Friday, April 28, 2006
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
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.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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.
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 Steelskin 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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
(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.
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.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Monday, April 10, 2006
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.
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.
Friday, April 07, 2006
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
tRANSCENDENTAL nONSENSE
Being and Rhyme
(March 25/06)
I live in an implosion, a collapsing variableness, an incontinence, a rhizome without a warren-hole, a way out or back in. I live one step behind the step that encouraged the first step forward—now a backward incontinent atomizes. I have a headache, a warren-pain in the subcutaneous coetaneous. All things, myself included, are coeval, simple rhythms in the greater logarithm. The Being-in, the Being-there, the being-thrown-in-there, that’s all that matters when the metaphysical is removed, excised like a suppurating boil. This thrown-into: a tatting of the inner and the outer, the internal barrister that supercedes the simple Id-eology of phantoms and ghostbodies. No more no-nothings, no being here nor there nor either or. One insufferable primal scene, the coital naysay, the perpetual inking machine fading in and out, no-nothings nor neither or.
I live in an implosion, a collapsing variableness, an incontinence, a rhizome without a warren-hole, a way out or back in. I live one step behind the step that encouraged the first step forward—now a backward incontinent atomizes. I have a headache, a warren-pain in the subcutaneous coetaneous. All things, myself included, are coeval, simple rhythms in the greater logarithm. The Being-in, the Being-there, the being-thrown-in-there, that’s all that matters when the metaphysical is removed, excised like a suppurating boil. This thrown-into: a tatting of the inner and the outer, the internal barrister that supercedes the simple Id-eology of phantoms and ghostbodies. No more no-nothings, no being here nor there nor either or. One insufferable primal scene, the coital naysay, the perpetual inking machine fading in and out, no-nothings nor neither or.
Who am I but the dilemma of dissolution and dimwittedness? The Ego left in the cellars of the ID, the truculently remembered remembrance of that first remember. When one is none, no further calculation’s logarithms or algebraic fistulas need be tried and trued. All is silliness, bad manners and couch-sitting, bringing forth, through hermeneutic and cajolery, the deepest recession of forgotten forgets. A trumpeting cacophony of repressed this and re-repressed that, a nonman’sland of Id-eulogizes and re-interments. Freud was wrong, there is no way out of the cellar, no rabbithole, no (Kafka) door through which to make that great Heideggerian leap, leaping into the ontological fray in excelsior glorious. Being-in-time is Being disguised as Being, nothing more nor, I suppose, less.
Monday, March 20, 2006
aPOSTaTE gLANd
Poor of Mouth
(March 20/06)
Penury is for the poor, the poor of mouth--the penuriously poor, poor. I am poor, penurious, financially defrocked. And grandma ma’s hastily hopped coppers, which never quite fell into the cusp of my hand, but fell through into the sewer at the tiptop of my feet, unshod and unholy souse’s soulless feet, feet. Flan has no-nothing on me, nor two-boirds at swimmy. Molly, that Liffey-laughy bogslut, now she I have a particular shinning for, as all men with a bird in their brain see fit to fiddle flummox betwixt the hunker of her legskin skin. And the wretch of poor Paddy Dingham, all dead and roiled in buttersoil and lime twists. Sad bastard he. No lemony scented lavations or up the end-out for the likes, or not, of he, as worms make ferrous wheels in the ocular obits of his scumskullskittle. Ah, but that I should be so lucky to have a drill bore in the labial ligneous of me headspore. Parricide butter, pads ends-up, to avoid an unseemly sebascone. Blackberry Alma tarts with wee-seeds and caraway on the sideplate. She was a sure fine one, with her apron trail and headscarf. And Uncle Jim, with the one cockeye and the other mulled in a tarn of puddle blood. Poor Uncle he said verily nothing when green sprouts and vegetables were heaped on the skid of his dinnerplate: not one for the verdigris or the parsimonious root, or a wedging of stale ends with Alma’s applebutterspread unevenly on the heel and croup. I must say, this poorman’s mouthing is none too wearying and saddlesad. Now, if time permits a permission, I will see fit to a cunning lingual in a wean the corrupt of dear dearest Molly’s bogslutted leggy leg legs. Adman or not, I see a fitting cloture in the mucking.
Penury is for the poor, the poor of mouth--the penuriously poor, poor. I am poor, penurious, financially defrocked. And grandma ma’s hastily hopped coppers, which never quite fell into the cusp of my hand, but fell through into the sewer at the tiptop of my feet, unshod and unholy souse’s soulless feet, feet. Flan has no-nothing on me, nor two-boirds at swimmy. Molly, that Liffey-laughy bogslut, now she I have a particular shinning for, as all men with a bird in their brain see fit to fiddle flummox betwixt the hunker of her legskin skin. And the wretch of poor Paddy Dingham, all dead and roiled in buttersoil and lime twists. Sad bastard he. No lemony scented lavations or up the end-out for the likes, or not, of he, as worms make ferrous wheels in the ocular obits of his scumskullskittle. Ah, but that I should be so lucky to have a drill bore in the labial ligneous of me headspore. Parricide butter, pads ends-up, to avoid an unseemly sebascone. Blackberry Alma tarts with wee-seeds and caraway on the sideplate. She was a sure fine one, with her apron trail and headscarf. And Uncle Jim, with the one cockeye and the other mulled in a tarn of puddle blood. Poor Uncle he said verily nothing when green sprouts and vegetables were heaped on the skid of his dinnerplate: not one for the verdigris or the parsimonious root, or a wedging of stale ends with Alma’s applebutterspread unevenly on the heel and croup. I must say, this poorman’s mouthing is none too wearying and saddlesad. Now, if time permits a permission, I will see fit to a cunning lingual in a wean the corrupt of dear dearest Molly’s bogslutted leggy leg legs. Adman or not, I see a fitting cloture in the mucking.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
pHICCIOnES
Marrowbone Soup
(March 19/06)
I
Have a photo
Of
Jorge Luis
Borges
--on
My Desktop
Top
(March 19/06)
I
Have a photo
Of
Jorge Luis
Borges
--on
My Desktop
Top
And
The concussiveness
Begins
Like marrowbone
--soup
Left to chill
Into
Gazpacho
The concussiveness
Begins
Like marrowbone
--soup
Left to chill
Into
Gazpacho
Friday, March 17, 2006
tECHnOPOMORPHIC hORrID(NESs)
Damnable Turing Machine
(March 16/06)
I live in a technopomorphic noman’sland compliments of my insufferably dimwitted Turing Machine. I dare say an abacus would be a step up in technology. One of those orthopedic lifts would certainly quell the arrhythmia in the catastrophe that is my horrid analytical engine, so horrid, in fact, that no algebraic panacea could ever-possible put things right. 16 rams’bottoms aren’t sufficient enough to motor a simple calculator, let alone a CPU with a laggard’s penchant for sluggardliness. Perhaps if I whisper ever so softly in the conical ear of the Turing Machine god a new and improved remembering machine will appear through a fugue of oily alchemic dust, or not, I suppose. For the time being—time, as you know, being a poor judge of time and happenstance—I will plow furrows of pixel dust with the uneven keel of my damnable Turing Machine in excelsior glorious amen. Good night and may clods bless.
I live in a technopomorphic noman’sland compliments of my insufferably dimwitted Turing Machine. I dare say an abacus would be a step up in technology. One of those orthopedic lifts would certainly quell the arrhythmia in the catastrophe that is my horrid analytical engine, so horrid, in fact, that no algebraic panacea could ever-possible put things right. 16 rams’bottoms aren’t sufficient enough to motor a simple calculator, let alone a CPU with a laggard’s penchant for sluggardliness. Perhaps if I whisper ever so softly in the conical ear of the Turing Machine god a new and improved remembering machine will appear through a fugue of oily alchemic dust, or not, I suppose. For the time being—time, as you know, being a poor judge of time and happenstance—I will plow furrows of pixel dust with the uneven keel of my damnable Turing Machine in excelsior glorious amen. Good night and may clods bless.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
aUGUST1993-2 wEEKS iN
Johnny’s Dead (part-one)
(March 11/06)
The rain swept down from the sky and ran on pelican feet across the top of the water. The gulls paced restlessly on the embankment beneath trees heavy with whirly-tops--and underneath benches where bits of discarded food and wet cigarette butts littered the hard ground. Rain fell like glass from the middle of the sky, twisting and reforming the horizon into a sleeping child, knees bellied into it’s chest, eyes pressed tight behind heavy lids. I slipped Johnny’s upper plate from his mouth and lay it on the floor next to his arm; I had to thump him hard on the side of his face to loosen the lowers. I figured Johnny would look pretty stupid with only his bottoms in if he died and the ambulance people came and saw him like that. I figured it’d be better to have a mouthful of nothing then just have of nothing. A cobble of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and dribbled into the hole of his ear like chocolate syrup. Johnny looked so funny, so out of sorts and relaxed lying there on the floor, his eye all gouged out and clouted with blood. And these little pinpricks in his ribcage that made him look like some sort of ornament or a cheese grater and his mouth all flaccid and devoid of teeth and just sort of puffing little ounces of air while his chest gurgled and spurted like a defective engine.
The rain swept down from the sky and ran on pelican feet across the top of the water. The gulls paced restlessly on the embankment beneath trees heavy with whirly-tops--and underneath benches where bits of discarded food and wet cigarette butts littered the hard ground. Rain fell like glass from the middle of the sky, twisting and reforming the horizon into a sleeping child, knees bellied into it’s chest, eyes pressed tight behind heavy lids. I slipped Johnny’s upper plate from his mouth and lay it on the floor next to his arm; I had to thump him hard on the side of his face to loosen the lowers. I figured Johnny would look pretty stupid with only his bottoms in if he died and the ambulance people came and saw him like that. I figured it’d be better to have a mouthful of nothing then just have of nothing. A cobble of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and dribbled into the hole of his ear like chocolate syrup. Johnny looked so funny, so out of sorts and relaxed lying there on the floor, his eye all gouged out and clouted with blood. And these little pinpricks in his ribcage that made him look like some sort of ornament or a cheese grater and his mouth all flaccid and devoid of teeth and just sort of puffing little ounces of air while his chest gurgled and spurted like a defective engine.
When Johnny and I were teenagers we used to spend a lot of time at the pumping station fishing off the concrete ledge for crappies and small mouths. Once, when Johnny caught a fat yellow sunfish, he cut it’s fins off with his pocketknife and popped it’s eyes out with his thumb then threw it back into the water. We watched as the poor fish floated all fucked up on it’s side, a little gouty hole where it’s eye had been, trying to right side up itself and swim. It just fluttered and shook like it was having an epileptic. That same day another kid we were sometimes friends with got his eye pecked out by a seagull when he tried to stab it with his fishing rod. Actually his eye didn’t really get pecked out, just a piece of it near his nose. He had to wear one of those the Man in the Hathaway Shirt black eye patches, all the while thinking he was better than us because he wore a patch over his eye and had only one good one left. Johnny and I could care less, more than less. We stopped being his friends and put more effort into stealing cigarettes from the Dominion.
I tried combing Johnny’s hair except the comb just kept snapping off his head. I figured since he didn’t have any teeth in he might as well have a combed head of hair when the ambulance people came to take him away in the back of the ambulance. It would be terribly embarrassing for the ambulance attendants to find him lying there all fucked up on the floor like that. Least this way he’d look somewhat presentable, even for all fucked up like that.
I asked Johnny if it was still a fish if it didn’t have any fins. He said that it still had gills and that’s what makes fish, fish. As long as they have gills they’re still fish. That’s what sets them apart from other things and animals. How come they have gills, I asked? I don’t know, he said. I guess because they’re suppose to—that’s all, they’re supposed to have them otherwise they couldn’t really be called fish I suppose. Without ‘em, I don’t know, I guess they’re just another thing or animal or something. How come you cut its fins off and popped its eye out, I asked? I don’t know, Johnny said, just seemed like the thing to do at the time is all. It’s only a fucking fish for Christ sake, its not like I’m a murderer or something. Just shut the fuck up and give me another worm, will you? I don’t feel like talking about it anymore—fucking fish.
Johnny could skip a rock seven, eight--sometimes even ten times across the top of the water if he put his mind to it. We’d spend half an hour looking for good flat ones, sometimes nice chips of shale or real smooth ones that were the colour of beer bottles. Standing shoulder to shoulder on the concrete ledge of the pumping station, we’d position ourselves—Johnny usually preferring the side-foot stance, his throwing arm loose at his side fisting a rock—and challenge each other, best out of ten. Johnny, when it came down to it, always won, even though his knees were all bony and cockeyed and his head was real sharp looking and too small for his body. That’s the way it was, always, skipping rocks and shale off the pumping station.
I resign myself to the fact that there’s not much I can do for Johnny, cause the bleeding won’t stay--and the other internal shit that’s coming out of him is too much to bear, and it looks like his chest might cave inside him and crush the breath out of his lungs, which are, I’m pretty sure, as fucked up as the rest of him. And with me as I am kneeling beside him like a beggar looking stupid and tired out because I don’t know what to do, and even if I did, I’m not sure I’d have the courage to do it anyhow. I just wish he’d die and get over with it, it’d make things easier for the both of us. I’m sorry, that’s how I felt, not bearing up as good as I’d wanted to.
Why’d you have to go and play around with that shit to start with? Christ almighty, Johnny, you knew it was fucking dynamite and could blow up in your face anytime, anywise, Johnny, you should have known better, Christ man, your smarter than that. Should a left it to the pros--and look where it got you, fuck man, you’re better than that. All fucked up and bleeding, you’re missing a fucking eye, a fucking eye, man, an eye for Christ sake. They must a given it to your real good this time, probably even gave you a second warning, but you just wouldn’t listen, never have—so they decide to make an example out of you this time, a fucking example man. They fucked you up some good this time; they did, didn’t they? Fucked you up and took your eye, Johnny, your fucking eye, like that kid with the Hathaway patch, fuck man—your fucking eye. Christ, I mean you weren’t much to look at to begin with, but now without an eye, I mean this is fucked man, real fucked. Now I mean you’re a real ugly sonuvabitch, really. You’re a fucking ugly sight; one fucked up ugly sonuvabitch, Johnny. Bet you wish it was only just a couple of teeth and all they’d have to do is wire your jaw shut for awhile. Fuck your mother man, she was never worth a piece of shit to begin with. Remember that silly fucker went and got his eye pecked out, by a seagull man, what a silly fucking cunt he was—wearing a man in the Hathaway shirt patch and stumbling on his two feet like a drunk, fucking crazy shit, Johnny, remember. I mean the fucker thought he was Errol fucking Flynn, some kind of hero or a pirate or some shit like that. Deserved him right, lousy bastard. Christ man that was funny, remember Johnny, so fucking funny we almost pissed out pants, that fucking funny.
And answer me this, why’d you have to go and start chucking it in your arm, Johnny? Didn’t you have anything better to do, anymore sense than that? Christ Johnny, you could have at least snogged it up your nose like everybody else—but then you aren’t like everybody else, never one for convention, were you Johnny. Always having to do this your way, the hard way, the opposite way of everybody else. Always trying to make things as difficult and complicated as ever, always one step out a sync with the way things are suppose to be. But that shit, Johnny, that shit was way out of your league. A big mistake, too much out a sync. Shit got your head all scrambled up man, and look at you now, they took your eye; your fucking eye’s gone Johnny, nothing there. Fed it to a dog, some sonuvabitch dog ate your eye man, like fucking Alpo. Your bitch of a cunt mother would be proud of you—laying here on the floor all fucked up, bleeding with a hole where an eye’s suppose to be. And we thought that kid got his eye pecked out was funny. Well let me tell you, Johnny, this shit sure beats the hell out of that; pales in comparison.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
THE WALK
Assorted Wherewithal
(March 08/06)
I am up but not about, as the barite and corns on my feet disallow such bipedal musing. Time permitting, which it seldom does (see Hegel for an exegesis on this point) I will reengage my feet and bustle through the day, or that which remains of the day. Perhaps I will don a paper mashie cap, on which I will append an assortment of stamen, or a bullfinch’s wingspan with feather and quill-bone intact. Or an ornate and fluffle of posy blooms, as spring is just round the corner, or so the meteorologists say. I seldom pay heed or merit to weather reportage, as it tends to be of the kind that is seldom accurate or worthy of umbrella and saffron slickerage.
I am up but not about, as the barite and corns on my feet disallow such bipedal musing. Time permitting, which it seldom does (see Hegel for an exegesis on this point) I will reengage my feet and bustle through the day, or that which remains of the day. Perhaps I will don a paper mashie cap, on which I will append an assortment of stamen, or a bullfinch’s wingspan with feather and quill-bone intact. Or an ornate and fluffle of posy blooms, as spring is just round the corner, or so the meteorologists say. I seldom pay heed or merit to weather reportage, as it tends to be of the kind that is seldom accurate or worthy of umbrella and saffron slickerage.
This conjoining, I must say, is symptomatic of a far greater neuroticism—obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, a swooning and stuttered fainting that people such as I, the be-heathen, are subjected to against out better judgment. Judgment, as you will no doubt see, has very little to do with repetitious repeating, very little indeed. Nor barite and corns, one may suppose, or bipedal musings and reengagement with the engaged. I seldom, if ever, pay much heed to musing, as it tends to unseal the envelope of my already pointless a-musings. For the time being, however—time being a most unsavory barometer of ups and downs—suffice it to say that should you take notice of a recklessness most unbecoming a person of my meager talents, please feel free to take me to task and bring it unchastely to my attention. Thank you all in advance for your persistent patience, courage and assorted wherewithal. I bid you good night and most savory dreams.
Monday, March 06, 2006
KaNT'S tHOuGHT and lIFE2
Thoughts Thought
(March 06/06)
I’m sitting here thinking about thinking, thinking of what I’ve thought and not yet thought. I’m thinking regardless of the process of thoughts thought or thinking about thinking those thoughts and those thoughts not yet thought but thought about just he same. I have a stomachache, perhaps from excessive thinking, or thoughts that I thought I thought yet are just thinking in abstensia of a thought yet to be thought. Perhaps this signals a slight shift in thinking or a thoughtful though about the sentinel of thoughts and thinking. I am a thoughtful thinker of thoughts and thoughts not yet thought or thought about. Thinking is quite complex, as is the thought of thinking about the complexity of thinking thoughts all together, or in single file, as in a sentinel of thoughts being thought thoughtless of the complexity of the thoughts thought. This is indeed confusing, if not far too complex for a mere thinker of thoughts and thoughts not yet thought regardless of the thought process of thinking thoughts, even in abstention of a first or originary thought, thought. Why, then, think when you can thought I ask? Why indeed?
I’m sitting here thinking about thinking, thinking of what I’ve thought and not yet thought. I’m thinking regardless of the process of thoughts thought or thinking about thinking those thoughts and those thoughts not yet thought but thought about just he same. I have a stomachache, perhaps from excessive thinking, or thoughts that I thought I thought yet are just thinking in abstensia of a thought yet to be thought. Perhaps this signals a slight shift in thinking or a thoughtful though about the sentinel of thoughts and thinking. I am a thoughtful thinker of thoughts and thoughts not yet thought or thought about. Thinking is quite complex, as is the thought of thinking about the complexity of thinking thoughts all together, or in single file, as in a sentinel of thoughts being thought thoughtless of the complexity of the thoughts thought. This is indeed confusing, if not far too complex for a mere thinker of thoughts and thoughts not yet thought regardless of the thought process of thinking thoughts, even in abstention of a first or originary thought, thought. Why, then, think when you can thought I ask? Why indeed?
tHE iDIOTILiAD
Cuirass Asses
(March 06/06)
Here is a fine example of the purblind leading the stone-blind. The commander and saucier of the Canadian military said the following—and here I paraphrase—we are in Afghanistan to establish peace in the region and then to enforce it. How, one might ask, does one enforce peace? When two adversaries are at peace there would be no need to enforce it—peace means peace, not almost-peace or just-about-peace. If one needs to enforce peace, there is no peace at all, but ongoing adversarial not-peace, or peace-lessness. It would appear that war is being mistaken for peace. This, I fear, is but one example of military strategy, Canadian-style no less. Perhaps the blue-helmet has been replaced with the olive drab Bush tincap or worse, a storm trooper’s cuirass. It’s a shame that Dialectical Materialism is an impossible political ideal. Cursed MacCarthy knockabouts. Perhaps the bitterness of my morning coffee will bring peace to the litigant in my stomach, if not, a salvo of Rolaids or Tums to enforce peace in my ad nausea.
Here is a fine example of the purblind leading the stone-blind. The commander and saucier of the Canadian military said the following—and here I paraphrase—we are in Afghanistan to establish peace in the region and then to enforce it. How, one might ask, does one enforce peace? When two adversaries are at peace there would be no need to enforce it—peace means peace, not almost-peace or just-about-peace. If one needs to enforce peace, there is no peace at all, but ongoing adversarial not-peace, or peace-lessness. It would appear that war is being mistaken for peace. This, I fear, is but one example of military strategy, Canadian-style no less. Perhaps the blue-helmet has been replaced with the olive drab Bush tincap or worse, a storm trooper’s cuirass. It’s a shame that Dialectical Materialism is an impossible political ideal. Cursed MacCarthy knockabouts. Perhaps the bitterness of my morning coffee will bring peace to the litigant in my stomach, if not, a salvo of Rolaids or Tums to enforce peace in my ad nausea.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
LOs 7 MADmEN
Sortilege Fantasticalism
(March 05/06)
I purchased a copy of Roberto Arlt’s Los 7 Locos this afternoon. I will begin reading it when time permits. Arlt influenced what has become known as the Magic Realism School of South American Hispanic fiction. He was a fine and gentlemanly fellow, a nice chap indeed. A gentlemanly fellow with a stern brooding stare, an Agnostic Magic Partisan Non-Catholic Bolero’s gawk. I will highly enjoy the read, of that I am certain. His influence touched Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, all four of whom I find most appealing indeed. He was a contemporary of Juan Carlos Onetti, and a friend of some other magic Latin writers with consonant names that are most troublesome to pronounce. I will keep you, indeed, posted indeed.
I purchased a copy of Roberto Arlt’s Los 7 Locos this afternoon. I will begin reading it when time permits. Arlt influenced what has become known as the Magic Realism School of South American Hispanic fiction. He was a fine and gentlemanly fellow, a nice chap indeed. A gentlemanly fellow with a stern brooding stare, an Agnostic Magic Partisan Non-Catholic Bolero’s gawk. I will highly enjoy the read, of that I am certain. His influence touched Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, all four of whom I find most appealing indeed. He was a contemporary of Juan Carlos Onetti, and a friend of some other magic Latin writers with consonant names that are most troublesome to pronounce. I will keep you, indeed, posted indeed.
SPINNERETS and CELLOS
Flutes and Flagella
(March 05/06)
There is a colophon perched roosting on the tree branch outside my windowsill pane. It is, as to its repertoire, making beautiful music, a symphonic cacophony of flutes, flagella, trumpets, oboes, violas, spinnerets, and cellos. I am of a mind to count them all, one by one and then from back to front. And Mozart made a trumpet of his ass, trumpeting a toot-tooting toiletry. When I was a boy there was a sign exclaiming for all to read and ponder, To Let, which to my eagle eyes read, Toilet. Eye marksmanship not being my strong suit, or the proper parsing of letters or words. And March came in like a Mayan, all rice-sticky and ready to toss a hymen into the mouth of the volcanic furnace. Headgear and plumage, and faces painted with rosin and cup-ash. No never a slighted moment nor a shimmer of the cursed impetigo. It is somber day, March 5th two thousand and six. When I played the jewsharp, my tongue would flail the mouth organ like a peal of orange rind or a pinch of the creamery. Never once, to my recollection, did I make a harmonious sound or a toot-tooting from the trombone of my ass. And he freely associated a disassociation. Not so free, but disassociate nonetheless.
There is a colophon perched roosting on the tree branch outside my windowsill pane. It is, as to its repertoire, making beautiful music, a symphonic cacophony of flutes, flagella, trumpets, oboes, violas, spinnerets, and cellos. I am of a mind to count them all, one by one and then from back to front. And Mozart made a trumpet of his ass, trumpeting a toot-tooting toiletry. When I was a boy there was a sign exclaiming for all to read and ponder, To Let, which to my eagle eyes read, Toilet. Eye marksmanship not being my strong suit, or the proper parsing of letters or words. And March came in like a Mayan, all rice-sticky and ready to toss a hymen into the mouth of the volcanic furnace. Headgear and plumage, and faces painted with rosin and cup-ash. No never a slighted moment nor a shimmer of the cursed impetigo. It is somber day, March 5th two thousand and six. When I played the jewsharp, my tongue would flail the mouth organ like a peal of orange rind or a pinch of the creamery. Never once, to my recollection, did I make a harmonious sound or a toot-tooting from the trombone of my ass. And he freely associated a disassociation. Not so free, but disassociate nonetheless.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
rEPETITION rEPULSION
Repetition Repeating
(March 04/06)
The answer is in repetition, all in the repetition. All things repeat, from the first to the last, in a sequence of repetitions that have neither a start nor an ending, but a constancy of repeating ad infinitum, or until death due us part. To repeat is to start anew, to begin at a new start, a new repetition of an old repeating. All things in they’re repetition, repeating to start anew, to begin to repeat again, repetition upon repetition. The number one is the first repeater of all formal numbers, all sequences and further repetitions. One repeated twice, three times until the repetition repeats itself. Once repeated, the repetition repeats itself without any further need for a first place repetition. To repeat is to repeat the repeat, the repetition of the first place repetition, the repeating of the repetition.
The answer is in repetition, all in the repetition. All things repeat, from the first to the last, in a sequence of repetitions that have neither a start nor an ending, but a constancy of repeating ad infinitum, or until death due us part. To repeat is to start anew, to begin at a new start, a new repetition of an old repeating. All things in they’re repetition, repeating to start anew, to begin to repeat again, repetition upon repetition. The number one is the first repeater of all formal numbers, all sequences and further repetitions. One repeated twice, three times until the repetition repeats itself. Once repeated, the repetition repeats itself without any further need for a first place repetition. To repeat is to repeat the repeat, the repetition of the first place repetition, the repeating of the repetition.
I am a repeater, not an ad hoc repeater, but a fist instance repeater, a first repeat repeater. I repeat without reason or rhyme, nor with a goal, aim or end to the repeating, a constant constancy of repeating. The repetition to repeat, ad nausea, etc. ad infinitum ad-add another repetition to the repeating repetition. The compulsion to repeat, to repeat the repeating of the repetition, the repetition to repeat with repetitious repeating. One is the integer of the repetition of one to the first power one. One is the one and only number that valiances the repetition of one and not one, two times one times one times three, etc., etc. Anon et al excreta Exeter, and so forth, ad asinine hoc ad. Perhaps I will, should and must valiance sleep, and with fleetness of foot, arch, toehold and in excelsior goriest, aurora Borealis finger-tapping on the pane of my windowpane pane ad infonauts.
sIR pAUL'S lOBSTERsKIN cOAT
I AM Not the Walrus
(March 04/06)
I am just to the left of you, a wee smidgen out of the frame, the frame of reference, the ontological cadre, if you will, which you mightn’t, but just the same, there I am, or not, as the case may or may not be. I am frame-less, having neither a point of reference nor scaffolding on which to erect myself, had I a self to erect, which I don’t, nor could I imagine having if I did, have one, a self, an ontological point of reference. I have no jumping in point, no entrance into the ‘into’, the ‘thing’, the me but not me, the other but not other, the otherly.
I am just to the left of you, a wee smidgen out of the frame, the frame of reference, the ontological cadre, if you will, which you mightn’t, but just the same, there I am, or not, as the case may or may not be. I am frame-less, having neither a point of reference nor scaffolding on which to erect myself, had I a self to erect, which I don’t, nor could I imagine having if I did, have one, a self, an ontological point of reference. I have no jumping in point, no entrance into the ‘into’, the ‘thing’, the me but not me, the other but not other, the otherly.
I have neither an other nor an other, other, the other-ness of others. I have neither other nor others, nor have I one of each, all or a coalition of all others. I have neither either or, nor or either neither or, or not or, no-nothing, nothingness, a flat paneled screen, a tabula raga. I am neither this nor that, or those or these, I am none and all of these. I regret nothing, except having nothing to regret, regretfully so, I regret regretting that I neither regret nor regret the regretting. Perhaps I am regretful, yet don’t know that I regretfully regret regretting ad nausea.
I am a seal pup clubsman, crackles and graylings of gray marrow gray bone, like chattering teeth, cutting swaths in the crisp eastern ice-flow flow. I am not Sir Paul, nor am I a walrus or an eggman, I am none of these, or them or him, or a Sir, a Sir Paul, the walrus, the eggman man. Sir Paul is a walrus, has the brain of a walrus, albeit a rich, paunchy all-knowing walrus. Sir Paul has the answer to poverty, hunger and shoelessness. He will, Sir Paul, save the economy of the Eastern flow with his harsh rich man’s blathering about the improprieties of clubbing poor baby seal pips. He will soar homeward, leaping the pond in one fell swoop, home to orchards and castles and dogs fed on grade A meat, the flesh of other poor animals, but no seal pups, who by virtue of their pelts are poor helpless creatures.
Paul, no longer Sir Paul, but the walrus, is a rich man with a rich man’s attitudes and beliefs, having never had to eat millet and grain seeds and wrap his frost bittern feet in sac cloth and boxing twine. He has not stood by, hopeless, as his children cry and wane for proper footwear and meat, any meat, animal flesh, fish flesh, a bean soup with day-old bread, cusps and heels of dry hard bread. So long Sir Walrus, and be wary of what you cram down your gullet, your rich never hungry rich man’s gullet, fed on Macadamian nuts and apple crisp Chardonnay. Tarry forth clubsmen, and may the gods be with you, and your children’s bellies brimming to the full, and their feet shod in Librium rubber and saltless calfskin hide.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
bEING as bECOMING
Analysis Interminable
(March 02/06)
Six years ago this month I started a most incredible journey, an invasion, a tarriance, a mountainous trek into the innermost recessions of my self: psychoanalysis. I have pillage, plundered and marshaled salvos deep into the darkest crannies of my self, my unconscious self. Some were successful, others the cause for more excavation, further exhumations. I lost myself often, resurfacing in places and thoughts as yet unknown to me; places that needed to be explored and understood. Capturing moments, instances of substantiation, perhaps a second of blissful recognition of what it would be like to be ‘one’, at one with the autonomy of the self. My diggings brought me fear, happiness, anxieties, and peace, though often fleeting and undecipherable repose. I searched for beginnings and ends, moments and things in between, and those yet to become, those things on they’re way, those becomings.
Six years ago this month I started a most incredible journey, an invasion, a tarriance, a mountainous trek into the innermost recessions of my self: psychoanalysis. I have pillage, plundered and marshaled salvos deep into the darkest crannies of my self, my unconscious self. Some were successful, others the cause for more excavation, further exhumations. I lost myself often, resurfacing in places and thoughts as yet unknown to me; places that needed to be explored and understood. Capturing moments, instances of substantiation, perhaps a second of blissful recognition of what it would be like to be ‘one’, at one with the autonomy of the self. My diggings brought me fear, happiness, anxieties, and peace, though often fleeting and undecipherable repose. I searched for beginnings and ends, moments and things in between, and those yet to become, those things on they’re way, those becomings.
Being is a fractious term, one Heidegger, with his cunning linguistic inversions, left unfound and still becoming, being becoming Being. Freud has taught me much, tutored me in the salience of self, of ego, id and the self-destructive nature of the super ego. How to punish myself in lieu of a punisher, as a proxy to the punishing ‘other’, the paternal voice that reverberates and pounds one into sycophantic compliance. He showed me how to be more understanding, empathetic, seeing and listening for the slightest nuances in others tone, speech and feelings. A facial movement, a grimace of pain yet uncovered, concealed beneath years of repression and fear. Freud showed me the way out of the warren, the self-destructive coffer where I had lived a meager unfulfilling existence, a not quite there existence, a not being there.
There is never a right time, the perfect moment to end analysis, as it has no ending, no beginning, but a timelessness that ends with death, with the death of the self. After six years searching high and low in the tallow light of Plato’s Cave, I have learned much, those things and yet to be things that are indispensable to me, the becoming of me, the me as me. To Doctor M I offer my greatest thanks and warmest sentiments. Of hope, some fear, understanding and a feeling of autonomy, a sense of what it is, and could be, to be a self bereft of self-loathing, self-punition and fear of not meeting the expectations that were never expectations to begin with, but phantasies and a feeling of childish exclusion. No longer am I an Ego-less Id, I am that which Is, a self, me.
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About Me
- Stephen Rowntree
- "Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
