'I am finished!' \r\nChoking its inhabitant as a mirror chokes beauty. \r\nSongs of sporadic intensity, wicked verses, \r\nThe poem of flayed skin, blind eyesight \r\nMutes imagining laughter, I forgive you! \r\n \r\n          Pathetic quiet!\r\nBring tympans, wild sibilants, \r\n           Drunken elephants of sound, mists,\r\nthe harsh clangour of brass.\r\n \r\nNew eyes, new hearts, new senses! \r\nBring a speech of bloods, the invention of Angels!  \r\nWhy was one ever afraid of waking? \r\nEh! a little daydream I had in the haypile. \r\n \r\nBut now the new era has arrived --this moment!  \r\nLet us revenge the sky for an hour! \r\n \r\nLet us run out muds of new births upon us, \r\nAnd seize in hands of ice the very flowing waters-- \r\n--Dreams of incorporeal perfection! \r\n \r\nDawn leaves splinter in my eye  \r\nEnacting the death of Satan. \r\n \r\nVertiginousness in the closet! \r\n \r\nVery astonishing! \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Shouts of Blankness<\/h2>\n
When nothing is left but divinity\r\nAnd each man shouts to the next: \"Look!\r\nWe are become the human angels!\"\r\nWings made fabulous-- disasters surpassing \r\nimagination!      \r\n\r\nAbominable, the bricks of this image.\r\nAll will be re-constructed, in Paradise.\r\n\r\n                 At the discretion of no God\r\n                 Do I spin and unfurl;\r\n\r\nWhat is the hypothesis of passion?\r\nThe inextricable answer in the diamond.\r\n\r\n\"I am the unnamable silver,\r\n                             past continuation,\r\nI march beyond continent and clime.\r\nI sing without vocable glitter.\"\r\n\r\n               A death that was reasonable shimmers\r\n                Shining ignored in a dirty  jade pool.\r\n\r\n Men will that day become?\r\n Men will that day become?\r\n Tales and fables melt to insignificance;\r\n Palaces disappear in a maze of flames.\r\n Men will that day become what?\r\n\r\n               I woke up in an ecstatic ditch;\r\n               I don't know very much about it.\r\n\r\n The disingenuous suffer overmuch.\r\n\r\n The rhetoric of Democracies!\r\n\r\n Very commendable!\r\n\r\n              And after the Sousas and  oompahs....\r\n              And after the senses to  emphasize\r\n                                                what  blankness?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Against the West Long Branch Redistribution<\/h2>\n
Golden houses gather at the sea's demesne,\r\nCrowded to dare the weather and the wave,\r\nTo raise childish laughter in the rocky spray\r\nDespite what moneyed worldlings crave:\r\nSunrise caught in the gilt of nouvaux rich<\/em>e fences,\r\nExiled faces shut from the sea that shaped their clay.\r\n\r\nThese sea-battered, sea-stung houses, strong,\r\nRooted long years on a battened coast,\r\nCreak, and crack, in the wind's stir shaken, broken\r\nTill hurricane pane and slatted roof rise in song,\r\nHurling hung cries above the developer's boast:\r\n\"God grants great strength to the hand that takes.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Clytemnestra’s Ghost<\/h2>\n
\"The rat I wrangled from my womb has wronged me!\r\nBit me! Bled me!  Hear a mother's cry to kill her kid!\r\nChoke the sopping monster who goes glued to Fate\r\nBy my very blood!  Sucked from my very teat,\r\n\tmilk and blood both-- bitter, bitter!\r\nO Aegiesthus' ghost-- where are you? \r\n\tHold my breasts and fuck me!\r\nThese same breasts that came with my pubescent blood,\r\nOresetes nuzzled-- his skull-top as soft as his pea of a nose.\r\nUnfinished he flooded into a turgid world,\r\nTorn by troubling dreams;  I built him from boy to man, I\r\nAnd I alone touched him wonderingly, wantingly:\r\nThat this star should fall from my fuckhole\u2026.\r\nDamn him!  Damn him!  What is it to be a mom\r\nIf men may treat their mothers thus?  Curse him!\r\nMy identity's stripped to ifs without him;  without him\r\nNumbered and known as my son, my son.\r\nHard the travail, hard the happiness, and now\r\n\thard the death-time\r\nOf mothers and their motherhood.\r\nSleepless across the groined earth I groan,\r\nLoneliness airless and endless.  Not mother, but murderer\r\nMy son--that damned man--proclaims me to finally be.\r\nHis insistence on Justice is a sinkhole of sorrows\r\nBurying his Mommy for God.  Ah, God--\r\nNo;  no refuge there;  no clouds, no angels, no respite\r\nFor a woman torn and scorned.  I'm jammed into my gender:\r\nFirst, pollution of the menstrual punch, then sex\r\nWished-for in waiting, not sought in warm arousal\r\nBut closeted and kept close, moldy with hoping--\r\nThin mystery of the singing clit mixed with sorrow-oh!\r\nKnown then as Agamemnon's woman, addendum to majesty,\r\nThat which cleaves and is cloven--flickeringly split in loving--\r\nHis arms the margins of my seacoast--no more, no less.\r\nAnd no woman knows another; slakers and takers of the defining phallus--\r\nCompetitive finessers of the clamping circumstance.\r\nCame Helen, and away went our hairy thousands,\r\nAll the wood echoing like a troubled drum.\r\nMen marching into the sea!  Seaborne, sea-torn,\r\nSo many with no fluff on their chins, little wrigglers.\r\nWar-widow I was then, alone as a lion,\r\nStalking the beaches at dawn, clubbed and stunned\r\nBy the night menaces;  the sins of the dreamless hours,\r\nMy mind a shifty shuttle on no holy loom.\r\nWhat was I in this absence of passions?  Unkicked, unlicked.\r\nNo nobility rolled, lucid and lovely, from my hurt hollows.\r\nI was uncoiled and void;  knowingless, dirty, and numb.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Daniel J. Danielson<\/h2>\n
An old-time, small-town hardcore \"con\"\r\npolite enough to jigger mint juleps in tinking silver cups\r\nrubbed smooth by lips ribbed smooth\r\nwith talking.  Politics, aesthetics, jeremiads,\r\nhistory's candid tangle of catastrophes\r\n--any subject that nights ripen and split\r\nenough to show the sense of meaning \r\nat the snapping seams;  thought stretched taut\r\nuntil articulation sang.  O the million nights\r\nchattered ruefully through to human truth!\r\nRhythm's doubled thrubs send the heart-beacon out\r\nbeneath the boards, like your troubled and beloved Poe\r\nmoaning lonely for his Annabelle Lee, lovely\r\nideal resurrected from the dead real.\r\n\r\nYour life-plot's coiled as Rosencrantz',\r\na labyrinthine mind of steel and twine\r\nfollowing each God-doled bread-crumb clue\r\nto God's appointed apotheosis;\r\nintent as a atheist pimping out a principle.\r\nYou loiter with stories forever unfinished,\r\nonce started, not knowing \"how way leads on to way.\"\r\nEach enunciated principle's broadened\r\nwith tributary amendments, altering\r\nprecursor and course upon reconsideration;\r\nRabelaisian babble nipped and tucked tidy\r\nby a laser-guided philosophy.\r\n\r\nLong ago in your yeoman youth you started\r\ndreaming past the dragon's hiss, the dragon's tooth,\r\nto inner virtue's unvarying, vibrant truth.\r\nNow an earnest father gone haggard at the world's lies--\r\nyou sit a spastic Little Hamnu down to talk--\r\nand finish grinning and whistling in the dark,\r\nstuck, like Coleridge with his quaint Constancy,\r\nor an aim-awry Orion facing West,\r\nstark as a marker in the stars' fixed rigging.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Restless Quester<\/h2>\n
Neither remembers the stark start\r\nwhen heart first advised the eyes\r\nto see a friend a foe.\r\n\r\nMeals at the table turned scattershot, casual....\r\nFace leaned to books, lipping the small print,\r\nyou gazed aglow at your torn, beloved\r\ngolden \"Dragon\" magazine:\r\nchatty advice about how to kill with stealth\r\nor sail the astral plane on a budget.\r\n\r\nEvery confab folded\r\nat a call from your Philly hottie, Maria;\r\nseminal points left forever unpinned\r\namong the live haywires of hasty love.\r\n\r\nOnce you grumped home\r\nstraight to your pigsty\r\ncontent to yodel D & D cusses\r\nat a screen filled with terror and fidgety limbs;\r\nmidnight found you miserably hunched,\r\na vulture clawing a mouse.\r\n\r\nYou click your friends together with a lassoed gesture,\r\ncircles of a single color under each pair of feet;\r\nyou hunt the haunted woods together,\r\ncrouch bunched at each blind sound\r\nand die in the fine faith\r\nof the necromancer's talent for resurrection.\r\n\r\nThere you were\r\nhunched under the overhead lamp,\r\nslaying evil to exhaustion\r\nbut unwilling to do the simple, sullied\r\nwork that keeps us good.\r\n\r\nThe sounds of all the world came crashing down,\r\npounded from the tinny PC speakers,\r\nan aria of Orc-growls\r\nthat crescendoed in a hash of static.\r\n\r\nWere you Ulysses,\r\na grey bureaucrat lost at sea\r\nand anxious to survive into the profit zone\r\nof his misfortunes. \r\nEvery crashing zag\r\nends in an ascending zig.\r\n\r\nUnhappy over your sogged bowl\r\nof Cheerios, you wept to make the minutes glisten,\r\npraying that the twin tracks of amnesia\r\nwould cure your ruin. \r\nO the world\r\nherself was bleak as ashes\r\n\r\nthat day.  That day\r\nyou had swallowed the plot\r\nthat plumed with your departure\r\na blue peacock's outburst fan\r\nwaving and waving.\r\n\r\nIt was months before I knew\r\nyou'd said goodbye.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Conclusions<\/h2>\n
No more can I turn aside with sunny face\r\nWhen the shocks of life upbraid me;\r\nNo longer can I see in the casual stranger's face\r\nOpportunities new unknown for causal love.\r\nWhatever has brought me to this pass\r\nMust heave me onward!  Nothing without\r\nBears my trust as had our friendship bourne\r\n--How easily!--as on a giant's back lighlty rides\r\nA sparrow!  heedless strength to carry all\r\nAnd to tar all things with easy hope.\r\nFar into the night with weariless footpad\r\nWe had pressed, uncaring where the journey led\r\nSo long as sojourn had no ending.\r\nSuggestive shadows of rock and claustric wood\r\nHeld no terrors for we two;  we two\r\nWho knew our honest talk could shrink\r\nDark's impostures down to shadow's sham.\r\nGone are those trusts, that happiness.\r\nNow rock and dark (ay, and rust and rot)\r\nPenetrate my nimble being like a pin\r\nWhose first sharpness opens slowly into wound\r\nRaw and unmendable, flinching if an ash\r\nAlthough cold as the bearing wind\r\nShould light upon its open redness.\r\n\r\nNow every face in my kind circle \r\nComes to nothingness or less;\r\nFor ain't it worse than all the loss\r\nOf miser-miserable death to lose\r\nWhat has no reason to be lost,\r\nImposed division, needless cost?\r\nWho'll now give heart to my restless quest,\r\nRemain for dinner and depart a guest\r\nAs closely allied in the heart\r\nAs one who never did, or would, depart.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Cain’s Abel<\/h2>\n
\"Brother, I've a shiv for your spotless side.\r\nAuthority's glory. You glow in God's eyes,\r\nThe only free thing who's immediately obedient.\r\nUnpausing panegyric to the Creator's cabal!\r\nOnly the brainless, the recklessly loyal,\r\nFly fired in ire or sit titivating introiblios<\/em>\r\nAt the unheard word of the Lord Our God--\r\nOut-thrust from grace you go--a holy turd.\"\r\n\r\nAbel's Cain<\/em><\/strong>\r\n\"Co-created creature inhabiting God's grace,\r\nHow like two ears of grain we thrive from a single stalk,\r\nListening to the mystery that lights, at dawn,\r\nAt dusk, in sourceless fog or stippled night,\r\nOur heavenly way.                          \r\n               . . .Oh, Cain, our cable's snapped\r\nThat had our frailer lights attached, and now\r\nInto God's welcoming grace we each must go\r\nBy nether paths neither tended nor knows.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
No Intercessor Angel<\/h2>\n
No intercessor angel tends\r\nOn steps no other did commend;\r\nNo vagrant God adjourns\r\nHeaven for what makes us mourn.\r\n\r\nNo pebble, despite eons going by,\r\nDisincarnates a sigh;\r\nOcean humps in its gelid sack\r\nOnly forth and over, there and back.\r\n\r\nSins commissioned ere our time\r\nGet writ as History, not as crime;\r\nNo insistless salve is spread\r\nTo comfort calumnies of the dead.\r\n\r\nAncient bitterness and vibrant strife\r\nImpose no twinge on man and wife;\r\nRemorseless immortals looking down\r\nNeither laugh nor frown.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
By Another Name<\/h2>\n
First the clouds were in a heap\r\nTill even sheep could not sleep;\r\nThen the palace of platinum bullion\r\nLost a shingle and was down a million;\r\nSt Peter loitering at the gate\r\nHad no new angels to berate;\r\nGabriel tossed his trumpet aside,\r\nSad it tootled unamplified;\r\nAn angel's anger at a broken harp\r\nIs more melancholy than sharp;\r\nSunshine seemed insult above the rain;\r\nThe gowns, though clean, were plainly plain;\r\nThe heavenly host and lordly train\r\nWere just a parade by another name.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Vivid Division<\/h2>\n
Vivid division of night and day's erased.\r\nIf only light were a little less wanted,\r\nThe pang that brings us to our knees,\r\nPraying and palavering among stone pews....\r\n\r\nWe murmur rumors of ill-lit hope\r\nIn illegible littleness,\r\n\r\nHave easy breathing in a blunted cove,\r\nVoluptuous sighs swiftly wrapped\r\nIn midnight velvets\r\nAnd cool contentment at the core.\r\n\r\nOur disdainful backs\r\nTurned to the emergent sun\r\nIn reticulated whispers\r\nVibrant and magnificent.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Fervid Superfluities of the Sun<\/h2>\n
What's done? What's done?\r\nDay advances day under the clock's gun. . . .\r\nSo little's left to do but die and rot,\r\nWhistling operatic lieder<\/em>\r\non my solitary cot.\r\n\r\nRomans knew the days but trooped to zero\r\nTeaching kindergarteners mortuary rhymes,\r\nHeroes paused at their redeeming crimes\r\nDefined by something, something<\/em>\r\nagainst erasing Time.\r\n\r\nWe aim at one overweening abstract: Truth:\r\nA volcano that we forge to raise the roof,\r\nAnd miss the little deity Pity\r\nSaucering stale milk to a crippled kitty.\r\n\r\nWhen once we've sighed ourselves asleep: \"\u2018Tis done,\r\n\u2018Tis done,\" there'll be no dream that needs \"Te Deum.\"<\/em>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
When I was well<\/h2>\n
When I was well the world did seem\r\nAlive with myriad tempting mysteries--\r\nWireless winds that moved each trembling tree\r\nMoved what spirit moved in me;\r\nThe light that lifted flowers from the seed\r\nBade me bloom and brighten in my new need.\r\n\r\nBut when I was ill the world did grow\r\nOlder and dimmer each diminishing hour;\r\nWeaker, darklier waned the woodland powers\r\nAnd crumpled came even the softest flower\r\nTo this cheek that felt it not,\r\nThis tear-dead eye that saw all ill\r\n            become one sizeless blot.\r\n\r\nNow recovered and alienate in my taut boat,\r\nI measure the world from within my moat,\r\nA magic circle of moveless seas\r\nUnfrozen and supple, but leadenly still;\r\nWind and light move, but move not me;\r\nFor I, I am well, but the world is ill.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
After-Time<\/h2>\n
Reading Rilke red-eyed, hoping\r\nsome one knows something about the afterlife,\r\nthe invisible, invincible gods\r\nwho hobble us to here.\r\n\r\nThere's no solace in Rilke's\r\nself-swallowing fountain,\r\nsword and gorge become one\r\nunprintable fuck-fest.\r\n\r\nNot even the old Caesars had a clue.\r\nRighteousness the economic health\r\nof the expanding Empire--\r\nall else sighed and died.\r\n\r\nWhat final detail sums us up\r\nthe way a bow expresses the ribbon's thinness,\r\nits graceful twist manifest supremely\r\nin darling, daring\r\n\r\nanti-utilitarian curls?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Parting at Mid-Height<\/h2>\n
Far from meaningless at the seams\r\nA good poetic conceit\r\nSounds off each tailored inch of its dapper dreams,\r\nThe too-neat neatness of its pinched pleats.\r\n\r\nHere, at the folded edge, a possible prow,\r\nSelf-reflexive style and raw wave hiss,\r\nTouching without changing their inner hows\r\nIn extended chemic kiss.\r\n\r\nPart and part with sigh depart\r\nTo unpoliced provinces of woe and wait;\r\nCrawling dawn defines two solitary hearts\r\nAlone as egos, as isolate.\r\n\r\nTheir bawdy bodies switch embarrassments\r\nEre noon has come to pin their shadows\r\nUnder them; each witched wight\r\nSauces lunch \"to-go\" with appetite.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Numbers, Up<\/h2>\n
Solemnly luminous, digital sticks on a \"dial\"\r\n(I don't know what else to call a clock's face)\r\nkeep pipping the milliseconds\u2026 serenely\u2026\r\nno, it's too quick for serenity, too assured for doubt.\r\nIs resolution any part of Time's onslaught?\r\nPrecise as the quills on a hawk or a lark:\r\nmillisec, millisec, millisec.\r\n\r\n--Too trim for a lugubrious drumbeat,\r\nthe boom of doom or closed coffin tapping: trapped!\r\nThe numbers change, adding up exhaustions,\r\nhalf-fulfilled love-affairs, the spark and shock\r\nof conflict.  In there, quartz heart tribulates,\r\nnever a blur of murders or smear of defeats,\r\nalways a consequent, nice accounting:\r\nmillisec, millisec, millisec.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Repullulation<\/h2>\n
Disengage the Sapphic eye,\r\nUnhand the hoary, knuckled clasp\r\n\r\nOf sensate effect upon the spine;\r\nBe stripped of skin, and of mere sense\r\n\r\nBe shriven, till no feeling falls from flesh\r\nAt all--and in this zero zone\r\n\r\nWhen bare and bathed in naked light alone,\r\nLet some jolt of jibeless spirit pique\r\n\r\nAnd have its flash in nothingness;\r\nLet shape arise from faith for once\r\n\r\nAnd remake these mere mirrorings\r\nThat offend the everything eternal in a man\r\n\r\nAs a bilge of dung become a monument\r\nMakes the nose weep for grief\r\n\r\nThat it had ever lived to smell a rose.\r\nInstead stand deaf, stand blind,\r\n\r\nAnd in inner dark but grope toward wonderment,\r\nAnd when again some flood of folly\r\n\r\nRolls along the living skin, some ache\r\nOr burn of fullness at the lips, as a kiss\r\n\r\nAches and burns at once,\r\nLet some new, green skeleton\r\n\r\nUnderpin and resist. \r\nLet darkness dazzle.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Shadows of the Moon<\/h2>\n
To survey the contested scene\r\nSerene from heights Olympian\r\nAnd know you had ascended there\r\nNot by what you did or dared\r\nBut by snipping short the wings\r\nOf one, among eagles, king\r\nDrives home a blinding nail\r\nThrough the landscape you surveil.\r\n\r\nThe sumptuous fete, the feast\r\nAttended by man and beast\r\nTo celebrate your sip\r\nFrom Nike's very lips\r\nAugurs a sudden hunger\r\nWhen your dear competitor\r\nHis cup to his winning host\r\nLifts up in noble toast.\r\n\r\nHow empty are such high scenes\r\nTo one whose victory's a dream\r\nGranted only by slight and slant--\r\nA gardener who but supplants\r\nAnd cannot raise from seed the grace\r\nThat blossoms in the face--\r\nOne who never shall know noon\r\nUnshadowed by the moon.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
“Flowers in the Dustbin”<\/h2>\n
The old trollop comes ga-lal-lopp-ing along\r\nREPEAT<\/sub><\/strong>\r\n\r\nLoves unfiltered \/\/ varnish the knotted heart;\r\nLoves laved with gravesores;\r\nLoves by the score: love-love;\r\nLove unadorned.\r\n\r\nShall the body bear its burning beacon\r\nUnseeing\r\n               Into another darkness\r\n               Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow\r\n\r\nThe body on fire\r\nAnd the mind gone on holiday\r\nMind mindless mind\r\nFlopped on a rocketing toboggan\r\n                in windy Switzerland\r\n\r\nThe old trollop comes ga-lal-opping along\r\nREPEAT<\/sub><\/strong>\r\n\r\nWhy, in such a desert, this simmering wetness?\r\nWhy this, why this?\r\n               Paradise by the inch.\r\nClick and sigh\r\n        of fricatives, force and odor\r\n        of opening a stawberry door\r\n\r\n         into endless fields\r\n\r\nAll the skyline's a thin guise of fire,\r\nMy face a gauze over echoes.\r\nA farther fierceness cinches my mystery ribbon.\r\nTireless vine binds my inches,\r\nA glug of bloods cured to fine rawhide:\r\nFrom tip of finger to tip of toe,\r\nCocktip to nosetip, cinching the inches\r\nFiner and tighter, cinched in and in--\r\nRaw zones and moldy wounds.\r\nA zero surgeon could not configure it.\r\nA tightest kite fit for any breeze.\r\n\r\nAnd I am aloft--\r\nCoughless and visionless, seeing all.\r\nNo need to imagine your spectacular sighs,\r\nYour ruinous cues, your fucked dugs.\r\nTwin cinders for eyes and a stovepipe hat,\r\nBody pure body, longing and troubled--\r\nBut starchest snow for all that,\r\nBreast and belly pure cold, pure pure.\r\nThighs stark as icicles\r\n                   pinning my insistence.\r\n\r\nTwo old trollops disordering the I.V.s,\r\nTripping past the bedpans, two toiling turnips\r\nUnable to ever verily bloom\r\nSave as tumors.\r\n\r\n\"Flowers in the dustbin\"\r\n                  ... and all that ...\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
One-Way Waltz<\/h2>\n
A one-way waltz is all we've got, and-a\r\nOne-way waltz is not love enough to live;\r\nFor friendship leads and friendship follows,\r\nBut always whatevers with our fellows.\r\nA memory marks its time upon a shelf,\r\nA dwindled nothing, a stationary elf,\r\nFrosted with dust, in dust diminished,\r\nUntil the affection that placed it there is finished.\r\nIf hand reach out to hand in timely dance,\r\nIn all the whirled hazard of our circumstance,\r\nAnd palm meets no palm but passes touchless,\r\nSuch hand's unfit but to carry torches.\r\nThen let torches burn what they cannot find,\r\nAnd find parade-rest for the whirring mind.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Final Edit<\/h2>\n
\"Supposing Roses\" is finally done--\r\neach blossom hacked and thorn shellacked.\r\nWhat had grown lovely in my release from loneliness\r\nis now packed back into perfected sonnets\r\n--raw squares that define and defile.\r\nArtifice filled out the feeling a kiss first insisted.\r\nI gussied up the ghost with dresses,\r\nrhetoric's high fashions, and, after,\r\nstripped the pickings at my sex's insistence.\r\nNaked and dated she lay there like a final draft.\r\nNone of her winsome tussle was left in her.\r\nInert and silent, she awaits a reader,\r\nthe dazzling sequins of approbation,\r\nthe instructor's star or apt remark,\r\ntender repeat of touch and tongue.\r\nHer backside's bare and brazen as an existentialist.\r\nWhat words she uses are more music than meaning.\r\nI lay beside her loosely--mute, inutile.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Bitter Tonics<\/h2>\n
Milk scalds and hisses in the brisk pan--\r\nBread, spiced with vomit, rises as a gorge,\r\nHurling health out of heated darks;\r\nDown the whole loaf, don't nibble!\r\nIt's the slack shape of a corrupted heart,\r\nClouded to black rye by my bituminous bloods!\r\nTear each end off like an ear!\r\nEat the sour words my soul has abandoned\r\nAnd kicked into the scabrous vat!\r\nRinged with wormy eyes like a stowed potato,\r\nEach eye splendid with pins as a voodoo doll.\r\nWhat I was is cooked in this object,\r\nWhat I am has sifted to the gutter;\r\nSo eat it, eat it! \r\nBite and claw with damaged nails--\r\nSwallow a tooth as you swallow my soul.\r\nChoke on it, fuck, and rub the crumbs into your pants--\r\nDrool a glum stain on your silken shirt;\r\nSomething icky and indelible\r\n                            should be my memorial.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Post-Nausea Notions<\/h2>\n
Here my pieces make their spluttering way\r\nTo infamy, not fame;  perspectiveless, yet not Picasso.\r\nWhat the heart tells itself cannot be trusted.\r\n\"There's too much juice in this goose to be flavorless--\r\nEven the flamboyant great paced out their days\r\nIn mendicant obscurity. . .\"  Lies lacquered on lies\r\nBlurring the clarity of the true grain.  And yet,\r\nWhat we tell ourselves becomes what we are,\r\nDissing the chance disasters that really happened.\r\nI sought a balance and sought for it in vain,\r\nFinding my stride in a downhill whirl at windmills. . . .\r\nWhatever favors fools favors me;\r\nMy Panama hat made motley by sweat,\r\nWaking frozen by nightmare and bathed with regrets.\r\nI check myself in the flatness of a passing glass:\r\nOne enlarged eye, the other dull, bald,\r\nIn flat retreat like a touched tentacle,\r\nThe fluted mouth aghast for air as it almost surfaces.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
 Flagrant casuistries By Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown] Beware of a spying gaze in the blind wall: The Word is bound to matter\u2026 Do not set it to profane usage! –Gerard de Nerval Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t’epie: A la matiere meme un verbe est attach\u00e9!… Na la fais pas server […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1495],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-champagne","category-1495-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7414,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions\/7414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}