The Twenty-First Century

by John Ryskamp

Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man,

of all things that on earth breathe and move.

For he thinks that he will never suffer evil in time to come

so long as the gods give him success and his knees are quick;

but when again the blessed gods decree him misfortune,

this too he bears in sorrow with such patience as he can,

for the spirit of men upon the earth is just such as the day

which the father of gods and men brings upon them.

-Odyssey, 18, 130-137

I

Fraud most displeases God.  Of what use is humanity?

Calm down, myself, and be still.  Between the

Torments and the Scaean gate,

Surviving in the valley of your speaking,

Each word a copy,

Wall before the watcher

(with burning sorrow, you beat upon that wall

til truth obeys your call

and soon tire of three enchanted fires of “the” Lower Empire,

never the contemporary of your own desires)

Atmospheric parting of the frieze

Sections of arcadian strata—

Dream intense, swift—

   Year to year and crag to crag, procuring,

Find, as if by design, this talking night book of signs

In a hell sans hooks

(only writing is thought, talking its book),

And tread—like a broken chariot,

Enfranchised, from the three worlds—

That path of humility which leads to reality, going forth,

No lodging for you but a cold hard confiding stone—

And shout an evil secret to the agora stone—

The air filled with covered water

and stone, in a bitter blue death light.

Eating the legumen of the algoraba,

Thin from eating flies, circumcising the indefinite.

Fulfilling your destiny,

Shadow-bearing lord of weak remembrance,

Dissembled, proffered, recovered, withdrawn—

Speaking radio silence—

(Why not just say, disheveled?)

Infernal hurricane in your breast,

Have a little drop of nothingness, rest on Hera’s breast,

perturbed spirit, from your friendquest—and no fingerpointing!

Confusion is the beginning of the philosophical quest.

Here, in the adminisphere, are some Iambic jests

and little straws to put in your nest.

I’m blown up!  Xook.

Impatient for night?  Vade mecum.  Every lazy postwoman is. 

Very well then, here it is,

Let’s have a dekko, conversate:

All men are whores,

Some named Therefore.

   In obedience to other laws,

Fog cruises everyone and mobs embattled Seraphim to war,

Only exaggeration moves them,

Their will bondsman to the obliterate dark,

They set sail in a black, enigmatic

vain and helmless raft or barque, scarf upon scarf

Baudelaire sprawled on the poop

Of that craft, mumbling epigraphs.  Gesunde Volkskraft.

Started—a thoughtwreck that.  Ships set sail on time.

   Then press at blue midnight beneath love’s cornice

(Draped by bunches of acorns, unsightly moss, mimicking

orchids, poplar, and grapevine tendrils)

In Porto Pozzo, live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

Welcome to the machine/poem.  I’ll language your efforting.

   Let me open the door for you:

   Night snores over the earth and wallows in wild dreams;

wishes take shape as deadly swallows and steal

into the silent house of dreams;

this is the curative oft-limned pure zero hour

of [the relationship of] the will to power:

an inarticulate red right hand transmitted

from a bookish iron famine tower

bringing back a white celestial flower.

Twentysomethings

all ready in cock rings

awash in their fluids

and tonsured by Druids,

powdered white, dressed in black

black-collar workers walking in the steps of Kerouac

shorn like an ox’s balls, with horse’s horns

a tattoo

of a warbler born from wishful bamboo.

They seem to undress

looking as if falling to earth

but are merely repeating forms in infinite regress.

Where are they?  Swear.

With ear-kissing arguments, hints and guesses

Nibbles and caresses

Hugo’s hide rope, dragon, present identical abyss

Severed heads kiss

In mourning eclipse

Under the assin between two apolinere enameled obelisks

(and their laurel wreaths slip)

In a garden without names, rapt in flames

Another old fat man, fat like a strange terrestrial cypress tree,

Daisy? or buttercup?

or just a rotten old fuckup?

   It’s the way I’ve always been treated,

a creepazoid baron, an occasional transvestite, an Uncle William,

with a wicked pack of franks

A banished old tightwad claiming to be

limited God, in imagination

   Bent on the wisdom of fisting deformed solar God

who shows you his open citron hand

(yet their heart’s covered waters

spill no baleful word abroad)

ulcerated scrotum à la Coleridge

replaced haunch and trailing paunch, consults

the threefold whorl of a

conch (the center of which cannot hold),

lives in the capsule of a cell phone

waits in a cassia tree munching the fungus of immortality,

not suffering very low food security,

plies and anoints with split nitrogen,

confiding, in a motionless sliding,

draws near, sweetly questioning in artificial English

If you lack anything:

A little usury up the mula bandha

While you’re in crow?

Fastens on your buttonhole

More subtle than a weaver’s shuttle

Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!

Si tu voulais seulement

M’approfondir ensuite un peu!—

the nineteenth autumn has come upon me

since I made my last count!  Ohno-second

Behind the unity of a hundred masks he asks:

Is there anything else you don’t like? what makes you weep?—

Hey, he gets off on that, OK?

   Tells tales (through halitosis) of a moral apotheosis,

Through barely-parted lips,

a muted half-pentameter apocalypse.

Pumpkin, when do you shed deconflicted diamond tears? 

when another sun appears?

Wiggle your unfathomed, unholy, burning Sanskrit ears and

Don’t look** so forlorn, baby,

was ever innocence in beauty born?

Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;

Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ich Gewalt.

What’s up with your antithetical deformed arm?

Your watch must be fast.  Show me your eggplant.

Thought is free: what’s your metaphor?

Bo-peep, what’s in the hibiscus basket?

Why are your fingers caressing my neck, you ignorant…

melting boy?

Non vis ut sim sollicitus: you parent killer!

Taking suggestion as a cat laps mouse milk,

in each other’s grill, about to throw down,

   A bouquet of blossoming vulvae, c’est du sang en fleur

Let a thousand humble hollow pelvises blossom

Get down this way often? 

Are you up for grabs?

Christ I’ve got monetized eyes for your peacock.

Some are anxious crossed out spineless

angels pulled away by an arm,

Some undone, in the unattended moment,

Approached in the sacred porch with consuming heat

from the speaking,

sulphurous torch (to let the warm love in!),

Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!

Si tu voulais seulement

M’approfondir ensuite un peu:

He fucked my ass off

while coalesced syllabic onyx nails scratched the rails.

men che drama di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi

sed faciles Nymphae risere

Elated chatter among the leaves.

Nothing outside; nothing inside.

Nothing inside and outside.

Your dying slave,

Lost eyes uplifted speckled knees bowed down,

In the distinct concessional,

In Urso Major, under the dragon’s tail,

Under the very nose of Jesus [death],

Nurse, the basting syringe

(Fill it with Grey Poupon),

Unwilled of heaven in mankind, in a

Childbirth of the mind

You, with your Spenglerian brownish hue

see the point which has passed beyond you

(outdo what you have undone)

at midnight in Byzantium

XX XX

primary master, secondary slave,

the bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft,

lance his piles,

give a masked antithetical neutering tincture

to his sphincter: all is beauty,

ecstatic concentration, and extinction

a new race of Longobardi, earth’s litter

speculators in derivatives

thoroughbreds and chickenheads

a sword fight

Some struggle—

torrid though torpid towards 3 PM (sundown)—

With a bottle

Up a millionaire’s ass,

Your idol and your tyrant—

Once a kindly Zephyros, now a

blustering Boreas

(and I mean that in a non-“windy” way)

a buster, stifled

Titan, going at it with Santa claws

out by the long home hidden by the almond tree

working burdensome gleaning grasshopper jaws

la lippe me fait le mouvement de paître

giving you a philoctetes with his everyday missile

by a divine thrusting on

and on a ratty couch in the vestibule,

in your hammock a whore!

   The blemished tiger springs from his fallen God, the dog

backs down before the bull.

Yacking, you eat the copper hair

on the eyes of his chest,

you blow menos in his wordhole,

potency gaining existence by form,

in the felly and the nave

breathing each other’s life, exchanging colors,

living each other’s smoky breath, blowing out:

thought, absence, language=pulsating death.

Vis-à-vis lesbian Picassoid tongues by teeth are torn

impaled on rhinocerous horn or Glastonbury thorn

(not until humanity composed itself could Christ be born)

terror and oblivion

   Your spirit overkissed—your young zeros! breath

scarce knows the way!  w00t!

Rubens Moreau

Balthus Corot

Destroys with the brightness of his coming.

O, O, O, O.  In life we are in death.

Au secours M. Kosygin!

You spill air;

it gathers in covered Rhone pools, psychic puddles

which whisper: “Call 647-8262,”

whisper The Solution:

“All crime is unsuccessful revolution.”

Laboring under the erotic, cinema

(let’s give baby an enema)

Narcotic Kairotic juju of his succubus-like spell

and balls as big as church bells

Bite, and with ardent eyes and brite,

In a lonely impulse of delight,

Draw back to watch the imprint of that bight.

Discharging starlight, I feel like a prerequisite Job tonite.

Il s’agit a shrine of melancholy in a temple of delight,

Synopsized, personalized hobby: exteriorized rite.

Unpack your heart with words:

Zoit!  A sillie worm: O do not bruise me!

quia amore langueo

The master struck him with three mirrors and a candle,

stole his yams and mandals.

Before you realize in the region of unlikeness

This Colonel you do not recognize

Tes yeux dans ces yeux-là!

You have changed blue eyes and have the throat of relanguaged late birds.

Soon.

In the Nd-Yag drishti of the stance

you have changed black eyes

and in intellectual sweetness pissed crosswise

so a menstruating Jew will die

(and the images of your mind are changed).

Qui s’en vont dans l’air pur

À l’aventure

I want to know what fat day this is.  What day is this?

Reproduce all marvels of classical architecture

In a distended platitude

Et puis? 

Well, in the dixit

of a contemporary critic

what follows radiates the sort of pathologic corona

of a pestilent Prufrockian persona:

in short, an herbal installation (a scanslation)

an asana in the assana (without straps)

of an aerie of little eyases

with most miraculous organ,

one great fact of interpenetrative causation,

four positions of the host and guest

whistle belly thumps

You send a meatloaf:

suave vulnus charitatis

gladius amoris

me vulnera

Behold the nadir:

Tension resolved at noon,

you show your O face without a

figure from the lips of your eye,

an unhorrified evacuation (full of sound and fury!)

against an art nouveau wall, de-

flowering indifference of liberation (a wonder to behold),

the separate substances: you produce a large unimpeachable

radish, ridenti colocasia, a rotted potato and la cookie

a chocolate kiss on a drop of hammered blood (a puddle

of frozen piss in the Pure Land—

and valor and luxury in a lonely place)

A little one is separated from the body—

la goutte d’encre apparantée à la nuit sublime—

and produces an author.

And why not?  Refrigerator art can change too!

huc ades; quis est nam ludus in undis?

sinister filaments in a thick, gelatinous substance

outraging two enameled shady serpents

which part the bears—

frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis

yes, divine justice like a sex poemmmm,

a combustion from below to make

Christian hell smell like a sweet sachet

and your back crack, knees freeze and

needled, observed liver quiver.

It raised the wall, and houses too

(and silenced the Sybil).

Perchè sei tu sì smarrito?

   And then a green apple quick step

Stouty lobby lizard stampede to the hereafter!

Fear of compelling interfaces and forms from this place:

Austerity of virgins, sobriety of slaves,

Outmoded shadows, children’s laughter.

I drank, from the clear milky juice allaying

Thirst, and refreshed—heads without name

Then made covered water at great need

Clutching seven unequal marsh reeds

Bio break: one thrill sweet grass, one pulse in bitter weed

Fue una vaga congoja de dejarte

Lo que me hizo saber que to quería.

et durae quercus subadunt roscida mella

Reader, can you help observe

that some things are like big, long words?

Who then devised the torment? 

Love, reinvented in perfect measure.

Io no lo intendo, sì parla settile.

Love took my hand, and smiling replied,

Who made eyes but I?  You were born in the sky.

A part of labor and a part of pain

(then reduced, somewhat, by wind).

The young in one another’s arms.

send out words and blood together from a tear

(there is no flying hence or tarrying here).

Radiantly sit down, love, and taste my meat.

Give me a gash, put me to present pain—

Beauty ripped by a boar.

Quick now, here, now, always—it’s Zen

Now and now

Teldeath I am coming.

He made time.

As men more like gluttinous swine

No checkypoo?

Wan wu sheng yu?

Yu sheng wu.

You who are a copy,

what is your name?

What is your name?

An sich?

Für sich.

Yanwai ngoh hai yat goh

Centing buck why-foo biby

Bit Hat.  No Cattle.

O—mm—okay?

Todestelle

Work my loom and visit my bed,

Leave me in peace and go.

Love is the wind

Frühling, der liebliche Knabe

Erring, erring

Under the lash of a lust

Which drives them—

Mongrels of the summer

(their life so pressing

but one undressing—

steady aiming at the tomb),

Taking enlightenment in the end,

Noisy sausage party of clerics, men of letters and neoterics,

nulli certa domus

Loud sky and silent sea,

Butterflies struggling in a vacuum,

Grief pouring out through their eyes—nurse

(conceived in the false cow,

with secret traces a concave womb re-worded—

they would have been lucky if they

had never been given cattle!—to devour entire! raw!)

grief in a gutter and give the world to chance,

Come here, boo boo, come give me dein Hand.  Sit here:

Cattywompus from there.  Did you ring?  Give me a pearl.

Stop sneezing and cool your spleen. 

Shake it off.  Bounce.  Call 647-8262.

Cheese.  Cancel past that.  Wake up.

Climb out of your K-hole and suck a slaughtered pig’s ass.

Thus gone, suckle Diana’s green breasts.

Snap on a feed-bag—or eat yourself to lessen pain.

Such an unlucky hand!  Symbolized

by five stars.  Your guest star is Karuna.

Mr. Netsuke, a mekiki with a Buddha-hand citron.

Observe your faults

Observe you.  In drag of regret.  Wahrheit und Richtigkeit.

Leering like the screensucking sun from the clouds. 

Real sun.  Don’t be too brazen!

A hooded monk, and toilet bowl soup.

Do you have a Pinto for sale?  Sell the Buick—

and put a Cadillac in a Ford!

Gaffle some skrill.  Gank now from then. 

Scarf Round Robin.  Sorrow,

sorrow.  Numbers are never spoken;

bodies by Cézanne or Dr. Seuss

Hope never comes that comes to all

Violence is done to one of three

From such soulful amberlight nothing can give shade,

and heaven is out of view. 

Anglican einfühlung is not appealed to.

   Your doom is in this sky

(the point of the infinite is sharp!),

Wherein you behold, in the délices

de Kermoune (the truth cannot be told without prejudice),

A bossy Hebraic homily in colloidal borrowed gold—

Clashing words in the air suspended,

unequal language in the agitated air—

Wherein perfection lives on in some Cartesian void

Raining points, even after its life has been destroyed,

Ideals unrealized so adformation unjustified.

The center thrice to the utmost pole.

Soleil, soleil, faute éclatante!  Job and Sophocles.

Offers no relief, and does not share in the banks of Ocean.

Remorse smiles up from the Bay. 

Fishes quiver in the seiche tone

on the unjust horizon.  Upward man and downward fish.

La cité d’Ys, la Sodome noyée.  Leman.

BHAG.  Ding-dong, bell.

In the circus of fixed destinies

Da ist kein “humanity”—

Only time devils, The Ape’s Problem and profanity.

The medical specialist and the painter,

The death light collector and the headlight child,

A nightingale named Ruth, the Green Man,

The gris-gris and the bochio, buoi and giogo,

The guey professor and the Negro twin

Brothers who are the only child of two mothers

(they perch like swallows and like swallows go),

Louis, Sir Sinister Palindrome in the sex act,

his two-faced silent echo sister;

Prince Fondle, OMO in encaustic emerging

from an acrostic on pride,

Hu Nu in a porkpie hat (McNamara with

a mouthful of bad teeth),

Hector with his stutter, phantom Helen

(her fair face) with her beauty spot,

Aeneas short and fat, that Greek chap Clitoris,

   And circus animals and animulae:

A veiled Maya, secret moonshine shopper, voluptuous fox,

Scapegoats and branch-grabbing

monkeys, scampering Chinese rat,

Un qui passait

Son ombre changée en souris

Fuyait dans le ruisseau

Baron Grimm the geology conductor,

hunting an Irish Atlantis in the swastika (facial?)

entrails of a greedy praying mantis,

Mr. Jimmy the mad hatter, a malignant turbaned dwarf

and eunuch deprived of the extension of his poetic unit,

Ursula Major the minor, Easter, Erato,

Suzy Sansouci and the Disappearing Master,

Buddha doing kung fu yoga in rose

midair, the immoralist Goethe,

Sue Kasana and Rick Shasana,

Colombo, Sardinian Foolio, Molina,

a yummy mummy reek-of-estrogen Sybillina,

the donna dello schermo and the melting girl in pig-tails,

Cowfaced and owleyed,

All look down from out the stair

from the pages of the Revue nue

What minor tearless gods are there (with such hair!)

light little people sous le ciel neutre

in corresponding Tiepolo air

(a phenomenon which I have often noticed)

twining deceitful faces of hope and despair?

If life is a dream, what does it foreshadow?

Who has a bird’s head

among the gods of imperturbable upper air?

Hakuryo still withholds the mantle

re-releases an immortal fox from a Chinese box

I met them all thirty years ago

for twenty minutes in some open studio

and endured a session

with poetry praised as an obsession: persiflage,

Duchamp playing chess in a mirage.

They created everything: God, money hash, time.

They’re not even listening.

a palimpsest on a Poussin

a dragon of the air

They don’t ever care.

White raisins, beautiful virgins

(blessed hoochie ladies in the sphere) and vaporized glass

Veronese and borzoi.

Melting schoolboy, wardrobe mistress and groom.

Fate yields to chance and chaos.

   The ecstatic princesse nocturne, la Muse camarde

ici pose, works a crucigram

and turns the worked and patient dark Marseille card

(you watch her, frowning,

as if she were speaking while drowning—

she foretold twentysomethings—

their hair uncut—who look seventy years old!):

look at yourself through inner other lost eyes: dormandise

aspire to taste bitter fire

avoid four (the black eagle), the fifth and hell’s wan

king; owl competes with first black swan:

seek protection of the serpent king,

a literary terrorist plants word bombs,

til dawn I can’t do anything.

Kingfisher and Fisher King.  BHNC.

Young man and melting girl in spring.

You have a predetermined number of breaths;

don’t hurry things—dream of me at your identical death.

Lord! You were once ideally ordered selves

who met over a rag in Munich in 1912—

you are asleep, let me speak first:

Tell me and I will tell you if you know

you resemble Foucault?  You must meet two women.

   I’m losing you.

I see you’ve given your soul away,

but masterful heaven has intervened to save it:

when small men cast long shadows then the sun is setting.

What is the one word?  Being.  Who speaks it?  Truth.

What is meant

by an autistic designer of abbatoir equipment?

If you’re not living on the edge, you’re wasting space.

Orderly beauty of mass destruction,

whether military or industrial I cannot see,

lost death eyes cannot be read with such certainty.

Byron dan les îsles, et Shakespeare encore

From fat morning to noon they fell

Seraphim in an avalanche, hit and hit

Apotheotic collapse joining heaven and earth

Craters through flames

Bells from gorges

Rung

From noon to dewy eve—

A summer’s day—and with the setting sun

Tone

Yet in that sound the earliest names

have all faded away;

Yet in that Word the weaker words

have long since died;

and the paler images also

have melted away in the seal of the spectrum.

Des fanums qe’éclaire la rentrée des theories, d’immenses vue

(mock) Tone

God Pantocrator, Ur-Glossator, in half-empty heaven

(when 4=7),

as God might be, conceived in adhocracy,

incumbent on air though shorn of his beams,

riding in molto forte C major, phosphorescence

and smoking Boucher clouds of conscious

unknowing upon the second black swan of melody,

Passing through brazen screaming tempestuous skies

of tumbling carp and butterflies

twittering predatory swallows and funky

wavelets à la Hokusai

(earth-born clouds vacate lost eyes

but Aphrodite renounces flux as her lucid curves crystallize),

borne into eternity upon selfful extended wings

of passionate things—ingenious lovely things,

flying in a dancing sleeve

of Thracian hail, false flags of rank indecency

Signing off on consistency,

Parousia of the logos, topos and tapas.

Measuring properties of angels in a Maya-like world.

The royal banners press forward (those banners come not in),

Tityrus is Arion and rides a dolphin

the Secret of the Cross is shining and

The flower pities the bee

for its fascist intertextuality,

in incommensurate mastery God hates 9 but loves 3

and throws an onion into the sea,

Christ Hospitaler [death]

Intones from the Cross,

“Heaven is to die for.”

We were all with Moses then, he

was drinking from a fire hose,

was under the cloud and in the sea,

mimicking mortality and immortality.

He transforms himself each salmon day anew.  I can’t hear you.

Bearing the skin of himself,

Peter the grudge bearer rails at ninth

Heaven.  cantus infirmus  Making all, unmade

unnamed universal He in the immense juniper shade

All over the map like an old tree

Black cloud occludes the sun

Like a Cubist collage, and then

Love clasps Grief lest both be drowned and

Homeless fearful sun dépose sa pontificale étole,

sleeps under the disappointed Bridge again,

The dead a talisman for men.

   righteous cock and noble balls

God swallows a phallus

Hercules fresh from harsh austerities,

disturbed by his own feces

discovers in it the pure concord of Empedocles

but without the strength to force the moment to its crisis,

addict Christ Adonis still half-brother to refined (wimpy) Dionysus

Achilleus—tiny two eyes, broad-shouldr’d

and pindick—impregnates

Hyperbolic Sinbad the fleeing leech-gatherer

and pea-green Atlantic

sucks up his wooden ship.

C’est Galathée aveuglant Pygmalion!

Impossible de modifier cette situation.

Only heroes redeem Eros.

Homosexual Diana and Camilla

Without concern for the meaning of marriage

Posterity decides everything and understands nothing.

Rome had its cuts too.

And Rome died.  Who is the blind starer?

As gods toward their rest—

Youthful Chinese figures on a gilded hearse—

Listen, why can’t you, who

Are a copy, as fat night passes shamelessly:

BOTTOM WATER DEEP

LIGHT NO IMMORTALITY

THAT ONE BREATHE

THE CORD OF EXISTENCE

Tapas? Heat by body

Kavi? Designates the Saint

Soma? South of Market,

where the sun’s rays never penetrate.

Zophos

but rinse their beams under Aquarius.

A third black swan in a labyrinth.

Collocation, ascetic conjunction,

Fire and Love and connectile dysfunction.

Eat the leaves, and give the pain,

an outlet in each tear.  Sad young man, cradler, on a train

contemplating poetry etched upon the window pane.

words found in the poet

What is young and old, and old and young?

II

This world has forgotten many things.

Which is the natural man

and which the spirit?

Who deciphers them?

Fame is a consensus of sorts.  What undermines it?

A bald face unbaptized, a blacksmith and his help,

tickled a pickl’e, tossed the salad and transferred data points.

made a clam dive, whacked the mole,

tied up the toa’d and christened the cat, shaved their balls

and galloped the lizar’d, killed Nan-ch’uan’s kitte’n,

played with a fat dill piec’e, a turtl’e and waxed the dolphi’n.

Paratactic son of man, you who are a copy,

Distinct configuration of selves (not entirely verbal

Pace atlas and iron herbal),

Viral phallucinogenic penis rising at morning to meet you—

bootstrapped, no less alive for that

Out of the sea of spinning sound

On entre à cheval

Huge leviathans forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands

In the feast of nights

Heart full of sorrow as the sea of sands.

Shadow governments inch toward the birth light.

   Kingfishers catch fire in a painting by Dali.

Europe after the rain—dance Monster.

Yes, did you ring?  I can’t hear you.

Do you feel

me?  Clear karma which is real

persistent rolling wheels

Radiant Ezekiel sitting in an open field

Greek steam engine and Aztec wheel

A scented citron hand from the cloud emerges

(bird’s round eye in the

palm),

holding a chart expanded—

The living lost eye—searching past and future—

of a gargantuan reordering,

A monumental ordering

of the doubly-contaminated eightfold way.

Great sea-horses bare their teeth

and laugh at the dawn.

Out of the sea of unjust sound

Freedom!

Freedom from tolerance, freedom from intolerance.

Freedom from freedom, freedom from servitude.

Freedom from mortality, freedom from immortality.

Freedom from indifference, freedom from concern.

Freedom from love, freedom from hate.

Freedom from sickness, freedom from health.

Freedom from poverty, freedom from wealth.

Freedom from death, freedom from life.

Freedom from darkness, freedom from light.

FREEDOM.

   Maitreya, schist, with the knowledge fist,

shake the tree, repress the mountain and startle the fish:

The gadfly clung like a nymphomaniac,

A hermaphroditic self-eating devourer of “the” dead

(identifiable by the necessary white patch on the rear).

I am the dog.

No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog,

a seven-year postwoman, a witch’s dog unearthed

from the sewers—

Hypospadias, urethral opening on the underside.

Warred on by cranes.

Kaum erwacht, hört’ ich dein Rufen,

Stürmte zu den Felsenstufen,

Hin zur gelben Wand am Meer.

Heil!  Da kamst du schon gleich hellen

Diamantnen Stromesschnellen

Sieghaft von den Bergen her.

Me, the heart moving toward the heart

Moving through the heart toward moving the heart

Love moved me.  Love has made me speak.

Todestelle.

Ist auf deinem Psalter,

Vater des Liebe, ein Ton

Seinem Ohre vernehmlich,

You who are a copy,

So erquicke sein Herz!

Öffne den umwolkten Blick

Über die tausend Quellen

Neben dem Durstenden

In der Wüste.

We move above the moving yew

Tree in light upon the figured leaf

Observe the black hunter and conversion of the Jew

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the vengeful boar

Pursue their pattern as before—

Only this, and nothing more:

terror and oblivion.

Beauty ripped by a boar.

Kill a boar and prove your name.

exultatio secura cantantium,

concordia summa laudantium,

lex mentis, lex in membris,

rixa cupiditatis

victoria charitatis

O qui dira les torts de la Rime?

infin che il mar fu sopra noi richiuso

Et son égal en pureté et son égal en piété

Ma Dame et Saint Michel

bénissez

A leper once he lost and gained a king

They had no son but the helmsman had his poem

These noisy cities are not my cities

East to New York

Far East to Japan

West to the Tyrean whore.

Gitmo and Indokorea

Tibetan Kalachakra

Merger, Japan

six great cities, 36000 years

Germany hears from every corner of heaven

Russia brings poetry

They’re making a circle out of a star

Pierrette in chains

The owl upon the wall

Banked

Where Michael bent proud spirits under law

[red star] We are [red star]

non iniussa cano

III

During the fat day

(and I mean this in a nighttime way)

We were alive to sunlit terrors

Syntax deceived us

With its sound-form phenocrysts

And obelisks swam in amethyst

Des noms barbares hurlés par les rafales roulés,

Sous les larmes sourdes, cases

Dans les brisants et perdus en

Chair de poule sur les marais

In sleep we are free.

In ambrosial night, still awake at 4 AM, eos erigeneia,

Aiolos, word and mind eponymous,

Castor and Pollux hapax,

Parrity and disparity,

synonymous, fractious fractals,

Mind dirt and broken ash, grimy ash over exhausted ground,

We are in mourning,

Knowing neither zophos nor eos,

That is, neither life nor death, but rather,

One longing for the other.

death unrelated to life

Or rather:

And die, being dead.  The world’s asleep,

the night keeps phonemic silence

and delivers dynamic convergence.

From where does the faded horny sun-in-moon emanate?

Dull, small astonished Equinox 1 moon has forced

the tie-dyed sun away,

This is the hour and the third day,

The bride stripped bare becomes the wife

And Strindberg wields a palette knife,

Dante is a foreign car,

Rimbaud a movie star.

Babbling all its foolish past

English, its head in a bag, goes down in babble at last.

Imagine all of

humanity leading you to chance death.

I know I do.

breuis est uia

You come too.

   Do you see what I see?

What is the date today?

What have the waves done wrong?

Even if it is not true

Even in despite of truth

We must maintain it anyway

Valence blinds and other valences

Logology made flesh

Il est minuit comme une flèche.…

We now enter the author’s gallery of grotesques

We hope you’re very lonely

Because it’s For Madmen Only.  Here you see unfurled

like a backdrop in a security theatre, the embodied world:

Featureless midnight, deceptive, itchy-fingered dawn

(sacred if only for the mask it grants you)

An AI insect climbs the tree of knowledge

the two taxations

animal-fantasies

Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque

First on your right side,

Breathing like the sea you are

Breathing like the sea in your black sack,

Between sleeping and waking

That postmodern krak of language breaking

Investing shadows with lucid rot

Notional stones with meteorological clot

as it were, fraught

with floating debris of mediaeval psychothought

(and reality with too much Eliot—

didn’t he have false teeth and put his wife

in an asylum?  They must have had a falling out—

he thought habit would atone for all his sins;

is it by rat choice

he exorcised the ghostly voice?)

It is typical of the mediaeval mind

to find meaning in concrete images of this kind

deep in shit, and blaming someone else for it

   Then on your back,

Turning beauty into a soggy sameness

Then face downward

—but at last a patient sad spider (Penelope)

brushes your lost black deconflicted diamond eye.

e li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare.

Beautiful body as you are,

you’re dead now: karmic retribution. XX

Two hours before cold and passionate dawn, in the sudden thunder of 59 mounting precursor fourth black swans—

warmly rejecting number—

and graphic figuration of the beyond

of the fertility myth and Ariel’s song

With burning sorrow, you appear upon

the identical mulleted lugubrious lawn

  Carpeted with yawns

And plant an oar in the radius of Venus.

Standing on your head: feces,

baby and penis—an infinite number of species.

Infra great sea-horses laugh at the dawn.

A cuckoo is erect in a good oak coffin

Sounding the knell of the vast hours.

Behold the man that loved and lost:

Des noms qui ont des voix

You rise, to wander, from your crib,

the cavernous waste shore,

bitter endive and ammonium chloride,

painting your white sister’s image on the ground,

Distractedly, jaded, along the line of narcissurf—

The unharvested seat of desolation, void of birth light—

Heart full of sorrow, disconsolate chimera tail in your mouth,

Forsaking unsounded deeps, lost in loss itself,

Cast out you are cast down, sand in your hand,

Blamestorming your world with sorrow’s wind and rain.

Des noms qui ont des voix

That one, that of so many myriads fallen,

Yet one returned not lost,

pour quêter un linceuil.

A sigh is the spirit come into this world.

From a sack of mute sounds

With twilight wrapped round

In a sordine enveloped:

“Rain, rain.”  With hints of burnt siena,

Padua at the marsh stains

the covered waters of Vicenza

and exploits intuitive supply-chains.

nec lacrimis crudelis Amor

The white rock, the gates of the sun,

The community of dreams.

Solus, si liceret, tota die sederet,

Libros versaret vel reversaret

Yes, paler for sorrow than a milk-white dove.

One by one the stains that kisses made

In biting cold and burning sunlight fade.

Io vegno il giorno a te infinite volte

No, no, he’s gone—it zoots you:

I’m losing you.

Before dawn his glory and monuments are gone.

Je ne retrouverai plus ma petite folie.

He is not here; but far away

in the inexhaustible fountain of beauty’s spray.

Devoid of return.

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,

J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,

Tellement aimé ton ombre

   In pilgrimage, bearing their cry inshore, long-legged gulls,

the albatross of the tempest, indignant

horny fifth black swans,

the kingfishers, Slavic ducks and warning geese are still there.

Veuve avant épouse car la mer est jalouse

You parch your skin and lose

Your bronze hair.  Inbaked, you see, or dream you see, di gonna in gonna,

3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n’ont rien à faire avec la sauvagerie

the throne of Lachesis in the talismanic dreamland—

Dream of Tangiers, American dream, Parisian dream—

You dream you throw embers, and a key,

in 62 rushing streams.

You are your Mother’s prophetic language dream.

Voluble flowers, stones look on.  Eliot’s dream.

Each is another’s bad dream.

Todestelle

Liebster, Liebster, der Morgen kommt.

Was sol ich allein hier tun?

In diesem endlosen Leben,

In diesem Traum ohne Grenzen und Farben.

Der Morgen trennt uns, immer der Morgen.

Wieder en ewiger Tag des Wartens.

I think there is nothing to be seen in light

But

The Muffled Gentleman and the ghost of Moritz.

No one can take my death from me.

Ignoring the strobes and tones,

Watered but cool in an ice age,

Before the pastoral obelisk, a symbol

and its tristitia we have put away,

On the descending ass-end of space you brood,

on an unjust wandering grave and rapid

cooling of nearby lands,

unpregnant of your cause, drawing resolution from despair,

Make it pregnant, and state an elegiac mood.

Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods.

Memory, and perception, and expectation.

Memory, and perception, and expectation.

that

what

how

where

when

why

if

March 10

if you know that you are but not what you are,

what you are but not how you are,

how you are but not where you are,

where you are but not when you are,

when you are but not why you are,

why you are but not if you are,

if you are but not that you are,

what you are but not that you are…

the hundred negations

The dead are a talisman for the living.

Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venire?

A restless seeming, dreadless, unlooking back,

Too full for sound and fury

Having shaken the oak, you turn again

in an allegory of the letter

to your memory palace and obscene confessor,

litigious tame Superman,

A sickle with never a handle

Your oar become a winnowing-fan,

Thoughts all a case of knives: Christ

Glittering with hatred,

You think: …solida casa di pietra squadrata e liscia…

Keeping your anger bright: Kleist

(you scare your melancholy).

Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore.

Eroma erpmes arapir litneg roc la.

Leonardo cradling a baby

Dusty garments committed to amber earth

before the swept threshold

of your hummer house: thou shalt die, and not live.

   Your house is empty, your late birds have flown.

In that bright unique tomb, and taking the

measure of that room, again—

descend the staircase, drink the poison and enter the tomb—

you destroy half your brain, mesh intuitive content

you go to bed

but cannot sleep with sleep

perceptions out of wedlock

recorded time

power to thyself, in singleness thy state

indictable on several grounds, self-indicted on them all

but all the while take the Fifth—and smile

Your watch must be fast

   Microwaiting, you must eat your medicinal meal (frying gravel),

asphalt, salt, pennyroyal and delirium (but not fish)

drink chocolate+blood+mescaline—nothingness—

amber, viscous and sawdust

from the cinnabar vase of the seven gods, from a cow’s hoof,

sweeten it with eater and eaten,

   jazz bachelor, to melodious thunk,

check your airline schedule and carrier pigeons,

observe teeth, the black snakes and kids

(you’re the man who built the pyramids!),

talk your book, defend to the devil the literal level,

cut off your eyelids,

nurse your habitus, brew your blood via sacred induction—

vengeance listen to a fool’s request—

manfully strive to squeeze your lemon dry

to step off the mad 51 bus, brush success

gridmaster, accept the armor and hoist your ass

into the noisy upper middle class—howl your howls,

but a draw a web out of your willow bowels

before the coveted crow and incestuous owl;

between the intention and the act

build a fire in the digestive tract.

It would be some kind of music.

   Thus gone, you do the bars, keeping your heart

and other inner organs, in Canopic jars.

Work harder, jog faster (keeping going)

then consult the horny Wu Li master.

Take 17 different immortal vitamin and deer market pills

then a hike into scores and spores

of the alchemic Berkeley hills.

You must learn to confirm

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in Esperanto,

frantic to become a reactionary romantic.  Wake

up.  Vous êtes mal armé.

Defend cliffs in stages

O captain of the rear guard,

nor trust too early to reluctant soil

a whole year’s hopes.

To make things clearer talk to the

orangoutang in the subtle mirror

(in which, like a Catholic Ulysses,

you see everywhere the turnless turning cosmic face

fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne—

wisdom’s reward for running life’s race—

but the finished man sees his enemies),

mirrored mirrors the mirroring mirrored;

whilst a three-legged white raven warns you: be craven.

Dead the warrior, dead his glory,

Above all, dead the cause in which he died.  Deja poo.

Practice pinning a ghost on a cactus.

   Your eyebrows fall out of the window of the hearing:

raw vegetables and cooked vegetables.

You open a door onto a constitutional

Right, the fact of knowledge (we don’t

tell the Jew!—transfixed by SM hash dog-whistle politics):

omnis feret omnia tellus

If anything, the opposite.

You’re back from where you went,

and become the constellation Virgo.

You sense a theatrical police presence.

You honor your limits and complete your partial mind.

Gathering string: “Right now I’m washing my feet”—

spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

   The stricken sun is not named, but his

hash power is amongst us:

Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts,

Just, stereometric bees with smoke, and

doves in mid-air with noisome stench.

And de se borner à connaître de près les belles choses, et

À s’en nourrir en exquis amateurs,

En humanistes accomplis.

Rimbaud with a cyst.  A diseased face shadowed by Catholicism.  Pretty as a pietà.

Bees from an unhappy cello come

Summoned by a deathless damask drum.

By wasps and hornets stung.

A dog dreams of a happy ending.

I charm asleep—and when I will, awake—the eyes of men.

Poetry from raw pork and opium.

They vibrate in the dark, and remain below language.

“You taught me language, malice, and I know how to curse.”

True dat.

quia amore langueo

and endless rooms of endless houses with

marble draperies, emerald chairs

and copper halls, violet corridors and

three tumbled ancestral ivory stairs

above or below? enharmonic elevations

leading to houses and—muffled scansion—endless

rooms, failures of wise

deconflicted diamond corridors to lead to endless rooms of

chemical red velvet houses and

Princess Eavesdrop, aka Belle Headache

aka Matelda Hale-Bopp,

a yellow-mouthed baby in oppression blue, her pet

tricked out chimps, Fantoche et Josette:

“I don’t care!” she screams,

“if you invented air!

There’s a real image there!

You only have so many breaths;

do you want to hurry up your death?

Vines and creepers, my melting girl!  You

haven’t killed your lower-case self yet?  I can’t hear you.

   The five vowels gave birth to you,

and passion turned you blue.

It’s time you got off that sofa, Mary (she was born in “the” sky)

(she hides her literature: she’s drained life to the dregs,

her arms are like forelegs—

how did she get in? she preens

and eats apricots where everyone can see her naked skin,

undoes herself across nine acres,

farts up a sky and expends her yellow labor—

she’s as tarty, farty and arty as Astarte

(her lovers discluded Sraffa and Malaparte)—

   in full view of bewildered neighbors:

the tricks of this dominatrix! the trysts of this Iscolde!

she reminds me of spilt covered water and

my long-lost daughter).  I’m losing you.

Viewless wind always brings a blush to

Phoebe avaricious of life,

The moon spots to destructive Bea cowardly as a spider

who never could bear much reality

and who, for that matter,

in thought, word and act always

smells of the fish of the sea—

she’d suck whiskey off a sore leg;

silk comes out of both sides of her mouth.

   To hell with her—and I mean that in a heavenly way.

Ma jolie (Rrose Mystica), you’ve

a run in your hose—you’ve been drinking from the fire hose—

don’t **look down the dot of your reversible Roman nose

in the anger of the pose!  You’re the opposite of prose.

   Marianne? takes it in her recuperating can

(she was “traded” between Bellmer and de Man, but

shat on Lacan—cauterise her sinus!

she sings of anger—and of her man)

nevertheless sees in Sanskrit and Chinese

the five elements and ten degrees:

she doesn’t see the forest for the trees

(what can I say? she digs sleaze)—

she just wishes she had a brain pearl! seeks “peace,”

has applied for it to the Bureau of Release.

Lulu (the first Mrs. Milton), in five signs—qu’elle est—

of an angel’s decline,

guides us all—or did, before her fall

(this Cinderella came late to the ball,

wearing a necklace of ping-pong balls!).

   She has an hyperbolic eye in her forehead:

she has monetized eyes—wha-what’s that you say?

What do you know about my image duplicator?

—for days!  They rest, like Keats’ vectors, in relays.

I suppose love’s blind heart conquers all.

What a fright! with her triple sight.

   Let me make this clear: in childbirth, she lost her mind over a mirror.

She hides her writing (her perfumed periods stink!).

She longed to see the top of her head.

She was born in an extant lotus and

flipped a coin as she rode on a shameless tortoise—

not to be believed! but what has my scolding ever achieved?

terror and oblivion.  She never

comes until Hugo (aka Basil), her anticipointment, gosee, her

arrival, leaves

(in love those two are one)—

   don’t worry about this nymph, I’m giving her (too much!) notice.  Enough; no more.

She’s not as sweet as she was before. 

They’re not people—they’re napkins: clockroaches!

Don’t even think about it—you have your music too!  This

is a chambered tomb à la Poe, a poem: what do you care?

She’s history, she’s talking a closed book.

   Dream on: you’ll always love her, and she’ll always be there.

Although she does not know, she is quite dead—

that’s in a life-enhancing way,

if you can see that in a light more than that of salmon day!

On whom is this joke being played?

Are you an undertaker’s hamburger? an occasional bachelor?

a fool in a shower? a meatball sundae?  I’m cold.  Menoporsche!

You’re throwed off.  Find everything

Here first. Listen, my little personette.  This is my advice,

my six-wired bird of paradise

(did Prince Albert ring?):

Next time you go out,

pack your cock in ice,

hide your syntax—

It’s much the safest way.

This is the hour and the day.

It’s not that anonymity is your best defense:

You are anonymous.  Get over it or emigrate to Saturn.  Have you

moved to Atlanta?  You are so dramatical!  You have Rachel tension.

It runs from the family.

Obsolescence is the mother of invention.

—the mother of invention.  Symbol of change.

What is your name?

What is your name?

Enlightenment is an ember not a flame.

Etor in her mouth.  “Baseball.”  Baudelaire and baseball

Voi che’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete

You know her: the spiky-haired postfeminist,

rather screechy—

she blinds you with botox science—

hey, she gets off on that, OK?

Polymath, polyglot, or

fashionable nonsense idiot, psychopath?

devotee of Derrida or simple

carping dogged barren Hecuba?—

anyway, she wanted to spank the shit out of Nietzsche

(he stood for formless norms a-and normless forms

which he hurled against life in nine fearful storms)

with the telephone:

BFO: I just could not understand the feminine blank—what,

and get that syphilis all over your hand?

(This shows how little you know—

she reached perfect enlightenment countless eons ago.)

epizootics of the blowhole

perdrix sans orange

a hieroglyph in a chicken

La jeune demoiselle à l’ivoirin paroissien

Modestement rentre au logis

persons haunted by a bird

to hell (in an eggshell) in the middle of our days

complete and pure as a polished shell

in the freezone Mercky narcotic of Ravel we go

with an old flame, Michelangelo

The bottle: “There is one among the relanguaged birds,

among the fish and among men one, perfect.”

words found in the poet

You should be forced to live out on the streets,

Eating your beard.

It’s your hat makes you mad.

It’s absurd.  Let’s leave the initiative to loan-words

(follow that bird!), try these:

Michelangelesque acorns—and baby birds!

Ignore the strobes and tones.

…les demains sont morts.

Zosted, imagine! drinking Mai Tais on the island of Ififi.

Feel into the moonness of your dog.  Which is my right leg?

Ring for an oscillating mushroom.  

I’ll language you: from the thigh lengthening.  Source it…

Get down this way often?  I’ll mirror you. 

Are you up for grabs?  Bee break.

   When small men cast long shadows then the sun is setting.

   I should give up tarts.  Reverse sixth black swan. 

I should have followed the arts.

I mean, that’s not O.K.—and I mean that in an O.K. way;

you could be meaningful—

and I mean that in meaningless way.

brittle Peking duck, savory M & M: Olympic dining

See this finger?  It’s a toe.  Someone shot my dog Munich.  He has a peppermint bark.  You cannot be deprived

of glorious haven if you follow your star.

With time—Josette (look at her turquoise

ring)!  Ne touchez pas!—

I have 0 tolerance for intolerance

it’s an occupation for a saint.

ppp We know what you mean by the second coming—

The wind take you.  Your highness, if I live a thousand years,

I’ll have your corpse spanked til enameled.  I overstand—

marry yourself in San Francisco.

Prince Fondle, I’ll eat your divine liver

over and over and throw it in the first meeting of local rivers.

Christ I’ve got eyes for your peacock:

your figure is striking—

you must have made a language to your liking.

You ought to go

On a barcode rape safari to Colorado

In Georgia O’Keeffe’s truck!

Speak of pearls before swine and you hear their wings.

You’re a bird of very ill omen—you’re such a monet.

Be less great to be less ridiculous—

golden frog of Supata, get off the

white stag and take a lilac, go;

mouse, put off holiness and put on intellect,

feed fat sheeple and sing a blind slender song. 

   Mr. 9, go eat your Jack in the Box.  Convoy.

Take a dog’s-eye view: mold the characterological.

Only an asshole is scatological—

that dark brown hash god with its red aureole!

You’re a case of involuntary certitude.

If things are so bad, why haven’t we noticed?

Little Coriolanus, you plunge your dart into

A supplicating mother’s purple heart.

Ne touchez pas!  Fantoche!  Wench!

I tell you this: you’ll leave a perfect corpse.

Right Dao, wrong day.

Some people were born

to be humiliated: Happy Birthday—

and have a great day!”

   Vous avez l’organe bien perdu.

Et lui comprit trop bien, n’ayant pas entendu.

But when you are dead you are not: what good is humanity? 

And keep blowflies away.

Contemplate

a world of things.

Weave and reweave, homage and regret.

Parfait chemiste, dull-witted ambassador

of the purposive cliché, Lunchin’

Drinkin ’em pretty,

Unfolded man, you wouldn’t dream of putting your

Tongue into their mouths

After you see them urinate, first

Some jelly beans,

Then a tiny ravening fish

sucer la chair d’un coeur élu,

ravening like autumn shears through century after century

Then strawberry seeds

and a thin little silver spangled polar snake

which bursts upon the ground.

Certum and verum

Forming the New Society

Out of the Shell of the old.

Word become flesh.

A fallen branch

Becomes a tether

Becomes a snake

Becomes a lazy postwoman

Becomes a cleft in a rock

Woman from rock and rock from woman

n’est que femme encore

the death of a beautiful postwoman is poetry

A flock of scarlet pigeons

columba mea in foraminibus petrae

Thunders imprecations, name and place,

Then in vigil plunge through meadows of flame

Into a thicket of somber emerald lace.

I wish I had been a tree

I wish I had been a fish

I wish I had been a melting young girl

Laforgue Baudelaire

Mallarmé Corbière

Despising hope and adoring despair

A blue, period gaberdined lunatic holds out the

rosy fingers of her immense phthisic hand,

soaked in a sweat of black venom,

Zoe ugly as a turd, vodka snorter and self-slasher

who bleeds at certain words

Chipper gluttonous Madonna of the garbage can

holy terror and carbon-based error,

can’t find herself in the mirror

(one of six daughters of a dead Indian and a three-legged Jew,

“I’m not waiting for the bus, I’m waiting for truth, for hell!”

pitched battle of well-matched oblivion and terror

“Richistanis!  Monkeys fly out of my butt.”

Of many thousand kisses the poor last.

The Nazi Yeats would say, “This one’s colossal—

A poor woman with the soul of an apostle.”

Your basic grousing homeless freak

here given a pomo tweak.

trails darkness as a robe,

sells ointment to kill dead moles, bio break,

smells like a Protestant church),

In America’s green and pleasant land.

Thank you for your letter.  We are doing very well here.  We have work and we are well treated.  We await your arrival.  We are working towards the Führer.

weltanschauliche

vernichtet warden  Bildung und Vernichtung

Whiter than butter on a ground

like a shower of red coagulate gore,

I am not used to live in a cage,

I only live, I only live

In the green forest,

My goal being modest:

To turn objective ideas into myths, Lord

The borrowed language we use today, will live forever

I only live in the green forest,

Fly up on mulberry branches,

Above the silent sea

And orchids in their mimickry

Of mortality—or immortality

As evolution circles relativity;

I eat pine-nuts, I drink pearl-dew, the food for glory.

breathless mouth of a golden bird

Quickly, you who are a copy,

run to where the passage starts!

And was that past life a dream?

Where sobbing Idea, like a rétiaire,

combs her girl’s mane in this people’s

garden, softly speaking tandemly repeated genes

(in which ontogenic concretion

recapitulates phylogenic abstraction!)—

Or was that only possible which came to pass?

IV

What largesse of bright air—

in which shuffled ducks flee M eagles, dogs attack a hare—

clothing the vales in dazzling light, is here!

in which everything, in dropped wind,

is a cylinder or a sphere.

Is this the most damned city, the region, the soil, the clime

Amidst spurge-laurel, vengeful heliotrope, cypress and thyme

Of one who cannot be changed by alltime?

Hier ist kein warum.

The year is at its nicest now.

Don’t praise cosmic paired cups when you can see 100 cows,

make yellow patches, quote a sutra,

or see the ship of the vow.

All things that love the desolate sun

are out of doors.  Infra wind-driven souls

on gilded runners run.

   Maitreya, schist, sclerosis and Farinata and

in the voiceless shady tamarisk and applauding juniper

curative fourth bear garden

of a reciprocal fresco of Siena we glimpse

the clouded leopard, Enhydris Gyii, smoky honeyeater,

and fashionable hyena devouring—its share of ecstasy—

the triple refuge of a Lady

while a fawning feral impotent poet

makes love to a lesbian lady

Distracted, tonal garden!  Hiatus.

Painting, not prose, is the opposite of poetry

ut bos piger palaestrae exerceat

aut asinus segnis inter spheristarum ordinem celeri

   This proscribed youthful land

has a sun and stars of its own

and cries out for a dragon mythology with none to citron hand.

The revelation flowers are inscribed

The exiled sky is five feet wide

Stretched taut over the last of genocide.

A pair of feathers and a long-legged fly

dance a jig on the surface of a greenwashed revelation pond.

   On freshly-cut conflict diamonds, with

white blackberries, genital babycakes

and applets—narcotic fare served with a slap in virtual gloves—

stolen pears, cloves and pressed cheese,

reader (or are you sick of apples?), rest

yourself awhile, kicking it freestyle, on these pithy green fronds—

but skirt the erotic laurel covered pond

(the audience is a myth) of human wishes and prolific

voiceless celadon fishes, where every maw

the greater on the lesser feeds evermore.

Gaze into the index of two ever-flowing

springs of unjust covered water

to see the water-bearing ao fish and

tears and horns of your scavenger’s daughter’s

daughter’s daughter

(you owe me a son, my barcode raped daughter),

sip mountain tea from ersatz, named Raku for an hour,

casually, against a sky blue as staggering lapis lazuli, and,

ton irrémédiable filet, l’ennui, browse:

the Elgin marbles have come to drowse

a te convien tenere altro viaggio

fête galante of Utrillo

with the Duce the Führer and the Caudillo.

thaw your locks, feed weeping figs to buried ravenous

loyalty pigs

and suppress the urge to devour

(like that fly, I seem to see you seethe

but remember: even poetry must breathe—

at this point your hostess,

a grave old insulted doll with a murderous gaze,

takes your order in reverse on a pad of little post-its

and muses, like nurses,

famish what you need for your verses).

Turning now to Wieland, Horace, Kant

and Plato—books fairies read—

now to Benedict, Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux (and perhaps Marot)

in a universal language of Latin, Greek, French and Hebrew.

Or draw from models here afforded you,

reverse profiles of Osiris in bistre upon thin boards

or protective papyrus,

or watch kings,

hash gods of their kind,

dismembered by subjects drugged out of their minds—

and that’s a good thing.

Love is perilous, beleaguered, blind.

Or, finally, renounce a wish

on the cup, the lance, the sword and the dish.

Did you ring?

For this magnified penny world is a perfumed academic room

Furnished with poplar, osier, pipal, teak and wise broom

Purple robes with embroidered roses, and stone looms

Batty zombient atmosphere distinctly “avian”:

goût grec, meubles Flavian—black archeology.

The White Cube is not a room. Proceed freely.

Hier ist kein warum.

The topmost spray entreats “the” forty-ninth day of Y2K

cliché serves and inhabits cliché

puns savage reality.

Why not just say, fictive narration with true signification?

This crown of blossoms, this gay of hue:

although not heaven, this noisy earth is lovely too.

Sraffa, the correspondence theory of truth a tautology,

We have no emotional economy now—and no singing:

we place orders in a cave,

The open kept City—where every sex club is

opacity and its revolutionary committee—

as levels of human satisfaction, epidemic contagion of space.

Judicial astrology in Macrobian zone theory

Characteristica universalis   differentiation without gravitas

Look!  There are those who sharpen the tooth,

glitter with glory,

sit in the sty (jigger the dance)

and suffer in ecstasy—

a moral geography, quirky in the first instance.

I could not weep—the children wept.

Bavius and Mevius

neatness and philanthropy

presents and constipation:

dark origin of liberality

   Here they scum again! Here comes one of the parings!

They ask the water buffalo to the bath

In Cancer above the flocks.  It is July 14^th, it is

One hour and forty-three minutes.

They bring a lead rope or not.

They grab him by the nose.  “Okay!  Beast!”

trahit sua quemque uoluptas

Look here come two ambulatory cowpies!

The composed lady of Christ (self)

and futureless Miss Virginity (soul)

beating an antique drum—on the amorous green enamel

out of council in pandemonium. 

Look!  Tiresias has his tit

fresh from the pallet of the posing misfit

(that forwardlooking nanogigawit)

caught in the wringer again!

He’s worse than Ruskin

struggling to master the seven laws of Tuscan!

They take us, leaving us behind, and

Leaving us behind, take us.

Destinesia…Autopsy of Ephesia

Some exercise upon the grassy-fields,

but grass is far from them and each ithyphallic goat is pined,

   Light  Salutaris Hostia

In malicious obedience to other laws, in plastic reaction,

surcharged with fairness

Cool in an ice age and clean as a piece of dusted glass

Tableaux vivants in the crushing

intercourse light show of beryl, non-repeating paradise

Naked green Sparta boys and embarrassed,

drowsy melting pearl girls relentlessly

against one another in pugnacious

array, receptive and directive, white archeology

hurling invective, balsamed ephebi,

hornless epiphany, verging on majority, starved for authority,

cries as shrill as the sound of a dentist’s drill—

echoing to enjoy their

Parian marble bodies and their own ideas

paradoxical prudes, rapt swift sunny intertextual nudes

Spiritual eugenics: BIRG

“Being hated makes us beautiful and strong—

mathodology: the logic of the body”

(the comparison to the mud puddle):

meeting moths and Visigoths

and non-hurting of any small animal

and close observation of small things:

beauty is no longer sexually attractive

two spheres and a sounding obelisk

skeletal centipede atop the femur throne

A terrible booty is born

Adorn

in tears amid the alien corn

and not a late bird or bat of day

dare extinguish that delight

Glittering with hatred and with

bloody throats in posthumous voice sing ara vos prec

(Martha, Sally and Aunt Flo are visiting),

mental Pez, an plutoed ode to divinity in a tone proper to sublimity

   Endlessly advancing,

endlessly resuming their initial positions, arrayed—

to repeat is not to reason—

thirst from the clear milky juice allayed

a thousand foreskins fall

summer’s gladness, repose, then a spasm of madness

Tu as vu la mort en face, plus de cent fois,

Tu ne sais pas ce que c’est que la vie.

   In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood,

exhausted tricky saffron himation

against fiery cotton chiton

After the bucolic diaerisis, before the sleepy feminine caesura

Cold pastoral!

pepnumenos  What is your name?

periphron  What is your name?

Sunk in the abyss of desire

clay babies melt the heart in laurel fire

and selfful desire

little bastards short and stout

here is their handle, which is also their spout:

Oto, Flo, Clo, Leo

Lio, Zio, Ojo, Geo

Abbo, gabbo, babbo

Tebe, plebe, zebe—

Ineluctable refinery! alder, poplar, heavenly fir

   Hunting in line, as if on physizoos earth again

arrayed in the middle air

a sangha member: don’t bear any children

Or wrestle on the yellow sands, desexuals

With strength hung in their dark blue steel hair

(what if that ancient hair were neatly

arranged with a boxwood comb!),

The spiritous hand of the land upon their shoulders,

Virgil and Rousseau, practicing skillfulness and trust,

sand in their hands, at speckled arm’s length militantly bland

scarified dominated must on their hands

or woven in their garments

In revelry of sport, in isolation

taking

bound confict diamond hands

Giving

energetic song to man,

singing

it in a strange land

one small step for man.

Ryskamp the rabbit scribe among them

with the sky rooster, grinding herbs

Orpheus offending (for style is fate),

Futurum: a trepanned poet en retard? not quite yet a bard?

(What was he thinking?

Ryskamp, like Stella, always loses at cards)

Still, the darling of the avant garde,

pursuing with Ciceronian aisance

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme (stil nuovo!)—

They do say he…

The appreciation of his verse

has exceeded the prewar level.

You who are a copy,

what do you think of Nature Studies? —

That twice-dead mystery Ryskamp is a famous man,

Skillful maker of comparisons.

quae Ryskamp praescripsit pagina nomen

And what of Metamusic? he transforms himself

each fat day anew—They say you play it with your eyes.

Aimez-vous Ryskamp?

(That jabronie does this all the

time!—he’s especially fond of a rap around rhyme

[“But it’s to lengthen the poetic unit beyond the line!

—longer poems mean longer lines”]

lives like three angels terminate on the rhyme

As if, “All drama is mine”

His rhetorical bitches his sublime

as if he knows there is no genuine rhyme

I’m losing you

That ghost in the machine

Where is the concordance with his rhyme?—he writes

The way a Czech cook speaks German!

Or a Scotch puisne judge of decidedly French origen! —

“There” as if it rhymed with “near”!

Keats in rhythm with Yeats!)

Annoyo Babylonian!  Xook!

He talks his book!  He razed the silver roof

with changes to the net proof.

One has to hope

he lives in a world which rhymes like Pope

and in his bowels conceals a reciprocal global proof—

or falls off a roof!

molti che forsechè per alcuna fama

in altra forma m’aveano imaginato

Concussive convulsive

Complex conventions for the sake of all people,

The convex lens of his conversation

His encyclopedist impulse does nothing but repulse—

Does he even have a pulse?

Than whom none are wittier

(Tho his doggerel stinks like Whittier!)

That he’s obscene

is clear to any reader seated in Phase 13.

“For sure, some of his lines do fall flat—

his metamorphoses are ovious—but

he is Number One—how cool is that!

He can ride but he’s the devil to guide.

Look**: he simply sought images for thought

and his audacity like lion’s wings—

motivated, to be sure, by all things antiquated

and rhymes subject to extension into another dimension—

flies, a delay in glass, like time’s arrow

to expression of six personal things.

It’s cornucopic, honey, not myopic:

he provides the new metaphysical foundation of the world—

he takes it with him.”

Yes, I catch your drift:

you think that, like a postwoman, he’s better than Swift.

In incommensurate mastery concetti

sprinkled like confetti,

more twists and turns than a plate of spaghetti—

but don’t cry,

feel free to dissect him before he dies.

He turns up his nose

And in pitiful prose

Turns poetry into a small Cheshire Cheese.

   And worse!  St. Ryskamp Demodocus!

His heart as broken

as his hollowed out verse!

Figliuoli where sì is spoken.

“His literary references violate sense—I’m losing you.

There has been a hostile influence

a sort of groping in cloacae for erotic penitence.”

A Veritable Bede!

A courtesan who reads!

Ses tendences m’alarmaient!

Bad breath from reading Gide!

perceptions out of wedlock

(this poem is like his Bride,

he can’t keep his hands off of her!—

so learned his readers divorce him!—

Modulations?  Discrete.  Allusions?  Replete.

Illusions?  Complete.  And the Lord knows what—

an excursion his readers take with aversion.)

Who, smitten by auctoritas, could say,

“Go to hell, Dante,”

and make hella rhymes that way—

but he has a headache today.

Even if it is not true

I can’t hear you

even in despite of truth

we must maintain it anyway.

Estraneo a la bellezza, non può essere nessuno

   Poetry’s reflexive stores serve

But to renew his stock of metaphors! —

And, like Nature, half reveal

The soul within—and then conceal.

O rustice et wozzock,

ut quid opus tuum inter

scriptores indi aestimas?

qui saepius pro masculinis femina

pro femineis neutra

pro neutra masculine conmutas

The work some praise and some the architect

parva quidem et humilia, sed subtilia ac dulcia

Ce charme! il prit âme et corps

Et dispera mes efforts

Thus gone, subtly of himself contemplative, vowing

Eternal hatred of poets and poetry, a nimble dance,

no poet but ego of poets, of a better nature,

a few years late

(but well worth the wait!)—

then he appears by speech (song is a need of man)

who walks beside him on the white road?  What is his Dao?  Who is his guide?—

Is it his sister?  We.  I can’t see: fears are in the way

I do not know who is going to come,

there is no root: where are you bound up?

   Two men are just, but held in disregard,

a weaver by his tooth,

a compositor by his vacuous left thumb.

Poetry is the subterfuge of an age.

Perhaps he has a brain tumor.

Philistines and the Saracen

and Blake the watcher (Jesus from his tomb) again.

Do you think he wants to rival Apollo…?

finding the element of surprise

in poetry and hash gods’ eyes.

It is easy to kill people.

lupi Moerim uidere priores

The muffled gentleman and the ghost of

Moritz—but what is the date today?

to be an azure Smyrna poet

cristal comme un conscience

a dancer and a tree

(and root beside that tree)

asphodel, lilies and the dead

mind, inky ash and mud

jade crystallized from blood

and footprints crystallized in mud

squeezing my medicinal lemon dry,

j’essaierai en choeur d’endonner la note

to overwrite is to override

thou are to me

but an invisible thing

a voice, a mystery

(the more I age, the more this weighs on me)

and a thing apart

amidst abdicated snake hash gods, white notional scorpions

and clever, timid rats of fixed art

in a parable of the poet—

we know not whence come

the basic beats of rhythm

Ach, wer heilet die Schmerzen

Des, dem Balsam zu Gift ward?

Der sich Menschenhass

Aus der Fülle der Liebe trank?

Erst verachtet, nun ein Verächter,

Zehrt er heimlich auf

Seinen eignen Wert

In ung’nügender Selbstsucht.

Todestelle.

   Light

Shedding veils on laurels, pulled away by an arm

Slender charm lotus feet and cool statist dignity

leaving a liver by a palm tree

ritual impurity! noxious magic! virginal irony

Some foot the bacchant rhythmic dance

(they have 0 tolerance for intolerance!)

transferring corn under the radar

in double flaming drishti of the orator stance

in the sacred grove of smoky inframince

(the medium says will sterilizes choice and

nocturnal, knowing chance)

and, in the hour’s right mode

(cider is the liquor of this ode),

chant locked poems aloud,

love in golden bee-loud bee breath—

   distichs, eclogues—rare forms—ellipses of psalms

(four syllables for the eternal, six for time),

   chantefables and rational allegory in the volgare illustre

in a style proper to comedy.  music as the key of love.

Chausson: Caillebotte

in another room.  a language without synonyms

cantares pares et respondere parati

   The Dance of Death, the Way:

choroi in northsouth progress, their foot their tutor,

…les demains sont morts

Friends neither ardent nor weak

Granite monuments to granite

Leur tête a du requin et du petit-Jésus, needless

Alpha pups careless and heedless

Regarding neither swadeshi nor Hindutva

Tho some do their duty

To the Buddha and the booty

   later, departed from the Greek Security Theatre, advance

pacified blackstone absolutist apsaras in a jetlag trance

as if at an immense séance

follows Orpheus Apollo

ad vocem tanti senis

to a green thought in a green shade: a convenient park,

a beneficent orgy in a far from cool

-.1 porous tufa grotto owing nothing to human artifice—

forgetting that recognition is begetting

hyena their emblem, fuck you their motto

Soon

   Rameses the Great spits three times.

Air and world unsought

Central focus of the eternal for a week

Not exactly statuesque—Picassoesque

With a crystal visor and a knot of ice

These kanephoroi and korai,

showing but a single face, jitterati, refugees from apogee

   spawning illiquid rescue fantasies

pressured by a postmodern absence

vegan cannibals of the apricot tree

who scent (their only food)

humanity’s one, piddling accomplishment,

endless argument:

when can wan “I” die,

pass and pass by,

beat up the light,

and chase it like a kite through the sky?

burdensome grasshoppers, surfeit of data points,

a cacophony of maiden

cicadas (Gold hedge-crickets sing

—actually their thought is rather messy;

it springs from aspidistra, not the root of Jesse;

their movement, their doxology,

from metaphysics to epistemology—

why not just say, applied typology?

they’re dopes, who “mope” in an erotic trope

passion fueled with frankincense and empty hope)

They are those criminals

whose crime is to invent their symbols

   Danseuses de Delphes, apple-cheeked melting celebutants

of la période flottante in amber beads and five chignons, chicken

cutlets and butt paste

   with tribal bling bling, fly tresses

Dora, Dora and Dora: bettys

asexual cornucopia, nonorgasmic utopia

enduring two changes, trivial systolic

confinement: disciplined diastolic expansion

contracting and expanding all their flexible senses

In a Herakles knot, streaming real-time between trailing firs.

Gold cicadas (which are quotations)

on the lifelike morning dew.

tum uero in numerum Faunosque ferasque uideres

ludere, tum rigidas motare cacumina quercus

Metamorphoses approach the epic.

   Fruits, leaves and human skin.

Glimmers of light amid the silver summit.

minuet, allegro, andante ground under Ixion’s wheel—

chemical syrinx music absorptive and resorptive! sonic

doubles, Stalinist hero twins, time devils, Hoho, He He

(are they twins or aren’t they?  I still don’t know what happened)

race teams, little light people in terza rima the walking rhyme

an inglorious harmonious crowd of

two in involuntary certitude

   release amid the girlish sala trees

forgetting human words and

wishing what is happening as if it weren’t

pascentis seruabit Tityrus haedos

will and world-spirit unconscious

where evolution and relativity once held sway

from these notions they have simply walked away

(as from establishments far gone in madness—

“And every salmon day is new:

Shouldn’t every thought be, too?

Trees shed leaves: people shed ideas.”)

rich in the simple worship of a day. 

moving in radio silence and detached hysteria

to unbearable Schubert

terrible lightning from the harmonium or shielding lute

tunnels between worlds

in the humility of the brute

and love affair with the assassin of the future absolute

morbus in patient pursuit

in distilled panic in the circle garden, to soft pipes,

amid meteoric obelisks and phallus-bearing herms,

frenzy in the broad cold palace

(“feet,” also “vestiges,” are a euphemism),

pruned trees by sepulchers, barebacked Priapus and Procne

(a surfeit of fruit, and dizziness),

in a field of non-actual hyacinths

strewn with weeping plinths,

huntsmen with horns spy on

an adminisphere of aquadextrous nymphs,

a caterpillar, a target, and music marked out,

on a beautiful soft poison tree,

procreation from friendly enmity,

ravished nightingales, reality by Satie:

this all takes place in Thessaly

murderer repeats his murder

lover his serenade

robber his robbery

on the foreground of Purgatory

parallelogram of painted wood

for them his ears gushed purified blood

and yet they call this Friday good

end of an endless childhood

but it’s all good—

Jesus before his mimetic birth

   love and hate movements of the dance

que peut signifier ceci

breasts white as a gambler’s cast dice

with no more sound than mice

   make their miniature hands move to and fro

in childish carpalistics

in exact transmission of relinquishment and distress

or of ether, or airy,

the auricular or annulary—the funeral of a fairy;

toying with a filial fan like a dancer of the Han

(or is it a Junwazhe surfboard from Bhutan?)

or in a boat reciting Qu Yuan

or bearing lilacs from France

font moins de bruit que des mouches

immense daisies must be daisies still,

and still saying, “We are here,”

   sunflower abuses, every hundredth iris glares

and lotus stares,

demurred orchids flatter and follow everywhere,

   to the blind singer,

discharging all sound

on a drum: ominous, displaced

white counterfeit stags, in letters paw

their left ground (later lashed as

riderless they pursue their course)

Subjective and objective,

none are better known to the hound

gazelles predicative of the law

What can doves do when eagles come?

(glocalize the sound)

the enamelled melting Puvis girl in pig-tails

and Thetis are pregnant from the germ

and in labor among the hazels

never-bathing bears springing to life;

Light light

in the silence of prior discord,

enemies cancel each other out

make one music as before

and love at fat noon on the bathroom floor;

mind and soul, according well, according to the canon,

defending clefs in staves along the digital divide

skipping from junk to junk

captive flies with detached features, on burning soil,

amplified valerian, lilacs and rank ailanthus support the sky,

calamus and oak tree in the front garden

(the dead hyacinth girl is a melting live boy!—

a hyacinth in the mountains which shepherds

trample underfoot, its purple flower on the ground)

“Black roses”

   and golden armor on the grass under a sky like lead

only exaggeration moves them who would not live long

by their own hard spirits deified, in natural piety—

where are the songs of spring?  menis and cholos

terror and oblivion, mystic union with deity

Daphnis plants a once more extant pear tree

but, conceiving no aspiration, plants no seed of liberation

thoughts fed by the sun: what is my self?

Devouring womb, self-ruined wheat and poppies in the right hand,

meadow of violet and parsley

   dreaming of change as warriors dream of childless war,

and war (a new home), the Trojan geste (God’s boke)

and the acme of heroic saga,

the war of the bones, shock and awe,

a bungle sans the jungle—the maddened love of Mars,

killing as mourning, mourning as wandering, nostalgia

moving as the real sun moves, swift-footed and swift-fated

un soleil blanc comme un crachat d’estaminet

comme une glande arrachée dans un cou,

   sweating selves in date—

less, branding lively heat:

griffins and bloody pedigree mares mate

Indecorous Keats masturbates—dubbing sound—with Yeats

draw rein, draw breath

lynx and river spellbound

a wilderness of monkeys

the boar and the boarhound—

they are words dipped in meaning and sound—

teaching which enjoins the good is seldom found

warmth the sculptural condition

enriching soil, sweating surplus, fed by bees,

opening paths and tightening pores

in a pasture of steel

BDN: 150,000,

000 dancing in the breeze they are dancing

everything, all lands are burning

a firedragon of the air

Epos

iam neque Hamadryades rursus nec carmina nobis

ipsa placent; ipsae rursus concedite siluae

V

   Every postwoman adores a Fascist.

Which was cruel, Mother, love or you?

They burst from the sauna like Jews from a grass chamber!

One dog goes in while another goes out.

Waiting out the regulars,

They don’t come and they don’t go.

Jews and screwdogs (dogs in heat).

word and word

terrible and gay

Why are you here every day?

You’re nothing if not in my way.

I loathe you—and I mean that in a loving way.

Then what they say three times is true:

There’s just no getting away from you

(but pines and laurels weep for you).

Who knew

You were evil through and through?

Then you bit my pretty red heart in two.

   They quicken their pace as at a lash,

Nor wait a second there,

But pick up their feet and make a dash.

Ebbing men, like shuddering toads from chthonic snakes,

near the bottom run, accroc de l’astre jaune, éteint.

The run of the mill are ground under foot.

Freud’s filthy image came on more and more

Yet landed with but head and chest in view,

Leaving his tail where all the unjust covered waters roar,

Eau et gaz rise from the floor.

Blind house of woe, shutting the door on futurity

(Shut up!  They have their Vanity to keep them warm!)

   Ach! du who walk alive, speaking well,

Ryskamp, you who are a copy,

We have lingered with the tips of our fingers

in the chambers of the sea

Because and because

White raisins, beautiful virgins and vaporized glass

Fanatic Egypt and her priests

To fright the reign of chaos

Falconetti

By melting sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Radiantly sitting in a park in Paris, France

Peace is despaired, for who can think submission?

Jane Fonda

The world is named so

Syncretic Chinglish

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

genoi hoios essi: the world congratulates the mind.

A mongoose spews a meteor,

then the circular origin of jewels.

In whose intelligences sixth in line

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought

Let us follow knowledge like a sinking star.

Leering, leering.

the clock on your wall

the clock on your VCR

the clock in your car

the clock on your wrist

(your watch must be fast)

the clock by your bed

Ransack the center

hora and hebe

divided time

My cousin, my wife, what are we here for?—you’re asleep.

I can’t hear you.  You are eighty and I am eighty.

It is late

in the world and Aremideia

must be skillful in Upaya to teach it.

My wisdom is not very great.

I have turned into what I hate.

I smell a plum blossom in a cherry blossom

Blooming on a willow branch.

Shuddering orchids and narcisso floreat alnus

peony tree and chrysanthemum tea

I engage in 3-coloring.

I use Chvátal’s red comb.

I think it is night

both years and fat days deep midnight.

   And I, Asinius Gallus, held on to one word

Eyes bandaged,

With but a memory of language,

Lingering between heaven and noisy earth

In gray twilight knowing

Neither victory nor defeat.

   Offered by a downy-lipped,

chlamys-clad melting eternal boy,

a mere intersexual lad in a wide-brimmed

hat (his anus holds the meat),

a syrinx air, and acorns in his aluminum hair

so aloof he falls off a silver roof! Early and late, foot and fate

who complains of Virgil, and that nothing happens

in “the” faint geologic Iliad,

Guarding sheeple by an obelisk

(or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep),

leading an unflawed

complacent ithyphallic goat from a fruit-laden vine,

to an old man blinded by an execution

and led by an unhealthy mongrel dog,

a bunch of acorns, cookies, a cold biscuit, then a cold potato.

A set of teeth and galvanized bones

is traveling upon this road

through explosive, tearstained bamboo,

screaming rabbits, tattered false flags

no-go zones, floral meteors and slag,

prunus and pine hunting the toad,

to where all loves end and all love ends,

bearing an impure load;

but better trudging through residue there—than living here—

on death’s hard royal road.

Non sum qualis eram,

there fell my shadow, there falls

my shadow—a distant shadow rhyme…

I cannot endure an old man like myself.  I’m tired,

the soles of my feet are on fire.  Hell is

middle age—and the faces you meet.

Square principle, circular knowledge

and the cone of nonduality.

What pity!  What pity!

Only exaggeration moves me.

Parcels and morsels, homage and regret.

I like to be alone,

my tongue’s a stone.  Iron must be the heart within me.

A poached egg underground, a windbag cobbler,

an old man but no bats hanging upside down

swinging the scaly horror of his folded tail,

a white ax in the open ground.

Let me load an empty autumn:

The rug, capsa, kandys and lamp of vigil,

En bas, dans la nef dalleé de pierres tombales

A blind insightful Sicel mother pouring chocolate

and opening blindfold a plain black egg to wisdom;

in a hanging osier basket, snake and an eaten filthy

melting baby boy;

and Friederike, a clairvoyant

restless dead child of seven: anastasis.

A kettle on the hob, some tea things on a shelf,

a mirror which does not show you

yourself—who is that blind starer?

   storehouse key, 9-eyed Gzi

Cézanne’s obliterated apple and 54-skull rosary.

   An indolent hash goddess on an urn,

a melancholy nightingale in autumn,

the soul’s assent to exquisite constraints,

the perpetual triumph of sacrifice, terror and oblivion.

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch.

   A red crab roasts on the hearth—

she roasts her man without fire,

and hands him over to raw old age.

Athena stares—and burns.

Late Vesper lights the lamp—

bid me strike a match and blow.

Scars and music—and sing the sun to bed.

A sterile supreme hour has struck and

   The horse and the bull have bridled their ardor.

Darkness hangs about me like a shroud or a sheet—

tomorrow I must go and go out and with myself compete.

The perishable sound of a bell.

A hollow form with empty hands.

Youth is landscape, old age the blacksmith’s cave.

the fence of time, the geological twilight

The repetitive stress of living,

and the drug of dreamed dreams.

Yes, soon.

You’ve said goodbye

when you’ve said goodbye to the lantern of the moon.

My fortune my misfortune.  What I heard

In the wingbeat of a late bird.  Ah, misery!

Glad to be old

and not see this mess unfold

even with my trousers rolled,

soon to face the wall and not speak—

thus gone, look after my soul in the seventh week

and place a three-headed dog at my feet.  I’m cold.

   Voll Güt’ ist, aber fasset

Allein Gott.

So lebte er hin

   It would be comforting to make love with a woman, suckle

and sing the canticle of infinite gratitude

Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute

for pleasure’s endless trance—

or of Kosovo or South Central L.A., in song:

place it on the female body.

I would rather be free than loved.

   What else have I to spur me into song?

Monetized eyes that lured a doting boyhood

Might well fool a dotard’s age.

BHAG: Lord make me chaste, but not just yet.

Silent, unaccompanied English is the language of the sea,

English poetry like sinful karma runs to the sea

And remembers the Thames valley. 

November 10.  I want to die.

Shakespeare and “heart.” 

Shakespeare and “stick.”

Everywhere I turn robbed by the urn.

Harp hung upon the willow,

a damask drum hangs in the laurel tree.

no long time will you remain to me,

a semi-Islamic litsedei among the fissiparous—in reality

or what us humans call childish reality.

evading the chain of causality

Who was the Prince Hal born under the sign of Gemini?

(Master Frost with his feeble stylus)

I am not rambling Prince Eliot nor was meant to be—

Fascist or Jew, he was once tall and handsome as you

La pensée est la houle ressassant le galet.

What is the use of humanity? 

Beautiful body as you are,

you’re dead now.

C’est la chanson des rêveurs

Qui s’étaient arraché le coeur

Et le portaient dans la main droite

perceptions out of wedlock

Ratification is a burning reality

and ransomed heart-mystery.

Di realtà e di acqua: la ratifica è un altro.

Tell death I am coming,

an old hunter talking with knee-mail gods—