something VERY peculiar HAPPENED today

As Long As My Finger

Fat plenty and red russet red hair (chokecherry red) and an equine nose as long as my finger and clamshell thighs lardy with cottage cheese and tapioca.

Of Cooking with Crack

Crack is not recommended for cooking
or for the removal of dry skin

It is
however

A good substitute for uppers or behind the counter tablets
but only when taken with milk or a light vinaigrette

Used for the removal and cooking
of skin

The Taking

The Taking of Christ
Sparrows blood, golem-oil

And stale biscuits

Caravaggio’s skeptic gaze
Judah with rabbit-skin, ox-bile

And cadger’s glue

FROKEN BOSSE visited ME, 1ST time

A Fool's Story (or) The Robber of Bird’s Nests

I give you fair warning; this is a story told by a fool. Not one of Dostoeveski's idiots, a boorish intellectual, but a fool whose sole purpose in life is to spread foolishness and confusion. Idiocy is far too common; I leave that to anarchists and idealists. I am the excrescence that fills the void, the otherness to the reality you feel, hear, touch, taste, fuck and shit out of all the holes that you lay claim to. I am no idiot, but a foolish man with little patience or tolerance for fools. I tolerate myself, but only out of shear necessity, a necessity to strike a balance in the imbalance of my life. All other necessities are meaningless.

I learned to read from looking through my father’s photography magazines. When I came upon a particularly fetching picture, say of a sunset or a woman without her clothes on, I would try to read what was written underneath the picture, in small and all too unreadable black ink. After much practice, and a great deal of squinting and effort, I taught myself to read, and after that, my whole world changed. I read everything I could get my hands on, newspapers, magazines, those other than photography ones, journals, and books. They sold clever looking paperback novels in the pharmacy at the end of our street, some with scantily dressed heroines on the covers, other with warships and paintings and sketches of historical events I’d never seen or heard of before. Pearl harbor and the Battle of the Bulge, and the siege of Leningrad and the fall of Berlin. I saw them all, and more, garishly painted on the dog-eared covers of cheap paperback novels. I read manuals on sports techniques, and books on tapestry and etching brass with dangerous acids. I read my father’s Maclean’s magazine, the New Yorker, when it was left around unattended, and a book describing how to flail the skin from a Chinese prisoner with knives and oddly shaped spoons sharpened on whetstones. I read until my eyes smarted and tears welled up underneath my eyelids. I read with a flashlight beneath my covers and in the back seat of my father’s new secondhand car when we went of on long summer holiday trips to visit relatives I hardly know, nor cared to. Now, as fate would have it, reading has become bothersome and painful, as I must count and recount, until the feeling is right, or until the correct number sequences is reached, which it seldom is. I sometimes feel compelled to flip the pages back and forth, rereading the last sentence or two until I get it right which then permits me to continue onto the next sentence, or two. This process, or reutilization as my doctor refers to it, has no intentions of letting up, so I’ve had to learn how to work around it, or to forget that its there, which it always is, even when I’m not aware of it. It has become so much a part of who I am that the difference between it and I is negligible at best.

Sodom took a wife named Gomorra, who bore him two children, both with a festering of mites and tics in the scalps of their heads. The children took to licking salt, lolling their tongues like calves awaiting the final bludgeoning. The word sodomy, the noun sodomite, is derived from this man who took a wife who bore him two children with tics and mites and tongues that lolled and licked salt from the gyps of stones. Michel Foucault, the great postmodernist, was a sodomite, a loller of salt licks and assholes. Plato, to the best of my knowledge, which is faulty at best, was not. Ass licking seems to have been a reaction to modernism, which in itself was a response to monotheism, which wrecked such havoc and cold bloodied murder on the world. So I suppose, as I do, that Foucault lolling salt and assholes is of little consequence in the greater scope of things. It changes nothing, as it should. I gave you fair warning from the start that this was a story written by a fool, not an idiot or an ideologue. Forewarnings aside, you best know what you are getting yourself into, because if you don’t, I will not be the one responsible for your sodomies or ill humors, simple or not. Be warned, all who enter.

MOVED to 85 1V DROTTNINGGATAN

Walser, Robert

I have said too much; I have yet to speak. This is my credo, my raison de ere for rising up from my bed each and every morning. I seem to have this frighteningly close kinship with the likes of Robert Walser, to whom I devoted much time and eye sight and still felt gypped out of a reason for it all. Madmen are like that, I suppose, or those to whom the simplicities of life pose such an odious challenge. There are days, few and far between thank gods, when I too feel the hacking away severing bone from collar, the suspicion that all is not right, and if it were, I wouldn’t know the difference anyway. This, I fear, is what has become of me; I have reached such a slovenly level of self-care that even the simplest daily attendees are fraught with despair and false hope. Perhaps the counting is to blame, or the incessant need to brush my hair or type words over and over anon. I have yet to speak; I have spoken too much.

I will often not eat for days, and when I do, I generally vomit back up an archive of poorly digested and hastily chewed odds and ends. Nothing resembling food, but bits of things eaten in a hurry to do something other than eat and vomit. This can get monotonous even when what I have eaten is something I value or take great pleasure in eating. If this continues, which given my current disgust with food seems reasonably assured, I will self-emaciate and end up in a hospital where much less edible foods and bits are served up to those scabbed over with bedsores or condemned to wheelchairs. My friend’s father eats with such great pleasure and relish that his teeth clack together causing a horrid clapping sound to issue from the glut of his mouth, resembling a post-symphonic cacophony of hand smacking and loud thumping of feet against floorboards and footrests. Eating is far too primitive for the likes of someone like me, so I limited my consumption to odd days or those in between, leaving one day in lieu for family gatherings or holidays, which, so it seems, are few and far between. Cheese, however, I will eat regardless of the pain it strafes in my ribcage and gall. My father brought hay bale size bricks of cheese home from work, some so big and unsettling that they had to be kept cold in the garage or on the cement bricks in the backyard. These we would eat slowly, almost methodically, seeing if we could eke away at them until they were sizeable enough to fit uncluttered in the refrigerator. We had an assortment of cheeses, Brie’s and Camber’s, and blues and Cheddar’s well past their expiry date. Some cheeses like Oka or those crafted by monks and aged in Sherwood casks and wet cellars, were particularly revolting and equally unpleasant on crackers, baguettes or rye melba. The crappy state of my gallbladder is in direct correlation to too much cheese, dairy products, and the need for antacids and stool softeners to counter effect a reaction to forced gluttony. I slept like a mange-dog last night, scalloped in the rigging of my sheets. I neither dream of food or eating. If one could sublimate chewing and grinding, and mastication and pulping, and griping and tearing into salvers easy enough to swallow, I’m quite sure I’d replace masturbation with chewing and griping, but as this seems highly improbable, I will not waste the bother. It is probable that I will be denatured sooner than I’d hope, which will make all this eating and chewing a passing indelicacy. When this occurs, which it will, regardless of my protesting, I might find myself lolling on saltlicks like a menace or a savant or one of Fyodor’s idiots. It will serve me right, no doubt, as fools should never tread where idiots dare to go. Another credo to place next to the canonical debris. Only when blinded with salt can one see with veracity unprecedented. All else is bad manners, dross and sycophantry.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's

Constant Flight

A Diaspora where bodies never rest, but are in constant flight, chased through back alleys, past faint images of others that aren’t there, but remain impacted in thought, sketched in memory just the same. Having read my fair share of Freud, I have a reasonable understanding of repressed memories and idic fears, an adult’s conditioned response to a world of torn sheets, scalawags, insecurities and unfulfilled wishes. With this as a bio-social-psychological template, its no wonder there are one-legged dogs, cowering children, and an intangible insistence on getting ‘it’ right. Its no wonder there are heavy sleepless eyes, knees pulled tight into galloping chests, night tremors, wet beds, and an indifference to pain. Remember never to forget; forget never to remember. Memories are all we’re left with when the present disappears. Remember that, and you will be intangible, galloping and never at rest. There is a cost to remembering, a cost many are unwilling to incur. The incurable alcoholic, the track scarred drug addict with blue wen eyes, and the one-legged dog that recalls a time when black bread biscuits, hot from the oven, filled a shiny silver bowl. I will try to forget how to remember, and remember how to forget. Should that fail, I will encourage catatonia, and be done with having vital thoughts all together. Keen as I am to remember, to have my own storehouse of memories, good or bad, the only tangible option is reification, or a slow boat to China. As I will surly come face to face with starving Chinese children, who’s hunger and thirst I could have slaked had I not be so belligerent and small minded, China is a option I care not to exploit. But then again, I will conveniently have forgotten what I have just said, and stuff my gullet with sweetbreads, millet and rice, perfumed with jasmine, saffron and the darkest black cumin imaginable. Should I fail, I will have failed, nothing more.

He gets on the bus with great effort, the thrombosis in his legs causing numbness where pain should be. He asks for a cigarette, should I have one to spare, as he is on his way to the courthouse, he says, to pick strays and half-smoked ones from the sandbox by the doors. His face is a litany of red lines and scratches, left behind, no doubt, after a night spent struggling to keep his legs warm, poached in a wicker of nettles and thorns. They bite my legs, he says, the ants and other bugs and sometimes a rat trying to get at dead skin. I worry they’ll eat their way into my leg, then I’ll need to go to the hospital for a new one or one made from screws and wood. They gave me this thing, he says, pointing at the walker, so as I could get round to the Mission for meals and a card game and such. One of the wheels is choused to the rim, the other worn through, spays of rubber gray as marrowbone. I smile and offer him an unsmoked cigarette; a sad happiness in his eyes that is unbearable beyond words. His life is subcutaneous, nothing living above bone and tendon. No burning sensation or itching, no lice scrabbling, infesting, the yellow skein of his legs, legs gone numb and palsied with grief and bad luck. Better to have lost all feeling than to be at odds with the constant maintenance of toes, shins and knee cups. Better to have no feeling at all, from head to toe, than to smoke half-strays with filter ends stained brown with someone else’s salver and good luck. I had a dog, he says, till it got run over by a car, not a brain in its damn head, poor thing. Always running in and out of traffic like a dervish looking for God knows what. Least when he was around I didn’t need worry ‘bout having my belongings taken away from me, he saw to that, smart, he was, having no brain as he did. He looks out into the road, at the traffic stopped up at the lights, and smiles, stupid, sure, but smarter than you’d think. He knew how to tell when the lights had changed, and when to nudge me into the crosswalk. He could tell what time it was, or when it was gonna rain, the way he shifted his weight from one leg to the other like it was time to go. He could even sniff out smokes for me, some with more than half left. Smart in that way, but dumb as hell when it came to cars and traffic. I sat two seats away from him on the bus, not wanting to see the sad happiness in his eyes, or think of the dog running in traffic, or legs without feeling, rats eating down to bone.

THE CALLE NICARAGUA

An Afternoon Seen Through My Eyes

His arms a scullery of red bumps and welts like those a hammer leaves when swung from hip to shoulder. Fingers tensed, holding onto the steering wheel with all his might. A butcher’s stock in trade, meat brokered from bone and tendon, sawing through hard gray bone, spurs of it catching the swinging light above is head, hair tousled and clumped into reeds. Moses’ boat choused from millet and hard toiling hands. Braided into equal lengths, to avoid tipsiness and improper keeling. His mount is much higher, reaching far above the clouds, high above the stratosphere. Sheep left to mallets, sluice, and God’s imprudence. His blue gray car cuts a memory in the tension of my thoughts, arms, welts, bumps, and a seeming indifference to pain. These I will never understand, and should I, would quickly forget. My stock in trade is forging other’s memories, not my own, but ones once removed and not subject to amelioration. I have no memories of my own, but a coterie of other’s recollections, experiences and forgetfulness. If I were to have my own, my own liturgy of memories, recollections and experiences, I would surly have to put an end to remembering, and then forget that I ever had memories at all. All this, this murder of words, is the result of me seeing a man driving a blue gray car this afternoon as I waited impatiently for a bus. And yes, his arms were a lurid reminder of viral infections, poor hygiene and shoddy eating habits; bulged and reddened with welts, carotids and eczema. You see, this is how and what I see, a simple afternoon waiting impatiently for the bus to arrive, and this is what slurries though my thoughts. My thoughts are bullies, not friends or old acquaintances, pushing and elbowing they’re way into the abattoir of my me. An afternoon seen through my eyes, captured in my mind’s eye, can be impossible, trickery at its best.

She often awakens to pain. Like a burning sensation or an itching, the result of too much of everything and nothing at all. Too much of this, too little of that. Not enough sleep, too much catnapping in between. Too many nights spent in a sweat, eyes pressed tight, ears thudding with footsteps and doors creaking open. A seam of hallway light, faint and yellow, illuminating the foot of her bed, hands groping and foraging for a scallop of skin, a hint of fear. She crouches, cowered, under the volcano: Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl, and Quauhnahuac. All mothers, yet harbingers of death and short lives. The holes in mother earth, dug by suspect hands. Here she will cower, knees pulled in tight to her chest, heaving and galloping with fear. It is here, beneath these behemoths, that she will find her comfort, her distance from the pain and horror of childhood. I think of her often, her hair braided in rows, corn silk and muslin, eyes bluer than the bluest sky, somehow bluer. Of her cowering, legs knocking against each other, tether marks still burning where he lashed her to his perversion. I remember her eyes, eyes that filled a room, a place, a moment, with sadness and fear, a child’s eyes of lost innocence, innocence never had. Only fear and trembling knees, a heart galloping and heaving with fear and suspect hands. She will never forget one tooth mark, one scratch on the milk of her thighs. Eyes pressed tight into the furrow of her brow, thoughts receding into the illusion of time and place. I am someone else, she would say, someone not here, not now, not this, not again. Not him, not me, but here, someone else, but not me, never me, never again. These images never fade, never recede into the landscape of her thoughts, where hornets and bees, gods’ winged furies, tend garden flowers and honeysuckle. I, too, will never forget, as much as I try. She is with me, her breath crushed against my cheek, her eyes heavy with sleep, yet unable to close whenever I awaken in fright. I have never told her, but suspect she always knew, how when she had finally given into sleep I would listening for footsteps, look for a stitch of yellow under the door, my own eyes heavy with sleep and volcanoes. Memories are like thieves, robbing us of the gift of forgetting, yet staying the capacity to remember that which we struggle to forget. I have had more than enough memories, more than one person need remember, yet never forget.

CIVILIZATION and its MALCONTENTS

Labia Majorca and Minorca

A gray ash morning sky, my eyes are open, labia Majorca and Minorca, but I have yet to awaken from troubled dreams. I may never, nor care to in the least. As long as I stay sleeping, eyes open, but mind fraught with bad grammar and thinking, I may just make it through another day, long and dreadful as it may be. As it will, as those that preceded it were, and those that will come after have a duty to repeat and uphold. After all, repeating is my game; one played in solitary without the aide of movable pieces or tricks up my sleeve. I leave trickery and slyness to foxes and hurricanes, and those with tunnel vision and thoughts off kilter, the sign of a faulty mind and poor intellectual habits. And the one on the bus, she had a doubloon size burn mark, or was it just bad suturing, on the keel of her neck, where the nape meets the clavicle scarp. I tell you this because I feel I have to, that it is important that you see others the way I do. The way I see others is not pretty, nor, for that matter, matter of fact, but rather with a jaundice eye for precision and things out of sorts, a molting, if you like. I see things in their molt, as they egress from something into nothing of importance. Once they reach an unimportance, I see them as they are, as they were and have always been, but hidden behind chadars and fine Egyptian clothe. I see the other as other, as the other that begets and bears the weight of the self, the other that is always a simple stand-in for the other self, which is no self at all, but a faint other of self and other. By no means is this simple, yet once mastered and inculcated into one’s visual acuity, one can see nothing else, nothing but others and stand-ins for others that once were self’s but hidden behind chadars and the finest Egyptian clothe. Perhaps cows, before the swing and stoke of axehandle and sledge, should be cloaked in chadars, to keep the flies from laying larva in their eyes. A fly senses death, the impoundment of death, and makes its play for a warm place to lay its eggs. The eggs lay festered in the caulking of the eye, feeding off maggots and other less hearty lepidopteran roe. Snuff roe, as in my dear father’s stand-in for tobacco and sweet, linger cheroots. The rectory parasite, he too smoked cigars and borrowed cigarettes, lolling the filtered end between the seam of his lips, where a curled toothpick stuck out like a circumcised wooden cock, announcing his annunciation into eternal hell. A caulking of mint gyps edging outward from the second scoutmaster’s prepuce lips. The seam of his mouth was far more unseemly, even though his worst crimes was one of omission and poorly executed knots. I wonder if the little girl with the sound box strapped to her chest had been invited into the marigold’s fold, brownies and nymphs and girls with tartan tweed skirts. All that yammering and begging of others to buy cookies, marled in cellophane and with pictures of shamrocks on tin and cardboard selvedge. And that cruelly cold February weekend, mired up to our hips in hard snow and ice, rubbing our hands till the dirt came off in brown shavings. Huddled like cattle around the mouth of the wood stove; the one we stoked with shims of wet wood and curled up leaves, dead and left trammeled beneath the tonsure of winter trees. There are more things unseemly than there are seemly, a reminder of man’s indifference to beasts, slaves and cows. Those were my poems you read, if read them you did, write and tortured from the trumpet of my ass. I learned ass trumpeting and writing from dear Alighieri, not Fedora or Nietzsche, or Headgear or Kanto.

PUNCTURE WOUNDS

Mosquito Bites

She had a puncture wound like a mosquito bite in the soft tissue at the base of her neck, where the clavicle bones meet up with the breastplate. She said that the closer you got to your brain, the quicker the dope would start working. So it seemed reasonable that starting at the neck or breastplate was an efficient way to reach that 20-minute high she would do anything to achieve. Yellow-blue bruises that defied description, and had they, would have made one sick to one’s stomach. Wend and trebled skin, scallops of raw unrefined tissue that seemed to cinch up around the crayon of her face. These things and imagines I remember, against my better judgment so it seems. Orange syringe tops, to keep the point form getting burred and troubled. Scabs of blood and mucus clogging the plunger keeping it from being driven home. You can use a condom, a lubed one, she said. By rubbing the condom up and down the plunger you can make it almost like new, getting rid of all the shit that’s built up in it. A fit is a tool, an indispensable mechanism, and like any mechanism or tool it can be repaired or upgraded, extending its half-life. I have never stabbed myself with a tool or a mechanism, perhaps once with a screwdriver, but with the exception of that, nothing else. My great uncle used a sledgehammer, swung over the hip of his shoulder, to fell cows once they’d outlived their purpose. Now, so I hear, they concuss them with compressed air and hydraulics. Public transit is like cattle cars, yet those being conveyed by them have no idea just how horrid an idea that is. When I think of cattle cars I think of death and train stations, bootstrapped young idealists screaming orders in a language those being screamed at barely understand, if understand at all. I think of babies being wrenched from screaming mother’s arms, tiny shaved heads being tossed into stoves and cattle stalls. Heads sheared white, to prevent a contagion of lice, is not a requirement for riding any bus or train I know of in my world. We have our own Auschwitz’s and Dachau’s in this country, but there called crack houses and shooting galleries, where emaciated soulless addicts torture and violate themselves, the result of faulty social engineering and up trickle economics.

You might ask why I write these things, these horrors. Writing is memory, and memories, by their very nature, must be dredged from the bottom most reaches of the self, from one’s being. We are all hostages to our thoughts and memories, to the things and yet to be things that make up our inner most selves. There is no surgical precision to this, just a hacking and dredging, an evisceration. We are all, to a one, vivesectors, nature’s beasts and miscreants. Once we get that through our thick skulls, not a moment before, life becomes meaningful again. Meaning is produced. Nothing is given or absolute, with the exception of memories, which we have whether we want them or not. This brings me back to the beginning of this diatribe, I am a fool, and as such, someone who should not be trusted or put faith in. Our prisons, and we all have them, some with windows, some without, are within us, built from memories and forgetting. I have chosen not to forget and will pay the price for having memories. You may not, but your are idiots to think that you are not hostages to your own selves. I am a hostage taker. I am a hostage. I am nothing more than memories held hostage by the hostage. You see the hostage and the hostage taker are one in the same, they live off of each other, like maggots on rotting carrion. We are the maggots and the carrion, the hostage and the hostage taker. This is where the notion of the binary comes into play, the dualities and ganging up that precedes the taking of hostages. Liebnitz was right, we are nothing more than solipsistic monads, but one’s whose windows are blackened out to keep the memories from escaping or rushing headlong back in. The clubfooted scoutmaster, the rectory parasite, the bomb droppers and emasculators, they all live on in our memories of them, taking us, the hostage taker hostage. The little girl with the sound box strapped to her chest, the very one we made fun of when we were children, she lives on regardless of my forgetting. The fear of castration, not phallic, but a simulacra of castration, a faulty copy, a poor representation of something we will never understand, and were we to, would castrate ourselves in horror of the thought that we could have but didn’t. The hostage taker and the hostage are one in the same; they are the castrator, the moil snipping away at the foreskin of our memories, like chickens pecking at each others necks, torn and bloodied beyond recognition. Now you may understand why I claim foolhardiness and not bland idiocy. Anyone can be an idiot, but only the few are fools. Castigate me for what I say and think, but the castrating is mine, as the memory is still fresh and heady. Another word for binary is testicular, having orbs of equal size and measure. A phallus is severed, not castrated.

AMPUTATIONS

I Am a Turing Machine

I am a Turing machine, better yet, I am the simulacrum of a Turing machine, the template from which it was engineered and hammered. I predate the computer and punch cards, sleeves of flimsy cardboard into which holes and divots were mauled and driven. You can drop me on the floor, the entire decimation of me, and never once have to put me back in order, for I am always in order, I am order itself. Neither am I a systemic numerology, or an alphabetized compendium of flat, interchangeable words. I am not a thought process thought up by mathematicians or idiot savants, nor am I a calculator of equities or false judgments. I am none and neither of these. I am all of these, but in a confabulation of interlacing parts and enmeshments. I am the continuum of all of these, yet no one in itself, not a single definite one thing or the other, but all or none at all, whether I wish to be or not. I calculate and enumerate, but not with an eye to logarithms or tautologies, Aristotelian syllogisms or catchalls, but rather with an ear for stuttering and mental leaps of irritable logic. My logic, one might suggest, one faulty and ill informed, but mine nonetheless. I count and recount, hash and rehash, as a way to lessen anxieties and oedipal reutilization, not to determine which vector or diorama will best serve the needs of mankind. I have no desire or wont to ease mankind’s suffering, because for the most part, he or she or it deserves what it gets, more perhaps, and with much harsher penalties. Why do I tell you all this, all this nonsense, because if I don’t, if I withhold it, keep it hidden, I will castrate myself or flay the skin from the rectory of my ass. I will cram my mouth to bursting with cat’s-eyes and the blackest black jujubes, and suffer the consequences. I will repeat and reuse every last thought or yet to be thought I have thought in the last few minutes, and in so doing, suffer the direst consequences. I will experience such incalculable anxiety and bad humors, that even Aristotle’s proctor couldn’t redo the wronging. I am a larder: I glut the culinary of my thoughts, my emotions and worse nightmares, with nary a hope for a grocer’s fair warning or heads up. I eat hay bale size bricks of cheese, fomented and arrogated in brines and concupiscent oils, a fine and mottled urinary infection soon to follow replete with sharp pips and razor burred edgings. I will lay a harsh beating on myself, and feel none the worse for it. I will seek out further punitions and harassment’s, never once calling it a day. I will grind myself into a bloodied pulp, then look no further than the mirror for an excuse to torment and variegate my selfsameness. These are the ‘things’ and yet to be ‘things’ that I must contend with daily, without my wont or permission figuring into it. I must contend with my own contentiousness, my inability to find either a rationale or raison de ere for my self-punishing beastliness. I am, as I said before, one of Darwin’s miscreants, a sad and pathetic Lamarckian mistake. If you haven’t surmised by now, which you should have if you hadn’t been preoccupied with other less savory ‘things’, I am figment of my own imagination, a mistake in logic and reasoning. I am that which occurs when seritonin falls in arrears, seeking refuge in the arms of a less gluttonous and forgiving neurotransmitter.

Hard drugs are for the feign of heart. Free base, crack, heroin, brown or white, amphetamines, in handfuls, uppers, downers, sidewayers, injectables, skin poppers, suppositories, tinctures, landline, mainline, combustible, smokable, inhalable, digestible, indigestible, swallowable, unswallowable, eyedropperable, like Bill Burrows, crushable, uncrushable but smokable just the same, drinkable and any other way thought possible or seemingly impossible. If there is a want, there is a way. Enough said. Cloister rooms and inner sanctums, nunneries and Masonic temples, Mosques and Episcopalian sanctuaries, Buddhean sitting rooms with rice paper room dividers, crack houses and shooting-up galleries with nary a renaissance painting or bust in sight. If there is an enclosure, there is a gallery. Or a house or a temple, or a sitting room or an inner sanctum with flowerpots and drinking faucets that drool fetid water mixed with high-grade chlorine, the stuff they use in public pools to kill the bacteria and urine stench. Or a one-room rooming house room with no windows or fresh linen or breathable air. If there is a demand, there is a supply. Windows blacked out with tarpaper and old newspapers like London or Berlin or Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where no windows stood after the emasculate explosion. We still have our Auschwitz’s and Dachau’s; there just not as efficient at killing in such great numbers. Gas chambers and slag ovens, bone kilns and convex microwaves with little windows in the front to afford a decent view of one’s weeping children and murders. We have not come very far, nowhere, if the truth must be known, which it must, and will soon reach the back end of evolution, cussing our bad manners and eugenic indelicacies. We deserve what we get, and much more.

FEAR of the RED SEA

The Reddest Red Sea (yet redder)

My analyst suggests that I can’t live with myself, which begs the question, with whom can I live? Perhaps monkeys, their asses hyaline red (redder than the reddest Red Sea) in-uterus pre post menstrual with depersonalized emotional disturbances, perhaps not. Or mental patients, whom I find so delightful and full of an unbridled enthusiasm for the simplest details, things you and I often miss out on in our haste to purloin a Mocha Java smoothie sweetened with petroleum byproducts and demurral sugar. Perhaps I am a mental patient but haven’t the wherewithal to know it. Perhaps I live in an insane institution, a fucking Bedlam, where Skinner’s box shucks dopamine from syntax. Gods forbid godsfearlessness and poor hygiene. It would have been much less time consuming, as far as I can see, to have used a comb caked in Boil Cream to part the part in the Reddest Red Sea. For the time being (Headgear, of course, fucked that up for us) I will live with myself until I find suitable lodgings.

FEAR OF SHOATS2

I Am Ill Suited To Sleep

I am ill suited to sleep. Treacle sweet sucrose sleep. Sleep at right angles sleep. Sleeping into sleep, sleep. Counting sheep sleepless sleep, sleep. Devil may careless sleep sleeping in and out of sleepless, sleep. I am tired of sleep. I am sheepishly sleepless, sleepless like a sheep, this sleepless sheep’s sleep. Sleep is wolves’ clothing sleep, yet sleepier still.

Works Cited

Carey, Phyllis, Jewinski, Ed, eds. Re: Joyce’N Beckett. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Elliot, Anthony, ed. Freud 2000. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Freud, Sigmund. The Penguin Freud Library, 15 vols. London: Penguin Books, 1990.

Gardiner, Patrick. Schopenhauer. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963.

Gay, Volney P. Freud on Sublimation, Reconsiderations. New York: State University of New York, 1992.

Janaway, Christopher. Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford, 1994.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

Joyce, James. The Critical Writings. Mason, Ellsworth and Ellmann, Richard, eds. New York: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Kain, Richard M. Fabulous Voyager. New York: The Viking Press, 1959.

Levine, P. Michael. ed. The Analytic Freud. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. New York: Meridian Books, 1960.

Power, Arthur. Conversations with Joyce. London: Millington, 1974.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An essay On Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Robb, Peter. The Man Who Became Caravaggio. New York: Picador, 1999.

Rycroft, Charles. Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Safranski, Rudiger. Schopenhauer And The Wild Years Of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1969 & 1966.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms. London: Penguin Books, 1970.

Spector Ethel, Person, Fonagy, Peter, Figueira, Servulo Augusto eds. On Freud’s "Creative Writers and day-dreaming". New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Sulloway, Frank J. Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

AARON-SHOULDER

Charily at Best

I’ve tried everything save amputation, which given my state of sleeplessness seems reasonable, charily at best. The tusker implant doctor said, he did, 18 months of recovery and then some, who knows, a lifetime of bad sleep and jimmying about hopelessly. Perhaps once I’ve finished reading Gide’s rendering of Kafka’s Trial mine will seem paltry and ill infirm (ed), chary at best. If I may be so dauntless, I might compare my recent shoulder surgery to K’s arrest, trial and inability to ferret out a possible rational for the whole ordeal. Gross postmodernism at its best, worse perhaps.

Jackscrews

Jackscrews in the halberd of my shoulder
(where davit bisects railhead)

A disagreeable commode burned (censured)
Into the marrow of spoiled bone

ORTHO-COLD

Colder Cold

cold
ferrule cold
colder still
still colder than
cold

I am cold
-er
than a money’s
ass cold
colder
still

feral cold
colder than
money-box
cold

there’s no explanation for this ferule coldness, colder than a trench-digger’s ass cold, colder still, yet ferule cold, money-box money’s ass cold, like a

fucking solstice cold that grabs and pranks at the tongue, the hypothalamus, the pineal gland, that fucking cold, cold, for the love of gods, heathens and knockabouts

MY FRIEND'S FATHER

Comminations

This cannot go on, it will go on. Sleeplessness has taken its toll, axing bone from collar, scapula from rachis, yardarm from scaffolding, such colicky Hobbesian malice.

Weaver Cloth

before my friend’s father turned on the gas
he trenched the window seams with rags

then skirled the tablecloth to the auld of his jaw
palled in kerosene oil and jam

Tight Skeins

she gathered the wool into a tight skein
moment’s wound into blankets and throws

early winter solstices
frailties

and cold snaps

and the spoon burnt blackened
like the bulbs under her eyes

FEAR of MOATS

The Unmoved Mover

The Unmoved Mover, the Arbitrator, the First Principle, the Mitigate, the Collector of non-corporeal scat, the dissector of all things rational, everything deemed reasonable and beyond reproach, this imbecilic grasping at straws (men). Damnably meretricious out there today, almost enough to send one careening over the edge. I, for one (not I oedipal or ether-wise) surly don’t know, nary an intentional stance or a relational integer, enough wind and windiness to upend the turnip cart. I, for none, am none to impressed with this pre-solstice (ness). Surely there is a better way to transition into winter than this sleety rain slapping the whiteness from the offal of one’s face, how profanely ungodly in deed. One would think, would one not, that rats flying and mice scurrying and teeth chattering would be a good indication, a portend, a harbinger, of worse things to come. I, for particular, see no end to these execrations and bad manners. Tailless, primate and odious as we (straw) men are, nothing changes just the same. Time for the Moved Mover to upturn the turnip cart and get on with it.

Fyodor’s Cave

Fyodor lived in a cave of words
some living most dead

unspeakable at best
among the rotting debris of echolalia

words
and guano

FEAR of SHOATS

O, E, I, O, EWE

The air is miserable with it, flying rats and juice heads with anemic sucks for faces and indents for cheeks, not a bone or railhead in sight. This is no man’s land, the paper doll cut from cardboard and crape. You live here, perhaps O, or E or I, but we’d be damn hard pressed to admit it. I live in the cave with the guano and mice feces, a welter of a dam place it is. And he him with the purple scold on his face yowling rice paper. Shreds of the stuff, like fucking millet, fucking papyrus and end bits and nugatory. Never a dull moment, so Seth the rector rectum. Rams’ bladder, some say, with onions (skins boiled on) and dead men’s finger nebs. Fancy that, a dogs’body toting an ashplant with a cherry on top. Dogs lick each other’s rectos in the hopes of discovering something new and savory about themselves. Fucking curs and bowwow knockabouts, not a brain amidst ‘em. Who in their slight of mind would think such things? I, for one, would be hard pressed to admit it, of that IOUE can assure you.

Cuckold of the Eye

Teeth chattering
and mice scurrying

The eye beholds the mice
not the chattering

(of teeth)

Lattices

when they found her tongue was curled latticed to the roof of her mouth skeins of thread and thistle scratches whelps of hair bridled stropping cheekbones sculpted from memory

when she awoke her tongue was latticed pressed to the roof of her mouth thorn scratches and thistle scars scrimshawed deepening the burn sculpted in the heaviness of her thoughts

ONE MAN

Meprobamate

No, maybe I meant rum-cakes or custard filled pastry horns, yolk-yellow saffron, a whey creamery cornucopia, devils’ tongues lappet and shellacked. No, I meant nothing of the sort. I meant that what I mean (what I montage) is meaningless at best, a plenitude of bland dithering and blather, nothing more. So it is I suppose, supposedly so. It is Sunday Sabbath day of dry biscuits, tannic hooch and bent-knees. A supplicants day of ‘I give-ups’ and ‘oh dear is me’s’. Gods be wary, we humans, heads-cocked to heavens know what or where above, are a humdrum, dim-witted bunch. I don’t care what another person or peoples believe, as long as they are good people; however, I take issue with those who’s beliefs, be that Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Isochronal, agnostic or atheist, are cause for evil, meanness, myopia, close-mindedness and abject stupidity. All beliefs should be based in humanism, in the simian, not in the ‘could be’ ‘was’ or ‘goodness I hope to gods it is, be’.

One Man

One man
murdering

another

In the face
of God

Is an atrocity
nothing more

No god
that I know of

Neither Muslim
nor Christian

Would condone
such inhumanity

Be that a god
or a heathen

such as I

Glen Gourd played the piano like a dervish, gods’ caliginous so-and-so: a gift from that place on high. He I would pay tribute to, perhaps Johanna or Ludwig Truck, but no other, or perhaps a heathen such as I, but that’s pushing good manners and will, a reprobation beyond calumny. I was into Webster’s C’s, as you can no doubt C. Oh woe is I, profligate sot-and-sot.

UNCONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED

Chilean Milt Clothe

I am a not so skillful skill-saw, tongue and groove, a monkfish with cloudy sebaceous eyes. A lung-sac; I am anemic and sickly. I am all of these yet none of these, none of them or that or this. I am a distended gallbladder, a cheap simulacra of a simulacrum. I am Plato’s dugout, candling my way deeper into the rectos of philosophical perdition. I am gunmetal blue, somehow bluer. I am a scalawag and a cheapskate; a switch of Joshua used for caning and scolding mistakes in logic and new math. I am a colophon and a curlicue. I am the tattered hem on the scurf of a whoopla’s dress. Most of all I am postmodernity taken to the nth power, or to L or Q or 5. I am unreasonableness and bad manners, tuber-root and famine. I am Godot’s tree and (Stephen) Dedalus’ minaret. I am Hemingway’s retch and Fitzgerald’s sanguine eyes. I am pancreatic sarcoma. I am the gyp that clods the soft tissue in between your toes, the hangnail that scratches your face when you take off your shirt, the poltroon cement in the tiles of your soaking-tub. I am New Math and Old English, Chilean milt cloth and Sunbelt ecru. I am quite tired (more so exhausted) and must find sleep before wakefulness finds me. I am the castrate (O) with the tonsure bare head and mill-hooves and mead. I cannot go on, I will go on, yes, I said yes, I will yes…

CARTESIAN TALLOW

Ball-metal Shims

And now what have I, I have a sclerotic goiter hulled on the milady of my neck, breastplate (ed) next to an awful itching and new Copeland shoulder, resurfaced with ball-metal, Elm’s epoxy and shims. Wittgenstein took a shot at it but he never came close to an exegesis on pain, the solipsistic, non-relational, concupiscent nomad’s land that is pain. I will tell you about pain, pain and agony and the charnel ache that scuttles the skirting of the neck to the wooden wheel of the scapula. Pee in your trousers kind of pain; pain so merciless and ill mannered that it makes one think of ego-cide and dissolution by drowning. I could tell you but I won’t, because even if you were to listen and pay heed, it’d surely go in one paraffin-ear and out the other. Lash yourself to masthead and be done with it, no dilly dalliance and moot pointing round here, we’ll have none of that now will we (you not me, certainly not me, no never not me, never). You could, should you so choose, jam a ballpoint pen into the quail bone of my shoulder and I wouldn’t flinch a bit, a damn crumb. And that damnable Joycean file clerk giving me the once over, drawing a bead on me like a monk’s peeler bethel in glass oculars and wiretapped rims. Smoking, incessantly, helps assuage the pain, so I have discovered through persistent proofing and solecism. Smoking and bitter, lye coffee trounced with heavy creams and unsweetened, not a dope of aspartame or Demerara cane for me, these two simple invasions seem to do the legerdemain. If Oedipus were to have met Dionysius, let’s say, at a Marxist workers fry-up or an ophthalmologist’s quibble, the outcome would have been diarrheal and none too pleasing to the eye, purblind or not. All that cloacal self-importance would surely have driven Freud to self-castrate, on the skein of his cuckolded wife’s tatting needle no less, no more no less than more no more. I have put a temporary halt to writing poetry, as it tends to gird up the cushioning in the racio-Centrex of my thinking machine.

POST-RHEUMATIC MODERNISM

Miller’s-Thumb

I have miller’s-thumb from eating too many mill-cakes lubberly with linseed oil and the blackest black jujubes. I have a disturbance in the hieroglyphic of my head that defies description, and if it didn’t, would surly cause me no end of rehashing and re-calibration. Ciphering comes naturally to me, as I have a Turing machine for a brain and an abacus (with basswood pegs, no less) that eelgrasses to and Frau like an engineer’s slide rule charley horsed with lubricants and macadam. As I write this, this murder of words, Samuel Beckett eagles me from atop my broken transistor radio; a hand-you-down handed down to me from my dear father fader. I have a wrench in my gut, a gutwrench, is it? that has worse manners and a lowlier mien than a PM-ist with rickets and rime disease. I have Melba toast heel pads and millet cheeseparer toe corns that cause me no end of pain and general embarrassment. I am a post partum Modernist, some say, who’s illogical canting and miscreantisms are legendary and subject to approbation. I urinated in the trolley of my pants the other day, Sunday was it? yet could have cared less, or less than less I suppose. I have no neurotransmitters to speak of, and if I did, have them, that is, would much prefer not to, as they are execrable and mean hearted. I do, however, have a nasty gout of miller’s-thumb brought on, no doubt, by cakes, assorted pastries, and the blackest black jujubes, these on their own or as a bland concurrency making up the balance of my treacherously unbalanced diet. I have no money, nor care to, as penury is much less complicated and infinitely more agreeable than finding oneself tormented by pantywaists and Hodo’s. I am a poached Modernist, a word mouser and alphabetical miscreant who has nothing better (or betel nut) to do then chouse grammar and proper syntax. I am a grammatical/syntactical/semantic charnel house of miscues, accidence-sodomy and ear-nettling. Thank you and may Buddha or Jehovah or God or some such phantom broaden your perspective on rationalism, eelgrasses, frontal lobotomies and embarrasing pre-diurnal enuresis. Enough said, I have yet to say enough.

ptm CONTUMELY

Separation of Spine from Hypothalamus

I have separated my spine from my hypothalamus. As I have no pineal gland to speak of, nor would I if I did, I am relatively free from Cartesian wellsprings and tallow. In turn, if I may, I have dislocated the non-lesion (ed) portion of my frontal lobe from the scup of my skullcap, resulting in a lessening, or cessation, of all psycho-locution activity. I tried pulling a rarebit from the rector of my ass, but sadly enough, was unsuccessful, more so, a complete and utter nonsuccess. I manipulated and rasped an xyster I found in a shoebox pushed beneath my bed, as would have it, against the manse of my glenoid and the cove of my scapula, resulting in an caulking of horrid pain and skirling. After which I leisurely smoked a haberdasher’s-made cigarette that refused to reach an ashen state of dereliction. Last night, was it? I slept in the clod of my bed linen, pillows fluffed and apportioned behind my neck, shoulders and head bereft of skullcap and scotching. Upon waking the following morning, was it? I hastily smoked a half-lit cigarette with lips chapped and russet with lice scales and nit skins. I drank several modest cups of coffee, smoked again, and evacuated the nostrum of my evacuee. This I will do ad nausea or until I recall how to spell Habramassif without laughing like a fucking Banshee. Thank you again, all one of you, for your continued support, hushed laughter, and purblind Oedipal I.

HEADGEAR and KANTO

What is Post-Traumatic Modernism?

PTM is a secular reaction to philosophical anality. An intellectual fusillade perpetrated from behind, a canonical sodomy that produces a bastard philosophical child. PTM isn’t comely or benevolent, but brash, imprudent and forgetful. It is insuppressible angry, petulant, Cyclopedic in it’s close-mindedness, and forever restless. PTM is childish, surly and unkind. It is unthinking, and wary of outside demonical intruders and highbrow intellectualizations. Post mudhens tend to be soporific, unreasonable and full of themselves. The Critique of Cynical Reason is, well, cynically unenlightened. Jargon Harems, (Jurgen Habermas for the uninitiated) while a genius, is a postmodern example of social intercourse caromed off kilter, a signifier without a signified, a philosophical cupboard gone bare. Teutonic postmodernism, while infinitely appealing and often delightful, is replete with non-sequesters (septicidal pleonastic recidivism) neologisms and tiresomely banal dithering. What I am suggesting (conjectures, disjunction and hand-clapping aside), is a simple Maypole modernism, a pre-post postmodernism that has no childish attachments to Russell, Moore, or Cambridge inkpots. A non-sycophantic, self indulgent, socially irresponsible trope of philosophical cutthroats whose sole driving force is the total abject deconstruction of social construction. What I am suggesting, then, is a joyous Deleuzian sodomy, the sterilization of canon, Kanto and all meta-philosophical discourses on post modernity. I thank you all for your patience, even temper, brash impudence, and, as it is, Odyssean ears.

LINGUISTIC HERESY

Grammacide and Futaba

I slurry words, I weir and sluice meaning, I impose a censor, a grammacide Jihad, a Futaba, I am a wrecker of syntax and meter. I am a cuckold, a smuttier. I sully letters, sentences, the very foundation of semantics. I am a Noam hater. I despise MIT and linguistic meddling. Oxon. moralists roil my stomach, the tripe and faro of analytic overindulgence. I abhor Russellian logic, mathematical gibbering and cutthroating. I’d rather have tea with Onan than god, eat cow’s tongue with Genet and Goytisolo rather than Faulkner or Memmingway. I am a sluice, a mortifier, a suppressant, no, an expectorant, cholera and pleurisy. I am a locution sodomite; I am assonance tearing selvage from spine. I am everything you despise--the jammed up paper in your copier, the dried up ink cartridge monk with proper spelling and accidence. I am all of these yet none, I am the word of clods, Mesmer’s rat skirling in the reformatory of a fatuous and not so wonderful mind. I smoke opium laced with seritonin, for the shear stupidity and ill manatees of it. I hate fish and fish byproducts more than Oxon. moralists and Memmingway’s sunbonnet. I hate Webster’s, Oxford’s (their fucking shoes notwithstanding, hard soles and scuffs), Roget and his minions, anything to do with nice spelling and Word Prefect. I am incongruent and bad mannered, ill kept and judgmental. I am a multiple of nothing, an algebraic oversight, a mistake in logic, a blunder, an erratum. I am a Leitmotif without intent, a grammatical faux pas, the Sodom and Gomorrah of morphology, a vexing whooping cough. I am grammacidal, nothing more nor less.

FANON's CHILDREN

Botched Colonialism

We botched our attempt at colonization, leaving a trail of disease, poverty and contempt for those who never made the grade. Canada’s First Nation’s are treated with contempt and little empathy not because our politicians and policy-makers are forgetful or too busy doing more important things, but because they simply don’t count; they are non-colonial. Point in case, the Kashechewan ‘dirty’ water debacle that has finally brought media and public attention to the plight of an all but forgotten Canadian population: Indigenous peoples. The very nature and driving force behind colonialism is the complete accession of one culture to another culture, submission and eventual acculturation. When this cultural/social eugenics fails, the colonialist is left with a ‘partial peoples’, an impediment to a total and indifferent colonial foothold. When one culture does not play by the rules of colonialism, the colonizer is left with a messy socio-political problem. What to do with non-compliant, cultural specific peoples whom, by reason of difference, are incapable of accepting colonial rule and cultural pasteurization? The answer is a simple one, forget about them and hope they in turn forget about us. This raises the philosophical question of autonomy; ones right to human value and selfness. Canada’s First Nations people lack autonomy, they have been robbed of a culturally specific selfness. When this happens, which is an inevitable result of botched colonialism, the colonizer refuses to attribute autonomy or selfness to those who have been unsuccessfully colonized. This is more than evident in Africa, where the colonial failure has created a sub-cultural of people who, by virtue of their inability to accept or be colonized, are looked upon as being non-autonomous or lacking in selfness. When this occurs, it is easy to forget or simply relegate an entire peoples to a non-compliant ‘other’ with no chance of cultural pasteurization. They simply don’t count by virtue of their lack of cultural sameness or compliance to colonial rules. The colonizer, and here one can insert Canada, is left with a population of non-persons, those to whom the basic human rights of autonomy, inclusion and, yes, clean drinking water, becomes a moot point, one not even worthy of conjecture or further discussion. When a country as rich and culturally diverse as Canada fails to meet the needs of its people, we all fail. We fail to accept the importance of difference and non-compliance; we fail to accept the selfness and autonomy of those different than us. In this manner, and sadly so, Canadian citizens are robbed of their autonomy, and are perceived of as being less-than or lacking in colonial autonomy. When this is the case, they are relegated to the unimportant bin, a closure where difference and non-colonial values and cultural hegemony are seen as non-compliance, and thereafter, not worth the bother of attributing autonomy and selfness to. Canada has created a culture of partial-people, those to whom basic rights and necessities are withheld because of our own botched attempt at colonial homogeneity.

Social Conscious

You have no social conscious
She said—

You are a pretender and a mountebank
A bogeyman

You are colicky with imbecility
And ideas about ideas

I said—

You are an imbecile and a quacksalver
A bogeywoman

I hate you and your lack of social conscious
You’re frail brain

She said—

I despise your conscious consciousness
You’re a mountebank and an imbecile

A pretending pretender
I said—

You are my dream, my one and only
She said—

You too
I said—

Imbecile or not

SHOATS and GORSE

Shoats and Razors

Milk teeth suckle whey slop with marrow
And you pule and yawl like a wan calf

Tongue keened on the whet of my back
Sharp as razors and shoats bristle

Tope Fingers

Tope fingers
And blue stone eyes

And your mother’s frail stitching
On hem

And collar

Nametags and curlicues
All but forgotten


Abbots’ Weed

Abbots’ tongue molt with scurvy, gorse
And creed

Sodas raise hackles and welts

Supplicants

Leavened on rye Melba, quillwort and scolding
Tonsure-comb separates right from wrong, sin from succor

Pumpernickel from flesh

FEAR OF GOATS

Blight of Eyes

Skin molt with corm and bone rill choused in the plow of her forehead where I once pressed my lips bloodied with mill-weed and choke and the nettles and briar tungsten and the yellow corn

blight of eyes gone sallow with fretting and misjudgments and never once a cackle or a sharp invective (the chaff never separated from the absence of skin)

Omphale’s Whore

Ears sheeted with rags
A wailing

Neither apiary
Nor tallow

Could stop

Omphale sluing man
Into bivalve, slurry

And conch