my poem a day challenge. I'll be adding a new poem to this thread every day for a month, along with the date. I'll leave the first drafts on here but I'll tinker with em a little and post newer drafts on my blog.
Last edited by satanicdoctor, Mar/19/2012, 11:29 am
poem2---3/19/2012 So I am left as gross a man as ever
Though she stands by the window in her dress
And raises a blithe hand to stroke the blinds
Looking towards the secondhand clock
But averting her eyes from mine
Waiting for that time to come
When we see no more of each other
This is an image
Rank and gross to all of my senses
Bogged in the banks of memory
As as permanent a fixture
As any lurking pain would be
To a mind tending to lacerate itself
In speaking no further on the matter
But anyways feeling it splinter there
In this mind that preys
Upon such breakable feelings
Such fragility made crass and dumb
By the need to speak it plain
Speak it at all
I speak for this image of mine for me
And though a representative
Am not one so fragile I am callous
Now am callous as any judge would be
Looking into the face of a murderer
I am one as to be shattered with looking
And for this to be the image I use
For this poem
This image of a peering through blinds
Well it is not so made of power as I thought
Because I forget whether she looked back
To suffer a sidelong gaze at me
Or whether she said her ride was here
And left without bothering to look at me
This is me recognizing
That I am going on in life not blessed
For if my nonsense is to drool eternal
Onto the page as eternally blank
Well then
I must not find out anything at all
I must remain as faithless and benign as she
Of what could change with one look
For we have still not spoken finally of it
And now I am left without a face to see
Through the clutter of analysis
That is really together a crude elegy
For something I had once
That cannot die
Because it should have long ago.
poem3---3/20/2012 I am no human for the saints
And I dare you to wipe off the caul
And dry your shaking self out
And say to me you are left anew forever
And that you dream of entering
The mileu of saints
The mythy martyrs and built greatnesses
Perhaps you dream this
And in your dreams enter that plane
But you are still underground
Shakily in the dripping brine
Frozen in a majesty adroit and unyielding
And so then not the cartilage of saints
And so then in the brine
The saint of the brine
The myth is made and is a sphere
Errant with muttered dithyramb
And hiving within a straight nucleus
Or grand bosom of blessings
For this hop o my thumb to inflate
With the breathing out of greatness
And the inhaling
Of the cancer of a mind of distance
And howling with utter crock
This is a weakest caesura for gerontion
A pause for the greatness
To collect like a breath breathed
In and out as such to make bold
The frozen self in the brine
Unable to penetrate the nucleus
And in recognizing this
Knows he is blessed
He knows he is a saint to be defiled
In rude awakenings like bold breaths
Each and every second
Awakening to one of the sides of duality
Without knowing how he got there
And in a godless sort of way
Crushes it thinking it a poison
Crushes the beauty
Only to remain incurably bright
Not knowing that he knows
And not knowing
That such an ambivalence
Is necessary is a necessary poison
And is a necessary heaven
For the mortals in the gutsy fray to deify
With nonsense and the raging
Of confusion
And all for ELIOT and his gerontion
And I
I a being in dry month
Waiting for beauty and
Stuck in breathing anew
And sloughing off it all
Not knowing what I trash as not trash
But growing up anyways all stubborn
And doomed to be pissed off forever
At having arrived too late
At wonder-wounding choosing instead
To buckle and grow from brokenness
A flower for coughing goats
Stuck raging in the words like a metaphor
And I blessed
To be in a hovel of brine
In a palace of ruin bent backwards
Towards a seeking
Of naught but my own place in myth
My own saintly destruction
Of a self of my own hellish design.
Re: my poem a day challenge. I like this last poem, "Madame sits at the STEINWAY talking," best, SD. The concrete imagery makes what is happening in the poem easier for me to visualize, holds my interest better and allows me as the reader to interact more freely with the material presented.
newer drafts: pome a day challenge. THE DACHSHUND AT THE STEINWAY.
Madame sits at the STEINWAY talking
Quietly to it as her fingers run across
The keys with a gentle tinkling grace.
It’s the grace of one who has made happiness
An exile there so as to fit more room in for
Her music; notes for meandering minds,
Yes, but meandering too much, beyond minds;
And, at last she puts her latest musical
Phrase outside to die with the retentive
Dachshund, yapping his own little
Notes from patio, paws against the
Sliding door. Forever the child
Of her passions, lady X with a shaking
Of her cuffs in falbalas stretches and
Gets up, goes out of sight. We hear
Strange noises, a coughing out of
Angst. We float to a spot where the
Woman can be viewed, observed, rather,
And find, she has spilled her drink
On the weathered white shag next to
A wooden cabinet with deckings, arty
Frieze; a gift from uncle, Andrew Jackson
Something. She takes a brief gander
At the spot of wine as it soaks into
The rug. She is half who made her,---
Half of uncle; her other half, some
Devil of music: tinkling notes and
Yaps yapping. Insipid canine, she
Thinks, always a distraction, she
Thinks---taking a finger running
Across the enamel of her teeth to
Wipe off residuum from brunch,
Alone, about ten minutes ago.
SLOPPY JOE on BUN, it was; and,---
SWEET POTATO FRIES, with MAYO
For dipping. So, she looks at the
Cabinet only to find that it has
Turned into a spacious, liminal,
Uncharted span of heaven, filled
With uncles, filled with uncles
Offering her wine but wine which never
Grew within the belly of a grape. Come,
Bacchus!, she murmurs, trailing a finger
Across the glued wainscoting, as she walks
Into her small retro-kitsch kitchen. Some
Of her time for the rest of the day is
Spent forgetting about heaven, all of heaven;
About good, and evil---even beyond what either
Is. She is half who made her, evil in the
Eyes of those who made her. The spot of wine
Grows up, becomes a figure, drawls in tinklings
On the STEINWAY, waiting, waiting, waiting,
Yes, for her to coo into the night badly,
Then yell, anticipating beforehand, then
Yell into the heavens fraught with
Nightfall---before lady X can think to
Anticipate anything at all---instead,
Opting to be, to be in the night, just
Be; to domesticate her universe, become
The furniture she desires to have, be in
The OLYMPUS of her hated happiness, whilst
In her notes’ death’s meantime, the dachshund
Blessed with human hands a sudden pushes open
With might the sliding doors, tells her to quit
Yapping, takes her place on the piano-bench to
Thunk the WORLD out of a STEINWAY, the STEINWAY,
Made humanely in the image of music,
All music; the music of lady X, stained
With wine. The stain becomes a dog:
Soon attenuated, gone for days without
Brunch, running his fingers of a mutant-
metaphor far across terrific glass, and we
Are left to grieve in light of a thing no
Longer to be observed, a figure of wine
No longer to be observed, digested,
Hit with swirls and made like Hermes
From the genius of one mortal, one
Comrade of a tinkling thunk in the night,
One night: one night, logic will stain
No such gifts: and no such furniture
Will be for the taking by some constipated
Heaven: no gifts: for example, cabinets,
Cabinets that make all happiness an exile
For this Lady X, this madame who fears the
Phrases of a thinking gone unsaid, lost:
And for the occult to sway forth with stains
With of done OLYMPUS and of STEINWAYS
And of dachshunds plagued with
Yapping hands, the hands of summoning
Happiness out of exile, gone unheard.
MAN CARRYING THING.
So here is a man carrying thing. He
Wanders through snow for miles. He
Is a new type of man; however, not
Necessarily good, a good man. He is
Of a thing in itself carrying him; yes, a
Prompt provider blessed with a meaning
For the design. He is a prompt maker,
True to his word, but a priori to the point
Of being guttural. Nathless, he carries him,
This new man, this man of unlucky telling
Of himself to know the thing he carries good,
As a good. This man who carries, heartless,
Telling only---and only of himself---a burden,
Yet no voice, no, for the clairvoyant sages,
Blind and beardy. Carrying a thing across
The snow, for miles. Must he be the
Elected for an image of desertion and
Paucity: and must that which provides
Give him only him, be not so descript,
Flourish nothing, merely charge the
Doughty drama of his going on with
Troubled, bubbling musics of desertion:
The desertion of a snow and the evils of
A thing that is a man who carries it.
So then they work hand in hand: they
Do not perjure one another openly,
Answering scoffs with scoffs, and yet
There is some beef between, some straining as
Though each were handling a sleight: a striking
Of the chords of ludicrous music---here---in a
Place we know not of but that it is for miles,
Is communicative of some distance, abstruse,
Steeped in carnal death to prompt a séance
For the sages to scratch out. We know not
What he carries, the man, this man for the
Sages, and yet himself a clown, funny with
Turbulence, wagging argument out from nothing;
Made of nothing, strung out from nothing, more.
Whatever it is is carried, entertained like a
Bad guest, as the narrative goes on through snow,
Begrudging death and more the death of life than truly
Death, a true-but-impure death of music and thus burden.
He, who is walking somewheres in the snow . . .
No, we know not what he carries but it
Comes from the sun, the music of the sun,
An insane, quiet, desperate sun of a gross,
Lighted cascade, shoved into the man’s pocket
As what all of his kind might carry, might not:
The sun is what he speaks to defend, for the
Very provider of him, via a ludicrous desertion
Of snow, snow, yes, beautiful, beautiful
Snow, for miles and miles, and this man
A symbol for the symbol, the leftovers
Of drab dreams. An endlessness
Of ecstasy; wait, no, vice versa. Wait,
No, not anything but a paucity: a hulk or
Form far off in the flatness of a big
Place, a WORLD consisting of snow, snow
And things, things to be carried and felt
And not known ever, also. Burdens of a
Seeming of a man, descript as a life seen
As being comprised of three or four hills
And a cloud. Only through a lens of dire
Distance could death drum, honeyed, a demented,
Thunderous clack; only through the persistence,
Yes, persistence of a lens, through which the
Scope of many musics see, couldst confusion see---
Carried out with panache and delicateness---and so
Arrest the songs of the death of meaning. Only
Through the beating of boards couldst the last
Throes die out there, the meaning die out out there;
Music of a man and his thing, and him the chief and
Also obsequious chimer or plebe hungering for
Approval from himself, the chief, way out in a
Place of chords from nothing---obscene with
Plateau, in gathered flatness, haunted wide
With snow. Figures in the snow; figures, forms
In a daydream, slowly melting in the sun.
TRIPLE-SOUNDS.
So I am left as gross a man as ever
As from the bed I sit upright at once to look at her
Observing the slouching slimness of her body
And visibly nonplussed I stare and stare
And wait for her to notice my eyes
Though she appears more fascinated
With some measly thing
Elsewhere
On the street
Or some trivia in her head regarded at will
For when a need arose
To address anything but the conversation
And so I remember I responded as an outsider but responded
So as to prove myself as more to her than just an obliging worm
So as to free myself almost from the usual deference
And I wondered
How her fury would be expressed this time around
In answering to such a stupid thing as passive
As that triple-sounded coronal
Or will she ignore the admonishment completely I thought
And communicate that which I would dread to hear despite
And in her silence say she sees my wickedness plain at last
She will ignore it I think
As if it were a moment
Of a windy drifting
Across her very cheek
Somewhat making an impression
And so then sensed however soft and fleet
But she stands and stands
In the windy silence of passionate ström
By the window in her sunny dress for the folks
And she raises a blithe hand to stroke the blinds
And it is this image of insignificant beauty
Out of all things
That I remember still as clear
Looking towards the secondhand clock
Instead of me she is averting her eyes
From mine I thought horrified
Waiting for that time to come
When we see no more of each other
So I tsk and tsk and tsk
This is an image and as much a feeling
Disquieting now as I tenderly recall the one mistake
Of a passive and angry man
I remember and know this feeling as as much an image
To torture to life from out of the whirligig
And it crying for pistol and ball to crush grossness
Out of these poor and overworked renderings
Once wakened like a mutant of a child
And it crying with his mutant-tears
For the destruction of these gross things
These words to describe a hurt that still is in me
And me by now sharpened to the nub
An emotional dullard
This as I rave bogs more in the banks of memory
And as I now know is as permanent a fixture
As any lurking pain would be
To a mind tending to lacerate itself
So then I speak no further on a matter of hurt
But anyways feel it splinter there
In my mind that preys upon such breakable feelings
Such fragility made crass and dumb
By the need to speak it plain
Speak it at all
I speak now just as harbinger for this image of mine for me
And though a representative of the things of the past
Am not one so fragile as my memories are.---
I am callous, callous
And struck by tenderness not much anymore
Less than a block would be
With his block-headed mutant-feelings
Now I am callous, callous as any judge would be
Looking into the face
Of a murderer of myself
I am one as to be shattered with looking
And for this to be the image I use
For this poem
This image of a peering through blinds
Well it is not so made of power as I thought
Because I forget whether she looked back
To suffer a sidelong gaze at me
Or whether she said her ride was here
And left without bothering
To look at me
This is me recognizing
That I am going on in life not blessed
For if my nonsense is to drool eternally
Onto the page as eternally blank
Well then
I must not find out anything at all
I must remain as faithless and benign as she
Of what could change with three clicks of the tongue
For we have still not spoken finally of it
And now I am left without her face to see
Through the clutter of analysis
That is really altogether a crude elegy
For something I had once
That cannot die
Because it should have long ago.---
PARATAXIS. Or, Life as Other
I am no human for the saints
And yet I dare to wipe him off as caul
So that he can dry out his shaking self
And say to me you are left anew now
To die forever and ever
Now that I have fully come out of my dreaming
You are left as a new but different man he might say
And to die a new but different death but still
You remain steadfast
You refuse out of ignorance to pluck
What fruits there are from the seeds
Of my own rising self he might say
And yet strangely I am the part of you
That is the wisest
If only you could breathe and savor life as it is
If only you rid of yourself
This disease of a placelessness
You might die a good death
And perhaps I think to reply that he
Is a brute-force foil to spur forth
An evil brutish life
And I the one now free of you am left
To be blessed and for your sake goodbye he says
I am no longer to be tortured by you your words
Wreaking a life of disease and paralysis
And yet you he says you in turn will be cursed
With a silence grand as death and as at peace
And perhaps I myself do dream of entering this
The galley of the saints and mythy martyrs
And of built greatnesses however built yes
Yes from no sort of foundation
Rather from bookish rumors that go round
And round and round and round and round and
Finagled like a tampering with of how it went
Thereby extreme fantasy
Is made alive out of a darkness
For the wonderful imagination to feed on
And for the people in want of a saint to feed on
Perhaps I myself dream this
And in my dreams enter that plane
But you are still underground he might say
This other different from myself
And most wise and yet to myself blurred
By some too salacious reckoning of him
And that shakily as I myself shivering
In the dripping brine frozen
Comprehend a majesty adroit and unyielding
And so then not the majesty of saints
And so then in my being in the brine
I am the saint of the brine
The myth is made and is a sphere
Spinning errant with muttered dithyramb and and
And poor diction and so then hiving
Within a straight nucleus
Or grand heavy bosom of blessings
For this other hop o my thumb to inflate
With the breathing out of a greatness
Is an awakening finally
A rebirth of senses
And yet with an inhaling
Of the cancer of a mind
Unable to breach spheres
Well yeah well with that cancer comes the utter crock
Of differences different men in me
Parroting out the same image
Woven to disarm all the saints reborn
With wires of a hopelessly paratactic thing
Yeah thing or a device
For the english language
To tamper with to fit
This damned spinny dingus of a pome
This my spinny fuckin dingus
Of a depression vested in the rebirth
Of that other and his words to me now
Are as futile devices
That merely change a darkness
To the ruin of light
And they are to me myself as sewage
Negations abrupt wordplay abruptly
Strewn blindly about
Fluttering like confetti or
Circling like as a wheel in the mud
But no no this is
A weakest caesura for gerontion
A pause for the greatness
To collect like a breath breathed
In and out as such to make bold
The frozen self in the brine
Unable to penetrate that
That that damned nucleus
And in recognizing this
I know he is blessed by me and my words
He knows he is a saint to be defiled
In rude awakenings like bold breaths
That each and every second awaken him
To one of the sides of duality
Without telling him of his place
And in a godless sort of way
He crushes either side
Once reborn there
Thinking it a poison
Crushes the beauty
Only to remain incurably bright
Amongst a juxtaposed darkness
Not knowing that he knows
Yet knowing I do
And not knowing
That I think him myself this other
Of differences and polarities
That make a garbage
Out of such an anguishing
As doubt provides
But to be ambivalent
Is necessary is a necessary poison
And is a necessary heaven the other might say
He says to me it is for
The mortals in the gutsy fray to deify
With nonsense and with the raging
Of confusion
And all for ELIOT and his gerontion
And I I I a being in dry month
Waiting for beauty and
Stuck in breathing anew
I who sloughing it off normally
Not knowing what I trash as not trash
But growing up anyways all stubborn
And doomed to be pissed off forever
At having arrived too late
At wonder-wounding choosing instead
To buckle and grow from brokenness
A flower for coughing goats
Stuck raging in the words like a metaphor
I blessed
To be in a hovel of brine know
In a palace of ruin bent backwards
Towards a seeking of of
Of naught but my own place in myth know
My own saintly destruction
Of a self is of my own hellish design.
BLOOD, BONE, MARROW, PASSION, FEELING.
"I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling---
Because at least the past were passed away---
And for the future---(but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say---the future is a serious matter---
And so---for God's sake---hock and soda water!"
---GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
If I were to heaven so much clay unformed---
And not a man held to the duty of receiving passions himself
And if I were as all condemned to live forever beneath the universe
And to look at the stars unfeeling and not marvel---
Nor understand I am mere yet beautifully strange
Because I can breathe and simply due to this am beautiful
And if to the luminous I and all were dim and blank---
And if none who trod a length of this small WORLD were bigger than it
Nor were salient in themselves enough to reflect and find principle in being
And though in a place as here one might endeavor they endeavor---
To feed not a collective nor individual knowledge but work
As kelson or cog to support and drone on for what is not more
Than some bad abstraction in the aether never processed---
Well if this were so this land would be to heaven a land of clay extant to feed
That heaven only and I and we unformed should want a form divine from it
From heaven but not harnessed by all by me although we work to or perhaps---
We have by this point harnessed that divine however nameless it might be
And it is unsupported once in the hands of the minds of I and all
Who are the recipients after all of what whatever beyond---
Chucks back to us in hopes we use it to shape in our own way ourselves
Rather than just for hands to get from up in the aether somewheres
And to happily shape something else happily in a compliance akin to helplessness---
With the base urges as a directive but not catalyst to swerve
And so revolt as clay from heaven and so as to be more than the WORLD
But if the rotten WORLD were mine---
And mine for me to paw forth on and mine to direct
Towards sanctity were my own understanding clods
Then passions as I would have had without realizing---
Instead of quickly wasted in addressing a beyond more furious
Only to be chucked back to me as guerdon for the toils of all
Would if encountered by what is beyond---
Have their riddance from me and all anyway in appearing different
And so then to the questioner whether me or other no such prize
That is once touched by heaven though only touched---
This my little clod of symbols might appear different
Though it is the same clod the same asked question
And in being the same clod would appear unchanged---
Though it has been to heaven and has been rejected by heaven
So that though it has seen well what I have not this my dirt for all
To examine is examined and thought of as nothing special---
And even if comprising the WORLD in me if as human
Might as well be unenlightened and as useful as figments
Of reality to reality as it is though they share in the same shade---
Though I am no shape for heaven nor in a shape to receive a beyond
If a beyond of negatives and wreathed in ignorance and poor planning
And yet all these words are all for heaven---
And all to still the tremors in my hands
Each to each that know of man that he is not enough
But this should instead be for the dignity of broken men---
Others vile others who live just to declaim to vile blackness
So they might hear an echo dumbly back to them
And thus feel not so much vacant and perturbed---
As like a discontented void a dark nothingness materialized
Made a visage to look at from out of clay heavens
Perhaps this yelling it will pass in stillness---
And I and we all will remain incurious and jaded
As to whatever identity or face of passion
That might have come out of infinite speech or symbol---
And all this well it is just to confer the dignity of being
More than myself oneself to that which has a name in us
And yet like fools we all and I wish to keep our faces---
So that I and all men broken then might be fixed
To some daft GOD of the WORLD
But all of us we will remain broken---
Nonetheless will remain as the chaff disjecta
Of an honest void beyond heaven already
More much more dignified than words allow for---
And by frank avowals made divine in me and all
And still sounding vague with stillness but strong
So then I am the clay we are the clay of an unreachable strength---
And in recognition though born jagged I now am of a grace
Both haunting and inconsiderate
For I am we are the echo---
I am the dull echo
For the void to face finally
And the void will with my voice make of me a clay---
Answering my answers to the answers
But not so limitless as I imagined
Not so limitless as to shape questions forever out of fact---
I and all men anyway only know the fact of our passions
And we out of a dignity get a grip and shoo them off
And so am I in being the yelling void---
Left a WORLD of dull and frivolous answers
Belched occasionally from nothing
Sometimes however serendipity occurs---
And myself and we all waken from the moil
An afflatus for so long in turbulent slumber turbulent
Though somehow for a moment we arrange with discretion---
A few base fits for the base work of passions to justify
With an identity fleeting as shade
But then tragically we are deserted---
And with the dark masculine of an utterance the void returns
Clutching the dignity of my name and the name of everybody
For we all are too devoted to fact---
And not enough to the shape of symbols
Ill-formed and fraught with unbelievable shade
And we all are of the shade of suffering out---
A wealth of answers suffering out
A meddling with some aching bareness
And brokenness as a bough wrested by high winds---
From the tree of knowledge now as but an abstraction
A weird gas filled to blooming with the brokenness
Of a shape for a moment to loosen and redact---
And so the hour of dignity made manifest yet again
Shows all of man the heaven in themselves for a little
Made manifest out a nothingness of their own typified clay---
And as such the damnable afflatus stripped to the nakedest symbol
Or question becomes of a quality and fabric more divine
Than any answer could have declaimed brutally---
By men to men and by me to me asked
And all for the rotten pleasure of suffering
And all---
To flip a thing on its head and all to groan
Not so much under the dull weight of a void
But so as almost to release the moment quickly by a breath---
Of my own conviction stitched as fabric
Like the loose WORLD tight we all and myself let go dignity
And as for my passions they are naught---
They are as utterances of a disembodied head
Jabbering to groin out of nothing
The idea of a sum of symbols and codes---
And to feel less alone
In the dark psyche of a WORLD made
For all of a passionate though incurious humanity---
Stitched out of a fabric-stillness breathing in and out
And made scrupulously just for me to shout for
So that all and all might chance answer the clay of ourselves---
Without a question without a reason or source
So as to chafe the stillness of a loud and crude infinity
And leave me and all of course robbed of the fabric of odd life---
And the beginnings of thought left without any ends of a thought
And this done by sapping the drama and strangeness of names
For what would have been an unbelievable understanding---
Between earthly and divine things that live quietly in coeval
Without questions or the pomp of answers
And satisfied as being an approbation of the pith of flesh---
As would a wayward dog a lost mind wishes to stick to
Might know and realer his own frank intelligence and dogged
Might in his shade hear the howl of all the incurious WORLD
And know that each walking clod of clay sicklied over with a pale cast of dignity
Is ridden once ridden of that nothing nothing
BEYOND THE GRAVE.
Pastor always said something about finding JESUS,
always sure he would come by next week: well,
Sunday rolls around again and no JESUS, just us,
sitting in the pews, waiting for the guy to explain
how it was possible: for a religion to keep going on like
this: possible to keep on being wrong about hope: about
all of it, all that what graves tell us anyway is the end: but
which a well-meaning CHRISTIAN might surmise is as but
a symbol to keep all of EARTH's inhabitants from fearing
that whatever VOID they sense while alive, if you are good,
won't be as palpable, or, present at all, once interment
comes to pass: but, what is death: death, JESUS,
hope: what is it to remain with hope, in spite of death:
of JESUS and his absence: well, perhaps the arc of life
ain't no arc at all, arc used in this case to mean pattern,
rather than a parabolic structure of improvement, or
merely change: I wanted to ask GOD if it was the VOID,
if when I felt the desperate emptiness of missteps or was
wallowing, sedentary, in all the bull of the past it was not
just a mind filled with existential waste letting ope the
floodgates but was in fact a metaphysical premonition of
sorts: that is, perhaps, emptiness was GODLY, was
of GOD, whatever it is; creator, sustainer, what have you.
And maybe it's a GODless WORLD, maybe; a structureless
structure of a WORLD. A gaff on us all, and for us all to
give dignity to, fathom as not so much nothingness as
much as self-created angst, wallowing; bright and wonderful
despite a suspicion that the will of a VOID, if what we
sense is the truth---and beyond a personal solipsism nothing
is all that exists---is something without an ability to be fathomed
with nods or declarations but rather a frightening indifference:
or, rather, a running poverty all the way to the other side of
hopefulness: but: the pastor he would say almost to defend
himself that JESUS would find it hard to enter into a WORLD so
nihilistic as to think him merely a homeless degenerate: he
said we were all batty with a structure of which the makeup
was our own lack of faith: he said he would be first in line to
miss out on the rapture next week, when JESUS was sure
to come, either way: into a WORLD of damnable parabolas and
undefined anguish, which upon his arrival would quake the
EARTH with misery no longer: at least, if JESUS had anything
to do with it: I guess he, the pastor, thought any crazy person
claiming himself to be the second coming would be a JESUS
enough, but I think what he meant is that anything amazing
ain't so amazing nowadays: any outstanding achievement
gets soon lost in a sea of a grim nothingness so very quickly:
all that we hope for is not so much expected to come but
rather hoped, perennially, to come, for the sake of being
disappointed, so that at least we all, on this planet, might
somewhat prove that the premonition of nothingness is
correct: that the VOID in us is really a void for all time, but
received in segments; that is, until we die, and realize, of
course, that we were all wrong, that everybody was wrong,
and that we are not even granted the dignity of having, at
least, at times, a hunch about the universe: well, we are wrong
about being wrong, wrong about being right, really: in that,
indeed, perhaps indifference, the indifference of all that is,
towards itself, is key: in the mix: but understanding that
indifference via experience is as key, and we cannot do that,
we cannot account for the vastness of this variable until we
are interred, dead, and realize that maybe we’re the only
things that can turn to look on themselves; that maybe
afterwards we’ll be no more able to scrutinize as breathe;
that, perhaps, an eternity of sweet, silent absence beyond
absence is what awaits each, every one of us afterwards,
and that---perhaps, perhaps---the gravestones were right.
SORITES PARADOX.
I live I expand I find out
I think my liver hurts it really hurts
I am all that kindness shoulders to carry
I wonder if it all means something,
I control the universe . . . sometimes.
I die I dwindle I remain ignorant
I think I can stomach a shot of liquor again
I leave kindness to bear nothing
I wonder whether it's meant to mean anything at all,
I'm utterly powerless.
I'm born I bloom I despise complacency
I get plastered and hurl my guts out
I let a kindness now unburdened in
I do not wonder about what's none of my business,
I am a GOD of GODS.
But if these thoughts
Were declaimed by SORITES
In being so very, in being
A so very beautifully
Humane paradox
In being representative
Of all the rage of contradiction
So very human in the clashing,---
In the flawless inching
Towards a side not like itself
Yet carried on beforehand
Journeying till
It got there, well-
-What's to say we're not
All connected and thus everything;
Thus, nothing, nothing,
Nothing.
KAFKA'S DAGGER.
Let me bleed into you,
let us grow and learn from one another,
let life not tell us otherwise,
tell us that we cannot learn,
cannot have faith,
yes,
In ourselves;
nor if we manage ourselves together break us open.
Again I am broken open,
bound to nervous,
clicking energy;
it is the energy of a freezing void.
Again I am bled out into another kind of source,
a source of evil and unkind;
again,
yes. Again to take what we have taken from ourselves for itself,
and that for still unknown reasons,
unknown,
never known,
not even beyond death to be known;
Not ever to be known. And if we cannot blend,
cannot reside in the one sphere,
perhaps,
what is salvaged from the apocalypse,
the death of the brains we both have,
being more than what we know,
being the dagger in me that you turn for me,,,
will make me bleed. Will you drink the blood that drops from my wound?
Will you eat this reflection of myself,
this isolated image of,
merciless,
the driving force that you have sucked from me,
this the grandeur of my sourceless pain,
my own pain,
the pain you twist deeper in with dagger to cause,
to cause so that I can see my own blood,
see the blood of my work,
see it kill me?
And thus you remember,
we have tried to be one,
or were one once were together in the struggle,
the struggle to be one,
to reside in the damnable sphere,
the sphere of blood's dropping.
Last edited by satanicdoctor, Mar/27/2012, 4:54 pm
poem6---3/23/2012 I live I expand I find out
I think my liver hurts it really hurts
I am all that kindness shoulders to carry
I wonder if it all means something,
I control the universe . . . sometimes.
I die I dwindle I remain ignorant
I think I can stomach a shot of liquor again
I leave kindness to bear nothing
I wonder whether it's meant to mean anything at all,
I'm utterly powerless.
I'm born I bloom I despise complacency
I get plastered and hurl my guts out
I let a kindness now unburdened in
I do not wonder about what's none of my business,
I am a GOD of GODS.
But if these thoughts
Were declaimed by SORITES
In being so very, in being
A so very beautifully
Humane paradox
In being representative
Of all the rage of contradiction
So very human in the clashing,---
In the flawless inching
Towards a side not like itself
Yet carried on beforehand
Journeying till
It got there, well-
-What's to say we're not
All connected and thus everything;
Thus, nothing, nothing,
Nothing.
Last edited by satanicdoctor, Mar/23/2012, 6:21 pm
poem7---3/24/2012 Alrighty, goes out, not much, in the place, in the stones, the stones, and they corrupt, and they mixed, like a plentifullest thing, like a thing denied, fixed, rotated, left to die, left to live, go on, no, no, I won't, I'll remain fixed, I'll remain, remain in the place, the place of stones, I am alright, I am alright, I'm corrupt, I fix myself to myself, I leave it beckoning, beckoning me, I add new elements, I make it happen, no, I do not, do not make it happen, give myself damnable fodder for damnable knowledge, words, words, reliquae, gone disjecta, repetitive bullshit, my shivah, shivering for fodder, more fodder, more words, want words, I want the reliquae, I want fixedness, I want nothing to change, no change, no corruption, yeah, no corruption if no change, unnatural thoughts, unnatural feelings beckoning, damnable feelings, made mad with knowledge, a knowledge of bullshit and stones and all that could be but won't, and all that is, all that is that is in a, or my, shivah, of sorts, building up, building fodder up, stoppit, go with it, don't, no, I am, I am not, forget, !@#$, my christ, oh my christ, knowledge, knowledge of disjecta, gone with going on, going on, unnaturally, in a place, a place of stones and chaff and no savior now for that, for this, for the 'will not', the 'don't', the forgetting of fodder, placeless fodder, confusion, beauty, !@#$, bullshit, bullshit beckoning, corrupted soon, no change, feelings change, gather, eyah, gather in a remaining of myself's speech, speech, unnatural speech, alright, alright and good words, without christ, without shivah, without anything, anything of substanc,e no substance, all of this, this is naught, proud, futile wake, prodded, prodded, to death, give me death, I shant go on, no, my chri,st stoppit, disjecta gone gone gone feelings I am damned, I am nothing, building more, more nothing, 'will not', the doddering of my impassioned pen, the pen of the damned void, and, yes, the void naught, it is nothing, it is all, it is all bullshit, going, going, gone.
Last edited by satanicdoctor, Mar/24/2012, 3:22 pm
poem8---3/25/2012 Pastor always said something about finding JESUS, always sure he would
come by next week: well, Sunday rolls around again and no JESUS, just us,
sitting in the pews, waiting for the guy to explain: how it was possible
for religion to be wrong: yet again, wrong, wrong about hope: about all
of it, all that what graves tell us anyway is the end but CHRISTIANITY
surmises as but a symbol to keep all of EARTH's inhabitants from fearing
that whatever VOID they feel while alive, if you are good, won't be as
palpable, or, present at all, once interment comes to pass: but, what
is death: death, JESUS, hope: what is it to remain with hope in spite of
death: of JESUS and his absence: well, perhaps the arc of life ain't no
arc at all, arc used in this case to mean pattern, rather than a parabolic structure of
improvement, or merely change: I wanted to ask GOD if he was the VOID, if when I
felt the desperate emptiness of missteps or was wallowing, sedentary, in all
the bull of the past it was not just a mind filled with existential waste
letting ope the floodgates but was in fact a metaphysical premonition of
sorts: that is, perhaps, emptiness was GODLY, was of GOD, whatever it
is; creator, sustainer, what have you. and maybe it's a GODLESS WORLD, maybe;
a structureless structure. A gaff on us all, and for us all to give dignity
to, fathom as not so much nothingness as much as self-created angst, wallowing;
bright and wonderful despite a suspicion that the will of a VOID, if what we
sense is the truth---and beyond a personal solipsism nothing is all that exists---
is something without an ability to be fathomed with nods or declarations
but rather a frightening indifference: or, rather, a running poverty all the
way to the other side of hopefulness: but: the pastor he would say that we
can't expect JESUS to enter into a WORLD so nihilistic as to think him
merely a homeless degenerate: he said we were all batty with a structure of which
the makeup was our own lack of faith: he said he would be first in line to miss
out on the rapture next week, when JESUS was sure to come, to come into
a WORLD of damnable parabolas and undefined anguish, which upon his coming would
quake the EARTH with misery no longer: I guess he, the pastor, thought any crazy person
claiming himself to be the second coming would be a JESUS enough, but
I think what he meant is that anything amazing ain't so amazing nowadays: any
outstanding achievement gets soon lost in a sea of a grim nothingness so very
quickly: all that we hope for is not so much expected to come but rather hoped,
perennially, to come, for the sake of being disappointed, so that at least we all, on
this planet, might somewhat prove that the premonition of nothingness is correct:
that the VOID in us is really a void for all time, but received in segments;
that is, until we die, and realize, of course, that we were all wrong, that
everybody was wrong, and that we are not even granted the dignity of having,
at least, at times, a hunch about the universe, and are wrong about being
wrong, wrong about being right: in that, indeed, perhaps indifference
is key in the mix but understanding that indifference via experience is
as key, and we cannot do that, we cannot account for the vastness of
this variable until we are interred, dead, and realize that perhaps the
gravestones were right.
Last edited by satanicdoctor, Mar/25/2012, 10:46 am
poem9---3/26/2012 Let me bleed
into you, let us grow
and learn
from one another,
let life not tell us otherwise,
nor if together break us open,
again,
again to take
what we have taken
from ourselves
for itself, and that for
unknown reasons, unknown,
an if we cannot blend,
cannot be one
sphere,
perhaps, our minds,
being more than what we know,
being the dagger
in me that you turn for,
will make me bleed.
Will you drink the blood
that comes
from my wound?
Will
Last edited by satanicdoctor, Mar/27/2012, 4:55 pm
The editing process to me was and is still sacred. The true shape is found; the old, attempted shape is cast off. And yet, as regards what the poem had wanted to be in its beginning stages: well, that urge, the urge a poem has to return again to the energy behind its original motive, encapsulate what inspired it in the first place---that is, be what it had initially started as being---pervades nonetheless throughout the new work; and the spats of that urgency ripple forth still further into the really new work.
It is this gap that creates discontinuity. That is, the content of what is written is very much unlike the style. What I want to say, struggling, at war with, almost, how I ultimately say it. One tries, in the first drafts, to match the two; one finds out later that something of either/or must be sacrificed in order to make a good poem. That is, content, style: one has to choose. At least, to a point.
Pascal believed that sustained eloquence would eventually weary the audience: if one in absorbing what is said is left to swirl with the speaker down a continuum of an endless, monotonous, near-hermetic balance between the idea presented and whatever stylistic ideal it conforms to. So then, a fugue in writing, or rather a point of aporia, is quite necessary if the writer, especially one like myself, is to truly get his or her point across.
This is highly ironic, yes, but also quite wonderful. It is true, good english is a must, as is thought-provoking subject matter; however, at least in my mind, these two things at times are very much irreconcilable, even in violent conflict. The thoughts of people are not so bare as to require a flounce and yet a sort of cognitive music regarding whatever piece of writing one might speak of has the possibility to better canvas a feeling, the feeling of speechlessness---the wordless, pictorial, though ultimately fragmented splendor of life---the sides of the divine, that is---what it is that rages around the beauty---with words, words that by their own immanent limits could not explain splendor as this without sacrificing something of either comprehensibility or tone. I am speaking mainly of words that in a literal sense do not say much specifically but rather cascade, flee, circle round the core with a curiosity whelming like a buoy.
In a broad sense words, words of this nature, convey something of what is sublime---of what is, indeed, evermore about to be. Via a pattern of thoughts that repeat themselves endlessly, something strange begins to happen. That is, a voice arises, shadowy---speaking for what the words themselves fail to say, over and over again. This perpetual failing says more however than what could have been made significant and clear if stated once. In an inverted, paradoxical way---I guess I want to make eloquence dithyrambic---say a point beyond words, with words that speak for the beyond, in attempting, forever, forever attempting, and falling short. In this way, perhaps, the beyond is reached, but reached in reaching, and is then not really a beyond at all; rather, ends up amounting to hopelessly manufactured, ersatz-eternities. A replication of how the infinite feels rather than a description of what it is. But, perhaps I fail at this, as well,
and so then, most of what I speak of is garbage; the nothingness of psychic trash.
But confusion is O.K. because it helps us go on; it helps us prize ourselves when whatever caused it is sufficiently deciphered and rectified, by us. In such a way perhaps I say more about sense in the continual expiation of sense by that which, at first, I (lets be honest, who else could these words defend?) failed to explain---make a meaning out of---through varying contexts wherein the image, even the word, in question, might find significance. Like Donne, mine is an attempt---daft, hopeless---to describe the invisible: a hopelessly, beautifully futile undertaking.
Regarding my way of writing you could say that I freely converse with myself through descant and---at times, subsequently following a poem expressed in one particular vein---palinode, or a recantation of something worked through in that previous poem---descant being kind of similar, but applied to the whole of one work, rather; to put it simply in the words of stevens, "an and yet, and yet, and yet". I do this, at times to the point of mental exhaustion; and then I give up. As a result of this---somewhat odd---stevensian intellectual poverty, I end up hurling out or throwing in negations---almost a white flag---saying I do not, will not, cannot. I believe it has poetic value but also contains some very true stuff. I mean, in terms of sense, logic, as these things might relate to reality: well, the only way I can see an elliptical, informal logic as this as what it is, I must see it---as an outsider---as a concept, which negates the very in-itselfness of what I am conceiving, perceiving.
The only way to find truth is to lose control, live for awhile in the fugue; and when you do, you'll find that whatever control you had was needed in order to make what you find comprehensible, in order to give it value. It's a roundabout way of saying that the reality we cannot see is realer than the reality we can see, and, yet, tragically, we cannot see it without losing a sense of control, we cannot see it at all. This very fact makes the reality we perceive with minds more fathomable, realer than the realer reality it is impossible to decipher. Because it's all we see, it might not mean it's all there is, but at least in our mind's veritable eye we can understand it. This may sound convoluted, but negations often are.
I mean, to me, art, in general, anyway, is reality, reality with meaning . . . but the nature of this meaning is at least partly disparate from whatever it expresses. It relents to fix towards a mystery of---impossible strangeness---that, ultimately, is as much an affectation as the will or rather perpetual drive to perpetually grasp. In this way the strangeness of art seems different from reality because the meaning behind a piece of art ends up being more important than the reality it depicts, or lack thereof. In reality, the only thing that is important is reality, because it is not lacking; art is lacking, because it is not reality---it is an imitation, and so then must convey something beyond itself. Equivocality is needed in order for one to rightly portray, in art, a reality that is not equivocal.
In other words, meaning is a necessary angel. A brightness of the sun we cannot look at straight; a distortion that, paradoxically, clarifies. Meaning itself, especially in art, is a symbol, as it is an expression; without symbols, art is seen to us as something manufactured and ersatz and unnatural and---ultimately, nonsensical.
No artistic expression yet has held enough weight to be meaningless---nor is it possible for expression as such to be meaningless---as it is that the sense of our minds---though skewed, when mapped out, expressed, in a painting or poem---will always, with enough time and patience, be deciphered in the corners of that painting or poem. Even if the expression is merely a symbol for meaninglessness. That in itself is a meaning, a distortion.
Just as reality itself is strong enough in our minds to not need a reason for existence, art is too weak a force to go on, for very long, without symbols. Sad, that we are unable to reconcile meaning with reality---as it is that, perhaps, they are unified, the same things---in the same way we cannot have meaning and reality exist as the same thing in a piece of art without the piece losing something valuable. They must be separate, in order to be meaningful. In simple terms, art is not reality---is, indeed, a defect of the imagination, an obscure bubbling in the swamp. The fact of this is depressing as hell---and yet, in keeping with the good graces of absurdity, I remain hopeful. But to what purpose?
Good logic is no sort of human concept; T.S. Eliot talked of a "substitute for sense", but to me if there is a possibility for no sense, there is no possibility for true sense, but in what we are able to garner from context and an appropriation of norms to suit our measureless imagination. My work is the process of a moving forth from one axis to another, and back; an exhaling and inhaling; the duality of good and bad. As such, there comes time and time again over the course of a poem when the subject seems hurtling on the stride of it's own, blank inertia; in order to truly escape one axis and be drawn into another, there must be times of nonsense and absurdity, times between subjects as between stations on a radio---late at night---yawling fuzz-bits and guttural mentionings into the dark of the night. This is a poem of the night;
as puzzling and oblique and, ultimately, merciful. And this concept of a dispositional axis is a concept of life as much as of literature. Forever will we move on and gain speed, and yet we know not towards what, or for what reason; will know only the rapture of the escape from the gravity of an object bigger than our subjects could allow for description. Out of a hunger for that feeling of rebirth and eventual slavery by yet another object too big to be settled in a succinct and fitting order.
I must, as a result of all this, to say it---finally---clearly, find out which element is more applicable, regarding making a contiguous, linear shape out of what I have just spent time typing out or scribbling down. In other words, I must ask the question: style, content: what's, ultimately, easier for me to disregard, in order to rise the other out of obscure, troubling depths; in order to manufacture grace? Words themselves are creations, manufactured; so then one has no choice but to beautify from an origin quite far from the wordless, senseless reality---beyond sense, beyond words---that is, in this case, to be reflected on but obviously not grasped. The poet must choose the easier path towards a shape; it is why good poets write with ease. It is why a good poem is graceful, graceful with ease, captivating in the very fluid way it presents, processes, destroys or transcends itself.
If one forces a shape, the shape feels forced. If one, a poet, that is, writes something and adheres, struggles to adhere, to what was contiguous and linear about a poem in its beginning stages---well---that poet will find himself deeper into abstruseness and obscure in the depths of a moil that wants too much to make sense of what is no longer sensible. This, I believe, is why discontinuity is so important. Even great poets have ended up talking about something else: Milton's Lycidas darkly speculates on its author's own premature fate, while at first an elegy in reference to the early end of an irrelevant Latinate scholar, Edward King. Lines Written in a Country Churchyard at its start focuses more on the imagery and sensory things of the countryside which a retired Thomas Gray saw sweep out before him; by the end of the poem he speaks more on the nature of poetic immortality---the image turning, suddenly, towards gravestones---and the poem, being high Romantic, loses focus and is redeemed by that very hesitance on the brink of naming oneself immortal. This hesitance is a strength. It's a phenomenon in poetry that recurs, again and again. It's fascinating: : : :
THE DACHSHUND AT THE STEINWAY.
Madame sits at the STEINWAY talking
Quietly to it as her fingers run across
The keys with a gentle tinkling grace.
It’s the grace of one who has made happiness
An exile there so as to fit more room in for
Her music; notes for meandering minds,
Yes, but meandering too much, beyond minds;
And, at last she puts her latest musical
Phrase outside to die with the retentive
Dachshund, yapping his own little
Notes from patio, paws against the
Sliding door. Forever the child
Of her passions, lady X with a shaking
Of her cuffs in falbalas stretches and
Gets up, goes out of sight. We hear
Strange noises, a coughing out of
Angst. We float to a spot where the
Woman can be viewed, observed, rather,
And find, she has spilled her drink
On the weathered white shag next to
A wooden cabinet with deckings, arty
Frieze; a gift from uncle, Andrew Jackson
Something. She takes a brief gander
At the spot of wine as it soaks into
The rug. She is half who made her,---
Half of uncle; her other half, some
Devil of music: tinkling notes and
Yaps yapping. Insipid canine, she
Thinks, always a distraction, she
Thinks---taking a finger running
Across the enamel of her teeth to
Wipe off residuum from brunch,
Alone, about ten minutes ago.
SLOPPY JOE on BUN, it was; and,---
SWEET POTATO FRIES, with MAYO
For dipping. So, she looks at the
Cabinet only to find that it has
Turned into a spacious, liminal,
Uncharted span of heaven, filled
With uncles, filled with uncles
Offering her wine but wine which never
Grew within the belly of a grape. Come,
Bacchus!, she murmurs, trailing a finger
Across the glued wainscoting, as she walks
Into her small retro-kitsch kitchen. Some
Of her time for the rest of the day is
Spent forgetting about heaven, all of heaven;
About good, and evil---even beyond what either
Is. She is half who made her, evil in the
Eyes of those who made her. The spot of wine
Grows up, becomes a figure, drawls in tinklings
On the STEINWAY, waiting, waiting, waiting,
Yes, for her to coo into the night badly,
Then yell, anticipating beforehand, then
Yell into the heavens fraught with
Nightfall---before lady X can think to
Anticipate anything at all---instead,
Opting to be, to be in the night, just
Be; to domesticate her universe, become
The furniture she desires to have, be in
The OLYMPUS of her hated happiness, whilst
In her notes’ death’s meantime, the dachshund
Blessed with human hands a sudden pushes open
With might the sliding doors, tells her to quit
Yapping, takes her place on the piano-bench to
Thunk the WORLD out of a STEINWAY, the STEINWAY,
Made humanely in the image of music,
All music; the music of lady X, stained
With wine. The stain becomes a dog:
Soon attenuated, gone for days without
Brunch, running his fingers of a mutant-
metaphor far across terrific glass, and we
Are left to grieve in light of a thing no
Longer to be observed, a figure of wine
No longer to be observed, digested,
Hit with swirls and made like Hermes
From the genius of one mortal, one
Comrade of a tinkling thunk in the night,
One night: one night, logic will stain
No such gifts: and no such furniture
Will be for the taking by some constipated
Heaven: no gifts: for example, cabinets,
Cabinets that make all happiness an exile
For this Lady X, this madame who fears the
Phrases of a thinking gone unsaid, lost:
And for the occult to sway forth with stains
With of done OLYMPUS and of STEINWAYS
And of dachshunds plagued with
Yapping hands, the hands of summoning
Happiness out of exile, gone unheard.
MAN CARRYING THING.
So here is a man carrying thing. He
Wanders through snow for miles. He
Is a new type of man; however, not
Necessarily good, a good man. He is
Of a thing in itself carrying him; yes, a
Prompt provider blessed with a meaning
For the design. He is a prompt maker,
True to his word, but a priori to the point
Of being guttural. Nathless, he carries him,
This new man, this man of unlucky telling
Of himself to know the thing he carries good,
As a good. This man who carries, heartless,
Telling only---and only of himself---a burden,
Yet no voice, no, for the clairvoyant sages,
Blind and beardy. Carrying a thing across
The snow, for miles. Must he be the
Elected for an image of desertion and
Paucity: and must that which provides
Give him only him, be not so descript,
Flourish nothing, merely charge the
Doughty drama of his going on with
Troubled, bubbling musics of desertion:
The desertion of a snow and the evils of
A thing that is a man who carries it.
So then they work hand in hand: they
Do not perjure one another openly,
Answering scoffs with scoffs, and yet
There is some beef between, some straining as
Though each were handling a sleight: a striking
Of the chords of ludicrous music---here---in a
Place we know not of but that it is for miles,
Is communicative of some distance, abstruse,
Steeped in carnal death to prompt a séance
For the sages to scratch out. We know not
What he carries, the man, this man for the
Sages, and yet himself a clown, funny with
Turbulence, wagging argument out from nothing;
Made of nothing, strung out from nothing, more.
Whatever it is is carried, entertained like a
Bad guest, as the narrative goes on through snow,
Begrudging death and more the death of life than truly
Death, a true-but-impure death of music and thus burden.
He, who is walking somewheres in the snow . . .
No, we know not what he carries but it
Comes from the sun, the music of the sun,
An insane, quiet, desperate sun of a gross,
Lighted cascade, shoved into the man’s pocket
As what all of his kind might carry, might not:
The sun is what he speaks to defend, for the
Very provider of him, via a ludicrous desertion
Of snow, snow, yes, beautiful, beautiful
Snow, for miles and miles, and this man
A symbol for the symbol, the leftovers
Of drab dreams. An endlessness
Of ecstasy; wait, no, vice versa. Wait,
No, not anything but a paucity: a hulk or
Form far off in the flatness of a big
Place, a WORLD consisting of snow, snow
And things, things to be carried and felt
And not known ever, also. Burdens of a
Seeming of a man, descript as a life seen
As being comprised of three or four hills
And a cloud. Only through a lens of dire
Distance could death drum, honeyed, a demented,
Thunderous clack; only through the persistence,
Yes, persistence of a lens, through which the
Scope of many musics see, couldst confusion see---
Carried out with panache and delicateness---and so
Arrest the songs of the death of meaning. Only
Through the beating of boards couldst the last
Throes die out there, the meaning die out out there;
Music of a man and his thing, and him the chief and
Also obsequious chimer or plebe hungering for
Approval from himself, the chief, way out in a
Place of chords from nothing---obscene with
Plateau, in gathered flatness, haunted wide
With snow. Figures in the snow; figures, forms
In a daydream, slowly melting in the sun.
PARATAXIS. Or, Life as Other
I am no human for the saints
And yet I dare to wipe him off as caul
So that he can dry out his shaking self
And say to me you are left anew now
To die forever and ever
Now that I have fully come out of my dreaming
You are left as a new but different man he might say
And to die a new but different death but still
You remain steadfast
You refuse out of ignorance to pluck
What fruits there are from the seeds
Of my own rising self he might say
And yet strangely I am the part of you
That is the wisest
If only you could breathe and savor life as it is
If only you rid of yourself
This disease of a placelessness
You might die a good death
And perhaps I think to reply that he
Is a brute-force foil to spur forth
An evil brutish life
And I the one now free of you am left
To be blessed and for your sake goodbye he says
I am no longer to be tortured by you your words
Wreaking a life of disease and paralysis
And yet you he says you in turn will be cursed
With a silence grand as death and as at peace
And perhaps I myself do dream of entering this
The galley of the saints and mythy martyrs
And of built greatnesses however built yes
Yes from no sort of foundation
Rather from bookish rumors that go round
And round and round and round and round and
Finagled like a tampering with of how it went
Thereby extreme fantasy
Is made alive out of a darkness
For the wonderful imagination to feed on
And for the people in want of a saint to feed on
Perhaps I myself dream this
And in my dreams enter that plane
But you are still underground he might say
This other different from myself
And most wise and yet to myself blurred
By some too salacious reckoning of him
And that shakily as I myself shivering
In the dripping brine frozen
Comprehend a majesty adroit and unyielding
And so then not the majesty of saints
And so then in my being in the brine
I am the saint of the brine
The myth is made and is a sphere
Spinning errant with muttered dithyramb and and
And poor diction and so then hiving
Within a straight nucleus
Or grand heavy bosom of blessings
For this other hop o my thumb to inflate
With the breathing out of a greatness
Is an awakening finally
A rebirth of senses
And yet with an inhaling
Of the cancer of a mind
Unable to breach spheres
Well yeah well with that cancer comes the utter crock
Of differences different men in me
Parroting out the same image
Woven to disarm all the saints reborn
With wires of a hopelessly paratactic thing
Yeah thing or a device
For the english language
To tamper with to fit
This damned spinny dingus of a pome
This my spinny fuckin dingus
Of a depression vested in the rebirth
Of that other and his words to me now
Are as futile devices
That merely change a darkness
To the ruin of light
And they are to me myself as sewage
Negations abrupt wordplay abruptly
Strewn blindly about
Fluttering like confetti or
Circling like as a wheel in the mud
But no no this is
A weakest caesura for gerontion
A pause for the greatness
To collect like a breath breathed
In and out as such to make bold
The frozen self in the brine
Unable to penetrate that
That that damned nucleus
And in recognizing this
I know he is blessed by me and my words
He knows he is a saint to be defiled
In rude awakenings like bold breaths
That each and every second awaken him
To one of the sides of duality
Without telling him of his place
And in a godless sort of way
He crushes either side
Once reborn there
Thinking it a poison
Crushes the beauty
Only to remain incurably bright
Amongst a juxtaposed darkness
Not knowing that he knows
Yet knowing I do
And not knowing
That I think him myself this other
Of differences and polarities
That make a garbage
Out of such an anguishing
As doubt provides
But to be ambivalent
Is necessary is a necessary poison
And is a necessary heaven the other might say
He says to me it is for
The mortals in the gutsy fray to deify
With nonsense and with the raging
Of confusion
And all for ELIOT and his gerontion
And I I I a being in dry month
Waiting for beauty and
Stuck in breathing anew
I who sloughing it off normally
Not knowing what I trash as not trash
But growing up anyways all stubborn
And doomed to be pissed off forever
At having arrived too late
At wonder-wounding choosing instead
To buckle and grow from brokenness
A flower for coughing goats
Stuck raging in the words like a metaphor
I blessed
To be in a hovel of brine know
In a palace of ruin bent backwards
Towards a seeking of of
Of naught but my own place in myth know
My own saintly destruction
Of a self is of my own hellish design.
BLOOD, BONE, MARROW, PASSION, FEELING.
"I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling---
Because at least the past were passed away---
And for the future---(but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say---the future is a serious matter---
And so---for God's sake---hock and soda water!"
---GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
If I were to heaven so much clay unformed---
And not a man held to the duty of receiving passions himself
And if I were as all condemned to live forever beneath the universe
And to look at the stars unfeeling and not marvel---
Nor understand I am mere yet beautifully strange
Because I can breathe and simply due to this am beautiful
And if to the luminous I and all were dim and blank---
And if none who trod a length of this small WORLD were bigger than it
Nor were salient in themselves enough to reflect and find principle in being
And though in a place as here one might endeavor they endeavor---
To feed not a collective nor individual knowledge but work
As kelson or cog to support and drone on for what is not more
Than some bad abstraction in the aether never processed---
Well if this were so this land would be to heaven a land of clay extant to feed
That heaven only and I and we unformed should want a form divine from it
From heaven but not harnessed by all by me although we work to or perhaps---
We have by this point harnessed that divine however nameless it might be
And it is unsupported once in the hands of the minds of I and all
Who are the recipients after all of what whatever beyond---
Chucks back to us in hopes we use it to shape in our own way ourselves
Rather than just for hands to get from up in the aether somewheres
And to happily shape something else happily in a compliance akin to helplessness---
With the base urges as a directive but not catalyst to swerve
And so revolt as clay from heaven and so as to be more than the WORLD
But if the rotten WORLD were mine---
And mine for me to paw forth on and mine to direct
Towards sanctity were my own understanding clods
Then passions as I would have had without realizing---
Instead of quickly wasted in addressing a beyond more furious
Only to be chucked back to me as guerdon for the toils of all
Would if encountered by what is beyond---
Have their riddance from me and all anyway in appearing different
And so then to the questioner whether me or other no such prize
That is once touched by heaven though only touched---
This my little clod of symbols might appear different
Though it is the same clod the same asked question
And in being the same clod would appear unchanged---
Though it has been to heaven and has been rejected by heaven
So that though it has seen well what I have not this my dirt for all
To examine is examined and thought of as nothing special---
And even if comprising the WORLD in me if as human
Might as well be unenlightened and as useful as figments
Of reality to reality as it is though they share in the same shade---
Though I am no shape for heaven nor in a shape to receive a beyond
If a beyond of negatives and wreathed in ignorance and poor planning
And yet all these words are all for heaven---
And all to still the tremors in my hands
Each to each that know of man that he is not enough
But this should instead be for the dignity of broken men---
Others vile others who live just to declaim to vile blackness
So they might hear an echo dumbly back to them
And thus feel not so much vacant and perturbed---
As like a discontented void a dark nothingness materialized
Made a visage to look at from out of clay heavens
Perhaps this yelling it will pass in stillness---
And I and we all will remain incurious and jaded
As to whatever identity or face of passion
That might have come out of infinite speech or symbol---
And all this well it is just to confer the dignity of being
More than myself oneself to that which has a name in us
And yet like fools we all and I wish to keep our faces---
So that I and all men broken then might be fixed
To some daft GOD of the WORLD
But all of us we will remain broken---
Nonetheless will remain as the chaff disjecta
Of an honest void beyond heaven already
More much more dignified than words allow for---
And by frank avowals made divine in me and all
And still sounding vague with stillness but strong
So then I am the clay we are the clay of an unreachable strength---
And in recognition though born jagged I now am of a grace
Both haunting and inconsiderate
For I am we are the echo---
I am the dull echo
For the void to face finally
And the void will with my voice make of me a clay---
Answering my answers to the answers
But not so limitless as I imagined
Not so limitless as to shape questions forever out of fact---
I and all men anyway only know the fact of our passions
And we out of a dignity get a grip and shoo them off
And so am I in being the yelling void---
Left a WORLD of dull and frivolous answers
Belched occasionally from nothing
Sometimes however serendipity occurs---
And myself and we all waken from the moil
An afflatus for so long in turbulent slumber turbulent
Though somehow for a moment we arrange with discretion---
A few base fits for the base work of passions to justify
With an identity fleeting as shade
But then tragically we are deserted---
And with the dark masculine of an utterance the void returns
Clutching the dignity of my name and the name of everybody
For we all are too devoted to fact---
And not enough to the shape of symbols
Ill-formed and fraught with unbelievable shade
And we all are of the shade of suffering out---
A wealth of answers suffering out
A meddling with some aching bareness
And brokenness as a bough wrested by high winds---
From the tree of knowledge now as but an abstraction
A weird gas filled to blooming with the brokenness
Of a shape for a moment to loosen and redact---
And so the hour of dignity made manifest yet again
Shows all of man the heaven in themselves for a little
Made manifest out a nothingness of their own typified clay---
And as such the damnable afflatus stripped to the nakedest symbol
Or question becomes of a quality and fabric more divine
Than any answer could have declaimed brutally---
By men to men and by me to me asked
And all for the rotten pleasure of suffering
And all---
To flip a thing on its head and all to groan
Not so much under the dull weight of a void
But so as almost to release the moment quickly by a breath---
Of my own conviction stitched as fabric
Like the loose WORLD tight we all and myself let go dignity
And as for my passions they are naught---
They are as utterances of a disembodied head
Jabbering to groin out of nothing
The idea of a sum of symbols and codes---
And to feel less alone
In the dark psyche of a WORLD made
For all of a passionate though incurious humanity---
Stitched out of a fabric-stillness breathing in and out
And made scrupulously just for me to shout for
So that all and all might chance answer the clay of ourselves---
Without a question without a reason or source
So as to chafe the stillness of a loud and crude infinity
And leave me and all of course robbed of the fabric of odd life---
And the beginnings of thought left without any ends of a thought
And this done by sapping the drama and strangeness of names
For what would have been an unbelievable understanding---
Between earthly and divine things that live quietly in coeval
Without questions or the pomp of answers
And satisfied as being an approbation of the pith of flesh---
As would a wayward dog a lost mind wishes to stick to
Might know and realer his own frank intelligence and dogged
Might in his shade hear the howl of all the incurious WORLD
And know that each walking clod of clay sicklied over with a pale cast of dignity
Is ridden once ridden of that nothing nothing
BEYOND THE GRAVE.
Pastor always said something about finding JESUS,
always sure he would come by next week: well,
Sunday rolls around again and no JESUS, just us,
sitting in the pews, waiting for the guy to explain
how it was possible: for a religion to keep going on like
this: possible to keep on being wrong about hope: about
all of it, all that what graves tell us anyway is the end: but
which a well-meaning CHRISTIAN might surmise is as but
a symbol to keep all of EARTH's inhabitants from fearing
that whatever VOID they sense while alive, if you are good,
won't be as palpable, or, present at all, once interment
comes to pass: but, what is death: death, JESUS,
hope: what is it to remain with hope, in spite of death:
of JESUS and his absence: well, perhaps the arc of life
ain't no arc at all, arc used in this case to mean pattern,
rather than a parabolic structure of improvement, or
merely change: I wanted to ask GOD if it was the VOID,
if when I felt the desperate emptiness of missteps or was
wallowing, sedentary, in all the bull of the past it was not
just a mind filled with existential waste letting ope the
floodgates but was in fact a metaphysical premonition of
sorts: that is, perhaps, emptiness was GODLY, was
of GOD, whatever it is; creator, sustainer, what have you.
And maybe it's a GODless WORLD, maybe; a structureless
structure of a WORLD. A gaff on us all, and for us all to
give dignity to, fathom as not so much nothingness as
much as self-created angst, wallowing; bright and wonderful
despite a suspicion that the will of a VOID, if what we
sense is the truth---and beyond a personal solipsism nothing
is all that exists---is something without an ability to be fathomed
with nods or declarations but rather a frightening indifference:
or, rather, a running poverty all the way to the other side of
hopefulness: but: the pastor he would say almost to defend
himself that JESUS would find it hard to enter into a WORLD so
nihilistic as to think him merely a homeless degenerate: he
said we were all batty with a structure of which the makeup
was our own lack of faith: he said he would be first in line to
miss out on the rapture next week, when JESUS was sure
to come, either way: into a WORLD of damnable parabolas and
undefined anguish, which upon his arrival would quake the
EARTH with misery no longer: at least, if JESUS had anything
to do with it: I guess he, the pastor, thought any crazy person
claiming himself to be the second coming would be a JESUS
enough, but I think what he meant is that anything amazing
ain't so amazing nowadays: any outstanding achievement
gets soon lost in a sea of a grim nothingness so very quickly:
all that we hope for is not so much expected to come but
rather hoped, perennially, to come, for the sake of being
disappointed, so that at least we all, on this planet, might
somewhat prove that the premonition of nothingness is
correct: that the VOID in us is really a void for all time, but
received in segments; that is, until we die, and realize, of
course, that we were all wrong, that everybody was wrong,
and that we are not even granted the dignity of having, at
least, at times, a hunch about the universe: well, we are wrong
about being wrong, wrong about being right, really: in that,
indeed, perhaps indifference, the indifference of all that is,
towards itself, is key: in the mix: but understanding that
indifference via experience is as key, and we cannot do that,
we cannot account for the vastness of this variable until we
are interred, dead, and realize that maybe we’re the only
things that can turn to look on themselves; that maybe
afterwards we’ll be no more able to scrutinize as breathe;
that, perhaps, an eternity of sweet, silent absence beyond
absence is what awaits each, every one of us afterwards,
and that---perhaps, perhaps---the gravestones were right.
TRIPLE-SOUNDS.
So I am left as gross a man as ever
As from the bed I sit upright at once to look at her
Observing the slouching slimness of her body
And visibly nonplussed I stare and stare
And wait for her to notice my eyes
Though she appears more fascinated
With some measly thing
Elsewhere
On the street
Or some trivia in her head regarded at will
For when a need arose
To address anything but the conversation
And so I remember I responded as an outsider but responded
So as to prove myself as more to her than just an obliging worm
So as to free myself almost from the usual deference
And I wondered
How her fury would be expressed this time around
In answering to such a stupid thing as passive
As that triple-sounded coronal
Or will she ignore the admonishment completely I thought
And communicate that which I would dread to hear despite
And in her silence say she sees my wickedness plain at last
She will ignore it I think
As if it were a moment
Of a windy drifting
Across her very cheek
Somewhat making an impression
And so then sensed however soft and fleet
But she stands and stands
In the windy silence of passionate ström
By the window in her sunny dress for the folks
And she raises a blithe hand to stroke the blinds
And it is this image of insignificant beauty
Out of all things
That I remember still as clear
Looking towards the secondhand clock
Instead of me she is averting her eyes
From mine I thought horrified
Waiting for that time to come
When we see no more of each other
So I tsk and tsk and tsk
This is an image and as much a feeling
Disquieting now as I tenderly recall the one mistake
Of a passive and angry man
I remember and know this feeling as as much an image
To torture to life from out of the whirligig
And it crying for pistol and ball to crush grossness
Out of these poor and overworked renderings
Once wakened like a mutant of a child
And it crying with his mutant-tears
For the destruction of these gross things
These words to describe a hurt that still is in me
And me by now sharpened to the nub
An emotional dullard
This as I rave bogs more in the banks of memory
And as I now know is as permanent a fixture
As any lurking pain would be
To a mind tending to lacerate itself
So then I speak no further on a matter of hurt
But anyways feel it splinter there
In my mind that preys upon such breakable feelings
Such fragility made crass and dumb
By the need to speak it plain
Speak it at all
I speak now just as harbinger for this image of mine for me
And though a representative of the things of the past
Am not one so fragile as my memories are.---
I am callous, callous
And struck by tenderness not much anymore
Less than a block would be
With his block-headed mutant-feelings
Now I am callous, callous as any judge would be
Looking into the face
Of a murderer of myself
I am one as to be shattered with looking
And for this to be the image I use
For this poem
This image of a peering through blinds
Well it is not so made of power as I thought
Because I forget whether she looked back
To suffer a sidelong gaze at me
Or whether she said her ride was here
And left without bothering
To look at me
This is me recognizing
That I am going on in life not blessed
For if my nonsense is to drool eternally
Onto the page as eternally blank
Well then
I must not find out anything at all
I must remain as faithless and benign as she
Of what could change with three clicks of the tongue
For we have still not spoken finally of it
And now I am left without her face to see
Through the clutter of analysis
That is really altogether a crude elegy
For something I had once
That cannot die
Because it should have long ago.---
SORITES PARADOX.
I live I expand I find out
I think my liver hurts it really hurts
I am all that kindness shoulders to carry
I wonder if it all means something,
I control the universe . . . sometimes.
I die I dwindle I remain ignorant
I think I can stomach a shot of liquor again
I leave kindness to bear nothing
I wonder whether it's meant to mean anything at all,
I'm utterly powerless.
I'm born I bloom I despise complacency
I get plastered and hurl my guts out
I let a kindness now unburdened in
I do not wonder about what's none of my business,
I am a GOD of GODS.
But if these thoughts
Were declaimed by SORITES
In being so very, in being
A so very beautifully
Humane paradox
In being representative
Of all the rage of contradiction
So very human in the clashing,---
In the flawless inching
Towards a side not like itself
Yet carried on beforehand
Journeying till
It got there, well-
-What's to say we're not
All connected and thus everything;
Thus, nothing, nothing,
Nothing.
TREMOLO.
Myself the great anti-master who meets, one day
a life---in anti-questions---as weak-
-as his own, decides---yes, yes,
yes, that he is, verisimilarly, the answer to what
makes a life from things, as this,---
a life: of sad phantoms: for
him to dissect no longer,---despite that it is, quite
so, the right time to dissect; make
lives from limits. In
living some self out. In blooming out the clash---or,
conflict---a myself-as-answer becomes
a myself-as-catalyst for
the quest to gag a dry throat with: welling words,
corrupt in their very cycled trying for
what is beyond parturiency,
never asking for the master of cycles to dignify
a word or two---if even in jest---for an-
-honorable sublimeness’s sake
and, understated, a vague and weary whistling, just
to hear the whistling: of mad music---and,
woven trends: and, ostensibly,
to still sportive blood: chunked somewheres in my dark,
pressing brain: well: collect the chalky,
bulky planets’ hulk backwards,
says the anti-question, one of many, saying a thing, at
times, with a mercurial sort of rage
in the havoc of dull keys
tapped, banged on bright pianos and with violence: and:
in the confusion of a damasking,
in frilly picot,
the master-key might emerge like a fringed guess and,
finally, lose the style and
portend a content
so important as to address the bright WORLD in-
-gaming for the questions
unanswerable; so, then,
a bit tired of their shaky lot, though far
removed from, incessant, the
wither of keys that sing
an anti-master’s own ambivalence in seeking-
-for life’s lifting off into reality.
The realness of a deep and
profuse cotton-content: and still as vast, as fast:
no, no, no: vaster; faster in its quality,
expansive seeing-
-even, than myself. And all stacks a broad layer, yes,
yeah: of some truth, dissembled, perturbed:
still as lucid, not-
-as close: hopping off into the solar system. Some old,
Big, big question braces for the dramatic-
-shift and swivels
like a head on a stick and not at all like a master's-
-anti-being. He's in me, apart and in,
shadowed by a crude
schism: but: all these damned elements go forth.
They chase the product, the final,---a
union of a trembling
mystic's fault, yes, and not on me; it is not
on me to take the damn blame. To wring
the fierceness at first
staggering dry: dry, with desperate planets
in jeopardy of losing truth's dusty
doggedness, paused, going,
and at last interposed there as would a fly:
in the room: I think of a gigantic-
-yawn of power in that small
fry: that noticed presence: pleasant, somewhat,
though the symbol for death’s portal.
All things endure; this will,
will endure and feed the pangs. And yet, the pangs
derive: from a strange and childish
haranguing: of this temple-
piece. This temple of a cotton-tweed anti-master man,
humbling in his fluid floundering,
his wishy-washy maculateness,
weltering well, runs a strait of conference across.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planets enduring: held together, jankily, with some
kinda wowed silence: propitiated-
-by preachers:
perspiring, once done with evil, brimstone:
this, this is in-between saying,
but saying-
-despite; so then, making the reader work to
explain with innuendo. And,
of course,
revel: in busted minutes of bafflement, as like
a surprise of consciousness;
even though,
truly, whatever pace kept, if the judge be too
optimistic, suffocates and goes
out,---which,
really, is the point. Myself really wants to
make readers O.K. with the fugue:
wowed silence,
after the sketchy speech: throat-spasms-
-for that ultimate politician to
build buildings
for, buildings of quandary and mouthed like
vague utterance: window to some
innuendo: made of
great knowledge, dignity, faith: some apeshit
soul out there must know the
goddamned location;
must see his nothing and all. And all the vast
questions: all the answers
are made, yeah, out-
-of naught, but spirals: shitty ellipses: but,
I am starting, slowly: to go at
a different velocity;
indeed, to speak before spoken to, send askew
messages at first quite sensible;
abort no longer,
but, see that I live out endless death,
implode the first death more
into a stillness:
small, crushed, wadded: what of common
threads of thought, eh?
Something, barely
unearthed and found to be uninteresting,
even though, for so long,
hidden, shrouded
in some alleged mystery until I knew and
finally that that mystery
was the focus and
source of the intrigue, and, though-
-crudely it sent forth odd
messages could
not translate well, could not be
captivating, was left as
some labyrinth
of bullshit overcome very long
ago,---now, resurfacing:
however out
of place the situation then was
in terms of it's popping
up out of
nowheres: giving pain a chance to
not be anticipated,---thus,
manufactured: :
POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO.
There's a whole WORLD in this room that goes
and goes. I receive colors from a small and-
-chipped heaven and I think sadly on this,
the reasons for my floundering and make
sense this shapely argument; this misery
of and yet. Or from some hell some letters
To be thrown away, as bills. But: the way it
goes is how it is received,---the room that is
in my rheumy brain, a rubbled clutter; it is-
-received, my thoughts are, as though eaten
and regurgitated. The result of contraband:
meanings' contraband: revealed in colors of
a florid psyche's chance: at half-grace, at
a shade made whole,---synecdoche of pith
and charged with utterance: colors of the
cosmos,---of the dark macho down the street,
coming, coming up to give it heaven,---give
the muse in the room my heaven and my hell
and still to send me letters from its grave;
indecipherable grave, scrawled with omens.
Chip heaven more, the colossal illusion
says. Chip the fine print of a dumb letter-
-from off volcanic expostulations of urgency:
the letter from her ghost, the ghost of-
-who she was: the girl once in my hell: dark
girl, arms at present rung round her macho;
round that culled heaven, whispered back
to me as grace; that passage of a sailing
sight. That shining of the croaked life out---:
that why, that ultimate, colossal why,
that letter of pain, of pain: a charnel-house,
filled with hell, the hell of sweat and rosy
hookers hanging on the door: and the door-
-plastered in big letters gives me greetings:
it gives me colors, shades: chipped shades
of heaven: the heaven I really, really don't
ever wanna learn from, just make a voice out
of, by the time I can't reason rhyme out-
-of reason: can just leave reason as reason
itself, half-created: a macho of a point: with her,
now: he, who grasps the street with his hands
and crumples it; he who is with her, this girl
of a heaven, once learned, once known, now
never to be known again. Again. So it goes on:
the fire's fueled up: the old memory crumples
in the hands of some farcical GOD, not of my
design, not of my shade: gnarled angel; she who
swears to hell. Not while I'm alive could she reason
rhythms stalking in a meter: absurd, dangerous
as whores on the stoop, stooped: or could she
satisfy the yet of yet, give meaning disallowed
a rhythm that could go of into some port in air:
but rather the muse goes, goes on, and on, until
I stop, and thus she dies in heaven---dies for all
of heaven: for all of a falling innocence: and all
the repetitions, lights, forgotten elements,---
chaotic !@#$, burnt fuckin elements; burning.
Chip it off the shoulder, you, you form of a
damnable confusion's going on: you utter,
utter malignancy, utter majesty of my tender,
living guts; give you up, go walk down the
street, dammit; leave me behind, holding,
cradling my heavens that bite hostilely at
my elbow---wanting out---out of going,
left then as a beautiful and delicate stasis.
As colors, given for the sake of shades; given,
chipped, my heaven of analysis. What comes after
the feeling, unanticipated---but, nobly, goes on,
gone out of this WORLD in this room I look out-
-onto the street from, seeing her---seeing macho---
seeing the street crumple and disperse by hands
of a dark character, a needed malignant spook
snickering in my ears: the music of a hapless
heaven's drought upon the finding out of this,
the port in air as no such port but rather chaos:
it is a choas, chaos, falling short,yes, of the
seeming: not seeming enough, critical, nonsensical,
a withered reaction to the macho of and yet:
outside of this my head's WORLD, the WORLD of
my bad head in the room, making synchronicity
out of horror, horror, horror, horror, horror.
KAFKA'S DAGGER.
Let me bleed into you,
let us grow and learn from one another,
let life not tell us otherwise,
tell us that we cannot learn,
cannot have faith,
yes,
In ourselves;
nor if we manage ourselves together break us open.
Again I am broken open,
bound to nervous,
clicking energy;
it is the energy of a freezing void.
Again I am bled out into another kind of source,
a source of evil and unkind;
again,
yes. Again to take what we have taken from ourselves for itself,
and that for still unknown reasons,
unknown,
never known,
not even beyond death to be known;
Not ever. And if we cannot blend,
cannot reside in the one sphere,
perhaps,
what is salvaged from the apocalypse,
the death of the brains we both have,
being more than what we know,
being the dagger in me that you turn for me,,,
will make me bleed. Will you drink the blood that drops from my wound?
Will you eat this reflection of myself,
this isolated image of,
merciless,
the driving force that you have sucked from me,
this the grandeur of my sourceless pain,
my own pain,
the pain you twist deeper in with dagger to cause,
to cause so that I can see my own blood,
see the blood of my work,
see it kill me?
And thus you remember,
we have tried to be one,
or were one once were together in the struggle,
the struggle to be one,
to reside in the damnable sphere,
the sphere of blood's dropping.
THE DACHSHUND AT THE STEINWAY.
Madame sits at the STEINWAY talking
Quietly to it as her fingers run across
The keys with a gentle tinkling grace.
It’s the grace of one who has made happiness
An exile there so as to fit more room in for
Her music; notes for meandering minds,
Yes, but meandering too much, beyond minds;
And, at last she puts her latest musical
Phrase outside to die with the retentive
Dachshund, yapping his own little
Notes from patio, paws against the
Sliding door. Forever the child
Of her passions, lady X with a shaking
Of her cuffs in falbalas stretches and
Gets up, goes out of sight. We hear
Strange noises, a coughing out of
Angst. We float to a spot where the
Woman can be viewed, observed, rather,
And find, she has spilled her drink
On the weathered white shag next to
A wooden cabinet with deckings, arty
Frieze; a gift from uncle, Andrew Jackson
Something. She takes a brief gander
At the spot of wine as it soaks into
The rug. She is half who made her,---
Half of uncle; her other half, some
Devil of music: tinkling notes and
Yaps yapping. Insipid canine, she
Thinks, always a distraction, she
Thinks---taking a finger running
Across the enamel of her teeth to
Wipe off residuum from brunch,
Alone, about ten minutes ago.
SLOPPY JOE on BUN, it was; and,---
SWEET POTATO FRIES, with MAYO
For dipping. So, she looks at the
Cabinet only to find that it has
Turned into a spacious, liminal,
Uncharted span of heaven, filled
With uncles, filled with uncles
Offering her wine but wine which never
Grew within the belly of a grape. Come,
Bacchus!, she murmurs, trailing a finger
Across the glued wainscoting, as she walks
Into her small retro-kitsch kitchen. Some
Of her time for the rest of the day is
Spent forgetting about heaven, all of heaven;
About good, and evil---even beyond what either
Is. She is half who made her, evil in the
Eyes of those who made her. The spot of wine
Grows up, becomes a figure, drawls in tinklings
On the STEINWAY, waiting, waiting, waiting,
Yes, for her to coo into the night badly,
Then yell, anticipating beforehand, then
Yell into the heavens fraught with
Nightfall---before lady X can think to
Anticipate anything at all---instead,
Opting to be, to be in the night, just
Be; to domesticate her universe, become
The furniture she desires to have, be in
The OLYMPUS of her hated happiness, whilst
In her notes’ death’s meantime, the dachshund
Blessed with human hands a sudden pushes open
With might the sliding doors, tells her to quit
Yapping, takes her place on the piano-bench to
Thunk the WORLD out of a STEINWAY, the STEINWAY,
Made humanely in the image of music,
All music; the music of lady X, stained
With wine. The stain becomes a dog:
Soon attenuated, gone for days without
Brunch, running his fingers of a mutant-
metaphor far across terrific glass, and we
Are left to grieve in light of a thing no
Longer to be observed, a figure of wine
No longer to be observed, digested,
Hit with swirls and made like Hermes
From the genius of one mortal, one
Comrade of a tinkling thunk in the night,
One night: one night, logic will stain
No such gifts: and no such furniture
Will be for the taking by some constipated
Heaven: no gifts: for example, cabinets,
Cabinets that make all happiness an exile
For this Lady X, this madame who fears the
Phrases of a thinking gone unsaid, lost:
And for the occult to sway forth with stains
With of done OLYMPUS and of STEINWAYS
And of dachshunds plagued with
Yapping hands, the hands of summoning
Happiness out of exile, gone unheard.
MAN CARRYING THING.
So here is a man carrying thing. He
Wanders through snow for miles. He
Is a new type of man; however, not
Necessarily good, a good man. He is
Of a thing in itself carrying him; yes, a
Prompt provider blessed with a meaning
For the design. He is a prompt maker,
True to his word, but a priori to the point
Of being guttural. Nathless, he carries him,
This new man, this man of unlucky telling
Of himself to know the thing he carries good,
As a good. This man who carries, heartless,
Telling only---and only of himself---a burden,
Yet no voice, no, for the clairvoyant sages,
Blind and beardy. Carrying a thing across
The snow, for miles. Must he be the
Elected for an image of desertion and
Paucity: and must that which provides
Give him only him, be not so descript,
Flourish nothing, merely charge the
Doughty drama of his going on with
Troubled, bubbling musics of desertion:
The desertion of a snow and the evils of
A thing that is a man who carries it.
So then they work hand in hand: they
Do not perjure one another openly,
Answering scoffs with scoffs, and yet
There is some beef between, some straining as
Though each were handling a sleight: a striking
Of the chords of ludicrous music---here---in a
Place we know not of but that it is for miles,
Is communicative of some distance, abstruse,
Steeped in carnal death to prompt a séance
For the sages to scratch out. We know not
What he carries, the man, this man for the
Sages, and yet himself a clown, funny with
Turbulence, wagging argument out from nothing;
Made of nothing, strung out from nothing, more.
Whatever it is is carried, entertained like a
Bad guest, as the narrative goes on through snow,
Begrudging death and more the death of life than truly
Death, a true-but-impure death of music and thus burden.
He, who is walking somewheres in the snow . . .
No, we know not what he carries but it
Comes from the sun, the music of the sun,
An insane, quiet, desperate sun of a gross,
Lighted cascade, shoved into the man’s pocket
As what all of his kind might carry, might not:
The sun is what he speaks to defend, for the
Very provider of him, via a ludicrous desertion
Of snow, snow, yes, beautiful, beautiful
Snow, for miles and miles, and this man
A symbol for the symbol, the leftovers
Of drab dreams. An endlessness
Of ecstasy; wait, no, vice versa. Wait,
No, not anything but a paucity: a hulk or
Form far off in the flatness of a big
Place, a WORLD consisting of snow, snow
And things, things to be carried and felt
And not known ever, also. Burdens of a
Seeming of a man, descript as a life seen
As being comprised of three or four hills
And a cloud. Only through a lens of dire
Distance could death drum, honeyed, a demented,
Thunderous clack; only through the persistence,
Yes, persistence of a lens, through which the
Scope of many musics see, couldst confusion see---
Carried out with panache and delicateness---and so
Arrest the songs of the death of meaning. Only
Through the beating of boards couldst the last
Throes die out there, the meaning die out out there;
Music of a man and his thing, and him the chief and
Also obsequious chimer or plebe hungering for
Approval from himself, the chief, way out in a
Place of chords from nothing---obscene with
Plateau, in gathered flatness, haunted wide
With snow. Figures in the snow; figures, forms
In a daydream, slowly melting in the sun.
PARATAXIS. Or, Life as Other
I am no human for the saints
And yet I dare to wipe him off as caul
So that he can dry out his shaking self
And say to me you are left anew now
To die forever and ever
Now that I have fully come out of my dreaming
You are left as a new but different man he might say
And to die a new but different death but still
You remain steadfast
You refuse out of ignorance to pluck
What fruits there are from the seeds
Of my own rising self he might say
And yet strangely I am the part of you
That is the wisest
If only you could breathe and savor life as it is
If only you rid of yourself
This disease of a placelessness
You might die a good death
And perhaps I think to reply that he
Is a brute-force foil to spur forth
An evil brutish life
And I the one now free of you am left
To be blessed and for your sake goodbye he says
I am no longer to be tortured by you your words
Wreaking a life of disease and paralysis
And yet you he says you in turn will be cursed
With a silence grand as death and as at peace
And perhaps I myself do dream of entering this
The galley of the saints and mythy martyrs
And of built greatnesses however built yes
Yes from no sort of foundation
Rather from bookish rumors that go round
And round and round and round and round and
Finagled like a tampering with of how it went
Thereby extreme fantasy
Is made alive out of a darkness
For the wonderful imagination to feed on
And for the people in want of a saint to feed on
Perhaps I myself dream this
And in my dreams enter that plane
But you are still underground he might say
This other different from myself
And most wise and yet to myself blurred
By some too salacious reckoning of him
And that shakily as I myself shivering
In the dripping brine frozen
Comprehend a majesty adroit and unyielding
And so then not the majesty of saints
And so then in my being in the brine
I am the saint of the brine
The myth is made and is a sphere
Spinning errant with muttered dithyramb and and
And poor diction and so then hiving
Within a straight nucleus
Or grand heavy bosom of blessings
For this other hop o my thumb to inflate
With the breathing out of a greatness
Is an awakening finally
A rebirth of senses
And yet with an inhaling
Of the cancer of a mind
Unable to breach spheres
Well yeah well with that cancer comes the utter crock
Of differences different men in me
Parroting out the same image
Woven to disarm all the saints reborn
With wires of a hopelessly paratactic thing
Yeah thing or a device
For the english language
To tamper with to fit
This damned spinny dingus of a pome
This my spinny fuckin dingus
Of a depression vested in the rebirth
Of that other and his words to me now
Are as futile devices
That merely change a darkness
To the ruin of light
And they are to me myself as sewage
Negations abrupt wordplay abruptly
Strewn blindly about
Fluttering like confetti or
Circling like as a wheel in the mud
But no no this is
A weakest caesura for gerontion
A pause for the greatness
To collect like a breath breathed
In and out as such to make bold
The frozen self in the brine
Unable to penetrate that
That that damned nucleus
And in recognizing this
I know he is blessed by me and my words
He knows he is a saint to be defiled
In rude awakenings like bold breaths
That each and every second awaken him
To one of the sides of duality
Without telling him of his place
And in a godless sort of way
He crushes either side
Once reborn there
Thinking it a poison
Crushes the beauty
Only to remain incurably bright
Amongst a juxtaposed darkness
Not knowing that he knows
Yet knowing I do
And not knowing
That I think him myself this other
Of differences and polarities
That make a garbage
Out of such an anguishing
As doubt provides
But to be ambivalent
Is necessary is a necessary poison
And is a necessary heaven the other might say
He says to me it is for
The mortals in the gutsy fray to deify
With nonsense and with the raging
Of confusion
And all for ELIOT and his gerontion
And I I I a being in dry month
Waiting for beauty and
Stuck in breathing anew
I who sloughing it off normally
Not knowing what I trash as not trash
But growing up anyways all stubborn
And doomed to be pissed off forever
At having arrived too late
At wonder-wounding choosing instead
To buckle and grow from brokenness
A flower for coughing goats
Stuck raging in the words like a metaphor
I blessed
To be in a hovel of brine know
In a palace of ruin bent backwards
Towards a seeking of of
Of naught but my own place in myth know
My own saintly destruction
Of a self is of my own hellish design.
BLOOD, BONE, MARROW, PASSION, FEELING.
"I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling---
Because at least the past were passed away---
And for the future---(but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say---the future is a serious matter---
And so---for God's sake---hock and soda water!"
---GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
If I were to heaven so much clay unformed---
And not a man held to the duty of receiving passions himself
And if I were as all condemned to live forever beneath the universe
And to look at the stars unfeeling and not marvel---
Nor understand I am mere yet beautifully strange
Because I can breathe and simply due to this am beautiful
And if to the luminous I and all were dim and blank---
And if none who trod a length of this small WORLD were bigger than it
Nor were salient in themselves enough to reflect and find principle in being
And though in a place as here one might endeavor they endeavor---
To feed not a collective nor individual knowledge but work
As kelson or cog to support and drone on for what is not more
Than some bad abstraction in the aether never processed---
Well if this were so this land would be to heaven a land of clay extant to feed
That heaven only and I and we unformed should want a form divine from it
From heaven but not harnessed by all by me although we work to or perhaps---
We have by this point harnessed that divine however nameless it might be
And it is unsupported once in the hands of the minds of I and all
Who are the recipients after all of what whatever beyond---
Chucks back to us in hopes we use it to shape in our own way ourselves
Rather than just for hands to get from up in the aether somewheres
And to happily shape something else happily in a compliance akin to helplessness---
With the base urges as a directive but not catalyst to swerve
And so revolt as clay from heaven and so as to be more than the WORLD
But if the rotten WORLD were mine---
And mine for me to paw forth on and mine to direct
Towards sanctity were my own understanding clods
Then passions as I would have had without realizing---
Instead of quickly wasted in addressing a beyond more furious
Only to be chucked back to me as guerdon for the toils of all
Would if encountered by what is beyond---
Have their riddance from me and all anyway in appearing different
And so then to the questioner whether me or other no such prize
That is once touched by heaven though only touched---
This my little clod of symbols might appear different
Though it is the same clod the same asked question
And in being the same clod would appear unchanged---
Though it has been to heaven and has been rejected by heaven
So that though it has seen well what I have not this my dirt for all
To examine is examined and thought of as nothing special---
And even if comprising the WORLD in me if as human
Might as well be unenlightened and as useful as figments
Of reality to reality as it is though they share in the same shade---
Though I am no shape for heaven nor in a shape to receive a beyond
If a beyond of negatives and wreathed in ignorance and poor planning
And yet all these words are all for heaven---
And all to still the tremors in my hands
Each to each that know of man that he is not enough
But this should instead be for the dignity of broken men---
Others vile others who live just to declaim to vile blackness
So they might hear an echo dumbly back to them
And thus feel not so much vacant and perturbed---
As like a discontented void a dark nothingness materialized
Made a visage to look at from out of clay heavens
Perhaps this yelling it will pass in stillness---
And I and we all will remain incurious and jaded
As to whatever identity or face of passion
That might have come out of infinite speech or symbol---
And all this well it is just to confer the dignity of being
More than myself oneself to that which has a name in us
And yet like fools we all and I wish to keep our faces---
So that I and all men broken then might be fixed
To some daft GOD of the WORLD
But all of us we will remain broken---
Nonetheless will remain as the chaff disjecta
Of an honest void beyond heaven already
More much more dignified than words allow for---
And by frank avowals made divine in me and all
And still sounding vague with stillness but strong
So then I am the clay we are the clay of an unreachable strength---
And in recognition though born jagged I now am of a grace
Both haunting and inconsiderate
For I am we are the echo---
I am the dull echo
For the void to face finally
And the void will with my voice make of me a clay---
Answering my answers to the answers
But not so limitless as I imagined
Not so limitless as to shape questions forever out of fact---
I and all men anyway only know the fact of our passions
And we out of a dignity get a grip and shoo them off
And so am I in being the yelling void---
Left a WORLD of dull and frivolous answers
Belched occasionally from nothing
Sometimes however serendipity occurs---
And myself and we all waken from the moil
An afflatus for so long in turbulent slumber turbulent
Though somehow for a moment we arrange with discretion---
A few base fits for the base work of passions to justify
With an identity fleeting as shade
But then tragically we are deserted---
And with the dark masculine of an utterance the void returns
Clutching the dignity of my name and the name of everybody
For we all are too devoted to fact---
And not enough to the shape of symbols
Ill-formed and fraught with unbelievable shade
And we all are of the shade of suffering out---
A wealth of answers suffering out
A meddling with some aching bareness
And brokenness as a bough wrested by high winds---
From the tree of knowledge now as but an abstraction
A weird gas filled to blooming with the brokenness
Of a shape for a moment to loosen and redact---
And so the hour of dignity made manifest yet again
Shows all of man the heaven in themselves for a little
Made manifest out a nothingness of their own typified clay---
And as such the damnable afflatus stripped to the nakedest symbol
Or question becomes of a quality and fabric more divine
Than any answer could have declaimed brutally---
By men to men and by me to me asked
And all for the rotten pleasure of suffering
And all---
To flip a thing on its head and all to groan
Not so much under the dull weight of a void
But so as almost to release the moment quickly by a breath---
Of my own conviction stitched as fabric
Like the loose WORLD tight we all and myself let go dignity
And as for my passions they are naught---
They are as utterances of a disembodied head
Jabbering to groin out of nothing
The idea of a sum of symbols and codes---
And to feel less alone
In the dark psyche of a WORLD made
For all of a passionate though incurious humanity---
Stitched out of a fabric-stillness breathing in and out
And made scrupulously just for me to shout for
So that all and all might chance answer the clay of ourselves---
Without a question without a reason or source
So as to chafe the stillness of a loud and crude infinity
And leave me and all of course robbed of the fabric of odd life---
And the beginnings of thought left without any ends of a thought
And this done by sapping the drama and strangeness of names
For what would have been an unbelievable understanding---
Between earthly and divine things that live quietly in coeval
Without questions or the pomp of answers
And satisfied as being an approbation of the pith of flesh---
As would a wayward dog a lost mind wishes to stick to
Might know and realer his own frank intelligence and dogged
Might in his shade hear the howl of all the incurious WORLD
And know that each walking clod of clay sicklied over with a pale cast of dignity
Is ridden once ridden of that nothing nothing
BEYOND THE GRAVE.
Pastor always said something about finding JESUS,
always sure he would come by next week: well,
Sunday rolls around again and no JESUS, just us,
sitting in the pews, waiting for the guy to explain
how it was possible: for a religion to keep going on like
this: possible to keep on being wrong about hope: about
all of it, all that what graves tell us anyway is the end: but
which a well-meaning CHRISTIAN might surmise is as but
a symbol to keep all of EARTH's inhabitants from fearing
that whatever VOID they sense while alive, if you are good,
won't be as palpable, or, present at all, once interment
comes to pass: but, what is death: death, JESUS,
hope: what is it to remain with hope, in spite of death:
of JESUS and his absence: well, perhaps the arc of life
ain't no arc at all, arc used in this case to mean pattern,
rather than a parabolic structure of improvement, or
merely change: I wanted to ask GOD if it was the VOID,
if when I felt the desperate emptiness of missteps or was
wallowing, sedentary, in all the bull of the past it was not
just a mind filled with existential waste letting ope the
floodgates but was in fact a metaphysical premonition of
sorts: that is, perhaps, emptiness was GODLY, was
of GOD, whatever it is; creator, sustainer, what have you.
And maybe it's a GODless WORLD, maybe; a structureless
structure of a WORLD. A gaff on us all, and for us all to
give dignity to, fathom as not so much nothingness as
much as self-created angst, wallowing; bright and wonderful
despite a suspicion that the will of a VOID, if what we
sense is the truth---and beyond a personal solipsism nothing
is all that exists---is something without an ability to be fathomed
with nods or declarations but rather a frightening indifference:
or, rather, a running poverty all the way to the other side of
hopefulness: but: the pastor he would say almost to defend
himself that JESUS would find it hard to enter into a WORLD so
nihilistic as to think him merely a homeless degenerate: he
said we were all batty with a structure of which the makeup
was our own lack of faith: he said he would be first in line to
miss out on the rapture next week, when JESUS was sure
to come, either way: into a WORLD of damnable parabolas and
undefined anguish, which upon his arrival would quake the
EARTH with misery no longer: at least, if JESUS had anything
to do with it: I guess he, the pastor, thought any crazy person
claiming himself to be the second coming would be a JESUS
enough, but I think what he meant is that anything amazing
ain't so amazing nowadays: any outstanding achievement
gets soon lost in a sea of a grim nothingness so very quickly:
all that we hope for is not so much expected to come but
rather hoped, perennially, to come, for the sake of being
disappointed, so that at least we all, on this planet, might
somewhat prove that the premonition of nothingness is
correct: that the VOID in us is really a void for all time, but
received in segments; that is, until we die, and realize, of
course, that we were all wrong, that everybody was wrong,
and that we are not even granted the dignity of having, at
least, at times, a hunch about the universe: well, we are wrong
about being wrong, wrong about being right, really: in that,
indeed, perhaps indifference, the indifference of all that is,
towards itself, is key: in the mix: but understanding that
indifference via experience is as key, and we cannot do that,
we cannot account for the vastness of this variable until we
are interred, dead, and realize that maybe we’re the only
things that can turn to look on themselves; that maybe
afterwards we’ll be no more able to scrutinize as breathe;
that, perhaps, an eternity of sweet, silent absence beyond
absence is what awaits each, every one of us afterwards,
and that---perhaps, perhaps---the gravestones were right.
TRIPLE-SOUNDS.
So I am left as gross a man as ever
As from the bed I sit upright at once to look at her
Observing the slouching slimness of her body
And visibly nonplussed I stare and stare
And wait for her to notice my eyes
Though she appears more fascinated
With some measly thing
Elsewhere
On the street
Or some trivia in her head regarded at will
For when a need arose
To address anything but the conversation
And so I remember I responded as an outsider but responded
So as to prove myself as more to her than just an obliging worm
So as to free myself almost from the usual deference
And I wondered
How her fury would be expressed this time around
In answering to such a stupid thing as passive
As that triple-sounded coronal
Or will she ignore the admonishment completely I thought
And communicate that which I would dread to hear despite
And in her silence say she sees my wickedness plain at last
She will ignore it I think
As if it were a moment
Of a windy drifting
Across her very cheek
Somewhat making an impression
And so then sensed however soft and fleet
But she stands and stands
In the windy silence of passionate ström
By the window in her sunny dress for the folks
And she raises a blithe hand to stroke the blinds
And it is this image of insignificant beauty
Out of all things
That I remember still as clear
Looking towards the secondhand clock
Instead of me she is averting her eyes
From mine I thought horrified
Waiting for that time to come
When we see no more of each other
So I tsk and tsk and tsk
This is an image and as much a feeling
Disquieting now as I tenderly recall the one mistake
Of a passive and angry man
I remember and know this feeling as as much an image
To torture to life from out of the whirligig
And it crying for pistol and ball to crush grossness
Out of these poor and overworked renderings
Once wakened like a mutant of a child
And it crying with his mutant-tears
For the destruction of these gross things
These words to describe a hurt that still is in me
And me by now sharpened to the nub
An emotional dullard
This as I rave bogs more in the banks of memory
And as I now know is as permanent a fixture
As any lurking pain would be
To a mind tending to lacerate itself
So then I speak no further on a matter of hurt
But anyways feel it splinter there
In my mind that preys upon such breakable feelings
Such fragility made crass and dumb
By the need to speak it plain
Speak it at all
I speak now just as harbinger for this image of mine for me
And though a representative of the things of the past
Am not one so fragile as my memories are.---
I am callous, callous
And struck by tenderness not much anymore
Less than a block would be
With his block-headed mutant-feelings
Now I am callous, callous as any judge would be
Looking into the face
Of a murderer of myself
I am one as to be shattered with looking
And for this to be the image I use
For this poem
This image of a peering through blinds
Well it is not so made of power as I thought
Because I forget whether she looked back
To suffer a sidelong gaze at me
Or whether she said her ride was here
And left without bothering
To look at me
This is me recognizing
That I am going on in life not blessed
For if my nonsense is to drool eternally
Onto the page as eternally blank
Well then
I must not find out anything at all
I must remain as faithless and benign as she
Of what could change with three clicks of the tongue
For we have still not spoken finally of it
And now I am left without her face to see
Through the clutter of analysis
That is really altogether a crude elegy
For something I had once
That cannot die
Because it should have long ago.---
SORITES PARADOX.
I live I expand I find out
I think my liver hurts it really hurts
I am all that kindness shoulders to carry
I wonder if it all means something,
I control the universe . . . sometimes.
I die I dwindle I remain ignorant
I think I can stomach a shot of liquor again
I leave kindness to bear nothing
I wonder whether it's meant to mean anything at all,
I'm utterly powerless.
I'm born I bloom I despise complacency
I get plastered and hurl my guts out
I let a kindness now unburdened in
I do not wonder about what's none of my business,
I am a GOD of GODS.
But if these thoughts
Were declaimed by SORITES
In being so very, in being
A so very beautifully
Humane paradox
In being representative
Of all the rage of contradiction
So very human in the clashing,---
In the flawless inching
Towards a side not like itself
Yet carried on beforehand
Journeying till
It got there, well-
-What's to say we're not
All connected and thus everything;
Thus, nothing, nothing,
Nothing.
TREMOLO.
Myself the great anti-master who meets, one day
a life---in anti-questions---as weak-
-as his own, decides---yes, yes,
yes, that he is, verisimilarly, the answer to what
makes a life from things, as this,---
a life: of sad phantoms: for
him to dissect no longer,---despite that it is, quite
so, the right time to dissect; make
lives from limits. In
living some self out. In blooming out the clash---or,
conflict---a myself-as-answer becomes
a myself-as-catalyst for
the quest to gag a dry throat with: welling words,
corrupt in their very cycled trying for
what is beyond parturiency,
never asking for the master of cycles to dignify
a word or two---if even in jest---for an-
-honorable sublimeness’s sake
and, understated, a vague and weary whistling, just
to hear the whistling: of mad music---and,
woven trends: and, ostensibly,
to still sportive blood: chunked somewheres in my dark,
pressing brain: well: collect the chalky,
bulky planets’ hulk backwards,
says the anti-question, one of many, saying a thing, at
times, with a mercurial sort of rage
in the havoc of dull keys
tapped, banged on bright pianos and with violence: and:
in the confusion of a damasking,
in frilly picot,
the master-key might emerge like a fringed guess and,
finally, lose the style and
portend a content
so important as to address the bright WORLD in-
-gaming for the questions
unanswerable; so, then,
a bit tired of their shaky lot, though far
removed from, incessant, the
wither of keys that sing
an anti-master’s own ambivalence in seeking-
-for life’s lifting off into reality.
The realness of a deep and
profuse cotton-content: and still as vast, as fast:
no, no, no: vaster; faster in its quality,
expansive seeing-
-even, than myself. And all stacks a broad layer, yes,
yeah: of some truth, dissembled, perturbed:
still as lucid, not-
-as close: hopping off into the solar system. Some old,
Big, big question braces for the dramatic-
-shift and swivels
like a head on a stick and not at all like a master's-
-anti-being. He's in me, apart and in,
shadowed by a crude
schism: but: all these damned elements go forth.
They chase the product, the final,---a
union of a trembling
mystic's fault, yes, and not on me; it is not
on me to take the damn blame. To wring
the fierceness at first
staggering dry: dry, with desperate planets
in jeopardy of losing truth's dusty
doggedness, paused, going,
and at last interposed there as would a fly:
in the room: I think of a gigantic-
-yawn of power in that small
fry: that noticed presence: pleasant, somewhat,
though the symbol for death’s portal.
All things endure; this will,
will endure and feed the pangs. And yet, the pangs
derive: from a strange and childish
haranguing: of this temple-
piece. This temple of a cotton-tweed anti-master man,
humbling in his fluid floundering,
his wishy-washy maculateness,
weltering well, runs a strait of conference across.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planets enduring: held together, jankily, with some
kinda wowed silence: propitiated-
-by preachers:
perspiring, once done with evil, brimstone:
this, this is in-between saying,
but saying-
-despite; so then, making the reader work to
explain with innuendo. And,
of course,
revel: in busted minutes of bafflement, as like
a surprise of consciousness;
even though,
truly, whatever pace kept, if the judge be too
optimistic, suffocates and goes
out,---which,
really, is the point. Myself really wants to
make readers O.K. with the fugue:
wowed silence,
after the sketchy speech: throat-spasms-
-for that ultimate politician to
build buildings
for, buildings of quandary and mouthed like
vague utterance: window to some
innuendo: made of
great knowledge, dignity, faith: some apeshit
soul out there must know the
goddamned location;
must see his nothing and all. And all the vast
questions: all the answers
are made, yeah, out-
-of naught, but spirals: shitty ellipses: but,
I am starting, slowly: to go at
a different velocity;
indeed, to speak before spoken to, send askew
messages at first quite sensible;
abort no longer,
but, see that I live out endless death,
implode the first death more
into a stillness:
small, crushed, wadded: what of common
threads of thought, eh?
Something, barely
unearthed and found to be uninteresting,
even though, for so long,
hidden, shrouded
in some alleged mystery until I knew and
finally that that mystery
was the focus and
source of the intrigue, and, though-
-crudely it sent forth odd
messages could
not translate well, could not be
captivating, was left as
some labyrinth
of bullshit overcome very long
ago,---now, resurfacing:
however out
of place the situation then was
in terms of it's popping
up out of
nowheres: giving pain a chance to
not be anticipated,---thus,
manufactured: :
POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO.
There's a whole WORLD in this room that goes
and goes. I receive colors from a small and-
-chipped heaven and I think sadly on this,
the reasons for my floundering and make
sense this shapely argument; this misery
of and yet. Or from some hell some letters
To be thrown away, as bills. But: the way it
goes is how it is received,---the room that is
in my rheumy brain, a rubbled clutter; it is-
-received, my thoughts are, as though eaten
and regurgitated. The result of contraband:
meanings' contraband: revealed in colors of
a florid psyche's chance: at half-grace, at
a shade made whole,---synecdoche of pith
and charged with utterance: colors of the
cosmos,---of the dark macho down the street,
coming, coming up to give it heaven,---give
the muse in the room my heaven and my hell
and still to send me letters from its grave;
indecipherable grave, scrawled with omens.
Chip heaven more, the colossal illusion
says. Chip the fine print of a dumb letter-
-from off volcanic expostulations of urgency:
the letter from her ghost, the ghost of-
-who she was: the girl once in my hell: dark
girl, arms at present rung round her macho;
round that culled heaven, whispered back
to me as grace; that passage of a sailing
sight. That shining of the croaked life out---:
that why, that ultimate, colossal why,
that letter of pain, of pain: a charnel-house,
filled with hell, the hell of sweat and rosy
hookers hanging on the door: and the door-
-plastered in big letters gives me greetings:
it gives me colors, shades: chipped shades
of heaven: the heaven I really, really don't
ever wanna learn from, just make a voice out
of, by the time I can't reason rhyme out-
-of reason: can just leave reason as reason
itself, half-created: a macho of a point: with her,
now: he, who grasps the street with his hands
and crumples it; he who is with her, this girl
of a heaven, once learned, once known, now
never to be known again. Again. So it goes on:
the fire's fueled up: the old memory crumples
in the hands of some farcical GOD, not of my
design, not of my shade: gnarled angel; she who
swears to hell. Not while I'm alive could she reason
rhythms stalking in a meter: absurd, dangerous
as whores on the stoop, stooped: or could she
satisfy the yet of yet, give meaning disallowed
a rhythm that could go of into some port in air:
but rather the muse goes, goes on, and on, until
I stop, and thus she dies in heaven---dies for all
of heaven: for all of a falling innocence: and all
the repetitions, lights, forgotten elements,---
chaotic !@#$, burnt fuckin elements; burning.
Chip it off the shoulder, you, you form of a
damnable confusion's going on: you utter,
utter malignancy, utter majesty of my tender,
living guts; give you up, go walk down the
street, dammit; leave me behind, holding,
cradling my heavens that bite hostilely at
my elbow---wanting out---out of going,
left then as a beautiful and delicate stasis.
As colors, given for the sake of shades; given,
chipped, my heaven of analysis. What comes after
the feeling, unanticipated---but, nobly, goes on,
gone out of this WORLD in this room I look out-
-onto the street from, seeing her---seeing macho---
seeing the street crumple and disperse by hands
of a dark character, a needed malignant spook
snickering in my ears: the music of a hapless
heaven's drought upon the finding out of this,
the port in air as no such port but rather chaos:
it is a choas, chaos, falling short,yes, of the
seeming: not seeming enough, critical, nonsensical,
a withered reaction to the macho of and yet:
outside of this my head's WORLD, the WORLD of
my bad head in the room, making synchronicity
out of horror, horror, horror, horror, horror.
KAFKA'S DAGGER.
Let me bleed into you,
let us grow and learn from one another,
let life not tell us otherwise,
tell us that we cannot learn,
cannot have faith,
yes,
In ourselves;
nor if we manage ourselves together break us open.
Again I am broken open,
bound to nervous,
clicking energy;
it is the energy of a freezing void.
Again I am bled out into another kind of source,
a source of evil and unkind;
again,
yes. Again to take what we have taken from ourselves for itself,
and that for still unknown reasons,
unknown,
never known,
not even beyond death to be known;
Not ever. And if we cannot blend,
cannot reside in the one sphere,
perhaps,
what is salvaged from the apocalypse,
the death of the brains we both have,
being more than what we know,
being the dagger in me that you turn for me,,,
will make me bleed. Will you drink the blood that drops from my wound?
Will you eat this reflection of myself,
this isolated image of,
merciless,
the driving force that you have sucked from me,
this the grandeur of my sourceless pain,
my own pain,
the pain you twist deeper in with dagger to cause,
to cause so that I can see my own blood,
see the blood of my work,
see it kill me?
And thus you remember,
we have tried to be one,
or were one once were together in the struggle,
the struggle to be one,
to reside in the damnable sphere,
the sphere of blood's dropping.
Last edited by satanicdoctor, Mar/29/2012, 5:42 pm
The editing process to me was and is still sacred. The true shape is found; the old, attempted shape is cast off. And yet, as regards what the poem had wanted to be in its beginning stages: well, that urge, the urge a poem has to return again to the energy behind its original motive, encapsulate what inspired it in the first place---that is, be what it had initially started as being---pervades nonetheless throughout the new work; and the spats of that urgency ripple forth still further into the really new work.
It is this wedge---this residual-rippling forth---that creates discontinuity. That is, the content of what is written is very much unlike the style. What I want to say, struggling, at war with, almost, how I ultimately say it. One tries, in the first drafts, to match the two; one finds out later that something of either/or must be sacrificed in order to make a good poem. That is, content, style: one has to choose. At least, to a point.
Pascal maintained that eloquence should fluctuate and that excessive or 'continuous' eloquence---in speech or written down---inevitably wearies those who are listening, looking, reading. The speaker in his or her failure to keep the attention of his or her audience is in the eyes of that audience all but completely denuded, laid bare, stripped to the vulgar limitations of their knowledge. How terrifying! The man seems to have in mind an audience whom together are to be swept off with you or dragged along. But, nonetheless: "grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated."
Hmm. I suppose I take this to mean that excessive eloquence most likely reflects an idea as tiresome and as long-winded as its description; that variations in writing, even from clear to unclear, provide to freshen up one’s thoughts, regarding the perspective of those listening, looking, reading. A continuous eloquence seems to me detrimental, of course, if one in absorbing what is said is left to eddy with the speaker down a continuum of an endless, monotonous, near-hermetic balance between the idea presented and whatever stylistic ideal it conforms to. So then, a fugue in writing, or rather a point of aporia, is quite necessary if the writer, especially one like me, is to truly get his or her point across.
This is highly ironic, yes, but also quite wonderful. It is true, good English is a must, as is thought-provoking subject matter; however, at least in my mind, these two things at times are very much irreconcilable, even in violent conflict. The thoughts of people are not so bare as to require a flounce and yet a sort of cognitive music regarding whatever piece of writing one might speak of has the possibility to better canvas a feeling, yes, the feeling of speechlessness---the wordless, pictorial, though ultimately fragmented splendor of life---the sides of the divine, that is---what it is that rages around the beauty---with words, words that by their own immanent limits could not explain splendor as this without sacrificing something of either comprehensibility or tone. I am speaking mainly of words that in a literal sense do not say much specifically but rather cascade, flee, circle round the core with a curiosity whelming like a buoy.
In a broad sense words, words of this nature, convey something of what is sublime---of what is, indeed, evermore about to be. Via a pattern of thoughts that repeat themselves endlessly, something strange begins to happen. That is, a voice arises, shadowy---speaking for what the words themselves fail to say, over and over again. This perpetual failing says more however than what could have been made significant and clear if stated once. In an inverted, paradoxical way---I guess I want to make eloquence dithyrambic---say a point beyond words, with words that speak for the beyond, in attempting, forever, forever attempting, and falling short. In this way, perhaps, the beyond is reached, but reached in reaching, and is then not really a beyond at all; rather, ends up amounting to hopelessly manufactured, ersatz-eternities. A replication of how the infinite feels rather than a description of what it is. But, perhaps I fail at this, as well,
and so then, most of what I speak of is garbage; the nothingness of psychic trash.
But confusion is O.K. because it helps us go on; it helps us prize ourselves when whatever caused it is sufficiently deciphered and rectified, by us. In such a way perhaps I say more about sense in the continual expiation of sense by that which, at first, I (lets be honest, who else could these words defend?) failed to explain---make a meaning out of---sense that is, indeed, redeemed infinitely, expiated, through varying contexts wherein the image, even the word, in question, might find significance. Like Donne, mine is an attempt---daft, foolish, hopeless---to describe the invisible: a hopelessly, beautifully futile undertaking.
Regarding my way of writing you could say that I freely converse with myself through descant and---at times, subsequently following a poem expressed in one particular vein---palinode, or a recantation of something worked through in that previous poem---descant being kind of similar, but applied to the whole of one work, rather; to put it simply in the words of Stevens, "an and yet, and yet, and yet". Each poem is a conversation, a conversation I am having with myself, really; vacillating between point and counter-point and most of all never really sure besides what I learn from how sense might fail me and thus in failing reinforce a skepticism already merciless to the point of absolute nihilism, destruction, aporia,---literally, 'beyond words' or not knowing truly 'where to begin' as regards the argument at hand.
I do this, at times to the point of mental exhaustion; and then I give up. This intellectual poverty---somewhat akin to Stevens---usually ends with me hurling out or throwing in negations---almost a white flag---saying I do not, will not, cannot. I believe it has poetic value but also contains some very true stuff. I mean, in terms of sense, logic, as these things might relate to reality: well, the only way I can see an elliptical, informal logic as this as what it is, I must see it---as an outsider---as a concept, which negates the very in-itselfness of what I am conceiving, perceiving. That is, if I must, must observe logic as such in order to give it meaning.
The only way to find truth, really is to lose control, live for awhile in the fugue; and when you do, you'll find that whatever control you had was needed in order to make what you find comprehensible, in order to give it that value. It's a roundabout way of saying that the reality we cannot see is realer than the reality we can see, and, yet, tragically, we cannot see it without losing a sense of control, we cannot see it at all. This very fact makes the reality we perceive more fathomable, realer than the realer reality it is impossible to decipher. Because it's all we see, it might not mean it's all there is, but at least in our mind's veritable eye we can understand it. This may sound convoluted, but negations often are.
I mean, to me, art---speaking generally, anyway---is reality. Reality with meaning. But the nature of this meaning is at least partly disparate from whatever it expresses. It relents to fix towards a mystery of---impossible strangeness---that, ultimately, is as much an affectation as the will or rather perpetual drive to perpetually grasp. In this way the strangeness of art seems different from reality because the meaning behind a piece of art ends up being more important than the reality it depicts, or lack thereof. In reality, the only thing that is important is reality, because it is not lacking; art is lacking, because it is not reality---it is an imitation, and so then must convey something beyond itself. Equivocalness is needed in order for one to rightly portray, in art, a reality that is not equivocal.
In other words, meaning is a necessary angel. A brightness of the sun we cannot look at straight; a distortion that, paradoxically, clarifies. Meaning itself, especially in art, is a symbol, as it is an expression; without symbols, art is seen to us as something manufactured and ersatz and unnatural and---ultimately, nonsensical.
No artistic expression yet has held enough weight to be meaningless---nor is it possible for expression as such to be meaningless---as it is that the sense of our minds---though skewed, when mapped out, expressed, in a painting or poem---will always, with enough time and patience, be deciphered in the corners of that painting or poem. Even if the expression is merely a symbol for meaninglessness.
That in its way is a meaning, a distortion.
Just as reality itself is strong enough in our minds to not need a reason for existence---is represented by that crucial atomic fact of our being-in-the-WORLD---is evidence of our existence simply because we exist in it---art, then, is too weak a force to go on, for very long, without symbols; nothing lives in fiction besides the observed symbol, and characters sprouted from the mind rather than the womb. Sad, that we are unable to reconcile meaning with reality---as it is that, perhaps, they are unified, the same things---in the same way we cannot have meaning and reality exist as the same thing in a piece of art without the piece losing something valuable. They must be separate, in order to be meaningful. In simple terms, art is not reality---is, indeed, a defect of the imagination, an obscure bubbling in the swamp. The fact of this is depressing as hell---and yet, in keeping with the good graces of absurdity, I remain hopeful. But to what purpose?
Good logic is no sort of human concept; T.S. Eliot talked of a "substitute for sense", but to me if there is a possibility for no sense, there is no possibility for true sense, but in what we are able to garner from context and an appropriation of norms to suit our measureless imagination. My work is the process of a moving forth from one axis to another, and back; an exhaling and inhaling; the duality of good and bad. As such, there comes time and time again over the course of a poem when the subject seems hurtling on the stride of its own, blank inertia; in order to truly escape one axis and be drawn into another, there must be times of nonsense and absurdity, times between subjects as between stations on a radio---late at night---yawling fuzz-bits and guttural mentionings into the dark of the night. Such is a poem of the night;
as puzzling and oblique and, ultimately, merciful. And this concept of a dispositional axis is a concept of life as much as of literature. Forever will we move on and gain speed, and yet we know not towards what, or for what reason; will know only the rapture of the escape from the gravity of an object bigger than our subjects could allow for description. Out of a hunger for that feeling of rebirth and eventual slavery by yet another object too big to be settled in a succinct and fitting order.
I must, as a result of all this, to say it---finally---clearly, find out which element is more applicable, regarding making a contiguous, linear shape out of what I have just spent time typing out or scribbling down. In other words, I must ask the question: style, content: what's, ultimately, easier for me to disregard, in order to rise the other out of obscure, troubling depths; in order to manufacture grace? Words themselves are creations, manufactured; so then one has no choice but to beautify from an origin quite far from a wordless, senseless reality---beyond sense, beyond words---an origin that is, in this case, to be reflected on but obviously not grasped. The poet must choose the easier path towards a shape; it is why good poets write with ease. It is why a good poem is graceful, graceful with ease, captivating in the very fluid way it presents, processes, destroys or transcends itself.
If one forces a shape, the shape feels forced. If one, a poet, that is, writes something and adheres, struggles to adhere, to what was contiguous and linear about a poem in its beginning stages---well---that poet will find himself deeper into abstruseness and obscure in the depths of a moil of a logic gone errant. A way of the WORLD that wants too much to make sense of what is no longer sensible. This, I believe, is why discontinuity is so important. Even great poets have ended up talking about something else: Milton's Lycidas darkly speculates on its author's own premature fate, while at first an elegy in reference to the very early end of a very much irrelevant Latinate scholar, Edward King. Lines Written in a Country Churchyard at its start focuses more on imagery and the sensory things of the countryside which a retired Thomas Gray saw sweep out before him; by the end of the poem he speaks more on the nature of poetic immortality---the image turning, suddenly, towards gravestones---and the poem, being high Romantic, loses focus and is redeemed by that very hesitance on the brink of naming oneself immortal. This hesitance is a strength. It's a phenomenon in poetry that recurs, again and again.
It's fascinating: : : :
SPLITTING THE SOUL IN HALF.
It has been a few days now since I've written anything.
But: the need is there, flailing like a !@#$ banshee:
or it is like some elastic torso of another subject or
figuration I’ll not get to in this piece here but that
wants attention; so, I conjure a few extremities, and some
digits for the extremities---to be appropriated by this
damnable mutant, and---promptly!---abandon it; leave-
-the torso unfinished; jabber on about a new thing. Ha!
Well, life is odd---about when it’s even---fickle about
when things go right. It’s a rite of passage for those alive,
at present, and should be seen as a way to determine, at
least to a degree, seemingly chaotic instances of errata
as---somewhat---predeterminations of path, whether in a
small scheme or large one. Well, how’s that for a subject?
Perhaps I sound a bit too devoted to hope yet for chaos,
but was I able to keep your attention? It’s hard not to be
optimistic about failure when it’s all the beans you got
to make a hill out of. Golly, gee, maybe I should indulge
asceticism and quit the Dionysian for the Apollonian. I
mean, there's this or that I could speak of, but, really,
not much, anymore, not much besides entropy, chaos,
torsos; besides a half-smile to be mentioned later;
besides processing thoughts via images, aborting
whatever credence might be given to what rages
in that mysterious hollow spot between the office
walls, where the insulation’s missing. Oh, this,
Oh, this mental paucity is outrageous. It's huge as
the sky; however, does not waiver, however much the
stuff of my bleeding is; however much a weight it is to-
-carry thoughts whirring this way, that: oh, to collect
those damn things---with or without virtue, besides what
one might spoon out of a clutter of gas---into a blind lump
of significance massed ugly as the gruel of being---and, then,
to carry all that frivol, nastiness past the very last galaxy,
the last clusterfuck of uninhabited planets---beautiful units---
as like what minutiae might---with a half-smile---be observed,
between persons coy in love, before love’s massacre---or at the
least, persons known a little---but, on a larger scale, from the
good lord’s penthouse view of all that is such things are rather
with a smallest meaning given magnified way beyond the truth
of their stature, measurement, to proportions biblically frenetic,
even for a creator without bias or sexual orientation---epicene,
pure---well---that multi-varied enigma of weird omnipotence
might view with a massive expression of reflection the quirks
of a quark---made significant---because seen rightly for its
purpose: to beautify the universe, via the infinite-various;
moreover, via a supreme extremity of careful arranging by the very
ignorant machinations of entropic circumstance---that is---as such
things might ruffle on one plane, in turn they might on a bigger,
macrocosmic level make more sense: and then, suddenly wowed,
everybody looks up to behold the magnificence of this goddamned
atomic fact, itself only possible via the mistakes of cosmic errata:
dismemberments of length and width for want of a more elaborate
breadth, that is, the breadth of stars: stars either blowing up their
gigantic danger into the warpath of a supernova or intelligent life
screwing itself over somewhere else, blowing up a populous
WORLD with nukes. Well, here's the conundrum: is this jabber just
mental masturbation: or will I fly like a saint all the way out of
anguishing; fly out of the mud, this interpreted lagoon, this WORLD
of spite hinging on a next line---yes, a new idea---soon to be
trashed, however good an idea it was, or might have been? I tease,
knead, boast. I think I know what I am talking about; must remember,
whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. That’s why
I’m never sure beyond the process, perhaps making a seething poetry
of the incarnate now but most likely all this is is a dull promise
of more fodder for processing: which, really, is the process itself:
how then can it seem like a poet is saying something, anything at
all, if his subject-matter is invisible? Well, I think in the case
of this particular writer it amounts to more than that. I am, yeah,
I am trying to find clarity, trying to process the scary, scary
substances and emissions of dreams: and the local meaning thus
gets lost in a meaning for all the redundant WORLD, found---for
the most part---in the infinite music inherent in such a wonder
of nonentity, abstraction, symbol: I’m trying to rip my soul
in half; that is, just for the sake of knowing a soul there.
Just for the sake of giving the lagoon some air: to feed the
gas from out the bizarre depths of its troubled water: green
and sick with stagnation: I’m ripping like a wizard till
the end of my goings with a hurtling music like a large
asteroid of proportions bizarre: hurtling parataxis, chaos,
havoc: the wrath of a process towards emotive catharsis,
not necessarily through words, gotten through words, as-
-through the ecstasy of commensurate sound to belt the
girth of my silly skill round: to assuage my anxious
need to create and bless the libido: and the spleening-
-courage to pass all things by in these desultory damn
free-form couplets: thanatos, self-hate, projection: to
be real, I do this for the sake of fulfilling a desire
I forewent, long ago, in dooming myself to process
---somewhat---what it is that all thoughts make us
mad with. Is this the same, with differences about?
This poem is like snatching something totally !@#$
destructive, wanting to snatch it, for the snake of it;
wanting to destroy what I create out of creating it.
Ah, so there's the kernel of the matter; that I cannot
write without emphatic expostulations on or negations
regarding making the point about a subject, the-
-suggestive subject of destruction's warpath. This
is me being honest with myself: I mean, anything I
could say about the process would itself be a thought
once written, so then, expression in general is static;
whatever comes to mind is as real as destruction.
THE DACHSHUND AT THE STEINWAY.
Madame sits at the STEINWAY talking
Quietly to it as her fingers run across
The keys with a gentle tinkling grace.
It’s the grace of one who makes happiness
An exile upon sitting so as to fit more room
In for her music; notes for meandering minds,
Yes, but meandering too much, beyond minds;
And, at last she puts her latest musical
Phrase outside to die with the retentive
Dachshund, yapping his own little
Notes from patio, paws against the
Sliding door. Forever the child
Of her passions, lady X with a shaking
Of her cuffs in falbalas stretches and
Gets up, goes out of sight. We hear
Strange noises, a coughing out of
Angst. We float to a spot where the
Woman can be viewed, observed, rather,
And find she has spilled her drink
On the weathered white shag next to
A wooden cabinet with deckings, arty
Frieze; a gift from uncle, Andrew Jackson
Something. She takes a brief gander
At the spot of wine as it soaks into
The rug. She is half who made her,---
Half of uncle; her other half, some
Devil of music. Tinkling notes and
Yaps yapping. Insipid canine, she
Thinks, always a distraction, she
Thinks---taking a finger running
Across the enamel of her teeth to
Wipe off residuum from brunch,
Alone, about ten minutes ago.
SLOPPY JOE on BUN, it was; and,---
SWEET POTATO FRIES, with MAYO
For dipping. So, she looks at the
Cabinet only to find that it has
Turned into a spacious, liminal,
Uncharted span of heaven, filled
With uncles, filled with uncles
Offering her wine but wine which never
Grew within the belly of a grape. Come,
Bacchus!, she murmurs, trailing a finger
Across the glued wainscoting, as she walks
Into her small retro-kitsch kitchen. Some
Of her time for the rest of the day is
Spent forgetting about heaven, all of heaven;
About good, and evil---even beyond what either
Is. She is half who made her, evil in the
Eyes of those who made her. The spot of wine
Grows up, becomes a figure, drawls in tinklings
On the STEINWAY, waiting, waiting, waiting,
Yes, for her to coo into the night badly,
Then yell, anticipating beforehand, then
Yell into the heavens fraught with
Nightfall---before lady X can think to
Anticipate anything at all---instead,
Opting to be, to be in the night, just
Be; to domesticate her universe, become
The furniture she desires to have, be in
The OLYMPUS of her hated happiness, whilst
In her notes’ death’s meantime, the dachshund
Blessed with human hands a sudden pushes open
With might the sliding doors, tells her to quit
Yapping, takes her place on the piano-bench to
Thunk the WORLD out of a STEINWAY, the STEINWAY,
Made humanely in the image of music, all
Music: the music of lady X is stained
With wine. The stain becomes a dog:
Soon attenuated, gone for days without
Brunch, running his fingers of a mutant-
metaphor far across terrific glass, and we
Are left to grieve in light of a thing no
Longer to be observed, a figure of wine
No longer to be observed, digested,
Hit with swirls and made like Hermes
From the genius of one mortal, one
Comrade of a tinkling thunk in the night,
One night: one night, logic will stain
No such gifts: of music: and no such furniture
Will be for the taking by some constipated
Heaven: no gifts: for example, cabinets,
Cabinets that make all happiness an exile
For this Lady X, this madame who fears the
Phrases of a thinking gone unsaid, lost:
And for the occult to sway forth with stains
With of done OLYMPUS and of STEINWAYS
And of dachshunds plagued with
Yapping hands, the hands of summoning
Happiness out of exile, gone unheard.
MAN CARRYING THING.
So here is a man carrying thing. He
Wanders through snow for miles. He
Is a new type of man; however, not
Necessarily good, a good man. He is
Of a thing in itself carrying him; yes, a
Prompt provider blessed with a meaning
For the design. He is a prompt maker,
True to his word, but a priori to the point
Of being guttural. Nathless, he carries him,
This new man, this man of unlucky telling
Of himself to know the thing he carries good,
As a good. This man who carries, heartless,
Telling only---and only of himself---a burden,
Yet no voice, no, for the clairvoyant sages,
Blind and beardy. Carrying a thing across
The snow, for miles. Must he be the
Elected for an image of desertion and
Paucity: and must that which provides
Give him only him, be not so descript,
Flourish nothing, merely charge the
Doughty drama of his going on with
Troubled, bubbling musics of desertion:
The desertion of a snow and the evils of
A thing that is a man who carries it.
So then they work hand in hand: they
Do not perjure one another openly,
Answering scoffs with scoffs, and yet
There is some beef between, some straining as
Though each were handling a sleight: a striking
Of the chords of ludicrous music---here---in a
Place we know not of but that it is for miles,
Is communicative of some distance, abstruse,
Steeped in carnal death to prompt a séance
For the sages to scratch out. We know not
What he carries, the man, this man for the
Sages, and yet himself a clown, funny with
Turbulence, wagging argument out from nothing;
Made of nothing, strung out from nothing, more.
Whatever it is is carried, entertained like a
Bad guest, as the narrative goes on through snow,
Begrudging death and more the death of life than truly
Death, a true-but-impure death of music and thus burden.
He, who is walking somewheres in the snow . . .
No, we know not what he carries but it
Comes from the sun, the music of the sun,
An insane, quiet, desperate sun of a gross,
Lighted cascade, shoved into the man’s pocket
As what all of his kind might carry, might not:
The sun is what he speaks to defend, for the
Very provider of him, via a ludicrous desertion
Of snow, snow, yes, beautiful, beautiful
Snow, for miles and miles, and this man
A symbol for the symbol, the leftovers
Of drab dreams. An endlessness
Of ecstasy; wait, no, vice versa. Wait,
No, not anything but a paucity: a hulk or
Form far off in the flatness of a big
Place, a WORLD consisting of snow, snow
And things, things to be carried and felt
And not known ever, also. Burdens of a
Seeming of a man, descript as a life seen
As being comprised of three or four hills
And a cloud. Only through a lens of dire
Distance could death drum, honeyed, a demented,
Thunderous clack; only through the persistence,
Yes, persistence of a lens, through which the
Scope of many musics see, couldst confusion see---
Carried out with panache and delicateness---and so
Arrest the songs of the death of meaning. Only
Through the beating of boards couldst the last
Throes die out there, the meaning die out out there;
Music of a man and his thing, and him the chief and
Also obsequious chimer or plebe hungering for
Approval from himself, the chief, way out in a
Place of chords from nothing---obscene with
Plateau, in gathered flatness, haunted wide
With snow. Figures in the snow; figures, forms
In a daydream, slowly melting in the sun.
PARATAXIS. Or, Life as Other
I am no human for the saints
And yet I dare to wipe him off as caul
So that he can dry out his shaking self
And say to me you are left anew now
To die forever and ever
Now that I have fully come out of my dreaming
You are left as a new but different man he might say
And to die a new but different death
But still you remain steadfast
You refuse out of ignorance to pluck
What fruits there are from the seed
Of my own rising self he might say
And yet strangely I am the part of you
That is the wisest
If only you could breathe and savor life as it is
If only you rid of yourself
This disease of a placelessness
You might die a good death
And perhaps I think to reply that he
Is a brute-force foil to spur forth
An evil brutish life
And I the one now free of you am left
To be blessed and for your sake goodbye he says
I am no longer to be tortured by you your words
Wreaking a life of disease and paralysis
And yet you he says you in turn will be cursed
With a silence grand as death and as at peace
And perhaps I myself do dream of entering this
The galley of the saints and mythy martyrs
And of built greatnesses however built yes
Yes from no sort of foundation
Rather from bookish rumors that go round
And round and round and round and round and
Finagled like a tampering with of how it went
Thereby extreme fantasy
Is made alive out of a darkness
For the wonderful imagination to feed on
And for the people in want of a saint to feed on
Perhaps I myself dream this
And in my dreams enter that plane
But you are still underground he might say
This other different from myself
And most wise and yet to myself blurred
By some too salacious reckoning of him
And that shakily as I myself shivering
In the dripping brine frozen
Comprehend majesty adroit and unyielding
And so then not the majesty of saints
And so then in being in the brine
I am the saint of the brine
The myth is made and is a sphere
Spinning errant with muttered dithyramb and and
And poor diction and so then hiving
Within a straight nucleus
Or grand heavy bosom of blessings
For this other hop o my thumb to inflate
With the breathing out of a greatness
Is an awakening finally
A rebirth of senses
And yet with an inhaling
Of the cancer of a mind
Unable to breach spheres
Well yeah well with that cancer comes the utter crock
Of differences different men in me
Parroting out the same image
Woven to disarm all the saints reborn
With wires of a hopelessly paratactic thing
Yeah thing or a device
For the english language
To tamper with to fit
This damned spinny dingus of a pome
This my spinny fuckin dingus
Of a depression vested in the rebirth
Of that other and his words to me now
Are as futile devices
That merely change a darkness
To the ruin of light
And they are to me myself as sewage
Negations abrupt wordplay abruptly
Strewn blindly about
Fluttering like confetti or
Circling like as a wheel in the mud
But no no this is
A weakest caesura for gerontion
A pause for the greatness
To collect like a breath breathed
In and out as such to make bold
The frozen self in the brine
Unable to penetrate that
That that damned nucleus
And in recognizing this
I know he is blessed by me my words yes
He knows he is a saint to be defiled
In rude awakenings like bold breaths
That each and every second awaken him
To one of the sides of duality
Without telling him of his place
And in a godless sort of way
He crushes either side
Once reborn there
Thinking it a poison
Crushes the beauty
Only to remain incurably bright
Amongst a juxtaposed darkness
Not knowing that he knows
Yet knowing I do
And not knowing
That I think him myself this other
Of differences and polarities
That make a garbage
Out of such an anguishing
As doubt provides
But to be ambivalent
Is necessary is a necessary poison
And is a necessary heaven the other might say
He says to me it is for
The mortals in the gutsy fray to deify
With nonsense and with the raging
Of confusion
And all for ELIOT and his gerontion
And I I I a being in dry month
Waiting for beauty and
Stuck in breathing anew
I who sloughing it off normally
Not knowing what I trash as not trash
But growing up anyways all stubborn
And doomed to be pissed off forever
At having arrived too late
At wonder-wounding choosing instead
To buckle and grow from brokenness
A flower for coughing goats
Stuck raging in the words like a metaphor
I blessed
To be in a hovel of brine know
In a palace of ruin bent backwards
Towards a seeking of of
Of naught but my own place in myth know
My own saintly destruction
Of a self is of my own hellish design.
BLOOD, BONE, MARROW, PASSION, FEELING.
"I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling---
Because at least the past were passed away---
And for the future---(but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say---the future is a serious matter---
And so---for God's sake---hock and soda water!"
---GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
If I were to heaven so much clay unformed---
And not a man held to the duty of receiving passions himself
And if I were as all condemned to live forever beneath the universe
And to look at the stars unfeeling and not marvel---
Nor understand I am mere yet beautifully strange
Because I can breathe and simply due to this am beautiful
And if to the luminous I and all were dim and blank---
And if none who trod a length of this small WORLD were bigger than it
Nor were salient in themselves enough to reflect and find principle in being
And though in a place as here one might endeavor they endeavor---
To feed not a collective nor individual knowledge but work
As kelson or cog to support and drone on for what is not more
Than some bad abstraction in the aether never processed---
Well if this were so this land would be to heaven a land of clay extant to feed
That heaven only and I and we unformed should want a form divine from it
From heaven but not harnessed by all by me although we work to or
perhaps---
We have by this point harnessed that divine however nameless it might be
And it is unsupported once in the hands of the minds of I and all
Who are the recipients after all of what whatever beyond---
Chucks back to us in hopes we use it to shape in our own way ourselves
Rather than just for hands to get from up in the aether somewheres
And to happily shape something else happily in a compliance akin to helplessness---
With the base urges as a directive but not catalyst to swerve
And so revolt as clay from heaven and so as to be more than the WORLD
But if the rotten WORLD were mine---
And mine for me to paw forth on and mine to direct
Towards sanctity were my own understanding clods
Then passions as I would have had without realizing---
Instead of quickly wasted in addressing a beyond more furious
Only to be chucked back to me as guerdon for the toils of all
Would if encountered by what is beyond---
Have their riddance from me and all anyway in appearing different
And so then to the questioner whether me or other no such prize
That is once touched by heaven though only touched---
This my little clod of symbols might appear different
Though it is the same clod the same asked question
And in being the same clod would appear unchanged---
Though it has been to heaven and has been rejected by heaven
So that though it has seen well what I have not this my dirt for all
To examine is examined and thought of as nothing special---
And even if comprising the WORLD in me if as human
Might as well be unenlightened and as useful as figments
Of reality to reality as it is though they share in the same shade---
Though I am no shape for heaven nor in a shape to receive a beyond
If a beyond of negatives and wreathed in ignorance and poor planning
And yet all these words are all for heaven---
And all to still the tremors in my hands
Each to each that know of man that he is not enough
But this should instead be for the dignity of broken men---
Others vile others who live just to declaim to vile blackness
So they might hear an echo dumbly back to them
And thus feel not so much vacant and perturbed---
As like a discontented void a dark nothingness materialized
Made a visage to look at from out of clay heavens
Perhaps this yelling it will pass in stillness---
And I and we all will remain incurious and jaded
As to whatever identity or face of passion
That might have come out of infinite speech or symbol---
And all this well it is just to confer the dignity of being
More than myself oneself to that which has a name in us
And yet like fools we all and I wish to keep our faces---
So that I and all men broken then might be fixed
To some daft GOD of the WORLD
But all of us we will remain broken---
Nonetheless will remain as the chaff disjecta
Of an honest void beyond heaven already
More much more dignified than words allow for---
And by frank avowals made divine in me and all
And still sounding vague with stillness but strong
So then I am the clay we are the clay of an unreachable strength---
And in recognition though born jagged I now am of a grace
Both haunting and inconsiderate
For I am we are the echo---
I am the dull echo
For the void to face finally
And the void will with my voice make of me a clay---
Answering my answers to the answers
But not so limitless as I imagined
Not so limitless as to shape questions forever out of fact---
I and all men anyway only know the fact of our passions
And we out of a dignity get a grip and shoo them off
And so am I in being the yelling void---
Left a WORLD of dull and frivolous answers
Belched occasionally from nothing
Sometimes however serendipity occurs---
And myself and we all waken from the moil
An afflatus for so long in turbulent slumber turbulent
Though somehow for a moment we arrange with discretion---
A few base fits for the base work of passions to justify
With an identity fleeting as shade
But then tragically we are deserted---
And with the dark masculine of an utterance the void returns
Clutching the dignity of my name and the name of everybody
For we all are too devoted to fact---
And not enough to the shape of symbols
Ill-formed and fraught with unbelievable shade
And we all are of the shade of suffering out---
A wealth of answers suffering out
A meddling with some aching bareness
And brokenness as a bough wrested by high winds---
From the tree of knowledge now as but an abstraction
A weird gas filled to blooming with the brokenness
Of a shape for a moment to loosen and redact---
And so the hour of dignity made manifest yet again
Shows all of man the heaven in themselves for a little
Made manifest out a nothingness of their own typified clay---
And as such the damnable afflatus stripped to the nakedest symbol
Or question becomes of a quality and fabric more divine
Than any answer could have declaimed brutally---
By men to men and by me to me asked
And all for the rotten pleasure of suffering
And all---
To flip a thing on its head and all to groan
Not so much under the dull weight of a void
But so as almost to release the moment quickly by a breath---
Of my own conviction stitched as fabric
Like the loose WORLD tight we all and myself let go dignity
And as for my passions they are naught---
They are as utterances of a disembodied head
Jabbering to groin out of nothing
The idea of a sum of symbols and codes---
And to feel less alone
In the dark psyche of a WORLD made
For all of a passionate though incurious humanity---
Stitched out of a fabric-stillness breathing in and out
And made scrupulously just for me to shout for
So that all and all might chance answer the clay of ourselves---
Without a question without a reason or source
So as to chafe the stillness of a loud and crude infinity
And leave me and all of course robbed of the fabric of odd life---
And the beginnings of thought left without any ends of a thought
And this done by sapping the drama and strangeness of names
For what would have been an unbelievable understanding---
Between earthly and divine things that live quietly in coeval
Without questions or the pomp of answers
And satisfied as being an approbation of the pith of flesh---
As would a wayward dog a lost mind wishes to stick to
Might know and realer his own frank intelligence and dogged
Might in his shade hear the howl of all the incurious WORLD
And know that each walking clod of clay sicklied over with a pale cast of dignity
Is ridden once ridden of that nothing nothing
BEYOND THE GRAVE.
Pastor always said something about finding JESUS,
always sure he would come by next week: well,
Sunday rolls around again and no JESUS, just us,
sitting in the pews, waiting for the guy to explain
how it was possible: for a religion to keep going on like
this: possible to keep on being wrong about hope: about
all of it, all that what graves tell us anyway is the end: but
which a well-meaning CHRISTIAN might surmise is as but
a symbol to keep all of EARTH's inhabitants from fearing
that whatever VOID they sense while alive, if you are good,
won't be as palpable, or, present at all, once interment
comes to pass: but, what is death: death, JESUS,
hope: what is it to remain with hope, in spite of death:
of JESUS and his absence: well, perhaps the arc of life
ain't no arc at all, arc used in this case to mean pattern,
rather than a parabolic structure of improvement, or
merely change: I wanted to ask GOD if it was the VOID,
if when I felt the desperate emptiness of missteps or was
wallowing, sedentary, in all the bull of the past it was not
just a mind filled with existential waste letting ope the
floodgates but was in fact a metaphysical premonition of
sorts: that is, perhaps, emptiness was GODLY, was
of GOD, whatever it is; creator, sustainer, what have you.
And maybe it's a GODless WORLD, maybe; a structureless
structure of a WORLD. A gaff on us all, and for us all to
give dignity to, fathom as not so much nothingness as
much as self-created angst, wallowing; bright and wonderful
despite a suspicion that the will of a VOID, if what we
sense is the truth---and beyond a personal solipsism nothing
is all that exists---is something without an ability to be fathomed
with nods or declarations but rather a frightening indifference:
or, rather, a running poverty all the way to the other side of
hopefulness: but: the pastor he would say almost to defend
himself that JESUS would find it hard to enter into a WORLD so
nihilistic as to think him merely a homeless degenerate: he
said we were all batty with a structure of which the makeup
was our own lack of faith: he said he would be first in line to
miss out on the rapture next week, when JESUS was sure
to come, either way: into a WORLD of damnable parabolas and
undefined anguish, which upon his arrival would quake the
EARTH with misery no longer: at least, if JESUS had anything
to do with it: I guess he, the pastor, thought any crazy person
claiming himself to be the second coming would be a JESUS
enough, but I think what he meant is that anything amazing
ain't so amazing nowadays: any outstanding achievement
gets soon lost in a sea of a grim nothingness so very quickly:
all that we hope for is not so much expected to come but
rather hoped, perennially, to come, for the sake of being
disappointed, so that at least we all, on this planet, might
somewhat prove that the premonition of nothingness is
correct: that the VOID in us is really a void for all time, but
received in segments; that is, until we die, and realize, of
course, that we were all wrong, that everybody was wrong,
and that we are not even granted the dignity of having, at
least, at times, a hunch about the universe: well, we are wrong
about being wrong, wrong about being right, really: in that,
indeed, perhaps indifference, the indifference of all that is,
towards itself, is key: in the mix: but understanding that
indifference via experience is as key, and we cannot do that,
we cannot account for the vastness of this variable until we
are interred, dead, and realize that maybe we’re the only
things that can turn to look on themselves; that maybe
afterwards we’ll be no more able to scrutinize as breathe;
that, perhaps, an eternity of sweet, silent absence beyond
absence is what awaits each, every one of us afterwards,
and that---perhaps, perhaps---the gravestones were right.
TRIPLE-SOUNDS.
So I am left as gross a man as ever
As from the bed I sit upright at once to look at her
Observing the slouching slimness of her body
And visibly nonplussed I stare and stare
And wait for her to notice my eyes
Though she appears more fascinated
With some measly thing
Elsewhere
On the street
Or some trivia in her head regarded at will
For when a need arose
To address anything but the conversation
And so I remember I responded as an outsider but responded
So as to prove myself as more to her than just an obliging worm
So as to free myself almost from the usual deference
And I wondered
How her fury would be expressed this time around
In answering to such a stupid thing as passive
As that triple-sounded coronal
Or will she ignore the admonishment completely I thought
And communicate that which I would dread to hear despite
And in her silence say she sees my wickedness plain at last
She will ignore it I think
As if it were a moment
Of a windy drifting
Across her very cheek
Somewhat making an impression
And so then sensed however soft and fleet
But she stands and stands
In the windy silence of passionate ström
By the window in her sunny dress for the folks
And she raises a blithe hand to stroke the blinds
And it is this image of insignificant beauty
Out of all things
That I remember still as clear
Looking towards the secondhand clock
Instead of me she is averting her eyes
From mine I thought horrified
Waiting for that time to come
When we see no more of each other
So I tsk and tsk and tsk
This is an image and as much a feeling
Disquieting now as I tenderly recall the one mistake
Of a passive and angry man
I remember and know this feeling as as much an image
To torture to life from out of the whirligig
And it crying for pistol and ball to crush grossness
Out of these poor and overworked renderings
Once wakened like a mutant of a child
And it crying with his mutant-tears
For the destruction of these gross things
These words to describe a hurt that still is in me
And me by now sharpened to the nub
An emotional dullard
This as I rave bogs more in the banks of memory
And as I now know is as permanent a fixture
As any lurking pain would be
To a mind tending to lacerate itself
So then I speak no further on a matter of hurt
But anyways feel it splinter there
In my mind that preys upon such breakable feelings
Such fragility made crass and dumb
By the need to speak it plain
Speak it at all
I speak now just as harbinger for this image of mine for me
And though a representative of the things of the past
Am not one so fragile as my memories are.---
I am callous, callous
And struck by tenderness not much anymore
Less than a block would be
With his block-headed mutant-feelings
Now I am callous, callous as any judge would be
Looking into the face
Of a murderer of myself
I am one as to be shattered with looking
And for this to be the image I use
For this poem
This image of a peering through blinds
Well it is not so made of power as I thought
Because I forget whether she looked back
To suffer a sidelong gaze at me
Or whether she said her ride was here
And left without bothering
To look at me
This is me recognizing
That I am going on in life not blessed
For if my nonsense is to drool eternally
Onto the page as eternally blank
Well then
I must not find out anything at all
I must remain as faithless and benign as she
Of what could change with three clicks of the tongue
For we have still not spoken finally of it
And now I am left without her face to see
Through the clutter of analysis
That is really altogether a crude elegy
For something I had once
That cannot die
Because it should have long ago.---
TREMOLO.
Myself the great anti-master who meets, one day
a life---in anti-questions---as weak-
-as his own, decides---yes, yes,
yes, that he is, verisimilarly, the answer to what
makes a life from things, as this,---
a life: of sad phantoms: for
him to dissect no longer,---despite that it is, quite
so, the right time to dissect; make
lives from limits. In
living some self out. In blooming out the clash---or,
conflict---a myself-as-answer becomes
a myself-as-catalyst for
the quest to gag a dry throat with: welling words,
corrupt in their very cycled trying for
what is beyond parturiency,
never asking for the master of cycles to dignify
a word or two---if even in jest---for an-
-honorable sublimeness’s sake
and, understated, a vague and weary whistling, just
to hear the whistling: of mad music---and,
woven trends: and, ostensibly,
to still sportive blood: chunked somewheres in my dark,
pressing brain: well: collect the chalky,
bulky planets’ hulk backwards,
says the anti-question, one of many, saying a thing, at
times, with a mercurial sort of rage
in the havoc of dull keys
tapped, banged on bright pianos and with violence: and:
in the confusion of a damasking,
in frilly picot,
the master-key might emerge like a fringed guess and,
finally, lose the style and
portend a content
so important as to address the bright WORLD in-
-gaming for the questions
unanswerable; so, then,
a bit tired of their shaky lot, though far
removed from, incessant, the
wither of keys that sing
an anti-master’s own ambivalence in seeking-
-for life’s lifting off into reality.
The realness of a deep and
profuse cotton-content: and still as vast, as fast:
no, no, no: vaster; faster in its quality,
expansive seeing-
-even, than myself. And all stacks a broad layer, yes,
yeah: of some truth, dissembled, perturbed:
still as lucid, not-
-as close: hopping off into the solar system. Some old,
Big, big question braces for the dramatic-
-shift and swivels
like a head on a stick and not at all like a master's-
-anti-being. He's in me, apart and in,
shadowed by a crude
schism: but: all these damned elements go forth.
They chase the product, the final,---a
union of a trembling
mystic's fault, yes, and not on me; it is not
on me to take the damn blame. To wring
the fierceness at first
staggering dry: dry, with desperate planets
in jeopardy of losing truth's dusty
doggedness, paused, going,
and at last interposed there as would a fly:
in the room: I think of a gigantic-
-yawn of power in that small
fry: that noticed presence: pleasant, somewhat,
though the symbol for death’s portal.
All things endure; this will,
will endure and feed the pangs. And yet, the pangs
derive: from a strange and childish
haranguing: of this temple-
piece. This temple of a cotton-tweed anti-master man,
humbling in his fluid floundering;
his wishy-washy maculateness,
weltering well, runs a strait of conference across.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planets enduring: held together, jankily, with
A kinda wowed silence: propitiated-
-by preachers:
perspiring, once done with evil, brimstone:
this, this is in-between saying,
but saying-
-despite; so then, making the reader work to
explain with innuendo. And,
of course,
revel: in busted minutes of bafflement, as like
a surprise of consciousness;
even though,
truly, whatever pace kept, if the judge be too
optimistic, suffocates and goes
out,---which,
really, is the point. Myself really wants to
make readers O.K. with the fugue:
wowed silence,
after the sketchy speech: throat-spasms-
-for that ultimate politician to
build buildings
for, buildings of quandary and mouthed like
vague utterance: window to some
innuendo: made of
great knowledge, dignity, faith: some apeshit
soul out there must know the
goddamned location;
must see his nothing and all. And all the vast
questions: all the answers
are made, yeah, out-
-of naught, but spirals: shitty ellipses: but,
I am starting, slowly: to go at
a different velocity;
indeed, to speak before spoken to, send askew
messages at first quite sensible;
abort no longer,
but, see that I live out endless death,
implode the first death more
into a stillness:
small, crushed, wadded: what of common
threads of thought, eh?
Something, barely
unearthed and found to be uninteresting,
even though, for so long,
hidden, shrouded
in some alleged mystery until I knew and
finally that that mystery
was the focus and
source of the intrigue, and, though-
-crudely it sent forth odd
messages could
not translate well, could not be
captivating, was left as
some labyrinth
of bullshit overcome very long
ago,---now, resurfacing:
however out
of place the situation then was
in terms of it's popping
up out of
nowheres: giving pain a chance to
not be anticipated,---thus,
manufactured: :
POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO.
There's a whole WORLD in this room that goes
and goes. I receive colors from a small and-
-chipped heaven and I think sadly on this,
the reasons for my floundering, and make
sense this shapely argument; this misery
of and yet. Or from some hell some letters
to be thrown away, as bills. But: the way it
goes is how it is received,---the room that is
in my rheumy brain, a rubbled clutter; it is-
-received, my thoughts are, as though eaten
and regurgitated. The result of contraband:
meanings' contraband: revealed in colors of
a florid psyche's chance: at half-grace, at
a shade made whole,---synecdoche of pith
and charged with utterance: colors of the
cosmos,---of the dark macho down the street,
coming, coming up to give it heaven,---give
the muse in the room my heaven and my hell
and still to send me letters from its grave;
indecipherable grave, scrawled with omens.
Chip heaven more, the colossal illusion
says. Chip the fine print of a dumb letter-
-from off volcanic expostulations of urgency:
the letter from her ghost, the ghost of-
-who she was: the girl once in my hell: dark
girl, arms at present rung round her macho;
round that culled heaven, whispered back
to me as grace; that passage of a sailing
sight. That shining of the croaked life out---:
that why, that ultimate, colossal why,
that letter of pain, of pain: a charnel-house:
filled with hell, the hell of sweat: and: rosy
hookers hanging on the door: and the door-
-plastered in big letters, gives me greetings:
it gives me colors, shades: chipped shades
of heaven: the heaven I really, really don't
ever wanna learn from, just make a voice out
of, by the time I can't reason rhyme out-
-of reason: can just leave reason as reason
itself, half-created: a macho of a point: with her,
now: he, who grasps the street with his hands
and crumples it; he who is with her, this girl
of a heaven, once learned, once known, now
never to be known again. Again. So it goes on:
the fire's fueled up: the old memory crumples
in the hands of some farcical GOD, not of my
design, not of my shade: gnarled angel; she who
swears to hell. Not while I'm alive could she reason
rhythms stalking in a meter: absurd, dangerous
as whores on the stoop, stooped: or could she
satisfy the yet of yet, give meaning disallowed
a rhythm that could go of into some port in air:
but rather the muse goes, goes on, and on, until
I stop, and thus she dies in heaven---dies for all
of heaven: for all of a falling innocence: and all
the repetitions, lights, forgotten elements,---
chaotic !@#$, burnt fuckin elements; burning.
Chip it off the shoulder, you, you form of a
damnable confusion's going on: you utter,
utter malignancy, utter majesty of my tender,
living guts; give you up, go walk down the
street, dammit; leave me behind, holding,
cradling my heavens that bite hostilely at
my elbow---wanting out---out of going,
left then as a beautiful and delicate stasis.
As colors, given for the sake of shades; given,
chipped, my heaven of analysis. What comes after
the feeling, unanticipated---but, nobly, goes on,
gone out of this WORLD in this room I look out-
-onto the street from, seeing her---seeing macho---
seeing the street crumple and disperse by hands
of a dark character, a needed malignant spook
snickering in my ears: the music of a hapless
heaven's drought upon the finding out of this,
the port in air as no such port but rather chaos:
it is a choas, chaos, falling short,yes, of the
seeming: not seeming enough, critical, nonsensical,
a withered reaction to the macho of and yet:
outside of this my head's WORLD, the WORLD of
my bad head in the room, making synchronicity
out of horror, horror, horror, horror, horror.
KAFKA'S DAGGER.
Let me bleed into you,
let us grow and learn from one another,
let life not tell us otherwise,
tell us that we cannot learn,
cannot have faith,
yes,
In ourselves;
nor if we manage ourselves together break us open.
Again I am broken open,
bound to nervous,
clicking energy;
the energy of a freezing void.
Again I am bled out into another kind of source,
a source of evil and unkind;
again,
yes. Again to take what we have taken from ourselves for itself,
and that for still unknown reasons,
unknown,
never known,
not even beyond death to be known;
not ever. And if we cannot blend,
cannot reside in the one sphere,
perhaps,
what is salvaged from the apocalypse,
the death of the brains we both have,
being more than what we know,
being the dagger in me that you turn for me,,,
will make me bleed. Will you drink the blood that drops from my wound?
Will you eat this reflection of myself,
this isolated image of,
merciless,
the driving force that you have sucked from me,
this the grandeur of my sourceless pain,
my own pain,
the pain you twist deeper in with dagger to cause,
to cause so that I can see my own blood,
see the blood of my work,
see it kill me?
And thus you remember,
we have tried to be one,
or were one once were together in the struggle,
the struggle to be one,
to reside in the damnable sphere,
the sphere of blood's dropping.
elegant disasters./new poems./drafts. RIPPING THE SOUL IN HALF.
It has been a few days now since I've written anything.
But: the need is there, flailing like a !@#$ banshee:
or it is like some torso of another elastic subject or
figuration I’ll not get to in this piece here but that
wants attention; so, I conjure a few extremities, some
digits for the extremities---to be appropriated by this
goddamned mutant, and---promptly!---abandon it; leave-
-the torso unfinished; jabber on about a new thing. Ha!
Well, life is odd---about when it’s even---fickle about
when things go right. It’s a rite of passage for those alive,
at present, and should be seen as a way to determine, at
least to a degree, seemingly chaotic instances of errata
as---somewhat---predeterminations of path, whether in a
small scheme or large one. Well, how’s that for a subject?
Perhaps I sound a bit too devoted to hope yet for chaos,
but was I able to keep your attention? It’s hard not to be
optimistic about failure when it’s all the beans you got
to make a hill out of. Golly, gee, maybe I should indulge
asceticism and quit the Dionysian for the Apollonian. I
mean, there's this or that I could speak of, but, really,
not much, anymore, not much besides entropy, chaos,
torsos; besides a half-smile to be mentioned later;
besides processing thoughts via images, aborting
whatever credence might be given to what rages
in that mysterious hollow spot between the office
walls, where the insulation’s missing. Oh, this,
Oh, this mental paucity is outrageous. It's huge as
the sky; however, does not waiver, however much the
stuff of my bleeding is; however much a weight it is to-
-carry thoughts whirring this way, that: oh, to collect
those damn things---with or without virtue, besides what
one might spoon out of a clutter of gas---into a blind lump
of significance massed ugly as the gruel of being---and, then,
to carry all that frivol, nastiness past the very last galaxy,
the last clusterfuck of uninhabited planets---beautiful units---
as like what minutiae might---with a half-smile---be observed,
between persons coy in love, before love’s massacre---or at the
least, persons known a little---but, on a larger scale, from the
good lord’s penthouse view of all that is such things are rather
with a smallest meaning given magnified way beyond the truth
of their stature, measurement, to proportions biblically frenetic,
even for a creator without bias or sexual orientation---epicene,
pure---well---that multi-varied enigma of weird omnipotence might
more ably view with a massive expression of reflection, the quirks
of a quark---made significant---because seen rightly for its
purpose: to beautify the universe, via the infinite-various;
moreover, via a supreme extremity of careful arranging by the very
ignorant machinations of entropic circumstance---that is---as such
things might ruffle on one plane, in turn they might on a bigger,
macrocosmic level make more sense: and then, suddenly wowed,
everybody looks up to behold the magnificence of this goddamned
atomic fact, itself only possible via the mistakes of cosmic errata:
dismemberments of length and width for want of a more elaborate
breadth, that is, the breadth of stars: stars either blowing up their
gigantic danger into the warpath of a supernova or intelligent life
screwing itself over somewhere else, blowing up its own populous
WORLD with nukes. Well, here's the conundrum: is this jabber just
mental masturbation: or will I fly like a saint all the way out of
anguishing; fly out of the mud, this interpreted lagoon, this WORLD
of spite hinging on a next line---yes, a new idea---soon to be
trashed, however good an idea it was, or might have been? I tease,
knead, boast. I think I know what I am talking about; must remember,
whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. That’s why
I’m never sure beyond the process, perhaps making a seething poetry
of the incarnate now but most likely all this is is a dull promise
of more fodder for processing: which, really, is the process itself:
how then can it seem like a poet is saying something, anything at
all, if his/her subject-matter is invisible? Well, I think in the case
of this particular writer it amounts to more than that. I am, yeah,
I am trying to find clarity, trying to process the scary, scary
substances, emissions of dreams: and the local meaning thus gets
lost in a meaning for all the redundant WORLD, found---for
the most part---in infinite music: inherent in such a wonder-
-of nonentity, abstraction, symbol: I’m trying to rip my soul
in half; that is, just for the sake of knowing a soul there.
Just for the sake of giving the lagoon some air: to feed the
gas from out the bizarre depths of its troubled water: green
and sick with stagnation: I’m ripping like a wizard till
the end of my goings with a hurtling music like a large
asteroid of proportions bizarre: hurtling parataxis, chaos,
havoc: the wrath of a process---towards emotive catharsis,
not necessarily through words, gotten through words, as-
-through the ecstasy of commensurate sound to belt the
girth of my silly skill round: to assuage my anxious
need to create and bless the libido: and the spleening-
-courage to pass all things by in these desultory damn
free-form couplets: thanatos, self-hate, projection: to
be real, I do this for the sake of fulfilling a desire
I forewent, long ago, in dooming myself to process
---somewhat---what it is that all thoughts make us
mad with, wherein I am mad, am made, with utterance.
Is this the same, with differences about? This poem
is like this: snatching something totally !@#$
destructive, wanting to snatch it, for the snake of it;
wanting to destroy what I create out of creating it.
Ah: so there's the kernel of the matter: that I cannot
write without emphatic expostulations on or negations
regarding making the point: about a subject, the-
-suggestive subject of destruction's warpath: this
is me being honest with myself: I mean, anything I
could say about the process would itself be a thought
once written, so then, expression in general is static;
whatever comes to mind is as real as destruction:
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The editing process to me was and is still sacred. The true shape is found; the old, attempted shape is cast off. And yet, as regards what the poem had wanted to be in its beginning stages: well, that urge, the urge a poem has to return again to the energy behind its original motive, encapsulate what inspired it in the first place---that is, be what it had initially started as being---pervades nonetheless throughout the new work; and the spats of that urgency ripple forth still further into the really new work.
It is this wedge---this residual-rippling forth---that creates discontinuity. That is, the content of what is written is very much unlike the style. What I want to say, struggling, at war with, almost, how I ultimately say it. One tries, in the first drafts, to match the two; one finds out later that something of either/or must be sacrificed in order to make a good poem. That is, content, style: one has to choose. At least, to a point.
Pascal maintained that eloquence should fluctuate and that excessive or 'continuous' eloquence---in speech or written down---sadly, inevitably, wearies those listening, looking, reading: the speaker as such in his or her failure to keep the attention of his or her audience is in the eyes of that audience all but completely denuded, laid bare, stripped to the ghastly truth of their intellectual limitations. A life’s knowledge, cultivated on the periphery in full! How terrifying! The man seems to have in mind an audience whom together are to be swept off with you or dragged along. But, nonetheless: "grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated."
Hmm. I suppose I take this to mean that excessive eloquence most likely reflects an idea as tiresome and as long-winded as its description; that variations in writing, even from clear to unclear, provide to freshen up one’s thoughts, regarding the perspective of those listening, looking, reading. A continuous eloquence seems to me detrimental, of course, if one in absorbing what is said is left to eddy with the speaker down a continuum of an endless, monotonous, near-hermetic balance between the idea presented and whatever stylistic ideal it conforms to. So then, a fugue in writing, or rather a point of aporia, is quite necessary if the writer, especially one like me, is to truly get his or her point across.
This is highly ironic, yes, but also quite wonderful. It is true, good English is a must, as is thought-provoking subject matter; however, at least in my mind, these two things at times are very much irreconcilable, even in violent conflict. The thoughts of people are not so bare as to require a flounce and yet a sort of cognitive music regarding whatever piece of writing one might speak of has the possibility to better canvas a feeling, yes, the feeling of speechlessness---the wordless, pictorial, though ultimately fragmented splendor of life---the sides of the divine, that is---what it is that rages around the beauty---with words, words that by their own immanent limits could not explain splendor as this without sacrificing something of either comprehensibility or tone. I am speaking mainly of words that in a literal sense do not say much specifically but rather cascade, flee, circle round the core with a curiosity whelming like a buoy.
In a broad sense words, words of this nature, convey something of what is sublime---of what is, indeed, evermore about to be. Via a pattern of thoughts that repeat themselves endlessly, something strange begins to happen. That is, a voice arises, shadowy---speaking for what the words themselves fail to say, over and over again. This perpetual failing says more however than what could have been made significant and clear if stated once. In an inverted, paradoxical way---I guess I want to make eloquence dithyrambic---say a point beyond words, with words that speak for the beyond, in attempting, forever, forever attempting, and falling short. In this way, perhaps, the beyond is reached, but reached in reaching, and is then not really a beyond at all; rather, ends up amounting to hopelessly manufactured, ersatz-eternities. A replication of how the infinite feels rather than a description of what it is. But, perhaps I fail at this, as well,
and so then, most of what I speak of is garbage; the nothingness of psychic trash.
But confusion is O.K. because it helps us go on; it helps us prize ourselves when whatever caused it is sufficiently deciphered and rectified, by us. In such a way perhaps I say more about sense in the continual expiation of sense by that which, at first, I (lets be honest, who else could these words defend?) failed to explain---make a meaning out of---a sense that is, indeed, redeemed infinitely, expiated, through varying contexts wherein the image, even the word, in question, might find significance. Like Donne, mine is an attempt---daft, foolish, hopeless---to describe the invisible: a hopelessly, beautifully futile undertaking.
Regarding my way of writing you could say that I freely converse with myself through descant and---at times, subsequently following a poem expressed in one particular vein---palinode, or a recantation of something worked through in that previous poem---descant being kind of similar, but applied to the whole of one work, rather; to put it simply in the words of Stevens, "an and yet, and yet, and yet". Each poem is a conversation, a conversation I am having with myself, really; vacillating between point and counter-point and most of all never really sure besides what I learn from how sense might fail me and thus in failing reinforce a skepticism already merciless to the point of absolute nihilism, destruction, aporia,---literally, 'beyond words' or not knowing truly 'where to begin' as regards the argument at hand.
I do this, at times to the point of mental exhaustion; and then I give up. This intellectual poverty---somewhat akin to Stevens---usually ends with me hurling out or throwing in negations---almost a white flag---saying I do not, will not, cannot. I believe it has poetic value but also contains some very true stuff. I mean, in terms of sense, logic, as these things might relate to reality: well, the only way I can see an elliptical, informal logic as this as what it is, I must see it---as an outsider---as a concept, which negates the very in-itselfness of what I am conceiving, perceiving. That is, if I must, must observe logic as such in order to give it meaning. So, then, it cannot exist in itself.
The only way to find truth, really, is to lose control, live for awhile in the fugue; and when you do, you'll find that whatever control you had was needed in order to make what you find comprehensible, in order to give it that value. It's a roundabout way of saying that the reality we cannot see is realer than the reality we can see, and, yet, tragically, we cannot see it without losing a sense of control, we cannot see it at all. This very fact makes the reality we perceive more fathomable, realer than that realer reality it is impossible to decipher. Because it's all we see, it might not mean it's all there is, but at least in our mind's veritable eye we can understand it. This may sound convoluted, but negations often are.
Since we are on the topic of reality, it seems suitable, of course, to mention how this perception of mine relates to art, which, to me---speaking generally, anyway---is reality. Reality, with meaning. But the nature of this meaning is at least partly disparate from whatever it expresses. It relents to fix towards a mystery of---impossible, impossible strangeness---that, ultimately, is as much an affectation as the will or rather perpetual drive to perpetually grasp. In this way the strangeness of art seems different from reality because the meaning behind a piece of art ends up being more important than the reality it depicts, or lack thereof. In reality, the only thing that is important is reality, because it is not lacking; art is lacking, because it is not reality---it is an imitation, and so then must convey something beyond itself. Equivocalness is needed in order for one to rightly portray, in art, a reality that is not equivocal.
In other words, meaning is a necessary angel. A brightness of the sun we cannot look at straight; a distortion that, paradoxically, clarifies. Meaning itself, especially in art, is a symbol, as it is an expression; without symbols, art is seen to us as something manufactured and ersatz and unnatural and---ultimately, nonsensical.
No artistic expression yet has held enough weight to be meaningless---nor is it possible for expression as such to be meaningless---as it is that the sense of our minds---though skewed, when mapped out, expressed, in a painting or poem---will always, with enough time and patience, be deciphered in the corners of that painting or poem. Even if the expression is merely a symbol for meaninglessness.
That in its way is a meaning, a distortion.
Just as reality itself is strong enough in our minds to not need a reason for existence---is represented by that crucial, simple, atomic fact---our being-in-the-WORLD---is evidence of our existence simply because we exist in it---art, then, is too weak a force to go on, for very long, without symbols; nothing lives in fiction besides the observed symbol, and characters sprouted from the mind rather than the womb. Sad, that we are unable to reconcile meaning with reality---as it is that, perhaps, they are unified, the same things---in the same way we cannot have meaning and reality exist as the same thing in a piece of art without the piece losing something valuable. They must be separate, in order to be meaningful. In simple terms, art is not reality---is, indeed, a defect of the imagination, an obscure bubbling in the swamp. The fact of this is depressing as hell---and yet, in keeping with the good graces of absurdity, I remain hopeful. But to what purpose?
Good logic is no sort of human concept; T.S. Eliot talked of a "substitute for sense", but to me if there is a possibility for no sense, there is no possibility for true sense, besides in what we are able to garner from context and an appropriation of norms to suit our measureless imagination. My work is the process of a moving forth from one axis to another, and back; an exhaling and inhaling; the duality of good and bad. As such, there comes time and time again over the course of a poem when the subject seems hurtling on the stride of its own, blank inertia; in order to truly escape one axis and be drawn into another, there must be times of nonsense and absurdity, times between subjects as between stations on a radio---late at night---yawling fuzz-bits and guttural mentioning into the dark of the night. Such is a poem of the night;
as puzzling and oblique and, ultimately, merciful. And this concept of a dispositional axis is a concept of life as much as of literature. Forever will we move on and gain speed, and yet we know not towards what, or for what reason; will know only the rapture of the escape from the gravity of an object bigger than our subjects could allow for description. Out of a hunger for that feeling of rebirth and eventual slavery by yet another object too big to be settled in a succinct and fitting order.
I must, as a result of all this, to say it---finally---clearly, find out which element is more applicable, regarding making a contiguous, linear shape out of what I have just spent time typing out or scribbling down. In other words, I must ask the question: style, content: what's, ultimately, easier for me to disregard, in order to rise the other out of obscure, troubling depths; in order to manufacture grace? Words themselves are creations, manufactured; so then one has no choice but to beautify from an origin quite far from a wordless, senseless reality---beyond sense, beyond words---an origin that is in this case to be reflected on but obviously not grasped. The poet must choose the easier path towards a shape; it is why good poets write with ease. It is why a good poem is graceful, graceful with ease, captivating in the very fluid way it presents, processes, destroys or transcends itself.
If one forces a shape, the shape feels forced. If one, a poet, that is, writes something and adheres, struggles to adhere, to what was contiguous and linear about a poem in its beginning stages---well---that poet will find himself deeper into abstruseness---errant---and, worst of all, obscurity: obscure in the depths of an elliptical !@#$ moil---logic’s darkest parts---a way of the WORLD that wants too much to make sense of what is no longer sensible. This, I believe, is why discontinuity is so important. Even great poets have ended up talking about something else: Milton's Lycidas darkly speculates on its author's own premature fate, while at first an elegy in reference to the early end of some irrelevant Latinate scholar named Edward King. Lines Written in a Country Churchyard at its start focuses more on imagery and the sensory things of the countryside which a retired Thomas Gray saw sweep out before him; by the end of the poem he speaks more on the nature of poetic immortality---the image turning, suddenly, towards gravestones---and the poem, being high Romantic, loses focus and is redeemed by that very hesitance on the brink of naming oneself immortal. This hesitance is a strength. It's a phenomenon in poetry that recurs, again and again.
It's fascinating: : : :
HERO’S MARBLE.
Just so. The blessing in this gentle breeze-
-offers no concession in the end: and, as this
righteous sense regards itself confused, so do-
-breezes blow: like a cruelty: an abuse: just as
thoughts which out of fright, nudged to broaden
out the arms of primitive dark, make a mess once
exposed: thrown beams of day upon those thoughts:
plausible, somewhat: yes, as plausible as bleakest
eidolons: proffering notions of existence, ideals
of their own---sans an experience of existence;
sans that such things’re the penumbra following
life, never there in the life preceding/proximate.
An eidolon’s got naught besides the timelessness:
memory freed of segments, shadow freed of whatever
perpendicular vessel, sense freed of logic: and no
insight beyond what a statue knows, what a thing
not of a sentience can muster: to manipulate those
things that think and breathe: its own insight but
dullard portals into damnable, bleak mirage: it-
-pushes to explain the windy sphinx, gets beyond
carnivorous repetition(?): that point of sense---
gleaming despite---: sculpted of wind by this hero
of the past, of a foremost place: so: the peeping
sun beats rays on the concrete of the big park,
bleaching it: and the breeze: fanning a poet’s
cheek: it checks itself, before blowing fully:
and passerby grumbling in the cold: together,
breeze and sun making thems folks squint and
batten their jackets of down down. The cold
wind wearies thems, makes the sun a perfidy
to thems, makes the statue’s stature, marble,
in the park, seem not so benevolent; more
like, the prettily dappled leaves with light
are; are to skittish passerby the coronation
of a more kindred giving. Yeah, the leaves
in light are like this: the statue, not:
frightening, almost: the rank of a ghost, to
be read on the placard below his large feet:
etched in frigid stone: the blessings of this
man upon the WORLD: and yet whatever significance
the man had upon his kind, is secondary---sad---to
what heat the name now brings to harrowing flame:
a known man, yes, once known, now at the corners
of rooms---a figure jabbering out his christening:
pictured as like the veritable curve of a large,
toothy signature: artistically maimed: haphazard
with a smooth yet reeling finesse: what’s in a-
-moniker, anyways: aesthetic: it is as though
the man wants to approach the stars, had wanted to
approach the stars; is now dead and yet not much
mourned. So then, all this harping is but harping:
a showy degenerate, once a pivotal human: once of-
-true viscera: once truly of the stone that wreaks
his presence: now, in a statue without meaning and
ignored: but: a name: scratched on the scroll of
a document of some levity---probably---in ill ink:
or perhaps he is not a man but an aspect of all
the kind: humanity’s wings: laurels: his sightless
gaze far off not blessed nor very human: but: the
breeze is not a breeze, as sleet is not rain: and
is not gentle, as far as gentle goes in terms of-
-blowing zephyrs shaking trash. These lines are
lines that betray senses’ fairness, beatitude;
they live like a man in the corner of the room,
of the phrase; praise naught but their own
illogical ranting. They betray and are no
help; and all this makes me no less sure of-
-my place as a visitor in words, these words.
But there are things from which the sublime
might shrink---such nameless perennials, by
chance forgotten, untoward: by history a-
-merest muttering, a wind’s reproach of
passerby and yet invisible commerce with
itself: flexibility and peace at the core
of meaning, chaos and scrutiny at the outset
what is coldest to blow from SHELLEY’s west:
wind crosses: manipulates the trash of ages-
-hovering in a twirl round a hero’s marbled
image: the hero is no longer to be observed by
haters, shaken: with hate: the invisible wind-
-a balm to soothe cracked, formless relevance,
no longer patent: his heyday, past. He bothers
no other any longer, not even the silent winds,
to unwillingly receive what mutters him; what-
-it is trailing down the street, agate as smoke.
He does not any longer care to express the very
nothingness of heroism: yeah: noble tarnishing,
broken expanse: does not mind the mindlessness of
spaces: spaces, on the street: an empty street of
the wind and, most of all---honorable---the search
for some place, a foremost place---together---lend
no meaning at all to an end of bravery and yet they
in their seeming airs null the hero: or will usurp
the man the grace of his ideal, never to be played
out? Well, perhaps all this is too much to ask,
to receive: but, by winds’ payless work to work
. . . . . . . .
the trash underneath some benches is he thus redeemed:
haters disperse, the passerby leave the figure to his
windy games: and: the wind, like a knowing, gifted-
-janitor sweeps dust from off his face: to beneath
benches, the benches where once haters, heckling,
watched from: gaped at with gawks this tired ruin
of themselves, in some ruined statue. Benches,
gathered like blank pilgrims round their idol. Is
this wind the artless waver of a muse, gone of sense
awhile; are the words---though noble, heroic, still
insubstantial? One must have a mind to know the-
-mindlessness: be the mind of winter, caged in
crouched being---yes, a squirm in the cold---in order
to know the thing said as the very dripping of this
WORLD we’re told we’re in’s miasma: yeah: a creeping
dialectic for the frauds to chase and the wise to
dismiss as no more than nitwits’ visitant-gusts,
a brief fanning of some cheek: and thus these very
words are brief: they are gone way out into stiff
realms of order’s disorder---disorder’s order
called off, because too complex: there is, after
all, wiggle room for holes, voids, in a disorder
interpreted all straight and clean: if a disorder
at its base it must be so that at its base it is
a trouble, a troubling void: logic’s malcontents:
and yet such things pursued straightly are oft
insincere: thus, not so clean as to seem of a-
-truth: half-created thoughts require half the
form, to be sure: a form like as a void, a dumb
terror of imbalance and yet serenity: in its keep-
-of the balance, despite: yeah, yeah, the straight
stratagems as this’re unkind towards the waver
of logic, how it can waver: how it can pick
apart itself to form’s corners: indeed, it is
a vagueness, the core of an aura I speak of, an
invisibility too invisible: an image, too random
in the ink: a lacking, a disconnect concealed
out of pride, struggling to be consummate, to-
-be more than half itself: and yet it is without
a content to grow poetical shapes from: and so
then I give it here as a thing: or, rather,
will give it, will give to it a name. As such,
it will be too pent in being. It will be a-
-thing too nakedly, nimbly evasive to be at the
core of it: an order: yet not viscous as the shade
of one: a figure in the corner of the darkened room,
not so loveless as to exist, not loved enough to die---:
that is, if one plans to ruin oneself, or plans to be
frailly, frailly mere---a statue in the park---well,
what should one do with that life wasted, surrounded
by waste? Why, then, should one care to be the loved,
to be a hero in the corner of rooms? erhm, just so.
FEELING.
You need to feel so bad sometimes that you
push yourself to the limits of the stuff
felt, hoping to make more of it: squeezing
life just to meet it halfway there: describing
the description of what life is but leaving out
what you observe of it: well, can feelings be
described: your feelings, that is---that is---
without an eating of the subject: a scratch in
one's aspect, certainly: suicide, anxiety made
a havoc of a sought sloughing of the feeling
of the scratch---what aspect, now?---which is
why you seek but can't slough it: this is what
makes you eat your own head: yes, makes you
gone with going on: don't speak, but tell silent
stories about yourself, scratchless: this lack
of knowing: the whole of yourself is familiar, but
not the parts, the specific, nitpicking, !@#$
intimate issues: a slew of 'em: in reality, to
me, this in-itself is just a lack of intellectual
ambition: man, you think, you could talk !@#$ about
yourself all damn day: you want to feel as though
you were alive, yes---almost as though: yes: just
to sense emotion---fecund stuff and flowered right
out of whatever occurrence, weakly: weakly to be
squeezed out into existence, reckoned, by you, the
one who wants out of their mind of problems. See,
sometimes you just gotta skip a step to get to
the step you skipped; sometimes, you just gotta
overshoot the mark, drown, yes, in order to know
what it means to breathe---or---be the moon to
know the sun, in order to find what had eclipsed
your loony self's sensing with vagary and mutation.
Or, is the eclipse really how you feel: are these
emotions' relics seen the sweeter because they have
passed and thus imply more to them than there could
have been: is the reality of the situation more that
---well---that the crime of feeling is, it cannot be
quite requited in a reaching, because it is what has
been reached: you fabricate this idea of more,
because you must, in order to know time a thing moving
forward; to know experience as lending to the very real
idea of time's improvement: that is: do you think what
you felt once might have been more than that, wasn't;
worried about how you were supposed to feel, as a result:
do you really live in the moment, free of all the worries,
free of feeling like something is lopsided, wrong---
contrived---because coming from you and ultimately an
expression of an attempted reconciling between you
and the contrarian skeletons in your closet: you imagine
whatever sort of relationship as unnecessary, as it is
you need only yourself, do not like the idea of a split
self, a split identity, combustible and tortuous;
lamed, moreover, by your inability to accept yourself
as two folks in one: anyway, you shower the thought of
this with guesses: you merge your identity, attempt to
love the relationship, yes; attempt to love yourself,
however split you may be---whatever mind, whatever
identity you might have at the core you share with your
grand SOUL, seen by you as not so grand, at all, no, not
so grand: see, in reality, you are so very influenced by
things that happen afterwards, because, after all, you
are obsessed with time, divisive time, odd, terrifying:
everything that once you did seems to need that forward
motion, improvement: you, albeit unconsciously, thought
through it all: those vital events, experiences, you
think, could have in the moment of whatever feeling
thwarted helped to make more of it, more use of it, the
feeling, damnable: is there a mute calling for of each
emotion to go way out, there, in la-la-land, that is,
a hell of stupid vagary, eclipsing the feeling felt at the
time with a sense that it could be amazing, transcendent:
but not everything can be amazing, right: I mean, it's
hard enough to squeeze the feeling into existence through
overshooting; even harder to know that such a sense is in
itself both creator and villain, looking to thwart that
which it brought life to: how can this work: how can
a thing anxious and eating itself sell this idea: an
addiction: chasing the emotional dragon: ride the white
!@#$ pony, why doncha: feel what you feel, damn it:
feel the moment and know glory to be in the now of the
moment. Know, yes, that problems you have do not resolve,
won't; rather, will revolve mostly around the thought that
you have problems: such worries, too, eat themselves like
a feeling, unrequited, that is: I don't know if I'll
bother to figure it out: I'll leave the orgasms of epiphany
to those who have it in them to touch the SOUL, and do not,
do not ever, in order to know it better, know the SOUL as
something wanting, unrequited; and,
that words, moreover, eclipse,
and do not save.
ELLIPTICAL LOVING.
I was talking to one of you one night for you
were curiously divided: between two folks: all
blinking together sanctified like a tail-light’s
faith of flow and stop and flow: these, these are
odd decorations, in depictions---verbal---specked with
the foils and wrappings of tinny music, rapping:
a chaotic music of a fixedness of argument as to
the welfare of you, her, the one within the vagary
of identification: that is, once we hug and the sparks,
sly, fly, once again: fixed motion, like a body within
a soul’s motion---the fixed body seen as a weltered
soul angering for life beyond a stasis seen as not,
externally, and so then the things in her receive what
they deny: it is like this, yes, is like this, this is her
life of negatives, prophetic: her dual-figurative like holy
jewels in the wind chimed in the fuzzy feed of wires,
all electric, cracking with a lighted though miserable-
-confusion: her colorful animus: to her but ultimatum
for the soul, hers, yours, to clash with: but who am I
speaking to and why: well, !@#$ it: there was something
sparky going on---between, I think, who you were all
that time ago and who you were once seen after a
good long while of years, wild years for the both
of us: eventually you became comfortable with
the animus-clash and found yourself housed, though
at first in who you were a-many years ago, in who
you wanted to be and---good on ya---who, yes, who
you eventually had become---had flourished as,
into---mostly due to my lack of knowledge
about it and thus inability to influence and
taint your progress; even the possible tainting,
in your mind, I believe, would be enough to corrupt
you, leave you tangled in spaces of recourse
and motivated belligerence by the thing wrong
with me, the one thing of me you hate and do not
want to fix, surgical though her phrases had been
in giving me the route out. This is an argument
about vague things, the duplicity of vagueness,
the comic paramour that duality is, and, why
not, how you seemed to me once---how that
seeming persists, still, and explodes me silly
into profound and stark ravings of incurable
content, outrageousness, true dangers of a passion
felt in you, now not in you but still in me. When
we met again on some busy street (it had been
awhile) we embraced a little and fought back tears---
well---I fought back tears and you fought back
tearful pity: and as a result probably
had to fight an urge to slap me across the face:
not out of any sort of maliciousness but rather
because you were kind of angry that there
remained pity to be felt for my sad-sack, even after
all this !@#$ time: it was more this that fueled
the truth of/in things: our jarring congress, once:
and, so, then, pity fueled that anger in you, preternatural
as dinosaurs to a WORLD’s first life in the larger,
abstract scheme of what a thing’s born with. You
were like the Jurassic age of my crucial experience,
I guess; you were so long ago you might as well
be a !@#$ reptile. Well. This more than my own
infinite sorrow, ghastly, hypocritical---I’d guess---would’ve
got you crying more than anything: that is, me, I the dunce
and my pitiful self, at that point long ago when I was divided-
-in my own way: a rift through the darksome belly of me:
me, out the womb and into the fuzzy bourn of consequence,
error. That’s what it was like for me, that heartless punk;
I mean, imagine brutally wounding someone emotionally for
the first time in your life! It’s like you’re a child again.
It’s like, I mean, you realize you exist by that exacting of-
-your influence upon the other: as children, we learn, first,
dismayed, the surety of being, and that it is mortal; thus, we
cut as though by knife through what courage we can to inflict
pain or pleasure upon those around us so as to negotiate in our
own heads the reality of a soul’s behavior. And all this for the
first time, again, but this time the evidence gotten solely via
unmanageable pain and strife unearthly and a monstrously-
-complex deliberateness of scheme: sabotage: well, at least I
ain’t a ghost, saith the ghost, the ghost in me that I am wholly:
but it was by the pain of another: and now I know that-
-immorality somewheres lieth in myself: somewheres uglily
and vague with ruin: deserted by the barking light of a soul
in us that tells us, me, tells me I am good: that I am of
gold, am golden, am the name I give myself and by such
am neither good nor bad anyways. We the both of us
were sad about it all for awhile. The first few months we
talked on the phone frequently, but that began to ebb
the more desperate I got to win her back: at present,
somehow, we made it back to my hood, and sat
together on a stoop to smoke, and the moonlight-
-struck things well. I asked how it was with
you: you said things were fine so I didn’t bother
to wheedle further even though you probably
wanted me to do that. But: it was on my mind
even after you left: why, why hadn’t it occurred
to her to stay the night: was she so very eager to be
rid of me once more, and for all time: to think on how
things had turned out that way---that wasteful anguishing
way---would be as fruitful as any vagary could prove to
magnify a lone significance, like the significance of her
call she gets on her way from my apartment and as to who-
-she speaks to I know not, will never know, will not know:
it knots my guts, I guess: in implying so much: and still
with the yadda yadda yadda: a deconstructionist attitude,
yes, of one prone to analysis---o crude aporia---even though
analysis in itself can be a headache---aggravates, of course,
these general feelings about her and I, massed brute in a
lump-emotional-sum of a self I daily begot over the years: so
yeah: I begot as claimant to preserve my uneasy frustrations
a new, ugly DAN, a DAN without
faith: you, she was, were a vague brand of feeling that---once
felt---multiplies/d into doubts mingled furious with passion---
and---leading back to no source but the beginning of time, can’t
be destroyed: rather, flattens out, buds what buds from it:
you were this universe in me, this ill gain that I made into-
-WORLDS of content, all relating back to myself, all eating
myself: and each with an equivalent gravity to its argument,
implication: and, all shouting like whispers in this head of
mine that rolls on shallow shoulders: o o o the scrutiny of-
-years passed in hell, catatonia: you were the mass of repetitions,
you are; you are the feeling I get, it seems, when I want to
say one thing and end up saying something else not so lucent,
vibrant, sparky; less constructive. A vague turn of the head,
a searching in your listless, detached expression: you are more
than any variable meaning could dissuade, dilute: the final judgment:
well: as for this identity, the one I hold fast to: it is just to have
an ability to regard myself---as I die---by this vulgar broadness,
this general mangling of upturned phrase---like me in a hot bed
with sheets, thinking whilst asleep, waking up, again---
to judge myself---to cock the gun but not blow brains out in
a sheer test of how the shambles could cook up some new force
to !@#$ me over with. After all this time, all these
years, these long years, why had you decided to talk to
me, why, after all; the inevitable sadness of days,
the misery of passing time got me no longer to think of you,
or else enter some metaphysic of misery beyond a single dropping
tone of time; between a squeezed millisecond’s reckoning.
I think of that single spot: in time: it was, and was,
until now, no longer to come around to rattle and
rouse me from sleep at night: until now did not chill
my sportive blood to leap out of my skin and beckon
forth and so then fan these premonitions of apocalypse:
yes: yes: uncontrollable, the coming of a bleak, bleak
daydream to produce some existential whatever: some
hunch of rotten death: all that’s left I guess is me and
my vagaries, twiddling like thumbs: the daunting grope
towards a sanctified life, a life of elements and phrasing,
however idiomatic, not fortuitous, not prophetic, merely
unique without being amazing, without being productive,
vacant meaning drudged-up in unhappiness, lost loves,
you love, the love of you, and for I am not more man
then than now I cannot say that things are any better.
SOME BRANCHES.
"He glows a moment on the extremest verge."
---Walt Whitman
"Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?"
---Wallace Stevens
My brain speaks; its tongue is at the door of life; I
Jostle myself awake in bed; I find myself weeping for
Chaos. I know by now I am held by the throat by this
The gravity of my own assumptions ideas beliefs, opaque presumably and
In a wild meaninglessness yet broken
Away and all furious
From griefs in a grief together like a drowse
Of flies about my head: an unclear spleen apart and menacing,
And for the bothersome titans casting bothersome
Shadows; to dismay them
And correct, but incorrectly. Once
In such a frenzy to be new that the words
Forgot to look back on themselves
And loosen the valve, tight with pressure to perform
Newness straightly. There is time for me to grow old,
Indeed; there is time to build
And destroy and build
Again. There is time to be elusive and yet very careful in
What words mean; to escape the blithe; to swat away
The orbit of cruelty and rankling and the unclear and the-
-Opaque. Awaiting, a fanatic set of dreams festers, had,
However, once, were not these bombshells of the naked word
Like they are now . . . differently,
Words started out explaining their offspring
Without beginning with who/what influenced them, as if
The words had spread from nothing at all and what
Spread from that yet more nothing still;
Instead, detached from influence, turned cursory,
Mendacious: gambles on what is the right phrase and the
Right meaning: throwing dice without bothering to know
The odds: an emptiness to feed the GODS. However, the thing now
As what it is in words not of the prig
But of the times and the vernacular of the times. Words thus soon
Allowed themselves to be frenchkissed by the past; became flexible
As to the difficulty regarding the diffidence of words towards
The past; still dreamlike, but now enjoyed-
-A few longedfor perquisites come out of an homage to the grace
Of greats: a giving of the satyr, back to them: in
this way all of rightness
Swerved the manner of the clouds of the expression
From a trying at exquisiteness
To an accomplishment of things as they are. Still, the hum
Of what is evaded had its form in the expression . . . things,
Then, confusedly resolved, transitioned
From thoughtmadeword to wordmadethought. Clarity
Staunchly stood like largest statues-
-In the stated mind, opaquely
But expressed,
Nonetheless; organized, proud, plumb in the uprights.
Things that were there were explained and felt and
Suffered for something, this time; were striven to find.
But in due time logic-
-Altered at the pagan alter: an appearance of one embellishment
And of one after and after that another
Switched the sides, notwithstanding
A ceaseless capturing of meaning and an
Ultimate lettinggo of self: the alter is bloody
With humanness: the writer: a small, wrinkled aborigine, brown
From the sun, his muscles weak,
His frame weak with years and starvation, wearing a necklace
Of teeth of some animal; he who balks at extricating
The heart of good reason from an inverted
Chest . . . kali-ma! . . . through
Embellishments proves the point, malnourished, faltering,
Messing up holiness and terrifically unable to let
Go of what would be eschewed of himself to benefit and make
Happy a thing he does not know . . . denying the exchange as though
Sublimity were the midwife and he the whisperer
Talking; lending ears to his broth
Of subjects, and, backwardly, made for his thoughts alone
To influence, and he the speaker of which-
-Logic is both ensign and obligatory terminus; is something
That he should have given, all in all, to that sublime religion, more
The speaker of grace, and to be heard by a hopeless calamity
Of himself. But logic grew famous in the words. At first, harmony
Seemed unable to coincide with sensemaking; a spareness
Could not be dithyrambic, professed the writer. The
Words assigned themselves
To the task without aid of the writer. The dreamthoughts-
-Recklessly, thanklessly collated, numbered together
Into a serial, a digestion of the res,
A phalanx of points with the seeming
Of them gone, and the door still closed anyway to his
Made peace, the writer's; achieved
Words chafed sullenly, once blushing with unheard,
Unfelt enigma either way tried for, despite
The isolated cause; the writer felt
His neck in a palpable-
-Snare of a cangue; became a fabulous opera; so much of
The wood that finds it is a violin; became a WORLD of spheres of rhetoric
And foppishness. Brained
Intelligence. The bard, bound in an evilly insistent sphere,
And the sphere in the trap of the cangue. The hands through
Holes, and the argument for myself, not his, and my absurdity suddenly
Stuffed with decking, rapping on the subject
Of ideas and words and taut
With accuracy and pale and fecund like a bag of perfumed
Towels, left in plenty at the door my speech
Tries to persuade open . . .
If only one idea of these could calculate itself out. If only
The times did not destroy me. What of it? Do not test my strength.
It lies in you; I am the maker of you. The question is, are we
Together? I don't care much for this relentless amativeness or
Trapping. Is the cangue love? Is to be trapped
To be guarded, protected, without
Knowing that horribleness must needs be as outside of the
Enclosure as the fact of being enclosed? Love
Or not, what relationships
I share I share with the WORLD. Sometimes this makes-
-Others cross my path as if I say to them, "beware". . . sometimes
That distance is better to restrain these strengths
Of mine. The strength is in the idea, after all; is the-
-Lingering harp on that inflexible string. I strive
For tangibility, though what reality is is uncouth
Once touched. How then may I see things as they are,
If what they are backs
Away from my love? And the
Times to come? I am in a present of my design
Or a past design of others that I refresh. My voice
Halts. What carries it on? What
Blessing does my daredfor calculation resist? I
Weep in bed, wrapped in love; I castrate the luminous
Findings with a blade of dark; I am
Interchangeable, found; I am the key
To your deceptions, friend, endless friend,
Amativeness notwithstanding. For,
I hear with the minds of others my own thoughts,
Struggle to struggle; wriggle out the egg
Of my restraint
And bear bearingless my child's eye. Don't think
There's a difference in being reborn
And telling how it is with things,
But once you get
Going the fertileness of that desire for attachment
To other voices ends up being an
Attachment to the womb but not what is in
The womb. Beginnings
Die. The most we
Can, I can, hope for, is to remain freed; remain,
To beseech the delicacy of hopes to change-
-To change me well, along with this guttural voice,
Griping to a stranger GOD my needs he does not
Understand; who follies and snorts at folly and like
Blades against the luminous heals tongues up into their own element;
Into darkness. Not nothingness, uh uh, but
An umbilical hold of the muse, always connected
But sometimes ungrasped, unfathomed, perceived
As a wane when it is just in the dark of the womb.
That's what it is; that's the connection, yeah,
That's what keeps reality out: an-
-Estranged feeling of being gone when it is just
The other voices that are gone, you're
Just unused to being, and being alone, along with your own
Throat to sing your own song, which-
-You, I, think as a nothingness, pretension,
Confusion. Don't confuse a free radical event
Of the writer's inspiration with the plots of some nihilistic
Affirmation, the voyeur of all sanity and choice peeking at the aim
Of his coveting, mine. There is not that-
-Much for me, him, to covet, anymore,
There is no need to hide myself. There
Is no need to grasp in the dark because I-
-Am in the womb again, the indifferent womb
Of the muse, partially conscious of the delivery
Of my words here and partially estranged
From the hope that put me back in there.
When I emerge, tomorrow, there will be
No tomorrow. I will have forgotten the colloquy
Between myself and myself, will-
-Have forgotten this terrible blaspheming of myself and
Of what I was comprised but that ended up not being
A void, merely darkness in the egg. Wait it out,
You'll see: there is an antidote
To this vile despair, and perhaps
I've found it, have found it in my solitude,
Have extricated myself from the conversation,
Have dabbled in the delicateness of furtive life;
Of the words of the egg. Of a wriggling
Into, there is naught left to find, and so
I quell the voices in my void or my temperate mind,
My mind foretelling a saga, my mind,
Conceived of janitor-sages of the mind, and an immigrant
Temper there, even after the vomit's off the floor and the floor's
Buffered; there, the follies of the ridiculous;
There, the place to hide become the clarity; there,
The channeling of the dark and scrupulous and
There rejection, yes, of my demands, a sinecure
To file away my life; a way on my openness to close the door,
My closeness to open it; a way
To not need what I was looking for.
And most of all a love not cosmic, nor base, not anything
But uninhibited. This time the breadth of my intelligence
Has no need to pay the price, if in expression not degrading,
Not a death and to be buried in the yard behind the house.
And so the carrionvoice, the simpler passion
Needs no other way to say its peace, needs
No other way to say what it is, no other fashion,
No choice to make, no map to draw and stab
With a knife: a way to take the drab
And give it life: reality, which spoken once
Will not be spoken ever. Hope is clever: the hope
To change, that is: it wills
The one who has it to deceive
Himself, as to what it means to begin; he begins
Again, whether or
Not he can; to organize and-
-Trade what he had been given by the past, benevolent,
Endless past, which, once gone from his
Own throat, may leave him wayward,
Impoverished, but at least
Not fruitlessly living, nor admonished
By the other voicing voices; nor select his choices
Which come from the gut: the gut, the honest belly
Of the womb: a delicacy, an accidental doom.
SHADOW OF A GRACE.
We tend to your pure grace--religiously--like some shadow.
You are a limpid length of limpid time dissolved from time--and
Clearly set, inhabiting the division as an act in of itself, without
A need for what has parted: and we the fabulous
Shadow and flawed issuance
Of yourself, need not oblige you to keep the strength
In its prism: just know, it is there, collecting this communicated
Infinity wrongly, dirtily, in a nice and
Vulgar pool: I get the feeling it is or
Has been tampered with,
Moreover, by us, we shadows enough, already;
We many voices of the night who in receiving this
Soft question of your grace--fickle, and
Yet pure--will through obsessive
Analysis mess
It up. You're all eternal, you, and so then held apart from
Fathoming, at least, besides that firmly accepted minute
Of reckoning: a collage of meant words
From that: a particular
Statement vouching in a burst vehemently and for the noble
Grace of your spent self, once left
To dwell in our hearts, our wrongnesses. You
Are no statement,
However; rather, animate in whispers
Only--a weapon to be used to smash logic, and
Contaminate the vacuous creeds
Of man with something ageless, more,
Than what could come from the most musical of ghosts;
More tactful, if only it could be more than
Bones, the predicate of knowledge. The time
At which took place the unbelievable answer to this purity
Was crushed beneath the clock. We could not
Answer; the beauty was plain and yet
Was no such obviousness
As could wail out the throat of a stout sophist-
-With reasoning as stout and unforgiving and he as caught
In this insurgent fog as we are, but not
Accepting of the fogginess; instead, pursuing
What cannot be found, went far away from us. Goodbye,
Figment! Until next time. We knew then that
Though the grace was there it was not visible, and
There was dignity, definitely, in this
Response to such unfathomable
Characters as beauty wills to life, but as no
Part of life: this ugly,
Barren time of windows through which no vision is yet dreamed;
Merely empty possibility, the possibility
Of more, is wagered. But the possibility
Of more what? We are slaves-
-To time, and cannot backwardly deny
These strange, supple answers, crescent-shaped,
Vivid in their freedom. We are the inner
Eye of your soft grace; the shadow, the unreal
Wideness of your covering; and, like a mountain
Scaled, we travel like significant priests down
The summit: this, this is, I finally know, a descent
Of pain from truth, an acceptance of pain
As the mimicry of that foregone and timid
Grace. This, this is a corruption, a piece of the form,
A carrying of meaning till we all (even the sophist) get
Tuckered out, and leave it
Somewhere. We know this only: that is,
A power very, very real; for a time, a channeling of-
-The universe by the personage of pain; pressured by the brain
To make sense, we could not see, and only shadow
What the moment gave us--could not derive
A picture from the experience, though it lay,
Though corrupted, within yourself most pure-
-But not in us, though you, you
Sweetness, tried
With all the strength of massive meaning to persuade
Us that something was there, definitely,
And pure, but incommunicable; but,
Hardly anything was left for these our brains to notice,
Besides a humming in the back of the head
That flowered bluntly what was by then very dead
And undistilled. We, searching for the definite,
Found nothing; found, we were slaves to time,
Yeah, and so then could not understand the magic
Of a timeless moment, a cherishing, a blessed
Proof of time, outside of time, outside of life.
Such a thing, it seemed a majesty so groined
In that same minute's temperance; however, such
Is not the way it looked, this grace of you,
This combing out of natty normalcy to find
Somewhere among the index--an impossible
Way of tangles--a melody, a secret of some
New paragon of wonder and some taste
For true and sanguine treasures . . . gone to waste
Out of ignorance, and still lingering there, that
Is, in what had been searched through; a realm,
A blemish not a blemish but in terms
Of what is so apparent to the senses.
Your grace is not attendant, as my shadow
Is upon your grace; your felt clarity
Accrues, again to say it, quite apart
From time: a light not vibrant, but
The nugget of an answer dwelling still
In that form, there. What could I say,
What more than all that I have said of this,
What final illness will transcend the kiss
Of your proved compactness, lackadaisical
And youthful time? Are you a cherishing
Lark, or more, much more than ruin washed?
Or could in true conveyance loiter there
A ruin not a ruin: seen itself as what-
-It is, and gentle, and so frail
As to be crushed by too much painful
Time: too many chafed interrelations,
Struggling to be thwarted, by that deep-
-Suspicion of thinking ourselves quite wrong?
Yours is an exquisiteness of kindred pain
So memorable, so sensitive to a minute's
Control, as to be separate from life.
And if I live in it, it is no life
Of comprehending all the rest of living,
But rather will persist in memory
As something very different from time.
