Capital

I will dream this lake
and when I do you will see
with eyes of soot, with
eyes unknown to us, black
holes worming in and out
the field of vision--
smart cheerleaders,
granted quarters, quirky
gumballs and candy corn.

Touche to you, the stampede,
with its backbreaks and
hollering from above.

Spiritus

Well, goodbye
Mr. Updike.
Only through
Eastwick, only
through women.

And then some,
goodbye.

Salem Caprice No. 2

Cafe ambience showcased
artifacts of this petit-b. milieu:

daring angles of fashionable black/white
wall photography for sale,
plush seating by picture windows,
italiano steaming, gallic deference
of attitude poured by tattooed hipster
barristas, accentuated by piercings
of typified placement sheen gauche,
the thin-hipped razor-lipped and yes
diligently boyish hair.

Then the unobtrusive Asian girl-
jet hair brimming
her fingers stirred
the onyx until it poured onto her shoulders
and seethed, steaming with light.

Unlearning Poetica

On reading the old scribbles when:

digital lights carved numerals
into dumb hieroglyphics,
consigned minutes to floating pyres

while blood rushed
afflated by libations
hekatomes and smoky sublimated nows
blackening temple walls

that perfect finger digging keypad
annihilation of geometries
dancing the unthoughts
with pealing blood rhythms

ungoaled ecstasis-


On academing the dance like:
Accounting for spoons and missing forks
washing windows and floors
consistent non-doing undoing
lugging word tendrils toward teleology
and other necessary myths
concerning 'thus', 'therefore',
and other crippled maenads.

Spiraled Up: Five Steps

I

Coin tossers
Reunite under earth

Creeping blooms
Buttery flame blinds

Another metal base
Bruised and oiled black

Collarbone whiplash
Reinforce Philly powder

II

She cut her hair
Scissors prying joints

He lost his pants
The dead repossessed

Dog's hot tamale
Lodged in to choke

Between a web of limbs
A distraction's hiss

Mel's medieval grimace
Drawn and Quartered once

III

Strangers crossing streets
Lapping up extra horns

Sirens on the street
Down toward the highest point

Alligator skins shining
His teeth yellowed molasses

Each look against them
Life's scourged pinion

IV

Oven mitt's hung song
Noose snapping valves

Air current anew
Prospects to suffocants

Strapped with boots
Extra knife sport

Drag marks on concrete
Bodies born twice

V

Mother in Gdansk
New strong monster strong

Robert paralytic snuff
Frayed storm of Hemingway

Kevin in trench "huh"
Genius to scrape surface

Katie breaking behind windows
The carpet scruffed beneath

Bird dog passing perfect
Another nap light awashed

Otherliness breathing
A white sheet to huff

Maria Winters, What a Gal!

3:09am Jeff

oh yeah

it's 3 here

i forget how far away you are

3:10am Maria

millions of miles

3:10am Jeff

the worst thing about it being 3 o'clock for me

is that I still need to cram in a whole night of drinking

i was conquering the world

on Rise of nations

I was France

we have "chevaliers"

3:11am Maria

oh yeah,,,that sounds...good...

3:11am Jeff

those are the unique units, anyway

3:11am Maria

ah

of course

3:11amJeff

but they're only good for when your in the Enlightenment epoch

which sucks, so I usually just skip to the Information Age

so I can use stealth bombers

and crush my enemies, iron-fistedly

3:12am Maria

i go for the iron-fisting myself

Twenty Chrome Couplets Times Two

I

Nestling
Things deep

II

Dark trance
Spatial potato

III

Somnambulist
Ambulance

IV

Black goo
Stretching

V

Long, thin cords
Bunching middles

VI

One less arm
An outstretched grab

VII

Indian Sunburn
Noogies

VIII

Lemon stench
Burning onion eyes

IX

Long pockets
Ghosts' mouths

X

Duct-taped
Knives for fingers

XI

Scorpion eyes
Eighteen sets

XII

Jaw structure
Wrecking balled

XIII

The corporation
Demanded granite

XIV

Trespassing leads
Two kids to flames

XV

Eyes as salt
Tripping against counter

XVI

Electric guitar
Within a cave

XVII

Swallowed pills
Swallows still to kill

XVIII

Tremendous march
Shakes floors of hut

XIX

Underneath the sink
Foams hold our ground

XX

Skin of rats
Too much hair allowed

I

Bullets stripped
Post flesh fuck

II

Demons called
Strange motorists

III

Slip up tears
Roots pathed to fall

IV

Audio dining in
Hush to sleep

V

Torch down the hallway
Grab extra batteries

VI

Sleeping on the couch
Crumbs filling cracks

VII

Like bullets rusting
Inside a new gutter

VIII

The logic to proceed
Dismantled sand dunes

IX

One ring ruled zero
Giant orificial bondage

X

Rasping voice post black gas
Vestibule sticker covered

XI

Enlightenment
A blue wall

XII

Nothing is
Rosy scent left overs

XIII

Check out that ass
Thanks for watching

XIV

Bubble gum blown
Onto electro train track

XV

Souped up tune to lead
Trouble inside Camden

XVI

The priest demands
Mistings of moments

XVII

Ears filled with blood
Stampings pressed without

XVIII

Giant smacking of sheets
Please fill Tray Two

XIX

Grope small shell pit
Frozen purple cherry dish

XX

Task varnished over
Snow globe shakes in Winter

You Were Gone, Little One

You were gone, little one
and a dark hatching could
cool if it were not around.

Spice of air bleeds through
spreading wild fires through
each of our eyes as grass.

A hopspun into trails of feet,
long snow slides and piny
(your problem if wanted)

clanking men holding wooden
mallets and wooden spikes
to drive into wooden heads,

crucifix land, head-strong
armory made of rusting nails
and rotting floorboards.

Everything turned upside,
even the maggots yelling,
hissing like pan-fried,

you wanted your intestines
gutted, buttoned, gluttonous
rites of the boy and girl

hand in hand all to supper
where blood sausage and
tuberculos' coughs cool us.

Against Music for the Day

After Elizabeth Alexander

Flat tires breed
ruined spokesmen.

This is the new
problem grammar.

Three sentences
in three days.

My ears are
leaving me slowly.

A car sits waiting,
the driver a ghast.

His hands are black
and leave marks

wherever he puts them
which is all over.

Drums are unable
to contact.

Nor is all the
splattered paint.

Beneath the table
my legs clamp together.

On your computer
the fans stay quiet.

Go outside your
bedroom and sit.

Slice open a banana
with one hand.

Choose to shake
your head slowly.

My mother's in Poland,
who knows the others?

I sit like a hit man
crushing glue.

I sit like a
person of the door.

You must be
hungry by now.

Go eat a bagel, or
a Carborundum.

On the Coffee Flavored Brandy Cantos

This poem was written in the university library on a monday. It was written as a reflection on the work of the previous night: a series of 30 automatic poems written by Greg Bem and I while watching a few documentaries on Pound in preparation for a presentation he had to give sometime during the week. We kept ourselves awake with minor doses of amphetamines and the drink du moin: Allen's Coffee Flavored Brandy. Like Bem, it's a Maine staple. I think I was re-reading the marriage of heaven and hell at the time. Maybe I had just got my haircut beacuse I disinctly remember the final allusion having a profound effect on me. Greg might still have a copy. Mine is in North Carolina on my other laptop.

We wrote in the dim
wood-punched basement
while shafts of TV din
flashed a lecture by Hugh Kenner

our cantos
completely escaped
the pharmacidal sanity
twelve times unclean
as the last, tattered alphabet
stanazed a broken, black pearl

a siren pulsed like breathing

upstairs was sick with
coffee flavored brandy
it stuck to me
like a candle to the sunrise

between the black and white spiders
composing the base, contagious air

The Hanging of Jake Spoon

After Lonesome Dove: Part 3

Why you cryin'
on such a beautiful day?

***

Trees, slate white sky
sun just hardly hiding
through the pale green canopy

***

I'm no horse thief

You ain't too old to learn somethin' new.

***

Deets said:
Jake's horse was one of em'
I know the track his horse makes
when he rides

***

You know I ain't a killer, Gus
But I'd rather be hung up by my friends
than a couple of strangers

***

Why's that man cryin' momma?

Men have tears in them, same as you.

Jason Myles Goss - another Ghost

So I had to review this album by Jason Myles Goss and a few others for OrigiVation. I don't think this one's going to make it. I couldn't hold myself back.

Here's a video of one of the opening song, "Twilight Serenade," off the album.

Your standard singer-songwriter, slightly-religious good-guy, Jason Myles Goss, has thrown eleven songs about morality and regret together into an album that is barely enjoyable if only for its professional texture. While sometimes cute and cuddly, and sometimes great background noise to accompany a mindless activity, this project remains a compilation that, as a whole, is choppy, irresolute, and riddled with impeccably sour lyrical clichés. Ironically enough, Goss’s most interesting phrases are the ones that don’t make any sense (“Give me wings baby just like a train” for instance), but all the same the music never comes close to meeting up with the fragmented, whirlwind biography that is Goss’s words. His helpless laments really have taken him down into the abyss, and he never realized he was supposed to stop playing after the plunge.

Gregory Bem

If you want to auditorially vomit even more, check here.

Music Update: Animal Collective, Garotas Suecas, Swan Lake

Accidentally saw these guys on Friday night. They're fun, soulful Brazilian "garage band" and they had a crowd of hip Williamsburgers dancing like the best of em'. Some girl dressed up like an Allosaurus gave me one of their pins.

Think Sargent Pepper's B-Sides.

Garotas Suecas - "Não Espere Por Mim"



Garotas Suecas - "Corina"


A petition is circulating to goad Canadian "supergroup" into going on tour to promote their upcoming release Enemy Mine. Swan Lake are comprised of Dan Bejar (Destroyer, New Pornos), Spencer Krug (Most notably: Sunset Rubdown, Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes), and Casey Mercer (Frog Eyes). Here is a Rapidshare of their 2006 Album Beast Moans. You can sign the petition here.

Finally, Animal Collective released the official video for "My Girls." It's an enlightening experience for anyone whose never seen them work up close and in person.



More poems from me (hopefully) soon.

Happy Chinese New Year of Ox!

One year I made a Ramen Sandwich. I cooked two packets of Ramen noodles and used both of the chicken flavor packets that came with them but nothing else because I wasn't at that point a risk taker. But after the noodles were all good to go I took two slices of whole wheat bread (or maybe it was 12 grain) and I packed noodles in between the slices and called it a Ramen Sandwich. It was tasty enough to have a second one too.

I'm not sure where I got the idea for a Ramen Sandwich. Those sorts of ideas usually come to you during blank times. They arrive when you're thinking of nothing else, just doing the same old thing, like cooking Ramen Noodles the same old way, waiting for that inspiration to strike. I may have been staring out the window looking at the snow coming down or it may have been Summer in Maine and there may not have been much snow where I was, in the southern portion of the state. Or I may have been staring at the stains on the kitchen counter top, or those pots I learned to know so well, or the flame curling up around the edge of that pot I was using for noodle cooking. I may have been sitting there with shut eyes just thinking of oceans and the breasts I'd seen in real life and drugs and my dog. Or maybe not. Maybe I wasn't doing anything. Whatever it was it wasn't memorable enough to file it for easy-access later on, like right now.

Needless to say that Ramen Sandwich was a hit for only two or three meals. After the third Ramen Sandwich lunch a few weeks later I wasn't satisfied anymore. I needed something bigger, something more explosive. Granted I could have switched up the Ramen Sandwich to incorporate the beef flavor packets, or perhaps used a different type of bread, but I just wasn't in the mood. Sometimes moods like that strike you down, and it's too painful to deal with anything, especially change. So I went back to the simplicity and ate Ramen noodles straight up, without the bread. Now when I could Ramen Noodles I used only half a flavor packet to cut down on boring sodium-packed chicken flavor, and I throw in ginger and garlic and Thai spice and curry powder sometimes. I put in some pepper too, because that's really what makes the difference. Red pepper if we've got some.

It's the Chinese Year of the Ox and it's getting warmer and I'm okay with eating Ramen again this year. I ate it when I lived with my folks and had the chance to eat much better, more creative meals. I ate it when I was at school in the little Styrofoam cups. I ate it when I first moved to this apartment a few months ago. I guess I'll keep eating it. I don't have anything wrong with it yet. It's a pretty versatile dish.

Night's Good

Crud in shoe spaces
looks good to them.

Spud potatoes with
spud launchers, hit
zombies in foreheads
like touch-pass football.

Grab your ass flag,
ties it together.
Vodka and lemons.
It's just about
time to run away from
all the people
and forget this
cesspoolish trend.

But Then, Underneath the Vicar . . .

Zero headphones raping zero goosenecks
to tie a golden-black tongue in cheeks

Blast off moon paddy pissed into dawn
but you still have pants, lucky
and don't mind no jerk sun

Toward light sounds become deep
and filled, jumpropes doughy, grabbed

Planted pots, the ones you take
dribble dirt morsels all the way home

No gravity, sloppy joes into the mouth,
pour down champagne mustard--
closed eyes for the future set unwind

Documenting a Call

Thank you.

The hotline.

For assistance in Spanish.

Your one stop number.

For more information.

To request an application.

Education award.

Press 3 to.

Press 0 to speak
with a specialist.

Calls will be answered.

The order they
are received.

(begin piano)

All specialists
are busy assisting.

(begin piano)

All currently busy.
Continue to hold.

(begin piano)

If you would like to
leave a message.

Name and number.

Normal business hours.

Otherwise.

(reset; begin piano)

(continues--)

You're a Writer? That's Sad.

You still read Milton?
I read, once
that the fire dies
the minute the sulfur
leave the air.

I read, once
that wine is fine
whiskey is quicker
but suicide is slow
with liquor

I read once,
Paul de Man
but now the
name seems
just familiar

Prayer of Paint

Part I

There are no newspapers
left to protect the floor.

Now everything's digital.
Now we use paper towels.

Nothing's the same.
It never was though.

Part II

Creaking steps up to swift
door and pungent smells behind.

So this is what oil smells like.
Now that we have no newspapers,

I have forgotten ink, paint,
and how nostrils function that way.

Part III

Es ist herrliches,
der Mond, die Jagdtasche.

I will paint it roughly if I can
and make sure it still smiles.

Then I will shake it like a dollar
but it will not dry. I will ache.

A Ring as Being Both Inside and Outside

After the Wrestler

Staples to the back
is nothing more than
cellular stigmata;
taking them out a
sky sealed off
and broken, the
sharpest points falling
through a glass hole.
Ceilings of collapse.
Breathe iron, pump
more than what's chewed.

The stripper's name
symbolic but this isn't
mentioned. Ever.
You 80s goon suffering
90s in the 00s. Lame duck.
Center stage spotlight.
Bouncing floors. Trouble.

Ne're a gun to behold.
Beer bottles to smash.
Sleep in the van, beer
to drink and a daughter
to let be beautiful.
Tears flamed like
evaporation, like calm.

None of it is for good.
The person getting it,
they are slammed,
the ancient ram to
crush through the gates.
You heart is a fowl
with its head cut off.

I Knew Lisa Jarnot Couldn't Save You

"From the burning I've learned burning"
-- Lisa Jarnot

I knew one poem by Lisa Jarnot couldn't save you
and I decided to try and tell you even though
you have known yourself. This quagmire situation.
There's more to life than this. Time immemorial.

There on the sidewalk more strands of hair.
They call them extensions. Why extend cells?
Why extend dead matter? Warmth and language.
I have never seen Lisa Jarnot's hairstyles.

One woman yesterday used the word "boombox."
Her name is Elizabeth Alexander and she wrote
the poem for the 44th Presidential Inaugeration.
The boombox died in the 80s, ceased in the 90s.

If this is the year 2008 time is moving on by,
time is, time is moving on by-- slowly--too--
I'll write: "fin de siecle is or is not dead
but most likely it is, so you know what that means--"

and you'll all move like giant squid in packs.
Squid are solitary beings though, celestial madhouses
when their veils get dispersed, all of them, but
that never happens. Scientists are lying--its atomic.

I will go to work today and it will be just like
any other day except today I will pretend to care.
This is the just once day that every employer
deserves because they feel like a wound sometimes.

At work I won't read fantastical authors on the clock,
I won't spend my day eating peanut butter truffles
and questioning how fat I am even though my ribs show
lots, and I won't text you. Then again, I am a god damn liar.

The school yard behind my home where I live now
has a giant bell. It's actually a stimulated bell.
When recess is over electricity surges--it rings
and rings. Everyone runs in except the problem child.

Beneath the surface of the skin there is a thought
running up and down our bodies; the difference
between us and the problem child is that we have
caught on to what's going on--we know the verses well.

Just like the new words I never have known but
maybe you have--we must pandiculate these withered
words--take each letter and pull it apart like tack,
take it to the end without tearing it--it's not Lisa Jarnot.

Jarnot may be a oomerang child beneath new shattered gold--
she may be a time-exposed wind chill greeting giants--
she may be what unknown to today's most famous bodyguards--
she may give me a lift, my car's door was recently removed--

Marcus Aurelius Rose

For Thomas

From the five good emperors
I have learned that there were five good emperors,

From the lemon tree I've planted
now I know that leaves unpummeled yet will drop,

From the clock, the time, it's five p. m.,
from the sun the length of day,

From Quercus borealis, the queer names of the leaves
of all the trees,

From the burning I've learned burning,
from the aster family chickory abounds,

From hawkweed of the colors brights,
from sleeping, of my dreams

From mosquitoes, scratching, from fishes, fishing
from turkeys how to run and how to hop,

from erect perennials I've leaved to reach the shelf,
from my cats to lick the dark part of the tin,

From the sparrows I've learned this and that,
From Germanic tribes, to gather thoughts in herds,

From the window blinds, from the sun decayed,
from the heart, a brimming record braised and turned.

-Lisa Jarnot

Inaugural Poem

I.

To: White Negro

Really stoned.
Underground as the
Jefferson L stop.
Some hipster on acid
is reading all the
posters and screaming
the text with his parka
body language. It is
impossible to understand.
Utterly impossible.

II.

The food we make here
is full of purple protein

The presidents we make here
are from Hawaii and Kenya

Here, our lemons are prostrated
over bottle caps like bodies

Our socks drape like poorly picked drapes
over our shoes which are the real problem

The water is failing
but we thought it was too big to

And we cannot find Doubt on
any of the good torrent sites

The torrents have confined themselves
to the Congo this quarter

The Drop Shadow

After the Meredith V. Avakian and Debrah Morkun reading at the Green Line Cafe

Dead to rights being the most common clause here,
around this fallow place, means you must find medium.
How many times have these things been cautiously said:
from boom to bust you must break even, find nature--?

Gallantly the chair creaks beneath us but we,
knowing our own tresses of hair, locks and knots,
go by sitting and gaping and forgetting to ask,
the questions being just above the light's surface.

Through parallax pounds--up from Barthelme I dream
the situation in a different lens, perhaps red
like explosions this time, or perhaps the color
of a hen's feather burning though we can't hide it.

This is who we are, freaks of the mainstream politic
with sores underneath our feat we beg to etch away,
from form to dust, that is how we will settle, but
it is the medium, I demand to be reimbursed--so gentle.

Those porous beads of sweat, that shaky stammering,
frown a little while, open your doors and speak--
anyone can speak this is a democracy go home shut up--
you were wrought with pleasure shut down celebrity--

And up from a tidal wave as if the boat had crested
and the sea was about to remain calm in its aftermath,
sirens wailed visually (yellow lights rebounding
off a sequence of photographs in the urban cafe),

and I tried to decipher all of the runs-around, blends
both haunting and callous, defendable but doomed to sit,
wait and rot, for what is art anyway but a poor disease,
a calling that will reach such perilous ends, an unwant?

To reach that medium, to go insane reaching that medium.
It is a mountain made of glass to chip away the stairs,
a blush of flowers as the sun evaporates the dropped dew,
or a wooden structure in the backyard molding and damp.

And still I return to the miles-away land, can't decide
whether to breath or hang closed, shut my pipes off
like valves in the triumph of the dull-drum Engineer,
a simple idea that will throw us to dark pits, searching.

To Change Time

Where will you come from?
Will you dance like a ballerina?
Will chopsticks form from
each of your skinny fingertips?

I lounge around hunched over,
sipping coffee and scowling.
The colors of these walls
won't do! I say, then stop,

my eyes closing, and I think
of women twirling about,
their partners wearing the
most rococo masks, pizazz.

The cats were outside again
today, returned from the grave
like the memory of Hamlet's
voice echoing across the palisades,

but all the two scoundrels did
was sit there, backs arched,
mystery in their eyes, which
glowed like planets or stars.

The Inaugural

I was about to post an edit of this poem, but apparently editing a post after already posting it will not auto-save it for you, so that's my sign that dissing Alexander as much as I did was not worth anyone's time, including my own.

Frankford Avenue Suzuki Dealer . . .
11:30 AM spitfire cold, the kind that is
meant for walks and regrets,
walks through the neighborhoods,
a woman with a raspy voice and her pitbull
on a leash in the cold near the park
in Northeast Philadelphia.

Millions dine together in this morning.
Millions to understand the bottom rung.

Here's to you in your armored car
with symbolism with GMC pit crews nearby;
here's to your causing shouts and cries
when I just want a peace of mind--

responsible pull from Iraq; the poet
a failure and the follow-up, Lowery,
golden with the voice of age, the age
of desperation, not the age of love,
like the poet, who failed though
some got it and some didn't (Michelle?)--

Bust out of there. Same daymares
lurking around with same hopes and dreams.

Traffic lurkers, cops bent up like opiums,
the white hearse tailgating my silver ass.

There are those who don't know love.
Barthelme was my book at Burger King
while I waited and forgot about the pinstripe suits.
Old people came in like coffins nailed shut,
or lobotomies, or seizures past the point of shaking.

We will never make it, and their heads are pounding,
screaming, tribal chants, deadly chants.

Pops and pants and splits--the rips and roars
of exhaust over a dying nation, a blind neutrality.

But not every voice is silent, not every voice
is silent in its madness, in its cheering girth.

I hear a voice alright. I hear thee voice of a gun.
How many rainbows settle over us today? Where is mother?
Where is father? Grab the shotgun. The shells dusty and old.
How many suicides will there be today, by people who care and don't?

Untitled

I wanted to eat up culture like a cookie
but was already filled with potato.

Boils on the forehead don't exist yet--
I remember seeing old women with forehead boils.

Two days ago:

A mad man Navajo told me about war drums
just after I got off the train--
he was heading to the district attorney's office--
it was a Sunday.

"I should've been dead more than twenty times,
but the Navajo have no fear, and all my thinking is in War Drums"

What the fuck you got to pay attention to the advertising
Buffalo soldier waking up at dawn the same shriveled mess
that all we white blindies are thinking doomsday and protocol

His protocol: tell me the Spirit's in me then walk away
like Johnny Cash or an asshole (I prefer the latter, dude)

Potato breath none of these girls will dig you

Now nimble fingers over brain and dry skin dirtying the carpet--

let's go oil changes, Spicer in Poetry, boss yellings and fat stomachs bulging--
new computers on the way, and despondent catalysts to your life--

potluck in two Saturdays no money to make the goulash--

eighteen year old girl in the store today going for Clockwork Orange
good luck it doesn't matter you won't understand the dialect
you're smarter than I was God Bless You and go to grad school

Your father recommends it yet lets you read Palahniuk like a douche--
what a douche the way he lets you do that but I still sold it to you--
yeah don't buy that Cormac McCarthy I just recommended to you
what's he going to do for you anyway probably nothing so nothing gained

"You're Killing Me, Cookie" or "Killing Colleen"

After Nip/Tuck Episode: Ronnie Chase

The title of a poem about
stabbing a woman in
her old liver, her Coco frames
hold tired, black balls

the stuffing stains the scrubs
but that's what they're there for
"I've made a mess in here Cookie
...but what else is new?"

she dips her bloody hands in the aquarium
I think of William Blake and Michelle's couch
of Robert Browning and the house with no water
and of the fame of being too crazy to graduate

You killed me, Cookie
and now everyone will remember me
at the height of all my vitality and power
like a jealous husband with a gun

I sat in the thick Brooklyn snow
after slipping to the liquor store
a flashing hotel, the mutant orange of New York
in the empty canopy of heaven

the comfort of never-ending blackness
the joy of infinite freedom
and together we'll catch up
on our rest and favorite TV shows

Triptych: Bangkok Dangerous

Part 1: Consideration



"If I see your people
again, I'll kill them"
with guns recoiling
like red-light under water
the hair of a greek unich
and the jacket armor
of a man living from his suitcase
correction: of a professional
who isn't allowed to fall in love
but from buildings
into fine white foam
of your asian girl arms

He takes girls from the country
and sells them as chattel

alak58 says:
"nicolas cage was perfect for
the role, and he was 50%
of the whole film.
the ending was also great
although sad.
not all films should end happy.
that makes them all same."

should we reply?
or report it as spam

Happy Panda Shoots Himself

The sex-affair had ended
Like November
the turkeys flew
like shadowy baskets

in the streets they were reading Žižek
and speaking softly about the RCP
understanding Parallax
relaxed them

The Yangse river waiting
for the bloated body of a boat
the head down like a jetty
of dirty, dirty fur

behind the tegulated beams
the dumb eyes of beasts
turn over like worlds of mucus
and precipitation

the crowd gathered around the news
the great young color guard
became the nation's
softest, stillest swimmer

Steelers are Heading to Superbowl XLIII

I'll return to regular posting starting tomorrow.

Another First Snow Remains Remarkable

And now snow has arrived
like a large man running
down the street and slipping,
an image we cannot forget,
for this is the first time
that snow really falls,
silent and beautiful and
we are warm, inside this home,
with the first real snow
coming down like in the movies,
or up north, in the cold,
the country freezing over,
or in a melting backwash,
one or the other, no blaze
of sun, this is winter,
not a heatwave of summer,
but the time to sit inside
staring through the window
and watching all of it come down,
in sheer force, come on down,
cover the ground, slip
somebody up--that large man,
or nobody at all, it doesn't
matter, let's just watch you.

Mercy

Wait over by the water
where the stones collect--
here you will know our justice.

Here you will know heat--
an arrow of carved birch
fizzing across the rapids
like a tossed halo, like
a comet of juniper.

Lightning's coming again.
The storm will provide story.

You Were Sightful, Cheeks Bubbling with Bloody Skin

After Scanners (Cronenberg, 1981)





And second let us forget our rags and riches
for one moment--there we are, we are here--
and gaze into each other's eyes (pens discarded),
the apropos bulge of a blood shrieking moment--

I watched you defend her even though she meant nothing.
It was a country you were to die for--transference, energy.

Outside of the film I heard voices complain about form,
form desecrates content, some might say--deterrents,
every last thing on this earth a huge differential force--
variations, subhuman caskets being lowered into the ground--
Burroughs writing about lemurs, hunters, and Jesus--
this is a ghost of a chance I will not remember . . .
. . . meanwhile Saramago tangoing to the white and blind,
while a shit-yard gets trodden and creates such beauty--

Force me down with your mind like pulsations like new places--
we are organic, yet we penetrate computers like terrorists--

Let us forget our rags and riches and form and content
and line length for one moment (for one moment imagine voices
swallowing into one another like the shore's ocean or a stranger
clicking her heels on the street corner--that bloody street corner),

and think about the van spinning ever-so-illogically onto its side,
sliding forward into the record shop and spilling vinyl everywhere--

and I walking later on this evening to buy a burger and
hear a band, buy cigarettes, smoke them, drive home, not lonely but
ready to approach these paintings I painted while watching this film,
check out this dark painting, all the arts, the news websites--

While I watched that man's art I imagined being in the asylums
where the insane salute the flag, the allegiance's morning pledge--

Obama took a train through this city, Philadelphia, earlier today--
our minds are more shattered glass than ever before while I work
and try to forget but fuck up while processing through memories--
(forget the angry streams of motifs of the Beats--forget the Chilean
authors and the Portuguese and New York City, too--forget
potlucks and danger, the men standing with bombs on their backs--
your own bomb big enough to blast buildings into forever ago)
every process becoming a great, rosy, puffing acknowledgment--
(the Twin Towers forever old, forever gone, forever geldings,
the twins in that pornographic video streamed online not even
attractive enough anymore, even when both fucked at the same time--

there was no dance scene during the film--it was all cold and dark,
the eighties seeping through its cracks but not its soundtrack--
I couldn't wait for it to be over the minute I started to hear,
and now I wonder if it will call as I wash my brushes in fear--

(sweating palms and a watch that ticks till a still death--the
death of time, the death of you and time and a coffee mug dirtied up)

The Easy Way Out Poem

for everyone

Poetry's been dead a long time.
This ain't no Untitled Author
sharpening his tongue on a whetstone,
getting drunk and merry, ready
to write off Beowulf at the sup.

This ain't no blind man's elegy
to forever men doin' everything
that will ever have to be known.

Doves on the palisades--fucking doves.

Why couldn't you just write about the doves?

A blind man's tale creates many tales
for many blind men. Yes we do not know the truth.

Now we have bullets in place of arrows.
Same syllabic tendencies.

"Get up or I will end this right now,"
he says on the big screen, the big one
that they never had in Greece or Rome
or Hades--yes, I believe in ghostworlds.

Part Two

Yes the literary world is a dead zone.
A zone Stephen King sidesteps in his own world--
we should all get wrapped up in fantasy worlds
sometime soon, for the benefit of the doubt.
Capitalism. Get caught up in it.

Stop writing for yourselves.
Stop writing for yourself.

Start writing for every man.
Start writing the good word.
Start writing the words they know.

Limit your vocabulary.
Drink more alcohol.
Cut down on adjectives. Adverbs.
They exist because of use, not overuse.
But they exist, so cut down on them.

Minimalism. Raymond Carver. The voice.

No Joyce. No Oates. No death to us all
from above and beyond. We are survivors,
not the survived. We are endless ones,
so pull the pistol's trigger--
watch it give life--watch insanity abound!
Watch the planes in the sky!
Don't drop the glass on the stairs!
All things follow gravity!
A poem's failure is like all poems' failures--
too easy!

Some January Editings

The following are three poems I wrote at the begining of this month which I have revised in a not-so-slight manner. The current plan is to submit them as part of a group of short poems to this chapbook contest. Criticism is, as usual, appreciated.

Too Much To

Buried beneath the subway stop
a light panel cracks shut and
furthers along tragedy, makes up hope.

Now that there is no light panel,
mountains of grit wait grimacing
behind all the shredded wallpaper.

An hour on the Night Owl Bus
(the Broad Street Line, northwards
to Olney and beyond), clamps my eyes.

I dream of impossible resolutions
instead of the usual revolutionary silence.
I dream I will be alone on the bus.

Two Friends

Two friends are waiting
in the cold for me to
show up, to get there.

Deep within some crinkle
of lobes several circuits
prop a friend dead
against the smoking
windshield just as I wake up
from dreams of bombs.

On the side of the ceramic,
a ring of coffee residue
lies open to serve as
reminder—whether
the rings are a blast radius
or excessive exhaust, there
are things worth keeping
from any explanation.

Trance and Writhing

No one has been home,
but the hallway lights
are buzzing in tones,
and the bathroom water
still runs on high—
noise I cannot ignore.

And yet some time,
long ago,
I purchased
this old book.

A Palpable Elysium
by Jonathan Williams.
Paperback—
October 1st, 2002.

It sits on the table
encrusting—there
are trails of wine
and salsa crumbs
that lead to corners.

The thrift store lamps
lead light to the
black cover, toward
the differences
of observation—
the book sits,
thick and stately,
less than a galaxy,
yet more than nothing.

The book is of many
colors—but
I cannot hope
with any of them.

A good level of
guilt rests upon
the tips of the book’s
crisp, new pages—
each one tightened up
with acid free wash.

And the cover’s
white letters
are sharp, like
civilization—
they startle,
are hollow,
and somehow
they are earthly.

Lost fragments
of meaning remain
printed upon
the book’s innards—
we may, at least,
be sure of that,
even though our
fingers tremble.

While sitting upon
this soiled couch,
the book hangs shut,
immobile, impotent—
maybe even slightly dusty.

This book masters
each moment.
It is uncanny,
like a plague.

The rotten eves
we once knew
still claim us.

They grab us
and reach beyond—
past this book,
past all its pages.

They extend to
the house’s
rolling structure.

Monsters
crawled up those
creaking steps
of periphery,
and yet the book
remains untouched—
for shame!
why didn’t we
open it to find
other heroes,
other villains?

Day for Celebration

I made my brothers pose in their new sweaters) we pay for your sperm)) 123 donate) harmonium) Anne W. at Tazza in Providence) Charles Bernstein) eMule 70 kbs) no wireless connection available) GERMAN)) how to speak and write it) Review Confederacy) talking to Tara) do you want to be on the books) dreams of A/S/L)) the Great Past and chat rooms) Tolstoy will never sell) TGI Fridays on Thursday) R1 Local to the Airport) candle out of wax and wick) Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe) Nathalie's) laundry) ORIGEN projectoLe - 03 Stasis (oC-2002).mp3 [07:49]) gut rolls growth) don't buy a Blackberry) NEED BOX #) two letters) stale blueberry coffee) blueberry yogurt with granola $2.59) Saramago's Blindness) Goodbye, Charmaine, this is for you)))

Beckett, Though They Say the Days are Getting Longer

So, I wrote this poem shortly before the other poem. It was a few days after Christmas and I was trapped in Stamford and in a developing relationship that I could have no part of. This period was also affectionately called "the quiet times" due to the fact that I was 80% deaf from double ear infections. It was my own fault. My close reading of Schopenhauer (evident from the last poem) inspired me to disavow western medicine and attempt to will myself back into good health. I was also writing a paper on WW2's effect on literary consciousness which justifies the Beckett allusions. It was a depressing period.

-----

Black branches root Connecticut
fog hills over sudden erosion
though the soil is weak from
the tyrant morning mists
the chipped oak splinters slosh and clog
old streams
receding into suburban lakes

Like back-page genocide
androgen photons
white Christmas in December rain
flood the sodden air
like headlights

The image melts
a deer that clacked across the interstate
disconnectedly
was corpsed, in a word, and sidelined

now waiting for the dew
with the aged leaves

Poem from One Year Ago Edited Lightly

Wrote this poem a year ago after a random New Year's hook-up. I remember writing it in Lizzy's room about three weeks after the encounter. We had just listened to I'm Wide Awake it's Morning and then people showed up to party and we were drowned out by Bon Jovi. I am pretty sure this was written the night before I presented on Bukowski's feminine ideal for Gizzi. It's obviously sadder, more confessional, and more unashamedly an imitation of O'Hara's aesthetic. Probably am posting it now because Snodgrass died.

-----

Extraordinary blindness now to your own logic!
-Jude the Obscure

A starless midnight settled around the moon
I composed an ode to birth control and
fat mommies WAL*MART fashion sense
another failure
(I'm sure of)
logically sleeping in our own never-ending February
like the beetles of an undergraduate dream

(Dick Clark and the ball dropping)

The girl bobbing across the room
strings banalities like pearls
music, the war, whales
dangle on her
like hooked lures

(Then the red-head, white like those good times)

I have seen the best minds of my generation
blink before the highest heaven
One year and a half ago I screamed at white stonewall
filmed Greg Bem hanging off of it
like a woman in a window
dorms that blew over in the wind
the dust brought them back

(I never learned the clarinet)

my muse is failing
like so many fathers
waves at the beach
seagulls in trash
the squawks like tulips
budding in wintered gardens

(library smiles)
(dirty bubbles in color-changing glass)

I want to tear my soul
from my veins
and smear myself with the cliches drizzling out
war paint, numb, streaking

(I let down Schopenhauer constantly)

The worst kisser ever
moaning on like a hive of
disintegrated nothingness
smelling like
some beautiful, new disease
the dress, some horrible animal
in the green bathroom where
our secretions and sloshed vomit
meshed like blood in a jet, black
flea

The Calm Trees

In Memoriam--W. D. Snodgrass (b. 1926 / d. 2009)

Is it time?
Do all things
drop like needles
to the heart,
or is life
really that easy?

A dense forest
of cacao, mint
bark--the closest
thing to nature
I've seen all day.

Broccoli crowns
covered in oil
splattered Saramago's
masterpiece
on my lunch break;
the tomatoes too
were especially
juiced up.

Nearly fallen asleep
on the train toward
West Trenton or
wherever it was headed,
I had no mind for
lines and lyrics,
just a mind for blind,
soft dreams, an echoing
lemur or ark filled
up with strangers.

Later on up to now
a pit of scorn inside
still has little use
for any crisp art--
there is much more room
dodging, and sips of
cranberry juice, and
a bronze sunset I forgot
to get up from my
bed to watch. Is
it so easy, then?

How does one get
there, and how does
one stay too?
Can there be no
easy way out--
can there be no
platter open
and waiting?

Tomorrow let the
trees be calmer,
the chill be paler.

Let the traffic
catch our eyes
and the graffiti
hearken to the sky
the way the water
can reflect.

Sometimes anyway,
when the hair
has greyed like grass
through the winter months.

They're Like Us

They might get in taxis like us,
but the trees will always bend
just a little more for them,
as their designer shoes step
to the pavement, which is softer
when they touch it, and the wind--
it will calm a little bit too; but
the dull night will still fall like
a blanket over the cities across
America, and each celebrity will,
like us, go home to bad dreams too.

Pumpkinhead's Philadelphian Subterfuge

After Pumpkinhead

I sat in my dusty room
copying D. H. Lawrence
while watching a pack
of honest teenagers
get torn apart by a beast
that was conjured up
in the southern mountains.

Pumpkinhead. That's what
they call the thing that
does more dragging than
tearing, that only drinks
the blood of a human once
throughout its entire movie,
that can't catch fire,
and has eyes that look
pretty realistic and human.

I sit here typing up about
the experience and I think,
it's no wonder I'm sad,
as I sit here alone, forcing
myself to watch others' peril,
knowing that many movies
are just noise, failures,
just like many writings too--
poems and prose alike,
and I think about my own work.

In at least one dream tonight,
I hope I find this Pumpkinhead,
or, more convenient, I hope
that it runs into me, so that
I may see its claws scratch
a cross onto my forehead, and
I may feel it snap my neck,
and I hope it chooses to
rip my head off and drink
all my blood, so that I may
get some kind of grip on reality,
when I wake up in a cold sweat,
wondering what's going on,
and not thinking at all about
Pumpkinhead, or other demons.

Quotes from D. H. Lawrence's the Rainbow (Part Two)

Chapter Eleven: First Love

"How to act, that was the question? Whither to go, how to become oneself? One was not oneself, one was merely a half-stated question. How to become oneself, how to know the question and the answer of oneself, when one was merely an unfixed something-nothing, blowing about like the winds of heaven, undefined, unstated." (282)

***

"And she knew that if she turned, she would die. A strange rage filled her, a rage to tear things asunder. Her hands felt destructive, like metal blades of destruction." (317)

***

"His will was set and straining with all its tension to encompass him and compel her. He seemed to be annihilated. She was cold and hard and compact of brilliance as the moon itself, and beyond him as the moonlight was beyond him, never to be grasped or known. If he could only set a bond round her and compel her!

"So they danced four or five dances, always together, always his will becoming more tense, his body more subtle, playing upon her. And still her had not got her, she was hard and bright as ever, intact. But he must weave himself round her, enclose her, enclose her in a net of shadow, of darkness, so she would be like a bright creature gleaming in a net of shadows, caught. Then he would have her, he would enjoy her. How he would enjoy her, when she was caught." (318)

***

"She stood for some moments out in the overwhelming luminosity of the moon. She seemed a beam of gleaming power. She was afraid of what she was. Looking at him, at his shadowy, unreal, wavering presence a sudden lust seized her, to lay hold of him and tear him and make him into nothing. Her hands and wrists felt immeasurably hard and strong, like blades. He waited there beside her like a shadow which she wanted to dissipate, destroy as the moonlight destroys a darkness, annihilate, have done with. She looked at him and her face gleamed bright and inspired. She tempted him." (319)

***

"Even, in his frenzy, he sought for her mouth with his mouth, thought it was like putting his face into some awful death." (319-20).

***

"But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallised with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not any more." (320)

Chapter Twelve: Shame

"Ursula could not help dreaming of Moloch. Her God was not mild and gentle, neither Lamb nor Dove. He was the lion and the eagle. Not because the lion and the eagle had power, but because they were proud and strong; they were themselves, they were not passive subjects of some shepherd, or pets of some loving woman, or sacrifices of some priest. She was weary to death of mild, passive lambs and monotonous doves. If the lamp might lie down with the lion, it would be a great honour to the lamb, but the lion's powerful heart would suffer no diminishing. She loved the dignity and self-possession of lions." (340)

Chapter Thirteen: The Man's World

"The Monday morning came. It was the end of September, and a drizzle of fine rain like veils round her, making her seem intimate, a world to herself. She walked forward to the new land. The old was blotted out. The veil would be rent that hid the new world. She was gripped hard with suspense as she went down the hill in the rain, carrying her dinner-bag." (366)

Chapter Fourteen: The Widening Circle

"And she gave herself to all that she loved in Cossethay, passionately, because she was going away now. She wandered about to her favourite spots. There was a place where she went trespassing to find the snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening and the winter-darkened meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods an oak tree had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp, golden splinters of wood that were splashed about, the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves pricked unheeding, the drooping still little flowers were without heed." (418)

Chapter Fifteen: The Bitterness of Ecstasy

"During the next weeks, all the time she went about in the same dark richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes of a wild animal, a curious half-smile which seemed to be gibing at the civic pretense of all the human life about her.
"'What are you, you pale citizens?' her face seemed to say, gleaming. 'You subdued beast in sheep's clothing, you primeval darkness falsified to a social mechanism.'

"She went about in the sensual sub-consciousness all the time, mocking at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest.

"'They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing,' she said to herself, looking in mocking contempt at the stiffened, neutralised men. 'They think it better to be clerks or professors than to be the dark, fertile beings that exist in the potential darkness. What do you think you are?' her soul asked of the professor as she sat opposite him in class. 'What do you think you are, as you sit there in your gown and spectacles? You are a lurking, blood-sniffling creature with eyes peering out of the jungle darkness, snuffing for your desires. That is what you are, though nobody would believe it, and you would be the very last to allow it.'" (446)

***

"He went on, disposing of her. If only he could be with her! All he wanted now was the marry her, to be sure of her. Yet all the time he was perfectly, perfectly hopeless, cold, extinct, without emotion or connection.

"He felt as if his life were dead. His soul was extinct. The whole being of him had become sterile, he was a spectre, divorced from life. He had no fulness, he was just a flat shape. Day to day the madness accumulated in him. The horror of not-being possessed him." (456)

***

"He only became happy when he drank, and he drank a good deal. Then he was just the opposite to what he had been. He became a warm, diffuse, glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse, aerial world. He was one with everything, in a diffuse formless fashion. Everything melted down into a rosy glow, and he was the glow, and everything was the glow, everybody else was the glow, and it was very nice, very nice. He would sing songs, it was so nice." (456)

***

"And she lay face downwards on the downs, that were so strong, that cared only for their intercourse with the everlasting skies, and she wished she could become a strong mound smooth under the sky, bosom and limbs bared to all winds and clouds and bursts of sunshine." (462)

***

"The sun was coming. There was a quivering, a powerful, terrifying swim of molten light. Then the molten source itself surged forth, revealing itself. The usn was in the sky, too powerful to look at." (464)

***

"It was so unutterably still and perfect with promise, the golden-lighted, distinct land, that Ursula's soul rocked and wept. Suddenly he glanced at her. The tears were running over her cheeks, her mouth was working strangely.

"'What's the matter?' he asked.

"After a moment's struggle with her voice,

"'It is so beautiful,' she said, looking at the glowing, beautiful land. It was so beautiful, so perfect, and so unsullied.

"He too realised what England would be in a few hours' time--a blind, sordid, strenuous activity, all for nothing, fuming with dirty smoke and running trains and groping in the bowels of the earth, all for nothing. A ghastliness came over him." (464)

***

"She saw him walking with brittle, blind steps along the path by the river. She could tell by the strange stiffness and brittleness of his figure that he was still crying. Hurrying after him, running, she took his arm.

"'Tony,' she cried, 'don't! Why are you like this? What are you doing this for? Don't It's not necessary.'

"He heard, and his manhood was cruelty, coldly defaced. Yet it was no good. He could not gain control of his face. His face, his breast, were weeping violently, as if automatically. His will, his knowledge had nothing to do with it. He simply could not stop." (466)

***

"But his eyes were quite still, like a washed sky after rain, full of a wan light, and quite steady, almost ghost-like." (467)

***

"He and she went out into the night. There was a moon behind clouds, shedding a diffused light, gleaming now and again in bits of smoky mother-of-pearl. So they walked together on the wet, ribbed sands near the sea, hearing the run of the long, heavy waves, that made a ghostly whiteness and a whisper.

"He was sure of himself. As she walked, the soft silk of her dress--she wore a blue shantung, full-skrited--blew away from the sea and flapped and clung to her legs. She wished it would not. Everyhting seemed to give her away, and she could not rouse herself to deny, she was so confused.

"He would lead her away to a pocket in the sand-hills, secret amid the grey thorn-bushes and the grey, glassy grass. He held her close against him, felt all her firm, unutterably desirable mould of body through the fine fire of the silk that fell about her limbs. The silk, slipping fierily on the hidden, yet revealed roundness and firmness of her body, her loins, seemed to run in him like fire, make his brain burn like brimstone. She liked it, the electric fire of the silk under his hands upon her limbs, the fire flew over her, as he drew nearer and nearer to discovery. She vibrated like a jet of electric, firm fluid in response. Yet she did not feel beautiful to him, only exciting. She let him take her, and he seemed mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay afterwards on the cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted, faintly luminous sky, felt that she was as cold now as she had been before. Yet he, breathing heavily, seemed almost savagely satisfied. He seemed revenged." (475)

***

"Suddenly, cresting the heavy, sandy pass, Ursula lifted her head, and shrank back, momentarily frightened. There was a great whiteness confronting her, the moon was incandescent as a round furnace door, out of which came the high blast of moonlight, over the seaward half of the world, a dazzling, terrifying glare of white light. They shrank back for a moment into shadow, uttering a cry. He felt his chest laid bare, where the secret was heavily hidden. He felt himself fusing down to nothingness, like a bead that rapidly disappears in an incandescent flame." (477)

***

"The sands were as ground silver, the sea moved in solid brightness, coming towards them, and she went to meet the advance of the flashing, buoyant water. She gave her breast to the moon, her belly to the flashing, heaving water. He stood behind, encompassed, a shadow ever dissolving." (477)

***

"Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him, hard, as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fastened her arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst her mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from the fierce, beaked, harpy's kiss. The water washed again over their feet, but she took no notice. She seemed unaware, she seemed to be pressing in her beaked mouth till she had the heart of him. Then, at least, she drew away and looked at him--looked at him. He knew what she wanted. He took her by the hand and led her across the foreshore back to the sandhills. She went silently. He felt as if the ordeal of proof was upon him, for life or death. He led her to a dark hollow." (478)

***

"He felt as if the knife were being pushed into his already dead body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for some minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in the moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eyes, in which slowly the water gathered, shook with glittering moonlight, then surcharged, brimmed over and ran trickling, a tear with its burden of moonlight, into the darkness, to fall in the sand.

He drew gradually away as if afraid, drew away--she did not move. He glanced at her--she lay the same. Could he break away. He turned, saw the open foreshore, clear in front of him, and he plunged away, on and on, ever further from the horrible figure that lay stretched in the moonlight on the sands with the tears gathering and traveling on the motionless, eternal face.

"He felt, if ever he must see her again, his bones must be broken, his body crushed, obliterated for ever. And as yet, he had the love of his own living body. He wandered on a long, long way, till his brain grew dark and he was unconscious with weariness. Then he curled in the deepest darkness he could find, under the sea-grass, and lay there without consciousness.

"She broke from her tense cramp of agony gradually, though each movement was a goad of heavy pain. Gradually, she lifted her dead body from the sands, and rose at last. There was now no moon for her, no sea. All had passed away. She trailed her dead body to the house, to her room, where she lay down inert.

"Morning brought her a new access of superficial life. But all within her was cold, dead, inert. Skrebensky appeared at breakfast. He was white and obliterated. They did not look at each other nor speak to each other. Apart from the ordinary, trivial talk of civil people, they were separate, they did not speak of what was between them during the remaining two days of their stay. They were like two dead people who dare not recognise, dare not see each other." (479)

***

"He never thought of Ursula, not once, he gave her no sign. She was the darkness, the challenge, the horror." (481)

Chapter Sixteen: The Rainbow

"One afternoon in early October, feeling the seething rising to madness within her, she slipped out in the rain, to walk abroad, lest the house should suffocate her. Everywhere was drenched wet and deserted, the grimed houses glowed dull red, the butt houses burned scarlet in a gleam of light, under the glistening, blackish purple slates. Ursula went on towards Willey Green. She lifted her face and walked swiftly, seeing the passage of light across the shallow valley, seeing the colliery and its clouds of steam for a omment visionary in dim brilliance, away in the chaos of rain. Then the veils closed again. She was glad of the rain's privacy and intimacy." (484)

***

"So she flitted along, keeping an illusion that she was unnoticed. She felt like a bird that has flown in through the window of a hall where vast warriors sit at the board. Between their grave, booming ranks she was hastening, assuming she was unnoticed, till she emerged, with beating heart, through the far window and out into the open, upon the vivid green, marshy meadow." (485)

***

"As she sat there, spent, time and the flux of change passed away from her, she lay as if unconscious upon the bed of the stream, like a stone, unconscious, unchanging, unchangeable, whilst everything rolled by in transience, leaving her there, a stone at rest on the bed of the stream, inalterable and passive, sunk to the bottom of all change." (488)

Without Chronology

Five Short Poems after Chapter 27

I

The Audience Thinks You're Inferior in Every Way (or, Finally Eating with Lindsay Lohan the Beatles Fan)

I love when he
raises his arms
from the table,
and in chirps he says:
"why don't we just
leave right now, just
get up and go some place?"

I love this mantra,
because it may
or may not
happen,
and if it doesn't,
well then, where
did it come from
to begin with?

II

A Lady for the Evening

The woman
in the green dress
nothing more than
a foreign hawk
and a creature of bone--
she hurries away,
degraded;
even her good looks
couldn't win his heart.

The generic hotel radio
sits in its disconsolate
corner, murmurs
the only offering in
the aftermath.

III

Ironically You Freak People Out Even Though You Keep Saying You Have to be Careful in New York

After seeing John
for the first time,
the only thing
to think about
is the picture
that was taken
of seeing John
for the first time.

Standing with a
photographer
is better than
standing with the
splintered self
while waiting
for John's return
right after he's left.

IV

Lindsay Lohan (Long Gone)

There are perhaps reasons
that these voices ring in one
ear and not the other, but we
really just don't know why,
and we also don't know why
all these pieces crack so well
together when symbolic
females leave the scene.

V

Mark David Chaplain's Void of Collage

How fast does a Ferris Wheel fly?
How far do these avenues extend?
When does the field of rye burn?

Let the others, as delusional, frighten.
Let the dark spaces bind and blind.
Let the children be the choir of death.

Holden Caufield wound up a new clock,
mounting his own strength to fight,
to demolish love's towers until the very end.

From Our Own Spirits Comes a Minotaur's Success

After House of Leaves

Each corridor did at one time lead to
this small shade of platform where we would sit,
coins in our hands waiting to fall on down forever.

But now the remnants of the house take on
ashen forms, nothing but layers to sift through leaving
black dust on our skin, so that we may slowly disappear.

Into this heart we can dream, but of what?
Of love, where the pairings stutter like a camera's click?
Or of absence, with its drawn curtains closing backwards?

The memories move forward as guttural chants,
a low growl approaching only when we move against it,
when we believe in ourselves toward wrong truths.

In our hands the quarters show that each hallway
points itself to the center; it is a simple series of walls--
the same logic, the same presence through which to exist.

And yet here, in these still, dustless spaces, within
these enclosures of infinity, despite how we stay together,
the cold, haunting echos come back like taps upon walls.

And each echo we find while searching around the abyss,
we discover, remains a form of silence, a contradiction
that is pressed over our open, deformed mouths like a glove.

Too Close though the Subway was the Same as Always

For in you I do feel that statements may turn true.
"The body is the shelter; the body is the house."

Once at a home, two figures turned slowly in dance,
though there was no one to remember it but them.

Perhaps we become bolder through our sighs and rasps.
There is, of course, the look I will give you upon hearing them.

And there are, on the melancholic train rides like this one,
more puzzle pieces than the space in open hands, minds.

A screech lets loose like a feline growl all around the cars,
my ears moved to subsistence, morphed to metallic shields.

As I heard your large male friend speak so loud, telling you
to get off at that stop, where you will wait, telling you to

go straight home where you will wait, and where then later
he will arrive to pound himself into you again, and again--

damn! There is always a third form, though it may come
as distance and not until later, to dwell through fatigue.

Before I left, you gathered and stood up to a second dance.
It must have happened as I was getting in, taking off my coat.

Done and For Juice

They won't let us, like the sparks--
they don't want but still they touch--
positive attraction and minimal
sun, light growing through the slits
of the sheet etching vines to walls--
we sit like the captured electric,
the dead union pole outside knocked
down as we sit and side with sores.

Bruises shotgunned into the red whole--
devoid of cancer and bubbling spirits,
this situation leads to lead poisoning
and testosterone (which you know as code)--

Before gulping down fresh air through
bags attached alongside our chairs,
we sat gazing into the Portal, aflutter,
hearing its voice calling its own name--
I know you, bird of sound, and we
will rock this boat until an outage
of power breaks our backs into kindling,
but first, pass me one of those pomegranates.

For the South, With Love

After a discussion on the merits of Florida with a recently-relocated, black welding contractor

Walk with me to the edge of the moon
where we will extend death further--
any attempts to bury its blurring self
soon dug into, gouged with a fast approach,
your smile a thick blade to give answers,
my head looking down at all the gravel--
death only an extension of our fascination
with engineered polar opposites, frozen hands--

Edit: 1.2 (Sonnet Variation)

Walk with me to the edge of the moon
where we'll try extend death further—
so we won't cry any longer in red,
our days pressing the lengths of blood.

We will try and bury this blurring death,
digging it, gouging it open with quick slashes,
your smile thick to provide sharp answers,
my head muddled down to search the gravel—

Death extends our angry fascination, death
with its polar engineering, our frozen hands wracked—
we disabled rising to fall back to the ground,
to find a hung, damp chorus soiling graves—

The nails twist having reopened the earth,
and the palms itch with a scattered sensation—
I fear we will soon walk to the edge of the moon
where death will extend us even further—

Quotes from D. H. Lawrence's the Rainbow (Part One)

I've compiled some memorable quotes from one of D. H. Lawrence's greatest novels, the Rainbow, which I recently finished reading. The second half of the quotes will be posted soon.

Chapter One: How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady

"He went about absorbed in the interest and the actuality of this dream. His eyes glowed, he walked with his head up, full of the exquisite pleasure of aristocratic subtlety and grace, tormented with the desire for the girl.

"Then gradually the glow began to fade, and the cold material of his customary life to show through. He resented it. Was he cheated in his illusion? He balked the mean enclosure of reality, stood stubbornly like a bull at a gate, refusing to re-enter the well-known round of his own life.

"He drank more than usual to keep up with the glow. But it faded more and more for all that. He set his teeth at the commonplace, to which he would not submit. IT resolves itself starkly before him, for all that.

"He wanted to marry, to get settled somehow, to get out of the quandary he found himself in. But how? He felt unable to move his limbs. He had seen a little creature caught in bird-lime, and the sight was a nightmare to him. He began to feel mad with the rage of impotency.

"He wanted something to get hold of, to pull himself out. But there was nothing. Steadfastly he looked at the young women, to find a one he could marry. But not one of them did he want. And he knew that the idea of a life among such people as the foreigner was ridiculous.

"Yet he dreamed of it, and stuck to his dreams, and would not have the reality of Cossethay and Ilkeston. There ha sat stubbornly in his corner at the Red Lion, smoking and musing and occasionally lifting his beer-pot, and saying nothing, for all the world like a gorping farm-labourer, as he said himself." (24)

***

"He went on stubbornly for a time. Then the strain became too great for him. A hot, accumulated consciousness was always awake in his chest, his wrists felt swelled and quivering, his mind became full of lustful images, his eyes seemed blood-flushed. He fought with himself furiously, to remain normal. He did not seek any woman. He just went on as if he were normal. Till he must either take some action or beat his head against the wall.

"Then he went deliberately to Ilkeston, in silence, intent and beaten. He drank to get drunk. He gulped down the brandy, and more brandy, till his face became pale, his eyes burning. And still he could not get free. He went to sleep in drunken unconsciousness, woke up at four o'clock in the morning and continued drinking. He would get free. Gradually the tension in him began to relax. He began to feel happy. His riveted silence was unfastened, he began to talk and babble. He was happy and at one with all the world, he was united with all flesh in a hot blood-relationship. So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire. But he had achieved his satisfaction by obliterating his own individuality, that which it depended on his manhood to preserve and develop." (26)

***

"Brangwen felt that here was the unreality established at last. He felt also a curious certainty about her, as if she were destined to him. It was to him a profound satisfaction that she was a foreigner.

"A swift change had taken place on the earth for him, as if a new creation were fulfilled, in which he had real existence. Things had all been stark, unreal, barren, mere nullities before. Now they were actualities that he could handle." (30)

***

"A shiver, a sickness of new birth passed over her, the flame leaped up him, under his skin. She wanted it, this new life from him, with him, yet she must defend herself against it, for it was a destruction." (38)

***

"But during the long February nights with the ewes in labour, looking out from the shelter into the flashing stars, he knew he did not belong to himself. He must admit that he was only fragmentary, something incomplete and subject. There were the stars in the dark heaven traveling, the whole host passing by on some eternal voyage. So he sat small and submissive to the greater ordering." (38)

***

"He returned gradually, but newly created, as after a gestation, a new birth, in the womb of darkness. Aerial and light everything was, new as a morning, fresh and newly-begun. Like a dawn the newness and the bliss filled in. And she sat utterly still with him, as if in the same." (44)

***

"They were such strangers, they must for ever be such strangers, the his passion was a clanging torment to him. Such intimacy of embrace, and such utter foreignness of contact! It was unbearable. He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them,know how entirely they were strangers to each other. He went out int o the wind. Big holes were blown into the sky, the moonlight blew about. Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges. Then there was a blot of cloud, and shadow. Then somewhere in the night a radiance again, like a vapour. And all the sky was teeming wand tearing along, a vast discorder of flying shapes and darkness and ragged fumes of light and a great brown circling halo, then the terror of a moon running liquid-brilliant into the open for a moment, hurting the eyes before she plunged under cover of cloud again." (47)

Chapter Two: They Live at the Marsh

"He was wasting away. Already when the child was born he seemed nothing but skin and bone and fixed idea. She watched him dying, nursed him, nursed the baby, but really took no notice of anything. A darkness was on her, like remorse, or like a remembering of the dark, savage, mystic ride of dread, of death, of the shadow of revenge. When he husband died, she was relieved. He would no longer dart about her." (49)

***

"She watched from the sick-room the snow whirl past, like flocks of shadows in haste, flying on some final mission out to a leaden inalterable sea, beyond the final whiteness of the curving shore, and the snow-speckled blackness of the rocks half submerged. But near at hand on the trees the snow was soft in bloom. Only the voice of the dying vicar spoke grey and querulous from behind." (51)

***

"She could neither wake nor sleep. As if crushed between the past and the future, like a flower that comes above-ground to find a great stone lying above it, she was helpless." (52-53)

***

"She sank away again. The strange leaves beating in the wind on the wood had come nearer than she. The tension in the room was overpowering, it was difficult for him to move his head. He sat with every nerve, every vein, every fibre of muscle in his body stretched on a tension. He felt like a broken arch thus sickeningly out from support. For her response was gone, he thrust at nothing. And he remained himself, he saved himself from crashing down into nothingness, from being squandered into fragments, by sheer tension, sheer backward resistance." (63)

***

"A bit dazed, he pushed back the wet hair. Like a living statue of grief, her blind face cried on." (76)

Chapter Three: Childhood of Anna Lensky

"His blood beat up in waves of desire. He wanted to come to her, to meet her. She was there, if he could reach her. The reality of her who was just beyond him absorbed him. Blind and destroyed, he pressed forward, nearer, nearer, to receive the consummation of himself, be received within the darkness which should swallow him and yield him up to himself. If he could come really within the blazing kernel of darkness, if really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation, that were supreme, supreme.

"Their coming together now, after two years of married life, was much more wonderful to them than it had been before. It was the entry into another circle of existence, it was the baptism to another life, it was the complete confirmation. Their feet trod strange ground of knowledge, their footsteps were lit-up with discovery. Wherever they walked, it was well, the world re-echoed round them in discovery. They went gladly and forgetful. Everything was lost, and everything was found. The new world was discovered, it remained only to be explored." (93)

Chapter Four: Girlhood of Anna Brangwen

"He came. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, talking again, there recurred the strange, remote reality which carried everything before it. Sometimes, he talked of his father, whom he hated with a hatred that was burningly close to love, of his mother, whom he loved, with a love that was keenly close to hatred, or to revolt. His sentences were clumsy, he was only half articulate. But he had the wonderful voice, that could ring its vibration through the girl's soul, transport her into his feeling. Sometimes his voice was hot and declamatory, sometimes it had a strange, twanging, almost catlike sound, sometimes it hesitated, puzzled, sometimes there was the break of a little laugh. Anna was taken by him. She loved the running flame that courses through her as she listened to him. And his mother and his father became to her two separate people in her life." (112)

***

"And yet he trembled, sometimes into a kind of swoon, holding her in his arms. They would stand sometimes folded together in the barn, in silence. Then to her, as she felt his young, tense figure with her hands, the bliss was intolerable, intolerable the sense that she possessed him. For his body was so keen and wonderful, it was the only reality in her world. In her world, there was this one tense, vivid body of a man, and then many other shadowy men, all unreal. In him, she touched the center of reality. And they were together, he and she, at the heart of the secret. How she clutched him to her, his body the central body of all life. Out of the rock of his form the very fountain of life flowed." (128)

Chapter Five: Wedding at the Marsh

"When they were out again in the sunshine, and he saw the frost hoary and blue among the long grass under the tombstones, the holly-berries overhead twinkling scarlet as the bells rang, the yew trees hanging their black, motionless, ragged boughs, everything seemed like a vision." (134)

Chapter Six: Anna Victrix

"He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams, the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away entire: Ilkeston, streets, church, people, work, rule-of-the-day, all intact; and yet peeled away into unreality, leaving here exposed the inside, the reality: one's own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent bedrock, knitted one rock with the woman one loved. It was confounding. Things are not what they seem! When he was a child, he had thought a woman was a woman merely by virtue of her skirts and petticoats. And now, lo, the whole world could be divested of its garment, the garment could lie there shed away intact, and one could stand in a new world, a new earth, naked in a new, naked universe. It was astounding and miraculous." (148)

***

"She was going to give a tea-party. It made him frightened and furious and miserable. He was afraid all would be lost that he had so newly come into: like the youth in the fairy tale, who was kind for one day in the year, and for the rest a beaten herd: like Cinderella also, at the feast. He was sullen. But she blithely began to make preparations for her tea-party. His far was too strong, he was troubled, he hated her shallow anticipation and joy. Was she not forfeiting the reality, the one reality, for all that was shallow and worthless? Wasn't she carelessly taking off her crown to be an artificial figure having other artificial women to tea: when she might have been perfect with him, and kept him perfect, in the land of intimate connection? Now he must be deposed, his joy must be destroyed, he must put on the vulgar, shallow death of an outward existence." (149)

***

"His soul only grew the blacker. His condition now became complete, the darkness of his soul was thorough. Everything had gone: he remained complete in his own tense, black will. He was now unaware of her. She did not exist. His dark, passionate soul. had recoiled upon itself, and now, clinched and coiled round a centre of hatred, existed in its own power. There was a curiously ugly pallor, an expressionlessness in his face. She shuddered from him. She was afraid of him. His will seemed grappled upon her." (150)

***

"He was not interested in the thought of himself or of her: oh, and how that irritated her! He ignored the sermon, he ignored the greatness of mankind, he did not admit the immediate importance of mankind. He did not care about himself as a human being. He did not attach any vital importance to his life in the drafting office, or his life among men. That was just merely the margin to the text. The verity was his connection with Anna and his connection with the Church, his real being lay in his dark emotional experience of the Infinite, of the Absolute. And the great mysterious, illuminated capitals to the text, were his feelings with the Church." (156-57)

***

"He had a soul--a dark, inhuman thing caring nothing for humanity. So she conceived it. And in the gloom and the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free, like some strange, underground thing, abstract." (157)

***

"It was purely individual. He took that which was of value to him from the Written Word, he added to his spirit. His mind he let sleep." (171)

***

"She, almost against herself, clung to the worship of the human knowledge. Man must die in the body, but in his knowledge he was immortal. Such, somewhere, was her belief, quite obscure and unformulated. She believe din the omnipotence of the human mind." (171)

***

"But he was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole." (177)

***

"Day after day came shining through t door of Paradise, day after day she entered into the brightness. The child in her shone till she herself was a beam of sunshine; and how lovely was the sunshine that loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden hung in their sheen, floating aureole, where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew-trees as a bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were among the hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent on the meadows." (178)

***

"She was afraid when he came home at night. As yet, her fear never spoke, the shadow never rushed upon her. He was gentle, humble, he kept himself withheld. His hands were delicate upon her, and she loved them. But there ran through her the thrill, crisp as pain, for she felt the darkness and other-world still in his soft, sheathed hands."