{"id":5260,"date":"2015-08-27T16:39:11","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/wordpress\/?p=5260"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:43","slug":"hell-darling-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/hell-darling-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Hell, Darling"},"content":{"rendered":"
 <\/span>\r\nby \r\n \r\nGregg Glory\r\n\r\nPublished by\r\nBLAST PRESS\r\n324B Matawan Avenue\r\nCliffwood, NJ 07721\r\n(732) 970-8409\r\n \r\ngregglory@aol.com\r\ngregglory.com\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Fly<\/h2>\n
\r\nAll our nobility's munched blank by Time;\r\nimpossible dreams fit simply\r\nin an unattended trash can\r\ntopped by Gower's lugubrious head.\r\n\r\nDead again\r\nin my dreams, repetitive as a horror flick,\r\nunfixed as a workaholic's mealtime\r\nor freckles on a cancerous face....\r\n\r\nI worry about bothering to worry,\r\nthe WHY of these needles my consciousness carries\r\nmore to damn than darn.\r\nWhy paper the slide to oblivion with sandpaper?\r\n\r\nThe august face of a kicked-up possum's skull\r\nmocks my mutable deportment,\r\nmy rubbery reckoning with the moment's emotions.\r\nWhere now the surprised eye\r\n\r\nbright as a blackberry cell?\r\nO possum!  Once, rooting for riccola in the compost bucket\r\ntipping its richness, a fly\r\n(always the same fly, same fly as ever)\r\n\r\nstraddled the corpse of a rind\r\non a mound of coffee grounds\r\nin a moonlight you are done with rummaging\r\n(and I almost done)\r\n\r\n,\r\n\r\nrubbing its hands.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Dive, Dive<\/h2>\n
\r\nClear tape\r\nanchors the motorcyclist's window\r\nthrown up frivolously against\r\nthe howl of \"onward.\"\r\n\r\nNaked and splayed\r\nas an exhibited newt\r\nstaked out flat as a collapsed tent on felt,\r\nI read the accompanying sign:\r\n\r\n\"Here lies one\r\ndull as the other one--\"\r\nIt lacks the garish wet that one\r\nfinds requisite for life.\r\n\r\nFrail light\r\nelongates lingeringly enough\r\nto define my diving bell,\r\nthe clear weirdness of here.<\/em>\r\n\r\nHere, without an onward.\r\nA here too full to ask: from whence?<\/em>\r\nA here deaf with wetness,\r\ndrenched with now,\r\n\r\na prismed bubble.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Empty Aria<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe web of syntax fastens\r\nbut does not fascinate,\r\nempty aria of here to there\r\nwithout the concrete context of content.\r\n\r\nI extend my fingerling claw to a thread....\r\n\r\n\"Filament, filament, filament,\"\r\njust like the old so-and-so's bag of beard\r\nthreading the elements\r\nwhisper-slipped from his brain-sac.\r\n\r\nThe cotton candy pinks my mouth with glue.\r\n\r\nWhy dot an I\r\nunless all connects to all,\r\nwe know not how?\r\nLying down together\r\n\r\nI say to you what you say to me until we hear it.\r\n\r\nA vivifying sample\r\nsuspended clear in a petri dish\r\ntwists forth its tentacular longing\r\nlike a potato eye\r\n\r\nbursting to see.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Time-Traveler<\/h2>\n
\r\nDo I long for the life of the Young,\r\nunfurnished by loss?\r\nEvery place new, yet familiarly full\r\nof itself, just as it is,\r\nand not disfigured by ghosts,\r\nby odd bits of old decor, absent everywhere\r\nsave in memory?\r\n\r\nI settle on the stuffed settee\r\nwith its price tag jammed in a cushion-crack.\r\nHow what surrounds us drowns us!\r\nEven if the flow and flood's\r\nmerely memorial, the happenstance and trash\r\nof a past no gloved hand has come\r\nto cart to the junkheap....\r\n\r\nInvisible lines\r\ncrowd before and behind me,\r\ntenants of Shelley's \"Triumph of Life,\"\r\na chain-gang spectacle of hope\r\nleading themselves in closed circle\r\nlike Dante's damned, like caterpillars a-creep;\r\nstep, wait; step, wait.\r\n\r\nMy moment comes:\r\nthe grey guard stumbles, I dash for the line,\r\nescape to a featureless plain or ice floe\r\n--either will do--a highway widened\r\nto destination, a pupil aghast\r\nat its own seeing....\r\n\r\nmyself a mote\r\nalone on the blacktop.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Hell, Darling<\/h2>\n
\r\nHell, darling,\r\nstares at us across the breakfast table\r\nas we pass the salt and brimstone\r\nand snap the paper\r\n\r\ncrowded with crowing cowards.\r\n\r\nWe're chafed by the hurrying goers in the Tube,\r\nthe racy lackadaisical others\r\nwho groom themselves and consume food\r\nout of sight.\r\n\r\nOther places, other faces\r\neat the intimate knowing of them;\r\nthose who remain strangers to us,\r\nto me, really, my dear guest-stranger--\r\n\r\nimprobable possible lover\r\nfull of shifts and slidings, unexpected music\r\nglad as a stack of glasses,\r\ntragic as matches.\r\n\r\nLord, help keep these words elided from my speech!\r\n\r\nWe eat our words and whey,\r\nsugaring the pus.\r\nToast scolds\r\nmy inner ear's inner aria . . . .\r\n\r\nWriting's just\r\na wounded man's spastic tracks in the snow\r\n--a litter of gesture\r\nagainst littleness.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Fuck Crutches<\/h2>\n
\r\nDinner meats\r\nand beer after beer revealed\r\na fostering affection flirting\r\nfinny and familiar as goldfish\r\nwashed from their bowl on the mantle\r\nby our tidalwave of talk.\r\n\r\nYour stories were reckless as guesswork,\r\na blind detective smelling after footprints,\r\nhis nose sodden with cold.\r\nI told my hummingbird heart's\r\ninner aria,\r\nflying backward and forward at once.\r\n\r\nDown at Der Wunder Bar, sipping lemonade,\r\nI telephoned my flaming doll to declare\r\n\"I'm drunk!\"\r\nlike Zapatistas at the barricades.  We watched\r\nThe Charms punk and skunk frantic as ants, while you\r\nbarracudaed through two more SoCo's and lime.\r\n\r\n\"Hurry up, please, it's time,\r\nHurry up, please, it's time.\"\r\n\r\nSquare dawn's backwash\r\nthrough the frigid windowpane revealed\r\nour underwear, pink and blue,\r\nentwined like DNA at the foot of the bed,\r\na pair of mating snakes\r\ntight as wrung laundry.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Zone Below<\/h2>\n
\r\nA purgatorial, picture-perfect Saturday afternoon\r\npulls her pin-striped awnings down, lackadaisical and O.K.\r\nwith limited sky and expanding shade.\r\n\r\nI twirl an umbrella drink and watch my toes roast\r\nin the zone below my cool equator's waist\r\n--all centaur once, now nulled to rubbery numbness.\r\n\r\nToo lazy to invent, I lie\r\nand note-take connections sifted out by Time,\r\nmy editor and better.\r\n\r\nWhat rings against my enlarging ears\r\nstill childish and complete?\r\nFull of a whistle's insistence and a tin drum's beat?\r\n\r\n\"Only you,\" I would lie,\r\nbut you are not here-- my dear encumbrance,\r\ntaking the hip-weight of my own imbalance.\r\n\r\nI remember our days of ire and fire, burning out\r\nfierce seeds that germinate my present dark,\r\nsurrounded by a shade that shadows out the lark.\r\n\r\nDo not come again.  Do not!\r\nMy downhill backyard is all otherworldly now,\r\nmounded snow and ice frothing at the plow....\r\n\r\nRest, remorseful shade.\r\nTake my sunglasses, explore the Everglades.\r\nJust do not intrude, intrude, intrude\r\n\r\nyour half-tone tune into my afternoon.\r\n\"Tu whit, tu whoo.\"  How rudely forced.\r\nWith my pink umbrella drink I'll beat you back!\r\n\r\nGuest ghost, how homeless you've made me--\r\nsecond-guessing what the mirror insists,\r\nmy hard-nailed words unpinned from referent.\r\n\r\nTime rolls me like the driftwood dead\r\nmy enervation imitates.\r\nOh la, olé.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Jungle Incursion<\/h2>\n
\r\nYou know me\r\ntalking always,\r\na Gatling gun of guesses\r\nshooting pillows into feathers....\r\n\r\nAs fine a time\r\nas that is, whirls and twirls\r\nof dusty angels, feathery stars,\r\nI want solider talk. \r\n\r\nCommandoes who shoulder\r\nthrough my slop of verbiage,\r\ntriangulating sightlines\r\non the night-goggled target.\r\n\r\nMy dictionary thins,\r\nmy words wasted by AIDS,\r\nhelpless helpers\r\nflashed to ash.\r\n\r\nAlphabet blocks\r\ntumble from my molting mouth.\r\nWe touch them together\r\nuntil the words glue.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
Arctic Expedition<\/h2>\n
\r\nI.... where have I gone\r\nthis minute, anger edging\r\nlike a blood iceberg loosed from the pack \r\ninto the corner of my watery eyes?\r\n\r\nSorrow insists on blindness,\r\nthe not-here of imagination and remembrance,\r\npotpourri and drapes to enhance\r\nthe zero hour decor.\r\n\r\nThe iceberg is cold\r\nand hot, sweeping me off my sleepy feet, \r\ncareening into wicked waters.\r\nThe salt spray licks my face.\r\n\r\nWary tears wake me wetly.\r\nI'm melting into the accommodating ice,\r\nthe ice is beating like a heart.\r\nBAAAHH-DHUMM beats the drum of me.\r\n\r\nNewly limber and unfinished,\r\nI stand in my fandangled\r\nfarragoes of frenzy,\r\nall outline now.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Terrarium View<\/h2>\n
\r\nSo little we ever do ever matters.\r\nIts only our penury\r\nhelps us hope otherwise,\r\nwishing against the grain of common sense,\r\ncrossing fingers because we can't cross the Alps.\r\n\r\nSo little... and little else... and less....\r\n\r\nOur terrariums\r\nnicker against the Ikea shelf--stone bubbles\r\n\"anxious yet to burst.\"\r\n\r\nSane only by dint of habit\r\nand the strange strength of plastic\r\nthat keeps us in our confines\r\nand our confines whole.\r\n\r\nTap tap, tap tap.\r\nWe go on rolling toward a tumble\r\nthat never breaks us,\r\nno matter the mess we're rolling in.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
“The Loneliness of Strong Feeling”<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe exhausted wash of time travel\r\ncomes over your concave face\r\nas I stumble and ram into your missus\r\nthrough the abruptly open door.\r\n\r\nFive years?  More?  Not a tick\r\nhas matured your memory of me\r\n--my head pickled like a prize\r\ncabbage consigned to a clay\r\n\r\nKim Chee pot in the plot out back.\r\nA ramshackle string of Xmas lights\r\nblinks the shape of Texas\r\naround an untenanted yard\r\n\r\nall tall weed.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Between the Acts<\/h2>\n
\r\n[for Marah's 33rd]<\/em>\r\n\r\nLike the cracking coal at Isaiah's lips\r\nOr shaft of little light at Mary's ear,\r\nLike Bodhisattva's sorrow of an afternoon,\r\nI am touched with speech, touching you.\r\n\r\nIf these witched words but glitter in the vast\r\nPast out-stretched Time--which itself cannot last--\r\n\r\nI am content to have come to yon Bo-Tree,\r\nTo have flickered in an ear I found dear\r\nOr touched two lips burning to be near\r\nWhatever fire alights when you are here.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Night-Brook<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe big moon starts\r\nIn ambushed grandeur from the grove--\r\nA lurid stone for lovers and others\r\nHaunting the brune woods alone.\r\n\r\nHere's no night for careful words,\r\nPersnickety parsing of this and that,\r\nGossipy gab like the hoot owl's hoo,\r\nOr long loose thoughts whittled to a quip.\r\n\r\nHere's a night the moon unpacks\r\nFor phrases full as teardrops, \r\nFor secret thoughts brought out and spoken\r\nWhile the white moon shines on unbroken.\r\n\r\nHere's a night for vows and roundels,\r\nA speech of misty insistences, and softest promise kept\r\nTo one whose absence, like the moon,\r\nCircles round me yet.\r\n\r\nO absent-present!  Phantom voice and face!\r\nCome, let these woods be your leaning-place,\r\nLet the night-brook murmur as you would do!\r\nTelling more of remembrance dear\r\n\r\nThan of remonstrance and fear.\r\nO ghostly tenor singing like the leaves\r\nA poem of nothing in the moony night\r\nWhose heavy air clinches like a kiss\r\n\r\nSing on until my brookstone heart's made right\r\nAnd misses not one mark or beat for thee.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Camera Obscura<\/h2>\n
\r\nI woke to walk in a dark room,\r\nNavigating cradles, snuffed candles and corners,\r\nThe ouch of a vacuum handle\r\nOr half-full tumbler of water\r\n\r\nNew-wet in surprise on my thighs.\r\n\r\nAsleep in my pin-striped PJs,\r\nI knew my nothing was nowhere\r\nFrom zen class that afternoon.\r\nBut this invisible here was still here\r\n\r\nWithout the help of the moon.\r\n\r\nOh what rhythm was there thrumming,\r\nNumb hum of the fridge and the heater,\r\nWhile I stood so unbecoming,\r\nA null pointer in raw blackness\r\n\r\nTo bleakness and its lackness?\r\n\r\nStep, step, step, with a sway I swept,\r\nFrom nettled and nervous I leapt,\r\nFrom stalking myself in the dark\r\nTo a questionmark on the carpet\r\n\r\nDancing inch by inch to the light.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Dance-Like<\/h2>\n
\r\nOur dancelike wishes haven't made us nimble\r\nbut rather like a cloth anchor\r\nhave us drag and dawdle\r\nuntil the rhythm of waiting is familiar.\r\n\r\nA stopped clock is twice right\r\nbut lacks the feral finesse\r\nof a kidder's remark remarking a remark\r\n--the sometimes lightning of a laugh....\r\n\r\nHow had desire left us\r\nin a slippery tangle on our hill,\r\nthe moon our only watchman\r\nmaking faces in a pool?\r\n\r\nHow had we missed the train\r\nwhose tracks we'd followed to every station,\r\nour fingers tracing the cracks in the map,\r\noccasionally in the same groove?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Anniversary<\/h2>\n
\r\nI stood before you\r\nanxious as a candle\r\nin a cupcake in the birthday girl's\r\nout-thrust pink palm\r\n\r\nhoping for your hot breath\r\nto put me out, me out,\r\nand start the dream of meaning\r\n--a timid lick at the icing\r\n\r\nstiffening in the crenellations.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Waltzing in Penn Station<\/h2>\n
\r\nA slipshod, soft-shoe waltz\r\ninattentive to daring\r\nand nearly too prim for whimsy\r\nstarted us soaring\r\n\r\nsquare by square by square.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Lightless, Limitless<\/h2>\n
\r\nWe hang the windows with flat black felt.\r\nNight's the only hour for our fantastic angst.\r\nAnd this one's limitless, without a star to scar it.\r\nFlat black and drab black closed eyes enliven.\r\n\r\nWe reach for the paddle first\r\nin the wake of dreams motoring onward\r\nstrong enough, fast enough\r\nto keep our rowboat the wrong way round.\r\n\r\nEccentric colors, the gauche wash of sunset\r\nare memory only in our ashy mysterium.\r\nDepth without thought, black without white,\r\nwe struggle flubberingly\r\nfor the longitude of some marker:\r\n\r\na foghorn, a death.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Fogbound<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere in easy strokes\r\nyour animated portrait lies aslant\r\n--happily aslant on the table of memory.\r\nKept in a crypt without a key\r\nto drag the thing from Death.\r\n\r\nMy brain noses its sponge\r\nfor the quirky gift of a squish--\r\na sound from the roundness\r\nno limber silence envelopes.\r\n\r\nOne sound, one dropped rock or tock\r\nrippling out into the fogbound, oceanic vast.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Broken Headlight<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe white, hard, plastic bench-- \r\nThe locked door and chicken-wire window-- \r\nThe rusted drain, the vaguely urinous steel toilet-- \r\nThe sink, carved from carbolic soap-- the freezing hiss\r\nOf water to numb a face of tears.\r\nNo mirror here to reflect the eye.\r\n\r\nStasis, while the world rolls by\r\nTen yards from the barrack's escape hatch. . . . \r\nThere, in the night, light, liberty,\r\nMacadam and horns, cars shouldered together\r\nIn their hurry and happiness,\r\nLoud as immigrants ganging a gangplank.\r\n\r\nHere, just stocking feet that point to Hell,\r\nWadded TP to grind into each eye,\r\nA shiver assuring you you still exist-- \r\nBare as a smashed bulb's electric wire-- \r\nGlowing all exposed now under null fluorescents.\r\nGrey-cuffed hands unlatch me, lift me, find my shoes.\r\n\r\nMy time is done.  I shuffle forward.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Surroundings<\/h2>\n
\r\nUnread books\r\npile up like showdown shadows at noon.\r\nArrogant words\r\nI cannot take back, take over,\r\ngather to a knot, and drop the sack.\r\n\r\nI hike from ignorance\r\nto ignorance, a mountain-climber\r\nperennially picking the incorrect peak.\r\nNow, old love, tomorrow\r\nsome mania\r\n\r\nI can't quite manage to squash.\r\nVoices flap like bats\r\nderanging the dark . . . .\r\nWhere now are the hard stars\r\nthat used to pin me in place?\r\n\r\nI've fallen from the constellations\r\nlike a high-school poster from the wall,\r\na browned leaf in the mass--\r\nNo longer tethered to the visible,\r\nanonymous at last.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Printed Repeats<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe printed repeats\r\nof post-modern modern living;\r\npattern copyrighted by the wry eye,\r\nthe deadbeat designer luft-lifted\r\n\r\nto religious legionnaire.\r\nA color co-ordinated rock chorus\r\nsings the setting pattern\r\nthat labyrinths us to death.\r\n\r\nThe wavy paisleys\r\nthat doily-work the lifestyle-stylist's \r\nunbuttoned blouse\r\ninto incestuous palimpsest\r\n\r\nmake my head ache.\r\nThe divine grind of the final line\r\nof the requiem's aghast ovation\r\ngladdens the lapse into silence.\r\n\r\nWill maggots fatten\r\non my quill of coffin?\r\nWho else will eat\r\nmy delectable inks?\r\n\r\nThe handwritten record of a thing\r\neeks out each etch\r\nuntil letters spider the eyes\r\nan unprintable black.\r\n\r\nFacsimile graffiti hang in the British Museum,\r\nthe scrawl of royal prisoners\r\ngallowsed or gutted\r\n--one scratch of time memorialized\r\n\r\nbefore they were mud.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Darkest Day<\/h2>\n
\r\nGod's eye\r\ncontracts, useless pupil,\r\nlight tapered to a filament,\r\nsunless tunnel-end.\r\n\r\nThe end of days is here.\r\nNight's arrow\r\nflies farther and farther\r\ninto untempered dark.\r\n\r\nBlack fogs\r\nfiligree the horizon's brim,\r\neating star-shards,\r\ncottoning the wattage.\r\n\r\nThis is my mistress\r\nthis zeroed hole of hours--\r\nan abandoned well\r\ntoo broad for boardage.\r\n\r\nEchoes sour\r\nin the swallowing silts,\r\nspit inks\r\ninfecting the gleaming trim of teeth--\r\n\r\nthe busted smile, chummed\r\nto scum and mockery.\r\nSuch grins!\r\nMy veins flash acid\r\n\r\nwith the insult.\r\nBlack suns\r\nbehind my eyes\r\nblaze and arise.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Asking for Sadness<\/h2>\n
\r\nI took away the candle's blackness\r\nand lit it.\r\n\r\nI took away the air's coolness\r\nand burned it.\r\n\r\nI took away her lips' emptiness\r\nand kissed it.\r\n\r\nI took away the cello's silence\r\nand played it.\r\n\r\nI took away this poem's sadness\r\nand had it.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Sitting with Sadness<\/h2>\n
\r\nSitting outside a snow globe\r\nand looking in\r\n\r\nSitting in a high airplane\r\nand looking out\r\n\r\nSitting outside the toy store at Christmas\r\nand looking in\r\n\r\nSitting on a sandy island alone\r\nand looking out\r\n\r\nSitting sitting sitting\r\nand breathing in\r\n\r\nSitting sitting sitting\r\nand breathing out\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Airy Vision<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere's a snare in the faerie-dust.\r\nA blind exhilaration\r\nflounders at the peak, given sudden sight\r\nand no recollection\r\nof how eyes arise.\r\n\r\nHistory limits\r\nour daring by demarking\r\njust where and when we last catastrophied--\r\nde-planing on some Utah salt flat\r\nwhen prepared for Parisian triumph.\r\n\r\nSuch modest heights\r\nas homo erectus<\/em> groaned to gain\r\nremain rosy and right to our reach--\r\njust stretch enough, a human\r\nusual and useful.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Uncle Tenzin’s Reply to the Epistemologists<\/h2>\n
\r\nHow much\r\nwould ever be enough\r\nto crowd-out doubt?\r\n\r\nInfinity's a pile of stackable chairs....\r\nAlways room for one more chair at the top,\r\none more molded word.\r\n\r\nHow little\r\ncan we whittle attention\r\nto die convinced?\r\n\r\nThe spotlight moves in the circus tent\r\nbecause all else is black\r\nand full of elephants.\r\n\r\nLove flatlines\r\nafter the initial spike, and so is not\r\ncause enough to carry us.\r\n\r\nUncle Tenzin,\r\nalert and loafing in his tennis shoes\r\nsays this:\r\n\r\nTrim sail\r\nwhatever the wind\r\nand begin.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Black Alphabets<\/h2>\n
\r\nTense, but without a hinge\r\nto direct the tension, I ache\r\nfor a doorway to anchor me,\r\n\r\nto make my ruination real, my ashes taste,\r\nto make the flint of my fiber flex\r\nand pinch me awake.\r\n\r\nI wait, vaporized napalm\r\nfor the drift of ignition, the spark\r\nof a star chart--\r\n\r\nthe magnetized pin of direction\r\nin all this frittery wilderness,\r\nthis haze of seeing\r\n\r\nonly what stays, what repeats:\r\nstaccato glockenspiel,\r\nblack alphabets.\r\n\r\nViolence\r\nmakes me visible, a steam arising\r\nout of the torrid void.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Paradise at Sunset<\/h2>\n
\r\nFruittrees \r\nweighted with blodclots\r\ngroan groundward.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Swan<\/h2>\n
\r\nOld autumn\r\nworks my bones brown in the sunset.\r\nAnother lamp is lessening.\r\n\r\nThe last sky, and the last\r\nmake envy inevitable.\r\nSuch blues to cruise through!\r\n\r\nFlaked light\r\nflashes and flitters fallward,\r\ntumbled luminescence\r\n\r\nwhose cry pries its beak black.\r\n. . . . Downed on the shushing swell\r\nof the Public Garden's plot of water,\r\n\r\nthe swan floats\r\nwith the puffed pride of an exile,--\r\na soul shorn from heaven,\r\n\r\na crisp shaving\r\nwhittled and whistled\r\noff of God's cloudy work table.\r\n\r\nDoughy children\r\ntoss their sweaty fistfuls of manna\r\nat its profile.\r\n\r\nToo perfect,\r\nit sways the waves heavenward\r\nwhen it flees\r\n\r\nunlingeringly.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Heavy Water<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe end of the film\r\nrattles on its spool\r\nand only the light shows--\r\nan image of death.\r\n\r\nSprezzatura of sperm,\r\nwith humans the only music\r\nfrom the swallowed notes--\r\nlives born of silence.\r\n\r\nCivilization bets\r\non being the coral bones\r\nshaping the latest scrim-scum of color--\r\nourselves above the dust.\r\n\r\nDivision and cohesion\r\nrule the choice sets of our game theorem,\r\nprocreation and death--\r\nour pegs on the board.\r\n\r\nThis leaf I eat\r\ntastes sandy, like everything\r\nsince I sauntered\r\nfrom the tidal pool\r\n\r\nbelow.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Neant<\/h2>\n
\r\nBaudelaire put a pistol to his evaporated brain\r\n\"Here, in the nowhere that is my everywhere,\r\nnadir, I take aim at the gods who love and oppress me.\"\r\nTurquoise swans on his cufflinks glitter;\r\nwho knew that the internal exile of \"not belonging\"\r\ncould be so bitter? Stale coffee gives his face its pained\r\nlook of being stricken, of being struck\r\ndumb from the inside where the words had come\r\nably bubbling as a spring of blood.\r\n\"My hand was a steel spring and the meter ticked\r\nlike rivets going in to the side of a ship;\r\nfaultless preparations for a voyage left unmade.\r\nNow sloppy in my silk slippers, I putter in the parlor\r\nthinking through the reams of old talk\r\n(Nerval's neuralgic nose, Huysman's figure thin \r\nas in a wishing glass)\r\nold talk that had ascended to the chandelier's burning bough\r\nand disappeared....\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
You Are What You<\/h2>\n
\r\nCannibal children race and chime\r\nmerciless against the flesh of age and time.\r\nOur soft bodies in gobbets get torn to feed\r\ntheir bright eyes, the tomorrows of their talk.\r\nWhy not let them scissor us to ribbons?\r\nBrains may feed brains as thoughts feed thoughts.\r\nBrutal, the musky corruption of our hides\r\nonce eiderdown and limber as a willow switch.\r\nCreased into the porch's awkward rocker,\r\nI talk until the stars seem plain enough to touch\r\n--the Dipper emptying its milkspill of fables....\r\na glitter of infinity good enough to drink.\r\nThe child sleeps against my hairy shins;\r\nhe'll have my hand-me-down brains and babble soon enough,\r\nhe dreams.  For now he must grow\r\nhis razory mouthful of teeth.--I rattle quarters\r\nfor the old raw one still wet beneath his pillow.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
As I Am<\/h2>\n
\r\nLike Poe's Purloined Letter,\r\nI find myself in public, plainly proffered.\r\nMy back and sides and secret innards\r\nexist only as surmise--\r\n\r\nthe way a pious Chinese\r\nburns finial incense\r\nfor the stacked racks\r\nof his crepuscular dead.\r\n\r\nAging and insincere,\r\neach wayward wardrobe change\r\nannounces a new soul, a new chance,\r\n\r\ngrand as an imprisoned pasha\r\nor deliquescent drag queen\r\nhaunting the docks.\r\n\r\nI maunder in the mirror,\r\nmy fat face an overfull balloon\r\nhilarious with helium--\r\n\r\nI recite Milton in pipsqueak\r\nin a jade smoking robe, too small\r\nto square up my embarrassment.\r\n\r\nI fit into my slippers\r\nthe way a pearl lurks in a oyster,\r\nwell-oiled irritant coated to a sulky glow.\r\n\r\nI am the hidden Imam of my household\r\nlolling in the fresh laundry,\r\ninsouciant and clean as a cat.\r\n\r\nNever in my nowhere of days\r\ndid I once suspect myself\r\nto be as guilty as I am.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Empty Field<\/h2>\n
\r\nIn me need\r\na dandelion weed\r\n\r\nhurts to push\r\nagainst this hush\r\n\r\nsilent\r\nmilitant\r\n\r\nas dead, windless\r\ngrass\r\n\r\nbrowned to burn\r\nto unlearn\r\n\r\nto unfeel\r\nin the empty field.\r\n\r\nStill, I will.\r\nWill wheel\r\n\r\npast dirt\r\nby dint\r\n\r\nof sheer need\r\nnarrowed to seed\r\n\r\nand lifted dead\r\nto a whited head\r\n\r\nwhere a a list-\r\nless kiss\r\n\r\nfloats\r\nmotes\r\n\r\nout.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Shadow Song<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy song is just the same\r\nas a rock whistling\r\ndown when thrown, or the same\r\nstone held unheard in shadow.\r\n\r\nTo boil a kettle\r\n'til articulation screams\r\neviscerates the dark\r\nwhich water dreamed.\r\n\r\nOur moon makes night\r\nabound by its little light,\r\na fey stone lamp\r\nthat unshadows the map.\r\n\r\nHere you and I\r\npause perplexed and like to die,\r\nweightless and wendless,\r\nethereal and endless\u2026.\r\n\r\nBut what if all things\r\nof weight and dirt\r\nvanished with the Earth\r\nexcept we sing\r\n\r\nto drape the stone\r\nwith a careful shadow\r\nand say the shadow\r\ncasts the stone?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
What<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe sky's exquisite blacks\r\nstarless expanse of acids\r\na mobile of cut strings\r\nwindless, airless, chaste void.\r\n\r\nMy face reversed into a skull\r\nnegative identity, sliced zero\r\nwithout the skin of thought,\r\nself shrived of subject.\r\n\r\nSluice of sex, jerked pole,\r\nfish and its fatal hook\r\na biology of bones\r\nmasked by muscle\r\n\r\nthe flint flirtation of pain.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
  by Gregg Glory Published by BLAST PRESS 324B Matawan Avenue Cliffwood, NJ 07721 (732) 970-8409 gregglory@aol.com gregglory.com The Fly All our nobility’s munched blank by Time; impossible dreams fit simply in an unattended trash can topped by Gower’s lugubrious head. Dead again in my dreams, repetitive as a horror flick, unfixed as a workaholic’s […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hell-darling","category-16-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5260","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=5260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7317,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5260\/revisions\/7317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}