Friday, April 28, 2006

mAN w/OUT a hAT9s







nOT-iN-tHE-wORLD

(April 27/06)
I am neither this or that, that or this. I am what lies in between, the that this, the silence within the this that. I am a bedsore, the septic wound that won’t scab over, a syphilitic ulcer that will never heal. I am the carotid artery that begs for more oxygen, but is given none. I am the shit bag appended to the bow of your hipbone, a conduit for the waste drained from a prolapsed bowel, the cesspool that collects the unwanted sewage. I dispense of nothing and have nothing to dispense; I am indispensable. I am the Rector’s surplice cinched round his churchman’s collar, the hair shirt worn beneath worsted Oxford broadcloth. I am the swine in Swinburne, the fuck in Foucault, the flaw in flawless, and the ass in assonance. I am all of these yet none of these; I am the that this, that which lies in between this or that, that or this.

Holderlin’s der Bildungstrieb


pure imminence
bled from the menace
of world
Gin jug cruet glasses for the far near sighted. Walser’s pencil end scribbling a brusque note to doctor Angola’s asking for a rasher of egg and dry melba, a poach of marmalade (blood orange) on the side. And me, straightjacketed and echoic, curtly demanding a pat of butter to smutch like ram’s gore on the mope of my addle head. The joy in madness is the madness in joy. Scrabbling endnotes to prefaces and appendixes never to be written, wangling the milt from the codpiece of hell. Coaxing the ovule from the nuclease, the nisus from the broadcloth, the ram’s gore from the rasher of toast. A wise man, a princely sage, once told me, fuck the truth, its all a bunch of flies. When I asked, don’t you mean lies? He said, with an abruptness broaching on madness, flies, its all a bunch of fucking flies. I left it, and him, at that, and threw myself into oncoming traffic. All a bunch of flies, I mutter to myself. The madness in joy is the joy in madness, the this that, the swineherd in Swinburne, the fuck you in Foucault, the flawlessness in flawless, the endnotes to a text never to be written.

Monday, April 24, 2006

tHE aDDLE-mINDED

Coping Skills
(April 22/06)
I raked the pump like a cat’s neck, sluing water from the tap head. My friends don’t like cats; nettle tongues and drivel hair, and the clobber of sharp claws on hard linoleum. I found a litter familied beneath the silage shed, tongues raspy with spurs and awl pins. The others were fire setters, gas cans and sheet wicks twisted into funnels. Just the right size to tamp down hard into the throat of a castoff beer bottle or scout’s canteen. The doctor said that fire setting is a sign of childhood abuse, sexual improprieties carried out by addle-minded grownups and wet brains. The rector’s bench slatted with spindle elm and hard ash, the low susurrus of the calliope forcing chancel air through trued pipes. Curds of stale bread and unction wine, draught from the parson’s own saintly tun. This is how it all began long before beginnings had names or reasons. This is how I started, the beginning of what has become of me, the in between, what was left after the fall. As a boy my mother taught me to check my stool for inelegance and colour. A healthy stool was medium brown and shaped like a cone or foolscap. Anything darker or unshapely was deemed sickly, visceral canker. I had a friend who would poke about with a stick, roiling up his defecate checking for organs, dark blood and faille. His father, before succumbing to dementia, urinated in wine bottles he kept in a low drawer next to his bed. When he died, we emptied the piss into the wash sink in the basement, my friend checking for bits of his father’s organs with the stick he used for his toilet. The piss smelled like death and spoiled wine. By the time his father was ready for death, he had cornered himself into a box on the top floor of their house, cloistering himself like a penitent in a six by six beg cell. He had constructed his own coffin, furnishing it with empty wine bottles, a rosary and Popular Mechanics magazines. His death came as no surprise, a slow cancellation into madness and time. His wife’s Parkinson’s and flippered hands saved her from having to be a sentry to her husband’s absurdity. Death is like that, a joke on the dying; an absurdity to those left behind to watch. My friend drank himself into a beg cell, piss bottles arranged in a votive altar to his father’s madness. My father’s older brother drank himself into an early grave, leaving behind two ex-wives and as many children. He drove a yellow forklift, never quite mastering how to change to battery. My father’s oldest brother, who rode in the Jonah’s belly of a submarine in the Second World War, drank until his insides swelled up, his organs perishing like rotten fruit. At his funeral, the older brother’s daughter climbed into his coffin weeping like a neglected child, tears brighten the cold meat of his face. Social Services put the youngest in a foster home, placing her cat with a family with a father and two small children. The oldest moved into a room downtown, with a hotplate and a window overlooking the switching yards. We never visited them; the oldest found God in Morphine and Quaaludes, the younger in a foster father who taught her how to change her underpants and keep quiet. I never really knew either of my father’s brothers, but did learn how to change a forklift battery and row a boat. Death leaves behind memories, many not worth remembering or having.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

sUNDERdAY(s)


Spindle Elm

the rector’s bench
slatted with spindle elm and ash
the low susurrus of the calliope
forcing chancel air through trued pipes
stale bread and unction wine
draught from the parson’s saintly tun
grain skin and trued blood

The Settlement

the settlement is pending
they should have stopped me
from running in traffic
without my straightjacket on

Doing the Done


I can’t help feeling that I should be doing something else, something other than this. Shucking corn or peeling a blood orange with the spurs of my teeth; or simply doing something else, something other than this, which is nothing, nothing at all but this. Whatever I’m doing, what I do, is other than what I should be doing, what I could be doing but don’t. I don’t do things that I should do, things that should be attended to and done, those other things that are always left undone. What I have done is done nothing; simply thought of those things that should be done but are left undone. In this manner I do very little, get very little done. True, I put great effort of thought into doing things that should be done, but in the end do nothing but think about not doing the done. What needs to be done, or what I think needs to be done but is simply a thought of done, never gets done, never gets past the thinking of doing what needs to be done. As you might well imagine, this is quite troublesome, even the thought of the troublesomeness of the trouble is troubling, the being troubled about trouble. Perhaps what needs to be done is a redefinition of the word done, or to be done, the doing of done or the done of doing. In this manner, the doing will become the done and the done the doing of the done, or vice versa. Either way, nothing of much import will get done, nothing whatsoever. I am done with this, done with the doing of what is never done yet is done by simply thinking that I have done what I will never do.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

sTART-fINISH

Coping Steel

skin and bone spoiled
prey to assonance
disassociation
and coping

Not Yet So, And


--That, your face, swallows, harpies, roan and, and, and lich, and, sackcloth, oil, sashes made, from perambulators, and, catgut, violas, chinking. It is, time, fur bed, and such, such. Prickly pear so, so, be it, for now, eternally yours, with grace, and, no, small pittance. Of, skullduggery, and, and queuing, for a spot, spot on, in, the armory, of your, your thoughts, not, yet, so far, so good, so, forth, and, abler than, than, and, so, and, so, and, and.

Chafe Pins

thalidomide spays muscle and bone
pins halyard scaffolding and post
a cure-all for nausea and distemper

blue steel proxies for shinbone
dragging bone slag fen with spoil
a breach for emptying sanguine waste

a panacea for anemia and retching
corrupting the moment of conception
a wither of genes and ancestry

Not So Free Association

(Jan 12/06)
START: mother, father, gun control, idiot savant, bubonic plague, overweight, sclerosis, scolioisis (sic) analysis, bubonic flagellant, skinny legs and all, Joyce’s mother, Beckett’s mother, father, son, girlfriend, apologia, skunky, monkswool, terrycloth, cowl, cowlick, genocide, lariat, bolo, coke a cola, drudgery, mud oven, rumple stiltskin, ouch, lecher, Fletcher, cow catcher, mulligan stew, Martello, Tower, bower, scour, shower, April Tower, Billy Bob Morton, salt, fault, kilt, milt, soil, alcan, John Defienbaker, package of gum, slum, chum, rum, come, dumb, bum, slummy bum stiltskin, onion rind, other kind, mind your mind, apologia, lieutenant punishment, crappy shit et al, over night low, minus two, or more, or snow, or minus one on Sunday, no high of nineteen point five, or six, CBC satellites, seeds of mirth, jackrabbit, scar tissue, tundra, jackpine, Saul, Gomorrah, salud wound, hiccup, rupture, fissure, don’t think, things, Binge, Crossly, club date, worsened by sun, dial, smile, guile, out of stile, sperm, wail, snail, kale, operates without batteries, cats ass, moat, tower, millseed, calliope, Munster Hamlet, fucking Dane cunt, CS, DS, RS, SS, CC, enthusiastic CS, or, DS, sometimes I eat celery, never, Ariel Sharon Bottomsly, caught stealing, or was it kneeling, feeling mirth and rumpled with stiltskin, ny bastard, Mother, Father, Gun Control, Oedipus’ mother, Jacosta, that dead fuck, what’s his name, O’s dad, cookies, I Ikea ;em with chocolate chips, gimme some milk, you fink, ass Fuqua, muck, ranker, faker, steak tartar, martin Amis’ new teeth, gum control, phyorreah, dietary substitute, cool, like Kools, smoke inhalation, removes stains, nasty little fucker, Sam Drunker, brand new bicycle with a basket and a bell and a horn and a jawbreaker bigger than a dog’s ass, or tits, or CBC’s dishes, never, flagellate a cow’s udder, retaliation, mastication, new car, old bar, too far, bowling scar, mar, mare, fare, care, tear, wear, stare, share, Nora Barnacle, Ulysses on the fucking
Liffey, stupid fuck, route, mooch, worse than measles or a hockey stick with black tape, END.

Friday, April 21, 2006

vETTING-mACHINERY

The Opposite of Opposite
(April 21/06)
These are barrow thoughts, thoughts thought without a thinker, a present without a past, a future without imminence or accident. A sonorous assonance, a Dylanesque liver, iron, rarebit and Guinness. No words to define the word that started it all. One word, One text. I desire nothing more than the desire to desire, to be desirous, to desire what is desirous. A carnality of desire, a desirous desire. If, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, we are nothing more (nor less) than desiring-machines, a binary opposition to the opposite, then all desiring is the desire to desire the opposition of the opposite. I desire the opposition of the opposite, the binary of the binary, the accident of imminence. I am the opposite, the opposition of all that I desire, the accident of desire, the accidental desire of the opposition of the opposite, the oneness of the binary opposition, the opposite of the opposite. In this way I desire nothing, all desire being an accidental opposition to desiring the opposition that was never there, the ‘never quite there opposition’ of desire. I am a coveting-machine; I desire the covetous, to covet the desire of desire. I am a vetting-machine, I vet what I desire, which I covet as the desire of the desirous. One desire, one vet. No binary, just sameness, the one desire to be desirous of desire, the covetousness to desire what I covet and vet as desirous, which is to covet the vet to desire the covetous, to covet the desire. The immanence of the immanent, the desire to covet and vet the desire to desire the immanence of the immanent. I think it prudent to desire nothing, to be desire-less, to covet the desire to be desire-less, to covet the desire to desire the undesirable. Foolishness is much more desirous than cleverness, as even a dog can be clever, but only a fool can be cleverly foolish.

Anamnesis

one day in the future
he will forget the past

the sun trawling the spar of his neck
dirt felled into a wheelbarrow

gears sluice with groundwater and machinist’s oil
the truss eaten away like felon bone

a faulty transmission
primer squalled beneath yellow touchup

the game winning touchdown
my mother’s tears gated with rain

a child’s wan cry
knees skinned for the first time

mAN iN hAT2

wHAT mAN iN hAT wROTE

mAN wITHOUT hAT rECUMBANT

mAN (jASPERS) iN hAT wALKING

nICE lAYdOWN wITHOUT sJACKET

iNHUMANITY1

rOARING-mACHINE

sANITY

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

pRESTO, pOUND and eLIOT


Collateral Evocations

A year ago I started writing poetry as a release from the detention of prose, a transient evocation of the unconscious clamor hidden within the prosaic. Poetry was surface, corposant, a looking out into the infinite collateral of thought. All poetry is collateral, a corruption of the word, the mnemonic traces left behind after the representations and images have faded. Poetry renders the simulacrum anew; it reissues the sameness of the same, a secretion, purgation, an emptying. Poetry is slaying, the poem the carnage left behind after the slaughter, the poet the assassin, the butcher of word, text and significance. The poet destroys the signified; recreating a signifier that in turn destroys the signifier, doing away with the antedate chain of words, text and signification. What in the name of Eliot and Pound do I know about poetry? Not a corposant thing, that’s what. Decorticating the corkboard from Presto’s study, or crumpling up one of Flatiron’s twentieth drafts--such dulcet raw genius--is more suited to such literary vandalism surely. Fuck poetry, and while your at it, poets and assassins too. And dogs and cats and hamsters and fish and…

A Poem about a Hat


my grandfather’s fedora
had a band circling the brim

with a scarecrow’s button
stitched into the felt

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

sEAMUS hEANEY

foR sEAMUS

Summer Heat

cocks wither in the summer heat
necks wrung like washing rags
languid socks of skin and thew

your hair twisted into cornrows
a quarrel of pale yellow sun
tracing the crib of your lips

cats prowl the silage for mice
tails scab with viscera and douse
the summer heat spun into shadow

my uncle’s gore callused hands
chucking necks like slough rags
into the silage trap

I lift the barrows of your skirt
revealing a warrant cat
a severed cockscomb in its mouth

Monday, April 17, 2006

tHE gIFT oF hUMANITY

Savage Disquisition
(April 17/06)
A fair to middling Monday morning, a clench of crows crackling in the tree outside my bedroom window. An aviary black as death and twice as final. Last night, scalloped in bed linen and gander, I began reading Homero Aridjis’ 1492, The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile. A coterie of whores and beggars, savages and dwarfs, innkeepers, penitents, mystics and the inclemency of the Christian Inquisition, a Spanish Inferno that would have shuddered Sancho and Don Quixote. Had cocaine been a staple victual in the fifteenth century, things might have been different, whores become kings, beggars become innkeepers, and penitents become agnostics. As it was, the Christian brethren held forth with their savage butchery, lopping off topknots and skullcaps with the dissever of the pietistic broad sword. Octavio Paz and Juan Carlos Onetti taught me that life, all life, is meaningful, that a beggar is a king and a prostitute a lady in waiting, that life is the gift of humanity, not a trinity of love, hate and savage disquisition.

hOKUM'S rAZOR


Gonorrheal and Pistachio Sherbet
(April 16/06)
I find myself half way through life’s journey in Dante’s ninth canticle with Judas and Brutes, an amentia of gorgons and hellcats, a scurvy of traitors and swine, a porcine sty. The creamery’s in the eighth, where one can buy, at meager cost, a Pistachio or a rum raison, or a gonorrheal sherbet with a hint of orange rind and schizocarp. Hokum’s razor for the unshaven and tawdry, or a punter’s spar in the evacuee hole, an apostate with a disemboweler’s vizard. Bovine encephalitis, and a weeks worth of spat up odds and ends and ends and odds. No need for sackcloth jodhpurs or a lamb’s wool toque, this is a place of dirges and weeping, not a five star Fodor’s or Ulysses. And for dinner a most delectable placenta gruel, for the dyspeptic and those lacking in esophageal temerity, a gourmand’s wet dream with a post parricidal after eight that deliquesces on the tip of your tongue. Its not hard to imagine that hell is a place beneath the hell of hell on earth, a sub-hell or hellish hell. A hell of vassals and bondmaids, scullery whores with denticulate teeth and pyorrhea(ic) gums. A hell where crack whores, debauchees and smart alecks have money to spend, on such niceties as shoes, handbags and a balanced verdigris diet. A place where traitors and zealots, and men in mitered caps, don’t cast calumny on those lacking in grace, votary and fallow breath. Good orderly insurrection for the meek and misjudged, the drudged and begotten, the inculpable and gentle. But I dream, as I must, of an ecclesiasticism that embraces all who dare draw the breath and the courage to awaken each morning to this Dantean hell, without the aid of jodhpur, toque or Hokum’s razor.

Sunday, April 16, 2006

sOUPcON bLUE sKY


Almsman’s Sherry

(April 16/06)
A soupcon of bluest blue sky, a murder of gray clouds rousting me from the Bedlam of sleep. A Prussian blue teal azure blue bluish bluestocking blue sky, a firmament of bluest blue sky. The appearance of sky bathed in a murder of gray clouds. A dye-maker’s indigo blue sky boiled and steeped in curare and almsman’s Sherry. The absence of sky, the mere semblance of a sky soaked in Valium and Diazepam to slow down the process of imminence. A Deleuzian sky diminished of rhizomes and signifiers. A chicken bone sky caught in the esophagus of an unsuspecting appearance of sky blue sky. A sky peeled from the labium of the eye, the blindness of the sky, the sanctum of the eye.

Boiled Skins On


my tongue
up between her thighs
the stench of boiled onions
skins left on

mY dECODER rING


Unconscious Static
(April 15/06)
This is fucking mercenary, this inability to differentiate between substance and dreamscape. No signifiers: just the absence of a distinct signatory. The ego-less-I, sitting in the roar of thoughts thought without a signifier or a signified. Perhaps this is the other Other’s work, perhaps not. A tam-o-cantor, quail blue plumage, or a regent’s plasterboard with braiding and serge waistcloth. Another mistake in logic, one less logarithm to tamp into the ungodly Turing machine, cogs and wheels rusted into Derridian sift. Appearances are mislead, they seduce one it mistaking a caliper for a lever, a mortise for a pestle, a dry biscuit for a helot of day old bread; pumpernickel, rye—light, dark and ecru—seven-grain, no grain, prairie millet whet with barley, rice and buttermilk. If I had the option, which surely I don’t, I would hightail it out of here and be done with signifiers and signified(s) altogether. Fucking Lacunae and his jouissance, a symptom is nothing more than a mnemonic trace gone bad, a faulty transmission, an enigmatic message without a decoder ring, unconscious static. A patriarchal cockfight with a phallic understudy, a signifier up the nativity hole, for the jouissance of it, nothing more.

Lacuna can be credited with making a caricature, a satire out of the effect of affect. Reading Reading Seminar CSX attests to that, if one uses one’s decoder ring and doesn’t get mired in the jouissance of it all. Skillet-cakes and dry melba hosts, a wholesome panacea without the offal aftertaste and insipid whooping. I write this from memory; traces left behind in discordance of grammar, syntax and morphology. A cacophony handed down from one generation to the next; a not quite there, quite heard or listened to, the mnemonic origin of the original sin of language, the Babel that disjoins the signifier from the signified. The unconscious keeps us at a distance from ourselves, from one another, at the cost of forgetfulness and an intransigence that is never easy to misremember. I have trained myself to remember how to forget how to remember, and to forget the moment of origin, the originary sin of language, the wedge driven between what is signified and what signifies. All else is nonsense, hyperbole and linguistic hearsay, a staccato jangling, bedlam, nothing more than bad manners, heresy and lacuna. I signify nothing, and prefer it that way.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

nEVER aGAin


The (Other) Other
I have the crassness, or some such respiratory indelicacy. Breathing becomes wheezing becomes a sputtering expectoration of insides-out, blackleg, phonographic things and not things. I am reading Paul Celan, more aptly, it is he that is reading me, in between the lines and striations of my being: my being-me in the world of things, of not things and things yet to be, to-be-things yet. Thank you P.C. you have closed the abyss of my heart, reawakened my spirit, my humanness, my Being-me in Others, not me and me, the other Other that is me and me alone. My responsibility to the Other other that is me, but not me: Me and the Other: the One, the indivisible Other that is One.

rENOLOGY2011


La Luna (the whorish dog)

I am no-man, lumen of thought and grandeur. I have a cuff at the base of my skullcap, a ganglion of hard cellulous bone, a wren’s wing varicose with lattice-bone and hard as whooping cough. When I was a child, a boy with stark whitest white hair whorled on the flat cone of my head, I would make whooping and yawing calls to awaken my mother from the dread of her sleep. I recall standing, knees stirrup(ed) into the coop of my chest, scowling and reaming at the moon, la Luna countess ferocious. My father, clad in skin and tallow, scud me into the cradle of his arms, forewarning me of the terror of night and the petulance of the whorish fat moon. Jaundice, he said, she is a yellow whore with evil scorpion’s eyes. You would do best to stay clear of her, as she’ll grab the heart from the scrum of your chest and eat it like a ravenous dog. I am in love with la Luna, the whorish dog that she is.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

dOWNsIDE(S)


Needs Oil, Grease and Lubricant
This awakening is becoming persistent, an omnipresent wakefulness, chronic eyes wide openness. I dare say I’d much rather be lounging, eyes wide shut. I do miss what’s his name; a timepiece carroty riling my lungsacs, coughing up red sputum and ginger root, a little of the old ‘in and out’, an intolerance for creamery small-mindedness; ungula of the eye (stoma drops) a lubricity that makes succumbing to playfulness that much more mischievous.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

sCATOLOGY1


Waking Wakefulness

I awoke with a whooping crack in the anterior posterior lobe of my skullcap. Like most mornings, all, in fact, all that I care to remember to forget, whooping and geeing and remonstrating are de rigor, mortis de Pieta. I was thinking sum thoughts, not algebraic or calculus, but the sum of all thoughts, the simulacrum of thoughts thought and the thinking of those thought thoughts. Thinking, I’ve come to think, is a waste of time, hooliganism, a punch in the solaria nexus. Who, I perhaps, gives a rat’s ass what I think or not, thoughts and thoughtlessness, all a vapid exercise in trough supping. Saltlicks and honey-sticks, saxhorn yellow yellows and nicotine sullied finger nubs, all or nothing, as is the case or not. Callowness and jackdaw wings ripping rectums of air, mourning air, not frigid and apoplectic as some seem wont to suggest. A schizoid response to a prophylactic world disorder; milling needs and fractures with a scullery whore’s eye for neat edges and folded over cover slips, cowslips, mordant cup swill and Sherry’s crocked in elm barrels stopped with bunghole corkier. I best attend to the day, or what remains of the day a day.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

dEATH and tHUMBPRINTS


Jacosta’s Thumbprint

I don’t work; I launder thoughts, a millinery of sorts, grist, stone, and words without tropes and syntax: grammarcide, sound and tonal sodomy, text graft and proper. I stain and sully, besmirch and allocate, revealing the soft fish-white belly underneath. I eat my words, tropes and intentions with Chomsky-like aplomb. I seldom eat connectors or hymens, though have been persuaded, against my better judgment, to grind and masticate whole tracts of linguistic heresy without batting an eye, a strophic eye. Jacosta’s thumbprint, nail curate, beveled like fencing lead, poleax(ed) my one good eye, the oedipal eye, with one fell swoop of her cuckolder’s hand, swung from a height well above C-level. Fucking PLQT, nothing better to do then smote out my eye, a B-level eyesore, nary a cunt’s worry about the sclera or retinal hemorrhaging, fucking no never, sad fucking state of affairs indeed.

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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